HENT DE VRIESTheologico-Political Treatisehas become known. The invention of the ‘‘higher criticism’’
was not Spinoza’s primary intention. As Levinas notes: ‘‘The idea of applying a historical
method to the Bible is... born from a concern to protect true philosophy [la vraie
philosophie] in the City, just as America was discovered by navigators who were expecting
to reach the East Indies’’ (112 / 160). But this derivative method restores Scripture to its
proper rights and becomes the key to reading—if not necessarily explaining (‘‘in terms of
cause’’)—the political text and texture from biblical times up to the emergence of early
modern nation states.
Spinoza’s un-Spinozistic solution of amalgamating reason and revelation, along with
its legacy, differs from Franz Rosenzweig’s (to which Levinas refers approvingly) in that
it leaves intact no separate, parallel, and compatible path to salvation for Judaism. Unlike
Rosenzweig, in Levinas’s reading, Spinoza conceives of ‘‘eternity’’ only in the most ab-
stract terms—terms that are theoretical and atemporal rather than ritual, calendrical, or
cyclical. But then, like Rosenzweig, ‘‘whose homage to Christianity consists in showing it
a different destiny than the one Judaism accomplishes all the way to the end’’ (109 / 156),
Spinoza develops a position far removed from Hegel’s sublation ofallreligion as merely
a transitional dialectical moment in the self-unfolding of reason. Spinoza’smodernity,
Levinas surmises, lies in what amounts to a profoundly anti-Hegelian stance, even though
his historical and contemporary—read systematic-philosophical—importance reveals a
profound ambivalence as well:
In our day, the history of ideas is the godless theology that stirs the soul of unbeliev-
ers.... Spinoza exerted an influence on this history of ideas that was decisive and
anti-Jewish.
It does not have to do with biblical criticism, which he inaugurated. Biblical
criticism can ruin only a faith that has already been shaken [e ́branle ́e]. Does not the
truth of eternal ideas shine forth all the more when they are denied the external
support of a dramatic and theatrical revelation? When they are studied for them-
selves, do they not bear witness to the divine value of their inspiration and the purely
spiritual miracle of their union? This miracle is all the more miraculous the more we
are dealing with numerous and disparate fragments, a marvel that is all the more
marvelous to the extent that rabbinic study develops a form of teaching that tallies
with it. (107 / 154)The all the more miraculous miracle of Spinoza’s genius—not necessarily of Spinozism,
but of its correlative, parallel, perhaps constitutive, ‘‘anti-Spinozism,’’ which is not to be
confused with its un-Spinozistic ‘‘treason’’—is that two possibilities (more precisely, two
necessities), two paths of life, of (Jewish) religion (and, as we shall see, indirectly, of
philosophy), are acknowledged in his writing, however obliquely. Levinas leaves no doubt
that these two paths, which are also two methods, are not given equal privilege by Spinoza
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