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THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTURE

or by most of the traditions on whose shoulders he stands or that stand on his shoulders
in turn.
What, then, is treacherously ‘‘anti-Jewish’’ in Spinoza? Is it the occasional Greek-
Christian amalgamation of reason and New Testament doctrine, notably the views of
Jesus and Paul—‘‘none of the Apostles did more philosophizing than Paul’’ (Theologico-
Political Treatise, chap. 11)—and hence the mixing of ontology and onto-theology, the
political and the theologico-political (an amalgamation that would, on close scrutiny,
contradict Spinoza’s own hermeneutic principle ofsola scriptura)? If so, what remains of
Levinas’s appreciation of theTheologico-Political Treatise’s perceived modernism and its
central scriptural and, more indirectly, philosophical claim (namely, the necessity of limit-
ing the claim that philosophy can bring to bear upon Scripture and, through it, upon the
political)? Or is Spinoza’s un-Spinozistic moment the forgetfulness—or rather ‘‘igno-
rance’’—of the rabbinic written and oral tradition, of the Talmud, a forgetfulness that
Levinas suggests, basing himself on the historical research of van Dias and van der Tak,
may already have taken root in the Jewish community of Amsterdam well before Spinoza’s
excommunication? If this is so, is there in Spinoza’s writings any single philosophical,
ethical, theological, or political statement or idea (that is to say, any definition, axiom,
proposition, demonstration, etc.) that Levinas should consider untrue or, rather, ‘‘inade-
quate’’ (to use the terminology so often deployed by both authors, albeit it with such
different connotations and, perhaps, ulterior aims)?
As we have seen, Levinas (and Zac) do not consider the historical critique of Scrip-
ture, for all its historicist-naturalist reductionism—that is, its presuming to offer a genetic
philology without philosophy—to have been ‘‘Spinoza’s fundamental project’’ (111 /
159). The fundamental project is, instead, to protect the freedom of thought in the com-
monwealth and thereby to ensure the commonwealth’s integrity and stability, in turn.
This aim, paradoxically, yields a secondary result, namely, insight into how the text and
texture of the state must be read. Genetic philology doesn’t equal archeology, let alone
causal explanation, but entails an altogether different hermeneutics of its own:

The neutrality of the Scriptures with regard to philosophy presupposes the possibility

of interpretingScripture through Scripture. To prove the truth of a text, one must

make it accord with reality [re ́el]; to understand its significance [signification], it suf-

fices to have it accord with itself. By right, certainly, everything human [tout l’hu-

main] is explained by Nature—that is, through causes. But before explicating ideas,

one can understand them as significations: ‘‘Spinoza’s great discovery consists in

showing that, in order to understand the exact meaning [sens] of the ideas contained

in the sacred texts, we can use a method that is as rigorous as the method of learned

men, without seeking to explicate things in terms of causes.’’^5

In so doing, Spinoza, having denying Judaism—that is to say, rabbinicism and Talmud—
the place it is due, nonetheless grants its irreducibility to categories of the Western spirit,

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