HENT DE VRIESwhether Greek or modern, and hence guarantees it an independence of sorts. True, Levi-
nas continues, the ‘‘colligation of literary facts’’ on which Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics
is based (in full accord with Bacon’s method for the ‘‘intellection of natural facts’’) may
seem to lack ‘‘an anticipatory project of the whole’’ (113 / 161), without which such tex-
tual data and strata, at first glance, would seem to make no sense. On closer scrutiny,
this ascetic withholding of the larger metaphysical project may, paradoxically, open up a
philosophical path in its own right: the interpretation of signs, that is to say, of good
theologico-political sense. In theTheologico-Political Treatise,as Levinas reads it: ‘‘Spinoza
thinks that a discourse can be understood without the vision of the truths enlightening it.
But isolating the fundamental significations of an experience while practicing an ‘epoche ̄’
in relation to its truth involved indicating one of the paths upon which philosophy may
embark, even after the end of speculative dogmatisms’’ (113 / 161).
What is least plausible in Spinoza’s engagement with the biblical text—his withhold-
ing of the philosophical totality implied in his very undertaking—is precisely what renders
it most promising and significant, for not only ‘‘religious philosophy, but... all philoso-
phy.’’ It is with this procedure that he makes place, ‘‘in the life of the Spirit,’’ for what
Levinas calls ‘‘ ‘prophetic’ light.’’ Prophecy speaks in its own voice—and does so, as Spi-
noza says, ‘‘without irony,’’ as the ‘‘Word of God’’—‘‘next [a`coˆte ́]’’ to that of reason,
which, for its part, must cast its ‘‘natural light’’ on seemingly contingent things and events.
Religion is thus a category ‘‘sui generis’’ just as much as it forms part of a larger scheme
(113 / 161). This is the dual-aspect character of all there is and all there is to say:
Of course, Spinoza does believe that the Word of God ultimately comes from the
nature of God and if one understood this nature, wisdom and the future would derive
from it in a rigorously determinist way. But in the complexity of things, this future
cannot be known philosophically.... Since the impenetrable complexity of things is
not contingent, the Word is not dedicated to the silence of the day in which ‘‘every-
thing will be clear.’’ (113 / 161)The lack of conceptual rigor for which the expression the ‘‘Word of God’’—to be distin-
guished, though it is not numerically or ontologically distinct, from the metaphysical idea
(existence and essence) of God or Nature—stands can, by Spinoza’s own account, not be
provisional, that is to say, temporal. Hence the noise of biblical language will not cede to
the silence of the philosophical concept. Already in Spinoza, who in this differed from
many of his contemporaries, there is, Levinas says, ‘‘a way of reading the Bible that comes
down to listening to the Word of God. This manner remains irreplaceable in spite of the
privileges to be gained by philosophy (that is to say, Spinozism)’’ (117 / 168).
Furthermore, Spinoza’s alleged betrayal hardly squares with Levinas’s no less em-
phatic claim that theEthics—in what Stuart Hampshire calls its metaphysical ‘‘dual-
aspect’’ view of reality^6 —assumes, in the name of rationalism, a ‘‘freedom of spirit,’’
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