THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTUREhis review of Lacroix’s work, ‘‘Scripture may be salutary, like truth—but it is not the
latter’s implicit prefiguration. It is not an infused wisdom, an interiority, or a reason
without knowing it.’’^18 In Levinas’s view, the relationship between Scripture (and the
political) and philosophy is more complicated and this already in terms of Spinoza’s own
philosophy, in both theEthicsand theTheologico-Political Treatise.
There is thus a certain duality in Spinoza’s understanding of the theologico-political
meaning of Scripture, which allows for the enduring value of the positivity of revealed
religion, at least at its minimal core. For Spinoza, this is Christian piety and charity; for
Levinas, the spiritual life of the Talmud as taught by the masters and, more broadly, the
‘‘religion of adults.’’
Since the possibility of ‘verification’ is ignored, the ‘‘ethical interiorization’’ of the
biblical ‘‘Word of God’’ that Levinas discerns in Spinoza’sTheologico-Political Treatise
and in the many interspersedscholiaof theEthicshas already taken place at the a priori,
that is to say, transcendental or metaphysical-ontological level. ‘‘Interiorization’’ is not
distilled or abstracted from a learning process in which the true gradually—and, as it
were, teleologically—sheds its cultural-cultic vehicles, which were necessary yet inessential
or inadequate, though not for that reason arbitrary or false. Scriptural religion is not, as
Schopenhauer mused, ‘‘truth in the garment of a lie.’’^19 Although this impression is cer-
tainly given by the early beginnings of genetic or higher criticism of the biblical text, the
stripping off of alladiaphorahardly captures the formal structure and acknowledgment
of the ‘‘ethical interiorization’’ that Levinas, reading Spinoza, singles out. The distinction
is subtle:
Between the interiority of the Divine inscribed in the hearts of men and the interiority
of fitting thought [i.e., of the ideas of the second and third kind of knowledge],
on the one hand, and the exteriority of opinion [i.e., imagination, the first kind of
knowledge], on the other, Spinoza would not have recognized, in history, a work of
interiorization that reveals the inner meaning [sens] of something that had previously
passed for opinion. But to his credit, Spinoza did reserve for the Word of God a
proper statusoutside opinion and ‘‘fitting’’ ideas. (117 / 167)More than the metaphysical inconsistency of which we spoke earlier—and given the
fact that he does not assume any ‘‘verification’’ in the sense of the becoming true and
adequate of the false or inadequate—Levinas is drawn to ‘‘this side of Spinoza that is
perhaps the least Spinozist,’’ for, as he says, the ‘‘fact that non-Spinozism can make an
appearance in Spinoza remains itself indicative. We are far from so-called Spinozists to
whom the believer-non-believer alternative is as simple as pharmacist-non-pharmacist’’
(117 / 167). So is the fact that it does this in atheologico-political, that is to say, scriptural
context, where ethics and ethical interiority take the form of an exegesis and hermeneutics
whose production of polysemic meaning has relevance well beyond the Bible, beyond
PAGE 243243.................16224$ CH10 10-13-06 12:35:18 PS