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THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTURE

even arbitrary laws are preferable to the fierce dangers of lawlessness and anarchy (of
which Europeans had a recent experience in the thirty-year war). The civil state is a
realistic middle term between two hypothetical extremes: the state of universal strife
where no government is available, and the state of universal rationality where no govern-
ment is necessary.’’^25 For Spinoza, an intrinsic tendency toward sociality—and hence
toward ecclesial communities and cultic practices, but also commerce and the common-
wealth, in short, the whole domain of the political—is inscribed into the very concept of
reason. Such a tendency announces itself with the first duality—‘‘on s’amuse mieux a`
deux,’’ as Levinas used to say—and extends to the third. Yet in Spinoza this social dimen-
sion of ‘‘ethical interiority’’ takes a peculiar form, as is clear from his statement that ‘‘The
reasonable man is one who seeks out other like-minded people to enjoy together the life
of the intellect, or freedom.’’^26
Such Spinozistic sociality hardly reveals the asymmetry or passivity of which Levinas
writes. Nor are like-mindedness or the life of the intellect, let alone the idea of Spinozistic-
deterministic freedom, categories for which Levinas has much use. And yet the parallels
between the two philosophers are difficult to ignore. Reason requires sociality, the politi-
cal, the theologico-political, whose constitutive function and relative autonomy—and
hence relative exteriority, heteronomy—it cannot (fully?) draw within its orbit or reduce
to a mere dialectical moment in its own unfolding.
Spinoza’s ‘‘betrayal’’ was his calculated departure from the community, rather than
his espousal of a monistic metaphysics, which, in Levinas’s reading, leaves room and,
perhaps, for the first time in modernity, establishes a nongeometrical ‘‘space’’ for ‘‘interi-
ority,’’ not least because ‘‘interiority,’’ in the Levinasian idiom, figures an ‘‘exteriority’’
within and beyond being and theconatus essendi. Add to this the explicit meditation upon
philosophy’s intrinsic limit and its no less internal link to the realm of the theologico-
political, whose relative autonomy religion—in all of its cultic manifestations and, indeed,
phenomenality—presents ecclesially and liturgically, that is to say, figuratively, dramati-
cally, theatrically, and performatively, and it becomes difficult to see in Spinoza the great-
est antagonist of the Levinasian project. On the contrary, although Spinoza doesn’t draw
on all the available resources that Scripture implies, he nonetheless conveys an eminently
modern—and, indeed, Jewish—point of view, which Levinas summarizes as follows:

Modern man no longer belongs, via his religious life, to an order in which proposi-

tions on the existence of God, on the soul, on miracles or a future revealed by the

prophets would remain, in spite of the abstract nature of their pronouncements, on

the level of truths of perception. At least, present-day Judaism in the West does not

understand them in this way. Hence, for a modern religious conscience, the idea that

Scripture contains the Word of God, but is not that actual Word, frustrates [or un-

does,dejoue] only an infantile representation of the Revelation without discrediting

a text to which a Jew nowadays can bring many more resources, when investigating

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