HENT DE VRIESthis word, than Spinoza could have dreamed. The theological formulations of his
tradition transport [charrient] the accumulated riches [l’acquis] of a long inner expe-
rience. (115–16 / 165)Nonetheless, we may conclude that Spinoza does make a significant contribution that
outweighs his ‘‘betrayal.’’ As Levinas acknowledges, ‘‘ ‘Judaism is a revealed Law and not
a theology’: this opinion from Mendelssohn came, then, from Spinoza’’ (117 / 169). This
task, Levinas continues, has lost nothing of its urgency:
Can Jewish consciousness in our days deny this teaching of interiorization, when it
is capable of giving such teaching a new meaning and new perspectives? Does it want
to side with a Kierkegaard in regarding the ethical stage as surpassable?... The ethical
significance of Scripture, whose irreducibility was perceived by Spinoza’s genius and
which he knew to single out in an age in which axioms, still superb, had nothing to
fear from axiomatics, has survived the dogmatism of adequate ideas. (117–18 / 169)Neither the precritical dogmatism of opinion nor the dogmatism of common notions—
and perhaps not even the intuitive science that grasps the essence of particular things—
can cover the proper domain of ethics, of the spiritual life of Scripture, whose hermeneutic
richness the Talmud expresses and whose no less important theologico-politicalsense
Spinoza formalized and phenomenologically concretized for modernity.
If there is any invective against Spinoza—beyond the claim that Spinozism harbors,
within its most vivid imaginations, within its most rigorous demonstrations, and within
its most intellectual intuitions, the seeds of a certain anti-Spinozism (which now no longer
necessarily means Judaism)—it is much less pronounced than the distance marked in
these pages from another Judeo-Christian philosopher, Henri Bergson, of whoseThe Two
Sources of Morality and ReligionLevinas notes in passing that, in privileging historical
Christianity (albeit in its most dynamic and mystical forms), it is far less hesitant than
Spinoza. Following Zac’s analysis, Levinas recalls that Spinoza interprets Judaism as a
‘‘State religion’’ and Christianity as a ‘‘religion of the individual,’’ while leaving no doubt
that ‘‘Christian universalism has remained a pure pretension’’ (297n.3 / 162n.). Not so
in Bergson. Hence, Levinas surmises: ‘‘On this point, did Bergson have other teachers
than Spinoza in order to forget the entire preceding point?’’^27
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