PLURALISM AND FAITHthat mockery does not succeed in the refutation of the orthodox tenets, but is itself the
refutation.’’^11
Indeed, we can now see that Strauss himself inverts Spinoza’s strategy, replacing Spi-
noza’s mockery of a personal God with invective concerning Havelock’s faith in the con-
tingency of the universe. Mockery weakens orthodox faith, Strauss says, when it taps into
dissonance between the expressed belief of the faithful and other tacit judgments they
make in daily life. If you already doubt at some level that every word in the Pentateuch
was asserted by the divinely inspired Moses, Spinoza’s presentation of textual evidence
that Moses died before the books were finished might threaten your faith. But if your
faith in divine inspiration runs deep, or if you think it is a faith that the masses must
accept even if you do not, evidence of the untimely death of Moses merely adds a minor
complication to be met in a variety of creative ways. So Spinozian mockery can take a toll
on some believers, but Spinozian reason and argument, Strauss asserts, is incapable of
providing a definitive refutation of orthodox faith.
The genuine refutation of orthodoxy would require the proof that the world and
human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God....
Spinoza’sEthicsattempts to be that system but it does not succeed; the clear and
distinct account of everything which it presents remains fundamentally hypothetical.
As a consequence its cognitive status is not different from that of the orthodox ac-
count. Certain it is that Spinoza cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.
But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic account
and the philosophic way of life are not necessarily, not evidently, the true account
and the right way of life; philosophy, the quest for evident and necessary knowledge,
rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of will, just as faith. Hence the antago-
nism between Spinoza and Judaism, between belief and unbelief, is ultimately not
theoretical, but moral.^12This is a superb formulation. I endorse much in it. Being a neo-Spinozist of sorts
myself, I concur, for instance, that Spinoza did not demonstrate his philosophy of sub-
stance as univocal, or prove parallelism of mind and body. His is a highly contestable
philosophy, one in which faith and argument are interwoven. Moreover, no secularist or
rationalist after Spinoza has demonstrated the sufficiency of reason to itself, either, though
it is understandable that a variety of scientists and atheists are impressed by the evidence
and arguments to be brought on behalf of such a creed. Orthodox faith in a created world
has not been eliminated by argument and laboratory results, though recourse to this piece
of evidence or that argument might press some of the faithful to sharpen their thinking
through alteration. Many modern Christians and Jews, for instance, have modified ele-
ments in their received faiths to render them compatible with evolutionary theory—
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