Your Humble Blogger is not actually finished with the Theological-Political Treatise, but I'm at a point where Spinoza appears to have finished with Scripture. It isn't sacred, he says, except insofar as anything is sacred which leads people to faith and obedience (of Divine Will, which Spinoza sees as simply charity and justice). I, on the other hand, view Scripture as sacred. So we're at odds there. But what, exactly is it about Scripture? I think of it as unique (or at least, that there is clearly Scripture and not-Scripture, and that the two should be treated differently), so how do I know what it is, and how do I know how to treat it?
Spinoza, first of all, has some hard questions to answer. If Scripture is sacred, and written by the Divine for man to study, why doesn't it say so? Why doesn't it say, for instance, "This is the Word of the Lord, and you shall study it and take its words for your teachings. Neither shall you put your own judgments above this book, nor shall you allow any editing, redacting, or abridging"? There are plenty of places where it says "You shall do this" and "You shall not do that," so why not "Honor thy Scripture?" Furthermore, since it seems clear that the actual words were written by humans and redacted by humans (and perhaps redacted again and again by different humans), how can the actual words be divine? If the Lord speaks to men in the tongues of men, does that make the language divine, or mortal? And if it is mortal (and certainly all the evidence is that it is mortal), why should we treat it as Divine?
Sadly, the answer is not rigorous, and not compelling. Those seeking some sort of rigorously defined logical Creator of the Universe must look elsewhere. Those of us willing to believe some unreasonable things, to doubt our own reason and to accept its limitations get to shortcut a bunch of stuff. And the answer to much of Spinoza's question is that there is a Written Torah and an Oral Torah, and they both work together to form Scripture, and that the Oral Torah says that the Written Torah is Scripture, and tells us how to read it. You can reject that—heck, you can reject the whole thing—but you can't really argue it.
Second, of course, is that the Lord is not only omnipotent and omniscient, but also ineffable. There are limits to human understanding, but there is none to the Master of the Universe. If the Creator can Create the whole bang shoot out of a Tohu Bohu, who is to say he can't Create a Scripture using mortal writers and redactors? If that's how the King of Kings wants it, then that's how it is, because that's what it means to be the Master of the Universe. Awesome power? Sure. Not just in the sense of being a bit bigger, a bit stronger, a bit more knowledgeable, a bit more creative, a bit more influential. The Lord is the Lord, and who is like unto him? Nobody, that's who.
Not that we should give up on reason altogether; Scripture (including the Oral Law) is pretty clear on that. Reason is what the Redeemer gave us, so that's what we get to use, and thank you very much for it. Scripture is meant to be studied, not just read; the entire universe was created (say the Rabbis) so that Torah could be studied by humans, so the faculties we were given (pattern-matching, logic, poetry, analysis, comparison, etc) are likely to be good ones to use. On the other hand, don't get all excited about your own head. Spinoza clearly can only believe what he can believe, and finds it preposterous that anybody, thinking clearly, eyes open, could ever come to a different conclusion. But people do, and people always have. If he kept in the back of his mind the little thought that "It looks like I'm right, but those other people think they are right, too," then he could not have so smoothly relegated several hundred years of scholarship into the dustbin of unreason. Spinoza thinks highly of the Gift of Reason, and calls the mind "the true handwriting of God's Word," which is all well and good, but I suspect he means only his own.
Anyway, that's the Spinoza news.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
firmly in the grip of reason, david thinks:
i like thinking that everything is sacred. this avoids the problem of having to figure out what is and isn’t profane, or having to choose among conflicting lists of forbidden acts and things.
but then i don’t pray or behave well… and i suspect that prayer and restricted behavior are part of the process of learning to embrace the universe… that’s what people say.
is the purpose of discovering, defining the sacred, a process of avoiding bad things? it’s possible to find good things without seeking the best.
the search for something most true in this world feels very mortal. not divine.
I’m not sure what you mean, here. The Divine, as I understand it, knows what is most true, in fact the Divine is what is most true. The search for it is absolutely mortal, and is in my eyes at least in part what the task of humans is.
If you are a believer, then you start (I think) with an idea that the Sacred does, in fact, exist. If that’s true, then finding it and learning from it is important. It’s not a matter of avoiding bad things, it’s a matter of fulfilling our task. Restrictions on behaviour are a part of Scripture (or at least a part of my Scripture) but a small part, and in some ways the part most easily grasped and least in need of study.
But then, and this is where I part ways with Spinoza, at the very beginning, you cannot study Scripture without first saying “This is Scripture.” I don’t think you can prove that a text is sacred; you either accept that it is (on divine authority, if you are lucky enough to have an epiphany, or on the authority of tradition, or on the authority of your own soul resonating and finding it so. Oof, that last sounded awfully mushy. I guess what I mean is that you can be told a text is Scripture, or you can decide that a text feels sacred and therefore is Scripture. If it is, then the Master of the Universe is talking to you through it, and if it ain’t, then it’s just another text. It’s in the definition.
Also, that’s just my belief. Your mileage may vary, everybody’s does.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
objects and language. stories and ideas.
maybe a book is scripture because of the paper it’s printed on and the light that reflects into your eyes, the hands you hold the book with, a click on the radio? because you are there, because you are there to experience it, because it made you, because you are the same?
no surprise that accumulated logic would seek a best solution, or that when found, the anointed best solution would lead away from logic. a good end point would have to defeat the seeker’s method, or: loneliness in a story is treated ineffectively by adding friendly elements; loneliness is eradicated only by releasing the boundaries of the story, or, making each element boundless.
my point is, if there’s something to find, that means there’s someone looking for it, maybe even inventing the target.
i feel like i’m missing something when i hold sky in one hand and my birth in the other and it makes sense. everything is inherited but all i feel like i’ve inherited is a desire for everything to fit in the drawer. it’s beyond me.