BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

On prophecy
men’, ‘men were ¢lled with the spirit of God and with holy spirit’, etc.,
become perfectly clear. These merely mean that the prophets had a
unique and extraordinary virtue, 9 and cultivated piety with a unique
constancy of purpose. Such expressions also denote that they perceived
the mind or thought of God; for ‘spirit’ in Hebrew, as we showed, signi¢es
both a mind and the thought of a mind, and for this reason the Law
itself was called the spirit or mind of God because it disclosed God’s
mind; and in as much as the decrees of God were revealed through the
imagination of the prophets, their imagination could with equal right
also be designated the mind of God. God’s mind and his eternal thoughts
are indeed inscribed on our minds also, and consequently we too perceive
the mind of God (to speak in biblical terms), but natural knowledge,
as we have already noted, is not highly regarded by men because it is
common to all, and in particular was not prized by the Hebrews, who
thought very highly of themselves, and were even prone to despise other
peoples and consequently to disdain such knowledge as is common to
everyone. Finally the prophets were said to have the spirit of God because
men were ignorant of the causes of prophetic knowledge, though they
also admired it, and therefore, as with other extraordinary things, they
tended to ascribe it to God and to call it God’s knowledge.
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[27] We can therefore now assert, without reservation, that the prophets
perceived things revealed by God by way of their imagination, that
is via words or visions which may have been either real or imaginary.
These are the only means that we ¢nd in Scripture and we are not permitted
to invent others, as we have already shown. But I confess that I do
not know by what natural laws prophetic insight occurred. I might, like
others, have said that it occurred by the power of God, but then I would
be saying nothing meaningful. For this would be the same as explaining
the shape of some individual thing by means of a transcendental term.
For everything is done by the power of God. Indeed, because the power
of nature is nothing other than the power of God itself, it is certain that
we fail to understand the power of God to the extent that we are ignorant
of natural causes. Therefore it is foolish to have recourse to this same
power of God when we are ignorant of the natural cause of some thing,
which is, precisely, the power of God. In any case, there is no need for us
9 Spinoza’s footnote: see Annotation 3.
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