BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Introduction
of society more generally.It is owing to these defective but strongly prevailing
ideas about politics aswell as religion,he argues,that‘superstition’is built up
(oftenbyambitiousclergy),intoaforcesu⁄cientlypotentto overshadowifnot
direct all aspects of men’s lives, including intellectual debate and the
administration of ordinary justice. Religious dogma comes to be enforced on
everyone by force of law because the common people are persuaded by
religious teachers that they should insist on doctrinal uniformity in the
interests of their own and everyone else’s salvation and relationship to God.
Religionis concoctedinto apowerfulforce inhumana¡airs,heargues,chie£y
by means of dogmatic appeals to Scripture, though also ‘with pomp and
ceremony, so that everyone would ¢nd it more impressive than anything else
and observe it zealously with the highest degree of ¢delity’. 1 Acorrect
understandingofthemechanicsbywhichallthishappens,basedonarealistic
analysis of human drives and needs, he contends, will not just help ground a
solidtolerationandreduceinter-confessionalstrifebutalsodiminishinternal
ideological threats to legitimate government and generally render the
individual happier and society more peaceful andstable.
Spinoza’s method
Although a particular system of philosophy inspired and underpins the
whole of theTheological-Political Treatise, it does so in most of the chapters
unobtrusively and frequently in a hidden fashion.While his revolutionary
metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy subtly infuse every
part and aspect of his argumentation, the tools which Spinoza more
conspicuously brings to his task are exegetical, philological and historical.
In fact, it is the latter features rather than the underlying philosophy to
which scholars chie£y call attention when discussing this particular text.
Spinoza’s hermeneutical methodology constitutes a historically rather
decisive step forward in the evolution not just of Bible criticism as such but
of hermeneutics more generally, for he contends that reconstructing the
historical context and especially the belief system of a given era is always
the essential ¢rst and most important step to a correct understanding of
any text. In this respect his approach was starkly di¡erent from that of
traditional exegetes of Scripture and from Renaissance text criticism as a
whole (as well as from that of our contemporary postmodernist criticism).
1 Spinoza,Theological-Political Treatise, Preface, para. 6.
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