BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

On the divine law
common people and their lack of knowledge, and that in reality God acts
and governs all things from the necessity of his own nature and perfection
alone, and his decrees and volitions are eternal truths and always involve
necessity.This is the ¢rst point that I proposed to explain and prove.
[11] Now let us pass to the second point, running through Scripture,
to see what it teaches about the natural light of reason and this divine 66
law. The ¢rst thing that strikes us is the history of the ¢rst man where it
is narrated that God forbade Adam to eat of the fruit of ‘the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil’, 4 which seems to mean that God instructed
Adam to do good, and to seek it under the aspect of good and not as the
opposite of what is bad, that is, to seek good for the love of good rather
than from the fear of harm. For as we have already shown, he who does
good from a true love and knowledge of good, acts freely and with a
constant purpose, but he who does good from fear of su¡ering injury, is
simply driven to avoid what is bad, like a slave, and lives at the command
of another. Hence, this one prohibition laid by God on Adam entails the
whole divine law and agrees fully with the dictate of the natural light of
reason. It would not be di⁄cult to explain the whole history, or parable,
of the ¢rst man on this basis, but I prefer to let it go. I cannot be absolutely
sure whether my explanation agrees with the intention of the writer,
and many people do not concede that this history is a parable, but
insist it is a straightforward narrative.
[12] It will be better therefore to adduce other passages of Scripture and
especially passages written by one who speaks according to the natural
light of reason in which he surpassed all the wise men of his time, and
whose opinions the people regarded with as much veneration as those of
the prophets. I mean Solomon, who is more highly commended in the
sacred writings for his prudence and wisdom than for his prophecy
and piety. In his ‘Proverbs’ he calls human understanding the fountain of
true life and locates misfortune in stupidity alone. This is what he says
at 16.22: ‘understanding is the fountain of life to him who is lord of it, 5
and the punishment of the stupid is their stupidity’, where we should
4 Genesis 2.17.
5 Spinoza’s footnote: a Hebrew idiom. He who has something or possesses it in his nature is said to be
a lord of that thing.Thus a bird is called, in Hebrew, a ‘lord of wings’, because it has wings. An intelligent
man is called a ‘lord of intellect’, because he has intellect.
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