BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Theological-Political Treatise
For this purpose, we need to demonstrate, ¢rst and foremost, that an
intellectual or precise knowledge of God is not a gift generally given to
all the faithful, in the way that obedience is. Secondly, we must prove
that that knowledge which God, via the prophets, required all men to
possess universally and which every individual is obliged to possess,
consists of nothing other than an understanding of God’s justice and
charity.Both of these points are readilydemonstrated from Scripture itself.
[5] For (1), the ¢rst point, most evidently follows from Exodus 6.3,
169 where in showing Moses the singular grace given to him, God says: ‘And
I was revealed to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai, butIwas
not known to them by my name Jehovah.’ To clarify this, we must note
that El Shaddai in Hebrew signi¢es ‘God who su⁄ces’ because he gives
each person what su⁄ces for him; and although Shaddai isoftenusedon
its own to refer to God, we should not doubt that the word El (‘God’)
should always be silently understood. We should further note that no
name is found in the Bible other than Jehovah to indicate the absolute
essence of God without relation to created things. The Hebrews therefore
claim this is the only proper name of God and that all the others are
forms of address; and in truth the other names of God, whether they are
nouns or adjectives, are attributes which belong to God in so far as He is
considered in relation to his creatures or manifested through them. An
example is El (or Eloha, if we insert the paragogical letter He), which
means simply ‘powerful’, as is well-known since it belongs to God alone
in a pre-eminent degree, just as when we speak of Paul as ‘the Apostle’.
Elsewhere the virtues of his power are given in full, as El (‘powerful’),
great, terrible, just, merciful, etc., or the word is used in the plural but
with a singular meaning, as is very common in Scripture, in order to
include all his virtues at the same time.
Hence, God tells Moses that he was not known to the patriarchs by
the name of Jehovah.The patriarchs, it follows, knew no attribute of God
disclosing his absolute essence, but only his acts and promises, i.e., his
power in so far as it is manifest through visible things. However, God
does not tell Moses this so as to charge the patriarchs with lack of faith
but, on the contrary, to praise their faith and trust, by which they
believed God’s promises to be true and certain, despite their lacking the
exceptional knowledge of God that Moses had. For while Moses possessed
more elevated conceptions of God, he entertained doubts about
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