To Spinoza

Spinoza died in 1677. But the rules of the game here specify that a great thinker may not only be treated as a historic figure, but also as one’s own contemporary, with at least some awareness of intervening history.

AN ANACHRONISTIC LETTER

TO SPINOZA:

ON LYRIC TRUTH

Dear Bento,

Dear Baruch,

Dear Benedictus,

thrice blesséd man; ‘blessed’ in three languages:

in Portuguese, as scion of an originally Portuguese merchant dynasty, although exiled from Portugal to the Netherlands, and resident there;

in Hebrew, as one whose earliest education was in the study of the Tanakh, of the Talmud, of Ibn Ezra, Maimonides and Hasdai Crescas;

in Latin, as a prime cosmopolitan philosopher of your day, leading critic of Descartes:

Greetings!

Why this letter? I want to review my basic sense of what is properly sacred, once again. Only, this time, to do so in dialogue with you.

But why, you may wonder, the epistolary form?

To me, it’s axiomatic that the truth of what is truly sacred – in other words, the community-founding truth of that which will forever matter more than we’ve yet come to realise – is nothing other than a quality of character. It’s the honesty of one’s persona, in inter-personal relationships. The quality of truth-as-openness, in that sense. And not, therefore, primarily a quality of definitive truth-as-correctness, regarding morality, metaphysics, or history. Not a quality of sacralised dogmatic propositions, considered in abstraction from the quality of their appropriation. Not even the inspirational power intrinsic to such propositions as are, potentially, the most potent channels for what I’m calling truth-as-openness. For, ‘potentially’, here, is not enough. Nothing truly counts as sacred except, and until, the actualisation of that potential. Indeed, it’s a very simple point. When we come to consider the criteria for identifying what ought to be sacred, I think we need to be quite strictly pragmatist: subordinating the authority-claims of truth-as-correctness, in the most decisive fashion, to those of truth-as-openness. Yet, so very few religious people fully do this, or ever have done so! And, likewise, so very few among the critics of religion in general!

Even you, I venture to suggest, fall short in this respect.

If, however, one is looking to perform truth-as-openness – in writing – what better genre is there, for the purpose, than that of the letter? What better genre, for enacting the thoughtful courtesy of one soul, as such, opened up to another? I think of great letter-writers. William Cowper, for instance. Or – that very different figure – St. Paul.

I’m writing you a letter – in this instance, it’s a playful venture. A letter, to be precise, defending ‘lyricism’, in the broad sense of: pathos-laden, imaginative playfulness, generally. Which you, though, scorned. A letter affirming the potential sheer poetic heft of such playfulness when sacralised, incorporated into liturgy. And its resultant capacity to mediate the most radical truth-as-openness, in political terms; its solidarity-building power, to that end. – Just so long as its ineradicable ambiguities are fully acknowledged. That’s to say: the fundamental variability in meaning of any lyric creed, depending upon who’s professing it, and in what context.

You were, yourself, a valiant upholder of truth-as-openness, inasmuch as such truth immediately implies a demand for wide-ranging freedom of serious speech. This brought you into bitter conflict with the official representatives of biblical lyric faith: first the authorities governing the Amsterdam synagogue, who excommunicated you, and then the Christian officials exercising powers of censorship on behalf of the Dutch state. What renders you unique, and to me especially interesting, is the way in which you grounded your resistance to these authorities. I mean: the radicality of your implicit challenge to the pious herd-mentality, the pious gang-mentality, the pious mob-mentality, from which they derived their power. The boldness with which you, in your Ethics, seek to clear away – root and branch – the banality, the cruelty, the mindlessness of these mentalities. The sublime, countervailing otherness of the true philosopher’s sense of personal identity, as you conceive it there; altogether swallowed up, as it were, into the sacred pantheistic One and All.

And yet, I think you over-reach.

I think you’re wrong to diagnose the basic malady in question here as being one that is intrinsic to the very quest for lyric truth itself. I see no need for such a scorched-earth strategy. You frame your Ethics not in pragmatist terms, as a phenomenological analysis of all that truth-as-openness involves; but, instead, as a quasi-Euclidean study, laid out as an idiosyncratic deductive geometry, so to speak, of metaphysical and moral truth-as-correctness. So, for you, the lyric thinking that informs popular religious liturgy is simply incorrect. I think that your judgement, at this point, is itself incorrect – because it oversimplifies. Lyric theology is built around sacred narratives with dramatic power; and such narratives presuppose the operation of free will both on the part of mortals and on the part of gods, or God. You, though, deny any possible connection between narratives of that kind and sacred truth. For you, philosophic truth is indeed essentially antithetical to ‘imagination’, in general. The doctrine of the Ethics sucks all the lyric oxygen, all the real life, out of theology. In your Theological-Political Treatise you do, it’s true, make some concessions to the lyricism of popular Judaism and Christianity. Yet, even in the Treatise the concessions are minimal: nothing more than grudging toleration for such lyricism, as at best a necessary evil, requiring skilful management by enlightened rulers, to contain its threat. This, I must confess, is not enough for me.

§

You were the first philosopher I ever read – and tried, and failed, to understand. That was fifty-five years ago, now. I was then a privileged, and precocious, schoolboy. I remember plucking a volume of your Ethics out from its place on the shelf, and starting to browse. It was a bright summer’s day; the school library, as usual, was perfectly still. Dating from the fourteenth century, that library had originally been a brewery built to cater for the members of the College, there being no clean drinking water available nearby. I used to go there often. (I’ve mentioned William Cowper. A volume of Cowper’s Letters was another book that I remember reading there. Cowper was downstairs, you were upstairs …) And I returned to you a number of times. I remember the flintstone walls; the great roof beams; the stately wooden furniture. Also: my sense of intrigued bafflement, upon first encountering you.

I didn’t get it: I mean, your anti-lyricism. And fifty-five years later, I must confess, I still don’t. Of course, anti-lyricism has been a recurrent tendency, within philosophy, right from the outset. Famously, in Book 10 of the Republic (607b5-6) Plato’s Socrates speaks of there being ‘an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. You for your part were, in the first instance, embattled against lyric thinking in the form of popular Judaism, popular Christianity. Socrates was embattled against it, above all, in the form of Homer, but with Hesiod and Pindar in mind, as well; also, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – and all those involved in the production and performance of their plays; plus, the whole tribe of celebrated orators in that world. A very different context.

Yours was a dangerous struggle. For Socrates, however, it was of course still more immediately perilous. I note that the three citizens chiefly responsible for his eventual trial, and condemnation to death, are named in the Apology (23e) as Meletus, Anytus and Lycon. And that Meletus – who plays the leading role, as Socrates engages him in dialogue – is said to be, primarily, ‘aggrieved on behalf of the poets.’ Anytus, ‘on behalf of the professional men and politicians.’ Lycon, ‘on behalf of the orators.’ For Plato, poetry and rhetoric are closely associated: in the Gorgias (502c) he speaks of poetry as a kind of rhetoric. Meletus and Anytus, one might say, stand for the two prime modes of lyric thinking, as expressed in speech; whereas ‘the professional men and politicians’ represented by Lycon are those most significantly responsible for upholding its educational prestige. Socrates’ alleged offence was that he had ‘corrupted the young’ – it appears that what, most of all, scandalised his accusers was his anti-lyricism.

Granted, Plato was nothing like as whole-hearted in his anti-lyricism as you; his own writing being so full of myth, allegory, metaphor, occasional passages of verse. But, as I’ve said, he shows provocative irreverence towards the great poets of the past; even – both in the Republic, Book 3, and in the Ion — towards Homer, the greatest of them all. In the Republic, Socrates envisages the philosopher-rulers of his model city instituting a strict regime of censorship, to avert the many dangers which he sees as inherent in the power of poetry – especially when it comes to the education of their successors. This censorship would forcibly suppress any poetic depiction of the gods as anything other than perfectly serene, and benign; or any poetic depiction of heroes, evoking sympathy for moments of weakness. Moreover, in the model city, no dramatic performances of any kind whatsoever would be permitted. Indeed, in the Republic 595a, Socrates goes so far as to declare that, of all the excellent features of his political ideal, there’s none he rates higher than this. Whilst, such is his scorn for any sort of rhetoric – unless expressly subdued to the service of philosophy – that the Gorgias, in which he debates with its protagonists, finally degenerates into little more than a shouting match.

After Plato, and alongside Platonism, Later Antiquity produced two further schools, both of which, notwithstanding their at times harsh opposition to one another, shared strong anti-lyricist instincts. Namely: the Epicureans and the Stoics. Both these schools, indeed, eventually produced poets. First, disregarding the founder, Epicurus’s own explicit hostility to any concern with poetry, Lucretius produced a major Epicurean treatise in verse form. And later, in a spirit of rivalry, Marcus Manilius did the same for Stoicism. But verse form is no guarantee of lyricist spirit. These are didactic / polemic poems scrupulously devoid, however, of any element of pathos. For, what the Epicureans called ‘ataraxia’ – and the Stoics, ‘apatheia’ – is a philosophic ideal absolutely equating true wisdom with perfect equanimity. Just as you, likewise, do.

Again, in your day – besides your own work – another, somewhat more populist revival of anti-lyricism appeared, in the form of Deism. And subsequently, too, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, there have been further surges: some labelled, by their adherents, ‘Positivist’, or ‘Agnostic’; others, ‘Atheist’. Not that all Atheism is anti-lyricist. It may of course also be lyric – as in the case of Ernst Bloch, for instance; or the case of Nietzsche; or (more weirdly) that of Deleuze and Guattari.

That I choose to focus on you, however, as a representative interlocutor in this regard, is essentially because I see in you the most sublime, and therefore the most troubling, version of that anti-lyricist spirit which has in other, lesser forms, now become so widespread in our civilisation.

What draws me to you in particular is, first and foremost, the unique, sombre purity of your viewpoint. It’s what Nietzsche, for instance, so admired in you – despite his atheistic lyricism, that extreme difference in style. In Nietzschean terminology: it’s your stance ‘beyond good and evil’. In other words, your resolute self-distancing from any kind of moralised resentment. It’s your absolutely non-consolatory, yet life-affirming ‘love of fate’; come what may. Your austerely neo-Epicurean, or neo-Stoic, contemptuous spurning of all bitterness. The flamboyant metaphysical sweep of your assault on the commonplace self-perception both of the individual ego, and, at every level also, of the corporate ego; insofar as these are reservoirs of bitterness, and the will-to-revenge.

Where, on the other hand, I think that you – like Nietzsche after you – essentially go wrong is in your failure to recognise the potential that exists for the very same purity of spirit, ‘beyond good and evil’, just as much within Christianity, within Judaism, or (one might add) within Islam. And not only within these Abrahamic species of religion, at their best. But, more or less, within every tradition of religious lyricism, without exception.

The trouble is, your critique doesn’t exactly target herd-religion, in itself – gang-religion, in itself – or mob-religion, in itself. In targeting the very form of lyric faith, as such, it’s much too scatter-gun. For, this is a form of thought which these excrescences, to be sure, all too often colonise; yet which they can never, exclusively, possess. And which, if one only looks, still provides plenty of resources for what may, surely, prove an altogether more truthful fight-back, than any anti-lyricist strategy, even yours, can ultimately manage.

§

Last year, my wife Dian and I sent some time on holiday in the Hague. Whilst there, we went to visit your old house on Paviljoensgracht; the one in which you spent your final years, and completed the Ethics; the house where, in the winter of 1677, you died, at the age of forty-four. There’s a fine statue of you, sat looking pensive, just outside.

It was early afternoon. The neighbourhood seemed fairly quiet. And you know the almshouses of the Heilige Geesthofje opposite your place? Well, they’re still there. Our guidebook mentioned a pleasant garden in the courtyard at the back. We idly wondered whether that garden was at all accessible, round the corner. So, we crossed the road, and took the turning on the right, to go and take a look. Doubletstraat. The guidebook had told us nothing, to warn us, about Doubletstraat’s notoriety! But very soon, the sleazy reality became apparent. It’s a little pedestrianised street. The only people sauntering up and down were men. They’d come to size up the sex-workers, in their glass-fronted booths. Between a few dozen and a few hundred yards from what was, once upon a time, your front door.

The Netherlands was the first modern country fully to legalise prostitution, in 2000. The red-light district in Amsterdam then became, more than ever, a major tourist attraction. Another effect – entirely desirable – was the increasing empowerment of some sex-workers, as advocates for their sisters in the industry. And yet, in recent years the Dutch sex industry has only grown more and more cruelly entangled with the problems of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. In the Hague, I gather, the city authorities, under pressure from residents of the surrounding area not involved in the industry, have proposed to re-locate their red-light district further out from the city centre. But opposition from residents of the proposed relocation area has obstructed this.

You must forgive me, I’m a priest. And, remembering that scene, so close to where you used to live, I’m immediately reminded of the story in the gospel of John, chapter 8, verses 1 to 11. (It’s a perhaps older text than the rest of the gospel, originally separate anyhow, and somewhat awkwardly inserted.) The story concerns a woman, not necessarily a sex-worker, but one who has been caught ‘in the very act of committing adultery’. A group of men, ‘scribes and Pharisees’, forcibly bring her into the Jerusalem Temple, where Jesus is sat, talking with interested enquirers. The angry men challenge Jesus: “In the Law Moses instructed us to stone such a person” [Deuteronomy 22. 21]; “so what do you say?” In response to which, Jesus, first, bends over, silently, and writes with his finger on the ground. (Maybe, he’s tracing the words of Jeremiah 17. 13: ‘Those who turn away from me shall be written in the earth’?) Then, he stands up, straight. He says: “Let whosoever amongst you is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And, again, he bends down, traces something on the ground, then waits. They’re taken aback. Silenced, they start, one by one, to drift away, the oldest of them first, until no one is left except the woman herself. To her, Jesus says: “Madam, where are they? Does no one condemn you?” She replies: “No one, Lord.” And he says: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

In the corollary to Part IV, Proposition 64 of the Ethics, you argue that ‘if the human mind had only adequate ideas it would form no notion of evil’.

I take it that what you, in your non-lyric way, mean is just the same as what that story of the woman taken in adultery, properly understood, means lyrically. Same content; different form. Thus, to borrow the Nietzschean phrase, again, the story shows Jesus as a model of ethical wisdom ‘beyond good and evil’; inasmuch as what you call the essentially ‘inadequate’ idea of ‘evil’ belongs to the moralised mere vindictiveness of outraged herd morality / gang (a-)morality / mob amorality.

Dear teacher, let me recite to you your ethical doctrine, to the extent that I have now come to understand it.

Intent on arriving at a more ‘adequate’ analytic idea of the struggles of the properly sacred, in strictly non-lyric terms, you draw a basic contrast between what you call ‘passive’ and ‘active’ emotions. ‘Passive’ emotion, in general, is what energises the inadequate ideas from which we need to be delivered. ‘Active’ emotion is what energises an ideal overcoming of those delusions. The ‘passivity’ or ‘activity’ in question isn’t what’s conventionally meant by ‘passivity’ or ‘activity’. But it’s the passivity or activity of the true self; that is, the thoughtful self which truly understands itself, and knows what will cause it true happiness; the self that is governed by ‘adequate ideas.’ So, consider for example Tolstoy’s lyric portrayal of the Emperor Napoleon, in War and Peace. Here is a man who, on the surface, is of course extremely active; a great gangster-ruler, endowed with the most tremendous power. Yet, Tolstoy presents him the way that you would, doubtless, also have seen him: as a man essentially devoid of ‘adequate ideas’ or, therefore, of any true self; deluded by his own glamour and, hence, morally nothing more than a pitiful cipher; at the deepest level, quite powerless; swept along, passively, by the imperatives of the false role that he finds himself driven to play, the pose that his propaganda imposes upon him. Napoleon is simply an extreme case of an all-too-common pathology; which your French contemporaries, La Rochefoucauld and Pascal skewered under the name of ‘amour-propre’.

‘Passive’ emotion is what renders one needy. In its strongest forms, it’s the sort of emotion bound up with addiction; whether that be addiction to drugs; to bad habits more generally; or to collusion with manipulative others. One might say: it traffics us – all of us, to one degree or another – into spiritual prostitution. (As Jesus says in John 8. 7: “Let whosoever amongst you is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her”. Prostitution, selling out to manipulative others, may be more discreet when it’s ‘only’ spiritual; it may, then, allow more concealment and self-deception than actual sex-work does. But that by means necessarily makes it any the less soul-destroying.)

What do the angry men in John, Chapter 8 verses 1 – 11 have in common with Napoleon Bonaparte, as portrayed by Tolstoy? Almost nothing at all! Except this: that both are illustrations of wrong-headed ideological activism, driven by notably powerful ‘passive’ emotion. In the case of the angry men: they’re delivered into bondage by inflamed amour-propre bound up with religious self-righteousness; spiritual prostitution pressed into the service of sacralised cruelty. In the case of Napoleon: he’s delivered into bondage by inflamed amour-propre bound up with an altogether secular conception of ‘glory’; spiritual prostitution pressed into the service of a bloodthirsty delusion.

But then you also argue that ‘an emotion can neither be hindered or removed save by a stronger emotion and one stronger in checking emotion’ (Ethics, IV, Proposition 7). ‘Active’ emotions, as you conceive them, are evidently emotions that, by nature, can never be excessive. For, they are what liberate one from one’s bondage to ‘passive’ emotion. So, they are expressions of ‘conatus’, meaning: the drive to integrity; holding fast to the vocation intrinsic to one’s original nature; proper loyalty to the best that one can be. ‘Active’ emotion is liberative, inasmuch as it is emotion resulting in the closest possible approximation to the ideal condition of being ‘causa sui’: that is, no mere random product of external causes, but a self-caused, self-created being. Nothing indeed is ever fully ‘causa sui’, in your metaphysical scheme of things, other than the sheer totality of what you call ‘Deus sive Natura’, ‘God or Nature’. But ‘active’ emotion, shaped by ‘adequate ideas’, nevertheless enables some real participation in that sacred whole, as such. In the scholium to Ethics, III, Proposition 59, you gather all such emotions into the encompassing category of ‘fortitudo’; which might best I think be rendered into English as ‘spiritedness’. And then you sub-divide spiritedness, so defined, into two prime aspects: ‘animosity’ (‘animositas’) and ‘generosity’ (generositas). ‘Animosity’, meaning a spirit of determined resistance to any kind of attempted manipulativeness, any encroachment by herd morality / gang (a-)morality / mob amorality. ‘Generosity’, meaning a spirit of solidarity in that resistance – solidarity with true friends, solidarity with true political and religious allies – spiritedness ultimately expanding to the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ in general.

All of this, so far it goes, I admire. I absolutely agree with your proposition that ‘if the human mind had only adequate ideas it would form no notion of evil’ – in the sense of the word ‘evil’, namely, current in herd morality / gang (a-)morality / mob amorality; where its meaning is more or less defined by mere moralised resentment.

If only, though, you had not decided immediately to translate that polemic insight into a wholesale repudiation of serious lyric thought! For, in the first place, you miss so much potential ambiguity, as a result. The fundamental ambiguity of hope and fear (Ethics IV, Proposition 47), for example; of humility (IV, Proposition 53); of repentance (IV, Proposition 54). These you see as essentially passive emotions. True, in the scholium to IV, Proposition 54, you do concede that these particular passive emotions, when religiously codified – as potential pressure points, to be exploited by enlightened rulers – may, after all, ‘do more good than harm’. (There is a distinct echo, here, of the Theological-Political Treatise.) But this still does not come close to the ambiguity that I’m inclined to see in these emotions, and in others akin to them. For, even in making your concession regarding them, you still persist in considering only their usefulness to benign would-be manipulators; not their potential, quite different role, mixed together with ‘animosity’ and ‘generosity’, in wholesale resistance to manipulation of every kind. You make no allowance for the possibility that these may be emotions that straddle the divide between ‘passive’ and ‘active’. So, you fail to consider active-emotional fear of the potential harm intrinsic to manipulation; active-emotional hope attached to anarchist projects of ultimate deliverance from such harm; active-emotional humility as a matter of being armed against the manipulator’s wily flattery; active-emotional repentance, prompting one constantly to reconstruct one’s defences, against such flattery.

And, secondly: don’t you, in fact, recognise the essential complementarity, in pragmatist terms, between, on the one hand, the active-emotional ‘spiritedness’ which you advocate in non-lyric fashion – and, on the other hand, the lyric spirit animating (just to take this one example) the New Testament story of the woman taken in adultery? It seems to me to be so clear.

Is your anti-lyricism, really, so overbearing?

§

I think that the argument of your Ethics goes wrong precisely at its starting point.

The fact that Part One develops into a series of Propositions about ‘God’ serves to indicate that your basic topic is the nature of the sacred. Yet, this ‘God’ differs from the God of conventional Abrahamic religion in two quite distinct ways: one of which seems to me good, the other not.

‘God’, you argue, is essentially to be understood as an infinite substance; within which all reality is contained. This infinite substance has two, also infinite, ‘attributes’ (attributa) which we may come to know from the inside – plus, an infinity of other ‘attributes’ which remain un-knowable in that way. One of the two divine attributes which we inhabit is Extension. The other is (human) Thought. And I take it that the multitude of others which we cannot inhabit are the minds of other species.

All the divine attributes, as you conceive them, are first and foremost, unimaginably vast, yet specific, systems of necessary causality; the human ones no less than those of other species.

Thus, according to you, our sacred calling in life – that which (by definition) always matters more infinitely more than we have so far come to realise – is, in the end, nothing other than a ceaseless quest both to explain, in the most scientifically naturalistic terms, and to reconcile oneself to, why things happen in our lives, and in our world. ‘God’ equates to ‘Nature’. And devotion to ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura) quite simply equates, at the level of truth-as-correctness, to the most rigorous possible determinism.

Your English friend Henry Oldenburg wrote you a letter from London, dated 17 December 1675, which has survived. (Letter 74.) Here, Oldenburg adopts the role of spokesman for any traditionally-minded Christians who might read you. I quote:

You appear [Oldenburg writes] to postulate a fatalistic necessity in all things and actions. If this is conceded and affirmed, they [your Christian readers] say, the sinews of all laws, all virtue and religion are severed, and all rewards and punishments are pointless. They consider that whatever compels or implies necessity excuses; and they hold that no one, in that case, will be inexcusable in the sight of God. If we are driven by fate, and if all things, brought round by its unyielding hand, follow a fixed and inevitable course, they cannot see what place there is for guilt or punishment.

Applying the pragmatist criteria proper to truth-as-openness, I myself would argue that the effects listed by Oldenburg, in this letter, as being undesirable, are on the contrary, essentially good. There is no need for our conception of the sacred to serve as mere back-up to our all-too-natural desire to be rewarded for our own goodness; or as mere back-up to our own all-too-natural disinclination to excuse ‘evil’ others. Such a conception of the sacred reduces religion to nothing more than an ideology of manipulative control; a mobilisation of herd, gang and mob closed-mindedness. In this way, it demeans religion; the real truth-potential of which consists precisely in its capacity to point beyond such ideology.

Unfortunately, however, this isn’t quite how you respond!

You don’t immediately reach for the criteria of truth-as-openness. At the beginning of the Ethics you launch straight into your theory of metaphysical truth-as-correctness, instead.

The criteria of truth-as-openness are, in themselves, essentially independent of any such theory. I would argue that they’re what ought to come first. And that then, when it comes to metaphysics, they should essentially just introduce a spirit of maximum generosity: a spirit dissolving all barriers tending to close down conversation – whether it be between people of different cultures, of different classes, or of different levels of educational attainment. Your metaphysical theory, however, isn’t conducive to any such spirit. It has, on the one hand, the excellent effect of outlawing any kind of sacralised vindictiveness. Yes. And yet, on the other hand, it also – quite unnecessarily – combines this with an altogether more comprehensive anti-lyric atheism. Thus, although you speak of ‘God’, you do so simply in order to designate an emptiness: the empty space that’s left behind by your excluding, from the picture, the lyric God, or gods, of popular religion. The resultant notion of ‘God’ is a projection of your intellectual elitism. So, there is nothing personal about this ‘God’. No metaphoric anthropomorphism survives in your ‘theology’; it therefore undercuts any sort of prayer. Your ‘God’ has no evolving creative relationship to the world, from the outside; and no providential will, at work within history. You allow no lyric narratives of grace.

I think we need metaphysics to track the many, many paths that lead from the essential unity of truth-as-openness, to pure, soul-shaping prayer, in all its various traditions. You begin at the wrong place. A much better starting point would have been from your analysis of ‘intuitive knowledge’ (scientia intuitiva).

Thus: tell me if and when I go wrong. You distinguish three kinds of knowledge. First, there is ‘imagination’ (imaginatio) or ‘opinion’ (opinio). This includes all manner of muddled, hence ‘inadequate’, ideas; sometimes serviceable, but often misleading. And second, there is ‘mathematical science’ (ratio). ‘Mathematical science’ gives us the fulness of reliable truth-as-correctness, in general. Accordingly, the Ethics itself is designed to be a systematic exploration of such knowledge, incorporated into a theory of what is properly sacred.

But what, in that case, is the third kind? Like ‘mathematical science’, you tell us, ‘intuitive knowledge’ deals in ‘adequate ideas’. Yet, we’re told that it somehow ranks higher.

How come?

‘Intuitive knowledge’. Here it is, occupying what I’d consider to be the rightful domain, in relation to the sacred, of truth-as-openness. But when the distinction between the three kinds of knowledge is first introduced, in Ethics II, Proposition 40, scholium 2, you illustrate them, not in relation to the sacred, but in relation to a little mathematical puzzle. In seeking to solve the puzzle, the first kind of knowledge resorts to stray scraps of technical memory; little calculative tricks. The second kind differs inasmuch as it proceeds much more laboriously, deducing the solution from first principles. – And the third kind? Are you really just saying that ‘intuitive knowledge’ is more reliable than the first kind, and quicker than the second kind?

No, there must be more to it than that! There must be more, because we aren’t in fact dealing with mathematical puzzles in the Ethics as a whole. We’re dealing with the question of what properly counts as sacred. And when you return to discussing ‘intuitive knowledge’, in Ethics V, Propositions 25 – 28, 31 – 33, 38, it’s characterised as the very essence of the true ‘intellectual love of God’. This love, you argue, is eternal (Proposition 33). It’s the energy which drives that ‘part’ of the human mind which is absorbed (to the extent any part ever can be) into the eternity of ‘God’; in that sense, ‘remaining’ beyond death (Proposition 23).

Undistracted, yet relatively liberated from the fear of death, and from all the other merely ‘passive’ emotions (Proposition 38), it is indeed exactly what I’d call ‘truth-as-openness’.

But you’ve left your consideration of this pragmatist third kind of knowledge right to the end of a book, in the main, dedicated to the sacralisation of the second kind. In this way, you’ve concealed, from yourself, the actual clash between the competing claims of each. Here, at the conclusion of your argument, you’re unconsciously, I think, subverting all that’s gone before. Or, at any rate, you’re laying the foundations for a subversive counter-theory. Thus, the third kind of knowledge ‘intuitively’ grasps the truth-potential of the second kind (Proposition 28), inasmuch as that truth-potential consists in a basic standpoint ‘beyond good and evil’. And yet, as I’ve been arguing, at the same time it also, no less decisively, transcends the anti-lyric dogmatism of the second kind, as you present it.

It surely must do. For, otherwise – if not (I mean) by virtue of its generous pragmatism – how does it differ at all from the second kind?

§

I’m advocating a comprehensively pragmatist understanding of the sacred.

No purported metaphysical, ethical or historiographical truth-as-correctness ought, in my view, be allowed to define it. Not even the philosophically most sophisticated. In other words: what counts, in this regard, cannot be confined to any kind of culture-specific theoretical correctness; but, on the contrary, is the essentially trans-cultural practice of truth-as-openness. When it comes to considering the sacred, I think that we need to relativise all culture-specific theory, without exception.

You (to your credit) are also a pragmatist. But only up to a point. Your pragmatism goes no further than relativising the culture-specific claims of lyric popular religion. It doesn’t extend to the no less culture-specific counter-claims of anti-lyric philosophy. In your Theological-Political Treatise, you do indeed allow a certain potential pragmatist validity to biblical prophecy. Yet, prophecy remains, there, strictly subordinate to philosophy. Its validity can never, as you see it, be more than second-best; very much, a mere concession to the common folk, who remain inextricably mired in the first kind of knowledge, as do the prophets themselves.

And how are we to understand this concession?

Take the seven ‘dogmas’ of ‘universal faith’, which you describe as ‘the basic teaching which Scripture as a whole intends to convey’, in Chapter 14 of the Treatise:

1. God, that is, a Supreme Being, exists, supremely just and merciful, the exemplar of true life.

Of course, this affirmation, opening out into the lyric narratives of ‘Scripture as a whole’, bears no relation to the anti-lyric, atheistic conception of ‘God’ developed in the Ethics. In terms of the argument of the Ethics, framed as a definitive account of metaphysical truth-as-correctness, it is in fact meaningless nonsense to apply such adjectives as ‘just’ or ‘merciful’ to ‘God’, or to describe ‘God’ as an anthropomorphic ‘exemplar’ to be followed. But, in the pragmatist terms of ‘faith’, operative in the Treatise, these surely are prime attributes of truth-as-openness.

2. God is one alone.

The oneness of God, envisaged by ‘universal faith’ as you outline it here, corresponds to the unique authority of truth-as-openness, when it comes to determining what is sacred at this level.

3. God is omnipresent, and all things are open to him.

There’s no hiding from the summons of truth-as-openness.

4. God has supreme right and dominion over all things.

The summons of truth-as-openness has, in principle, absolute authority.

5. Worship of God and obedience to him consists solely in justice and charity, or love towards one’s neighbour.

For the pragmatist purposes of ‘universal faith’, in the God of truth-as-openness, you are willing temporarily, in the Treatise, to bracket metaphysical truth-as-correctness as you conceive it in the Ethics.

6. All who obey God by following this way of life, and only those, are saved; others, who live at pleasure’s behest, are lost.

Such is the sacred existential urgency of truth-as-openness.

7. God forgives repentant sinners.

As noted above: in Part IV, Proposition 54 of the Ethics, you specifically declare that ‘repentance is not a virtue’. It isn’t a virtue for your sort of philosophers, due to its intrinsic association with lyric pathos. But again, as you also remark in the scholium to that Proposition, it’s one of those elements of popular religious lyric pathos which, outside the context of philosophy, may nevertheless ‘do more good than harm’ ...

I just wish that you could have developed the pragmatist logic of those seven ‘dogmas’ a whole lot further.

But they remain, in your presentation, so abstract! That’s to say: so altogether abstracted from the fiery narratives and the poetry that could have enlivened them. When, in the Treatise, you do deal with the lyricism of Hebrew Scripture, your approach is so very largely governed by a desire just to debunk the general world-view of the prophets; and by your insistence on the absolute separation between prophetic thinking and philosophy, your polemic to this effect, both against Moses Maimonides (Chapter 7) and against Jehuda Alpakhar (Chapter 14).

In principle though, as I would see it, philosophers and prophets are surely called to be collaborators, united in promoting the cause of truth-as-openness: philosophers, analysing the ineradicable ambiguities of lyric thought, in relation to that cause; prophets, deploying lyric thought to energise dynamic solidarity, in resistance to bullying and tyranny. There’s perhaps the glimmer of a proper recognition of this complementarity in the brief scholium to Ethics IV, 54: where you speak of prophets facing down the threat of the mob. In the Treatise, however, I think that you miss much of the actual historic originality of Hebrew prophecy. You remark, somewhat casually (in Chapter 3) that ‘no doubt’ many other nations, besides the ancient Hebrews, had prophets. Well, I would say – it all depends on just what is meant by ‘prophecy’. Hebrew prophecy is surely unique, in at least one quite crucial respect.

For, it isn’t only the phenomenon of the mob which requires facing down. But there’s also the phenomenon of the gang, and the phenomenon of the herd.

The earliest of the writing prophets, Amos, in the mid-eighth century BCE, is embattled in pioneering fashion against both. His prophecy as a whole is a brilliant, scathing attack, in YHWH’s name, on the gangsterism of the ruling class in Israel; and on the priestly cult of YHWH insofar as he saw it functioning as a great swindle, designed to legitimate that gangsterism, and to promote a docile herd-morality amongst the lower orders. YHWH, here, denounces the manipulativeness of this. And, what is most startling of all, he rejects the worship of his own devotees – not for any liturgical fault in it – but, it seems, purely and simply because of its being infected with the mentalities of gang and herd. In that world, it was common knowledge that (of course) what gods wanted most of all was to be flattered. But, according to Amos, uniquely, not YHWH! On the contrary, we hear YHWH roaring:

I hate, I despise your festivals
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5. 21 – 24)

YHWH, as Amos represents him, refuses to be flattered by anyone, inasmuch as flattery means distraction from the intransigent demands of ‘justice and righteousness’: the practice of perfect truth-as-openness. Where, in the ‘prophetic’ literature of other cultures, do we find anything equivalent to this?

It may be objected, YHWH in the book of Amos backs up his ethical demand with threats, of terrible punishment for his people. And isn’t this a case of (in my own phrase) ‘mere moralised vindictiveness’? Well yes, the lyric tradition that immediately offered itself to Amos was that of oracular prediction, a form which did indeed lend itself, all too readily, to manipulative rhetoric, deploying threats and promises. But it isn’t the form of his prophecy that constitutes its prime originality. Far more interesting, to my mind, is the substantive ethical breakthrough that Amos accomplishes; notwithstanding the limitations of the given literary form within which he is working. Manipulative oracular rhetoric had already long been commonplace. What’s really new in Amos is the infinite imperative to which the book gives voice: the sublime holiness of YHWH, inasmuch as it altogether transcends the moral (or amoral) codes of gang and herd.

And moreover, two centuries later, there also appears another prophet – ‘Deutero-Isaiah’ – who, in his famous ‘servant songs’, celebrates an ideal figure who precisely represents the absolute antithesis to any kind of ‘moralised vindictiveness’ (Isaiah 52. 13 – 53. 12; and c.f. 42. 1 – 4; 49. 1 – 6; 50. 4 – 9). A figure whom the early Christians immediately identified as the prototype of Christ.

The Amos-impulse, correctively mediated by the Isaianic archetype – isn’t that, after all, the ultimate Hebrew lyric formula expressive of what you, for your part, celebrate in non-lyric terms, as the primordial ‘active’ emotion of ‘animosity’; the fierce negation (in effect) of herd, gang and mob, all three?

The shaken spirit of ‘animosity’, pressing towards a complementary ‘generosity’, or solidarity: pressing, I would argue, in the end towards the simple solidarity of the shaken; that is, solidarity grounded in shakenness – by the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness – alone. Quite regardless of how those imperatives are communicated; whether lyrically or non-lyrically, never mind!

§

Although I am a Christian priest, my argument here isn’t, in the first instance, grounded in the solidarity of Christians with Christians. It isn’t only Christian lyric thought I want to defend. But it’s the potential of lyric thought, in general, to contribute to the solidarity of the shaken.

In the Theological-Political Treatise, on the other hand, you’re evidently intent on addressing open-minded Christian readers first and foremost. Here, you’re negotiating: making concessions, drawing red lines.

Your chief concession is to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the ultimate biblical symbol of ‘intuitive knowledge’. Thus (in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 4) you note how Christ differs from the prophets: in that they, with their hyperactively lyrical imaginations, report seeing divine visions and hearing divine voices, addressed to them; but he doesn’t. (In the Synoptic Gospels, God the Father’s thunderous voice is heard acclaiming him, both on the occasion of his baptism and in the story of his transfiguration. This acclamation, however, isn’t addressed to him; it’s presented as being for the benefit of the bystanders.) Moses also, you argue, differs from all other prophets in that the divine voice which addressed him on Mount Sinai was, somehow, more ‘real’ than the voices they heard. Yet, Christ ranks higher even than Moses, because his apprehension of what God required of him is represented as having been purely intuitive. He was guided by the very purest moral instincts, you suggest. Radically beyond the notions of good and evil codified by Torah, he was therefore ‘not so much a prophet as the mouthpiece of God’ (Chapter 4).

In Letter 73, addressed to Oldenburg, you try to go the extra mile, distinguishing between ‘Christ according to the flesh’, that is, the Christ of merely superstitious faith, and Christ ‘the eternal son of God’. Of course, this God is not the impersonal ‘God’ of the Ethics. But rather, It / He is the God of second-best theology: mediating the spirit of the Ethics, so far as possible, through the filter of a minimalist lyricism. So, It / He is, as you put it, ‘the eternal wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things, especially in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ’. It / He is the God of ‘eternal faith’, with its seven ‘dogmas’. And Christ is the supreme teacher of such faith, to the non-philosophic masses.

I certainly appreciate the pragmatism at work here. So far as it goes.

But unsympathetic as you are to the apocalyptic lyricism of Jesus’s teaching, you fail, I think, to do justice to its revolutionary urgency. Again, you seem to value popular religion solely for its potential utility from the point of view of the state; as a reinforcement of political stability. This, though, is not in fact the primary ethical concern of Jesus! In Chapter 17 of the Treatise, you praise the political stability (evidenced by Scripture) of the ancient Hebrew nation, especially in the period from Moses to King Saul: as a high-morale, non-despotic tribal theocracy. Jesus however, in the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t advocating any return those glory days. On the contrary, what he does advocate is a kind of sacralised anarcho-pacifism. In Chapter 7, you refer, briefly, to Matthew 5. 38 – 39: Jesus’s teaching, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Whereas I tell you not to oppose the wicked man by force; rather, whosoever strikes you upon the right cheek, turn to him the other as well.” Yet, you make no attempt to explore the meaning of this trans-political injunction as a universally valid principle coming, as you yourself put it, from ‘the mouthpiece of God.’ Instead, you speak of the particular political circumstances of Jesus’s day, and limit this teaching’s applicability, exclusively, to that sort of context. Nor do you make any mention of Jesus’s other anarcho-pacifist utterances: his insistence on loving even one’s enemies; on forgiving without limit; on never swearing an oath (as though, otherwise, one’s not to be trusted). Practices fundamentally disruptive of political order. Imperatives of truth-as-openness ablaze, at maximum intensity.

And then, on the other hand, you show no appreciation, either, for the anarcho-pacifist logic of Christ’s resurrection. Set aside the mystery surrounding God’s modus operandi here, and consider the symbolic result. A crucified dissident is raised from the dead: God’s verdict reverses the verdict of the political authorities. To understand this, one has to understand the symbolism of crucifixion as a Roman institution. Jesus would surely not have become the Christ of Christian faith had he died any other death. The Roman Empire, of course, had formidable armies; but they were very small, in relation to the vast territory that they were charged with holding together. Therefore, in order to deter rebellion, and so help preserve Roman civilisation, the universal consensus amongst civilised Romans condoned the utterly un-civilised practise of crucifixion, as a form of state terrorism, by way of back-up to the threat of the legions. Crucifixion was not just capital punishment. It was capital punishment designed to be as public and as ostentatiously cruel as possible, for the purposes of deterrence. Every crucifixion was meant to be a symbolic statement: intended to convey a universal warning, addressed to the slaves, and subject peoples, of the Empire; a universally valid value judgement on anyone who dared endanger the security of the state, as the state authorities understood that security; a universal declaration of the rights of the tyrant, as such. But with the resurrection of the crucified dissident, that universality has, as it were, flipped. Jesus Christ is revealed precisely as the universal symbol of truth-as-openness, negating and overthrowing everything that crucifixion, as an act of state terrorism, affirmed.

In your correspondence with Oldenburg, you profess to be simply baffled by the Christian dogma of the Incarnation. The proposition that God took upon himself human nature, you say, appears to you ‘no less absurd than would a statement, that a circle had taken upon itself the nature of a square’ (Letter 73). And, as for the doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, however that may be formulated, your fury with Albert Burgh, when he converted to Roman Catholicism, drives you to still harsher language (Letter 74). But consider: here, the lyric symbolism of Holy Week and Easter is established as the basis for a whole liturgical culture. Transformation upon transformation: God transformed into a human individual is then transformed, again, into sacramental bread and wine. There’s a tremendous store of metaphoric energy in this; accumulated over two millennia. All of it, potentially at least, in the service of truth-as-openness, the solidarity of the shaken. In response to which, however, you opt for mere philosophic closure. Yes, your thought represents a fundamental, proto-Nietzschean openness to moral reality ‘beyond good and evil’. But, as I would see it, this is coupled with an altogether premature closure to the urgent elements of grief, primordially powering the imaginative processes of Abrahamic religion.

Philosophy begins in wonder; prophetic faith begins in transfigured grief.

I think, for example, of the words of Nelly Sachs:

Our memories still bleed.
We hold them cupped within our hands.
Companions of the darkly parted,
Death would have us
hide our grief.
But no, we say, no, no, bleed on –
for all to see!

An exiled, last-minute German Jewish fugitive from the Shoah, Sachs wrote these lines in the summer of 1947. And observe: there’s no consolation here. At any rate, no cheap consolation, of the sort mobilised by kitsch manipulative piety, flourishing where religion has been prostituted to accommodate the idolatrous corporate egoism of the herd, the gang, the mob. But this is the voice of pure truth-as-openness; energised by grief, and intent on its transfiguration.

‘Death would have us / hide our grief’. At its most sophisticated, ‘Death’ is a Stoic, an Epicurean, a Spinozist.

I hear your voice asking: what, then, shall we do about the constantly repeated spiritual prostitution of Christianity; as the Church blesses the libido of devout herds as such, devout gangs as such, devout mobs as such? What shall we do about the Church’s malign evangelistic impatience? What shall we do about the Constantinian catastrophe; and all that, down the centuries, has since followed from it?

But if the sacred is defined as the ideal of perfect truth-as-openness, isn’t it, after all, a much more promising therapeutic strategy, not just to abandon lyric theology, but rather to confront corrupted lyricism with fresh layers of counter-lyricism? One absolutely basic difference between faith in truth-as-openness and faith imprinted with the corporate egoism of the herd, the gang, and the mob, has to do with the conception of divine ‘almightiness’ operative in each case. The God of faith in truth-as-openness is ‘almighty’ (a) in the sense that, for such faith, no other, rival principle has the same power to give authentic meaning to life; and (b) in the sense that the ideal devotees of such faith, at the deepest level, receiving life as a gift, refuse, when things go wrong, to indulge bitterness against their neighbours, but, rather, subsume all in ultimate gratitude. Whereas, the herd, the gang, and the mob are – on the contrary – so many stations in a cycle of bullying. And hence, their idol-deity is ‘almighty’ in the quite other sense of being, in effect, an imagined supreme celestial bully. In practice, most talk of divine ‘almightiness’ remains more or less ambiguous, strung between these conflicting possibilities. But a therapeutic counter-lyricism seeks to tip the balance between them.

Thus, consider, for example, the argument of my friend Graham Adams, in his recent book God the Child: here’s a prime case of such re-balancing counter-lyricism at work. ‘Child theology’ is a recently emergent tradition. Of course, the Christmas story immediately provides a biblical niche for such thinking. However, Adams transfers the idea of God-as-child from this ancient folk-religious appendage to the gospel story, and renders it the starting point for a far-reaching review of the concept, divine ‘almightiness’. The sub-title of his book gives at least some hint of what this project involves: ‘Small, Weak and Curious Subversions’. Recall the words of Jesus, to his disciples: ‘Amen, I tell you, unless you turn back and become as children, you most certainly may not enter the Kingdom of the heavens’ (Matthew 18. 3). Adams develops ‘Child theology’ with exemplary playfulness, amongst other things relating it, here, to another recently emergent tradition, ‘Disability theology’: as this is also a bid to purify our notion of divine ‘almightiness’, only from another imaginative angle. – (I think of my own Uncle Oliver. Whom I never knew, because, as a Down’s Syndrome child, he was placed in an institution; then, never spoken about, in his sister’s, my mother’s, presence again; so that, as she grew up, she supposed that the little, infant brother she faintly remembered was dead. Yet, as we later discovered – too late! – he out-lived her. I remember train journeys, with my mother, down to Penzance, where she came from, and where we regularly holidayed. At Dawlish, the train suddenly swerves right and encounters the sea. There, it turns out, my uncle was living, all the while; quite close to the track. But his sister was quite unaware.) – Counter-lyrical faith affirms: we’re all of us, primordially, made in the image of God. All of us, without exception. And, in their different ways, both ‘Child theology’ and ‘Disability theology’ link that fundamental lyric affirmation to ideas of God as being subject to risk; as being vulnerable; and as being dependant on others, especially the Church.

You, though, in rejecting God the celestial bully, have also closed the door to the theological ferment of another age; to God the Child; to the Disabled God.

Isn’t it only natural for human beings to conceive of the sacred in anthropomorphic terms? God prescribes truth-as-openness, analogously to the way in which prophets prescribe it. God exemplifies truth-as-openness, analogously to the way in which saints exemplify it. One God, in three Persons; and then a plethora of further, superficially – but only superficially – contradictory anthropomorphic characteristics which, assembled by probing empathy, constitute a richly dialectical conduit for divine revelation ...

What in the end does it mean when someone, like you, rejects any form of theological anthropomorphism? Isn’t this, essentially, just an expression of – misanthropy?

In your thinking, it seems to me, two energies collide:

• projected misanthropy, presented as ultimate philosophic truth-as-correctness; and
• pragmatist, but lyrically minimalist, dedication to truth-as-openness.

Both energies originate from a depth of thinking ‘beyond good and evil’. But in opposite ways. And the battle between the two ebbs and flows, throughout your writings, most thought-provokingly.

All the best,

Andrew Shanks