Faith without Logic
What is faith without logic? Well, if one wanted to be snarky, the obvious to that question is: religion. Spinoza is kind of snarky, but he couches in intellect so that never suffers the indignity of trying to sound like Robert Downey, Jr. attempting to be deep:
“You can’t give a reasoned knock-down proof that the basic principle of theology—that men are saved only by obedience—is true, so why do you believe it? If you accept it without reason, like a blind man, then you too are acting foolishly and without judgment.”
It's Not Rocket Science
The level of snark that Spinoza does introduce can, however, get pretty rough. In laying out his quite solidly prosecuted argument that Moses is not the author of the first five books of the Bible as has been commonly maintained for thousands of years, he almost engages in overkill. Which, of course, he gets! This is clear when near the end one can almost seem his rolling his eyes and shouting “how can you not get this, people!”
“All this makes it clearer than the noonday sun that the Pentateuch was written not by Moses but by someone who lived many generations after him. But now let us attend to the books that Moses did write.”
Godliness is Next to Greatliness
Spinoza was what you call a close reader of scriptural text. He was not one of those philosophers ready to just sacrifice the actual meaning of individual words to the big picture. He was a detail-oriented kind of guy. The kind of guy who notices the connection between the use of words and the objects they represent. This turns out to be something that can introduce awkwardness into the big picture: “Given that unusual works of nature are called ‘God’s works’, and trees of unusual size are called ‘God’s trees’, it’s not surprising that in Genesis the strongest and tallest men are called ‘sons of God’, even those who are immoral robbers and womanizers.”
God is Metaphor
Nobody in the Bible really seems to know exactly what God looks like because whenever He does make an appearance it often takes on the appearance of different forms. Spinoza explains that God is not describing himself, but rather is being described by a host of various perceptual interpreters. Since they cannot adequately describe the incorporeal, their language in describing God is inevitably left to the job of metaphor, which explains:
"•why Daniel saw God as an old man dressed in white [Daniel 7:9],
•why Ezekiel saw him as a fire [Ezekiel 1:4],
•why those who were with Christ saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove [John 1:32] though the apostles saw it as fiery tongues [Acts 2:3]"
The Handmaids’ Tale
Chapter XV is devoted to delineating and explaining the relationship between theology and reason and the origination point of the debate is Spinoza’s assertion that many people simply don’t know how to separate philosophy from theology. Thus, the widespread assumption is that one or the other of the following metaphors must illuminate the truth:
(1) Scripture should be the handmaid of reason. (2) Reason should be the handmaid of Scripture.
To which Spinoza prosecutes his case by reaching yet another conclusion:
“reason remains in charge of its own domain of truth and wisdom, while theology is in charge of its domain of piety and obedience, neither of them being a handmaid to the other”
