Balibar-Spinozas Three God

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00511.
Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Etienne Balibar
Abstract: The paper, which retains a hypothetical character, argues that Spinozas propositions referring to God (or involving the use of the name God, essentially in the Ethics), can be read in a fruitful manner apart from any preestablished hypothesis concerning his own theological preferences, as denite descriptions of three ideas of God which have the same logical status: one (akin to Jewish Monotheism) which identies the idea of God with the idea of the Law, one (akin to a heretic Socinian version of Christianity) which identies it with the idea of Human Love, and one (akin to a form of Cosmotheism, rather than Pantheism) which identies it with Nature. Evidence of this analytic tripartition can be found in the letter of the texts themselves. If accepted (at least as a thought experiment), it would carry three interesting consequences: 1) to renew our understanding of the theory of the three kinds of knowledge, which have obvious affinities with the three possible ways of understanding the idea of God; 2) to emphasize the critical move associated by Spinoza with each of the three ideas of God (passing from an anthropomorphic legislator to an impersonal command, passing from an imaginary community of similarities to a practical community of singularities, and passing from a teleological and harmonious idea of nature to a causal, even conictual, idea of its innite power); 3) to locate the essential ethical and political questions associated with religion on the vectors which lead from one idea to another, and represent themselves practical conatus: obedience, utility, order. It is also assumed that such a reading enhances the relevance of Spinozas philosophy with respect to contemporary debates about religion and secularism.
There is much risk that this paper appears at the same time little more than a fragile sketch, and nevertheless very dogmatic, in proposing readings and interpretations which would require additional and perhaps more nuanced discussions.1 Within the narrow limits of a conference paper, I must bring together what amounts in fact to assembling in a new manner (at least, new for me) many different propositions in Spinozas philosophy. This will force me to describe an argument in general terms rather than fully construct it. Butwhy not admit it?I remain somewhat uncertain about the best way to enunciate an interpretive hypothesis that has been haunting me for a long time. I choose to give it a form as simple and provocative as possible, focusing on some problems and deliberately ignoring many others, in order to attract the critical reactions that would help me improve or rectify it.
European Journal of Philosophy 20:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 2649 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Perhaps the best way to engage matters will be to indicate how I hesitated between different titles. They can look rather similar, but have in fact divergent implications, although they certainly hint at different sides of a complex of interrelated questions. This will be a way to suggest what kind of interests lie behind my discussion, some of which are related to the ever renewed attempt at clarifying our understanding of the enigmas of this philosophical system, while others refer to the present political reasons (in the broad sense), which push us to ask questions for which we would like to know Spinozas answers in a new historical conjuncturemarked by the so-called return of the religious into the political, or simply return of the theologico-political, a term, let us remember, that may have been coined by Spinoza himself.2 I hesitated between four possible formulations. One of these was Spinozas three ideas of God, which would suggest that Spinoza, in the bulk of his work (and especially in the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [hereafter TTP]) discusses three different ideas of the same object, God, or classies ideas of God into three main categories.3 Whether these are ideas that Spinoza attributes to others or ones that he adopts himself, either absolutely or from a certain point of view and for a certain purpose, is something that we cannot decide in advance, until we have described them. Adopting this formulation strongly draws our attention to the importance of the number three and also its problems. For any reader of Spinoza it almost immediately suggests that there could be an intrinsic relationship between the existence of three different ideas of God and the crucial epistemological notion of the three kinds of knowledge distinguished and hierarchized by Spinoza, which will indeed form one of the horizons of my discussion. But such a relationship can work both ways. A reference to the three kinds of knowledge may help us understand what crucially distinguishes ideas of God according to Spinoza, from the point of view of their truth value or, more precisely, their degree of adequacy. But a comparison of the three ideas of God may also provide a much needed instrument to understand why and how exactly Spinoza classies what he calls heterogeneous kinds of knowledge, which are also affective modes, and modes of communication, i.e. procedures according to which different minds can think in common, share or exchange representations. We should of course not exclude the possibility that the consideration of the ideas of God may complicate and perhaps obfuscate the epistemology of the three kinds of knowledge, because God who is a privileged object of thought is also a limit case to which the exemplary hierarchy does not apply normally. Starting from this difficulty, I was led in two possible directions, whence came two further possible titles: Spinozas three theologies or Spinozas three religions. Let us recall that theology is often (albeit not always) a pejorative term in Spinoza.4 By contrast, religion is a positive term (especially if we remember the equivalence between religio, mainly used in the TTP (a book whose declared intention is to describe and vindicate a true religion, vera religio), and pietas (mainly used in the Ethics), which names a subjective attitude, or a virtue (whose scope largely exceeds what the Churches institutionally call
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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religion). Notwithstanding these terminological problems, it could be suggested that Spinoza develops different theologies, inasmuch as he constructs discourses about Gods nature or essence, therefore Gods relationship to human life and the diverse routes for the minds access to God.5 These theologies follow profoundly different logics, and they grant each time a privilege to certain divine attributes, in the classical sense. It is necessary to discuss them in Spinozas own terms before we decide whether and to what extent he would consider them compatible with his own philosophy, something never simple (one of the reasons why the permanent attempts by commentators at dening what they call Spinozas God, in the singular, are so strikingly divergent, ranging from the idea that Spinoza actually adopts or invents a certain positive theology, however heretic or heterodox, to the idea that his philosophy is an anti-theology or a theoretical atheism).6 But at this point it could be suggested also that Spinoza is not so much interested in theology for its own sake but rather in religion, mainly for ethical and political reasons. If we adopt this point of view, the formula which says that there are three religions in Spinoza must refer (at least obliquely) to a long tradition which, tracing back to Hellenistic discussions about private and public cults, also includes modern controversies, either dogmatic or sceptic, about the diversity of human beliefs and relationships to the divine, and seems to anticipate Rousseaus discussion in the nal chapter of the Contrat social. Taking this approach would lead us to examine the reasons that we have to believe that Spinoza endorses certain forms of religion or piety,7 either politically or morally, as contributions to human salvation and happiness (beatitudo), and the extent to which he would consider them incompatible. This would include, for example, a fresh discussion of his critique of superstition, admittedly a form of primitive popular religion lled with inadequate ideas of God and his regulation of human affairs, which is often manipulated by astute rulers, but whose necessity and even positive role for a certain historical environment is stressed in the TTP when dealing with the theocratic moment in the formation of the Hebrew nation.8 And above all it would include a return to the vexed question of the affinities and incompatibilities between the language of the TTP, centred on a universal religion9 whose truth is presented as independent of conceptual or intellectual notions, and the language of the Ethics which (above all in its Fifth Part, but already in previous passages anticipating that systematic presentation) identies the highest form of religionor perhaps its overcomingwith a form of rare and difficult wisdom (sapientia) whose core is an intellectual love of God, premised on the adequate knowledge of its innite nature. Again this is no new debate (and I share the position which rejects a pragmatic solution based on the idea that Spinoza wrote sometimes according to his convictions, and other times with the intention of manoeuvring his readers more traditional beliefs). But in the end neither of these two formulations really expresses what I am trying to do, which is not to separate the speculative from the practical, or to construct ideal-types of Spinozas virtual theologies, or to read him as a precursor of a comparative sociology of religions, however interesting all
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this might be. Rather, what interests me (as I believe it interested Spinoza) is the problematic relationship between a speculative understanding of God, or the divine essence, and the questions of communication and the community, the representations of the common effort towards salvation and happiness. That is why I decided nally to discuss this theoretical-practical complex under the simple title Spinozas Three Gods.10 The ambiguity and the tension, here, are maximized, and intentionally so. I want to trace in Spinozas text itself the impossibility of reducing the essence of God to a single idea, or a single name for its idea, thus emphasizing the fact that ideas and names are never to acquire a meaning that can be separated from the way through which it can be attained. And there are several heterogeneous ways, clearly identiable provided we stay with the texts letter. But I want also to maximize the tension between this fact, and Spinozas notorious insistence on the essential unity of the divine, that is to say of God.11 Hence my suggestion that, in a most paradoxical manner, Spinoza has an equivocal representation of a God which he affirms to be essentially one (or one substance). This is of course a locus of intense confrontation with the monotheistic tradition. It is even aggravated by the fact that the number threeonce again evokes the problem of the Trinity. I am not directly discussing here Spinozas affinities with an anti-Trinitarian discourse, widely shared among his contemporary fellow scientists and philosophers, but also by popular heretics.12 The problem I am considering does not concern the Trinity (three persons or hypostases within one God), but a triplicity: three Gods whose ideas are incompatible but nevertheless form parts of a single process of communication.13 It is this triplicity that I claim should be taken into account when we discuss Spinozas contributions to the ethical, the epistemological, and the theologico-political problems. Following the text itself, I will call these three Gods (1) God as Nature (but also, more accurately, God as Power, and God as Cause: Deus sive Natura sive Potentia sive Causa), (2) God as Law (or more precisely as a Lawgiver or Legislator who vanishes in his Legislation: Deus sive Legislator sive Lex), and (3) God as Love, or more precisely as Human Love which can be considered an expression of the humanity of the human itself (Deus sive Amor sive Homo). I will briey indicate how these incompatible essences are presented in Spinozas works. Finally I will sketch a discussion about the problems which arise from his attempts to articulate them (or, if you prefer, his attempts to use the tripartite distinction to clarify certain issues in science, ethics, and politics, in terms of a transition from one God to another). Let me begin with a simple classication. It will be useful to present it in a formal manner: we do not nd in Spinoza only one formula of the type Deus sive X, namely the famous Deus sive Natura, but implicitly we are given several competing ones. When I say implicitly I am not second-guessing Spinoza, looking for esoteric doctrines la Strauss, but I believe that the denitional or quasi-denitional equivalences are given in the rhetorical strategies of the texts. I will indicate some of these equivalences which are, in fact, explicit. I shall use the Deus sive Natura motto as an analogue of all these equivalent formulations which, each time, take a different form related to the context.
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If we choose this analogy, we must start with God as Nature, which (with or without the word pantheism) is often supposed to represent the true idea of God in Spinozas philosophy.14 As we know however, not only does this formula appears very late in the Ethics (in the preface to Part IV), but its context would also seem to qualify and relativize its meaning: Now we showed in the Appendix to Part 1 [Spinoza Study, n.d.: E1APND], that Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and innite Being, which we call God or Nature (innitum Ens, quod Deum seu Naturam appellamus), acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. For we have shown, that by the same necessity of its nature, whereby it exists, it likewise works [Spinoza Study, n.d.: E1P16]. The reason or cause why God or Nature exists, and the reason why he acts, are one and the same (Ratio igitur, seu causa, cur Deus, seu Natura agit, et cur existit, una, eademque est). This is even more apparent if we remember that Deus sive Naturawhen it is associated with a causal understanding of the principium rationisis in fact a quotation, or more precisely an inverted quotation, deriving from the Natura sive Deus that belonged to the Stoic tradition and was adopted by Descartes.15 This may explain why, as a denitional tautology, it can be used to qualify the meaning of either of the two terms: what we call God, in reality is properly Nature, or what we call Nature, in reality is God. But Spinozas formulation is not relativistic in this sense, because it indicates itself the underlying absolute meaning, namely the idea of agire, acting (and agency), and more precisely of acting necessarily.16 This directs our attention to the formulations that are to be found in quasi-identical terms in the Ethics, Part One, and in the TTP, chapter XVI, which express the same idea by privileging the category of power, potentia (or, in a developed form, substantia sive potentia innita). I would suggest that this is the most adequate, or encompassing name for this idea of God, which as we know governs all the Ethics and supports Spinozas critique of the revealed doctrine of Creation. Contemporary readings have drawn our attention to the importance of never confusing potentia with potestas, which is an anthropomorphic representation, implying a relationship of exteriority. Whereas a potestas dominates its object from outside, as a sovereign or an imperium in imperio, potentia names the immanent (in this sense divine) productivity or causality of nature.17 This theology, which is absolutely opposed to the creationist theologies of the monotheistic tradition, is associated with the idea of an open or innite totality: God is operative but operates within itself, by innitely expanding and diversifying its modes.18 The same idea can also be viewed from the opposite direction (and this reversibility indeed characterizes immanence): innitely multiple individuals or res singulares reproduce their singularity through emergent interactions, producing new combinations. But, before we discuss the issue of the relationship between causality and order, it is important to note that this interaction need not be harmonious. On the contrary, it involves conict or permanent processes of destruction, as stated by the single Axiom of Part IV: Nulla res singularis in rerum natura datur, qua potentior, et fortior non detur alia. Sed quacunque data datur alia potentior, a qua illa data potest destrui.19 But this destruction is only the limit
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case and the reverse side of a more profound idea, which concerns the relationship between the nite and the innite: Gods idea includesand in fact consists ofthe idea of innitely many powers (including the human powers) which continuously tend to increase or decrease their capacity to act (or agency), owing to their causal relations. How can we relate this theology of nature (rather than a natural theology) to a religion? Notoriously, this is the most difficult question, which involves articulating the notion of innite immanent power with what the Ethics, Part V, calls intellectual love of God and virtue. We realize that Spinoza himself could hardly use the phrase intellectual love of Nature instead.20 The name nature, which in some cases remains imaginary (this would lead perhaps to some sort of ecological religion: love of nature as a mythical total being, e.g., a mother nature), is used here as a general (common) name, apparently belonging to the second kind of knowledge (reason). However, an attentive reading of Part V, propositions 21 to 33, seems to indicate that the intellectual love of God involves not only a representation, or knowledge, of the causal relationship between each singularity and Gods universal power or action, it names a relation between this causal relationship and the mental activity of the Human understanding, which perceives the individual body as a part of nature itself. For this reason, it becomes identical with a virtue capable of liberating the mind from affective passivity. In this sense it could be said, not that then intellectual love of God is anthropomorphic, quite the contrary, but that nevertheless it contains an anthropotropic element, or an oriented relationship between the idea of God and the idea of the Human, completely mediated by natural causality or productivity. In short we could also say that this idea of God involves a reective idea of the idea, which relates God to the human, or determines a certain mode of communication among humans involving their relation to God.21 We shall ask if this is not the case, albeit in a different modality, for each other idea of God, or simply for each God. Let us now jump to what seems to be the exact opposite of Deus sive Naturawhat the naturalistic idea refutes or excludes radicallynamely the idea of God as a Sovereign Legislator, imposing laws on his human subjects, who are entirely dependent on him because they are his creatures (or, in some cases, who prescribes his laws to certain humans in particular, and only through their mediation to the other humans). We know that this is the Biblical representation of God as Spinoza sees it (although it is perhaps not conned to a single cultural tradition).22 The Biblical model is especially important because, around the prescription of the law, or the command of God (Dei jussum), it unies the logically independent representations of creation, decision or will (decretum), revelation, and election (the Elect or Chosen People being the one to whom the revelation is addressed, and therefore responsible for its implementation). This idea is both anthropomorphic and monarchic (God being represented as an absolute or innitely powerful monarch, which also opens up the possibility of viewing Monarchs as images of the divine power, or endowed with a divine mandate to rule over the other humans). It is this theologico-political imaginary23 which explains why Spinoza declares that this idea of God is completely inadequate, and he never
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tires of criticizing its inverted relationship to the true causal order of nature (including human nature). This is particularly the case in the Appendix of Ethics, Part One, but also in many other passages. However we should not understand this critique as an absolute dismissal, an assertion that the sovereign legislation is not an idea of God. On the contrary, it is a very effective one, which has the status of a ction (and also a projection of human experiences and desires), and produces very powerful effects, both mental and social, in other terms affective. It is the logic of this ction that interests Spinoza, and to which he devotes lengthy analyses, particularly in the TTP through his historical and anthropological discussion of the phenomenon of prophecy: the variety and the efficacy of prophetic discourses which carry or embody images of the divine commands in a manner that speaks to the imagination of human communities and convinces them to obey the law as a means of achieving redemption from their earthly misery. This indicates that we should not underestimate the importance of this imaginary idea of God from Spinozas own point of view, as more generally we should not dismiss the rst kind of knowledge that it illustrates, and to which it gives full ethical signicance. In fact it would be impossible for most humansperhaps for any humanto know (of) God (and Gods power) if not in this revealed or ctitious manner, even if through this ction God remains unknown. Paradoxically, in this kind of knowledge, God is known in the modality of the unknown or of ignorance.24 Imagination is an essential part of the process of knowledge. We should take literally E2P32: Omnes ideae, quatenus ad Deum referuntur, verae sunt (Sinoza Study n.d.: E2P32). Every idea which refers to God is true (or has truth content).25 But there is much more than that to be said. I will try to express it in a nutshell by taking together three mental elements which, basically, are constitutive of a certain religious structure, even before they give rise to theological elaborations (such as theologies of creation, of the oral and written law, of miracles and providence, or of redemption and damnation, etc.). They will show that the notion of an inadequate idea of God, qua anthropomorphic sovereign being, is also the site of a deep dialectical tension. It works (and elaborates its own images and narratives) in opposite directions, thus carrying the theological imaginary to its own limits, what we might call in fact a point of impossibility. But a certain religious tradition (which, for Spinoza, has a universalistic meaning, even if it was invented, or brought to perfection in the history of a singular people who, in the form of a performative contradiction, called this Sovereign God Yhwh, or the Unnameable), is build on its own anxious relationship to that impossibility. The three elements that I want to single out are 1) the relationship of the idea of God as Sovereign legislator to human desire (this is essentially the doctrine of the appendix to Part I of the Ethics); 2) the tendency to identify God not with any concrete lawgiver, but more abstractly with Law itself, or to understand the expression lex divina as a tautology (the divine being nothing other than the legal, or the enunciation of a principle of unconditional obedience) (this is essentially the doctrine of TTP, chap. IV); and 3) the understanding of this
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enunciation as revelation, i.e. the communication of a word, or even more precisely the written communication of an oral word. This latter forms the concept of scripture in the Biblical tradition, but encompasses a complete theory of the performativity of language, carrying injunctions and adding to them representations which make them compulsory (this is essentially the doctrine of TTP, chap. VII). From the combination of these elements results an idea of God that we can try to summarize by calling God the imagined place from which a word that can become transmitted indenitely as a law is enunciated: a place towards which humans orient their desire to obey. In other terms this is a linguistic and anthropological structure of voluntary servitude.26 The relationship of the Sovereign to human desire is essentially presented by Spinoza in terms of the ambivalence of hope and fear, and its relationship to the legal system of punishment and reward, without which apparently there is no law (hence the classical difficulty, to which I will return, of thinking of obedience in terms of love, which apparently eliminates this ambivalence). Spinozas tendency to identify the divine not with the Legislator but with the Law itself shows that anthropomorphism contains an essential tension: the law is divine, or it embodies an absolute injunction, only if is not arbitrary, if it cannot become represented as contingent decision of a will that would in fact be nite, and therefore itself obey intentions and projects (although this is very much a part of the common idea of providence). This leads now to a sharp distinction between the divine legislation and the historical or earthly ones (therefore accounting for the subversive or revolutionary uses of the monotheistic imaginary, whereby the conditional laws of political rulers are challenged in the name of the unconditional divine Law). But it can also be applied to the idea of the divine legislation itself, which becomes legislation without a legislator, or, in more acceptable terms, a legislation whose legislator is only revealed through his law. This is a dialectic that conducts to a form of negative theology with which Spinoza was perfectly familiar because of his reading and discussion of Maimonides,27 but which he transformed in chapter IV of the TTP through his denition of the divine law (lex divina) or the divine natural law (lex divina naturalis), where the monarchic element of decision or will is minimized and the element of necessity (more precisely necessary relationship between obedience and salvation) is maximized, so that in the end, in a formula that practically amounts to another sive, Spinoza can write that to know the Law is to know God.28 But this amounts to explaining that we (or those of us who receive and accept the revelation) know a word, that is rst enunciated and repeated, then transcribed in the form of a narrative. Spinoza was possibly aware of the mystical Jewish tradition in the Kabbalah that represented the written law as existing before God himself, or preceding its creator,29 but he was more interested in the historical understanding of this relationship, namely the idea that the Law is enunciated in a given language: accordingly, the idea of God emerges as the unity of the oppositesthe universal revelation and the particular idiom, which are merged in the continuity of historyor it forms the symbolic condition of possibility of the historical narratives about the Law and its contradictory effects
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(obedience and disobedience of the Chosen People). In Spinozas description, Moses is an extraordinary gure, standing apart from all the other prophets, because he is the one who rst and most completely occupies the place of God (vicem Dei gerit) as a receiver and a transmitter of a word whose original speaker is represented as a pure voice or interpellation, therefore imagined as hiding himself (and prohibiting his name, etc.) in his speech (or enunciation): again a perfect unity of opposites, anthropomorphic and anti-anthropomorphic within the same imaginary construction. Surprisingly, and contrary to the Christian theology of the Verb, and to the letter of the Gospel itself, Spinoza then describes Jesus-Christ (called the mouth of God) not as absolutizing this mystical identity of God and the Word, but rather as secularizing and humanizing it, i.e., transforming the incarnation of the divine law into an intellectual and moral relationship to God which is exceptional, but neither mysterious nor supra-natural. This is indeed where the Socinian inuence on Spinoza is most visible, above all because Spinoza wants to single out another aspect of the Christian doctrine: that which identies God with Love (agape, charitas), and to propose a radical interpretation of its meaning. We arrive thus at our third God, which I announced as Deus sive Amor sive Homo. It is this transition from love to human that contains the greatest difficulty and also the greatest provocation. We might describe the corresponding theology as humanism. In short, this new idea of God offers an alternative to the theology of incarnation: it is not Christ who is God, or God who becomes human (temporally or even temporarily, in the framework of a divine economy of the fall and the redemption at the end of history) by engendering within himself a separated double or hypostasis with a human gure and a human destiny (culminating in the Passion), but it is the Humanmore precisely the affective relationship among the human individuals that saves them from their misery, or brings them happinesswhich can be called love (or love without hate, therefore without passionate ambivalence), which we must also call God (since it is completely identical with our understanding of God).30 This is the core of what the TTP calls the true religion, vera religio, whose dogmas or beliefs historically akin to what traditionally has been known as natural religionare presented in chapters XII to XIV of the TTP. In fact, one element of this doctrine is to be found in the TTP and the other one in the Ethics, especially in proposition 35 and scholium of Part Four, where Spinoza uses in his own way the traditional gnomic formula homo homini deus. Following Paolo Cristofolini I suggest taking this not as a rhetorical trick, merely displaying a classical reference to support a moral discourse, but in a strictly literal sense: man is (a) god to man, or even: for a man, God is nothing else than a man, or another man, therefore his/her own relationship to another man (which sounds like Levinas, but is even closer to the critical idea of Christianity in Feuerbach).31 In order to understand the genealogy of this new sive, we must start with the way in which the TTP treats the celebrated formula Deus est Caritas, coming from St Johns First Epistle, which is the source of every Christian discourse on the community as corpus mysticum Christi, therefore also of post-Christian
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philosophy of the transcendence of the Community.32 The term theology should, therefore, become used here ironically, since its actual content is a reversal of the Christian tradition, although still based on the Scripture (at least on a partial reading of the Scripture), and it relies on a description of Christ as a historical gure which deconstructs the Christian theology itself.33 But the result is not atheism, or a suppression of the reference to God, it is rather a different interpretation of its truth. Johns formula is quoted by Spinoza in TTP, chapter XIV (quisquis diligit [sc. proximum], ex Deo natus est et novit Deum; qui non diligit, non novit Deum; nam Deus est charitas) and it is also certainly alluded to in the nal denitions of divine love given in the Ethics.34 This is crucial to understanding the transition from the biblical terminology of charitas (agape) to the secular terminology of amor, which brings the whole problem back into the problematic of passions, therefore, again, human desire.35 In Spinozas TTP, in fact, Charitas is never used directly, but always as a quotation, and it is always (or almost always) associated with iustitia in the doublet (in fact a rhetorical hendiadys) iustitia et charitas. Finally it is frequently used in the forms: Iustitiam et Charitatem amare, amor charitatis, Deum cultu iustitiae et charitate erga proximum [adorare], and nally Cultum Dei, ejusque obedientiam in sola Iustitia, et Charitate, sive amore erga proximum consistere (TTP: ch XIV). As we see, this is another sive, even more directly expressed. It involves a double proposition, which is commented on at length in the TTP: rst, there is no other way of loving God (therefore also knowing him as ones object of love, or inasmuch as one loves him: amor erga Deum) than practicing charity, i.e., loving ones neighbour. This is the single command of the universal faith; all the others are representations or interpretations of the name God which support this command. Conversely, loving ones neighbour is really the same as loving God: which does not mean that we love God indirectly, in the form or through the person of the neighbour (as Gods representative), a possible interpretation of some passages in the Gospel, especially in Matthew and in Paul, but that the two loves are identical. Therefore their objects are also identical, or in any case they are indiscernible from the point of view of this kind of knowledge, itself closely associated with a joyous affect. Hence, what charitas refers to is in fact a form of love exclusively associated with the actions or works (opera) through which we are useful, or helpful to our neighbours. In other terms, this form of love has become puried of every ambivalence, liberated from its internal relationship to its opposite, hate, either because that passion was neutralized through the application of a superior moral or institutional force, or because the subjects conatus has reached an absolute primacy of joy over sadness, activity over passivity.36 Such a doctrine identifying God with the Human, in the sense of mutual benevolence among individuals, does indeed raise numerous problems and difficulties. Above all it calls for an answer to the question: who is the neighbour? Or, in other terms, is anyone our/my neighbour? We should start here a triple discussion, which I have to reduce to a minimum. First, Spinoza in the TTP (chapters XVII to XIX) shows that, when humans are citizens of a state, the neighbour is identied (or primarily identied) with
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the compatriot (civis), therefore the universality of charitas is limited to the internal political space, otherwise it would threaten the conservation of the state. But doesnt this idea reduce the notion of loving ones neighbour as oneself to something like a preference (dilectio), which in turn involves a negative counterpart regarding the alien (or the foreigner)?37 In the TTP, it is combined with the historical thesis that Christianity, but also previous examples of the prophetic religion of charity, were the products of critical circumstances in history where the state had collapsed.38 This could also become interpreted as meaning that the true religion for Spinoza forms a utopian overcoming of the political state. Second, we need to consider whether the neighbour is only a friend, or also includes an enemy. Spinoza avoids raising this issue directly (leaving aside the no less celebrated injunction attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: but I tell you, love thy enemies (Matt. 5, 44)).39 This is indeed the formula that somebody like Rousseau will interpret as establishing that Christianity is the opposite of a civil religion, or remains an impolitical one. It is also what Freud nds highly objectionable in Christianity, this time from the point of view of the ethics of psychoanalysis.40 From a Spinozist point of view, it means above all that such notions as repentance, mercy and reconciliation, which ultimately refer the disentangling of Love and Hate to a supernatural grace of God, mediated by Christs suffering, are all ruled out. But above all it raises the question of our understanding of the neighbour as the person who is like us. This is a very complicated issue, since Ethics Part III includes a full theory of imitation or identication which, in a pre-Freudian manner, describes the affects produced by our imagination of the actions of our likes, which essentially involves the oscillation between love and hate, and which makes it very difficult to understand in Spinozas own terms how this ambivalence can become neutralized or overcome. Here Pierre Machereys discussion of Ethics IV, 35 (where we nd the formula homo homini deus), seems particularly illuminating, although he does not read it explicitly as enunciating an idea of God. According to Macherey, the community effect is not produced among individuals who are similar (because, for example, they all belong to the same human species), but rather among individuals who are different and, for that very reason, can enter into a mutually benecial relationship of cooperation (utilitas or convenientia: the key term, that Spinoza always associates with the idea of a rational rule in human affairs).41 What characterizes the neighbour as such, similarity, is not a given, but it is a product, the result of an activity of mutual convenientia (reliance, appropriation, assimilation) that we can also call love, in the practical sense, or which fosters love. As a consequence, in this representation we should perhaps not say that humans who love each other (or are useful to one another) as neighbours are God, but rather that together they make God, or produce the divine as such, inasmuch as they produce their own community. We have now described, albeit in a very schematic fashion, the complete system of Spinozas three Gods, using the detour of their ideas which are given

Lex (Sovereignty) (Word)
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Amor (Charitas, Homo homini deus)
Natura (Potentia, causa)
Figure 1 in the form of more or less developed equivalences. I will summarize this system in the form of a topography or a triangular scheme of names, mimicking perhaps ironicallya scheme of divine attributes (see Figure 1). From this topographic representation I want to proceed in two complementary directions that I shall describe as epistemological and ethical, although anyone who is familiar with Spinoza knows that these two points of view are in fact complementary, and can never become completely separated. I said in the beginning that it is tempting to relate the topography of the three Gods with the theory of the three kinds of knowledge. In fact it was always inspired by this model, but the correspondence also works the other way round, andas a consequenceit could lead to emphasize difficulties in the understanding of this crucial piece of Spinozas epistemology. It seems quite natural to assert that the idea of God as sovereign legislator is essentially an instance of the rst kind of knowledge, or imagination (and especially of the religious or prophetic imagination).42 But we can also see that this example of the rst kind, if it is an example, could force us to modify our understanding of the rst kind of knowledge itself. It emphasizes the fact that this kind of knowledge is necessary, so that there is no question of abolishing it or presenting the human effort (conatus) striving towards wisdom or happiness as its simple suppression or bracketing, but it also suggests an internal diversity, or even tension, which tends to produce an internal transformation of knowledge of the First Kind. This is a difficult idea. A certain rationalist understanding of Spinozas theory, which derives in particular from an isolated reading of Ethics, II, 40 and scholia (where the case discussed is not God, but a mathematical notion of measure or proportion), suggests that the only way to overcome the inadequacy of the ideas of the rst kind is to counter them with ideas of the second kind, namely rational common notions (notiones communes) which are not based on imagination, but follow a rule of truth (veritatis norma) based, precisely, on the analogy of nature, i.e., the homogeneous character of causal demonstrations applied to every kind of being (for example, treating human passions as geometrical objects). Our discussion of the tendency to transform an idea of God as legislator into an idea of God as law
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without a legislator (but only with an interpreter) suggests that any transformation of the rst kind of knowledge must also rely on its internal dialectics or instability, at least when the case under scrutiny is Godagain if this is simply a case or an example. But this does not suppress every ambiguity. On the contrary, it can lead us either to the idea thatespecially in the TTP, where this discussion is carried onSpinoza has transgressed his own epistemological thesis that language belongs entirely to the realm of imagination, or is unnecessary to the understanding of the truth.43 Language, or a certain language game, would appear now as what makes the realm of imagination itself unstable and pushes it to its own limits (which is also, in many respects, the implicit lesson of chapter VII of the TTP on the interpretation of scripture). Alternatively it could lead us to describe the imaginary realm as a genuine ideological world (in the Althusserian sense), where the anthropomorphic representations of the divine are redoubled through a theology of language, not to say a theory of the signier (the Verb), where the sacralization or divinization of a language which enunciates a prescription or an interpellation of the subject, essentially reinforces the illusion, providing the imaginary with a second degree of closure. Similarly, we seem in a position to view the idea of God as Natures innite power, resulting from the connexion of its modes and the continuous production of new individualities through destruction and combination, as belonging to the Third Kind. However, this is far from simple, since the denitional formulae that we have used are found essentially in the First part of the Ethics, where potentia, substantia and causa are still discussed in a generic manner, and therefore belong to the Second Kind (or, at best, provide a model of the Third Kind within the Second). They are legitimate rational abstractions, but not intuitive singularities or ideas relating to intuitive singularities themselves. The new developments in the Fifth Part would suggest that this idea of the immanent cause becomes an idea of the Third Kind, or leads to an idea of the Third Kind, when it is associated with the minds consciousness that it forms the idea of a body, which is itself part of the innite power of nature, or in this sense a part of God. At this moment the reective character of the notion of God emerges, an enigmatic but also fascinating possibility beyond the dilemma of the ontological notions of God developed by the metaphysical tradition (for example as prime mover, primary cause, innite substance, etc.) and the affective notion that mystics like Pascal (Dieu sensible au Coeur) and later Kierkegaard opposed to this very philosophical tradition. Causa sui appears then as the very formula that operates a transition from the Second to the Third Kind of knowledge. However the major difficulties lie in the virtual relationship between the idea of the second kind of knowledge itself and the idea of God as (mutual) human love without hate, or the development of an economy of joyous, active and affirmative affects. The difficulty concerns primarily the relationship between the common notions, which form the content of the second kind, and the quasihomonymous idea of community (communis societas, communis consensus), or it
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concerns the equivocity of the name common. A great interpreter like Deleuze seems to be permanently struggling with this difficulty: sometimes he suggests that there is a God of the second kind, which he does not however identify with Love, but in a manner that seems nevertheless compatible, with the construction of a community of affects, or a development of the joy that derives from the adequate understanding of the properties common to all bodies; at other times he suggests that there is no such thing as a God of the second kind, but only a transition towards the understanding of God, whose idea always belongs to the third kind, through the development of increasingly adequate representations of nature, and the joy that it provokes.44 This apparent hesitation comes indeed from the fact that Deleuze would never accept the formula that I am using: three Gods in Spinoza. To him there is only one God which is real, namely the God of the Third Kind, or the object of the intellectual love of God. But in this manner the three kinds of knowledge tend to become reduced to two: either the second kind is only a methodological mediation or transition, or the third kind is the limit towards which the development of common notions naturally tends, the reective moment within the second kind, where adequate ideas become projected onto the consciousness of our own corporeal and mental identity. If we want to suggest an alternative conclusion, we must directly tackle the idea that the kind of convenientia or mutual appropriation of minds subsumed under the ethical expression love of the neighbour forms an adequate, therefore also rational form of knowledge. Not only must we overcome the dualistic representation (which could be Kantian, but also Aristotelian and Christian), of an essential difference between the practical realm to which love and utility belong, and the theoretical realm where mathematical principles are situated, but we must criticize the idea that reason is essentially an extensive category, covering the progressive extension of knowledge to many different problems and objects. Spinoza is insistent that the content of the universal faith is poor, or concentrated in one formula. However we can also take into account the fact that he describes the understanding of God whose example can be found in the teaching of Christ as an extraordinary capacity to communicate with God (communicare) from mind to mind, without the help of the imagination, hence rationally. This is consistent both with the idea that the practical rule of loving ones neighbour is perceived as a necessary means of salvation, and with the idea that it is not a means towards an external goal, but it performs its own result. In other places, Spinoza would adopt the ancient Stoic idea that virtue is not rewarded externally, but contains its happiness or enjoyment within its own practice.45 From the point of view of salvation, indeed, the doctrine of the TTP is not only that the true religion could become adopted by all men, in the manner of a natural religion, it is above all that its practical content has exactly the same necessary status as what the Ethics describes as common notions, namely ideas which, as a consequence of their adequacy, create a community of thought, that is virtually universal. However, just as there are historical limitations to this possibility of universalization, the same may be true of the kind of
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universality organized around the common notions, or the second kind of knowledge in general. From such considerations, taking into account at the same time the verisimilitude of a correspondence between Spinozas three ideas of God and his problematic of the three kinds of knowledge, and the fact that this correspondence reveals internal difficulties in the denition of the three kinds, I want to derive an additional hypothesis: in a sense it is not the case that the idea(s) of God are examples of the three kinds of knowledge. Rather, the very distinction of the three kinds always already concerns the possibility of thinking God and relating to it/him in a manner that is both theoretical and practical, individual and collective or common. The three kinds apply to particular objects and problems, including the mathematical and physical objects, only inasmuch as they are related to certain ways of understanding causality, which themselves are ways of understanding God.46 Therefore kinds of knowledge are kinds of the knowledge of God, not in the mystical sense, but in the practical sense. And it is only in this way that we can understand completely their articulation, the transitions from one kind to another, which are to be thought of in the form of transitions always in the making, or mental efforts to orientate the internal tensions of every kind of knowledge in the direction of greater activity, rather than in the form of crossing pre-existing demarcations (or borders) between domains, or elds of objects. As we know the three kinds always have exactly the same objects, which they consider in different modalities (nality, necessity, singularity). But this makes sense, ultimately, only if the objects are related to God, and their ideas are in fact parts of Gods idea, since it is the different relationship to a certain idea of God that characterizes these heterogeneous modalities. This suggests that what I call the three Gods or I represent as the triplicity of God, in fact forms the true idea ideae, or idea idearum in Spinozas philosophy, namely the reective idea of the articulation of adequate and inadequate ideas.47 It is not simple, but multiple, even equivocal, because simplicity is itself a very inadequate representation of the mind whose action we call knowledge. To conclude, but only in the form of indicating new dimensions of our problem, I want to suggest another way of reading the topography of the Three Gods. In a sense what is most interesting in this topography, and also most ethically important, are not the names that we nd in the text for the heterogeneous ideas associated with a representation of the divine, even if we discover a dynamic that is intrinsic to each of them, i.e., a complexity or a tension latent in such words as nature, or law, or love and even the human. But it is the possibility of locating interpretive and ethical problems on the ideal trajectories which connect each term to the others. Paradoxically, what initially emerged as a conceptual typology could then become essentially an instrument to discuss vacillations that affect the use of certain critical categories in Spinozas thought, but also cover the most interesting polemical and practical aspects of his reorganization of the classical language of philosophy. I will therefore suggest that, on each of the trajectories, we nd a
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notion whose function in Spinozas philosophy is unstable, or seems to be contradictory. On the trajectory connecting the notion of law to the notion of love, we clearly nd the notion (and the problem) of what Spinoza, following the Bible itself, calls obedience.48 We know thataccording to the TTPthis is the crucial issue regarding the social and political function of religion. What is disturbing here is certainly the fact that Spinoza uses the same word, obedience, to describe the observance of law, especially the divine law, and the effect of love, in the form of the love of ones neighbour. He seems to be trapped in the Pauline idea of overcoming law through charitas, that Paul (in Ga, 5, 1314, and Rm 13, 8b) associates with a messianic theology of the incarnation: Law when incarnated spiritually negates itself as an external constraint, and becomes the instrument of a virtual metamorphosis of human nature, which will be achieved when all humans are united in Christan idea that Spinoza certainly rejects. As a juridical or meta-juridical concept, law seems to be intrinsically associated with the ideas of punishment and reward, and more profoundly with a distinction of good and evil that calls for a judgment and a sanction. How could there be a law without a sanction, either in this world or in the imaginary world of the afterlife? Could it still be called a law? Positivists like Hobbes or Kelsen would respond with a resounding no . . . Or should it be considered as limit case where it becomes indiscernible from its opposite, love? A disturbing way to probe this issue would be to ask the question: how can we distinguish between, on the one hand, voluntary servitude, and, on the other hand, a freedom that acknowledges the necessity of the community? We can identify similar problems located on the other trajectories. Between God as Law and God as Nature in the sense of potentia or causa, I would suggest that the problem is order. This is one of the most embarrassing categories employed by Spinoza, which seems to be torn between a nalistic use (criticized in the Appendix of Part One of the Ethics, in the course of a general critique of anthropomorphic valorizations and projections), and a causal use associated with the idea of natural order (we remember the typical formula ordo et connexio rerum/idearum/causarum). Above all it could undermine the notion that the third kind of knowledge associates ideas and affects following an intelligible order, or an order that refers to/leads to the intellect (secundum ordinem ad intellectum). The latent question here is the following: would it be possible to develop an understanding of nature that would not include the rational notion of order, or some of its connotationssuch as immutability, and especially homogeneity? But how would this immutability-homogeneity, which also accounts for Spinozas preservation of the Cartesian expression leges naturae, remain compatible with the thesis that nature is a complex of innitely different modes which are never produced in the same conditions and the same manner? Some interpreters have been led to sacricing either the order or the multiplicity rather than maintaining this equivocity which is never discussed as such by Spinoza.49 How about the third axis binding the names Love and Nature? I would suggest that this is where the problem designated by the name convenientia
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emergesa term that is very difficult to translate: agreement or association are possibilities, but we must remember that it comes originally from Ciceros Latin translation of the Greek word oikeisis (central in Stoic philosophy), which involves a notion of appropriation. We could also say utility: there is utilitas both in the form of mutual love and in the form of the natural construction of individuals who are composed of many other individuals, and such are the two ways in which Spinoza uses convenientia and convenire.50 It is certainly a useful indication to point out that the notion of love is purely human, as the idea of God as love transforms theology into humanism, whereas the notion of a natural power is indeed broader than any limitation to the human world, or incorporates it into a totality of natural interactions. But it provides only a formalistic and misleading way of solving the problem, because it suggests a reduction of love to some sort of physical attraction or combination, which would make love a metaphoric notion. This is the kind of materialism or pantheism that Spinoza certainly does not follow in his phenomenology of the passions. Much more relevant in my opinion is the following discrepancy: God can be conceived as love (and conversely love can be conceived as God) because we can conceive a form of love overcoming its own ambivalence, which becomes liberated from its constitutive relationship to hate, and more generally to the sad passions, and thereby limited to constructive processes. But, as already indicated by the axiom of Part IV, this is not how we can understand the combinations of individuals if nature is conceived as an open causal totality.51 Here there is permanent conict and destruction as well as construction. As Spinoza will point out in the TTP: Big shes eat small shes (chap. XVI), and this is true also for human societies inasmuch as they are considered natural individual themselves.52 On this basis Spinoza proposes an utterly realistic and provocative notion of natural right. It would seem, therefore, that the axis on which the notions of utilitas and convenientia are evolving towards one another marks the transition from a utopian to a realistic understanding of the formation of communities, which also coincides with an extension from the human to the natural realm in which it is included. One may ask here: does humanism become antihumanism, not only theoretically but practically? But again, it would be more interesting to discuss the problem in ethical terms. Considering that on one side we have an idea of love without hate, and on the other side an idea of conict, or construction through destruction, the ethical problem covered by the term convenientia would become: can we separate conict and hate, or think of destruction without implying the imaginary de-humanization of the other, her transformation into an enemy? This sounds now Nietzschean rather than Levinassian, but also resonates with many of our contemporary troubles.53 Etienne Balibar Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Universit de Paris-Ouest France e.balibar@wanadoo.fr
Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication NOTES
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This paper was presented at the international conference Thinking with Spinoza: Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Birkbeck College London, 78th May 2009, and has been revised for publication. I express my gratitude to the European Journal of Philosophy for suggesting corrections to my defective English writing. Useful suggestions for the nal version resulted from a discussion at the Groupe de recherches spinozistes, Universit de Paris 1, organized by Profs. Chantal Jaquet, Pascal Svrac, and Ariel Suhamy in April 2010. 2 See Assmann 2000: 1531. 3 In this paper I mainly leave aside the Tractatus Politicus, which briey discusses the political function of religion, but apparently has no interest for the idea of God. I also focus on the mature work, i.e., I leave aside the Korte Verhandeling: not because its concept of God would not be crucial, but because its interpretation and the assessment of the difference with the Ethics (which some readers see as a continuous evolution, and others as a veritable epistemological break), deserve a complex discussion per se. For recent interpretive attempts (in French), see Jaquet 2005; 2007. 4 This is the case when it forms the antithesis of philosophy, or when it represents the pseudo-abstractions that divert human minds from the acknowledgment of the universal requirements of salvation and throw them into speculative disputes, but not when (more rarely) it is taken literally as meaning Gods word (logos). The theologians are always on the rst side. In this case and others, when Spinozas terminology is at stake, I check my notes against Emilia Giancotti Boscherinis unsurpassable Lexicon Spinozanum (Boscherini 1970). On the distinction of theology and religion in Spinoza, see Balibar 1998: 5ff. 5 In a very useful passage (La dysfonction Dieu dans le systme spinoziste) of her important book (Lagre 2004: 158ff), Jacqueline Lagre speaks of a plurality of theological languages and refers it to an Epicurean tradition of the equivalent hypotheses. This resonates with Spinozas thesis in the TTP that a free republic is one in which individuals (rather than sects) must be able to ground their pious actions in different ideas or representations of God. 6 A standard presentation of this dilemma, including a precise discussion of Spinozas own way of addressing the notion of atheism, is Giancotti 1995. See also Pierre-Franois Moreaus balanced interpretation in Moreau 2006: 62, who rightly (in my view) focuses on uses of the name God. 7 In Spinozas texts religio and pietas are often used as equivalent terms (e.g., TTP, chs XV, XVI, XVII, etc.: ad pietatem, et religionem attendamus), but also as complementary designations of the objective (or institutional) and subjective (or affective) dimensions of our practical relation to the idea of God (cf. Spinoza Study n.d.: E4P37S1 and E4P73S). With a political connotation, pietas has also a wider use : pietas erga patriam summa sit (TTP, ch. XVIII), which indicates that the love of ones country has a religious dimension. 8 I have discussed this point in Balibar 1998: ch. II. 9 TTP ch XIV speaks of a universal faith (universalis des) associated with the complete scripture (universa scriptura, which is one of the terms he also uses to translate the Hebrew Torah). In their critical edition and French translation (Spinoza 1999: 475), Moreau and Lagre make the slight mistake of rendering dei universalis dogmata sive universae Scripturae intenti fundamentalia enumerare as numrer les dogmes de la foi universelle, cest--dire les points fondamentaux qui sont la vise de lEcriture universelle.
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A similar terminology is used by Andr Tosel in Tosel 2008. There is also an essay by Wim Klever, Drie Goden (in Dutch), to be found on the website http://www. benedictusdespinoza.nl/lit/ that he kindly transmitted to me. I drew vital inspiration from Franois Regnaults older essay on Newtons Gods: see Regnault 1985. 11 This is the case not only in the Ethics (see in particular Spinoza Study n.d.: E1P10 and after: as soon as Spinoza has refuted the idea that there could exist several innite substances, the substantia constans innitis attributis . . . becomes namedor renamed with the term God: Deus), but also in the TTP (see ch. XIV: the second dogma of universal faith: eum esse unicum; hoc enim etiam ad supremam devotionem, admirationem et amorem erga Deum absolute require nemo dubitare potest, which bears a striking similarity with the rst phrase of the Appendix of Ethics, 1: His Dei naturam, ejusque proprietates explicui, ut, quod necessario existit; quod sit unicus; quod ex sola suae naturae necessitate sit . . .). 12 On the simultaneous banning of Spinozas TTP and the Socinian writings of the Polish Brotherhood, see Israel 2001; also Cristofolini 2007. 13 But it is also possible to think that, for Spinoza, the Christian dogma of trinity could be an imaginary theological reection of the multiple ideas of God. 14 Most contemporary Spinoza interpreters agree that pantheism (which is much more adequate to describe the early doctrine of the Korte Verhandeling) does not adequately t the theory of the Ethics: Martial Gueroult has proposed the category panentheism (see Gueroult 1968: 220ff). 15 Different scholars have traced the Deus, seu Natura motto to separated backgrounds: the Stoic-Cartesian tradition (cf. James 1993; Macherey 1999; Lagre 2004: 82); the medieval juridical tradition (Tierney 1963); and the Medieval Jewish philosophical tradition (Maimonides) (Fraenkel 2006). 16 Spinoza always insists that the essence of a cause is to act, or a cause is what cannot not produce effects: in this sense every thing, res, is also a cause, causa, and this is a fortiori the case for the innite totality of things/causes, or the interrelation of their productive powers: Natura naturans. As we know, the distinction of Natura naturans and natura naturata (which has a late scholastic background) occurs only once in the Ethics (Spinoza Study n.d.: E1P29S). It was more explicit in the Korte Verhandeling. This does not prevent the Ethics from developing (against the theory of creation) the idea that Gods power to produce singular things (natura naturans) is immanent to the innite multiplicity of its effects (natura naturata). The affinity (or even line of derivation) on this point between Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, which had been a central tenet of the pantheist reading of Spinoza (culminating in Schelling), is now widely rejected by Spinoza scholars: cf. Mignini 2007. 17 See Negri 1981, and his subsequent writings. 18 See Macherey 1992, and also Balibar 1996. 19 Here we can remember Bayles ironic remark, which in fact hits the point: in Spinozas philosophy, you should not say 5000 Germans killed 10,000 Turks, but God in the form of 5000 Germans killed God in the form of 10,000 Turks . . . (See Bayle 1983: 69). 20 But later Spinozists did it without hesitation: cf. Naess 1977: 51: The maximum is an understanding love of Nature, amor intellectualis Dei (which is also an interesting illustration of the reversibility of the sive, what I have called the denitional equivalences). 21 This idea is explained very convincingly in Cristofolini 1987: 171ff. 22 Spinozas subversive thesis that all nations may have had prophets, linked to their respective elections (i.e., existence and prosperity in History), does not absolutely
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involve that claim that the form of revelation attributed to Moses in the Bible is universal. On the other hand, a contemporary Jewish tradition has insisted that Spinozas understanding of the Torah as a command which has been revealed once and for all, instead of an oral teaching that should be continuously studied/reinterpreted (in the Talmudic tradition), is highly reductive (see Levinas 1982: 201ff). 23 It was perfectly analysed by Franois Zourabichvili in Zourabichvili 2002a: 183ff. 24 conscius as inscius, or nescius: see Balibar 1994. 25 See the illuminating commentary by Pierre Macherey in Macherey 1997a: 226ff. 26 The idea of the place of enunciation is repeated twice by Spinoza in similar terms, by insisting once on the theological and once on the political context. In TTP ch. IV the divine law forms an unstable limit between a kind of knowledge (a universal content is perceptible through natural light) and a narrative which contains the story of one people (or one election) in a given language. We might say in quasi-Kantian terms that there is a paralogism involved in the event of enunciating the law, which pushes the imagination to hypostasize an author for the phrases of the Law. Christ as os Dei (mouth of God) is located exactly on this unstable limit. In ch. XVII the same pattern becomes a historical and political construction of the foundation of the Hebrew State: coming out of slavery (in Egypt), the Hebrew people build a theocracy by granting God (and only God) the sovereign power. But they soon realize that this is a ction (verum enimvero haec omnia opinione magis quam re constabant), whereby the place of God (vicem Dei) has to be lled by some representative. It is Moses who realizes the Law through interpreting it, on the basis of his interpellating God and being interpellated by God who, nevertheless, remains invisible. Paralogism and ction form the two poles of the logical construction. On the background of this problematic in Ancient philosophy and theology, cf. Stroumsa 2005. 27 See Robelin 1991: esp. 145 ff. 28 I admit that, here, the denitional equivalence has to be extracted from a more complex phrase: Denique videmus summum legis divinae praemium esse ipsam legem, nempe deum cognoscere eumque ex vera libertate et animo integro et constante amare [nally we see that the supreme reward of the divine law is the law itself, or Gods knowledge and loving him in a truly free manner, with a full and constant heart] (TTP, IV, p. 48 of the Gebhardt edition). 29 See Brague 2005: 316. This mystical thesis has equivalents in Islam in the form of the idea of the uncreated Koran. Part of the Kabbalah (Zohar) views the creator (or the Demiurge) as forming only a secondary emanation of the impersonal God (En Sof) (cf. Scholem 1995: 20545), whereas some modern Jewish thinkers develop the idea that it is the Thorah which is the primary object of love, instead of God (cf. Levinas 1963: 1923). 30 On the possibility of suppressing the ambivalence of Love as a passion (or disentangling the relationship of Love and Hate, and more generally the sad passions which create the uctuatio animi, see the collection Spinoza, philosophe de lamour (Jaquet, Sverac and Suhamy 2005), particularly Lagre 2005. 31 See Cristofolini, 2007, page 191. On the genealogy of the twin formulas: homo homini deus, and homo homini lupus, cf. Lagre 1995. On the equivalence between loving God and loving ones neighbour, see Reinhard 2007. Feuerbachs understands the equivalence homo homini deus est as the turning point of world history which brings back the religion of Love from theology to anthropology (Feuerbach 1968: 425ff.) (in his preface, the translator and commentator Jean-Pierre Osier discusses the parallel and opposition of Feuerbach and Spinoza: ibid.: 6171).
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E.g. in Hegels early essay Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (1799, published posthumously), and later in the ch. VII.C of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) on revealed religion. 33 This probably involves a judaizing representation of Christ, but above all dovetails with the Socinian humanist understanding of Christ. See Osier 1996. On the tension between a Socinian doctrine and an interpretation of the universal faith after the model of the Gospel of the Mount (Matthew), cf. Cristofolini 2007: 79ff. 34 Ethics, Part V, prop. 3536: Deus se ipsum Amore intellectuali innito amat. On Spinozas reading of John, see Breton 1977, as well as Laux 2005. 35 In writing about love (amor, charitas) in a theological context, Spinoza could think of several terms of the Hebrew Bible, with or without sexual connotations, particularly ahaba and hesed (but also tsedek, usually translated as justice). The problem was that, not reading Greek, he would miss the intermediary link and could not discuss relations between agape, eros and philia. 36 This is very much the Deleuzian interpretation: see Deleuze 1968: 282ff. 37 This is the consequence that Rousseau tried to avoid by distinguishing a religion civile from the religion de lhomme in the Social Contract, Book IV, chapter 8. 38 See my commentary in Balibar 1998: 40ff. 39 Spinoza does in fact quote the immediately preceding sentence in Matthew: Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy (King James Bible, Mat 5, 43), which he interprets as a political command which was valid as Law of an existing state (the Hebrew kingdom). After its destruction, it lost its validity, and Jeremiah and Christ successively taught to avoid making any difference based on nationality among humans (ut omnes absolute pietate colerent) (TTP, ch. XIX). There is in fact no equivalent of this phrase in the Hebrew Bible (Torah). Some readers view this partial quotation as tainted with antijudaism. I prefer to insist on the fact that Spinoza minimizes the differences between the universalistic elements of the Prophetic tradition and the Christian scripture, but also erases the antinomian dimension of the fundamental dogma in the New Testament. However the idea that patriotism (in the case of the Ancient Hebrews or of modern nations) involves a distribution of love and hate among fellow citizens and foreigners, which is theologically justied (odium theologicum) and becomes for the members of the national community a second nature, is crucial in the TTP, ch. XVII. See my commentary in Balibar 1985. See also Miqueu 2005. 40 See Reinhard 2007: 2ff (commenting on Freud, Civilization and its Discontents: As creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness (. . .) their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him (. . .) Homo homini lupus). 41 Macherey 1997b: 208ff. 42 On the construction of the First Kind of Knowledge as a theory of signs in the imagination, cf. Vinciguerra 2005. 43 See Vinciguerra 2005; and Moreau 1994: 307ff. 44 Deleuze 1968: 284ff. 45 On Spinozas relation to Stoicism in general and specically their understanding of virtue, cf. James 1993. 46 The rst kind of knowledge is also a way of understanding causality, by representing it as nality: it combines an Aristotelian common sense with a creationist and providentialist imaginary.

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An idea of the articulation or proportion of our adequate and inadequate ideas of the body (not a xed one, but a mobile proportion, continuously transiting towards a greater or lesser perfection), is nothing other than the mind (mens) (Ethics: ch. II, prop. 27 and sv.). It is precisely this idea idearum which, in Part V (pro. IVff) becomes reected as such and related to Gods power, thus conceived sub aeternitatis specie (prop. 2224). On the difficulty of relating the adequate and the inadequate ideas to the same body, which evolves between Parts II and V, cf. Macherey 1997a: 245ff. 48 The complete paradigm, including obedientia, des, obsequium, consensus, even acquiescentia, deserves a discussion: cf. Bove 2005. 49 See Balibar 1990. Zourabichvili 2002b and Ansaldi 2007 have linked the different understandings of natural order in Spinoza to the issue of admitting the possibility of metamorphoses transgressing the limits of natural types or species. 50 See Boscherini 1970. 51 The meaning of the single Axiom of Part IV of the Ethics becomes qualied in Part V, scholium of Proposition 37 (Partis Quartae Axioma res singulares respicit, quatenus cum relatione ad certum tempus, et locum considerantur, de quo neminem dubitare credo). This follows on the proposition that the intellectual love of God is indestructible as such (because there is nothing in nature that is contrary to it), and it precedes the proposition that having a Body with multiple capacities (Corpus ad plurima aptum) corresponds to having a Mind whose greatest part is eternal (Mentem habet, cujus maxima pars est aeterna). It seems to me that this does not involve having an indestructible body, or imagining immortal individuals: it is a question of the modality in which the conicting processes of nature of which we form a part become adequately perceived. 52 The same idea is developed at length in ch. II of the TTP (albeit without the allegory of the sh), becoming the foundation of a theory of the collective power of the mass (potentia multitudinis) which exists as if led by one single mind (veluti una mente ducitur). See Balibar 2001. 53 After Feuerbach, Levinas, Nietzsche, I must add another reference: Louis Althusser uses the expression coercion without hate in his posthumous essay Machiavelli and Us (Althusser 1999), to describe the political capacity of the Machiavellian Prince. But this idea (which he combines with a reection on the place where the Prince must stand to govern the multitude) must have a Spinozistic background as well.
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Balibar-Spinozas Three God

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00511.

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Amor (Charitas, Homo homini deus)

Natura (Potentia, causa)

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication NOTES

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Spinozas Three Gods and the Modes of Communication

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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