S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 1 5 Anton Vydra Doc. Mgr. Anton Vydra, PhD. is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts at Trnava University, Slovakia. His academic interests include French philosophy of science, especially Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, and more recently cultural history and the history of imagination. He was a founding member of the humanities journal Ostium. From 2015 to 2019, he worked as a journalist at .týždeň, where he also served as deputy editor-in-chief. His email address is anton.vydra@truni.sk. 1 Introduction When in 1670 Baruch Spinoza (anonymously) expressed in his Tractatus theologico-politicus the idea that the speeches of prophets are characterized more by their highly sensitive and vivid imagination than by their own power of reason, it brought him hostility from the Jewish community in Amsterdam and later also an official publishing ban. Spinoza literally wrote that an act of prophecy is not the work of a perfect mind but rather of vivid imagination (“prophetizandum non esse opus perfectiore mente, sed vividiore imagination”; Spinoza 2005, I, 20, 3–4). Despite his excommunication back in 1656, Spinoza was undoubtedly a deeply spiritual man, this notwithstanding the fact that the God of his Ethics (as causa sui) was later described not as a personal God, but as the God of philosophers. Spinoza’s spirituality remained silent or rather violently silenced. Of course, his spirituality inevitably bears Cartesian traces, but Spinoza can hardly be described as lacking an inner sensitivity to the Transcendent. Spinoza longed for a spirituality released from images and elevated to the level of purified rationality. The prophets, according to him, used parables and mirroring analogies (“omnia fere parabolice et aenigmatice”), because they were accustomed to expressing the spiritual through the corporeal (“omnia spiritualia corporaliter expresserint”). To them this was more in accord with the nature of the imagination (Spinoza 2005, I, 29, 8–11). From Spinoza’s point of view, imagination is a matter of uncertainty and ambiguity and influenced by the prophet’s personality traits and abilities (the elegance or confusion of his style is then reflected in the elegance and confusion of God’s words) as well as by the natural circumstances of his life. Hence, he argues that if the prophet was a peasant, he described his visions through farm animals; if he was a soldier, he described his visions through warlords and armies; and if he was of courtly origin, he saw kingdoms everywhere (Spinoza 2005, II, 18, 5–10). Thus, as God himself has no distinctive style of speech, it is entirely a matter of the prophet’s abilities whether he shows God’s language as elegant, terse, stern, coarse, rambling, or obscure (Spinoza 2005, II, 20, 25–28). However, it is not my purpose to analyze Spinoza’s work in detail here. In fact, I do not intend to deal with it at all in the
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