Ebook: Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza.

Matheron published Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Christ and the Salvation of the Ignorant in Spinoza) (1971) in Gueroult’s series Analyse et Raisons with the publisher Aubier-Montaigne, a book which, like Gueroult’s two-volume study, has long been out of print and is nearly impossible to find today. This book is devoted to unravelling some of the most difficult tensions in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, which lie precisely at the point of articulation between politics and theology. The initial question that animates the text also gives it its title: how is it possible for Spinoza to consistently hold in the first Tractatus both that the ignorant can achieve salvation by mere obedience, and also that salvation is a matter of knowledge and freedom? Or again: how can we reconcile Spinoza’s absolute rationalism, which is clearly on display in his ruthless criticism of any possible knowledge of God through miracles, with his insistence that the truth of salvation by obedience cannot have been reached by reason, but only through revelation? Indeed, what, for Spinoza, was the meaning of Christ, that subversively unarmed prophet who, ‘master par excellence in matters of the third kind of knowledge, was, among finite modes, the one through whose mind the Idea of God was manifest to the highest degree yet attained’? Matheron refuses absolutely every easy resolution of these dilemmas, insisting on the consistency of Spinoza’s thought and the simultaneously conceptual and historical necessity of these problems themselves. The result is an astonishing work of philosophical productivity, which elaborates concepts whose meaning extends well beyond the esoteric scope of its apparent focus; it is a text about historical contingency and necessity, about the concrete logics of ideological diffusion and relapse, about the power of the imagination and the interplay of complex social dynamics in the historical constitution of a truth that aspires to radical universality. As Negri puts it, in this work Matheron shows us how, for Spinoza, ‘the religious problematic of salvation is completely reinterpreted in light of this secular and materialist perspective of liberation’.