125. - Miracles

Summary

Theories of religion, prophecy, and the interpretation of Scripture in the TTP incorporate Spinoza’s account of miracles (miraculi). “On Miracles,” Chapter 6 of the TTP, includes two different senses of the term. The chapter opens with an acknowledgment of an ordinary understanding of the term, on which a miracle is a divine action in which God violates the universal laws of nature (TTP6.3–4). Spinoza strongly denies that there are any such actions. He does, however, offer a different sense of “miracle,” which he accepts:

the term ‘miracle’ cannot be understood except in relation to men’s opinions, and means nothing but a work whose natural cause we cannot explain by the example of another familiar thing, or at least which cannot be so explained by the one who writes or relates the miracle.

(TTP6.13)

Spinoza’s argument that there are no miracles in the first sense of the term depends upon his rejection of what he takes to be the ordinary understanding of divine action, on which God does not act so long as nature acts in an ordinary way (TTP6.2). Instead, Spinoza maintains, nature’s virtue and power just are God’s virtue and power; to hold that a given divine action is an action against nature, then, would be to hold “at the same time also that God acts in a way contrary to his own nature. Nothing would be more absurd than that” (TTP6.9). While many doctrines of the TTP may be in tension with the doctrines of the Ethics, this view seems to be consistent with the account of God in Ethics 1 and the criticism of ordinary views of God in the Appendix there (see especially ii/81/15–19).