As to my opinion of miracles, I have sufliciently expounded it, if I
mistake not, in the theologico-political treatise. I now add but this
much : if you consider these matters, to wit that Christ appeared not
to the Sanhedrin, not to Pilate, nor to any of the unbelieving, but
only to the saints ; that God hath no right or left hand, nor is
naturally in any one place, but everywhere ; that matter is every-
where the same, and that God cannot display himself outside the
world in the imaginary space men feign ; lastly, that the fabric of the



SPINOZA AND THEOLOGY 343

human body is restrained by the mere weight of the air within certain
bounds : you will then easily perceive that the appearance of Christ
after his death was not unlike that in which God appeared to Abraham,
when Abraham saw men and asked them to dine with him. You will
say, surely all the Apostles believed that Christ had risen from the
dead and in truth ascended into heaven ; which I deny not. For
Abraham likewise believed that God had dined with him, and all
Israel believed that God had come down from heaven in fire to
Mount Sinai and spoken to them in his proper person ; whereas these
and sundry other matters of the like sort were appearances or revela-
tions adapted to the capacity and conceit of the men to whom God
was minded thereby to reveal his counsel. I conclude therefore that
the resurrection of Christ from the dead was in truth spiritual, revealed
only to the faithful, and to them after their capacity ; consisting in
this, that Christ was gifted with eternity and rose from the dead (the
dead, I mean, in that sense in which Christ said : let the dead bury
their dead), in that by his life and death he gave a singular example
of holiness; and he raises his disciples from the dead in so much as
they follow this example of his life and death. And it were no hard
matter to explain the whole doctrine of the Gospel according to this
hypothesis. 