In this general section on Language and Interpretation we focus on three related interpretive issues: the nature of religious language, the correct interpretation of Scripture, and finally, the historiography of Jewish philosophy. The Bible and its memorable imagery seem to ill consort with the propositional structure of theological doctrine developed by medieval religious philosophers intent on squaring reason with revelation. Howard Wettstein presses the point, and draws a very strong contrast between biblical discourse (imagistic poetry) about God and theological doctrine that abstracts God from such imagery so as to iron out âpoeticâ inconsistencies. The anthropomorphic descriptions of God that we find in the Bible and the rabbis of the Talmudic period are, according to Wettstein, not a misguided attempt to understand divinity, but rather a perfect vehicle to capture His disparate roles in history, as creator, lover, judge, etc., and to give meaning to the vibrancy of religious life. For Wettstein, it is the theologians who, in demanding consistency and uniformity, miss the point of the story and flatten out the contours of religious life and practice.
Wettstein has thrown down the gauntlet, and it is natural to turn straightway to two of the greatest Jewish religious philosophers, Maimonides and Gersonides. We present the classic debate between them concerning human discourse about the divine. For Maimonides, the utter simplicity of God, His metaphysical unity, entails the impossibility of describing God in any direct way. Periphrases are necessary, and even they must be interpreted aright. We are able only to say of God what He is not, and such negation is a denial of the applicability of the property in question. So, for Maimonides, âGod is oneâ means âGod is not not-one,â the negation of the privation, and this latter is understood as the denial of the applicability of the very property in question. It is a category mistake to say of God that He is the kind of being who is one (or even ânot manyâ), precisely because God is not the sort of being for whom this property applies.
Gersonides finds this via negativa unintelligible. Such absolute equivocation would render us mute and uncomprehending, and though Maimonides himself praises silence and human incapacity to describe the divine, Gersonides argues that in fact univocality is assumed in the negation itself. Contra Maimonides, if anything can be inferred from Godâs being ânot not-one,â then âoneâ must be used in its normal sense. For Gersonides, a kind of analogy obtains between divine and human nature. For example, God has knowledge (âis wiseâ) in a primary, perfect way, and is the cause, the grounds, for human knowledge, which exists in a lesser degree. Aquinas lodged the same objection against Maimonides (ST I q. 13, art. 2).
Samuel Lebens rounds out the section with a response to Wettstein, and a way to understand biblical imagery and language. In reconciling poetic imagery with philosophical doctrine, Lebens points to the way metaphorical imagery works. While not translatable in so many words, while not expressive in propositional form, metaphors depend for their efficacy upon a âcore set of background beliefs.â The multifarious images of God (lover, judge, etc.) all work against the background of a life lived according to certain principles and beliefs. This doxastic element gives metaphorical imagery its power to move us. Metaphors âpointâ or hint in ways that reach beyond our discursive capacities, but are not untethered from them. In countering Wettstein, Lebens defends the via negativa as a way that, like metaphor itself, illuminates in spite of its literal falsehood.
HOWARD WETTSTEIN
âPoetic Imagery and Religious Beliefâ (1997/2000), in D. Shatz (ed.), Philosophy and Faith: A Philosophy of Religion Reader (2002)
Religions are systems of thought. So we tend to suppose. What certainly qualify as systems of thought are the products of philosophical theology. But there is some tension between such constellations of theological doctrine and the primary religious worksâin the tradition on which I will be focused, the Hebrew Bible as understood through, and supplemented by, the Rabbis of the Talmud.
This tension is a product of the genesis of philosophical theology, the application of Greek philosophical thought to a very different tradition, one that emerged from a very different world. The primary religious works speak of God impressionistically. Their mode of description is as remote from definition as poetry is from mathematics. Their imagery is strikingly anthropomorphic.
Medieval religious philosophy, by contrast, disparages anthropomorphic description. While not quite an abstract entity, God is described, even defined, in abstract terms. The flavor of this is perhaps best conveyed by an example from the Christian philosophic tradition, St. Anselmâs characterization of God as âthe most perfect being.â This is no mere honorific supplement to the anthropomorphic characterizations. It is a definition, one that subsumes specific divine perfections.
My aim here is to explore this tension with an eye to the fate or ultimate status of the doctrinal output of the philosophers. I will argue that theological doctrine is not a natural tool for thinking about Judaism, and insofar as Judaism is in this way representative, itâs not a natural tool for thinking about religion. The âsystem of thoughtâ model applies only with the application of force.
A. J. Heschel, an important American Jewish scholar and thinker, comments that much of his career was devoted to elucidating distinctively Jewishâas opposed to medieval Greek-inspiredâmodes of religious thought. âIt is not an easy enterprise,â Heschel notes.
The Hellenization of Jewish theology actually goes back to Philo [first century B.C.E]. ⌠The impact of Philo on theology was radical. To oversimplify the matter, this approach would have Plato and Moses, for example, say the same thing, only Plato would say it in Greek. ⌠This view has had a great impact on much of Jewish medieval philosophy. They talk about God in the language of the Greeks.
(1997, 155â6)
Perhaps we should not suppose any failure on the part of the medievals to discern the distance between biblical-rabbinic and Greek-inspired modes of theological thought. Rather, for the medievals, this was the only way to make sense of the God of the tradition; the only way to square revealed and philosophic truth. One who wants to make philosophical sense of biblical-rabbinic remarks about God will inevitably do so in terms of oneâs own idiom and conceptual repertoire. It might seem, then, that the medievals only did what we all do, what is inevitable.
Still, as Heschel sees it, Philoâs innovation violates something at the heart of the tradition. The introduction of Greek modes of philosophical thought encouraged the minimization or outright rejection of anthropomorphism. The God of the Hebrew Bible is, among other things, loving, nurturing/merciful, just, even angry. The Bible speaks of relations between people and God in the language of personal relationships. What grounds obligation to God, for example, is nothing very abstract. It is rather the communityâs historic and personal relation to God.
Such robustly anthropomorphic characterizations of God play an apparently indispensable role in the religious life. That God loves and cares are, for the religious practitioner, no throwaways. To attempt to relegate anthropomorphism to the status of a mere surface level phenomenon is to engage in an uphill battle. The burden of proof, given the character of religious life, surely seems on the other side. On the face of it, the distance between biblical/rabbinic and medieval philosophic thinking is enormous.
I. Poetic Imagery and Religious Belief
1. Poetic Imagery
Letâs consider a somewhat lengthier list of anthropomorphic images of God in biblical/rabbinic literature: loving and nurturing, even if demanding, parent; benevolent judge/ruler who does not forget acts of loving kindness and generously and lovingly passes on the rewards to oneâs progeny; righteous judge who has access to our deepest secrets and who rewards and punishes accordingly; king of the universe, to be treated with lordly deference; bridegroom; husband; woman in labor; angry, regretful, even vengeful, remembering the sins of the parents and visiting them upon distant generations. When one scans this panoply of images, doctrine seems far away. Many of the images fail to yield anything like a characterization of God that could figure in doctrine. Among the images, moreover, are striking dissonances, hardly a phenomenon friendly to doctrine.
Clearly, conceptual refinement and coherence is not a high priority in the Bible and Aggada [nonlegal portions of rabbinic literature]. One has the sense that one is dealing with something more like poetry; sometimes poetry per se, as in Psalms, other times poetic, image-laden prose.
The virtues of this poetry, any poetry, do not include the discursive articulation characteristic of philosophy. The sorts of things one seeks from poetry are brilliance and depth of perception, suggestiveness; these inextricably bound with beauty of formulation. A collection of poetry on the subject of, say, love might include pieces reflecting different attitudes, moods, experiences. The poet seeks to illuminate the phenomena, sometimes casting them in a positive light, sometimes in a negative light. Many of the images, perhaps even the most beautiful and suggestive ones, do not yield easily to anything like a philosophically adequate idea. Nor would the images presumably constitute a coherent set. Imagine the folly of trying to derive any sort of theory of love from such poetry.
Doctrineâthe theory of God, as it wereâis equally remote from biblical/rabbinic characterizations of God. The point holds not only for Psalms and the like; one of the fundamental ideas of Genesis, that humans were created in Godâs image, provides an example from biblical prose. The idea of reflecting divinity is potent, pregnant with meaning. But it is imagery, not doctrine. Its very magnificenceâliterary and religiousâseems to place it at some distance from doctrine.
2. The Language of Poetry
One should not suppose that literary or poetic âimagery,â any more than other forms of discourse, is necessarily connected with visual or mental images. Perhaps literary imagery is more likely than is, say, a weather report, to stimulate one to form an image in oneâs mind. But that is not essential. We do not refer to these figures of speech as imagery because they induce mental images. How to characterize literary imageryâwhy exactly we call it âimageryââis more difficult, something I wonât explore here. But simple examples of metaphor, one form of such imagery, make it clear that mental imaging is not essential. âSea of troubles,â mentioned below, will do.
Hereâs The American Heritage Dictionaryâs definition of metaphor: A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in âa sea of troubles.â When we explain metaphor to our studentsâsay, in connection with some philosophical metaphorâmetaphorical language, we suggest, is second best. We revert to it when we are not in a position to provide literal description, when we canât do better than mere analogies, implicit comparisons. What we donât mentionâbecause we are not really thinking about poetry and literary languageâis that in literary contexts, metaphor is often used for its own sake; it is not second best.
Why is metaphorical language sometimes preferable? It goes to the heart of literary imageryâhere we go beyond metaphorâthat the words resonate. One might speak about this phenomenon in terms of levels or layers of meaning. But âresonanceâ better conveys the lingering intimations, the echoes, the movement of the mind. In poetry or poetic prose, a single word or phrase may have multiple resonances. Sometimes one predominates, comes to the fore; others linger in the background. Other times one finds oneself moving between them, sometimes repeatedly. Resonances have many determinants: the occurrence of the expression in famous literary contexts; or other contexts, or other ways, in which the words are customarily used; or other words that sound alike or that come from the same rootâthese are a sample.
Where does meaning, significance, come in? We should not try to say what the meaning of a word in poetry consists inâa bad idea even in, as it were, straight philosophy of language. Instead, letâs say that an expressionâs significance has everything to do with the networks of resonance in which it is embedded. A host of just such miscellaneous considerations, for example, figures in the significance of âGod.â
3. Mere Poetry?
Have I distanced the biblical/rabbinic literature too far from theological doctrine? If imagery is at the heart of biblical/rabbinic characterization of God, then what becomes of religious belief, of the tenets of religion?
Heschel writes, âIn Biblical language the religious man is not called believer, as he is for example in Islam (muâmin), but yere hashem[one who stands in awe of the Lord].â (1959, 77) In the present context this is extremely interesting; it suggests that in thinking about religion we make too much of the doxastic dimension and too little of the affective. What I take from this is not that the concept of religious beliefs has no purchase in Judaism. Or that the religious life does not require appropriate beliefs. Rather belief is not at the heart of the matter; one gets a misleading picture of Jewish religiosity if oneâs focus is a set of beliefs. There is an analogy with the question of linguistic meaning in poetry. Itâs not that a linguistic expression in poetry does not mean what it ordinarily does, say, in a newspaper article. But that dimension of its meaning is often not at the heart of its function in poetry.
What then do I make of religious belief, given my emphasis on poetic imagery? My answer is that likening biblical/rabbinic remarks to poetry certainly does not imply or even suggest that these remarks involve no beliefs, no real commitments; that they are, as one might say, âjust poetry.â For such commitment-neutrality is surely not true of poetry itself.
Poetry may assume, for example, straightforward factual information about the world, that there are people, that they behave in certain ways, and so on. Second and more interestingly, poetry may be committal even where there is no way to formulate the relevant belief in straightforward, literal language. If we wish to formulate such belief, we do one of two things. We can approximate, extracting a piece of the picture, one that is propositionally manageable, and attributing that piece. Alternatively, we can mimic the poet, attributing belief using the very imagery she usedâor related imagery. This may be a philosophical no-no; it will strike some as bizarre to suppose that such a thing counts as belief. Here as elsewhere, as Wittgenstein urged, philosophy would do well to look at actual practice rather than think about what it must be like.
In the religious literature that is my focus, many things are assumed about the world, many beliefs can be distilled from the imagery. All the old standards, as it were: belief in God, in God creating the world, creating people in his image, freeing his people from Egyptian bondage, revealing himself to Moses and giving the Torah on Mount Sinai, and the like. How should we think about these beliefs? Are they like the straightforward propositional claims that we can often distill from poetry or are they of the second variety mentioned, claims that remain at the level of imagery? When we report someone as having such and such religious belief, to what extent are we discursively articulating propositional content; to what extent are we ourselves using religious imagery?
Iâm intrigued by the idea that in speaking of the divine, intimation is the rule. Religious belief, one might then say, lives at the level of imagery. Belief ascription would then be a matter of utilizing the believerâs imagery in characterizing his belief. However, I am doubtful that things are this simple and uniform, that there is a single story to tell about religious belief per se. Clearly, the matter requires much ...
