Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed

Silence and Salvation

Donald McCallum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134103355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia medievale e rinascimentale

Providing an excellent overview of the latest thinking in Maimonides studies, this book uses a novel philosophical approach to examine whether Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed contains a naturalistic doctrine of salvation after death.

The author examines the apparent tensions and contradictions in the Guide and explains them in terms of a modern philosophical interpretation rather than as evidence of some esoteric meaning hidden in the text.

1

Enframing

I

In the introduction to his translation of Averroes’ The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Simon Van Den Bergh describes the deep emotional difference between Averroes and Al-Ghazali as being, in part, that between a thinker who conceives of God as a ‘dehumanized principle’ and one who regards God as ‘the Pity behind the clouds’.¹ This is indeed a deep difference.

Van Den Bergh explains how despite the fact that Averroes is unwilling to go as far as Aristotle in regarding man as a mortal God due to his intellectual capacity, Averroes’ faith in reason ‘remains unshaken’.² This faith is something which Averroes shares with his fellow Andalusian, Moses Maimonides, whose The Guide of the Perplexed can be read as providing assistance to those of his fellow Jews who had the necessary intellectual and moral training, to enable them to reconcile the fundamental tenets of their faith as laid down in the Bible and post-Biblical sacred texts with Aristotelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by Aristotle’s Arabic exegetes. Maimonides’ Aristotelianism differs from Averroes’ insofar as the former’s is heavily imbued with the Neo-Platonic interpretations of Alfarabi and Avicenna, whereas Averroes was keen to return to what he regarded as a pure Aristotelianism purged of any Neo-Platonic accretions. Maimonides and Averroes also share the dubious distinction of having been accused of heresy in their own lifetimes by their respective co-religionists due to the results of their application of independent reasoning to the sacred texts of their respective religions, and linked with this, they shared what can fairly be described as an intellectual elitism, due to their view that the aforementioned texts are aimed predominantly at the unlettered masses, and aim to communicate basic religious truths in a picturesque fashion which appeals primarily to the imagination of ordinary people. As Maimonides puts it, in a rabbinic phrase which he characteristically appropriates for his own purposes, ‘The Torah speaketh in the language of the sons of man’.³ The philosophers, on the other hand, form an elite cadre who can grasp these truths conceptually by the appropriate exercise of rational thought, without any imagination-dependent adulteration.⁴ Furthermore, philosophers and non-philosophers, for both these thinkers, form mutually exclusive groups. Generally speaking, one can either be a philosopher, and thereby a member of a small and intellectually privileged minority, or a member of the uneducated bulk of the populace which forms the majority of humankind.⁵

The provision of these sacred texts is interpreted by the philosophers as a divine concession to the weakness of the intellect in most people, which enables them to live in accordance with God’s will for them, and in a sense can be regarded as an act of ‘Pity’, which ensures that no human being is left without essential guidance in the important issue of how one should live one’s life. Correct behaviour towards one’s fellow citizens and in one’s own private conduct is thereby fostered without any knowledge being required of the philosophical truths underlying this behaviour. These truths can be directly grasped by those whose rational powers are sufficiently developed. However, for those who are not so equipped, help and guidance is available from a different source – one which is external to the individual, and which is presented as a given rather than requiring acts of intensive abstract cognition. It can be seen here that there is a sense in which the provision of religious texts acts as a bridge between Averroes and Al-Ghazali with respect to the above-mentioned gulf which separates them. For those who have sufficient intellectual capability and who have the appropriate educational background, which according to Maimonides, at least, requires as a minimum training study in logic, mathematics, the natural sciences and, finally, in metaphysics,⁶ as well as a highly developed moral character, reason will provide the maximum illumination possible to the unaided human intellect of the first principles underlying the universe, and, by extension, mankind’s place within it. However, for those who have neither the time nor the aptitude⁷ for philosophical studies, revelation will provide, at least for all practical purposes, knowledge which is missing – knowledge which is essential and without which a human life cannot be properly lived.⁸ This revelation is a gift from God, and as a bare minimum comprises the Koran, for Averroes, and the Torah, for Maimonides. The universe may be underpinned and permeated by reason, but there is a different route to the truth and to salvation from the dilemma of how human life should be lived, and this route has been provided as a result of God’s mercy towards human beings. Philosophers in the Middle Ages were, as a general rule, proud of man’s capacity for rational thought, and for them, man is a created being of the genus ‘animal’ whose differ-entia is ‘rationality’.⁹ Nevertheless, they had an acute awareness of how few people were actually able to make the fullest possible use of this faculty, and while this awareness led to a radical intellectual elitism, which sometimes sits uncomfortably with us in the twenty-first century, it also led to a toleration of religious texts, which they regarded as compensating, to a limited extent, for the less than fully developed state of the intellectual faculty in most people. Ideally, one learns of God’s existence, unity and incorporeality through the unaided use of reason, as indeed one learns how to behave towards one’s fellow creatures, but for those who cannot do this, for whatever reason, religious texts such as the Koran and the Torah perform this function, and steer those of weaker intellectual power away from inadvertent heresy or idolatry, or from inappropriate behaviour towards others.

Although Maimonides was a devout Jew he was steeped philosophically, in terms of style, methodology and content, in a milieu that was very much Islamic,¹⁰ and indeed the post-Aristotelian thinkers most often named or referred to in The Guide of the Perplexed are generally Islamic.¹¹ Like all those thinkers, he lived in a community of his co-religionists, and had been educated from childhood in the customs, mores and texts proper to his particular faith, although unlike the others he ran a considerable risk for a large part of his childhood and early adulthood by practising his religion openly.¹² Indeed, not only did Maimonides not grow up in a religious vacuum, he was steeped in the faith of his ancestors, and the overwhelming majority of his literary output was devoted to the clarification and codification of post-Biblical Jewish sacred texts and the religious law contained therein. Despite his view that in a sense these texts have a socio-political function, and that they are provided as a supplement to the use of unaided reason, he did not thereby automatically reject them as unnecessary for those whose intellectual faculty was sufficiently well developed.¹³ For example, in Part III of The Guide of the Perplexed he devotes a considerable amount of space to establishing rational grounds for as many of the injunctions contained in the Mosaic Law as he can.¹⁴ He splits them into (a) those commandments whose rationale is as obviously relevant at the time he was writing The Guide of the Perplexed as it was in Moses’ day, such as the prohibitions on murder or theft and (b) those commandments whose rationale can only be explained by reference to relevant historical conditions pertaining at the time of their enactment – conditions which no longer obtain, such as much of the legislation regarding sacrifices. However, he does not suggest that those injunctions described in (b) need no longer apply because the historical conditions which gave rise to them do not apply. On the contrary, in the Mishneh Torah he states that in the time of the Messiah ‘All the ancient laws will be reinstituted in his days; sacrifices will again be offered’.¹⁵ Not only is he sympathetic to the purpose of religious texts, despite regarding them as a less effective tool for grasping truth than unaided reason, which in his day was to a large extent co-extensive with the philosophy of Aristotle, but he also appears to be unwilling for the philosopher, who, almost by definition, has a highly developed ratiocinative faculty, to be allowed to abstain from adherence to religious law in all its detail. This is certainly seen from the events of his own life. Despite his wide-ranging and eclectic grasp of the philosophy of his contemporaries and of his predecessors, regardless of their cultural origin, he remained right to the end of his life a devout Jew, the majority of whose literary output was, as stated earlier, devoted to the clarification and codification of post-Biblical Jewish sacred texts. Whatever philosophical insight he personally achieved, he maintained a lifelong devotion to the faith of his fathers and a full adherence to the requirements of Jewish religious law.¹⁶

One implication of the above seems to be that not only in his theory, but also in his practice, Maimonides regards religion and religious texts as having intrinsic value of some description, and does not view them as being merely of socio-political utility,¹⁷ although their protreptic role is an important part of their significance in human life. Now even a cursory glance at The Guide of the Perplexed will reveal that some of the key doctrines contained therein appear at first glance to be difficult to reconcile with the Bible, at least as traditionally interpreted. Most of the first half of Book I is devoted to an examination of certain Biblical terms which, if interpreted literally, would connote corporeality in God, such as those whose primary signification is of bodily organs or sensory powers. Maimonides reinterprets the terms in question to remove the possibility of attributing corporeality to the deity. He believes that not only is it essential to reinterpret such terms to ensure that the ascription of corporeality to God, which demonstrative reason (in the Aristotelian sense) has conclusively shown to be improper, is avoided at all costs, but also that such ascriptions are to be viewed as worse than idolatry.¹⁸ His willingness to perform such reinterpretations is a key methodological principle of the Guide. Once demonstrative reason has indicated that a given proposition must be true – in this case, the proposition that ascriptions of corporeality are not to be made with respect to God – then all other propositions which appear, on a literal reading, to clash with this first proposition, such as the attribution to God of bodily parts or organs, must be interpreted in a non-literal way. This principle applies even when the set of propositions to be reinterpreted is found in sacred texts,¹⁹ and is relatively unproblematic, given a certain view of the power of human reason, at least when this is used properly.²⁰ What is potentially much more problematic for traditional religious faith is the uncompromising apophatic theology put forward in Book I of the Guide, which severely circumscribes what can be said about God in ordinary language. Put as simply as possible,²¹ attributes to be ascribed to God must be either essential or accidental. Essential attributes must be entirely negative in content, inasmuch as they can only be used to state what God is not, and accidental attributes can only be used to describe effects of God’s actions. Neither type of attribute expresses positive knowledge of His essence. If this doctrine is followed with rigour, as Maimonides appears to intend, the conception of the deity that emerges is so austere and distant that it is hard to reconcile with the traditional God of the Bible – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who created the universe from free choice, and who cares for His creation, in particular for the human element of this creation, and who while capable of inspiring love, awe and fear, communicates with His creation. This traditional God also is not only aware of the needs of human beings, but is responsive to pleas for help, and indeed welcomes and expects human supplications and expressions of love and thanks.

We now have, on the one hand, a philosophical conception of the deity, inspired by Aristotelian logic, physics and metaphysics, and presented by Maimonides in the Guide – one in which God appears to be supremely and essentially unknowable, at least to mankind, as He is in Himself, as opposed to how He manifests Himself in the universe. On the other hand, we have the traditional God of Judaism, as described earlier, who, although undoubtedly the Supreme Being and creator of all that is, is apparently more accessible and open to human cognition, and is more evidently at work in the world. Nevertheless, in an important sense, the tension is not so much between two conflicting conceptions of God, as is the case with the contrast between Averroes’ and Al-Ghazali’s accounts of the deity, as between two conflicting accounts of what ordinary language can say about God and His activities in the world. After all, even if we accept Maimonides’ negative theology in its full rigour, we are not thereby logically compelled to accept, for example, that God did not create the universe or does not exercise providential care for the beings that He has created, or even that he does not communicate with human beings via the medium of prophecy. What we would be compelled to accept is that we cannot discuss the quiddity of God, or why and how He does what He does. God’s essence completely transcends not only human intellectual powers but also human language, and our statements about His actions are really being made by our drawing analogies with our own actions. The conflict between Averroes and Al-Ghazali is one between a conception of God as the eternally existing and eternally acting Prime Mover, who did not create the universe by voluntarily acting but who necessarily and eternally underpins its continuing existence by the consequences of His essence, and who is unaware of the existence of anything other than the purest, most abstract thought, and a conception of God which is in most important respects similar to that of the Torah. On his own principles, Maimonides is able to put forward a conception of God which shares many of the features of that of Al-Ghazali, insofar as he can defend the creation of the universe in time, the validity of prophetic revelation, and the existence of divine providence, but what he cannot do is to discuss God in the ordinary language used in the Torah, which is carefully crafted to meet human intellectual and linguistic limitations.²² Ultimately, the apophatic theology of The Guide of the Perplexed, if followed consistently to its logical conclusion, forces us to acknowledge that the purest worship of which human beings are capable, once all undesirable anthropomorphic accretions have been expunged, is a silent, numinous contemplation of God. Maimonides is quite explicit about this.²³ Human language is a poor tool for expressing the highest truths available to the unaided human intellect, and they cannot be adequately represented in such a medium, which can only confine itself to conveying them in a pictorial, and thus easily envisaged, manner to the unlettered masses, who rely much more on the faculty of imagination than they do on the intellect. The philosopher can grasp these truths conceptually, without using the imagination but simply by applying the intellect, assuming that his or her ²⁴ intellect has been adequately prepared, and from a purely epistemic point of view would appear not to require religious texts. Nevertheless as stated earlier, the philosopher is not given any dispensation to refrain, for example, from adherence to religious law, even where the law in question relates to ceremonies of worship, thanksgiving or supplication. There appear from The Guide of the Perplexed to be two main reasons for this. First of all, religion and the collective opinions which it fosters, and the behaviours which it engenders, are a force for social cohesion and political stability, but over and above this there is another, no less important, reason, which is rather less instrumental. The practical demands on the time of the philosopher are distractions from metaphysical thought, but cannot be entirely evaded. Worldly affairs place intellectual demands on people, which may involuntarily intrude even into times set apart for quiet reflection. Reading sacred texts, reciting prayers and performing other prescribed religious activities, may help to focus the mind on God and away from more mundane matters.²⁵

II

This view of the twofold function of religion as a vehicle for socio-political stability and as an aid to facilitate the focus of thought on the divine, and, furthermore, a vehicle which is apparently as essential for the practised philosopher qua member of his or her community as for all the other non-philosophising members of the same community, automatically raises the question of how essential revealed religion is for a philosopher who lives in isolation. That is, for a philosopher who either does not participate in the life of t...