God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
came from. Hayy tells the people that he’s seen the fundamentalist light, that he was wrong all along. He adjures them: Submit to tradition, as literally as you can; shun innovation; observe the laws and statutes; and don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you. Then Hayy and Absal sail back to where they can have their ecstasies in peace. That’s where their story ends.
Condescension like this was common among those who dealt with philosophy in Ibn Tufayl’s time. Al-Ghazali, for instance, liked to repeat Muhammad’s saying, “Hold fast to the religion of old women”15—old women being simple, pious, and practical. Al-Ghazali saw fit for himself to cull through Aristotle and Ibn Sina, and to construct proofs for the God of the Qur’an, but he didn’t intend it for popular consumption. Ibn Tufayl says he discloses his light-bearing truths through Hayy’s story only reluctantly.
Still, he does. He won’t buy into Hayy’s cynicism completely. “I had risen to pinnacles higher than the eye can see,” Ibn Tufayl says at the end of the book, “and I wanted to try, at least, to approach them in words so as to excite desire and inspire a passion to start out along this road.”16 Most people probably aren’t ready for these precious secrets, yet here he is writing them down. And, actually, the elitism becomes just part of their allure.
∴
As Islamic philosophy flourished, Arabic-speaking Jews were paying attention and making parts of it their own: Sa’adia, Solomon ibn Gabriol, and Musa ibn Maimun—Moses Maimonides. Maimonides played the elitism game too, just as Hayy felt forced to do. But this was no islander; he suffered too much and bore too much responsibility to mistake himself for that.
Like Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, Maimonides grew up in Andalusia. During his twentieth year the Almohad dynasty took over, the same one to which Sultan Abu Ya’qub belonged. While Muslim philosophers could float above trouble in the sultan’s company, Maimonides saw the business end of Almohad repression. He endured exile, humiliation, and forced conversion to Islam. After almost twenty years of it, his family moved, eventually settling in what is now Cairo, Egypt. Maimonides stayed there until his death in 1204. Having come from half a world away didn’t prevent him from becoming head of the Jewish community there, and—philosopher that he was—he served as a physician to the local Muslim rulers. Maimonides remained indelibly a Jew, and an especially pious one. But as a thinker, writing mostly in Arabic, he belonged to the Mediterranean milieu. His concerns were as much those of the Islamic philosophers and their Greek antecedents as those of the Bible and the rabbis.
Maimonides thus thought between worlds: between philosophy and scripture, between community and cosmopolis. As both a leader of Jews and a doctor among Muslims, the stakes were especially high. “Truths should be at one time apparent,” he wrote, “and at another time concealed.”17 The twentieth-century philosopher Leo Strauss took Maimonides as an exemplar of writing between the lines, one who tried to defend the practice of philosophy even while protecting the religion of the multitudes and the powerful from its hazards. At the start of Maimonides’ magnum opus, The Guide for the Perplexed, he warns that if you haven’t studied enough religion yet, or you’re not mature enough to know what’s at stake, he would prefer you to put the book down before you start.
Maimonides is vicious against those who would abandon philosophy to save divine creation. “Consider the fate of these speculators and the result of their labors; observe how they rushed, as it were, from the ashes into the fire.” People obsessed with proving creation ex nihilo, he continues, “have weakened the arguments for the existence, the unity, and the incorporeality of God.”18 Maimonides affirmed creation himself. But, like Ibn Tufayl, he wanted to ensure that the proofs for God’s existence wouldn’t hinge on that fragile question of whether the universe is eternal or created. If we have only an argument like William Lane Craig’s for God from creation in time, and its assumptions about the nature of the universe turn out wrong (as they might), we would be left proofless, doubting whether God really exists.
The first chapter of the Guide’s second book gives four proofs. The first and most rigorous is a version of Aristotle’s argument from motion in the world and among the celestial spheres, up to the top: “This prime mover of the sphere is God, praised be His name!”19
Next comes an argument from composition, which resembles what the Nyaya school was doing in India. Things in the universe, it says, are evidently composed of other things—honey vinegar is his example—and such combinations require a combiner; the sequence of combinations leads, again, to a first combiner, itself uncombined. Third is an argument from necessity, along the lines laid by Ibn Sina, and fourth follows the logic of causation to a first willful agent, like Plato. At each step Maimonides takes care to demonstrate what Aristotle couldn’t do very convincingly—that there is only one God. Good philosophy leads back to the God of the Torah, he meant to show; fear not. But bad philosophy is a different matter.
The Jewish Talmud tells stories about the damage foreign notions can do. There’s an antihero named Elisha ben Abuya, often called just acher, “other.” A brilliant student who seemed sure to be a great rabbi, Elisha falls prey to Greek culture, and it seduces him away from Judaism. The rabbis scorn and condemn him, but they also betray a little sympathy. He is an elusive character, as ambivalent as the feelings Jews have often had for what lies beyond their own community-in-exile. But for Maimonides, Elisha’s problem was being a sloppy philosopher—sloppy in particular about creation and eternity—and he doesn’t intend to follow suit.
This archetype of Elisha is one I’ve known and felt and repeated. I grew up with trace amounts of Judaism, but it was the religion my teenage curiosity most carefully ignored. My father made some attempts, during that time, to remind me of our ancestors’ traditions. He gave me the yellowed copy of the Sayings of the Fathers he had gotten as a boy in Hebrew school. Soon after he moved away, with our wounds still fresh, we took a road trip, and he surprised me with a Passover Seder in plastic containers for us to share in the car: matzoh, charoset, bitter herbs, and everything—more than any other Passover I can remember, it was authentically exilic and resolutely hopeful. The first Hanukkah after he left, I lit the candles with my mother and was surprised to find that I remembered the blessings well enough to sing them. I still thought of myself as Jewish, but I didn’t go much further than that.
There is, in this omission, a certain history. Since the time of Elisha and before, Jews have lived among the nations, adrift, between worlds, never sure when tolerance would turn to persecution. The love of studying and questioning that has bound Jewish culture together like the pages of its books has also led some to drift outside the canon. The Judaism I learned from my father had in it a sense of resignation. If the choice was between being Jewish and being himself, he seemed to take the latter, even if it meant becoming part of the quiet attrition that every generation of Jews has known. The Arabic-speaking philosophers liked to repeat a maxim that came to them jointly from ancient Greece and early Islam: truth is truth, regardless of its source.20
Looking for truth, I careened everywhere I could. A weekend retreat at a Buddhist monastery. Hindu scriptures. Metaphysical bookstores. Evangelical churches. No matter how scattershot the options were, each experience seemed to lead to the next, with the sensation of overriding reason. But my grandparents on my father’s side learned something about what I was up to, and it worried them. Myopic me, I couldn’t understand why they felt that way. I felt shocked in turn. My experiments weren’t about them, or my father, or Judaism. Why weren’t they happy that I was fashioning my proof?
The Judaism I had learned from them before didn’t go far beyond matzoh ball soup, anyway. Their house was a place for more ordinary forms of love. I would come downstairs in the morning and find Grandma, still in her nightgown, making eggs. I was her only grandchild. If everyone piled into the car, I would sit with her in the back, and her soft, bony hand would hold mine the whole way while we whispered to each other underneath whatever conversation the others were having. When I left for home, she would hold me still,