The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
admonition to let our ideas grow out of the facts rather than to tailor our convictions to suit our peculiar situation.
On the other hand, we cannot gainsay the obsoleteness of Maimonides’ picture of the cosmos, with its basic categories of Matter and Form, its four earthly elements and the ethereal substance of the heavenly bodies, its many “spheres” and “intelligences,” and its deference to Aristotle’s authority in regard to all matters “below the moon.” Also his knowledge of comparative religion and of history was inevitably minute by our standards, though he pioneered the exploration of these themes for the understanding of the mizvot. Again, we cannot assent to his aristocratic disdain for the common people. Yet, if we transpose the living core of his thought into the structure of nature and history, as they appear to us, we arrive at a philosophy of life that is balanced and harmonious. Neo-Maimonism also harks back to Maimonides in terms of the approaches he rejected—the personalistic voluntarism of Ibn Gabirol, the ethnic romanticism of Judah Halevi, the “reductionism” of those who confined all thought within “the four ells of Halachah,” the imaginative exuberance of proto-Kabbalists and even the mild, superficial rationalism of Saadia. Each one of the rejected viewpoints has its counterpart in our time. Neo-Maimonism, therefore, is definable negatively, as well as affirmatively.
TENSION AT THE HEART OF REALITY
We begin with the pathways that Maimonides disdained to follow. He conceived his task to be the resolution of the perplexities troubling the educated Jew. On the one hand, such a person could not conceive of life without the guidance of Torah and the assurance of redemption contained in it. On the other hand, he was made uneasy by the literal meaning of many verses in the Torah, which described the actions of God in crass anthropomorphic terms. M.* prefaces his mighty effort with the confession that the contradictions in Torah cannot be understood with full clarity. The wisest can only get occasional, lightning-like flashes of the truth. (“More Nebuhim,” Petiha; Pines’ translation, The Guide of the Perplexed [Chicago, 1963], p. 7.) Only Moses can be said to have perceived the mysteries of creation and providence in the full light of day. But, Moses is more a dogmatic than a historical figure, with the beliefs concerning him falling into the category of “necessary truths,” to be discussed presently.
At this point, we call attention to the modernity of M.’s position. The modern age in philosophy was opened by Descartes, who proceeded to subject all experiences to the acid-test of total doubt. When we face the ultimate mystery of existence, we sense the tension between the polar opposites of being within ourselves. The rational points beyond the rational; the immanent feelings of holiness intimate His transcendence; the traditional accounts of God speaking to His Chosen People are somehow right, yet also far too narrow, too particularistic; since God addresses Himself to all men. In rare moments of inspiration, God speaks to those who are properly qualified, but excepting Moses, His “speech” is filtered through the thick strands of imagination. We are torn between our awareness of creaturely dependence on Him, without whose “everlasting arms” we should instantly disappear, and our rational conviction that we cannot say of Him aught that is meaningful and affirmative. Nor can we ever outgrow this state of tension. All our attempts at a synthesis are but so many words strung together, waiting to be fused into fleeting lights of meaning by bolts of lightning from above.
Is not this recognition of our human condition essentially compatible with the vision of reality in our time?—We no longer think of the flux of existence in terms of tiny billiard-balls in motion. Atoms, we know now, consist of many tiny particles, which can be described both as electromagnetic waves and as bits of matter. Modern physics operates in terms of fields of force, which are condensed into relatively stable structures of congealed energy. Every thing is in reality an event, a series of tremors, fixed in space, yet infinite in outreach. Should not, then, the human soul in its confrontation with the Infinite Whole of the cosmos be similarly caught in a ceaseless tension?
*In this essay, we shall refer to Maimonides as M.
On a more popular plane, we recall Pascal’s famous remark—“reason which is small enough for the mind is too small for the heart; if it is big enough for the heart, it is too big for the mind.” Here, then, in simple language, is that cluster of contradictions, which we can resolve only in those moments when heart and mind join to lift us temporarily above ourselves. Yet, it is not knowledge that we glimpse in those moments, but the assurance that our inner quest for wholeness and consistency is right, in direction, if not in content. We must try again and again to understand in love and to love with understanding, for only the whole man can approach the Creator of the Whole. We are launched on an infinite road.
“SOVEREIGNTY OF REASON”
M. maintained that his “Guide” was the first effort to deal with the mysteries of Creation and Providence (maasai bereshit and maasai merkava). (Moreh, Petiha; Pines, p. 16.) He scorned the works of Saadia and Halevi, as being either superficial or fallacious. To him, a “philosopher” was an Aristotelian who recognized the sway of the unvarying laws of nature. Saadia associated himself with the Moslem school of Mutazila, and Halevi reflected al Ghazzali’s critique of “the philosophers.” (Moreh, i, 71; Pines, p. 176.)
In a larger sense, Saadia and Halevi represented the “short but long road” that popular theologians prefer in all generations. Saadia’s way is that of superficial rationalism. He rejected the coarse anthropomorphism of literalists. In M.’s view, Mutazilites thought they removed materialization from their notion of God, but, they did not really, since they ascribed to Him, emotional and psychological factors. (Moreh, I, 53; Pines, p. 119.) All the references in the Torah and the Bible to physical appearances of God apply to His temporary theophanies, not to His own Being. So, there is a “created light” or divine effulgence, which the Lord employs as a manifestation of His Presence. This luminous body called Kavod or Shechinah was seen by Isaiah and Ezekiel, by “the elders of Israel,” and by some of the Sages. Similarly, the Creator formed a “created voice,” which spoke in so many words to the prophets and to Moses. In this way, Saadia managed to retain the literal significance of the anthropomorphic passages in Scripture and Talmud, without ascribing to God Himself any material qualities. But, this method is, after all, an invention of the imagination. If the “lights” and “voices” are not themselves divine, why should we assume that they attest to the truth of prophecy? What is to prevent us from rejecting them as merely visual and auditory hallucinations?—If they are not temporary and detached events but integral manifestations of the Supreme Being, His emanations or His “Garments,” then we fall back into the trap of idolatry, where all kinds of images might be said to be His representations and “incarnations.” Furthermore, truth can only be self-authenticating, an extrapolation of man’s outreach, but not an alien intrusion from another realm—a communication which man can only accept in blind faith. As a matter of fact, the “created light” and the “created voice” of Saadia became the basis of the neo-anthropomorphic school of the Ashkenazi Hassidim. They conceived of the Divine manifestations as permanent “forms” of the Deity, allowing the fevered imagination of mystics to rhapsodize on their visions of the various parts of the Divine anatomy.
M. did not altogether reject the doctrine of “created lights.” He granted that it was helpful to those whose minds were too unsophisticated to grasp the concept of an immaterial Deity. At least, this doctrine kept them from ascribing materiality to God Himself. Also, it is extremely difficult to interpret the Pentateuchal description of the gathering at Sinai, without those “lights” and “sounds.”1 Yet, M. aimed to raise his readers to a higher philosophical level, which demands inner coherence and rejects the possibility of self-contained islands of truth, breaking into man’s consciousness.
In M.’s view, the sustained quest of man for truth, as seen for example in the works of Aristotle, is itself the product of revelation. When a person’s rational faculties attain a pitch of perfection, while his intuitive