Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered. Kaufmann Kohler
of the holy Name itself, but even the common use of its substitute Adonai. Therefore still other synonyms were introduced, such as “Master of the universe,” “the Holy One, blessed be He,” “the Merciful One,” “the Omnipotence” (ha Geburah),149 “King of the kings of kings” (under Persian influence—as the Persian ruler called himself the King of Kings);150 and in Hasidean circles it became customary to invoke God as “our Father” and “our Father in heaven.”151 The rather strange appellations for God, “Heaven”152 and (dwelling) “Place” (ha Makom) seem to originate in certain formulas of the oath. In the latter name the rabbis even found hints of God's omnipresence: “As space—Makom—encompasses all things, so does God encompass the world instead of being encompassed by it.”153
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10. The rabbis early read a theological meaning into the two names JHVH and Elohim, taking the former as the divine attribute of mercy and the latter as that of justice.154 In general, however, the former name was explained etymologically as signifying eternity, “He who is, who was, and who shall be.” Philo shows familiarity with the two attributes of justice and mercy, but he and other Alexandrian writers explained JHVH and Ehyeh metaphysically, and accordingly called God, “the One who is,” that is, the Source of all existence. Both conceptions still influence Jewish exegesis and account for the term “the Eternal” sometimes used for “the Lord.”
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Chapter XI. The Existence of God
1. For the religious consciousness, God is not to be demonstrated by argument, but is a fact of inner and outer experience. Whatever the origin and nature of the cosmos may be according to natural science, the soul of man follows its natural bent, as in the days of Abraham, to look through nature to the Maker, Ordainer, and Ruler of all things, who uses the manifold world of nature only as His workshop, and who rules it in freedom as its sovereign Master. The entire cosmic life points to a Supreme Being from whom all existence must have arisen, and without whom life and process would be impossible. Still even this mode of thought is influenced and determined by the prevalent monotheistic conceptions.
Far more original and potent in man is the feeling of limitation and dependency. This brings him to bow down before a higher Power, at first in fear and trembling, but later in holy awe and reverence. As soon as man attains self-consciousness and his will acquires purpose, he encounters a will stronger than his own, with which he often comes into conflict, and before which he must frequently yield. Thus he becomes conscious of duty—of what he ought and ought not to do. This is not, like earlier limitations, purely physical and working from without; it is moral and operates from within. It is the sense of duty, or, as we call it, conscience, the sense of right and wrong. This awakened very early in the race, [pg 065] and through it God's voice has been perceived ever since the days of Adam and of Cain.155
2. According to Scripture, man in his natural state possesses the certainty of God's existence through such inner experience. Therefore the Bible contains no command to believe in God, nor any logical demonstration of His existence. Both the Creation stories and those of the beginnings of mankind assume as undisputed the existence of God as the Creator and Judge of the world. Arguments appealing to reason were resorted to only in competition with idolatry, as in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah, and subsequently by the Haggadists in legends such as those about Abraham. Nor does the Bible consider any who deny the existence of God;156 only much later, in the Talmud, do we hear of those who “deny the fundamental principle” of the faith. The doubt expressed in Job, Koheleth, and certain of the Psalms, concerns rather the justice of God than His existence. True, Jeremiah and the Psalms157 mention some who say “There is no God,” but these are not atheists in our sense of the word; they are the impious who deny the moral order of life by word or deed. It is the villain (Nabal), not the “fool” who “says in heart, there is no God.” Even the Talmud does not mean the real atheist when speaking of “the denier of the fundamental principle,” but the man who says, “There is neither a judgment nor a Judge above and beyond.”158 In other words, the “denier” is the same as the Epicurean (Apicoros), who refuses to recognize the moral government of the world.159
3. After the downfall of the nation and Temple, the situation changed through the contemptuous question of the [pg 066] nations, “Where is your God?” Then the necessity became evident of proving that the Ruler of nations still held dominion over the world, and that His wondrous powers were shown more than ever before through the fact of Israel's preservation in captivity. This is the substance of the addresses of the great seer of the Exile in chapters XL to LIX of Isaiah, in which he exposes the gods of heathendom to everlasting scorn, more than any other prophet before or afterward. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath “meted out the heavens with the span,” and “weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.” Before Him “the nations are as a drop of the bucket,” and “the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers.” “He bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by name,” “He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end.”160 Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII, CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly be convinced by them.
4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of common sense.161 Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars—all worshiped by the pagans as deities—was considered a proof of God's omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.162 In like manner, the apocryphal Book of Wisdom163 [pg 067] says that true wisdom, as opposed to the folly of heathenism, is “to reason from the visible to the Invisible One, and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer.”
5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the “atheistic” views of materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God's existence from nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines the entire universe.164 Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the inner experience of the soul.
6. Two proofs taken from nature owe their origin to Greek philosophy. Anaxagoras and Socrates, from their theory of design in nature, deduced that there is a universal intelligence working for higher aims and purposes. This so-called teleological proof, as worked out in detail by Plato, was the unfailing reliance of subsequent philosophers and theologians.165 Plato and Aristotle, moreover, from the continuous motion of all matter, inferred a prime cause, an unmoved mover. This is the so-called cosmological proof, used by different schools in varying forms.166 It occupies the foremost place in the systems of the Arabic Aristotelians, and consequently is dominant among the Jewish philosophers, the Christian scholastics, and in the modern philosophic schools down to Kant. It is based upon the old principle of causality, and therefore takes the mutability and relativity of all beings in the cosmos as evidence of a Being that is immutable, unconditioned, and absolutely necessary, causa sui, the prime cause of all existence.
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7. The Mohammedan theologians added a new element to the discussion. In their endeavor to prove that the world is the work of a Creator, they pointed as evidence to the multiformity and composite structure, the contingency and dependency of the cosmos; thus they concluded that it must have been created, and that its Creator must necessarily be the one, absolute, and all-determining cause. This proof is used also by Saadia and Bahya ben Joseph.167 Its weakness, however, was exposed by Ibn Sina and Alfarabi among the Mohammedans, and later by Abraham ibn Daud and Maimonides,