The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  Pleasanter is his picture of the scholar growing into a sage. He approved the rabbinical saying that “a bastard who is a scholar [of the Law] takes precedence of an ignorant high priest.”54 He advised the scholar to give three hours daily to earning a living, nine hours to studying the Torah. Believing environment more influential than heredity, he counseled the student to seek association with good and wise men. The scholar should not marry until he has reached the maturity of his learning, has acquired a trade, and has bought a home.55 He may marry four wives, but should cohabit with each of them only once a month.

  Although connubial intercourse with one’s wife is always permitted, this relation too should be invested by the scholar with sanctity. He should not be always with his spouse, like a rooster, but should fulfill his marital obligation on Friday nights.… When cohabiting, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.56

  And so at last is produced the sage. He

  cultivates extreme modesty. He will not bare his head or his body… When speaking he will not raise his voice unduly. His speech with all men will be gentle… He will avoid exaggeration or affected speech. He will judge everyone favorably; he will dwell on the merits of others, and never speak disparagingly of anybody.57

  He will avoid restaurants except in extreme emergency; “the wise man will eat nowhere except at home and at his own table.”58 He will study the Torah every day until his death. He will beware of false Messiahs, but will never lose his faith that some day the real Messiah will come, and restore Israel to Zion, and bring all the world to the true faith, and to abundance, brotherhood, and peace. “The other nations vanish, but the Jews last forever.”59

  The Mishna Torah irritated the rabbis; few could forgive the presumption of aiming to displace the Talmud; and many Jews were scandalized by the reported assertion of Maimonides60 that he who studies the Law is higher than he who obeys it. Nevertheless the book made its author the leading Jew of the time. All Eastern Israel accepted him as its counselor, and sent him questions and problems; it seemed for a generation that the Gaonate had been revived. But Maimonides, not pausing to enjoy his renown, began work at once on his next book. Having codified and clarified the Law for orthodox Jews, he turned to the task of restoring to the Jewish fold those who had been seduced by philosophy or lured into the Qaraite communities of heretical Jews in Egypt, Palestine, or North Africa. After another decade of labor he issued to the Jewish world his most famous work, the Guide to the Perplexed (1190). Written in Arabic with Hebrew characters, it was soon translated into Hebrew as Moreh Nebuchim, and into Latin, and aroused one of the bitterest intellectual tempests of the thirteenth century.

  “My primary object,” says the introduction, “is to explain certain words occurring in the Prophetic books”—i.e., the Old Testament. Many Biblical terms and passages have several meanings; literal, metaphorical, or symbolical. Taken literally, some of them are a stumbling block to persons sincerely religious but also respectful of reason as man’s highest faculty. Such persons must not be forced to choose between religion without reason or reason without religion. Since reason was implanted in man by God, it cannot be contrary to God’s revelation. Where such contradictions occur, Maimonides suggests, it is because we take literally expressions adapted to the imaginative and pictorial mentality of the simple, unlettered people to whom the Bible was addressed.

  Our sages have said, It is impossible to give a full account of the creation to man…. It has been treated in metaphors in order that the uneducated may comprehend it according to the measure of their faculties and the feebleness of their apprehension, while educated persons may take it in a different sense.61

  From this starting point Maimonides advances to a discussion of deity. That some supreme intelligence rules the universe he deduces from the evidences of design in nature; but he ridicules the notion that all things have been made for the sake of man.62 Things exist only because God, their source and life, exists; “if it could be supposed that He does not exist, it would follow that nothing else could possibly exist.” Since in this way it is essential that God exist, His existence is identical with His essence. Now “a thing which has in itself the necessity of existence, cannot have for its existence any cause whatever.” *63 Since God is intelligent, He must be incorporeal; therefore all Biblical passages implying physical organs or attributes in God must be interpreted figuratively. In truth, says Maimonides (probably following the Mutazilites), we cannot know anything of God except that He exists. Even the nonphysical terms that we use of Him—intelligence, omnipotence, mercy, affection, unity, will—are homonyms; i.e., they have different meanings when applied to God than as used of man. Just what their meaning is in God’s case we shall never know; we can never define Him; we must not ascribe to Him any positive attributes, qualities, or predicates whatever. When the Bible tells how God or an angel “spoke” to the Prophets, we must not imagine a voice or sound. “Prophecy consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty”; it is “an emanation from the Divine Being” through dream or ecstatic vision; what the Prophets relate took place not in actuality, but only in such vision or dream, and must in many cases be interpreted allegorically.64 “Some of our sages clearly stated that Job never existed, and that he is a poetic fiction … revealing the most important truths.”65 Any man, if he develops his faculties to their height, is capable of such prophetic revelations; for human reason is a continuing revelation, not basically different from the vivid insight of the prophet.

  Did God create the world in time, or is the universe of matter and motion, as Aristotle thought, eternal? Here, says Maimonides, reason is baffled; we can prove neither the eternity nor the creation of the world; let us therefore hold to our fathers’ faith in its creation.66 He proceeds to interpret the creation story of Genesis allegorically: Adam is active form or spirit; Eve is passive matter, which is the root of all evil; the serpent is imagination.67 But evil is no positive entity; it is merely the negation of good. Most of our misfortunes are due to our own fault; other evils are evil only from a human or limited standpoint; a cosmic view might discover in every evil the good or need of the whole.68 God permits to man the free will that lets him be a man; man sometimes chooses evil; God has foreseen the choice, but does not determine it.

  Is man immortal? Here Maimonides applies to the full his capacity for mystifying his readers. In the Guide he avoids the question, except to say that “the soul that remains after death is not the soul that lives in a man when he is born”;69 the latter—the “potential intellect”—is a function of the body and dies with it; what survives is the “acquired” or “active intellect,” which existed before the body and is never a function of it.70 This Aristotelian-Averroist view apparently denied individual immortality. In the Mishna Torah Maimonides rejected the resurrection of the body, ridiculed the Moslem notion of a physically epicurean paradise, and represented this, in Islam and Judaism alike, as a concession to the imagination and the moral needs of the populace.71 In the Guide he added that “incorporeal entities can only be numbered when they are forces situated in a body”;72 * which seemed to imply that the incorporeal spirit which survived the body had no individual consciousness. As physical resurrection had become a central doctrine of both Judaism and Mohammedanism, many protests were aroused by these skeptical intimations. Transliterated into Arabic, the Guide made a stir in the Moslem world; a Mohammedan scholar, Abd al-Latif, denounced it as “undermining the principles of all faiths by the very means with which it appears to buttress them.”73 Saladin was at this time engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Crusaders; always orthodox, he now more than ever resented heresy as threatening Moslem morale in the heat of a holy war; in 1191 he ordered the execution of Surawardi, a mystic heretic. In the same month Maimonides issued a Maqala, or discourse, “On the Resurrection of the Dead”; he again expressed his doubts about corporeal immortality, but anno
unced that he accepted it as an article of faith.

  The storm subsided for a time, and he busied himself in his work as a physician, and in writing responsa to doctrinal and ethical inquiries from the Jewish world. When (1199) Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, who was translating the Guide into Hebrew, proposed to visit him, he warned him not to expect

  to confer with me on any scientific subject for even one hour, either by day or by night; for the following is my daily occupation. I dwell in Fustat, and the Sultan resides at Cairo two Sabbath days’ journey [a mile and a half] distant. My duties to the regent [Saladin’s son] are very heavy. I am obligated to visit him every day, early in the morning; and when he or any of his children, or any inmate of his harem, is indisposed, I dare not quit Cairo, but must stay during the greater part of the day in the palace…. I do not return to Fustat until the afternoon.… Then I am almost dying with hunger. I find the antechambers filled with people, theologians, bailiffs, friends, and foes. … I dismount from my animal, wash my hands, and beg my patients to bear with me while I partake of some refreshments—the only meal I take in twenty-four hours. Then I attend my patients … until nightfall, sometimes until two hours in the night, or even later. I prescribe while lying on my back from fatigue; and when night falls I am so exhausted I can scarcely speak. In consequence of this, no Israelite can have any private interview with me except on the Sabbath. On that day the whole congregation, or at least a majority, come to me after the morning service, when I instruct them…. We study together till noon, when they depart.74

  He was prematurely worn out. Richard I of England sought him as personal physician, but Maimonides could not accept the invitation. Saladin’s vizier, seeing his exhaustion, pensioned him. He died in 1204, aged sixty-nine. His remains were conveyed to Palestine, where his tomb may still be seen in Tiberias.

  VI. THE MAIMONIDEAN WAR

  Maimonides’ influence was felt in Islam and Christendom as well as in the Jewish world. Mohammedan pundits studied the Guide under the direction of Jewish teachers; Latin translations of it were used at the universities of Montpellier and Padua; and it was frequently quoted at Paris by Alexander of Hales and William of Auvergne. Albertus Magnus followed the lead of Maimonides on many points; and St. Thomas often considered the views of Rabbi Moyses, if only to reject them. Spinoza, with perhaps some lack of historical understanding, criticized Maimonides’ allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures as a disingenuous attempt to preserve the authority of the Bible; but he hailed the great rabbi as “the first who openly declared that Scripture must be accommodated to reason”;75 and he took from Maimonides some ideas on prophecy, miracles, and the attributes of God.76

  In Judaism itself Maimonides’ influence was revolutionary. His own posterity carried on his work as scholars and Jews: his son Abraham ben Moses succeeded him as Nagid and court physician in 1205; his grandson David ben Abraham and his great-grandson Solomon ben Abraham also succeeded to the leadership of the Egyptian Jews; and all three continued the Mai-monidean tradition in philosophy. For a while it became fashionable to Aristotelize the Bible through allegorical legerdemain, and to reject the historicity of its narratives; Abraham and Sarah, for example, were merely a legend representing matter and form; and Jewish ritual laws had only a symbolical purpose and truth.77 The whole structure of Judaic theology seemed about to fall upon the heads of the rabbis. Some of them fought back vigorously: Samuel ben Ali of Palestine, Abraham ben David of Pos-quières, Meïr ben Todros Halevi Abulafia of Toledo, Don Astruc of Lunel, Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, Jonah ben Abraham Gerundi of Spain, and many more. They protested against “selling the Scriptures to the Greeks,” denounced the attempt to replace the Talmud with philosophy, deplored Maimonides’ doubts on immortality, and rejected his unknowable God as a metaphorical abstraction that would never stir a soul to piety or prayer. The followers of the mystic Cabala joined in the attack, and desecrated Maimonides’ tomb.78

  The Maimonidean war divided the Jewish communities of southern France precisely when orthodox Christianity was waging there a war of extermination against the Albigensian heresy. And as Christian orthodoxy defended itself against rationalism by banning the books of Aristotle and Averroës from the universities, so Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier—perhaps to forestall Christian attacks upon Jewish congregations as harboring rationalists—took the unusual step of anathematizing the philosophical works of Maimonides, and excommunicating all Jews who should study profane science or literature, or who should treat the Bible allegorically. The supporters of Maimonides, led by David Kimchi and Jacob ben Machir Tibbon, retaliated by persuading the congregations of Lunel, Béziers, and Narbonne in Provence, and those of Saragossa and Lerida in Spain, to excommunicate Solomon and his followers. Solomon now took a still more startling step: he denounced the books of Maimonides to the Dominican Inquisition at Montpellier as containing heresies dangerous to Christianity as well as Judaism. The monks accommodated him, and all procurable publications of the philosopher were burned in public ceremonies at Montpellier in 1234, and at Paris in 1242. Forty days later the Talmud itself was burned at Paris.

  These events drove the supporters of Maimonides to bitter fury. They arrested the leading adherents of Solomon at Montpellier, convicted them of informing against fellow Jews, and condemned them to have their tongues cut out; apparently Solomon was put to death.79 Rabbi Jonah, regretting his share in the burning of Maimonides’ books, came to Montpellier, did public penance in the synagogue, and undertook a pilgrimage of repentance to Moses ben Maimon’s grave. But Don Astruc resumed the war by proposing a rabbinical ban on any study of the profane sciences. Nachmanides and Asher ben Yehiel supported him; and in 1305 Solomon ben Abraham ben Adret, the revered and powerful leader of the Barcelona congregations, issued a decree of excommunication against any Jew who should teach, or should before the age of twenty-five dare to study, any secular science except medicine, or any non-Jewish philosophy. The liberals of Montpellier replied by excommunicating any Jew who debarred his son from the study of science.80 Neither ban had any wide effect; Jewish youths, here and there, continued to study philosophy. But the great influence of Adret and Asher in Spain, and the growth of persecution and fear throughout a Europe now subject to the Inquisition, drove the Jewish communities back into intellectual as well as ethnic isolation. The study of science declined among them; purely rabbinical studies ruled the Hebrew schools. After its escapade with reason the Jewish soul, haunted with theological terrors and an encompassing enmity, buried itself in mysticism and piety.

  VII. THE CABALA

  The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly. The medieval Jews, like the Moslems and the Christians, covered reality with a thousand superstitions, dramatized history with miracles and portents, crowded the air with angels and demons, practiced magical incantations and charms, frightened their children and themselves with talk of witches and ghouls, lightened the mystery of sleep with interpretations of dreams, and read esoteric secrets into ancient tomes.

  Jewish mysticism is as old as the Jews. It received influences from the Zoroastrian dualism of darkness and light, from the Neoplatonist substitution of emanations for creation, from the Neopythagorean mysticism of number, from Gnostic theosophies of Syria and Egypt, from the apocrypha of early Christianity, from the poets and mystics of India, Islam, and the medieval Church. But its basic sources were in the Jewish mentality and tradition themselves. Even before Christ there had circulated among the Jews secret interpretations of the creation story in Genesis and of Chapters I and X of Ezekiel; in the Mishna it was forbidden to expound these mysteries except privately to a single and trustworthy scholar. Imagination was free to conceive accounts of what had preceded the creation or Adam, or what would follow the destruction of the world. Philo’s theory of the Logos or Divine Wisdom as the creative agency of God was a lofty sample of these speculations. The Essenes had secr
et writings which were zealously guarded from disclosure, and Hebrew apocrypha like the Book of Jubilees expounded a mystic cosmogony. A mystery was made of the Ineffable Name of Yahveh: its four letters—the “Tetragrammaton”—were whispered to hold a hidden meaning and miraculous efficacy, to be transmitted only to the mature and discreet. Akiba suggested that God’s instrument in creating the world was the Torah or Pentateuch, and that every word or letter of these holy books had an occult significance and power. Some Babylonian Geonim ascribed such occult powers to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and to the names of the angels; he who knew those names could control all the forces of nature. Learned men played with white or black magic—marvelous capacities obtainable through alliance of the soul with angels or demons. Necromancy, bibliomancy, exorcism, amulets, incantations, divination, and casting of lots played their part in Jewish as in Christian life. All the wonders of astrology were included; the stars were letters, a mysterious sky-writing that only the initiate could read.81