The last decade has seen the rise of strident atheism as a cultural and literary phenomenon. Books such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great mounted all-out assaults on religion.1 Hitchens and Dawkins argue that the beliefs of the world’s religions are irrational, their God is vicious, and their followers have been responsible for most of the horrors and atrocities in world history. They maintain that religious belief has no redeeming features.
Militant atheists are strikingly confident that they know what religion is, what religious adherents think, and the specific nature of the God in whom people believe. In The God Delusion, for example, Dawkins characterizes God as “a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic racist, an infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”2
Numerous writers have noted Dawkins’s fundamental ignorance of religious thought. In a review, the literary critic Terry Eagleton remarks about The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”3 It is not hard to pillory Dawkins’s description as a gross parody of what any major religion says about God.
A more sophisticated line of criticism, however, was advanced by Karen Armstrong in her 2009 book The Case for God.4 Armstrong argues that the real problem lies in the attempt to say anything at all about God. She is witheringly critical both of religious traditions that make dogmatic claims about the nature of God and of polemical atheists who aim to deconstruct such claims. Both groups, in Armstrong’s view, have missed the point of religion.
Armstrong advocates returning to the apophatic approach to religion. This was a stream found in all of the great traditions that “understood faith not as something people thought, but as something they did.” Religious leaders in this tradition practiced, according to Armstrong, “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred.”5 They were more concerned about what we are not able to know about the divine.
One need not subscribe to Armstrong’s sweeping history and taxonomy of religious belief to agree with her that a little more “deliberate and principled reticence about God” would improve the tone and raise the level of contemporary public discussion of religion. In the history of religious thought, probably no one has been more careful to respect the limits of what can meaningfully be said about God than Maimonides. His “negative theology,” which I outlined in the preceding chapters, was the cornerstone of The Guide for the Perplexed. It may also be the basis for a more productive contemporary discourse about God and religion. We began this part by talking about God and have moved, via discussion of three fundamental religious ideas—prophecy, providence, and redemption—to some conclusions about the Rambam’s conception of human beings. A pattern emerges from our analysis of these three ideas. In each case, the Rambam radically recasts traditional beliefs.
Prophecy: The prophet is someone who is perfectly endowed with intellect and imagination, who attains prophecy after a lengthy process of education and moral training, and who, while not desiring political power, achieves a position of societal leadership by virtue of his prophetic status.
Providence: Providential protection is achieved through a process of study and spiritual refinement that leads a person to refocus his desires from the material to the spiritual so he is no longer emotionally dependent on the physical world and thus less likely to be disappointed by it.
Redemption: Human beings are active participants rather than passive objects of the redemptive process. The yearning for wisdom is redemptive, in that it displaces the desire for limited resources such as money, honor, and power, thereby reducing conflict and war.
The common denominator in the Rambam’s treatment of these subjects is an ambitious attempt at refocusing desire. By directing human yearnings away from the physical and toward intellectual and spiritual goals, Maimonides sought to mold a new type of person who would be a more active religious agent.
People are born, according, to the Rambam, with an immense desire to learn. He adopted Aristotle’s dictum, which opens the Metaphysics, that “all men by nature desire to know.” Over a person’s lifetime one’s desire for knowledge tends to diminish. This does not happen automatically. The yearning for knowledge is crowded out as more physical desires are awakened. The Rambam describes how this happens:
Even a perfect man, if he were to occupy himself much with these necessary things and all the more if he were to occupy himself with unnecessary things, and if his desire for them should grow strong, he would find that his theoretical desires had grown weak and had been submerged. And his demand for them would slacken and become intermittent and inattentive. (Guide, 1:34)
According to Maimonides, human eros, which we may define, following Plato, as passionate love that is not necessarily focused on a physical object, is essentially a single force. When eros is captured by the senses, intellectual desire is decreased. This dynamic can also work in reverse: strengthening our intellectual yearnings weakens sexual desire. This is implicit in the Rambam’s discussion of male circumcision. He believed that one of the purposes of circumcision was to lessen the sexual urge so as to strengthen the desire for knowledge. As the Rambam expressed it in the Mishneh Torah, “A person should direct his thoughts to words of Torah and increase knowledge and wisdom, because thoughts of sexual sin are only overwhelming to a heart that is devoid of wisdom” (MT, Hilkhot Issurei Bi’ah, 22:21).
Maimonides believed that sexuality was a necessary evil for the continuation of human life, but for him there was no more potent force distracting human beings from their true purpose:
As we have said, there are among men individuals to whose mind all the impulses of matter are shameful and ugly things, deficiencies imposed by necessity; particularly so the sense of touch, which, as Aristotle has stated, is a shame for us, and because of which we wish to eat, to drink and to copulate. Consequently, one’s recourse to these things should be reduced to the extent that is possible; one should do them in secret, feel sorrowful because one does them, and not have them spoken and discoursed about; no gathering should be held with a view to these things. A man should be in control of all these impulses, restrict his efforts in relation to them, and admit only that which is indispensable. He should take as his end that which is the end of man qua man, solely the mental representation of the intelligibles. (Guide, 3:8)
However, the Rambam’s opposition to uncontrolled sexuality did not stem from opposition to eros. On the contrary, he describes love of God in terms of fierce, erotic desire.6 It was precisely his interest in channeling this desire toward wisdom that led to his suspicion of untrammeled sexuality. In one of his dialogues, Plato compares the human being to a charioteer with two horses. One horse is well behaved, representing our desire for knowledge, and the other is wild and rebellious, representing our physical desires. The rider’s job is to subdue the horse of our earthly desires and let the horse of reason and intellect lead. For the Rambam there was only one horse. The drives for sexuality and for knowledge are at root the same. Our challenge is to make the yearning for knowledge rather than for sex the channel and outlet of our passions.
One might call this “the law of conservation of eros.” We cannot crush our erotic desires, according to the Rambam, but we can redirect them. I would argue that this is the Rambam’s view in his treatment of other urges too, for food, resources, and political power. In his discussions of prophecy, providence, and redemption we have seen how he advocates sublimating our material desires to higher ends and in the process molding a new kind of human personality.
The Rambam challenged anthropomorphic understandings of the divine and argued instead for an incorporeal God to whom human language and human characteristics could not be attributed. To fortify his conception, Maimonides invested considerable effort in reinterpreting biblical verses that seemed to imply that God has physical characteristics. When the Bible applies words like “sit” and “stand” to God, it suggests to the reader a physical, embodied God. This was, for the Rambam, intensely problematic. Throughout part 1 of the Guide, the Rambam reinterpreted biblical verses that might be taken to provide a license for anthropomorphic beliefs and rendered problematic words and phrases metaphorically in order to free God of any physical attributes or associations with human linguistic descriptions.
As we have seen, the Rambam also recast key religious concepts such as prophecy, providence, and redemption so that they aligned more closely with his understanding of God. This too involved extensive reinterpretation of biblical verses and passages. The reader of the Guide cannot but be struck by the gap between the Rambam’s understanding of core religious concepts and those of the Bible. The philosopher-prophet of the Guide seems very different from the prophets of the Bible; it is hard to imagine Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel devoting his time to studying books of metaphysics. Similarly, the divine providence of the Bible does not much resemble the Rambam’s concept. In the Bible, God interferes with the laws of nature and brings miracles to wreak vengeance on evildoers and redeem the righteous, apparently without any regard for the educational level of the people he is saving. In the Guide, by contrast, providential concern is primarily an intellectual and spiritual achievement of the perfected human being.
These far-reaching projects in biblical interpretation raise the important question of how Maimonides understood the degree of interpretative freedom that we have in reading the Bible. He addressed this issue in the context of the Guide’s discussion about whether the world was created, as the Bible teaches, or whether it had always existed, as Aristotle argued (a subject that I will address in part 3). After a lengthy analysis of the competing claims, the Rambam concludes that there is no decisive proof on either side. Nevertheless, he argues that the stronger argument lay in favor of the creation of the world. In the chapter where the Rambam explains his reasons for thinking this, he offers a rare glimpse into his approach to biblical interpretation:
Know that our shunning the affirmation of the eternity of the world is not due to a text figuring in the Torah according to which the world has been produced in time. For the texts indicating that the world has been produced in time are not more numerous than those indicating that the deity is a body. Nor are the gates of figurative interpretation shut in our faces or impossible of access to us regarding the subject of the creation of the world in time. For we could interpret them as figurative, as we have done when denying His corporeality. Perhaps this would even be much easier to do: we should be very able to give a figurative interpretation of those texts and to affirm as true the eternity of the world, just as we have given a figurative interpretation of those other texts and have denied that He, may He be exalted, is a body. (Guide, 2:25)
The Rambam avers that he does not decide in favor of creation because of the content of the biblical verses. If there were a decisive proof for the eternity of the world, then he would have no problem reinterpreting the Torah—whose opening words are, “In the beginning God created”—in line with the view that the world had always existed. Indeed, he writes that this would have been easier than his intensive effort to reinterpret the many biblical verses that could be taken give credence to anthropomorphism.
The idea that the commentator has considerable interpretative freedom was not new. The Rambam was continuing a tradition, in this respect, from the sages of the midrash and Talmud.7 What was new, however, was how openly the Rambam declared what he was doing. Usually, interpreters of sacred scriptures take pains to emphasize their fidelity to the meaning of the authoritative text. The Rambam broke the rules of the game by stating explicitly that if he wished to, he could reinterpret the text to make it mean the opposite of what the plain sense suggests.
The Rambam does, however, place an important condition on when the reader may exercise such freedom. Only when there is a decisive proof in favor of a theological position is it legitimate to reinterpret the biblical verses to conform to that view. In the case of the incorporeality of God, which the Rambam believed to have been unequivocally demonstrated, he threw his whole weight behind the reinterpretation of biblical verses that seemed to suggest that God was physical. In the case of the creation of the world, on the other hand, where there was no decisive argument on either side, there was no mandate to reinterpret the verses in a way that contradicted their plain meaning.
The Rambam’s approach to biblical interpretation was underpinned by a sophisticated conception of language. He understood that words often have many meanings and can be used metaphorically in multiple ways. How does one know when a word is being used metaphorically? One important condition is to understand the context. Knowledge about the cultural and intellectual context that was prevalent when the text was created can help identify when a literal interpretation of a given word or phrase would not have been entertained.8 In such cases it is reasonable to think that the word or phrase is being used metaphorically.
If this is true, then we need contextual information that is external to the text we are trying to interpret in order to understand its elusive meanings and hidden aspects. According to the Rambam, any body of knowledge whose truth has been decisively demonstrated becomes part of the context that enables us to understand the text. So, for example, the Neo-Aristotelian theology of the Middle Ages, in particular the proof of the incorporeality of the divinity, became part of the contextual framework for texts about God. When we learn from external sources that God has no body, we realize that a verse that speaks, say, about the “hand of God” must be read metaphorically. Philosophical knowledge gives the reader the background that is necessary to interpret the Torah correctly. The Rambam did not think he was imposing philosophy on the Torah; rather, he believed that philosophy enables us to reveal the Torah’s meaning.
In a certain sense, the Rambam believed that the biblical interpreter actually has little freedom. Once a truth has been unequivocally proved, the reader has no choice but to interpret the text in line with this truth. In this respect, philosophy may restrict our interpretative possibilities. The Rambam’s openness to sources of knowledge outside the Torah does not necessarily result in openness in his interpretation of the Torah. Unlike the midrashic tradition, which promoted the plurality of possible meanings in the biblical text, for the Rambam, after a philosophical view was established as certain, only readings of the Torah that conformed with that view were possible.
This is what drove the Rambam to recast traditional understandings of prophecy, providence, and redemption. Once the existence of a God who was absolutely beyond human experience and language had been established beyond doubt, the Rambam was compelled to reinterpret the Torah’s teachings on other basic religious concepts in accordance with this knowledge.