Continuation of the Story, as well as Some Thoughts on Religious Mysteries
SINCE I JUST MENTIONED secret societies, this is, to my mind, the best place to offer the intelligent reader my thoughts on mysteries in general and on the mysteries of religion in particular.1
Mysteries as such are a true—or true-seeming—kind of ground and consequence relation between objects of nature, insofar as a person cannot discover that relation through the natural use of his intellectual or perceptual powers. Eternal truths, that is, the necessary relations of objects grounded in the nature of our knowledge capacities, [244] are not, in this way of thinking, mysteries. For however little known such relations may be, anyone can discover them through the use of his knowledge capacities.
On the other hand, the effects of sympathy, antipathy, medical conditions, and such things, which some people come to accidentally, and confirm through observations and experiments, are true mysteries of nature. Others would not discover them through their powers of observation, but only due to the same sort of accident, or else from the teachings of those who already discovered them. If such mysteries cannot be confirmed through observation and experiment, believing in them counts as superstition.
Religion is a pact between a human being and another moral being of the highest kind.
It presupposes a natural relationship between humans and a higher moral being, so that [245] both sides further their interests through the mutual fulfilling of the pact.
If this natural (not merely arbitrary or arranged) relationship is true, and if it underlies the reciprocal obligations of those who have entered into the pact, then it is a true natural religion. If not, it is a false one.
If this reciprocal obligation between a human being and a higher being (or his representative) is formally laid out, the religion is a positive or revealed religion.
True religion—natural as well as revealed—which Judaism represents, as I have mentioned, consists, at first, of a tacit contract, and later an explicit contract, between certain people and the Highest Being, who appears to the patriarch in person (in dreams or prophetic visions) and makes his will known. That is, he makes known both the rewards of obeying his will and the punishment for disobedience. Afterwards, a contract is put into effect with the agreement of both sides. In the case of the Judaism, [246] this Highest Being later renewed the contract with the Israelites in Egypt through His representative, Moses, and defined the reciprocal obligations more precisely. Both sides then confirmed the new arrangement on Mount Sinai.
I need not tell the intelligent reader that this idea of a pact between God and man is meant as an analogy and that it is not to be taken literally. The most Supreme Being can reveal himself only as an idea of reason. What revealed itself to the patriarchs and prophets visually—in an anthropomorphic way, which accorded with their powers of understanding—was not the most Supreme Being itself, but rather His representative (its sensuous image). The contract that the Supreme Being enters into with man does not have as its purpose a mutual satisfaction of needs, for the Supreme Being has no needs and the contract does not meet man’s needs. Rather, man’s needs are met through observing the relationships, based upon natural laws, between himself and [247] other objects of nature. Thus, this pact can be grounded only in the nature of reason, without reference to any goals.
As I see it, the main difference between paganism and Judaism is that the latter is grounded in formal, absolutely necessary laws of reason, whereas the former (even if based on the nature of things and thus real) is grounded in material and thus contingent laws of nature, which necessarily results in polytheism. Each particular cause is personified through the power of imagination—that is, each cause is represented as a moral being and made into a particular god. In the beginning, this practice was merely a kind of empiricism. But over time, people realized that the causes represented as different gods were in fact interdependent in their effects and even arranged in relation to one another. A system of pagan theology gradually emerged in which each divinity claimed a certain rank and a defined relationship to the others. [248]
Judaism, by contrast, has been a system from the beginning; it has always presupposed a unity among natural causes. It thus eventually achieved this purely formal unity, which is solely one of regulative use (for the complete systematic interrelating of all natural phenomena) and presupposes knowledge of the diversity of different natural phenomena. But owing to their excessive love of system, as well as to anxieties about preserving the purity of the principle, the Israelites appear to have completely neglected the use of this principle. And thus, they arrived at a pure but very unfruitful religion, useful neither for expanding knowledge nor in practical life. This state of affairs explains not only their constant grumbling about the arbiters of their religion, but also the frequency with which they fall into idolatry. Unlike the enlightened nations of today, they could not pursue the purposeful use of their religion and the purity of principle at the same time; they had to choose between the two. [249]
Finally, the Talmudists introduced a purely formal application of religion, which had no real end, thereby exacerbating the situation.
According to the intention of its creator, Judaism should have made the Jewish nation the wisest and most rational of all. Through the nonpractical use of Judaism, the nation turned instead into the least wise and least rational. Knowledge of nature, rather than being unified with and subordinated to religious knowledge (as matter to form), is completely neglected, and the principle that has been kept pure remains without application.
A religion’s mysteries are objects and actions in accord with that religion’s concepts and tenets. While the inner meaning of religious mysteries is of great importance, their external forms are in some way off-putting, ridiculous, or otherwise repellent. Their exteriors must therefore be concealed from the common people, who cannot see into the interior. What we have here, then, is really a twofold mystery for the common man. [250] The objects and actions are the lesser mysteries, and their inner meaning is the greater one.
One example of this kind of mystery was the Ark of the Covenant among the Jews in the Tent of Meeting, and later in the Holy of Holies in the temple. According to the testimony of a famous writer, this Ark was very similar to the holy chest in Adytis.2 Thus we find among the Egyptians the coffin of Apis, which hid a dead cow, of great symbolic meaning but grotesque appearance, from the crude eyes of the masses. In the Ark of the Covenant of the first Temple of Solomon, there were of course merely two tablets, according to the testimony of the Holy Scripture. But I have found a passage in the Talmud about the Ark of the second Temple—the one built after the Babylonian exile—that is too noteworthy not to be mentioned here.
This account reads as follows: After they had taken possession of the temple, the Jews’ enemies found in the Holy of Holies the image of a man and a woman [251] with bodies intertwined, and they desecrated the holy relic with a vulgar interpretation of its inner meaning.—3 The image was supposed to be a vivid sensuous representation of the union of the nation and the divinity, and it had to be kept out of sight of the common folk to protect it against misuse. The common people would not be able get beyond outward signs and penetrate to interior meanings—hence the practice of hiding the Cherubim behind a curtain.
All the mysteries of the ancients were of this type. The greatest of all the mysteries of the Jewish religion, however, is the name Jehova, which expresses pure Being, abstracted from any particular type of being, and without which Being as such cannot be conceived of at all.4 The doctrine of the unity of God and the dependence of all other beings on Him—both the possibility and the actuality of other beings—can be completely understood only within a single system.—5 When Josephus says, in defending the Jews against Apion, [252] that “The first lesson of our religion concerns the divinity, and it teaches that God contains all things and is a completely perfect and blessed Being, as well as the single cause of all beings,”6 I believe his words offer the best explanation there is of a very difficult passage, the one in which Moses says to God: “See! When I go to the children of Israel and say, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask, ‘What is His name?’ what am I to answer?”7 And God replies, “You should tell the children of Israel that Jehova, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has sent you to Him, for this is my name for all eternity, and it commemorates me at all times.”8 In my opinion, this passage means nothing other than that the ground of Judaism is the unity of God as the immediate cause of all Being;9 the remarkable inscription on the pyramid at Sais says as much: “I am everything that is, was, and will be; no mortal has lifted my [253] veil.” And the inscription under the pillar of Isis: “I am all that is.”10 For the Talmudists,11 the name Jehova means Schem ha-Ezam (nomen proprium), the name of the Being that God as such is entitled to, without any consideration of His effects.12 The other names of God are appellative, expressing characteristics that He has in common with His creatures, although He has them to a greater degree. For example, Elohim means a lord, a judge, and so forth. El means a potentate. Adonai is a lord. And so, it is with all the rest.13 The Talmudists take this principle so far as to assert that the entire Holy Scripture consists of names for God.14
The Kabbalists used the principle, too. After listing the main properties of God and ordering them within a system (which they named Olam Ezilloth or the Sephiroth), they not only searched the Holy Scripture for an appropriate appellation for each one, but also made all kinds of combinations out of these [254] characteristics, setting them in different contexts and expressing these combinations with similar combinations of the corresponding appellations. Thus, they interpreted the Holy Scripture however they wanted to, finding in the text what they themselves had brought into it.
There can also be religious mysteries consisting of the knowledge that this religion, as an enlightened person understands it, has no mysteries at all. Such knowledge can either go with an effort to gradually disabuse the people of mysteries and suppress the so-called minor mysteries by revealing the major ones, or, in contrast, with an effort to maintain the small mysteries among the people by making preservation of the minor mysteries a purpose of the major ones.
In the spirit of its creator, Judaism is of the former type. Both Moses and the prophets who followed him unfailingly [255] stressed that external ceremonies are not the purpose of religion; its purpose, rather, is knowledge of the true God as the single ineffable cause of all things and the exercise of virtue according to the mandates of reason.
Pagan religions, by contrast, show obvious signs of being of the second type. Still, I am not inclined to believe, as some are, that everything is intentionally set up in Paganism to be deceptive. I believe that the founders of these religions were in many cases deceived deceivers, and I think that this perspective is much more in line with human nature. Nor can I imagine that any intentionally deceptive secret plans could have been passed down from generation to generation through a formal tradition. What would be the point? Don’t more recent generations have the same ability to formulate practical designs that earlier ones had? There have been princes who never read Machiavelli and yet succeeded brilliantly at putting his principles into practice. [256]
I am convinced that the Society of the Pious15 described in the last chapter had few if any links to freemasons or other secret societies. But one can speculate. What matters is the degree of probability. In my estimation, every state contains societies that are in essence secret, but whose outward appearance suggests otherwise. Every group with a common interest is, for me, a secret society. However well known their aims and main operations may be, the most important ones remain hidden from non-initiates. There are good things and bad things to say about them, just as about all secret societies, and so as long as they don’t cause too much trouble, they will be tolerated.
The Society of the Pious had more or less the same goal as the orders of the illuminati in Bavaria and made use of nearly the same means. Their goal was to infiltrate a people wandering in the dark;16 [257] to do so, they used superstition in a remarkable way. They sought to attract young people, for the most part. Marshaling a kind of empirical knowledge of human nature, they tried to form each person into what nature had destined him to be and steer him into the right position. Every member of the society knew just enough about its aims and organization to be able to see his subordinates behind him, not his superiors in front of him.
These superiors knew the art of communicating truths of reason to their subordinates through exalted images, and also that of turning sensuous images into truths of reason. One might almost say that they could speak the language of animals17—a very important art, indispensible for any teacher of the people. By doing away with melancholic piety, they won the hearts of the happy and energetic young. The principle of self-annihilation that they taught is, understood correctly, [258] no different than the foundation of self-activity. The principle dislodges all other modes of thinking and acting, which, established through education, habituation, and discussions, undermine productive human activity, and the principle also clears the way to a free mode of activity suited to the individual. In fact, this is the only way moral and aesthetic feeling can be achieved and perfected.18 It is harmful only if misunderstood, as I have tried to show using this society as an example. [259]
1 Maimon is referring to, or playing on, multiple meanings of the word “Geheimnis,” which can denote both secret and mystery. His discussion throughout this chapter is of a piece with contemporary discussions of Egyptian mysteries as a model for Enlightenment secret societies. On this eighteenth-century discourse, see Jan Assman, From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2014), ch. 6.
2 Maimon is probably referring to his philosophical rival Karl Leonard Reinhold’s Die hebräischen Mysterien, oder die älteste religiöse Freymaurerey (1787), which, in turn, inspired Friedrich Schiller’s influential essay of 1790 “Die Sendung Moses.”
3 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma, 54b, quoting Reish Lakish, and cf. Midrash Lamentations Rabbah, ed S. Buber (Vilna, 1899), p. 8. The allegorical interpretation Maimon goes on to assert is consonant with Rabbi Akiva’s allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs as depicting the love between God and Israel. Although Maimon speaks of discovering this text it is alluded to in a crucial passage of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, op. cit., p. 114, which is also on the nature of religious symbolism, and to whose theory he would appear to be responding here and elsewhere in the Autobiography.
4 See Maimonides, Guide 1:61–63.
5 Maimon seems to be alluding here to Spinoza’s system. Like Maimon, Spinoza too accepted Maimonides’ interpretation of the Tetragrammaton as indicating God’s inner-most essence as pure existence. For Spinoza’s and Maimonides’ interpretation of the Tetragrammaton, see Melamed, “Spinoza’s Deification of Existence” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 6 (2012): 75–104.
6 Josephus, Contra Apion, 2:23.
7 Exod. 3:13.
8 Exod. 3:15.
9 Here Maimon seems to adopt Spinoza’s claim that the Hebrews were accustomed to ascribe all actions to the first cause, paying little attention to the intermediary causes. See Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, ch. 1 (3/16–17) and ch. 6 (3/94), and his Compendium of Hebrew Grammar, ch. 12. Cf. Maimonides, Guide 2:48| Pines 2: 409–12.
10 The saying is quoted by Schiller in the essay mentioned above (he also wrote a famous poem about it), and most famously by Kant, who says in the Critique of Judgment, sec. 49, that the inscription at Sais is “perhaps the most sublime thing ever said.”
11 See Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah, 38s: “My name—the name that is peculiar to Me.”
12 See Maimonides, Guide 1:61 | Pines 1:147.
13 See Maimonides, Guide 1:61 | Pines 1:147 and Guide 1:63 | Pines 1:155–56.
14 This is, in fact, a mystical tradition most famously proclaimed by the thirteenth-century Talmudist and kabbalist Moses Nachmanides who read the doctrine back into earlier rabbinic texts. In his introduction to his commentary on Genesis, he writes: “the whole Torah is comprised of names of the Holy One, blessed be He. And the letters of the words separate themselves into divine names when divided in a different manner.” The classic modern discussion of this and related ideas is Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Daedalus. (For a possible Talmudic source for this teaching, see Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot, 21a.)
15 That is, the Hasidim.
16 This is a Maimonidean trope.
17 Maimon’s irony here is especially pointed because the Baal Shem Tov (and a few other early Hasidic masters) were said to know the language of animals, birds, and trees. See In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov [Shivhei ha-Besht], 242–44.
18 Maimon once again endorses what he takes to be the chief teaching of Hasidism, i.e., the self-anihilation of the I, and its submersion in an acosmic God. It is this bold Hasidic doctrine that he planted in German philosophical soil.