Continuation. The Crow Is Robbed of the Feathers Stolen from Other Birds, or the Denial of God’s Positive Characteristics
THE FIFTIETH SECTION1 is the author’s brief introduction to his doctrine of the negation of God’s positive properties. “Faith,” he writes, “doesn’t lie in what one says, but rather in what one represents, when one believes that an object really is as one represents it to be.”
Do you want to content yourself with praying for certain truths without understanding them? If so, that is very easy. Even the most obtuse person can manage it. If, however, you want to reach a higher level of speculation, and you [49] want to be convinced that God is a true unity without any piecing together, then you must know that God can have no essential attributes. But whoever believes that He is indeed a unity and yet has multiple attributes will, while saying that God is a unity, represent Him in his thoughts to be of a plural nature. This way of conceiving of God resembles the Christians’ claim that He is both one and three, as though what matters is how we express something, rather than how we represent it to be. Take care not to wind up among those of whom it is said: “You are close to their mouth, but far removed from their innermost.”2 Rather, strive to be just like those of whom it is said: “Think for yourself on your bed and be silent.”3
There are things inherently so self-evident that anyone can recognize right away that they are true,4 and no proof is necessary: for example, first principles and that which is known through immediate sensory perception, [50] or what comes close to this. However, as soon as false views about what should be obvious are circulated, scholars are compelled to ground these self-evident truths. Thus, for example, Aristotle demonstrates the existence of movement, because some philosophers had denied it.5 Thus, too, he demonstrates the impossibility of atoms, whose reality some thinkers had asserted.6
It has been the same with God’s essential attributes, for it should be self-evident that an attribute is something beyond the essence, and, consequently, that an attribute can be added on only accidentally. If something is present in the essence, speaking of it as people often do is redundant, like saying, for example, a human is a human, or it is like giving a simple definition, for example, that a human is a living, rational creature. An attribute of the latter kind could be ascribed to God (provided that the concept of God can be explained), [51] but we deny that this is so, because the concept of God is in fact inexplicable. The former kind of attribute, however, must be denied on the very basis of God, because it comes from outside His essence and thus represents an accidental modification, which goes against the necessity of this Being and His true unity.
Some thinkers try to overcome these difficulties by asserting that God’s attributes are neither His essence nor outside His essence. But this claim is just as if someone wanted to say: general concepts (genera and species) exist as little as they don’t exist. Or, an atom isn’t in space and yet occupies space. Or, humans don’t act and yet can be skilled in action. Such assertions consist merely of words, not in an actual mental representation, and have even much less reality outside representation. With such attempts, thinkers have failed to find a means between contradictory propositions. [52]
Chapter fifty-two addresses five kinds of attributes.
1 When the definition (Definitio) is ascribed to what is defined (Definitum) as an attribute, or when a thing is defined, when, for example, one says, a human is a rational animal. Because every definition consists of a genus and the proximate species, a definition presupposes the concept of the proximate species as something inherently possible, and it is on this possibility that, in turn, the possibility of the thing defined depends. God, as the absolutely possible Being, on which the possibility of all other beings depends, cannot be defined, and an attribute of this kind cannot be ascribed to Him.
2 When an essential determination is ascribed to a being as an attribute, for example, when one says: a human is a rational animal. An attribute of this kind can only be ascribed to a composite; it cannot be ascribed to God as a Being absolutely simple. [53]
3 When an accidental modification is ascribed to a being (the possibility of ascribing a property as an attribute of God follows from what has been said already). Such an attribute cannot be ascribed to God as the absolutely necessary Being.
4 Nor is it possible to ascribe a relationship or relation to God as an attribute. The relationship of space and time doesn’t apply to God as a purely intellectual Being. His relation to the world is also no true relation, for such a relation assumes that the relata are of the same kind, and are distinguished only through this relation. Thus, for example, master and slave are both humans, and because individual differences aren’t taken into account here, they are distinguished from each other only though this relation. By contrast, God has nothing in common with all other beings. Even His existence is of a kind different from theirs, for with Him, existence is necessary, and the existence of the other beings is merely accidental.7 [54]
5 When the effect is ascribed to the cause as an attribute. (The laws of Solon, the city of David.) Such attributes, which leave the rest of the Being totally undefined, can be rightly ascribed to God.
In the following section,8 Maimonides shows that manifold effects9 don’t require their efficient cause to be a manifold. For example, the sun melts some things, makes others harder, cooks, burns, blanches, blackens, and so forth. All attributes ascribed to God in the prophetic scriptures are thus to be seen as attributes of the fifth kind.
In the fifty-seventh section, the author shows that one isn’t even permitted to ascribe existence to God as an attribute in the way one does with other things, because the existence of God, as that of a necessary Being, is already contained in His essence.10 Thus it cannot be ascribed as an attribute. God exists, then, without existence11—and the same goes for His other attributes. [55]
In the following section,12 Maimonides goes farther still and shows that with regard to God, one can only use as attributes negations of negations. (One can see from this proposition that the author’s concept of God is the same one Descartes and Leibniz took as the basis for their a priori proof of the existence of God—namely, the concept of the most real Being, or of reality itself with all limitations negated.)13 He then shows how one can come progressively closer to knowledge of God through this double negation. All philosophers, it is said, agree: “God’s perfection triumphs over our knowledge. Owing to his highest clarity, we remain in the dark.”14 The Psalmist has a more exalted formulation for this: “For You, silence is praise.”15
In closing, he cites a passage from the Talmud that coheres well with that one. Someone had positioned himself to pray before Rabbi Chaninah, beginning his prayer with the words: “You great, strong, fear-inspiring, exalted, and magnificent God.” [56] Rabbi Chaninah interrupted him and said: “Have you finished complimenting your Lord? We wouldn’t even permit ourselves to use the first three expressions (great, strong, fear-inspiring) if Moses himself hadn’t used them and the Men of the Great Council hadn’t put them into the standard prayer. Yet you want to go much further! It is just as if one were to celebrate a king with millions of gold pieces by boasting that he had millions of silver pieces. The compliment would actually be an insult.”16
Thereupon Maimonides emphatically denounces the excesses of prayer formulas meant to propitiate and flatter God, and he concludes this section with a remark about the parable of Rabbi Chaninah. Its message isn’t that one should celebrate a king who has many pieces of gold for having a few hundreds of them. For in the first place, he says, such a message would be appropriate if divine perfections were of the same kind as ours, [57] just different with respect to degree; but it isn’t in this case, for the comparison between divine and human perfections is impossible. Solomon, too, gives us a remark that fits well with this observation, he says: “God is in heaven (far above us), you are on earth. Thus, your words (with respect to God) must be few.”17
In the following section,18 Maimonides shows that the person who ascribes (positive) characteristics to God doesn’t merely have an incorrect concept of God, such a person has no concept of God. What would one say, for example, in response to someone who, having heard people talking about an elephant, formed the following concept of one? It is a water animal with a transparent body that has one leg, three wings, a wide face, and human appearance. It sometimes speaks like a person, flies like a bird, and swims like a fish. One could not say about this person that he had an incorrect concept of an elephant; rather, one would say that he had no concept at all, for his concept is merely [58] fabricated, and thus its reality is to be doubted.
God is a necessary Being. He can thus have no attributes outside his Being; for if this were so, He would be dependent on something outside Himself with respect to these attributes. Therefore, when someone says, God is a necessary Being to whom certain attributes can be ascribed, one cannot simply say that he has an incorrect concept of God. Rather, we should say that he has no concept of God. But in this case, the concept isn’t just doubtful; it is a completely misguided fabrication. [59]
1 Guide 1:50.
2 Jer. 12:2.
3 Ps. 4:5.
4 Maimon’s expositon of Guide 1:51 begins here.
5 See Aristotle’s response to the Eleatics’ arguments against the reality of motion in bk. 6, ch. 2 and bk. 7, ch. 8 of Aristotle’s Physics.
6 See Aristotle, Physics, 231a20–231b22.
7 Guide 1:61.
8 Guide 1:53.
9 Or actions.
10 Here Maimon diverges slightly but signficantly from Maimonides’ assertion that God’s essence and existence are identical. See Guide 1:57 | Pines 1:132.
11 Cf. Guide 1:57 (Pines 1:132): “He exists, but not through an existence (other than His essence).”
12 Guide 1:58.
13 For a discussion of the ens realissimum, see the “Ideal of Pure Reason” in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A578/B606.
14 Guide 1:59 | Pines 1:139. On whether Maimonides’ allusion here is to Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, or to Al-Ghazali, see Michael Schwarz’s note to his modern Hebrew translation of the Guide Moreh Nevuchim LeRabbenu Mosheh ben Maimon (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press), p. 148, n13.
15 Ps. 65:2.
16 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot, 33b, and Tractate Megila, 25a.
17 Eccles. 5:1.
18 Guide 1:60.