Continuation. Overcoming Doubts about God’s Omniscience. The Book of Job as the Vehicle for a Metaphysical Treatise on Providence
MAIMONIDES THEN TRIES to overcome the doubts some philosophers raised about divine omniscience and providence.1
Inherent (he says) in the concept of God (as a necessary Being) is that all perfections pertain to Him, and that all deficiencies must be negated of Him. One will readily concede that ignorance in this regard is itself a deficiency. What has misled some philosophers to, as noted, the bold assertion that God can’t know [120] everything is merely their observation of human events (that evil people often thrive while the good ones fare poorly), which result not only from necessary natural laws, but rather, in the first place, from our free will. The prophets remarked on this repeatedly,2 and the Psalmist says: “The godless speak: ‘The eternal one doesn’t see, the God of Jacob does not understand. Take heed, you foolish people, dumb ones, when will you become wise? Should the one who created the ear not hear, and the one who forms the eye not see?’”3
Several medical scholars of our nation asked me some time ago: What did David want to say with his comparison between the idea of purposeful construction of the organs and their use?4 By this logic, the one who created the mouth must eat, and the one who built the lungs must scream. Note, reader, how these scholars misunderstood the entire passage. [121]
It is obvious that whoever makes an instrument wouldn’t be able to make it if he had no idea about the effects it was supposed to produce.
If, for example, a needle-maker had no idea about sewing, he wouldn’t be able to make a needle as it needs to be for this purpose. The godless say that God’s omniscience doesn’t extend to individuals because they can be perceived only through sensuous organs. David refutes this by invoking the constitution of the organs themselves, which couldn’t have been built so purposefully without an understanding of their use. How can one believe that the so purposefully arranged moisture of the eye, its skin, and its nerves could have come to be by accident? Truly not! They are effects of necessary laws of nature, as has been shown by every philosopher and doctor. Nature as such has no consciousness and no capacity for consideration. Thus, this arrangement must be the doing of an Intelligent Being that has an idea [122] of the use of these parts. David correctly names all those who deny this fools and idiots,5 and he shows that such doubts are a function of our limited perspective, and that we must not reject truths grounded in other reasons on its account. He says that God, who gave humans the capacity for knowledge, knows their thoughts are futile.6
The peripatetics’ objections to the omniscience of God are that:
1 God must imagine what could happen in the future, what is merely possible, either as possible or as actual. And in the first case, his omniscience undergoes a change, because after what was possible has become actual, God must understand itself differently than before (due to the additional predicate of the actual). In the second case, however, His representation wouldn’t be adequate, and also because
2 a real (not merely formal) representation must encompass the represented object, but what is infinite cannot be the object of a [123] real representation, for it cannot be encompassed.7 The author attempts to overcome these objections in the following way.
How a person who has created something represents that something will differ greatly (Maimonides says) from how everyone else will represent it.8 The artist, for example, who makes a water-clock9 must form a representation of it before he makes it. The quantity of the water that flows out, its complex routes, their different directions, and all the piping—he doesn’t become familiar with all this through observing the finished product, but rather it is known to him earlier; his way of representing the clock isn’t determined by these movements, but rather the other way around: The latter are determined by the former. For the mere observer, this is all very different. Every movement leads him to form a new representation. Therefore, if these movements are infinite, then he cannot encompass them within such a representation. He cannot know anything about any of the movements prior to the object’s genesis. [124]
We find just the same difference obtaining between our knowledge and God’s omniscience. We know what we know purely from the observations we make about nature. Thus, we can’t know that which isn’t present or that which is infinite. Our mental representations come to be in succession and are as diverse as the things we perceive. God, by contrast, doesn’t know things from perceptions and observations, which would make his knowledge subject to multiplicity and change; rather, the opposite is the case: The things we perceive are the consequences of his pre-knowledge, which determines and makes them what they are. God’s Being contains no multiplicity and isn’t subject to change. He represents His knowledge as the ground of all things. The representation of all things is thus inseparable from the representation of His Being, even if we are unable to attain any intuitive cognition of such a representational capacity.
The Book of Job is, according to Maimonides, a disputation on divine omniscience [125] and providence, applied to one single case (whether an actual case or a poetic invention).10 The pious man (not, however, the wise one, for he knows no evil other than moral imperfection) suffers without having done anything wrong. What is explored, then, is the cause of this suffering. Gods’ angels (the forces of nature) administer the operation that God entrusted to them (maintaining the objects of nature). Idle Satan (the privation) mixes in among them11 (privation is not an end of nature as such, but rather an evil inseparable from matter) and wanders the earth,12 but he has nothing to do with heavenly things (privation occurs only in the corporeal realm on account of matter, not in the non-corporeal realm). He is given power over Job’s property, indeed, even over Job’s body, but not over his soul (as a rational being with free will, man is not subjected to physical evil and can avoid moral evils). [126]
Here an excellent passage from the Talmud warrants mentioning, where Rabbi Simon Ben Lakish says: “Satan, the evil spirit, and the angel of death are one and the same person.”13 (Privation or the limitation of forces of nature, evil desires that are the privation of reason’s activity and that of the free will, and physical as well as moral destruction are all one and the same thing.)
Maimonides ascribes, in accordance with his plan, a philosophical view about divine providence to every person in the Book of Job. He does this in such an exemplary fashion that each person coheres not only with himself, but also with the system attributed to him as it unfolds throughout the whole book.14 Another scholar of our nation, Rabbi Levi Ben Gerschon, understood how to make good use of these suggestions for interpreting a book that is otherwise so difficult to explain, and he wrote a compete commentary on Job in accordance with this plan, which is perhaps the only one of its kind.15 [127]
1 Guide 3:16 | Pines 2:461–64.
2 See the biblical quotes in Guide 3:19 | Pines 2:477–78.
3 Ps. 94:7–8. Maimonides discusses this passage in Guide 3:19 | Pines 2:478.
4 Guide 3:19 | Pines 2:478.
5 Ps. 94:8.
6 Ps. 94:10–11.
7 Guide 3:20 | Pines 2:481.
8 Guide 3:21 | Pines 2:484.
9 This is Maimonides’ own example.
10 Guide 3:22 | Pines 2:486.
11 Job 1:6.
12 Job 1:7. Cf. Guide 3:22 | Pines 2:487.
13 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Batra 16a. Cf. Guide 3:22 | Pines 2:489.
14 Guide 2:23 | Pines 2:490–503.
15 Gersonides’ (1288–1344) commentary on the Book of Job was completed in 1325, and printed for the first time in Ferrara in 1477. For an English translation, see The Commentary of Levi ben Gerson on the Book of Job, trans. Abraham L. Lassen (New York: Bloch, 1946).