Chapter VIII: Part 8

2. Men “who are in the country,” but “have their backs turned towards the king’s palace, and their faces in another direction.” These are “those who possess religion, belief and thought, but happen to hold false doctrines, which they either adopted in consequence of great mistakes made in their own speculations, or received from others who misled them. Because of these doctrines they recede more and more from the royal palace the more they seem to proceed. These are worse than the first class, and under certain circumstances it may become necessary to slay them, and to extirpate their doctrines, in order that others should not be misled.”

3. “Those who desire to arrive at the palace, and to enter it, but have never yet seen it.” These are “the mass of religious people; the multitude that observe the divine commandments, but are ignorant.”

4. “Those who reach the palace, and go round about in search of the entrance gate.” These are “those who believe traditionally in true principles of faith, and learn the practical worship of God, but are not trained in philosophical treatment of the principles of the _Torah_.” On the same level with them are those who “are engaged in studying the Mathematical Sciences and Logic.”

5. Those who “have come into the ante-chamber”—that is, “those who undertake to investigate the principles of religion,” or those who have “learnt to understand Physics.”

6. Those who have reached the highest stage, that of being “with the king in the same palace.” These are they “who have mastered Metaphysics—who have succeeded in finding a proof for everything that can be proved—who have a true knowledge of God, so far as true knowledge can be attained, and are near to the truth wherever only an approach to the truth is possible.”[130]

In this classification Maimonides sets forth his ethical system in plain terms, with perfect coldness and calm, as though there were nothing startling about it. We of the present day feel our moral sense particularly outraged by his cruel treatment of the second class—“those who happen to hold false doctrines”—though we can understand that a logical thinker like Maimonides, who always went the whole length of his convictions, was bound to draw this conclusion from his philosophical system. For that system regards “true opinions” as something much more than “opinions”: it attributes to them the wonderful power of turning the reasoning faculty into a separate and eternal being, and sees therefore in the opposite opinions a danger to life in the most real sense. But in Maimonides’ day the persecution of men for holding false opinions was a common thing (though it was done in the name of religion, not of philosophy); and even this piece of philosophic ruthlessness created no stir and aroused no contemporary protest. What did stir contemporary feeling to its depths was another conclusion involved in his classification: namely, “that philosophers who occupy themselves with physics and metaphysics are on a higher plane than men who occupy themselves with the Torah.”[131] Whoever knows in what esteem our ancestors of that period held the study of the _Torah_ will not be surprised that “many wise men and Rabbis” were driven to the conclusion that “this chapter was not written by the Master, or if it was, it should be suppressed, or, best of all, burnt.”[132]

Poor, simple men! They did not see that this chapter could not be either suppressed or burnt except in company with all the other chapters of Maimonides’ system, which led him inevitably to this extreme conclusion. But there were other men in Israel who saw more clearly, and actually condemned all the chapters to the fire. To them we shall return later.

III

The supremacy of Reason! Can we to-day, after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conceive how tremendous, how fundamental a revolution the phrase implied in the time of Maimonides?

We all know that the outstanding characteristic of the human mind in the Middle Ages was its negative attitude to human reason, its lack of faith in the power of reason to direct man’s life and bring him to the goal of real happiness. Reason was almost hated and despised as a dangerous tempter and seducer: it led men away from the pursuit of truth and goodness, and was to be eschewed by all who cared for their souls. Fundamental questions about life and the universe had to receive _super_-rational answers. The simpler and more reasonable the answer, the more suspect and the less satisfactory it was; the stranger the answer, the more violently opposed to sane reason, the more cordial was its welcome and the more ready its acceptance. The famous _Credo quia absurdum_ of one of the Church fathers was the cardinal rule of thought for all cultured nations, Christian and Mohammedan alike. Nor had Judaism escaped the sway of this principle. Not only the mass of the people, but the leaders and teachers, generally speaking, believed in the literal sense of the Scriptures and the Talmud, even where it was plainly contrary to reason. The coarsest and crudest ideas about the nature of the divine power and its relation to men, and about the soul of man and its future in “the world to come”—ideas which reason cannot tolerate for a moment—were almost universally held; and even those learned in the Law staunchly maintained these ideas, because so they had found it written in Bible or Talmud, and that which was written was above reason, and no attention should be paid to that impudent scoffer. It followed naturally from this fundamental point of view that the important things in the sphere of morals were to know and to perform all that was written. The function of reason was not to understand life and the universe, but to understand what was written about life and the universe. The thing best worth doing for a Jew was to ponder on the written word and to work out its details, theoretically and practically, to infinity.[133]

No doubt some Jewish teachers before Maimonides had tried to introduce into Judaism more rational principles, which they had derived from Arabic philosophy. But these attempts only affected details; the cardinal principle remained untouched. Reason remained subordinate to the written word; its truths were still discarded for the higher truth of religion. The Gaon Saadiah, the greatest of the earlier Jewish religious philosophers, explains the relation of reason to religion by the following simile: “A man weighs his money, and finds that he has a thousand pieces.” He gives different sums to a number of people, and then, “wishing to show them quickly how much he has left, he says that he has five hundred pieces, and offers to prove it by weighing his money. When he weighs the money—which takes little time—and finds that it amounts to five hundred pieces they are bound to believe what he told them.” But there may be among them a particularly cautious man, who wants to find the amount left over by the method of calculation—that is, by adding together the various amounts distributed and subtracting their sum from the original amount.[134] Religion, of course, is the weighing process, which gives us the truth at once, by a method which is direct and cannot be questioned. Reason corresponds to calculation: a cautious man with plenty of time may use it to establish a truth which has already been proved to him by the short and certain method of weighing. But obviously calculation cannot change the result which weighing has already given; and if there is any difference in the results, the weighed money will neither be increased nor diminished, and the mistake must be in the calculation. This way of regarding reason and its relation to religion was common to all the Jewish thinkers who laboured, before Maimonides, to reconcile religion and philosophy. They regarded their labour only as a necessary evil. They shouldered the burden because they saw that it had to be done; but in their heart of hearts they were wholly on the side of religion, and it never occurred to them to give reason precedence.[135] In this respect they were like the Arabic religious philosophers; and like them they chose the philosophical views which confirmed their religious faith rather than those which were confirmed by reason. “They did not investigate,” writes Maimonides, jeering at “philosophers” of this kind, “the real properties of things; first of all they considered what must be the properties of the things which should yield proof for or against a certain creed.” They forgot “that the properties of things cannot adapt themselves to our opinions, but our opinions must be adapted to the existing properties.”[136]

If we remember that this was the general attitude of mind, we cannot help asking how it could happen that in such a period and in such an atmosphere Maimonides arrived at the doctrine of the supremacy of reason in its most uncompromising form. No doubt, if we care to be satisfied with any answer that comes to hand, we may say that Maimonides, starting out with a predisposition in favour of the Arabic version of the Aristotelian philosophy, and a sternly logical mind, could not stop half-way, or fail to see the logical consequences of Aristotelianism. But when we observe how, with a devotion far greater than that of his non-Jewish teachers, he set himself to develop and extend the idea of the supremacy of reason till it became a complete, all-embracing theory of life; and when we remember also his love for the teachings of Judaism, which ought to have induced in him a disposition not to extend the empire of reason, but to restrict it: we are forced to confess that logic alone could never have produced this phenomenon. There must have been some psychological force, some inner motive power, to make Maimonides so extreme and uncompromising a champion of reason.

We shall discover what this motive power was, I think, if we take account of the political position of the Jews at that time.

It was a time when religious fanaticism was rife among the Moslems. In many countries to profess another religion meant death, and large numbers of Jews, who could with difficulty change their place of abode, accepted Mohammedanism, though but outwardly. One of these countries was Southern Spain, the birthplace of Maimonides, who was a boy of thirteen when religious persecution broke out in that country. It may or may not be true, as recent historians maintain, that he and his father and the whole family changed their religion under compulsion: the question has not yet been definitely settled. But there is no doubt that even if he was saved by some means from an open change of faith, he was at any rate forced to conceal his Judaism, for fear of oppression, so long as he lived in Spain and in Fez (where religious persecution first started, and fanaticism had its stronghold). It was only in Egypt that his troubles ceased, and when he reached Egypt he was already about thirty years of age. This, then, was the terrible position in which Maimonides spent his years of development. He was surrounded by lying and religious hypocrisy; Judaism had to hide from the light of day; its adherents had to wear a mask whenever they came out of their homes into the open. And why? Because Mohammed had called himself a prophet, had performed miracles, according to his followers, to win their faith, and by virtue of his prophetic power had promulgated a new Law and revealed new truths, which all men were bound to believe, although they were contrary to reason. This state of things was bound to make a profound impression on a young man like Maimonides, with his fine nature and his devotion to truth. He could not but feel every moment the tragedy of such a life; and therefore he could not but become violently opposed to the source of religious fanaticism—to that blind faith in the truth of prophecy which relies on supernatural “evidence,” and despises the evidence of reason. It was this blind faith that led the Moslems to force the Jews into accepting the teaching of the new prophet; and it was this that led many of these very Jews, after they had gradually become accustomed to their new situation, to doubt of their Judaism and ask themselves why they should not be able to believe in Mohammed’s prophecy, just as they believed in that of Moses. If Moses had performed miracles, then surely Mohammed might have done the same; and how could they decide between the one teaching and the other with such certainty as to pronounce one true and the other false?[137]

These impressions, which were constantly influencing Maimonides’ development in his childhood and youth, were bound to swing him violently over to the other side, to the side of reason. Ultimately he was led to subject man—and God too, if one may say so—to that supreme ruler: because Judaism could trust reason never to allow any new prophet with his new teaching to work it harm. When once Judaism had accepted the supremacy of reason and handed over to reason the seal of truth, it would never again be difficult to show by rational proof that the first divine religion was also the only divine religion, never to be displaced or altered till the end of time; and then, even if ten thousand prophets like Mohammed came and performed miracles beyond telling, we should never believe in their new teaching, because one proof of reason is stronger than all the proofs of prophecy.[138]

Perhaps, too, Maimonides’ rationalism is traceable to yet another cause, which lies like the first in the situation of the forced converts of that period. These men were no doubt able to observe the Jewish law within their own homes; the Moslems did not, like the Christians later, invent an Inquisition to pry into every hole and corner. None the less, Maimonides himself makes it clear that the Jews were often compelled to break the commandments of their Law, when they could not observe them without arousing suspicion in the minds of the authorities. This naturally caused the unfortunate Jews great distress, and drove some of them to despair. What, they asked themselves, was the use of remaining true to their ancestral faith at heart, if they could not in practice keep clear of transgressions both great and small, and must in any case merit the pains of hell?[139] It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that this painful feeling also helped to lead Maimonides—though unconsciously—towards the doctrine of the supremacy of reason, which teaches that man’s “ultimate perfection does not include any action or good conduct, but only knowledge”[140]—thus implying that man may win salvation by attaining to true opinions, though he is sometimes forced in practice to transgress the commands of religion.

However that may be, whether for these reasons or for others, we do find that Maimonides had his system perfected and arranged in all its details even in his early days, when he first came out of his study into public life, and that he made scarcely any change in it from that time till the day of his death.[141] All his efforts went to the propagation of his teaching among his people, and to the endeavour to repair by its means all the shortcomings which he found in contemporary Judaism.

These shortcomings were great indeed. Judaism, as Maimonides found it, was by no means fulfilling its function as “the divine religion.” It was not “true opinions” that the people derived from Judaism: on the contrary, they had come, through a literal acceptance of all that it taught, to hold false ideas about God and man, and had therefore by its means been removed still further from perfection. Even the practical duties of morality and religion could not easily be learnt by the people generally from their religious writings. For in order to deduce practice from theory it was necessary to navigate the great ocean of the Talmud, and to spend years on minute and tangled controversies—a task for the few only, not for the masses. Here, then, was an odd state of things. The whole purpose of religion was to improve society at large, to speak to the masses in a language which they understood; but if the masses could not understand the language of religion, and could learn from it neither true opinions nor practical duties, then religion was not fulfilling its function in society, and its existence was useless.

This state of affairs produced in Maimonides, while he was still young, an ardent desire to stand in the breach and make Judaism fit to fulfil the double function—theoretical and practical—which it had as the only “divine religion.” For this purpose it was necessary on the one hand to show the whole people, in a form suited to its comprehension, the “true opinions” contained in the _Torah_, and on the other hand to rescue the practical commandments from the ocean of Talmudic disputation and to teach them in a short and simple manner, so that they should be easily remembered and become familiar to the people.

But in those early days Maimonides had not the courage to strike out a new line and to present the whole content of religion in an entirely fresh manner in conformity with his philosophical system. Hence he chose a line which was already familiar, and decided to supply the need of his own age by the help of a book which in its time had been intended to fulfil a somewhat similar purpose—the Mishnah. Thus it was in the form of a Commentary on the Mishnah that he tried to give his contemporaries what they lacked: to wit, clear doctrine and a plain rule of practice. Wherever the Mishnah leaves a point in doubt, he gives the decision laid down in the Talmud; and wherever the Mishnah hints at some theoretical opinion, he takes advantage of the opportunity to explain the “true opinions.”[142] This latter process was, of course, especially important to him; and he sometimes expatiates on the subject at much greater length than is usual in a Commentary of the ordinary kind.[143] Thus he was able to introduce into his Commentary, besides a mass of scattered notes, complete essays on questions of faith and philosophy in the form of Introductions to different sections of the Mishnah.[144]

Maimonides gave a great deal of work to this Commentary, which he began and finished in his years of trouble and wandering. In the result he produced a masterpiece, which remains to this day superior to all later Commentaries on the Mishnah. But he did not achieve the principal object for which he took so much trouble: he did not make religion effective. His Commentary did not become widely known, and made no great impression; still less did it bring about a revolution in popular opinion, as its author hoped that it would. And it failed of its object on the practical as well as on the theoretical side. Many of the later laws, which have no basis in the Mishnah, could not be included in it; and those that were included were scattered about in no proper order, because the Mishnah itself has no strict order.

But as Maimonides grew older and reached middle life, years brought him wider knowledge and greater confidence in himself. This self-confidence gave him courage and decided him to approach his goal by another road. He would produce a work of striking originality, such as no Jew had ever produced before.

So he set to work on his _Mishneh Torah_. Instead of a Commentary on the Mishnah of R. Jehudah, Maimonides now produced a Mishnah of his own, new in content as in arrangement.[145] Here he sets forth all the practical laws of religion and morality and all the “true opinions” in the form best adapted to the understanding of ordinary men, in beautiful and clear language and in perfect logical order. Everything is put in its right place; decisions are given without hair-splitting arguments; opinions are set out untrammelled by arguments or proofs. In a word, the book presents all that the divine religion ought to give in order to fulfil its function, and presents it in precisely the right manner.[146]

This time Maimonides was justified in supposing that he had fulfilled his duty to his people and his religion, and had attained the end which he had set before himself. Within a short time this great book spread through the length and breadth of Jewry, and helped considerably not only to make the practical commandments more widely known, but also to purify and transform popular religious notions. Views distinguished by their freedom and their antagonism to current religious ideas appeared here in the innocent guise of canonical dicta; and as they were couched in the language of the Mishnah and in the familiar terminology of the old religious literature, people did not realise how far they were being carried, but swallowed the new ideas almost without resistance. If the dose was accepted not as pure philosophy, but as religious dogma, that was precisely what Maimonides intended: for according to his system religion was to teach philosophical truth to the masses in the guise of “divine” truth which needed no proof.

But Maimonides’ work was not yet completed. In the _Mishneh Torah_ he had reformed religion so far as its social function was concerned: that is to say, so far as the needs of the common people demanded. He had still to reform it from the point of view of the function of society itself: that is to say, to meet the needs of the chosen few. For the common people it was necessary to clothe philosophical truth in religious garb; for the few it was necessary to do just the reverse—to discover and expose the philosophical truth that lay beneath the religious garb. For this minority, consisting of those whom “human reason had attracted to abide within its sphere”—who had learnt and understood the prevailing philosophy of the time with all its preambles and its proofs—could not help seeing the deep gulf between philosophy and Judaism in its literal acceptation. It was impossible to hide the inner contradiction from such men by means of a superficial gloss, or to harmonise discrepancies of detail by a generalisation. What then should one of these men do if he were not only a philosopher, but also “a religious man who has been trained to believe in the truth of our Law”? He must always be in a state of “perplexity and anxiety.” “If he be guided solely by reason ... he would consider that he had rejected the fundamental principles of the Law; ... and if, instead of following his reason, he abandon its guidance altogether, it would still appear that his religious convictions had caused him loss and injury. For he would then be left with those errors [_i.e._, those derived from a literal interpretation of Scripture], and would be a prey to fear and anxiety, constant grief and great perplexity.”[147]

If we remember Maimonides’ conception of the “actualisation” of intellect, and how it obtains independent existence through understanding the Ideas, we shall see that he was bound to regard this perplexity of the “perfect individuals” as being in itself not merely something undesirable, but a grave danger from the point of view of the supreme end of mankind. For how could these perplexed men attain to the summit of perfection, to “acquired intellect,” if they doubted the truth of reason because it did not square with the truths of religion, with the result that subject and object could not be united in them and become a single, indivisible whole? If the divine teaching itself brings “loss and injury” to the chosen few, the harm that it does more than outweighs the good that it has done in improving the multitude and thus removing social obstacles from the path of the few.

This grave evil required a remedy; the “perplexed” had to be satisfied that they could devote themselves peacefully to the acquisition of the Ideas, without being disturbed by the thought that in so doing they were rejecting the fundamental principles of the Law. This was the task which Maimonides set himself in his last book, the _Guide for the Perplexed_. The book is in a way his own confession of faith; it shows his perplexed pupils the method by which he has succeeded in escaping from his own perplexity. After what has been said above, we need not here deal with this book at length. The “true opinions” which it contains have already been explained in outline; the method by which these opinions are discovered in the _Torah_ has been broadly indicated, and the details are not essential to our present purpose. It does not matter to us _how_ Maimonides subordinated religion to reason; the important thing is that he did subordinate it. From this point of view we may put the whole teaching of the _Guide_ in a single sentence. “Follow reason and reason only,” he tells the “perplexed,” “and explain religion in conformity with reason: for reason is the goal of mankind, and religion is only a means to the end.”

Had Maimonides written the _Guide_ before he wrote the _Mishneh Torah_, he would certainly have been pronounced a heretic, and his book would have made no deep impression either in the orthodox camp or in that of the doubters. The orthodox would have turned their backs on it and have striven to blot out its memory, as they did with so many other books which they thought dangerous to their faith; and the doubters would not have accepted its views as a perfect doctrine, but would have regarded it as merely an attempt on the part of one of their fellow-doubters to escape from his perplexity, and an attempt which in many details had failed and could not give entire satisfaction.

But in fact the _Guide_ was written after the _Mishneh Torah_, when Maimonides was already considered the greatest exponent of the Law, and enjoyed an unequalled reputation throughout the Diaspora. Hence even the _Guide_ could not dethrone him from his eminence. Willingly or unwillingly, his contemporaries accepted this further gift at his hands. The believers stormed and raged among themselves, but did not dare to attack Maimonides openly so long as he lived. The doubters welcomed the book with open arms; they did not stop to test or criticise, but drank eagerly of the comforting draught for which their souls had been thirsting. It was not some sophist, but the greatest sage in Israel, the light of the Exile, who went before them like a pillar of fire to illumine their path. How could they but be satisfied with such a guide?

But things changed when Maimonides’ death freed the zealots from the restraint of fear. A fierce conflict broke out about him, and raged for a hundred years. The religious leaders, long accustomed to ban every book that did not suit their views, could not possess their souls in silence when they saw, for the first time in Jewish history, that revolutionary books like the _Guide_ and the _Book of Science_ were spread abroad without let or hindrance, and were more popular and more esteemed by the people at large than almost any of the other books which the teachers and sages of Israel had placed in the treasury of Judaism.[148] The details of this conflict are familiar to scholars, and it is not my intention here to write the history of that period. But it is worth pointing out that most of Maimonides’ opponents at that time did not recognise clearly the fundamental change which he had introduced into Judaism. No doubt they all felt that his teaching meant a complete revolution in the national outlook; but they did not all understand what was the pivotal issue of the revolution. For the most part they merely pointed to certain details in which they found heresy, such as the denial of resurrection, of hell and paradise, and so forth. Only a few of them understood that Maimonides’ teaching was revolutionary not because of his attitude on this or that particular question, but because he dethroned religion altogether from the supreme judgment-seat, and put reason in its place: because he made it his basic principle that “whenever a Scripture is contradicted by proof we do not accept the Scripture,” but _explain_ it in accordance with reason.[149]

This emancipation of reason from its subordination to an external authority is the great and eternal achievement which has so endeared Maimonides to all those of our people who have striven after knowledge and the light. The theoretical system at which Maimonides worked so hard from his youth to the end of his life has long been swept away, together with the Arabic metaphysics on which it was based. But the practical consequence of that system—the emancipation of reason—remains, and has left its mark on the history of Jewish thought up to the present day. Every Jew who has left the old school and traversed the hard and bitter road that leads from blind faith to free reason must have met with Maimonides at the beginning of his journey, and must have found in him a source of strength and support for his first steps, which are the hardest and the most dangerous. This road was traversed not only by Mendelssohn, but also by Spinoza,[150] and before and after them by countless thinkers, many of whom won golden reputations within Judaism or outside it.

S. D. Luzzatto’s criticism of Maimonides, on the ground that his views on the nature of the soul led to the degradation of reason in Jewish thought, is superficial. Maimonides, according to him, “laid down what we must believe and what we must not believe,” whereas before his time there was no rigid dogma, “and there was no ban on opinions to prevent each thinker from believing what he thought true.”[151] Now this is not the place to show how far Luzzatto was from historical accuracy when he credited pre-Maimonidean Judaism with freedom of thought. To understand the true nature of that freedom we need only remember how Maimonides’ opponents—who were certainly faithful to the older Judaism—spoke and acted in the period of conflict. But as regards Maimonides himself, Luzzatto overlooks the fact that, while his psychological theory no doubt led him to regard certain opinions as obligatory, he placed the source of the obligation no longer in any external authority, but precisely in human reason. That being so, the obligation could not involve a ban on opinions. For as soon as other thinkers are persuaded that human reason does not make these particular opinions obligatory, they are bound, _in conformity with Maimonides’ own system_, to believe each what he thinks true, and not what Maimonides erroneously thought true. In other words: if we wish to judge Maimonides’ system from the point of view of its effects on Judaism, we must look not at the Thirteen Articles which he laid down as obligatory principles in accordance with that system, but at the one principle which underlies all others—that of the supremacy of reason. A philosopher who frees reason from authority in general must at the same time free it from his own authority; he cannot regard any view as obligatory except so long as it is made obligatory by reason. Imagine a man put in prison and given the key: can he be said to have lost his liberty?[152]

IV

Here ends what I wished to say about the supremacy of reason in Maimonides’ system; and here I might conclude this Essay. But I should like to add some remarks on another supremacy—on that of the national sentiment. In these days we cannot discuss the thought of one of our great men, even if there are seven hundred years between him and us, without wanting to know whether and to what extent his thought reveals traces of that sentiment which we now regard as the most vital element in the life of Judaism.

But this question really contains two different questions, which have to be answered differently so far as Maimonides is concerned. The first question is: Did Maimonides recognise the supremacy of the national sentiment in the spiritual life of his people, and allow it consciously and of set purpose an important place in the teaching of Judaism? The second is: Do we find traces of the supremacy of the national sentiment—as an unconscious and spontaneous instinct—in the mentality of Maimonides himself?[153]

The first question cannot be answered in the affirmative: the evidence is rather on the negative side. Had Maimonides recognised clearly the strength of the national sentiment as a force in Jewish life, and its importance as a factor in the development of Judaism, he would undoubtedly have used it, as Jehudah Halevi did, to explain the numerous features of Judaism which have their origin in the national sentiment. At any rate, he would not have endeavoured to invest those features with a universalistic character. For instance, in seeking reasons for the commandments he could easily have found that many of them have no purpose but to strengthen the feeling of national unity; and he would not have said of the Festivals that they “promote the good feeling that men should have to each other in their social and political relations.”[154] Nor would he have said, in dealing with the future redemption, that “the wise men and the prophets only longed for the days of the Messiah in order that they might be free to study the _Torah_ and its wisdom, without any oppression or interference, and so might win eternal life.”[155] No doubt we do sometimes find in his Letters, and especially in those that were written to encourage his people in times of national trouble, feeling references to the fortunes and the mission of the Jewish people.[156] But despite these isolated and casual references, only one conclusion can be drawn from the general tenor of Maimonides’ teaching: that he did not recognise the value of the national element in Jewish life, and did not allow that element due weight in his exposition of Judaism.[157] On the other hand, various indications show that in Maimonides himself the national sentiment was, without his knowledge, a powerful force: so much so, that it sometimes actually drove him from the straight road of logic and reason, and entangled him—of all men—in contradictions which had no ground or justification in his theory. We shall always find in the psychology of even the most logical thinker, despite his efforts to give to reason the undivided empire of his thought, some remote corner to which its sway cannot extend; and we shall always find a rebel band of ideas, which reason cannot control, breaking out from that point of vantage to disturb the order of its realm. Of this truth Maimonides may serve as an example. It is particularly evident in regard to the dogmas of Judaism which he laid down, accompanied by a declaration that “if any man rejects one of these fundamental beliefs, he severs himself from the community and denies a principle of Judaism: he is called a heretic and an unbeliever, and it is right to hate him and to destroy him.”[158] As we have already seen, it is an inevitable consequence of Maimonides’ teaching that the dogmas of religion must be formulated clearly and made obligatory on the whole people. But in strict accordance with his system Maimonides ought to have included among the dogmas only those “true opinions” without which religion could not have been maintained or have fulfilled its function. And in fact all his dogmas are of that character, except only the two last—those which assert the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection. How, then, did he come to include these two?

This question was raised soon after Maimonides’ own time (especially in regard to the belief in the Messiah); and his critics rightly pointed out that before laying down dogmas one must define exactly what is meant by a dogma, so that we may know how to distinguish between what may and what may not be properly so called.[159] It is indeed strange that Maimonides forgot so elementary a rule of logic, and still more strange when we remember that elsewhere, in enumerating the six hundred and thirteen commandments of the Law, he was fully alive to the necessity of explaining first of all “the principles which it is proper to take as a criterion,” in order to select from the multitude of ordinances in the _Torah_ those capital commandments from which the rest are derived. For this reason he fell foul of the earlier enumerations, which he regarded as ignorantly made and full of mistakes; and for his own part he first laid down fourteen “principles,” and then proceeded to enumerate the commandments according to those principles.[160] But if this procedure was necessary in dealing with the practical commandments, surely it was even more necessary in the case of the dogmas of faith. How, then, did it happen that Maimonides embarked on so important a task as the enumeration of dogmas without first laying down some principle by which to guide himself?

It seems to me that we have to do here not with a casual mistake, but with one of those facts which indicate that the national sentiment was strong enough in Maimonides to conquer even logic. If Maimonides had set out to define the term “dogma” in its purely religious sense, he could not have found the slightest justification for regarding the national belief in a future redemption as a dogma. But he felt that a national hope was necessary to the existence of the nation; and without the existence of the nation the continuance of its religion is unthinkable. It was this feeling that made him for once oblivious of logic, and prevented him from clearing up in his own mind the nature of religious dogmas in general, so that he might be able to include among them that national belief on which the nation depends for its existence, although it has no direct relation to the maintenance of religion as such.[161]

So also with the belief in resurrection, by which our people has always set great store in its exile. Every individual Jew has suffered the pain of exile not merely in his own person, but as a member of his people; his indignation and grief have been excited not by his private trouble only, but by the national trouble. He could find personal consolation in the hope of eternity in paradise; but this did not blunt the edge of the national trouble, which demanded its consolation in the prospect of a bright future for the nation. In those days the individual Jew was no longer, as in ancient times, keenly conscious that successive generations were made one by the organic life of the nation; and he could not therefore find consolation in the happiness which awaited his people at the end of time, but which he himself would not share. Hence he clung to the belief in resurrection, which offered what he required—a reward to himself for his individual share of the national grief. Just as every Jew had participated, during his own lifetime, in the national sorrow, so would every Jew be privileged in the future to see with his own eyes the national consolation and redemption.[162] Thus the belief in resurrection was complementary to the belief in the Messiah. United, they gave the people heart and strength to bear the yoke of exile and to battle successfully against a sea of troubles, confident that sooner or later the haven would be reached. When, therefore, Maimonides found it written in the Mishnah (beginning of chapter _Chelek_) that he who denies resurrection forfeits eternal life, he did not feel any need to explain this statement in a sense opposed to its literal meaning, as he usually did when his system so demanded, but took it just as he found it, and made it a dogma. He satisfied his heart at the expense of his head.

Strangely enough, Maimonides himself was perplexed over the question of resurrection, and could not explain why he clung to a belief which it was not easy to combine with his own theory of the soul and the future life. When he formulates the dogmas in his Commentary on the Mishnah, he passes hurriedly over this one, and dismisses it in a few words, as though he were afraid that if he lingered at this point logic would catch him up and ask awkward questions. In the _Mishneh Torah_, again, he does not explain this dogma at all, either at the beginning of the book, where he deals with the Foundations of the Law, or at the end, where he discusses the Messianic Age. This omission led some of his critics to suspect that he did not really believe in a literal resurrection of the body, but explained it in the sense of the rebirth of the soul hereafter (on which he enlarges very often). This suspicion made him very indignant, and he wrote a whole treatise to prove that he had never intended to take resurrection in any but its literal sense. On the contrary, he maintained that the belief must be accepted literally, and that it was in no way inconsistent with what he had written or with his general view.[163] But the arguments in this treatise are all very weak, and the general impression which it leaves is that he did not clearly understand his own mind. He felt instinctively that he could not give up this belief, though it was foreign to his system; but it was only with great difficulty that he could explain why he allowed it such importance. It was, of course, impossible for a man like Maimonides to admit to himself that he was following feeling rather than reason. He tried therefore to justify his standpoint on rational grounds, but without success.[164]

We find the same struggle between philosophical system and national sentiment in Maimonides’ attitude to the Hebrew language. From the point of view of his system he naturally saw no difference between one language and another: what matters is the idea, not its external dress. Hence he lays it down that speech “is not to be forbidden or allowed, loved or despised, according to the language, but according to the subject. That which is lofty may be said in whatever language; that which is mean may not be said in any language.”[165] Practising what he preached, he wrote most of his books not in Hebrew, but in Arabic, because he thought that by being written in the ordinary language of his age and his surroundings they would be of greater use from the point of view of their subject-matter. The only book that he wrote in Hebrew was the _Mishneh Torah_; and here also he was guided by practical considerations. He chose the language of the Mishnah because he wanted his people to regard the book with respect as a kind of second Mishnah. The beautiful Mishnaic language would carry off the “true opinions,” which needed the help of a sacred language to make them holy and bring them under the ægis of religion. Thus far Maimonides the philosopher. But in his letters we find clear indications that after he had finished his work his national sentiment proved stronger than his philosophy, and he regretted that he had not written his other works in Hebrew as well. Not only that, but he actually thought of translating them into the national language himself, so as “to separate that which is precious from that which is defiled, and to restore stolen goods to their rightful owner.” But the decline of his powers in old age did not permit him to carry out this intention, and the Hebrew translation had to wait for other hands. Some of it was done in his lifetime; and his letter to the translator of the _Guide_ shows how pleased he was.[166]

But there is really no need to look for the influence of the national sentiment in particular parts of Maimonides’ work. His work as a whole cannot be fully understood unless we allow for this sentiment. Of course, as we have seen, Maimonides’ efforts to improve religion were the result of his philosophy, which taught him that religion must be made fit to fulfil its function in the spheres of theory and practice; and for his own part he certainly believed that he was actuated solely by this conviction, and was doing, as needs he must, what reason demanded of him. But we, who look at things in the light of modern psychology, which tells us that intellectual conviction is not sufficient to produce sustained effort unless it is accompanied by a strong emotion, whereby the will is roused to conquer all obstacles—we cannot conceive the possibility of arduous work without a compelling emotion. And when we look for the emotion which is most likely to furnish an explanation in this particular case, we shall find none except the national sentiment.

For we know, on the one hand, that religious laws were for Maimonides nothing but an instrument of education—a means of confirming people in true beliefs and good habits of life. Moreover, he regarded many of them (sacrifices and the ceremonial associated with sacrifices) as merely a necessary evil, designed to restrict a bad practice which had taken root in the national life at an early period, and could not be abolished entirely; and even this justification applied only to the laws as a whole, while their details, as we saw above, were in his opinion wholly without meaning or significance. And yet, holding such views, he worked day and night for ten years to collect all these laws and arrange them, with meticulous exactness, down to their smallest details. Whoever realises the enormous labour that it required to get together the mass of legal prescriptions, scattered over an extensive literature, must admit that no man can be qualified for the work (even if he recognises its usefulness from a certain point of view) unless the work itself has a strong attachment for him. To see the usefulness of the work is not enough; it must be a real labour of love. What then can have kept Maimonides to his task if not the national sentiment, which made him love his people’s Law and ancient customs even where his philosophy did not attach to them any particular importance?

And on the other side, Maimonides could not have laboured to turn Judaism into a pure philosophy without the help of the national sentiment. We can understand the religious philosopher who tries to effect a compromise between religion and philosophy. The impelling force is his religious feeling: anxious to save religion from the danger threatened by rationalism, he adopts the familiar expedient of dressing religion in the trappings of philosophy, so as to safeguard its essential meaning. But when a philosopher starts, as Maimonides did, with the conviction that there is no room for compromise, but that religion is compelled, willy-nilly, to teach only what reason approves and when he labours indefatigably to purify religious belief of all super-rational elements, and to turn its essential content into a pure philosophical system, and all this by long and devious methods, which reason cannot always approve: then we are bound to ask what emotion it was that gave him the strength and the will-power required for so difficult a task. Religious emotion certainly gained nothing from a process by which religion was driven from its own throne and deprived of its letters patent as a guide to eternal happiness along a private road of its own. Philosophical emotion—if the term may be used—might have gained more if Maimonides had accepted and prescribed the method adopted by free-thinkers before and after him—that of leaving faith to the believing masses and being satisfied for his own part with reason alone. But the national sentiment did gain a great deal by the transformation of the Jewish religion—the only national inheritance which had survived to unite our scattered people in exile—into philosophical truth, firmly based on rational and (as Maimonides sincerely believed) irrefragable proofs, and consequently secure for all time against assault.

So we come finally to the conclusion that Maimonides, too, like the other Jewish thinkers, had as the ultimate aim of his great work (though perhaps he did not realise it clearly) the shaping of the content and form of Judaism into a fortress on which the nation could depend for its continuance in exile. There is only this difference: that whereas his predecessors held Judaism secure because it was _above_ reason, Maimonides came and said: “No! Judaism is secure because it _is_ reason.”

Footnote 86:

[Maimonides died on the 13th December, 1204.]

Footnote 87:

[Jewish Law.]

Footnote 88:

[Allusion to well-known speeches at Zionist Congresses.]

Footnote 89:

_Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Law_, chaps. i.-iv.

Footnote 90:

_Ibid._, chap. iv. 1.

Footnote 91:

_Guide_, Part I., chap. i. [In rendering quotations from the _Moreh
Nebuchim_ (_Guide for the Perplexed_) the translator has used Dr.
Friedländer’s English version so far as possible.]

Footnote 92:

_Foundations of the Law_, _ibid._, 7.

Footnote 93:

In the upper world Aristotle’s philosophy postulates the existence of
forms divorced from matter: they are the “separate Intelligences,”
which emanate one from another and are eternal (see _Foundations of
the Law_, _ibid._, and _Guide_, Part II., chap. iv.).

Footnote 94:

_Guide_, Part III., chap. viii.

Footnote 95:

_Foundations of the Law_, _ibid._, 8 and 9.

Footnote 96:

_Eight Chapters_, chap. i.

Footnote 97:

See Munk, _Le Guide des Egarés_, I., pp. 304-8 (note).

Footnote 98:

_Guide_, Part I., chaps. lxx. and lxxii. and _passim_. For details see
Munk (_ibid._), and Dr. Scheyer’s monograph, _Das Psychologische
System des Maimonides_, Frankfort a/M, 1845.

Footnote 99:

_Foundations of the Law_, chap. iv., 8, 9.

Footnote 100:

There is some ground for thinking that Maimonides thought of the
eternal existence after death of the possessors of “acquired
intellect” not as personal, but as a common existence in which they
are all united as a single separate being. See _Guide_, III., chap.
xxvii., and _Foundations_, _ibid._, and chap. ii., 5-6. This has been
pointed out by Dr. Joel in _Die Religionsphilosophie des Mose ben
Maimon_, Breslau, 1876 (p. 25, note).

Footnote 101:

_Guide_, I., chap. lxviii.

Footnote 102:

According to the division of the sciences current in those days, all
this knowledge of true Being is contained in Physics and Metaphysics.

Footnote 103:

All this teaching is scattered up and down Maimonides’ works, partly
in explicit statements and partly in hints (see, _e.g._, _Guide_,
III., chap. li.). Dr. Scheyer was the first to work out these
definitions in detail (_ibid._, chap. iii.). In general it must be
remembered that Maimonides nowhere explains his whole system in
logical order, and we are therefore compelled, if we would understand
his system as it was conceived in his mind, to make use of scattered
utterances, hints, and half-sentences written by the way, to explain
obscure statements by others more precise, and to resort freely to
inference.

Footnote 104:

_Guide_, III., chap. xiii., and Introduction to _Commentary on the
Mishnah_, section _Zera’im_.

Footnote 105:

Introduction cited in last note.

Footnote 106:

_Ibid._

Footnote 107:

_Guide_, III., chap. li. Maimonides does not there emphasise the
difference between practical studies on the one hand and mathematics
and logic on the other, because this is not germane to his purpose at
the moment. But the distinction is necessarily implied.

Footnote 108:

_Guide_, III., chaps. xxvii. and liv.; _Hilchoth De’oth_, chaps. iii.
and iv.

Footnote 109:

Introduction to _Zera’im_.

Footnote 110:

Maimonides’ attitude to perfection of character is most clearly
revealed by the fact that he calls it “bodily perfection,” in contrast
to “perfection of the soul,” which is _intellectual_ perfection
(_Guide_, III., chap. xxvii.).

Footnote 111:

See _Hilchoth De’oth_, chap. i.; _Eight Chapters_, chap. iv.

Footnote 112:

_Guide_, III., chap. liv.

Footnote 113:

See _Eight Chapters_, end of chap. iv. and beginning of chap. v.
Lazarus (_Ethik des Judentums_, I., chap. xiv.) fails to notice this
difference between Aristotle and Maimonides, and therefore finds it
strange that Maimonides introduces Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean
into Jewish ethics.

Footnote 114:

Introduction to _Zera’im_.

Footnote 115:

See _Guide_, III., chaps. xxvii., xxxiv. Maimonides is not explicit on
the relation of the minority to social morality; but his view on this
question is evident from what he says in the chapters quoted, and
_passim._

Footnote 116:

_Eight Chapters_, chap. v.

Footnote 117:

_Guide_, II., chap. xxv.

Footnote 118:

_Guide_, II., chaps. xxv. and xvi.

Footnote 119:

Maimonides explains his views on the methods of divine revelation and
the nature of prophecy in general, and of the prophecy of Moses in
particular, in several places: especially in _Guide_, II., chaps.
xxxii.-xlviii., and in _Mishneh Torah_, section _Foundations of the
Law_, chap. vii. But for our present purpose we need not enter into
these speculations. It suffices to say that here also he was true to
his own system. The Prophet is for him the most perfect “actual man”;
and the divine inspiration reaches the Prophet through that separate
Intelligence (“active intellect”) which is, according to the
philosophical system adopted by Maimonides, charged with the guidance
of the world and with the raising of all forms (including the form of
the soul) from potentiality to actuality.

Footnote 120: