Maimonides, Spinoza and the Book of Job[1]
I invite you to reflect
with me on the meaning of the Book of Job and of Maimonides' comments on
it in the Guide of the Perplexed.
This exercise in interpretation offers the pleasures inherent in any
attempt to decipher a difficult text, a pleasure doubled here by the fact that
we have two difficult texts. Maimonides' discussion of Job is at least
as puzzling as the work it analyzes.
But philosophers have a
special reason to try to solve the puzzle of these texts. They treat, in an
uncompromising way, a difficulty for theism which, as Hobbes remarked, has
shaken the faith, not only of ordinary people, but also of philosophers, and
even of the saints themselves: why do bad things happen to good people? This is clearly one of the main perplexities
Maimonides hopes to resolve in the Guide.
Those are no doubt
reasons enough to do what we are about to do.
But students of Spinoza have a further motive for pursuing this
inquiry. It appears that the main reason
Spinoza turned to philosophy, and to the new philosophy of Descartes, was that
he was disillusioned with the theology they taught in the synagogue.[2] It appears also that his Theological-Political
Treatise (TTP), though published only in 1670, recapitulates the essence of
the lost defense of his opinions which Spinoza wrote when he was excommunicated
fourteen years earlier.[3] Since Maimonides is very much under attack in
the TTP, it seems fair to regard him as a prime example of the kind of theology
Spinoza was rebelling against in 1656.
And though Spinoza has very little to say explicitly in the TTP about
Maimonides' interpretation of Job, it seems likely that in reflecting on
Job and on Maimonides' analysis of Job we will be engaging in the
kind of reflection Spinoza went through at a critical stage of his
development. At least I hope you will
find that conjecture plausible by the time we finish.
*
* *
Let's begin by
recalling the broad outlines of the story.
We can divide Job, the book, into three main parts:
1) a prose prologue, consisting of
two chapters;
2) a poetic dialogue, running from
the beginning of Chapter 3 through verse 6 of Chapter 42, and so constituting
by far the greatest part of the story; and
3) a prose epilogue, consisting of
the remaining 11 verses of Chapter 42.
It's also natural to subdivide that long second part into three parts of
its own:
2a) the dialogue between Job,
Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar in Chapters 3-31;
2b) the intervention of Elihu, in
Chapters 32-37; and
2c) God's address to Job from the
whirlwind, in Chapters 38-42:6,
making a total of five parts in all.
The prose prologue
characterizes the hero of the story as a man "blameless and upright"[4] who
lived and prospered in the
Have you marked my servant,
Job? There is none like him on earth, a
blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil. (1:8)
To this the Satan replies;
Does Job fear God for nought? Have you not hedged him round, him and his
household and everything he has? His efforts you have blessed, and his property
has increased in the land. Just reach
out and strike what he has, and he will curse you to your face. (1:9-11)
Yahweh takes up the challenge, giving the Satan permission to afflict
Job with various evils, so long as he does not touch Job's person. So the Satan destroys Job's livestock, and
his servants, and his children. But Job
accepts these afflictions and refuses to curse God:
Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked shall I return there; Yahweh gave, and Yahweh took away; blessed be
Yahweh's name. (
The same scenario is then repeated, except that in the second dialogue
with the Satan Yahweh gives him permission to touch Job's person, so long as he
spares Job's life. The Satan then
inflicts "loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of
his head." (NRSV 2:7) But still Job
remains faithful to Yahweh. His wife
says to him:
Do you still maintain your
integrity? Curse God and die. (2:9)
To which Job replies:
You talk like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God and not accept
evil? (
Then three friends come to comfort him, Eliphaz, Bildad, and
Zophar. They sit with him on the ground
for seven days and seven nights, and no one speaks, "for they [see] that
his anguish [is] very great." (
At this point there is
an abrupt shift, both in literary style and in content. The characters begin to speak in poetry. Job, whose conduct up to this point has
justified traditional talk about his patience, now curses the day he was
born. His friends, often called his
comforters, begin now to blame the victim: he should not complain; he must have
sinned in some way, or he would not be so afflicted, since God is just. Job defends his innocence and demands to be
told his fault. He can no longer calmly
accept his afflictions. This kind of
dialogue runs from Chapter 3 to the end of Chapter 31, and constitutes the
first of three subdivisions in the poetic dialogue.
In Chapter 32 a new
character appears, Elihu, a young man who criticizes the friends for failing to
confute Job, and undertakes to do so himself.
Whether he has anything to add to what they have said, or whether there
are any interesting differences among the three friends,[6] are
questions we must defer until later.
Elihu goes on for six chapters, without any response from Job. This is the second subdivision of the poem.
Then Yahweh speaks to
Job out of a whirlwind, in a long series of rhetorical questions:
Who is this that obscures counsel
with words void of knowledge?
Gird your loins like a hero, I will
question you and you tell me.
Where were you when I founded the
earth? Tell me if you know so much. (38:2-4)
The poem continues in this vein for four chapters; they do not to
respond directly to Job's challenge by identifying his sin, but emphasize God's
power and knowledge, contrasting it with Job's weakness and ignorance. The poetic section then concludes with Job
submitting once again to Yahweh:
I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted...
I talked of things I did not know,
wonders beyond my ken...
I had heard of you by hearsay, but
now my own eye has seen you;
So I recant[7] and
repent in dust and ashes. (42:2-6)
Here the poetic portion of the book ends, and Yahweh, in prose,
chastises Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar for not speaking the truth about him, as
Job did. (42:7) He does not mention
Elihu, but then Elihu is not mentioned anywhere in the book outside those six
chapters where he speaks. Nor is there
at the end of the work any reference to the Satan or his challenge. God simply restores Job's fortunes, giving
him twice as much as he had before.[8] The final word is that Job continued to live
for another 140 years, and saw his children, and his children's children,
"to four generations," until he finally died, "old and satisfied
with life." (42:17)
If you have a fresh
memory of this book, you will know that in retelling this story I have left out
much interesting detail. My aim has been
to set the stage for philosophical discussion and interpretation, without, so
far as possible, prejudging the questions the narrative may occasion. I have alluded to certain oddities in the
story - the differences in perspective between the prose and poetic parts of
the story, the mysterious appearance and disappearance of Elihu late in the poetic
dialogue, the absence of the Satan at the end.
Such puzzles may make a modern reader suspect multiple authorship. But Maimonides seems not to consider that
possibility, and for now I shall follow his example.
*
* *
Maimonides' discussion
of Job is contained in two chapters of the Guide,[9] III, 22
& 23. Before analyzing it, however, we need to look first at III, 17. The discussion of Job occurs in the context
of a general discussion of the problem of providence. In III, 17, Maimonides says that there are,
all told, five kinds of opinion people have about providence, all of which are
"ancient," in the sense that they have all been around since the time
of the prophets (p. 464/282). When he
comes later to the book of Job, he will identify Job, Eliphaz, Bildad
and Zophar with one or another of these five opinions, each with a different
one. So we need to lay out these various
possibilities.
The first opinion,
which Maimonides identifies as being that of Epicurus, is that
there is no providence at all...
that everything [both in the heavens and in the sublunary world] happens by
chance and in accordance with the way things were predisposed; there is no one
who orders, governs, or is concerned with anything. (p. 464/282)
This is the one opinion Maimonides does not identify with any
participant in the dialogue of the book of Job;[10] it is
also the one opinion he says definitively is "inadmissible," since
Aristotle has demonstrated that "it cannot be true that all things should
have been generated by chance; and that, on the contrary, there is someone who
orders and governs them."
Students of Aristotle
may protest at the idea of finding a defense of divine providence in his works.[11] After
all, they may say, the God of Book Lambda of the Metaphysics is thought
thinking about itself and only about itself (1074b15-34). So it cannot order and govern all
things. Later we will find Spinoza
complaining that Maimonides reads Greek philosophy into Scripture; here we
might rather complain that he reads Scripture into Greek philosophy.
In a way Maimonides
addresses this objection when he goes on to describe the position he ascribes
to Aristotle, the second of the five opinions he discusses in III, 17. On this view God does not watch over
everything, but only over certain things.
His concern for individuals extends only as far as the realm of the
spheres; in the sublunary world he is concerned only with species, not with
individuals. It appears that Maimonides
owes this reading of Aristotle to a treatise by Alexander of Aphrodisias On
Providence, written originally in Greek and surviving only in an Arabic
translation.[12] Maimonides apparently thinks Aristotle held
this view because he observed order at the level of individuals only in the
realm of the spheres, and only at the level of species in the sublunary
world. "Order" here seems to
mean continuous subsistence without any corruption or change. (III, 17, p.
466/283) What happens to individuals in
the sublunary realm, on this reading of Aristotle, is to be ascribed to chance,[13] not to
the governance of one who governs.
The next two opinions
Maimonides discusses he associates with two schools of Islamic theologians, the
Ash`arites and the Mu`tazilites. The
Ash`arites react strongly against the idea that anything might happen by
chance. Everything that happens happens
through the will of God. They interpret
this dictum in a way which entails a denial of the effectiveness of finite
causes. "It is not the wind which
causes the leaves to fall, for every leaf falls through an ordinance and a
decree of God." (p. 467/283) On the
Ash`arite view
if we see that an excellent man who
was devoted to God's worship has been killed through torture, we should say: He
[i.e., God] has willed this. And in this
there is no injustice, for according to them, it is permissible for God to
punish one who has not sinned and to reward a sinner with benefits. (p.
467/284)
The permissibility of God's punishing the innocent (like their denial of
the effectiveness of finite causes) stems from the Ash`arite conviction that
anything else would be incompatible with God's omnipotence. That is to say, if a finite cause were to be
truly effective, or if God were to be bound by justice to reward the virtuous
and punish the ungodly, that would imply that God's power was not
absolute. The Ash`arites were
voluntarists about right and wrong, who held that sin consists in disobedience
to the will of God, with the consequence that it is impossible for God's acts
to be unjust, regardless of what their specific nature is.[14]
Maimonides does not
reject the Ash`arite view as unequivocally as he rejects Epicureanism. He does not say it has been demonstrated to
be false. But he does say that it
involves "great incongruities,"[15] which
constitute a burden for the people who accept it. One incongruity is a point on which they
agree with Aristotle: that there is an equality between the fall of a leaf and
the death of a human individual. (p. 466/283) Of course they understand that
equality differently than Aristotle does.
For them both events happen as a result of the will of God. For Aristotle (as interpreted by Maimonides)
both happen by chance. Maimonides
rejects the equality. He finds it
repugnant to say that there is no difference between the fall of a leaf and the
death of a human individual or between a spider's devouring a fly and a
ravenous lion's devouring a prophet.
Other incongruities in the Ash`arite position are that they deny free
will and contingency, and that their position entails that the Law is "quite
useless," since the man to whom it is addressed lacks the ability either
to do or not to do what it commands or forbids. (p. 467/284)
The fourth opinion
Maimonides discusses he identifies with the Mu`tazilites, who hold that man
does have free will (in the sense of an ability to act of his own accord), and
that the commandments and prohibitions, rewards and punishments, of the Law are
"well ordered." (p. 467/284)
All God's actions follow from his wisdom, injustice is not permissible
to him, and he does not punish a man who does good. So far, you might think, this is a position
congenial to that of Scripture, and indeed the Mu`tazilite view is also
represented within Jewish thought, as Maimonides is aware.[16]
But the Mu`tazilites
also hold (with the Ash`arites) that God has knowledge of everything which
happens to individuals, both in the human realm and in the non-human. God knows "the falling of this
particular leaf and... the creeping of this particular ant, and... His
providence watches over all the beings." (p. 468/284) The Mu`tazilites do,
it seems, allow, as consistent with God's justice, that a person might be born
with an infirmity without having sinned or that an excellent man might
perish. This happens, they say, not as
punishment, but as a benefit, though we may not be able to understand what the
benefit consists in. In the case of the
excellent man who perishes, it is presumably that he may have a greater reward
in the life to come. In the case of the
man born with the infirmity, it is apparently that it is better for this
individual to be infirm than for him to be sound in body, though we may not be
able to understand why.
One thing Maimonides
finds particularly objectionable in the Mu`tazilite view is that they extend
divine providence even to animals other than man. So if a mouse, which has not sinned, is
devoured by a cat, this is because God's wisdom has required it, and the mouse
"will receive compensation in the other world for what has happened to
it." Still more serious, however,
is the charge of self-contradiction. To
hold both that God knows everything and that man has the ability to act,
Maimonides claims, leads to self-contradiction, "as the slightest
reflection should make clear." (p. 469/285)
The fifth opinion, that
of the Law of Moses, is that man has an absolute ability to act, and indeed,
that all species of animals move in virtue of their own will. It is also a principle of the Law that God
cannot be unjust, where this is held to entail that the benefits and calamities
which come to men are deserved, though we may be ignorant of the way in which
they are deserved. I'll call this, for
short, the Mosaic position. It is also,
apparently, the Maimonidean position, though we will subsequently encounter
some grounds for doubting whether or not we should ascribe it to him.
Maimonides does not
claim that he has demonstrative knowledge that the Mosaic position is correct.
(p. 471/286) He accepts it, he says, because this clearly appears to be the
teaching of Scripture. And sometimes his
acceptance sounds grudging, as when he says that the Mosaic position is
"less disgraceful than the preceding opinions and nearer than they to
intellectual reasoning."[17]
One reason for
preferring the Mosaic position to the others, apparently, is that, as
Maimonides interprets the teaching of the Law, the doctrine of a divine
providence coordinating good and evil with desert applies at the level of
individuals only to humans. Regarding
members of other species in the sublunary realm, Aristotle is right and the Law
agrees with Aristotle. It is not the
case that "this particular leaf has fallen because of a providence
watching over it; nor that this spider has devoured this fly because God has
now decreed and willed something concerning individuals." Maimonides says that he
was impelled to adopt this belief by
the fact that I never found in the book of a prophet a text mentioning that God
has a providence watching over one of the animal individuals, but only over a
human individual. The prophets are even
sometimes astonished because providence watches over human individuals - man
being too insignificant for providence to watch over him...[18]
So he will cite, among other verses, one from Elihu in Job:
For his eyes are on man's conduct,
He sees his every step,[19]
but also the familiar question of the Psalmist:
What is man that thou art mindful of
him?[20]
The idea is that, since humans barely qualify as objects of God's
concern, non-human individuals certainly will not qualify. Maimonides dismisses scriptural texts which
might suggest a divine providence extending even to the animals, e.g.,
He gives to the animals their food,
and to the young ravens when they
cry (Psalms 147:9)
These show only a concern for species, not one for individuals.
The argument that God's
providence does not extend to individual members of non-human species is
essentially an argument from silence.
But it does help to explain why Scripture permits us to kill animals and
use them for our own ends, and I do not find this limitation of God's
providence to human individuals outlandish as a reading of Scripture. (pp.
472-473/287)
Toward the end of III,
17, however, Maimonides suggests, apparently as a further specification of the
Mosaic position,[21]
an additional limitation on God's providence.
On this view, God's providence is selective even within the human
species; God is more concerned with the welfare of the wise than with that of
the ignorant:
I believe that providence is
consequent upon the intellect and attached to it. For providence can only come from an
intelligent being, from One who is an intellect perfect with a supreme
perfection... Accordingly everyone with whom something of this overflow is
united will be reached by providence to the extent to which he is reached by
the intellect. (p. 474/288)
I take this to mean that God will have some concern for every human
being who achieves some measure of participation in the overflow (or emanation)
from the divine intellect, but that God's concern will be less for those whose
degree of participation is less, and non-existent for those who do not
participate at all.[22] I take it that participation to any degree
requires some knowledge of God, and that rationality alone is not sufficient.[23] The ignorant cannot expect a nice correlation
of benefits and calamities to desert; the wise can. I propose to call this "the
intellectualist position," since it seems, prima facie, to be a view
distinct from the Mosaic position.
Though Maimonides apparently regards what I am calling the
intellectualist position as the proper way to understand the Mosaic position, I
find his arguments to that effect perfunctory and unconvincing.[24]
The intellectualist
position has a fair claim to being Maimonides' final word on the general
subject of divine providence, and knowledgeable interpreters of Maimonides
often take it to be just that.[25] I would like, for the time being, to leave
open the following questions:
i) Whether the intellectualist
position is, in fact, Maimonides' final word on the issue of providence?
ii) Whether Maimonides honestly
believes that the intellectualist position is the proper way to understand the
Mosaic position? and
iii) Whether there is any
plausibility at all in regarding the intellectualist position as being, in
fact, a legitimate way of understanding Scripture?
If the answer to the first two of these questions is "yes,"
and the answer to the last question is "no," then that would be a
confirmation of Spinoza's general criticism of Maimonides as a Hellenizer of
Scripture. Whether or not the
intellectualist position is one we can really describe as a Platonic or
Aristotelian speculation, the preference it gives to intellectual excellence
over moral excellence does seem more Hellenic than Hebraic in spirit.[26] But since the answer to the third question
seems to me clearly to be "no," I hesitate to answer "yes"
to the second. And I also have doubts
about the right way to answer the first.
Some of my reasons will emerge from our consideration of what Maimonides
has to say about Job, but I can indicate one reason now.
Much earlier in the Guide,
in I, 72, Maimonides had made a preliminary, and rather skeptical declaration
on the subject of providence:
The governance and the providence of
Him, may He be exalted, accompany the world as a whole in such a way that the
manner and true reality of this accompaniment are hidden from us: the faculties
of human beings are inadequate to understand this. On the one hand, there is a demonstration of
His separateness, may He be exalted, from the world and of His being free from
it; and on the other, there is a demonstration that the influence of His
governance and providence in every part of the world, however small and
contemptible, exists. (p. 193/119)
Here we have Maimonides the precursor of Kant, denying knowledge in
order to make room for faith.[27] Except, of course, that when Kant claims that
the exercise of pure reason leads to antinomies, he actually gives you what
purport to be demonstrations of the contradictory propositions, whereas
Maimonides merely claims that the demonstrations are available, and leaves it
as an exercise for the reader to find them.
When Maimonides comes
back to the discussion of providence in III, 17, he makes no mention of this
earlier skeptical view and it is a fair question how the two parts of the Guide
are supposed to be related. Here is one
possible answer: in the earlier passage, when Maimonides claims that God is
demonstrably separate from the world, he is claiming the demonstrability of
either the Epicurean view or the Aristotelian view (Epicureanism if we take
"the world" to refer to the whole of the physical universe,
Aristotelianism if we take it to refer only to the sublunary realm); when he
claims that God's providence demonstrably extends to every part of the world,
he is claiming the demonstrability of either the Ash`arite or the Mu`tazilite
view (since the universality of God's providence is common to both positions
and they disagree only about how to reconcile this with God's justice). If the first demonstration is sound, it
presumably destroys both the Ash`arite and Mu`tazilite positions (since it
proves the falsity of their common element).
If the second demonstration is sound, it presumably destroys the
Epicurean and Aristotelian positions (since its conclusion is inconsistent with
the weaker Aristotelian position, a fortiori it destroys the Epicurean
view). The mutual destruction of these
views leaves the field clear for Maimonides to affirm the Mosaic position on
grounds of faith.
I say that's a possible
answer, in the sense that I can imagine someone saying that. But I don't think it's a very satisfactory
answer. After all, the Mosaic position,
insofar as it affirms the compromise view that God's providence extends only to
part of the world and not to all, is inconsistent with the conclusions of each
of the alleged demonstrations. So you
might better say: if either of these demonstrations actually works, then the
Mosaic position must be false; and given Maimonides' view that we must interpret
scripture in such a way that it is consistent with what philosophy can
demonstrate (Guide II, 25, pp. 327-329/199-200), then if either of the
demonstrations works, any scriptural passage we might appeal to as prima facie
supporting the Mosaic position would have to be interpreted so as not to
actually support it. Faith is deprived
of its basis. Before we ever enter into
the interpretation of Job, we have reason to find Maimonides' position
highly problematic.
*
* *
The intellectualist
position appears to offer the following simple solution to the problem of
undeserved suffering: if a person is morally virtuous, but lacking in
intellectual excellence, he cannot expect his well-being to be proportioned to
his moral virtue. God does not care that
much about moral virtue; what he values is intellectual excellence. This somewhat brutal way of stating the
position will make it clear, I hope, why I find it unattractive
philosophically, and hence, why I need some persuading that it is Maimonides'
"final solution" to the problem of people like Job.
Of course, if
Maimonides held that moral and intellectual virtue were necessarily connected,
so that you could not have either one without the other, the notion that
providence is proportionate to intellectual excellence would be less
problematic. Sometimes Maimonides does
seem to hold that there is such a connection between moral virtue and
intellectual excellence.[28] But if this is his considered view, then it
excludes the possibility of dealing with Job in the way he seems to want to in
III, 22:
The most marvellous and
extraordinary thing about this story is the fact that knowledge is not
attributed in it to Job. He is
not said to be a wise or a comprehending or an intelligent man. Only moral virtue and righteousness in action
are ascribed to him. For if he had been wise,
his situation would not have been obscure for him...[29]
Job's problem, it appears, is that he is one of those "ignoramuses
who observe the commandments,"[30] i.e.,
someone who is scrupulous in his observance of the Law (1:5), but whose belief
in God is based only on hearsay, not on philosophical argument (42:5). Such people are too remote from God to merit
his consistent concern for their well-being.
One thing to note about
this passage, though, is the concluding counterfactual. Maimonides does not say that if Job
had been wise, his situation would have been different (i.e., he would not have
suffered the calamities he did). He
merely claims that Job would have understood his situation (i.e., presumably,
he would have understood why he suffered those calamities). So this passage does not represent a
straightforward application of the intellectualist theory of providence to the
case of Job.
To understand what is
going on in Maimonides' discussion of Job, I think we need first to ask
ourselves why it is divided into two chapters.
Does this merely reflect Maimonides' preference for keeping his chapters
relatively short, or is there some deeper rationale for the division of the
material?
*
* *
Maimonides begins the
first of his chapters on Job by claiming that the story "is a parable
intended to set forth the opinions of people concerning providence." In support of this Maimonides cites the opinion
of "some of [the Sages]," i.e., the wise men of the Talmud, who have
said that "Job never existed."
He is careful to note that other sages believe Job did exist, and that
the story told of him did happen, though they differ as to when and where these
events occurred, whether it was in the days of the patriarchs, or in those of
Moses, or in those of David, or in the post-exilic period. Maimonides seems to think this disagreement
about the time and place confirms the view of those who hold the story to be a
parable.
What is at stake in
this dispute? I take it that the issue
is how much of the story we should believe to be true. Maimonides writes that
whether Job ever existed or not, "cases like his... always exist,"[31] and
that they cause "all reflecting people" to become perplexed and to
turn to one or another of the five opinions about providence. (p. 486/296) Someone who holds the story to be a parable
will hold that only the most general features of the story are descriptive of
any sequence of events which ever occurred.
Suppose we rewrote the story, stripping it of all proper names:
Once upon a time there was a man,
who was blameless and upright, and who prospered for a long time. Then one day calamity befell him, without
there being any evident reason why he should deserve to suffer...
This would be sufficient to generate perplexity in anyone who believes
in God, who believes that God is aware of what happens to individuals in the
world, and who believes that God has the power and the disposition at least to
intervene in those happenings, to prevent bad things from happening to good
people.
Maimonides writes that
even those who believe that Job really existed take certain aspects of the
prose prologue to be a parable. He
mentions specifically, "the discourse of Satan, that of God addressed to
Satan, and the giving-over [of Job to Satan]." Anyone "endowed with intellect"
recognizes that that part of the story is a parable, though Maimonides remarks
that
it is not a parable like all others,
but one to which extraordinary notions and things that are the mystery of
the universe are attached. Through
it great enigmas are solved, and truths than which none is higher become clear.[32]
In the remainder of this chapter Maimonides focuses primarily on the
role of Satan in the story, whom he takes to be (or at least to be presented in
the Book of Job as) the cause of Job's misfortunes. (p. 487/297) The picture he presents of Satan is one
modern scholarship would reject as anachronistic: Satan[33] is not
a member of God's court carrying out one of its functions, but an adversary of
God's, who leads men astray.[34]
At the end of III, 22,
Maimonides comments, astonishingly, that he has "analyzed and explained
the story of Job up to its ultimate end and conclusion."[35] But he has not, at this point, said anything
at all about the dialogue between Job and his friends, or God's answer to Job,
or Job's final submission to God, or the restoration of Job's prosperity. Those subjects Maimonides reserves for the
following chapter:
I want, however, to explain to you
the opinion ascribed to Job and the opinion ascribed to each of his friends,
using proofs that I gleaned from the discourse of each of them. You should not, however, pay attention to the
other dicta rendered necessary by the order of the discourse, as I explained to
you in the beginning of this Treatise. (p. 490/299)
This last appears to be a warning that what is to follow may contain
certain contradictions, and hence encourages a Straussian reading of the text.[36]
*
* *
III, 23, proceeds on
the assumption that the story is not a parable: "if it is supposed that
the story of Job happened..." And it seems to take the notion that
the story happened in a stronger sense than had been allowed before. Previously we were told that even those who
believed that Job existed (i.e., who thought the story was not a parable)
rejected as a literary fiction the prologue's depiction of God as wagering with
the Satan on Job's integrity and giving the Satan permission to afflict
him. Now one consequence of
taking the story not to be a parable is that God is understood to be the cause
of Job's misfortunes:
... the first thing that occurred
was a matter on which there was general agreement between [sic] the five [Job,
Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu], namely, that everything that had befallen Job
was known to Him, may He be exalted, and that God caused these misfortunes to
befall him. (p. 490/299)
This is indeed a point on which Job and his four friends agree. It is also a point the Biblical narrative
endorses. After the first round of
calamities God points out to the Satan that Job
still holds fast to his integrity,
though you incited me against him, to destroy him without cause. (2:3)
The Satan may have instigated Job's destruction and been its proximate
cause, but God accepts responsibility for it as well.[37]
I observe further that
the intellectualist solution to the problem of undeserved suffering will
apparently not work on this hypothesis.
I.e., if God caused Job's misfortunes, then we cannot explain them by
saying that God concerns himself consistently only with the wise and leaves the
ignorant largely to chance. That, I take
it, is why the remark about Job's possessing moral virtue, but not intellectual
excellence, occurs in III, 22, not III, 23.
It would be inconsistent with the hypothesis under which III, 23, is
conducted.
The rest of III, 23,
consists in a discussion of the various participants in the dialogue, most of
whom are identified with one or another of the five positions on providence
which Maimonides had described in III, 17.
Maimonides acknowledges that there is a good deal of repetition in the
dialogue and that it may seem hard to distinguish the participants'
perspectives.[38] But he insists that it is possible. The remainder of the first paragraph
describes Job's position in the dialogue: that he is righteous, that he has
suffered terribly, and that his fate shows that God treats the righteous and
the wicked equally, because he has contempt for the human species and has
abandoned it. There follow three
paragraphs describing, respectively, the positions of Eliphaz, Bildad, and
Zophar. These three all agree that (in
the end, at least) God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, but
Maimonides undertakes to find differences between them. In ¶5 he claims that Job's position is the
Aristotelian one, Eliphaz's the Mosaic position, Bildad's the Mu`tazilite
position, and Zophar's the Ash`arite position.
Then comes a long paragraph dealing with Elihu, in which Maimonides
argues that, though he may seem merely to repeat the views of the other three
friends (of whom he is highly critical for their failure to confute Job), he
does add one new idea: that Job may hope for an angel to intercede on his
behalf. The chapter concludes with a
paragraph on God's answer from the whirlwind.
These various
identifications are extremely interesting.
To say that Eliphaz represents the teaching of the Law is neither
surprising nor problematic. To say that
Bildad is a Mu`tazilite may be slightly surprising, but is supported with
plausible scriptural evidence.[39] The claim that Zophar is an Ash`arite seems
much more difficult to make out.
Prima facie Maimonides'
identification of Zophar as an Ash`arite is inconsistent with the previous
assertion (p. 491/299) that all three of the friends agree that people suffer
if and only if they have sinned. The
scriptural evidence Maimonides offers in support of his new view might more
aptly be taken as evidence for the old.
He cites the following passage:
11:5 [Would] that God would speak,
and open His lips against thee;
11:6 And that He would tell thee the
secrets of wisdom, that they may teach thee doubly...
11:7 Canst thou by searching find
out God? Canst thou find out the
Almighty unto perfection?
What Zophar says here, essentially, is that man cannot understand why
God does what he does. But this is an
idea more characteristic of the Mu`tazilite and Mosaic positions than it is of
the Ash`arite view. Insofar as Zophar
suggests that God has a reason for afflicting Job, which Job might understand
if only God would reveal it, he denies that God might afflict Job without
cause. Note also that Maimonides omits
that part of 11:6 in which Zophar says that God exacts of Job "less than
thine iniquity deserveth." On this
evidence, Maimonides has no case that Zophar is an Ash`arite. Moreover, there is a more plausible candidate
for representing the Ash`arite position in God himself. At any rate, that is one natural way of
reading God's answer to Job in chapters 38-41.[40] More of this anon.
The most interesting
case, though, is that of Job. Absolutely
nothing is said to show that Job is an Aristotelian in the sense of holding
that God exercises a providence over individuals among the spheres and over species
in the sublunary world. Prima facie, the
only sense in which it can be said that Job is an Aristotelian, on the evidence
presented in the paragraph describing his views, is that he denies that God has
any concern to adjust welfare to desert among individuals in the sublunary
realm. And, of course, that's a point of
agreement between Aristotle and the Epicureans.
So we might just as well say that Job is an Epicurean.
That would not be a
nice thing to have to do. Job, after
all, is not merely a character in a dialogue, whose views need not be ascribed
to the author of the dialogue. He is a
character whose views are pronounced by God himself, at the end of the
dialogue, to be correct. Immediately
after Job repents, God turns to Eliphaz and rebukes him:
My anger burns against you and your
two friends; for you have not spoken the truth of me, as did Job, my servant.
(42:7, repeated with some variation in 42:8)
To his credit Maimonides faces this problem squarely. After citing the passage just quoted,
Maimonides reports that
the Sages, in order to find an
excuse for it, say A man is not to be blamed for [what he does when]
suffering, meaning that he has to be excused because of his great
suffering. (p. 492/300)
Maimonides observes that "this kind of speech does not accord with
the parable." I think we may agree that the Sages' solution is
inadequate. Job's suffering may excuse
his Epicureanism, but praising him for speaking the truth goes beyond mere
excuse, and Job's suffering gives God no reason to fault Eliphaz and his friends
for defending the idea that God afflicts only those who deserve it.
Maimonides' solution to
the problem of God's praise of Job is that by the end of the dialogue Job had
given up his mistaken views and had demonstrated that they were mistaken:
This view [viz., that God treats the
righteous and the wicked equally, because he has contempt for the human species
and has abandoned it] was such as arises at the first reflection... especially
in the case of one whom misfortunes have befallen, while he knows of himself
that he has not sinned... For this reason this opinion is ascribed to Job. However, the latter said all that he did say
as long as he had no true knowledge and knew the deity only because of his
acceptance of authority, just as the multitude adhering to a Law know it. But when he knew God with a certain
knowledge, he admitted that true happiness, which is the knowledge of the
deity, is guaranteed to all who know Him and that a human being cannot be troubled
in it by any or all the misfortunes in question. While he had known God only through the
traditional stories and not by way of speculation Job had imagined that
the things thought to be happiness, such as health, wealth and children, are
the ultimate goal. For this reason he
fell into such perplexity and said such things as he did... (pp.
492-93/300-301)
So the opinion of Job which God approves is not the Epicurean opinion he
had expressed through most of the dialogue, but an insight he comes to only
after God has appeared to him, when he realizes that what he had taken to be
evils befalling him were not really evils, not, at any rate, by comparison with
the good he was finally granted. In
support of this Maimonides quotes Job's final lines:
I had heard of Thee by the hearing
of the ear;
but now mine eye seeth Thee;
wherefore I abhor myself and repent
of dust and ashes.[41]
He glosses the last line:
wherefore I abhor all that I used to
desire and repent of my being in dust and ashes.
How satisfactory a solution is this?
I find this to be in
some ways an attractive reading of Job.
It seems to make plausible sense of the concluding verses of the poetic
dialogue. And it is preferable to the
solution of the Sages in that Maimonides does have available a response to the
question: what is wrong with what Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar have been
saying? Their problem is not that they
defended God's justice, but that they misconceived the nature of good and
evil. They thought, as Job had before
his enlightenment, that such things as the loss of wealth, of family, and of
health, were evils. So while they may
have been right to say of God that he does not afflict man with undeserved
evils, they were wrong to grant that Job was suffering evils.
This line of thought would combine naturally with what we have previously called the intellectualist position. On that conception of providence, merit is determined by intellectual excellence, not by moral virtue; if we add that knowledge of God is the greatest good man can attain, by comparison with which any other human good is of no consequence, then there will be a necessary correlation between merit and well-being; coming to know God by speculative reasoning is one of the criteria of intellectual excellence; so anyone who achieves intellectual excellence necessarily possesses the highest good.
Maimonides'
solution, if this is, indeed, his solution, does have some awkward
consequences, though. The prose epilogue
represents Job as being blessed in the end by having all the things he had lost
restored to him. If these things are not
true goods, this is no blessing. But
perhaps Maimonides would reply that the story of Job is one of those parables
in which not every detail "adds to the intended meaning," some being
included either "to embellish the parable and render it more coherent or
to conceal further the intended meaning."[42]
More seriously, this
solution requires us to say of Job, prior to his revelation from God, that the
misfortunes which befell him were of no importance by comparison with his separation
from God. I think that trivializes those
misfortunes in a way not true to the spirit of
Job. In III, 22,
Maimonides says, more realistically I think, that, though some people may be
able to bear the loss of their fortune, and others the loss of their children,
"no one endowed with sensation" can bear patiently the kind of pain
Job had to endure. (p. 487/297)
It would also seem to
distort the narrative to say that Job was abandoned to chance, when it was by
God's choice that the Satan was permitted to inflict those sufferings on him,
or to say that Job ultimately achieved knowledge of God "by the way of
speculation" (Pines, p. 493), or by "research" (Friedländer, p.
300), when Job's ignorance of God was repaired by a direct revelation from God,
and not the kind of arduous intellectual discipline Maimonides usually seems to
think is necessary for speculative understanding. Moreover, if the position of Eliphaz is the
position of the Law, then any rejection of the position of Eliphaz is a
rejection of the position of the Law, in spite of the fact that Maimonides
represents himself as an adherent of the Law.[43] Perhaps these are minor difficulties, but
they do seem to me to be difficulties. The ultimate test, however, is whether
this reading of God's praise of Job in the prose epilogue is consistent with
what God says when he addresses Job in chapters 38-41. It is to that passage that I now turn.
*
* *
On any reasonable
interpretation of Job which does not dismember the text,[44] God's
answer to Job out of the whirlwind must be the key to the meaning of the work
as a whole.[45] I've already suggested that I think one
natural way of understanding that answer is to give it an Ash`arite
reading. Let me elaborate that idea.
God does not respond
directly to Job's challenge. He does not
identify any sins Job has committed which would justify his punishment. How could he, given the repeated insistence
in the prose prologue on Job's being without fault? Not only had the narrator said that Job was
"blameless and upright" (1:1), so had God himself (in 1:8 and again
in 2:3). I take it that the initial
situation has not been changed by anything which occurs in the course of the
dialogue, i.e., that Job has not become wicked merely by protesting that he is
and has been innocent. What he has said
about himself in the dialogue has been true, so I do not think he commits the
sin of pride in saying it.[46]
God addresses to Job a
series of rhetorical questions which emphasize his impotence and ignorance, by
contrast with God's power and knowledge.
God does not explicitly affirm his own omnipotence and omniscience, but
that affirmation is contextually implied, as Job’s response acknowledges:
I know that you can do all things;
No purpose of yours can be thwarted.[47]
The implication would appear to be that God's omnipotence makes it
legitimate for God to do as he will with Job, whether Job has disobeyed an
antecedent divine command or not. To say
this is to give an Ash`arite reading of Job.
It is also to agree with Hobbes: God's irresistible might gives him the
right to afflict men at his pleasure.[48]
How does Maimonides
read God's answer to Job? He says he
takes the speech to be intended to show
that our intellects do not reach the
point of apprehending how these natural things that exist in the world of
generation and corruption are produced in time and of conceiving how the
existence of the natural force within them has originated them. They are not things that resemble what we
make. How then can we wish that His
governance of, and providence for, them... should resemble our governance of,
and providence for, the things we do govern and provide for? (p. 496/303)
That is, Maimonides invokes his doctrine of equivocal predication to
deal with the problem of undeserved suffering.
The term "providence," applied to God, does not mean what it
does when applied to man. There is
nothing in common between the two uses of the term except the term itself. If a man knows this, he will be able to bear
"every misfortune lightly." (p. 497/303)
It's an interesting
feature of Maimonides' discussion that he does not explicitly identify the
answer he attributes to God with any of the five positions on providence he had
previously distinguished. On the plausible
assumption that those five positions were supposed to exhaust the
possibilities, we must ask: can we see the divine answer as corresponding to
one of those five positions?
Prima facie we can
immediately exclude both the Mu`tazilite position and the teaching of the
Law. Both of these positions are
committed to holding that (in the end, at least) God distributes good and evil
to individual humans in proportion to their desert. But if that were true of God, then we could
say that the term "providence" is applied to God in the same sense in
which we might use it in application to a wise and just human ruler. And while I find the doctrine of equivocal
predication rather mysterious, one thing it seems to imply is that we cannot
truly say of God that he is just in the same sense a human ruler might be said
to be just: it is not true that God sees to it that individual well-being is
proportioned to desert.
Now, it may be
possible to reconcile the teaching of the Law with the doctrine of equivocal
predication by interpreting the Mosaic position in an intellectualist way. So we might say: look, the problem with
claiming that God is provident in the same sense in which a human ruler might
be provident is not that God does not distribute well-being to individuals in
proportion to their merit; the problem is that God's conceptions of well-being
and merit are quite different from ours; he recognizes that knowledge of
himself is the greatest gift he can bestow on his creatures, and he recognizes
that only the intellectually excellent are worthy of that gift; so though there
is a superficial similarity between God's providence and human providence, it
is merely superficial.
Still, I think the
Ash`arite position gives a better expression to Maimonides' theory of equivocal
predication. If we adopt the compromise
solution outlined above, blending equivocal predication with the
intellectualist interpretation of the Mosaic position and Job's ‘Aristotelian’
valuation of contemplation, we do see an analogy between the meaning of
"providence" when it is applied to God and its meaning when it is
applied to humans.
But Maimonides'
doctrine of equivocal predication, as I understand it, does involve a complete
difference between the meaning of terms applied to God and the meaning of the
same terms as applied to humans:
The terms "knowledge,"
"power," "will," and "life," as applied to Him...
and to all those possessing knowledge, power, will, and life, are purely
equivocal, so that their meaning when they are predicated of Him is in no way
like their meaning in other applications. (I, 56, p. 131/79)
It seems to me that this total disparity of meaning is better expressed
by saying that it is consistent with God's providence that there should be no
connection at all between well-being and merit as humans would conceive these
notions, that God's justice does not require him to relate well-being to merit
in any way. He may act quite arbitrarily
and still be just. And after all, isn't
that just what God admits to doing when he says to the Satan "You incited
me against him, to destroy him without cause"? (2:3)
There is, however, a
price to pay for this interpretation too.
I think it's a better reading of Job. But it does reinstate a view of divine
providence which Maimonides characterizes as a mistake Job first made and then
corrected (III, 23, p. 492/300). What
Job argued during the dialogue was that God treats the wicked and the righteous
equally, that to judge by his actions he is indifferent to questions of
desert. For most of the dialogue Job
sounds like an Epicurean. But so far as
I can see, the Ash`arites (and Maimonides, when he is availing himself of the
theory of equivocal predication) really agree with that part of the Epicurean
view. Where they differ from the
Epicureans is in assigning an arbitrary personal agent as the cause of man's
misfortunes, not chance.
Where does this leave
us? At this stage of my reflections on
Maimonides, I find it very hard to decide what his final word is, on providence
in general, or on the book of Job in particular. It does seem that his position on this issue
is implicitly, if not explicitly contradictory, in that he suggests two different
and incompatible solutions to the problem of undeserved suffering. I am inclined to think that the contradiction
is one he was astute enough to recognize.
So I also think, with Strauss,[49] that we
should identify one of these solutions as his exoteric doctrine and the other
as his esoteric doctrine. I would guess
that the intellectualist position (or the intellectualist interpretation of the
Mosaic position) is his exoteric doctrine, and the Ash`arite position as his
esoteric doctrine. I realize that the
intellectualist solution is the one Maimonides suggests more frequently than he
does the Ash`arite solution, particularly in the concluding chapters of the Guide. But I have come to think Strauss was right to
advocate the following rule for dealing with Maimonides' contradictions:
Of two contradictory statements in
the Guide... that statement which occurs least frequently, or even which
occurs only once, was considered by him to be true.[50]
While this may seem a rather mechanical principle, which reverses all
normal canons of textual interpretation, it seems inescapable given the
following statement from the Introduction to Part I:
My purpose is that the truths be
glimpsed and then again concealed, so as not to oppose that divine purpose
which one cannot possibly oppose and which has concealed from the vulgar among
the people those truths especially requisite for His apprehension. (pp. 6-7/3)
But, of course, any esotericist interpretation of the Guide must
be highly controversial, and ultimately unprovable. I can well imagine the young students in the
synagogue in
*
* *
For the Spinozist it is
a piece of rare good fortune that we have available some fairly direct evidence
about how these matters were discussed in the
Manasseh begins by
citing the following, prima facie contradictory, Scriptural verses:
1 Sam. 2:6. The Lord killeth and maketh alive, he bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up.
Job 7:9. So he that goeth down to the grave shall not
come up.
He acknowledges that the verse from Job is only one of many in
Scripture which appear to deny the resurrection, and he refers the reader to
his treatise on the subject for a full explanation of the others. But he does
offer an explanation of Job's statement in The Conciliator:
Moses, who wrote the Book of Job,
introduces him as suffering much affliction, and considering himself innocent,
so that he doubted and disbelieved the interposition of Divine Providence,
attributing everything, even the resurrection, to the influence of the planets.
(II, p. 41)
This is interesting for a number of reasons. Note
1) that Manasseh takes Moses to be
the author of the Book of Job, whereas Maimonides grants that it may
have been written as late as the post-exilic period;
2) that Manasseh appears to doubt
Job's innocence, representing this as an idea Job had (in spite of the fact
that both the narrator and God testify to Job's innocence), whereas Maimonides
never questions Job's innocence;
3)
that Manasseh also seems to have rejected Maimonides' contention that
Job is an Aristotelian, making him, instead, a believer in astrology; where
this idea comes from I do not know.
In all these respects Manasseh disagrees with Maimonides. As he continues, however, he follows
Maimonides in ascribing to Eliphaz the Mosaic position, to Bildad the
Mu`tazilite position, and to Zophar the Ash`arite position. (He does not use these labels, but his brief
descriptions of the three positions match those of Maimonides quite
closely.) Then he presents his solution
to the problem of Job's (apparent) mortalism:
Moses, therefore, being desirous of
treating on Divine Providence in this Book, by interlocutors, and giving
reasons pro and contra, as usual in such discussions; therefore,
no notice can be paid to Job denying, or his apparent denial of, the
resurrection; for we find him at the conclusion repentant, saying, "O
Lord, I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth
thee, therefore I abhor myself and repent me in dust and ashes." (II, p.
41)
Manasseh seems here to accept the view that the Book of Job is
"a parable intended to set forth the opinions of people concerning
providence"; he is not content simply to say that Job is a character in a
dialogue, whose views are not necessarily those of Scripture itself. Though he does not call attention to God's
endorsement of Job's statements, he does implicitly deal with that problem as
Maimonides had, by calling attention to Job's repentance and the consequent
ambiguity as to just what opinion of Job's God is endorsing. Manasseh's use of the recantation, though, is
different from Maimonides': the opinion
Job recants must be his denial of resurrection, not his affirmation that in
life as we experience it the innocent often suffer and the wicked often
prosper.
The logic of this
analysis would seem to lead to a Mu`tazilite solution of the problem of Job:
"the upright sometimes experience misfortunes and troubles, that their
reward in the next world may be increased."[53] Though this is a reading of Job which
seems natural enough if you focus on the prose prologue, it is difficult to
defend if you take into account the prose epilogue, where God rejects the
opinions of all three of the friends.
I think Manasseh's
reading of Job is also difficult theologically. The Mu`tazilite idea is that Job is being
tested: though at the beginning of his afflictions he has been without sin, it
has to that point been too easy for him to be virtuous; the depth of his
integrity can be fully demonstrated only if he persists in his loyalty to God
even though he does not receive a reward for it, but instead suffers terribly
in spite of it; by demonstrating the depth of his integrity, Job earns an even
greater reward than he would have merited without this trial.
But to whom, on this
view, is Job's integrity to be demonstrated?
In Saadiah the answer is fairly clear.
It cannot be to God, since his foreknowledge makes it unnecessary to test
his creatures.[54] Had God not permitted the Satan to afflict
Job, He would still have known how Job would have responded to such a
trial. The test must be intended to
demonstrate Job's integrity to someone else, the obvious candidate being the
Satan, whom Saadiah takes to be a man (p. 154-158), representative of Job's
many neighbors, who envied him his prosperity, and thought he did not deserve
it, since he served God, they thought, only out of self-interest. (p. 159) But it seems rather hard on Job that he (and
his family) should have to suffer so to prove a point to these other
people. Is this not to treat Job as a
means only, and not as an end in himself?
And is afflicting an innocent man with grotesque suffering really an
effective way to teach people that he is disinterestedly loyal to God? None of Job's friends seems to have drawn the
intended conclusion, persisting, until corrected by divine revelation, in their
belief that Job must have done something terribly wrong. It would have been fairer to Job if God had
resorted to that revelation earlier.
Perhaps the difficulty of understanding God's action on Saadiah's
interpretation of Job is one reason Manasseh hesitates to accept the textual
evidence that Job must be conceived as innocent. The tendency of theists to find some fault
with Job is strong.
Manasseh makes no mention of Elihu or of God's address to Job from the whirlwind, but concludes by mentioning another way of dealing with the problem of Job's denial of the resurrection:
Maimonides solves it in another
manner, saying that this verse of Job, and similar ones, treat only of
the ordinary course of nature, for he who dies does not naturally awake or rise
again from the grave; he does not, therefore, impugn the resurrection, for that
will be a future miracle that will surpass the natural order of things. By which the doubt is also resolved.[55]
This completes Manasseh's reconciliation of the contradiction from which
he began. I'm afraid that it is characteristic of his treatment of prima facie
contradictions in Scripture. He is
content if he can come up with one way of reconciling them; if he is aware of
more than one, he may simply give the alternatives without feeling obliged to
justify a preference for one over the other.
Manasseh is a very learned man, whose work drew high praise from his
contemporaries, [56]
but his attempts to reconcile scriptural contradictions often seem rather
casual. Whatever difficulties Spinoza
may have had with Maimonides' treatment of Job, I suspect he recognized
it to be superior to Manasseh’s.
*
* *
Maimonides is clearly
an important figure in the Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza frequently cites him, always for
purposes of disagreement. His general
complaint in the TTP about the religious thinkers of his day is that they teach
nothing but
Aristotelian and Platonic
speculations. Not to seem to constantly
follow pagans, they have accomodated Scripture to these speculations. It was not enough for them to be insane with
the Greeks, they wanted the prophets to rave with them. This clearly shows that they do not see the
divinity of Scripture even through a dream. (Preface, §§18-19, Gebhardt edition
III/9)
Maimonides appears to be his historical paradigm of that misconceived
Hellenization of Scripture. So when
Spinoza is defining his own method for the interpretation of Scripture in TTP
vii, it is Maimonides he takes as the representative of the principal
alternative methodology, which requires you first to know the truth before you
can determine what Scripture is saying.
He quotes at length a passage from the Guide, in which Maimonides
writes that he does not deny the eternity of the world merely because of the
Scriptural texts which appear to teach that the world was created.
The texts indicating that the world
has been produced in time are not more numerous than those indicating that the
deity is a body. (Guide, II, 25, p. 327/199, cited at TTP vii, 76,
III/113-114)
If we had a philosophical demonstration of the eternity of the world (as
we have for God's incorporeality), we would be obliged to interpret
figuratively the texts indicating creation in time (as we do those indicating
God's corporeality). It would not be
difficult to do this; but it is not necessary, since Aristotle's attempt to
demonstrate the eternity of the world is inconclusive.
This does seem to
illustrate an attitude toward the Biblical text which fails to respect its
integrity. Whatever you think
Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports the
claim that he reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian
speculations. Insofar as he advocates
the Mosaic position, he does so by understanding it in terms of Greek ideas
about the value of contemplation and intellectual excellence. And even when he seems to be adopting an
Ash`arite/Epicurean view of providence, which you might think not particularly
Platonic or Aristotelian, he develops those ideas in the context of a negative
theology which evidently goes back at least to Plotinus, and perhaps to Plato's
Parmenides. The God who emerges
from this theology seems very remote from the personal God of the Bible. However you understand Maimonides on this
issue, arguably he Hellenizes Scripture.
Still, I want to argue,
Spinoza's final evaluation of Maimonides may not be as negative as this would suggest. To say that Maimonides reads Scripture in a
Greek way is not necessarily to say that he reads Greek ideas into
Scripture. Perhaps those Aristotelian
and Platonic ideas are there in the text.
I think, in fact, that's a plausible thing to say, so long as we
restrict ourselves to the Book of Job and certain other books like
it. I think each of the two views of
providence to which Maimonides seems drawn has some support in the text of Job. I'm inclined to think the Ash`arite/Epicurean
view is a better reading of the text than the Mosaic/Aristotelian view. But neither seems to me crazy as an
interpretation of Job.
Spinoza does not offer
an extended discussion of the Book of Job in the TTP. He does, however,
make a number of brief, but suggestive comments. The first of the three passages I shall
consider occurs toward the end of Chapter II, where Spinoza is arguing that God
accommodated his revelations to the prophets’ intellectual capacities and
opinions, and that the prophets could be ignorant about speculative matters,
though not about practical matters:
Concerning the reasonings by which God
showed Job his power [potentiam] over all things – if it is in fact true
that they were revealed to Job, and that the author was concerned to narrate a
history, not (as some believe) to embellish his conceptions – we must say the
same thing: that they were adduced according to Job’s power of understanding [ad
captum Jobi], and to convince him only, not that they are universal reasons
for convincing everyone.[57]
What is most interesting in this passage, though also quite puzzling, is
its implicit critique of the reasoning in Job. Job is convinced by
reasons which are not suitable to convince everyone. Indeed, Spinoza suggests
that the reasons which convinced Job would not have convinced someone whose
power of understanding was greater.
It’s tempting to see in this a critique
of Job, as read by voluntarists like Calvin and Hobbes (and
Maimonides?): in Job God claims that his omnipotence gives him the right
to inflict suffering on Job without cause; but this is a primitive view of the
relation between power and right, which a more sophisticated understanding
would reject. But this seems a dubious reading of the passage, since Spinoza
himself appears later in the TTP to embrace the voluntarist ideas which this
reading would have him criticize. This occurs when he argues that
nature, considered absolutely, has the supreme right [summum jus] to do everything in its power, i.e., that the right of nature extends as far as its power [potentia] does. For the power of nature is the power itself of God, who has the supreme right over all things. (TTP xvi, 3, III/189/17-21)
It’s difficult to see how someone who holds this could legitimately
criticize the teaching of Job, as interpreted by the voluntarists.
Perhaps the solution is that Spinoza is criticizing, not the inference from absolute power to absolute right, but the reasoning by which absolute power is established in the first place. (He does, after all, speak of the reasonings by which God showed Job his power over all things, not his right over all things.) When God speaks to Job from out of the storm, he does not offer reasons from which Job could legitimately infer that God can do all things. He addresses a series of rhetorical questions to him, challenging him to say, for example, where he was when God founded the earth, or whether he has ever commanded a morning, or whether he can tie Pleiades’ fetters, or whether he knows when the ibex give birth. If Job answered these questions, he would presumably say “I didn’t exist then,” or “no, I haven’t,” or “no, I can’t,” or “no, I don’t know.” Perhaps Spinoza’s criticism is that, although the suggested answers might well be correct, Job should not infer from his ignorance and incapacity that there is a personal being who possesses the power and knowledge he lacks, who can, in fact, do the things Job can’t, and knows the things Job doesn’t. This is a conjecture, no more. But it seems more coherent with the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy than the first suggestion does.
Spinoza returns to the book of Job briefly in Chapter III of the TTP, in connection with the claim that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Here he uses the example of Job to argue that far from favoring the Jews, God is equally well-disposed to all nations. Both reason and scripture show this, and he cites Job 28:28,
Behold, the fear of the Lord that is wisdom,
To turn from evil is understanding,
as one of several scriptural passages which are supposed to establish his point. Job, Spinoza argues, was a gentile,[58] yet he was most acceptable to God, because he surpassed everyone in piety and religion.
When Spinoza returns to the topic of Job later in the TTP, he begins by noting the controversies which have existed about this book and about the person of Job:
Some people think that Moses wrote
this book, and that the whole story is only a parable. Certain Rabbis in the Talmud hand down this
view, and Maimonides too is favorably inclined towards it in his Moreh
Nebuchim. Others believed the story
to be true. Of these, some thought that
this Job lived in the time of Jacob, and that he married Jacob's daughter,
Dinah. (TTP x, 16, III/144)
Then he reports Ibn Ezra’s opinion, that the book of Job was not
written originally in Hebrew, but was translated into Hebrew from another
language,[59]
commenting that
I wish he had shown us this more
convincingly, for if he had, we could infer that the gentiles too had sacred
books. So I leave the matter in
doubt. Nevertheless, I do conjecture
that Job was a gentile whose heart was very constant, and whose affairs at
first prospered, then went very badly, and finally went very favorably. For Ezekiel
Here Spinoza, possibly following Hobbes,[60] aligns
himself with those who think, on literary critical grounds, that the story of
Job is a parable, though (like Hobbes) he will allow that the story probably
has some historical basis, in the sense that there was a person of that name,
to whom roughly those things happened.
Most significantly,
perhaps, Spinoza is attracted to the hypothesis that Job is a gentile
book. Here is how he concludes his
discussion:
I would believe, along with Ibn
Ezra, that this book really was translated from another language, because [the
author] seems to aspire to the poetic art of the gentiles. For twice the Father of the Gods calls a
council, and Momus, here called Satan, criticizes God's words with the greatest
freedom, etc. But these are only
conjectures, and are not sufficiently firm. (§18)
In the end he declines to flatly affirm that Job is a gentile
book, but it is clear what he would say, if forced to make a judgment.
What is the
significance of this issue? In the first
instance, of course, it bears on the question "In what sense are the Jews
God's chosen people?" If other
peoples had sacred books, then God's revelation was not to the Jews alone, even
before the advent of Christianity. But
it is possible to see in this issue a broader significance: if Job is a
gentile book, then there is no particular reason to expect its theology to be
Jewish. Spinoza's concluding remarks
suggest that the theology of Job is, indeed, a gentile, polytheistic
theology, with Yahweh as "the father of the Gods," and Satan as
Momus, a figure from classical mythology noted for his fault-finding. If the theology of Job is gentile,
then there is no particular reason to expect it to be consistent with the
theology of the rest of the Hebrew Bible.
Is this what Spinoza intends to suggest?
I think quite possibly
it is. If we could press Spinoza on his
interpretation of Job, and get candid answers from him, what we might
find him saying is this: Job is a book whose meaning is very
obscure. But the kind of interpretation
you're apt to get in the synagogue - which says that Job was just being tested,
and that if he passed the test by demonstrating that he really was serving God
disinterestedly, his unmerited sufferings would be compensated in the afterlife
- that interpretation is hopeless both as a reading of the text and as a
theodicy. There are better readings of
the text available in the Jewish tradition, specifically in Maimonides, where
what Ibn Ezra suggested is tacitly admitted - that the theology of Job
is very unhebraic, that we have to either conceive God as caring only about
intellectual excellence and not about moral virtue, or else regard him as a
purely arbitrary ruler, who has no concern for proportioning well-being to
merit in any way. This last way of
reading Job is probably the best, but adopting that interpretation
requires you to realize that the theology of Job is radically different
from what you get in most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible.
We can only say
"most of the rest" because Job is not without parallel in the
Bible on the issue of providence. If you
accept the theology of Job, then you will say, with Solomon:
All this I laid to heart, examining
it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God;
whether it is love or hate one does not know.
Everything that confronts them is vanity, since the same fate comes to
all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean
and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and to those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners... This
is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to
everyone. Moreover, the hearts of all
are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that
they go to the dead.[61]
Solomon's view is equivalent to Epicureanism, as is the theology of Job:
there is no proportioning of well-being to merit in this life; there is no life
to come in which we might hope that things would be corrected; Solomon, like
the author of Job, will express this in terms of a kind of theism,
saying that everything happens by the will of God; but so long as that God is
conceived as acting completely arbitrarily, there is no meaningful difference
between that kind of theism and the Epicurean doctrine that everything happens
by chance.
We should not be
surprised to find a contradiction this fundamental in the Bible. After all, does not Maimonides warn us that
one reason why books or compilations contain contradictory statements is that
someone "has collected the remarks of various people with differing
opinions, but has omitted citing his authorities and has not attributed each remark
to the one who said it"? (Pines, p. 17)
He cites the Talmud as an example, but he might equally well have cited
the Bible itself. The idea current in
the synagogue of Spinoza’s day - that Moses wrote both the Pentateuch and the
book of Job - can only be defended by profoundly misunderstanding the
meaning of Job.
This view has
consequences which go beyond the immediate issue of theodicy. Once we recognize the impropriety of
conceiving God as proportioning well-being to merit, we will recognize also
that we cannot any longer conceive of God as a lawgiver, who rewards the
obedient and punishes the disobedient, and that the whole notion of a natural
law, and of sins being committed in the state of nature, is without foundation
(cf. TTP xix, 8). But to pursue those
consequences would take us out of theology and into politics. That is a story for another day.
[1]
From Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s
Philosophy, ed. by Heidi Ravven and Lenn Goodman,
[2]. Cf. the
preface written by Spinoza's close friend, Jarig Jelles, for the edition of his
posthumous works:
from his childhood on the
author was trained in letters, and in his youth for many years he was occupied
principally with theology; but when he reached the age at which the intellect
is mature and capable of investigating the nature of things, he gave himself up
entirely to philosophy. He was driven by
a burning desire for knowledge; but because he did not get full satisfaction
either from his teachers or from those writing about these sciences, he decided
to see what he himself could do in these areas.
For that purpose he found the writings of the famous René Descartes,
which he came upon at that time, very useful.
This document is given
in F. Akkerman, Studies in the Posthumous Works of Spinoza, Krips Repro
Meppel, 1980, pp. 216-217.
[3]. See
Bayle's article on Spinoza in his Historical and Critical Dictionary,
reprinted in Pierre Bayle, Ecrits sur Spinoza, ed. by P.-F. Moreau, Berg
International Editeurs, 1983, p. 22.
[4]. 1:1.
Unless otherwise indicated, I follow the translation by Marvin Pope, in
the Anchor Job (Doubleday, 3rd edition, 1973). I also consult the King James (KJV) and
Revised Standard Versions (RSV), as given in The Interpreter's Bible,
vol. VI, ed. with commentary by Samuel Terrien (Abingdon, 1954), the
translation of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), as given in the Soncino Job
(2nd ed., by Rabbi Dr. Victor Reichert, with revisions by Rabbi A. J.
Rosenberg, Soncino Press, 1985), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), as
given in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Oxford UP, 1991), the
translation by Norman Habel in The Book of Job (Westminster Press,
1985), and the new JPS translation, as given in Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures
(JPS, 1985).
The KJV at this point has "perfect and
upright," a rendering against which the Soncino commentary protests, on
the ground that "such a designation the Jewish mind would only accord to
God. What the word connotes is `without
moral blemish, blameless, innocent, serving God without ulterior motives.' Job
is presented to us as a man of complete human integrity." Other commentators who would apparently allow
the use of the term "perfect" seem to mean no more by it than what
the Soncino commentary allows. Cf. Pope,
p. 6, and The New Jerome Bible Commentary, Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 469
(cited as NJBC).
[5]. On the use of the definite article, see Pope
(pp. 9-10): "...the term is a title and not yet a proper name. The figure here is not the fully developed
character of the later Jewish and Christian Satan or Devil... The Satan is one
of the members of the divine court and comes with other attendants to present
himself at the celestial court and report on the fulfillment of his duties...
The Satan was a kind of spy, roaming the earth and reporting to God on the evil
he found therein..." The NJBC
concurs, p. 470. The later conception of
Satan with which that in Job is here contrasted would be one in which
Satan is the leader of the forces of evil in the world, who tempts man to sin
that he may have companions in his rebellion against God. Cf. Harper's Bible Dictionary (Harper
and Row, 1985, pp. 908-909) and
[6]. Pope remarks that "attempts to find
progression in the debate and subtle differences in the character and
personality of the three friends are labored and unconvincing." (Anchor Job,
p. lxxv)
[7]. The Hebrew does not supply an object for the
verb and translations fall into two main groups, those which offer something
equivalent to Pope's translation (e.g., "I abhor my words"(JPS),
"I repudiate what I said" (Driver and Gray)) and those which follow
the lead of the KJV ("I abhor myself," followed by RSV and NRSV).
[8]. So 42:10 says. And indeed Job does get double the number of
sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys. But
the numbers of sons and daughters are not doubled.
[9]. In citing The Guide of the Perplexed I
generally follow the highly regarded translation by Shlomo Pines (U of Chicago
P, 1963, 2 vols.). Cf. the comments by
Marvin Fox, in Interpreting Maimonides (U of Chicago P, 1990, pp.
47-54.) Occasionally I suspect that
Pines may be misleading. In such cases,
lacking Arabic, I consult and cite as possible alternatives the renderings of
M. Friedländer (
[10]. Maimonides does, however, ascribe this
opinion to "those in
[11] From Charles Touati, I learn that there was a controversy about the correctness of this reading of Aristotle among Maimonides’ medieval successors. See his “Les deux théories de Maïmonide sur la providence,” in Prophètes, Talmudistes, Philosophes (Cerf, 1990, p. 189n). I am indebted to Steve Nadler for calling my attention to Touati’s work.
[12]. See Pines' introduction, pp. lxv-lxvii, and
his “Un texte inconnu d’Aristote en version arabe,” in Archive d’histoire doctrinale
et littéraire du moyen age, 31 (1956): 5-43, 34(1959): 446-9 (reprinted in
vol. II of Pines’ Collected Works, Jerusalem and Leiden, 1986, pp.
157-200). H. J. Ruland has translated this treatise into German (Die
arabischen Fassungen zweier Schriften des Aleexander von Aphrodisias über die
Vorsehung und über das liberum arbitrium, diss. Saarbrücken, 1976). See also the discussion by Robert Sharples,
“Alexander of Aphrodisias on divine providence: two problems,” in Classical
Quarterly, n.s. 32(1982): 198-211. I understand from Sharples (personal
communication) that there should be an Italian translation out by now (S. Fazzo
and M. Zonta, Alessandro d’Afrodisia, Sulla Provvidenza,
[13]. The view Maimonides ascribes to Aristotle in
III, 17 (Whatever happens to individuals in the sublunary realm happens by
chance) seems patently inconsistent with the view he ascribes to him in II, 20
(No natural things come about by chance).
More of this later.
[14]. In III, 17, Maimonides does not explain why
(according to the Ash`arites) we should not seek reasons for God's actions, but
in III, 23, he does: "The point of view of justice or a requirement of
wisdom should not be sought in whatever the deity does, for His greatness and
true reality entail His doing what He wills..." On Ash`arite voluntarism see George Hourani, Reason
and Tradition in Islamic Ethics, Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 118-123, and
Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy, Cambridge
UP, 1985, pp. 123-143.
[15] Goodman: “outrageous consequences.”
[16]. See The Book of Theodicy, Translation and
Commentary on the Book of Job, by Saadiah ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi, tr. by L.
E. Goodman, Yale UP, 1988. For
Maimonides' awareness of Saadiah's position, see the passage cited below in n.
15 ("some of the latter-day Gaonim").
It's unclear, however, whether Saadiah embraces the extension of divine
providence to non-human animals. Cf. p.
138, n. 31.
[17]. Pines, p. 471. But perhaps the appearance of grudging
acceptance is an artifact of the Pines translation. Friedländer here reads: "The principle
which I accept is far less open to objections, and is more reasonable than the
opinions mentioned before." (p. 286) Munk reads: "L'opinion que
j'admets offre moins d'invraisemblance que les opinions précédentes et
s'approche davantage du raisonnement de l'intelligence." Goodman: “This
view I accept is less beset with unfortunate consequences than those I have
already described and more capable of winning the assent of reason.”
[18]. P. 472/287.
Cf. p. 471/286: "Our Law is
exclusively concerned with the circumstances of human individuals; and in
ancient times the story of this compensation accorded to animals has never been
heard in our religious community, nor was it ever mentioned by one of the
sages. But some of the latter-day
Gaonim... have heard it from the Mu`tazila and have approved it and believed
it."
[20]. Psalms 8:4.
There is an ironic allusion to this verse in Job 7:17-21, interesting
(among other reasons) because the context suggests not merely that Job does not
welcome God's attention, but also that God's interest in him would be more
understandable if he were (not a mere man) but "the Sea or the
Dragon." (
[21]. Cf. p. 474/288: "This is the opinion
that to my mind corresponds to the intelligible and to the texts of the
Law."
[22] In comments on an earlier version of this paper the editors of this volume commented that this sentence presupposed “a more anthropomorphic/anthropopathic God than Maimonides’” (citing Guide III, 28). But this, in fact, is one important reason why I don’t think that the position I describe here represents Maimonides’ last word on the subject. See below, p. nn.
[23]. "Accordingly, divine providence does not
watch in an equal manner over all the individuals of the human species, but
providence is graded as their human perfection is graded." (III, 18, p.
475/289) In III, 51, Maimonides is more
specific about what "grading" implies: "Providence always
watches over an individual endowed with perfect apprehension, whose intellect
never ceases from being occupied with God... an individual endowed with perfect
apprehension, whose thought sometimes for a certain time is emptied of God, is
watched over by providence only during the time when he thinks of God... [the]
withdrawal [of providence when he is occupied with something else] is not like
its withdrawal from those who have never had intellectual cognition... [the
latter are] like one who is in darkness and has never seen light... the reason
for an individual's being abandoned to chance so that he is permitted to be
devoured like the beasts is his being separated from God." (pp.
624-626/388-389)
[24]. E.g., in III, 18, pp. 475-76/289-90,
Maimonides cites various passages in which God promises to watch over Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua, and cause them to prosper. But nothing in the passages cited suggests,
what Maimonides would need to show, that these men were selected for special
favor because of their intellectual excellence (or combination of intellectual
excellence and moral virtue).
"With regard to providence watching over excellent men and
neglecting the ignorant," Maimonides cites 1 Samuel 2:9, "He will
keep the feet of his holy ones, but the wicked shall be put to silence in
darkness, for not by strength shall man prevail," which seems rather to
indicate that moral virtue is the sole criterion for divine providence. The Hebrew term translated by "holy
ones" in Pines is hasidhim, which is rendered "saints"
(KJV) and "faithful ones" (RSV, NRSV). According to the Interpreter's Bible,
"it includes in it an element of love, but the fundamental element is
loyalty, and usually it is loyalty to an agreement." (Vol. III, p. 885)
[25]. Maimonides reaffirms this view vigorously at
the end of the Guide (see particularly III, 51 and 54). Oliver Leaman seems to take this to be
Maimonides' last word on providence in Moses Maimonides, Routledge,
1990, pp. 120-28 (but see pp. 170-171 for a more subtle reading), as does Fox, Interpreting
Maimonides, pp. 192-193, 218-219, 314-15 (but see pp. 203-204 for a passage
suggesting an Ash`arite solution). Perhaps Touati’s ‘second maimonidean theory
of providence’ is a version of what I am calling the intellectualist position,
though he seems to stress direct knowledge of God more than intellectual
excellence in the broad sense.
[26]. As to whether it is a Hebraic view, see Fox,
p. 172 (commenting on the view, expressed in the Guide, III, 27, p. 511,
that the ultimate perfection of man is "to become rational in actu"):
"This doctrine might be expected to trouble any thoughtful reader... If
one were to ask within a normal Jewish setting what it is to be a good man or a
good Jew, the answer would almost certainly focus on moral virtues and/or the
fulfillment of God's commandments."
As to whether it is Hellenic, we might cite the
following passage from the Nicomachean Ethics:
If the gods have
any care for human affairs, as they are thought to have, it would be reasonable
both that they should delight in that which was best and most akin to them
(i.e., intellect) and that they should reward those who love and honor this
most, as caring for the things that are dear to them and acting both rightly
and nobly. And that all these attributes
belong most of all to the wise man is manifest.
He, therefore, is the dearest to the gods. (X, viii, 1179a24-30, Ross
tr., rev. by Urmson, cited by Touati, p. 189n)
I find this passage
curious both in its own right, and in relation to other Aristotelian
passages. Aristotle begins with a
conditional, whose antecedent he does not affirm (and whose antecedent seems
inconsistent with the theology of Book Lambda).
He concludes with a claim which seems to require the truth of that antecedent. I suppose that he is seeking support for his
high valuation of contemplation in popular beliefs which he himself does not
accept.
As further evidence of the difference between
Aristotle's view and that of the Hebrew Bible, we might note that earlier in
ch. viii, Aristotle finds it absurd to think of the gods as behaving justly, in
the sense of making contracts and performing what they have promised. (1178b10)
[28]. III, 22, pp. 489-90/298: "Good
inclination is only found in man when his intellect is perfected." This would make moral virtue entail
intellectual excellence. That intellectual excellence entails moral perfection
seems implicit in the claim that our love of God is proportionate to our
knowledge of him (III, 51, p. 621/386).
[29]. III, 22, p. 487, translator's emphasis. Cf. Leaman's comment on this passage:
"The account of Job only arises because Job is not very bright." (Moses
Maimonides, p. 125)
[30]. III, 51, p. 619. Friedländer's translation seems less
disparaging of those who observe the commandments: "the multitude that
observe the divine commandments but are ignorant." (p. 384) Munk has "les ignorants qui s'occupent
des pratiques religieuses."
[31]. This is somewhat surprising, since Maimonides
holds elsewhere that "an individual cannot but sin and err" (III, 36,
p. 540/332), a view encouraged by the Psalmist: "They have all gone
astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not
one." (Ps. 12:3) We might interpret
the claim that cases like Job's always exist to mean that there are always some
people who approximate blamelessness and who nevertheless suffer calamities out
of all proportion to their fault. I
think this is consistent with the passage from the Guide III, 36, if not
with the Psalm.
[32]. III, 22, p. 486/296; the phrase in italics is
an allusion to the Talmud, though Pines reports that the passage alluded to is
a discussion of the vision of Ezekiel, not the story of Job.
[33]. Pines’ translation always uses
"Satan" as a proper name; Friedländer uses "the adversary."
I follow Pines. Omitting the definite
article seems better suited to Maimonides' interpretation of Satan.
[35]. So Pines, p. 490. Similarly Goodman. Friedländer: "I have fully
explained the idea contained in the account of Job..." (p. 298, my
emphasis) Munk reads: "Je crois
maintenant avoir exposé et éclairci à fond l'histoire de Job."
[36]. Pines' annotation at
this point refers us to the introduction to Part I, presumably to pp. 17-18 (=
Friedländer 10-11), where Maimonides lists seven reasons why contradictions may
be found in a book, and indicates that one of the reasons why contradictions
may be found in his book is the need to conceal some parts of his teaching
regarding obscure matters from the vulgar.
[37]. Cf. David Clines: "In reminding the
Satan that he ‘urged’ Yahweh to ‘destroy’ Job, Yahweh is by no means
repudiating responsibility for Job's former trial (Peake), nor giving him credit
for instigating the experiment (Pope).
Rather Yahweh invites Satan's agreement to the apparent success of the
experiment in which the Satan and Yahweh have together been implicated." (The
Word Biblical Commentary, Job 1-20, Word Books, 1989, p. 43) The commentary
of Norman Habel (The Book of Job, a commentary, pp. 94-95) seems to
concur. The prose epilogue flatly
ascribes responsibility for Job's misfortunes to God (41:11).
[38]. He goes so far as to say that "if now
you consider the discourse of the five in the course of their conversation, you
may almost think that whatever one of them says is said also
by all the others..." (p. 491, my emphasis) This would be reasonable as regards Eliphaz,
Bildad, Zophar and Elihu, but is hard to accept (even giving due weight to
"almost") when Job is included.
The paradox is also present in Friedländer: "When you consider the
words of the five who take part in the discussion, you will easily notice that
things said by one of them are also uttered by the rest." (p. 299) Munk reads: "Si l'on considère les
paroles que les cinq hommes échangent dans leur dialogue, on serait tenté de
croire que ce que dit l'un, tous les autres le disent également..."
Similarly Goodman.
[39]. Maimonides cites Job 8:6-7, which contends
that, if Job really is innocent, God will compensate him in the future
for his undeserved suffering. What
Bildad says there, however, makes no explicit appeal to compensation in an
afterlife.
[40]. It was Hobbes' reading of God's answer (Leviathan
ch. xxxi, ¶6, pp. 236-37 in the Hackett edition). It is also a good Calvinist
reading. See his Sermons on Job, esp. Sermon 5, emphasizing Job
1:21, “Yahweh gave, Yahweh took away, blessed be Yahweh’s name.”
[41]. Here I follow the translation of 42:5-6 given
in the Pines translation, which is closer to the KJV (& RSV & NRSV)
than to the Pope translation.
[42]. Introduction to Part I, p. 12/6-7. At the end of III, 23, Maimonides writes that
he has summed up all the notions of the Book of Job, "nothing being left
aside except such matters as figure there because of the arrangement of the
discourse and the continuation of the parable, according to what I have
explained to you several times in this Treatise." (p. 497/303). I don't believe Maimonides ever does mention
the restoration of Job's prosperity.
[43]. It may, however, be necessary to take
Maimonides' professed adherence to the Law with a grain of salt for independent
reasons. The contradiction he claims to
identify in the Mu`tazilite position does not involve any doctrine peculiar to
the Mu`tazilite view, but only doctrines which are shared between the
Mu`tazilites and the adherents of the Law (that man has free will and that God
knows everything). See pp. 469/285 and
485/295. On the other hand, III, 20, p.
482-83/293-94, seems to take back the claim that the Mu`tazilite position is
contradictory.
[44]. On one interesting theory of the formation of
the book, in the original narrative Job maintained his patience throughout,
though (in a section now lost) his friends urged him, as his wife had done, to
"curse God and die." (H. L.
Ginsberg, “Job the Patient and Job the Impatient," Conservative Judaism
21/3 (1967):12-28) This would completely
alter the significance of God's rebuke of the friends and praise of Job. But if the poetic dialogue is, as this
hypothesis assumes, a later addition, we still have to reckon with the fact
that whoever joined the poetic dialogue to the prose narrative and whoever
judged the result worthy of inclusion in the canon apparently thought the
composite work told a coherent story.
[45]. In "Maimonides, Aquinas, and Gersonides
on
[46]. Pace Samuel Terrien, Interpreter's Bible,
III, 899. In conversation Eric Sward
suggested a way of defending the claim that Job is guilty of pride in claiming
to be innocent: we might so define pride that you commit the sin of pride
merely by holding highly favorable beliefs about yourself without adequate
evidence, even if the beliefs are true.
On this view, Job commits the sin of pride, not by falsely believing
that he is without fault, but by believing in an innocence no human can know
himself to possess. This is an
interesting conception of pride. But if that had been the point of God's
answer, then it would seem that it should have focused, not on Job's ignorance
of the operations of nature, but on his ignorance of himself.
[47]. 42:2.
The Qumran Targum has an interesting variant at this point: "I know
that you are able to do all, and power and wisdom are unlimited for
you." See the Anchor Job, p.
349. This explicitly affirms both
omnipotence and omniscience, whereas the Masoretic Text is explicit only about
omnipotence.
[48]. Leviathan xxxi, ¶5, pp. 235-6 in the
Hackett edition. If it is possible to
translate 41:11 as in the RSV ("Who has given to me that I should repay
him? Whatever is under the whole heaven
is mine."), the Ash`arite/Calvinist/Hobbesian reading would be very strongly
confirmed, but there seems to be no consensus about that translation.
[49]. My agreement with Strauss is only of a
general, methodological kind. So far as
I can see, he is never explicit about the nature of Maimonides' esoteric
teaching regarding providence. See
"The Literary Character of the Guide..." pp. 50-51, in Maimonides:
a collection of critical essays, ed. by Joseph Buijs, U of Notre Dame P,
1988, and "How to Begin to Study the Guide..." pp. liv-lv, in
the Pines edition of the Guide. As
Fox remarks somewhere, Strauss' discussion to Maimonides seems itself to be an
instance of esoteric writing, as well as a discussion of it.
[50]. "The Literary Character..." p.
48. I would not, however, hold that the
Ash`arite view is one which occurs only once in the Guide. It seems to me to surface also in III, 53,
where Maimonides writes that "every benefit that comes from Him... is
called hesed," i.e., an act of "beneficence toward one who has
no right at all to claim this from you." (p. 631/392) I take this to imply
that God cannot be under any obligation to man.
[51]. First published in Spanish, in
[52]. Maimonides does allude to Job's denial of the
resurrection, pointing out that some of the sages of the Talmud accused Job of
blasphemy because of it. (III, 23, p. 492/300) But when he discusses the excuse
other sages made for Job ("A man is not to be blamed for what he does when
suffering"), he treats this as if the blasphemous opinion to be excused
were that God treats the righteous and the wicked equally, and not the denial
of the resurrection. Perhaps Maimonides'
avoidance of this issue is one reason why some who denied the resurrection
claimed his authority for doing so, in spite of the fact that he had explicitly
included the life-to-come as one of the essential articles of Judaic
faith. See Maimonides' Essay on
Resurrection, in Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, tr.
by Abraham Halkin, comment by David Hartman, Jewish Publication Society, 1985,
p. 217.
[53]. This is how Manasseh characterizes Bildad's
position, II, p. 41. When Maimonides
describes Bildad's position, he does not claim (nor would the text he cites
permit him to claim) that the compensation is in the afterlife.
[54]. See the Goodman ed., p. 155: "God
foreknew that the angels would never disobey Him, and it is not possible for
what contravenes His foreknowledge to take place. For if things were to take place contrary to
what we have supposed, God would have foreknown that instead."
In the Guide III, 24, Maimonides considers the
notion of a trial, though in connection with the Abraham‑Isaac story, not
the story of Job. He finds that to be the strongest scriptural case for the
theory that God sends calamities to an individual, without their having been
preceded by sin, in order that the individual's reward might be increased. He agrees with Saadiah that God's
foreknowledge precludes conducting a trial so that God will know the
individual's virtue. On his account, the
purpose of Abraham’s trial was that the people of the religious community
should know what the love and fear of God require of them, and that they must
take a prophetic revelation as true even if it comes to them in a dream or
vision.
I
suppose Maimonides might say something analogous about Job. The first purpose seems relevant, even if the
second is not. But it seems a harder
thing to say in the case of Job than in the case of Abraham. The way the story of Abraham is usually told
at least, Abraham did not have to sacrifice Isaac; he had only to show himself
willing to do so. So he does not
actually have to suffer the loss of his only son, whom he loves. But Job has to suffer all the calamities the
Satan had planned for him. If this is to
show the community what the love and fear of God require of you ‑ that
you should remain loyal to God no matter how he treats you ‑ that may be
counterproductive, generating more doubt than piety.
Both Saadiah and Maimonides assume that God has what
later came to be called "middle knowledge," i.e., knowledge of
counterfactual conditionals in which the consequent describes the free actions
of God's creatures, such as "If David stayed in Keilah, Saul would besiege
the city." (The example comes from 1 Samuel 23:1‑14.) Middle
knowledge is controversial. Robert Adams
denies that God has it, essentially because he doesn't understand what the
truth conditions for such counterfactuals would be. (See his "Middle
Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly,
14(1977):109‑117.) I think the
Saadian‑Maimonidean intuition that God must have middle knowledge is
sound, and have argued this in a paper-in-progress called “Some Problems about
the Coherence of (Christian) Theism.”
[55]. II, p. 41.
Manasseh is referring here, not to anything Maimonides says in the Guide,
but to the position he takes on the resurrection in the Essay on
Resurrection, pp. 225-227. Saadiah deals
with Job 7:9 in a similar way (Goodman ed., p. 209).
[56]. Lindo cites the following testimonial from Rees's
Cyclopedia: "This work shews
that its Author had a profound and intimate acquaintance with the Old Testament
Writings, and it procured for him the esteem and admiration of all the learned,
as well Christians as Jews. It was
recommended to the notice of Biblical Scholars by the learned Grotius."
(p. vii)
[57] TTP ii, Bruder section 55, Gebhardt edition vol. III, p. 43, ll. 13-19.
[58]
This is apparently an insecure inference from the fact that Job lived in the
[59] Initiating a controversy which is still going on. See Pope, pp. xlix-l.
[60]. Leviathan, ch. 33, ¶12, takes the fact
that the bulk of Job is written in verse as evidence that the book is
not a history, but a philosophical treatise on the problem of evil: "Verse is no usual style of such as
either are themselves in great pain, as Job, or of such as come to comfort
them, as his friends, but in philosophy, especially moral philosophy in ancient
time, frequent."
[61]. Ecclesiastes 9:1-3, cited twice by
Spinoza in the TTP, in vi, 32 (III/87) and in xix, 7 (III/229). In each case Spinoza accepts the traditional
ascription of Ecclesiastes to Solomon.
The former passage also cites Ecclesiastes 3:19-20, denying the
immortality of the soul: "The fate
of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the
other. They all have the same breath,
and humans have no advantage over the animals, for all is vanity..."