MAIMONIDES' "GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED."* THonust Abu Amram Musa ben
Maimun, whom moderns call Maimonides, is one of the few medimval Jewish thinkers whose reputation extends beyond the limits of the Synagogue and whose writings have secured a place in general literature, it is extremely doubtful whether outside the ranks of those in- terested in the history of scholastic speculation, there is any large reading public to which a translation of his Dalcdat -d Hairin, or Guide of the Perpleced, is likely to appeal. Even among Jews, who affect a kind of familiarity with the Morn Nebuchim, as they style it, the work is far more widely known than read. As a matter of fact, the Guide is altogether out of date. Its philosophy is obsolete, its methods are antiquated, and its in- terest now-a-days is mainly antiquarian. If read at all, it is read by a few for the light it is calculated to throw upon the theo- sophic speculations of the Middle Ages. It is true that the critical study of Spinoza, which has become increasingly fashion- able in the last quarter of a century, has added to the number of those who turn to the pages of Maimonides' magnum opus with a view to pronouncing upon the question of the Am- sterdam philosopher's indebtedness to his Jewish prede cessors. But to such the work has long been accessible through the admirable French translation that accompanies Dr. Munk's critical edition of the Arabic text. Still, there may be some to whom an English version will not prove unacceptable, and to such Dr. Friedlander's rendering can con- scientiously be recommended. It is clear and faithful, and leaves not much to be desired on the score of accuracy. There is an ample body of notes, made with considerable judgment, ex- plaining the difficulties likely to be encountered by the student who would master the Guide, and obtain an insight into Jewish philosophy. It will hardly take rank with Munk's scholarly production, upon which Dr. Friedlander has largely drawn ; but is infinitely superior to Buxtorf's Doctor Perplexorum, which many are in the habit of consulting. Anyway, English readers, if so disposed, have now an opportunity of testing the truth of the eulogy pronounced upon Maimonides' writings by the Arab critic, Cadi al Said ibn Sena al Mulk, when he said that Abu Amram (Maimon practised as a physician) gave us medi- cine for mind, as well as body, and purged the age from the disease of ignorance.
In the usual sense of the word, the Guide of the Poplexed can hardly be called a philosophical work. It is simply an attempt to put revealed religion on a philosophic basis,—an attempt, in fact, to harmonise science and belief, or, to put it more precisely in the case of Maimonides, to find a rational fundament for dogmatic Judaism. And only to this extent can the work lay claim to- the epithet " philosophic " which has been so freely bestowed upon it. Maimon's great predecessor, Sandia, the Gaon, or Head of the Academies, had undertaken a somewhat similar task in his Einnuoth v' dioth, written in the tenth century, and founded the philosophico-religions school of which the author of the Guide became the most distinguished exponent. The immediate cause that moved Maimonides to produce his work was the spread of free-thought among his co-religionists. Judaism was divided. On the one side was a party that—as Dr. Benisch has tersely said—" publicly did homage to philosophy ;" on the other, a party prepared to
• The Guide of the Perplexed of Maimonides. Translated fromits Original and Annotated by IL Friedlander, Ph.D. 3 vols. Lmdon: Tn1bner and Ca. 1885. abjure everything on the altar of faith. It was Maimonides' design to show that religion was not incompatible with scientific knowledge, by discovering, or trying to discover, in Scripture, an allegorical and philosophical sense which both sides could accept, and thus create common ground, on which the rival parties might meet in common friendship. And it is impossible, even at this distance of time, to read the Guide without admiring the dexterity of argument, the lucidity of thought, the flashes of true philosophic insight, which the author occasionally dis- plays in it. The influence of the work upon medimval thought was profound. It was read and re-read, translated, and studied by theologians of every shade of opinion, and in this way the More Nebuch.ina of Maimonides gave birth to the Summa Theo- logics of St. Thomas of Aquinas. It was, however, through Albertus Magnus, though, that Maimon's theosophic and theologic notions were widely disseminated in the Middle Ages. He gathered what St. Thomas afterwards arranged and sys- tematised. Albertus, indeed, tried to do for Christianity what Maimonides had done Li- Judaism, and in doing so he appro- priated the Guide of the Perplexed with that customary freedom which moves Renan to say that Albert "a coutume de fondre dans son texts tout ce qu'il a entre lea mains." The investiga- tions of Joel have shown that not a single passage of any import- ance in the More Nebuchim escaped the lynx-eyed Churchman. But though Maimonides and Albertus Magnus set about a similar task, there is a notable difference in the fundamental principle upon which they work. Maimonides believes in the capacity of man to attain to a knowledge of God—the intel- lectual cognition of the Godhead—in a greater or lesser degree, according to the degree of man's intellectual development. Albertus holds that between the knowledge of the mind, or actual, and the supernatural there is a chasm to be bridged not by intellect, but by grace. The result is characteristic. Maimonides is often rankly unorthodox ; Albertus never puts himself in opposition to the tenets of the Church. Maimonides occasionally argues like a theologian, but his conclusions are generally philosophic. Albertus reasons like a philosopher, but always sums up like a Churchman.
Apart from the influence of Maimonides' work upon scholastic philosophy, the most interesting question raised in connection
with the Dalalat al is that of Spinoza's indebtedness
to his Jewish predecessor. The traditional view of all
writers is that Spinoza owed nothing to Jewish philo- sophy,—" he learnt enough of it to throw it off altogether." This is the opinion not alone of non-Jewish critics like Mar- tineau, Sorley, and Pollock, but of the first of Jewish authorities, Joel, of Breslau ; and as this view is based upon an examina- tion of the Guide of Maimonides, it may not be out of place here to say something upon the subject. As long ago as 1869, Professor Schaarschmidt, of Amsterdam, drew attention to the one-sidedness of this opinion ; and within the last few years additional light has been thrown upon the question by Professor Pearson. He very truly says :—" No great work ever sprang from the head of its creator like Athena from the head of Zeus ; it has slowly developed within him, influenced and moulded by all that has in- fluenced and moulded its shaper's own character." Now, Spinoza was a Jew, and was certainly not unacquainted with Jewish literature, and to assert that he was wholly unin- fluenced by the Jewish thinkers whose writings were known to him, hardly seems scientific. The truth is, investigators have not hitherto looked in the right place for the needful evidence of Spinoza's indebtedness. Misled by the fact that the More Nebuchint was the only avowedly philosophic produc- tion of Maimonides, they have confined their researches to its pages, and ignored the other works of the Jewish writer. Following up this idea, Professor Pearson overhauled the Yad Hachazakah, known also as the 31ishruzh Torah, and with some striking results. It is impossible to indicate here all the points of resemblance which have been traced between the tenets laid down in Maimon's digest of laws—for such the YadiHachazakah is—and those promulgated by the author of the Ethica. But a few are well worth noting, less by reason of the striking similarity they show, than for the strange conclusion to which they lead. There is, in the first instance, Maimonides' conception of the Deity as set forth in the Yad Hachazakah. He tells us God has neither form, nor frame, nor limit. He has none of the accidental qualities of bodies, "neither composition nor decomposition, neither ascent nor descent, neither before nor behind ; nor does he exist in years, so that he should have beginning or end or a number of years; nor is he liable to change, since there is nothing which can cause a change in him." God is one ; but his unity is not that of an individual or material body, "but such a one as there is no other unity like his in the universe. God's similitude or form in the Scriptures is due to the "apparition of prophecy." This Being exists, and "he has called into existence all other beings," and "all things existing, heaven and earth, and whatever is between them, exist only through the truth of his existence, so that where we supposed that he did not exist, no other thing could exist." It seems impossible to deny that this is Spinoza's God who "exists necessarily,"—" Quod sit unicus, quod sit omnium rerum causa libera, et quomodo ; quod omnia in Deo sint et ab ipso ita pendeant ut sine ipso nee ease nee concipi possint." Professor Pearson thinks "the words might stand for a translation of Maimonides." Similarly, the Yad tells us that with God "there is neither death nor life, neither folly nor wisdom, neither sleeping nor waking, neither anger nor laughter, neither joy nor sorrow." Is Spinoza's dictum, "God is without passions, and is not affected by any emotions of joy or sorrow," more than "a paraphrase of Maimonides P" Again, nothing is more characteristic of Spinoza than the part played in his scheme of metaphysics by the terms "thought" and "extension." And yet the equivalent Hebrew terms, " quality " and "matter "—used, moreover, in exactly the Spinozistic sense,—play the same role in the Yad Hachazakah. These two things compose the entire universe, they co-exist throughout being, and the degrees in which they are possessed form, to use Professor Pearson's phrase, "the basis of all classi- fication and individuality." Maimonides says :—" You can never see matter without quality, nor quality without matter, and it is only the understanding of man that abstractedly parts the existing body and knows that it is composed of quality and matter." But this proposition "is the very foundation of Spinoza's Ethica." So, too, the intellectual knowledge and love of God which are so prominent in Spinoza's system, find their exact analogies or originals in the Yad Hachazakah. With Maimonides, the measure of man's knowledge of God is his intelligence ; and his knowledge the measure of his love of the Deity. The knowledge of God's work "moves the intelligent man to love God ;" and "a man can love the holy One—Blessed be He !—only by the knowledge he has of him, so that his love will be in proportion to his knowledge." The intellectual love of God is, in the Yad, the highest good, just as the fullest know- ledge of the Deity will be its greatest happiness hereafter; and, in pursuit of it, the man's whole soul must be absorbed. "It cannot be made fast in the heart of man unless he be constantly and duly absorbed in the same, and unless he renounce every- thing in the world except this love." Is not this Spinoza's idea also ?—" Ex his dare intelligimus, qua in re nostra salus, seu Beatitudo seu Libertas consistat, nempe in constanti et reterno erga Deum amore ;" and, "Hie erga Deem Amor summum bonum est, quod ex dictamine Rationis appetere possumus." Many more instances of parallelism of thought might be adduced tending to upset the traditional view as to Spinoza's freedom from Jewish influence, but the foregoing must suffice. They are too striking to be passed over as mere coincidences, and cannot henceforth be ignored by critics of Spinoza's philosophy. We do not, how- ever, know if Professor Pearson understands fully the signifi- cance of the indebtedness of Spinoza to the Yad Hachazakah, which appears to be so clearly indicated. Readers will do so, when we point out that the Yad is not an original work of Maimonides, but only a digest or summary of the Talmud and its teaching. The language is that of Maimonides, but the ideas it clothes are those of his early progenitors. What will Spinozists say to a conclusion which traces back the roots of Spinoza's ethics and metaphysics to the "rubbish-heap "—as Lightfoot calls it—of Talmudic rabbinism The introduction Dr. Friedlander has furnished to this trans- lation of the Dalalat al Hairin, is meagre and unsatisfactory to a high degree. It treats of not a single topic of any general interest bearing either upon Maimonides' influence or philosophy. There is a lengthy discussion of Maimon's alleged apostasy, and the evidence of his temporary conversion to Islamism. This may be an all-absorbing topic among Jews, and overpower all other problems connected with the life and writings of the fore- most figure in orthodox Jewish literature; but in appealing to a wider public, Dr. Friedlander might have borne in mind that the mental horizon of people likely to study the Guide of the Perplexed is not bounded by the Synagogue walls. For the greater world the question of Maimonides' supposed apostasy
has no interest whatever in these days ; and if Jewish philo- sophy, of which Moshe3 Ben Maimon was the greatest exponent, could suggest nothing better to discuss, it might well have been left alone.
Previous page
