Naïve Readings: Reveilles Political and Philosophic 9780226353326

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Naïve Readings

Naïve Readings Reveilles Political and Philosophic

Ralph Lerner

The University of Chicago Press c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

R a l p h L e r n e r is the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in the College and professor emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Playing the Fool and Maimonides’ Empire of Light, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-35329-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-35332-6 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226353326.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lerner, Ralph, author. Naive readings : reveilles political and philosophic / Ralph Lerner. pages cm Includes index. isbn 978-0-226-35329-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-35332-6 (e-book) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Philosophy. I. Title. b65.L47 2016 190—dc23 2015031810 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for granted or otherwise despising the obvious and the surface. The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

Contents

Acknowledgments ix 1

Looking for the Figure in the Carpet

1

P a r t 1 American Originals 2 The World through Ben’s Bifocals

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3 The Gospel according to the Apostle Ben

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4 Jefferson’s “Summary View” Reviewed, Yet Again

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5 Lincoln: The Statesman as Outsider

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P a r t 2 Stories to Live By 6 Of Human Ends in Bacon’s Essayes

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7 Gibbon’s “Jewish Problem”

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8 Tocqueville’s Burke, or Story as History

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P a r t 3 In Aid of Lost Souls 9 A Thread through Halevi’s Maze

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10 On First Looking into Maimonides’ Guide

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Afterword 219 Index 223

Acknowledgments

I owe special thanks to the following colleagues, students, or friends, who through conversation, correspondence, and criticism have brought me to greater clarity as I was writing this book’s essays: Andrew Abbott, Clifford Ando, Ewa Atanassow, Richard Boyd, David Bromwich, Dean DiSpalatro, Robert Faulkner, Hillel Fradkin, Robert Gannett, Jack Greene, Dennis Hutchinson, Barry Kogan, Joel Kraemer, Carol Lerner, Yuval Levin, Jonathan Marks, Svetozar Minkov, David Nirenberg, Peter Onuf, Thomas Schrock, John Sexton, Gerald Stourzh, Heidi Studer, Bernard Wasserstein, Raymond Weiss, Michael Zuckerman, and Michael Zuckert. Chapter 2, “The World through Ben’s Bifocals,” appeared in Enlightenment and Secularism: Essays on the Mobilization of Reason, ed. Christopher Nadon (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), 257–69. An earlier version appeared in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver: Honoring the Work of Leon R. Kass, ed. Yuval Levin, Thomas W. Merrill, and Adam Schulman (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 21–33. Reprinted by permission of Lexington Books. Chapter 3, “The Gospel according to the Apostle Ben,” first appeared in American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 1, no. 1 (2012): 129–48. Chapter 4, “Jefferson’s ‘Summary View’ Reviewed, Yet Again,” also appears in Principles and Prudence in the History of Political Thought, ed. Christopher Lynch and Jonathan Marks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 257–74. Chapter 6, “Of Human Ends in Bacon’s Essayes,” first appeared in Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life,

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Acknowledgments

Essays in Honor of Heinrich Meier, ed. Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 119–36. Chapter 8, “Tocqueville’s Burke, or Story as History,” appeared in Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, ed. Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74–86. An earlier version appeared in Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle, ed. Timothy Burns (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 369–75. Reprinted by permission of Lexington Books.

Chapter 1

Looking for the Figure in the Carpet

The chapters in this volume are presented as experiments in reading complex texts. However diverse these texts may be as respects author, subject, and period, they are alike in appearing daunting and in some cases even impenetrable to readers today. It is worth pondering why that should be. Let us grant from the outset that it is hard to gain entry into these writings of another age. Many of the works to be discussed here are anything but plain and simple, nor are their authors transparent and direct. Confronted with such challenges and sensing, often with good reason, that there is treasure to be retrieved from deep within these writings, we readers yield to impulse. We rush to dig deep, dissect, and deconstruct what we take to be the core of the text, the better to discover a writer’s intent and meaning. As we move briskly along, we eliminate from consideration whatever we deem irrelevancies and superficialities. We ignore the surface of the work, gliding blithely by its tedious features that seem irrelevant to our needs precisely because they are so obvious and “unthematic.” Yet this hasty dismissal is almost always an error fatal to our gaining a better insight into an author’s intent. Our incapacity appears to have less to do with the impediments of archaic or technical language, or an author’s highly abstract reasoning, or for that matter the limited historical and cultural knowledge we may be able to bring to the task—though all of these may also render a text opaque to some degree. Rather, our reading problem has more to do with the manner in which we approach unfamiliar and challenging texts and our presumptions about how authors choose to communicate their thoughts to others. I do not mean to suggest that these barriers to comprehension are simply novel or symptoms

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of a diminished age. Not so. Authors typically have had an audience in mind, and not all authors have had the ability or desire to emulate the ingratiating lucidity of, say, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator essays. Indeed, there are authors (Maimonides and Sir Francis Bacon being prime examples) who designedly made sure that their readers must sing for their suppers. It is especially with regard to these most challenging authors that, I would maintain, our current habits of reading need reconsideration. The premise of this book is that when confronting the works of notoriously difficult authors, writers of extraordinary ability and artistry, we should proceed with caution and patience and refrain from drawing hasty conclusions about what is being said. This stance is especially appropriate when confronting writers who display great self-consciousness about their art. In proposing that we approach such works naïvely, I am suggesting that we not give short shrift to the obvious. Indeed, as Sherlock Holmes repeatedly had to draw to Dr. Watson’s notice, it is precisely what lies directly under our eyes that we have greatest difficulty observing. When it comes to engaging with the literary productions of uncommon authors, attention to their surface may be especially rewarding. The proof of that assertion, like that of a pudding, can only be in tasting the result. But a few words may be devoted to exposing the premises and assumptions that have led me to make that claim. We need not belabor the distinction between competent and incompetent writers. But it is harder to accept the notion of authorial control that goes far beyond taking care to reject slapdash methods and shortcuts unworthy of one’s craft. Such an author will also strive to control all aspects of his production, mustering all his powers to have his intended message (or messages) embodied and reflected in every feature of his work. Is such a degree of control possible? There is no difficulty accepting a more modest claim. Even readers of limited experience know that authors have choices of forms to make before putting pen to paper: will it be fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, a broadside or pamphlet, a satire, a dialogue, an epistolary novel, a treatise, a commentary? The possibilities are several, and the challenges and opportunities each presents will test both author and reader. Here, to begin with, is an unassuming fact—the choice of form—that deserves consideration and has not escaped the notice of even the nonscholars among us. But press onward and insist on the possibility that every jot and tittle of the work is a product of deliberation, even its seeming inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies, and we open ourselves to disbelief and likely derision. It is much easier to accept the “logographic necessity” of a sonnet by John Keats than of a work comprising

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hundreds of pages.1 Can we seriously claim that the most banal features of a work—even and especially a simple plainspoken account of the movement of its argument—can disclose artistry and intent deserving of our scrutiny? Even if we grant that some few authors privately (or, rarer still, publicly) entertain such grandiose notions of perfect control over their text, we are not obliged to assume that the author never stumbles or slumbers. But neither are we obliged to project our own all-too-evident shortcomings onto others. If we provisionally accept someone’s claim to mastery and adopt a preliminary stance, not of awe, but of patient attentiveness, we open ourselves to possibly learning something important and to not missing something. If we subsequently discover we have attributed too much control and precision to an author, we can always back away. That is more easily done than trying to correct the effects of our having been oblivious to such possibilities. The task that confronts us when engaged with a demanding text by an uncommonly challenging author may be compared to attempting to detect the figure in a carpet. Somewhere in that dazzling array of colors, curves, and lines is a figure, out there in plain sight (so we are assured or assume). But where? When presented with a visual conundrum, our mind’s eye often has to engage in multiple revised perceptions until it “gets” the puzzle of a trompe l’oeil or the perspectives of an Escher print. We might think of this as a conversational exchange in which we venture a preliminary understanding, only to have it tested, rejected, modified, tested again, and so on. Some such process takes place in confronting a written text as well, and in that case we can think of the exchange between attentive reader and artful author as dialectical. (Obvious instances of that would be the way we come to recognize irony or satire or parable beneath a surface.) Ultimately all may be revealed, although some works (such as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia) are remarkably resistant to being reduced to a single generally accepted understanding. We have to allow as well for the possibility that it may be no part of an author’s intention to bring his readers to a fixed conclusion at all, but rather to open their minds to an enlarged and enlarging series of reconsiderations. In any event, we are free to assume that the way the author shapes a work matters. All these seemingly incidental features—its form, initial appearance, order of presentation, peculiar mode of opening and reopening its sundry themes, to say nothing of its irregularities and idiosyncrasies—are not to be ignored because they are possibly deliberate on the part of an author who has or had his reasons. 1. On “logographic necessity,” see Plato, Phaedrus 264b.

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No more need be claimed for present purposes. In accepting or confessing that the approach I adopt here toward texts of great subtlety is naïve, I am mindful that speech that is charming in a nine-year-old may expose an adult to ridicule or pity. Nonetheless, everything has its costs, and some outcomes are worth the price.

Chapter 2

The World through Ben’s Bifocals

The degree of Benjamin Franklin’s “secularism” cannot even be approximated by any simple word search through his voluminous writings. There is no recorded appearance of the noun in English before the middle of the nineteenth century; and Franklin uses the adjective “secular” in its various early meanings only rarely. In the case of this author, at least, one must seek not the telltale word but the overall stance. From his first appearance in print to his last—a span encompassing sixty-eight years—Franklin exhibits and promotes a way of viewing, thinking, and acting that sets him markedly apart from that little world of Bostonian orthodoxy into which he was born in 1706. His aged parents later had good cause to be concerned that he had imbibed some erroneous opinions, and his respectful response to their voiced misgivings (13 April 1738) can hardly have allayed those anxieties. Indeed, it is safe to say that Franklin had turned his back on their world of pious submission even before his escape, as a sixteen-year-old, from the correcting hand of paternal and clerical authority. But the evidence in support of that assertion has to be sought in Franklin’s own nuanced presentation of his thoughts and deeds. Considered in detail and as an ensemble, they tell a memorable tale—in muted, ingratiating language—of one man’s radical self-assertion. Typical autobiographers see no need to explain or excuse offering up their life stories to the world at large. Having a tale to tell, they plunge in. Not so the author of one of the most widely read of all autobiographies. Benjamin Franklin finds it fitting to open his unfinished account of his life with the reasons or “inducements” impelling him to undertake such a project. They are several, a fact that might prompt the reader to be alert for redundancy; Franklin may be overdo-

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ing it. To begin with, he says he has always enjoyed hearing little anecdotes of his ancestors and imagines that his son (to whom this narrative is addressed) would enjoy hearing of his father as well. Beyond such idle sharing of enjoyment, however, is the thought that Franklin’s descendants might find some utility in applying to their own situations the means he used in raising himself from poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. Accordingly he promises to show them how he did it. Furthermore, Franklin is so pleased with his present happy condition that he says he is ready to relive his life, even without the opportunity of correcting some of its “errata.” But that kind of repetition being out of the question, he settles for mere recollection; and to make that recollection “as durable as possible,” he will commit it to writing. The final reason given in this catalog of inducements is Franklin’s admission that writing about himself will “a good deal gratify my own Vanity”—a gratification for which he is very grateful indeed (43–44).1 This opening paragraph, occupying a scant page and a half, is a tour de force, opening as it does a window into the mind of one of the subtlest and most charming observers of humankind. Looking in, we see that Franklin’s most powerful inducement has been left at mere insinuation. Rather than sermonize, rather than state explicitly his largest lesson on how to look at the world and how to view our place in it, Franklin enacts a series of scenes in which we observe the drama and draw his conclusions on our own. With finesse and wit he accustoms us to borrow his bifocals and to observe and interpret the story he tells through his eyes. Consider again how this opening paragraph works. The first inducement rests on the assumption that I’m like you and you’re like me. I have always enjoyed hearing about my forebears and so might you. This, dear son, is less a matter of your being a chip off the old block than of our sharing a common human curiosity about our origins. The next inducement, however, rests on the assumption that I’m not like you and you’re not like me. I am the noteworthy instance of a man who lifted himself quite a bit above the common dust of humanity. This ability is rare and not simply to be presumed in one’s offspring. You, my posterity, might nonetheless wonder how I did it and whether the like might work for you. Franklin acknowledges that he must have had the blessing of God, but emphasizes how much is owing to his own efforts. For though a kind providence may have supplied 1. Parenthetical page references are to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964).

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“the conducing Means” for the autobiographer, it was “I [who] made use of [them]” (43). In the very course of announcing that he is now prepared to teach what every generation needs to learn, Franklin nudges us to realize that he is an autodidact, having found out this teaching on his own. On the whole, his has been a good life, not without its “sinister Accidents and Events” to be sure, but with what he calls “a considerable share of Felicity” (43). He sees no point in dwelling on what might have been; he has little taste or time for regrets and brooding. What’s done is done, and one is better advised to get on with life. Yet, being an old man (he is sixty-five when writing these lines, though his brilliant diplomatic career still lies before him), he affects to be ready to indulge himself in recollections. Lest you imagine that this is an old codger in an assisted-living facility prattling away, note that Franklin is concerned that his recollection be made as durable as possible and spread as far as feasible. What we have here is not an aide-memoire of an old man with a short memory, but rather an ambitious production by a man very much possessed of his faculties and avid for ambitious readers. His audience extends far beyond his son, his immediate descendants, or even future generations of his countrymen. (It turns out that the full reach of this author’s ambition for an audience does not emerge until later in the account.) Finally, there is this matter of vanity. There is no point in denying that it comes into play when I decide to tell you at length all about myself, nor is there any point in my apologizing for displaying this all-too-human trait. Franklin takes what earlier theologians and moralists had deemed a sin or a vice or at least a failing and adroitly transforms it into a socially and privately beneficial trait. In many cases, Franklin asserts cautiously, “it would not be quite absurd if a Man were to thank God for his Vanity among the other Comforts of Life” (44). With this amiable nod, the circle of inducements is closed with a blending of private and public concerns. Franklin has suggested he will not hold back telling about some incidents that do him no credit, incidents where he would have behaved otherwise were he able to relive his life. In these pages, he leads us to believe, we shall see him portrayed warts and all. As he puts it later when refusing to excuse his decision to stop attending church services, “My present purpose [is] to relate Facts, and not to make Apologies for them” (198). He creates expectations that his story will be marked by candor, even if you the reader are put off by his open self-satisfaction and self-absorption. For now we need only to be reminded that we are not obliged by politeness to hear him out. We can close the covers of this book whenever we please. Ben’s plain message is, Take me as I am. But that plain message is wrapped in such diffident language and

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delivered in so charming a manner that we are left with a general sense of warm geniality. Who can remain out of sorts with someone who confesses to having waged a losing war against pride and then wiggles out of this selfcondemnation with this graceful flourish? “You will see it perhaps often in this History. For even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility” (160). Ben, tell us more! Please! Nowhere is Franklin’s mastery of artful speech more evident than in his discussions of religious belief. His tone of voice when alluding to divine providence suggests that he is on easy terms with the deity. His god is not that of his Presbyterian parents or of John Calvin, to say nothing of the Lord of Hosts who spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. Having planted in our minds the almost reasonable notion of thanking God for one’s vanity, Franklin goes on immediately to acknowledge (as he puts it) “with all Humility” how much he owes to God for the happiness he has enjoyed up to this time. This expression of humble thanks is not without its own little twist. Ben speaks of “his kind Providence, which led me to the Means I us’d and gave them success” (45). It is not quite clear from this acknowledgment where the credit belongs: whether to the providence that pointed young Ben to the right means for attaining happiness or to the “I” who used those means so effectively. However one understands it, Franklin is ready to hope, though not presume, that his unknowable future fortune will be for the best. His is not a faith tortured by misgivings. He is ever-ready to enlist all of his human providence in support of whatever divine providence shines in his direction. Immediately after this pious interlude, Ben sets out to satisfy the firstmentioned reason for writing the memoir. He presents a portrait gallery of some of his ancestors. Theirs is an old family of freeborn Englishmen, plain people with calluses on their hands, but by no means ordinary. From surviving genealogical records Ben discovers—and makes sure we register this fact as well—that he is “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for 5 Generations back” (46). In a world where being first-born carried distinct social, legal, and economic privileges, Ben’s disadvantageous start in life seems all the greater. But in the context of his whole life’s trajectory, this curious fact may strike us as neither a complaint nor an expression of regret, but as a boast. Consider the odds I have overcome; consider how far I have risen. The individual ancestors Ben sketches are remarkably vivid. They come across as genuine characters. What is more, they are described in terms that invite the reader to see them as bearers of traits that one might observe in the author himself. His maternal grandfather, Peter Folger, labored for the repeal of Massachusetts Bay Colony laws that constrained the liberty of conscience

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of Baptists, Quakers, and others. His appeal to authorities was cast in a rustic poetry that Benjamin Franklin finds redeemed by what he characterizes as “a good deal of Decent Plainness and manly Freedom” (52). On his father’s side, he singles out two uncles in particular. Uncle Thomas was a smith, but no ordinary laborer, as we can tell from his nephew’s account: “being ingenious, and encourag’d in Learning . . . he qualify’d for the Business of Scrivener, became a considerable Man in the County Affairs, [and] was a chief Mover of all publick Spirited Undertakings.” Ben draws attention to the “extraordinary” similarity of this forebear and himself, a resemblance that might suggest the one is a prefiguration of the other, or that the soul of Thomas Franklin has migrated to the body of his nephew (47–48). Uncle Benjamin elicits a comparison, even a silent contrast. Like his namesake, he was an “ingenious” man and lived to a great age. He was also pious and an avid “Attender of Sermons of the best Preachers” (48–49). His literary legacy consisted of two manuscript volumes of poetry of a rather moralistic sort that he had composed, along with many volumes of others’ sermons that he had transcribed in a shorthand of his own invention. The latter he had proposed to offer to his young nephew should Ben become a clergyman. (“I suppose,” Ben says, “as a Stock to set up with” [53].) But this was not to be, thanks in part to the decisiveness of the most influential ancestor, Ben’s father. Josiah Franklin, chafing under the Stuart laws aimed at suppressing religious practices at variance with prescribed Anglican rituals, had emigrated to New England with a wife and the first few children of what was to become a very large family. Ben describes this former dyer, who made himself into a tallow chandler and soap boiler, as a man of parts, able to draw and sing and play music and possessed of “a mechanical Genius.” “But his great Excellence,” he says, “lay in a sound Understanding, and solid Judgment in prudential Matters, both in private and public Affairs” (54–55). Here was a tradesman whose opinion was frequently consulted by others who recognized and respected his judiciousness. Josiah casts a long shadow in the autobiography, even after the teenager runs away from Boston and from the whole web of obligations that tie him to his parents and his apprenticeship. We note in passing that Ben is the third of Josiah’s ten sons who rebels and escapes from paternal control. Ben’s account of his forebears is full of curious details but lacks warmth. More to the point, his depiction of his father’s management of his education contains muted but unmistakable criticism. He writes, “My Father’s little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted, that at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way, since it was now

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resolv’d I should not be a Clergyman” (58). The original resolve that Ben be trained as a clergyman was Josiah’s; he had intended “to devote [Ben] as the Tithe of his Sons to the Service of the Church” (52). In keeping with this intention, number ten boy was sent to the grammar school where he flourished and shone for the bare year in which he was enrolled. But Josiah’s second thoughts, prompted by considerations of the expense of a college education and the “mean living” that graduates might expect, led to his second resolve (53). After a further year in a school for writing and arithmetic, young Ben would learn a trade. At age ten he is back among the tallow pots making candles. Ravenous for books, he settles for what is at hand, works of polemical divinity which are, strictly speaking, good for nothing and good for none save other polemical divines. What a waste! Even worse, he insists, such works instill a disputatious turn of mind which all too soon turns into a nasty habit. A love of contradiction sours and spoils conversation. It is a sure way how not to win friends and influence people. Viewed in retrospect, Ben sees his youthful enthusiasm for confrontational argument as a disease: “I had caught it by reading my Father’s Books of Dispute about Religion” (60). Ben’s account of his forefathers leaves us with a strong impression of a world suffused with religious doctrine and religious controversy, in which individuals with more or less practical wisdom try to wend their way. Prudence, above all, is needed, and any level-headed individual possessing it has in his hands an important instrument for making his mark. As though to reinforce that point by way of contrast, Franklin fills the rest of his autobiography with sketches of characters in high places and low who are very sure of themselves even while showing they lack good sense. Take Sir William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania. He proposes to help set up eighteen-year-old Ben in business as a printer, even while knowing he has no means for bringing that about. On the strength of Keith’s vain assurances of a promised letter of credit, Ben sets sail for England to buy the necessary equipment only to be left high and dry and to discover this damning truth about the governor: that “He wish’d to please everybody; and having little to give, he gave Expectations” (80–82, 86–87, 92–95). Or consider the ill-fated British Major General Edward Braddock. Confident of himself and of his redcoats, and dismissive of both the colonists and the Indians whom he has been sent to pacify, he rejects and loses the advantage of local knowledge and experience. When warned by Franklin of the danger of ambushes awaiting his army’s extended line of march through the wilderness, “He smil’d at my Ignorance” and proceeded into the disaster he could not envision (216–17, 223–25). On a more amusing and triumphant note, listen to Ben’s account of the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, preceptor in natural

The World through Ben’s Bifocals

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philosophy to the French royal family and an early experimenter in electricity. When first encountering Franklin’s scientific pamphlet, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Nollet refuses to believe that such a work could emerge from America (of all places) and is persuaded that his enemies in Paris have concocted this fraud the better to attack his reputation. Even after being satisfied that the alleged author is not a hoax, Nollet proceeds to contest Franklin’s experiments and deductions. Ben reports that he thought better of responding: either his experiments could be replicated or not, and he was not under any obligation to defend observations that had been offered only as conjectures, not delivered dogmatically. In the end, he says, “I concluded to let my Papers shift for themselves”; other scholars came to the defense of Franklin’s theories; while the poor Abbé, fallen from favor, now lives to see himself barely a footnote in the annals of science (243–44). Overweening people provide endless opportunities for a careful observer to draw a lesson and make his move. Perhaps the most engaging and rewarding parts of Ben’s narrative are those describing how Ben observes and learns from others’ folly and where we too are able to observe and learn from his education in life. But we are not yet done with his vignettes of character. Here is another sketch, a splendid instance of chicanery and misplaced confidence offering much matter for reflection. After stealing out of Boston, incognito as it were, the young apprentice seeks work in New York City, but with no success. The local printer there, William Bradford, tells him that his son Andrew, a printer in Philadelphia, may well have need for an extra hand. On the strength of this intelligence, Ben continues southward and after many misadventures finally makes his memorable entry into town. Presenting himself at Andrew Bradford’s shop, whom should he meet there but the elder Bradford, on a visit from New York. Andrew can offer no immediate employment, but in a spirit of helpfulness suggests that his competitor, Samuel Keimer, might. And even more helpfully, the senior Bradford volunteers to accompany Ben to the interview. Now the comedy begins. Before it is over, a fool shows his true colors, and readers who reflect on these scenes may be the wiser for it. This is how Ben picks up the story: And when we found him, Neighbour, says Bradford, I have brought to see you a young man of your Business, perhaps you may want such a One. He ask’d me a few Questions, put a Composing Stick in my Hand to see how I work’d, and then said he would employ me soon, tho’ he had just then nothing for me to do. And taking old Bradford whom he had never seen

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before, to be one of the Towns People that had a Good Will for him, enter’d into a Conversation on his present Undertaking and Prospects; while Bradford not discovering [i.e., not disclosing] that he was the other Printer’s Father, on Keimer’s saying he expected soon to get the greatest Part of the Business in his own Hands, drew him on by artful Questions and starting little Doubts, to explain all his Views, what Interest he rely’d on, and in what manner he intended to proceed. I who stood by and heard all, saw immediately that one of them was a crafty old Sophister, and the other a mere Novice. Bradford left me with Keimer, who was greatly surpris’d when I told him who the old Man was. (77–78)

The sixty-five-year-old man who tells this story clearly relishes exposing Keimer’s profound ignorance of the world. Presuming that someone who addresses him as “Neighbour” is indeed such, leaves this naïf naked and exposed. Getting the better of such a dunce head is child’s play, and the seventeen-year-old who witnesses the encounter understands “immediately” what the man twice his age does not. The humorless Keimer is in for it once he hires Ben. This boy with more than a touch of spite knows how to deal with his future employer so as to secure his own interests and at the same time provide a steady source of amusement. How ought one to understand the unthinking readiness of Keimer to spill the beans? He was clearly an eccentric and perhaps mentally unstable. Though a rotten printer, he was no illiterate and even had some scholarly pretensions. But he was a congenital believer. In Franklin’s words, “He had been one of the French Prophets and could act their enthusiastic Agitations. At this time he did not profess any particular Religion, but something of all on occasion” (79). Franklin’s reference to French Prophets is to a sect of “French Protestant refugees [Camisards] in England in 1706, given to trances and revelations, proclaiming a Messianic kingdom soon to come” (79n7). Keimer’s yearning for some kind of religion-inspired transcendence led him to try on different ones for size, but finding none suited him for long, he was prepared to make his own. It is tempting to say much the same about young Ben. He abandons his parents’ Presbyterianism, goes on to “become a thorough Deist,” fabricates his own private credo and liturgy, and ultimately envisions forming a worldwide secret “sect” in which the “Virtuous and good Men of all Nations” would unite around a single creed, a creed stripped of anything “that might shock the Professors of any Religion” and hence be acceptable to all (113–14, 147, 161–62). This demands a much closer look, but we cannot turn

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to what Ben calls his “great and extensive Project” until we have finished our business with the inimitable Keimer (158, 163). Ben is now working full-time at Keimer’s print shop. They are on good terms, the employer having no wind of the fact that his pressman, backed by the promised patronage of the provincial governor, is aiming to set himself up as a competitor. Keimer’s skewed preoccupations keep him from appreciating that this skilled, hyper-energetic young man will not long settle for being an underling. Further, he finds Ben good company, a perfect complement (as he sees it) to his own strengths: namely, his indulgence in old religious enthusiasms and his love of argumentation. As Ben reports, “We therefore had many Disputations” (88). Only gradually does Keimer come to realize that they are not fighting on a level field. A few years earlier Ben had learned from a book (as you the reader might learn from his book) that there are better ways of dealing with the world’s stupidity than by what he calls “abrupt Contradiction, and positive Argumentation.” A lesson he took away from Xenophon’s Memorabilia, recollections of the life of Socrates, was the utility of the method whereby Socrates affected a profoundly ironical humility. Ben reports, “I was charmed with it, adopted it . . . and put on the humble Enquirer and Doubter” (64). (For more on Franklin’s promotion of this noncombative stance and his insistence on the value of keeping a low profile, see 65, 117, 143, 159, 193.) Ben was drawn to this method for a deeper reason than that it would permit him to win arguments on the cheap, though that undeniably had its own attraction. He had a very strong inducement for becoming a master practitioner of a strategy of humility: “being then . . . become a real Doubter in many Points of our Religious Doctrine, I found this Method safest for my self and very embarassing to those against whom I used it” (64). Given this background, it was a near certainty that Keimer would soon find himself flummoxed, even paralyzed, by the artful snares that Ben had laid for him. “I us’d to work him so with my Socratic Method, and had trapann’d him so often by Questions apparently so distant from any Point we had in hand, and yet by degrees led to the Point, and brought him into Difficulties and Contradictions that at last he grew ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer me the most common Question, without asking first, What do you intend to infer from that? ” (88). You might think that Keimer suffers from a lack of self-esteem, but you would be off the mark. He is too dull-witted for that. Instead he sees a new opportunity, with Ben as his sidekick, “in a Project he had of setting up a new Sect.” Ben explains that Keimer “was to preach the Doctrine, and I was to confound all Opponents” (88). From each according to his abilities! The

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comedy now begins in earnest as master and apostle negotiate over the content of the doctrines to be preached. Keimer, inspired by the law of Moses, insists on his essentials: wearing one’s beard untrimmed and keeping the seventh day as the Sabbath. Ben reluctantly concedes, provided he can have his way too: let there be strict vegetarianism. Keimer objects: “I doubt, says he, my Constitution will not bear that. I assur’d him it would, and that he would be the better for it. He was usually a great Glutton, and I promis’d my self some Diversion in half-starving him. He agreed to try the practice if I would keep him Company. I did so and we held it for three months” (88–89). Again, one ought to view this episode in the spirit in which it is offered. Although he had once been a vegetarian on principle, Ben no longer is, having been seduced from his higher commitment by the delicious smell of cod coming hot out of the frying pan. His covenant with Keimer is prompted, rather, by “the Cheapness of it”—that is, by the economies in keeping to a vegetarian diet—and by the prospect of the fun he will have in tormenting this intemperate carnivore. “I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffer’d grievously, tir’d of the Project, long’d for the Flesh Pots of Egypt, and order’d a roast Pig. He invited me and two Women Friends to dine with him, but it being brought too soon upon table, he could not resist the Temptation, and ate it all up before we came” (89). Here is a vaudeville version of how yet another high-minded movement for the elevation of humankind bites the dust. There are more than a few laughs in this episode, but not only that. We are entitled to ask, what kind of religion are master and apostle preaching to the gentiles? The doctrines, insofar as we are informed about them, make no pretense of explaining how the believers would be better men and women by virtue of their adherence. The hollow core of this would-be sect anticipates a criticism Franklin would later make of a preacher whose sermons he described as “very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral Principle was inculcated or enforc’d, their Aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good Citizens.” (147) Disgusted with that preacher’s missed opportunity, Franklin finds better use for his Sunday’s leisure and thereupon, if we are to believe him, resumes use of his private liturgy as laid down in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion of 1728. It seems to him that there has to be a better way than the inanities of a Keimer and the self-satisfaction of the Presbyterian sermonizer. And indeed, now something grander and more challenging hovers into sight: “It was about this time,” he says, “that I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” (148). Ben is famous not only for the book he began but never finished—the story

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of his life—but also for the book he intended to publish but never wrote—The Art of Virtue (157). He explains in the autobiography that his long-cherished design was frustrated by the press of his private business when he was still young and by the press of his public involvements during his mature years. Those preoccupations have effectively barred his ever bringing his book to light. He adds these words, pregnant with meaning: this book, The Art of Virtue, “being connected in my Mind with a great and extensive Project that required the whole Man to execute” (158). These few words offer a glimpse into his far-reaching design (158). Nothing less than the “whole Man” will suffice. We are teased into wondering why that should be so. Clearly, if it were simply a matter of bringing together the sundry “short Hints” he has been composing over the years, arranging and amplifying those notes, developing his commentaries on the various virtues he means to promote, or even refining “the Utility and Excellency of my Method” by showing “the Means and Manner of obtaining Virtue” (157)—all these could have been accomplished over the years, bit by bit, by even a very busy man if he steals odd interludes from his schedule. Indeed, this is a fairly adequate description of how Franklin manages to compose as much of his memoir as he does. One might also dismiss his excuse as being superfluous, for he has in fact folded into his autobiography what amounts to a twelve-page executive summary of the whole Art of Virtue (148–60). A more likely account of what is afoot here would focus less on the little book itself and more on the “great and extensive Project” to which it is connected in Ben’s mind. It is that “Project” that requires the whole man. Recall that Franklin’s point of departure is “the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any Fault at any time; I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into” (148). This is a tall order indeed, and even in merely trying to reshape himself into something better than he is, Ben falters and stumbles. The path toward individual perfection is steep and rocky. Ben readily confesses that. But thanks to his excellent method of habituating himself to better words and deeds, he does inch closer to his goal. Now enlarge the field of vision and multiply the number of those who are to be enlisted in a “united Party for Virtue” (161). At age twenty-five Ben contemplates forming a worldwide party of believers, a secret society composed at first of young single men who will submit to the prescribed thirteen-week cycle of moral reform and reinforcement as prescribed in The Art of Virtue. Combining self-help with mutual promotion of “one another’s Interest, Business, and Advancement in Life,” Ben endows this support group with a nondenominational

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“Creed” to which no one would take offense, referring as it does to a creator, providence, prayer, the immortality of the soul, and reward and punishment “either here or hereafter.” Critical to this new religion is the notion “that the most acceptable Service of God is doing Good to Man” (162). Plainly put, this “Sect” (Ben’s own word) has a god whose message to men is that they ought to focus their thoughts on their own business here on earth and leave the deity (however understood) to take care of his. With a breathtaking blandness, Ben proposes calling this new sect “the Society of the Free and Easy; Free, as being by the general Practice and Habit of the Virtues, free from the Dominion of Vice, and particularly by the Practice of Industry and Frugality, free from Debt, which exposes a Man to Confinement and a Species of Slavery to his Creditors”—truly a sect given to works over faith (163). Note that Ben does not explain in what sense the adherents of this society will be “Easy,” though the implication is left for us readers to draw after asking, “Easy—compared to what?” (For more on this “great and extensive Project,” see chapter 3, “The Gospel according to the Apostle Ben.”) The plainspoken answer to that question has to be sought, not in the pages of Franklin’s memoirs, but in the preface he wrote in 1773 to a proposed revision of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, an undertaking in which he collaborated with a fellow deist. In that preface the anonymous editors, speaking in the singular, profess pious admiration for the work they are about to dismantle. Their book purports to be only an “Abridgement”; and they are motivated to make this effort out of regard for the suffering, or at least inconvenience, caused by the overlong liturgy of the Church of England. Think of the aged and infirm shivering away for hours in a wintry cold church. Think of the young who are put off by those endless, repetitive services. Think of busy, gainfully employed people who might be tempted to drop in for a weekday service if only the prayers were reduced to a much narrower compass. The language suggests that this editorial project is driven by compassion for parishioners and care for the renewed vigor of the established church. Yet the bland tone of the preface smacks rather of a time-motion engineer focused on his stopwatch, and it prefigures the heavy hand to be visited upon the liturgy: “this humble performance may serve to shew the practicability of shortening the service near one half, without the omission of what is essentially necessary.”2 Judgments of what is “essentially necessary” must differ, of course. But it was unlikely that orthodox Anglicans would have quietly suf2. The text of Franklin’s preface is printed in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William B. Willcox et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 20:345–51 (quotation at 349).

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fered the virtual excision of references to the Holy Ghost, the mediating role of Jesus, and his real presence in the consecrated bread and wine—and they did not. Even modern commentators on Franklin feel compelled to view this revision less as an abridgement than as an evisceration of the Book of Common Prayer.3 Still, it is undeniable that congregants using this trimmed-down version would have found their accustomed religion suddenly and markedly made more “Easy.” We might well wonder how far the Great Projector got in realizing his “great and extensive Project.” Ben turns rather vague; it is, after all, hard to recall details fifty-seven years after the event. But he does remember sharing his project—“in part”—with two young men “who adopted it with some Enthusiasm” (163). Far from regarding such results as slim pickings, Ben is in no way dismayed. He could not spare time to do more then, but remains firmly convinced that his scheme is both practicable and useful. “And I was not discourag’d by the seeming Magnitude of the Undertaking, as I have always thought that one Man of tolerable Abilities may work great Changes, and accomplish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good Plan, and, cutting off all Amusements or other Employments that would divert his Attention, makes the Execution of that same Plan his sole Study and Business” (163). Here, if anywhere, we find the credo of the authentic Benjamin Franklin. Ben remains to the end an evangelist of a new kind. He is proselytizing for a “Scheme [that] was not wholly without Religion” or a “Method . . . that might be serviceable to People in all Religions” (157). The artful blurring of lines in this account suggests powerfully that Franklin’s religion of the future aims, over time, to transform popular preoccupations and orientations. The change he has in mind is encapsulated in a little story he tells about his friend George Whitefield, who was so prominent in the first major religious revival in America—the “Great Awakening.” Franklin had offered to have this famous evangelist as his house guest when he came to Philadelphia to preach. “He reply’d, that if I made that kind Offer for Christ’s sake, I should not miss of a 3. Ibid., 345 introductory note and 349n4. See also Alfred Owen Aldridge, Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), 172: “In tackling the liturgy, he slashed right and left. Gone completely were the Absolution and the Canticle— nearly all of the Exhortation, the Te Deum, the Venite exultemus—and a large section of the Confession. Over half of the Apostles’ Creed went by the board.” The ribald deist agenda behind this editorial project is nicely, if gently, developed by Aldridge at 166–79 as he traces the relationship between Sir Francis Dashwood (Baron Le Despencer), the principal “abridger,” and Benjamin Franklin, his aider and admirer.

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Reward. And I return’d, Don’t let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake. One of our common Acquaintance jocosely remark’d, that knowing it to be the Custom of the Saints, when they receiv’d any favour, to shift the Burthen of the Obligation from off their own Shoulders, and place it in Heaven, I had contriv’d to fix it on Earth” (178–79). Benjamin Franklin lived a life full of accomplishments. He made his mark in technology, science, politics, diplomacy, music, and literature. His many acts of benefit to others still entitle his memory to be held in regard not only by his countrymen but by humankind at large. Yet there is no denying that he was motivated to perform these public-spirited deeds by considerations lying outside the moral and religious mainstream. Recall how in his memoir’s opening paragraph he plants the notions that a mixture of many motives may lie behind a simple action, that the seemingly private may have important social consequences, that a useful public action may be driven by intensely private desires. He knew from firsthand experience that very many of his contemporaries would have been ill at ease with his unorthodox reasonings had they been stated baldly and decisively. He had, then, good cause to adopt the strategy he used in presenting his life story. Close reflection on his thoughts and words discloses that both his starting point and his end point were firmly lodged in this world, in this life. He would have us readers come to understand that it is here that we ought to focus our attention and care. His cautionary tales, told with so much understated wit and grace, are meant to work on our understanding and then on our will. He could not have expected that his readers would move as far from the preoccupations of their fathers as he had from his, but perhaps it is a measure of his long-term success that today his bold project hardly seems revolutionary at all.

Chapter 3

The Gospel according to the Apostle Ben

It is almost an article of faith among Western liberal people that close scrutiny of another individual’s religious beliefs is a grave act of trespass. The very thought of such probing evokes in the imagination a long dismal prospect ending at last with the stake and the pyre. What could be more emphatically private, mine, than my thoughts? Keep out! Yet for all our respecting a living person’s domain of faith, our curiosity about others’ religious beliefs is not quite extinguished. This is markedly the case when we try to recover or reimagine the inner lives of historical personages of especial interest to us, those rare individuals whose achievements and singularities command attention through the generations. And when, among those individuals, there is to be found a record of spiritual searching, the invitation to look more closely into what is said, what is left unsaid, and what is implied becomes well-nigh irresistible. This is precisely the challenge that confronts anyone trying to reconstruct or unearth the religion of Benjamin Franklin. Serious-minded scholars have tried their hand at this, producing quite a few learned studies with predictably mixed results.1 Starting from different premises—more often assumed than 1. Among recent monographs, the following are noteworthy for their willingness to address Franklin’s puzzling religiosity (or lack thereof): J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, Journalist 1706–1730, vol. 2, Printer and Publisher 1730–1747 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Lorraine Smith Pangle, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Kerry S. Walters, Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005). Still pertinent and challenging is Alfred Owen

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argued—commentators have focused on different aspects of a public figure who lived long and wrote much. It is not only their conclusions that have differed. Even more disparate and conflicting have been their assessments of the mind they are trying to fathom from a great distance. The fact that the object of their scrutiny delighted in donning masks, playing jokes, and conveying his teachings both by explicit maxims and by indirection only further complicates the already challenging task of reading another’s inner thoughts. The more earnest we may be about getting to the bottom of this wily fellow’s mind, the more do we need to lighten up, detect a wink, and be ready to go along with a joke as far as it may take us. Alas, all too often serious people find that hard to do. Ben understood this very well.2 He was an astute reader of men and made careful, deliberate use of that understanding both to enlighten and to conceal, as best served his purposes and interests. Taking advantage of our human propensity to generalize on the basis of insufficient evidence, he engaged in wholesale manipulation. Appreciating our inordinate love for our long-held but largely unexamined opinions, he avoided frontal attacks in daytime in favor of mining and sapping under cover of darkness. All of which is to say that Ben is never more carefully to be watched than when he is charming, or wearing a zany mask, or sincere. This premise of mine is not without its own pitfalls. Predetermined wariness may tempt us to apply a large discount rate to everything our author has to say, to the point that a presumed irony dissolves an argument into incoherence. We dare not be flat-footed when trying to catch up with someone as Aldridge’s classic study, Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967). 2. In assuming an air of familiarity with this great man, I disown any unseemly or disrespectful intent. Franklin himself (in a parody, to be sure) disdained pretentious formalities and honorific titles. “In old Time it was no disrespect for Men and Women to be call’d by their own Names: Adam, was never called Master Adam; we never read of Noah Esquire, Lot Knight and Baronet, nor the Right Honourable Abraham, Viscount Mesopotamia, Baron of Carran; no, no, they were plain Men” (W 49, P 1:52). Having invited his readers to cozy up, we in turn have no reason to rebuff him. Parenthetical page numbers reference The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed., ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 39 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–); Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Library of America, no. 37 (New York: Literary Classics, 1987). Where reference is made to A (Autobiography), corresponding pages are given in W (Writings). Where reference is made to materials appearing in W, corresponding pages are given, if available, in P (Papers).

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nimble as our man. At the same time we ought not to dismiss a naïve reading of a sophisticated text. Following an argument as it presents itself and wherever it may lead keeps us focused on the issue at hand. This mode of procedure may not bring us directly to the depths of a problem, but it at least does not keep us from getting there. When examining Ben’s literary output bearing on religious themes, one can hardly complain of a want of materials. His most recent and knowing biographer assures us, “No colonial American layman wrote as much on religion, ethics, and values as Franklin. Indeed, few ministers did.”3 From first to last, from the “Silence Dogood” essays of 1722 to his last writings in 1790, he found occasion to touch on points of belief and practice that may have troubled him, or may have troubled others, or may have troubled him about the way others had laid their doubts to rest. Yet from the standpoint of ordinary believers (leaving enthusiasts aside), Ben’s analyses and conclusions often appear thin, tepid, and disengaged. In some cases—as in the 1725 pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain—he argues with especial vigor. But to what end? This straight-faced satire makes a travesty of the traditional core of Christian beliefs. This pamphlet testifies more to its anonymous author’s cleverness than good sense. But never mind! Writing in his old age and for the public, and hence with due deliberation, Ben twice draws attention to the pamphlet, summarizes it in passing, and pointedly regrets his ever having printed it (A 96, 114, W 1346, 1359). Nor, to add to these ambiguities, is it easy to reconcile his many orthodox-sounding pronouncements with the outlandish news hoaxes, loony letters to the editor, and satires in which he embeds them. Ben’s crazy house of mirrors can make us reach for the walls to steady ourselves and ward off vertigo. Where, then, to begin? And how far afield ought we to search? I propose to be guided by this reformulation of the problem. Ben presents himself in his memoir as a man with a message (in fact, many messages) to which he devotes much thought and energy in the hope of bettering himself, his immediate environs, and ultimately all of posterity. He has good news to share with mankind, but entertains few illusions about their readiness to hear and act on his gospel. Observing firsthand the successes and failures of contemporary evangelists, he resolves to do them one better. Rather than rely on the emotive power of a living voice to rouse a multitude, he will use his own life as an example—and especially his judicious, carefully constructed, written representation of his example, the so-called 3. Lemay, Life of Franklin, 2:81.

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autobiography—to reorient people’s desires and expectations. Ben is no orator; neither is he a nonstop prattler; but he is a winning conversationalist. He has mastered his overweening ambition and intelligence at least to this extent: that he can appear in public like one of us, foibles, warts, and all. Draping diffidence all over his more disturbing propositions, he would set his audience’s thoughts in motion. Let each go as far as he can. Even the least of them will be the better for it, while those who see more deeply into his program can themselves become apostles in turn. In considering Ben as a man with messages, with a mission, indeed as a missionary, we both enlarge the range of relevant themes and free ourselves of the need to deal with each and every explicitly religious paper. Of especial interest ought to be the “little Liturgy or Form of Prayer for my own private Use” that Ben composed in 1728. In his memoir he points readers in that direction after expressing his disgust with the sermons of polemical preachers and after explaining, but emphatically not excusing, his nonattendance at public worship (A 147–48, W 1383). Early on in his narrative Ben signals his impatience with the seventeenth-century Presbyterian piety that still suffused his childhood home. Once he was out from under his father’s supervision, the young apprentice could retreat to the quiet of his brother’s printing shop—“Sunday being my Studying-Day”—and devote himself to the more urgent business of self-improvement (A 146, W 1382). Ben confesses that as a young adolescent “I still thought [church attendance] a Duty; tho’ I could not, as it seemed to me, afford the Time to practise it” (A 63, W 1320). Indeed, it is far from certain that Ben would have made it to the church door even had he lucked on a preacher after his liking—one focused more on urging his congregants to be good citizens rather than simply orthodox members of the sect. Even after sacrificing “five Sundays successively” to listening to a Presbyterian who failed his test, the most Ben allows is: “Had he been, in my Opinion, a good Preacher perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion I had for the Sunday’s Leisure in my Course of Study” (A 147, W 1383). You had better not stand there waiting for him to appear in his Sunday best. In light of all this we may turn to Ben’s private liturgy, his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, with expectations that it will be stripped down, generic, and focused on rendering its reader useful to himself and others. That it does so is no surprise, but how it goes about that task is another matter. Mixed signals appear from the start. A quatrain from Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy (V, i, 15–18) sets the tone of what is to follow: “Here will I hold—If there is

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a Pow’r above us / (And that there is, all Nature cries aloud, / Thro’ all her Works), He must delight in Virtue / And that which he delights in must be Happy” (W 83, P 101). All’s well with a world in which a loving god delights in virtue. Yes, we mortals have our work cut out for us, but we can approach it with a spring in our step. Yet, oddly enough, these lines are taken from a soliloquy in which the tragic hero, Cato, is contemplating suicide, oppressed as he is by the sense that this world is made not for the likes of him, but of Caesar. One might take this semi-concealed incongruity to reflect Ben’s own inner struggles.4 Or one might doubt that Ben shared the Roman’s severe notion of virtue and thus could more readily accept the “shadows, clouds, and darkness” that rest on this world. All in all, Ben’s liturgy lifts spirits and encourages belief that we can achieve and deserve the fruits of virtue, however understood, if only we put our minds to it. The prospect of human happiness is not a cosmic joke. Only the first part of this self-styled liturgy has survived. It begins with a statement of “First Principles,” which turn out to be a collection of beliefs and imaginings. Ben posits “one Supreme most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves.” The multiplicity of lesser created gods seems to be required by Ben’s inability to imagine man, or this earth, or even our entire solar system to be worthy of the attention (let alone the solicitude) of “the Supremely Perfect.” However much he stretches his imagination, he cannot picture “the Infinite Father” as other than utterly removed and utterly unconcerned with anything as inconsequential as man. So far from expecting or requiring worship or praise from us, this incomprehensible power is “even infinitely above it.” Notwithstanding this seemingly unbridgeable chasm, “there is in all Men something like a natural principle which enclines them to Devotion or the Worship of some unseen Power.” And given that our species is superior in rationality to all other animals in our world, “Therefore I think it seems, required of me, and my Duty, as a Man, to pay Divine Regards to Something” (W 83–84, P 102). It is hard to do justice to this seeming syllogism. Is it by virtue of our rational faculty that this seeming, this imagining, sets us in search of a “something” to which we can offer praise and adoration? Is it intolerable to think we are alone and on our own, bereft of any connection to anything greater than ourselves? Ben doesn’t say. Instead he offers a series of paragraphs beginning 4. See Elizabeth E. Dunn, “From a Bold Youth to a Reflective Sage: A Revaluation of Benjamin Franklin’s Religion,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111, no. 4 (1987): 510.

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“I conceive,” in which he literally conceives a polytheistic universe of lesser gods (creatures of the unreachable “Infinite”), each of whom in turn creates his own solar system. The “Supremely Perfect” god appears to have delegated the paltry business of looking after our earth and us earthlings much farther down the chain of command. Now at last there hovers into view our kind of god: wise, good, and approachable. Whether this local god of ours is immortal or subject to decay and replacement by others seems not to matter. It is enough that “I conceive that he has some of those passions he has planted in us.” Thus this god is not above caring for us and is open to being pleased by our praise and offended by our slights or neglect. Hence, too, it is no indignity toward him that I should “conceive” having such a being for “my Friend,” and even believe he takes pleasure and delight in his creatures’ happiness. “I firmly believe he delights to see me Virtuous, because he is pleas’d when he sees me Happy” (W 84, P 1:103). What a relief! But on what grounds can we support this benign view of our local god? In his earlier radical pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, Ben had deduced harsh, disturbing conclusions for man based on two generally accepted propositions. First, “There is said to be a First Mover, who is called God, Maker of the Universe”; and second, “He is said to be all-wise, all-good, all powerful” (W 57, P 1:58). Such a god holds everything in his hands, leaving no room for chance, free will, or for that matter prayer. The design of that universe is beyond our merely human comprehension, and hence all our judgments of good and evil and of virtue and vice are myopic and senseless. Our only comfort lies in the belief that the design of “this great Machine, the Universe” is an expression of the presumed attributes of its divine artificer (W 61, P 1:62). Three years later, in his Articles of Belief, Ben works the other side of the street, or rather, he frees himself from a preoccupation with figuring out what motivates a now infinitely remote First Mover. He focuses instead on a presumed junior god closer to hand. Thanks to the intercessions of those lesser beings or gods made by the “Infinite” for reasons known to himself—or more precisely, thanks to “that particular wise and good God, who is the Author and Owner of our [solar] System”—we enjoy the many things he has created, “which seem purely design’d for the Delight of Man.” This local god is no kill-joy, and Ben is mightily moved to love and adore unfailingly and “continually” a god whose message seems to be, “Be happy and you will be good.”5 Indeed, the body language that Ben recommends to himself prior to entering into his liturgy’s prayers of adora5. See the interpretation of Aldridge, Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God, at 48–49.

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tion, petition, and thanksgiving is worlds away from the fears, weeping, contrition, and even self-flagellation of others seeking to address the Almighty: “I ought to use a Countenance that expresses a filial Respect, mixt with a kind of Smiling, that signifies inward Joy, and Satisfaction, and Admiration.” It is no small relief to believe that one is addressing a father who is “pleas’d with the Pleasure” of his children (W 84–85, P 1:103–4). In keeping with this sense of closeness to a god who seems almost predisposed in our favor—the local god, of course—Ben’s petition deals only in passing with the “Temporal Blessings” he might hope for. Rather than presume to ask for these, he desires divine assistance in living a life that would merit such rewards. Is the message now, “Be good and you will be happy”? In any event, Ben sets himself apart from those men who commonly petition the deity for many things without any certain knowledge that the objects of their wishes would prove “real Goods if they were in our Possession.” Ben understands that we mortals are invincibly ignorant in this crucial respect. Thus he declines to prescribe what his “Father” ought to give him by way of rewards and bounties. This humble petitioner asks instead and most of all for help in avoiding certain actions and in abhorring certain patterns of behavior. “Which kind of Supplications will at least [!] be thus far beneficial, as they should remind me in a solemn manner of my Extensive Duty.” Judging from the catalog of vices to be eschewed, Ben’s “Continual Endeavours and Resolutions” would be unceasing6 (W 88, P 1:107). Barring a miraculous transformation of this twenty-two-year-old, some other auxiliary support had to be enlisted. “It was about this time,” Ben recalls, “that I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” (A 148, W 1383). The memoir’s account of his “great & extensive Project ” is detailed enough to allow us to recapture the thinking that undergirds it (A 148–63, W 1383–97). To be sure, those few pages are not the book he had promised to write under 6. Vices that Ben petitions his Heavenly Father that he be “preserved from”: Atheism, Infidelity, Impiety, Profaneness. That he “avoid”: Irreverence, Ostentation, Formality, odious Hypocrisy, Pride, Disrespect, Contumacy, Cruelty, Harshness, Oppression, Insolence, unreasonable Severity, Avarice, Ambition, Intemperance, Luxury, Lasciviousness. That he “abhor”: Treason, Tyranny, Extortion, Perjury, every kind of Wickedness. That he “refrain from”: Calumny, Detraction. That he “avoid and abhor”: Deceit, Envy, Fraud, Flattery, Hatred, Malice, Lying, Ingratitude. That he be “watchful against”: Pride, Anger (that momentary Madness). That he be “averse to”: Craft, Overreaching. “And forasmuch as Ingratitude is one of the most odious of Vices, let me not be unmindful gratefully to acknoledge the Favours I receive from Heaven” (W 88–90, P 1:107–9).

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the title The Art of Virtue. Pressed by the competing commitments of a very busy life, Ben settles for offering a summary or prospectus of that never-to-bewritten work. Even so, its inclusion in his life story signals an expectation that these dozen or so pages might suffice as they stand to inspire and instruct any young person intent on taking charge of his or her own moral development. Nor is that all. Certain features of what Ben characterizes as an “Art” cannot escape notice. Foremost among these is the stress on method as the means of arriving at, or drawing nearer to, the goal of moral perfection. His is not still another of those tedious ineffectual sermons conjuring you to be good, but rather a practical exhibition of how to do better. You can do it! Equally prominent is the pride shown by the inventor in promoting this method for others to adopt and follow. And especially noteworthy is the “Creed” around which might be formed, first, a small clandestine “Sect” to be called “the Society of the Free and Easy,” and ultimately, a “united Party for Virtue” composed of good and wise men of all nations (A 161–63, W 1395–97). Stripped down to its basic propositions, Ben’s “Doctrine to be Preached” is designed to steer clear of “every thing that might shock the Professors of any Religion.” With bland self-assurance, Ben nods toward a creator, providence, prayer, the immortality of the soul, and reward and punishment “either here or hereafter.” With even greater confidence, he insists that this creed contains “the Essentials of every known Religion,” as though having allowed this much, nothing is left wanting. There is not even a hint that believers might demur—I mean the kinds of believers we see about us, people to whom it has never occurred to distinguish between the remote Artificer posited in the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity and the local god who owns our solar system. Such believers might draw back from a creed so purged of otherworldliness, a creed where faith, hope, and charity are unmentioned and implicitly folded into or replaced by the thirteen (redefined) virtues put forth in The Art of Virtue. Ben, however, calculates otherwise. He seems to believe that enough has been offered in his minimalist “Doctrine to be Preached” to enlist virtuous men everywhere to “league together to strengthen the Interest of Virtue in the World.” It is striking that this elaborate program of self-help presupposes that “Men’s Minds do not die with their Bodies, but are made more happy or miserable after this Life according to their Actions.” In short, this “one God Father of the Universe” cares and extends his providence to those of his creatures who love and do good to their fellow men (W 179– 80, P 1:213). A pious person might recast this thought differently—that divine providence attaches to those who exercise human providence—but that

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would obscure or mistake the grounds on which Ben rests his case for providence. (See also chapter 2, “The World through Ben’s Bifocals,” for more on The Art of Virtue.) Fortunately those grounds are still available to us thanks to Ben’s having inscribed in his Commonplace Book a draft of a talk he gave on this subject to his “intimate Pot Companions” in the self-improvement and mutual aid society he had formed called the Junto (W 163–68, P 1:264–69). Ben begins his remarks “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World” with a confession of rashness and an appeal for his listeners’ indulgence. He lacks the qualification for speaking to this matter, and his audience (who know him too well) can have no presumptions in his favor. All he can hope for is that they will treat his argument as an acquaintance’s private opinion that they are free to approve or disapprove as they please. He humbly asks for their patience and attention. Being men of substantial reason, they would not be taken in by “Flourishes of Rhetorick”; nor will Ben, who is no “master of that deceitful Science,” presume to offer anything other than plain, unadorned reasoning “unsupported by the Authority of any Books or Men how sacred soever.” His argument has to stand on its own two feet. Neither speaker nor audience would have it otherwise. Yet the argument’s point of departure is indeed an appeal to authority: “It might be judg’d an Affront to your Understandings should I go about to prove this first Principle, the Existence of a Deity and that he is the Creator of the Universe, for that would suppose you ignorant of what all Mankind in all Ages have agreed in.” Have Ben’s discerning pals already dropped their guard so as to mistake a consensus gentium for a self-evident truth? Will they reexamine their casual acceptance of the foundation of this principle when they learn a few pages later that some evildoers “even blaspheme him their Creator in the most horrible manner”—a minority, to be sure, but hardly the unanimity asserted at the beginning (W 166, P 1:267)? Ben compliments his fellow members of the Junto for their wariness: “ye believe a Thing to be no more true for being sung than said” (W 163, P 1:265). One wonders, however, whether their wariness extends as far as that expressed by Ben when writing as “Veridicus” a few years later: “Prevailing Opinions insensibly gain the Possession of our Minds, and have commonly the Advantage of being Firstcomers: and yet are very often no better than prevailing Falshoods, directly the Reverse of Truth. . . . A Man can hardly forbear wishing those Things to be true and right, which he apprehends would be for his Conveniency to find so:

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And many Perswasions, when they are looked into, plainly appear to have no better a Foundation.”7 But Ben does not tarry; he proceeds to “observe” three attributes of this deity that will shape his entire analysis of the possibility of providence: “1. That he must be a Being of great Wisdom; 2. That he must be a Being of great Goodness and 3. That he must be a Being of great Power.” The evidentiary basis for these propositions is developed with economy and care, even as Ben in the retelling elevates his god’s wisdom and power almost immediately from “great” to “infinite.” The proof of infinite wisdom consists in the admirable order and disposition of the visible universe. Ben goes further than the Psalmist, whom of course he does not quote; it is not only the heavens that declare the glory of God. Look closely, consider attentively and thoroughly the large and the small, and you must be “astonish’d and swallow’d up in Admiration.” The fitness of it all is such that “the highest and most exquisite human Reason, cannot find a fault and say this would have been better so or in another Manner.” Human reason sets the criterion and gives the ultimate compliment: we couldn’t have done it better! The proof of great goodness appears, first of all, in the gift of life itself. If it weren’t a benefit, why would creatures be so unwilling to leave it? Further, this deity exhibits his goodness in supplying plentiful sustenance for all his creatures, not least of all the vegetables, metals, and animals useful to men. Considered seriously and carefully, this beneficence would fill us with the highest love and affection. Yet this goodness is not at first said to be infinite, perhaps in recognition of what Ben has suppressed: namely, that the gift of life is inexorably connected with mortality; and that our enjoyment of corn, iron, horses, oxen, and sheep is mitigated by our having to contend with pests, disease, and human toil. The proof of infinite power appears most clearly in the vast matter and prodigious motions of a planetary system that does not self-destruct. Consider this from the standpoint of “weak and foolish Creatures as we are.” Despite our knowing the nature of only a few things, we are able to produce “such wonderful Effects.” We can make liquids that dissolve the hardest iron or render the most solid bodies fluid; knowing the nature of saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal, “those mean ingredients mix’d we can shake the Air in the most terrible Manner, destroy Ships Houses and Men at a Distance and in an Instant, overthrow Cities, rend Rocks into a 7. “On a Pertinacious Obstinacy in Opinion,” 27 March 1735 (W 253–55, at 254). The case for attributing this anonymous essay in the Pennsylvania Gazette to Franklin is persuasively made by J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin 1722–1776: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 88–90.

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Thousand Pieces, and level the highest Mountains.” If we finite men can do all this with gunpowder, imagine the power of one who knows the nature of everything and can even make things of new natures! Given, then, that the world was made by a being of such wisdom, goodness, and power, how might we conceive of his governance of this world? Four possibilities present themselves. One is that everything in nature is predetermined. Second is that everything is left to general nature and the free agency of his creatures. Third is that some things are decreed, while others are left to the workings of general nature and free agency. And fourth is that this being we call God “sometimes interferes by his particular Providence and sets aside the Effects which would otherwise have been produced by any of the Above Causes.” The arguments Ben raises to dismiss the first three suppositions are all premised on a tacit rejection of Isaiah 55:8 (not that he quotes it of course): “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”8 On the contrary, Ben labors to show that the first three suppositions ought to be rejected out of hand precisely because they are “inconsistent with the common Light of Reason; and that the 4th is most agreeable to it, and therefore most probably true.” Under the first supposition, a god who unchangeably decreed everything at the beginning would have nothing left to do: “he has ty’d up his Hands, and has now no greater Power than an Idol of Wood or Stone.” There would be no reason for us to pray to him or worship him. Even worse, all the manifest evil in the world would be attributable to a being posited as wise and good, a being who ordained prayer that is guaranteed to be both futile for improving men’s condition and useless to him. Absurd! Under the second supposition, God must either make “so glorious a Universe merely to abandon it”—and what sense does that make?—or else turn into an indifferent observer who leaves men to their devices with such outcomes as chance would have it. To the pleas of the just, the innocent, the beneficent, and the good as they cry to him standing at the brink of destruction, he can only say, in effect: “I cannot help you, ’tis none of my Business nor do I at all regard these things.” Are we to believe that all the glorious attributes of this god are to lie dormant and useless? The third supposition is no less unacceptable. To assert that the deity has decreed some things but otherwise refrains from altering or interrupting the workings of nature and free agency is no better than the preceding. “Still you unGod him  .  .  .  ; he has noth8. Recall that it was the assumed inscrutability and remoteness of “the Infinite Father” that led Ben, in his Articles of Belief, to concoct a polytheistic universe of lesser gods to whom we could at least reach out.

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ing to do.” This absurdity “cannot be swallowed without doing the greatest Violence to common Reason.”9 By that criterion of judgment—our human understanding—we are “necessarily driven” into accepting the fourth supposition, which has this too going for it: that it perfectly conforms to what we can know of God’s attributes and perfections. The adroitness with which Ben has transformed a generally accepted belief into an unquestionable standard may be admired but has to give us pause.10 The only objection to his neat reasoning that Ben feels obliged to consider before concluding his talk is a possible misgiving some might have about the proposition that men are indeed at least partially free agents. He offers one short argument: if an infinitely powerful, wise, and good God has seen fit to communicate to us a part of his wisdom, power, and goodness, why might he not also have communicated some part of his freedom as well?11 “Is not even his infinite Power sufficient for this?” It is enough for Ben to show that it is not impossible; he thinks no man can show that it is improbable; and he leaves it at suggesting that he might possibly “demonstrate clearly” on some other occasion (not now!) that men are in some degree free agents and hence accountable for their actions. At bottom, however, the case for occasional interventions and displays of particular providence rests on the unacceptability of the alternatives. Are the sufferings of an oppressed righteous nation to go unanswered because God cannot—didn’t you grant his infinite power?—or because he will not—didn’t you grant his infinite goodness? To escape from such absurdities you are obliged to allow that it is highly reasonable to believe in the providence of a deity who observes and cares and rewards us. It is this belief, Ben concludes, that is the “Foundation of all true Religion; . . . and this Religion,” in turn, “will be a Powerful Regulater of our Actions, give us Peace and Tranquility within our own Minds, and render us Benevolent, Useful and Beneficial to others.” The very mention of “true Religion” in this context ought to draw us up short. Strictly speaking, a deity of infinite power cannot be presumed to be bound by anything. Any conjectures we might make about the cosmic order on the basis of conflicting, not to say contradictory, premises are doubtful in the extreme. More plausible is Ben’s conclusion that belief in “this Religion” will give us peace of mind and make us 9. Yet God’s abandonment of his creation or indifference to it is the logical conclusion of the 1725 pamphlet, the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. 10. See the interpretation of Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked, at 167–73. 11. By this point the utterly indifferent Unmoved Mover of 1725 is hopelessly conflated with the highly approachable lesser god of 1728.

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less troublesome to our fellow men. In that sense it is “true.” By virtue of our loving, revering, thanking, adoring, fearing, and praying to that caring deity, we move closer to the same goals Ben had in his sights when first conceiving his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” As it turns out, the method of The Art of Virtue and the liturgy of the Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion are two sides of the same coin. Reaching out to his audience, this adroit evangelist enlists alternative modes and masks in pursuit of his singleminded mission. It is inviting to carry this observation even further. Might not the same be said of that writing of Ben’s which has been most reprinted, most translated, and most responsible for others’ holding him in both respect and derision? Consider the images of Benjamin Franklin that have endured in the popular mind for the past two centuries. First, there is that forty-six-year-old man flying a kite with a key attached in the midst of a thunderstorm—an example to be shunned by anyone hoping to live long. Second, there is the author/promoter of the advice in “Father Abraham’s Speech”—an example to be recommended to anyone hoping to live free. In the first case we cannot know whether providence or just plain good luck preserved Ben from being electrocuted on the spot. In the second case the ambiguities are of a different character. Father Abraham’s speech is emphatically the production of a man with a message and even presents itself as a sermon addressed to a congregation of sorts. That message is a plea for human providence. It states and restates, with studied tedium, the means within the grasp of any ordinary human being to gain some control over his or her own life and to bend circumstances to one’s earthly advantage. Needless to say, coming from Ben’s hand that account is not without its ironies and mixed signals. Viewed in isolation, the substance of the sermon is a potpourri of folk sayings, drawn from the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanacks of the previous twenty-five years. Its boring repetitiveness calls to mind the reasons Ben offered for absenting himself from church as soon as he could. In its reported effects the sermon is a total failure. And yet this comical fiasco is treated by Richard Saunders, the idiosyncratic purported author and editor of the almanac, as a flattering endorsement of his wit and wisdom. Once again, the song sung by our evangelist has more than one register. The preface to Poor Richard Improved of 1758 is Ben’s swansong, so to speak, to the enterprise that has brought him a considerable amount of fame and fortune. He composes it at sea while on his way to London where the challenges, frustrations, and achievements of a new diplomatic career await him. However much the thoughts of the newly appointed colonial agent may

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have run ahead, his mode of composition here reflects his earliest efforts and ambition to become “a tolerable English Writer” (A 62, W 1320). Like so many of his literary creations, this preface aims to simultaneously inform, persuade, and entertain. In his memoir, Ben makes no secret of his didactic intent in publishing the Almanack. I consider’d it as a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarce any other Books. I therefore filled all the little Spaces that occurr’d between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality, as the Means of procuring Wealth and thereby securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Man in Want to act always honestly, as (to use here one of those Proverbs), it is hard for an empty Sack to stand upright. These Proverbs, which contained the Wisdom of many Ages and Nations, I assembled and form’d into a connected Discourse prefix’d to the Almanack of 1757, as the Harangue of a wise old Man to the People attending an Auction. The bringing all these scatter’d Counsels thus into a Focus, enabled them to make greater Impression. (A 164, W 1397)

Impress it does, but unfortunately in different ways. For the multitude of reprintings and translations that spread Father Abraham’s harangue wide and far12 usually stripped the speech from the two contexts in which Ben embeds it. What remain are the flat-footed, deadly earnest injunctions to pinch pennies and keep your nose to the grindstone—the kind of counsels that drove Ernest Renan and Max Weber and D. H. Lawrence and many others to distraction. A charitable excuse for their failing to catch on to what Ben is about would be that they had an incomplete and hence imperfect text before them. At any rate, they were not in the least amused. In his final address to his “Courteous Reader,” the author of Poor Richard Improved, Richard Saunders—astronomer, astrologer, prognosticator, philomath, microscopist, and more—begins with a public confession of his private chagrin. Like any author, he would like to have the pleasure of hearing himself quoted “respectfully” by other learned authors, but only seldom has he been gratified in this regard. For though he has been, “if I may say it 12. The editors of the Yale edition of the Autobiography note: “This famous preface, known in different versions as ‘Father Abraham’s Speech’ and ‘The Way to Wealth’ (in French, ‘La Science du Bonhomme Richard’) was reprinted at least 145 times in seven different languages before the end of the eighteenth century and countless times since” (A 164n).

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without Vanity, an eminent Author of Almanacks” for a full quarter-century, the world of letters seems not to know him at all. But for the “solid Pudding” his publication has earned, he would have been quite discouraged by this “great Deficiency of Praise.” Poor Richard finds solace at last, not from his brother authors who sit on their hands, but from the people at large who buy his works and show thereby that they are the best judges of his merit. Better yet, he discovers on his rambles where he is not personally known that his maxims are frequently quoted, “with, as Poor Richard says, at the End on’t; this gave me some Satisfaction, as it showed not only that my Instructions were regarded, but discovered likewise some Respect for my Authority; and I own, that to encourage the Practice of remembering and repeating those wise Sentences, I have sometimes quoted myself with great Gravity” (W 1294–95, P 7:340). What price respect? What price authority? To gratify his vanity, this eminent author (if he must say so himself—and he does) is reduced to priming the pump of respect. Poor Richard! Happily, things look up one day for Richard when he comes on a great gathering of people at a public auction of merchant goods. While the crowd waits for the appointed hour of sale, they grouse to one another about the badness of the times. Spotting “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,” someone calls out: “Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the Times? Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country? How shall we ever be able to pay them? What would you advise us to? ” The old man is willing to oblige and speak his mind: “I’ll give it you in short, for a Word to the Wise is enough, and many Words won’t fill a Bushel, as Poor Richard says.” What follows is a harangue of almost three thousand words, containing a barrage of some fifty “as Poor Richard says” attributions. Who could ask for more? Who would ask for more? In judging the character of Father Abraham’s speech, one ought not to forget Ben’s own statement of intent. He is not offering an anthology or a representative sample of the many hundreds of proverbs on man, marriage, and society that he has tucked into the blank spaces in the almanac. His principle of inclusion is determined by a theme, and the arrangement of the selected proverbs is to bring those scattered counsels into a focus. Richard Saunders’s valedictory preface appears to be offering a recapitulation, but Ben is in fact redefining what he wants people to take away from those twenty-five years of reading.13 It is no misnomer that the multitude of reprintings of “Father Abraham’s Speech” 13. Patrick Sullivan, “Benjamin Franklin, the Inveterate (and Crafty) Public Instructor: Instruction on Two Levels in ‘The Way to Wealth,’“ Early American Literature, 21 (Winter 1986–87):248–59, at 252.

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call it “The Way to Wealth.” But to the extent that the speech was printed or read without regard to the two frames that surround it—Richard reporting the speech and its reception, and behind him Ben, orchestrating and manipulating the responses of the entire ensemble (Abraham, the crowd, Richard, and the readers of this piece of fine craftsmanship )—it is hazardous to draw quick and easy conclusions about Ben’s own stance.14 All this is to suggest that in examining this paean to industry, prudence, and frugality, we proceed with caution. There is more to discover about this apostle’s gospel if only we try. Father Abraham is ready enough to accede to the crowd’s call for advice, but what he delivers is hardly a model of gentle, ingratiating speech. The brunt of his message is that his audience’s grousing is misdirected. Their discontents and distress are less of the government’s making than of their own. “We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly, and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement” (W 1295, P 7:341). The people’s blindness to the real costs of their sloth leaves them resentful and ineffectual. “So what signifies wishing and hoping for better Times. We may make these Times better if we bestir ourselves. Industry need not wish, as Poor Richard says, and He that lives upon Hope will die fasting.”15 Industry, however, does not suffice for an individual to escape his depressed and dependent condition. He must also make it his business to attend closely to his own affairs. “Trusting too much to others Care is the Ruin of many; for, as the Almanack says, In the Affairs of the World, Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it” (W 1298, P 7:344). Even so, Father Abraham’s admonitions are not yet finished. Finally, and most expansively, he dwells on the need for frugality. This is a hard case to make to a crowd straining for the sale to start. But the old man (like his biblical namesake) is not one to shrink from uttering unseasonable truths. “A Man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his Nose all his Life to the Grindstone, and die not worth a Groat at last” (W 1298, P 7:344–45). Pride, vanity, susceptibility to seeming bargains and offers of free credit—all work to seduce the heedless into lives of debt, anxiety, and dependency. At bottom, Father Abraham’s sermon is a call for ordinary people to recognize their real situations. Rather than complain about conditions beyond their control, they ought to address the many ways in which their own fecklessness leads them into poverty and keeps them there. What is worse, “Poverty often 14. Edward J. Gallagher, “The Rhetorical Strategy of Franklin’s ‘Way to Wealth,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 4 (1973): 475–85. 15. An earthier version of this maxim appears in the 1736 almanac (W 1200, P 2:138).

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deprives a Man of all Spirit and Virtue.” Remember that empty sack? “The Way to Wealth” is not a celebration of wealth or of money grubbing, still less a rehabilitation of avarice. If it focuses so narrowly on the prosaic needs and economic behavior of man, that is because they are indispensable means—the material preconditions, so to speak—for a human being to be able to act in his own true interest. By the end of his harangue, the old man pleads with his congregation to disdain the chain of debt and thereby “preserve your Freedom; and maintain your Independency” (W 1301, P 7:348–49). Only then are you in a position to shape and cherish a decent character of your own. Before concluding his remarks and descending from his pulpit, Father Abraham fires off two warning shots at the crowd. Each appears strangely at odds with this long paean to self-sufficiency. Coming at the end, these misgivings cast a long shadow over much of what has been so confidently asserted throughout the speech. “This Doctrine, my Friends, is Reason and Wisdom; but after all, do not depend too much on your own Industry, and Frugality, and Prudence, though excellent Things, for they may all be blasted without the Blessing of Heaven; and therefore ask that Blessing humbly, and be not uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it, but comfort and help them” (W 1302, P 7:349). Poor Richard may have been correct in asserting in 1733 and reasserting here in 1758 that “God helps them that help themselves,” but Father Abraham urges that you not get too confident about your ability or the deity’s timely assistance. Humility and charity, however understood, make a surprising cameo appearance in a performance that gives little evidence of having missed them. Finally—and this is indeed the old man’s parting shot—a profound doubt is raised about this whole effort to speak sense to the people. “Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that; for it is true, we may give Advice, but we cannot give Conduct, as Poor Richard says: However, remember this, They that won’t be counseled, can’t be helped, as Poor Richard says: And farther, That if you will not hear Reason, she’ll surely rap your Knuckles” (W 1302, P 7:349). Here is a severe judgment indeed, not only of the many fools who can barely learn their ABCs in the School of Hard Knocks, but of the earnest purveyors of good advice themselves—Father Abraham, Poor Richard Saunders, and that wholesaler of endless proverbs, Ben. Are they all so lacking in self-awareness that they do not realize how futile their efforts are bound to be? What transpires next in this narrative makes it abundantly clear that the answer to that question has to be ambiguous. Richard reports that the people heard the harangue, “approved the Doctrine, and immediately practised the  contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon” (W 1302, P 7:350).

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No sooner did the market open for business but the congregation took off on a spending spree. For all their patient attendance, they had learned nothing. Lacking both a will and a method to take charge of their lives, they were sure to persist in the same cycle of servitude and dependency. The question recurs: given the manifest failure of this exercise in popular enlightenment, ought we to pity or mock those who would gladly teach? As far as Father Abraham is concerned, we need to recall that he did not volunteer his advice or impose it on an unwilling audience; he was merely obliging a general request. Yet given his rules for conducting one’s life, we have to wonder what he was doing among all those door busters in the first place. What about the observer and narrator of this ridiculous scene, that “eminent Author,” Richard Saunders? He, of course, is as pleased as Punch at hearing himself echoed so long and so well. “The frequent Mention [the old man] made of me must have tired any one else, but my Vanity was wonderfully delighted with it, though I was conscious that not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me, but rather the Gleanings I had made of the Sense of all Ages and Nations” (W 1302, P 7:350). Only a master’s hand, I think, could have crafted so humble a display of vanity. In the very act of puffing himself up with pride, Poor Dick deflates and then explodes the whole charade. It turns out that it was not mere happenstance that he came on this scene, as we had been prompted to surmise from the opening words of his story: “I stopt my Horse lately where a great Number of People were collected at a Vendue of Merchant Goods” (W 1295, P 7:340). At the very end Richard lets the cat out of the bag: he had come to shop! But happily, fortunately, providentially (?), just hearing his own “Gleanings” rehearsed saved him in the nick of time: “though I had at first determined to buy Stuff for a new Coat, I went away resolved to wear my old One a little longer.” And lest you fail to draw the moral, Richard (ever the beneficent educator) draws it for you: “Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy Profit will be as great as mine” (W 1303, P 7:350). With this, Ben’s satire on self-improvement is complete. After a quarter-century contending with competitors and his wife Bridget, Richard Saunders has surely earned a place with Silence Dogood and Polly Baker among the finest productions of Ben’s comic genius. Savoring his sense and nonsense might incline us to come to think of Poor Richard as simply his creator’s alter ego, but that temptation ought to be resisted. By conflating the two we risk losing our way in the singularly tangled forest that is the inner life of Benjamin Franklin. Granted, the challenge of entering therein is great, given that what Poor Richard once said of himself applies all the more to Ben:

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“I have good Reasons for concealing the Place of my Abode.”16 Nonetheless, we need to be wary of missing the forest for the trees. A man who concocts so many masks behind which to speak must indeed have “good Reasons.” But about his largest message, at least, Ben is open and aboveboard. He does not conceal his dedication to clarity of thinking. In a world in which wishes pass for facts, he offers sober counsel and witty encouragement so that each of us might come both to see better and do better. He would help one and all to disentangle themselves from snares and traps largely of their own making or neglect. At the same time he has no illusions that the bulk of mankind can perform the kind of auto-emancipation that he managed to accomplish while still an adolescent (albeit not without committing a few “errata”). People need support, and he is careful not to openly disparage or mock the many ways in which they seek and find that support. He cares little for small-minded clergy haranguing their congregations on matters of doctrine while neglecting to help their flock actually lead moral and useful lives. He has similar disdain for village atheists who have nothing better to offer than mockery and disillusionment. Ben’s special gospel is directed toward gaining self-respect and deserving it. No power, human or divine, can give that to you. It is yours to earn. And the best way to begin is to start a program of methodical self-improvement, keep at it, and gradually expand your power to do good as widely as you can. This single-minded objective informs his private liturgy, his special conception of providence, his formation of the Junto, his program for moral perfection in The Art of Virtue, and his many public-spirited proposals bearing on the social, economic, and political issues of his day. The artful design of the story he wrote about his life and the zaniness of many of the characters who populate his writings are all meant to further that objective. If Ben drew on a wide variety of modes and devices in all these cases, it was to better reach and motivate a wide variety of human types. And lest some straight-laced characters be put off by what they take to be his earthy unseemliness, he warns them: “Be thou not disturbed, O grave and sober Reader, if among the many serious Sentences in my Book, thou findest me trifling now and then, and talking idly.”17 Never fear, this wily apostle knows what he is doing.

16. Preface to the 1742 almanac (W 1221, P 2:332). See Ralph Lerner, “Dr. Janus,” in Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10–11. 17. Preface to the 1739 almanac (W 1211, P 2:218).

Chapter 4

Jefferson’s “Summary View” Reviewed, Yet Again

The revolutionary document of August 1774 known to us as “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” has hardly suffered from lack of attention. If anything, it has assumed protean shapes and significance, inviting its contemporary and subsequent readers to discover diverse intentions and messages in its stirring words. Was it a petition, or a manifesto, or a deliberate reformulation of a common past with a view to charting a separate future? Was it an attempt to reduce tensions or rather to redirect them? Does it show its anonymous author foreseeing a new model of imperial relations, one finally realized more than a century and a half later in the Statute of Westminster? Not least to puzzle over is the author’s high-toned assertion of principle in a context calling for political accommodation. The examination that follows seeks neither to support nor to challenge these differing interpretations that historians and legal scholars have offered over the intervening years. It is less concerned with the eighteenth-century context and the prevailing common notions to which this document was responding than in considering the text as a work of art in its own right. Taking a confessedly naïve view of a sophisticated literary production, it seeks to trace how that text works on the minds and feelings of a diverse readership. From that vantage point Thomas Jefferson may be seen as threading a narrow path. He must refrain from insisting on radical conclusions lest he lose more cautious members of his audience. Yet he must give voice to radical principles. For unless his public recognizes and adopts those principles as their own, they cannot become the distinct people Jefferson envisions: a people capable and worthy of shaping their own destiny.

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But before turning to Jefferson’s words, one must first recognize that his text is itself embedded in several shells or frames. In this respect it calls to mind the way Shahrazad in the Thousand and One Nights tells a story wherein someone tells a story about some man or animal who tells a story illustrative of something or other. The point of the story is not necessarily fixed or exhausted at any one particular frame. In this case, we have an anonymous author composing (unsolicited so far as we know) a draft of instructions to be adopted by a body of Virginians meeting as a specially elected albeit irregular convention.1 These instructions, if adopted, would be carried by Virginia’s deputies to what we now know as the First Continental Congress and proposed to that body for adoption as “an humble and dutiful address” to King George III (1:121/105).2 At each level, then, there are objections to be met, opinions to be won over, and ultimately actions to be taken. A junior member of the colony’s political establishment takes it on himself to set all this in motion. It may be doubted that when Jefferson left Monticello for Williamsburg carrying his draft of instructions, he intended to move their adoption himself in a formal address to the convention. That was not his favored mode of political negotiation. So when, as he recollected in his Autobiography of 1821, he fell ill en route and could not attend in person, he forwarded two copies of his draft (had he already had them prepared in advance?) to the two men who he knew had the prestige and ability to turn his proposal into a binding resolution— Patrick Henry and Peyton Randolph. There is no record of what the former thought of Jefferson’s production; the great orator was silent, and Jefferson even doubted that he had read it. But Randolph did more, bringing the draft to members’ attention. Their reaction is characterized thus in the Autobiography: “It was read generally by the members, approved by many, but thought too bold for the present state of things; but they printed it in pamphlet form under the title of ‘A Summary view of the rights of British America’” (LA, 10).3 1. Virginia’s House of Burgesses had been dissolved by the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, for having dared to proclaim a fast day to signify solidarity with the people of Massachusetts who were about to feel the brunt of Parliament’s passage of the Boston Port Act. 2. Quotations from the “Summary View” are cited in parentheses first to the pagination of volume 1 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950); and then to the pagination of Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984). Hereafter, these editions are cited as Papers and LA respectively. 3. The title page of the Williamsburg imprint of the pamphlet is reproduced in Papers, 1: facing 134, and reads as follows: “A / Summary View / of the / rights / of / British America / set forth in some / resolutions / intended for the / inspection / of the present / delegates /

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In so doing, the younger, more forward, and zealous members set Jefferson’s argument on a national and international career of its own. These men chafed at being held back by the likes of Robert Carter Nicholas, “whose mind was not yet up to the mark of the times” (LA, 11). But although the resolutions actually adopted by the Williamsburg convention fell short of what Jefferson insisted was the “true ground” of the American cause,4 he came to view them more charitably in a later undated memo (ca. 1809–21). Speaking of the convention’s temporizing, he wrote, [T]amer sentiments were preferred; and I believe, wisely preferred; the leap I proposed being too long as yet for the mass of our citizens. The distance between these, and the instructions actually adopted is of some curiosity however, as it shews the inequality of pace with which we moved, and the prudence required to keep front and rear together.

Readers of Jefferson’s massive paper legacy are likely to be struck by this rare concession that others had acted wisely in rejecting his proposition and adopting a “more prudent one” of their own. At the same time, however, he would not have it forgotten that “my creed had been formed on unsheathing the sword at Lexington.”5 He, for one, had seen clearly and early the grounds on which an American people ought to take their stand.

I . R e s o lv e d   .   .   . The manuscript text of Jefferson’s draft of instructions lacks the title, motto, and preface that his well-wishers had added in arranging for its publication. These need not detain us as our concern here is with the way Jefferson shaped his presentation with a view to the discrete audiences he had in mind: most immediately, the Williamsburg convention that would be appointing and instructing its deputies; then all the deputies from the other colonies who, together with Virginia, would form the Continental Congress and need to be won over to presenting some such message to the king; then, almost last and probably least, the newly styled “chief magistrate of the British empire” being called to a sense of his duties; and finally and emphatically not least, the of the / people of virginia. / now in / convention.” Its author is identified only as a “Native, and Member of the House of Burgesses.” 4. See Jefferson to John W. Campbell, 3 September 1809, in LA, 1211. 5. Papers, 1:671.

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American people at large. The latter would discover—under the guise of being reminded—that they already constitute a separate people, with ancestors, history, interests, and characteristics distinct from those of other members of the British Empire. In the course of ostensibly urging George III to do the right thing, Jefferson spins a tale that, if accepted, would literally constitute a new people and a new nation. As a piece of prose aiming to persuade, Jefferson’s text slithers and slides. Much of what it would have readers believe is assumed or asserted with hardly a sign that it is propounding a truly revolutionary view of the structure of the empire and of the king’s and Parliament’s places in it. Although the text presents itself as a set of resolutions—“Resolved that . . .”—it proceeds with seemingly careless ease to fall out of third person to direct address and back again and ultimately to insulting direct address.6 The initial conceit is that these instructions and resolutions bear on a proposed “humble and dutiful address,” which these his states beg leave to lay before him and “humbly . . . hope” will fare better than their earlier individual “humble application[s]” have done. But that conceit collapses of its own weight before the opening paragraph has even run its course. The linguistic stance that these words are being delivered on bended knee is subverted, nay belied, within the compass of two dozen lines. The acknowledgment of the king’s majesty is exposed as a sham from the outset. The message for the current occupant of the imperial throne is to bestir himself, to look up and listen, to realize who is speaking to him. There is more here than an anticipatory rumble of one of Jefferson’s cherished lines—“a people fostered & fixed in principles of freedom” (LA, 22).7 These are a people who would not be misunderstood and hence speak in the plain “language of truth.” Theirs is a language “divested” of expressions of servility, but the resonance of this sentence suggests more: these people disdain to use anything smacking of inferiority. Far from asking favors, they are asserting their rights, giving voice to their expectations, calling their addressee to his senses, and reminding him to reflect that “he is no more than the chief officer of the people . . . and consequently subject to their superintendance” (1:121/105). The case for respecting such a people (dare one speak 6. See the nuanced reading in William L. Hedges, “Telling Off the King: Jefferson’s ‘Summary View’ as American Fantasy,” Early American Literature 22, no. 2 (1987): 166–74. 7. After the Second Continental Congress deleted these among other lines from his draft of a declaration of independence, the proud author took care to preserve for posterity his original language “as the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also” (LA, 18).

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of their majesty?) proceeds apace with an unmistakable diminution of the majesty of their chief officer. One need not be a vainglorious Sun King to find this language and tone grating and insolent; even a merely self-respecting ruler would be repelled by its condescension. Jefferson’s is not a speech designed to win friends and influence people in high places. But if, as I have suggested, the primary addressee is not George III or his advisors but rather the descendants of those men of Europe who transplanted to America, then both the manner and the matter of this draft prove to be artfully and fittingly wrought. Those very features of argumentation that some have judged clumsy, confused, ungainly, and bordering on incoherence testify rather to an author who has mastered the arts of storytelling and satire.8 In telling his contemporaries, fellow colonials, what they are not, Jefferson helps shape them into what he wishes them yet to become—a people fit to strike off on their own distinctive and honorable career.

II. Origins Running like a bright line through Jefferson’s text is the divide between Great Britain (its king, Parliament, ministers, subjects, etc.) and what is on the western side of the Atlantic, British America.9 Yet for all its brightness, that line is neither sharp nor unambiguous. References are variously made to the “states of British America,” “his majesty’s subjects in America,” “colonies,” “American colonists” who “continued in the sovereignty of their state” even while mid-seventeenth-century England was undergoing a radical change of regime, an “American public” (1:126/111), “Americans” who turn out to be “an exasperated people,” “inhabitants of British America,” “American states,” “American legislatures,” and, within the same paragraph, “a free people,” “your great American council,” and “your subjects in British America.” If all this variation were taken to be a writer’s limp attempt to avoid sounding repetitive, it might rightly be dismissed—and with equal right might such an explanation be resented by Jefferson who took care to memorialize himself on his tombstone as “Author.” A different perspective is offered if we surmise, however tentatively, 8. Contrast the views reported in Kristofer Ray, “Thomas Jefferson and A Summary View of the Rights of British North [sic] America,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 32–43. 9. Though, to repeat, the title of the published pamphlet is not Jefferson’s, he does refer to “British America” four times in his MS text (1:121/105; 1:129/115; 1:135/122).

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that these varied designations refer to the same people as viewed with greater or lesser understanding of who they are and whence they come. Jefferson’s striking account of the origins of his aggrieved fellow countrymen turns out to be crucial to his argument as a whole and the key to grasping the cause of their present discontents. All sides need to hear his story. And let it be noted, “Jefferson was an accomplished teller of stories.”10 One might have expected that at some point in his account Jefferson would have referred to his fellows as Britons or Englishmen living in America. That he does not is deliberate, for he is intent on preserving as great a gap as he can between the transplanted or emigrant man of America and those whom that man or his forebears left behind in old Europe. For all that Americans of the eighteenth century might cherish in the British connection (and this cultured Virginian was not the least among them in this respect), politically Britain had nothing to envy and much to contemn. Once upon a time there had been “free inhabitants [in] the British domains in Europe,” men whom Jefferson is proud to call “our ancestors.” They lived free and meant to continue doing so. For reasons unstated and left for the reader to infer, they chose to avail themselves of the “right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness” (1:121/105–6). It is a truth universally acknowledged (once it is stated) that happy men living at ease where they are do not choose to emigrate. It is no part of Jefferson’s self-appointed task to bring up a bill of indictment against Britain’s domestic unjust and despotic policies. Suffice it to say that our ancestors, the Americans’ ancestors, chose to emulate their ancestors, the still more ancient Saxons, by leaving home and hearth and making a fresh start. Jefferson’s invocation of the Saxon Urureltern serves as a double point of reference in his overall argument. First, by virtue of the fact that his depiction of that ancient people in the wilds and woods of northern Europe suppresses to the vanishing point their character as illiterate barbarians devoted to rapine and pillage, all that remains is their priceless bequest—a readiness to live free or die. From such stock are we, the free inhabitants of the British 10. “Jefferson possessed, among his other acknowledged gifts, the power to tell stories, and to make those stories, the basis for pointed political dispute.” Stephen Howard Browne, “Jefferson’s First Declaration of Independence: A Summary View of the Rights of British America Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 236, 251. This article mounts a powerful case that Jefferson knew all along where he was heading.

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dominions in America, descended. Second, the striking parallel between the ancient Saxon emigration to Britain and the modern emigration of Englishmen to America offers a telling example of the proper relation of a mother country to its expatriates. Can one imagine the indignation and scorn with which today’s Britons would greet a latter-day German monarch’s claim to reassert his dominion over descendants of those early Saxon emigrants now resident in Britain? And yet George III and his ministers and Parliament presume to assert such “visionary pretensions” with respect to the descendants of early English emigrants now resident in America!11 One might never guess from Jefferson’s confident assertions that there was a considerable body of conflicting arguments stretching back to the seventeenth century about the right of migration and the expectations and limits migrants might reasonably presume.12 But rather than appeal to letters-patents, charters, and other musty records, this avid archivist focuses on experience. It is, however, an experience viewed from a quite specific vantage point. Jefferson’s account presents a British world’s customary practices being subverted by new policies. Under the old habits a largely self-governing people might confidently expect that its consent had to be sought and won. Under the new regulations all power would flow from a remote and increasingly hostile center. Such a change was not likely to be endured by the “self-made, possessing settler classes” of the polities that constituted the early modern British Empire. The new metropolitan measures undertaken in the wake of the Seven Years’ War signaled an intention to change the British Empire from the loose federal polity it had long been into a more unitary polity with authority fixed more clearly at the center. Such measures both directly challenged the autonomy of the colonies over their local affairs and, by subjecting the colonies to legislation and other directives to which the settler populations had not given their consent, called into question settler claims to a British identity, and rights, as Britons to enjoy Britain’s traditional liberties.13 11. Jefferson is no stranger to irony, but he does not take up the comic possibilities here. Predictably, Benjamin Franklin exploited the opportunity in his classic spoof of 1773, “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” John Phillip Reid quotes from this satire but oddly neglects to identify its anonymous but inimitable author. Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 116–17, 343n7. 12. Reid lays out the changes and complications of the terms of debate with characteristic clarity and rigor in ibid., 114–23. 13. Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 71. For more on viewing the

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The settlement of British America (or at least of that part of the Atlantic littoral that Jefferson is concerned with) was free of any taint of governmental indulgence, let alone support. As little as the king of the Saxons had conquered Britain had the seventeenth-century rulers of England conquered America. In both cases migrants had on their own gone over to thinly populated lands, subjugated the aboriginal inhabitants, and with their own blood and sweat established in their respective new lands “that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country” (1:121– 22/106). Unless and until one recognizes that the association of these expatriated men with Great Britain was and remains voluntary, the grounds for their feeling aggrieved will seem captious or unintelligible. Jefferson recounts a series of decisions whereby the emigrants—in their own minds at least—had shaped the character of the imperial relationship. It was the emigrants who gave the inhabitants of Great Britain certain exclusive trading privileges. It was the emigrants who chose to adopt the legal system of the mother country.14 It was the emigrants who chose to “continue their union with her by submitting themselves to the same common sovereign,” thereby making him “the central link” connecting the several parts of a newly expanded empire (1:122–23/107). Believing this, Jefferson’s sturdy ancestors “thought themselves removed from the hand of oppression” and positioned to enjoy without further disturbance the rights they had bought so dearly. In this they were quite mistaken.

III. Oppression The litany of complaints that fills many of the following paragraphs of Jefferson’s text has an old familiar sound by virtue of anticipating the catalogs of participation of independent individuals in the colonizing process as “a deep and widespread process of individual self-empowerment” and the corresponding threat to those settlers’ sense of entitlement and English/British identity, see ibid., 87 and 291. 14. Jefferson was firm in rejecting the notion that emigrants from Britain were confined to the common law rights they had enjoyed at home. “this [sic] narrow notion was a favorite in the first moment of rallying to our rights against Great Britain. but it was that of men, who felt their rights before they had thought of their explanation. the truth is that we brought with us the rights of men, of ex-patriated men. on our arrival here the question would at once arise, By what law will we govern ourselves? the resolution seems to have been, By that system with which we are familiar, to be altered by ourselves occasionally, and adapted to our new situation.” Jefferson to John Tyler, 17 June 1812, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5:135.

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grievances in better-known documents: the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress (14 October 1774), the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms of the Second Continental Congress (6 July 1775), and of course the Declaration of Independence itself. Where the “Summary View” sets itself apart is in suggesting a single answer to two perplexing questions that it never explicitly articulates: why were the British brethren so deaf to the Americans’ appeals to justice and consanguinity? Further, why were the expatriated colonists so long accepting of metropolitan encroachments, usurpations, and high-handedness? Jefferson’s answer emerges only obliquely and, strangely enough, out of a technical discussion of land tenure. Was it a case of a failure to communicate? No, it was rather a failure on both sides to fully grasp that modern Britons and modern Americans (whatever their shared biological inheritance) had become two different peoples. This mutual incomprehension was expressed five years earlier with unsurpassed power and from the vantage points of both prudence and principle by Edmund Burke: Taxes for the purpose of raising revenue had hitherto been sparingly attempted in America. Without ever doubting the extent of its lawful power, parliament always doubted the propriety of such impositions. And the Americans on their part never thought of contesting a right by which they were so little affected. Their assemblies in the main answered all the purposes necessary to the internal economy of a free people, and provided for all the exigences of government which arose amongst themselves. In the midst of that happy enjoyment, they never thought of critically settling the exact limits of a power, which was necessary to their union, their safety, their equality, and even their liberty. Thus the two very difficult points, superiority in the presiding state, and freedom in the subordinate, were on the whole sufficiently, that is, practically, reconciled; without agitating those vexatious questions, which in truth rather belong to metaphysicks than politicks, and which can never be moved without shaking the foundations of the best governments that have ever been constituted by human wisdom. By this measure was let loose that dangerous spirit of disquisition, not in the coolness of philosophical enquiry, but enflamed with all the passions of an haughty resentful people, who thought themselves deeply injured, and that they were contending for every thing that was valuable in the world. In England, our ministers went on without the least attention to these

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alarming dispositions; just as if they were doing the most common things in the most usual way, and among a people not only passive, but pleased.15

In failing to recognize and acknowledge that the Americans are a breed apart, not only a land apart, British authorities persist in treating New Hampshire as though it is old Hampshire, or all of America as though it is in the Manor of East Greenwich in Kent. The Americans, for their part, are slow to recognize the historical circumstances that have altered the political spirit of the two peoples. The most curious aspect of A Summary View consists in the enormous political distance that it posits between England and America. Jefferson’s description of the right of emigration under natural law leaves Americans closer in spirit to their Saxon ancestors than to their contemporaries in England. So distant are the latter that parliamentary encroachments appear as “acts of power, assumed by a body of men foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws.”16

It is tempting to go even farther down this path on which Jefferson would lead his readers. In American eyes, the enactors of the Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Quebec Act, and the whole panoply of “intolerable acts,” are living proof that English law and English men have undergone a profound transformation over the centuries. In English eyes, the Americans are lost in a time warp of sorts, affecting the pretense that they are still living in Saxon times, speaking and acting as though nothing fundamental has changed since 1066. Jefferson’s analysis digs deeper into the causes of the present alienation of affections. It shows, with much deftness, that both sides have caught a glimpse of the truth, but that what each has perceived and has come to believe carries a radically different moral valence. Yes, when William the Norman invaded England and vanquished Harold II at the battle of Hastings, he did more than seize the crown and proceed to pacify the countryside. He had also to satisfy the hungry expectations of 15. Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late State of the Nation, 2nd ed. (London, 1769), 110–11; The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 2, Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis, 1766–1774, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 187–88. 16. Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 107. Jefferson’s quoted words are found in Papers, 1:129; and LA, 115.

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his Norman cohorts. This was a conquest, not a war of national liberation. Expropriation of the lands of the fallen proceeded apace, and with it the installation of a system of feudal tenures in the kingdom of England. Norman lawyers propounded the doctrine (and they had the force of the conqueror to back them up) that “all lands in England were held either mediately or immediately of the crown.” Here was a principle not only new to England but radically at odds with the prevailing system of proprietorship. “Our Saxon ancestors held their lands, as they did their personal property, in absolute dominion, disencumbered with any superior, answering nearly to the nature of those possessions which the Feudalists term Allodial” (1:132/118–19). More is at stake here for Jefferson than the nature of landholding in medieval England. The superimposition of the feudal system carried with it new duties and new burdens for a people who had long thought themselves unbeholden to any. Even so, feudal tenures were the exceptions. As far as the Normans’ Saxon subjects were concerned—even those who had been coerced by legislation to assume various military duties and other feudal burdens—they knew that they had never surrendered their lands to the king. These, they believed, they still held in absolute right. Those ancestors who migrated to America may well have thought they were escaping from the constraints and obligations of the mother country’s feudal system. They certainly knew that America had not been conquered by William or any of his successors, and yet were somehow taken in by “the fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king.” Were they heedless of the principle at issue? Or did it all not matter as long as the crown demanded only small sums and reasonable rents in order for people to take a royal grant? And yet, Jefferson insists, possessions in America are “undoubtedly of the Allodial nature.” The issue of land tenure has come to the fore now owing to the crown’s having doubled the price for securing a grant. The adverse effects of this change for the future expansion and population growth of America are predictable. Yet notably, Jefferson takes this occasion not to dwell on the policy of the change but to contest the principle itself. A paragraph that begins with an almost apologetic aside—“That we shall at this time also take notice of an error in the nature of our landholdings, which crept in at a very early period of our settlement” (1:132/118)—ends with a rousing declaration of popular authority and individual appropriation. It is time therefore for us to lay this matter before his majesty, and to declare that he has no right to grant lands of himself. From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits which any particular so-

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ciety has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society, and subject to their allotment only. This may be done by themselves assembled collectively, or by their legislature to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority: and, if they are allotted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title. (1:133/119–20)

We have no way of knowing whether many, or even any, contemporary readers of Jefferson’s text had their memories jogged by these lines into recalling John Locke’s account (in his Second Treatise of Government) of the origins of primordial proprietorship. But it is a safer surmise that Thomas Jefferson did so when he emended his copy of the Williamsburg imprint, scratching out the word “farmers” and substituting “laborers” by way of explaining why the early emigrants had not protested royal pretensions from the outset. “Our ancestors . . . , who migrated hither, were laborers, not lawyers” (1:133, 137n35/119, 1551n to 119.21). It was probably not merely a taste for alliteration that dictated this change. “Farmers” might suggest rustics, fair game for sharpsters, confidence men, and politically well-connected lawyers. “Laborers,” in Locke’s alternative Genesis, conjures up images of men who, by mixing their sweaty labor with something lying unclaimed, made that thing unqualifiedly their own. In their minds (Jefferson would have us believe), those sturdy spiritual Saxons in America never doubted that what they had made their own was indeed theirs beyond the reach of others to shake or dispose of unilaterally. Locke’s famous dictum that in the beginning all the world was America could nowhere have been truer than in America.

IV. Unkinging the King By emphasizing the self-confident character of those early settlers, Jefferson raises the stakes for all concerned. Neither the wisdom of current imperial policy nor even its justice is at issue here. It is rather the more fundamental question: what kind of executive does such a people deserve? Or, perhaps more pointedly, what kind of executive can such a people accept? Given who they are and where they live, it must be an executive who constrains himself to stay within “the laws of the particular state which he is to administer within that state, and not those of any one within the limits of another” (1:134/120). By this account the British Parliament has no right to legislate for the Americans, and the king accordingly has no duty to execute those laws in disregard of the Americans’ coequal free and independent legislatures. Nor is that all.

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Both king and Parliament have to fully grasp that these demands are not open to negotiation. “A free people, as we have hitherto supposed, and mean to continue, ourselves” can brook no compromise on so essential a principle of their being (1:126/112). If past experience is any guide, there is no reason to expect that Parliament is ready to absorb that lesson. Jefferson’s long catalog of discriminatory enactments hostile to America is draped with bitter irony when he instances them as examples of parliamentary “justice,” “moderation,” and “equal and impartial legislation.” In sum, they “too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery” (1:124–25/108–10). On its face, the “Summary View” is an appeal to the king to rise to the occasion and to come to the aid of his beleaguered subjects in America. He is, after all, “the only mediatory power between the several states of the British empire” (1:129/115). George III may well have been shocked to discover that he was, among other things, the umpire of a federal system of coequal states. But that shock would be overtaken almost immediately by resentment and worse. For no sooner does Jefferson’s text ask the king to resume his long-dormant power to veto acts of Parliament than it blames him for vetoing colonial laws of the most salutary tendency. No better has been the king’s “inattention to the necessities of his people here” (1:130/119). By neither giving colonial legislation his formal assent nor annulling them with his negative, royal inaction leaves his subjects in a legal limbo and with nowhere else to turn. In truth, little (really nothing) that this text says about the king would support the expectation that he could bring himself to do the right thing.17 Nonetheless, Jefferson is ready to instruct his wayward magistrate. It is easy to imagine the frisson Jefferson may have experienced in writing the rhetorical crescendo with which he concludes his text. It captures that delicious moment when (in the spirit of Oscar Wilde) telling the truth is no longer merely a duty and becomes a positive pleasure. There is nothing for which an aggrieved free people need apologize when addressing its chief magistrate with brutal frankness. “Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art” (1:134/121). Viewed in isolation and without regard for the general tone of the text as a whole, Jefferson’s counsel to the king might appear 17. “We know that George never had the intention of acting as a patriot king, and it seems in the highest degree unlikely that Jefferson thought he was going to; the strategy of the Summary View is surely to offer the king a role in order to denounce him for refusing it.” J. G. A. Pocock, “1776: The Revolution against Parliament,” in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 84.

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almost avuncular. First of all (young man), get this straight: You do not own the people; you serve them. “Open your breast . . . to liberal and expanded thought” (ibid.). Have regard for how history will judge you. Free yourself from those who surround you proffering bad advice. Start thinking and acting for yourself and your people. There is no great mystery in distinguishing right from wrong. You can do it! “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail” (ibid.). By chance you are in a position to hold the balance of a great empire. Rise to the challenge, but know that this is “our last, our determined resolution” (1:135/122). The thirty-six-year-old to whom this Polonius-like advice is directed has been on the throne for fourteen years. It can hardly be imagined that he would accept being spoken to as though he is an adolescent about to go off to college. Nonetheless, Jefferson chooses to turn his draft of a resolution into a “dramatic monologue” that dares to express in writing what no one would dare speak freely in the king’s presence. A free people, convinced that it is in the right, sheds all pretense, even “to the point of impudence and insult.”18 Indeed, when the author’s good advice is read against the peculiar inflection or tone of the preceding critique of the king, one might rightly conclude that “Jefferson stakes his position just short of outright treason.”19 The anonymous “Native” who pens this text has at least earned a place on any bill of attainder that might be devised in response.20 If this account of the trajectory of the “Summary View” is plausible, then its opening and closing expressions of prayerful reconciliation, humility, fraternal love, and harmony deserve to be viewed as the thinnest sort of camouflage. That suspicion compels a reader to raise once again the question of authorial intent.

V. Jefferson’s End in View There would seem to be no grounds for challenging Jefferson’s plainspoken assertion that his “creed had been formed on unsheathing the sword at Lex18. Hedges, “Telling Off the King,” 169–70. 19. Browne, “Jefferson’s First Declaration of Independence,” 249. 20. See Papers, 1:676; LA, 10. A preoccupation with death and treason in Jefferson’s entries in his Commonplace Book during these years leading up to the revolution is noted and interpreted by Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 19–21.

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ington” (Papers, 1:671). Who was better positioned to know the man’s mind? Nonetheless, one might demur by asking, what does this text, written eight or nine months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, lack to make it a revolutionary document—other than an explicit call to arms? We have no way of entering deeper into Jefferson’s thoughts in hopes of discovering how far along he was in 1774 toward conceiving of an empire of liberty. The political state of affairs at the time did not yet call for public pronouncements on the restructuring of government. Yet Jefferson’s readiness so soon afterwards suggests that his thoughts already ran well ahead of others’. Nor was there any call for the “Summary View” to anticipate the needs of a people already in revolt. Rather, the task at hand was preparatory: the preconditions were still lacking whereby a successor to British America might first perceive itself as a whole and then act as a whole. That task promised to be a daunting challenge. The abortive efforts to adopt the Albany Plan of Union in 1754 only demonstrated what was already all too evident: Few provincials felt a sense of common fate with Americans in other provinces, and no comprehensive conception of American singularity ever achieved wide currency before the final crisis. . . . Americans were still very far from being a people bonded by a shared sense of purpose and identity by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It was, ironically, almost solely in this regard that the colonial experience prepared the consolidation of a national identity in the years after the accomplishment of national independence. The very fragmentation of the country that had occurred in the colonial era made all the more imperious, and poignant, the craving for social solidarity that attended the creation of a nation. And since that craving could not be satisfied in a social reality that was already too heterogeneous for successful centralization, it had to be gratified in symbolic ways. The symbols would begin to be forged in the maelstrom of revolution.21

21. Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 157. For more on “the almost total absence of any sense of American national consciousness . . . right down to the actual break with Britain,” and on how limited Americans were, even as late as 1775 to 1787, in thinking of themselves as “a people,” see Jack P. Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 136–39.

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The story that Jefferson tells in his draft of instructions to Virginia’s delegates is meant to reach far beyond the confines of colonial Williamsburg. It invokes the existence of the very audience it means to address. Before there can be a nation there must be a people. In this case that people must be roused to a sense of their special being, distinctiveness, and self-respect. That arousal is already in itself a revolutionary act. It is the first step they must take toward positioning themselves to assume a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth. In telling his story of the origins and characteristics of those who first transplanted themselves to America, Jefferson was constructing “the protohistory of a new national community.”22 That story, once adopted, would serve to help shape the self-understanding and aspirations of a truly republican people. With that in view, it is almost beside the point to question the historicity of the Saxon story or to dwell on the manifestly feudal principles embodied in Elizabeth’s letters-patents to Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh in the late sixteenth century. Jefferson was hardly alone in believing in an ancient constitution, but he outpaced others in using it to inspirit his countrymen. As he noted only two years after composing the “Summary View” and in the first flush of revolution and independence, any shortcomings in its argument might be corrected at a later and more leisurely hour. But for now, theory had been overpassed by events. How far our acts of assembly or acceptance of grants may have converted lands which were allodial into feuds I have never considered. This matter is now become a mere speculative point; and we have it in our power to make it what it ought to be for the public good. . . . Are we not the better for what we have hitherto abolished of the feudal system? Has not every restitution of the antient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?23 22. Brian Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14. More plainly put, “the Virginians, and by extension all those assembled in Philadelphia, were being shown what should be said and how a colonist ought to sound—what kind of stance ought to be taken toward England and toward themselves, what kind of language and comportment should be expected of Americans at this juncture in the crisis of identity that soon was to erupt into armed combat.” Browne, “Jefferson’s First Declaration of Independence,” 250. 23. Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, 13 August 1776, Papers, 1:491–92; LA, 751–52. For a different understanding of the “troubling contradictions” and “historical confusions” entailed in

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Here was a case where the principle and its practical effects validated one another. Jefferson would be keen to preserve that happy coincidence through institutions, as can be seen in his ambitious proposals for the revisal of Virginia’s laws. But that project lay a few years ahead. Now, in 1774, the urgent task was to sustain and extend the feeling that had prevailed on the first of June when the people met to choose delegates to the Williamsburg convention. Jefferson recalled in his Autobiography how the clergy had been invited to those assemblies & to address to them discourses suited to the occasion. The people met generally, with anxiety & alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day thro’ the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man & placing him erect & solidly on his centre. (LA, 8–9)

The “Summary View” is, in turn, Jefferson’s discourse to the people suited to the occasion. He too means to place every man in Virginia and beyond “erect & solidly on his centre.” In crafting his text, he struggles visibly to maintain some equilibrium between a prudential regard for what his audiences are not quite yet prepared to accept and the fundamental principles whose demands dare not be silenced or denied. Those signs of tension support the conclusion that although his creed may well have been formed when the sword was unsheathed at Lexington, Jefferson had already “burn[ed] his bridges in 1774.”24

Jefferson’s reliance on the ancient constitution for legitimizing American independence, see Sheldon, Political Philosophy of Jefferson, 34–40. 24. Ferguson, American Enlightenment, 107.

Chapter 5

Lincoln: The Statesman as Outsider

It seems to be easier to define or at least characterize statesmanship than to recognize it in action. The accolade, “statesman,” is usually applied in retrospect, as in “elder statesman” when speaking of someone still living, or from a historian’s perspective when speaking of someone long dead. In this respect, at least, the challenge is the opposite of that attending pornography, of which a Supreme Court justice has assured us that, although he could not define it, he knew it when he saw it. Do we know statesmanship when we see it in action? I am not all that confident. In the heat of the moment and in the confusing hubbub that is the perennial condition of political life, we are often at a loss in trying to detect the decisive from the trivial, the deep and lasting effect from the transient incident. For all that, we know—or at least assume we know—that a statesman is someone who holds office, is politically prominent, and can actually wield political power. These might be thought of as the preconditions; in their absence there is no venue or effective opportunity for statesmanship to manifest itself. As the ancient Greeks would have it, “Office will show the man.” But then again, we may find it necessary to discriminate further. In his excellent little collection of essays, The Statesmanship of the Civil War, the noted historian Allan Nevins includes a lecture titled “Lincoln as More Than a Statesman.” Nevins stresses Abraham Lincoln’s stern realism, toughness, and especially his grasp of what was practicable at any given moment. In this he stood apart from the “group of great-statured men” who worked under him—William H. Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, and Salmon P. Chase—and surpassed the presidents who preceded or succeeded him. This is not to say that

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Lincoln did not exhibit failures of judgment, and it ignores his general incompetence, really indifference, in coordinating the executive departments during a crisis that called for the utmost in coordination. Notwithstanding all that might be said along these lines, Nevins concludes that Lincoln’s shortcomings were “more than counterbalanced by [his] supreme dexterity in managing both his associates and the mass opinion of the country.”1 In going on to document, briefly but tellingly, the evidence for reaching this conclusion, Nevins justifies his choice of the title “Lincoln as More Than a Statesman.” For obvious reasons, I leave the subject of the statesmanship of the wartime president to those who, like Allan Nevins, are fully immersed in the vast historical record of the Civil War. Instead I will try to identify the statesmanship that informed Lincoln’s words and deeds before he held high office, indeed while he held no office. This might appear paradoxical, even perverse. Can a private citizen—and an outsider to boot—be thought to be exhibiting statesmanship? To even begin to address that question and to ascertain that it is not simply nonsensical, we need to turn to the record of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. There, happily, we can find some evidence of what he thought about statesmanship. That should be a helpful starting point. In his first debate with Senator Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, on 21 August 1858, Lincoln went to considerable pains to cast his opponent as knowingly or unknowingly subverting the distinctive American commitment to liberty. In effect—and notwithstanding his denials and professed neutrality or indifference to whether slavery was voted up or voted down in the new territories—Douglas was setting an example that ultimately would render slavery permanent and triumphant throughout the United States. So Lincoln argued. He contrasted Douglas’s stance with that adopted by Henry Clay, “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life”2 (460). Here is an opening we are invited to explore. It is our good fortune that six years earlier, in the course of delivering a eulogy on the recently deceased Clay, Lincoln had dwelt on the theme of statesmanship. There had been eulogies aplenty following Clay’s death, but those concentrated most on Clay’s success as a fashioner of compromises and a pacifier of heated controversies. Lincoln, however, looked deeper and hence 1. Allan Nevins, The Statesmanship of the Civil War, enlarged ed. (rpt. pb.; New York: Collier, 1962), 119, 123, 136. 2. Parenthetical page numbers reference Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland: World, 1946). (S . . .) refers to pagination in Steven B. Smith, ed., The Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

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saw more. He focused on the statesmanship of a Whig who had been at the center of recurring national crises for more than forty years. He identified Henry Clay’s “ruling passion” as encompassing not only his fellow Americans but all mankind: “a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes” (274). Lincoln portrayed a Clay who “desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous” (270). How was it that this Kentucky slaveholder could have become so influential? Here is Lincoln’s meticulous and deeply considered dissection of Clay’s success: The spell—the long-enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle. Who can compass it? It is probably true that he owed his pre-eminence to no one quality, but to a fortunate combination of several. He was surpassingly eloquent; but many eloquent men fail utterly; and they are not, as a class, generally successful. His judgment was excellent; but many men of good judgment, live and die unnoticed.—His will was indomitable; but this quality often secures to its owner nothing better than a character for useless obstinacy. These then were Mr. Clay’s leading qualities. No one of them is very uncommon; but all together are rarely combined in a single individual; and this is probably the reason why such men as Henry Clay are so rare in the world. (269)

Lincoln stressed that Clay brought a rare gravitas to his eloquence, choosing his matter and modes always for practical effect. And that effect was always with a view to Clay’s ruling passion: to further the great moral revolution of the age and to preserve, undiminished, what Clay called “that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world—pointing the way” for all men to recover their rights, liberties, and happiness (276). It is not hard to read much of Abraham Lincoln’s own character and aspirations in this account of his “beau ideal.” And yet, truth to tell, Henry Clay, for all his great vision and formidable qualities, was among the small group of political leaders in the years between 1820 and 1854 who failed to confront the unbearable challenge that slavery posed to American society and government. Along with Daniel Webster and of course Stephen Douglas, Clay could do no better than to (forgive the expression) kick the can down the road—and hope. Lincoln rejected the national oblivion to which that policy led, even as he rejected the rigid doctrinarism that made John Quincy Adams and many abolitionists disdainful of popular opinions. Seeking his inspiration where he would, Lincoln found a way to lead a reluctant, not to say hostile, public opin-

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ion toward a necessary confrontation with slavery as a matter of principle. In effecting this as a private citizen, Lincoln had somehow first to transform himself. Starting out as an ambitious office seeker eager for recognition, this oneterm congressman and failed frontier politician-turned-wealthy railroad lawyer grew into something greater. When this outsider found himself aroused in 1854 “as he had never been before” (554) by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, his moral outrage propelled him into a new arena and new heights. He was to discover to himself and others that he had the makings of a statesman of the first rank. How did Lincoln do that? How was he able to bring about the necessary change in the American public’s self-understanding? (1) The first, indispensable step in coming to grips with the challenge posed by what used to be called Negro chattel slavery was to see it as it was, to look at the relevant facts without blinking. Americans had for too long been fed a diet of what Lincoln called “lullaby” arguments. He called on his country’s people to wake up and shake off their comforting illusions. Slavery would not disappear on its own. Slavery would ultimately find places where it would flourish both in the North and the Far West. The naked truth was that slavery was profitable and as such was a powerful disincentive to slave owners contemplating voluntary emancipation. As he put it at the end of his speech on the Dred Scott decision: “The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle; and it will be ever hard to find many men who will send a slave to Liberia, and pay his passage, while they can send him to a new country Kansas, for instance, and sell him for fifteen hundred dollars, and the rise” (365). It was not until a century later that economic historians, using computers to analyze vast amounts of slave auction records, were able to confirm Lincoln’s insight. The pricing of slaves and the operations of slave markets in New Orleans and elsewhere were premised on the expectation that slavery would be profitable. In important respects, the massive investment in slaves distorted the economies of the South and retarded their development. But slave owners, at least, saw their stock of slave wealth grow tenfold from 1805 to 1860, when it reached three billion dollars. That was a lot of gold eagles! Another cold fact, equally disturbing to anyone meditating on how to rid this country of the burden and shame of slavery, was the state of public opinion, that is to say, of white public opinion, regarding blacks. Lincoln had the courage—or if you will, the temerity—to address this head-on. There was no magic wand to make slavery and the slaves disappear overnight. In his 1854 speech at Peoria on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Lincoln laid open an important principle informing his politics. “What then?” he asked.

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Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next?—Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south. (292)

All too many people, reading this today, might shake their heads in dismay at the man who came to be called the Great Emancipator. Yet this statement, I argue, exhibits some of the cardinal features of Lincoln’s statesmanship. In his pursuit of true justice and high principle he remained fully mindful of the limits within which he or any political actor could operate. Most whites, he intimated, disdain or fear blacks. The same might be said even of some of those whites who detested slavery and sought to end it. That is one of those inconvenient facts of life in antebellum America that could neither be wished away nor ignored. Note, too, that Lincoln explicitly refused to claim the high moral ground against “our brethren of the south.” “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” “They are just what we would be in their situation.” Nonetheless—and this is the crux of the matter— nonetheless, “the monstrous injustice of slavery itself ” must not be lost sight of, whether because it is concealed by that mountain of “gold eagles” or by an assumed or genuine moral obtuseness (291). Lincoln inveighed with especial force and wit against the phony logic that maintained that if you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, I in turn must not object to your taking your slave there. That is “perfectly logical,” Lincoln admitted, “if there is no difference between hogs and negroes” (301). But normal human sympathies revolt at that suggestion. Likewise Lincoln attacked the counterfeit logic that presumed that “because I did not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife” (400). It is hard to overestimate the difficulty Lincoln encountered in trying to respond to Senator Douglas’s playing the race card. Against this background of white hostility to blacks, Douglas was not above routinely referring to Lincoln’s

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supporters as “Black Republicans” and to associating them with advocates of what used to be called miscegenation. This was a political minefield that the candidate had to cross in his first debate with Douglas. I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. . . . But I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—

Pay special attention to this next move. —certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (444–45)

One can only admire the adroitness with which Lincoln distinguished the inequality about which he is certain—the superiority of one color over another—and that about which he is less than certain—presumed differences in moral or intellectual capacity. And one can only admire the shrewdness and understanding displayed by Lincoln’s most knowing black critic, Frederick Douglass, when, many years later, he took a comprehensive view of the man he saw as “preeminently the white man’s President.” “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” (2) This brings me to the second respect by which we can attempt to trace how Lincoln was able to transform the American public’s self-understanding. He was surely not the first to insist on raising the moral dimension of American chattel slavery. Quakers and other abolitionists had been doing that for

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at least seventy years. But Lincoln put the moral issue in a political frame, a frame that he might have surmised most Americans would accept as their own. Recurring to what he repeatedly called “our ancient faith,” he enlisted “the leading principle” of the Declaration of Independence—“that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent ” (304)—against the phony moralism of Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty.” In truth, Lincoln insisted, both slavery and its current meretricious defense ought to be seen as a betrayal of America’s political-moral legacy. Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.”—Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations. (315)

At issue for Lincoln was not only the integrity of the Declaration, though that was greatly endangered by the growing readiness to openly proclaim its assertion of human equality a “self-evident lie.” Those who would make the bondage of the black slave universal and eternal turn their rage on the document: “it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it” (359). But that was not the worst of it. In Lincoln’s gloss on the text, the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” served no practical purpose in separating the thirteen colonies from Great Britain back then in 1776. Rather, it was there “for future use.” It set up “a standard maxim for free society,” something to be constantly approximated although never perfectly attained. It was intended as a “stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism” (361). In Senator Douglas’s gloss on the text, the signers of the Declaration were referring only to British subjects then resident in this continent and asserting that they were equal to their contemporary British subjects born and residing in Great Britain. Far from having universal import and continuing relevance, Douglas’s

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Declaration, having served its job of justifying the colonists’ rebellion eighty years earlier, had no further use. As Lincoln put it: “mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won” (362). If that was the case, he asked rhetorically, what was the point in celebrating the Fourth of July? In draining the moral imperative of the Declaration of Independence, Douglas made room for his doctrine of “care not whether slavery be voted down or up” in any of the newly organized western territories. And if that attitude came to be accepted by “the public mind,” Lincoln foresaw extensions of the Dred Scott decision that ultimately would forbid any state from excluding slavery altogether. The “house” would no longer be divided; it would become one thing, the land of bondage. I would stress Lincoln’s repeated references to “the public mind.” He interpreted the convoluted and circumlocutory treatment of slavery in the Constitution of 1787 as reflecting a compromise with necessity, but a compromise that let the public mind rest in the belief that slavery as an institution was in the course of ultimate extinction. The Missouri Compromise did not shake that belief, but Douglas’s insistence that slavery’s containment or spread was a matter of indifference—combined with the troubled and troubling reasoning in the Supreme Court’s judgment regarding Dred Scott—foretold the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery. No longer could the public mind rest in the belief that the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction. Without that confidence there could be no peace. From that perspective, Lincoln viewed the current situation as perilous indeed. Not only was Douglas’s indifference a betrayal of America’s political-moral legacy, but slavery itself could now be seen clearly as a subverter and corrupter of public life. This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. (291)

These biting words from the 1854 Peoria speech recur through Lincoln’s writings. He insisted, again and again, that public sentiment could not be ignored by anyone purporting to be a leader. Douglas’s professed indifference—his

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policy of “don’t care”—stands at odds with how “the great mass of mankind” view the subject. They consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feeling against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with.—It is a great and durable element of popular action, and I think, no statesman can safely disregard it. (322)

It is no little thing, “this matter of keeping one sixth of the population of the whole nation in a state of oppression and tyranny unequaled in the world” (395). Douglas could say, and did say in Ottawa in response, that by insisting in principle on treating slavery as a moral question, Lincoln and his friends were instigating a sectional war between the free states and the slave states. If successful, they would drive one group or the other to the wall, and the Union itself would be dissolved. For himself, Douglas said, as a believer in the inferiority of the black man, it did not follow that therefore he ought to be a slave. “On the contrary, I hold that humanity and Christianity both require that the negro shall have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives” (438). But what the bounds of that right ought to be is a matter of local option. Let every sovereign state exercise its right to do as it pleases, refrain from meddling in the business of other states, and live happily ever after. This principle of popular sovereignty had enabled America to flourish and grow from strength to strength. To which Lincoln replied in a famous letter to Bostonian Republicans that the public denigration of Jefferson’s principles, whether they were called “glittering generalities” or “self-evident lies” or (more deviously) held to apply only to “superior races,” had the same subversive object and effect: “supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism” (489). (3) A third respect in which this outsider was able to reshape the national debate was by insisting on a political way of extricating the country from its impending disaster. He eschewed grandstanding; he hedged his concessions to his audience’s prejudices; he claimed no superiority over those he was opposing. In a time and place marked by high passions and feelings of desperation, Lincoln studiously refused to stoke the fires. He viewed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as effectually repealing not only the Missouri Compromise but also killing the spirit of compromise itself. “The spirit of mutual

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concession—that spirit which first gave us the constitution, and which has thrice saved the Union—we shall have strangled and cast from us forever. And what shall we have in lieu of it? The South flushed with triumph and tempted to excesses; the North, betrayed, as they believe, brooding on wrong and burning for revenge. One side will provoke; the other resent” (311). In such a political climate how might calmer voices make themselves heard? To begin with, partisans had to be shown how to overcome their fear of being identified with the radicals who surrounded them on every side. They were being over fastidious to the point that they risked losing sight of the principle that was at stake: Let no wheedling, no sophistry, divert you from throwing a direct vote against it [i.e., the principle behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act]. Some men, mostly whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration, lest they be thrown in company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old whig to tell them good humoredly, that I think this is very silly? Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise; and stand against him when he attempts the repeal of the fugitive slave law. In the latter case you stand with the southern disunionist. What of that? You are still right. In both cases you are right. In both cases you expose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand on middle ground and hold the ship level and steady. In both you are national and nothing less than national. This is the good old whig ground. To desert such ground, because of any company, is to be less than a whig—less than a man—less than an American. (312–13)

You might say that Abraham Lincoln was incapable, by temperament, from demonizing and playing the demagogue. This loner had had ample opportunities, growing up as he did and where he did, to learn how to look at others from a distance. Notwithstanding the many disappointments life had dealt him, he did not view the human comedy with a bitter or sardonic eye. In most respects, people had to be taken as they were, and that meant necessarily that hoped-for changes in attitudes and beliefs could only be gradual. Accordingly Lincoln was prepared to temporize, delay, and accommodate to local circumstances and local prejudices—but not to yield on the main point. One can see this instinct to steer clear of rigid positions even as early as 1837. While serving as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives,

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Lincoln and a fellow representative from Sangamon County, Dan Stone, issued a formal protest to resolutions bearing on the slavery question that had been passed by both branches of the General Assembly. Those resolutions put Illinois on record as abhorring abolitionism and sympathizing with the slaveholders whom they were attacking, although without committing the Assembly one way or the other about slavery itself. Lincoln and Stone’s protest avoids the Assembly’s full-throated condemnation of abolitionism by criticizing only the doctrine’s likely effect and reaching even that criticism only after taking a stand on the morality, or rather immorality, of slavery. “They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of Abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils” (552). The cautious, dry, legal language of the protest and its failure to highlight the differences between the resolutions that the Assembly passed overwhelmingly and the propositions of the two lonely protesters leave it to the reader to discover wherein Lincoln and Stone parted company from their fellow legislators. What is not left to inference or in doubt, but rather stated with total explicitness, is the moral judgment that slavery is unjust. In line with his understanding of the Constitution and of the circumstances that prevailed at the time of its ratification, Lincoln drew a sharp line between the existing institution and the question of its extension beyond the states where it was constitutionally protected. It was one thing to acknowledge that the existence of slavery in the United States of America in the eighteenthcentury was a fact, a fact that could not be ignored or wished away by those who made the Constitution. But by the same token, the assertion of the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men are equal on principle was not thereby negated or rendered irrelevant. “We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard” (402–3). On this main point there was to be no compromise: slavery had to be seen and treated as an evil that must not be allowed to grow and expand. The corollary for public policy was clear. As Lincoln put it in a letter to a Whig supporter of his in 1845: “I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the States, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old” (170,

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to Williamson Durley, 3 October 1845). The public mind had once again to rest in the belief that the institution of slavery was in the course of ultimate extinction. This chapter began with a reflection on the difficulty we have in recognizing statesmanship in action. Basil Williams, in his general editor’s preface to Lord Charnwood’s justly famous biography of Lincoln, goes even further by insisting that even retrospectively statesmanship fails to win the same unquestioning recognition as that accorded great warriors or great achievers in science, art, or literature. “This is only natural,” he says. A warrior, a man of science, an artist or a poet are judged in the main by definite achievements, by the victories they have won over foreign enemies or over ignorance and prejudice, by the joy and enlightenment they have brought to the consciousness of their own and succeeding generations. For the statesman there is no such exact measure of greatness. The greater he is, the less likely is his work to be marked by decisive achievement which can be recalled by anniversaries or signalised by some outstanding event: the chief work of a great statesman rests in a gradual change of direction given to the policy of his people, still more in a change of the spirit within them. . . . He has to do all his work in a society of which a large part cannot see his object and another large part, as far as they do see it, oppose it. Hence his work at the best is often incomplete and he has to be satisfied with a rough average rather than with his ideal.3

It seems to me that this observation rings true and especially in the case of Lincoln. Lincoln did indeed set in motion a gradual change in the spirit of the American people by helping them rediscover (so to speak) the inspiring principle that he found in the Declaration of Independence. That principle, he maintained, was “the electric cord” that linked the hearts of the eighteenthcentury founders and the newest immigrant to these shores. It was “the father of all moral principle” in all of them (401–2). It is nothing short of astonishing that Lincoln was able to initiate this act of statesmanship while he was still a private man holding no political office. What followed in the terrible years of his presidency was already prefigured by his achievement in the years leading up to his taking the oath of office. This conclusion is supported by the judi3. Basil Williams, general editor’s preface to Abraham Lincoln, by Lord Charnwood [Godfrey Rathbone Benson] (rpt. ed., Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1929), iii–iv.

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cious assessment of Don E. Fehrenbacher in his fine study titled Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850’s. If greatness is the response of inner strength to an extraordinary challenge, Lincoln had first met such a challenge and begun to show such strength in 1854, after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Never in the presidency did he surpass the political skill with which he shaped the Republican party of Illinois, held it together, and made himself its leader. In his relations with other Illinoisans one finds the same patience and respect for human dignity that characterized the wartime president. Ambition drove him hard in these years of preparation, and yet it was an ambition notably free of pettiness, malice, and overindulgence. It was, moreover, an ambition leavened by moral conviction and a deep faith in the principles upon which the republic had been built. The Lincoln of the 1860’s was much the same man under greater challenge.4

In sum, not the least of Lincoln’s extraordinary political achievements was his success in making general an awareness of the problem of public opinion—his nurturing of an opinion about the signal importance of opinion. As he put it in 1859: “Public opinion in this country is everything” (S 267). Do not mistake this for our present-day preoccupation with the latest ephemeral polling results from Gallup or the Washington Post. Lincoln referred rather to something deeper and more lasting. The question of slavery that had roiled American political life for so long could only be settled “on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained” (S 302, New Haven, 6 March 1860). At a Republican banquet in December 1856 he put it this way: “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate” (S 107). So when Senator Douglas attacked or subverted what Lincoln maintained was the central idea in this, our American political public opinion—the equality of men affirmed in the Declaration of Independence—he was guilty of “debauching public opinion” (S 268). Douglas was to be judged by the influence he was exerting on public sentiment. Lincoln raised this concern and stated it most memorably in his first debate with Douglas. 4. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850’s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 161.

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In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed. (458)

Understanding this in all its profundity, Lincoln exercised his great statesmanship in making ordinary Americans understand that the founders’ “central idea” was indeed central to national identity. It would not be enough to save the Union from the threat of secession. We had also to save the Union as it once was, a Union that was worthy of the saving.

Chapter 6

Of Human Ends in Bacon’s Essayes

“Verba bilinguis quasi simplicia, et ipsa perveniunt ad interiora ventris.” [“The words of the double-tongued man seem artless, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly” (Prov. 18:8).] Here is distinguished, that flattery and insinuation which seemeth set and artificial sinketh not far; but that entereth deep which hath shew of nature, liberty, and simplicity. Advancement of Learning, II.xxiii.6, OWC, 270

Fortunate indeed has been the career of Sir Francis Bacon’s collection titled The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral. It has remained in continuous demand, and hence in print, for more than four centuries. It has occupied the attention of a host of readers, interpreters, and editors who have variously been entranced, baffled, and repulsed by what they take to be their author’s intended meaning. It is highly likely that Bacon would not have been surprised by all this; rather, he would have taken it all in stride. The many formulations of his intentions, expectations, and methods that he has left scattered throughout his writings testify to a consummately self-conscious and self-assured author. We readers in turn are obliged to thank him for instructing and guiding us in how to approach his work. Serpentine as his mind might be, he is forthright at least in this respect. And so, if my experience in reading any essay of his is beset with uncertainties and mixed messages, if I find myself compelled to retrace my steps and ponder the force of any particular assertion, I ought at least to be open to the thought that all this was by Bacon’s design.

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Over the course of its several editions (1597, 1612, 1625), the collection is enlarged, reworked, reordered, and transformed. Even after supervising what turned out to be the last edition published in his lifetime, Bacon appears to have considered the assemblage as a work still in progress, a work not yet to be removed from this artist’s easel.1 Bearing more generally on this point is Bacon’s confession in a letter to a Catholic friend: “My great work goeth forward; and after my manner, I alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till all be finished.” 2 This stance might be taken for an expression of genuine modesty on the part of a man not otherwise known for timid hesitancy. More certain is his commitment to opening rather than closing avenues of inquiry. Consequently he repeatedly faults modes of presentation that affect to offer readers a body of knowledge apparently complete, comprehensive, and finished. He detects here a long-standing tradition whereby childish men yearn for simple certainties, while ambitious confidence men rush in to meet the market’s demand. Rather than settle for such deceptive wholeness, Bacon urges following the example of “the first and earliest seekers after truth.” Those men insisted on presenting their findings candidly—that is to say, without any camouflage of their incompleteness. In choosing to write essays in the first place and in choosing to cast his observations and findings in the form of aphorisms, Bacon introduces his audience to a way of reading and thinking for which they are ill prepared. He means to teach them better.3 In a dedication to Henry, Prince of Wales, intended for the 1612 edition, 1. The enlargements and reorderings may be traced in the comparative table given in Sir Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), cxvi–cxvii. The reworkings and transformations are duly noted in Kiernan’s apparatus criticus to each essay. My quotations from the essays follow the spelling of this edition. Edward Arber’s side-by-side presentation of different, albeit fewer, versions of the essays makes their evolution easier to grasp. See A Harmony of the Essays. Etc. of Francis Bacon, English Reprints (Birmingham, 1871). 2. To Sir Tobie Matthew, 17 February 1610 [1611 n.s.], in A Selection of His Works, by Francis Bacon, ed. Sidney Warhaft, College Classics in English (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1984), 469. 3. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum: With Other Parts of the Great Instauration, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), bk. 1, aphorism 86 (p. 96). For more on the method of the tradition as “a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver,” see The Advancement of Learning, II.xvii.3, in The Major Works, by Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 233. Further references to this edition are cited as OWC.

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Bacon explains and justifies his decision not to write a treatise. Neither writer nor addressee can spare the time, the one from “my continuall Services,” the other from his “princely affaiers.” Accordingly the author offers only “certaine breif notes, sett downe rather significantlye, then curiously,” which he calls by a neologism, and then defines: “Essaies” or “dispersed Meditacions.”4 This choice commits him to a mode of presentation sharply at odds with the “Magistral” mode favored by tradition. He offers instead a method that would test, challenge, and probe: “Knowledge that is delivered as a thread to be spun on, ought to be delivered and intimated, if it were possible, in the same method wherein it was invented, and so is it possible of knowledge induced.”5 Taking their bearings by the author’s own characterization of the work as “com[ing] home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes,” readers might reasonably expect to be handed some useful advice, ready for application to their own affairs, both public and private.6 At some level, indeed, those expectations are not dashed. Yet the richer benefits to be gleaned from his work will demand more than a cursory reading. There are threads to be spun on, lessons to be earned.7 With that educative function in mind, Bacon opts for the aphorism as his vehicle of choice. Its comparative advantage is not so much its terseness or economy of language as its obstinate subversion of any attempt to make a neatly packaged (though spuriously coherent) whole. Aphorisms represent “a knowledge broken.” Unlike “Methods,” which satisfy and win consent by making a “shew of a total,” leaving readers with a sense that the doctrine or subject under investigation has attained its highest development, aphorisms thumb their noses at pretences to system.8 Bacon makes the grounds of his 4. Kiernan, Essayes, 317. See also the commentary of Vickers in OWC, 678. 5. Advancement of Learning, II.xvii.4, OWC, 233–34. See also the English translation of bk. 6, ch. 2 of De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, new ed., ed. James Spedding et al. (London, 1875), 4:449 (hereafter cited as De Augmentis). 6. Dedication of the 1625 edition to the Duke of Buckingham, in Kiernan, Essayes, 5. 7. Speaking of the opening sentences of the essay, “Of Truth” (1), but in terms that apply to the Essayes as a whole, a sensitive reader observes: “The movement performed is deliberately oblique in a way that forces the reader in part to create the link himself. A passive attitude here, or even a very rapid perusal of the page, is fatal to the essay. . . . Agree to the special demands of Bacon’s prose on the other hand, here and throughout the essay, and a vast and complex building—the joint creation of author and reader, of reason and the imagination, completely individual and yet never either exhausted or quite the same twice—begins to arise from the sentences.” Anne Righter, “Francis Bacon,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1968), 319. 8. Advancement of Learning, II.xvii.7, OWC, 234–35. See also De Augmentis, 4:450–51.

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decision abundantly clear in the preface to his Maxims of the Law (1597, but published only posthumously). Whereas I could have digested these rules into a certain method or order, which, I know, would have been more admired, as that which would have made every particular rule, through his coherence and relation unto other rules, seem more cunning and more deep; yet I have avoided so to do, because this delivering of knowledge in distinct and disjoined aphorisms doth leave the wit of man more free to turn and toss, and to make use of that which is so delivered to more several purposes and applications. For we see all the ancient wisdom and science was wont to be delivered in that form; as may be seen by the parables of Solomon, and by the aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the moral verses of Theognis and Phocylides.9

If it promises anything, the aphoristic essay in Bacon’s hands leaves ample space for a reader’s wit to toss and turn. Here again, the author is as good as his word. Notwithstanding all these channel markers and sounding horns and bells, our effort to find a clear way through the Essayes is maddeningly difficult. Perhaps this is only to be expected. In aiming to come home to (all or most or many) men’s business and bosoms, the author must perforce speak to their different concerns, and with differing considerations of what will grab and keep any particular audience’s attention. His appeals must reflect his estimate of their differing abilities, inclinations, and aspirations. Bacon may have plans for all kinds of men and women—indeed, for the entire human race—but he is no democrat. There is no blinking the fact that his replacement for the largely worthless philosophy of the past is not there simply for the taking. “It does not lie upon the surface. It cannot be gathered in passing. . . . It does not sink to the capacity of the vulgar except in so far as it benefits them by its works.”10 This philosopher-courtier knows in his bones that the speech must fit the occasion and the addressee. Considerations of rhetorical strategy thus compound the difficulties posed by his principled dedication to dispersed and 9. Cited in Vickers’s excellent discussion of this “combination of pregnant utterance and free form.” OWC, 544. 10. “The Refutation of Philosophies” [Redargutio Philosophiarum], in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on Its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts, by Benjamin Farrington, Phoenix Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 108.

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disjointed presentation. Yet this much, at least, is clear: Bacon means not only to enlist the understanding of a heterogeneous readership but also to reshape it in fundamental ways. Looking at the Essayes as a whole, then, it is all too easy to conclude that they are an assemblage and barely a whole. The record of their evolution, expansion, and repeated reorganization might suggest that Bacon was given to nourishing better second thoughts; or that he suffered the vice of restless minds (of whom he was surely one), in that he kept tampering with what already sufficed; or that he only gradually came to construct an underlying framework on which to suspend these fifty-eight highly diverse essays. However one views the matter, serious efforts to discover a coherent pattern of developing argumentation in the Essayes as a whole have been few and far between. And no wonder: there are so many trees in his forest. The sheer variety of matter, the studied manner of writing that induces perplexity in the reader almost to the point of vertigo, and the seemingly random grouping or separation of essays on related topics: these are enough to dissuade all but the most determined. And yet, not all is disorder. In giving a modest, honest account of his manful search for Bacon’s organizing principles, Robert Faulkner has laid out his grounds for concluding thus: Bacon, dancing with the opinions dear to others, manages to turn traditional opinions into enlightened opinions and to do this while disguising the transformation. His is a revolution more insinuated than imposed. . . . . . . Each essay stands by itself as a separate counsel fitted to move those peculiarly susceptible to its appeal, and is also part of a whole plan that attempts comprehensive revolution. Together they are a paradigm of enlightenment. They are perhaps the classic example of the art behind the light, as D’Alembert said marvelously in his preface to the Encyclopédie, “which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world.”11

What follows here does not do more or better in uncovering Bacon’s presumed grand design. It only purports to offer another view of Bacon’s Essayes, as seen from a small clearing in his forest. Of the eighteen new essays Bacon added to his expanded and reworked 1625 edition, two in particular stand out. By virtue of their exposed placement— 11. Robert K. Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 28, 29.

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“Of Truth” (1) at the head of the collection and “Of Vicissitude of Things” (58) at the end—these essays could take on the appearance of pillars or portals through either of which readers might pass into or out of Bacon’s work.12 Indeed, either of these terminal essays might appear to be an admonition addressing the different dominant concerns of two distinctive addressees. Preoccupation with the status or reality of truth could rightly be assigned to a lover of wisdom, a seeker after truth—in short, to someone attempting to pursue a philosophic way of life. Has Bacon anything to say to such an individual by way of warning or support as reader and author part company?13 Preoccupation with the mutability of human (and especially political) affairs could rightly be assigned to rulers, to the gray eminences behind their thrones, and to those who aspire to be such. Has Bacon anything to say to such an individual by way of warning or support as reader and author go their separate ways? It is not farfetched to surmise that, among his multiple conceivable audiences for the Essayes, this philosopher-statesman was especially attentive to counseling both potential philosophers and potential rulers. And as though to signal that concern, he hoisted his colors where they might most readily be noticed. Each of these terminal essays, then, invites reexamination with these questions in mind. Truth to tell, the jury is still out in assessing the reality and value of truth. Pontius Pilate dismisses with a scoff a claim made for the highest conceivable truth; he for one cannot afford to waste his time on nonsensical assertions. Bacon prompts us to wonder whether Pilate is one of those anarchic minds that chafe at any presumed restraints on thinking and acting. There was a time when “Sects of Philosophers” could coalesce on the fixed belief that there ought to be no fixed beliefs. Latter-day “discoursing Wits” are only pale shadows of the ancients in this respect. If there was a fall at all, perhaps it was in this: that we no longer have the equals of the full-blooded skeptics and deniers that flourished in antiquity. Bacon discloses only in passing the grounds on which truth seeking has been dismissed and, in the process, has yielded the field to lies. Digging 12. An author of such diverse and disjointed pieces has no reason to assume that readers will necessarily move through his work by the numbers. They are perhaps more likely to follow their fancy, much as those approaching an anthology or an encyclopedia pick their own way through a multitude of offerings. 13. There is no essay titled “Of Wisdom” or “Of Philosophy.” Nor can the essays “Of Wisedome for a Mans selfe” (23), and “Of Seeming wise” (26), and “Of Studies” (50) be mistaken for an endorsement of a philosophic life.

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out the truth is labor intensive; and even if found, it “imposeth upon mens Thoughts.” Wherein is that imposition offensive or oppressive? Does the discomfiture arise from being challenged in our most comforting and self-serving beliefs? The conclusion seems to be that men have “a naturall, though corrupt Love, of the Lie it selfe.” But why? An unnamed adherent of “the later Schoole of the Grecians”14 is at a loss to explain why this should be the case. Where neither pleasure nor advantage is at stake, why should men yet love lies “for the Lies sake”? Bacon adds, “But I cannot tell,” and then proceeds to tell. In fact, much that is dear to us is put in jeopardy when exposed to a “Naked, and Open day light.” What Edmund Burke will later refer to as “the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” and “the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination . . . to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature”:15 none of these can long endure when exposed to anything stronger than candlelight.16 Hans Christian Andersen’s clear-sighted, impertinent little boy who saw—and cried out— that the emperor was indeed naked was a killjoy. Bacon understands full well that we need these lies to feel good about ourselves, but does he rise to their defense? “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of Mens Mindes, Vaine Opinions, Flattering Hopes, False valuations, Imaginations as one would, and the like; but it would leave the Mindes, of a Number of Men, poore shrunken Things; full of Melancholy, and Indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?” Bacon is no misanthrope intent on leaving men so bereft. Nor is he to be confused with some unnamed austere Father of the Church who, filled with indignation and severity, inveighed against poesy and the imaginative faculty altogether. That Father missed the point, Bacon suggests. “It is not the Lie, that passeth through the Minde, but the Lie that sinketh in, and setleth in it, that doth the hurt.” Rather than leave men prisoners of their false hopes or without any hopes at all, Bacon (in his philanthropic and charitable mode) is an assiduous purveyor and promoter of new hopes—hopes only partly un14. Lucian of Samosata is identified later in “Of Atheisme” (16) as “perhaps” a contemplative atheist. 15. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 239. 16. As an author and producer of masques, Bacon has given much consideration to stagecraft and to the effects of varied lights and to the colors that show best by candlelight. See “Of Masques and Triumphs” (38). See also the discussion of lighting in Christine Adams, “Francis Bacon’s Wedding Gift of ‘A Garden of a Glorious and Strange Beauty’ for the Earl and Countess of Somerset,” Garden History 36, no. 1 (2008): 36–58, esp. at 38 and 47–48.

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warranted because partly grounded in an observable, verifiable world; hopes that have some rational basis. His gravamen against earlier philosophy is not only that it is barren but that its dogmas are dedicated to hopelessness. Bacon, in contrast, offers genuine hope that men, by their own art, can actually master nature to the point of improving their lives here on earth.17 Where does that leave the state of the question? Is there indeed a truth to be sought and possibly even grasped? Or is the very notion of leading a life dedicated to that pursuit only another will-o’-the-wisp, another idol that we cave dwellers foolishly adore? Bacon would have us rise above “mens depraved Judgements, and Affections.” The judge qualified to rule on this matter is Truth itself. Not surprisingly, Truth’s declaratory judgment is that it is “the Soveraigne Good of humane Nature.” Yet that teaching, as expressed metaphorically, is not free of ambiguity. “The Inquirie of Truth, which is the Love-making, or Wooing of it; the knowledge of Truth, which is the Presence of it; and the Beleefe of Truth, which is the Enjoying of it”—these altogether constitute human nature’s sovereign good. What begins with wooing ends, when all is said and done, with belief. Our enjoyment stems from our trust that we do indeed possess the beloved, but this falls short of asserting or assuring actual possession. In the dark or half-light, Leah may pass for Rachel. Bacon resorts to two additional metaphors to develop his thoughts on Truth, one taken from Genesis, the other from a poet’s anti-Genesis. God’s creation, as retold here, moves from breathing light on the face of primordial chaos (i.e., visible light), to breathing light into the face of man (i.e., the light of reason), to breathing and inspiring light “into the Face of his Chosen”—a “Sabbath Worke” that continues even now. Believers in a beneficent creator may hope to be among those chosen few who are illuminated by his spirit. In that sense God’s work is never done, and one may presumably take comfort from that. The nonbiblical account shifts the focus from a manifestation of divine grace to a celebration of an individual’s pleasure. Bacon introduces the metaphor with a sentence that exemplifies his ability to simultaneously give and take, to praise and diminish: “The Poet, that beautified the Sect, that was otherwise inferiour to the rest, saith yet excellently well.” The unnamed poet 17. Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 75 (p. 85). In book 1, aphorism 87, Bacon charges the authors and promoters of the ancient systems with having brought about the destruction of all greatness of mind in his own times. In the concluding portion of book 1, he keeps up a steady drumbeat of “hope” (aphorisms 92, 94–97, 100–114), culminating with the humanitarian vision of aphorism 129 and the call to have faith that the human race can “recover its God-given right over Nature” (p. 131).

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is the philosopher Lucretius; the sect is that of the followers of Epicurus; and the excellent saying from De rerum natura (2.1–13) is paraphrased by Bacon in such a way as to conceal and hence distort the grounds on which Lucretius chooses to defend the contemplative life.18 As presented in this essay, a poet celebrates the pleasure that one, “standing, upon the vantage ground of Truth,” enjoys as a voyeur contemplating the not-so-comic human comedy with its “Errours, and Wandrings, and Mists, and Tempests.” The comparison is to someone safely on shore watching ships laboring in heavy seas; and to someone standing at a castle’s window (Bacon’s addition), looking down on the alternating fortunes of armies struggling below. In each case the pleasure ought not to be prompted by Schadenfreude, Bacon cautions (as though Lucretius had intimated any such thing), but rather be viewed “with Pitty, and not with Swelling, or Pride.” It is not clear from Bacon’s account whether that high ground of Truth—“where the Ayre is always clear and serene”—is attained by pursuing “the Soveraigne Good of humane Nature.” If this is indeed a simply human achievement, Bacon’s warning against our taking in the prospect below with hubristic self-satisfaction is a piece of good counsel. But if his gloss on Genesis is to be credited, then anyone among the “Chosen,” illuminated by inspiring light and favored to stand on this higher ground, ought to view the scene with piety, murmuring “There but for the grace of God go I.” “Certainly, it is Heaven upon Earth, to have a Mans Minde Move in Charitie, Rest in Providence, and Turne upon the Poles of Truth.” With this sublime metaphor drawn from Ptolemaic astronomy, Bacon is ready to pass from “Theologicall, and Philosophicall Truth, to the Truth of civill Businesse.” It is a sharp turn. Although the final paragraph of the essay “Of Truth” begins by praising “clear and Round dealing,” the actual movement of the argument is anything but straightforward. How much of a commendation is it that truth telling is praised “even by those, that practize it not”? How should we take the acknowledgment by these worldly wise people that the admixture of falsehood (“like Allay in Coyne of Gold and Silver”) makes the matter easier to fashion, albeit at the price of debasing it? Being told that these words come from people who are not themselves straight shooters ought to put us on our guard. We might well suspect that they see an advantage for themselves in having the rest of us behave honorably. Nor are suspicions allayed by Bacon’s sudden flurry 18. Bacon omits Lucretius’s “eulogy of a serenity protected by the teaching of the wise, and his explicit disavowal of pleasure in others’ misfortunes.” See Faulkner, Francis Bacon, 95, for a fuller account of this act of selective appropriation.

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of terms of high moral condemnation.19 The net effect is overwrought and arguably out of place in a paragraph that is announced as moving away from theological and philosophical concerns. But no matter; the moral outrage is but a charade, and proved to be so by a sentence plainly at odds with the sentiments that precede and follow it. “There is no Vice, that doth so cover a Man with Shame, as to be found false, and perfidious.” It is not your judicious use of the lie that is blameworthy in civil business, but your blunder in being so incautious or inept as to have been detected in the act. The practical lesson of “Of Truth” fully accords with the conclusion Bacon reaches after a cool costbenefit analysis in his essay “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” (6).20 “The best Composition, and Temperature is, to have Opennesse in Fame and Opinion; Secrecy in Habit; Dissimulation in seasonable use; And a Power to faigne, if there be no Remedy.” Bacon’s studied blurring of “Policy or Wisdome” and his escape clause at the end strongly suggest that this counsel is apt not only for the “Arts of State” but for the “Arts of Life.” To politique and philosopher alike, the message is: take heed! Less direct and perhaps less helpful is the counsel a man of affairs might glean from the final essay, “Of Vicissitude of Things” (58). This is hardly surprising if it is indeed a certainty, as Bacon asserts, that “the Matter, is in a Perpetuall Flux, and never at a Stay.” There would be little point in searching for general rules; we ought to settle instead for calculations of probability. But in fact Bacon’s essay offers readers neither. It is less an essay on the limits of human knowledge than an exploration of the conditions—natural and man-made— that increase or diminish our vulnerability and exposure to nasty surprises. To that extent the essay is a fitting final word to a man of affairs who yearns to manage events rather than to be controlled by them.21 19. For example, among others, “crooked courses,” “the Goings of the Serpent,” “basely,” “Disgrace,” “Odious,” “Wickedness,” “Breach of Faith.” For suggestive readings of other features of “Of Truth,” see Faulkner, Francis Bacon, 94–96; and Svetozar Y. Minkov, Francis Bacon’s “Inquiry Touching Human Nature”: Virtue, Philosophy, and the Relief of Man’s Estate (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 57–60. 20. See the analysis in Stanley E. Fish’s classic study, “Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays,” reprinted in his Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 78–155, at 102–8. 21. By this reading, essay 58 prefigures the fulfillment of that dream of Man as Master that is embodied in Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days’ Works, and which Bacon serves forth as the climax of the New Atlantis. “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge

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Where essay 1 enters into its announced subject with explosive energy, essay 58 sidles into its theme, slowly, circuitously, almost absentmindedly. Is it true that there is nothing new under the sun? Not really; novelty is indeed possible. Our being so impressed with novelties is tantamount to a public confession of our forgetfulness and ignorance. There are, to be sure, natural disasters such as deluges and earthquakes that bury all things in oblivion. Or perhaps not quite since some remnant of people may be spared. Or perhaps yes, they are as good as lost since these survivors are apt to be ignorant mountain dwellers incapable of transmitting an account of time past. Bacon continues in this vein, indulging in an amble in which he casts doubt, in passing, on the mythic accounts of scripture and Plato. Nor does Machiavelli appear to fare any better with his account of the man-made actions that eliminate the memories of things. As Bacon reports it, Machiavelli attributes much of our historical amnesia to the “Jealousie of Sects . . . Traducing Gregory the Great, that he did, what in him lay, to extinguish all Heathen Antiquities.” Wherein does Machiavelli traduce or libel that pope? Not for misrepresenting Gregory’s intention, but for failing to note the ineffectiveness of his campaign and the fact that his successor undid his zealous efforts. A parallel movement from natural causes to man-made ones occurs when the essay’s theme changes at last from oblivion to vicissitude. Bacon is rather noncommittal in estimating the bearing of celestial bodies, comets, and meteorological cycles on earthly affairs “in grosse.” These questions await closer study by knowing observers; we are not yet in a position to speak with authority. No such tentativeness, however, affects Bacon’s analysis when he “leave[s] these Points of Nature, and . . . come[s] to Men.” It now appears (albeit without acknowledgment) that Machiavelli is correct on his main point. “The greatest Vicissitude of Things amongst Men, is the Vicissitude of Sects, and Religions. For these Orbs rule in Mens Minds most.” The pious exception Bacon quickly makes in favor of the “True Religion” gets lost, even forgotten, in the sociological analysis that follows. Its ostensible theme is to lay out systematically the causes of new sects with an eye to counseling how one might “give stay to so great Revolutions.” In a brief paragraph that commands admiration for its cool sobriety, if not its piety, Bacon details in turn the preconditions for the formation of new sects, the means by which new sects can spread, and finally some prudent measures that might forestall or defang new sects and schisms. As little as his model for this particular essay exempts the “Christian of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” OWC, 480.

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sect” from a purported general rule—that “these sects [both Christian and Gentile] vary two or three times in five or six thousand years”22—so too does Bacon’s analysis lead one to calculate that even the religion “built upon the Rocke” (Matt. 16:18) may join the rest in being “tost upon the Waves of Time.” Indeed, the very even-handedness of Bacon’s analysis calls forth an image wherein both the opportunistic promoter of a new sect and the determined suppresser of any such “Extravagant and Strange Spirit” join in a close study of this paragraph. Prevailing symptoms of religious discord, corruption in high places, and barbarous times altogether signal hope to the one and anxiety to the other. Bacon’s case in point is the success of Muhammad, who saw his chances and took them. Even so, not every enterprising spirit need be feared as starting a contagion—unless the new sect presents itself as the anti-establishment party (“For Nothing is more Popular than that”) and also relaxes existing constraints on leading a life of pleasure. As for dealing with “Speculative Heresies,” Bacon advises nothing harsher than watchfulness. For all that the Arians of the fourth century and the Arminians of his own century “worke mightily upon Mens Wits,” their political effects are insignificant unless seconded by unspecified “Civill Occasions.” This exercise in even-handedness is followed by an analysis of how new sects grow and spread, an analysis that might also be taken for a prescription. There are three modes: “By the Power of Signes and Miracles: By the Eloquence and Wisdome of Speech and Perswasion: And by the Sword.” Especially noteworthy is Bacon’s reckoning martyrdoms as well as “Superlative and Admirable Holinesse of Life” as miracles because “they seeme to exceed, the Strength of Human Nature.” Authorities intent on suppressing the rise of new sects would do well to follow Bacon’s hints. Occasions that prompt popular astonishment often serve to incite and recruit fervid zeal. Should such occasions arise, authorities ought at least to take care not to add to those sectarians’ roster of martyrs. The better way is to reform abuses, compromise on smaller differences, act mildly, and finally, win over the discontented leaders with rewards. This comes close to being a policy of limited toleration in all but name. At any rate, it is far better than enraging the “principall Authors . . . by Violence and Bitternesse.” This counsel of mildness is followed and perhaps superseded by an extensive discussion (amounting to about 40 percent of the whole) on the manage22. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2:5, p. 139. The title of this chapter is “That the Variation of Sects and Languages, Together with the Accident of Floods or Plague, Eliminates the Memories of Things.”

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ment of the changes and vicissitudes brought on by violence. The length of the discussion owes much to the fact that wars are so prolific in producing changes that generalization about them is difficult. Bacon is obliged to muster one concrete example after another to make his points. For one, there has been a significant change in the theater of operations in war. In ancient times, invasions mostly came out of the East; now, for one possible reason or another, it is the northern peoples who are preying on the southern part. Then again, “the Breaking and Shivering of a great State and Empire” are sure to occasion wars. Once it is perceived as tottering, the predator becomes the prey and all goes to ruin. (Spain, beware!) Especially dangerous and destabilizing are the “great Accessions and Unions of Kingdomes.” There is no containing within bounds a state to which excessive power has accrued. Rather, “like a great Floud,” it will be sure to overflow, as can be seen in the cases of Rome, Turkey, Spain, and some unnamed others. (Britain, beware?) Another source of potential danger is connected by Bacon to the number and behavior of “Barbarous Peoples.” If they are mindful not to marry and propagate beyond their means of support (as he claims is the case almost everywhere in his day), then there is no danger of being inundated by the desperate. But disruptive population movements may not be only a thing of the past. Whenever “great Shoales of People” multiply without providing for their sustenance, they will of necessity discharge some portion of their desperate population on other nations. (Europe, beware?) Nor is it safe for a state to rest on the memory of its laurels. “When a Warre-like State grows Soft and Effeminate, they may be sure of a Warre.” Their palpable vulnerability invites and encourages new challengers. Given that Bacon views the modern discovery of gunpowder as a world-altering event,23 it is no wonder that he should here expand on the destabilizing effects of technological improvements in weaponry and, more generally, in military science. What is the reader to make of this litany? Is this long discussion of changes and vicissitude in wars yet another instance when Bacon sets up an exhaustive classification only to end up being exhausting? What, if anything, is the reader—and especially our hypothetical politique—being counseled to do beyond temporizing with would-be prophets? The answer, if any there be, may lie in the essay’s final paragraph. Bacon’s hail-and-farewell to the reader passing through this portal is 23. “No empire, no sect [not even Christianity!], no star has been seen to exert more power and influence over the affairs of men than have these mechanical discoveries [of printing, gunpowder, and the compass]. Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 129 (pp. 130–31).

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strangely at odds with the confidence and promise of mastery that exude from the pages of The Great Instauration. Its almost elegiac tone borders on converting an essay on vicissitude into a kind of memento mori. In the Youth of a State, Armes do flourish: In the Middle Age of a State, Learning; And then both of them together for a time: In the Declining Age of a State, Mechanicall Arts and Merchandize. Learning hath his Infancy, when it is but beginning, and almost Childish: Then his Youth, when it is Luxuriant and Juvenile: Then his Strength of yeares, when it is Solide and Reduced: And lastly, his old Age, when it waxeth Dry and Exhaust.

States, like individual men, pass through a life cycle in which vigor and accomplishment wax, consolidate, and then wane. The reader, going off on a voyage into uncharted waters, needs to make his passage through the world with an awareness that nothing is forever. For a time, but only for a time, military prowess and intellectual prowess may flourish together. Thereafter, consumption and softness take hold and, in the process, mark the decline of the state; learning itself withers. In other writings, especially in the New Atlantis, visions of an indefinite prolongation of life are dangled before readers. But even the Fathers of Salomon’s House do not claim to have the magic elixir that would preserve a state against all contingency. Lest this unwelcome truth dampen the enthusiasm and dedication that Bacon strives to rouse in his acolytes, he ends with a shrug of the shoulders and a “never mind.” “But it is not good, to looke too long, upon these turning Wheeles of Vicissitude, lest we become Giddy.” With this penultimate sentence of the whole work, Bacon calls to mind the second sentence of the whole work. These two are the only places in the Essayes where “Giddy” and “Giddinesse” suddenly appear. In both instances Bacon makes and takes an opportunity to heap scorn on those who fall victim to this vice without regard to its root cause. For some (in essay 1), it is owing to their principled inconstancy, “Affecting Free-will in Thinking, as well as in Acting.” For others (in essay 58), it is a consequence of their deeply flawed unsystematic modes of investigation, whereby they end up (in the language of the preface to The Great Instauration) being “carried around in a giddy whirl of arguments” with nothing to show for their troubles. Bacon’s last word is to turn away from those rotating wheels of vicissitude with a contempt and impatience worthy of a Pontius Pilate: “As for the Philology of them, that is but a Circle of Tales, and therefore not fit for this Writing.” This puzzling statement—almost a throw-away line—calls for closer scrutiny.

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There is a long literary and philosophical tradition in which the image of the circle is a trope suggesting perfection, beauty, eternity. Bacon not only rejects that but attacks it head-on with the fury of an iconoclast. He even goes beyond breaking and shattering; he transforms the image of the circle to an emblem of mindless futile busyness. This is brought out with perfect clarity in the Novum Organum (bk. 1, aphorism 31 [p. 51]): “A fresh start (instauratio) must be made, beginning from the very foundations, unless we want to go round for ever in a circle, making trifling, almost contemptible progress.”24 To speak, then, of “a Circle of Tales” is as much as to say, “Don’t waste your time on vapid speculations about vicissitude. All that talk comes down to nothing more than sound and fury, blather.”25 In stark contrast to Lucretius’s imperturbable voyeur on the seashore, Sir Francis Bacon demonstrates through word and deed his own response to our world of vicissitude. The experience of reading these terminal essays in tandem, so to speak, captures both the ambiguity and the promise visualized in the title page of the 1620 Instauratio Magna. Here too is a portal, two pillars (presumably the Columns of Hercules), between and behind which an ocean stretches to the horizon. In the foreground a galleon under full sail approaches; in the distance another such ship appears. But since the vantage point of the reader/viewer is uncertain, so too must be the interpretation of the scene as a whole. If we are ourselves positioned beyond terra cognita and observing from a boundless sea, the ships heading toward us would be seen as leaving their familiar world on a voyage of discovery. If, on the other hand, we are standing in that Old World, the ships might be interpreted as returning with reports of new worlds to conquer. We can even imagine the narrator of the New Atlantis to be aboard, ready to share news that the imagined fruits of Bacon’s great instauration are already in hand—in Bensalem. If that report is indeed the Truth, then we have at last within reach the means to master Vicissitude. To those who might say, this is the stuff of which dreams are made, the Lord Chancellor might reply, “Not if you will it.” And as though to underline that message, Bacon includes 24. See Walter R. Davis, “The Imagery of Bacon’s Late Work,” Modern Language Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1966): 165–66. 25. This is supported as well by the Latin translation of the essay (noted in Arber’s edition, 576), which speaks of “a mass of tales and useless observations.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest citation for the obsolete depreciative meaning of “Philology” the 1623 definition in Henry Cockeram’s The English dictionarie; or, An interpreter of hard English words: “Phylologie, loue of much babling.”

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on his frontispiece/title page a line from the book of Daniel (12:4): “Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased” [Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia]. But whereas Daniel prophesied about the last days of the world, Bacon’s gloss caters to our impatience. “This clearly implies that it lies in destiny—that is, providence—that the passage through the world (which by its many long voyages plainly seems to be accomplished or under way) and an increase in knowledge will come at the same period of time.”26 Emulating Christopher Columbus’s confidence and modeling his human creation after God’s divine operations, Bacon would have us take heart. “All things glide onward calmly without commotion or sound.” We need not wait for the end of days. Soon, or even now, before we have hardly noticed, politique and philosopher alike will be able to shout in unison, “It is accomplished!” But first we must join the project and get to work. The rest will follow. Although we may infer from high authority that it is not given to us humans to search the hearts and reins of men, the temptation to do so in this instance is well-nigh irresistible. Francis Bacon, philosopher and politique, attained the rarefied heights from which he could observe, experience, and evaluate both a life dedicated to contemplation and a life dedicated to action. His much-vexed efforts to embrace them both in his own person and career are all the more remarkable for how much he did in fact achieve. But it is far from obvious where his life’s center of gravity lay. Granted, his early declaration that he took all knowledge to be his province is not to be discounted.27 But his is also a life marked by constant importunings of those with power, influence, and cash for patronage, office, and engagement with affairs of state. Even after his fall and public humiliation, he still fluttered like a moth drawn to the royal court’s light. Then, too, there is reason to question whether Bacon’s devotion to philosophy arose out of a selfless love of truth. Timothy Paterson argues with much cogency that power rather than truth is the supreme goal of Baconian philosophy or science.28 Through a close consideration of Bacon’s retelling of myths in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients—most especially “Orpheus, or Philosophy” and “Sphinx, or Knowledge”—Paterson concludes that Bacon 26. Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 93 (p. 104). 27. Letter to Lord Burghley (ca. 1592), OWC, 20–21. 28. Timothy H. Paterson, “Bacon’s Myth of Orpheus: Power as a Goal of Science in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients,” Interpretation 16, no. 3 (1989):427–44.

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focused on addressing men’s powerful preoccupation with “immortality or continuance.” The prolongations of life, perhaps even indefinitely, perhaps even the resurrection of the dead, are possibilities his reconceived natural philosophy dangles before our eyes. Even if the goal of resurrection ultimately eludes us, the gains in longevity and the retardation of bodily decay achieved en route are gratifying and sustain our hopes for more of the same. Nevertheless, the frustration of the greatest goal—overcoming mortality itself—is hard to accept. “Therefore Philosophy—almost [!] unequal to so great a thing, and for all that, in deserved sadness—turns herself toward human things.” Bacon’s account of the motivation for this turn from natural philosophy to ethics and politics is terse and stark: “And this care for Civil things, by rite and order is placed after the busy attention to experiments for the restoration of the mortal body. And it is frustrated at the end because the inevitable necessity of death—evidently proposed for mankind—makes their souls intently seek eternity by fame of merit and name.”29 By this account, Plato’s Socrates, in drawing philosophy down from the heavens to earth, conceded the failure of his predecessors to master nature. Looking beyond the cheap and easy way, the vulgar way, of achieving immortality through the propagation of children, Socrates blazed another path by which a philosopher might make an immortal name for himself. Through the adroit employment of persuasion and eloquence, moral and civil philosophy might tame unruly passions to the point that communities can be formed and human beings accept “the yoke of laws, and submit themselves to commanders.” In the process, and not coincidentally, the founder and propounder of that philosophy would win immortal fame. Bacon, the philosopher, responded keenly to a life full of opportunities for study and reflection. The sheer variety of matter to ponder invites the mind to rove and constitutes a pleasure in itself. But once one tries to reduce those speculations to practice “so that they pursue and urge Action and Choice and Decision: then is when the Riddles begin to be troublesome and cruel; and unless they are solved and dispatched, they twist and vex the souls of men in wondrous modes, and in all parts are distracting and plainly lacerating.” Bacon presents our human confrontation with the riddles of the Sphinx in the starkest terms. As long as the riddles about the nature of things and the riddles about the nature of man remain unsolved, we can only suffer “laceration of the 29. “Orpheus, sive Philosophia” (fable 11). I quote, with permission, from the unpublished draft translation of De Sapientia Veterum by Heidi Studer and Nathan Pinkoski.

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mind.” We can find no rest, no relief for our souls’ perturbations. But should we meet and best the Sphinx’s challenge: “in the prize for their solution follow two Commands: Command [Imperium] over Nature and Command [Imperium] over Men.”30 It is for us to reach for that prize. Bacon, politique and reader of men, was no stranger to a concern for honor and reputation (essay 55); nor was he blind to the judicious uses of vainglory (essay 54). He observed and partook of both in full measure. So it is no surprise that the unflattering light shed by his psychic analysis of his philosophic predecessors might reflect on him as well. In a typically backhanded compliment, Bacon marvels at, and praises, Aristotle’s dismissal of his predecessors. Yes, Aristotle was following “the right course”—if the end in view was not truth but glory and the recruitment of followers and disciples.31 Is the conceiver of The Great Instauration any differently situated? Yet this same Bacon also allows that command in the form of self-aggrandizement is not good enough. “Aristotle, as though he had been of the race of Ottomans, thought he could not reign except the first thing he did he killed all his brethren; yet to those that seek truth and not magistrality. . . .” 32 The descent from the clear and serene heights of speculation to the grubby world of affairs is undoubtedly a descent, but one to which we may all be condemned. “But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on.” It is fatuous to expect that contemplation can be self-contained and “without casting beams upon society” at large. “Assuredly divinity knoweth it not.” So on the question whether the contemplative or the active life is to be preferred, the judgment “decideth it against Aristotle.”33 Thinking so, Bacon judged also that it would not suffice to sweep away the cobwebs of past thoughts and beliefs. To put an end to our lacerations and to attain any degree of mastery or “Command” [Imperium], new thoughts and beliefs had to be introduced and sustained. This task would require a founder-legislator, an unbroken succession of like-minded managers and promoters, and, finally, an unflagging wariness of prophets hawking more tempting promises. This was a task beyond the capacities of dreamy men of 30. From the Studer and Pinkoski translation of “Sphinx, sive Scientia” (fable 28). 31. Advancement of Learning, II.vii.2, OWC, 193–94. 32. Ibid., II.viii.5, OWC, 204. 33. Ibid., II.xx.8, OWC, 246–47. See the clear analysis of how Bacon distinguishes his own contemplative way from that of the ancients, in Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays in Modern Philosophy, ed. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 17–32, esp. at 29–31.

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contemplation, nor would the fastidious be able to rise to the challenge. Even as a young man, Francis Bacon saw what it would take. He prepared himself for the sacrifices and the encounter, and he fought the battle of his choosing with steely determination. In earning his fame as a seeker of truth, he assured (as much as a mortal can), the immortality or continuance of his name through all the vicissitudes of things.

Chapter 7

Gibbon’s “Jewish Problem”

How shall Jacob stand? For he is small. Amos 7:5 “What? Jews again!” Imagine a cultured eighteenth-century reader of French or English enlightened texts putting down the book in hand for a moment and wondering aloud. Why are these almost mythical people being dredged up and paraded before me as if they still matter or as if they are emblematic of some other thing that still matters? It is safe to assert that contemporaries of Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon were almost as ignorant of living Jews as Shakespeare’s groundlings had been in an earlier England long since purged of them. Even in the eighteenth century, Jews were scarcely to be seen or heard in most of France or Britain. And yet it was no severe test of cultural literacy in Western Christendom to expect the word “Jew” to evoke recognition and feelings of disdain. The common narratives marked that ancient people as indeed “chosen,” but whether for eternal favor or eternal rejection depended on the viewer’s angle of approach. For eighteenth-century philosophic authors, however, the evocation of “Jews” or “Judaism” offered a trope at once versatile and flexible, rich with connotations, and ready for use in tarring others by insinuation. The story within which Christianity situated the Jews fixed their character forever in the popular mind and also—perhaps an unintended consequence— blurred the very respects on which the newer religion proudly asserted its superiority to the older dispensation. Excessive legalism was hardly limited

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to adherents of the rabbinic law; nor were carnality, hypocrisy, and cruelty the preserve only of the Children of Israel and their biblical rulers. Hence, Christian polemicists had found it as easy and effective to damn their Christian opponents for “Judaizing” as to condemn Jews for persisting in their ancestral ways. But enlightened thinkers carried matters further. Those authors prided themselves on standing apart and on higher, philosophic ground. They viewed with a mixture of calmness and contempt the beliefs, principles, and behavior of those they were pleased to think of as equally sectarian, equally fanatic. Taking a page out of the Christians’ own book, so to speak, and deploying irony and a straight face, they could now criticize regnant social, political, and (above all) religious beliefs with relative safety by directing their barbs against real or imagined Jews. In this respect as in others, Edward Gibbon learns from his predecessors and yet succeeds in maintaining a distinctive voice and his own moral stance. A closer look at the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire might disclose how he manages to do this. The intimate but troubled relations between Christians and Jews—and especially between a daughter religion and the earlier religion that it dared not utterly dismiss, even while claiming to supersede—that complicated relation turns out, in Gibbon’s account, to have much bearing on the history of the Roman Empire and on Christianity’s self-understanding. Yet the manner of his telling might well have disturbed his contemporary readers (and in fact did trouble many), most especially the characterization and agency he ascribes to “the chosen people of Palestine.”1 Nor is that all. Almost all of those readers might be presumed to have been raised as Christians of some sort or to be at least familiar with the common narrative of Christianity’s central figure. So they were bound to be surprised that Gibbon does not treat that religion’s emergence out of Judaism at its appropriate chronological place in his narrative. After all, Gibbon’s point of departure in the Decline and Fall is the moderate policy established by Augustus, that same Caesar from whom (those readers would readily recall) a decree went out that that entire Roman world should be enrolled (Luke 2:1). By choosing to defer that thematic discussion and drawing attention to his decision as well, the author insensibly creates an undercurrent of tension and concern. In this larger context, then, Gibbon’s ambiguous stance toward Jews and Judaism might suggest some tacit reservations about Christianity itself and about a people who are not 1. Citations are to the volume, chapter, and page of this three-volume edition: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1995), 1.15.465.

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merely figures out of a remote past (like Goths and Parthians) but a persisting, living presence in the modern world. In following the scattered traces of Gibbon’s references to Jews, we may hope to detect an evolving argument, perhaps even an authorial intention, but in any event nothing less than a close view of a mixed and hence ambiguous message. At the end it might be possible to detect whether, and, if so, in what ways, Edward Gibbon differed from some other luminaries of his century in appraising the fate and character of the Jewish people. The word “Jews” makes its first appearance in Gibbon’s pages in a footnote conceding an exception. Celebrating what he calls the “pacific system” of Hadrian and the two Antonines, Gibbon marks the forty-three years of peace that they and the world enjoyed thanks to those emperors’ success in persuading mankind (or much of it) that Roman power was “actuated only by the love of order and justice,” not by the temptation of conquest. One might even speak of universal peace, if one excepted “a few slight hostilities that served to exercise the legions of the frontier” (1.1.37–38). This pleasing prospect is almost immediately disfigured by Gibbon’s recollection in a marginal aside that “a rebellion of the Jews raged with religious fury” during Hadrian’s reign (1.1.38n27).2 This was clearly more than a police action, and Gibbon treats the decisive measures taken by Rome’s armies to suppress those repeated Jewish rebellions as a benchmark of persecution.3 At this early stage in the narrative it is too soon to say that the Jews had only themselves to blame for their disaster. (See 1.15.454.) On the other hand, they might be hapless victims of a brutish mob. (See 3.58.571.) At any rate, to speak of their “religious” fury in this context is to suggest strongly that this people is not like all the other nations of the earth. The next allusion to our theme occurs when Gibbon brings under review each of the provinces of the empire in the age of the Antonines. Moving from west to east, his spotlight falls at last on Syria and, more narrowly, on Phoenicia and Palestine. Considered as parts of an empire that stretched two thousand miles from north to south and more than three thousand miles from the 2. Nor was that localized war unique. There is a record of two “necessary and successful wars” that the generals of Antoninus Pius conducted in North Africa and in Britain, as well as several other unspecified hostilities. 3. “At length, under the reign of Hadrian, the desperate fanaticism of the Jews filled up the measure of their calamities; and the Romans, exasperated by their repeated rebellions, exercised the rights of victory with unusual rigour” (1.15.454).

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Atlantic to the Euphrates, these physically unprepossessing provinces surprise us by bearing a significance incommensurate with their size. The former of these was a narrow and rocky coast; the latter was a territory scarcely superior to Wales, either in fertility or extent. Yet Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the memory of mankind; since America, as well as Europe, has received letters from the one, and religion from the other. (1.1.53)

It was not hard for Gibbon’s predetermined critics to detect a slight here, perhaps even a blasphemy. Was the Promised Land—God’s gift to the descendants of Abraham as a mark of that patriarch’s merits—so unpromising as to be compared to Wales! In time (three years after the publication of volume 1), Gibbon saw fit to defend himself against, among many other charges, the suspicion that he was “profanely depreciating the promised Land, as well as the chosen People.”4 His tone of injured innocence may or may not ring true, but at bottom Gibbon can only appeal to the facts. Palestine is indeed tiny. Moreover, compared to the banks of the Nile, or the fields of Sicily, or the plains of Poland, eighteenth-century Palestine is anything but a land flowing with milk and honey. Abundant in rocks and wasteful of water, its desert landscape bespeaks the cumulative effects of despotic rule and prolonged abandonment. But it was not always so. Under more benign political conditions, the deficiencies of nature could be, and were, overcome and corrected by “the labours of a numerous people, and the active protection of a wise government.” Gibbon thus assimilates the former fecundity of Palestine to the present “useful victories which have been atchieved by Man” in the Swiss Alps, the rocky coast of Genoa, and the rugged country of Wales under the influence of “English freedom.” A comparison of Palestine to Wales is far from being “a tacit libel on the former,” as Gibbon’s critics would have it. It is they, rather, who are guilty of perpetrating an unjust satire against Wales and against those other regions that display the glory of man’s handiwork (Vindication, 247–48). It might appear, then, that nothing precludes future victories by a revived people in an ancient land. The question comes down to this: are the Jews capable of such a revival? Can a submissive people, lorded over by a long succession of despots who 4. A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779), reprinted in The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia B. Craddock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 246.

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held them in contempt and treated them as despised slaves, ever recover enough to reassert their civil and religious rights? Relying on Josephus and especially Tacitus, Gibbon suggests an affirmative. The proof is in the successful uprising against the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes: “the age of the Machabees is perhaps the most glorious period of the Hebrew annals” (Vindication, 245). In an explication of a terse Tacitean passage, Gibbon surmises what the Roman historian might have reasoned on the matter: He probably considered that every nation, depressed by the weight of a foreign power, naturally rises towards the surface, as soon as the pressure is removed; and he might think that, in a short and rapid history of the independence of the Jews, it was sufficient for him to shew that the obstacles did not exist, which, in an earlier or in a later period, would have checked their efforts. (Vindication, 245)

This cautiously hopeful assessment might be warranted; Gibbon might even believe it himself. Yet being the author’s post-facto self-justification and vindication, it cannot altogether color or override the impressions given by Gibbon’s original text in the Decline and Fall. In those pages the Jews appear as not only unlovely but also unlikely candidates for reclaiming and renewing a life as a free and civil people. It is not clear whether they are the victims of bad circumstances or rather exhibit a congenital weakness that unfits them for forming and maintaining a civilized rational society. Presumably the details of Gibbon’s historical account will help uncover his views of the matter. The Jews’ next appearance in the Decline and Fall is again in a footnote, this time to a discussion of “the union and internal prosperity” of the empire under the Antonines. Some features of that brief notice demand attention. First, both Jews and Christians are presented as alike in that they formed “a very important exception” to the universal spirit of toleration that characterized ancient polytheism (1.2.57n3). If Rome at that time was free of strife fueled by theological rancor, it was owing to a pervasive relaxed sense of mutual indulgence. “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful” (1.2.56). Viewed from the perspective of this lapidary sentence, there is no reason to prefer the one monotheistic sect to the other. Both are outliers in that ancient world; both show a harsh uncivil face toward the multitude of polytheists who surround them and who are disposed to live and let live. Second, one might wonder how it is that Jews and Christians, both past and present, should share this

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common stance even while insisting on maintaining their separate identities and rejecting one another. Does this affinity bespeak something essential in monotheism? Or might this intolerance result from a sickness carried over into Christianity from its Jewish antecedents? A Roman observer, considering the early appearance of the primitive Christians, might write them all off as Jews. Their savior was the Jewish son of a Jewish mother; his closest associates were all Jews; their primary followers were likewise Jews; the first fifteen bishops of the church of Jerusalem were all circumcised Jews; and the orthodoxy of that soon-to-be-called Nazarene church “united the law of Moses with the doctrine of Christ” (1.15.453). Would it be a fair inference (or is it only a suspicion?) that Gibbon’s characterization of the Jews’ cast of mind, for better or worse, is meant to apply no less to those early Christian converts? This much at least is clear: the spirit of intolerant exclusivity shared by Christians and Jews alike is so important an exception that Gibbon requires a distinct chapter to address that. In flagging this promised discussion (1.2.57n3), he doubtless raises expectations. He does not disclose, however, that readers will have to go through almost four hundred pages of narrative traversing three centuries of political and military history before they reach the heralded chapter. It is only then, with the reunion of the empire under Constantine and the founding of Constantinople, that Christianity emerges from the shadows and becomes a matter of interest to the self-styled “philosophic historian.” As for the eager readers waiting for an account of how “a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men . . . and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol”: it must be confessed that the relief and pleasure they might expect barely survives the first paragraph of Gibbon’s “candid but rational inquiry” (1.15.446). They are about to discover that his thoughts are not their thoughts.5 5. There is altogether too much art and artfulness on display here to credit the author’s alleged surprise that his depiction of the sentiments and manners of the primitive Christians should have elicited so fierce a response. In his drafts of an autobiography, Gibbon reveals that he completely revised the offending chapters 15 and 16 three times before he was satisfied with the result. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1990), 158, 161. The artful devices employed in those chapters are laid bare in William A. Gibson, “Order and Emphasis in Chapter XV of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in Rhetorical Analyses of Literary Works, ed. Edward P. J. Corbett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 86–99; Grant L. Voth, “Gibbon and the Christian Soldier: Tonal Manipulation as Moral Judgment,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 14, no. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1974): 449–57; and David Wootton, “Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed.

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Nowhere is the discussion of the Jews’ sentiments and manners more sustained and more germane to Gibbon’s larger purposes than in his effort to discern how it was that Christianity obtained so remarkable and rapid a victory over the other religions of the time. To be sure, there is the “obvious but satisfactory answer.” The doctrine was convincing, and Providence willed it. Gibbon genuflects briefly in this direction, but persists (“with becoming submission”) to inquire into “the secondary causes.” The first of these is most pertinent to our theme: “The inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit, which, instead of inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the law of Moses” (1.15.447). In a world where even hostile nations at least respected each other’s “superstitions,” Jews stood out for their “sullen obstinacy” in adhering to their peculiar ways and unsocial manners. They were, to all intents and purposes, a separate species of men, distinguished by their overt or barely disguised “implacable hatred to the rest of human-kind” (1.15.447–48).6 Gibbon has not made it easy to dissociate the inflexible (and, yes, intolerant) zeal of the primitive Christians from the sullen (and, yes, hateful) zeal of the Jews. Granted, Christianity from the outset was an intensely proselytizing religion and accordingly welcomed others. Judaism for most of its history did not seek converts. Yet it is of the Jews in particular that Gibbon finds the union of zeal and devotion to turn furious. Their “inflexible perseverance”— otherwise “devout and even scrupulous attachment”—was a source of wonderment or ridicule in the ancient world (1.15.448). This leads Gibbon to pause and muse about an apparent contradiction to every known principle of the human mind exhibited by that “singular people.” Jews of the era of the Second Temple adhered more firmly to their ancestral traditions on the basis of hearsay than had their stubbornly incredulous forefathers who had actually witnessed the effects of a wonder-working providence (1.15.449). But this, by the by. The main point, not to be missed, is that the Jews’ vanity at David Womersley, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 385 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 216–28. 6. Gibbon cites as evidence the teaching of “the wise, the humane Maimonides” to the effect that a Jew should refrain from saving an idolater who is in imminent danger of drowning (1.15.448n3). For a careful, nuanced explication of the “tightrope” Maimonides walks in trying to distinguish the political structures a self-governing Jewish community must adopt to maintain its monotheistic character without appearing to justify free-wheeling individuals intent on conducting a “holy war” on their own, see Josef Stern, “Maimonides on Wars and Their Justification,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 3 (2012): 255–56.

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being God’s chosen favorites reinforces the parochialism of Jewish law and practice. Judaism, as depicted here, institutionalizes contrariety and peculiarity for their own sakes. No wonder that their “inflexible rigour” in practicing their various “trivial though burdensome observances,” even in their fallen state after the destruction of the Second Temple and the forced suspension of the prescribed sacrifices, “were so many objects of disgust and aversion for the other nations” (1.15.450–51). Primitive Christianity, as depicted by Gibbon, was no less zealous than its predecessor, but it bore a more welcoming face and an all-embracing stance. In shedding the burdens and oddities of the Mosaic ceremonial law and extending the promise of divine favor to all of mankind, Christianity made an offer one could not refuse. It even gratified “that secret pride, which under the semblance of devotion, insinuates itself into the human heart.” And should even that not satisfy a potential convert, a sterner message might follow. New converts to Christianity were obliged to warn their reluctant friends and relations that a refusal to follow suit would be punished as “a criminal disobedience to the will of a benevolent but all-powerful deity” (1.15.451–52). Within the silken glove lay an iron fist. Even so, with all these factors working in its favor, the course of primitive Christianity was far from smooth. The Jewish converts who acknowledged Jesus as the promised messiah still obstinately persisted in adhering to their ancestral ceremonies and practices. Gibbon allows that these Judaizing Christians (soon to be called Nazarenes and later, more derisively, Ebionites) had some plausible reasons for believing that the Mosaic law had not been repealed. But their views could not prevail as more and more Gentiles entered the ranks and rejected the “intolerable weight of Mosaic ceremonies” (1.15.453). The center of gravity had permanently shifted. Those who had laid the foundations of the church now found themselves banned and excluded. And those Gentiles who had asked for toleration when they were but few and vulnerable now were free to practice their own brand of intolerance. It was not long before orthodox Christians were not only excluding their Judaizing brethren from the hope of salvation but also banning “any intercourse with them in the common offices of friendship, hospitality, and social life” (1.15.455). Gibbon finds it “natural” to expect that a more rigorous opinion would prevail over a milder. The effect of all this is that “an eternal bar of separation was fixed between the disciples of Moses and those of Christ.” Once again in Gibbon’s pages, the bitter fruit of a victory is “irreconcilable hostility” (1.15.449). Gibbon is obliged to dwell longer on an issue that continued to roil those Christians of the first century. What should be the status of the Old Law

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under the new dispensation? Predictably, opinions ran to extremes, ranging from “excessive veneration” to “improper contempt.” Gibbon asserts that the orthodox church preserved “a just medium” between those extravagant errors, but he offers no details that might enable readers to see where that golden mean might lie. Instead he recounts in eleven long sentences the objections and reservations “petulantly urged by the vain science of the Gnostics” (1.15.456). Those heretics, for all the negative terms with which Gibbon decks them out, certainly are awarded a fine opportunity to vent their wicked thoughts. They go well beyond raising objections to the Mosaic law that would readily occur to the “sceptical mind.” Prompted by their morose aversion to pleasures of sense, they arraign “the polygamy of the patriarchs, the galantries of David, and the seraglio of Solomon.” They condemn the Children of Israel’s conquest of Canaan as irreconcilable with common notions of humanity and justice. Looking at the annals of the Jews, they see almost every page stained with a “sanguinary list of murders, of executions, and of massacres.” They treat with “profane derision” the Mosaic account of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the curse consequent on the transgressions of the First Pair.7 They “impiously” represent the God of Israel as so given to passion, error, caprice, and jealousy as to preclude thinking of him as a wise and omnipotent creator. They allowed that the Jews’ religion was “somewhat less criminal” than the Gentiles’ idolatry, but that it was only with Christ’s appearance on earth that the “first and brightest emanation of the Deity” manifested itself to a mankind mired in error (1.15.456–57). Before this litany of sneers has even run its course, a reader is eager to learn how orthodox Christianity responded in maintaining its “just medium” of regard. Their counterargument, such as it was, is brief and unimpressive. The most learned fathers of the church, “by a very singular condescension,” gave away their case. Conceding that the literal sense of the Hebrew scripture is “repugnant to every principle of faith, as well as reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory, which they carefully spread over every tender part of the Mosaic dispensation” (1.15.457). Dull indeed would be the Christian reader who found this limp response sufficient ground for holding the Old Law in any regard. 7. For neither the first nor the last time, Gibbon gives full voice to those whose opinions he rather ostentatiously seems to condemn. And even while toying with his straitlaced readers, Gibbon inserts a footnote condemning Dr. Thomas Burnet for discussing the first chapters of Genesis “with too much wit and freedom” (1.15.456n28).

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As Gibbon lays out his narrative of the progress of the Christian religion, it becomes evident that the image of “Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity” is an illusion. Theologians may indulge in such pleasing fantasies, but “a more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian” (1.15.446). It is simply not true that “the virgin purity of the church [in its first century] was never violated by schism or heresy.” Yes, primitive Christians at first did enjoy greater latitude in matters of doctrine and practice. But the general, seemingly irresistible movement was toward narrowing the terms of communion and increasing the severity with which spiritual authority was exercised. As might be expected, ever more intolerance by one party provoked ever more resistance by the other, to the point that the unity of the church was shattered (1.15.457). Gibbon almost apologizes for concluding that “the primitive fathers were very frequently calumniators” and for leading his readers to conclude that “our present gospels” are polemical works designed to oppose the Gnostics’ favorite tenets (1.15.458nn32, 35). The larger point, however, is not to be missed. When we raise our eyes above the differing views of those early sectarians regarding the divinity or continuing obligation of the Mosaic law, we can see that “they were all equally animated by the same exclusive zeal, and by the same abhorrence for idolatry which had distinguished the Jews from the other nations of the ancient world” (1.15.459). In short, these warring Christians are no better than the Jews in their hateful, unsocial zealotry. In some respects they are even worse. The Jews, we may recall, are presented by Gibbon as preoccupied with their own interests. Eschewing evangelizing, they tend to their own and are indifferent to the spiritual health of the Gentiles. The Christians, in sharp contrast, are preoccupied with bringing everyone into their fold to save those Gentiles’ souls. In further contrast, the pagan authorities in the ancient polytheistic world were calmly accepting of religious differences because they understood and practiced the politic use of religion. Christians, however, viewed paganism (and even more the philosophers’ thinly disguised atheism [see 1.2.58–59 and 1.15.498]) “in a much more odious and formidable light” (1.15.459). They found themselves immersed in a world of pagan abominations every way they turned. That world was the work of demons, and notwithstanding the beauty bestowed on pagan mythology by poets, artists, and public festivals, the “trembling Christians” could not but be filled with “pious horror”(1.15.461–62). Indeed, the conclusion of Gibbon’s discussion echoes its beginning. His account of the first cause of Christianity’s rapid rise begins with “zeal of the Jews” (1.15.447) and ends with “zeal for Christianity” (1.15.462). The more Christians felt challenged by the seductions of the

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established pagan religion, the more did their zealous opposition take on the character of a “holy war” (1.15.463). The steady drumbeat of disparagement that accompanies Gibbon’s depiction of Jews and primitive Christians tends to blur the difference between them. But happily Gibbon offers another perspective from which a reader can regain some clarity. In telling his story, Gibbon takes special pains to look at men and events as they might have appeared to those who ruled and administered the Roman Empire. In their eyes there was a great difference between these zealots, a distinction that justified merely holding the one group in contempt but actively persecuting the other as a conspiracy against the public good. Roman authorities could not grasp why Jews would reject with horror an invitation that their Lord of Hosts join a hundred other pagan deities in the Roman Pantheon. Nor could they understand why an order that a statue of the emperor be placed in the temple in Jerusalem would be regarded as sacrilege (1.15.448). Notwithstanding this incomprehension and despite the Romans’ disdain for the beliefs and behavior of their Jewish subjects, the relaxed genius of polytheism was inclined to allow each people to worship in its own way. True, when the Jews (and the Jews alone) “inflexibly refused” to pay the tribute required of all, they were made to rue their resistance. And when they broke out in furious massacres and rebellions, that “race of fanatics” felt the terrible weight of Rome’s measures of pacification (1.16.515–16). With the return of order, however, their masters’ resentment faded, and many of their privileges were restored. Did the Jews learn the lesson that the rights of toleration are held by mutual indulgence? Perhaps. More likely is it that the gentler treatment that succeeded to harsh repression “insensibly assuaged the stern temper of the Jews.” They sublimated their hatred of mankind. Instead of resorting to acts of violence, “they embraced every opportunity of over-reaching the idolaters in trade” (1.16.517). Although they were free once again to openly practice their religion, they remained what they were: a highly unsocial people. One might well ask (and Gibbon indeed does), why weren’t the Christians too extended that degree of toleration by their Roman masters? The answer lies in the way that ancient world viewed these two groups. The Jews were a nation; the Christians were a sect: and if it was natural for every community to respect the sacred institutions of their neighbours, it was incumbent on them to persevere in those of their ancestors. The voice of oracles, the precepts of philosophers, and the authority of the laws, unanimously enforced this national obligation. By their lofty claim of

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superior sanctity, the Jews might provoke the Polytheists to consider them as an odious and impure race. By disdaining the intercourse of other nations they might deserve their contempt. The laws of Moses might be for the most part frivolous or absurd; yet since they had been received during many ages by a large society, his followers were justified by the example of mankind; and it was universally acknowledged, that they had a right to practise what it would have been criminal in them to neglect. (1.16.517–18, Gibbon’s emphasis)

Christians found themselves beyond those customary limits. Their very decision to embrace the faith of the Gospel was a public declaration of their contempt for the superstitions of their family, city, and province. They were acting, in effect, like moral outlaws in deserting their ancestral ways. Such behavior was neither intelligible nor acceptable. In the eyes of both the philosophic and the believing parts of that pagan world, the Christians were a society of sullen subversives. “‘Whatever,’ says Pliny, ‘may be the principle of their conduct, their inflexible obstinacy appeared deserving of punishment’” (1.16.521). With the accession of Constantine and his open conversion to Christianity, a profound revolution was set in motion. The official establishment of Christianity as the state religion was bound to display the proclivities of pagans, Jews, and Christians on a larger stage and in a stronger light. With so much more to hope to gain or fear to lose, the sundry religions and sects grew ever more radical in their characteristic opinions, passions, and interests. Accordingly, readers of the Decline and Fall, accustomed after twenty long chapters to Gibbon’s derisive stance toward enthusiasms of any sort, are not shocked to be told that “with the knowledge of truth, the emperor [Constantine] imbibed the maxims of persecution” (1.21.766). Edicts that Diocletian had issued to persecute Christians were copied and “applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of oppression, and had pleaded for the rights of humanity” (1.21.767). Predictably, persecution failed to temper zeal. So when the Donatists found themselves outlawed, they reciprocated by excommunicating everyone else! Driven to the last extreme, those singular fanatics were “possessed . . . with the desire of martyrdom.” These Donatists seem driven by a horror of life itself and appear to see no better way of honoring the god who gave them life than by ridding themselves of it. In this astonishing frenzy “an impartial philosopher may discover the influence and the last abuse of that inflexible spirit, which was originally derived from the character and principles of the Jewish nation” (1.21.823). This is not Gibbon’s last word on Jewish inflexibility.

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Among the more improbable relationships reported by Gibbon is that between the emperor Julian and his Jewish subjects. That relationship is almost emblematic of the complex, baffling character of that philosophic hero.8 When Julian at age twenty formally and publicly renounced his Christian upbringing, it was only a matter of time until the new emperor at age thirty should give expression to his fondness for ancient polytheism and his profound hostility to Christian doctrine and institutions. What is astonishing is that Julian should have judged Jews worthy of his special solicitude. While the devout monarch incessantly laboured to restore and propagate the religion of his ancestors, he embraced the extraordinary design of rebuilding the temple of Jerusalem. In a public epistle to the nation or community of the Jews, dispersed through the provinces, he pities their misfortunes, condemns their oppressors, praises their constancy, declares himself their gracious protector, and expresses a pious hope, that after his return from the Persian war, he may be permitted to pay his grateful vows to the Almighty in his holy city of Jerusalem. The blind superstition, and abject slavery, of those unfortunate exiles, must excite the contempt of a philosophic emperor; but they deserved the friendship of Julian, by their implacable hatred of the Christian name. The barren synagogue abhorred and envied the fecundity of the rebellious church: the power of the Jews was not equal to their malice; but their gravest rabbis approved the private murder of an apostate; and their seditious clamours had often awakened the indolence of the pagan magistrates. Under the reign of Constantine, the Jews became the subjects of their revolted children, nor was it long before they experienced the bitterness of domestic tyranny. The civil immunities which had been granted, or confirmed, by Severus, were gradually repealed by the Christian princes; and a rash tumult, excited by the Jews of Palestine, seemed to justify the lucrative modes of oppression, which were invented by the bishops and eunuchs of the court of Constantius. (1.23.884–85) 8. It would take us too far afield to trace in any detail Gibbon’s evolving portrait of Julian’s character as it emerges over four chapters of the Decline and Fall. The curious reader might consider the accounts of his peculiar education and upbringing (1.19.686, 692–95, 712–13); the philosophic warrior (1.22.830, 850–52, 863); his descent into superstitious prejudice (1.23.864, 872, 875, 883); and his ambitious inflexible spirit (1.24.910, 931, 936, 945). All in all, Gibbon’s account makes it easier to be astonished by Julian than to admire him.

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Gibbon’s presence can be felt everywhere in these lines, but one is at a loss to say with confidence what conclusions the author would have his reader draw. Is Julian driven by compassion or hatred? Is his project grandly ambitious or fatuous? Have the Jews earned the tyranny that oppresses them, or have theological ire and avarice added special bitterness to their vulnerable pathetic condition? Gibbon does not at first show his hand. But after taking a detour that satirizes Jerusalem as a tumultuous, corrupt city whose business is fraudulently inducing the simple to undertake pilgrimages to its holy sites, Gibbon returns to the theme of Julian’s plan to rebuild the temple in all its original glory. Were he to accomplish this, “the Imperial sophist” would have given the lie to those Christians who argued “a sentence of everlasting destruction had been pronounced against the whole fabric of the Mosaic law.” A resurgent temple would be a silent, visible rejection of the claims of prophecy and revealed truth. Although Julian found nothing to like or respect in the spiritual worship of the Jews, he approved of the Mosaic law’s incorporation of many pagan rites and practices to which the Children of Israel had been accustomed during their long Egyptian bondage. In general, Julian—the ardent polytheist—wanted to multiply the number of gods and would gladly have added the national deity of the Jews to his roster. He especially liked the practice of bloody animal sacrifice. All these considerations (Gibbon surmises) might have led him to resolve to rebuild the temple on Mount Moriah as soon and as grandly as he could. There it might “eclipse the splendor of the church of the Resurrection on the adjacent hill of Calvary” (1.23.888–89). Julian was not disappointed in counting on the “stern fanaticism” of the Jews to understand his hostile intent and to join in the great project. “At the call of this great deliverer,” Jews came from near and far, assembled on the holy mountain, and worked with a ready will to satisfy what had been their ruling passion in every age. Needless to say, “their insolent triumph alarmed and exasperated the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem,” leaving them to hope for some miracle that would frustrate Julian’s plans and restore the honor of the Christian religion. As it turned out, Julian’s project came to naught, perhaps because it was started only in the last six months of his reign, perhaps because some natural disaster overturned the new foundations—though where is the testimony of some impartial witness to that event? At any rate, the Christians would celebrate their “glorious deliverance,” and the “pious art” of their clergy would magnify the frustration of Julian’s plans and the Jews’ hopes as a splendid miracle (1.23.890–91). Although Jews do not vanish altogether from Gibbon’s account in the two

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thousand pages that carry his narrative further, their appearances are scattered and few. For the most part, these fleeting references differ from the passages that have been discussed to this point. Gibbon is less concerned with characterizing Jewish behavior, having already dwelt so much on the highly charged, unappetizing qualities of that uncivil people. Instead he now draws attention to the highly charged, unappetizing qualities of the people who embittered those Jews’ lives. This might bespeak an intention to restore some balance or impartiality to his overall account. He is, after all, a “philosophic historian.” But this shift in focus might be viewed as well as an expression of his humaneness, of his own deep-seated revulsion at displays of gratuitous cruelty. Sometimes Gibbon deems it sufficient to state a matter of fact without embellishment or commentary, leaving it to the reader to pause and ponder. Thus simply to be told that Ambrose considered toleration of the Jewish religion to be tantamount to persecution of the Christian religion speaks volumes—not about the Jews, but about that sainted archbishop of Milan (2.27.58). Likewise, in an account that treats the increasing worship of saints and martyrs in that period as effectively a return to polytheism, there is a footnote whose acid cannot be overlooked or mistaken. “At Minorca, the relics of St. Stephen converted, in eight days, 540 Jews; with the help, indeed, of some wholesome severities, such as burning the synagogue, driving the obstinate infidels to starve among the rocks, &c.” (2.28.95n84). Or, to be told, most delicately, that the wholesale pillaging and massacring of Jews at each successive crusade, as reported in contemporary accounts, are “coolly related” (3.58.571n37, Gibbon’s emphasis) may prompt an attentive reader to pause and raise his eyes from the page.9 Most of the later references to Jews in Gibbon’s final volumes trace that people’s fortunes as a means of illuminating the character of the larger society within which they led their precarious lives. Subtlety and nuance yield to plain statement and sharp judgment. Gibbon finds much to praise in the deeds and aspirations of Theodoric, the Gothic conqueror of late fifth-century Italy. In some respects he is a model of courage and ambition, and the peace and prosperity that Italy enjoyed during his long reign are the true memorials of his greatness. Notwithstanding his limited political vision, Theodoric had “the glory of introducing into the Christian world” a policy of religious toler9. See in another context Gibbon’s critique of the historian Orosius. In recounting the Romans’ humiliating execution of a brave defeated enemy ruler, the “piously inhuman” Orosius shows not even a “symptom of compassion.” This prompts Gibbon to interject: “The bloody actor is less detestable than the cool unfeeling historian” (2.30.147n82).

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ation—a policy that his zealous Italian subjects found “painful and offensive.” Theodoric understood something that was beyond the grasp of his orthodox subjects and so was able to resolve in his mind the quandary presented by his military victory. Raised as an Arian, he found himself ruling a people devoted to the Nicene faith. At the level of doctrine, no bridge was conceivable. But because Theodoric’s principal concern was peace, not zeal, he could overleap “the subtile arguments of theological metaphysics. Satisfied with the private toleration of his Arian sectaries, he justly conceived himself to be the guardian of the public worship, and his external reverence for a superstition which he despised, may have nourished in his mind the salutary indifference of a statesman or philosopher” (2.39.546). Perforce, the Catholics had to respect “the armed heresy of the Goths; but their pious rage was safely pointed against the rich and defenceless Jews.” The passive voice conceals the identity of those who did the pointing, but the rapid descent into violence and counterviolence strongly suggests that it was the orthodox clergy. Theodoric’s government could not ignore the ravage wrought by rioters at Ravenna and Rome. In the absence of the fugitive instigators, the entire local Christian community was charged with paying to repair the damage; and “obstinate bigots” who refused were publicly whipped. “This simple act of justice exasperated the discontent of the Catholics who applauded the merit and patience of these holy confessors, [and] three hundred pulpits deplored the persecution of the church” (2.39.548–49). In the course of one paragraph, Gibbon portrays the transformation of an emperor resplendent in the glory of introducing religious toleration, now “soured by indignation, jealousy, and the bitterness of unrequited love,” and at last “driven to the brink of persecution” (2.39.549). Where are the Jews in all this? They had formed their establishments for the sake of trade and under the sanction of the laws. But in that world of zealotry and vengefulness, it was enough that they were there at all for rage against them to find its vent. Gibbon delights in telling how those early Christians turned from appealing for the benefit of toleration into merciless persecutors of pagan superstition as soon as they established their own spiritual hegemony. Gradually, however, a Christian people abolished the crime and punishment of idolatry. But “the intolerant spirit,” having run out of idolaters and heretics to hound, “was reduced to the persecution of the Jews” (2.37.448). Is Gibbon suggesting that there is a continuing psychic need for objects of hate and persecution? Or is it, rather, that the wealth accumulated by a people who had “lost the use, and even the remembrance, of arms” offered an irresistible target for the “pious avarice of their masters”? The policies of Gothic kings and bishops in

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Spain were at odds with themselves: no forcible imposition of sacraments on Jews, yet no escape for those Jews who had been coerced to convert; orders of banishment, yet also an unwillingness on the part of tyrants “to dismiss the victims, whom they delighted to torture, or to deprive themselves of the industrious slaves, over whom they might exercise a lucrative oppression.” At long last those oppressors would discover they had nourished a secret enemy in their midst who would find an opportunity of revenge by aiding the Muslim conquerors of Spain (2.37.449; see also 3.51.307). It is striking to observe in Gibbon’s accounts how often “fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity” (3.50.202), and how often zeal trumps politic or prudential considerations. Thus Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, “without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate,” is able to lead a mob in a riot that destroys, plunders, and expels a numerous Jewish community of seven centuries’ standing. “In this promiscuous outrage, the innocent were confounded with the guilty, and Alexandria was impoverished by the loss of a wealthy and industrious colony.” But rather than suffer the consequences of his law-breaking, “the episcopal warrior” was able to emerge unscathed: “in a feeble government, and a superstitious age, he was secure of impunity, and even of praise” (2.47.994). Gibbon’s Jews, too, seem blinded by an obstinacy prompted by zeal. “Happy would it have been for their temporal interest” had they not turned Muhammad’s propensity in their favor into an “implacable hatred.” All they had to do was to recognize him as their promised messiah. But spurned, this apostle/conqueror extended his persecution of “that unfortunate people” to this world and the next (3.50.201–2). The seeming nonchalance with which Gibbon presents the alternatives facing those beleaguered Jews of Medina, Cheibar, and other towns of Arabia might suggest that he believes the Jews brought their misery on themselves. If only they had been capable of assuming “the salutary indifference of a statesman or philosopher”—like Theodoric—(2.39.546); or, less grandly, made a “sacrifice of their habits and prejudices”—like the Nazarenes who thereby bought “a free admission” into Ælia Capitolina, the colony from which Hadrian had rigorously barred all Jews (1.15.454). But can a reader accept at face value the inference that Gibbon would regard the conversion of those Jews of Arabia to Islam under conditions of duress as merely another instance where “the force of truth was . . . assisted by the influence of temporal advantages” (1.15.454)? Consider yet another instance where Jewish obstinacy fueled by zeal led to disaster. It is hardly surprising that Gibbon would level all his artillery fire against the crusaders, embodying as they do so much of what he finds

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contemptible, ludicrous, and criminal in the religion of that era.10 Here we touch only on that feature of the frenzied “epidemical disease” that bore on Jews. The rear guard of the First Crusade is characterized by Gibbon as a “herd of two hundred thousand, the most stupid and savage refuse of the people, who mingled with their devotion a brutal licence of rapine, prostitution, and drunkenness” (3.58.570). Predictably, the first and easiest targets of that mob were the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich; and they enjoyed, under the protection of the emperor and the bishops, the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Treves, Mentz, Spires, Worms, many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred; nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian. A remnant was saved by the firmness of their bishops, who accepted a feigned and transient conversion; but the more obstinate Jews opposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the Christians, barricadoed their houses, and precipitating themselves, their families, and their wealth, into the rivers or the flames, disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable foes. (3.58.571)

These brilliantly crafted sentences cry out to be unpacked. The Jews are inevitably and perpetually the ones against whom it is easiest to wage war: were they not, are they not, deicides? How, then, can one account for their continuance and, what might seem even more perplexing, their prosperity? Why would the emperor and the bishops see fit to tolerate these stiff-necked and despised people? Why would bishops make themselves complicit in accepting their sham conversion? Doctrinal considerations appear to have been eclipsed by some unstated interest that readers are left to surmise and reconstruct on their own. One has to go back to earlier times and ask: how did this once overwhelmingly agricultural nation (as the Mosaic law and its talmudic elaborations make abundantly clear) become an urban people surviving on trade and finance? Jewish energy and modes of livelihood were redirected into these new niches created by the very restrictions that ejected them from the old. Monarchs and bishops found it convenient to use Jews as instruments of indirect taxation, thereby shielding themselves from popular ire while 10. “Palestine could add nothing to the strength or safety of the Latins; and fanaticism alone could pretend to justify the conquest of that distant and narrow province” (3.58.564).

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enjoying the benefits of unchallengeable and successive expropriations. Medieval Jews could serve as the fabled goose that would continue to lay golden eggs; one had only to protect the goose from the wolf. But what about those more obstinate Jews? Far from being rational calculators able and willing to buy a free pass, they chose to die so as not to dishonor God’s name. Without precluding an ironical intent, it is hard to determine from these lines whether Gibbon, at bottom, is able to comprehend martyrdom as anything other than an expression of fanaticism. And to what effect? The malice of the Jews’ foes would have a life of its own, independent perhaps even of their physical presence. In calling them an unhappy and an unfortunate people, the “philosophic historian” displays more than a symptom of compassion. Edward Gibbon, bookman par excellence, may safely be presumed to have been acutely aware of what leading figures of the French Enlightenment had been writing about Jews and Judaism. These were hardly casual topics for Bayle and Montesquieu; and as for Voltaire, they might rightly be deemed an obsession. So it is no surprise that Gibbon’s accounts of who the Jews were, how they appeared to others, and why they still mattered should echo many of the characterizations found in those other writings. This is not to say that Gibbon needed the examples of eighteenth-century philosophes to consider the ways in which Jews could be used to make a philosophical or political or polemical point. The span of history that the Decline and Fall traverses is replete with instances where the charge of “Judaizing” was used to cudgel opponents, quite independently of whether the parties had even ever seen a Jew in the flesh.11 The close relation between Christianity and its Jewish roots offered endless opportunities to imply that perceived defects of the older religion and its adherents were applicable to a greater or lesser extent to the successor religion and its adherents. To be sure, the French did not need to use coded language to damn the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions for their cruelty and fanaticism. They could do that openly and safely in France. But by insisting that fanaticism and superstition are somehow “Jewish,” a troubling doubt is raised that hits closer to home. All that the radical enlightenment found 11. Improbable as it may seem, living Jews were almost nowhere to be seen in prerevolutionary France (perhaps totaling 40,000, or 0.15 percent of the total population). Yet references to them figure disproportionately large in eighteenth-century French literature, and vastly so in the writings of the philosophes. See David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 343–44.

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hypocritical, manipulative, and even hateful about Christian institutions and practices could be impugned and mocked by harping on those alien Jews. Similarly with respect to Bayle’s and Voltaire’s retelling of the lives of Abraham and David. The morally ambiguous actions of those biblical heroes are not fictions fueled by antitheological ire. One had only to quote scriptural chapter and verse or recur to generations of commentators, Jewish and Christian, who struggled to make sense of those troubling instances of human grandeur compromised by human weakness. The same holds true for the negative characterizations of the Jewish people themselves. Both the Torah and the prophetic writings offer repeated examples and condemnations of Israelite backsliding and whoring after false gods. What the philosophes add to their brief against the Jews are not new facts, but scorn and gibes—and a strong suggestion that these moral failings are persistent character traits. Readers were to take away an unpleasant message, to the effect that the ingratitude and hostility so marked in the Generation of the Desert and in the people of the ancient Jewish monarchy are no less evident in contemporary times, in the beggars and peddlers of Alsace and in the merchants and financiers of Amsterdam and London. Indeed, it is the very persistence of the Jewish people or nation—as men and as Jews—that poses a puzzle and a challenge to enlightened thinkers. Those esprits forts traced the continued existence of the Jews (despite their long squalid history of oppression), to their obstinacy and rigidity. They would not change or could not change. Whatever the reason—the fatal grip of a primitive religion or their inescapable genetic makeup—it was problematic whether they could be rendered civil in an enlightened society. Unlike Augustine, philosophes were not likely to see in the fact of Jewish survival a token of some higher design that these once-chosen people continue to bear witness to the truth of the Gospels’ narrative. They were there! From that theological standpoint, contemporary Jews resembled what today might be called a precious fossil record. Were they to disappear through extirpation or conversion, that testimony would be effaced. Yet radical philosophes would shed no tears over a people on whom they were happy to heap all the disdain they felt for fanaticism in all its forms and let that disdain wash over Christianity as well. However much Gibbon may use mockery and ridicule to delegitimize Judaism—the better to undermine Christianity’s foundations—he is no Bayle. He does not descend to attributing to the beliefs of the Jews “even in our own day . . . that it is a good deed and one of great merit in the eyes of God to deceive Christians, not only by going to Mass with great outward manifestations of zeal so as to deceive the Court of Inquisition, but also by robbing

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them through fraudulent business deals, through excessive usury, and by not keeping one’s word.”12 Such slurs are simply beneath Gibbon. Even greater is the distance between Gibbon and Voltaire. Notwithstanding that both authors detest superstition and see the Jews as simultaneously victims and embodiments of fanaticism, the fervor with which Voltaire calumniates Jews is nowhere to be seen in Gibbon’s pages. The great French apostle of toleration left a literary legacy of vituperation that would richly serve the coming centuries’ ideological Jew haters.13 Again, no such taint touches Gibbon. Of the many eighteenth-century enlightened thinkers whose works Gibbon pondered, to none perhaps did the historian’s way of thinking have a greater affinity than to Montesquieu. Complexities abound in both authors’ writings, leaving readers obliged to carry on and think for themselves. Neither author condescends to explain a joke; each expects an attentive reader to catch the wink and proceed from there to a greater awareness of one’s self-satisfied, unexamined (and perhaps unconscious) premises. In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (letter 30), a Parisian is reported as having asked on first meeting one, “How could one be a Persian?” What are we to think of such naïveté? Ask, as well, how could one be a Jew? Ask whether any people can be other than what they have hitherto been.14 How many of Montesquieu’s nine justifications of “the right we had of making Negroes slaves” must one read before realizing that the sober-sounding defenses are no better than the manifestly ridiculous ones?15 Or to come closer to our theme, what message ought an alert 12. Cited in Myriam Yardeni, “Jews and Judaism as Viewed Through the Works of Pierre Bayle,” chap. 10 in Anti-Jewish Mentalities in Early Modern Europe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 205. Bayle, let it be said, is noncommittal about the truth of this allegation. If Jews in fact do hold such beliefs, all the worse for them. But if this is a calumny, still worse for those slanderers who fancy they render a service agreeable to God by resorting to so impious a zeal. For the context, consult the source: Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), § 197, para. 4, p. 243. 13. “Voltaire presents Jewishness, like Lady Macbeth’s bloody spot, as an indelible feature that, even when invisible, marks the Jew with the inescapable characteristics and vices of his or her race.” See the subtle analysis of Voltaire’s letter to De Pinto in Adam Sutcliffe, “Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participation in the European Enlightenment,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 6, no. 3 (2000): 37–38. 14. See Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 38–39. 15. Yet the literal-minded editor of the eighteenth-century English translation of The Spirit of the Laws felt obliged to interject a footnote to bk. 15, chap. 5, regretting that even so liberal a mind as Montesquieu’s should have been overcome by prejudice to the point of writing that

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reader take from the disclaimer with which (in The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 25, chap. 13) Montesquieu in his own name introduces a fictional “Very humble remonstrance to the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal”: “An eighteen-yearold Jewess, burned in Lisbon at the last auto-da-fe, occasioned this small work, and I believe it is the most useless that has ever been written. When it is a question of proving such clear things, one is sure not to convince.”16 For both Montesquieu and Gibbon, Jews may be overly legalistic and rigid. But their sheer survival and persistence as Jews raises the consideration that what is commonly faulted as their “obstinacy” may really be an expression of their fidelity disliked. The fictional author of the “Remonstrance” is a Jew acting out of a regard for Christianity to deprive non-Christian princes, such as the emperor of Japan, of a plausible pretext for burning his Christians by a slow fire. The Jew’s arguments are eminently sober, raising the kinds of consideration that people living in an enlightened age ought to find persuasive. It is for the addressees, the “Christian inquisitors” and those who follow in their steps, to demonstrate that they are able to overcome their passion-driven prejudices. Failing that, we are to conclude that it is not the Jews but their persecutors who are incorrigible. In pointing readers toward that conclusion, Montesquieu demonstrates his own “intransigent moderation.”17 This trait informs Gibbon’s presentation as well, and it is one that he, too, would foster in his readers. There is yet another feature of Gibbon’s treatment of the Jews (if not of Judaism) that needs to be addressed, one that has been obscured in the discussion up to this point but comes to sight when approached obliquely and from outside the world of French philosophes. Gibbon was part of a British social circle that included, among other notables, Edmund Burke. In his Memoirs Gibbon pauses to pay tribute to “Mr. Burke’s creed on the Revolution of France. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can almost excuse his reverence for church establishments.”18 Burke was indeed a political actor about whom even his admirers might enit is almost impossible to feel sorry for people who are black from head to toe and have such flat noses! 16. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 490. See the especially insightful analysis of Diana Schaub, “Of Believers and Barbarians: Montesquieu’s Enlightened Toleration,” in Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Alan Levine (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 1999), 229–30. 17. Schaub, “Of Believers and Barbarians,” 243. 18. Gibbon, Memoirs, 187n68.

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tertain reservations. The power and momentum of his oratorical style could carry him into troubling, sometimes nasty extravagance. Thus, for example, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he repeatedly falls back on locutions that “Judaized” the revolutionaries as well as their admirers and supporters in Britain.19 There are references to “Jew brokers,” “money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews”; allegations of French church lands being sold to “Jews and jobbers”; and sneers at those London “Jews in Change Alley” who do not yet dare to hint their hopes of cashing in on the revenues of the see of Canterbury.20 Yet this is the same Burke whose labors on behalf of full civil protection of public religious worship and teaching extended “far beyond” his contemporaries’ notions of toleration. He would include “Jews, Mahometans, and even Pagans,” especially if such groups had already enjoyed any of those advantages by long usage.21 Burke was tireless in his efforts, whether on behalf of Roman Catholics or Dissenters or even more marginal groups, because he knew that “toleration is a new virtue in any country” and “a late ripe fruit in the best climates.”22 Nonetheless, his hateful language sticks in the craw and rankles. It has been suggested that Burke’s resort to talk about “Jews” had nothing to do with Judaism as such and much to do with responding to the real social, economic, and political changes that were swamping the older prescriptive European order.23 But again, however much Burke might rail against the “sophisters, œconomists, and calculators” who had triumphed over the ruins of the age of chivalry, he accepts the premises of their political economy. He 19. See Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 378–80, 562n24. 20. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 204, 205, 212, 269. Elsewhere there is more of this inveighing against “the whole gang of usurers, pedlars, and itinerant Jew-discounters” in France gorging on the plunder of the churches. Burke distinguishes some “very respectable persons of the Jewish nation” in London from others of the criminal sort whom he is ready to ship to France to fill the National Assembly’s new episcopal thrones. “A letter from Mr. Burke, to a member of the National Assembly; in answer to some objections to his book on French affairs” (1791), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, vol. 8, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 304. 21. Letter to William Burgh (9 February 1775), in Edmund Burke, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 59–60. 22. “Some Thoughts on the Approaching Executions, Humbly Offered to Consideration” (1780), in Burke, On Empire, 205. 23. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 380–82.

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acknowledges the social costs of free markets catering to luxury and fashion— the many wretches “inevitably doomed” to laboring “from dawn to dark in . . . innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations.” He confesses he is strongly inclined to liberate these unhappy people forcibly (a genuinely revolutionary act), but refrains from doing so in the beliefs that the “natural course of things” ought not to be disturbed and that the “great wheel of circulation” will somehow distribute the surplus product of those labors.24 In short, over his long career Burke left a record of pronouncements that on the face of things put him on different sides of some challenging issues. Yet despite this seeming complication and perhaps even because of it, Gibbon could well have had Burke, among others, in mind when he wrote: “The eight sessions that I sat in Parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian.”25 In portraying himself as an assiduous, attentive (albeit mute) participant in parliamentary proceedings, Gibbon in effect invites us to wonder where he stood when issues of civil prudence were being deliberated in the House of Commons. It would be especially pleasing to round off this chapter by showing that Gibbon explicitly approved Burke’s singular effort on 14 May 1781, protesting against an act of inhumanity committed in the name of the Crown. That would be a happy instance where Gibbon’s “Jewish problem” and Burke’s meet. Even better, we might be able to break through Gibbon’s ironic veneer and discover a deeper stratum of his thought. Yet the definitive evidence we need and seek is, alas, beyond our reach.26 The fact that no such evidence appears to be extant does not, however, preclude our positing a supposed congruence of these two men’s sentiments in at least this respect: each was moved—and in Burke’s case, deeply moved—by instances of wanton cruelty. The incident that impelled Burke to take the lead in the House of Commons 24. Burke, Reflections, 238, 332. 25. Gibbon, Memoirs, 159. 26. At the time Burke raised the issue of the mistreatment of the Jews of St. Eustatius, Gibbon was no longer sitting as the member for Liskeard. It was only five weeks after Burke’s speech that Gibbon returned to the House of Commons as the newly elected representative of Lymington (25 June 1781). Furthermore, the documentation that would enable one to identify how individual members voted on matters before the House of Commons is at once voluminous, scattered, and spotty. See Donald E. Ginter, ed., Voting Records of the British House of Commons, 1761–1820,, 6 vols. (London: Hambledon Press, 1995). At this late stage we can know that Burke’s motion was roundly defeated, but little more.

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that day in May was the British military occupation earlier that year of a Dutchheld Caribbean island, St. Eustatius. Immediately following its prompt capitulation (the Dutch commander of a token garrison did not have to deliberate long when faced by an invading force of fourteen ships of the line with three thousand troops aboard), a series of rapid, far-reaching confiscations were ordered and carried out by the British authorities. Burke characterizes these actions in the harshest terms27 but raises his pitch even higher when describing a further act of cruelty. He blushed, he said, to relate the sequel for the honour of humanity, of this enlightened age, and still more of the Christian character. The persecution was begun with the people, whom of all others it ought to be the care and the wish of human[e] nations to protect, the Jews. Having no fixed settlement in any part of the world, no kingdom nor country in which they have a government, a community, and a system of laws, they are thrown upon the benevolence of nations, and claim protection and civility from their weakness, as well as from their utility. They were a people, who by shunning the profession of any, could give no well-founded jealousy to any state. If they have contracted some vices, they are such as naturally arise from their dispersed, wandering, and proscribed state. . . . Their abandoned state, and their defenceless situation calls most forcibly for the protection of civilised nations. If Dutchmen are injured and attacked, the Dutch have a nation, a government, and armies to redress or revenge their cause. If Britons are injured, Britons have armies and laws, the laws of nations, (or at least they once had the laws of nations,) to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power, and no such friend to depend on. Humanity then must become their protector and ally. Did they find it in the British conquerors of St. Eustatius? No. On the contrary, a resolution was taken to banish this unhappy people from the island. They suffered in common with the rest of the inhabitants, the loss of their merchandise, their bills, their houses, and their provisions; and after this they were ordered to quit 27. These actions beggaring an entire civilian population are successively denounced by Burke as “a most unjustifiable, outrageous, and unprincipled violation of the law of nations,” and a “complete act of tyranny . . . unparalleled in the annals of conquest.” “Debate on Mr. Burke’s Motion relating to the Seizure and Confiscation of Private Property in the Island of St. Eustatius,” 14 May 1781, in The Parliamentary History of England, vol. 22 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1814), cols. 221–22.

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the island; and only one day was given them for preparation; they petitioned, they remonstrated against so hard a sentence, but in vain; it was irrevocable.28

There is no mistaking here the authentic Burke, the man whose powerful moral imagination was triggered by actions and policies inflicting gratuitous cruelty on the vulnerable. Humaneness comes in different shapes and forms. We are not obliged to weigh Burke’s prodigious efforts on behalf of those distant multitudes whom the East India Company was humiliating and impoverishing as against Gibbon’s prodigious efforts in leading his readers to recognize and reject immoderation and hatred in all their guises. Each author feared the social and political consequences of whatever hardens the human heart. It is at least noteworthy that they both found room to voice concern, when so many others did not, over the aggravated cruelties inflicted on an unhappy and defenseless people. A fair-minded reader today would be much inclined (and rightly so) to applaud those enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century who strove to abate man’s inhumanity to man. Yet in taking the measure of those men and their words, that reader has also to deal with other sobering and even disquieting reflections. For all their high intentions, those enlightened and philosophic writers appear to have had little or no hesitation in deploying characterizations and images that had been used to stigmatize Jews and Judaism through the ages. In the very act of befriending humanity, those thinkers gave renewed currency to highly charged modes of thinking that rendered Jews less than fully human. None of those thinkers could have foreseen the uses to which that language would be put in justifying the unprecedented brutalities of the succeeding two centuries. All the more remarkable, then, is the singularity of a contemporary of theirs—a public man with no pretensions to philosophy— who had the vision and fortitude to declare openly an enlarged and liberal policy that he commended to the rest of mankind as deserving of imitation. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that 28. Ibid., cols. 223–24.

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they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.29

In the new order of the ages being established under his administration, it took a George Washington to stake a claim worthy of his young nation’s aspirations. Men of greater learning and sophistication in Europe had yet to stretch themselves to reach that level.

29. George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (18 August 1790), http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN-05-06-02-0135.

Chapter 8

Tocqueville’s Burke, or Story as History

The brooding presence of Edmund Burke can hardly be overlooked in the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime and the Revolution. His opinions, judgments, and very words serve as bookends to the first part of that work and to the volume as a whole. It is clear that Tocqueville found great value in a witness who was, so to speak, present at the creation. And such a witness! A man of long experience, with powers of close observation, yet distant enough from the scenes of action not to be entangled in the factional maneuverings that beset the French both before and during the dismantling of their state. Tocqueville would expect Burke’s understanding of contemporary events to be as discerning as one might hope—comparable in value though for different reasons, say, to the firsthand observations of Arthur Young. But it is no less clear that Burke served Tocqueville as an exemplary case of contemporary ignorance and bewilderment about the Revolution. Burke, whose loathing for the Revolution radiated through his mind from its birth, even he for a few moments was uncertain when it happened. His first prophecy was that France would be weakened and virtually destroyed by it. “We may assume,” he said, “that France’s military capacity has for a long time been removed, maybe forever, and that men of the following generation will be able to echo the words of this ancient writer: Gallos quoque in bellis floruisse audivimus. (We have heard that the Gauls, too, once excelled in war).”

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Judgments of an historical event from close to are no better than those coming well after it.1 (AR, 1.1, 18)

One might even say that any reader whose understanding of Burke’s views on France relied solely on Tocqueville’s reportage of those views would put the book down with some skewed notions indeed. The more Burke saw, the less he understood. His astonishment was misdirected. He mistook accidental features of the French Revolution for fundamental causes. His magnificent fulminations made for great reading, but they would not bring you closer to understanding the peculiar character and vehemence of that revolution. For that deeper understanding, you the reader would have to have waited for Tocqueville. So Tocqueville would have you conclude. Recent researches, and most especially the meticulous detective work of Robert Gannett in the Tocqueville Archives, have brought to light how intensely Tocqueville labored before settling on his artful use of Burke as a foil in his book.2 On the face of it, the Frenchman ought to have found much to admire in the Briton. Consider that the latter’s great broadside, Reflections on the Revolution in France, had been written when the Revolution was still in its early stages—only some lynchings and mob actions, nothing like the steady parade of tumbrels rattling through the streets bringing the daily ration of victims for the guillotine’s yawning maw. If only for his quick-sightedness Burke deserved to be treated with regard, even respect. Yet, strange to say, Tocqueville’s stance toward Burke falls just short of being derisive. For all that Burke saw and foresaw, he just did not get it. Consider this brief passage in which Tocqueville displays both his own astonishment and Burke’s, and yet ends up disparaging the latter. I am astonished at the surprising ease with which the Constituent Assembly was able to destroy at a stroke all the former French provinces, several of which were more ancient than the monarchy and then to divide methodically the kingdom into eighty-three distinct districts as if it was dealing

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution [sic], trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin, 2008), 1.1, 18. References to the text of the one volume of this projected work that was published in Tocqueville’s lifetime are hereafter cited in the body of this essay, giving Tocqueville’s part and chapter numbers, followed by the page number of this edition’s translation. Thus: (AR, 1.1, 18). 2. Robert T. Gannett Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for “The Old Regime and the Revolution” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 60–65, 70–77.

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with the virgin soil of the New World. Nothing surprised and even terrified the rest of Europe more, since it was not prepared for such a sight. “It is the first time,” said Burke, “that we have seen men tear their country into shreds in such a barbarous fashion.” In fact [Tocqueville adds], while they seemed to be dismembering living bodies, they were only butchering dead flesh. (AR, 2.7, 83)

By Tocqueville’s account, Burke mistook the French; he mistook what he imagined to be the enduring “ancient common law of Europe”; he even mistook the effectual truth about his own British regime (AR, 1.5, 35). Here, then, is my point of departure. Why was it not enough for Tocqueville to document with care and precision whatever it was that Burke had grasped and, correspondingly, what he had failed to see? He does indeed do that. But pressing further he leaves a reader with the sense that he and Burke are engaged in a kind of winner-takes-all contest. Whatever points can be made against Burke’s account redound to Tocqueville’s advantage. This is, to say the least, puzzling. What political or rhetorical necessity might dictate such a stance? Given that so much of Tocqueville’s narrative testifies to the ignorance, blindness, and folly of the historical actors involved, why single out Burke? It is still more puzzling that Tocqueville, after praising Burke for his acumen in seeing so much while events were still unfolding, insists on blaming Burke for not perceiving what now comes to sight after the dust has settled. His assessment is that Burke’s account is “filled with true touches, but very false on the whole.”3 One might be inclined to excuse this behavior—without of course admiring it. It calls to mind a nineteenth-century professor, persuaded of the decisive advantage he enjoys as an investigator thanks to his coming later and knowing what was to follow, confidently beginning, “Wir wissen heute,” and taking it from there. His temporal distance from the events he studies permits him to penetrate the fog and obfuscations generated by the passions of partisans. Tocqueville’s book contains more than a little of this. His first chapter concludes with these assurances: The time for investigation and judgment seems to have arrived. Today we are positioned at that exact moment when we can best decipher and assess this important event. We are far enough from the Revolution to experience only a pale version of the enthusiasms which disturbed the sight of those 3. Cited in Gannett, Tocqueville Unveiled, 61–62, and 188n41.

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who led it, yet near enough to be able to empathize with the spirit which guided it and to understand it. Soon it will be difficult to do such a thing, since those great revolutions which are a success conceal the causes which have inspired them and thus they run beyond our capacity to understand because they were so successful. (AR, 1.1, 20 [emphasis added])

Tocqueville’s point is not only that the moment is right for seeing better. Our author goes on to stake a further claim: we know today what contemporaries could not have known because I, Tocqueville, have studied the unmediated true confessions of that time. Thanks to my archival researches in Tours, thanks to my examination of contemporary letters and reports written in confidence, thanks to my assiduous collection and collation and comparisons, I  can present you at long last with a true understanding of the beast itself. Mark that well: I did it. It is no surprise that Tocqueville should put himself at center stage. Even in Democracy in America (and not only in the famous author’s preface to the twelfth edition), he makes readers cognizant of his actions, tenets, feelings, and so forth. He is no Flaubert hiding behind his story while displaying his omniscience. Rather, Tocqueville means for readers to accompany him making his discoveries, be they of a new world or a newly uncovered past. This makes for engrossing reading and enables him to get away with offering readers a single example while assuring them that he could offer a thousand more. This relentless insertion of the author into the consciousness of the reader is especially marked in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. The researches in the Tocqueville Archives alluded to earlier show how studied he was in that work in crafting his ethos as an author. His candor with us entitles him to enjoy our trust that he in fact has seen further and understood better than all his predecessors. All the more reason, then, to wonder at the anger and edginess bordering on scorn that creep into Tocqueville’s dismissal of Burke. A gentleman would not descend to that, still less should a nobleman. And when one goes on to reflect on the many points of congruence between Burke and Tocqueville, this tone seems both unbecoming and unwarranted. Both authors deplore the religious fervor that pervaded the Revolution. They both disdain the abstract certainties of the fashionable men of letters, those Luftmenschen whom Burke dismisses at the end of his Reflections as “the aëronauts of France.”4 Both of 4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 414.

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them lament the loss and destruction of intermediate bodies that would have offered the various strata of French society the opportunity to come to know one another, to hear and to be heard. Both cherish institutions and habits that reinforce a sense of liberty and the personal dignity that accompanies it. There was, in short, much in Burke’s moral taste that would have appealed to Tocqueville’s humane liberalism. Yet, for all that, Burke will not do. As Tocqueville puts it in his reading notes on Reflections on the Revolution in France: In sum, this is the work of a mind in itself powerful, and provided with those notions of practical wisdom which are acquired, so-to-speak without thinking about it, in a free country. We see in him, to a supreme degree, the superiority which the practice of [freedom] gives for judging the significance of institutions and their short-term effect. This same effect makes a farmer of good sense like [Arthur] Young so superior, in this regard, to an inexperienced man of genius like Mirabeau. Thus Burke is admirable when he judges the details of new institutions, their immediate effects, the countless errors arising from the new reformers’ philosophical presumption and inexperience. He foresees several of the great dangers of the future. But the general character, the universality, the final significance of the Revolution which is beginning, completely escape him. He remains seemingly buried in the old world and the English part of that world, and does not understand the new and universal thing which is happening. He does not yet see in the Revolution anything but a French accident; he does not perceive anything but the strengths the Revolution is taking away from France, and does not see the strengths it will give her. In this work his already furious hatred for our innovators (for he senses that it is his old world that is being attacked, without yet seeing that it is going to fall) is mingled with a supreme contempt, not merely for their villainy, but for their foolishness, their ignorance, their impotence. Later this hatred, stronger and stronger, is mingled with terror and with the kind of respect that one has for great abilities used for doing evil. “These are rogues,” he says in 1792, “but the most terrible rogues the world has ever known.”5

5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan S. Kahan, vol. 2, Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 480. The translation has been slightly altered in light of the French text printed by André Jardin in his edition of L’ancien régime et la révolution: Fragments et notes inédites sur la révolu-

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As Tocqueville would have it, Burke was drunk on his vision—really an imagination—of an England resting on solid establishments. What Burke took to be bedrock in Britain in fact had been undergoing the same decay of a feudal and aristocratic order that had afflicted France and the rest of Europe for the past ten generations. Burke’s seeming blindness prompts Tocqueville to vent his spleen: “You see this destruction of all individual influence and you seek the causes of the Revolution in accidents! You who see a great aristocracy live before your eyes, do not perceive that the aristocracy here is not just sick but dead before one touches it!”6 Only a gross phantasm could have prompted Burke to urge on the French the fatuous project of trying to reform a corrupt, moribund state. “I must think such a government well deserved to have its excellencies heightened; its faults corrected; and its capacities improved into a British constitution.”7 Tocqueville can hardly contain himself in the face of such advice. It is surprising that what today appears so easy to see remained as tangled and hidden as it was even to the most far-sighted observers. “You wished to correct the abuses of your government,” said Burke himself to the French, “but why stir up novelty? Why did you not adhere to your old traditions? Why not limit yourselves to recovering your old freedoms? Or, if you found it impossible to recover the obliterated character of the constitutions of your ancestors, why did you not cast a glance in our direction where you would have found the ancient common law of Europe?” Burke did not perceive what lay beneath his gaze, namely that the Revolution itself must abolish this ancient common law of Europe. He did not spot that this and nothing else was what it was about. (AR, 1.5, 34–35)

Even more narrowly, there were no such materials, Tocqueville insists, whereby the French might have soberly attempted to emulate their neighbors across the Channel. They had been systematically stripped of the institutions and practices by which men who exercised power could be held accountable. Reaching for a grand generalization, he said that anyone who had closely studied the condition of France on the eve of the deluge should have readily foreseen (even without the prophetic gift) that now all desperate actions tion (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 340–41. This volume corresponds to vol. 2, pt. 2, of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes, edited by J.-P. Mayer. 6. Cited in Gannett, Tocqueville Unveiled, 64. 7. Burke, Reflections, 299; and see 185–89.

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would be possible, however reckless, however violent. Given Tocqueville’s silence about anyone who did comprehend the void at the heart of France, one is tempted to mumble that hindsight is always 20/20. But what about Burke? He was no casual observer. “What,” cried Burke in one of his eloquent pamphlets, “is there not one single man who can reply on behalf of the smallest district? In addition, I do not see anyone who can speak on behalf of anyone else. Each man is arrested without resistance in his own home whether it is for royalism, moderantism or anything else.” Burke did not realize in what conditions this monarchy he regretted had left us to our new masters. The administration of the Ancien Régime had in advance removed from the French both the possibility of and the desire for mutual support. When the Revolution took place you would have searched in vain throughout the greater part of France for ten men who might have possessed the habit of acting in tandem on a well-organized basis or of looking after their own defence. The central government was supposed to take charge of these matters. The result was that the central power, having fallen from the hands of the king’s administration into those of a sovereign and irresponsible assembly, from being good-natured to being terrible, saw nothing which could stop its progress nor even slow it down even briefly. The cause which so easily brought the monarchy low had made everything possible after its downfall. (AR, 3.8, 201–2)

Burke ought not to have been astonished at the French people’s inability to act in defense of their own liberties. Strictly speaking, France had long had no public to rouse. The Old World order was a house of cards, although its inhabitants—even its most far-sighted ones—had hardly an inkling of that fact. I confess to having much trouble accepting a reading of Burke that discounts his acumen so heavily. I say this not as a partisan of his politics (which I am not) but as an admirer of his demonstrated conscientious discernment in so many of the great political contests of his day. Burke was congenitally incapable of shooting from the hip, but when he did shoot, you could be confident that he had taken careful aim. Here is a suggestion I offer with much tentativeness. Is it possible that Tocqueville, in turn, mistook his man? Or, worse, is it just possible that Tocqueville chose to mischaracterize one of his most valuable contemporary informants for reasons sufficient to himself ? I would not need to be so cautious and tentative today if I asked whether Burke chose for

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reasons sufficient to himself to mischaracterize features of both France and Britain in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Any half-awake reader can sense that the author of that book is driving with a fully open throttle. Hyperbole abounds; irony, outrage, a cultivated moral imagination, cutting humor, and more are all enlisted in the service of a master of English prose. But to what end? Young Monsieur Charles-Jean-François Depont, the ostensible addressee, was in no position to act on Burke’s counsel and criticisms, even had he been so inclined. The fairly common understanding today is that Burke’s primary audience was the British public itself, especially those members of the political elite who, enthralled that the French had at long last cashiered a corrupt and repressive government, could imagine following suit and likewise poise themselves to enter into a brighter and happier era. Burke aimed to destroy and besmirch every vestige of that seductive tale lest Britons come to believe it and choose to follow the latest Paris fashion. With that in view, he felt free, perhaps even compelled, to present his concerns in the most vivid language. Readers of Burke’s writings and speeches on America, Ireland, India, economical reform, religious toleration, and representation know that exaggeration is a tried and tested modus operandi for him. Burke was undoubtedly a master of telling detail, but his powers of persuasion relied less on the exactness of details than on the emotive truth of the whole ensemble. Thus in telling his story to the British, Burke elided the radical and bloody discontinuities that marked so much of their own national history. I like a characterization I once heard of the account Burke gave of the events that led to the replacement of James II by William and Mary: “This is Burke rowing with muffled oars through the Glorious Revolution.” Precisely. Burke praised the Convention Parliament of 1689 for throwing “a politic, well-wrought veil” over proceedings that might otherwise constitute a dangerous precedent. He did not want to trivialize (and thereby encourage) extreme acts by domesticating them.8 So it strikes me as odd indeed that Tocqueville—himself no stranger to the uses of rhetorical devices—should have given no sign in the text of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution that Edmund Burke was not acting as a rapporteur of public sentiment at the time of the outbreak of the Revolution but rather as a dedicated, hyperactive shaper of that public sentiment. Had he chosen to read Burke’s flamboyant prose in that way (yes, Burke, like his hapless Dr. Richard Price, was capable of going off the deep end), Tocqueville 8. Burke, Reflections, 166.

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might have been tempted to extend toward Burke the same kind of slack that I am about to extend toward Tocqueville. There is no call for me to rehearse here the evidence and grounds for my conviction that the text of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution can be read as an example of political defensive theology, the type of argument that the medieval Arabs called by the name kalaˉm.9 In Tocqueville’s case, this aggressive defense was mounted not in the name of what had been, but for the sake of what might yet be. To show that this was not just another piece of utopian fantasizing, Tocqueville was compelled to identify prefigurations in French history and in French national character, reaching back if need be to ancient portrayals of the early Gauls. He had to show that France, his France, the country presently lulled into stupefaction by the Nephew, still had a useable past. This was by no means the first time he resorted to this tactic. A notable earlier instance is to be found in his bravura speech of 12 September 1848 opposing a proposed constitutional guarantee of a right to work. Tocqueville made repeated references there to the goals of the “French Revolution,” identifying them with the “proud” beliefs and even dreams of that revolution’s “immortal assembly—the Constituent Assembly” of 1789. He conjured his contemporaries: “Recall the French Revolution, gentlemen. Return to the terrible and glorious origin of our modern history.” There, in those opinions and actions of the men of ’89, later generations would find a standard and a corrective to which they should repair.10 I cannot improve on Robert Gannett’s words: “Revisiting the Revolution of 1789 in these ways, Tocqueville extolled rupture in an earlier era as part of a strategy to resist it in his own.”11 Buried in the detritus of the Revolution were episodes worthy of a difficult but potentially great people. Tocqueville meant to unearth and salvage those possibly redeeming moments, casting them not as a history but as a story. In telling that story he had to reject Burke’s story. Tocqueville’s situation differed from Burke’s. There were aspects of the Old World order whose passing this son of an ancient noble family might genuinely have regretted. He might have sought politically acceptable institutions 9. Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 57–66, 122–34. 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Speech on the Right to Work,” in Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, ed. Seymour Drescher (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 183, 185, 191. 11. Robert T. Gannett Jr., “Tocqueville as Politician: Revisiting the Revolution of 1789,” in Enlightening Revolutions, ed. Svetozar Minkov (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), 235–36.

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and practices as surrogates for what could no longer be.12 But for Tocqueville, unlike Burke, that Old World was irretrievably gone. The Revolution had only ratified that fact. Burke, for his part, might have known as much in his bones, but he would never let on. He accepted the new understanding of political economy, with a clear-eyed recognition of the terrible human costs it exacted. But he would not concede the fight, and to that extent he could not serve Tocqueville’s purposes. Tocqueville aimed to redirect and awaken his people’s pride. He told a story of what he presented as France’s finest hour, that all-too-brief moment when love of liberty inspired a people to rouse itself. His story is a call to remember that not so long ago the French had believed in themselves. He took care to mute or suppress the fact that the brave, somewhat mad Frenchmen of ’89 were products of a world now utterly vanished. That silence of his is perhaps the most telling part of his story. To recapitulate: Burke and Tocqueville each engaged all his art in retelling his nation’s history with a view to reshaping prevailing perceptions. For all their overlapping beliefs, the more significant fact is that they confronted different urgencies and differed in their stance toward past, present, and future. Tocqueville was delighted to have become aware of so perceptive a foreign observer of the tumultuous events that formed the stuff of his work in progress. But he could not accept Burke’s program of trying to salvage the past and hence could not accept the way in which that program colored Burke’s observations and interpretations. For Tocqueville, Burke’s was a lost cause; he had no tears to shed over that loss. He would, instead, focus his own mind and that of his readers on the conditions under which France and the French might yet recover a commitment to political liberty. Achieving that would entail a revolution of another kind, a psychic self-transformation rivaling the events of ’89. The servitude of his countrymen had stretched from the reign of the Sun King down to his own days. Tocqueville needed to offer a rival story, a different perspective by which to take in both the old order and its successor. Were he to succeed, a moment in 1789 might come to be accepted as proof that the French were not forever fated to lead such diminished lives. As friends of liberty and human dignity we can only cheer on Tocqueville’s efforts on behalf of his people. Whatever they might recover or achieve by dint of his labors would be a net gain for mankind, at least by way of inspiring example, and would entail no loss to ourselves as non-French. Yet our admi12. Consider his treatment of the legal profession and jury trials in Democracy in America as substitutes for the aristocratic institutions that a young democracy had never known.

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ration is tinged by a shadow or misgiving. As readers of histories (without presuming to speak for the historians among us), we have to wonder whether his admixture of edifying intent does not in fact dilute and corrupt the value of what he presents as a sober and true account. Does not the muse of history demand more of him, and are we not obliged to insist on his honoring and fulfilling that duty? Granted that in the very first sentence of his preface Tocqueville disclaims any intention of writing a “history” of the French Revolution. That has already been done; he means only to present a “study” of that revolution. Adjusting our expectations accordingly, we need not look within the covers of his book for a large cast of characters or a narrative of memorable episodes. We are, from the outset, pointed in another direction. The drumbeat of his chapter headings is on “how,” in effect announcing in the table of contents that this is a summary report of findings. The heavy work of collecting evidence and evaluating its import has been done behind the scenes. To the extent that concrete details are adduced at all in the book, they are offered only as exemplary. The reader thus is spared the messy business of sifting through dusty documents—for which he might well be grateful. At the same time, however, the very neatness of Tocqueville’s account effectively purges or camouflages the uncertainties, false starts, and surprises that dogged his long efforts to give his research a shape and resolution. The air of finality that suffuses the work and the highly rhetorical interjection of its author in the text combine to rouse suspicions even while attempting to quiet them. This “study” emerges as an extended essay in persuasion in pursuit of a political objective. In a skeptical age such a conclusion might be dismissed as bordering on the banal. It would be asked, what work of historical writing is not political in its intent and formulation? In some cases the author openly shows his colors, without hesitation or apology. Thus, for example, Winston Churchill nailed to the prow of his multivolume account of the Second World War (as seen from his high office) both a moral of the work as a whole (“In War: Resolution / In Defeat: Defiance / In Victory: Magnanimity / In Peace: Good Will”) and the theme of its first volume (“How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm”). No reader is to miss those lessons, lessons drawn from the past but intended to be absorbed and acted on by the coming generations.13 Other authors might tread more lightly, muting their didactic and political intent under cover of setting the historical record straight. A striking case in 13. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

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point is the way Abraham Lincoln enlisted his skills as a historical researcher to buttress his moral argument against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. To demonstrate that documentary evidence supported his claim that the Founders had been ashamed of slavery and had worked within practical limits to prevent its extension required specific citation of a large number of events, dates, and documents. His intention was to create a valid alternative to what seemed to him the false history of legal and public opinion about slavery circulated by those favorably or indifferently disposed to it. . . . [His] was, he recognized, an optimistic reading, an alternative vision that took its force from his increasing commitment to the power of narrative to create the truth that comes from belief in the narrative itself. . . . As an historian, he looked to the past to support the views he desired to promote in the present. The effort was a prodigious one precisely because he recognized that human experience provided powerful oppositional arguments. Slavery and slaveholding were an indisputable historical reality.14

As was the case with Tocqueville’s retelling of his people’s revolution, so too with Lincoln’s: we might well cheer on his effort to recall his fellow citizens to the better angels of their nature. Patriotic feeling was to be enlisted in behalf of a country in which one could rightly take pride. If Lincoln pressed Jefferson’s principle further than its author had the inclination (or courage) to venture on his own in his own time, it was for the sake of the same cause— liberty and self-governance. Yet the nagging doubt recurs: does this degree of partiality not detract from the claim that an account is indeed the unvarnished truth, the genuine history of an event or place? In this respect such histories and historians fall short of the highest standards pronounced by Pierre Bayle in the name of the “Lawgiver of the Historians.” That legislator’s commands are first that historians not dare to say anything that is false, and second that they have the boldness to speak the whole truth. It is fair to say that Bayle devoted the larger part of his life and energies to detecting and exposing others’ violations of those commands. Yet even he acknowledged that to act on the second command was well-nigh suicidal, given the ways of the world and the passions of the wicked. And even he acknowledged that a judicious historian would trim his sails, so to speak, by avoiding current events and still-living rulers as subjects of his research lest he 14. Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 248–50.

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expose himself to the resentments of the powerful. But still, this acknowledgment was not a warrant for passing off an untruth as a truth. While allowing a historian to give less than a full account for present purposes, it left room for his successors to fill in the story in calmer times. Given Bayle’s concession to an individual historian’s concern for his own preservation, might not comparable slack be cut for a historian intent on helping to preserve an entire form of government or even an entire civilization?15 It must be confessed that with such considerations in mind we have ventured forth onto a dangerously slippery slope. At the bottom of that incline lie the preposterous overstatements of “identity museums”; the effrontery of myths and other human inventions parading as verifiable facts; and the tendentious accounts that help a people feel doubly resentful of its history of having suffered the malevolence of oppressors or supremely indifferent to its role in abusing vulnerable others. Psychic satisfaction is not cost-free. Yet any aggregation of human beings conscious of itself as linked in some significant way—all the more in cases where it conceives of itself as a people—needs and wants to hear its story told, and retold. And, having to take its bearings in a changing world, that people needs a story reaffirming its worth by helping it distinguish whatever is substantial and enduring in its sense of peoplehood from the accidental and transient events that fill its everyday horizon and distort its vision of itself. Rare indeed have been those historians/storytellers whose conscientiousness and self-control enabled them to tell all the truth their times could bear hearing without slipping into fawning, flattery, and lying. They remain, in our age no less than in the age of Tacitus or Bayle, an endangered species.

15. For an overview of Bayle’s counsel to historians and readers of histories, see Ralph Lerner, Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 63–86.

Chapter 9

A Thread through Halevi’s Maze

The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. William Shakespeare, Hamlet Plain and direct is the announcement a reader encounters on the title page of Judah Halevi’s twelfth-century masterpiece, the one commonly called the Kuzari. It is “the book of refutation and proof on behalf of the despised religion”—in short, a work of apology and instruction for an audience of beleaguered or troubled Jews or, it may even be, for comfortable Jews who ought to be troubled. Composed in Judaeo-Arabic, the lingua franca of Halevi’s compatriots in Andalusia, the work has since then been translated and commented on repeatedly in the several languages of dispersed Jewish communities. Those readers have approached the text with distinct and diverse concerns in mind, yet few if any have failed to find in Halevi’s words precisely the support and interpretation for which they yearned. Small wonder, then, that the Kuzari has endeared itself to successive generations of Jewish readers. The book’s protean richness, however, comes at a price. It is a sprawling, ungainly work, almost disdainful of tidy organization and abounding with detours, with questions posed but not answered and answers offered to questions never posed. Given that its author is also a poet of the highest rank, one whose artistry in both Arabic and Hebrew verse bespeaks extreme discipline and control, one is precluded from assuming that Halevi dropped the reins during the decades he was composing his great prose work. It is safer to assume that a master had his reasons than that his hand had lost its cunning.

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This chapter begins with this naïve presumption and proceeds with almost perverse disregard of issues that have rightly preoccupied serious students of the work: the integrity of the original text; the historical, religious, political, and philosophical contexts to which Halevi may have been responding; the possibly changing focus of the author’s concerns during those years of composition; and the like. My point of departure is Halevi’s decision—and it is emphatically his—to present his refutation and proof in the form of a dialogue divided into five treatises.1 The give-and-take of the participants in this dialogue heightens the inherent drama of the plot. A pious pagan king, prompted by a message in repeated dreams that he presumes to be divine, sets out to find a way of life that would rectify his hitherto unsuspected shortcoming. Against all expectations (not least his own) he ends up converting to the despised religion, Judaism, and compelling his people to do likewise. Although this transformation from a pagan kingdom to a new Israel with its own replica of the Tabernacle (2.1/42.12–13)2 might seem arresting enough, the true drama of the Kuzari lies in the exchanges between the king and those he interrogates in his search for the kinds of actions that might be pleasing to God. It is perhaps no surprise that almost 98 percent of the work as a whole consists of exchanges between that ruler and the Jewish sage whose expositions and arguments lead to the king’s ultimate conversion and reconfirmation. Herein lie the title’s promised refutations and proofs. What ought to be surprising, or at least give us pause, is Halevi’s decision to encase this entire dialogue in a frame story wherein he simultaneously draws close to the narrative and distances himself from it. Speaking in the first person, the anonymous author tells how he has come to compose this book. The question posed to him was whether he had any “argumentation” (ih․ tijaˉj) to use against “those who differ with us, such as 1. In this and other respects, readers will detect how much of the approach being adopted here owes to two earlier essays in particular: Aryeh Leo Motzkin, “On Halevi’s Kuzari as a Platonic Dialogue,” Interpretation 9, no. 1 (1980): 111–24; and, at a still deeper level, Leo Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 95–141. Also helpful is the comprehensive view presented by Barry S. Kogan in an unpublished essay, “Judah Halevi: Reflections on the Argument and Action of Kuzari I.” 2. Parenthetical citations are to the treatise and section number of Halevi’s text, followed by the page and line numbers in the critical edition of the Judaeo-Arabic text, Kita¯b al-radd wa’l-dalıˉl f ˉı ’l-dıˉn al-dhalıˉl (al-Kita¯b al-Khazarıˉ), ed. David H. Baneth and prepared for publication by Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1977). Quotations in English are from a draft translation by Barry S. Kogan and the late Lawrence V. Berman (used by permission).

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the philosophers and the adherents of [other] religions,” as well as those who dissent from the Jewish mainstream. The author’s response is a recollection of a hearsay account (testified to by a history book) relating the arguments of a Jewish sage that had led to the triumphant conversion of a pagan king four centuries earlier. That argumentation is being recorded here “just as it took place.” It is, or ought to be, striking that this narrator at the same time takes care to show that there is daylight between him and the king or, more to the point, between him and the Jewish sage. Some arguments that must have been very persuasive to a pagan not otherwise favorably disposed toward Jews and Judaism are not altogether persuasive to the Jewish author of this work. And with that, Halevi concludes his prefatory remarks, adding a nod in Hebrew: “And the intelligent will understand” (Dan. 12:10). This is as much as to invite a self-selected reader about to enter this work not to leave his critical judgment behind. By framing this work as a drama of sorts, the enactment of a process of conversion, Halevi presents the reader with a number of concerns to consider. These concerns need not be stated explicitly; the form itself insinuates them in the thoughtful reader’s mind. Most obvious would be the arousal of some curiosity about the king himself. What does it take to persuade him? What does he know or think or believe even before meeting and quizzing his four interlocutors? As for the Jewish sage, why would he care to continue the conversation at the beginning of the second treatise once the king has converted to Judaism? These concerns direct us to look behind the literary conceit itself and invite us to flesh out the personalities of these sometimes-snappish interlocutors. Concerns such as these might appear trivial or tangential to the profound religious issues addressed in the Kuzari. Yet when considered together, they form a context within which any particular assertion or objection can be weighed and judged from the outside. Even as we enter into the spirit of the drama and engage with its substantive arguments, we also have the opportunity to observe and assess the participants themselves. Let us, then, begin with the troubled king.

I. Uneasy Lies the Head . . . Rather than being preoccupied with matters of statecraft and war making, this king is focused on the state of his soul. He is most emphatically a believer, so ardent that he doubles as a priest in the Khazar religion. He has no doubt that his repeated dreams are authentic messages from on high, although Halevi’s account is somewhat ambiguous about whether those messages are being

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conveyed “as though” (ka-anna 1.1/3.4) by an angel or indeed by an angel. In any event, the message is taken to heart. Although his intention is said to be pleasing, his actions are not. That sets the king in motion; he undertakes a systematic inquiry into the various religions and sects in hope of finding and adopting the way of life that would be judged pleasing by heaven. Far from being a stalwart of his state’s religion, this king-priest is open to persuasion and ready to switch. The repeated dreams, which he doubtless regards as revelations, suffice to persuade him that the tradition to which he is heir is, to say the least, problematic. Given that state of mind, is it obvious or, on the contrary, puzzling that the king should begin his field research by seeking out a philosopher and inquiring of his belief ? Perhaps the king turns to philosophy because he believes it might offer an independent standard by which to judge traditions. Yet this would be a strange way of putting the question if the king were soliciting an objective (or at least transsectarian) appraisal of the sundry religions current in the area. If the issue at hand is suitable actions, why inquire of beliefs? The philosopher is unfazed, blunt, and anything but courtly. From his first word (laisa “Not so”) he is negativity personified. He dismisses any notion that God would feel pleasure or hatred for anything that the king might do. Far from caring or changing, God doesn’t even know you. According to the philosophers—and here the king’s interlocutor speaks as though there is a sect of philosophers who all adhere to this fundamental creed and that he is their messenger—even thinking of God as your creator is only a figure of speech. You are no part of his intention because an intention would imply an imperfection in God until that intention was achieved, and that cannot be posited of a perfect being. Anyone hankering for a close personal relation with a beneficent creator would find cold comfort indeed in this philosopher’s words. His insistence on a remote, unapproachable First Cause, on a visible world that has no beginning and no end, and on an eternal human race that is itself the creature of an endless genetic inheritance as modified by the influence of varied terrestrial and celestial physical forces—all this might appear to leave the individual a mere plaything of fate. But in fact, the philosopher’s message is not one of despair and passive acceptance. We are, to be sure, dealt different hands in life—human inequality is central to the philosopher’s understanding of the world—but it is up to us individually to play the hand we are dealt. Our potentialities may be greater or lesser, more perfect or deficient, but they are ours to make the most of. Even those individuals most favorably endowed begin life with mere dispositions. These require both instruction and training to be-

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come actual. And if and when they do, what might the aspirant to perfection anticipate? The king is in for a surprise. At its best and fullest development, an individual’s passive intellect will be so irradiated by a divine light called the Active Intellect that it will seem to that individual that he has shed his body altogether and is at one with the Active Intellect, and that he has come to be like an angel. Notwithstanding this mystical imagery, the thrust of the philosopher’s injunction to the king is that he should stop dreaming and start thinking. The proper way of life is to persevere in study and to master the genuine sciences. These ought to be pursued, not with an expectation of divine reward but for their own sake. The philosopher would have the king cultivate a stance that is indifferent to worship and no longer preoccupied with ceremonies, in short, a stance that is indifferent to what almost everyone else is concerned with. Having reached this high state of intellectual perfection, you will not be concerned about what kind of religious law you observe or profess or revere, or what kind of speech, language, or actions [you employ to do so]. Or else, create a religion for yourself for the sake of [cultivating] submissiveness, reverence, and praise, as well as for governing your character traits, your home, and your city, if you are accepted by them. Or adopt the rational nomoi composed by the philosophers as your religion. (1.1/5.13–17)

Herein, the philosopher concludes, lies the way to the purification of the soul, union with the Active Intellect, and possibly even the gift of foretelling future events. The king pronounces the philosopher’s words persuasive, but in fact he is not persuaded. He knows by himself that his soul is already pure, so that leaves his longing to please heaven by his actions decisive. By virtue of the philosopher’s dismissal of actions as meaningless, the king can see no utility in continuing this conversation. His thoughts turn instead to Christians and Muslims, people for whom actions do indeed matter. Yet for all their similarities (seclusion, asceticism, fasting, and prayer), those religionists are at one another’s throats, persuaded that there is no better way of coming close to God and ending up in Paradise than by killing the other. Surely they cannot both be right; pleasing actions cannot be merely a matter of opinion. These musings of the king elicit a terse, final statement from the philosopher: according to the “religion of the philosophers” (1.3/6.9), there is no call for killing even one of either of these peoples. The intellect points in quite another

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direction. It says something about the king’s state of mind that he lets this last statement of the philosopher pass unremarked. Instead he purports to imagine what the philosophers ought to find most perplexing about the Christians and Muslims’ shared belief: that the world was created in six days, that the First Cause speaks to individual human beings (about this the philosopher has said nothing), and that God knows particulars (something the philosopher has emphatically denied). Turning to the attack, the king observes that given the philosophers’ actions, scientific knowledge, investigation of the truth, and independent judgment, ought they not to be known for their ability to prophesy and to perform miracles and wonders? Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. We sometimes see veridical dreams come to people who do not meet the philosophers’ criteria, while individuals who would seem to qualify fail despite their best efforts. “This proves that the divine order [of things] (al-amr al-ilaˉhıˉ) as well as the souls [of certain human beings] have a secret [character] other than what you have mentioned, O Philosopher” (1.4/6.17– 18). And with that, the interlocutor who has dismissed so much is himself dismissed from the king’s presence. His arguments, as it turns out, will linger on. It is not clear how much the king’s own religion already resembles the beliefs of the Christians and Muslims, apart from the conviction that God may speak to an individual. The king’s reaction to his own dreams suggests that that experience is unequivocal proof for him that such communication is possible. His mind, however, is focused on actions. He assumes that either the one sect or the other must have adopted the religious practices pleasing to God and resolves, accordingly, to ask a representative of each for the desired information. As for the Jews, whatever the king knows about them (by direct observation or by hearsay) is so disparaging—their despicable condition, their paltry numbers, and the fact that they are universally loathed—that he concludes they are not even worth considering in his search for the right way. Summoning a Christian scholar, the king asks him about both his knowledge and his action. In view of the king’s earlier remarks to the philosopher contrasting the philosophers’ and religionists’ beliefs, one might think that the king knows enough about beliefs to limit his query to actions. But having been invited to speak of both, the Christian scholar begins with a “Credo.” His personal beliefs (“I have faith in . . .”) are what one might expect in a monotheist: creation ex nihilo, a single human family descended from Adam and Noah, providence, and reward and punishment. All these beliefs he subsumes under the Torah and the traditions of the Children of Israel. Especially consequential for the king are the Christian scholar’s criteria for trusting a tradition. The truths embodied in that Israelite tradition cannot be gainsaid, according

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to the Christian, owing to “their renown, their continuity, and their having been made public in the presence of great multitudes” (1.4/7.4–5). This is the first signal to the king that he might have to modify his blanket dismissal of all things Jewish. But when the Christian scholar turns to the beliefs that set Christians apart, he now speaks in the first person plural, and the judgment of Jews generally is far less benign. When the multitude of his contemporary fellow Jews rejected the one “called by us ‘the Son of God,’” God’s anger toward them became permanent. Correspondingly, those individuals and nations who followed the Messiah became the worthy (if nonlineal) descendants of the ancient Children of Israel. The distinctive actions of these new Children of Israel are set forth plainly: a triumphant universal proselytizing, the adoration of the Messiah and his cross “and whatever resembles and imitates it,” and the ways of life derived from the Torah as amended by Simon the Apostle (i.e., Peter). The Christian scholar seems to have assumed that the king would expect that there be a law governing actions, but in fact the king’s mind now stops well short of considering that law. Instead he ponders the role and limits of reason in assessing such claims as virgin birth and the divine made flesh. Our propensity to believe in something we have observed or experienced is so strong that reason (or something that pretends to be reason) devises all sorts of ingenious explanations for transmuting the improbable or impossible into something likely and credible. Natural scientists, too, surprised by some strange phenomenon they have seen, are not at a loss to account for it. But the king balks at accepting an account so much at odds with reason and his own experience. Had he been raised on such beliefs—that is, had these beliefs and practices been part of his tradition—he would think otherwise. But as it is, he must investigate further and summon another interlocutor. His dismissal of the Christian scholar is certainly more civil than his treatment of the philosopher, but is it anything more than courtesy? The king has been ready enough to abandon the religion in which he was raised and to that extent already partakes of a state of mind potentially capable of challenging all customs and testing all unexamined assumptions. To be sure, he is prompted to move in this direction by an experience he apparently still takes to be a message from on high. He is far from being a philosopher, but he is at least starting to think for himself. Although the scholar of Islam is posed the same question concerning his knowledge and belief, the manner of his response is markedly different from that of the Christian scholar. From the outset, the Muslim speaks only in the first person plural. His is a community bound by faith, and he speaks as a

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member of that transnational community. He stresses belief in God’s incorporeality (notwithstanding the Koran’s language implying the contrary), and the supercession of all previous religious laws by the universal law brought by “our prophet, the seal of the prophets.” Despite the fact that Islam is famous for its prescribed actions (the daily profession of faith, prayer, alms giving, fasting, and pilgrimage), this Muslim scholar breathes not a word of this to a king who is yearning for such prescriptions! Instead the scholar lays special emphasis on the marvelous character of the Koran. There is absolutely nothing like it. The king’s response is commonsensical: that may well be so, but how am I, a non-Arabic speaker, supposed to know that? It’s all Arabic to me! The logically prior question has to be whether God does indeed speak to flesh and blood. If one thinks that unlikely, the decisive proof would have to be the miracle that is the Koran itself, not the beauty of its language. What, then, is the evidentiary basis for believing that? What are the well-known facts that cannot be slighted or rejected? People who doubt that the divine ever comes in contact with human beings would hardly accept a hearsay account of what someone saw in a dream or was merely passed down as a tradition. They would expect some miraculous transformation, visible and witnessed by a multitude. Even so, the suspicion that magic or chicanery is afoot demands that the traditional account be “studied and tested time and again.” Even so, the king continues, raising the hurdle ever higher, people find it hard to accept the notion that the exalted creator of all the universe would descend so low as to deign to speak with “this dirty piece of filth, I mean, man,” let alone fulfill his longings and whims (1.8/9.9–12). This ad hominem argument has a nasty edge to it and ends up attacking the Muslim scholar for positions he never uttered. The scholar had already denied that Muhammad regarded the miracles he performed as proofs that his religious law ought to be accepted. To the fundamental point—that God cares and speaks and performs wonders on behalf of those he favors—why one need only look to the Koran and see all the miraculous accounts it incorporates from the Hebrew Bible. Given the publicity that attended those events, there are no grounds for suspecting fraud. One cannot say that the Muslim scholar has chosen the best ground for making the case for Islam. He has at his disposal a broad and detailed array of practices that would have matched the king’s concern for purity and action. That he never has an opportunity to speak of that is largely owing to the king’s initiative. Where he initially sought pleasing actions, prompted by what seemed to be an authentic message from on high, the king now is beset by doubts and wonders whether such communications are only figments of

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the imagination. Searching for solid ground on which to steady himself, he is driven against his will to inquire more closely of the quite unimpressive existing remnant of the Children of Israel. Both the Christian and Muslim interlocutors have adduced the ancient Jews’ documented experience as proof that God has a religious law for men to live by. It is to test the credibility of that claim that the king summons one of the sages of the Jews and asks him, not about his action, but only his belief.

I I . W h at M a n n e r o f J ew ? The social distance between these two interlocutors could hardly be greater, but the tone and manner of the Jewish sage’s speeches barely reflect that. Devoid of expressions of deference, they convey, rather, a sense of self-confident superiority. Someone who is not accustomed to approaching his fellow man (even his king!) cap in hand speaks without ceremony. The sage’s “Credo” is not cast in terms of doctrine as the other religionists had done and as the king would have expected. The Khazar assumes that the present degraded and miserable condition of the Jews has left them with nothing to praise. Why not then speak of a caring creator whose wisdom and justice the religion urges its adherents to imitate? The sage takes a different path. He makes it clear that his faith is in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, the God of history who redeemed the Children of Israel from the house of Egyptian bondage, provided for them with continuing miracles, and gave them a religious law armed with promises and threats. Contrary to the king’s understanding, the sage insists that this historical experience, this record of observed events, is the true demonstration. He rejects a religion based on speculative premises because theory cannot settle all the doubtful points. Ask the philosophers themselves, and you will see that they cannot agree on any single action or belief. The king might have retorted on the basis of what he heard from his first interlocutor, the philosopher, that this assertion is overstated. The philosophers may have no demonstrative proof for the pre-eternity of the visible universe, but they agree on at least one big point: no creation. But the king does not raise this objection. His curiosity is piqued by the implicit critique of the sufficiency of reason, and he would have the sage expatiate on that rather than on the probative value of generally accepted facts. The sage begins to accede to the king’s wish by telling him a parable about a distant king of India. What would it take for you to believe the accounts exalting that king and his exploits? Clearly, hearsay would not suffice. But if you received gifts and attestations that these were indeed from that king,

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and moreover received from him medicines for your health and poisons to overcome your enemies, what then? The Khazar king is readily persuaded to accept this as evidence based on direct observation. The Jews’ adherence to God is precisely of this character, according to the sage. His retelling of Moses and Aaron’s encounter with Pharaoh departs significantly from the account in Exodus, but it suffices to explain and justify the way in which he, the sage, chooses to respond to the king’s question about his faith. By speaking not of a creator but of the God of the Jews’ ancestors, “I answered you in terms of what is compelling for me and for the community of the Children of Israel” (1.25/12.1). The Khazar rightly concludes from this that Judaism must be only for Jews, and the sage’s elaboration draws out even further unwelcoming implications. Yes, converts to Judaism partake of whatever good comes to that community of believers, but not as equals to the lineal descendants of the patriarchs. The obligation to fulfill the requirements of the religious law does not derive from the fact that we are all creatures of God, for that would entail that all mankind bear that burden. No, it is only we, the direct descendants, who are held to abide by that law on account of “His having brought us out of Egypt and His becoming attached to us because we are the choicest of the descendants of Adam” (1.27/12.6–7). How could the pagan king view this grating assertion as other than insulting and absurd? His chilly response—“I see you are changing your colors, O Jew”—prompts the sage to seek permission to explain himself. It is a long explanation, but this principle of discrimination, however explained, remains a source of contention between the king and the sage through much of the dialogue.

I I I . T h e I s s u e s a t S ta k e Let us pause for a moment to recapitulate the issues as they now appear to the king. His initial concern, the one that propelled him into seeking these interviews, was a search for actions pleasing to God. That inquiry remains incomplete and unfulfilled but has receded in the presence of new issues that have grown out of his conversations. How can one establish that the divine does indeed communicate with flesh and blood? Religionists recur to their respective traditions that report such momentous events, but how can one assess the credibility of those accounts? The religionists themselves (to say nothing of the naysaying philosopher) agree that the burden of proof is on those who raise such claims and that the rest of us should be wary of false prophets and charlatans. All the more ought we to suspect and challenge anyone claiming that a particular segment of mankind enjoys a special status in the eyes

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of God, a status that sets it permanently apart and above all others. Having received the king’s permission to “say whatever you wish” (1.30/12.11), the Jewish sage now attempts to address all of the king’s concerns. Once again we are presented with an opportunity to reflect on what the king finds persuasive. The sage begins by asserting a general principle to the effect that there is a hierarchy of beings. This is true of “the natural order” (encompassing biological and physical powers), the psychic order, and the intellectual order (distinguishing the rational animal from all others). At this level of generality the king has no trouble accepting the still not fully articulated notion that nature or the entire cosmos consists of unequal and ranked parts. When asked whether there is a level above the intellectual order, that is, above the level at which ethics and politics come into being, the king thinks of great men of knowledge—only to be corrected by the sage. The orders he is speaking of are based on essential differences (think of plants and rocks), not on accidental differences (think of smarter or duller human beings). In that case, the king says, he can think of nothing perceivable by our senses that would rank above man. Here the sage introduces a new possibility. Extrapolating from the general principle of superiority, he offers a sketch of a man who is more than a man, a being so astonishingly freed from our ordinary physical, psychic, and intellectual limitations as to be essentially different from all other folk. The king exults over this vision: “This level would be truly divine, heavenly, if it exists”; an individual of this description would constitute a class apart (1.42/13.14). This is the opening toward which the sage has been steering the king. Taking advantage of this moment of royal rapture, he recounts the actual accomplishments of a historical figure who embodied all of the previously indicated hallmarks of a genuine prophet. This is the one who leads a multitude to awareness that there is a Lord who rules and cares for them and who rewards and punishes. This prophet informs that multitude of the origin and development of the human race and offers a veritable chronology of which they would otherwise be ignorant. This claim of being able to date precisely the creation of the world especially impresses the king. But the sage drives on to make his larger point. The chronological calculations are based on the life spans of those very best, choicest, uniquely divine descendants of Adam. This chain, reaching from Adam and Seth through the patriarchs down to Moses, might rightly be called the “sons of God.” The king is doubly impressed by the specificity of the chronology and the unanimity of the multitudes that accept it. This could not be the result of a conspiracy to defraud; the secret would have been exposed sooner or later.

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Further, when Moses came forth with his message, it was not only the pharaoh and his learned men who doubted his credentials but the Children of Israel as well. Those were not dark ages; “the world was brimming with all that had been mastered of the celestial and terrestrial sciences” (1.49/14.21). Even the enslaved Israelites were wary of subterfuges facilitated by astrological legerdemain. They were reluctant to believe that God addresses human beings. The fact that Moses’s own people challenged him and yet in the end accepted his chronology and genealogy is proof—according to the king—that the traditions Moses reported were already well established. Even so, evidence of the longevity and integrity of a tradition is not proof of its veracity. The king is prompted to raise two telling objections. It is said that the people of India maintain that they have relics and buildings that are a million years old. In the face of that, can you still believe in your traditional chronology? The sage’s ad hominem rejoinder leaves something to be desired. Consider who these Indians are. They have no book with a generally accepted chronology of their own; their character and behavior are disreputable; and their writings such as The Nabatean Agriculture are notorious for deceiving the weak-minded.3 The king gives no sign that he is actually persuaded by this broad-brush calumny, but he does acknowledge that he might have chosen a more enlightened people with whom to challenge the sage’s account—and then proceeds to do so. What about the counterposition of the philosophers? They are of one mind that this world has no beginning and no end. Considering their standing, one should not wave them aside so cavalierly. The sage backtracks a bit from his earlier claim (1.13) that the philosophers cannot agree about anything and are forever squabbling, throwing claims and counterclaims against one another. Now the sage concedes that the philosophers are of one mind about this (the issue of eternity or creation is surely a large issue), but do not blame them: they did not know any better! The sage expatiates on this in a speech noteworthy for its effrontery and historical revisionism. Yes, being Greeks, the philosophers lacked an inheritance of knowledge and religion. That philosophy arose among them at all is owing to their conquest of the Persians, who in turn had received philosophy from the Chaldeans. In short, philosophy among the Greeks was but a moment, so to speak. It came to them as a result 3. Maimonides draws on Ibn Wah․shiyya’s Nabatean Agriculture when trying to reconstruct the background of pagan beliefs and practices against which Abraham rebelled and the Mosaic legislation was directed. See Guide of the Perplexed, pt. 3, chaps. 29, 30, and 37. For more on this, see chapter 10, “On First Looking into Maimonides’ Guide.”

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of a conquest, and (note this) it departed from them when they in turn succumbed to Roman conquest. This disparaging account labeling the Greeks the ill-favored progeny of Japheth who are excluded from the privileged connection with the divine order enjoyed by the progeny of Shem prompts the king to draw an inference. The knowledge or science that Aristotle conveyed to others is not simply to be accepted as true. One cannot tell from the text with what degree of tentativeness the king utters these words, but the sage heartily agrees and confirms. Aristotle had the ill fortune to live among a nation that lacked “inherited traditional opinions and generally accepted beliefs that could not be rejected” (1.65/18.1). He was left to draw his own deductions from his abstract thinking and, oddly enough, came out in support of the less likely hypothesis, that asserting the world’s eternity. The king yearns for a demonstrative proof that would settle this issue—eternity or creation—but the sage assures him that none is to be had; the two arguments counterbalance each other. Of course, if there were a demonstration that the world is eternal, God forbid! (the sage swears) that the religious law should teach the contrary or disregard the evidence of sensory experience. Even so, the religion’s account of this world’s origin and first inhabitants would remain intact. The Jews’ religious tradition is based on prophecy “which is more trustworthy than reasoning” (1.67/18.9). It abounds with accounts of miracles and otherwise inexplicable transmutations of matter. The king is ready to settle, for the moment, for a persuasive argument, but he knows that the sage has not yet come forth with a demonstrative proof. Should their association and conversation continue, he would later expect the sage to produce a more decisive argument for creation. But now his mind turns back to the other great and unresolved issue. How can one conceive of so exalted a creator having to do with so contemptible and material a being as man? This objection suggests that the king has some lingering reservations or doubts about the very possibility of revelation. And this, coming from a man who has no doubt that he has received some kind of divine communication in his dreams! At bottom, the king’s quandary stems from his awe for the wisdom evident in the whole of the visible world and his simultaneous contempt for man’s embodiment in matter. In the larger scheme of things the presumed intelligent design of the natural world (from its largest to its most minute manifestations) offers no grounds for believing that man enjoys a special status of his own. The exchange between the king and the sage blames Aristotle’s notion of a purposive nature for obscuring how much the whole character of the world depends on God’s involvement. The laws of physics,

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for example, bespeak regularity and limits, but not anything we could describe as “wisdom directed towards an end.” The latter can only be ascribed to God. So however much we may come to know about the properties of matter, in the end we human beings cannot know all the particular conditions that endow that matter with its distinctive form. Here, the sage insists, is the great dividing line between the man of faith and the rebel. Those who acknowledge our lack of “consummate divine knowledge” (1.79/20.8) fall back on a religion that teaches a way of life and prescribes a regimen in accord with the divine order. Others, following their own syllogistic reasoning, lose sight of the all-dispensing and all-disposing God and rely instead on their own ingenuity. Like the pagans of antiquity, they flitter from nomos to nomos and from deity to deity in a futile search for some reliable source of benefits. Like those who put their trust in astrology and talismans, these fools are doomed to disappointment. The king treats this turn in the conversation as a digression and is eager to satisfy his curiosity about Judaism’s beginnings. He offers his own fairly crude sociology of the origin of religions by way of explanation. Undoubtedly the beginnings of religious communities are [to be found] in individuals who help one another in supporting the opinion that God wishes to prevail. They keep on growing in number and [either] achieve victory by themselves or a victorious king arises on their behalf who forces the multitude [to adopt] that opinion. (1.80/21.13–15)

The sage is quick to show the king that this explanation holds only for manmade “intellectual nomoi” (1.81/21.16), which unknowing people are all too prone to ascribe (falsely) to divine inspiration. Not so is the truly divine nomos. It appears of a sudden in response to the divine “Fiat!” just as was the case in the creation of the world. With an exclamation that marks this as a significant turning point in his path to conversion, the king cries out, “You have filled us with awe, O sage!” (1.82/22.3). The sage tries to dampen this momentary enthusiasm. He has other matters to report even more worthy of awe and then promptly launches into a retelling of the exodus from Egypt and the Israelites’ forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. The sage’s depiction of the people is more flattering than scripture’s. These were a socially cohesive band of brothers patiently waiting for God to fulfill the promises made to their ancestors. The highly public miracles and wonders that accompanied every stage of their flight from slavery to freedom are designed to convey an unmistakable message: God rules! These are the doings of a god who wills whatever

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and whenever he wishes; they are not to be mistaken as stemming from nature, or the influence of the stars, or as chance occurrences. We may wonder, who in particular is most to be impressed by this message? A tyrant reluctant to let these people go? Or the Israelites themselves, a people diminished by four centuries of servitude and ignorant of the art of war? Whatever the ambiguity, there is no mistaking the stress the sage places on what the Children of Israel saw with their own eyes and clearly heard. They, like the Khazar king, needed to be persuaded. The king appears to be more easily impressed by this account than were those who actually witnessed those momentous events. He sees the divine order manifesting itself and carrying with it an obligation to accept the religious law and the Sabbath. The people, however, still had a lingering doubt whether God could speak to flesh and blood—the very misgiving voiced earlier by the Khazar king. But where his doubt is prompted by the vast gulf he imagines between the Almighty and lowly man, the Israelites could not conceive of a noncorporeal being engaging in a corporeal act such as speaking. The vast, terrifying theophany at Mount Sinai was meant to lay such doubts to rest. Although the people lacked the capacity to witness what had transpired between God and Moses, they henceforward believed that God had indeed spoken to him. His prophecy was no union with the Active Intellect, as the philosophers would have it. The multitude of the people saw the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments just as they had heard their presentation. Assuming a certain distance from this strange account, the king ponders and wonders aloud whether someone hearing this might not be excused for ascribing “the idea of [God’s] being corporeal to you.” But by the same token, given those undeniably sublime sights, “you have an excuse for rejecting reason and intellectual speculation” (1.88/25.10–11). This evokes another oath of denial from the sage: “God save me from what is impossible and anything [else] the intellect denies and posits as impossible” (1.89/25.12–13). It is absurd to think of us attributing corporeality to God when we have the strict prohibition of the Second Commandment and when we hold many of God’s creations to be above corporeality, for example, “the rational soul, which is what man is in reality” (1.89/25.16–17). If this is true of the creature, how could it be less true of its creator? As for the theophany at Mount Sinai, the sage confesses that we do not know how the divine intention became corporeal, audible, and visible to humankind. But having said that, he goes on to offer an imagined possibility, which satisfies the king but which the sage then allows might well have been otherwise. In any event, what the people saw with their own eyes at Sinai led them to have faith in the religious law’s report that in

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an analogous act God had created the world out of nothing. Armed with that faith, they are no longer troubled by the doubts raised by philosophers and materialists. Notwithstanding the several occasions when the king has expressed his satisfaction with the sage’s explanations, this latest statement’s untroubled self-satisfaction provokes him to demur to this rosy depiction of the Israelites. He has heard that those witnesses of the theophany were the selfsame rebels who worshipped the Golden Calf. The sage is quite unfazed by so telling and embarrassing a challenge. His lengthy explanation/exculpation borders on the bizarre and is a model of evasion (1.93–97). The very fact that those people were held accountable for their sin is evidence of their high status (as though the lowly can transgress with impunity)! The king rejects this piece of special pleading. What kind of residual virtue could exist in people guilty of so massive a sin? The sage develops his apology at length. In singling out this group from among all the religious communities of the world, God has followed a principle of discrimination. Starting from Adam, all his descendants are scrutinized for evidence of their forefather’s perfection. We call those choicest offspring “sons of God” and dismiss the rest of them as husks and fruit of poor quality (1.95/28.3, 6). To be sure, the genetic basis of this superiority allows for varied results, but selective breeding, so to speak, culminates in a Moses and others of that generation who were fit for the closest attachment to the divine. And yet, amidst that elite were “rebellious and loathsome individuals” who were preserved for the sake of their innate character. A trait recessive in one generation might emerge dominant in the next. “We see something like this in things that are [entirely] natural” (1.95/29.6, 10–11). The king is ready to grant that an identifiable true nobility has been passed down genetically from Adam to selected lines of his descendants. The question remains, however, why that nobility did not manifest itself at the time of this sinful act. The sage shifts his ground from biology to sociology. At that time idolatrous practices were common everywhere. Even philosophers, who could demonstrate God’s unity and lordship, nonetheless had to resort to investing images and places with divine qualities when addressing their common folk. But then, shifting from the past to the present, the sage allows that popular teaching requires such concessions even now. Consider what “we ourselves do today with regard to places revered by us, so that we seek to be blessed through their dust and stones” (1.97/30.2–3). In short, if the intention is to unite a multitude around a single religious law, they have to be supplied with some tangible image or object on which to focus their hopes and fears and by which they can orient themselves. Hence the extraordinary things that

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the Children of Israel were able to see and follow after escaping from Egypt: the pillar of cloud, the pillar of fire, the two tablets bearing the commandments, and the ark in which to place the tablets and toward which the people would face in prayer. The sage then reimagines the anxious and confused state of mind of the multitude standing at the foot of Mount Sinai waiting for Moses to descend again from his interview with God. What were they to think when an anticipated one-day absence stretched on for weeks? Diverse and contending opinions led to the formation of factions. In demanding a tangible object of worship, just like the other nations, they were not intending to repudiate the one who had brought them forth from the house of bondage. Their sin, rather, was in making an image (which they were forbidden to do) and then attributing something divine to their handiwork. Even so, those who acted on their wicked opinion amounted to only one-half of one percent of the adult males. As for Aaron and others of the Israelite elite who aided and abetted the rebels in making their idol, they too had an exculpatory motive: they wished to be able to identify the rebels so that they might thereafter be killed. Yet this smacks of entrapment, so the sage finds Aaron rightly blamed for helping an inward potential sin become overt and actual. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the sage’s account of the incident of the Golden Calf is how temperate he is even while being judgmental. After all, they broke only one of God’s commandments! Further, consider that the episode strikes us today as shocking and shameful because most religious communities by now have purged themselves of such objects of worship; back then, remember, all religious communities used to worship such images. We would have precious little to condemn if that generation’s transgression had consisted in making use of some house for the purpose of worship, made it the direction in which to face in prayer, offered sacrifices in it, and revered it. Why? Because we today freely make use of houses of worship as necessary for bringing our community together; we even say that God dwells in them and that angels surround them. Yet in the era of the Israelite monarchy, virtuous kings would demolish such structures as idolatrous for daring to compete with the one house of worship that God had singled out (although even in the Temple there were images of the cherubim that God had commanded). It would seem that the sage is trying to introduce the king to the notion that every religious community in every age might require some concessions relative to its situation and development. There might even be degrees of idolatrous worship. It does not appear that the nuances of the sage’s long speech have registered with the king. The message he draws from all this is that he has been

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confirmed in what his own independent judgment had led him to believe and what he saw in his dreams. Actions matter, and the only way to attain to the divine order is through such directives as God ordains. The sage supports this conclusion with emphasis and enthusiasm. All the necessary instructions, down to the smallest details, were revealed at that time in the wilderness. Even the artistic physical details of the Tabernacle and its contents were shown to Moses “in a spiritual way,” which he in turn fashioned “in a material way”— again as a concession to the populace’s need to imagine the divine in physical objects (1.99/33.17–18). Altogether these directives constitute the lasting tradition through which Jews maintain their connection to the divine order. A fair inference from all this would be that the answer to the Khazar king’s search lies at hand. The beauty of this tradition is that it relieves us of the challenge of trying to puzzle out which actions would be pleasing to God, while having nothing more than our slender, merely human resources to fall back on. “In the worship of God, there is no guessing, nor speculating with the intellect, nor judging on one’s own.” Were it otherwise, we would be on the philosophers’ ground, and they would have surpassed what the Children of Israel have attained many-fold (1.99/33.20–34.3). A reader might surmise that at least the religion of the philosophers would be—in theory—open to all. (Recall the invitation that the king’s first interlocutor extended to him at the end of 1.1.) The Jewish law, in contrast, appears doggedly parochial and exclusionary. The very fact that God’s book is in Hebrew bespeaks a narrow audience and a limited intention. Yet, the king wonders, wouldn’t it have been compatible with God’s wisdom if he had made his guidance available to all? One detects here more than a concern for the salvation of the people of India and other faraway places. The king appears to be looking for a way by which he can make a claim on Judaism for himself. The sage’s response cannot be gratifying for non-Jews. Has the king forgotten about the sharp distinction between the choicest of Adam’s progeny and all the rest, the “husks”? The sage’s repetition heightens the contrast. Jews differ from the other children of Adam by “virtue of a special divine distinctiveness which made them as though they were a different species and a different, [even] angelic substance.” To be sure, not all of them reached the peak of prophecy, but the others came close to it by performing actions pleasing to God (1.103/35.2–3). So even the latter undergo a spiritual transformation of sorts through their association with a prophet and hearing his divine speech. They experience a foretaste of the immortality that awaits a soul when it sloughs off its body. To the king’s rejoinder that the other religions promise more, the sage counters that Jews may enjoy this exalted con-

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dition in this life, while the other religions’ promises are all in the hereafter. He then adds as an aside that one does not exactly see all those religionists rushing to escape life in this world, with all its miseries and frustrations, to claim their promised otherworldly rewards. No, we have been promised, and in fact enjoy, a privileged attachment to the divine order, while all the rest of the world conduct their affairs in accord with the natural course of things. It is this direct personal experience of our indebtedness to God that evokes our sense of obligation and obedience. The sage concludes his long speech exalting Jews and their religious law with a rhetorical question: “Isn’t the very nature of the prophets and the pious friends of God (al-awliyaˉ’ ) to be closer to eternal life than the nature of those who have not even come close to this level?” (1.109/38.6–7). The king does not challenge this instance of question begging. Instead he challenges the reasonableness of alternative teachings concerning eternal life. According to the philosophers, when mortal man passes away nothing survives, neither body nor soul. Our fate is indistinguishable from that of the beasts of the field—unless, of course, one is a philosopher! Is this reasonable? Alternatively, there is the claim of various religions that all you need do is utter the right word (no matter whether you understand it), and you may come to enjoy eternal bliss. That is quite a powerful word that can raise someone from the level of the beasts to that of the angels! At the same time, according to them, whoever fails to utter that word is doomed to remain a beast, even if he is a learned and worshipful philosopher who has longed for God all his life. Is this reasonable? The sage hastens to reassure the king that the assertion of Jewish chosenness does not entail the absolute derogation of others. “We do not deny anyone the reward of his virtue, especially in the eyes of God, whatever community (umma) he may belong to” (1.111/38.14–15). But, of course, reward after death correlates with closeness to God during one’s life. The sage does not have to spell it out any further: the Jewish people are singularly privileged in this respect. The king’s response to this reminds us (lest we forget) that this is a king in conversation with a member of a despised religious community. Well now, he thrusts back, try reversing the correlation: as one’s rank in this world, so is one’s rank in the hereafter. The nimble sage never misses a beat as he converts a reproach into further evidence of superiority. In any contest of which religious community has endured the most degradation and destitution, the Jews take the prize. Christians have to look back to their early centuries when primitive Christianity was hounded and persecuted. Even now, they regard those centuries of survival under oppression as their glory days. The same is true of the Muslims. They take pride in what their prophet and his companions had to endure in the years before

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they became victorious. But we Jews (the sage concludes triumphantly) have a closer relationship to God thanks to our not having achieved victory in this world! The king cannot fail to respond to this perverse display of pride in one’s degradation. Well and good, if you had chosen your lowly condition. But if you had achieved the kind of victory the other religious communities have enjoyed, you would be killing along with the rest of them. Beginning with the sage’s pained response to this telling point, Halevi brings forth a strange medley of themes with which to conclude the first treatise of the Kuzari. The sage cries out more than “touché” to so deflating an accusation. He has been detected in displaying false pride. It is as though all of the assertions of Jewish singularity have vanished in a puff of smoke. “You have hit my most vulnerable point, O king of the Khazars!” (1.115/39.9). For by the sage’s own understanding of the Jews’ special relation to divine providence, they should not have been left to endure their degradation so long if only most of them had accepted their condition for the sake of heaven. But admittedly this is not true of most Jews. They endure their humiliation partly out of necessity and partly out of free choice. They know (or believe) they would have a way out by merely uttering a word and converting to the locally dominant religion. In not taking that fateful step they should earn at least some credit with the heavenly judge. But there is a nobler way: if we were to bear this exile and tribulation for the sake of God (as we should). That would be a source of genuine pride and would hasten the day of redemption. This helps clarify the sage’s disparagement of conversion through the simple utterance of a word. It takes more than that to become an equal among Jews. Actions matter and, what is more, actions burdensome to the soul, not least of which is circumcision. In short, according to the Jewish sage, there is no such thing as a token conversion to Judaism. To even approach the status of native-born Jews (there is no question of equaling or surpassing them), the convert must conduct himself in full accord with the burdensome way of life imposed by the religious law. Finally, the sage turns to deflate or demystify some of the Christian and Muslim accounts of the afterlife that have so entranced the king. He is forced to admit that promises of the hereafter are not as frequent in the Hebrew Bible as they are in the later writings of the rabbinic sages. This is a vast understatement. Yet the sage manfully digs up some verses that promise or suggest resurrection or belief in the possibility of communicating with the dead. All in all, he intimates, Christian and Muslim eschatologies have added nothing new to what you might find if you researched the writings of the Jewish sages. And on this abrupt and improbable note, treatise 1 ends.

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One may surmise, however, that in reflecting on the sage’s final, seemingly motley remarks, the king would pay special attention to one theme in particular: the sage’s passing indirect reference to an unnamed individual “who prophesied with God’s authorization” and prayed that he might be allowed to die the easy death and share the end promised the righteous (1.115/40.9–10). Here is a hitherto unsuspected possibility that, when once duly considered, might well raise the king’s spirits. Not only is this a prophetic testimony to an afterlife, but it also evidences that a non-Jew can indeed receive a communication from God thanks to a miracle of sorts. The Khazar king might have reason to fancy himself a latter-day Balaam. The message in his dreams appears to be validated. He is left with very much to ponder before taking his next decisive step.

IV. Progress and Return The anonymous narrator (or perhaps Halevi himself ) reappears briefly at the opening of treatise 2 to carry the story forward. Again, the alleged source is a Khazar history book that details the king’s conversion and its momentous consequences for his entire nation. The process by which the king and his people at large become Jews follows the very pattern that the king had surmised in 1.80 and that the sage had then dismissed as applicable only to “intellectual nomoi.” Judaism, to be sure, is a divine nomos, but its manifestation in the land of the Khazars is unmistakably an artifact of man. It all begins in concealed places removed from the publicity of a royal court. Somewhere in the mountains of Warsan the king of the Khazars shares the secret of his dreams with his trusted vizier. Together, traveling by foot and unaccompanied by any retainers, they set off on a pilgrimage of sorts to some mountain wilderness near the sea. (One imagines them traveling in disguise rather than hiking in courtly regalia.) What follows is something short of a theophany. One night king and vizier stumble on a cave in which a group of Jews were wont to gather to celebrate their Sabbath. This odd detail gives one pause. Have these Jews gone underground the better to block out the distractions and impurities of everyday life, much as an individual mystic or recluse might do? Or are they lying low to avoid harassment or worse from hostile political authorities or resentful non-Jewish neighbors? Whatever their reason, these subterranean Jews find their Sabbath rest interrupted by two unexpected visitors asking to be converted to their religion and to be circumcised then and there. The deed being done, the two converts head back home with plans for their next move.

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Enthusiasm and conspiracy go well together, so it is no surprise that these freshly minted Jews should mount a cautious secretive campaign of evangelization. Only bit by bit do they disclose the secret of their new belief to selected members of the Khazar elite. Growing more numerous, the new sectarians emerge from the shadows until finally “they prevailed over the rest of the Khazars” and converted them as well4 (2.1/42.9). Scholars and books are now imported from abroad to conduct a massive reeducation program featuring study of the Torah. If the Khazar history book is to be credited, the bountiful rewards the Torah promises those who follow its injunctions shower down on these new Jews. They gain in nobility, they triumph over their enemies, they conquer and gain treasure, their armies wax great, and they grow so intense in their love for their new religion as to constitute a new Israel with its own replica of Moses’s Tabernacle. For all that, they recognize the special status of those native-born members of the Children of Israel who are pure and unadulterated, as it were, and they seek their blessing. Needless to say, the king is the most forward in enthusiasm and diligence. Having studied the Torah and writings of the prophets, he summons his old interlocutor, now teacher, the sage, and begins asking him “Hebraic questions” (2.1/42.13–15). What ensues in the rest of the dialogue is a series of long discourses and minitreatises, interrupted by flashes of exchanges reminiscent of treatise 1. It is in those fleeting moments that character and tensions come to sight, and it is those displays in particular that this chapter treats as a thread to be followed in puzzling our way through the maze that is the Kuzari. The king’s point of departure echoes the Muslim scholar’s absolute denial of God’s corporeality and the consequent need to interpret as metaphoric any Koranic language implying otherwise (1.5). Prompted doubtless by his exposure to the names and attributes that Jewish scripture ascribes to God, the king rejects its literal meaning out of hand. The intellect pronounces the notion of God’s corporeality absurd, and scripture itself dismisses any such reading (alluding perhaps to Deut. 4:15). The sage’s lengthy response presents a taxonomy of God’s names that stresses that these are to be understood as either inferences from the effects that proceed from God by natural means, or inferences from the reverence rational beings have for God, or negations denying that even their opposites can apply to God. Thus, for example, calling God “compassionate” bears no resemblance to what compassion means 4. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ policy of “cuius regio, eius religio” that both calmed and roiled Western Christendom was bloody enough. In the Khazar story we are to envision an entire population of males, from babes to graybeards, being circumcised at once.

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“among us” (2.2/43.2)—meaning not us Jews, but us human beings—namely, having a weak soul and a soft nature. Our condition may change but God’s does not. When things improve for us, we attribute this to divine judgment and pronounce God compassionate, gracious, and merciful. Similarly, when our situation worsens, we speak of a jealous and vengeful God. But all this is by way of analogy to a human ruler who deals with individual claimants and petitioners. The thrust of the sage’s discussion is that conceiving of God by means of analogy and metaphor misleads more than it informs. Why then does scripture resort to such language and, in the process, encourage misconceptions? Both the question and its answer are unstated and left to inference. But a clue may reside in the sage’s explanation of why God did not create a miracle for the patriarchs as he did repeatedly for Moses and the Children of Israel. It was not because the latter were superior to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but because they were a community (jamaˉ‘a) beset with unresolved doubts. The patriarchs, with their invincible faith and utter purity of heart, were above the need for miracles. It is the multitude (jumhu¯r) who require such concessions (2.2/45.5–7; see also 1.97/30.5). The conversation takes a sudden turn when the sage makes a seemingly casual reference to special benefits occurring when “His people are in His land” (2.8/46.19–20). The king has already been convinced that the Jews are indeed God’s chosen people but balks at accepting the notion that those inhabiting this particular place5 are more perfect than the rest of mankind. The sage finds a ready parallel in the way we attribute the excellence of a vineyard’s produce to its “terroir.” In his retelling, the rivalries and conflicts narrated in scripture turn on who shall possess this favored land. Indeed the place makes the man who is prepared and worthy of it into a prophet. Encouraged and stimulated by the king’s queries, the sage waxes at length about the merits of the Land of Israel only to be drawn up short (for the second time—see 1.115) by the king’s reproach. It is a Zionist reproach. In view of all the expressions of praise and love the sage has cited from scripture and Talmud, “you,” the king says, “you are falling short of what is required by your religious law if you do not go to this place and make it your home [both] in life and death.” In the absence of decisive action, “your bowing down and bending your knee towards it” are either plain hypocrisy or thoughtless rote worship (2.23/57.4–5, 11–12). 5. Halevi almost always (as here) uses the Arabic name, al-Shaˉm, to refer to Greater Syria or Syro-Palestine. More rarely he refers in Hebrew to “the Land of Israel” (2.15/50.10; 2.20/51.10, 52.3, 53.3). Reference in Arabic to “the land that was hallowed” is rarer still (3.1/90.5; 5.20/220.2).

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The sage’s chastened response reflects an awareness that this criticism comes from one who speaks now not as a fellow Jew but as an outsider of high status. “Indeed, you have reproached me [with good cause], O king of the Khazars.” Going back as far as the Babylonian Exile, Jews have been loath to leave their fleshpots and creature comforts; and even those who do return to that chosen land, do so reluctantly. Corresponding to the thinness of their intentions has been the slightness of their rewards. Indeed, the benedictions repeatedly uttered in our prayers referring to the restoration of the divine presence to Zion are like the chattering of starlings and parrots. “We do not realize what we are saying . . . just as you said, O prince of the Khazars” (2.24/58.1, 15–16). The sage soon covers over this sudden outburst with more long speeches, but the discontent and self-reproach remain simmering just beneath the surface. At a certain point the king has heard enough and changes the subject. He is still troubled by scripture’s language when discussing sacrifices. That language and the anthropomorphisms with which the holy writings abound imply that God is a body. Once again the sage is called on to make an elaborate analogy to lay the king’s misgivings to rest. Yet at bottom, he allows, it may be best not to speculate at all about the sacrificial service (2.26/63.5–6). From the analogies that the sage does not make, the king concludes that today “you” (meaning Israel and excluding himself ? 2.29/63.15) are a body without a head or a heart, lacking both priests and prophets. The sage goes even further: Yes, we are like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in his vision. But having conceded this much, the sage maintains that while Israel may be only a shadow of its old self, it still retains some remnants of its spirit and singularly enjoys God’s particular providence. Indeed, one might say that the Jews are the decisive evidence of God’s presence in the world. Their flourishing or distress is tied to their obedience to the law. In this respect their fate or condition is easily distinguishable from the natural causes that operate unimpeded on the other nations. The king of the Khazars is quick to supply the proof by deducing Israel’s advantage from Israel’s distress. Notwithstanding its long dispersion and displacement, Israel still survives as a people and has outlasted many other nations that “existed after you” (he names eleven) but that, having been destroyed, have vanished without a trace (2.33/64.18–65.2). The sage does not bother to correct this overstatement. Edom and Moab may be long since gone, but surely Persia and Greece can hardly be said to have left no memory. Rather, the sage is concerned to specify more narrowly the reasons Jews continue to survive. Some commandments in particular—respecting circumcision and the Sabbath—go far toward maintaining the Jewish people’s

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singularity6 and preserving their special bond with the divine order. This is not to deny the obvious: viewed from outside, Israel appears sick, vulnerable, and despicable. Yet one ought not to conclude that Israel is doomed to disappear. If it now seems overwhelmed by disease, that is owing not to its original nature but rather to its being overtaken by alien malignancies, by its imitating the corrupting ways of the other nations. But since in the divine order of creation everything is arranged for the sake of the choicest part, these calamities have the effect of enhancing the soundness of the religion and the purity of the choicest part of the choicest (2.44/68.1–3). Out of regard for his chosen few, God forefends the natural effects that would otherwise overtake a corrupt community. This assertion has a special appeal for the king. Throughout the dialogue he has been portrayed as impressed by zealotry and yearning for extreme purity. So it is no surprise that he should challenge the sage by expecting to see “more devoted worshippers and ascetics among you” than among other peoples (2.45/68.6). This somewhat naïve observation earns him a sharp rebuke. The sage chastises the king for his forgetfulness. Did we not agree that it takes actions commanded by God to get close to Him? This seems to be an especially unwarranted rebuke given the preoccupation with actions that prompted the king’s search from the outset. By now the king can quote chapter and verse from “your books” (2.47) that call for believers to exhibit reverence and like qualities. But these are summarily dispatched by the sage as “intellectual nomoi,” a kind of sine qua non that even a gang of robbers would require and merely a preparation for being able to live under the divine law (sharıˉ‘a) (2.48/68.13–14). The king has to be taught a more refined understanding of what actions bring one closer to God. When Israel in olden times slighted even the intellectual and governmental Laws (sharaˉ’i‘) while holding fast to the acts of worship pertaining to the sacrifices and the other divine and traditional laws, God let them know that he would have been satisfied with less. No community or association—even the least and the lowliest—can survive without adhering to some minimal code of justice and acknowledging God’s bounty. This is the basis for advancing further and fulfilling the obligations imposed by the divine law. That law’s commands supplement the intellectual nomoi and serve to distinguish the Israelites as a people unlike all others. Granted, those commands defy rational analysis, yet they are irrefutable given the oral tradition that reports what the Children of Israel actually experienced and witnessed for themselves. 6. This prefigures Spinoza’s assertion in his Theologico-Political Treatise, chap. 3.

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In addressing the challenge posed by the king, the sage has created challenges of his own. His complicated response in 2.48 moves from telling how the Jews were reproved for neglecting to provide for fundamental justice even while adhering to the nonrational requirements of the ceremonial law, to concluding that it is unimaginable that the Jews would fulfill the minimal demands of the intellectual law and prosper without also adhering to the opaque commandments regarding circumcision, the Sabbath, and the like. To this assertion the king blandly consents, yet he recalls to mind (in this section, 2.49, the central section of the entire work) the opinion of the philosophers pronounced in his first interview: it is a matter of indifference whether someone striving for virtue chooses to follow one religious path or another, or even one that he invents for himself. This startling thought would jeopardize the elaborate case the Jewish sage has been constructing in defense of the despised religion. But no sooner does the king raise this disturbing thought than he drops it as leading to absurd consequences. Nonetheless, the shadow cast by this philosophic assertion lingers on. The elaborate analogies developed by the sage seem designed to dispel the notion that drawing close to God is a do-it-yourself project. To be sure, it takes no special revelation to arrive at a code that enables a community to survive at some basic level. But getting beyond that minimal stage demands more, and those prescriptions are beyond our capacity to grasp through individual reasoning and judgment. This is the context in which the sage mounts his attack on asceticism as a distortion of the soul. The divine law exhibits and prescribes moderation. Even while instilling fear, love, and joy in its adherents, it avoids running to extremes in any direction. The obligations it imposes on believers appear to be less for their own sake than to instill a certain opinion about God’s actions. That clearly presupposes more than routine performance, but rather thoughtfulness and a proper intention. The proof of the divine order’s presence among us on earth ultimately comes down to this: that an individual performs humanly burdensome actions with the utmost desire and love. If the sage has in mind to persuade the Khazar king that being a Jew is hard, he may be said to have succeeded almost too well. At any rate the king takes it on himself to turn the conversation to topics that put Jews in a more flattering light. Speaking now not as a convert but as one standing aside and apart, he inquires of the strong presence of scientific knowledge in “your sharıˉ‘a” (2.63/77.12). This is a challenge to which the sage rises with alacrity. The punctilious performance of the commandments presupposes the ability of people at all levels to make fine discriminations of species, diseases,

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impurities, lunar and solar cycles, and more. All this presupposes a level of scientific knowledge that goes beyond what is available to unassisted human reason.7 Indeed, Solomon, the archetype of wisdom in the Jewish tradition, is characterized by the sage as the fount from which all the peoples of the earth derived their knowledge of the sciences. Although this is no longer remembered or recognized, the fact remains: it was from us that the Chaldeans and, after them, the Persians, Medes, Greeks, and Romans learned the roots and universals of science as we know it. That fact of transmission has itself been lost in transmission, but that does not faze the sage. Prompted by the king’s observation that other people’s languages are more capacious and more widely used than Hebrew, the sage sets off to demonstrate its superiority. His response is lengthy and oddly disjointed, but enough to satisfy the king and lead him at the end to set the agenda for the following three treatises. To the extent that Hebrew does indeed suffer in comparison to other languages, its poverty is perhaps to be traced to the worsening condition of the Jewish people. The sage does not dispute the assertion that Hebrew is less musical, but insists that it is correspondingly more precise, clear, and intelligible. The supporting evidence takes the form of a minitreatise on the vocalization or pointing of Hebrew words, by virtue of which tenses and meanings are unambiguously distinguished.8 And yet, for all that, the defense of unmusical Hebrew as a superior mode of written communication is preceded by an unambiguous concession that subverts that claim. When it comes to completely fulfilling the aim of language—communicating what is in the soul of the speaker to the soul of the audience—written communication can only struggle to match the array of devices available in face-to-face communication. In face-to-face conversation one receives aid from pausing at a stop and continuing at a juncture, speaking emphatically and [speaking] mildly, communicating by means of hints and gestures of surprise, and also [from] questioning, reporting, arousing, intimidating, imploring, as well as [various kinds of ] movements, which a plain mode of expression lacks. Sometimes the speaker receives help [in expressing himself ] by means of movements of his eyes, his eyebrows, his whole head, as well as his hands in 7. But for this limitation (the sage leads one to wonder) would Aristotle have been concerned to elaborate his analysis of the vital parts of the animals so as to ward people off from eating carrion (2.64/78.5–6)? 8. It is hard to believe that the king’s eyes did not glaze over before the sage’s eighty-nineline exposition of the “subtle science” (‘ilm daqıˉq) of vowelless consonants had run its course (2.80/83.17–89.5).

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order to express anger, satisfaction, supplication, or disdain to the degree he wishes. (2.72/81.4–11)

Happily, some remnants of an ancient tradition have survived that make scripture’s written Hebrew intelligible. But in all this the sage’s main points are not to be missed by the reader of this dialogue. Oral communication is superior to written communication, and metered verse is to be rejected in favor of lucid prose. “One could write [whole] books about this,” the sage concludes (2.72/82.1–2). Readers may be excused for momentarily breaking the spell of the Kuzari and reflecting that these and succeeding lines, disparaging the imitative practice of putting Hebrew in poetic meters, were written by a poet who excelled in that and then chose to cast his thoughts in the form of this dialogue.

V. Renewing the Search for Right Actions In staging this drama Halevi highlights that it is the Khazar king who sets the themes and order of discussion. (Consider the prominent positions of 2.81, 3.74, and 5.1.) Less obvious is the manner in which the sage’s responses reshape the king’s queries by addressing that ruler’s implicit understanding and concerns. Thus, to the straightforward request for a description of the kind of person that “you” people regard as a pious worshipper (muta‘abbid 2.81/89.7), the sage proceeds circuitously, beginning with what such a person is not. Among us, he says, the distinguishing trait or mark would not be detachment, seclusion, or withdrawal from quotidian affairs. No, the true worshipper is a social being, a believer who loves life—and a long life at that—and partakes of the bounty it offers. Such an individual is not a Nazarite, nor is he a hedonist. He immerses himself in the life of the world not because he finds that fulfilling but rather to better deserve a higher reward in the hereafter. If he could, he would rather be at the level of Enoch or Elijah, those semiwithdrawn believers who kept company with the angels and yearned for death to release them to witness the kingdom of heaven. The king might well puzzle over this response, and so too might Halevi’s readers. Is the sage responding to a yearning for the ascetic way of life that he detects buried in the king’s soul? His piety inclines him toward an extreme, and that in turn would imperil what he truly needs: a religion that keeps him fit to perform his royal duties.9 The sage, however, is not yet done as he shifts 9. This tension would be displayed in Ibn T ․ufayl’s H ․ayy Ibn Yaqz․aˉn written not long after Halevi’s work was composed.

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momentarily from the Jewish perspective on serving God to the perspective of learned philosophizers. They too yearn to be alone, the better to clarify their thoughts and reasonings. But for all that, they differ from the more extreme pietists. Rather than withdrawing from the world and welcoming death, they seek out students for the stimulus they provide in a common search for certainty. Admittedly, there is no hope of finding such a Socrates today! The sage’s not so subtle message to the king is that he needs to revise his expectations. Once upon a time when the divine presence dwelt in the hallowed land and the resident Jewish nation displayed its disposition toward prophecy, there were isolated bands of ascetics who secluded themselves the better to study the sciences of the religious law and practice its prescribed actions. But the preconditions for that sort of life no longer prevail. In the absence today of the requisite knowledge, anyone who undertakes to follow that kind of regimen is subjecting himself to needless psychic and physical pain. Lacking contact with divine light, he cannot enjoy the companionship enjoyed by the prophets. And being ignorant of the sciences, he would miss the life-long challenges that occupy and delight the philosophers. The sage’s portrayal of a contemporary would-be ascetic is harsh and forbidding. Such an individual is self-deluding, indeed sick, although he and others will mistake his sickness for saintliness. Even if you posit such a paragon of piety and goodness, consider how stale his pattern of solitary supplications will appear to him once it becomes a routine. Even worse, the natural faculties of his soul will persist and remind him of all the entanglements with human affairs he has arbitrarily sought to sever. The sage’s unmistakable message is that a freely chosen life of solitary asceticism is both sterile and futile. A regimen that removes the highest kind of man from the world of action in reality takes him farther from the divine order he was hoping to approach. A thoroughly perplexed king has been brought back to his point of departure. He has been waiting all this while to learn what actions can be performed now by the kind of man “you” hold to be superior.10 The sage’s response is bound to surprise this markedly apolitical king. The superior person is the guardian of his city, acting justly and assigning its people their daily provisions and everything they need. He treats them fairly inasmuch as he does not cheat any of them nor give anyone more than that which he deserves. Subsequently, when he needs them, he 10. The term being translated as “superior”—khayyir—describes the kind of person who is good, better, or best.

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will find them obedient, immediately responsive to his call. He commands them, and they carry out [his] command. He forbids them, and they desist. (3.3/91.18–92.2)

One might think that a man who actually rules and has exercised his prerogative to compel his entire people to convert to his religion would find the sage’s description gratifying. Instead he protests that the sage has not addressed the question he posed. Being literal-minded, the king fails to see that the sage has been speaking figuratively. Every superior human being is to be viewed as a potential prince, one who rules over those he leads, not despotically but by “a political governance” (3.5/92.5). In the context set by the king’s question, that is to say that the better kind of human being governs his senses as well as his psychic and bodily faculties with a regard for justice and moderation. As he moves from moral virtue to intellectual virtue to political virtue, there then looms before him a higher, divine level of being. Here is a prospect in which princely rule and piety may coincide. Although the sage insists that this mode of purging, purification, and psychic separation differs radically from the banal routines practiced by others, the king assumes he knows what these actions are. Once again he needs to be corrected. He is probably thinking of governmental actions and intellectual nomoi. These are indeed commonly known, although the precise determination of even these (how much charitable giving, how much fasting) lies beyond our ken. Still more are we at a loss when it comes to the superadded divine prescriptions, actions to be performed within a community governed by a living god. Our intellect cannot grasp those actions and even shuns them. We are left to accept these commands the way an invalid follows a physician’s prescriptions—unquestioningly. Consider the case of circumcision. Yes, the king affirms (perhaps recalling his own recent experience in a cave in the mountains of Warsan), you Jews have done well to hold fast to this command. The associated pain is mitigated by the pleasure of imagining its underlying reason—to serve as the sign of an everlasting covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham. Elaborating on the sage’s earlier reference (in 2.34/65.4–8) to the utility of certain divine commands, the king now offers a thoroughly political analysis to account for the Jews’ survival. It is not only the rite of circumcision that goes far toward creating and sustaining a sense of common identity. Similarly, the commands to observe Sabbaths and festivals are among the most powerful causes keeping Jews alive and preserving their splendor in the face of their present dispersion, helplessness, and degradation. Perhaps the king’s appreciation is tainted by an unconscious irony.

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The very scrupulousness with which “you” keep Sabbaths and festivals has disqualified you from being compelled to serve in your oppressors’ armies. By refraining from labor on the Sabbath and forgoing those earnings, you have stymied your earthly overlords who might otherwise have plundered you. The Khazar king sees a brighter side of contemporary degradation. He calculates a net gain for “you both in this world and the hereafter” on account of what Jews endure for the sake of heaven (3.10/96.18–97.10). The sage’s portrayal of the better kind of Jew is somewhat forbidding. He observes all the prescribed divine laws, even those predicated on the existence of the Temple and the continuation of its priestly service and sacrifices.11 He is ever mindful of committing potential transgressions and of being scrutinized by his heavenly master. He is totally immersed in a world calling for caution and awe, a world that elicits from him a steady stream of blessings, even for the things that afflict him. Belief and pure intent: these, not genetics, define a “true Israelite” (3.17/105.16). In contrast to the natural scientists, he understands that God’s will is a continuing presence in this world and is not limited by a seemingly fixed nature. This good man’s conduct reflects and expresses that understanding. It might come as some relief to the king to learn that the sage has been characterizing the behavior of “a virtuous individual (al-faˉ․dil) in our time” (3.21/111.10). Imagine how different would be the situation of such a person in that distant happy time and place when sanctity suffused those living in “the city of the divine presence.” The alacrity with which the king responds suggests that the sage’s contrast with times past may have been intended to hold forth the promise of a better future. In any event, the vision of an entire community living in accord with the prescriptions that would constitute a holy nation seems, at long last, to free the king from his preoccupation with asceticism and reclusiveness as the defining hallmarks of a pious way of life. But his continuing uncertainty about which actions would be pleasing to heaven now takes the form of wondering about the required intensity of worship. It is consistent with this drama’s portrayal of the king that he should be attracted to certain features of the Qaraites, even though he knows when he first signals his interest in them that the sage will disapprove (2.81/81.7). In responding to what he sees as their assiduous worship and what he hears about 11. This incongruity is resolved if one assumes that sincere prayer substitutes for the divine commands that cannot presently be observed. Prayer would also display to a god who reads the hearts and reins of man whether an individual is fulfilling the prescribed psychic laws (3.11/98.1–4, 8–11).

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the relative weightiness of their arguments, the king offers yet another challenge to his mentor. The sage is more than a little peeved by this turn in the conversation because it forces him to revisit issues he thought he had put to rest. The word the king has used to characterize the Qaraites—mujtahidıˉn (3.22/112.9; also 3.36/120.3)—may denote people who struggle or exert themselves or, alternatively, those who reach independent judgments in legal or theological matters through certain prescribed modes of interpretation. The king’s admiration is premised on the former sense of the term, the sage’s dismay on the latter. The sage has repeatedly been drumming on the theme of the insufficiency of unassisted human understanding (1.13, 1.67, 1.79, 2.48). Those who, like the Qaraites, reject or neglect the trustworthy oral traditions that elaborate and further specify the commands of the Jewish law, place an unwarranted trust in their own ingenuity and syllogistic reasoning. Yet their zeal in speculating about the Torah’s language is driven (according to the sage) by a fundamental anxiety. They cannot rest in confidence that they have resolved the textual ambiguities. Indeed, the gravest charge that the sage levels against those who reject the tradition in favor of reasoning things out for themselves is that they fragment and corrupt the community as a whole to the point that “in a house [consisting] of ten people, there will be ten [different] legal doctrines” (3.49/129.2). Ultimately the king is persuaded that he ought to shun the ways of the Qaraites and adhere to the traditions transmitted faithfully by the Rabbanites. But the sage’s reasons are not the king’s. For the sage, the main consideration is to avoid a way of thinking that jeopardizes the unity of the entire community. For the king, on the other hand, the telling advantage of adhering to the tradition is that it gives the individual believer the cheery reassurance that his actions are pleasing to God. The old quandary that bedeviled the king’s dreams seems now to be resolved (3.50/131.5–6). Gladdened and newly confirmed in his faith in the Jews’ oral tradition, the king is ready to be instructed in the mysteries and riches of his new religion. Once again, he sets, or rather resets, the agenda for the discussions in the following treatises. (Compare 2.81/89.7–9 with 3.74/146.10–12.)

VI. Return of the Specter of the Philosopher At the end of treatise 3 the king asks for more information about the names of God and for some further elaboration. The sage obliges by distinguishing “Elohim” (a vestige of pagan idolatry) from the mysterious “YHVH” (God’s proper name). The king’s interruption is occasioned by his lingering puzzle-

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ment: how can one think of God as a distinct individual when we can rely only on inferences drawn from an observation of his effects? The sage’s response constitutes the longest speech in the entire work. Once again, he draws a sharp distinction between an attempt to know God through one’s powers of reasoning (an activity likely to lead to heresy and corrupting doctrines) and trying to know God through a prophetic vision, and by having experienced God’s distribution of rewards and punishments, and—in the case of the people at large—by accepting this tradition on faith. The sage laces his exposition with a number of parables meant to show that our senses apprehend only the accidents of things, not their substance. Our access to that deeper knowledge depends on our being granted an inner eye, an inner sense, by which a sighted individual is able to lead the blind. In its highest form, this expresses itself in prophecy. But what about the naysaying philosophers of Greece? The imperturbable sage insists that had those philosophers seen the prophets in their prophetic states, they would not only have acknowledged the veracity of their claims but would have sought a rational explanation of the phenomenon, “especially those adherents of the religions who devote themselves to philosophizing” (4.3/157.13–158.1). Notwithstanding all this, the king still cannot understand why religionists resort to a corporeal representation when the intellect should suffice to realize enough of God’s qualities to elicit the proper fear and love of him. Approximating a philosophic critique of Judaism, the king asks in effect, who needs all this? The sage’s response is embodied in his old refrain. Nothing beats seeing, experiencing. The prophet’s vision simultaneously fills his soul with fear and desire. This goes beyond the capability of merely human thinking. The sage disposes of the claims that might impress the king should they be raised successively by the philosophizers (al-mutafalsifıˉn 4.5/159.16), or by a “rationalist” (al-muta’qqil 4.5/160.2), or by astrologers (al-munajjimıˉn 4.8/161.14), or by followers of some other revealed law (al-mutasharri‘ 4.13/164.2). Of special importance to the sage—and, by inference, what ought to be of special interest to the king and to Halevi’s readers—is the divide he draws between an adherent of a revealed religious law and a philosophizer. The former, the sage asserts, seeks out the Lord not only for the benefit of knowing him but in expectation of receiving other benefits as well. In contrast, a devotee of philosophy has but one end in view: to know things according to their true character and ultimately to unite with the Active Intellect. The very activity of philosophizing transcends the divide between true believer and atheist—for such an individual could be either (4.13/164.7–8)! The sage delivers this striking assertion in passing and leaves its implications unstated. Instead, he presses

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on to revive and repeat the belief system of the philosophers as the king’s first interlocutor had pronounced that in treatise 1. According to them, any reference to God as “creator” or “artisan” has to be taken as merely a figure of speech, given that the philosophers hold that this world has had no beginning and will have no end. Far from condemning the philosophers for committing this grievous error, the sage excuses them. Their only access to divine science was through unassisted reason, and they could not advance beyond reason’s inherent limits. While the sage is surely not absolving the naysaying philosophers, neither is he calling for a jihaˉd against them. Rather, he seems to invite adopting a civil stance toward them, one that matches what the fair-minded (muns.ifuhum) among the philosophers say to those who follow a revealed religious law. He quotes Socrates’ address to his fellow Athenians: “O people, I do not deny this divine law of yours; rather, I say that I don’t comprehend it. I am wise only in human wisdom”12 (4.13/164.15–17). A reader is entitled to pause here to take exception to the sage’s earlier assertion of the superiority of oral communication over writing (2.72). For it is precisely in this respect, in the opportunity that a written text affords to stop, ponder, and reconsider an argument, that readers have an advantage over the Khazar king in particular and auditors in general. Perhaps later on in this dialogue, the king will feel the jolt embedded in the sage’s bland and blurred account of the philosophers’ challenge. For now, however, an excursus seems merely a digression (4.15/166.4–5), and the sage can resume resorting to metaphors in explaining the various names of God. The repeated message that the sage would convey is encapsulated in the distinction “Elohim”/“YHVH.” The former encompasses what lies within the reach of unassisted reason, but cannot go beyond. Using syllogistic arguments, human beings can deduce that the world has a ruler and an establisher of order. But even philosophic minds cannot grasp the meaning of “YHVH.” That is accessible only through a prophetic kind of seeing. When enveloped by the “holy spirit,” an individual transcends the uncertain world of reasoning and becomes a passionate believer. The king confirms that he has indeed received his mentor’s message: The difference between Elohim and YHVH has now become clear to me, and I have also understood the difference between the God of Abraham and 12. This quotation is repeated almost word for word in 5.14/212.2–4. But compare the source in Plato, Apology of Socrates 20d-e. Plato does not present Socrates, a hater of the lie in the soul, as explicitly denying that he denies the Athenian populace’s “divine wisdom.”

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the God of Aristotle. One longs for YHVH, exalted be He, by way of savoring (dhawq) and witnessing for oneself, whereas one inclines toward Elohim by way of reasoning. Moreover, that savoring calls upon the one who has experienced it to do his utmost for the sake of His love and even [to prefer] death [to living] without Him, whereas this reasoning makes one see that exalting Him is obligatory as long as one is not harmed and one does not undergo hardship because of it. Therefore, Aristotle should be excused for attaching no importance to the actions [associated with] the nomos, since he doubts whether God knows [anything] about that. (4.16/168.15–169.2)

The king introduces the notion of “savoring” (dhawq), a term with mystical Sufi resonance, and in so doing appears to have made a decisive move away from his earlier quasi-philosophic stance. The bulk of mankind may be likened to the blind who need to be guided by the sighted (4.3/155.7–9). But who are the truly sighted: those whose reasoning has brought them close to a union with the Active Intellect or those who, like the prophets, have been honored with an inner eye? As regards the multitude of believers (al-jamaˉhıˉr), they are content to follow the men of vision and to accept their traditions on faith (4.17/169.13–18). Does the same apply to the king? Not quite. He takes exception to the sage’s exaggerated denigration of philosophers. Everyone, so to speak, knows that philosophers practice seclusion and asceticism. People take it for granted that anyone adopting such behavior must be philosophizing and adhering to the philosophers’ opinions. The king charges the sage with stripping these recluses of every worthy action. Not so, says the sage; and he proceeds once again to portray the philosophers’ way of life as an expression of their foundational beliefs. His account is pithy, clear, and free of rancor. Given their conviction that man’s ultimate happiness consists in obtaining theoretical knowledge and a grasp of intelligible things, it is hardly surprising that these philosophers would steer clear of whatever might interfere with their lifelong preoccupation. The distractions of social and family life are shunned. They are beyond the usual calculus of rewards and punishments that is supposed to induce people to do the right thing. The sage portrays philosophers not as immoral but as indifferent to the things with which morality is concerned. They have, in effect, a private law of their own. Their public face, however, is to reinforce conventional notions of right and wrong and to urge people to behave accordingly. Assuming the role of legislators, they prescribe rules of political governance that are neither universally valid nor unqualifiedly rational—an acceptance of a degree of indeterminacy (as the sage drily notes) that is alien to the sharıˉ‘a.

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Although the king does not demur from the sage’s characterizations of the two modes of perceiving God, he still entertains some deep reservations. Is it even any longer possible to expect the kind of “penetrating light” (nu¯r tha¯qib 4.15/166.7) that once was directed from above to the most perfect individuals? The sage assumes that the king’s misgiving is prompted by his reaction to the Jews’ present despicable condition, but the king denies this forcefully and at length. Has the teacher forgotten having taught that “being despised and submissive are more appropriate to the divine order than being triumphant and arrogant”? The student, at least, remembers that lesson and recalls as well the earlier discussion of how both Christians and Muslims, flush with their present worldly success, still take pride in the humiliation and suffering endured by the earliest generation of their coreligionists. (Compare 4.22/171.4–172.2 with 2.34/65.11–66.3 and 1.13/38.19–39.6.) But, in truth, the king is less interested in going over this old ground than in learning the basis for the sage’s earlier claim that in ancient times knowledge of the natural sciences resided among the Jews. Where is it now? What relics remain? The sage’s response, embracing the second longest section in the entire dialogue (4.25), takes up the rest of treatise 4. Whether the evidence the sage adduces satisfies the king is hard to determine for he is presented as almost speechless in the last two-fifths of treatise 4. Having requested a brief account, a “taste” (dhawq) of the evidence, he is treated instead to an inundation of words. The sage himself concedes at various points in his monologue that the writings are profound and the presentation cryptic, as might be expected when dealing with divine secrets. Yet he would leave the king in no doubt about his own intentions: I have only mentioned these principles to you so that philosophy won’t leave you awestruck, for you [apparently] think that if you were to pursue it, you would put your soul at ease with the [kind of conclusive] demonstration that fully satisfies [one’s longing for certainty]. Quite the contrary, their first principles are all things that no intellect can accept and that no syllogism can ascertain precisely [in their totality]. Beyond that, there is no agreement between any two of them, except for those who accept the tradition of a single master on faith, whether [that be] Empedocles, or Pythagoras, or Aristotle, or Plato, as well as numerous others besides them. Not one of them [fully] agrees with his fellow. (4.25/183.18–184.2)

The Khazar king responds with the ardor of a true believer. Who needs all the convolutions and mysteries that the sage has been expounding from the

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Book of Creation!13 The account in the opening of Genesis suffices. When the king then quotes a line from the morning prayers in confirmation of his credo, he accomplishes two things. By saying, “just as we say” (4.26/184.6), he is signaling in words for the first time his conviction of the truth of Judaism. He speaks now as a Jew. Moreover, he sends his mentor, the sage, into rapture. “You have done well, O king of the Khazars. By God, that’s it! This is the truth, and belief in the truth, and abandoning superfluities” (4.27/184.8–9). The king is now well positioned to accept as sufficient evidence the talmudic sages’ calendric calculations and determinations of ritual purity and impurity as these happen to be embedded in their juridical texts. These fragments bespeak the existence of a once flourishing scholarly elite who, alas, were the first to be destroyed in an ill-fated nation, along with their scientific writings. Today we can only imagine what has been lost. By the time the sage has run through his litany, it may be presumed that the king has heard more than enough. Other thoughts have been pressing on him as he discloses in the opening of treatise 5. Once again, he resets the agenda he had announced at the end of treatise 2. It turns out that his faith is not as firmly based as one might have supposed and as he would wish.

V I I . P e r s ua s i v e O p i n i o n s a n d ( at   L a st ) a P l e a s i n g A c t i o n The fifth and final part of the Kuzari opens with a plea from the throne. In both manner and matter it is a curious blend of diffidence and assertiveness, a candid acknowledgment of one’s limitations accompanied by a student’s instruction to his teacher on how to proceed. Early on (in 2.81) the king had given notice that he would expect the sage to offer a summary view of Judaism’s fundamental principles as regards opinions and beliefs. That moment has arrived. The king now stipulates that he would have the sage’s exposition follow the method of the practitioners of kalaˉm, or dialectical theology.14 This request might be taken to signify that the speaker is insecure in his faith and feels the need for plausible sounding arguments to bolster his commitment. 13. Sefer Yes․irah,, an early text of uncertain provenance ascribed to Abraham and treated in this dialogue as a product of that patriarch’s philosophizing before he received a revelation and henceforth abandoned his speculative search for God. 14. See Maimonides’ classic account of kalaˉm’s origins, purpose, and limitations in Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pt. 1, chap. 71.

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Indeed, the king confirms as much. “The exalted level of pure belief without investigation is simply beyond me” (5.1/191.3–4). His mind is no blank slate; he has been exposed to the conflicting opinions of philosophers and adherents of different religious communities. Moreover, in the course of the preceding four treatises he has repeatedly voiced doubts and misgivings and has shown a growing awareness of how much he has yet to learn. He seems not to doubt that a blind adherence to a faith would be best. But given his recalcitrant soul, he needs to be armed against corrupting opinions by becoming proficient in the arts of refutation. The sage responds to this cry from the heart, at first with empathy and then with a manifestly insincere compliment. Who among us would not be misled by the cacophony of opinions with which we are bombarded? Rare indeed is the individual who is faithful by nature and can instantaneously recognize errant opinions for what they are. It is bizarre that the sage should express the hope, after all this, that the king is one of those unique individuals. But be that as it may, the sage is obliged to explain those fundamentals to the king—in the proper order, convincingly, and as briefly as possible. What the sage does not do, however, is provide from the outset the kind of dialectical arguments that would help the king hold his own against unsettling thoughts. Instead he begins with a summary of philosophic physics. The king draws the conclusion that the philosophers hold that everything comes down to chance, but is corrected by the sage. By his account, the philosophers’ teaching about forms compels them to admit of something divine, which they call “Intellect” and “Giver of Forms.” The king interprets this to mean that philosophers believe in a creator. He is ecstatic: “By your life! This is the faith!” (5.5/194.5). Once again he makes a leap of faith, this time on the basis of this reported intellectual necessity. Who needs to resort to asserting the role of chance? In effect, the sage informs him, he has reconstructed the argument of the religious law. Philosophers—Aristotle, Galen, and unnamed others—as well as believers agree. The design and purpose, order and ranking, so evident in domesticated animals bespeaks an overarching divine wisdom. When the king prompts the sage to make a short detour by explicating Psalm 104, the sage obliges by presenting it as a biblical account of the whole— but as interpreted by the philosophers. Embedded in the sage’s discussion of God’s providence are instances as well of man’s providence (5.10/195.18– 196.2; 196.7–8). As the sage proceeds to lay out the philosophers’ account of the soul—remember, all this is in response to the king’s request for the kinds of dialectical arguments that might fortify his faith—the line separating philosophers and believers grows murky and indistinct. Consider, for example,

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the “marvelous wisdom” exhibited in the ways plants reproduce: the philosophers call this “nature.” They say nature governs, although in truth, God governs. With a figurative shrug of the shoulders, the sage says, “Call it what you will, ‘nature,’ or ‘soul,’ or ‘power,’ or ‘angel’” (5.10/198.12, 16–17). The king, however, is more decisive in giving credit where credit is due. We may recall that at the beginning of his spiritual search, the king had pronounced the philosopher’s speech persuasive. He dismissed him only because that interlocutor could not satisfy his preoccupation with right actions. Now, after the sage’s very long presentation of the philosophers’ teaching about the soul, the king is mightily impressed. “I see that this philosophic account (or: speech [kalaˉm]) surpasses any other account in precision and accuracy” (5.13/208.15–16). It is a little shocking that the king should be so open to the power of philosophic argument after all these extended conversations with his Jewish mentor. The sage, however, is neither surprised nor shocked. He says that he had feared the king would be dazzled by the successes philosophers have achieved in the mathematical sciences and logic. He had feared that the king would then proceed to assume that the philosophers had attained comparable demonstrative knowledge of metaphysical matters. Not so! We have no need for the trickery (tah․ ayyul 5.14/210.10) to which the philosophers are forced to resort to hold fast to their premise that the world is eternal and yet still maintain that the soul will survive even after the body is no more. Thanks to a prophetic authority passed on by an authentic tradition, we are assured that a future life awaits us. That is all we know and all we are capable of knowing. There is no point in wasting your time and thought trying to logically verify or disconfirm all the various opinions about such matters. You might think, given all their talk about souls, that the philosophers would have mentioned that they have genuine knowledge in this respect, but in fact they are like the rest of mankind. Once again, the sage summons Socrates as his witness, quoting his words to the Athenians: “O people! I do not deny your divine wisdom; I say rather that I am not conversant with it. On the other hand, I am wise in human wisdom” (5.14/212.2–4; compare 4.13/164.15–17). The sage not only quotes from the Apology but also apologizes once more for the philosophers. They should be excused. Lacking both a tradition of prophecy and access to the divine light, they sought refuge in their ratiocination. They had nothing better to hand. The sage’s judgment of the philosophers as a class is, to say the least, mixed. As regards the demonstrative sciences, they are not to be surpassed and are of one mind. But when the subject turns to metaphysics and many things in physics as well, they fall into sectarian divisions and resort to farfetched hypotheses, “even less convincing than the Book of Creation.”

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But they should be excused in any case and also thanked for what they were able to conclude from nothing more than their own reasonings. They meant well, fulfilled the intellectual nomoi, and led pious, ascetic lives in this world. In any case they should be regarded as virtuous, since it is not incumbent on them to accept what we have [by way of revelation]. But we ourselves must accept what has been witnessed [by our ancestors] as well as the continuous tradition [that reports it], which is as valid as what has been witnessed. (5.14/212.17–213.3)

Far from being Epicureans and deniers of God, the philosophers now appear as decent folk. Their duties (such as they are) are self-imposed. Nothing indicates that they view themselves as having any duties toward God. At this late stage in the conversation, the sage apparently believes it safe to present the convert-king with a sketch of an alternate way of life. The king may have received a fuller account of the philosophers’ position than he bargained for, but he is still waiting to hear the sage address his other concern. It is only now, after delivering himself of a philosophic account, that the sage turns at last to the kalaˉm—but not without first pronouncing it to be often both useless and harmful. The grounds for his disparagement are of special relevance to the theme of this chapter and invite us once again to pause and consider how that critique might bear on the dramatic encounter enacted in Halevi’s pages. Just as the earlier assessment of the relative superiority of oral to written communication (2.2) made a reader conscious of the necessary limitations of this author’s representation of a dialogue, so too here, the sage’s reflections on teaching prod us to ponder the present engagement of mentor and pupil. It goes without saying that not everything can be taught to everyone in the same way.15 But now the sage’s critique of kalaˉm raises misgivings whether some things can be taught at all. This doubt emerges from the sharp contrast he draws between “the plain scholar” (al-‘aˉlim al-saˉdhaj 5.16/213.7) and “the master of theological disputation”(s․aˉ․hib al-kalaˉm 5.16/213.9), a contrast that highlights the simplicity, naïveté, and artlessness of the one and the dazzling showiness of the other. The simple scholar is outshone; he appears to be incapable of formally instructing another; and he does not respond to queries in the manner of the adroit dialectical theologian. Yet (and this is the sage’s unsettling point), this plain man whose soul is naturally inclined to15. The earlier discussion of God’s names has emphasized the different ways in which Adam, Cain, Abel, the patriarchs, Moses, the prophets, and the people came to know God (4.3/148.16–149.1).

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ward the articles of faith, at living by the religious law, and drawing close to God—it is precisely this unassuming person who can kindle sparks in a kindred soul. Individuals who are similarly inclined by nature respond to his slightest hint. The sage draws a parallel to someone who is naturally inclined to poetry but seems ignorant of poesy because he is unable to teach it. In contrast, there are people who read treatises on the subject, make blustery speeches about it, and labor to achieve what comes naturally to the gifted. Has it come down to this? You either have “it,” or you don’t. In that case, the king’s twice-expressed need for kala¯m arguments (5.1 and 5.15) is indeed a confession of his inadequacy. The sage delivers an executive summary of religious principles that is concise and ordered in an abstract, even scholastic fashion. Notwithstanding his citing of two proof texts from Genesis, his account is not specifically Jewish. Anyone who denies the pre-eternity of the world might subscribe to it. The Khazar king now has the aide-memoire for which he says his soul has been longing, but he remains unsatisfied. He regards the sage’s discourse to be a restatement of what someone else has said, a recounting as it were of a tradition that the sage accepts on faith but is willing to subject to further investigation. The king wants more. He wants the sage to express his own opinions and beliefs and to address the practical question of divine predestination and human free choice. The sage’s long response (5.20) is a testimonial to his sobriety, level-headedness, and candor. First, he disposes of the argument that an eristic fellow would make in denying the nature of what is possible. Such a person says what he does not believe; the very actions he himself performs when preparing for, or taking precautions against, contingencies belie his doctrine. The sage maintains that everything, to be sure, is traceable to God, but it is no derogation from God’s control to acknowledge that intermediary causes—divine, natural, coincidental, or freely chosen—also are at work in this world. How, then, ought one to account for utterly new phenomena? The multitude bolster their faith by ascribing all kinds of effects to God—falsely (or at least misleadingly). A discerning person (mumayyiz 5.20/219.18), in contrast, discriminates among causes and distinguishes peoples, individuals, times, places, and circumstances. What once happened to the Children of Israel was special in every respect, exhibited divine effects, and constitutes even today a proof against the Epicurean notion that all things happen by chance. Someone who adheres to a religious law wants above all to be pleasing to God. (The Khazar king’s own point of departure!) Rather than preoccupy himself with natural and chance causes, he puts himself in God’s hands by seeking divine inspiration. Yet this is not to say that a pious believer can dis-

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pense with developing and exercising foresight, prudence, and energy. On the contrary, if we behave negligently we become the authors of our disobedience and of the evil that befalls us. “An intelligent person does not flee to a place of [danger from a place of ] safety, just as he does flee from a place of danger to a place of safety” (5.20/221.20–21). What conclusions ought the king to draw from the sage’s discourse on predestination and chance? It is indeed a mixed message. When thinking about the extraordinary events that occurred when the divine presence dwelt among the Children of Israel, it is evident that all that was a result of God’s direct intention. Whether subsequent events, too, are to be understood likewise or, rather, as owing to the movements of the celestial spheres in their orbits or to chance is open to doubt—excepting, of course, in the hearts of the faithful. No decisive proof settles the question. But rather than leave his student in terminal suspense, the mentor draws a bottom line, so to speak, and offers a pious conclusion for the king (and others) to bear in mind: “The main thing is for everything to be ascribed to Him (exalted be He), especially all that is of great importance, like death, defeats, good fortune, and misfortune, and whatever else is similar to this” (5.20/225.5–6). It takes no further prompting from the king for the sage to extend and amend his conclusion. He admits candidly that such questions deserve investigation and now explicitly raises the issue of God’s justice. Yet our minds falter when trying to discern the fitness and principles of rewards and punishments specified in scripture and the rabbinic tradition. It is best to acknowledge that we are ignorant of the causes that might be at work, that our minds are too limited to pursue the matter, and that there is a veil of light that dazzles both our eyesight and our insight.16 Rather than ponder intricate questions of theodicy, one should simply trust in the knowledge and justice of God. This message of passive acceptance, featured so prominently as one approaches the conclusion of the Kuzari, is itself qualified not by a conflicting opinion but by a decisive action. The sage resolves to leave the land of the Khazars and go directly to Jerusalem. It would appear that the Zionist reproach with which the king had so shaken the sage (back in 2.20) has been simmering all this while. Can it be that he too has come to learn that his action does not match his intention? The king is loath to see his conversational partner go and tries to persuade him to 16. This is perhaps an allusion or at least a parallel to the distress and temporary blindness that overtake someone who is compelled to ascend from the cave and look directly into the light of the sun. Plato, Republic, bk. 7, 515c-516a.

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abandon so unnecessary and imprudent an undertaking. The divine presence has long since been gone from that ancestral land. If the objective is to draw near to God, why that could be accomplished anywhere—given a pure intention and a fervent desire. Furthermore, why burden oneself with the danger attending travel by land and sea and among different peoples? The king’s sensible counsel displays both his regard for the sage and his continuing dependence on him. It is also revealing of the king’s natural preoccupation with opinions and beliefs. Astonishingly enough, he seems to have forgotten those nocturnal messages to the effect that intention and desire are not enough. These must be accompanied by appropriate pleasing actions. Having been exposed to so much of the sage’s manner of thinking and speaking, a reader fully expects that the sage will have a ready response to the king’s plea. We may safely surmise that his decision to leave is neither abrupt nor ill considered. Yet we are not prepared for the highly personal tone that colors that response. We are offered a glimpse of a troubled soul who believes he has much to answer for. The sage begins by granting that the conditions that would render the divine presence visible to the eye do not prevail at present. It still remains a matter of wish and prayerful expectation. But the hidden, spiritual divine presence is within reach, so to speak, to any Israelite whose actions, purity of heart, and intention make him worthy of it. All this, however, can be achieved especially, or perhaps only, in Zion. It is even the case (so the sage asserts) that someone who comes from afar to that special place has a comparative advantage, all the more if he comes as a repentant sinner seeking expiation. The sage cites a rabbinic dictum, “Exile atones for sin,” adding, “especially if he were to immigrate to a place that is pleasing [to God]”17 (5.23/228.6–8). As for the charge that he is needlessly courting danger, the sage denies it outright. Considering what is at stake—devoting oneself to pleasing one’s Lord—it is worth taking greater risks than someone accepts in mercantile exchange and is in fact less hazardous than engaging in jihaˉd in anticipation of reward. Although the king has two more appeals (they are hardly arguments) to dissuade the sage, the latter is able to dispose of them in short order. For a lover of freedom, the sage behaves strangely by going to a land where it will be incumbent on him to fulfill additional religious obligations that are operative only there. The sage assures the king that the freedom he seeks is a release 17. If one takes the words of this passionate lover of Zion literally, he views his forthcoming return to Zion as an exile from his homeland in the Diaspora and to that extent an expiation in itself.

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from servitude to the many and the attempt to please them. In seeking instead to please God and serving Him, he expects to enjoy true freedom. But is not all this superfluous, given the sage’s earlier arguments? God already knows your intentions. Yes, that would have to suffice if it were humanly impossible to carry out the appropriate actions. “But man is given a free hand in what he hopes for and what he does, and so man is blameworthy if he does not wrest a clearly perceptible reward for a clearly perceptible action. . . . [Only] when intention and action have [each] been fulfilled is there a reward for them” (5.27/229.6–8, 12). With these parting words, the sage heads on his way, accompanied by a royal blessing. Does the king of the Khazars realize that the riddle of his dreams has been solved?

Chapter 10

On First Looking into Maimonides’ Guide

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” Living in an age beset with habits of haste and oversimplification, we hardly need to be encouraged to take yet another short cut. It might appear incongruous that this chapter should offer a deliberately naïve reading of a most complex work by an exceptionally subtle and nuanced thinker. There may be a time and place for popularized science or for what the French call high vulgarization, but Moses Maimonides’ masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, is a most unlikely candidate for such treatment. As becomes immediately clear on opening this work, Maimonides shunned addressing the vast majority of potential readers. He chose instead to speak to a specific kind of individual with distinctive preoccupations, qualifications, and aspirations. Anyone else, chancing upon this work and finding himself in a psychic condition comparable to that of its announced addressee, is urged to proceed ahead. All others, however, need not apply. Unfortunately, the obstacles to modern readers’ coming to grips with Maimonides’ way of writing are many. Some are of our making, some of his. We grow up on a diet of easy and rapid communication, bite- or byte-sized thoughts, and with the anticipation of nearly instant comprehension and response. Most of what is offered to today’s world of readers is expected to be grasped on the run, as it were, and amid the static and clatter of everyday life. In Maimonides’ world there were distractions enough to be sure, often

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involving matters of life and death. Yet in the midst of that tumult there were some classes of authors—and there is no denying that Maimonides was one of that number—who nursed grander aspirations for themselves and their readers. They required and expected an audience beyond the ordinary, individuals who would be uncommonly demanding and discriminating. One might compare such readers to connoisseurs of poetry or of Japanese screen painting or of fine furniture. Those capable of bringing more to their examination of a finely wrought work would get more from it. Such readers or viewers are alert for evidence of an artist’s skilled hand: a mastery of the chosen materials, signs of control in expression, and an ability to suggest and insinuate more than first meets the eye. They partake of the pleasure the creator of the work might have felt in testing his audience’s ability to discern and understand. If all this sounds snobbish and elitist to contemporary ears, it is because it is so. Here, then, is the first hurdle confronting modern democratic readers: they must adjust their habits of engaging with a text so as to conform better to a different kind of writing. Readers of the Guide are tested still more sorely by its author’s design. Even someone as qualified as the student to whom the work is addressed would find that Maimonides had set up hurdles in the text that seem to deliberately impede the reader’s progress. Maimonides as much as said so. Yet we are not free to dismiss such behavior as a bizarre perversity by which someone purporting to communicate a thought instead studiedly blocks or frustrates its transmission. Rarely does an author publish a book for himself alone; and there are no grounds for attributing this intention to Maimonides. In order, then, to ward off the disgust (or even anger) a reader might feel toward an author who seems to be trifling with him by making tempting offers but playing intellectual hide-and-seek, Maimonides (acting rather out of character) chose to tell the reader some stories. If we accept those stories on his sayso, we might reconcile ourselves to the author’s peculiar modus operandi. At the very least we might reserve final judgment until we learn more. We might come to see those impediments to quick and easy communication not as expressions of our author’s quirkiness but rather as efforts on his part to slow us down. Ordinarily we are too quick to judge and dismiss whatever new considerations first strike us as strange and threatening. Maimonides tried to create space for us, his readers, to develop stronger habits of care and reflection. Gradually we might come to suspend our comfortably familiar opinions and start thinking afresh. The experience of reading and studying the Guide is meant to be educating—provided that we are willing to work at it. One story told in the introduction to the Guide is an account of Maimonides’

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frustrations and failure to honor a promise made in his earlier Commentary on the Mishnah (1:Introd.).1 He had announced there that he planned to compose two books—the Book of Prophecy and the Book of Correspondence—dedicated to explaining “strange subjects” and resolving the seeming incongruities and absurdities abounding in talmudic homiletics when these are taken literally. But when he undertook that effort to identify parables and to explain figurative language, he found himself in a quandary. Not all recondite subjects could be presented in clear and distinct language. Just as we individually arrive at our understanding of difficult subjects by fits and starts, so too does our exposition of them to others proceed haltingly. Try as we may to lay these deep matters bare, we stumble and falter. In effect, Maimonides found himself recapitulating the experiences that had led those earlier sages (al-h.ukamaˉ’ ) and men of knowledge to resort to parables and riddles in the first place. Further, not all recondite subjects should be stated in clear and distinct language. For this assertion Maimonides called on the authority of the Jewish sages who insisted on the need to shield the “multitude” or the “vulgar” from unsettling thoughts about matters beyond their comprehension. In the face of this moral injunction, combined with the near-impossibility of rendering all obscurities transparent, Maimonides said he had to give up his project. This work, the Guide, was his substitute for those two never-completed books. In telling this story Maimonides in effect fired a warning shot across the reader’s bow. The way ahead will not be without its challenges. The second story in the introduction is not strictly speaking a narrative. But the reach of the claim Maimonides made is so grandiose that it strains our credulity and inclines us to treat it as an unlikely fiction. The claim is that every word in this treatise has been chosen with “great exactness and exceeding precision” and that everything is in its proper place. In short, those many features of the work that might reasonably strike a reader as irregular, awkward, confusing, or contradictory are so by design. The clear implication is that the author has exercised total control over all aspects of a very large work and that he has never nodded or stumbled. His work not only promises to make a virtuous man perfect but is itself perfect. A skeptical reader might dismiss all this as hyperbole. A pious reader might bristle at the notion that any human artifact could be perfect. He might be quick to recall what the Psalmist (19:8–9) saw fit to characterize as “perfect, restoring the soul”; “sure, 1. Parenthetical references are to part and chapter numbers (or, in this case, to an unnumbered introduction) in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). All direct quotations are from this translation.

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making wise the simple”; “right, rejoicing the heart”; and “pure, enlightening the eyes.” So when Maimonides promised at the end of his introduction that this creation of his would lead qualified readers to a place where their souls would find rest, their eyes be delighted, and their bodies be eased of toil and labor, he came close to assimilating his handiwork to the divine, his guide or torah to that given to Moses. It is a striking and even shocking move on an author’s part to set off this train of inferences. How are Maimonides’ intentions served by inducing a reader to consider this multifaceted and multilayered work of his as perfect? For one thing, that proud assertion might temper a reader’s own pride and assertiveness. One of its messages might be: “If you find something wanting in this treatise, don’t be quick to fault the author; look to your own shortcomings. To be sure, bashful and retiring students don’t learn, but neither do the overconfident and presumptuous. Approach this teacher’s lessons with the belief that he is acutely attentive to your strengths and limitations; that he wishes you well and will help you cultivate the capacity to attain what both of you wish for yourself.” Maimonides was far from attempting to inculcate servile obedience in a student. But neither could he assume that his student already possessed the needed modesty, patience, dedication, and intellectual daring. Such traits had to be developed and supported through repeated exercise. In the end, those who stayed the course with a master who knew what he was about would be rewarded. It is in that spirit of openness, trust, and naïveté that we set off on our voyage. On this, at least, Maimonides was explicit and unequivocal: his Guide of the Perplexed is not addressed to beginners. Yet even a highly competent reader who ventures into the work for the first or second time is willy-nilly a beginner. This masterpiece may be likened to a mysterious forest with tangled underbrush, obscure trails, and slanting shafts of sunlight illuminating scattered openings in its dense foliage. Although the author promises to relieve his intended reader’s perplexity, the course of enlightenment he offers generates new perplexities of its own. The reader who hopes to benefit from Maimonides’ guidance quickly discovers that he cannot sit back and simply wait for solid advice and liberating truth to wash over him. Far from addressing passive readers, Maimonides demanded active engagement on the part of any alert and intelligent mind wishing to be guided by him. It follows as a matter of course that this author was fully reconciled to being able to reach only a very select few. A beginner, then, might well ask, “Where does this leave me?” Maimonides’

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forbidding stance offers few inducements to persevere. It seems to suggest, rather, “Here is a first test of your fitness.” This is not to imply that readers of the Guide are left on their own to drill down to Maimonides’ semiconcealed teaching. Auxiliary aids in the form of paraphrases and commentaries have hovered around this text since the thirteenth century, offering a helping hand to those in need. But those aids already presume a background in scripture, rabbinic literature, theology, and philosophy that cannot realistically be presumed in most US college students and instructors today. Entry into the world of the Guide has to proceed otherwise. The present chapter attempts to address that audience’s needs, but without any pretensions to sufficiency. It assumes that a beginner’s initial bafflement arises from an uncertainty about the structure and movement of the Guide as a whole. One can see a bewildering number and variety of trees but is hard pressed to grasp the character of the forest. The approach to be adopted here is designedly partial, simple, and straightforward. It takes the author at his word. He made large claims for his text, implying a level of perfection and control more credible in a composer of haiku verse than in an author of a work of many hundreds of pages. That assertion along with many others made by Maimonides will be accepted here at face value. No regard will be paid to the substantial manuscript and other evidence showing how the text of the Guide was very much a work in progress, being altered, corrected, and reworked over a course of years even as its installments were being circulated in public. Nor, in the absence of a modern critical edition that collates all the many manuscripts and fragments of Maimonides’ text, can we be confident that any particular irregularity is intentional and not accidental. But rather than engage in surmises, we shall put all that aside. For our present purposes the decisive fact is that Maimonides presented his work, with all its seeming irregularities, as a perfected whole, as a product of his vast ambition to transmit his coherent understanding of matters human and divine. That constitutes an invitation, even an injunction, to enter his forest and to concentrate on following the path as he laid it out. Let us then begin.

Opening Poem The Guide of the Perplexed is framed by two brief Hebrew poems, composed respectively of twenty-six and nineteen words. These verses are constructed out of biblical phrases, but the message is emphatically Maimonides’ own. The theme is of a traveler, a seeker on a road that is inviting for some but closed for others. Maimonides offers his knowledge to the traveler; it can

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serve as a means or road sign for the trip that lies ahead. But in the end each seeker must make his own way, focusing his powers and thoughts as best he can on the great end in view: apprehending God as he is in truth, and drawing close to him.

E p i st l e D e d i cato ry The proximate cause of the composition of the Guide is the interruption of a private course of instruction. Owing to unexplained circumstances, the student who once came from Morocco in the west to be instructed by Moses ben Maimon in Egypt has now moved on eastward. In that interim Maimonides had taught Joseph ben Judah face to face. That intimacy permitted the teacher to gauge his student’s strengths and weaknesses, his progress and his wayward confusions. Earlier, Joseph’s poems had persuaded Maimonides of his intellectual qualities and of the genuineness of his yearnings for theoretical studies, enough so that the master took on the pupil for what might have been a comprehensive course of instruction. But apart from the fact that this program of intimate education was brought to an abrupt end, the tastes and temperament of Joseph gave a peculiar cast to what Maimonides could accomplish. Their interactions reflect an enduring truth: a teacher must begin where his students are. Joseph’s eagerness to learn is reflected in his avidity and impatience. Rather than follow Maimonides’ orderly progress through the sciences, Joseph was ready to rush to the end of the road. Maimonides suggests that Joseph is not yet ready to study physics and metaphysics. For all his accomplishments Joseph still lacks the proper foundations for reaching his goal. An otherwise intelligent man, without a proper grounding in the sciences, is bound to fall short. It was to be expected too that a believing Jew, once he became aware of the issues raised by modern science, would fall into perplexity, perhaps even stupefaction. The Guide is Maimonides’ lengthy response to a cry from afar calling for help. Addressed first to Joseph, it is intended also for the Josephs of any time or place, “however few they are.” This dedicatory letter to Joseph, like all the rest of the Guide, is composed in Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Middle Arabic written usually (as here) in Hebrew characters and which was the lingua franca of Jews living in the Islamicate world. The choice of language, it is worth noting, was a choice Maimonides was free to make. Had he so preferred, he could have composed in Hebrew (as he did in the case of his restatement of the Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah). That would have made his work directly accessible to troubled Jewish com-

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munities everywhere, even those lying far from the Arabic-speaking world in northern France and the Rhineland—but at the price of forgoing a language with a highly developed philosophical terminology. It is not surprising, then, that Maimonides would write a work of this character in Judeo-Arabic. Had he so wished, he could have written in Arabic script, stripping his text of its Hebrew cross-dressing. That would have made his work readily accessible to a sophisticated intellectual elite stretching from Central Asia through North Africa to Andalusia, a realm of learning in which Maimonides was deeply immersed—but at the risk of exposing his thoughts to Muslim critics and censors. He chose to do neither, leaving readers with the distinct impression that the Guide is some kind of hybrid. The chosen language is indeed itself a hybrid, and the very many Hebrew and Aramaic words and fragments that Maimonides strews through the work, apart from its quotations from biblical and rabbinic texts, only serve to accentuate that composite character. In an odd way this very mixture undercuts the sense that there is anything strange about it. Author and addressee are on familiar terms; they can speak with ease and as they please with the confidence bred of past intimacy. It is, of course, not uncommon for bilingual or multilingual correspondents to move freely from one language to another even within the confines of a letter. But this sprawling work, a treatise in the guise of a letter, announces itself as something altogether unique, the production of an author who has left nothing to chance, an author whose every word is deliberate and determined. As noted earlier, we accept rather than challenge this assertion for our present purposes; we mean, rather, to look at the Guide as it presents itself. We would, if we could, like to try to imagine Joseph’s reaction on reading Maimonides’ first installment, an introduction laying out its author’s intentions as well as a guide to how to read all the many chapters yet to come. But that effort, however tempting, is beyond our powers. All we can know for certain is our own excitement and surprise on first entering the antechamber of the Guide.

Introduction The introduction to the work fills out the sketchy picture of Maimonides’ addressee. Going beyond Joseph, it represents the psychic landscape of a man in the grip of a perplexity he cannot shake. At one level it would seem that the problem is linguistic. Without a clear sense of the kinds of terms used in scripture, the uninformed reader falls victim to either literalism or free-floating fancies. Having been exposed to enough of the sciences of the philosophers to see that their account is not congruent with the apparent meaning of the

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books of prophecy, that reader finds himself stranded and bereft. If he relinquishes his prior understanding of scriptural language, he will feel as though he has renounced the very foundations of the religious law. But should he choose rather to disown the conclusions of his intellect and remain faithful to his earlier notions, he will be no happier, regarding himself and his faith much diminished by the experience of doubt. Maimonides makes it clear that he is addressing not any and every perplexed believer but only qualified readers. His is not an open road; as the initial poem insists: “The unclean and the fool shall not pass over it.” In an enlarged sense all of Maimonides’ writings and activities can be taken to express his concern for the survival of his coreligionists and devotion to their welfare. In that respect his contributions and sacrifices for the House of Israel have been massive. But this preoccupation with the community might seem much muted in the pages of the Guide. His concern here is focused on the rare, the exceptional, the singular soul capable of striving for the highest. Thus it is no surprise that the introduction warns off unqualified browsers from even loitering within the covers of this treatise. What is perhaps surprising is that among those dismissed and waved away, along with the multitude (“the vulgar”) and mere beginners in theoretical studies, are “those who have not engaged in any study other than the study of the law—I mean the legalistic study of the law.” It speaks volumes that the greatest post-talmudic scholar of the Jewish law should contrast all that with what he is now undertaking in the Guide—“the science of law in its true sense.” Maimonides specifies two “purposes” that the Guide is meant to accomplish: the explanation of possibly misleading scriptural terms and the explanation of obscure or possibly misleading scriptural parables. There is no reason to assume that this exhausts the author’s purposes, even though it hews closely to the diagnosis of what ails Joseph. For Maimonides turns immediately to indicating how far short this treatise will fall of solving all of the reader’s perplexity, and suggesting how much more the reader may discover in the pages to come. Think of a reader’s engagement with an author’s text as a field of forces with a different dynamic for each engagement. Does the subject matter admit of lucid, linear explanation? Is the teacher’s mastery of the subject up to the challenge of leading another to the appropriate level of understanding? What skills, knowledge, and native intelligence does the reader bring to his study? The fine adjustments that these variables demand could be made by a skilled teacher who attended to the subtle signs that the student before him was or was not making progress. That was precisely what

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Maimonides did in the days when he and Joseph were locked in intimate conversation. But now all that is profoundly changed. In committing his side of the conversation/instruction to paper and ink, Maimonides can hope to overcome the distance that now separates him from his student, but at a significant cost. Suggestions once whispered in private are now broadcast, open to any uncomprehending or malevolent spirit who might happen upon them. Taking his cue from the practice of the inspired texts (according to his interpretation of scripture) and from the injunctions of the talmudic sages, Maimonides offers Joseph and those like him an astonishing gift: a treatise that will sort out and segregate its readers according to their capacities. It will explicate and conceal; it will attract and repel; it will solve puzzles and generate more than a few of its own. Scripture thus serves as a subject of explication and as a model of composition and camouflage. Maimonides makes parables of his own while explaining the parables of the prophets. He offers repeated instances of his way of reading scripture and at the same time instructs readers in how to approach his own text. In each case, we are to conclude, the surface of apparent meaning is the beginning of our inquiry. With a more adequate understanding of the author’s intentions in composing his work will come a greater awareness of the wisdom lying at its core. It is safe to say that among the most accessible parts of the Guide are those many chapters where Maimonides, like a lexicographer, lays out the various senses that a term carries in biblical usage, and the many places where he signals that a scriptural account is to be taken as a parable or figuratively rather than literally. This much, at least, is plain for all to see. Maimonides concludes his introduction with a section headed “Instruction with respect to this treatise.” He enjoins qualified readers to immerse themselves “constantly” in this work. It is a fair inference that the author does not expect readers to outgrow the Guide. The issues it stirs and the scientific problems it explores would fill all the days of our lives. Assiduous students will come to comprehend more and more. What if they detect Maimonides moving beyond his cited authorities and breaking new ground? Rather than share the news, students are urged to keep those observations to themselves. Maimonides means to maintain a low profile in a world that does not hold claims of originality in high esteem. At the same time he makes a claim for his work that is probably unique in philosophic literature and breathtaking in its display of confidence. After presenting a classification of the seven possible causes that might account for the presence of contradictory or contrary statements in any particular book or composition, he goes on to assert that all such

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statements in this treatise are deliberate or dictated by the necessities entailed in teaching difficult and obscure matters. All cannot be explained at once, and the teacher is obliged to offer a partial account based on one set of premises to be followed later by a fuller or deeper account based on another premise. Homer may nod; so also do “scholars who write books” who are oblivious of contradictions buried deep in their arguments. Not so Maimonides: “Know this, grasp its true meaning, and remember it very well so as not to become perplexed by some of its chapters.” To readers who can work their way through the puzzles posed by the Guide, Maimonides promises ultimate rest, delight, and ease. But first they must labor. To an extent yet to be discovered, the Guide will address two large subjects: the “Account of the Beginning” and the “Account of the Chariot.”2 The mere mention of these names suffuses the text with a sense of mystery, secrecy, danger, and caution. Modern liberal sensibilities may well be baffled by the notion that investigating certain subjects is comparable to venturing into a minefield. And what are we to think when being told that the talmudic sages were so fearful of openly discussing these mysteries that they resorted to coded language, riddles, and parables even when speaking of these matters in private with trusted companions? Bafflement may give way to parody. Yet neither Maimonides nor the sages whose behavior he claims to be following can be dismissed as victims of a semidelusional conspiracy theory. Consider the divinely prescribed laws regarding actions as an expression of God’s wish that we be perfected and that our communities be improved. Adherence to those laws and performance of those actions presupposes our first adopting certain opinions or beliefs, most elementally that we can conceive of a supreme being and further that he knows and cares about us. At this point Maimonides proceeds to attribute to the sages an equivalence never stated by them and perhaps never even contemplated by them: that the “Account of the Chariot” corresponds to what the philosophers call “metaphysics,” and that the “Account of the Beginning” corresponds to “physics.” Whatever his predecessors, ancient and modern, may have had in mind, none had gone as far as Maimonides now goes in explicitly connecting scriptural and rabbinic figurative language to Aristotle’s philosophy. The fundamental beliefs or opinions that underpin the practices of an adherent of the religious law are thus to be viewed from a distinctly philosophic perspective. Such opinions are in the realm of “divine science” or metaphysics; and that science already 2. In earlier times these terms designated mystical or magical esoteric studies. As used by Maimonides, they correspond to modern (i.e., Aristotelian) physics and metaphysics.

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presupposes a natural science or physics as its basis. The sages, then, were correct in understanding that an investigation into the “Account of the Beginning” and the “Account of the Chariot” was an investigation into the very foundations of the entire legal superstructure of the Jewish faith. The implications of such an inquiry, to say nothing of its possible findings, might have the most far-reaching consequences. Avid, impatient Joseph had this, too, to learn. There are no short cuts to learning the highest matters: one must begin at the beginning.

Views Concerning God (1:1–70) Tracing the twists and turns, the ins and outs, of each of Maimonides’ chapters in the Guide would strain even the most extensive commentary. With every new observation or discovery, the configuration of the work as a whole begins to appear in a somewhat different light. An enterprise of such magnitude is certainly beyond our powers and most likely beyond the needs of an intelligent reader approaching the Guide for the first or second time. We will focus instead on some large features of Maimonides’ presentation, noting especially those that might surprise or undermine our expectations. The first chapter of the first part of the work proceeds as promised. It opens a series of lexicographic chapters, continuing with some interruptions until 1:70, in which one or more biblical terms is announced and then illustrated, each in its different significations, literal and figurative. Some of these terms appear in two verses in particular to which Maimonides gives special attention. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). “And the figure of the Lord shall he look upon” (Num. 12:8). These biblical verses, among many others, invite the easy conclusion that God resembles us even while surpassing us in every imaginable respect (size, power, knowledge, wrath, mercy, etc.). The critical point is that the Bible’s language encourages imaginings that render God corporeal, a being capable of physical movement (drawing near or absenting himself from us) and psychic change (growing angry, regretting, opening himself to pleas). Yet such tendencies are profoundly at odds with the main intention of scripture, which (according to Maimonides) is to extirpate idolatry, even the very memory of it. Any thought that corporealizes God draws us farther from that incomprehensible, utterly transcendent being before whose perfection we ought only to stand in speechless awe. How, then, is one to understand this seeming paradox: that scripture might foster the very thought it hates? Maimonides’ answer is developed through the length and breadth of this

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treatise and constitutes, when considered as a whole, an entire psychology and sociology of learning. If man is indeed created in the image of God, it is not by virtue of sharing an analogous shape and configuration. Rather, it is our human capacity for knowing—the potentiality that sets us apart from all other worldly beings and whose actualization renders that individual but little lower than the divine. Maimonides devotes an entire chapter to the biblical account of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden (1:2). His striking interpretation stresses what our earliest ancestors lost rather than gained by eating the forbidden fruit. Whereas Adam (perfect as God created him) at first focused on intellectual apprehension, distinguishing truth from falsehood, he now was overcome by the desires of his imagination and by bodily pleasures. The opening of his and Eve’s eyes—“and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7)—is in fact an eclipsing of intellectual clarity by generally accepted opinions, a preoccupation with conventional notions of what is acceptable and what is shameful. For Maimonides, regaining that primordial orientation, refocusing on distinguishing truth from falsehood, is the distinctive concern of a truly human life. That is the destination at the end of Maimonides’ road, which he identifies with the apprehension of God as he is in truth. For all the persistence that Maimonides displays in opening the eyes of readers of scripture to the multiple meanings of its terms, his analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive. He is not composing a dictionary of Hebrew based on historical principles. His is not an account of the range of meanings available to speakers of that language. Rather, he cites whatever he cites “for our purposes and no others” (1:10). This reasserts his earlier claim of complete authorial control. We are to understand that the Guide, despite its many words and digressions, is a lean and taut composition. An example of that economy can be seen in two very brief chapters (1:6 and 14) in which Maimonides unpacks the meanings of two biblical words signifying “man” and distinguishes them from each other. The word ’ish means a human male, or the male of any species. The word ’adam refers to the first man of that name, or the species as a whole, or the multitude as distinguished from the elite (citing Ps. 49:3—“Both the sons of man [bene ’adam] and the sons of an individual [bene ’ish]”).3 In explicating scripture’s usage, Maimonides simultaneously sheds retrospective light on his own. In the epigraph that stands at the head of the introduction to this treatise, he had inserted a verse from 3. This sharp distinction is thoroughly blurred at the end of 3:13 when Maimonides interprets Job 15:16 in the light of Exod. 21:12.

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Proverbs (8:4): “Unto you, O men [pl., ’ishim], I call, / And my voice is to the sons of man [bene ’adam].” Rather than reading this verse as yet another instance of those synonymous parallelisms so common in biblical poetry (each line presenting the same thought twice), the attentive student can now see that Maimonides is once again discriminating among his potential readers. Although ordinary human beings can benefit from some of his more accessible chapters—for example, those distinguishing the various meanings of certain words used in scripture—his deeper message, by design, is lost on them. His call is directed to individuals, humans in more than shape, individuals of whom one might rightly say that they are in the image of God. The sound of Maimonides’ voice, in contrast, can be heard by anyone, though his message is neither addressed to them nor likely to be grasped by them. Maimonides hastens to disabuse readers of any notion they might have that his caution is restricted to matters pertaining to divine science, or metaphysics. The considerations that dictate concealment, resort to similes, and the use of ambiguous language apply to discussions of the principles of natural science as well. Nor are those restraints peculiar to communities constituted under a revealed law, where one might suppose teachers would be anxious lest they be charged with subverting established doctrine and corrupting others. No, Maimonides says, pointing to the riddling speech of “the philosophers and learned men of the various communities in ancient times.” Consider that Plato and his predecessors among the pagans were concerned not even to appear to be rattling the prevailing opinions of the multitude. How much more is comparable caution “incumbent upon us” (1:17). Some such blend of social responsibility and fear for one’s own safety might account for the guarded public presentations of men of science. But that still leaves unexplained why God’s book should adopt a style of speech at odds with its ulterior purpose. Maimonides’ short answer (although not put in these terms) is that we humans model our heaven after our earth. If we descendants of a fallen Adam and Eve were to grasp anything about God—his existence, his perfection, and the like—it had to be cast in terms we understand to constitute existence and perfection among us. God’s speech to human beings thus made a massive accommodation to human imaginings and adapted itself to the limits of most men’s understandings. In a bravura act of appropriation, Maimonides adduces a saying of the talmudic sages in support of his interpretation. “The Torah speaks in the language of the sons [or: children] of man [bene ’adam]” (1:26, citing B.T., Yebamoth, 71a, and many other places). That dictum had been generally understood to mean that the Bible uses ordinary language so as to be intelligible to ordinary people; there is no need for elaborate interpre-

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tation. Maimonides takes the sages to be asserting something quite different. Scripture speaks as it does about God—corporealizing him and anthropomorphizing him—because the bulk of its addressees literally cannot conceive of a supreme being lacking what we would consider perfections in us. The price of popular acceptance of, and belief in, the God of Abraham is the reinforcement of the demonstrably false notions predicated of God to which most people have grown accustomed. With this, Maimonides has pointed to the core of Joseph’s perplexity and shown him how to resolve it. Maimonides’ explanation, directed to “those whose souls grasp at human perfection,” now positions those who understand him to “put an end to the fantasies that come to them from the age of infancy” (1:26). Still further orientation is needed for those who, like Joseph, are eager for the truth but remain impatient and insufficiently self-disciplined. Maimonides is obliged once again to interrupt his run of lexicographic chapters devoted to scripture’s use of equivocal terms. Aspirants to the highest truths need to be forewarned against entertaining unreasonable hopes or being unreasonably disappointed (1:31). However genuine may be our desire to apprehend something, we can have no assurance that our individual capacity is up to the mark, or even that the demonstrative knowledge we seek is possible for us humans. Nor are matters helped by the disputes that surround so many questions in divine science and even some in natural science. Such disagreements serve to distract and dissuade seekers from following the proper road. Why do these conflicts persist? In response Maimonides looks to the analysis of a late second-century commentator on Aristotle’s works. The causes of disagreement were anciently said by Alexander of Aphrodisias to be the love of domination and victory, the sheer difficulty of apprehending an obscure object, and the inherent limitations of the seeker. Nowadays, Maimonides adds, we suffer from a handicap the ancients did not have: habit and upbringing. Texts invested with the highest conceivable authority have accustomed people to mistaking images for the truth. This is a cast of mind from which they cannot readily extricate themselves. Maimonides tries to inculcate different habits, beginning with a habit of moderation. Our eagerness to apprehend some truth may cause us to be carried away, to the point that we tire ourselves needlessly and actually grow duller in our perceptions (1:32). Or we may be too quick to persuade ourselves that things are so, or are impossible, without regard to a full consideration of what is or can be known. These various forms of immoderation and the delusions to which they lead bear witness to the necessity and wisdom of scripture’s mode of pedagogy. Pace Joseph, one cannot begin one’s stud-

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ies with the divine science (1:33). Nor ought one to publicize and broadcast the meaning of the prophets’ parables or the figurative senses of scriptural terms. (Hence Maimonides’ own guarded presentation in this treatise.) This is heady stuff, too rich a diet (so to speak) for the immature to digest. Out of regard, then, for the intellectual limitations of the bulk of mankind, the Torah presents an image of the true opinions it means to inculcate. These representations of God’s existence, unity, and so on, are by no means the proofs that a fully capable aspirant to perfection would seek and accept, but they are well adapted to scripture’s primary audience. Most people can accept the Torah’s sound opinions on the basis of tradition and rest satisfied with that. The camouflaging of scripture’s true opinions is not, Maimonides insists, owing to the subversive character of those opinions or because of something bad being hidden in them. This is the kind of misconception to which pseudointellectuals are prone. They do not grasp what you, the reader of this treatise, must understand: the several causes that prevent beginning instruction with divine science, and indicating the things that need to be indicated, and presenting all this to the multitude. It takes Maimonides a long chapter (1:34) to detail the psychological and social constraints that shaped the Bible’s pedagogy and still obtain even today. He does not underestimate the problem when he declares that the obstacles to perfection are very many and that the objects that distract from it abound. If the only way of gaining an awareness of God’s existence were through a demanding and disciplined course of speculative scientific studies, who would escape dying in the perdition of this ignorance other than a “few solitary individuals that are ‘the remnant whom the Lord calls’” (citing Joel 3:5)? The Bible was obliged to adopt another way. It would be hard to exaggerate the rigor with which Maimonides insists on the distinction between knowledge and opinion, between truth and belief. One might be mistaken about any number of things, but the gravity of one’s deviation from the truth turns on the greatness of the thing being misperceived (1:36). In a striking adoption of a term with theological overtones, Maimonides defines infidelity or disbelief (kufr) as belief about a thing that differs from what that thing really is. If, as he further states, ignorance is strictly speaking ignorance of what is possible for us to know, we cannot plead ignorance in defense (or mitigation) of our literal readings of scripture’s figurative language. Given that the popular Aramaic translations of scripture (those of Onqelos and Jonathan) then read in all synagogues thoroughly strip away any language that might suggest God is a body or subject to bodily feelings, ignorance can be no excuse. We are left then with this severe conclusion: the multitude of believers who accept the corporealizing implications of the Bible’s

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figurative language are themselves guilty of the greatest disbelief. “Such a man is indubitably more blameworthy than a worshipper of idols who regards the latter as intermediaries or as having the power to do good or ill” (1:36). As one moves through the Guide it becomes increasingly clear that the root of the problem that Maimonides is addressing is not the general public’s unawareness of equivocal terms or failure to recognize figurative speech. The problem lies deeper than that. It is hard to resist the thought that the concessions made to the intellectual limitations of their intended audience by authors of books have rendered popular misunderstanding of God’s essence more intractable. Most people find it easy to utter a certain notion, believing it to be true, and leave it at that (1:50). Without going to the further trouble of reaching beyond the words and representing that notion in one’s soul— without seeking certain knowledge about that notion, without drawing out its premises and implications, without trying to establish its truth or falsity— “you take a very easy road” (1:50). Maimonides sees a world, his world, suffused with insignificant speech. If people knew some of the useful teachings of natural science, they would see the absurdity of declaring God’s unity while positing certain attributes of him that imply compositeness and change and anything but true Oneness. Far from affirming God’s greatness and honoring him, our dwelling on these attributes and even multiplying them for good measure distracts us from concentrating on those matters that are within the reach of human understanding. Scripture reports that when Moses was denied being able to see God’s “face” or “glory,” he was shown instead God’s “back” or “goodness” (1:21, 37). Maimonides interprets as follows: apprehending God’s essence is beyond us, but knowledge of his actions, of the whole of existence that he created, is indeed our proper business. Reflecting on the goodness of this world of ours, the talmudic sages ascribed to God the kinds of moral qualities that evidence of such goodness would bespeak in a human actor. This figurative attribution of human qualities to God (being merciful, gracious, longsuffering, and so on [Exod. 34:6–7]), puts a human face on a mysterious god, but more importantly provides a divine model for human governance (1:54). The main point, however, should not be lost sight of: whatever qualities are ascribed to God are attributes of his actions as embodied in the world he created and sustains, not that God himself actually possesses such qualities. The most we can safely say about his unfathomable essence without inadvertently denigrating God is to indicate what he is not. Thereby we give voice to the utter lack of correspondence between him and everything else. But best of all,

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Maimonides says, is to follow the injunctions of “the perfect ones when they said, ‘Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah’” (1:59, citing Ps. 4:5).

C r e at i o n o r E t e r n i t y ? ( 1 : 7 1 – 2 : 31 ) Yet in fact Maimonides cannot leave it at that. By the time he reaches the end of the first long run of lexicographic chapters he has made the reader aware of how much depends on one’s understanding of the natural world and particularly of astronomy or cosmology. Maimonides’ proofs for the existence of God are intimately intertwined with his acceptance of the Aristotelian shape of the universe. He pronounces the diurnal movement of the heaven “the greatest proof through which one can know the existence of the deity” (1:70). Such an assertion can bring little comfort to a Jewish reader who is aware of the yawning void in his community’s cultural heritage as regards natural science, to say nothing of celestial mechanics. Nor are the strained efforts Maimonides is obliged to make to find scattered hints in the rabbinic texts much of a consolation. It would appear that a believing Jew who takes up Maimonides’ challenge to liberate himself from childish imaginings and rise to a genuine intellectual apprehension of the divine has no option but to seek outside his tradition. How can this be? And how is he to find his way through the contending accounts, at odds with one another and, most significantly, with the core Jewish belief that a creator once brought this visible universe into being through his word, or will, or wisdom? For all that these next chapters (1:71–2:31) occupy almost 30 percent of Maimonides’ text, they are no substitute for the systematic curriculum that the teacher had wished for Joseph. An ideal reader would be inspired or provoked by the condensed account offered here to seek remedial education elsewhere. After learning from the many non-Jewish books in which demonstrative proofs are made, he might then return profitably to Maimonides’ account of those proofs and read them with deeper understanding. But that is not the immediate purpose of this work, and Maimonides is ever mindful of the perplexity that propelled Joseph (and those like him) to seek out this teacher in the first place. It is indeed surprising, even shocking, that an intelligent believer in search of a nonrhetorical proof for the existence of his god can barely find any trace of such a proof in his religious community’s authoritative texts. Maimonides addresses this perplexity at the outset:

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Know that the many sciences devoted to establishing the truth regarding these matters that have existed in our religious community have perished because of the length of the time that has passed, because of our being dominated by the pagan nations, and because, as we have made clear, it is not permitted to divulge these matters to all people. For the only thing it is permitted to divulge to all people are the texts of the books. (1:71)

This is not an instance of overdetermined causes. Separately, each of these might suffice to explain the near-invisibility of physics and metaphysics among the Jews, but each carries its own distinct implications. Time erodes most things, and traditions are no exception. (Elsewhere in the Guide [1:61, 67], Maimonides remarks that we know very little about the Hebrew language and its pronunciation in antiquity.) Then, too, the oppression and instability and sadness that afflict a people unable to live its distinctive life in a land it can call its own are powerful distractions and disincentives from engaging in focused scientific studies. But Maimonides’ reminder of the strict rabbinic injunctions against the public teaching of the “mysteries of the Torah” opens the possibility that this ancient wisdom has not vanished altogether but rather remains where it has always been, below the surface—out of sight for most, but not out of mind for those for whom it is fit (1:71). This is all the opening Maimonides needs. There was in Maimonides’ time a substantial body of polemical literature in the three monotheistic religious communities (most of all among the Muslims, least among the Jews), that addressed the challenge posed by the ancient pagan philosophic traditions. At issue for the religionists was establishing in the eyes of all God’s existence, oneness, and incorporeality, and most urgently the doctrine of the temporal creation of the world (or at least  the refutation of its pre-eternity). The chapter in which Maimonides unearths the origins, motivations, and methods of those who took up this challenge— the dialectical theologians or Mutakallimu¯n—is a tour de force (1:71). By his account, dialectical theology (kalaˉm) owes its origin to the resistance early Christians encountered when proselytizing in Greek and Syrian lands. These were communities in which philosophy had first risen and where the philosophers’ opinions were widespread. All could see how greatly opposed the new Christian doctrine was to the philosophic opinions. To meet and overcome that resistance, preachers developed “the science of kala¯m.” They selected from among earlier philosophic opinions and adopted premises with an eye principally or solely to their usefulness in supporting and defending their sect’s particular opinions. With the rise of Islam even greater energy and

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ingenuity were invested in this activity. There is a perceptible edge to Maimonides’ detailed analysis of kalaˉm, traceable to the offense he takes at seeing special pleading parading as philosophy. Subsequent generations reading the writings of the dialectical theologians neither recognize nor understand the single-minded thoroughness with which those men recast that which exists— nature itself—to conform to the opinions they were promoting. Now when I considered this method of thought, my soul felt a very great aversion to it, and had every right to do so. For every argument deemed to be a demonstration of the temporal creation of the world is accompanied by doubts and is not a cogent demonstration except among those who do not know the difference between demonstration, dialectics, and sophistic argument. (1:71)

Given that philosophers have disagreed for millennia about the question, whether the world is eternal or was created, and given that so much hinges on that question—namely, proving the existence, unity, and incorporeality of the deity—a radically different approach is called for. However sublime it would be for believers to refute the philosophers’ proofs for the eternity of the world, the truth of the matter is that no cogent demonstration is accessible to the human intellect. The better course would be to prove God’s existence, unity, and incorporeality on the basis of the philosophers’ premise of eternity. With these solid and certain demonstrations in hand, adherents of revealed religion could then turn to mustering as strong an argument as they can (albeit short of a genuine demonstration) in support of their doctrine of the creation of the world. The great advantage of his method of proceeding, Maimonides claims, is that it is built on a solid foundation; it preserves the phenomena of the observable world. The response of the dialectical theologians to the philosophers’ challenge, in contrast, has been to pursue problematic ways of analysis and proof. Maimonides’ restatement of their premises and methods (1:73–76), masterly in its clarity and coherence, highlights how far the Mutakallimu¯n were willing to go to support a belief in God’s continuing, omnipresent interventions in the world. If their arguments are to be credited, everything that exists or occurs flows from an unknowable, arbitrary, boundless divine will. In such a world one cannot speak of a stable nature or of regularities indicating cause and effect. Rather, anything that can be imagined might well come to pass. It all depends on how an inscrutable god chooses to make and mix the atoms of which everything is composed. Recoiling from such a mode of procedure, Maimonides first presents a summary view of what is known—

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through demonstration rather than fantasy—about this existent world. This, and only this, can be the basis for solid inferences proving the existence of God. Next, the great systematizer presents a detailed analytic account of the premises and methods of the Mutakallimu¯n, ending with an exhortation to the thinking reader. Let him focus on the quest for truth; let him “cast aside passion, blind following of authority, and obeisance to what you are accustomed to hold great” (1:76). Let him, in short, leave behind these ingenious subterfuges and examine the premises and demonstrations of those who are guided by the permanent nature of what exists, a nature that can be apprehended by the senses and the intellect. On turning to the philosophic or Peripatetic understanding of the questions under discussion, Maimonides once again musters his powerful analytic skills (2:Introd.-4). Now, however, his treatment is free of those expressions of contempt that marked his chapters on the Mutakallimu¯n, even while insisting on the chasm that separates Aristotle from the beliefs of the religious community. Notwithstanding his express regard for the philosopher’s achievements, Maimonides cannot and does not subscribe to what he presents as the decisive Aristotelian premise: that affirming as necessary the eternity of the world. That premise leaves no possible basis for a belief in miracles, in God’s special providence for Israel, and in prophecy (2:25). At this stage of his argument, however, Maimonides’ focus is elsewhere. He has first to trace out the implications of Aristotelian physics as they demonstrate the existence of God, refute belief in his corporeality, and establish his unity. Before proceeding further into an examination of Aristotle’s cosmology and the question of its compatibility with scriptural teaching, he directs a special advisory to his reader (2:2). One should not mistake the Guide for a textbook or even a summary of natural science or divine science or cosmology. Offering that forms no part of Maimonides’ plan; for the actual demonstrations of those premises, a reader has to turn to the substantial books others have devoted to these subjects. In raising these matters at all, Maimonides claims to be guided by his original intention of elucidating some difficult points in the law and in the prophetic writings. One might say that Maimonides resorts to Greek mathematics, science, and philosophy in search of a key to scripture. In pursuit of that objective he adopts Aristotle’s deductions about the existence of separate intellects, the interface so to speak between heaven and our terrestrial world. Maimonides allows that these are “simple assertions” on Aristotle’s part, but (compared to the views of others) subject to the fewest misgivings and lending themselves to be harmonized with scriptural and rabbinic sayings (2:3). There is a whiff of special pleading when Maimonides

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finds support in Aristotle for the Jewish understanding of angels as incorporeal. “But there is a difference in the terms; for he speaks of separate intellects, and we speak of angels” (2:6). Maimonides addresses an obvious objection: why is it so hard to find traces of this philosophic science and cosmology in the Jewish community today? His response echoes the earlier explanation at the beginning of 1:71. Scripture predicted that the world at large would pronounce the Jewish community “a wise and understanding people” on the basis of its divinely given statutes and ordinances (Deut. 4:6). But exposure to the wicked pagan nations and intermingling with them has led to corruption, loss, and reversion to ignorance as Jews adopted alien morals, actions, and opinions. “When, in consequence of all this, we grew up accustomed to the opinions of the ignorant, these philosophic views appeared to be, as it were, foreign to our law, just as they are foreign to the opinions of the ignorant. However, matters are not like this” (2:11). With cool assurance as he introduces philosophic wisdom to a perplexed Jew, Maimonides claims to be recovering that individual’s own national patrimony.

Prophecy (2:32–48) In turning next to the great theme of prophecy, Maimonides is now able to combine “the requirements of speculation . . . with the explanation supplied by our law” (2:45). This is by no means an easy or a seamless harmonization. If anything, Maimonides draws some sharp lines of difference between the opinion of the philosophers and the opinion of our law, even while muting that disagreement. Yet the fact remains that he silently draws heavily on the political science of Plato, Aristotle, al-Farabi, and Avicenna in analyzing and explicating the phenomenon of prophecy and in distinguishing a divinely revealed law from ordinary human legislation. Given the central importance of the prophetic mission of Moses and of the revelation at Mount Sinai in constituting the Israelite nation, it can come as no surprise that much is going on in these seventeen chapters. Maimonides is obliged to define what prophecy is; he has to establish grounds for ranking the prophets who preceded Moses as well as those who followed him; he needs to provide criteria for distinguishing pretenders and plagiarists from authentic prophets; and as if this were not enough, he also provides an extensive analysis of the language used by prophets in reporting their ecstatic experiences. Nor is this all. Recall that Jews in the Diaspora everywhere live out their lives as discrete minorities completely surrounded by adherents of other religions. These religions claim equal divinity and, going even fur-

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ther, purport to have superseded the revelation promulgated by Moses in the Sinai desert. Stiffened by their confidence, those adherents importune and threaten Jews to give up their old ways. Here is a miserable fact of everyday life to which Maimonides is obliged to respond—repeatedly in his writings as a communal leader and even here in a theological-political treatise. Clearly, then, the general theme of prophecy is rife with perplexities not only for the likes of Joseph ben Judah but for all coreligionists. Maimonides begins his discussion of prophecy in a way that echoes (but does not strictly correspond to) his discussion of the eternity of the world in 2:13. He starts with the diverse opinions held by believers in the existence of a deity (2:32). The first opinion, oddly enough, seems to transcend the divide between pagan and Jew. The “multitude” in either group opine that God may choose anyone he pleases and turn that individual into a prophet, provided only that he not be of bad morals. Maimonides does not deign to address this view further. The second opinion, that of the philosophers, sees prophecy as the natural outcome of human perfection, hence rare but by no means miraculous or even mysterious. “The third opinion is the opinion of our law and the foundation of our doctrine” and differs from the philosophic opinion only in this: that one might be fit and prepared for prophecy and yet miraculously (“on account of the divine will”) not become a prophet (2:32). In light of this Judaized philosophic opinion, ought one to infer that the whole body of Israel, assembled at the foot of Mount Sinai at the time of the promulgation of the Ten Commandments, was infused with prophetic spirit? Not so. Citing some rabbinic dicta, Maimonides claims the multitude heard only the first two of the commandments—those affirming God’s existence and unity— principles known by human speculation alone and accordingly accessible to prophet and nonprophet alike. “As for the other commandments, they belong to the class of generally accepted opinions and those adopted in virtue of tradition, not to the class of the intellecta” (2:33). This suggests that it took a prophetic pronouncement to establish a class of generally accepted opinions. Maimonides insists in these pages that he will not utter a word about the prophecy of Moses (2:35), but he is obliged perforce to return to that subject again and again, if only to distinguish it from other, lesser forms. Whether you consider the extraordinary character of what Moses was able (or permitted) to apprehend or the highly public miracles he effected, Moses stands in a class all his own. Perhaps as a consequence of this superiority, Maimonides later concludes (2:39), only Moses among the prophets announces that God has sent him to command and prohibit. Unlike Abraham who preaches and

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teaches by example and unlike the prophets who succeed Moses and enjoin the people to adhere to his Torah, Moses legislates (1:63). The chapter in which Maimonides carefully explicates “the true reality and quiddity of prophecy” (2:36) already anticipates the prerequisites for being able to posit the law for a community. The highest form of prophecy corresponds to the ultimate term of human perfection. But that perfection resolves itself into three different perfections: that of the rational faculty, that of the imaginative faculty, and that of moral habits. None is dispensable. Maimonides employs the neo-Platonic image of overflow or emanation (already introduced in the cosmology of 2:11–12) to account for the way in which a divine influence manifests itself. In a properly trained and accomplished and hence properly receptive human being, it first flows to the intellect. Thereafter that influence flows over to an imaginative faculty whose original natural disposition is as fine as can be. (A defective temperament can be modified and improved somewhat, Maimonides asserts, but not perfected,). Finally, the candidate for prophecy must possess the well-balanced moral habits that would shield him from lusting after bestial things associated with the sense of touch and from pursuing spurious kinds of rulership and popular acclaim. Maimonides allows that the “perfect” differ greatly in their rank in these respects, and so accordingly would the prophets differ in their ranking. The metaphor of overflow opens the possibility of making further discriminations (2:37). Where the overflow reaches only the rational faculty, one finds a man of science. Such an individual may be a man of understanding and discernment but, for want of a greater overflow, lack any desire to teach others or to compose writings for them. Where the overflow reaches both the rational faculty and thereafter the perfected imaginative faculty, one finds a prophet. As with the previous class, the total overflow might suffice only to perfect himself. A greater overflow might impel him to speak out, to teach the people, and to let his own perfection overflow toward them—often at personal peril since audiences typically resent chastisement. And what of those whose overflow reaches only their imaginative faculty, bypassing their rational faculty altogether owing to its being defective or to the insufficiency of their training in the sciences? “This is the class of those who govern cities, while being the legislators, the soothsayers, the augurs, and the dreamers of veridical dreams” (2:37). Maimonides notes dryly that such people suffer from what we today would call excessive self-esteem. They fancy themselves prophets and introduce great confusion into speculative matters of great import, “true notions being strangely mixed up in their minds with imaginary ones.” Con-

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temporary examples of leaders and pundits more confident than wise come readily to mind. For all his disparagement of those who have little to show for themselves beyond a developed imaginative faculty, Maimonides insists at the same time on the prophet’s need to employ his imagination when addressing his public. The divine message has to be cast in terms the general run of mankind can grasp and accept. It is not surprising, then, that the prophetic writings abound with figurative language, parables, hyperboles, and anthropomorphisms. Nor is it strange that the prophets routinely trace everything back to God and suppress or skip over all the proximate causes that might otherwise account for some particular action or occurrence (2:48). The free choice of a man, the volition of an irrational animal, the ordinary course of nature, chance itself: these are not so much denied by the prophetic texts as obscured by their attributing the shaping of causes to God’s commanding, saying, speaking, sending, and calling. As with scripture’s resort to language that presents God as resembling us in body and feelings, the benefit of making God’s existence and presence vivid and real to all comes at a price: literalism, misapprehension, and perplexity. Maimonides’ project in the Guide is to relieve the Josephs of this world from having to pay that price. From a political perspective, however, a calculated use of the imagination is essential. Maimonides accepts without further argument what “has been explained with utmost clarity” elsewhere—namely, that man is political by nature, that society is a necessity for him, and that his species embraces an extraordinary variety of temperaments and accidents (2:40). How can the requisite unity of social purpose be achieved in the face of such great individual heterogeneity? Maimonides finds the answer in the indispensable man: “A ruler who gauges the actions of the individuals, perfecting that which is deficient and reducing that which is excessive, and who prescribes actions and moral habits that all of them must always practice in the same way, so that the natural diversity is hidden through the multiple points of conventional accord and so that the community becomes well ordered” (2:40). Divine wisdom has seen to it that some individual human beings possess this faculty of ruling. At the peak of this class stands the prophet-legislator or “bringer of the nomos” (Arabic: wa¯d․i‘ al-na¯mu¯s; Greek: nomothete¯ s). Below these founders of a regime stand other individuals—lesser men—capable of actualizing and maintaining some or all of the lawgiver’s prescriptions. They may be faithful stewards of the founder’s legacy or adopters of some part of it (pretending to be prophet-legislators in their own right). Prophetic perfection, Maimonides sternly notes, presents the lazy and envious with the same temptation to pla-

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giarize as does high achievement in poetry and scientific work. With a discreet nod toward his immediate Muslim milieu, he utters this caution: be wary of prophets preening in borrowed feathers. How can one tell the genuine prophetic regimen from the spurious? Maimonides offers two tests (2:40). Consider first the aim and purpose of the law and the lawgiver. If their concern is to establish justice, secure domestic tranquility, and promote the pursuit of whatever the lawgiver presumes to be happiness, know that this is a nomos, a conventional law engendered by someone perfect only in his imaginative faculty. In contrast, a law that attends to all of the foregoing but goes beyond that by taking pains to inculcate correct opinions about God and the angels, “and that desires to make man wise, to give him understanding, and to awaken his attention, so that he should know the whole of that which exists in its true form”—testifies to a guidance coming from God. That law is divine. Even so, there remains the possibility of fraud. Maimonides urges the reader to apply a second test to the actions and way of life pursued by the purported prophet-lawgiver. If he is notorious for sexual profligacy, you can know for a certainty that he is a pretender. Maimonides concludes, “Understand this intention.”

Account of the Chariot (3:Introd.–7) With the opening of the third and final part of the Guide, Maimonides’ second announced aim emerges from the shadows. He has promised his intended reader an explanation of that great, noble, and sublime subject called the “Account of the Chariot.” But from his first mention of the subject at the beginning of this work, Maimonides has also stressed the severe restrictions hemming in the transmission of this esoteric teaching. The talmudic sages and some of their successors have condemned anyone tempted to divulge its mystical and perhaps magical secrets. Going further, they have insisted that those who conceal it will be deserving of great reward. More than legal prohibition argues against clear and full disclosure. So too does sound judgment, for the metaphysics that according to Maimonides lies at the core of the mysteries of the Torah is profoundly alien to the minds of the multitude (3:Introd.). Where no good and much harm would attend the general dispersal of this knowledge, responsible teachers guard their tongues and pens. Over the long run, however, the consequence of that self-censorship is that “the knowledge of this matter has ceased to exist in the entire religious community, so that nothing great or small remains of it.” There are enough ambiguities and contraries in this two-page introduction

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to alert the reader to be mindful of the gap between appearances and reality. Maimonides is confronted by a strong injunction against publicizing what has already disappeared. Yet he is also under a strong moral imperative to transgress that rule. He believes he has understood those secret matters and that his withholding that knowledge from a qualified student would constitute an act of cowardice or fraud on his part. “It would have been, as it were, robbing one who deserves the truth of the truth, or begrudging an heir his inheritance” (3:Introd.). Maimonides dares not risk that this esoteric knowledge should die with him. A reader might wonder how Maimonides was able to recover or rediscover this vanished Jewish learning. The answer may lie in the passing remark that what the Jewish sages called the “mysteries of the Torah” are teachings that are already “clear and manifest to the men of speculation.” Maimonides claims to have worked out all this on his own, using conjecture and supposition, and without the benefit of any special revelation or anything he might have received from a teacher. Of decisive importance (one may suspect) are the speculative premises that he is able to bring to his scrutiny of the scriptural and rabbinic texts. In light of Maimonides’ success in recovering what had been lost, one might also wonder whether it is even necessary for the addressee to be preoccupied with the semiconcealed secrets of the scriptures. If those teachings, at bottom, are accessible as well—and more directly—through the teachings of the philosophers, why not focus on that? What would Joseph (and those few like him) expect to gain from adhering to the old, familiar texts? There is certainly no suggestion here that the Jewish people could survive as a people were they to regard their constitutive scripture as redundant or superseded. But the individual intent on perfecting himself might nonetheless ponder what he owes to the community into which he was born. These soul-wrenching questions, barely stirred here, rise to the surface at the very end of this work. As regards his own understanding of those mystifying texts of the prophetic books and dicta of the sages, Maimonides asserts, with barely a breath’s pause, both that “things are indubitably so and so” and that possibly they are different (3:Introd.). In general, Maimonides does not overreach in making claims for his interpretations (see end of 3:4). Yet if Maimonides faces a dilemma here, it is not over what knowledge he has to convey but over how best to convey it. He allows that his presentation has been informed by “rightly guided reflection and divine aid in this matter.” Adducing the visions reported in Ezekiel 1 and 10, Maimonides is able to intimate that scriptural texts embody in riddling metaphors the metaphysics of the philosophers. Still, decency forbids his offending or shocking any-

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one who reads his words. He resolves, therefore, to present his interpretation in such a way that those who hear it would think that he is merely restating or summarizing Ezekiel’s words, nothing more. On the other hand, the singular, qualified, intended reader who examines Maimonides’ interpretation with “perfect care” and has understood every chapter in this treatise—“every chapter in its turn”—will grasp the entire matter just as it has become clear to the author (3:Introd.).4 Maimonides sounds satisfied that he has reached a perfect solution: accomplishing a great good without violating the spirit of the rabbinic prohibition. In any event, he will not have another word to say about the “Account of the Chariot,” not even a “flashlike allusion. For everything that it is possible to say about this has been said; I have even plunged deep into this with temerity” (3:7).

Providence (3:8–24) These words betoken a major change of focus in the Guide, and the opening words of the next chapter confirm that. Maimonides will no longer speak of the unchanging incorporeal heavens but of this terrestrial world in which we live out our lives for a space of time and then make room for succeeding generations. Most people are absorbed in their own particular situations; considering them closely, they find much cause for puzzlement and even distress. They wonder about a god who could create or tolerate so much unfairness and misery in their lives. Does that god see? Does he know? Does he care? Maimonides’ response is, to say the least, austere. He offers not solace but understanding, an understanding that redirects our complaints from heaven back to ourselves. The misapprehensions that prevail among people at large can be traced to their flawed understanding and their narrow perspective. “All bodies subject to generation and corruption are attained by corruption only because of their matter” (3:8). That matter’s union with some specific form is fugitive, fleeting. Inasmuch as we are material we are therefore subject to all the changes 4. The interlocutor of Job whose understanding of providence most closely corresponds to Maimonides’ own adopts this mode of presentation. Elihu appears to be merely repeating in different terms what Job’s other companions have already said. His seemingly insignificant amplifications and additions are undetected by “the multitude” who mistake the camouflage for a genuine concurrence of opinions. “However, when you consider the matter, the additional notion that he introduced will become clear to you; this notion is the one that is intended” by the author of the book (3:23).

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and ills that flesh is heir to. Further, Maimonides traces a man’s appetites and bad habits, his passionate desires and anger, all of his “acts of disobedience and sins,” back to the corruptible matter of which he is composed. Keeping that “earthy, turbid, and dark matter” under control appears to be our most urgent business at hand. Solomon and others exhort us to do so. “Also the commandments and prohibitions of the law are only intended to quell all the impulses of matter” (3:8). From this perspective those who rail against what they see as the bad order of the world and conclude that the ruling deity is either absent or indifferent or cruel are doubly mistaken (3:12). Not seeing that most of what vexes them stems from their own matter, they fail to take measures that would enable their human form, their capacity as rational beings, to exercise dominion over that matter and bring it to its most excellent condition. At the same time they presume to judge the whole of existence as though everything that exists is only for the sake of that individual. This fateful solipsism might be said to disarm men and distract them from accomplishing whatever does lie within their powers. “Man is merely the most noble among the things that are subject to generation,” and he enjoys the god-given properties that might perfect him. But compared to the heavenly spheres, the stars, and the angels, he is of no value at all. A clearer understanding of man’s place in the whole of existence would lead him to recognize God’s beneficence. He created all members of the species equal in their possession of the necessary natural, psychic, and animal faculties and parts. He created a world in which the necessities for man— air, water, and food—are abundant and relatively cheap (3:12). We have, then, no complaints to lodge against the natural or divine order. We need rather to interrogate ourselves. It is striking to see Moses ben Maimon—a man compelled by fundamentalist Islamic fervor to flee his beloved Andalusia and to transplant himself and his family yet again from worlds in disorder in jihadist North Africa and crusader Palestine; a communal leader receiving and responding to laments from distressed Jewish communities in Muslim lands; a physician with ample opportunity to observe and treat the physical and psychic disorders of the powerful and poor alike—resolutely insist that our troubles are mostly of our own making (3:12). What, then, would Maimonides have his reader think? Bodies necessarily decay, but most people are born in perfect health. Criminals and tyrants prey on others, but such evils are not the norm except in the case of great wars, and these too do not form the majority of occurrences on the earth as a whole. By far the most common source of the evils that afflict our bodies and souls is our intemperate desire for the pleasures of table and

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bed and our insatiable taste for superfluities. It is no part of God’s providence that he should shield men from the consequences of their perverse choices. The chapters devoted to providence begin with a clear statement of the divergent opinions people have held since antiquity about this fundamental principle. They are announced as five, subjected in turn to criticism, and then followed by an extended account of “my own belief ” (3:17). The first opinion is that of unbelievers, according to whom there is no deity superintending anything. Whatever exists is the product of the random combination of atoms. Like Epicurus, these people hold that it is futile to seek a purpose and pattern in a world generated by chance. Maimonides refers the reader back to his earlier presentation (2:20) of Aristotle’s refutation of this position. The regularities observable in nature, showing that things occur either always or for the most part, give the lie to this assertion of unmitigated randomness. The remaining opinions grant that there is divine providence but understand its reach and character very differently (3:17). For Aristotle, a believer in the pre-eternity of the world, providence is confined to whatever is permanent and unchanging, namely the heavens and the species. To the extent that an individual may have achieved a level of perfection enabling him to govern, think, and reflect so as to preserve himself as an individual along with his species, this can be taken as a manifestation of providence. But otherwise the things that befall individuals in this lower world of ours are all matters of chance. In Maimonides’ striking images, Aristotle does not differentiate between an ox who suffocates a host of ants with his feces and a building that collapses on its praying occupants and kills them all. A cat devours a mouse; a ravenous lion devours a prophet: it is all chance that each victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In direct opposition to Aristotle is the opinion of the Ash‘ariyya, an Islamic school of kala¯m that holds that there is no chance and that everything that happens to an individual—the falling of a leaf, or a sparrow, or a man—is owing to the unfathomable will of an all-seeing god. The question of just deserts does not arise. Nor, it would seem, is there any point to the law’s commands and prohibitions, to its promised rewards and punishments. Things are either necessary or impossible. Maimonides associates the fourth opinion with the Mu‘tazila school of kala¯m. According to them God sees and watches over everything, governs everything by his wisdom even while allowing a man to act of his own accord. Events and situations in life that impress us humans as being unjust ought in no way to be ascribed to God. Rather ought the evils besetting nonsinning mice and men to be seen as down payments on a greater reward with which all

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of them will be compensated in the hereafter. Maimonides calls this response “disgraceful.” “The fifth opinion is our opinion, I mean the opinion of our law. I shall let you know about it what has been literally stated in the books of our prophets and is believed by the multitude of our scholars” (3:17). Here is a classical Maimonidean formulation, signaling to the attentive reader that a deep fault line is about to be disclosed. Biblical literalists insist that man and the animals alike are free to move and act in virtue of their own will. This is a fundamental principle of the Mosaic law. Likewise fundamental is the belief that God cannot be unjust. Whatever calamities or benefits come to an individual or a group of men are deserved; as we sow, so do we reap. “But we are ignorant of the various modes of deserts” (3:17). Maimonides goes to some pains to separate himself from this commonplace view of providence. At the same time he denies that his heterodoxy is driven by a strictly philosophical or non-Jewish understanding. It stems rather from what he takes to be the intention of the sacred texts, while avoiding the scandalous inferences and conclusions of the other opinions and conforming better to intellectual reasoning (3:17). Like Aristotle, Maimonides denies that providence extends to plants and animals. Scripture suggests no such thing. Theirs is the realm of chance. Individuals belonging to the human species have a totally different standing. Divine providence extends to them and metes out what they deserve. Maimonides cites again the second-mostquoted verse in the Guide: “For all his ways are judgment” (Deut. 32:4).5 We may be unable to grasp the rationale of God’s judgments, but Maimonides has no doubt that “divine providence is consequent upon the intellect and attached to it” (3:17). Only our species has intellect and thus is in a position to receive and unite with an overflow from the supremely perfect divine intellect. The greater and more perfect the human intellect, the greater the providence reaching and watching over that individual. Divine proportionality assures that prophets and righteous and excellent men get what they deserve. So too do ignorant and disobedient men whom scripture (in Maimonides’ reading of Ps. 49:13 and 21) relegates to the status of beasts (3:18). In chapters yet to come, Maimonides spells out some of his opinion’s implications for social policy and individual conduct. For now it is enough to understand clearly and firmly that there is no correspondence between the notion of divine providence and 5. The scriptural verse most frequently cited in the Guide is Num. 12:6. On the other hand, the Torah’s most emphatic declaration of God’s Oneness fittingly appears but once (Deut. 6:4) and is cited but once in the Guide.

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the notion of human providence; nor is the notion of divine governance of the things created by God the same as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. “There is nothing in common except the name alone” (3:23).

Actions (3:25–50) The opening words of 3:25 signal an even greater shift in attention. Up to this point the discussion has been of the varied opinions about, or understandings of, God, the heavens, the angels, and humankind. From now on the emphasis will be on actions: first, God’s own actions; then the actions God’s law commands and prohibits; and finally (in the last section), the actions an individual needs to perform to arrive at the end of Maimonides’ road—finding and drawing near to the true reality of the deity. God is purposeful, according to the Guide, but Maimonides does not presume that those divine purposes are transparent to us in each and every respect. People who exercise endless ingenuity in trying to find reasons for every jot and tittle of the law of sacrifices, for example (why a lamb and not a ram? why seven and not eight?), are suffering from a “prolonged madness” (3:26). They miss the forest for the trees. In place of such futility Maimonides offers the reader a comprehensive framework for making sense of the Torah’s 613 commandments. But first one must gain an insight into the most general aims of the law and the constraints that affect the realization of those aims. Law, even divine law, has its limits. Human nature renders us incapable of suddenly switching from one opposite to another; we do not lightly give up whatever it is we are accustomed to. Nor does God will that the nature of human individuals should be changed by miracles. Were it otherwise, what would have been the point in God’s sending prophets to chastise the people or in prescribing a law containing all those commandments (3:32)? It is likewise important to understand that the law’s absolute and universal prescriptions speak only to the majority of cases. The isolated, rare, exceptional individual falls outside its purview. Unlike medicine, which has to adapt its treatment to each particular patient, law is concerned with the needs and character of a multitude (3:34). These considerations must be borne in mind. “The law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body” (3:27). The welfare of the soul might be thought of as medicine for the many with a view to their acquiring correct opinions as best they can. Conveying those opinions to a popular audience entails using both explicit statements and parables—a mixture that consequently leads individuals like Joseph to experience perplexity or uncertainty when trying to inter-

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pret scriptural language. Welfare of the body consists in improving the ways in which people live together, first by abolishing their wronging one another, second by having everyone acquire the “moral qualities useful for life in society so that the affairs of the city may be ordered.” The law’s intense focus on the welfare of the body, relative to its treatment of matters having to do with the welfare of the soul, reflects the following truth: the higher, nobler aim can be achieved only after the lower, more urgent ordering of civic life has been secured. Maimonides draws an analogy between this relationship and that between an individual’s two perfections. A man’s bodily perfection—health— presupposes conditions he can secure only through coordination with others in a political association. “His ultimate perfection is to become rational in actu,” to come to know as much as is humanly possible about all the beings; and that preoccupation has nothing to do with actions or moral qualities. Yet such high-order intellection lies out of reach if that individual is suffering from pain, hunger, thirst, and the effects of social disorder. “But once the first perfection has been achieved it is possible to achieve the ultimate, which is indubitably more noble and is the only cause of permanent preservation” (3:27). As might be expected, Maimonides says the Torah comes to bring us both perfections. Its relative emphases and the attention it devotes to each reflect the fact that higher things depend on lower things, which must therefore be given priority. As for the correct opinions through which man’s ultimate perfection might be attained, “the law has communicated only their end and made a call to believe in them in a summary way” (3:28). The same might be said of the Torah’s treatment of all beliefs, even those necessary for the sake of political welfare—for example, the belief that God is violently angry with the disobedient and that we have to fear and dread him. On matters having to do with the regulation and improvement of communal life, however, “every effort has been made precisely to expound it and all its particulars” (3:27). Maimonides’ tripartite classification of all the commandments according to their “reasons” or “causes” bears witness to this disproportion. More troubling than the Torah’s summary treatment of the highest things is the extent of God’s accommodations to his people’s slavish habits. One might criticize the Torah’s efforts to show and teach the people a better way as being too solicitous of their absurd beliefs. That judgment would be supported by Maimonides’ flat assertion that “the first intention of the law as a whole is to put an end to idolatry, to wipe out its traces and all that is bound up with it, even its memory as well as all that leads to any of its works . . . and to warn against doing anything at all similar to their works and, all the more, against repeating the latter” (3:29). Yet it is precisely because pagan beliefs

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(what Maimonides calls Sabian doctrines and “Amorite usages”) were ubiquitous at the time of the exodus from Egypt that God resorted to a “divine ruse” (3:32). Directly confronting the ingrained habits of a lifetime would invite feelings of repugnance and rejection on the part of those to be freed from the house of bondage—Israelites, but pagans in all but name. Accordingly, God in his “wily graciousness” redirects the object of those pagan forms of worship (burnt offerings and sacrifices, temples, burning of incense, invocations and prayers) from the stars to himself. If God suffers some of those practices to remain (albeit regulated and restricted), it is for the sake of his “first intention” that the people should apprehend God and worship no other. “And I will be your God, and ye shall be my people” (3:32, citing Jer. 7:23). The Torah’s strategic accommodation to prevailing superstitions is designed to help wean people away from those practices, but at the same time it undeniably runs the risk of letting the service of the god (“the second intention”) overshadow the god itself. Still we dare not look down on that ancient compromise with any sense of superiority. For Maimonides, popular misapprehension and forgetfulness are not limited to times past when Jeremiah and the Psalmist inveighed against the whole religious community. The souls of the vulgar continue to be captivated by senseless jabber even now (3:29). To get a good sense of the difficulty facing the divine legislator, Maimonides suggests you try to imagine a prophet arising in “these times” who calls the people to worship God without having recourse to any prayers, fasts, or petitions. “‘Your worship should consist solely in meditation without any works at all’” (3:32). With what consternation would this message be received? “If the belief in the existence of the deity were not generally accepted at present to such an extent in the religious communities, our days in these times would be even darker than that epoch. However, their darkness is of different kinds” (3:29). Maimonides finds little reason to celebrate the people’s generational progress in understanding. The Guide’s elaborate taxonomy of the commandments and explication of their reasons or purposes is preceded by some general observations. Just as some of the evils besetting us were earlier traced back to man’s matter (3:8,  12), so is the first purpose of the perfect law now said to be directed against the desires stemming from our matter. Maimonides’ tone is markedly austere, even ascetic. The law means for us to shun, depreciate, and restrain our desires “in so far as possible, so that these should be satisfied only in so far as this is necessary” (3:33). It means to instill gentleness and docility in its adherents, as well as purity and sanctification (here understood as the avoidance of sexual intercourse). Their hearts should be purified of polluting

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opinions and polluting moral qualities; their bodies and clothing too ought to appear unsullied and pure. It is no easy thing to make of ordinary people “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” but God sent Moses to accomplish no less (3:32, citing Exod. 19:6). The entire fabric of the commandments needs to be examined from that perspective, and Maimonides proceeds to do so. A reader who takes seriously Maimonides’ often expressed distaste for needless repetitions and wasted words might wonder at his choosing to devote fourteen chapters of the Guide to unearthing and explicating those reasons. Would it not have sufficed to refer Joseph to the codification of the commandments in the fourteen volumes of the Mishneh Torah? Maimonides had there laid out with admirable clarity the religious community’s cultic beliefs and practices along with many of their underlying reasons. No less surprising is the fact that the organization of the commandments as presented in the Guide differs significantly from that followed in the code. Indeed, Maimonides draws attention to that divergence by cross-referencing in the Guide to the scattered places in the Mishneh Torah where those same commandments are discussed. All this is an invitation to pause and ponder a difference in the intentions of the two works, a difference about which Maimonides makes no secret. The organization of the Mishneh Torah is governed by a desire to present the consensus of the talmudic sages as distilled by Maimonides from a vast postbiblical rabbinic literature. The code abstracts from debates and ambiguities with a view to clarifying and prescribing uniform norms of practice and belief. And it correlates, as closely as it can, the expansive developments of the oral law to the terse commandments of the written law. In the Guide he has something quite different in mind, and that intention demands a distinctive organization of the matter. At multiple places in the Guide (and much more evidently than in his code), Maimonides looks at his Jewish subjects from a vantage point outside that tradition. His discussions of the law and of the prophet who brings that law are arguably informed by a philosophic (or political philosophic) understanding. The same might be said of the chapters devoted to the reasons for the commandments. There the laws are viewed in two respects: (1) generically, as pertaining to any divine law; and (2) specifically, as pertaining to the Jewish religious community in particular. Bearing in mind his criteria for ascertaining that a law is indeed divine (2:40), Maimonides proceeds to ascribe to all the classes of commandments one or more of the following intended objectives: communicating a correct opinion, abolishing reciprocal wrongdoing, or promoting a noble moral quality (3:28). So viewed, the utility of most of the classes of commandments is “manifest” (3:35). As for other, less than

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self-evident commandments—those concerned with sacrifices and with magical practices, as well as those prohibiting wearing garments of mingled stuff, or consuming the first produce of trees, or sowing with diverse seeds, or mingling diverse species of animals—their underlying reasons can be discerned only through a careful investigation of the pagan milieu of the time (3:29, 30, 37). Maimonides assiduously mines The Nabatean Agriculture and other Sabian writings for details of pagan practices, “Amorite usages,” the better to see what the Torah was contending with. Yet that elaborate investigation stirs some unsettling thoughts. In its dedicated effort to extirpate idolatry root and branch, the Torah has paradoxically tied itself to the idolaters’ cast of mind. Quite a few of scripture’s puzzling commandments are presented by Maimonides as mere contraries of the pagans’ cultic practices and as a response to once-prevalent superstitions. Such affinities might even give rise to the fugitive thought that The Nabatean Agriculture is itself a tenth-century parody of the Torah’s prescriptions. However that may be, Maimonides’ search for the rationale of the commandments highlights in a number of cases the irrational background of their original promulgation. When turning to a consideration of particular commandments specific to the Jewish community, Maimonides adopts a strikingly literal reading of scripture. By and large, he steers clear of the sages’ glosses and ignores the elaborations and mitigations the talmudists have constructed over and around the Torah’s black-letter law. His present intention is to give reasons for the biblical texts, taking them according to their external meaning (3:41). This insistence on literalism—surprising in so subtle and nuanced a reader as Maimonides— has the advantage of letting us see the stark outlines of a complete code. Like an archeologist unearthing an entire site, like an anthropologist scrutinizing an alien place and time, Maimonides seeks to recover a way of life and a way of thought that literally constituted that ancient Jewish nation. Given that investigative stance, he finds it easy to offer naturalistic explanations for distinctively Jewish practices: why Passover is celebrated for seven days, why four species in particular were designated to form a lulab, and why the festival of Tabernacles is celebrated in the fall (citing the Nicomachean Ethics) (3:43). He explains numerous commandments concerned with the Sanctuary in terms of their intended psychological effects: the candlestick, the choice of priestly garments, the burning of incense to camouflage the stench of slaughtering, the use of anointing oil (3:45). Starting from the Torah’s categorical injunction to preserve the law in its integrity—neither adding to it nor diminishing from it (Deut. 13:1)—Maimonides goes on to develop a thoroughly political case for investing in the Great Court of Law (Sanhedrin) the prerogative of enact-

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ing and even perpetuating precautionary measures, repairing fissures in the law, and temporarily abolishing prescribed actions and permitting forbidden ones (3:41).6 Viewed as a whole, then, this literal reading of the commandments displays a body of law aimed at imbuing its adherents with feelings of benevolence, pity for the weak, and kindness toward the vulnerable. These are moral qualities far removed from the pride and undiscriminating partisanship celebrated in the pagans’ stories and poems. At the same time, the Jewish law inculcates something approaching ferocity toward the worker of injustice. “Pity for wrongdoers and evil men is tantamount to cruelty with regard to all creatures” (3:39). All in all, the Torah aims at establishing a community marked by a pronounced sense of fraternal caring. Beginning with a reference to Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in the Ethics, Maimonides extrapolates to the nuclear family and beyond. “Accordingly a single tribe that is united through a common ancestor—even if he is remote—because of this, love one another, help one another, and have pity on one another; and the attainment of these things is the greatest purpose of the law” (3:49).

In Search of Perfection (3:51–54) The reader who has come this far, walking down Maimonides’ road and pondering the preceding chapters with diligence and attention, must by now be more than ready for a prescribed program of action. And indeed the focus of the work shifts in these final pages from its emphasis on establishing and sustaining a holy community. Now the Guide’s original concern reasserts itself in a most dramatic way: helping an individual in his private search for perfection. In these final four chapters Maimonides once again speaks not as a jurist, communal leader, physician, or philosopher, but as a personal trainer. He offers the Josephs of this world a regimen for achieving the kind of worship “which is the end of man” (3:51). The striking parable with which he begins (“The ruler is in his palace, and all his subjects are partly within the city and partly outside the city”) lays out for Joseph with brutal frankness both what he must aim for and what he ought not to settle for. Like Aristotle, Maimonides sees nature as consisting of unequal and ranked parts. In aiming for the highest, one dare not mistake lesser approximations for the real thing. Needless to say, pagans and polytheists are 6. Maimonides anticipates by five centuries John Locke’s case for investing this prerogative power in a wise and godlike prince (Two Treatises of Government, II §§ 158–60, 164–65).

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beneath consideration as models of human perfection. So too are most of the adherents of the law. Maimonides dismisses the multitude of observant Jews as “ignoramuses.” He thinks only a little better of those whom he had earlier called “Rabbanites” (Introd., 3:43): “jurists who believe true opinions on the basis of traditional authority and study the law concerning the practices of divine service, but do not engage in speculation concerning the fundamental principles of religion and make no inquiry whatever regarding the rectification of belief ” (3:51). They are walking around the ruler’s habitation still looking for its gate, as is Joseph himself as long as he is engaged in studying mathematics and logic. To enter into the ruler’s antechamber requires “speculation concerning the fundamental principles of religion,” or an understanding of “the natural things.” There is a studied ambiguity in Maimonides’ discussion of the higher stages of human perfection. He speaks of an individual who has achieved as much demonstrative knowledge as possible in divine matters (or perhaps demonstrative knowledge simply). And he speaks as well of Joseph should he achieve perfection in the natural things and understand divine science. In both cases the man is presented as being with the ruler in his inner court. This may suggest alternative paths toward perfection or, arguably, an identification of the two. The Guide’s own efforts to establish demonstrative proofs for the fundamental principles of religion are thoroughly entwined with Maimonides’ understanding of physics and metaphysics. This is the route by which those at still higher levels—the prophets—were able to find a place in the ruler’s council or, in the extreme case—that of Moses, “the Master of those who know” (3:12 )—even “‘with the Lord,’ putting questions and receiving answers, speaking and being spoken to, in that holy place” (3:51, citing Exod. 34:28). That exalted status presupposes an almost superhuman exercise of concentration, directing all the acts of one’s intellect toward “an examination of the beings with a view to drawing from them proof with regard to him, so as to know his governance of them in whatever way it is possible.” This statement resonates with Maimonides’ earlier insistence that we can know only God’s handiwork, not his essence or “face.” In being permitted to see God’s “goodness,” Moses was able to see the nature and interconnectedness of all existing things and how God governs them in general and in detail; he grasped “the existence of all [God’s] world with a true and firmly established understanding” (1:54). This statement also resonates with the soft-spoken identification that opens 3:32: “If you consider the divine actions—I mean to say the natural actions . . .” In short, the high road to perfection lies through the acquisition of genuine knowledge, not imaginings, not the mere mouthing of words, but

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through the intellectual apprehensions earned by one’s concentrated thinking on the whole of existence. Only then can one begin to engage in the highest form of worship and fulfill the commandment “to love the Lord your God” (3:51, citing Deut. 11:13). Mostly, Maimonides says, this act of total devotion is achieved in solitude and isolation. To the likely—and perfectly reasonable—objection that most of us do not live out our lives as hermits in the wilderness, that we have hostages to fortune in the shape of family and other dependents, and that we therefore are in no position to withdraw in so radical a fashion from physical and psychic engagement with others, Maimonides retorts, look again at the patriarchs and Moses. Outwardly, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were very much of the world. They tended to their livelihoods, governed their households, and engaged with the people and rulers around them. As for Moses, scripture portrays an unceasing succession of political challenges with which he, as the founder and governor of a nation, had to cope. But all this had to do with externals. Inwardly, in their hearts, these models of human perfection were always and wholly turned to God. Rightly considered, all their actions were directed to spreading the doctrine of God’s unity and to guiding their people to a love of God: “these actions were pure worship of great import” (3:51). Seen from this perspective, the Torah as a whole is an intense training program for individuals aspiring to reach such heights. Its prescribed actions help men’s minds and bodies adopt a proper stance. It urges and reinforces behavior that shows one is aware of being in the presence of a great king and of being scrutinized from on high. Accordingly, the aspirant is filled with humility, a sense of awe and fear of God, and an attitude of reverence and shame. Having so little to say for himself, he is a man of few words. All this, however, is but preparation. Of greater dignity and importance are the Torah’s prescribed opinions. These teach us love, not fear. “You know,” Maimonides says to Joseph, “to what extent the Torah lays stress upon love” (3:52, citing Deut. 6:5). He has already interpreted that singular commandment to mean that “you should make his apprehension the end of all your actions” (1:39 end). If the reader has been persuaded by this line of argument, he now knows better than to lay waste his powers getting and spending. He will understand that possessions are completely external to his own individual self and that the pleasure people take in saying “This is mine” is purely imaginary. Nor will he mistake the perfection of one’s bodily constitution and shape for an end in itself. Neither will he fail to see that the perfection of one’s moral habits (to which most of the law’s commandments are directed) has to do only with

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being useful to others.7 Abstracted from a social situation, these moral virtues “do not perfect the individual in anything” (3:54). The philosophers, ancient and modern, have made this clear; and the prophets too have said as much: the true human perfection consists in the acquisition of the rational virtues. In apprehending the intelligibles one gains access to the true opinions concerning the divine things. Here is a perfection that is truly one’s own; “through it man is man”; this knowledge is “the true science” (3:54). What more urgent concern could an aspirant have? The Guide ends with what in effect is a call to assimilate our actions to God’s and to follow a way of life here on earth that emulates divine loving kindness, righteousness, and judgment. A totally private preoccupation with the perfection of oneself can manifest itself in a way of life that ennobles the lives of some others. The stories of the patriarchs and Moses tell of such effects. And the story of Maimonides’ life shows that as well. This work’s concluding quatrain makes it clear that the next step is for the properly prepared reader to take on his own: “God is very near to everyone who calls, If he calls truly and has no distractions; He is found by every seeker who searches for him, If he marches toward him and goes not astray.”

7. Hence a solitary—be he alone on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe or otherwise isolated—would have no need for moral virtues and would shed those habits.

Afterword

The authors whose thoughts and arguments have been discussed here are a diverse lot indeed. Given their vastly different times, situations, audiences, and preoccupations, commonalities are hardly to be expected. My rationale for assembling these studies under a single head is, to repeat, that they are all intended to be experiments in reading complex texts. And yet it turns out that these strange and discordant materials, when read naïvely, do in fact disclose that their authors share a common stance. Readers who undertake to approach a text naïvely must perforce commit themselves to acting against their normal impulses. They must resolve to read slowly. They must be willing to retrace their steps, to pause over irregularities, to attend to seemingly trivial repetitions or near-repetitions, to resist skimming over bland and boring passages—in short, to combat those natural inclinations we ordinarily have to move quickly to what we take to be the core of an argument. Artful writers have long been aware of these human proclivities and probably partook in these weaknesses when they were young, impatient, and brash. But now grown wiser and more politic and knowing that much about themselves and their audiences, these thinkers could employ that understanding to discriminate among classes of their readers and—let it be said plainly—use that to both alert and manipulate different readers as they thought the case demanded. My concern in these chapters is not to unearth and display secret thoughts, heterodox opinions, and other such arcana that fear or a sense of social re-

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sponsibility might impel a thinker to camouflage or mute.1 Rather, I would draw attention to the obvious, the message or teaching that is lying out in the open and that is conveyed not necessarily through explicit assertion but by the very movement and action of the argument itself. One might well wonder why an author with a message—in itself salutary and confessedly not subversive—would not proclaim and promote his truth forthrightly and with vigor. Perhaps out of awareness that experience has shown sermonizing and hectoring an audience to be notoriously weak means for altering behavior. Proceeding by indirection and taking one’s audience unawares (so to speak), an author might better insinuate a resolve or a cast of mind to greater effect. What then, finally, do I now detect to be the plain but barely stated message these heterogeneous texts all would promote, not only among their authors’ immediate contemporaries but also in any who might encounter their words in some unforeseeable time and place? Whatever might have been these authors’ private or public views about divine providence—and they assuredly did differ—their texts exhibit and enact a noteworthy consensus as regards human providence. Passivity and feckless behavior, not to speak of fatalistic acceptance, are rejected out of hand. Notwithstanding our limited understanding and finite powers, we are not absolved, individually or collectively, from confronting and mitigating as best we can the difficulties and dangers that life on earth poses to our flourishing. Even Abraham Lincoln, famous for having confessed that he had not controlled events but rather had been controlled by them, even Lincoln at repeated critical junctures had chosen to act and did so in the belief that human choices had made a difference and would continue to do so for better or worse.2 One might well believe that the larger order of things is mysterious and that our place in that order is beyond our scrutiny, let alone our mastery. And yet none of our authors refrains on that account from speaking and writing—which is to say, from acting. That decision to act bespeaks a shared judgment: for all its vanity, ambition, and self-preening, our species hardly stands in need of being confirmed in a sense of helplessness and futility. Rather, our potentialities 1. For a masterly and lucid exposition of that mode of writing, see Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 2. For an extended discussion, albeit from a different point of departure, see Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 18, no. 1 (1997): 57–81.

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for excellences of various kinds are not to be ignored or squandered. To that extent, at least, the lesson conveyed by a naïve reading of these texts is that, singly and collectively, we have our work cut out for us. We might take that to be these authors’ enduring compliment and challenge to all who would read their words.

Index

Aldridge, Alfred O., 19n3 Aristotle, 147–48, 172, 188, 198–99, 207, 208, 214; Nicomachean Ethics, 213, 214 audience(s): of Bacon, 74, 76–77, 78; of Burke, 126; of Franklin, 9, 17–18, 28; of Jefferson, 40, 42–43, 44, 55–56; of Halevi, 135; of Lincoln, 62, 65–66, 69–70; of Maimonides, 179–82, 184–85, 191, 205; of Tocqueville, 128 authorial control, evidence of, 2–3, 219; in Bacon, 73; in Burke, 125–26; in Franklin, 8, 10, 22, 35–36, 39; in Gibbon, 93, 97, 100; in Halevi, 135–36; in Jefferson, 44–45, 52–53, 56; in Maimonides, 180–82, 184–85, 187–88, 190; in Tocqueville, 120, 122, 128 Bacon, Francis, 2, 73–91; on Aristotle, 90; on essay form, 74–77; as purveyor of hope, 79–80, 87–88, 89; on Socrates, 89; on use of aphorisms, 75–76 Bayle, Pierre: on Jews, 111–12; on writing history, 130–31 Book of Creation, 170–71, 173 Browne, Stephen H., 45, 53, 55n22 Burke, Edmund, 79, 126; compared to

Tocqueville, 127–28; on the crisis with America, 48–49; on the Jews, 113–17 Churchill, Winston S., 129 communication, oral and written, 74–77, 161– 62, 168, 174, 186–87 Douglas, Stephen A.: on “Black Republicans,” 61–62; on Declaration of Independence, 63–64, 69; popular sovereignty, 65; professed neutrality regarding slavery, 58, 64–65 Douglass, Frederick, 62 Faulkner, Robert K., 77, 81n18 Fehrenbacher, Don E., 69 Ferguson, Robert A., 49, 56 Franklin, Benjamin, 7–20, 21–39, 46n11; Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, 24–27, 31n8, 33; The Art of Virtue, 17, 27–28, 33; autobiography of, 7–20; bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection, 16–18, 27–28; credo, 19; Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, 23, 26, 28; “Father Abraham’s Speech,”

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Franklin, Benjamin (continued) 33, 34–38; great and extensive project of forming a world-wide sect, 14–15, 17–19, 27–28; Poor Richard’s Almanack, 33–35; on providence, 8–9, 10, 28–29, 30–33; religion of, 7, 14, 16, 19–20, 21–39; revision of Book of Common Prayer, 18–19; strategy of humility, 15 Gannett, Robert T., 120, 127 Gibbon, Edward: compared to Bayle, 111–12; compared to Montesquieu, 112–13; compared to Voltaire, 112; on the Crusades, 106, 109–10; on Cyril (patriarch), 108; distinguishes Christians and Jews, 99, 102–3; on the Jews, 92–110; on Julian (emperor), 104–5; on Maimonides, 98n6; on Orosius, 106n9; on Tacitus, 96; on Theodoric (emperor), 106–7 Greene, Jack P., 46–47, 54n21 Guide of the Perplexed, 179–217; audience, 179–80, 182, 185–86, 191, 205; barriers to reading, 180–83; character of Joseph ben Judah, 184; on divine law, 209–14, 216; on human perfection, 210, 214–17; on knowing God, 194; languages of, 184–85; on prophecy, 199–203; on providence, 205–9; on scriptural pedagogy, 192–93, 202, 209–11, 216; on written and oral communication, 186–87. See also Maimonides, Moses Halevi, Judah. See Kuzari, The Hedges, William L., 53 human providence, 28, 33, 80, 138, 172, 175– 76, 208–9, 217, 220

kalaˉm: 171–75, 196–98, 207–8; Tocqueville’s resort to, 127 Kaplan, Fred, 130 Kuzari, The, 135–78; on the ascetic way of life, 162–63; on belief, 145–47, 149–50, 173, 175– 76; character of the Christian, 140–41; character of the Jewish sage, 143–44; character of the king, 137–38; character of the Muslim, 141–43; character of the philosopher, 138–40; on the conversion of the Khazars, 155–56; on creation, 138, 146–47; on the degradation of the Jews, 153–54, 158–59; on divine law, 160; dramatic form of, 136–37; on the Golden Calf, 150–51; on Jewish chosenness, 152–54; on the philosophers, 146–47, 153, 160, 167–68, 170, 172–74; on the philosophic way of life, 163, 169; on the pious way of life, 163–65; on providence, 158; scriptural language, 156–57; on written and oral communication, 161–62, 168 Lincoln, Abraham, 57–70, 220; on Henry Clay, 58–59; on Stephen A. Douglas, 58, 61–62, 63–65, 69; as historian, 130; on public opinion, 69–70; on slavery, 60–68 Locke, John, 51 logographic necessity, 2 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 83–84 Maimonides, Moses, 2; authorial control, 181–82, 187–88, 190; Mishneh Torah, 184– 85, 212. See also Guide of the Perplexed Montesquieu, 112–13 More, Thomas, 3

Ibn T ․ ufayl, 162n9

Nabatean Agriculture, 146, 213 Nevins, Allan, 57–58

Jefferson, Thomas, “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” 40–56 “Jews,” as a trope, 92–93, 97, 110–11 Julian (emperor), 104–5

Paterson, Timothy, 88–89 Plato, 191 Pliny, 108 Pocock, J. G. A., 52n17

Index Qaraites, 165–66 reading naively, 1–4, 23, 40, 137, 183, 219–21 Righter, Anne, 75n7 Schaub, Diana, 113n17 Sheldon, Garrett W., 55n23 Socrates, 15, 89, 163, 168, 173 Spinoza, Benedict, 159n6 Steele, Brian, 55 Stern, Josef, 98n6 Sutcliffe, Adam, 112n13

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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 119–31; Ancien Régime as a work of kalaˉm, 127; compared to Burke, 127–28; use of Burke, 119–28 Vickers, Brian, 76n9 Voltaire, 111–12 Washington, George, 117–18 Williams, Basil, 68 Zuckerman, Michael, 54