The Question of God's Perfection 9789004387980, 9004387986

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The Question of God’s Perfection

Philosophy of Religion World Religions

Editor in Chief Jerome Gellman (Ben Gurion University) Editorial Board Richard Hayes (University of New Mexico) Robert McKim (University of Illinois, Urbana-​Champaign) Rusmir Mahmutćehajić (Međunarodni forum Bosna/​International Forum Bosnia)

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​prwr

The Question of God’s Perfection Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud

Edited by

Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Thomas Moran (American, 1837–​1926). Sunset at Sea, 1906. Oil on canvas, 30 3/​16 x 40 3/​ 16 in. (76.7 x 102.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, gift of the executors of the Estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, 32.845. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 32.845_PS2.jpg. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2018963903​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 2210-​481X ISBN 978-90-04-38795-9 (hardback) ​I SBN 978-90-04-38798-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction 1 Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson

Part 1 Challenging God’s Perfection 1

Is God “Perfect Being”? 9 Yoram Hazony

2

God the Walker 27 Berel Dov Lerner

3

The Living God: on the Perfection of the Imperfect 43 James A. Diamond

Part 2 In Defense of God’s Perfection 4

The Personal God of Classical Theism 65 Eleonore Stump

5

Toward a More Perfect Idea of God 82 Lenn E. Goodman

6

Perfect Being Theology and Friendship 104 Brian Leftow

Part 3 Divine Morality 7

Trusting God and Being Ourselves 113 Alan L. Mittleman

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8

Anger and Divine Perfection 130 Edward C. Halper

9

Omnipotence Is No Perfection: Rabbinic Conceptions of God’s Power, Knowledge, and Pursuit of Justice 142 Alex Sztuden

Part 4 Divine Attributes 10

On How Not to “Sublime” God’s Perfection 169 Randy Ramal

11

Unifying the Name of God 189 Joshua I. Weinstein

12

Turning from the Perfection of God to the Wondrousness of God: Redirecting Philosophical-​Theological Attention in Order to Preserve Humility 211 Heather C. Ohaneson

Index 231

Notes on Contributors James A. Diamond Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies University of Waterloo Lenn E. Goodman Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Vanderbilt University Edward C. Halper Distinguished Research Professor University of Georgia Yoram Hazony President The Herzl Institute (Jerusalem) Dru Johnson Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies The King’s College Brian Leftow Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion Oxford University Berel Dov Lerner Associate Professor of Philosophy Western Galilee College (Israel) Alan L. Mittleman Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Jewish Philosophy The Jewish Theological Seminary Heather C. Ohaneson Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies Faculty Fellow, William Penn Honors College George Fox University

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Randy Ramal Assistant Professor of Theories and Philosophy of Religion Claremont Graduate University Alex Sztuden Templeton Fellow The Herzl Institute (Jerusalem) Eleonore Stump Robert J. Henle, S.J., Professor of Philosophy Saint Louis University Joshua I. Weinstein Senior Fellow The Herzl Institute (Jerusalem)

Introduction Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson A god that can be moved or pressed is no better than a god that can be forced or bought. lenn e. goodman

…

Metaphors such as immutability, impassibility, and simplicity are not drawn from the realm of living things at all. yoram hazony

∵ Philosophers often describe theism as the belief in the existence of a “perfect being”—​a being that is said to possess all possible perfections, so that it is all-​ powerful, all-​knowing, immutable, perfectly good, absolutely simple, and necessarily existent, among other qualities. However, there are reasons to question whether this conception of God’s nature is appropriate as a basis for Jewish theology, and indeed, for religious belief more generally. In The Question of God’s Perfection, we bring together philosophers, theologians, and scholars of rabbinic literature to take a fresh look at this notion of God as perfect being, asking whether it is consistent with Judaism’s foundational texts, or whether it needs to be revised or replaced by a theology that is better suited to Jewish thought. Most people who are interested in God—​whether believers or atheists—​ spend a great deal of energy arguing about God’s existence:  They argue for and against variations on traditional “proofs” of God’s existence, discuss what would constitute suitable evidence of God’s existence, ask whether the imperfect world before us could possibly be the product of a perfect God, and so on. Nearly all of these efforts to establish whether or not God exists assume a conception of God as a “perfect being.”

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But if this description of God were mistaken, then many of the arguments for and against God’s existence would quickly be seen to be irrelevant. For example, the famous ontological proof of Anselm assumes that God is perfect. But if God is not perfect, then the proof doesn’t work. Similarly, many of the atheist arguments against God’s existence depend on God’s perfection. They argue that a perfect God (all-​good and all-​powerful) would not have created a world in which the innocent die unspeakable deaths at the hands of human tyrants or incurable disease. But here too, if God is not perfect, then the argument is irrelevant. These examples demonstrate something that really should be obvious: Arguments about God often fixate on trying to show existence or non-​existence, whereas discussions trying to get a better understanding of God’s nature are much harder to come by—​even though a good grasp of what we mean when we speak of God would seem to be a pre-​requisite of any intelligent discussion about God. Moreover, at least one major factor seems to suggest that the common conceptions of God may be erroneous: The fact is that the God of the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) does not at all resemble the God that the great debates over God’s existence are about. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible are we told explicitly that God is perfect, perfectly good, omnipotent, and so forth. Rather, the supposition that God is perfect being is usually read into Hebrew Scripture by means of de-​contextualized readings, or over-​interpreting texts. For instance, Psalm 139 may be the most commonly appealed-​to text for the claim that God is present everywhere or that he has perfect knowledge of all things, as it says: Where will I go, away from your spirit? And where, away from before you? (Ps 139:7) However, upon closer inspection, we find that this famous text is an expression of faith in the God that watches over David, and indeed Israel, even amid the extraordinary hardships of exile. This is evident from the subsequent verses, in which the poet writes that even if he were to wander up to heaven or under the sea: Even there would your hand lead me, Your right hand would hold me. (Ps 139:10) These verses are among the most powerful expressions of faith ever written, comparable to Moses’ assertion that even if Israel were scattered to the ends of the earth, from there will God retrieve them (Deut 30:4). But in context, their

Introduction

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purpose is to express faith in God’s ultimate care and support. Regarding his omnipresence or his omniscience, they make no claim one way or the other. If an argument about God’s perfection is to be advanced on the basis of biblical texts, it is crucial that they be read in context to determine whether God’s perfection is a necessary implication of the texts, or only one permissible reading that enters into our discussions from other sources. Indeed, a clear and diligent methodology will be needed to show how one moves from the biblical and rabbinic narratives, poetic praise and songs of great hope, and legal codes, to the logical entailments that are supposed to teach us that God is perfect being. When all is said and done, this conception of the “divine attributes” as a series of perfections seems to enter Christian (and later Moslem and Jewish) theology through Greek texts, especially Xenophanes, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. And if this is so, then it is fair to ask how the Greek philosophers know of God’s perfection, and whether the “perfect” God inherited from Greek philosophy—​putatively the acme of religious rationalism—​is based on a reasonable set of ideas and arguments. The present volume, therefore, opens with scholars arguing that we need a better understanding of God before we try to determine whether he exists. Subsequently, scholars then answer the call to offer a rigorous defense of God’s perfection, whether derived from Greek or Jewish sources. Method and the Notion of “Perfection” A volume of essays examining the question of a perfect God must necessarily concern itself with methodology. What evidence is there of God’s perfections and from which sources should one prioritize such evidence:  Experience, a priori reasoning, biblical texts, rabbinic traditions, or something else? The arguments in this volume offer epistemological guidance at the boundaries of ambiguity in the sources. What do we do when the text, tradition, or familiar modes of reasoning do not have sufficient philosophical heft to arrive at satisfactory explanations? Some will suggest restraint in the face of a host of unknowns. Others see potential paradoxes as opportunities for creative analogies that can bridge the gap between the common sense of the argument with the mysteriousness of a God beyond our understanding. The authors in this volume have before them the demanding task of justifying their methodological choices in addition to their argument as to how those choices lead to certain conclusions. Remarkably, these scholars rise to the challenge. In this volume, they examine and proffer fresh insights into ancient

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conundrums about the challenge of describing or disclaiming the possibility of a perfect God. Two Routes Exploring Divine Perfection As the base of these mountainous questions—​Is God perfect and, if so, then in what sense?—​two routes emerge exemplified by the epitaphs at the beginning of this introduction. This first route treats divine perfection as an already valid construct, trusting that something akin to perfection is possible, probable, or even necessary with respect to God. In the past, this route has often relied uncritically on the assumption that the construct has consensus and this itself lends credence to its assessment. But consensus or not, the various sources, traditions, and forms of reason do not allow an unchallenged embrace of God’s perfection. The goal for this first route, then, is to show what valid demonstration of perfection should look like. This leads to the second route, which focuses on whether these analyses of perfection can ever be accurately assessed with the data available and the tools we have at our disposal. For instance, a strictly literary approach might find God’s impassibility (i.e., God’s being impervious to being affected) untenable without a strong account of why the biblical texts so frequently depict God as reacting to events in the world, not least human supplication and argument. Depending on the authoritative role one assigns to the biblical literature or traditions of interpretation, we might question whether we can assess the construct of perfection with any confidence. The scholars taking this second route might note that perfection is a construct seemingly absent from the ­Hebrew Bible. Realist accounts might suggest that the wrong metaphors are being dragged into the biblical texts or traditions in order to bolster the otherwise anachronistic construct of divine perfection. On the other hand, proponents of perfect being theology might argue that a God short on such perfections risks collapsing the monotheistic enterprise entirely. After all, if the God of the Bible was not supposed to be perfect, what was he supposed to be? They might ask: What did the prophets and scholars who composed the Bible think they were doing in describing an “imperfect” God? How was this supposed to help their audience relate to the world? And is there anything that we can learn about God’s nature and existence from thinking about God in this very different way? The answers to these questions, if accepted, might lead us to different understandings of God from the one commonly debated in public debates and in academic theology alike.

Introduction

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In this volume, scholars examine the texts of the Hebrew Bible through various interpretative lenses to see what they teach us about God’s nature and present a conception of God as the biblical authors understood him. Some find that, contrary to what has been said so often, the conception of God that emerges from the Bible is, in fact, more realistic and plausible than the perfect being handed down to us from Greek and medieval theology. Others find new reasons to reaffirm a view of God’s perfection that is a renewed version of these traditions. The Essays This volume is divided into four sections. In Part 1—​Challenging God’s Perfection—​the traditional construct of “perfect being theology” comes under rigorous scrutiny. Yoram Hazony’s essay, “Is God ‘Perfect Being’?” (­chapter 1), opens by tackling the problem of realism in divine metaphors and questioning the Hellenistic metaphors often employed in the reasoning of perfect being theology. Berel Dov Lerner’s “God the Walker” (­chapter 2) challenges the supposition that God’s rule can usefully be called perfect. James A. Diamond’s “The Living God: On the Perfection of the Imperfect” (­chapter 3) explores the implications of conceiving of God as becoming rather than being. Part  2—​In Defense of God’s Perfection—​features authors who examine ways in which God’s perfection could be seen as a valid construct. Eleonore Stump expounds in detail Aquinas’ account of God’s simplicity and personality in “The Personal God of Classical Theism” (­chapter 4). Lenn Goodman’s “Toward a More Perfect Idea of God” (­chapter 5) argues that the Hebrew Bible is full of indications of God’s perfection and the human understanding of universals. Brian Leftow’s “Perfect Being Theology and Friendship” (­chapter 6) extrapolates what we should expect from a perfectly loving God who is seeking friendship from his free creatures. Part  3—​Divine Morality—​grapples with the appearance of perfection or imperfection in descriptions of God’s behavior in the biblical texts. Alan L. Mittleman’s “Trusting God and Being Ourselves” (­chapter 7) considers the phenomenal experience of self as implying divine perfection. Edward C. Halper’s “Anger and Divine Perfection” (­chapter 8) discusses how anger could be a perfection in God, even if it is not for human beings. And, Alex Sztuden’s “Omnipotence is No Perfection” (­chapter 9) surveys the rabbinic tradition as instructive for focusing this discourse on God’s “pursuit of justice”—​a neglected theme in perfect being theology.

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Part 4—​Divine Attributes—​deliberates over what aspect of the biblical depiction ought to take primacy in our thinking about the attributes of God. Randy Ramal, “On How Not to ‘Sublime’ God’s Perfection” (­chapter 10) addresses the construct of “perfection” across the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, and Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament. Joshua I. Weinstein’s “Unifying the Name of God” (­chapter 11) explores the construct of “unity” across the Hebrew Bible, Aristotle, and the Talmud. Heather C. Ohaneson’s “Turning from the Perfection of God to the Wondrousness of God” (­chapter 12) re-​focuses the question of God’s perfection on the phenomena of awe and wonder.

pa rt 1 Challenging God’s Perfection

∵

Chapter 1

Is God “Perfect Being”? Yoram Hazony Philosophers often describe God as “perfect being”—​a being that possesses all possible perfections, so that it is all-​powerful, all-​knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent, among other qualities. This way of understanding God’s nature is the source of much of contemporary theological discourse. Moreover, something like it has become quite widespread among lay people as well. However, there are a number of reasons to question whether this long-​ standing conception of God’s nature is appropriate as a basis for Jewish theology, and indeed, for religious belief more generally. This paper seeks to highlight some of the issues that should move philosophers, theologians, and scholars of the Bible and Talmud to reexamine whether this notion of divine perfection is in fact consistent with Judaism’s foundational texts, and whether it needs to be revised or replaced by one that is better suited to Jewish thought. The God of Scripture A first question derives from the manner in which God is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Historically, it has often been said that the view of God as perfect being has its roots in Hebrew Scripture. However, the Bible itself seems far removed from supporting this view. Much of biblical narrative depends for its coherence on a view of God as being unable to control human action (and perhaps also the behavior of animals), and at times also as lacking foreknowledge of what human beings are going to do.1 For example, God is plainly portrayed 1 My characterizations of God’s behavior and attitudes here are no doubt too quick. For example, it will be asked why God should be described as “unable” to prevent man from eating from the forbidden fruit, rather than as being “unwilling” to prevent this. This question is well-​motivated, but answering it requires a more sophisticated textual discussion than I can include here. For now, I will only suggest that on this point we must make a frank investigation into whether the texts in question really do depict a parental “decision not to interfere” with the eating of the fruit, say, or with the fashioning of the gold calf, on God’s part; or whether, alternatively, what is depicted is a reaction of surprise, anger, and humiliation. If the latter, then the so-​called “decision not to interfere” will be seen to be a misreading whose

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as wanting man not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and yet contrary to God’s wishes, man eats from the fruit. Similarly, God obviously wants Cain to control his anger and refrain from shedding blood, and yet contrary to God’s wishes, Cain slays his brother. In the same way, God wants the freed Hebrew slaves to obey his precepts as given at Sinai, and yet contrary to God’s wishes, they make a gold calf and declare this abomination to be their god. And the same may be said of hundreds of additional points in the biblical narrative and in the orations of the prophets, in which God is presented as wanting one thing to happen, even though what happens in practice is something else entirely. In the same vein, Scripture describes quite a few instances in which God is depicted as changing his mind (e.g., regretting having made man [Gen 6:6], regretting having made Saul king over Israel [1 Sam 15:11]), or as changing his plans to accommodate decisions that human beings have made (e.g., the giving of laws governing the shedding of blood in the time of Noah, the acceptance of a king in Israel, the construction of Solomon’s Temple). There are also human innovations that are not anticipated by God (e.g., Abel’s invention of shepherding [Gen 4:2], the midwives’ resistance to Pharaoh [Exod 1:15–​20], the zealotry of Phinehas [Num 25:6–​13]), although God is pleased with them anyway. In all these cases, the biblical text remains comprehensible and coherent if, and only if, we understand God’s relationship to the created world as analogous to that of a human being: Like a human being, God strives to achieve desired ends, and experiences pleasure and disappointment as matters unfold that are not entirely in his control and not entirely anticipated.2 The fact is that the God of Hebrew Scripture is not presented as the “perfect being” of the theologians. He appears to be neither eternally unchanging nor impassable (that is, unaffected by human behavior), neither all-​powerful (in the sense that all that he wishes comes true) nor all-​knowing (in the sense that he always has knowledge of what human beings will do before they do it). Which raises the question of why we should think that the God of the Bible is “perfect being” in the first place. After all, the source of the equation of God with perfect being is quite clear in Greek thought: We find it in Xenophanes,

source is an assumption, introduced from outside, that in these texts God has both complete foreknowledge of all events and the power to alter their course. 2 Here, too, I apologize for the excessive simplicity of my textual treatment. Although I cannot enter into this matter at present, an appropriate reading must place these isolated episodes within the context of the entire narrative History of Israel from Genesis to Kings. Such a reading would support the oft-​mentioned thesis that what is described is a process by which God comes to accommodate the world and human nature, thereby “learning from his mistakes.”

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Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. For example, the realm of immutable and perfect forms is at the center of Plato’s philosophy, providing relief from the realm of ceaseless change in which we live, which for Plato is but an arena of illusion and tragedy. In Platonic philosophy, it is quite natural to place an immutable and perfect being at the center of a realm of immutable and perfect forms. Aristotle likewise identifies the heavens with eternal and unchanging perfection, and so has a fitting place in the structure of his cosmos for an eternal and unchanging perfect being. In Scripture, however, it is difficult to locate sources supporting the existence of a comparable realm of eternally unchanging being. In Genesis, for example, all things—​including the heavens—​emerge from God’s wind blowing upon chaotic waters at the creation. This means that in the Bible, all things emerge from movement and change, without any reference to a static source of being such as the Greek philosophers proposed.3 Even God himself is described as possessing no static nature, responding to Moses’ questions about his name with “I will be what I will be” (Exod 3:14).4 And the great four-​letter name of God is likewise couched in the imperfect tense, again suggesting incompleteness and change. An immutable perfect being is a Greek conception of what God must be like, not a biblical one. Similar questions can be raised with respect to classical rabbinic sources. In the Talmud and Midrash we find it said, for example, that neither God’s name nor his throne (i.e., his essence and his rule) will be perfect so long as the heirs of Amalek persist in the world;5 that God asked for encouragement from Moses, and to be blessed by R. Ishmael, and so can apparently benefit from, or be strengthened by, the blessings of human beings;6 that God determined the judgment of Israel in accordance with Moses’ proposals and even thanked him for his assistance;7 that God permits true legal judgment to emerge from the debates of human beings even in cases in which his opinion would have been otherwise;8 that God never ceases to regret the destruction he has inflicted upon Israel;9 that God admitted to Moses that he was wrong in showering gold on the Israelite slaves;10 and so forth.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Indeed, we can say that the biblical account is one in which a degree of order is imposed by God on the primordial chaos, but the result is a world in which all things continue to change. See the explanation of R. Aba ben Mamel, Exodus Rabbah 3.6. Tanhuma, Ki Tetzeh 11; Rashi on Shemot 17.16. Shabbat 89a; Berakhot 7a. [All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.] Mekilta on Numbers 14.20. Bava Metzi’a 59b. Berakhot 3a. Berakhot 32a.

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All of these opinions of the rabbis stand in stark contrast with the view of God as perfect being, and a great many additional texts might be mentioned that are no less problematic from the perspective of Greek perfect being theology. All this suggests that the view of God as perfect being needs to be reexamined in light of the views of the rabbis, not less than in the case of Hebrew Scripture.11 The Choice of Metaphors for God The difficulty in finding a toehold for perfect being theology in the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources points us to a more general question. Theologians have long been of the opinion that human categories cannot describe God directly, so that all of our terms for describing God are necessarily metaphors—​terms drawn from other domains and used with reference to God by way of analogy.12 This is not merely an opinion of later theologians. We can easily see that the prophets and scholars who composed the Hebrew Bible were aware that all terms for God are metaphors from the fact that they freely use multiple and shifting metaphors for one and the same aspect of God’s actions in the world. Indeed, we can say that the Bible relies upon “mixed metaphor” as perhaps the principal means by which human beings can approach a knowledge of God! Given this very basic fact, it is important to notice that nearly all of the metaphors chosen in Scripture for describing God are drawn from comparisons to human beings or other living or moving things: God is envisioned as a king, a lover, a father; or as a speaker, or as breathing his breath upon the world, or as an eagle, or a fountain of living waters. God’s thoughts and plans, his emotions, 11 12

Nor are these questions limited to classical rabbinic sources. Kabbalah, as well, has often relied upon concepts such as tsoreh gavohah (divine need), which understand God as being dependent on human action. In using the term metaphor here, it is not my intention to commit to any particular metaphysical system. It is common to suppose, following Aristotle, that a metaphor must refer to a different, independently existing object, whose attributes can also be described in non-​metaphorical language. On this reading, for example, to say that “The moon is a galleon” draws attention to similarities between the moon and a galleon, but it remains possible to speak of the moon as spherical, white, and so on, without relying on metaphor. However, this model of metaphor may not be apt in speaking of God, who is approached only through metaphor, and for whom we have no non-​metaphorical language that might be usable. Such an alternative understanding of how metaphor works may also have relevance for metaphorical language that does not refer to God. However, for present purposes it is not necessary to resolve these questions.

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and his actions are all depicted as changeable as they are in human beings and other living and moving things, with the result that reality itself is presented as being analogous to a living, changing thing. Consider, for example, the declaration of God’s essential nature to Moses at Sinai, which consists of a shifting series of metaphorical attributes, all drawn from the sphere of human thought and action, and specifically that of a king or a judge: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, long-​suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation” (Exod 34:6–​7). This is in sharp contrast to the metaphors used in describing God in perfect being theology: Metaphors such as immutability, impassibility, and simplicity are not drawn from the realm of living things at all.13 No living creature resembles them or can be grasped by invoking them. Rather, these are metaphors that are drawn from the realm of inanimate (or perhaps mathematical) objects. The metaphor of God as “necessarily existing” likewise relies on a rigidity that is entirely alien to our understanding of living things. So is the metaphor of God as “being”—​as something whose essence can be said to be “existence”—​ which relies on a category most of whose members are inanimate objects, and whose content is, as it seems, a quality that living things share with these inanimate objects. Indeed, given this proliferation of metaphors from the sphere of non-​living and non-​moving things, one must wonder whether even attributes such as “all-​knowing” or “all-​powerful,” which are supposed to impart the qualities of a living thing to perfect being, are really successful in achieving this aim; or whether they are so far removed from any imaginable characteristic of living things as we know them that they in fact complete an image of God as something that does not live at all. The metaphors used to describe God in Scripture are, when considered together, far removed from those that are central to perfect being theology. Indeed, although Western theology has often sought to avoid having to choose between these two collections of metaphors, the tension between them is so

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Perhaps philosophers do not actually intend such terms to be metaphorical. Instead, these terms are intended as non-​metaphors that are capable of describing God’s reality. But if so, then the existence of non-​metaphorical language suited to describing the reality of God needs to be explored carefully: How is it that the traditional limitations on what can be known of God can be surmounted with respect to these terms? However, it is more likely that these philosophical terms are metaphorical, just like all other terms that describe God, and that the sense that they are non-​metaphorical is misguided.

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great that it seems to force a choice as to which constitutes the better approach to understanding God and his action in the world. And in practice, we will notice that a great many theologians do tend to consider mankind’s ultimate experience of the world as resembling either a “perfect being,” or a lord or king, but not both. Splitting God in Two There have, of course, been attempts to embrace both sets of metaphors for God simultaneously. Indeed, there is a common synthetic view according to which God should, in effect, be regarded as being split in two: On the one hand, there is that view of God which is in accordance with mankind’s experience of the world, and with the specifically human vantage point that generates this experience. Such a human perspective is said to give rise to a view of God as resembling a lord or a king, and it is this perspective that is found in Hebrew Scripture. On the other hand, there is a view of God that is not in accordance with mankind’s experience and perspective, but is a description of God as he is in and of himself (or alternatively, as he is “from God’s perspective”), and this is the view of God that we find in perfect being theology. The difficulty with this view, of course, is that it seems to elevate the God of perfect being to the status of the true God, while reducing the metaphors used in describing God in Scripture—​often dismissed as “anthropomorphisms”—​to a less desirable status, as though these were metaphors that are to be accepted only by the uneducated or simple-​minded, who might not have any view of God at all if they could not think of God as resembling a human king. In this sense, this composite model of God is nothing more than a variation on perfect being theology, since it dismisses the God of Scripture as being inappropriate to individuals who have the desire and the ability to know God as he really is. But setting aside its condescension toward the metaphors deployed in Scripture, there is a more fundamental difficulty with such a composite view of God’s nature, which is this: If all terms used to describe God are really metaphors, it is unclear what are the grounds for determining that the metaphors drawn from perfect being theology are the ones that “really” describe God, whereas metaphors that compare God to a living and moving thing are “not really” appropriate descriptions of God. To put this more directly, it is unclear why there should be this bias toward one set of metaphors rather than another, as though the biblical metaphors were not true descriptions of God’s nature. As has been said before, the terms used in perfect being theology are not less human constructs—​and not less metaphorical—​than those of Scripture. So

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on what basis are they to be held as more truthful or more illuminating than those that compare God to a living or moving thing? Mathematics as a Model for God The most obvious source for this bias toward perfect-​being metaphors is in Plato, whose entire theological effort is directed to stripping the pagan gods of their human qualities, and recreating them as perfect, eternal, static forms. Thus Aphrodite is transformed into the eternal form of the beautiful, Apollo into the eternal form of truth, Zeus into the eternal form of justice, and so forth. Plato’s theology is in this sense a systematic attempt to eradicate metaphors and analogies for the gods drawn from the world of living things, and to replace them with immutable, perfect beings. This Platonic theology draws its inspiration, as we are told explicitly in the Republic, from mathematics.14 This is for Plato the highest discipline, precisely because it turns the human mind from the world of change and contingency and trains it to enter into a realm of immutable and necessary things. It is through this discipline that we understand that there is a realm of immutable and necessary things—​which Plato refers to as the realm of “true being” because only unchanging and necessary things are things that truly are. Once this is accepted, it is only fitting that one should wish to find God in the realm of the things that truly are, rather than in our own realm of illusion. However, it is unclear whether this Platonic metaphysical structure is at all relevant to Jews, or to modern people more generally. It is unclear, for example, that Scripture and rabbinic tradition, or contemporary thought in general, are so easily brought into conformity with the dualistic view that our world is a realm of illusion, and that “true being” is found elsewhere, in a realm of eternal, perfect things. In the Bible, true being would seem to be found in the world of our experience, for Hebrew Scripture knows only this one world. And if this is so, then God, too, must have true being in this world of our experience and not elsewhere. By the same token, it is doubtful whether mathematics can serve as a model for Jewish theology as it does for Platonic theology. Whereas Plato believed that the eternal and perfect forms of mathematics—​he was thinking principally of geometry—​are a window into the world of true being, we do not tend to regard them in this way at all. In mathematics, we recognize only a science 14

Plato, Republic, 521c–​530c.

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of manipulating idealizations. Mathematical forms, if considered in themselves, are mere fictions. The internal validity of a given mathematical system is no longer believed to be sufficient to make it true. A mathematical system is true only to the extent that it is discovered to be a reliable description of human experience in practice. Thus Euclidean geometry, which for Plato is an opening into true being, is for us only a construct—​one that is useful in certain contexts as a simplification of reality, but which has for more than a century been recognized to be false as a description of reality. Far from serving as an example of how idealization leads us into the world of true being, mathematics thus demonstrates how idealization can mislead us: How it can fool us into thinking we are discussing true being, when in fact what we are discussing is ideal constructs that may have no bearing on what is true and real. For this reason, the attempt to understand God’s nature by means of a science of ideal forms modeled on mathematics must be far less attractive than it has been in the past. Given that neither the Bible nor the Talmud seeks to understand God using such tools, it is at least a question why they should be considered relevant to Jewish theology, or to theology at all. Questions about Certain Ideal Conceptions of God This having been said, it seems worthwhile to make a careful reexamination of the various idealizations that have been introduced as the basis for formal theological systems, and to determine whether they are in fact as useful for understanding God as has often been supposed. For example, the ontological argument for God’s existence attempts to make an inference to a conclusion about actual reality based on what can or cannot be said concerning certain ideal forms. As the argument goes, the greatest or most perfect being is one that cannot logically lack existence, for then it would not in fact be the greatest or most perfect being. But the concept of a “most perfect being” is an ideal construct of the human mind, just as a Euclidean “perfect line” is an ideal construct of the human mind. Idealizations are simplifications of reality, and as such they can be useful in certain contexts. The perfect line of a formal geometric system serves to model certain aspects of the relations among lines and points as they are found in experience. This, however, does not mean that a perfect line is something that is found in experience. Similarly, there does not seem to be reason to suppose that the idealization of a “most perfect being” describes anything that exists in reality any more than the Euclidean idealization of a “perfect line” does.

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The same would appear to be true regarding arguments from the contingent to the unconditioned or “Absolute,” which are often invoked in describing God. In certain formal metaphysical systems, a distinction is drawn between contingent and absolutely necessary beings. According to this view, contingent beings have no capacity to bring themselves into being, and so would not have existed had they not been caused by other things; whereas an absolutely necessary being is said to be self-​subsistent and capable of bringing itself into being, and in fact does so necessarily. Arguments are then advanced to show that all contingent beings depend for their existence on a being that exists out of absolute necessity, which is said to be God. But absolute necessity is not a quality that is found in our experience of reality. It is a property that exists only in formal or ideal systems, and is only an idealization of our experience of real causal relations. There is no reason to think that absolute necessity or an absolutely necessary being exists in reality. And the same will be true of any other qualities that are ascribed to God on the basis of their existence in ideal systems without reference to what is found to be the case in reality. Questions about Perfection This brings us to the question of what we are talking about when we speak of God as “perfect.” The Bible and the Talmud avoid explicitly attributing perfection to God—​although they do of course refer to God’s justice, mercy, wisdom, and so forth; and we do find that God’s works, his path, or his teaching are called tamim (Hebrew, meaning complete, unspoiled, innocent, or perfect).15 This hesitation to refer to God himself as “perfect” is particularly striking in that the early rabbis were certainly aware that Greek philosophy equates God with perfect being. There seems to be a good reason for this avoidance, but to get at it we need a clear view of what it means to say that anything is perfect. On its face, the term perfection is used to refer to two different things: First, there is the perfection that is found in formal or ideal systems such as mathematics. An ideal circle is perfect in that each of its points is, without exception, equidistant from a given center. But this kind of perfection exists “by definition”: The ideal circle has no points that fail to be equidistant from its center because a circle is defined as a figure all of whose points are equidistant

15

E.g., Deut 32:4; 1 Sam 2:22–​31; Pss 18:30, 19:7. It seems that a biblical or talmudic attribution of perfection to God would rely on terms such as tamim and shalem, although we should consider whether there might be other ways of expressing perfection.

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from its center. But this kind of perfection—​perfection by definition—​exists only in fictional constructs. There are no perfect circles in reality, and the same will be true of all other ideal constructs: None of them exist in reality. None of them have true being. This means that the perfection that is found in mathematics and other ideal systems is not of much use in discussing God’s perfection. For if perfection is to be meaningfully attributed to God, it must be something that can exist in reality. And the perfection found in formal or ideal systems is not a quality of real things. Second, there is the perfection that is attributed to real things. When we say that some real-​world thing is “perfect,” we mean something quite different from mathematical perfection. Normally, we mean that the thing under discussion has attained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn’t handle well) or the neck too short (so it’s hard to hold). There is an inevitable trade-​off among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And this is so whether what’s being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine or a gymnastic routine, or human beauty. However, when we speak of the perfection of a real-​world thing such as a bottle or a horse, we do so because these are things that can be encompassed (more or less) by our senses and understanding. That is, it must be something that can be viewed in full, or that approaches being something we can view in full. For example, having the whole bottle before us so that we can look at it on all sides and weigh it in our hands and pour from it, we feel that we can judge how close it is to being a perfect instance of its kind. But if asked to judge the perfection of a bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that’s partly hidden in the stable, we will surely protest that we cannot know—​for we can only see part of it. This is the key point that must be taken into account in any discussion of God’s proposed perfections. For biblical accounts of man’s relations with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in this very way: In their encounters with God, human beings can glimpse a corner or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a “coming-​into-​being” as God approaches and passes, and no more. The most important texts dealing with man’s ability to gain an understanding of God are of course the passages in Exodus dealing with Moses’ seeking to know God’s nature. In the climactic text, we are told that God’s “face” can never be seen by any man; and

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that what Moses, the greatest of the prophets, was able to see of God was only seen in passing, from within a crevice in the face of the mountain, and with God’s hand covering him and so mostly obscuring his sight (Exod 33:20–​23). Other relevant texts point in the same direction: Man cannot hope to approach encompassing God with his senses and with his mind.16 The conclusion from this must be stated with care. And readers should also strive to read the following carefully so that nothing ends up being misunderstood or misrepresented: The perfection of real things can only be known to human beings where the object in question can approach being encompassed by man’s senses and mind. This is to say that human beings cannot reasonably attribute perfection to something that is grasped in only a partial and fragmentary fashion. But human beings are capable of knowing God only in a partial and fragmentary fashion. For this reason, it would appear to be a mistake for a human being to attribute perfection to God. This would be to attribute to God a quality that no human being can experience God as having. At this point, one may wish to suggest that perhaps God is perfect as he is in himself, even though human beings cannot have any experience of this perfection.17 To which one should respond: If there is no way for a human being to have experience of God’s perfection, and neither Scripture nor arguments drawn from formal or ideal systems reveal God’s perfection to us in some other way, then human beings have no way of knowing anything at all about God’s supposed perfection.18 And if we have no knowledge of such a thing, it is best to refrain from asserting something concerning which no man can have any knowledge whatsoever. Again, let us be careful in our understanding of this discussion. What has been said should not be read as suggesting that God, whose perfection cannot 16 17

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An immediate question arises as to why Jacob believes he saw God “face to face” in Genesis 32:31. Compare also Genesis 33:10. This question is presented from a dualist perspective, as though there exists a reality that can be distinguished from what is before the minds of observers. Hebrew Scripture does not assume such a dualist metaphysics, which should lead us to suspect that this question is misconceived. See my The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 193–218. As has been said, there appears to be no source in Hebrew Scripture directly attributing the quality of perfection to God. It is true that Christians often seek a New Testament proof text in Matthew 5:48, which exhorts them to be perfect as God is perfect (teleios). But this text seems to settle nothing even for Christian readers, since the perfection mentioned here is one that is plausibly attainable by human beings. Terms that are drawn from human experience are applied to God only metaphorically, and such metaphors offer little basis for the kinds of assertions concerning God’s nature that are made in perfect being theology.

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be known by men, should be considered as being imperfect in the sense of being “flawed”—​in the sense of having moral flaws, for example, or any other failings when compared with some standard that the human mind can apply. It is entirely true that where we are capable of encompassing the entirety of an object with our senses and our mind, or of approaching this, the lack of perfection perceived in the object is necessarily the same as the perception of a flaw or failing. But this is not the case where the object of our attention is something that our senses and our minds cannot encompass. For example, it is no imperfection in the horse that only its head and forelegs are visible to us from where we stand outside the stable. It is simply impossible to judge the perfection of the horse because our view of it is fragmentary and partial. The same will be true more generally of any object that is too vast or great to encompass with our minds. Famous examples are the ocean, or a storm, which are so vast and overwhelming that our experience of them must at all times be partial and fragmentary. In these cases, too, we should say that it is meaningless to call the object of our attention “perfect,” for no man can have sufficient experience of an ocean or a hurricane to permit him to judge whether it is perfect or not. In aesthetics, a distinction is traditionally drawn between the beautiful and the sublime. The term beautiful is restricted to those things that can be recognized as approaching perfection because the mind can encompass them. Thus a beautiful horse is one that approaches being a perfect horse. The term sublime has been introduced, on the other hand, to describe the grandeur—​ the awe-​inspiring character, the breathtaking quality—​of something the mind cannot hope to approach encompassing, and which cannot therefore be judged to be approaching perfection. The ocean and the storm are never known to approach perfection, yet they can be experienced in their enormity and power, and this experience is said to be sublime. In the same way, Scripture describes man’s experience of God in a manner that admits of being described as sublime, precisely because our view of God is of something vast and overpowering, something which our mind cannot hope to encompass. But it does not admit that man can know God as beautiful, since the mind of man cannot encompass God, and so cannot be in a position to judge his beauty.19 19

Longinus and Edmund Burke touch briefly on the Hebrew Bible, describing the Jewish God as sublime: Longinus refers to Genesis 1:3 in On the Sublime, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 14; Burke refers to passages from Job in The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame, 1968), 63–​67.

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Our inability to recognize perfections in God is akin to this inability to recognize beauty in God. It is the sublime that we find in the biblical abstention from attributing perfection to God: In the lack of a perfect form so evocatively suggested by the assertion that “No man can see my face”; or in the lack of a perfect form indicated by the visibility only of God’s wind or breath or word at the creation; or in the use of the imperfect tense, the tense of incompleteness, in God’s self-​description as “I will be what I will be.” Perfect Being Theology as a Conceit? Additional techniques are deployed in the Bible for emphasizing God’s sublime nature and man’s limited grasp of it. One such technique is to describe God’s grandeur by means of questions such as “Is anything too wondrous for God?”20 and “Can anything be hidden from God?”21 Later philosophy tends to interpret such rhetorical forms as if they were equivalent to propositions such as “God is all-​powerful” or “God is all-​knowing.” But this indirect approach to describing the seemingly unbounded quality of certain divine attributes is not equivalent to the declarative assertion of God’s perfections. Questions of this kind approach God as sublime, not as perfect, seeking to instill in the listener or reader the intuition that God is too vast to be assessed and judged by any man. Notice also how limited are the claims being made in such questions, even if we attempt to translate them into propositions. The statement “Nothing is too wondrous for God” does not assert that God’s might is perfect and total, or that his power is infinite, or that God is capable of all things—​all of which are things that are beyond the possibility of any human being to know. Its meaning is rather that in human experience, nothing should be ruled out as impossible, for God at times does things that defy man’s limited imagination. Likewise, the statement that “Nothing is hidden from God” falls far short of being a claim about God’s knowledge being perfect and total, or that God has always had foreknowledge of all events. It means only that there are no human actions that are without consequences, and that God’s judgments will take man’s every action into account. In other words, these are more limited constructions that address our experience of God’s actions in the world, and that affirm the

2 0 21

Cf. Gen 18:14; Jer 32:17, 27; Job 42:2; Dan 4:35. Cf. Jer 16:17, 23:24, 32:19; Ps 139:7; Job 34:21–​22.

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possibility that the world is ruled with justice. They are also more humble, being without the presumption that man is capable of assessing God’s perfection. Such considerations mean that we must take seriously this possibility: That the belief that a human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors and the rabbis of the Talmud as a vain conceit. Is it not, after all, impudence to believe that we can know enough of God’s nature to assert the ways in which he is perfect? Do not such constructions of God’s perfections run the risk of turning into “idols of the mind,” in Ezekiel’s chilling phrase (Ezek 14:3)? What Makes God “Worthy of Worship”? Discussion of God’s perfections is often linked to the question of what would make God “worthy of worship.” Here the argument is that if we do not believe that God is perfect being, then we would not have suitable grounds for worshipping him. This is perhaps a useful test case of the contrast between the conception of God as perfect being and that of God as lord or king. Neither Hebrew Scripture nor the rabbinic literature seems to treat the question of whether God is worthy of worship. In Jewish tradition, interactions with God usually consist of giving thanks to God, praising God, asking God for assistance, and asking God for forgiveness: One thanks God for the things he has given us; one praises God for the good he has done; one asks for assistance where it is needed, and for forgiveness where we have sinned. None of these things requires a prior judgment that God is perfect, any more than one would need to consider a human being (a king or father, for example) perfect in order to be worthy of being thanked for the good they do, or praised for it, or asked for assistance or for forgiveness. More generally, devotion to God may be said to consist of fear of God, as expressed by an avoidance of any kind of wrongdoing; and love of God, as expressed through loyalty and adherence to his covenant. Here, too, it would seem that no prior recognition of God’s perfection is required in order to fear him and refrain from wrongdoing for this reason, or to love him, to remain loyal to him and to adhere to his covenant—​any more than a human being (a king or a father, for example) needs to be recognized as perfect in order to be feared, or loved, or for us to be loyal to him and to honor promises we have made to him. Overall, then, the metaphor of God as a king or father permits us to orient ourselves in reality and to embrace fitting habits of thought and action, yet without presuming to judge God’s perfection. In the context of Scripture or the classical rabbinic tradition, the claim to be capable of judging God’s perfection

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would be understood as arrogant, and as involving an overestimation of what can be grasped with man’s limited faculties. Only once an insistence on God’s perfection is introduced into theology do we find human beings presuming to judge whether God is “worthy of worship” or not, and this by way of a discussion of perfections that no man can know God to have. The Distortion of Metaphor Perfect being theology invokes metaphors for describing God’s attributes, but in general, these metaphors appear to be less useful in understanding God than the metaphors found in Scripture and in rabbinic teaching. This is due to the fact that God’s supposed perfections are derived by idealizing other metaphors that are more readily understood. For example, the assertion that God is “all-​powerful” is an idealization of the metaphor that God acts in the world as its lord and king. The assertion that God is “all-​knowing” is an idealization of the metaphor that God rules like a wise king. The claim that God is perfectly simple and has no parts is an idealization of the metaphor that the God who rules heaven and earth is one. The claim that God is immutable is an idealization of the metaphor that the God who rules the earth keeps faith with those who are faithful to him. And so forth. But these idealizations come at a heavy price. For the purpose of each metaphor is to draw attention to what is supposed to be a valid analogy between human experience of the world and our experience of a human lord or king. However, the more thoroughly idealized the metaphor becomes, the harder it is to see how it can be applied in such a way that it is still valid. In other words, the idealization of the metaphor is always an exaggeration of the metaphor and a distortion of it. And the further the metaphor is distorted, the less it appears to apply. For instance, the metaphor of God as a king permits God to be seen as acting unevenly in the world: As having remained silent in the face of the oppression and murder of the Hebrew slaves, but then as finally “awakening” or “rising” and liberating these slaves and destroying Pharaoh’s armies—​as a powerful human king might. The validity of the metaphor derives entirely from the similarity that is perceived between God’s actions and the behavior of a great and just human king who may for various reasons be slow to action, but whose deliverance will ultimately come once circumstances enable him to act. However, when this metaphor of God’s acting in the world is idealized and transformed into the metaphor of God as “all-​powerful,” there is no longer any reason for any event that takes place to be anything other than the expression

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of God’s will. The result is a view in which God is envisioned as being equally responsible for all things. This means that God is equally the author of the act of drowning the Hebrew children in the Nile, and equally the author of the act of saving Israel from Egypt. By the same token, God is the author of the slaying of his own prophets in the time Ahav, and of the destruction of the prophets of Baal. In this way, the image of God is transformed into that of a “being” that has no particular preference for good over evil—​precisely the opposite of the metaphor of the king who is slow to act but ultimately just, and precisely the opposite of the biblical claim to have discerned that the world is ruled by a just God. Similarly, the assertion that God is perfectly powerful deprives us of the ability to learn almost anything from the theology of the biblical History of Israel (Genesis-​Kings), or from that of prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, which rely heavily on metaphors of God’s weakness and neediness to describe reality: All of them return time and again to the need for an alliance (i.e., covenant) between decent men and women and God, for God cannot bring the world to righteousness without such assistance. And what is true of God’s “omnipotence” is true of all the other perfections that have been introduced into God’s nature by divine perfection theology: The assertion that God must know all things in advance turns our own struggles and decisions into a great game in which God toys with us without purpose and without end; the assertion of God’s immutability and impassability renders human action and prayer irrelevant in altering the course of ultimate reality; the assertion of God’s simplicity, which is interpreted as meaning that he possesses only one attribute, means that metaphors such as “God’s love” and “God’s justice” must all be collapsed into one another so that “really” none of them have any meaning that can make sense to human beings; and so on with regard to every idealization that is introduced into theology in accordance with the pattern proposed by Greek philosophy. What we witness with the adoption of Greek idealization into theology is thus the destruction of the metaphors with which biblical religion was capable of advancing its view of the world. This is not merely a destruction of the metaphors that primitive or childish or common people “need” in order to maintain their belief. It is the destruction of the capacity of any human being, no matter how intelligent or wise, to interpret the world in such a way as to recognize the action of the God of Israel, a just God who rules, in reality. We have all met people who say that they cannot believe in God because they cannot accept that an all-​powerful God with perfect foreknowledge would have allowed, say, the Holocaust. In other words, they have been deprived by Greek-​influenced theology of the tools the prophets of Israel offered us for making sense of the

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world. First and foremost, these are metaphors portraying God as living and moving, a good and just God who longs for us to turn to him so that together we may repent of our mistakes and establish a more just reality. Metaphor and Reality All terms used to describe God in Scripture are metaphors, and they were understood as such by the prophets and scholars who deployed them. When the prophets spoke of God’s hand or God’s breath, they used metaphors and did not mean to say that God’s hand is just like a human hand, or that God’s breath is just like human breath. However, we have been trained since childhood to think that because we speak metaphorically in speaking of God’s hand or his breath, this means that “God doesn’t really have a hand” or “God doesn’t really have breath.” If we are to understand anything that is written in Scripture concerning God’s nature, we have no choice but to recognize that we were trained poorly, and that this conclusion is false. Scripture deploys metaphor to point to what is real—​to propose truths about reality. And so while a statement concerning God’s hand relies upon a metaphor, it is nonetheless a statement about something real. This is just as Newton relies on the metaphors of “mass” or “force” to describe real things for which he had other no words available, and which he has borrowed from other usage. It is just as Darwin relies on the metaphor of natural “selection” to describe something real, for which there is no other term available, although it is clear that nature cannot, in keeping with the normal meaning of the term, select anything. So too in the Bible: God really does have a hand and God really does have breath. The things that are described by these terms are real, even though it is by way of a metaphor that the prophet describes these real things, for he has no other terms for them. In the same way, God’s kingship and rule are to be understood as metaphorical, but nonetheless real. So is God’s disappointment with the course of the world of his creation. And so is the covenant and alliance he offers Israel. All these are metaphorical but nonetheless real things.22 What is so compelling in Greek-​inspired perfection theology is the claim to be offering praises for God that are more lavish, more extravagant, than those that are dispensed by the prophets in Scripture. This seems to make the

22

My use of the term metaphor diverges from traditional usage, which assumes that metaphorical statements are false. In my view, metaphorical statements can be true.

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perfection theologians more pious for what they are willing to say, and to portray God as all the greater for the more extensive praise he receives. But in fact, these praises are empty. They are empty because they teach us to speak of things of which we cannot judge, and of which no human being can judge. And they are empty because we cannot use them to understand the world of our experience, the world in which God is to be found. The metaphors of Hebrew Scripture and of the Talmud, on the other hand, are framed so as to approach the world of our experience, the world in which we find what is real and so has true being. The reality that is revealed by them—​including God’s abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-​times devastating responses to mankind’s deeds and misdeeds—​reflects the actual character of our experience, which is fraught with hardship. To be sure, the biblical God also appears with sudden and stunning generosity, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. At these moments, we are able to catch a glimpse of the depths of God’s faithfulness and justice. But these are not the “perfections” of a God who is a “perfect being.” They do not exist in God’s character out of some “absolute necessity,” or in any way that is similar to this. God faithfulness and justice is an aspect of our experience as well. The metaphors of Scripture and of the rabbis permit us to see this with our own eyes, thus paving the way for an understanding, however limited, of God’s true nature. Bibliography Burke, Edmund. The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edited by James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame, 1968. Hazony, Yoram. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Longinus. On the Sublime, Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991. Plato. Republic, Volume I: Books 1–5. Edited and translated by Christopher Emlyn-Jones, William Preddy. Loeb Classical Library 237. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Chapter 2

God the Walker Berel Dov Lerner Yom Kippur On the holiest day of the year (Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement) the holiest person (the Kohen Gadol or High Priest), would enter the holiest place (the Qodesh Haqedoshim or Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem). There he offered the most ethereal of sacrifices (the smoke of incense) and, upon leaving, uttered a short petitionary prayer.1 This meticulously choreographed encounter between mortal humanity and transcendent God was so harrowing that the High Priest was held to be in immediate danger of death. Later, he would invite his friends to a celebration of his safe completion of the service.2 The Talmud records one High Priest’s account of the climactic moment of the Yom Kippur service:3 It was taught: R. Ishmael b. Elisha says: “I once entered into the innermost part [of the Sanctuary] to offer incense and saw Akathriel Jah, the Lord of Hosts, seated upon a high and exalted throne. He said to me: ‘Ishmael, My son, bless Me!’ l replied: ‘May it be Your will that Your mercy may suppress Your anger and Your mercy may prevail over Your other attributes, so that You may deal with your children according to the attribute of mercy and may, on their behalf, stop short of the limit of strict justice!’ And He nodded to me with His head.” This is exactly the kind of Talmudic passage which no doubt induced headaches in rationalist philosophers such as Maimonides who were trying to

1 Mishnah Yoma 5:1. 2 Mishnah Yoma 7:4. I should mention the alternative position that any weekly Sabbath is actually deemed holier than Yom Kippur. Thus, the Sabbath evening Amidah prayer states that God sanctified the Sabbath “more than any other time.” 3 Berakhot 7a. Translations of Talmudic passages are based on the Soncino translation The Babylonian Talmud (1935–​52) with my modifications of antiquated language. [All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.]

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004387980_004

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cleanse Judaism of anthropomorphism. I approach such texts as I would a parable by Kafka: prepared for a mixture of revelation and irony and even some humor. In fact, the next line of the text, which explains the purported lesson of the story, is not without a pinch of irony. The Talmud explains, “From here we learn that the blessing of an ordinary person [the High Priest Ishmael] must not be considered lightly in your eyes.” Speaking of God and the Language of Perfection Crucially, such parables also assume a dose of epistemic modesty. These daringly anthropomorphic passages from the rabbinic literature are all prefaced explicitly or implicitly with the Hebrew word kivyakhol—​“as if it could be”—​a term which I believe reminds us of the incapacity of human thought and language to fully penetrate the nature of the divine.4 This volume is concerned with the role played by notions of perfection in regard to understanding God’s nature. I’ve got to admit that the whole endeavor worries me. I would like to bracket the entire project in a big kivyakhol. It seems wise to maintain a default option of negative theology—​the idea that we are not really capable of making any strictly true positive assertions about God Himself—​as a kind of escape route from difficulties associated with discussions of God’s nature. My at least partial embrace of negative theology is not motivated by high-​flying philosophical theorizing or mystical enlightenment, but rather reflects the simple-​minded idea that it would be ridiculous of me to presume that I could understand the Creator and Master of the universe. Such concerns are hardly strange to Jewish tradition. Maimonides, the central figure of Jewish philosophy, famously rejected the idea that mere humans might describe God’s essence, and while the mystical Kabbalistic tradition produced detailed diagrams of the inner workings of the godhead, those systems were always presented as describing partially intelligible emanations generated by the inconceivable divine principle of Ein Sof, the Unbounded, and linking it with the created world.5 Thus, the ultimate divine reality remains beyond human speculation. Such a policy protects us both from overstepping 4 For an extended discussion of the uses of kivyakhol in rabbinic literature, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 325–​ 401. 5 For recent discussions of the tendency towards negative theology in Judaism, see Michael Fagenblat, ed., Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017).

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our humanity as well as from downsizing God. Only God is truly capable of knowing God’s ultimate nature, or as the anonymous Hebrew maxim has it, ilu yeda’ativ hayiytiv: “If I knew Him I would be Him.”6 Once that constant and explicit caveat is firmly in place, people of faith are freed to speak of God in ways which express their experience of the divine and which draw them closer to God and His service. It is this epistemic humility concerning knowledge of God which makes me nervous about perfection theology. People who wish to speak of God’s greatness yet admit that they cannot ultimately comprehend that greatness may disagree about whether talk of perfection really helps matters. I’m not convinced it does. Notions of perfection lead to simple definitions. A perfect circle can be completely defined as the set of all points equidistant from one particular point in a plane. That’s it. That is the complete essence of the perfect circle. With that simple definition in hand I can confidently go on to deduce as many truths about circles as I  please. In contrast, the imperfect circle drawn by a child is, practically speaking, infinitely complex. The width of its line changes from one segment to the next, and its shape is unlikely to be precisely definable even by a lavishly intricate mathematical formula. Instead of viewing notions of perfection as offering a road towards glimpsing the transcendent, I want to suggest that they may merely constitute an artifact of our own quite limited cognitive faculties. When Plato venerated the perfect ideas of his philosophy, he was idolizing the cognitive short-​cuts that people use to contend with reality’s overwhelming complexity and mistaking those short-​cuts for ultimate reality itself. While Descartes was impressed by our possession of the notion of a perfect God and insisted that it must have been planted in our minds by that perfect God, I view all notions of perfection as all-​too-​human concepts which derive from our all-​too-​human tendency to construct simplified versions of reality that are palatable to our all-​too-​human minds. By thinking of God as perfect, we risk deceiving ourselves into imagining His essence to be as immediately comprehensible as are the perfect figures of geometry.7 Notions

6 See Howard (Haim) Kreisel, “ ‘If I Knew Him I would be Him’—​The Evolving of a Maxim” [in Hebrew] Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 74/​75 (2013): 73–​103. 7 And so we find Descartes claiming paradoxically that although he does not grasp the infinite and there are “additional attributes of God which I cannot in any way grasp, and perhaps cannot even reach in my thought,” nevertheless “the idea that I have of God [is the] truest and most clear and distinct of all my ideas.” Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. and trans. J.  Cottingham (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32.

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of infinity lay the same traps: just think how easy it is to completely grasp the notion of Euclid’s infinitely long parallel lines which never meet. Is the Notion of Moral Perfection Conceptually Coherent? Let us return to the High Priest Ishmael and his encounter with God. It is Yom Kippur and God must decide the fate of His people. Opposing aspects of God’s thought—​justice and mercy—​vie to find expression in His judgment. Ishmael intervenes with his plea that mercy overcome justice in God’s mind, and in a perhaps weary nod of His incorporeal head, God silently expresses His assent. This vision of a dynamic divine morality, dialectically swinging between the poles of mercy and justice, is fairly common in Judaism. Every morning Jews pray that God remember Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and allow mercy and loving-​kindness to overcome His other attributes. The rabbis identify God’s two chief names in Scripture, the Tetragrammaton (rendered in English as “Lord”) and Elohim (rendered in English as “God”), with, respectively, the attributes of mercy and justice. Thus, any passage mentioning God in the Hebrew Bible can be read in light of the aspect of God’s mind which is preeminently expressed or addressed by it, as this is signaled by the name it uses to refer to God. The distribution of divine names used by classical biblical criticism to attribute biblical passages to hypothetical ancient sources labeled “J” and “E” are instead seen to trace the path of God’s inner moral dynamic. Famously, the rabbis read the verse “When the Lord God made earth and heaven …” (Gen 2:4) in this fashion and concluded that the very act of creation stemmed from inner divine deliberations over the roles of mercy and justice:8 This may be compared to a king who had some empty glasses. Said the king: “If I pour hot water into them, they will burst; if cold, they will contract [and snap].” What then did the king do? He mixed hot and cold water and poured it into them, and so they remained [unbroken]. Even so, said the Holy One, blessed be He: “If I create the world on the basis of mercy alone [under the aspect of the name Lord], its sins will be great; on the basis of judgment alone [under the aspect of the name God], the world cannot exist. Hence, I will create it on the basis of judgment and of mercy, and may it then stand!” Hence the expression, The Lord God.9

8 Biblical quotations are from the New jps translation. 9 Genesis Rabbah 12:15, from Soncino Midrash Rabbah.

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The rabbinic view of God’s inner dynamic of justice versus mercy is strikingly reminiscent of a passage from “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” one of Isaiah Berlin’s most famous short essays and a locus classicus for the doctrine of values pluralism, a view which claims that opposing values may be equally valid. There Berlin writes: Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false. Justice, rigorous justice, is for some people an absolute value, but it is not compatible with what may be no less ultimate values for them—​mercy, compassion—​as arises in concrete cases.10 Berlin goes on to explain that in some circumstances there is no perfect equilibrium to be achieved that successfully addresses the claims of all authentic values. Justice is good and mercy is as well, but sometimes it is impossible to achieve perfection in both goods at the same time. I would compare such moral dilemmas with aesthetic dilemmas. Clarity, literal accuracy, and trueness to style are all legitimate values in literary translations, but sometimes stylistic features must be sacrificed in order to ensure clarity, while at other times accuracy does not jibe with the preservation of stylistic conventions. The various literary values are not fully commensurable, and thus in some cases it will be impossible to identify the optimal translation of a passage of text. Worse yet, the translator must take into account the endlessly variegated backgrounds and abilities of potential readers—​just as the moral agent must take into account the endless complexities of the people affected by her actions. Berlin further claims that the difficulties he discusses are not merely pragmatic or psychological, but rather conceptual and thus inescapable: The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable—​that is a truism—​but conceptually incoherent; I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.11

10 11

Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal” in The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 10. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 11.

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Berlin is no theologian. Throughout his essay, he repeatedly explains that values and the conflicts between them grow in the soil of human lives lived in human societies. However, his claim that the irresolvablity of conflicts between values is ultimately a conceptual affair does not bode well for the possibility of their resolution by God. We may easily say that God’s moral thinking involves profound knowledge and sensibilities completely beyond those of any mere human. But if the clash of values is rooted in conceptual contradictions, their perfect resolution will become problematic in an entirely different way. One might suggest that God works with better concepts than ours. It is almost as if Berlin (loc. cit.) were addressing this proposed solution when he writes: If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonized in principle, then we must answer, to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours. It is as if to say: at times there is no perfect moral solution available to God, if morality is to be understood in any humanly intelligible sense. And if there is a solution in terms of a divine morality unintelligible to humans, a “morality of the ein sof,” so to speak, for us that is no morality at all. That divine morality would have as much to do with our systems of values as the Dog Star has to do with a cocker spaniel. If we accept Berlin’s thesis—​and I realize that it is a hotly debated one—​moral perfection becomes a logical impossibility, and the attribution of logically impossible actions and qualities to God delivers us into a philosophical and theological quagmire well worth avoiding.12 The Unbounded Nature of Moral Action God’s interaction with the High Priest Ishmael suggests yet another line of critique against the notion of moral perfection. The idea of perfect or maximal 12

I should point out that I have recently discovered that the thesis I develop here has a­ lready been suggested by Michael Slote, an important scholar of virtue ethics. His book, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), is devoted to a systematic defense of Berlin’s value pluralism. In a theologically-​minded aside, Slote writes (44): “Indeed, if time allowed, I think it could be shown that even God or a god couldn’t be ethically perfect. This goes against a long tradition of Western theological and religious thought, but I think the example used just a moment ago could readily be reconfigured in such a way as to target the familiar idea that God must be and can be perfect (or perfectly good).”

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morality is too limiting—limiting, so to speak from both above and below. It blinds us both to the limitless heights of moral creativity as well as to the inexhaustible plentitude of morally relevant minutiae. When Ishmael enters the Holy of Holies to supplicate in the name of the House of Israel, God’s response is completely unexpected: He radically overturns the whole structure of the encounter. Before Ishmael can petition God, God petitions Ishmael and asks for his blessing. Here God is exhibiting an essential quality of moral agency: that the agent may surprise us. While philosophers tinker with toy moral dilemmas in which actors must choose between two artificially limited options, such as pulling the switch to redirect a trolley to run over one victim instead of five, real-​life dilemmas are always sufficiently complicated that we cannot be sure whether we have taken into account every ingenious response to them that someone might potentially think of. Not a few teachers of philosophy have contended with the embarrassing moment when a bright student offers an original and practical solution to some toy dilemma, forcing the lecturer to add yet further artificial restrictions on the range of available responses in order to keep the lesson-​plan on course. Scripture goes out of its way to point out that creative ingenuity is the surest sign of wisdom in moral judgment. When the Book of Kings recites an incident from Solomon’s reign to explain how all Israel came to believe that Solomon “possessed divine wisdom to execute justice” (1 Kgs 3:28), it chooses the story of the two prostitutes who each claim to be the mother of the same child. Famously, Solomon makes the shocking announcement that he will cut the child in two, knowing that the true mother would rather relinquish her claim than see her child die. Talk of “perfect” or “optimal” solutions to ethical problems brings to mind the clean determination of maxima for the well-​behaved functions of differential calculus. The wisdom of Solomon’s quirky “judgment” does not map well on to such predictable functions. The existence of a perfect response to a morally challenging situation would necessarily imply a limit to possible ingenuity. But can a cap be placed on ethically-​motivated creativity? That would seem to require that the quality of moral action be hemmed in by restrictions akin to the ideal limit set by thermodynamics upon the efficiency of steam engines. The idea of moral perfection is too limiting from above. Let us continue to “limiting from below.” After receiving Ishmael’s blessing, God nods in assent. There are many gestures and words which express assent, but God chooses to nod. God’s action is fine-​tuned, as is all meaningful behavior. There is an unlimited variety of tones of voice in which the same words can be spoken, an unlimited number of ways to express assent, and, at the micro-​level below the description found in our Talmudic passage, an unlimited

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number of ways to nod assent, each expressing a slightly different attitude. Moral action in the real world is like what Nelson Goodman calls “autographic” art.13 When considering a work of autographic art, claims Goodman, we can set no lower limit on the magnitude of detail below which aesthetic significance disappears. Thus, when we look at a painting—​Goodman’s paradigmatic autographic art—​we can never be sure we have taken notice of every aspect of every brush stroke, or paint mixture, or some other minute detail, which some future critic might find telling. Similarly, in real-​world moral action, even the slightest variation in speech or gesture can bear moral significance. Is there, for instance, a perfect way to hand money to a beggar? Should it be a businesslike affair, sparing the recipient a longer moment of indignity during which he receives a handout? Or should it be exploited as an opportunity for expressing personal concern? Or should care be taken that third parties take notice of the act so that they might imitate it? Once more, faced with these countless and at least in part incommensurable vanishingly fine fine-​points of moral nuance, I find no place for talk about the perfect action.14 The Impossibility of Moral Perfection and Imitatio Dei Assuming for the moment the cogency of my argument so far—​which, of course, can only be fully assessed in the light of the broader debate on value pluralism—​what significance does the rejection on conceptual grounds of divine moral perfection have for the existential concerns of religion, especially those of Judaism? God’s morality is of at least triple importance for Jewish thought: 1) God’s providence is held to be moral. 2) His teachings to humankind are held to be moral. 3) His own moral character serves as a model for human morality via the notion of imitatio Dei. I  don’t see why any of these 13 14

See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-​Merrill Co., 1968), 113. I have not taken much care to differentiate between morally perfect actions and a morally perfect character. One might argue that even if the former—​perfect actions—​are not always available, perfect character might remain a possibility. In that case, we might save the notion of divine moral perfection by saying that it is a matter of character and virtues. However, I don’t think this move would ultimately work. The structure of character and virtue is no less complex than that of action; the balance between justice and mercy isn’t just a matter of mixing the two in the correct mathematical proportions. Characters can be virtuous in surprising and innovative ways. There is unlimited room for fine-​tuning of character, and it is not clear that all the members of this infinite set of possible character-​ structures can be compared and ranked relative to each other.

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purposes require the notion of God being morally perfect. It is enough for Him to be unapproachably better morally than human beings, for Him to be able to take into account full knowledge of reality (after all, I have not dismissed divine omniscience)—​for Him to be in a league of His own, so to speak—​for God’s morality to satisfy these concerns. Furthermore, the notion of God not being morally perfect leaves atheistic arguments as they are. The problem of evil challenges faith in an exceptionally good God as much as it challenges faith in a perfectly good God. When a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands of innocents, it creates exactly the same problems for belief in a very, very, good God as it does for belief in a perfectly good God. And when it comes to imitatio Dei, an imperfect God may actually better serve as a role model than a God who makes neatly perfect choices. Allow me to explain. The divine/​human analogy lies at the center of Jewish attempts to understand God. On the one hand we are told humans are created in God’s image. On the other hand, the psalmist asks “Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?” (Ps 113:5–​6). And, King Solomon proclaims that “the heavens and the heavens’ heavens” cannot contain Him (1 Kgs 8:27) We are told repeatedly to walk in God’s ways, yet also that “ ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isa 55:8–​9). What then is the common ground between God and humans which underlies the idea that we are created in the divine image? According to one ­explanation which became popular in later rabbinic literature, it is human metaphysical freedom of choice which makes us godlike. This idea can be found, for instance, in the writings of R.  Obadiah Sforno (ca. 1470–​1550),15 Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bezalel, ca. 1525–​1609),16 and R. Meir Simḥah Ha-​ Kohen of Dvinsk (1843–​1926).17 Free choice of the robust “non-​compatibilist” variety which is needed to solve theological problems stipulates that an action can be free only if the agent is genuinely capable of performing an alternative action in its stead. Experience teaches us that all human beings occasionally act badly, sparing us the worry that their moral freedom might be quashed by an innate inability to choose evil alternatives. God’s situation is more complicated and has motivated the creation of a whole literature on the subject.18 In a 15 16 17 18

Commentary on Gen 1:26. Derekh Hayyim on Avot 3:15 Meshekh Hokhma on Gen. 1:26. See William L. Rowe, Can God Be Free? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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nutshell: if being perfectly good is an essential characteristic of God, then He is only capable of choosing the morally perfect set of actions, leaving no alternatives available to Him, in which case His actions are not free. To make matters even worse, if we accept the common assumption that only freely performed actions can possess moral value, we might reach the paradoxical conclusion that if God is essentially morally perfect, He is also incapable of doing anything of moral value. He never really chooses the good. Value pluralism offers a direction out of this impasse. While God does not possess an evil inclination, He does possess reciprocally opposing moral attributes which combine in different ways in different circumstances. Sometimes the attribute of mercy has the upper hand, while at other times the attribute of justice wins the day, resulting in quite different consequences. The existence of mutually opposing virtues makes room for alternative possibilities of divine action, just as the struggle between the good and evil inclinations make available alternative possibilities of human action. While it would be difficult to imagine God being able to engage in straight-​forward evil, we can imagine God grappling to make His choice from among incommensurable alternatives, each of which requires the sacrifice of some good or the inner repression of some moral virtue. When thinking of God in this way, imitatio Dei can offer models for perhaps the most crucial aspect of human moral experience: the inner conflicts that accompany moral deliberation and action. After all, if human morality is all about internal struggle, what help is it to be told to imitate a statically perfect God who lacks an inner dynamic? The God encountered by the High Priest Ishmael, a God seeking human encouragement in His grappling with moral decisions and responding to the blessing with a silent nod, gives expression to the profound seriousness and effort such deliberations deserve. Of course, as always, this dynamic picture of God must be qualified with the ever-​present kivyakhol. Is God a Stander or a Walker? Rabbinic texts contrast humans and angels in philosophically interesting ways. Consider a homiletic trope which has become popular over the past few hundred years.19 It is based on an idiosyncratic reading of a verse from the 19

Jacob Elbaum, Repentance and Self-​Flagellation in the Writings of the Sages of Germany and Poland 1348–​1648 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 120n80 suggests that the homily makes its earliest appearance in the work of R. Yitzḥak Ḥayyot (1538–​1617?). I am indebted to Admiel Kosman for bringing this to my attention.

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description of a prophetic vision in the third chapter of the Book of Zechariah that relates a divine promise made to the High Priest Joshua, who is to serve in the Temple once it is rebuilt. In verse 3:7 he is told by the Lord of Hosts that “I will permit you to move among these [angelic] attendants.” The Hebrew for this verse has been read counterintuitively by some rabbis as stating “I will give you walkers among these standers.” They understand the passage to juxtapose walkers, dynamic human beings whose lives are a constant process of change, to the standing angels, who are created and remain in a state of unchanging and absolute obedience to God. The contrast emphasizes the human capacity for change resulting from our exercise of free will, the Godlike attribute which gives humans a leg-​up on angels. It is through our freely taken decisions that we can change ourselves. But if free will is associated with the human propensity for change, does that suggest that God might change as well? If God (kivyakhol) deliberates over moral issues which are not given to absolute perfect resolutions, do His imperfect decisions impact on His character? In other words, is God a “stander” or a “walker”? A further element of this line of thought can be based upon the writings of Rabbi Meir Simḥah Ha-​Kohen of Dvinsk, one of the leading rabbinic scholars of his generation. He discusses the human/​angelic dichotomy in several passages of his erudite and exegetically daring commentary on the Torah, Meshekh Ḥokhma. Meir Simḥah cites rabbinic sources which support the notion that while humans are essentially social and interdependent beings, the angels are independent singletons, each performing its specific task without help from others. Meir Simḥah proposes that it is precisely the social nature of human life which affords humans the possibility of growth and change while the angels’ asociality condemns them to live at a static level of angelic spiritual perfection.20 Applying this thesis to God, one might suggest that God’s relationship with creation in general and human beings in particular serves as a motor for His process of self-​development. There will be a difference between God’s goodness before Creation and His goodness in particular decisions related to Creation. These relationships and the divine decisions taken in their wake allow God to be a walker whose nature is not limited to a static kind of greatness, but who rather enjoys the possibility of inexhaustible development. We need not take this to mean that God improves in some absolute sense, but rather that He chooses to balance the incommensurable virtues of (for instance) justice 20

See Meshekh Ḥokhma on Deuteronomy 32:1–​3. For an extended analysis of R.  Meir Simḥah’s relevant ideas see Berel Dov Lerner, “Angels versus Humans in the Moral Psychology of R. Meir Simhah Ha-​Kohen of Dvinsk” in Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics, eds. Curtis Hutt, Halla Kim, and Berel Dov Lerner (London: Routledge, 2018), 13–​26.

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and mercy differently in response to his role as Creator. The High Priest Ishmael’s story can be read as describing how God’s interaction with humans affects this process, just as the parable of the hot and cold drinks cited above portrays God as adjusting His attributes to accommodate the project of creation. “On God’s Creation” A rather radical example of this way of thinking about God may be found in Harry Frankfurt’s reading of the opening chapters of the bible. Frankfurt distinguishes between the spirit of God which hovers over the water in the second verse of the bible with God Himself who enacts creation—​beginning with light—​in later verses. He explains: The difference between the spirit of God and God is the difference between a relatively unactualized and a more completely actualized mode of divine existence. This corresponds to the difference between the formless state of the world before creation and the fully determinate state of the world subsequent to the creative process. At the beginning of creation, God was as unformed as the world. The divine was present and active only as an indistinct spirit; its reality was not yet that of God Himself. The nature of this divine spirit was indefinite, and its activity was vague. In the still indeterminate condition of things that prevailed prior to creation, neither the world nor God was wholly developed. The specific character of the deity—​i.e., the exact direction of its purposefulness and power—​had not yet been articulated or realized. Like the unshaped and fluid world itself, the divine presence was inchoate.21 How does the indeterminate spirit of God become the actualized God of the bible? Through His very acts of creation He formulates the determinate intention of creating light, thus imposing order on the universe and setting in place the very first instance of structured difference in the world—​the difference between light and darkness. Through this very same process He simultaneously imposes order on His own will by crystalizing His determinate intention to create a specific thing—​light. Thus, by creating the world out of chaos God creates Himself as God out of the indeterminate spirit of God. Frankfurt

21

Harry Frankfurt, “On God’s Creation” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 121.

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further explains that while all these acts of Creation resulted from God’s mere formulation of intentions, something like the way a mind affects its body, the creation of humans is described as having required a kind of work—​God forms Adam from clay—​thus signaling that humans enjoy a degree of independence from God. I find Frankfurt’s thesis intriguing, and it can be read to some extent as a kind of kabbalistic “toy theory” exhibiting (in a simplified manner) notions which might be found in more developed systems of mystical Jewish thought. Be that as it may, I would, as always, bracket Frankfurt’s reading within a qualifying kivyakhol. Like any human talk about God, Frankfurt’s article can only attempt to formulate a human understanding of God as He may be known to humans. That being said, I will conclude my paper by discussing a biblical passage which has quite profound implications for the relationship of God-​as-​ knowable-​by-​humans to humans themselves. The Threatened Death of God Frankfurt writes that “it often seems that He [God] regards Himself as being in some way dependent on the conduct of mankind. The things people do appear at times to affect Him in ways that even suggest a certain vulnerability on His part.”22 Genesis 15 offers a striking yet little-​discussed example of such divine vulnerability. It recounts the story of how God made a covenant with Abraham to give the land of Canaan to his descendants. The chapter reaches its climax with the performance of an exotic ritual and a profound moment of revelation: Then He said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to assign this land to you as a possession.” And he said, “O Lord God, how shall I know that I am to possess it?” He answered, “Bring Me a three-​year-​old heifer, a three-​year-​old she-​goat, a three-​year-​ old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird.” He brought Him all these and cut them in two, placing each half opposite the other; but he did not cut up the bird. Birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him. And He said to Abram, “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.” When the sun set 22

Frankfurt, “On God’s Creation,” 117.

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and it was very dark, there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I assign this land …” (Gen 15:8–​18) While this whole procedure may bewilder today’s lay readers, there is little doubt about its significance. It has direct parallels in extra-​biblical texts from the ancient Near East, and also in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. Jeremiah 34 describes a similar ritual used for making a covenant concerning the freeing of slaves in which “the princes of Judah and the princes of Jerusalem, the officers and the priests, and all the people of the land … passed between the parts of the calf” (34:19). God warns that if the covenant is not kept, “I will deliver them into the hand[s]‌of their enemies and into the hand[s] of those who seek their lives, and their dead bodies shall become food for the birds of the heavens and for the beasts of the earth” (34:20). The ritual signifies that whoever walks between the pieces swears that if they do not abide by the covenant they shall be punished by being cut up into pieces like the calves to be eaten by birds and wild beasts. In extra-​biblical sources we find the ceremony being used to establish a pact between a vassal, who walks between the pieces, and his superior, the suzerain.23 The odd thing about the story is that a flaming torch—​the symbol of God’s presence—​passes between the pieces. Commentators of all stripes view this detail as implying that the covenant is unilateral: God unconditionally promises the Land to Abraham’s progeny without demanding any commitments on his part. However, the commentators shy away from an obvious corollary: that God is here announcing that His breach of the covenant would spell the end of His unity, in fact, His death. If God fails to keep His promise to Abraham, He will be torn asunder like the carcasses of the animals. What are we to make of this dramatized oath? Again, I  will differentiate between the unknown God of the Ein-​Sof and God as He is (at least partially) available to human experience. Here the Torah speaks of an apparition of a torch, a representation of God made present to humans. The death of God threatened by His pact with Abraham is the same death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche’s madman. It is, as Richard Schacht explains, “the demise of belief in the existence of God, as a cultural event of profound significance for people who from time immemorial have 23

Discussion of these issues can be found in many scholarly commentaries on the relevant verses, such as Victor Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–​17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990).

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been accustomed to thinking in terms of a theocentric interpretation of themselves, their lives, values, and reality.”24 It is, in other words, the death of God as He exists for humans. By making His covenant with Abraham, God has staked His existence for human beings upon the fulfillment of that covenant within human history. Everyone will know that God is said to have made the promise, and if the promise is not kept, God will be found out to be a fraud. It is precisely on this basis that the Psalmist makes his plea: “Let the nations not say, ‘Where, now, is their God?’ ” (115:2) Perhaps recognition of the way God has endangered Himself by entering into a fateful pact with Abraham might help us more fully understand a seemingly brazen passage from the Talmud: R. Nahman b. Isaac said to R. Hiyya b. Abin: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel: ‘You have made me a unique/​unified entity [ḥativa aḥat] in the world, and I shall make you a unique/​unified entity in the world. You have made me a unique/​unified entity in the world, as it is said: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one (Deut 6:4). And I shall make you a unique entity in the world’, as it is said: ‘And who is like Your people Israel, a nation one in the earth.’ (1 Chr 17:21)”25 The midrash seems to be saying that if it weren’t for Israel (and thus, Israel’s existence and well-​being) God would lose His unity, he would be “cut up into pieces” as far as the human world is concerned. In other words, God’s known presence in the world (His presence as known to human beings) depends upon the People Israel, who declare His presence and unity to humanity, and whose history gives witness to God’s presence in the world. Their fates are bound together, and the destruction of the one would imply the destruction of the Other. God in this world has made Himself vulnerable indeed. Bibliography Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” In The Proper Study of Mankind, Edited by H. Hardy, 1–​16. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Elbaum, Jacob. Repentance and Self-​Flagellation in the Writings of the Sages of Germany and Poland 1348–​1648 [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes Press: 1992.

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Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 119–​120. Berakhot 6a.

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Fagenblat, Michael, editor. Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. Fishbane, Michael. Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On God’s Creation.” In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 117–​128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-​Merrill Co., 1968. Hamilton, Victor. The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–​17. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990. Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Derekh Hayyim Hashalem. London: Hahinukh, 1961. Kreisel, Howard (Haim). “ ‘If I Knew Him I would be Him’–​The Evolving of a Maxim” [in Hebrew]. Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah 74/​75 (2013):73–​103. Lerner, Berel Dov. “Angels versus Humans in the Moral Psychology of R. Meir Simhah Ha-​Kohen of Dvinsk.” In Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics, Edited by C. Hutt, H. Kim and B. D. Lerner, 13–​26. London: Routledge, 2018. Meir Simḥah Ha-​Kohen of Dvinsk. Perush Meshekh Ḥokhma ‘al HaTorah, 4th edition, Edited by Y. Kuperman. Jerusalem: Y. Kuperman, 2002. Midrash Rabbah Edited by H. Freedman and M. Simon. London: Soncino Press, 1939. Rowe, William L. 2003. Can God Be Free? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Sforno, Obadiah. Bi’ur al Ha-​Torah, Edited by Z. Gottleib. Jerusalem: Mossad Ha-​Rav Kook, 1980. Slote, Michael A. The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. The Babylonian Talmud. Edited by I. Epstein. London: Soncino Press, 1935–​52.

Chapter 3

The Living God: on the Perfection of the Imperfect James A. Diamond Introduction Contemporary abstract conceptions of God, the core of which is some philosophical notion of “perfection,” originate with the ancient Greeks. The strength of their thought shaped the development of philosophical theology in all three of what are commonly grouped together as the monotheistic religions to the present day. Within Judaism that theology displaced a far more dominant and “imperfect” portrait of a God depicted first in the Hebrew Bible, adopted and adapted in rabbinic theology thereafter. That God of revelation is possessed of a vital personality, capable of entering into and exiting relationships, falling short of the traits that are the measure of perfection in the philosophical model. Following the Greeks, the later medieval Jewish rationalist tradition replaced that living and dynamic God with a static “Being” possessed of all the omni-​superlatives associated with “perfection” that have become so familiar: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and immutability. The cost of constructing a deity as an archetype of perfection was the sacrifice of much of the divine character that constitutes God as a living God of Judaism and Jews. The prime religious mandate of imitatio dei is at stake. Maimonides, Jewish rationalism’s chief expositor, for example postulated a God of pure abstraction whose only activity is thinking Himself, and who is “always constantly an intellectually cognizing subject, an intellect, and an intellectually cognized subject.”1 Consequently, imitatio dei of the philosophically perfect God, consists of the pure contemplation of universal truths. In striking contrast, the imitatio of the anthropomorphically conceived biblical and rabbinic God calls for all that is associated with the ethics, politics, and relationships needed for the development and perfection of personhood.2 In 1 Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), (Hereafter referred to as Guide) I:68, 166. See also Guide, I:1, 23, and Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:10 which, because of this, concludes that God knows the creation by knowing Himself. 2 As David Stern suggests, “the major questions raised by the presence of anthropomorphic statements in rabbinic literature are not, What did the Rabbis believe about God? or How sophisticated was their understanding of God’s nature? did they believe He had a body or

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order to recapture the personal deity that the rational tradition worked so hard to eradicate, one prominent biblical scholar called for turning “up the mythical decibels of the old personal God” to avoid “a model of divinity that does not partake of personhood [that] can hardly be expected to cultivate personhood” in human beings.3 The biblical portrait of God patently belies every one of those philosophically construed perfections. Consider but one passage early on in Genesis, which sets the pace for all the ensuing narratives that recount the interactions between God and the world. Chapter six records developments such as pervasive human wickedness that are apparently unanticipated by God’s original creation (Gen 6:5). God consequently regrets that creation (6:5), is deeply saddened by it (6:6), impulsively reacts by intending to eradicate every living product of that original plan (6:7), and restrains Himself from ­acting on that impulse after experiencing some pleasure from a singular exception to human evil (6:8). This is a God who observes, reacts, regrets, indulges, is conflicted, and indeed, is capable of executing devastation of apocalyptic proportions. Next consider just one illustration of the God of the classical rabbis depicted early in the Talmud:4 It was taught: Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha related, One time I entered the Holy of Holies to place incense in the innermost place and I  saw God (Akatriel), the Lord of Hosts, sitting on a throne exalted and high. And God said: “Yishmael, My son, bless Me.” And I responded, “May it be Your will that Your capacity for mercy overwhelm Your capacity for anger, that Your capacity for mercy overshadow Your attributes, that You behave mercifully toward all Your children, and that, for their benefit You go beyond the boundaries of judgment. And God responded by nodding His head.”5 This rabbinic legend is simply an extreme formulation of a consistently emotive experiential “imperfect” God that defers to and relies on the authority of

not? but rather, What is God’s character? What type of personality does He have? What sort of character is God?” in “Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Prooftexts 12, no. 2 (May 1992): 157. 3 Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005), 192–​193. 4 Guide I:55, 128. 5 Berakhot 7a. [All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.]

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the rabbis characterized throughout the rabbinic corpus.6 The perfection of Maimonides’ God demands the negation of any of the attributes intrinsic to the logic of the biblical and rabbinic sources just cited for “all affections entail change.” To allow for some relationship between God and human beings that somehow has an impact on God would be tantamount to asserting that God is only potentially perfect, requiring “some other thing [to exist] in actuality that causes [God] to pass to actuality.”7 Yet the biblical and rabbinic God offends the notion of a God whose “perfections must exist in actuality.”8 This God is not a necessary being in its philosophical sense but one that is contingent on human endeavour in order to realize compassion, perhaps God’s principal trait.9 In the words of one prominent historian of ancient Judaism, an anthropomorphic, anthropopathic God, is “the God of practically all the Hebrew, and Aramaic, and some of the Greek, Jewish literature of antiquity.”10 While the rationalist movement attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through to medieval midrash, and on through Kabbalah, deeply cultivated that myth, developing, expanding, and enhancing it even further.11 Rabbinic and mystical interpretations of an evolving, impressionable, and at times fragmented and suffering God, emerge naturally from the original sense of the Hebrew Bible as well as its rabbinic overlay. As one expert in ancient rabbinic thought asserts, “While the medieval kabbalists elaborated and developed these ideas, they inherited 6 7 8 9

10 11

See Alon Goshen Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 2 (April 1994): 171–​195, who argues categorically that rabbinic literature is totally devoid of any incorporeal concept of God. Guide, I:55, 128. Guide, I:55, 128. It is noteworthy that the central verses of Exodus 34:6–​7 listing God’s attributes have come to be traditionally known as the thirteen attributes of mercy or compassion. All of them can be reduced to that one essential trait. Rashi on verse 34:6 identifies the first four with compassion (rahum). In what might be a direct repudiation of a Christian caricature of the Old Testament God as one of strict unforgiving justice, Rashi cites Psalm 22:2 (My God, (eli) my God, why have you forsaken me) as his prooftext supporting compassion as the meaning of the divine epithet el. See also Rivka Ulmer’s discussion in “Psalm 22 in Pesiqta Rabbati: The Suffering of the Jewish Messiah and Jesus,” in The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation, ed. Zev Garber (West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press, 2011), 111–​113. Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 86. For one examples of a leading biblical scholar who has done this, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109, where Fishbane argues, “Mythopoesis is … part of the meaning of Scripture and its rabbinic recovery.”

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a mythic worldview from the rabbis.”12 Thus there is a mythic continuum of divine personhood that stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, Kabbalah, and onward to the present. Conversely, the philosophical abstraction of divine perfection actually requires a violent distortion of the original Jewish scriptures, imposing a notion of the Deity that is foreign both to the written text and its voluminous oral interpretive traditions.13 Naming Being versus Naming Becoming My focus in this essay is on one facet of biblical and rabbinic theology that was instrumental in the near schismatic differences between the God of philosophical perfection and the living God of imperfection. The most crucial sources for divulging knowledge about the nature of God and his relationship with his creation are the various names by which God is identified throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus. Arthur Marmorstein (1882–​1946), for example, who was both a yeshiva-​trained rabbi and a professor at Jews’ College in London, launched his classic study on the rabbinic doctrine of God only after listing all the alternative names by which He is known. For him, these names provided a “wealthy sanctuary of the most treasured religious ideas and doctrines … which invites entrance to all who want to come nearer to God. Nowhere is the creative genius of the pious scribes more at its best than in this long list.”14 English translations most often blur the distinctions between different names by their indiscriminate renderings as “God” or “Lord.”15 However, the canonical texts subtly shift between such epithets as Elohim, El, Adonai, Shaddai, Zevaot and, of course, yhvh, the name that has come to be singled out as “the Tetragrammaton,” or the paradoxically termed, unpronounceable,

12 13

14 15

See Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “From Mythic Motifs to Sustained Myth: The Revision of Rabbinic Traditions in Medieval Midrashim,” Harvard Theological Review 89, no.  2 (April 1996): 132. It is of note that much of modern scholarship of the previous generations in Jewish studies followed Maimonides’ lead by expunging all anthropomorphisms from Judaism. See Yair Lorberbaum, “Anthropomorphisms in Early Rabbinic Literature:  Maimonides and Modern Scholarship,” in Traditions of Maimonideanism, ed. Carlos Fraenkel (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 317. Arthur Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. 1, The Names and Attributes of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 13–​14. For a good overview of the way the myriad of English translations have translated the name of God, see Glen G. Scorgie et al., eds., The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003).

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“articulated name (shem hameforash).”16 The names signify versatile dimensions that contribute to a divine personality rather than to constructing a divine abstraction of perfection. For biblical criticism, the different names of God signal the disjointed fragments of a layered text offering clues to the editing process and dating of a multi-​authorial composition spanning many centuries. Source criticism, in fact, emerged from the recognition of the transitions between different names of God by Jean Astruc in the early eighteenth century, and later developed into the Documentary Hypothesis most prominently associated with Julius Wellhausen.17 However, for Jewish theology, retrospectively and prospectively, the names cohere holistically to capture the elusiveness and dynamism of a God evolving, in tandem and reciprocally, with His creation and His creatures. Historical criticism, as one scholar put it, often amounts to a “foundation of sand” as a basis for any theological development.18 This is particularly so in the case of Judaism once the Hebrew Bible as we know it became canonized and, later, intricately reread by Second Temple works such as the book of Jubilees and by the rabbinic sages in antiquity. What is critical for Jewish theology are the ways in which all of the Jewish schools of thought, be they rabbinic/​midrashic, rationalist/​philosophical, or Kabbalistic/​mystical, have explored the meanings, significations, and precise roles of divine names within the diverse biblical contexts in which they appear.19 16

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For the various alternatives suggested as the meaning of the term hameforash, see Samuel Cohon, “The Name Of God: A Study in Rabbinic Theology,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23, no. 1 (1950–​51): 590. See also Moshe Halbertal and Hillel Ben-​Sasson, “The Divine Name YHWH and the Measure of Mercy” in And This is For Yehuda: Studies Presented to Our Friend Yehuda Liebes on the Occasion of his Sixty Fifth Birthday, eds. M. Niehoff et al. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012) [in Hebrew], 58. See, for example, Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 and the sources cited in Ephraim Urbach’s discussion in The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. I. Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), 124–​134. However, as Jeffrey Tigay points out, the names themselves are not decisive markers of compositeness unless they “fall into clear patterns of distribution which cannot be explained plausibly as a result of the author’s random variation of style.” In “The Stylistic Criterion of Source Criticism in Light of Ancient Near Eastern and Postbiblical Literature,” in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey Tigay (Eugene, OR:  Wipf & Stock, 2005), 151. Of late, there has been much greater interest in biblical theology by biblical scholars such as Marc Brettler, Benjamin Sommer, and Michael Fishbane, who argue that the biblical authors were, in some sense, theologians. See, for example, Marc Brettler, “Biblical Authority: A Jewish Pluralistic View,” in Engaging Biblical Authority: Perspectives on the Bible as Scripture, ed. William P. Brow (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 1–​9. For example, Moshe Idel claims that the very origin of the term Kabbalah as esoteric wisdom is related to divine names. See “Defining Kabbalah: The Kabbalah of Divine Names,” in Mystics of the Book, ed. R. A. Herrera (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 100. For a recent

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For example, if we begin at the beginning, the first chapter of Genesis refers to God by the name Elohim who is responsible for creating or shaping the world. However, in the supplemental creation version of the second chapter, the name yhvh joins Elohim in that primordial formative moment. For the ancient Rabbis, the transition from Elohim to its subsequent amalgamation with yhvh reflects the internal deliberations within the divine psyche between justice and mercy, two opposing dimensions of the divine Being. In fact, the rabbinic tradition pushes that notion daringly further by imagining the creation unfolding only behind the back of a personified Truth. Despite the objections of Truth (emet) that the world would be thoroughly suffused by falsehood, God persisted in creation, but only by first thrusting Truth to the ground and incapacitating it.20 The implications of this midrash for our understanding of God, human nature, and God’s relationship with the world are radical. For if truth is one of the essential divine attributes, then God compromised his own being to enable the creation. Assumedly, He maintains His compromised being, altruistically suppressing his own nature for the sake of the world’s continued viability. So goes the way of divine perfection. The philosophical implications of these readings are profound in the polarities they establish between the philosophically conceived transcendent God and the midrashic creation of a relational God. The former reflects a theoretical construct of perfection that necessarily exists, hermetically sealed off from all that is outside of itself. The latter emerges from an experiential encounter with a God who symbiotically coexists with the world, imperfect in the sense that He is contingently affected by that which lies outside His being. They mirror precisely the polarity between the philosophically “perfect” immutable God on the one hand, and the biblical, evolving God on the other. The former is unwavering, constant, stable, and fixed, unaffected by anything external to its own essence, reflected in the absolute nature of truth and the uniform dispassionate administration of the world’s affairs in accordance with it. The latter is vulnerable, growing, learning, influenced, and subsisting in a reciprocal relationship to that which is external to it. Rabbinic theology largely subscribes to a notion of “perfection” that is achieved rather than simply one that is.21

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extensive bibliography on the names of God consisting of 164 pages of entries under twenty-​six thematic subheadings, see Admiel Kosman, The Multilingual Bibliography of Names of God in the Hebrew Bible and in Rabbinic Literature: Lists, Summaries, Notes (Berlin: Potsdam University and Abraham Geiger College, 2015). Genesis Rabbah 8. See for example Jerome Gellman’s characterization of R. Abraham Isaac Kook’s notion of God as a being who is ever in the process of “an infinite achievement of more and more value.” Therein lies God’s perfection. In “The God of the Jews and the Jewish God,”

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Pivotal to the determination of God’s nature or personality through the various divine names is that dimension uniquely divulged through the essential name yhvh. Particularly intriguing are its most prominent etymological origins in the seemingly tautological and seductive play on the root “to be” of ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exod 3:14).22 However, the history of biblical translation has been overwhelmingly influenced by the Greek Septuagint version of “I am the One who is (ego eimi ho on),” overshadowing all ensuing interpretation with its present tense, Greek metaphysics, and ontology of pure Being. It is a prime example of “a non-​philosophical statement which has since become an epoch-​making statement in the history of philosophy.”23 Subsequently, Philo rendered it “the Being who Is.”24 The New Testament has it as “the Was, the Being, and the Is to come.”25 Maimonides’ “necessary existent” and Aquinas’ “true being, immutable, simple self-​sufficient,” take this metaphysics to its logical conclusions.26 Etienne Gilson sees Aquinas taking the “royal road of the metaphysics of esse” paved by Maimonides. And so, he eloquently credits Judaism with “one of the most solemn moments of the history of Western thought,” in which Maimonides’ conception of God’s name yhvh as necessary existent, “makes the world of Aristotelian substances burst, submitting the act of theoretical forms to Pure Act, which is not that of thought which thinks itself, but that of existence in itself.”27 All of them set the agenda for future onto-​theological notions of divine perfection in their respective religious

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in The Routledge Companion to Theism, eds. C.  Taliaferro, V.S. Harrison, and S.  Goetz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 50. There is an interminable debate regarding its meaning, including inventive alternatives ranging from “blow” (a storm god) to “fall” (the one who destroys) to “roar” (thunderous god) to “passionate.” That debate itself attests to what I believe is its deliberate ambiguity and irresolvable open-​endedness, which is more consistent with a concrete divine personality rather than a theoretical divine perfection. For one thorough overview of the philological, historical, archaeological, and theological issues related to the meaning and significance of the name yhvh, see Tryggve Mettinger, In Search of God: The Meaning and Message of the Everlasting Names (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1987), 14–​49. Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 40. Philo, Life of Moses, I:75. See N.  A. Dahl and Alan Segal, “Philo and the Rabbis on the Names of God,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 9, no.1 (1978): 1–​28. Rev 1:8; 4:8. See Guide, I:61. Etienne Gilson, “Maimonides and the Metaphysics of Exodus,” in Medieval Essays, trans. James Colbert (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 126.

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traditions.28 Gilson best sums this up with his assertion that “Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended … There is but one God and this God is Being, this is the cornerstone of all Christian philosophy.”29 One leading contemporary Christian theologian also argued against the Greek-​Medieval metaphysics of Being, labeling it an “unbaptized” way of thinking about God.30 Analogously, if that metaphysics is a foreign intruder in the biblical and rabbinic traditions, then the God of Being is an “uncircumcised” Jewish metaphysics. Martin Buber forcefully challenged understandings of yhvh as pure Being in contemporary theology first on philological grounds. But more importantly, he did so on the grounds that it is an abstraction of a kind that does not usually arise in periods of increasing religious vitality. For him, “It means happening, coming into being, being there, being present, being thus and thus; but not being in an abstract sense.”31 Thus, there can be no greater corrective to the notion of divine perfection than the meaning of yhvh both within the Hebrew Bible and as interpreted by the “non-​rationalist” trends in Jewish thought. As such, yhvh conveys more a relational being, a “God of becoming,” rather than One of “Being,” an elusive existence, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom it establishes relationship. For example, a partial appearance of yhvh, such as YH, indicates for the Rabbis a “partial” God whose imperfect state of brokenness, alienation, and even exile, especially in the face of substantive evil in the world, can only be remedied by the restorative acts of human beings.32 Kabbalah accentuated this notion of a broken 28

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For a short overview, see Richard Kearney, who also calls for a partial retrieval of the Hebraic notion of becoming advancing Christian theology beyond a metaphysics of being based on reading Exod 3:14 as “a God that neither is nor is not but may be.” See Richard Kearney, “God Who May Be: A Phenomenological Study,” Modern Theology 18, no.1 (2002): 84. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 51. See also Robert Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 14, who asserts, at the beginning of an exhaustive study of Western Christianity’s reception of the Name, that, “For some fifteen centuries from the Fathers to Leibnitz and Wolff, the God of Moses’ religion and the Being of Greek philosophy met without confusion at the heart of the Christian faith.” See Robert W. Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, Fortress, 1992). Martin Buber, “The Burning Bush,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum Glatzer (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 58–​59. Pesiqta de Rab Kahana 3:16., Tanhuma, Ki Teitzei 11.

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fragmented deity in need of repair to the extent that it became a staple of mystical theology since the Middle Ages.33 As Buber’s observation implies, “religious vitality” gives rise to a vital and dynamic being, rather than a static definitive one. Many synagogue congregants in the English-​speaking world might be superficially familiar with this existential notion of God as a result of Rabbi J.H. Hertz’s commentary on Exodus 3:14, which, until recently, was the standard edition of the Pentateuch used in most Modern Orthodox congregations. Hertz states that the name “must not be understood in the philosophical sense of mere ‘being’, but as active manifestation of the Divine existence.”34 For a philosophically theological notion that can still be viable after the Holocaust, Hans Jonas suggested surrendering the omniscience and omnipotence formerly associated with perfection for a “becoming” God, “a God emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity.”35 Introducing the “God of Becoming”: Moses at the Burning Bush Though the name yhvh occurs repeatedly throughout the book of Genesis, its etymology is only introduced formally in direct response to Moses’ request for it at the burning bush (Exod 3:13). Its derivation from the seemingly tautological ehyeh asher ehyeh, pronounced from the burning bush is the sole overt exposition of the divine name yhvh in the entire Hebrew Bible. Thus, the narrative context from which it emerges provides essential clues to the meaning of the Name, which has become a mainstay of any Jewish theology, philosophical or otherwise, ever since. The encounter and dialogue between Moses and God out of which the Name emerges is the transformative moment that envisages all future divine-​human encounters. I conduct the following close reading of that encounter in the spirit of the project that Franz Rosenzweig credited

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For one lucid example that focuses on this concept, which goes by the technical term tsorekh gavoha (need on high), see Morris Faierstein, “God’s Need for the Commandments in Medieval Kabbalah,” Conservative Judaism 36, no.1 (1982): 45–​59. His claim that the notion of divine need was one aspect of constructing an accessible, living, interactive God in place of “the sterile God of the philosophers,” is particularly pertinent to this chapter (46). J. H. Hertz, ed., The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 215. Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion 67, no.1 (1987): 6.

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Moses Mendelssohn with pioneering: “connecting the name to the moment at which the name was revealed.”36 A narrative logic underlies Moses’ asking for God’s name here, in light of the kind of human being he has proven himself to be. First, he matured without any family tradition or awareness of this particular deity. Second, he is the first in biblical chronology to act in a way deserving of divine attention prior to being privileged with God’s personal revelation. Though Abraham was also raised in a pagan culture without any knowledge of this God, unlike Moses and the beginning of Exodus, Genesis discloses no information that would warrant Abraham’s election. God’s choice appears arbitrary which is why it elicits so much midrashic and exegetical activity to justify it. However, for a literary composition that has been described as extremely sparing in detail, yet “fraught with background,” Moses’ pre-​revelation biography is relatively detailed in its development, providing explicit background of a heroic, morally courageous, personal profile.37 Moses acts decisively, passionately, and radically in order to prevent oppression out of an inherent sense of justice, prior to Gods’ revelatory introduction commissioning him as a national liberator. Moses’ birth narrative consciously recalls the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis. Moses’ mother, Yocheved, evaluates him as “good,” (“And she saw that he was good” [Exod 2:2]), adopting the very same language used by God in evaluating creation in the first chapter of Genesis.38 Moses was then “hidden” (2:2), “placed” (2:3), “taken”(2:5), “pitied” (2:6), and “nursed” (2:7). Once he “grows up” (2:10), he is “brought” (2:10) to his adoptive Egyptian mother, passively “becomes a son to her,” and is “named” (2:10) in commemoration of his rescue from the river in which he also played no active role. His life thus far follows the route of inanimate objects at creation, launched by “seeing he was good” and ending with calling him by a name. Analogously, the primordial light is seen by God as “good” and then assigned the name “day” (Gen 1:4–​5). Moses then “grows up” a second time, but this time, on a trajectory of becoming that rebels against the “name” by which others have defined him. Moses, in a sense, names himself by growing out of his royal Egyptian caste. He “goes out” and sees on his own, but sees only suffering so revolting as to compel

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Franz Rosenzweig, “The Eternal,” in Scripture and Translation, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 106. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 12. As you would expect, the linguistic association with its prior appearance in Genesis 1 generates much midrashic activity. For example, the expression imports its first appearance with primordial light to indicate that Moses’ birth lit up the entire house (Sotah 12a).

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him to commit a drastic act of resistance and rebellion in an attempt to prevent further suffering (Exod 2:11). His thrice-​repeated “seeing” provokes a murderous act, but one that is ultimately constructive in relieving suffering:  “In those days Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and saw their suffering and he saw an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man. And he turned this way and that and saw that there was no man and he killed the Egyptian man and hid him in the sand” (Exod 2:11–​12). His “going out” precisely follows the route of a “becoming” Adam in Genesis, who is charged with leaving the orbit of his parental home in order to create himself anew: “Therefore shall a man leave his father’s and mother’s house and cleave to his wife and they shall become as one flesh” (Gen 2:24). So, too, Moses escapes the cocoon of his adoptive home in Pharaoh’s palace, the very home that promotes and indulges systemic suffering. He acts so violently against that home’s interests, which are materially synonymous with his own, as to irrevocably bar any way back to it. For probing the nature of the God of Israel, it is essential to note that the text relates God’s awareness of Israel’s suffering immediately following the narratively quick succession of acts Moses initiates. These acts share the common feature of interventions that curtail injustice and oppression. Considering the narrative sequence of events, it is quite plausible to conclude that Moses’ autonomously motivated acts instigated by his “seeing,” or evaluation of circumstances, provokes God’s own “seeing (vayar)” and “knowing (vayeda)” of Israel’s suffering (Exod 2:25). God is then motivated, in turn, to act. In other words, God, or Elohim at this point, is inspired to emulate Moses’ becoming by becoming Himself. Rashi’s comment on “God’s knowing” poignantly captures God’s transformation from ignoring the plight of his creation (he’elim eynav mehem) to focusing his attention on them (natan alehem lev). God’s new awareness, compelling his own intervention pursuant to Moses’ exemplar, can be described as imitatio humani. In this reading, the Hebrew Bible already adumbrates the daring theology that began with the ancient rabbinic tradition, continued through medieval Kabbalah, and reached its apogee in the eighteenth-​century Hasidic movement. In Hasidism, the righteous or the tzaddiq actually rehabilitates a deficient fragmented Divinity by dictating God’s actions or having the power to nullify God’s decrees.39 In fact, the midrashic Moses sets the precedent for this 39

The Honi HaMeagel narrative forcing God’s hand to end a drought, Mishnah Taanith 3:8, is only the most famous Talmudic exemplar of this idea. For God fulfilling the decrees of the righteous see Tanhuma, VaYera 19. For the righteous nullifying God’s decrees, see Mo’ed Qatan 16b. See Jonathan Garb’s discussion in Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004), 37–​40.

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supreme power of the righteous, convincing God to revoke his own previous legislation in favor of one more consistent with human notions of ethics.40 In a certain sense, later radical Kabbalistic reinventions of ehyeh asher ehyeh capture this conception of it, which is already latent in the text. Using traditional anagrammatic strategies of transposing letters in words to create new words, in this case the last letter of the alphabet for the first (atbash), the Name becomes “I will be what you will be (ehyeh asher tihyeh)”!41 God’s “knowing” here in Exodus evolves from a chain of sensory and mental perceptions consisting of hearing, remembering, and seeing (Exod 2:24–​25), all evoked by the human suffering experienced below: “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the children of Israel, and God took cognizance of them.” Considering the phrasing of verse 23 which sets the chain of divine knowledge in motion,42 God was also touched by an embodied form of Israel’s anguish which “rose up to Him,” conveying a sensual experience of Israel’s pain. That Moses jolts God into a mode of compassion is best expressed by the midrash that conditions God’s revelation to Moses on observing his selfless compassion for his compatriots: God says [to Moses]: You left your own affairs to witness the suffering of Israel and you conducted yourself with them in a brotherly manner, so, too, I will leave the upper ones and lower ones and converse with you.43 Moses’ expansion of his world beyond the safety of the familiar to the precarious world of unknown others, prompts God’s own parallel venturing out to witness Israelite suffering. At the same time as responding decisively to the suffering of others, Moses liberated himself from the hold of those who nurtured and created him in the mold of an ideology he rejected. Yet Moses had lapsed from his activism in Egypt by retreating into the solitude of desert shepherding. The political rebel had descended to a disengaged environment resembling Plato’s cave. Moses’ 40 41 42 43

See, for example, Tanhuma, Shofetim 19. This is one example of a rabbinic strategy that accounts for Deuteronomic revisions in a way different from the modern critical solution of composite authorship. See Menachem Kasher, Torah Shelemah (Jerusalem:  Torah Shelemah Institute, 1992), 8:153n188. Cf. Moshe Idel’s discussion in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 173–​178. “And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.” Exodus Rabbah 81:32.

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question of “Who am I?” (Exod 3:11) in response to God’s commissioning him as Israel’s liberator from slavery emerges from the disappointment that thrust him into withdrawal. In other words, he is cognizant of his purpose but, other than momentary relief, his actions failed to achieve anything except rejection by both his adoptive and biological families. God’s response to Moses’ question “Who am I?” of “I will be with you” (ehyeh imakh) (Exod 3:12) is multi-​faceted. It is not only supportive and protective, as it has generally been understood, but also descriptive. God vindicates Moses’ previous behavior, which constituted the very ultimate in the process of becoming. Moses shaped himself and became an entirely different human being than he who was shaped by his adoptive home. Thus God proclaims that ehyeh is with you. In other words, God assures Moses, “You qualify as liberator because you can authentically declare, ‘I will be.’ ” Yet, the phrase also retains its sense of divine accompaniment, since Moses’ becoming enables God’s own becoming, dispatching them both on a journey of reciprocal becoming. Once Moses’ own identity is validated as the one necessary for his revolutionary commission and is established as a mutual ground of being between him and God, Moses asked God a second question. This question relates to the people’s state of being: “When I come to the Israelites and say, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me,’ and they ask me ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exod 3:13). Moses anticipates their dissatisfaction with identifying God in relation to the past (in general) and to their own ancestral legacy (in particular). Moses understands, from his own experience of becoming, that becoming—​in this case, a free people—​entails a courageous rupture with the past and disturbing the contentment with one’s environment and how one has been nurtured. Thus, to address them in the name of the “God of their forefathers” would be self-​defeating, since it would mire them in the past and prevent them from becoming. It would signal a particular inheritance, rather than open a way to an autonomous future of becoming. Moses’ anticipation of the people’s question and their desire for a “name” or symbol that would jettison them out of their entrenched slave mentality is grounded in their reaction to his own act of rebellion. Moses’ first foray outside the sheltered life of the Egyptian palace exposes him to the suffering of others: “When Moses grew up he went out to his brothers and witnessed their suffering” (Exod 2:11). The stark brutality of “an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man from among his brothers” graphically captures that suffering. The next verse, discloses the moral breach which Moses must mediate in its reiteration of the term man, but this time without any ethnic association: “And he turned this way and that and he saw that there was no man, so he killed the Egyptian.” The parallel literary structure highlights the precise societal malaise

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confronting Moses. In the community into which Moses ventures, human beings are defined by ethnic or national identities and not as their unique selves. Their existences are determined by their respective backgrounds rather than their own choices. This is the meaning of Moses’ observation when surveying the landscape and seeing that “there was no man,” in contradistinction to the previous objective binary of an Egyptian “man” and a Hebrew “man.” The implication is that is there is no individual simply defined as “man,” who has broken free of his ethnic/​religious/​national/​tribal constraints in order to exercise his own individual humanity. Perhaps this is the meaning of the midrash that identifies the Tetragrammaton as Moses’ weapon.44 It is precisely the process of becoming that the Name signifies, which strikes the lethal blow that kills the Egyptian and launches Moses’ life of becoming. When Moses is commissioned by God to lead the people out of slavery, his expectation of the people’s lack of confidence is well-​justified by previous experience. Moses’ second intervention, in the series of actions prior to his first encounter with God at the burning bush corroborates his prior assessment of the people’s state. Their response to Moses is a sarcastic “Who appointed you chief and ruler over us”(Exod 2:14)? However, the verse literally reads, “Who appointed you as a man chief and ruler over us?” The redundant use of the term “man” in this retort is telling. It is a term whose repeated appearance within this pericope acts as a literary key to the passage’s intent. Moses is correctly perceived as a “man” who, instead of being defined in terms of his familial origins, is identified by how he has shaped his own identity as a “chief and ruler” by intervening in a violent dispute. It is precisely Moses’ assertiveness and initiative that Israel needs in order to galvanize a revolt in the name of the same freedom that Moses achieved earlier. Yet, Moses is rejected, and the people miss an opportunity to follow a leader who has demonstrated the potential to liberate them. Moses’ request for God’s name elicits the name ehyeh asher ehyeh, which is divulged only to Moses. It is elusive, open-​ended, and most unpredictable—​ for all intents a non-​name. It identifies a process of becoming, an ongoing and perhaps never-​ending venture that places the paths of divine and human beings in tandem.45 Moses is a man of encounters, each of which transforms 44 45

Exodus Rabbah 1:30. This elusiveness also accounts for this revelation as partial and consistent with the limitations of its human recipient. As Yoram Hazony trenchantly puts it, “it does not overcome the limits of Moses’ constitution as a human being … It therefore constitutes a limited and imperfect vision.” Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 248.

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his identity. He is born a slave; raised as a member of the ruling class; acts to disqualify himself from either class; exiles himself to live as an alien in a foreign land; identifies once again with an oppressed class (this time based on gender); and, finally, withdraws from membership in any social class at all to the solitude of shepherding in the desert. Becoming is often gained at the cost of belonging. Moses pays this price, agonizingly expressed in his realization of intense alienation: “I am a stranger in a foreign land” (Exod 2:22). Rather than the philosophical abstraction of a Being that, in its perfection, is always fully actual, the ehyeh asher ehyeh is precisely the one that is forever fluctuating between potential and actual. Every new state of becoming opens up further potential for becoming.46 Moses is not the Maimonidean model of a supreme philosopher whose unparalleled intellect aspires to comprehend an immutable Being that is better described as a Prime Existent (matsui rishon) who has no attributes who simply is the first efficient Cause that acts once instigating a chain of causation we call nature.Rather, Moses is privy to a God who is ever in flux, who can never be caught in an other’s gaze, making him a fitting subject for the magical rituals of paganism. God constantly acts, and with every act, he defies any illusory human attempt to capture God by definition. Only Moses is privy to this God since he himself inimitably acted humanly beyond religious, communal, ethnic, and gender allegiances, becoming rather than belonging. This name, then, is the quintessential name of autonomy, freedom, and everything that is the antithesis of Israel’s current state of enslavement, whose existence and potential is dependent on others. From a political point of view, this name exudes the power that directly militates against slavery. Moses relates to this particular name because it reflects his own current state of being, autonomously shaping his own existence. The great biblical scholar Walter Zimmerli captures this meaning of ehyeh asher ehyeh when he states, “at the very point where Yahweh reveals his true name so that people can call him by it, he remains free, and can be properly understood only in the freedom with which he introduces himself.”47

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See, for example, Exodus Rabbah 2:6, where one opinion considers ehyeh asher ahyeh to be a rejection by God of any definitive name. Rather, it conveys the idea that there is an array of names by which God is known that reflect fluctuating encounters and relationships. The phrase is the equivalent of God saying, “I am called according to my deeds.” Walter Zimmerli, Old Testament Theology in Outline, trans. David Green (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 20.

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yhvh versus Ba’al: Becoming versus Negating The prophet Hosea envisions a utopian future when the relationship between Israel and her God will be based on reciprocity, when “you will no longer call me ‘my master (ba’ali),’ rather, you will call me ‘my husband (ishi)’ ” (Hos 2:18). As Rashi points out, Hosea distinguishes between a relationship based on the mutuality of “matrimony and youthful love,” and a relationship that lacks mutuality and is rooted in “mastery and fear.”48 David Kimhi adds an insightful comment that directs us toward a fuller appreciation of the meaning of yhvh, as developed so far. In addition to restoring a relationship based on love, “since ba’al is an equivocal term that is used for idolatry, God promises that they will no longer call me Ba’al in order to remove ba’alim from their speech.”49 The verse then contrasts the type of relationship yhvh cultivates with that of Ba’al, an idolatrous cultic god emblematic of paganism. The latter follows the master/​slave model while yhvh reflects one based in reciprocity. The confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al at Mount Carmel pits the two theologies against each other by graphically representing the type of relationship each commands. Elijah lays down the gauntlet, challenging those who “call in the name of Ba’al” against those who “call in the name of yhvh” (1 Kgs 18:24). Ba’al and yhvh are two deities so opposed that there exists no common ground between the two and thus there can be no syncretistic fusion of the two cults. As Elijah contends, the two pose an either/​or choice; the acceptance of one entails a rejection of the other: “How long will you toggle between two branches? If yhvh is God, then follow Him and if Ba’al, then follow him” (1 Kgs 18:21). The stark contrast between the rituals directed toward Ba’al and those toward yhvh is telling. The Ba’al adherents resort to self-​mortification, “gashing themselves with spears and swords until blood flowed from them as was their custom” (1 Kgs 18:28). Rather than acts of self-​actualization and becoming, their worship of Ba’al consists of acts of self-​negation concretely captured by the literal diminishment of their physical bodies. It is a ritual endemic to the cult, as evidenced by the verse’s characterization of it as “customary”

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Rashi on Hosea 2:18. David Kimhi on Hosea 21:18 in Mikraot Gedolot haKeter, ed., Menachem Cohen (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2012). Kimhi’s insight is consistent with modern biblical scholarship, though not for the same reasons. Otto Eissfeldt, for example, attributes this thoroughgoing purge of any vestiges of Ba’al to the threat it posed “to Yahweh by encroaching upon his monarchic status as God of Israel.” Otto Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” Journal of Semitic Studies 1, no. 1 (1956): 26.

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(1 Kgs 18:28). In addition, as indicated by Elijah’s reconstruction of a destroyed altar, Ba’al’s cult can only persevere by the negation of others. Ba’al worship is paradigmatic of everything that opposes becoming. Its devotees suppress themselves and others in order to sustain its cult. In contradistinction, Elijah, whose very name reflects allegiance to YH (Elijah means “YH is my God”), first invites the entire community to approach. He then constructs an altar out of twelve stones, representing the twelve tribes that, together, constitute corporate Israel. yhvh’s worship demands inclusiveness, but not at the expense of the distinctions and differences among the tribes, as expressed by the altar’s very embodiment of each particular tribe in its edifice. Even more striking is the explicit reminder that these stones, signifying the twelve tribes (the sons of Jacob), thereby represent the one whose name was changed to Israel: “And Elijah took twelve stones like the number of tribes of the sons of Jacob to whom God said ‘Israel shall be your name’ ” (1 Kgs 18:31). At this juncture in the conflict between yhvh and Ba’al, there is a direct reference to the etymological origins of the name Israel, which is rooted in the most powerful single event of “becoming” in biblical history. The name “Israel” memorializes a struggle between Jacob and God, out of which Jacob emerges victorious for “he fought with God and with men and prevailed” (Gen 32:29). Absolute silence greets the Ba’al followers’ initial frantic and lengthy rituals to attract the attention of their deity. Their shouts and screams and dances elicit “no sound and none who responded” (1 Kgs 18:26). Further louder shouts and self-​mortification achieve the same result “and still there was no sound and none who responded or heeded” (18:29). As opposed to Ba’al worship, the ensuing performance by Elijah is carried out in the tradition of overcoming rather than submission, of becoming over negation, of freedom in place of abject surrender. At the resolution of this cultic competition, the victorious yhvh worshippers declare, twice, “yhvh is the Elohim!” (18:39). That pivotal public display of the contrast between Ba’al worship and worship of yhvh set the precedent for the climax of the final service on Yom Kippur to this day, when Jews declare, over and over, “yhvh is the Elohim!” Throughout Jewish history, this phrase declares that the Jewish God is yhvh, the God who is Becoming. yhvh is the God who encourages humanity to become, even to the point of prevailing over what God himself, at a certain moment, seems to be. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s advice offered to a conference of Jewish educators distinguished between a “notion,” identified with the Greeks and the rationalist school of thought, and a “name,” associated with the traditions endorsing a personal God of history. For him, the two are so different as to be “profoundly incompatible,” and therefore Heschel presented the two alternatives as an either/​or choice. He boldly admonished those most responsible for

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the perpetuation of Jewish thought to the next generation of potential scholars, theologians, philosophers, and halakhic authorities: “the God of Israel is a name, not a notion … don’t teach notions of God, teach the name of God.”50 What Heschel meant is not the name of God, but that what must be taught is what names signify in terms of relationship and intimacy. The name ehyeh asher ehyeh precisely defies the definition and classification that are the hallmarks of philosophical reasoning. Its openendedness informs the myriad of names ascribed to God in the Bible, indicating that God is all of them and none of them at the same time. Even Philo himself, who subscribed to the metaphysics of Being, acknowledges the ultimate epistemological failure of naming God, as if to freeze-​frame Him within rigid conceptual boundaries. He cautioned against complete confidence in any such identification of God since, implicit in God’s naming Himself is the warning that “no name at all can properly be used of Me, to whom all existence belongs.”51 Bibliography Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Brettler, Marc. “Biblical Authority: A Jewish Pluralistic View.” In Engaging Biblical Authority:  Perspectives on the Bible as Scripture, ed. William P. Brow. 1–​9. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Buber. Martin. On the Bible:  Eighteen Studies, Edited by Nahum Glatzer. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Cohen, Menachem, ed. Mikraot Gedolot haKeter. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1992–​2013. Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. Cohon, Samuel. “The Name Of God: A Study in Rabbinic Theology.” Hebrew Union College Annual 23, no. 1 (1950–​51): 579–​604. Dahl, N. A. and Segal, Alan. “Philo and the Rabbis on the Names of God.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 9, no.1 (1978): 1–​28. Eissfeldt, Otto. “El and Yahweh.” Journal of Semitic Studies 1, no. 1 (1956): 25–​37. 50 51

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Jewish Theology,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 162. Philo, Life of Moses, I:75. See, also, Yoram Hazony’s critique of the translation “I am that I am,” which, among other errors, “misrepresents the broader biblical metaphysics, which is very far from associating God with being.” in Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, 244.

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Faierstein, Morris. “God’s Need for the Commandments in Medieval Kabbalah.” Conservative Judaism 36, no.1 (1982): 45–​59. Fishbane, Michael. Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Garb, Jonathan. Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004. Gilson, Etienne. God and Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940. Gilson, Etienne. “Maimonides and the Metaphysics of Exodus.” In Medieval Essays, Translated by James Colbert. 123–​127. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011. Gilson, Etienne. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Goshen Gottstein, Alon. “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature.” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 2 (April 1994): 171–​195. Halbertal, Moshe and Hillel Ben-​Sasson. “The Divine Name YHWH and the Measure of Mercy.” In And This is For Yehuda: Studies Presented to Our Friend Yehuda Liebes on the Occasion of his Sixty Fifth Birthday, Edited by M. Niehoff et al. [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012. Hazony, Yoram. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hertz, J. H., editor, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 2nd edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1981. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. “Jewish Theology.” In Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Edited by Susannah Heschel. 154–​163. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Idel, Moshe. “Defining Kabbalah:  The Kabbalah of Divine Names.” In Mystics of the Book, Edited by R. A. Herrera. 97–​122. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Jenson, Robert W. Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, Fortress, 1992. Jonas, Hans. “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice.” The Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 (1987): 1–​13. Kasher, Menachem. Torah Shelemah. Jerusalem: Torah Shelemah Institute, 1992. Kearney, Richard. “God Who May Be: A Phenomenological Study.” Modern Theology 18, no.1 (2002): 75–​87. Kosman, Admiel. The Multilingual Bibliography of Names of God in the Hebrew Bible and in Rabbinic Literature: Lists, Summaries, Notes. Berlin: Potsdam University and Abraham Geiger College, 2015. Lorberbaum, Yair. “Anthropomorphisms in Early Rabbinic Literature: Maimonides and Modern Scholarship.” In Traditions of Maimonideanism, Edited by Carlos Fraenkel. 313–​353. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009.

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Maimonides, Moses. Guide of the Perplexed, Edited by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Marmorstein, Arthur. The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God. London:  Oxford University Press, 1927. Mettinger, Tryggve. In Search of God:  The Meaning and Message of the Everlasting Names. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1987. Muffs, Yochanan. The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005. Philo. On the Life of Moses, Translated by F. H. Colson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Rosenzweig, Franz. “The Eternal.” In Scripture and Translation, Translated by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. “From Mythic Motifs to Sustained Myth: The Revision of Rabbinic Traditions in Medieval Midrashim.” Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 2 (April 1996): 131–​159. Scorgie, Glen G. et al., editors. The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003. Stern, David. “Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God in Rabbinic Literature.” Prooftexts 12, no. 2 (May 1992): 151–​174. Tigay, Jeffrey. “The Stylistic Criterion of Source Criticism in Light of Ancient Near Eastern and Postbiblical Literature.” In Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, Edited by Jeffrey Tigay. 149–​174. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005. Ulmer, Rivka. “Psalm 22 in Pesiqta Rabbati: The Suffering of the Jewish Messiah and Jesus.” In The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation, Edited by Zev Garber, 106–​128. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. Urbach, Ephraim. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, Translated by I. Abrahams. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979. Wilkinson, Robert. Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015. Zimmerli, Walter. Old Testament Theology in Outline, Translated by David Green. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994.

pa rt 2 In Defense of God’s Perfection

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Chapter 4

The Personal God of Classical Theism Eleonore Stump Introduction It is common among contemporary theologians and philosophers to suppose that the God of the Bible is radically different from the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers is generally understood to be the God of classical theism, whose standard divine attributes are those paradigmatically given by the great medieval philosophers of the three monotheisms, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas. Some of the current trend towards open theism among philosophers of religion has its source in the twinned convictions that there is an inconsistency between the description of God given by the Bible and the characterization of God upheld by classical theism, and that the biblical portrayal is greatly preferable to the account of God accepted by classical theism. To see the apparent inconsistency, take first the presentation of God in the Hebrew Bible; and consider, for example, the Bible’s story of Jonah in the biblical book that bears his name.1 As that story opens, God comes to talk to Jonah, who knows God and recognizes God’s voice right away. God tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and warn the people that their city will be destroyed in forty days. Jonah not only understands what God is saying to him, but he understands that it is God who is saying it. Only Jonah does not want to do what God is asking of him, and so he reacts to God’s speech by taking a ship to a far country. Once Jonah is on board the ship, God responds to Jonah’s attempt to run away by making a violent storm that imperils everyone on the ship. When the sailors cast lots to see whose fault it is that there is a storm, God somehow brings it about that the lots come out to indicate Jonah. And when, at Jonah’s urging, the sailors throw Jonah overboard in consequence, God responds to their action by calming the sea for them. 1 It should be said in this connection that some thinkers take the book of Jonah as intended to be read allegorically or in some other analogical way. For my purposes, taking the story literally is appropriate since it is the picture of God in the literal story that is opposed to the picture of God apparently given by classical theism.

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Cast overboard, Jonah begins to drown; and, as he goes down in the water, he prays to God for help. In response, God prepares a rescue for Jonah in the form of a large sea beast who saves Jonah by swallowing him whole. Inside the beast, Jonah finally prays to God a prayer accepting the task that God originally set him. Because of this prayer of Jonah’s, God speaks to the beast, who hears and obeys God’s voice and spits Jonah out on shore. Then Jonah does in fact go to the people of Ninevah to give them God’s message that their city will be destroyed in forty days. The result of Jonah’s prophesying God’s plan for the city’s imminent destruction is that the whole Ninevite people repent in dust and ashes. Because they do, God responds to their repentance by abrogating the destruction of the city which he had told Jonah to announce. And this is not yet the end of the story. When Jonah is filled with anger at God’s failure to follow through on the message of destruction that God told Jonah to announce to Ninevah, God teaches Jonah a lesson about mercy. He makes a fast-​growing plant appear by Jonah and then quickly die. When Jonah laments the death of the plant, then, in interactive conversation with Jonah, God uses the example of the plant to try to get Jonah to understand God’s actions towards Ninevah. In this story, the God of the Hebrew Bible is so present to human beings that they know God and relate to God in highly personal ways. For his part, God converses with people, responds to their needs and prayers, apparently changes his mind about what he has told them, issues prophecies about them that he seems to decide not to fulfill, and in general engages with individual human persons in close and personal ways. One might say that the God portrayed in this story and in the Hebrew Bible generally is very human. When Genesis says that human beings are made in the image of God, the stories of God in the Hebrew Bible bear out the claim. As the story of Jonah illustrates, the humanity of human persons has its correlative image in the responsive and personally present God of the Hebrew Bible. There is a rich anthropomorphism here that the stories underscore and approve. By contrast with these biblical representations of God, to many people the God of classical theism seems unresponsive, unengaged, and entirely inhuman. That is because, on classical theism as it is often interpreted, God is immutable, eternal, and simple, devoid of all potentiality, incapable of any passivity, and inaccessible to human knowledge. So described, the God of classical theism seems very different from the God of the Bible. In this paper, I will try to show that the God of classical theism is the engaged, personally present, responsive God of the Bible. I will focus on just one

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proponent of classical theism, namely, Aquinas, because Aquinas’s work contains the representative classical theism that I know best. I will show that, for Aquinas, who is the most frequently invoked proponent of classical theism, an immutable, eternal, simple God is most certainly the God of the Bible, knowable, accessible, interactive with human beings, and responsive to them. As I will argue, the sense that the God of classical theism cannot be the God of the Bible is based on a mistaken understanding of the divine attributes at the heart of classical theism, at least in Aquinas’s version of it. The Apparent Inconsistency The claim that God is immutable because God has no potentiality but is pure actuality has seemed to many philosophers and theologians to imply that God cannot be responsive to human beings, since nothing that a human person does or says could effect a change in such a God. The facts about God, one might say, are set, and nothing that human beings do can alter those facts. It seems that an immutable God could not answer prayer, as Jonah’s God does, because, it seems, God’s decisions cannot be altered by human prayer. A fortiori, since an immutable God cannot change his mind or retract a previously made decision, it seems that an immutable God could not first decide to destroy a city and then decide not to do so because of the actions of the people in that city. Eternity implies immutability. Consequently, many of the problems highlighted above in connection with an immutable God apply also to an eternal God. In addition, however, the claim that God is eternal has seemed to some contemporary philosophers and theologians to raise special problems of its own because it seems to imply that God cannot engage in second-​personal interaction with human beings, as, for example, conversation requires. On this view, nothing that is outside of time could engage interactively with a person inside time. An eternal God could produce timeless decrees, but such a God could not answer Jonah after Jonah has prayed to God; and, in general, such a God could not be personally engaged in conversation with a human person, as God is with Jonah in the story. Finally, the claim that God is simple has seemed to some contemporary philosophers and theologians to imply that, at best, human beings can have no positive knowledge of God and that, at worst, God is entirely unknowable by human beings. Unlike Jonah in the story, no human being could know a simple God or be engaged in inter-​personal conversation with God. The anthropomorphism of

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the God who talks to Jonah looks antithetical to the incomprehensibility of a simple God. Even worse, the view of divine simplicity held by many of its adherents (and many of its detractors too) seems to imply that God is only being itself, esse alone, and not an entity or a being (an id quod est) at all. But if God is not a being at all, not any kind of concrete particular, it is hard to see how a human person could have a personal relationship to God and engage in conversation with him, as Jonah does in the story. So understood, then, the God of classical theism has seemed to many opponents of classical theism to be not only unbiblical but even religiously pernicious. Nothing that is not even an entity could enter into any kind of personal relationship with human persons. In fact, it seems that no standard divine attributes such as being omniscient or being possessed of free will, for example, could apply to something that is not a being. Or, to put the same point another way, it is very hard to see how something which is not a being but which is characterized only as being itself could be capable of knowing or loving anything. In the biblical stories, there is a readily discernible image of God in human beings, and conversely a readily discernible divine original in God for the image of God in human beings. By contrast, there seems to be so little in common between God and human beings on the characterization of the God of classical theism as I have described it here that it is hard to imagine why anyone would suppose that human beings are made in the image of such a God. In the Christian world, classical theism held sway for well over a millennium, in a tradition that ranges from the thought of Augustine (and earlier) to that of Aquinas (and later). Augustine and Aquinas both certainly accept the divine attributes central to the characterization of God in classical theism as I sketched it above: immutability, eternity, and simplicity. And yet it is noteworthy that each of these great thinkers also wrote biblical commentaries without giving any indication of unease at the combination of biblical stories and classical theism. What is even more noteworthy is that each of them supposes that the engaged, knowable, personally present, responsive God of the biblical stories is available to him personally. In his Confessions, for example, Augustine addresses God directly, in second-​personal terms, and he clearly assumes that God is available and responsive to him. A similar point can be made about Aquinas. In all his works, but especially in his biblical commentaries, he shows that he expects God to be engaged with all human beings, himself included, in such a way that God is known by human beings and is personally present and responsive to them.

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How is it possible that these and other philosophers and theologians in the tradition of classical theism could also have accepted the picture of God in the biblical stories? Is it so much as metaphysically possible for the God of classical theism to be the God of the biblical stories? I want to approach these questions by what may seem a circuitous route. I will begin by sketching Aquinas’s views of the Holy Spirit and his account of the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit when it indwells in a person of faith. On Christian doctrine, which Aquinas certainly accepts, the Holy Spirit is God; all the characteristics of God are also the characteristics of the Holy Spirit. That is, if God is immutable, so is the Holy Spirit; and the same point applies to the other attributes characterizing the God of classical theism, including eternity and simplicity. If God is eternal or simple, then so is the Holy Spirit; on the doctrine of the Trinity, it could not be that the Holy Spirit is temporal or composite while God is eternal and simple.2 And so whatever Aquinas accepts as true of the Holy Spirit is also true of God. I will argue that, on Aquinas’s views of the Holy Spirit, God is as intimately and responsively engaged with human beings, as knowable and personally present to human beings, as any proponent of the characterization of the biblical God could want. There is no difficulty in seeing that the God of the biblical story of Jonah could be the God Aquinas describes in his account of the Holy Spirit’s interactions with human beings. On the other hand, of course, in the history of Christian thought, Aquinas is one of the most influential proponents of classical theism. So in the next sections of this paper, I will show why Aquinas’s account of the Holy Spirit is compatible with his view of God as immutable, eternal, and simple. Contrary to some contemporary interpretations of classical theism, nothing about these divine attributes as Aquinas understands them rules out the characteristics and relations Aquinas attributes to the Holy Spirit. Consequently, both the questions above have an answer. Aquinas accepted the picture of God given in the biblical stories because it did not contradict his own classical theist view of God. And he was right in this assessment. As I will try to show, nothing about God’s immutability, eternality, or simplicity, as Aquinas interprets these divine attributes, precludes any of the characteristics of the biblical God.

2 Some contemporary scholars suppose that the doctrine of the Trinity is incompatible with the doctrine of divine simplicity. For an argument that the doctrine of the Trinity requires the doctrine of divine simplicity, see Thomas Joseph White, “Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 1 (2016): 66–​93, and “Nicene Orthodoxy and Trinitarian Simplicity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2016): 1–​24.

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Aquinas on the Holy Spirit To show the way in which Aquinas thinks of the relations between God and human beings that are mediated by the Holy Spirit, it is helpful to begin with Aquinas’s exposition of the characteristics of the Holy Spirit. The very name of the Holy Spirit, as Aquinas explains it, is indicative of Aquinas’s views. When Aquinas describes the Holy Spirit in the Summa theologiae (ST), he says that the name of the person of the Holy Spirit is “Gift.” To explain this claim, Aquinas says, We are said to possess what we can freely use or enjoy as we please. … A rational creature does sometimes attain to this, … so as freely to know God truly and to love God rightly. Hence, rational creatures alone can possess the divine person … [But] this must be given to a rational creature from God, for that is said to be given to us which we have from another source. And so a divine person can be given and can be a gift.3 Aquinas expands on these views this way: God is in all things by his essence, power, and presence, according to his one common mode, as the cause existing in the effects which participate in his goodness. In addition to this common mode, however, there is one special mode belonging to the rational nature in whom God is said to be present as the object known is in the knower and the beloved in the lover. Since by its operation of knowledge and love a rational creature attains to God himself, then according to this special mode God is said not only to exist in a rational creature but also to dwell in that rational creature as in his own temple.4 In Summa contra Gentiles (scg), Aquinas makes clear that, in his view, God himself, the whole Trinity, indwells a person of faith when that person has the indwelling Holy Spirit: Since the love by which we love God is in us by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit himself must also be in us … Therefore, since we are made lovers

3 ST I q.38 a.1 corpus. 4 ST I q.43 a.3 corpus.

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of God by the Holy Spirit, and every beloved is in the lover … by the Holy Spirit necessarily the Father and the Son dwell in us also.5 Aquinas holds that the divine indwelling unites a human person with God to some (no doubt limited) degree. In so doing, it makes God available to her to know, to love, and to enjoy. This is a position Aquinas maintains and develops in many places. So, for example, in commenting on Paul’s wish for the Ephesians, “that you may able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of the love of God],” Aquinas says: It is evident from John 14:21 that God reveals himself to one who loves … and that he shows himself to one who believes. … Now it should be noted that sometimes to comprehend means “to enclose,” and then it is necessary that the one comprehending totally contains within himself what is comprehended. But sometimes it means “to apprehend,” and then it affirms a remoteness or a distance and yet implies proximity. No created intellect can comprehend God in the first manner … But the second kind [of comprehension] is one of the gifts [of the Holy Spirit], and this is what the Apostle means when he says [to the Ephesians] “that you may comprehend”—​namely, that you may enjoy the presence of God and know him intimately.6 For Aquinas, then, the relationship between God and a human person of faith which is brought about through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is one that is close enough and intimate enough to be thought of as a uniting in love. Expanding on the idea that a person of faith is friends with God, Aquinas says: In the first place, it is proper to friendship to converse with one’s friend. … It is also a property of friendship that one take delight in a friend’s presence, that one rejoice in his words and deeds … and it is especially in our sorrows that we hasten to our friends for consolation. Since then the

5 SCG iv c.21, p.122. 6 Commentary on Ephesians, Chapter 3, lecture 5. I like and therefore have used the translations from Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians by St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Matthew L. Lamb (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1966), but I have felt free to modify those translations in the few places where I felt I could do better. Page references below are to their translation.

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Holy Spirit constitutes us God’s friends and makes God dwell in us and us dwell in God, it follows that through the Holy Spirit we have joy in God.7 In fact, for Aquinas, the Holy Spirit so fills a person with a sense of the love of God and God’s presence to him that joy is one of the principal effects of the Holy Spirit.8 Aquinas says, “When [Paul] says ‘the Lord is near,’ he points out the cause of joy, because a person rejoices at the nearness of his friend.”9 It is evident, then, that the God described in Aquinas’s account of the Holy Spirit could deal with a person such as Jonah in the ways that the biblical story portrays. I do not see how one could make it clearer than the texts cited above do that, on Aquinas’s view, God is personally present to a person of faith in maximally responsive ways, communicating, counseling, and comforting, able to share rejoicing, as one friend does with another. But, equally, I do not see how anyone could suppose that Aquinas is guilty of so great an inconsistency as to maintain this view of God when discussing the nature and actions of the Holy Spirit and yet also to hold that God is immutable, eternal, and simple, if by these attributes Aquinas means what some contemporary philosophers and theologians, friendly or unfriendly to classical theism, suppose Aquinas to mean. If God is not an entity (an id quod est) but only being (esse) alone, unable to act as a concrete particular does, incomprehensible to human beings, and by nature unable to respond to them, then Aquinas’s views of the indwelling Holy Spirit are so inconsistent with his views of God as to be obviously ridiculous. And there really are not two Aquinas’s, one who wrote the questions on the divine attributes in the Prima Pars of the Summa, and one who wrote biblical commentaries. The same mind composed both. In my view, the solution to the conundrum posed by seeing that Aquinas accepts both classical theism and these views of the Holy Spirit consists in recognizing that the interpretation of classical theism on the part of some contemporary philosophers and theologians is not the interpretation Aquinas himself held. For Aquinas, classical theism’s view of God as immutable, eternal, and simple is not inconsistent with the view of God Aquinas presents in his discussions of the Holy Spirit’s characteristics and relations with human beings.

7 SCG iv c.23, 125–​26. 8 See, for example, Commentary on Romans, Chapter 5, lecture 1. 9 Commentary on Philippians, Chapter 4, lecture 1. For the English translation, see Commentary on Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philippians by St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. F. R. Larcher and Michael Duffy (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1969), 113.

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The Doctrine of Eternity and the Biblical God of Aquinas To begin to see the consistency of Aquinas’s position, it is helpful to start with the doctrine of eternity as Aquinas understands it.10 Contrary to the way it is sometimes thought of, eternity is not just timelessness. The concept of eternity as Aquinas accepts it is the concept of a life without succession but with infinite atemporal persistence or atemporal duration, where “duration” is understood analogically with temporal duration. God’s life consists in the duration of a present that is not limited by either future or past.11 Nonetheless, nothing in the concept of eternity denies the reality of time or implies that temporal duration or temporal events are illusory.12 An analogy may help here. So consider Edwin Abbott’s famous Flatland, a story about a two-​dimensional world occupied by sentient two-​dimensional creatures. In Flatland, one of these two-​dimensional creatures, a sentient square, comes into conversation with a sentient sphere, who is an inhabitant of a three-​dimensional world. The sphere has a terrible time explaining his three-​dimensional world to his new friend, the two-​dimensional square. As Flatland presents things, there is more than one mode of spatial existence for sentient beings. There is both the Flatland two-​dimensional mode of spatial existence and the three-​dimensional mode of spatial existence. That the sentient sphere is in three-​dimensional space does not mean that the sentient square of Flatland is really somehow three-​dimensional or that the square’s mode of spatial existence somehow really has any of the three-​dimensional characteristics of the sphere’s mode of existence. In the story, the two spatial modes of existence, that of Flatland and that of the sphere, are both real; and neither is reducible to the other or to any third thing. An analogous point holds as regards temporal and eternal modes of duration. Reality includes both time and eternity as two distinct modes of duration, neither of which is reducible to the other or to any third thing. Nonetheless, it is possible for inhabitants of the differing modes of duration to interact.

10 11 12

To avoid clumsy locutions, I will leave this qualifier out in the subsequent discussion, but it should be understood throughout. For more detailed discussion of this doctrine, see my “The Openness of God:  Eternity and Free Will,” in Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism, ed. Benjamin H.  Arbour (New York: Routledge, 2018). For more discussion of these and related issues, see my and Norman Kretzmann’s “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 429–​58; “Prophecy, Past Truth, and Eternity,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 395–​424; and “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): 463–​82.

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To understand the nature of the interaction, it is important to see the implications of the Boethian definition of eternity. Because an eternal God cannot be characterized by succession, no temporal entity or event can be past or future with respect to, or earlier or later than, the whole life of an eternal God. On the other hand, eternity is also characterized by the duration of a present that is not limited by either future or past. Because the mode of existence of an eternal God is characterized by a limitless and atemporal kind of presentness, the relation between an eternal God and anything in time has to be one of simultaneity. Of course, the presentness and simultaneity associated with an eternal God cannot be temporal presentness or temporal simultaneity. In earlier work, Norman Kretzmann and I called this special sort of simultaneity “ET-​ simultaneity,” for “simultaneity between what is eternal and what is temporal.” If Flatland were finite and linearly ordered with an absolute middle, there might be an absolute Flatland here, which in the Flatland world could be occupied by only one Flatlander at a time. Nonetheless, if Flatland were small enough, then from the point of view of a human observer in the three-​ dimensional world, all of Flatland could be here at once. And yet it would not follow and it would not be true that all of Flatland would be here with respect to any occupant of Flatland. So it could be the case both that only one thing in Flatland could be here at once (with respect to the occupants of Flatland) and also that all of Flatland could be here at once (with respect to the inhabitants of the three-​dimensional world). The reason for this apparently paradoxical claim is that all of Flatland can be encompassed within the metaphysically bigger here of the three-​dimensional world. An analogous point holds with regard to the present, on the doctrine of eternity. With respect to God in the eternal present, all of time is encompassed within the eternal present, insofar as all of time is ET-​simultaneous with the eternal present. The logic of the doctrine of eternity has the result that every moment of time, as that moment is now in time, is ET-​simultaneous with the whole eternal life of God. Or, to put the same point the other way around, the whole of eternity is ET-​simultaneous with each temporal event as that event is actually occurring in the temporal now. But it does not follow and is not true that all of time is present with respect to anything temporal at any particular temporal location. One consequence of God’s eternality is that in respect of time God can be more present with regard to a human person Paula than any other contemporary human person Jerome can be. As regards Paula, her contemporary Jerome can be present only one time slice after another. When Paula is thirty years old, for example, neither her three-​year-​old self nor her sixty-​year-​old self is

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available to Jerome. But eternal God is present at once to every time of Paula’s life; none of Paula’s life is ever absent or unavailable for God. On the logic of the doctrine of eternity, it is therefore possible for an eternal God to have the kind of conversation with Jonah represented in the biblical story. In one and the same eternal now, eternal God is ET-​simultaneous with every moment of Jonah’s life. And in one and the same eternal act of will, God can will that he make one speech to Jonah which Jonah apprehends at time T1 and another speech to Jonah which Jonah apprehends at time T2. God’s act of will which is in the eternal now can be for effects which are in different temporal locations. Furthermore, it is entirely possible and compatible with the doctrine of eternity that the speech God wills to introduce into time at T2 is a function of what God in the eternal now knows that Jonah says at some time between T1 and T2. God’s eternality therefore does not rule out God’s having effects in time or God’s responding to things that temporal human beings do. Someone might object that even if God’s eternality does not preclude God’s responsiveness, God’s immutability does; but this is a mistaken objection. It is true that since change requires time, nothing eternal and therefore outside of time can change. An eternal God is immutable. But it does not follow that an eternal and immutable God cannot alter his plans or be responsive to human beings. An eternal, immutable God is not changeable across times since he does not exist at any times. At each and every time ET-​simultaneous with the one eternal now, God is one and the same. And so an eternal immutable God cannot do anything after something happens in time. But such a God can certainly act because of something that happens in time. So, for example, in one and the same eternal now, God can will to introduce into time T1 an announcement to the Ninevites of the destruction of their city within forty days and also will to introduce into time T2 the retraction of the destruction of Ninevah because the people repented between T1 and T2. In making this complex act of will, God is not changing. He is responding to what the Ninevites do, but his responsiveness does not require any alteration on his part. To generalize from the point about Jonah above, in one and the same eternal act of will, without alteration, an eternal immutable God can will to introduce different effects into different points in time because of what human beings do at other points in time.13 13

Some philosophers suppose that even if these claims can be adequately supported, they do not suffice for the sort of engaged interaction between God and human beings that the story of Jonah illustrates. Something about God’s being outside of time and immutable seem to them incompatible with God’s being personally present to human beings.

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Some people, however, have supposed that the doctrine of simplicity rules out precisely any kind of responsiveness on God’s part. As I explained above, on the view of such philosophers and theologians, the doctrine of simplicity implies that God is identical to being (esse) alone. On their view, God must be distinguished from a being or an object (an id quod est). Furthermore, since being is just being and nothing else, God has no accidents. But, then, this claim seems to entail that the only things God can do are the things God does in fact do.14 In that case it is hard to see how God could be responsive to human beings. To see why some scholars have supposed that this conclusion follows from the doctrine of simplicity, consider that if God could do otherwise than he does, then some characteristics of God would be contingent, not necessary. But contingent features of God would be accidents in God, or so it seems. In medieval logic, an accident is just a characteristic that a thing can have or lack and still be what it is.15 Since the doctrine of simplicity rules out accidents in God, it seems to follow that everything about God is essential to him and therefore necessary for him. And so, on this way of thinking about simplicity, God would do what God in fact does no matter what human beings do. And if that is so, it is indeed very hard to see how God could be responsive to anything human beings do. It is perfectly clear, however, that Aquinas does hold that God can do other than he does. In particular, Aquinas holds that God was free to create or not to create. God’s creating was not brought about in God by any necessity of nature.16 And since this is so, with regard to creating, God could do other than he did. Not creating is therefore something that God could have done but did not do. And if it is possible for God to do other than he does, then it is possible for God to do something that God does not do in the actual world or to omit something that he does do in the actual world.

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15 16

The question whether God could do what he does not do, or refrain from doing what he does, is a well-​recognized problem in the tradition of rational theology. Aquinas, for instance, discusses it several times—​e.g., In Sent I.43.1.1–​2; SCG ii.23, 26–​27; Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei (QDP) 1.5; ST Ia.25.5. For detailed examination of different interpretations of Aquinas’s views on this score, see, for example, W. Matthews Grant and Mark Spencer, “Activity, Identity, and God: A Tension in Aquinas and his Interpreters,” Studia Neoaristotelica 12, no. 2 (2015): 5–​61. See, for example, Peter of Spain (Petrus Hispanus Portugalensis), Tractatus. Afterwards Called Summule logicales, ed. L.M.  de Rijk, (Assen, The Netherlands:  Van Gorcum, 1972): “Accidens est quod adest et abest praeter subiecti corruptionem,” 23. See, for example, SCG ii.23.

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But then it is also the case that God’s simplicity does not by itself rule out God’s responsiveness. It could be true even of a simple God that if Jonah had not prayed to God then God would not have saved Jonah from the sea. In that case, then in the possible world in which Jonah does not pray, God does otherwise than God does in the actual world (the actual world of the story, that is) and does not rescue Jonah. And since the doctrine of simplicity does not rule out such claims, then it also does not rule out saying that God rescues Jonah because of Jonah’s prayers. In that case, we have what we need for the compatibility of divine simplicity with divine responsiveness to human beings. Those who suppose (contrary to Aquinas) that a simple God cannot do other than God does and those who, contrary to their own views, find themselves stuck with this conclusion go wrong because they interpret Aquinas as holding that God is being alone. In fact, Aquinas’s position is more nuanced and more sophisticated.17 Aquinas explicitly takes the doctrine of simplicity to imply that God is—​somehow, in some way we do not understand—​both being itself and also a being or an entity, both esse and id quod est. In his commentary on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus, where he spells out his position explicitly, he says, “In simple things, in reality (realiter), esse itself and id quod est must be one and the same.”18 After giving an argument that there cannot be more than one thing which is both esse and also id quod est, Aquinas sums up his position by saying “This one sublime simple is God himself.”19 And later in that same work, he says, “[in God] esse and quod est do not differ.”20 For Aquinas, then, on the doctrine of simplicity, being (esse) and a being (an id quod est) are somehow the same in God. And for this reason, contrary to what some scholars have maintained about Aquinas’s view, for Aquinas God is 17

18 19 20

For helpful discussion of related metaphysical issues, see Michael Rea, “The Problem of Material Constitution,” The Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 525–​52; “Sameness Without Identity: An Aristotelian Solution to the Problem of Material Constitution,” Ratio 11 (1998): 316–​28; “Constitution and Kind Membership,” Philosophical Studies 97 (2000): 169–​ 93; “Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Philosophia Christi 5 (2003): 431–​ 46; “Material Constitution and the Trinity,” (with Jeff Brower), Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005): 487–​505; and “Understanding the Trinity,” (with Jeff Brower) Logos 8 (2005): 145–​ 57. For a discussion of divine simplicity different from that presented here but helpful in this connection, see Jeffrey Brower, “Simplicity and Aseity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, eds. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2011); “Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy 25 (2008): 3–​ 30; “A Theistic Argument Against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity),” (with Michael Bergmann), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 (2006): 357–​86. In De hebd., ii. 33. In De hebd., ii. 35. In De hebd., v. 66.

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not just being, but rather being which somehow also subsists as a being or an id quod est. On Aquinas’s view, it is right to say that God is esse, but this esse is somehow also an id quod est. That is, it is acceptable to say that God is being, provided that we understand that this claim does not rule out the claim that God is an entity, a concrete particular, an individual, an id quod est. Those who take the doctrine of simplicity to imply that God is not an entity but is only being therefore misread Aquinas’s position. In effect, their interpretation takes the doctrine of simplicity to make God metaphysically more limited than concrete things such as composite human beings, who can do otherwise than they do. But this is to get the doctrine upside down. The doctrine of simplicity implies that at the ultimate metaphysical foundation of all reality there is esse. But it also implies that this esse, without losing any of its characteristics as esse, is something subsistent and concrete, a particular, an individual (an id quod est) with more ability to act and with more freedom in its acts than any concrete composite entity has. This interpretation of Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity also serves to correct the misconstrual of Aquinas’s prologue to ST I q.3. When Aquinas says of God that we do not know of God what he is (quid est), he is not espousing a radical via negativa, as some scholars have supposed. He is maintaining only that, on the doctrine of simplicity, what we do not know is the quid est, the quiddity, of God. As Aquinas explains this point elsewhere, “With regard to what God himself is (secundum rem), God himself is neither universal nor particular.”21 Consequently, with regard to the quiddity of God, the best we can do is a kind of quantum metaphysics, analogous to the physics that characterizes light as both a wave and a particle. In some contexts, we can say appropriately that God is esse; and in other contexts, we can say appropriately that God is a being, just as in some contexts we can say appropriately that God is love and in other contexts we can say appropriately that God is loving. But neither claim rules out the other, on the doctrine of simplicity, as Aquinas interprets it. Furthermore, just as the human inability to understand fully the nature of light is compatible with a developed quantum physics, so the human inability to know the quiddity of God is compatible with a great deal of positive knowledge about God. The doctrine of simplicity is the most fundamental and therefore also the most difficult of the standard divine attributes, and it is clear that many of the details of this interpretation of the doctrine of simplicity would benefit from 21

ST Ia q.13 a.9 ad 2.

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further discussion in order to ward off the objection that the doctrine is just incoherent if it is interpreted in this way. But the important thing to notice is that this is the interpretation of divine simplicity that Aquinas, the exemplary proponent of classical theism, gives. And if we understand divine simplicity in the way Aquinas explicitly does, as perfectly compatible with the claim that God can do other than God does, then nothing about simplicity rules out God’s responsiveness to human beings. Conclusion Genesis maintains that human beings are made in the image of God. But the relation being an image of requires some reciprocal relation of similarity. Something X is an image of something else Y only if X resembles Y in some way; but then Y must also resemble X in some way. The biblical commitment to seeing human beings as made in the image of God makes it reasonable that the biblical God so often seems so human. Anthropomorphism is wrong-​headed only if it is stupid. Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image of God. Classical theism has been widely interpreted as rejecting any kind of anthropomorphism and as making God totally other than anything in the created world. The God of this version of classical theism is so unlike human beings that it is false even to think of God as a being or a concrete particular. On this view, the divine attributes of simplicity, eternality, and immutability preclude God’s being anything like the deity portrayed in the Bible. In the Christian tradition, Aquinas is universally recognized as one of the main proponents of classical theism; and certainly he is committed to the view that God is simple, eternal, and immutable. But, as his views on the indwelling Holy Spirit makes clear, the God Aquinas takes himself to be discussing is a God in whose image human beings are made. Aquinas’s God is highly responsive to human beings and engaged with them in personal and interactive ways. He is a God who is a particular and personal friend to every person of faith. And he looks very like the biblical God. The God Aquinas describes in his biblical commentaries and in his texts about the indwelling Holy Spirit is very human. Aquinas can accept this characterization of God even while maintaining classical theism, because there is nothing in the logic of the attributes of simplicity, eternity, or immutability, as Aquinas understands them, that rules out God’s acting in time, responding to human beings, conversing with them, and altering his announced plans for them because of what they do. As Aquinas

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understands these divine attributes, the God of the story of Jonah could also be simple, eternal, and immutable. And so, for that exemplary and influential proponent of classical theism, the God of the philosophers and the God of the Bible are the same God—​not because the biblical God is, after all, a frozen and unresponsive deity, but because the God of classical theism is truly the engaged, responsive, intimately present God of the biblical stories.22 Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas (1253–​6). Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (In Sent.) (Commentary on the Sentences). Aquinas, Thomas (1259?). Expositio super librum Boethii De hebdomadibus (In de hebd) (Commentary on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus). Aquinas, Thomas (1265–​6). Quaestiones disputatae de potentia (Disputed Questions on Power). Aquinas, Thomas (1266–​73). Summa theologiae (ST) (Synopsis of Theology). Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians by St. Thomas Aquinas, Translated by Matthew L. Lamb. Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1966. Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philippians by St. Thomas Aquinas, Translated by F. R. Larcher and Michael Duffy. Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1969. Aquinas, Thomas (1259–​65). Summa contra gentiles (SCG) (Synopsis [of Christian Doctrine] Directed Against Unbelievers), Translated by Anton Charles Pegis. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1975. Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, Translated by F. R. Larcher, edited by J. Mortensen and F. Alarcon. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012. Bergmann, Michael, and Jeffrey E. Brower. “A Theistic Argument Against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity).” Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 (2006): 357–​86. Brower, Jeffrey E. “Making Sense of Divine Simplicity.” Faith and Philosophy 25 (2008): 3–​30.

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This article is a shortened version of my Marquette Aquinas lecture: The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers, Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2016).

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Brower, Jeffrey E. “Simplicity and Aseity.” In The Oxford Handbook to Philosophical Theology, Edited by Michael Rea and Thomas Flint. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011. Brower, Jeffrey E., and Michael Rea. “Material Constitution and the Trinity.” Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005): 487–​505. Brower, Jeffrey E., and Michael Rea. “Understanding the Trinity.” Logos 8 (2005): 145–​57. Grant, W. Matthews, and Mark Spencer. “Activity, Identity, and God: A Tension in Aquinas and his Interpreters.” Studia Neoaristotelica 12, no. 2 (2015): 5–​61. Peter of Spain (Petrus Hispanus Portugalensis). Tractatus. Afterwards Called Summule logicales, Edited by L. M. de Rijk. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972. Rea, Michael. “The Problem of Material Constitution.” The Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 525–​52. Rea, Michael. “Sameness Without Identity: An Aristotelian Solution to the Problem of Material Constitution.” Ratio 11 (1998): 316–​28. Rea, Michael. “Constitution and Kind Membership.” Philosophical Studies 97 (2000): 169–​93. Rea, Michael. “Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity.” Philosophia Christi 5 (2003): 431–​46. Stump, Eleonore. The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers. Aquinas Lecture. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016. Stump, Eleonore. “The Openness of God: Eternity and Free Will.” In New Essays Against Open Theism, Edited by Benjamin H. Arbour and Kevin Timpe. New  York:  Routledge, 2018. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann. “Eternity.” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 429–​58. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann. “Eternity, Awareness, and Action.” Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): 463–​82. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann. “Prophecy, Past Truth, and Eternity.” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 395–​424. White, Thomas Joseph. “Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 1 (2016): 66–​93. White, Thomas Joseph. “Nicene Orthodoxy and Trinitarian Simplicity.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2016): 1–​24.

Chapter 5

Toward a More Perfect Idea of God Lenn E. Goodman Monotheists face a problem with ideas of God. If we think of God, say, as a higher power, bigger, wiser, more powerful than we, but still a person, we have something we can deal with, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, perhaps, but still seemingly subject to emotions—​even vulnerable—​a welcome thought, perhaps, in a therapeutic culture. But can we worship such gods, deathless perhaps, but like us, mirroring ourselves as we might like to be or wish to be imagined? Can we worship gods created in our own image? We treasure the biblical trope that we are made in God’s image, but it’s easy to forget that not every likeness is reciprocal: We may resemble God without God’s resembling us. And every human idea of perfection, as Maimonides taught, bears connotations of imperfection. Our conceptual vocabulary and our conative repertoire, like our diction, are fraught with finitude. Our ideas of class membership help us arrange things in taxonomic dovecotes. But any taxonomy we build will inevitably slight divine uniqueness. Our ideas of divine compassion demand ­corollaries about accessibility and mutability. Our ideas of judgment are fraught with notions of wrath and pity. Even our ideas of existence struggle to free themselves from the implications of contingency familiar in every existent we encounter in our daily lives, not to mention expectations of physicality. We can model gods on many of the powerful and impressive things we know, or on combinations of the favorite features we find among them. But our projections are of dubious coherence, and our choices bear telltale marks of bias. The art of godmaking has not advanced far since Xenophanes observed human images of gods so closely mimicking their makers’ idealized selves, if not their vices. Even our most dynamic images, interactive and responsive, utter threats or promises assuring us, perhaps, that our weaknesses are known and judged, and perhaps forgiven. We still seem to be projecting little more than our hopes and fears. Our liveliest divinity dolls seem far better at making promises and threats than keeping them, like midway answer machines whose judgments sound suspiciously like what we would like or dread to hear, even if the volume is turned up a bit, or the pitch set a little

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004387980_007

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lower. But nothing real can survive a contradiction. Fallibility, vulnerability, and regret are as incompatible with godhood as capriciousness, favoritism or venality. A god that can be moved or pressed is no better than a god that can be forced or bought. Coherence is the forge at which robust ideas of God, like any others, must be hammered out. What’s revolutionary in the idea of God that we Jews credit to Abraham is the absoluteness of God’s truth and justice. Abraham, as Maimonides reminds us in the epigram he set at the entryway to his Guide, invokes a universal God. It is from God’s universality that the patriarch, who is called God’s friend, can infer God’s justice and generosity (Gen 21:33, 18:25)—​the generosity that called life and light into being (Gen 1:3–​4, 12, 31), and a justice that we will learn cannot be swayed by bribes or hecatombs (Deut 10:17, Isa 1:11). We humans differ from one another and even within ourselves from moment to moment. So the virtues, strengths, and beauties we admire in diverse and changing circumstances form a many-​faceted prism—​an object that projects an array of ideals in as many directions as permitted by the faces cut into it by history’s rough handling and the work of our own hands and minds. The light, refracted and projected toward infinity will take many different angles, but the lively or faded images of gods it forms against the backdrop of human experience inevitably reflects our fears and wishes. Monotheism, pursuing an undivided source of light, finds God’s truth in the idea of perfection, linking rays coherent with one another and dismissing the scattered shadows and reflections that fall away or fail to cohere. Just as light goes dark when its beams fall into patterns of destructive interference, monotheism finds any lesser thought than that of absolute perfection canceled by its incoherence even before the battles begin among rival gods sprung from conflicting ideals. Abraham’s ideals of peace and justice, love and truth outlast the warring images still active in the archives of imagination, the liturgies and literatures of hope and fear, projections not of truth itself but of human appetites and passions. In this paper I  will argue for two main claims:  First, the idea of divinity functions like a value concept, disabling any notion assigned to the divine that seems unworthy. Second, the Torah finds alien gods nugatory when they reveal feet of clay. A god that demands enormities like child sacrifice or temple prostitution is disqualified as a divinity. Those are extreme cases. But the dynamic is to press toward ultimate rather than proximate causality, ultimate rather than compromised truth and justice. Monotheism is born when causal and moral ultimacy fuse in the idea of a God whose will and wisdom are expressed as

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grace, making creation God’s fairest act. For the monotheist, light and life, enlightenment and love are the clearest expressions of divinity. Divinity and Perfection Plato defined theology when he coined the term, as proper speech about the gods. He stipulated that the inquiry demands that “God always be represented as he truly is.” God, being good, must never be spoken of as evil or hurtful but only as the source of good (Republic ii 379). The thought echoes Xenophanes, who held it “always good to hold the gods in high regard” and used that thought to motivate his critique of anthropomorphism and his rejection of mythic tales of divine outrages.1 Simplicius ascribes to Xenophanes affirmations of perfection in the divine, complementing the exclusion of divine vice and evil: If Apollo stands for insight, one might ask, will his arrows also bring plague?2 Can there be a lame god at the forge, continually cuckolded by Aphrodite, his faithless, irresistible consort? Can there be a god of war, or the hunt? Then why not a god of manuring, as Augustine archly asks (City of God xviii 15)? Would Artemis, Apollo’s twin, hunt the hunter Actaeon, now made a stag? Or is the role reversal just a case of poetic justice counterfeiting and eclipsing its moral counterpart? Beyond dismissing the farce and epic conflicts among the gods, motifs born of poetic license and pregnant with opportunities for more, what Plato found most notably in the idea of divine perfection, was a clear implication of unity. One corollary: deathlessness is replaced by changelessness, its logical foundation the timelessness of the divine will now bespeak perfection, belying the shifts that myth enshrines and that pantomime (or trance dance drama) seeks to enact: Do you think God is a wizard, who would play devious games with us, assuming now one shape, now another? Would he really change, shed his own form and take many others—​or deceive us at times by feigning such shifts? Or is God simple and least of all liable to shed his own form? … If anything left its own form, must it not be changed either of itself or 1 Xenophanes, Fragment 1. See Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-​Socratic Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 20. 2 See J. H. Lesher, Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments: A Text and Translation with Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). And, “Xenophanes’ Skepticism,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Albany, NY: suny Press, 1983), 220–​40.

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by another? … And is it not true that the best things are least likely to be changed? … Surely God and all that pertains to God is in every way perfect … So he can hardly be compelled externally to take on diverse shapes … If he is altered … it must be for the worse. For we cannot assume him to be lacking in excellence or beauty … So even for God to wish to change is impossible. Being intrinsically good and beautiful, God abides forever simply in his own form. (Republic 380d–​381c) The rivalries, usurpations, and titanic tortures luridly portrayed in myth to mark the violent powers of the gods or celebrate the exchange of old gods for new, the philandering and bestial liaisons immemorially were intended, perhaps, to enact relations within nature or beyond it, or aiming to cement bonds of fealty and reliance. But, on reflection, they prove to suffice for the dismissal of any claim to divinity for the figures projected in the mythic pantheon. Subtly but tellingly Plato’s words shift from talk of gods to talk of one God, simple and abiding, drawing immutability from divine nobility; and, from immutability, a stronger inference: “Then God is altogether simple and true in deed and word” (382e)—​in Shorey’s translation. Pressing his point (with Parmenides just offstage), Plato has drawn absolute simplicity from thoughts of immutability: If the divine is invariant there will be but one God, varying no more from part to part or relation to relation than from moment to moment. Plato lightly covers his defection from the anthropomorphic pantheon by allowing “simple” to suggest the sincerity promised by the denial of divine dissembling. But he does not pull his punches: God has no more need to change than to disguise himself in avatars. His is the simplicity of goodness. Plato’s argument masks a sharper shift than the mythic rebellions that displace disused or disrespected gods. For the old gods here give way not to new counterparts but to the Forms and the Good beyond the Forms. No violent upheaval but thought itself dislodges the Olympians: only goodness is predicable of divinity. Invariance opens up the ascent to unity. The nested hierarchy of Forms, rises toward their Source, the Form of the Good, where unity is absolute and temporality, like strife, proves just another veil of multiplicity. Escape from the cave now means more than learning to distinguish shadows from traffic. It will require learning to discriminate divinity from its simulacra. Xenophanes had prepared the ground, by projecting a kind of henotheism: “There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, utterly unlike mortals in form or thought. All of him sees, all of him hears. He remains unmoving, ever in place, nor is it fitting for him to come and go from place to place.

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But without toil he sets all things in motion by his mind’s thought.”3 It was left to Aristotle to work out how a god could move all things without being in motion—​by drawing all things to emulate its perfection, by realizing perfection in themselves, each in its own way. How the divine might know all things and yet remain unmoved and thus unchanging was a question that would vex philosophers for centuries. But clearly, as Maimonides will argue, God’s knowledge must be utterly unlike ours: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways, saith the Lord. High as the sky above the earth are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts” (Isa 55:8–​9, cited at Guide iii 20). The Torah does suppress the myths of violent and quarrelsome gods, as Plato only hoped to do. There are no wars here of gods with giants and with one another. The gods of ancient myth are gone. The sun and moon are now God’s creatures, bereft of their divine names and left only delegated functions, to preside and light God’s world and mark the time and seasons. The days and months, too, are stripped of their cult names. They’re known by numbers here—​except the seventh day, now called “stoppage,” and blessed for marking God’s gift of surcease (Gen 1:14–​17, 2:1–​3). The monsters of the deep are now God’s creatures, like the birds of the sky or the crawling creatures of the earth (Gen 1:20–​22). Leviathan and Behemoth, whether natural creatures like the hippo and crocodile, as Saadiah thinks, or portents peeking from the fringes of fantasy, are now God’s pets (Job 41:1–​4).4 The serpent, once divine, has itself become a creature, subtle but subdued, his cunning reduced to nakedness by a play on words and loss of all his limbs, left to eat the dust and snap at people’s heels, only to be beaten about the head by humans towering over it (Gen 3:1, 14–​15). Barely a trace is left of divine liaisons with humans, and gone are the mythic irruptions into human lives of gods imagined as capricious or malicious bearers of changing fortunes. Almost undetectable are the remains and names of the gods of pagan piety and dread—​Rahab, Tiamat, Tammuz—​ shards for philologists to trace. God’s world is disenchanted, leaving no rightful room for spells and necromancy. The Torah has anticipated Plato’s discontent. Piety, to be worthy of the name, demands not mere flattery and carefully couched invocation but a worthy idea of what warrants worship—​and how holy acts are to be conceived. Only so do ideas of God afford fit models for emulation. The Torah underscores the point by outlawing the practices in which the frisson of violation masks 3 Fragment 23, translated after Kathleen Freeman and John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 53. 4 Job 40:25–​28, in the Hebrew Bible’s numeration.

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God’s face. Epicureans will condemn religion generically for the horror of Iphi­ genia’s sacrifice; but the Mosaic law, guided by Abraham’s example, purges human sacrifice from the practices of piety, along with royal incest, temple prostitution, and every confusion of the fear of God with the terror of violence and violation, or of God’s delight with bestial or priapic license. The Torah frames its idea of God’s perfection when it situates God’s laws as radical alternatives to the extremes it finds in pagan piety. Emblematic of the transformation is the image of Ham, pointedly named as the ancestor of Egypt and Canaan (Gen 9:18, 2, 26; 10:6; cf. Pss 78:51, 105:23, 27, 106:22, 1 Chr 4:40). Genesis highlights what the Torah finds most troubling in pagan practice when it pictures Ham’s violation of his drunken father’s dignity. Noah, like Adam, is mankind’s father and thus an archetype of humankind. Introduced as a good man who had walked with God, Noah models the human difference by taking charge of the animals and saving every species from the flood. But, like Adam, he has lost his grip on human perfection—​ not by eating a piece of fruit but by drinking the wine he had made. Ham’s exposure of Noah’s nakedness, described in the same terms Leviticus will use in banning incest, foreshadows an enormity that reaches a peak of sorts in Egyptian royal incest and points tellingly toward the orgiastic cult of Canaan. Well before Israel enters the land promised her patriarchs, Egyptian and Canaanite mores are rejected. Moral revulsion marks a tipping point—​in mores and in gods: I am the Lord. Ye shall not do as they do in Egypt, where you have dwelt, nor shall ye do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I bring you. (Lev 18:2–​5) Life is the focus here. Israel’s God is a God of life; the Source of all life—​and of human lives specifically (Gen 1:20, 2:7); His laws are laws of life (Deut 30:7, 15–​16, 19–​20). Egypt, biblically, seems fixated on death and afterlife. Temple prostitution and cults of human sacrifice in Canaan pose yet greater moral dangers, mingling lust with violence and violation. The norms and mores of these termini of Israel’s formative experience vividly set off the expectations of Israel’s God, whose love of life finds a concrete emblem in the demand that the lifeblood of a beast not be consumed (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10–​14, Deut 12:23–​25). And human life, still named in terms of blood, is hedged about with moral, legal, even cosmic consequence (Gen 4:10–​11, 9:5–​6; Num 35:30–​34). God’s imperatives mediate transcendence to humanity morally, opening pathways of emulation through their tableaux of ways of pleasantness and

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peace, grounded in love and caring (Lev 19; Deut 32:47; Prov 3:17–​18, 22, 4:10–​13, 8:35–​36). Through its mitzvot and the counsels that expound them, the Torah becomes a guide to life (Ps 16:11, 34:13–​15; Prov 3:1–​2), lest ideas of divine perfection slip into lip service or stark abstraction. Life, here, is not mere survival but flourishing for the individual and the community (Pss 36:9–​10, 19:8–​12, 91:16; Prov 2:19). The ideal, replacing the old gods and their mores, is voiced in the summary commandment of Leviticus lacing together the elements of God’s code of purity: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord thy God am holy” (19:2). God’s truth demands justice; God’s face will be seen in the human image. Plato and the Torah reach common ground not because either copies the other, but through the dynamic of the idea of divinity, active even in the Titans’ displacement by the Olympian gods, governed (if imperfectly) under the rule of Zeus, patron of justice and hospitality—​even if his spouse finds him inconstant. We can see the dynamic of the idea of divinity at work when Plato invents etymologies for Athena’s name. Building on her cultic bonds to Athens and her affinity to the wisdom he longs to see realized in his city, he links her name with nous, the mind, and dianoia, thinking, then presses higher, finding in the name a penchant for divine reason, theou noesis, “as if to say, ‘she who has the mind of God’—​a theonoa—​or, perhaps, ta theia noousa, she who knows divine things” (Cratylus 407b)—​and, thus, things moral too, en ethei noesin. Whatever is divine must be known to be what is highest and most perfect. Purity and Holiness God reveals Himself to Abraham in the epiphany that transformed what might have been a familial trauma into a blessing for all the nations of the world (Gen 22:18). Abraham, we read, received a command from God: “Take your son, your only son, that you love—​take Isaac, and betake yourself to the land of Moriah, and offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I that will show you” (22:2). The Rabbis do not fail to notice that the command comes from God, although an angel countermands it. Love, as they reason, trumps asperity. The moment of truth in Abraham’s trial came not when he rose early and saddled his ass, nor even at the poignant moment when he tried to prevaricate but unwittingly told the truth, reassuring Isaac, “God will see to the sheep for the burnt offering” (22:8). The impact on Isaac of that evasive answer is conveyed with powerful economy. The text, pregnant with meaning, says simply the two walked on together (22:8). Somehow Isaac has accepted his father’s decision.

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But the moment of truth for Abraham comes as he faces the choice between obeying God’s seeming command and an angel’s urgent admonition not to lay a hand on the boy (22:11–​12). He could not know until he made his choice that God would not strike him down for disobeying. The choice was his alone. With insight and moral courage, he listened to the angel. Relief and confirmation come swiftly, when God’s words are relayed to him:  “I know now”—​indeed, I already know—​“that you fear God. You have not withheld your son” (22:12). Abraham stands forth as a paradigm of piety without the bloody act—​indeed, because he has not used the knife. He has rejected an ideal of piety cherished among his contemporaries, the notion that those who love their gods will sacrifice to them everything they love best, even the children that are their futurity.5 Once more, as he had done earlier, Abraham must betake himself, not just from his land now, but from all too familiar ways. Again he will travel to a place that God will show him, again promised that God will make of him a great nation—​indeed, as he learns now, a nation through which all the nations of the world will be blessed (Gen 12:1–​2, 22:2, 22:17–​18). The blessing, in the event, lay in his decision not to bring down his knife. In time, it will be very clear what kind of human offering the God of Israel expects—​not Jephthah’s kind, the outcome of God’s deadly irony answering the brigand warrior’s cunning attempt to out-​bargain God.6 Hannah will promise God the son she longs for, but at the altar, not on it (1 Sam 1–​2). Samson’s mother, too, dedicates a life, not a death (Judg 13). Abraham’s trial rests on his not yet knowing what God expects of one. He’s ready to argue with courtly humility, even chaffer with God for strangers in Sodom. But how can he know that to exempt his long-​awaited son from God’s demand would not amount to special pleading? It’s at this moral crux that God defines Himself: the test was not of blind obedience. It produced no auto da fé. The faith it uncovered was no surrender to cruelty or credulity. Rather, Abraham’s false words of reassurance turned true and unwittingly prophetic, echoed in the name he gave the place, with a sigh of relief, almost laughing at himself, discovering the irony in his evasive words: the mountain, the Torah explains, became known as Mount Epiphany (Moriah), signaling the object lesson in which Abraham had played his role: the mountain where the Lord was seen (22:14). 5 See 2 Kgs 3:27; Lev 18:21, 20:2; Deut 18:10; Mic 6:7 and Lenn E. Goodman, God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16–​31. 6 See Jack M. Sasson, Judges 1–​12: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014) and Lenn E. Goodman, Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16.

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God, in a way, had “seen to” the sacrifice—​letting a ram wander by and get tangled in the brush. But, crucially, by aborting the sacrifice and framing a paradigm of what Maimonides will call the extreme limit of devotion, God had let Himself be seen, His true character revealed: divine absoluteness lies not in violence or violation of the bonds of love and caring but in their sustenance. That recognition is the brunt and burden of Abraham’s blessing to his descendants and followers, and all the nations of the world. Recognition of God’s steadfastness is the steady fulcrum of prophetic reasoning. It’s that constancy that the Torah intends in calling God faithful (Deut 7:9), not that God is a believer. The word intends a stronger, richer sense: God is true to His commitment to the love of life (Ps 146:6; Lam 3:21–​23). Such thoughts steady Balaam’s reasoning when he tries to explain how foreign God’s purpose is to Balak’s intent: How can I damn whom God has not damned, or doom whom God has not condemned? (Num 23:8) And, pressing the same thought: God is not a man that He should lie, or a human to change His mind! (Num 23:19) Likewise when Samuel argues that God’s sentence must be executed, implacably: … the Eternal of Israel does not lie; nor is he a human to change His mind! (1 Sam 15:29) Truth here, as so often in Hebrew, portends unswerving justice. Deviation would be a lie, inconsistent with God’s very being. The reach of God’s constancy is revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Exod 3:14). Some are pleased to translate what God says there as, “I shall be what I shall be,” making God seem arbitrary, even whimsical. Robert Alter offers: “I-​Will-​Be-​Who-​I-​Will-​Be,” making God a kind of existentialist. Everett Fox prefers, “I will be-​there howsoever I will be-​there”—​wringing from the three simple words of the Hebrew an opaque assertion in an invented language cobbled from archaizing verbiage (“howsoever”—​forsooth!) and hot-​tub mannerism (being there!). The Jewish Publication Society decides (presumably after much deliberation) not to translate the Hebrew at all, even ignoring God’s own explanation: “So

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shalt thou say to the Israelites: I AM sent me to you” (3:14). They preface their Bible with a stammer of disarming hesitancy, calling the Masoretic Text “THE UNBROKEN CHAIN OF UNCERTAINTY” (1999, ix). Here they transliterate the Hebrew, adding in a note in tiny type: “Meaning of the Heb. uncertain; variously translated: ‘I Am That I Am’; ‘I Am Who I Am’; ‘I Will Be What I Will Be’; etc.”7 Ehyeh, too, remains untranslated. Its note becomes:  “Others ‘I Am’ or ‘I will be.’ ”—​as though offering alternatives to a translation unventured. So God’s revelatory moment is transmuted to bemused confusion. The Hebrew does say I AM THAT I AM. The King James translators did not quarrel with that thought or try to reduce God’s self-​disclosure to mere repetition of His promise to stand by Moses (Exod 3:12). The old jps (1917) wisely followed the King James Hebraists.8 If more recent translators find it embarrassing that God speaks quite so metaphysically, naming Himself to Moses and all Israel in terms of Being, they should address their worries in their commentaries and not impose them on God’s words, and make the God of Israel sound like Popeye. The problem we have is not that Moses hears God call Himself I AM and proclaim that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall be known as such forever (Exod 3:6, 15). It’s clear enough that God called Himself the Absolute. For, as Maimonides explains (Guide I 63), what God gave Moses at the burning bush was no mere name but an argument that would convince the elders of Israel that the God he encountered was “in a word, the Real that is the Real.”9 The problem we must face is how the Absolute can speak and indeed make promises—​to stand by Moses, liberate Israel, execute judgment on Egypt. How can God be turned to and relied on if God is simplex and invariant? If God’s justice is truth and His faithfulness is constancy, how can one turn to God in hope or prayer? The answer I’ll propose, in all humility, is that God’s constancy itself must be the bastion of our hope and refuge of our prayer, not the superstitious expectation that God will change His plan. God’s life is not a metabolism. The sweet savor of sacrifices may evince human gratitude or penitence, but God does not scent those odors or taste the flavors they promise. Our prayers weave hopes amidst the strands of praise and gratitude, shot through with golden subtexts marking a sense of unity and community as we reflect on past events in which our sages and poets saw God’s 7 Jewish Publication Society, JPS Hebrew-​English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and The New JPS Translation, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999). 8 See Lenn E. Goodman, “The King James Bible at 401,” Society 50 (2013): 73–​80. 9 See Goodman, Judaism, 28–​30, and Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, translated with ­commentary by Goodman and Phillip Lieberman, forthcoming.

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hand, and await future trials in which we hope to see that power manifested once again. As Adin Steinsaltz says, “The prayer of every Jew is always, in truth, in the ‘name of all Israel’.”10 But prayer’s deep themes of trust and reverence, penitence and gratitude, must uncouple themselves from any expectation of a quid pro quo. We can see why Maimonides, who read God’s I am that I am as a thumbnail ontological-type argument, made still more compact in the Tetragrammaton, called silence the purest worship (Guide I 59), citing as his proof-​text the Psalmist’s words: “silence, to Thee, is praise” (Ps 60:2)—​a fruitful paradox since the poet did not keep silent but sang, even as his words made silence the subject of his poesy. Maimonides, paralleling and paralleled by Plato, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, argues that God’s oneness, proclaimed in the Shema (Deut 6:4) means not just that God alone is to be worshiped but that God is supremely simple: incorporeal, of course, and thus no composite of form and matter, but also changeless, beyond time or any shift from potency to act, active and creative by His very essence, uniquely identical with His necessary existence. Having attributes, Maimonides argues, would render God composite and contingent, dependent on the union of His features, in need of a cause to assemble His constituents and sustain their union. Analysis cannot distinguish God’s wisdom from His will. Any such distinction that we make must reflect our limited understanding, our failing to see wisdom in every seeming arbitrary determination within nature, our inability to see God’s will at play in every natural necessity. We get an inkling of divine unity when we reflect on the identity of grace with wisdom and the intricate union of grace with efficacy in nature. But our own stake in nature’s operations often obscures that unity for us and masks the beauty resident and emergent in the scheme. There’s danger in these waters, and we can see why mystic signage marks God’s unity as an ocean. Our most basic questions do have answers, but as Harry Wolfson used to warn, those answers, too, have answers. One can say that God can act without altering: If God’s thought is a plan, its phases can be realized at every stage of history, biographical or universal. And if God’s wisdom is timeless, God can know from beyond time. Such thoughts need not impede or implode human freedom and responsibility. The Creator’s knowledge, Maimonides proposes, is more like that of an inventor than like that of a human investigator. A human inquirer who wants to know how a water clock works must first take it apart and follow the water’s

10

Adin Steinsaltz, A Guide to Jewish Prayer (New York: Schocken, 2000); first published in two-​volumes as Ha-​Siddur ve-​ha-​Tefillah (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 1994), 19.

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path through the mechanism. The designer has the pattern in mind before seeing it in the clock. Does that mean, as some medieval Aristotelians presumed, that God knows only universals? It need not. It is individuals, in the end, that have essences for God to know. The smith could hardly make a needle, Maimonides explains, if he knew nothing of sewing. That thought helps us see what the Psalmist must have meant, the Rambam argues, by saying, “Will He who set the ear not hear, will He who formed the eye not see?” (Ps 94:9). Divine simplicity does demand a shift in how we think about knowing and acting. The psalmist, after all, is not contemplating water clocks, or meditating on the a priori. He’s awaiting divine action, as his opening words make very clear: “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rouse Yourself, Judge of the earth, and give the arrogant their due!” (Ps 94:1–​2). Like so many of the Psalms, this one, which includes the verse Maimonides glossed so elegantly, pleads for God to act against evildoers—​murderers and oppressors (Ps 94:5–​6). Yet it moves on to voice a wisdom resonant with the Rambam’s point. For the poet calms his own anxiety with the bold affirmation that God has embedded His justice in the very dynamic of evildoers’ acts. What fools and scoffers fail to understand in their boorish cynicism is the self-​destructiveness of evil (Pss 94:8; cf. 92:7–​8): “Will He who disciplines nations not rebuke—​the same who gives man knowledge? The Lord knows human plots are vain!” (Ps 94:10). The psalmist’s vision is not abstract but concrete, anchored in the moral logic of the rise and fall of nations and built into the dynamic of human actions as securely as the laws of life—​the laws of physiology, ecology, and history. God acts and judges immanently, not by intervention; just as God knows not by dismantling a structure and trying to explain it by reference to its history and parts, but immanently, in the same way that He created and continues to create. Tradition The familiar response to the perfect being idea is the charge that an immutable God is inaccessible. Doubling back on the demand that anything less than perfect is unworthy of worship comes the countercharge that a perfect being, so understood, cannot be worshiped. Immutability would render God unapproachable with human needs and wants; infinite transcendence would set God out of reach even conceptually, far beyond human praise, let alone aspiration. What we want—​and the argument is often driven by human wants, reflecting a buyers’ market in spiritual allegiances—​is a God we can relate to and

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who can relate to us as one person to another, a God who cares about us empathically, who acts for us, even suffers with us. That last is a telling claim, trading on the pathos and paradox of transcendence made vulnerable. We know that we suffer, so it’s perversely comforting to picture God suffering with us. Christianity presses a step further, with images of a God who suffers for us. The classical, Maimonidean, response to the populist elenchus, as it teeters on the brink of making gods to order, turns to biblical poetics in an effort to fathom what we can know of a transcendent God. Biblical poetry, by prophetic license, the Rambam reasons, inevitably falls short of God’s uniqueness. But it always points toward the Absolute. Biblical symbols self-​deconstruct For every trope overreaches when it reaches for the Infinite, and every metaphor aimed for God confesses its inadequacy by its very standing as a metaphor—​and often by its teaming with other images, as if openly confessing its weakness. But by that very weakness every such trope leaves clear markers of the direction in which God is to be sought: toward perfect goodness, truth and beauty, uncompromised by finitude. Ritual symbols, too, the living personal and social counterpoints to verbal poetry, point in the same direction, adding vitality to what poets reach for in words—​much as dance and song add pitch and harmonies, movement, bodily engagement, and expression to the more abstract ideas and disembodied emotions toward which words can point. Hebraic ritual turned toward God’s face from the moment of its birth by rejecting human sacrifice and the frisson of all its violative counterparts, yet pursuing God not in sheer thoughts of the infinite, as if God were a mere number beyond all numbers, or a tremendum to be met only in actions beyond all reason and moral sense. Not content with the vertigo that spiritual altitude can bring, the faith of Abraham, which became the faith of Israel, steadies and orients itself as a twirling dancer or skater does, by fixing on one point, even in its swiftest spin. That point, for us, was not chosen randomly but singled out, as Abraham himself was, and crystalized for contemplation in our record of the moment of discovery when God showed His true character to Abraham, and Abraham discovered the God a good man could love, his encounter with God as the infinite Love that creates all finite good. Communal ritual confirmed Abraham’s choice at Mount Moriah. For the sacrificial cult of ancient Israel chose cleaner more pacific beasts for immolation in the days when sacrifice still spoke to worshipers and seemed to them a fit way to reach out toward God and attain or regain a sense of purity and communion. A pacific moral tone persists in the diction, harmonies and assonances of spoken prayer as it rings the changes on biblical and midrashic motifs, to express joy or gratitude, hope, resolution, love and yearning, longing,

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penitence and return. There’s no orgiastic self-​immolation here, as in the ancient cult of Cybele, no celebration of violence, no confusion of lies with wit, of mystery with paradox, or of resolve with ugliness or anger. Through what it says and what it leaves unspoken, Hebrew prayer points in God’s direction, just the same as the many non-​verbal rituals accrued throughout our history. Spoken and unspoken, Hebraic rituals point toward peace and purity; gentle love and caring; gratitude for nature’s beauty, bounty, and wisdom. The rituals connect us, since we are a literate tradition, to our historical and cultural past, our practical and political present, and our intellectual and spiritual future. They draw their themes from the textual canon. Their tropes, moral, affirmative, exemplary, and prescriptive, invite hands to intertwine. And, since literacy makes us a philosophical as well as a historically conscious nation, they affirm that the higher skies we look to are emblematic of our hopes: our ascent toward the God we worship will be found, intellectually and practically, in the work God gives us. Our rituals and prayers, like the thoughts and actions that inspire and are inspired by them, connect us with God, not because God suffers with or for us, and still less because we imagine there is something we can do for God that might deserve repayment, but because we see how the goods of beauty, truth, and love connect, sustain, and complement one another, all of them manifest in the world we know, all of them accessible through our partnership with God’s creative and sustaining work, and all of them of a piece with God’s indissoluble goodness. Can we avoid a tone of condescension in describing biblical symbolism and the tropes that Aggadah and Halakhah build upon it as a coalescence of images and rituals seeking to pay fealty to an infinite Goodness best known to reason? The temptation is worth resisting, not just out of respect for the intentions of those poets who hunt for words and gestures they know must prove inadequate. The truer reason to avoid such condescension is that the poetry and the rituals that give poetry a second life are not just souvenirs, quaint caricatures of higher thoughts, or gray precipitates of a vision now lost. They are themselves modes and moments of discovery. They mean. And, because they mean, they too are gateways to spiritual and intellectual discovery: our words give definition to our thoughts and content to our rituals, allowing them to point the way to moral doing and spiritual and intellectual growth. But the same is true in the opposite direction: every ritual bears an expressive valence; and the valence here, when read aright, is of love and justice, truth and beauty, morally energizing and spiritually livening. So there’s nothing secondary in our poetic tropes and ritual gestures: both point to pathways of perfection that human beings can travel, fleshing out what might have languished in abstraction

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and allowing moral and spiritual amateurs and adventurers to link strivings with ideas in ways that can turn lives into songs of praise. Anyone knows that this is so who has experienced an epiphany in studying a great painting or sculpture, reading a serious book, hearing great music, understanding a profound theory, or learning of inspiring examples that illustrate in life what it means to serve a higher cause—​as moral virtuosi do when their actions point toward what is worthy of being thought divine. Monotheism invites us to seek the common Source of every good toward which such moments and modes of expression orient us. All of our most aspirational poetry and rituals are, in that sense, originary, not derivative. They are as adequate, with all their limitations, as the many technical devices of philosophy can be that seek their power in efforts to state and argue ideas with precision—​only provided that the rituals and symbols are not taken as though they intended no more than themselves, or as though they were magic surrogates obviating active thought and thoughtful action. Let’s speak about prayer. The English word can be misleading since its root signifies entreaty and its usage connotes fervent petition or request. Those senses are not absent from the range of meanings of the Hebrew counterpart, tefillah. That’s clear enough when Hannah sets the pattern of Hebrew prayer by her silent but not wordless worship at Shilo. In time she will tell Eli, the priest to whom such prayer seems rather unfamiliar, “It was for this boy that I prayed” (1 Sam 1:27). Hannah’s prayer is distinct from the sacrifices her family offers. The seasonal rhythms of the festivals set the occasion. But there’s a message in the discreteness of her prayers from the family offerings; and it was her prayers, not her husband’s offerings, that were requited. Offerings may be received, but they are not “answered.” What Hannah’s story relates is a movement of the mind translated into words. Some derive the Hebrew word for prayer from the root p-​l-​l in the sense of accepting or invoking judgment. Others look to p-​l-​i, searching or scrutinizing. That makes some intuitive sense. For the idea of inquiry seems never far off in Hebrew prayer, surfacing when the biliteral root is doubled in the derivatives of p-​l-​p-​l that point to discussion or debate and take on connotations of exhaustive, even excessive attention to detail.11 That hypothesis is confirmed when the Psalmist calls his prayer hegion libi, the meditation of my heart (19:14). For, as Yoram Hazony stresses, the Tanakh does not distinguish heart 11

See Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 511–​12, s.vv. p-​l-​l and p-​l-​p-​l. The discursive sense of p-​l-​p-​l, as Klein explains, has nothing to do with pepper, an Iranian name that becomes cosmopolitan.

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from mind. Indeed, the psalmist has followed the sun’s course and compares the spread of its light to the penetrating truth and moral invigoration brought by God’s Law. His only request is that God allow him to purify his actions of any unseen taint and let him align his words and intentions with His purpose. Hannah did make a request, pouring out her soul to the Lord, as she put it, “out of my great anguish and anger” (1 Sam 1:15–​16). Her anger was provoked by the taunting of her rival wife (1 Sam 1:6–​7). Her husband does his best to comfort her with assurances of his love (1 Sam 1:5, 8). But her prayer is tear-​ drenched, and her vow is almost desperate, as if she too would bargain with God (1 Sam 1:10–​11). Yet her emotion does not banish thought: sichi, her word for her anguish, would normally mean musing. It draws its force, in context, as the Brown-​ Driver-​Briggs lexicon explains, from its coupling with ka’as, anger and grief.12 She petitions God, but she is also musing, as she must explain to Eli, when he thinks her drunk and merely muttering to herself, her lips moving soundlessly. She is thinking, not calmly but intensely, framing her highest heart’s desire and her thoughts of what she would give to see that desire realized. Hannah’s resolve interweaves divine with human freedom.13 One cannot say it was precisely for this boy that Hannah prayed (1 Sam 1:11). Her hopes gave definition to her choices, and her promise was ratified by the rituals of Nazirite dedication and by her bringing Samuel to serve at Shiloh, to learn the lore and practice of the shrine. But even a mother’s hopes could not anticipate the Samuel that her son would become—​that he would hear God call him in the night, or that he would rise to a new role, no mere priest’s helper but a prophet answering that voice, his moral and spiritual character eclipsing the sacerdotal roles of Eli’s corrupt sons (1 Sam 2:12), and making him a man who would traverse the land, a champion of his people, with the moral and spiritual authority to anoint and depose kings. God far exceeded anything Hannah could expect. But human thought and freedom answering God’s call effectuated Samuel’s transformation. His free choices and creative commitment made him a vehicle of God’s intent. The psalmist suggests the complementarities of answered prayer in saying, “Deep calleth unto deep” (Ps 42:8), dark words, illuminated glancingly by the Midrash. Taking up the psalmist’s images of waves, cataracts, and torrents and the bold personification of paired deeps, the Midrash assigns voices to those vastnesses: “The waters above say, ‘We are male’; the waters below 12 13

Brown, Francis, et  al.  The Brown-​Driver-​Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 967. See Goodman, Judaism, 4.

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say, ‘We are female.’ When the waters above descend, they say to those below, ‘You are creatures of the Holy One, blessed be He; we are His messengers. Welcome us warmly!”14 Supporting its gloss, the Midrash cites Isaiah: The justice and salvation the poet longs for spring from God’s active presence in the world, His creation, which is fecund, and the longed-​for fruit when it welcomes God’s word. A telling counterpart to Plotinus’ thoughts of the flight of the alone to the Alone, the Psalmist’s image offers not escape from the world to the One but welcome of God’s oneness in the world: God’s infinite love finds and is found by the lesser love of God’s world-​bound beloved. Union here bespeaks mutuality, as loving union must: this is possible not because God needs human love or praise but because God gives expression to His goodness in the act of creation and in the sustenance of His work, in which God’s infinite perfection is expressed, as Spinoza would put it. In an eloquent essay reprinted in the Artscroll Siddur, Saul Berman explains how prayer can be justified and make sense in the life of a thoughtful and committed Jew. Opening his essay by defining prayer in Joseph Soloveitchik’s words, as “the covenantal experience of being together with and talking to God,” Berman calls “the essence of prayer” avodah shebalev, “service of the heart.” Understandably, he asks how such a dialogue is possible:  “how can the human being, a minuscule element in the universe which God created, presume to engage his Creator in conversation?”15 If we’re right about the Torah’s theology, the issue is not merely one of disproportion. The difference between man and God, as the Rambam argues, is not one of degree or even of kind. For God belongs to no kind(Guide I 59). Our existence is contingent; God’s is necessary. There is no proportion between the finite and the Infinite. How, then, can we address God? We might be far more than a speck, but God would still be infinitely beyond us. We have nothing in common with God, Maimonides says. No tertium quid can relate our finitude to God’s transcendence (Guide I 52). Yet we are said to be created in His image. That image, the Rambam says, is the human mind, the seat of thought and aspiration, and of valuing. For we humans do not confine our thinking to the execution of algorithms. Human reason, at its fullest, loves and knows beauty, hates cruelty and wrong, and prizes life and love itself, just 14 15

Psalms Rabbah 42–​43, tr. after Wm. Braude, 443–​44. Saul Berman, “An Overview—​The ‘Approach’ in Prayer,” in Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz, eds. Siddur Ḳol Yaʻaḳov = The ArtScroll Siddur: A New Translation and Anthologized Commentary, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1990), xii. (Further page references to Rabbi Berman’s Introduction are given textually in what follows).

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as God did when He saw the goodness of His work. Can that affinity, our love of truth, goodness, and beauty (despite our fallibility), not open up some channel of communion with God’s absoluteness, since we understand God’s goodness as the summit and source of all goodness and love? “By what right,” Berman asks, if God is transcendent, “do we stand before Him to beseech or even to praise?” And then: For whom, “on whose behalf do we rightfully pray?” And even assuming that we, who are earth, have opened ourselves to God, how can God receive or “hear” our prayers: “to what qualities in God,” Berman asks, “do we appeal?” (“Overview,” xii). God, for Maimonidean reasons, has no literal qualities. No attributes compromise His Unity. But what facets of God’s absoluteness can we single out to address. How can Infinitude make credible our hope to bless God and expect a hearing for our prayers? Framing his answers, Berman cites a thought from R. Eleazar ben Yehudah (ca. 1165–​ca. 1230), relating the symbolic three steps forward that we take when about to address God in the ‘Amidah to the three figures of whom it is said, vayyiggash, he approached (“Overview,” xii):  Abraham approaching God in behalf of the Cities of the Plain; Judah approaching the as yet unrecognized Joseph to beseech him to release Benjamin, accused of stealing the potentate’s silver cup; and Elijah, approaching God to supplicate Him to manifest Himself to vindicate His active presence and discomfit the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. Abraham, Rabbi Berman urges, addressed God by right, as a child of the covenant. He did so in behalf of strangers, appealing to God’s justice (“Overview,” xii–​xiii)—​and beyond justice, we might add, since he hoped that all of Sodom’s evil hold could be spared for the sake of the few honest men who might be found there. Justice, we observe, so often contrasted with mercy in human practice and in accounts of facets of God’s being, is in fact at one with mercy. For justice is the source of mercy when one extends even to the guilty the benefit of human doubt—​or, since there is no doubt in God, because mercy is the source of justice in any decision to treat all beings in accord with their deserts and, taking those deserts to be affirmative, on the premise that all being is good (Genesis 1:31), extending recognition to the claims of finitude. Strikingly, at the freighted moment when he makes his plea in behalf of others, the founder of Israel’s identity and mission appeals to universal principle, and he reads that principle, his appeal to God’s justice, not in terms of the stereotypic equation of justice with asperity but in terms of love and grace. Abraham’s prayer, however, is no more successful than his bargaining. God hears the prayer and accepts Abraham’s stipulations, but God knows well that even Abraham’s most minimal conditions are not met in Sodom. Life offers many

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a reprieve, but the Cities of the Plain will fall; the mores of the place make it irredeemable. The Torah’s second vayyiggash—​he approached—​comes when Judah appeals to Joseph, still known to him only as a high officer of Pharaoh’s (Genesis 44:18). He speaks out, Berman explains, because he has assumed responsibility for his youngest brother. That charge gives him the right and obligation, although his own character must give him the courage. Rivalries among the brothers are suppressed. Judah’s plea is for his brother and his father, but also, in a way, as Berman argues, it is made in behalf of Israel’s futurity since “only his petition’s success could avoid the bitter dissolution of the household of Israel.” (“Overview,” xiii–​xiv). From where he stands Judah cannot know all that the failure or success of his plea will mean. But the weight of his appeal and Joseph’s response brings home to us the potential magnitude and impact, typically unseen, latent in any choice or abdication. Judah’s plea may be historic in its reach, as any human choice may prove to be, but in its moment, its incendiary focus is on a small knot of individuals: a father, a kid brother, and the still veiled project of a family that has yet to become a nation. Yet, as Berman argues, Judah’s plea “was not made petty by its particularism.”(“Overview,” xiv) Like Abraham’s prayer, its moral claim was anchored in the inestimable worth of each human life. That would be true even without the larger hopes suspended on the thread of one life’s preservation. The quality Judah appeals to is mercy, Berman argues (“Overview,” xiv), a mercy, we must say, that, at its Source, is one with justice, just as justice is one with mercy. But something more must be said here since polemics and pogroms so typically target the particularism Berman finds at the heart of Judah’s appeal, a trait often invidiously ascribed to the people that proudly wears Judah’s name as the label of its heritage. It is ugly to find charges of particularism (a code word for more obvious brickbats like tribalism, clannishness, and the rest) hurled at Jews and Judaism by monotheists who expect only those who share their faith to escape eternal fires of damnation, while normative Judaism expects divine salvation for the righteous of all nations. But there’s a logical point to make as well: universality has no reality without particularity. Aristotle explained that in general terms, metaphysical and epistemic. Alasdair MacIntyre spelled it out in cultural and moral terms. No ­universal value is realized by finite beings without particularity. That’s a fact of human life not safely neglected by those who hope that the universal ideals they prize will not vanish up the chimney of abstraction, if not the crueler chimney of some rival particularism cloaked in the colors of a false universality. Recognition that history demands concrete instantiation of the ideals that prove themselves worth living by, and of the related fact that history is a dangerous

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place, goads every effort to preserve and reconcile the diverse and sometimes disparate elements of Jewish tradition, including the present attempt to bind together with mutual respect—​and, yes, fecundity—​the philosophic and symbolic, moral, social, and political facets of Jewish identity and commitment.16 Berman’s third vayyiggash, Elijah’s plea at Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18), is made by a prophet, a man in constant converse with his Creator:  “sometimes the prophet and sometimes God took the initiative to assure that the Divine message would reach the Jewish people. It was precisely due to the constancy and intimacy of his relationship to God that Eliyahu—​Elijah—​had the right to make an otherwise unconscionable demand.” (“Overview,” xiv–​xv). What prompted that demand was not Elijah’s audacity but the crisis brought on by Ahab’s reign and Jezebel’s murderous acts. But Elijah’s plea was not made immediately for humanity, justice and mercy, although the inhumanity of Baal worship might have urged it on him, nor for Israel and the individuals who now made Israel a people, although Israel had slender chance and still more dubious claim to endure as a nation of Baal worshipers. Elijah’s plea, Berman argues, was made in behalf of God Himself; or to put it more precisely, in behalf of the honor of God’s name, God’s recognition, if not among the nations then at least among the one nation pledged covenantally to bear witness to His reality and character. What made Elijah’s prayer audacious was his asking for a miracle, gilui Shekh­inah, as Berman put it. The prophet had challenged God, as much as Baal, to manifest Himself. “Whatever circumstances had previously caused the presence of God to be hidden from the Jewish people, whether the sinfulness of the people or the withdrawal of God, now was the time for those obscuring clouds to be banished and the full glory of God’s involvement and concern for His people to be revealed.” (“Overview,” xv). We don’t know just how that happened. Divine pyrotechnics would not have impressed an audience today. Such displays are seen at many a high school homecoming game and in many a nightclub. Sometimes the miracle is that an audience lives to return home in the small hours, not trapped behind locked doors when the fire-​show goes wrong. But miracles are hard to notice if one is unready for them. Operation Entebbe in 1976 looks much like a miracle. So does Israel’s 1967 victory in the Six Day War that saved the State and reunified Jerusalem. But those miracles involved much planning and the sacrifices of many human lives. Human engagement can make a miracle hard to see, especially for those un-​attuned to the ways in which God acts. 16

See Goodman, Judaism, 123–​68.

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What’s very clear is that God’s good name depends for its continued honor and credibility on the working out of justice within history. But, in history, human engagement is not inessential. We can see that in the fall of the Soviet behemoth and in the ending of Apartheid in South Africa without a bloody war. But we can also see the weakness in the human material God works with. We see that weakness in the decadence and corruption that followed the Soviet collapse, in the absolute evil of the Nazi Reich, in the class-​based genocides of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and in the barbarous acts and still more barbarous wishes of Daesh. The narratives received, rituals practiced, virtues pursued, and hopes cherished by normative Israel all intend transcendent Perfection—​not as an abstraction but in the concrete, aspiring toward a God of mercy and justice, love, grace, and truth. Poetry and gesture, ritual and law, caring, charity, and justice reach out toward one another, the intellectual and spiritual, moral and symbolic constituents of our traditions enliven and invigorate one another. Ritual builds a shelter that a people diverse in interests and experience can live in, plan in, and build from, for thought creates a place from which holiness can be glimpsed. By doing so, it constructs the footings for a ladder toward the Holy. The marvel of that ladder is that even as one begins to climb it one can already touch the summit. Bibliography Berman, Saul. “An Overview—​The ‘Approach’ in Prayer.” In Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz, editors. Siddur Ḳol Yaʻaḳov = The Art Scroll Siddur: A New Translation and Anthologized Commentary, 2nd edition. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1990. Brown, Francis, et al. The Brown-​Driver-​Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996. Freeman, Kathleen. Ancilla to the Pre-​Socratic Philosophers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Goodman, Lenn E. God of Abraham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Goodman, Lenn E. Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Goodman, Lenn E. “The King James Bible at 401.” Society 50 (2013): 73–​80. Jewish Publication Society. JPS Hebrew-​English Tanakh:  The Traditional Hebrew Text and The New JPS Translation, 2nd Edition. Philadelphia: jps, 1999. Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Lesher, J. H. Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments: A Text and Translation with Commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

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Lesher, J. H. “Xenophanes’ Skepticism.” In Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Edited by J. Anton and A. Preus. Albany, NY: suny Press, 1983. Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed. Translated with commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip Lieberman. Forthcoming. Robinson, J. M, editor. An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy. Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Sasson, Jack M. Judges 1–​12: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Yale Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Steinsaltz, Adin. A Guide to Jewish Prayer. New York: Schocken, 2000. Steinsaltz, Adin. Ha-​Siddur ve-​ha-​Tefillah. Tel Aviv: Miskal, 1994.

Chapter 6

Perfect Being Theology and Friendship Brian Leftow “Perfect being theology” can denote a method or a set of results associated with that method. Thus the question of whether perfect being theology (pbt) is appropriate for Jewish theology can be one of whether it is a proper way for Jewish theologians to think about God, or whether, if perfect being theologians have typical doctrines, they are doctrines Jewish theologians should endorse. I now address the first. It raises at least this issue: Many individual Biblical texts affirm that God is perfect in specific ways, and I’ve argued elsewhere that these give pbt Biblical license: one perfect-​ being project is simply to fill out our concepts of perfections the Bible ascribes, by the best light reason and experience can shed.1 But texts out of context are a pretext. Does the overall Biblical narrative point in any way to pbt’s being appropriate? It is appropriate if God is a perfect being, but why think that God is a perfect being if the Bible’s large-​scale story is of a God who largely does not get what He wants? Someone with all the resources of perfection should be able to work the world out as He wishes. My answer might in part be Jewish theology by someone who is neither Jewish nor a theologian. If it is, perhaps my amateurism will at least give professionals some amusement. pbt is appropriate only to thinking about a perfect being. If the Biblical picture is not one of a perfect God, that is a powerful argument that pbt is not a proper way to think about the Biblical God. Scattered texts do point to particular divine perfections, but to have confidence in pbt, we need confidence in an overall hermeneutic that takes perfection texts at face value, and beyond that as normative—​as the key to interpreting other texts. If they are not the key, and the other texts point to a lesser God, perfection-​sounding texts are outliers that need to be “explained down”—​not explained away, but read as making lesser claims than they seem to. A hermeneutic normative for Biblical thinking

1 Brian Leftow, “Introduction” in God and Necessity (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–​28.

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and favourable to pbt can only be based on the overall content of the Bible. So pbt has true Biblical license only to the extent that this overall content is at least compatible with pbt, and preferably outright favours it. I now turn to the question of whether the overall Biblical narrative points in any way to God’s being perfect. The question is whether we can take perfection texts at face value in the face of the rest of the narrative. Would a perfect being act as the Bible depicts God acting? This is (to put it mildly) a large topic. The full answer to that would be a systematic theology. And the topic may well be beyond our ability. How much can we know about what to expect from an omniscient, omnipotent, morally and metaphysically perfect God? The answer may be: not a lot. The more different God is from us, the less we can extrapolate from what we know to expect of human levels of knowledge, power and goodness to what we could expect a perfect God to do. And the more unsure we are of just how different from us God is, the more uncertainty infects our extrapolations at a meta-​level. Here is one basic way the Biblical story might seem not to go as pbt might suggest: the Biblical God appears to fail. He tries to get certain things out of Israel and does not. He tries to get things out of the world at large and does not get those either. One would think that a God all-​knowing, -​powerful, -​good and -​wise could get things to come out better. Should we expect failure of a perfect being? I note first that to the extent that we are unsure about God’s intentions and methods, we should be unsure that He has failed. Some say that He wants there to be no evil—​but that’s too simple. What He wants is that there be no evil He did not have to permit to forward His morally good plans. We know little of God’s plans or what makes them good. We know less of what alternatives might have been available, with what risks of what costs. This is true on the global scale and a fortiori at the level of individuals. So I do not see how we could ever be in a position to judge that God did not have to permit an evil to forward a morally good plan. The less we know of God’s plans, the less we are in a position to know of any evil that permitting it had no moral justification. Again, some say that God wants the salvation of everyone, but that too is too simple. What He wants is that all freely choose salvation. If He can have this only if we so choose, then if He does not get it, that does not entail that God has failed. It could be because we have. Or perhaps it’s too early in the story to conclude that the goal will not be attained. Perhaps only the last chapter will tell. Still, if we cannot say that God has failed, we certainly can say that He has commanded and not been obeyed, and sought friendship and not found it. So what about that? I now argue that the latter, at least, is what we should expect if God is perfect. I suspect that if we should expect the latter, we should also

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expect the former, given what it takes to be God’s friend, but I  do not have space to make that case here. We are doing Scriptural pbt. So I begin from the Biblical picture of God as personal. If God is personal and perfect, He is the best possible person. So He is perfectly good. He has the best possible set of virtues. Perhaps this includes virtues we’ve never met and can’t even imagine. Perhaps some of these are incompatible with virtues we do know about. We cannot absolutely rule out “mystery perfections” when doing pbt. So we cannot certainly rule in the familiar virtues, for we can’t certainly rule it out that there are better, unknown virtues incompatible with these. pbt has to be done a bit tentatively, which makes it no worse than any other sort of theology. But still, we have no positive reason to believe in mystery virtues, and it’s hard to imagine that something could be incompatible with and better than being perfectly loving. So I  place my bet that a perfect God would have whatever perfect love is. So let’s examine perfect love. What is perfect love like? To begin with, it’s love. That is, our word “love” applies to it. So it is not utterly dissimilar to other things we call love. If it were too dissimilar, it would not deserve the word. pbt constructs humanly-​ comprehensible theories, even if (as Anselm thought) true perfection is too great to comprehend fully.2 God has spoken to us of Himself as loving, using our word “love” to communicate whatever it is that He really has. Pace the negative theologians, He would not have done that had the word not applied to Him in any sense we can understand. For that simply would not have served the goal of telling us truths about Him. It would have left the vast majority of us—​ordinary believers and non-​negative theologians—​believing things that are just false. So “loving” applies to Him in some sense we can understand. So whatever perfect love is, it is at least a bit like what we know of love. It is what our love aspires and never manages to be. If some sorts of human love are better than others, perfect love is in some ways more like the better than the lesser sorts. There is a way abusive, twisted parents love their children, and a way the best parents love theirs: presumably perfect love is more like the latter, though perhaps it is not much like human parental love at all. How would a perfect God love us? A perfect God is one rational agent who has made vastly lesser rational agents. If the greater agent is perfectly loving, it loves the lesser agents it made. The only analogue we have to love of lesser agents one has made is parental love: we also love pets, but we didn’t make them, even if we bred them. So the best guess pbt can make is that a perfect 2 Anselm, Proslogion 15.

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God would love us in some way at least distantly analogous to the best sort of parental love. There is a way parents love their children, and a way cat owners love cats: however God loves us, it is more like a parent’s love for a child than like old Mrs. Smith’s love for her 27 felines. (She might well call them her children. Ignore that.) But there is another facet. Children may grow into friends; when they become adults, the relation does not cease to be parent-​child, but it is often and perhaps always should be a form of friendship. What sorts of love other than parent-​child can link rational agents? The sorts we know are romantic and friendly. Perfect love would be a bit like whatever is purely love in all love’s varied forms. If it were just a perfect analogue of parental love, it would be perfect parental love, not perfect love simpliciter. So we should expect that a perfect being’s love would be at least distantly analogous to romantic and friendly love too. The Bible does make use of romantic analogies—​most prominently in Hosea. Again, Exodus tells us that “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exod 33:11). Isaiah has God call Israel “descendants of Abraham my friend” (Isa 41:8). Job laments, “Oh, for the days when … God’s intimate friendship blessed my house” (Job 29:4). Evidently, in the best cases, God’s relationship to His children is not merely parental; Hebrew Scripture uses “friendship” to describe the love between God and its All-​Stars. Further, it takes little extrapolation to say that God as the Bible depicts Him would wish to relate to all of us as to Abraham and Moses. The Bible tells us, I suggest, that among God’s goals is friendship with us. And that is, in any case, the best we can do in return, I think, and so whatever other forms of love are possible, a perfect God would have to seek friendship as our best available response to Him. We must ask, then, how a perfect God who had made us would seek our friendship. The answer is constrained by the nature of friendship itself. For friendship requires freedom. Most friendships begin in involuntary attraction, but we choose whether to seek the friendship of those who attract us and whether to continue it. Friendship is a deliberately pursued project, for we seek our friends’ company, seek to know them better, to further their interests, and to keep ourselves attractive to them. Further, we commit ourselves to our friends. Fair-​weather friends aren’t true friends. A true friend is someone you can count on. A true friend is committed to stand by us and help in times of trouble, and will if the time comes to choose to honor that commitment. Genuine commitment cannot be coerced. Nor can the rest of friendship. We can be forced to act friendly, but we cannot be forced into genuine friendship; in fact, attempts to force us may make us cease even to like the person coercing us. Coerced acts not motivated by friendly love or genuine commitment do

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not constitute a friendship. Coercion produces imitation friendship. So would brainwashing. If Demon brainwashes Pythias into thinking he is Demon’s friend and believes he thereby has a friend, Demon is deluded. Pythias is Demon’s puppet, and puppets are not friends. True friendship emerges ultimately from one’s friend. Pythias’ response to Demon emerges ultimately from Demon. So too, a coerced response emerges ultimately from the coercer, to the extent that it is coerced. Now we come to the crux.3 If God gave creatures natures which guaranteed that they would love, trust and commit to Him, this would be relevantly like brainwashing or coercion. Our response would come ultimately from God, not us. God would frustrate His goal of befriending us. So God can befriend us only by giving us natures which leave us free to reject this friendship. Because God imposes our natures on us, if God genuinely wants us to be friends, He must impose natures which leave us free to reject this friendship.4 Further, God cannot bias us by nature overwhelmingly toward it, for a related reason: if my response to you is 95% due to what you implant in me, then it’s as if I’m 95% brainwashed. It would take an overwhelming effort to reject you, and I would be strongly motivated not to make it, simply because of how you’d stacked the deck. My response to you would really come from you, as long as I went with the flow you’d initiated. My consent to that flow would be forced to the point of being hardly genuine. Thus God has a tightrope to walk. The more God biases our natures toward Him, the less genuine our friendship. Yet if God were to bias our natures against friendship, the less likely our friendship would be. Given the goal of friendship with us, God has to seek an optimum balance between likelihood and genuineness. I’m not sure what that balance-​point is; my hunch is that it is a slight bias toward God, but no more. Suppose that’s how it is: God can slightly bias us toward it without diluting the genuineness of any resulting friendship, but would pay for making friendship more likely by making it correspondingly less genuine—​which is to say, by making less genuine friendship more likely, God would make fully genuine friendship much less likely. If the human race has only that sort of bias toward God built in, that leaves it robustly possible for any given person to reject God’s friendship, and that makes it highly likely that large numbers of people will do just that. All of this applies just as strongly if we think in terms of romantic love, which might just be a form of friendly love. Because of what friendship is 3 This crux has debts to Anselm and to Eleonore Stump. 4 We do not impose God’s nature on Him, and so none of this requires that He be able to reject friendship with us.

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and God’s position as our creator, if God seeks our friendship, we should expect Him to endure a good deal of rejection, which is of course what we see. Let me recap, then. I have been addressing whether the Biblical story of God largely not getting what He wants is to be expected if God is a perfect being. My reply is this: if God is perfect, He is perfectly loving. Perfect love for us would have some analogy to friendly love. God gives us our natures. This imposes a constraint on what He can do to seek our friendship: it implies that He cannot strongly bias us toward Himself. If He cannot, large numbers of people will likely reject Him. A perfect God would love perfectly, and perfect love, given the constraint that it creates for us, would set itself up for large-​scale rejection. So I submit that yes, indeed, the Bible’s tale of a God who loves and loses is pretty much what we’d expect from a perfect being. So it actually counts in favor of the claim that God is a perfect being, and therefore one large facet of the Biblical story recommends a hermeneutic on which perfection-​texts are normative, not outliers. Bibliography Leftow, Brian. “Introduction.” In God and Necessity. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015.

pa rt 3 Divine Morality

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Chapter 7

Trusting God and Being Ourselves Alan L. Mittleman In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the concept of trust in God. Trust in God (bitachon) is an important Biblical and Jewish idea. My concern, however, is not to assess this concept on its own terms but to evaluate the work that the concept can do in helping us to underwrite and stabilize an often taken-​for-​ granted presupposition, namely, that we ourselves (as selves) exist. I too shall presuppose that you and I exist; that we exist as lives, as loci of phenomenal consciousness and experience. But I will not presuppose that selfhood is the necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness and experience, for sapience and sentience. Selfhood—​which awaits definition—​does seem phenomenologically warranted. But whether it is ontologically warranted is another question (and how phenomenology and ontology are related in this case is yet another). I will argue (or at least exemplify) that, appearances notwithstanding, it is plausible to downgrade selfhood—​if our point of departure is scientific naturalism in the sense of physicalism. But if our point of departure, or better, of hoped-​for arrival, is a full flourishing and responsible life, we likely need the concept of selfhood. To affirm it in a full sense, while taking on board whatever truth naturalisms such as cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology provide, will require trust that, in the matter of our own lives, appearance is reality. How we appear phenomenologically is how we are ontologically—​or at least tracks how we are ontologically. Belief that the self is not an illusion requires belief that the world, ultimately, is of such a nature as to contain and support our selfhood. To trust ourselves in this sense requires trust in what is absolutely or ultimately trustworthy. This brings us to God, to a God worthy of our trust. An absolutely trustworthy God, a God who will not lie, implies the notion of a perfect being. Being ourselves and trusting in God are correlated. Two considerations inform this reflection. The first is that contemporary neuroscience—​and some of the philosophical projects inspired by it—​dissolve selfhood into neural processes. It is as if Hume’s famous denial of the existence of an essential self has become a research agenda, an object of experimental method. If the subject, in the first instance, the epistemic subject but following on from that the moral subject, the agent and person, can be fully naturalized to brain activity and if brain activity subsists in “vast assemblies of nerve cells

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and their associated molecules” then selfhood becomes an illusion.1 This illusory sense of self, this “magical sense of our own interiority,” as Nicholas Humphries puts it, conferred adaptive advantages on the beings who acquired it. The sense of being a subject of experience, a unified diachronic mental thing, as it were, is an effect of natural selection. It is a story that the brain tells itself in order to function more efficiently. The survival oriented pattern-​finding activity of the brain is also directed inward. Mental events are woven together into patterns. To the extent that “brain” takes the place of “self,” the beings that we take ourselves pre-​theoretically to be and the beings that we actually are, at least from an impersonal, scientific point of view, are highly, perhaps completely discrepant. The physical universe would seem to have no place for the beings that we thought we were. We are left—​as selves, at least—​with our own unreality. Such a claim arises not from classic Pyrrhonian skepticism but from a scientific or ontological dogmatism. But it’s a dogmatism that gets results. The second consideration is inspired by Descartes. Descartes begins with radical doubt, but this implies a subject capable of doubt. If we have also grounds to doubt the existence of the doubter then the fundament of the res cogitans, on which Descartes wanted to diffuse the crise pyrrhonienne, crumbles. Even in the most extreme application of methodological skepticism, Descartes takes it as basic that there is a subject of doubt: I doubt. The question then is what am I? But that there is an I about which to ask the question seems immune to doubt. Doubt seems to apply to everything except the brute factuality of the presumptive doubter. Although there is not much that can initially be said about the nature of the doubter—​that needs to be filled in step by step through reasoning—​that doubt and thus thought are happening is beyond doubt. Doubts do not subsist on themselves; they belong to someone. Descartes builds out from the thinking thing that he is to an external world, relying on God, whose existence has been proven through ratiocination alone. But what if this alleged ground floor gives way to the firing of billions of neurons and trillions of connections among synapses? What if all we are is a collection of particles, assemblies of molecules, neuronal networks? The fundamental nature of thought as such—​of thought having the last word, as Thomas Nagel puts it—​gives way. Rather than being left in the paralyzing doubt Descartes hoped to dispel, we are left in dumb perplexity, hardly able to articulate why nature would produce such (literally) self-​deluding animals. 1 The full citation from Francis Crick is: “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Scribner, 1994), 3.

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Descartes is regularly faulted, even mocked, for all sorts of things. Dennett’s derisive “Cartesian theater,” as the place where an alleged self beholds its perceptions and other mental events is a ready example. But I think that Descartes was on to something in his contention that a rational conception of a perfect God can help support our conceptions of the reality of the world. He was right to think about how appearance relates to ultimate reality. He was right to tie ultimate reality, divine perfection, to trustworthiness. A less than perfect God could be indistinguishable from a malevolent demon, the perpetrator of an infinite jest. Had God been an evil, doubt-​inspiring demon, Descartes could have no epistemological confidence. Trusting God, who can only be trusted because of his perfect goodness, secures the world for us. It lends strength and validity to our well-​conceived claims about the world; it allows our claims to fit the world. An imperfect God would not help here. Indeed, an imperfect God would deepen our doubts and resultant anxieties. What I propose is to run Descartes’ argument in the opposite direction. In a climate less of skepticism than of dogmatic materialism, what is in doubt is not the status of the external world but of the reality of the human subject. What is in doubt is the adequacy of the fit between the conceptions that we have of ourselves as selves, that is, as subjects of consciousness, possessors of identity, enduring diachronically, capable of judgment, choice and action, and the biological and ultimately physical reality from which these phenomena are thought to emerge. None of us conceive of ourselves as “collections of particles” but why should we not? We no longer believe that the sun rotates around the earth or that rest is more basic than motion. Could we not fully take on board a brain-​based view of ourselves and relegate a privileged subjecthood to the dustbin of folk psychology? Patricia Churchland claims to have done so and finds it liberating.2 There are extremely powerful experiential factors that militate against our doing so, but arguably these must be bracketed if a scientific explanation of consciousness is to succeed. If we were to develop a truly explanatory account of consciousness that rendered our first-​person experience of selfhood epiphenomenal or otiose, what then? Is the natural phenomenology of the subject’s own consciousness ontologically secure enough to resist such a scientific debunking? I have my doubts. Here perhaps the God, whom we address as “You” and who addresses us by name (Isa 43:1) grounds our reality as selves, as unique and uniquely valuable beings. The appeal to—​or, perhaps, the encounter 2 Patricia Churchland, “The Benefits of realizing that you’re just a Brain,” New Scientist, November 27, 2013, https://​www.newscientist.com/​article/​mg22029450-​200-​the-​benefits-​of-​ realising-​youre-​just-​a-​brain/​.

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with—​this God secures the self as, in Heschel’s phrase, a “significant being,” an entity emerged from collections of particles but having an integrity and stature irreducible to its material and energetic existence conditions. Trust in a perfect, good God gave Descartes an external world. It is at least arguable that trust in such a God gives us a world in which we can be ourselves. Selfhood: between Phenomenology and Ontology In Dennett’s notional Cartesian Theater, a homunculus sits and watches the action tendered by perception from the external world (and thinks about it, plans to act on it, etc.). This represents, for Dennett, the now discredited portrayal of an experiencing subject vis-​à-​vis an experienced world. The subject is concentrated into a miniature version of ourselves, a little person. More accurately, we picture our subjecthood as an individual perceiving-​thinking thing, set off from the rest of what we are. This subject, in addition to being a unified self, is also an executive, a decision-​maker and agent. For Dennett, however, this stipulated homunculus has no explanatory value. One would have to explain how this inner sentient subject is itself capable of sense, thus leading to an infinite regress of homunculi, no one of which is more able than another to provide a relevant explanation. The subject should rather be understood as a ramified, distributed set of processes, diffused across space and time. There is no place in the brain where a self lies, nor are there any discrete moments in time when a self acts or is acted upon. “In many respects, the brain is more a ‘society’ of control systems, sometimes cooperating for control of an individual’s overall behavior … The notion that there is someone in charge in there, responsible for coming to rational decisions, based on a careful consideration of all available information, appears to be an illusion.”3 “Self” is a semantic tag for a bundle of cognitive and other processes.4 When approaching a physical system, we can take one of several stances toward characterizing it, as well as assuming a relationship with it. We can treat it, where appropriate, as a physical system and take the “physical stance” toward it. We do this, say, with weather. We can take the “design stance” and relate to a thing as a designed object that we have reason to believe will behave in a certain way. Think of a temperature regulating thermostat or an automobile. We can also take an “intentional stance” toward “intentional systems,” expecting not

3 Taduesz Zawidzki, Oneworld Thinkers: Dennett (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007), 18. 4 Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), 241–​42.

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only that an object will behave in a certain way but that the object has the functional equivalent of goals, desires, and beliefs. The chess playing computer “wants” to beat me in chess. It “believes” that its moves are the best possible moves under the circumstances. The computer is an intentional system and it is appropriate to regard it from the point of view of the intentional stance. Dennett’s move is to lower the wall between human beings, other animals, and computers as intentional systems. He would remove the scare quotes in the above sentences; the goals, desires, and beliefs of humans, their thought and volition, are continuous with those of other intentional systems. The capacities of such systems are not functional equivalents of human capacities; delete “functional.” Intentional systems are multiply realized in different physical contexts. In this way, Dennett seeks to remove the “magical interiority” of the Cartesian theater-​self. Self-​consciousness is neither privileged nor ineffable. There is no irreducible first-​person experience or language which forever eludes or exceeds third person, objective discourse. There is no “what is it like-​ness” to consciousness (recall Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?”).5 Thought is more fundamental than consciousness. Thought—​ or holding beliefs—​ is what chess-​playing computers can do. What they can’t do is think about themselves. Humans, however, can take an intentional stance toward their own intentional-​ system status. Dennett calls this “heterophenomenology.” He deprives the phenomenology of first-​person experience of its authority, uniqueness, and ­irreducibility. We don’t so much experience and report on inner experience—​ that is too redolent of the homunculus sitting in the Cartesian theater. Rather, we report on our beliefs about what an intentional system, you or I, is doing. Dennett is not, therefore, an eliminativist—​the hard-​core position occupied by Paul and Patricia Churchland. He does not want to reduce the sense of selfhood entirely to neuronal activity. On the other hand, he wants to deflate it by subjecting the language that we use to discuss our selfhood to logical analysis along the lines of his teacher, Gilbert Ryle. Selfhood loses its privileged ontic status. It becomes a perspective on a complex, intentional system. It is less a fact than a point of view on impersonal facticity. Galen Strawson differs from Dennett by holding to the importance of the first person phenomenological aspects of selfhood, albeit while allowing the ontological dimension to cut in the opposite direction. Strawson also rejects the extreme reductionism of materialist eliminativism as “certainly false.” That

5 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (Oct 1974): 435–​50.

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is, he rejects the view that “experience is just neurons firing” and that this can be discerned and described by current physics “or by any non-​revolutionary extension of current physics.”6 On the other hand, Strawson is a materialist, so the phenomenology of selfhood cannot be allowed to support a dualism of any kind. Materialism must be sufficiently capacious as to contain the non-​ mental aspects of things and events, as well as the mental aspects. Realistic materialists accept that “each particular mental or experiential phenomenon has, essentially, in addition to its mental or experiential character or mode of being, a non-​mental character or mode of being. One might call this ‘mental-​ and-​non-​mental’ materialism.”7 The distinction between mental and physical is misconstrued; the proper distinction is that of mental/​non-​mental within a physical, material universe. Strawson can then, as a good materialist, investigate the phenomenology of selfhood without having immediately to reduce it, Churchland-​style, to something “merely” physical. That mere or brute construal of the physical is misleading; it generates the fruitless mind/​body problem. The self to be investigated is “the mental self,” that is, the sense of the self that appears mentally (=sms). Strawson wants to block “metaphysical” questions about whether the sms represents (or misrepresents) an ontological self. He disallows metaphysical questions “that fail to respect limits on the concept of the self revealed by the phenomenological investigation.”8 What then does phenomenology reveal with regard to the self? Strawson lists eight features of selfhood: The proposal for consideration is that the mental self is conceived or experienced as (1) a thing, (2) a mental thing, a single thing that is single both (3)  synchronically considered and (4)  diachronically considered, (5) a thing that is ontically distinct from all other things, (6) a subject of experience and (7) an agent that has (8) a certain personality.9 Strawson strongly upholds (1), (2), and (3). The sense of a single, unified mental self would endure independent of the situation of its non-​mental being. You might discover, for example, that there were three brains in your body collaborating to produce your experience of selfhood; this would not override the 6 Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 5/​6 (1997): 405–​28. All subsequent citations from Strawson are from this article. 7 Strawson, “The Self,” 411. 8 Strawson, “The Self,” 410. 9 Strawson, “The Self,” 412.

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experience of mental singleness. Or one might imagine that a single self was instantiated in three bodies; one could be a three-​bodied creature, taking in different kinds of sensory input through the three modalities, and yet have a sense of unified selfhood. The sense of mental self is independent of the fact situation of its non-​mental being. But Strawson also believes that on phenomenological grounds, one can deny (4): the self need not be thought of as a diachronically persisting (single, mental) thing. Some people have poor memories or do not construe their lives in a narrative way; some live intensely in the present and have no regard for the future. This goes to the experience of consciousness as such. When I am alone and thinking I find that my fundamental experience of consciousness is one of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of complete, if momentary unconsciousness. The (invariably brief) periods of true experiential continuity are usually radically disjunct from one another in this way even when they are not radically disjunct in respect of content … consciousness is continually restarting. There isn’t a basic substrate (as it were) of continuous consciousness interrupted by various lapses and doglegs. Rather, conscious thought has the character of a (nearly continuous) series of radically disjunct irruptions into consciousness from a basic substrate of non-​consciousness. It keeps banging out of nothingness; it is a series of comings-​to.10 The sense of a mental self with diachronic continuity, as opposed to the sms with synchronic presence, lacks “direct phenomenological warrant,” given the episodic nature of our consciousness. The “gappy and chaotic” experience of consciousness does not necessarily undermine a belief in the long-​term continuity of the self; it merely establishes that one can have a full sense of a single mental self without the belief in long-​term continuity. Strawson thinks that phenomenologically the sms fulfills conditions (1), (2), (3), (5), and (6) but not (4), (7), and (8). The self is felt to be a distinct mental thing, a subject of experience that is single during any gap-​free period of experience. Proceeding to the metaphysical or ontological question of whether there is such a thing and, if so, if it is right to call it a self, Strawson thinks that the answer is yes. That self will lack diachronic persistence, however, and thus might not fulfill a condition that most people expect from selfhood. He calls his view the “pearl view”: many selves exist seriatim, like pearls on a string. Any 10

Strawson, “The Self,” 422.

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one of these transient selves is real during the course of its (typically brief) existence. “And it is as much a thing or object as any G-​type star or grain of sand. And it is as much a physical thing as any blood vessel or jackhammer or cow.”11 The physicality of the real, albeit non-​persisting self rests, once again, on Strawson’s expansive characterization of the physical. Comprising both mental and non-​mental dimensions, the physical must not be conceived along Cartesian lines. Strawson thinks that physics is pointing in this direction: substance cedes to “fields of energy.” What ultimately exists is “pure process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing distinct from it.”12 Both Dennett and Strawson try to thread the needle between eliminativist views and Cartesian dualist ones. Strawson gives far more credence to phenomenology than Dennett, who takes more neuroscience on board. Strawson’s grant of reality to selfhood is compromised by the episodic and ultimately impersonal nature of that reality. Dennett’s demotion of human consciousness, including self-​consciousness to a kind of interpretative stance vis-​à-​vis “intentional systems” rejects Strawson’s insistence on the primacy of phenomenology. Both of these thinkers try to meet the challenge of adequately joining the manifest image, as Wilfred Sellars put it, that we have of our own reality with the scientific image.13 Yet both of them leave us with a manifest image that is not true to the ones we actually hold of ourselves. Strawson more than Dennett gets us to an image that has phenomenological continuity but only insofar as we are simple subjects of consciousness. How we might be beings with complex diachronic projects, ontic stature, and personality is not clear. The self that Strawson gains is not one that most of us would want to be. I do not think that the neuroscientists and experimental psychologists improve categorically on the picture that emerges from (these, admittedly, highly selective examples of) contemporary philosophy of mind. Consider, briefly, the work of Michael Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga, a leading contemporary neuroscientist who popularizes his research in a philosophical manner, is also not an eliminativist.14 Nonetheless, like Dennett and Strawson, his work is no less dissolutive

1 1 12 13 14

Strawson, “The Self,” 425. Strawson, “The Self,” 427. Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA:  Ridgeview Publishing, 1991), 16. Part of my treatment of Gazzaniga has previously appeared in Alan Mittleman, “Modeh Ani: A Jewish Affirmation of Personhood” in Modeh Ani, eds. David Birnbaum and Martin Cohen (New York: Mesorah Matrix Publishing, 2017), 317–​330. Used with permission of the editors.

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of traditional modes of understanding ourselves (Sellars’ “manifest images”) as persons. According to Gazzaniga, most of the brain’s work “occurs outside of conscious awareness and control … The systems built into our brains carry out their jobs automatically when presented with stimuli within their domain, often without our conscious knowledge.”15 Our brains support a host of “complex systems” which work “subconsciously in a diversified and distributed way.” The question then arises, “why do we feel unified?”16 Philosophers of mind call this “the binding problem.” What, if anything, binds together the stream of perceptions, thoughts, memories, emotions, and intentions that seem to converge in a single subject? Whence this feeling of “I”? Although this is a centuries-​old question, addressed by Locke, Hume, Kant and others, neuroscientists such as Gazzaniga have something that his armchair philosopher predecessors didn’t have: an experimental method. Thus, Gazzaniga writes “I believe the answer [to the binding problem] resides in the left hemisphere and one of its modules that we happened upon during our years of research” on split-​brain patients.17 When the link between the two hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callosum, is severed partly or fully, patients are referred to as split-​brain. The hemispheres no longer communicate with each other. The processes localized in each, which we normally experience as in harmony are now divorced from one another. This affords a unique opportunity to investigate how the brain processes information in parallel and sometimes competing ways, and how these processes are coordinated, or in the case of the split-​brain patients, not. In one series of experiments, Gazzaniga and his team showed a split-​brain patient two pictures. His right visual field, leading to his left hemisphere, was shown a picture of a chicken claw. His left visual field, leading to his right hemisphere, was shown a picture of a snow scene. An array of pictures was then presented to both eyes and he was asked to choose two. His left hand picked a photo of a shovel. This matched appropriately with the snow scene perceived by his right hemisphere. His right hand picked a photo of a chicken, which went well with the chicken claw perceived by his left hemisphere. When asked why he picked the photos that he did, the subject, looking at his right hand, said “The chicken claw goes with the chicken.” But then when he looked at his left hand, he said, without missing a beat, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” The left hemisphere knew nothing of the snow scene. The snow scene remained trapped, so to speak, in the split off right side of the brain. The left 15 16 17

Michael Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: Ecco, 2012), 81. Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge?, 81 Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge?, 82.

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hemisphere composed an explanation, given what it knew about chickens, to account for the shovel. Gazzaniga explains that the left hemisphere did not say “I don’t know,” which truly was the right answer. “It made up a post-​hoc answer to fit the situation.”18 Gazzaniga calls this left hemisphere process the “interpreter.” The interpreter is the function of the brain, located in the left hemisphere that has been naturally selected to discern patterns and generate causal explanations for them. Gazzaniga and his colleagues have identified differences in the way that the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere analyze the world. “We have concluded” he writes, “that the neural processes responsible for searching for patterns in events are housed in the left hemisphere. It is the left hemisphere that engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos; that tries to fit everything into a story and put it into context. It seems that it is driven to hypothesize about the structure of the world even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists.”19 When we are faced, as we almost always are, with overwhelming amounts of puzzling data, the left hemisphere of our brain organizes it and generates a story about why the pattern captures reality. Interesting enough, but one might still say that this ability of a portion of our brain serves the whole and the whole is the self, an integrated human person. Gazzaniga, however, makes a much more radical claim: How come we have that powerful, almost self-​evident feeling that we are unified when we are comprised of a gazillion [sic] modules? We do not experience a thousand clattering voices, but a unified experience. Consciousness flows easily and naturally from one moment to the next with a single, unified, and coherent narrative. The psychological unity that we experience emerges out of the specialized system called the interpreter that generates explanations about our perceptions, memories, actions and the relationships among them. This leads to a personal narrative, the story that ties together all the disparate aspects of our conscious experience into a coherent whole: order from chaos. (102) On this view, to put it crudely, we are not simply our brains; we are our left hemispheres. Without that pattern-​postulating process, we would be cognitively enhanced animals, information processing zombies, adapted to our environmental niches, but without a sense of self-​consciousness. The cognitive

18 19

Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge?, 83. Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge?, 85.

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abilities of the right hemisphere do not require self-​consciousness. The self, such as it is, is the story that the left hemisphere interpreter tells itself in its naturally selected capacity to cope with the world. Other neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio, agree with Gazzaniga but differ over the nature, complexity and status of the self-​process.20 Psychologists, such as Bruce Hood, concur that the feeling of selfhood is phenomenologically significant but ontologically misleading. With respect to ontology, selfhood is an illusion. As always, at issue is the role of the physical processes of the brain vis-​à-​vis the emergent status of the self. Thus, Hood: Love, hate, the capital of France, the winners of the last World Cup soccer tournament, how to pitch a tent, how to divide by ten, the plot of your next novel, the taste of chocolate and the smell of oranges—​every feeling, bit of knowledge and experience that you have or plan to have is possible because of the cascading activation of neurons. Everything that we are, can do, and will do is nothing more than this. Otherwise, we would need ghosts in the brain and, so far, none have been found.21 Hood is less crude than this. He goes on to tell a complex story of how the self emerges in a social context; in the world of our peculiar form of social primate. The core self, wandering down the path of development, enduring things that life throws at us is, however, the illusion. Like every other aspect of human development, the emergence of the self is epigenetic—​an interaction of the genes and the environment. The self emerges out of that journey through the epigenetic landscape, combining the legacy of our genetic inheritance with the influence of the early environment to produce profound and lasting effects on how we develop socially … In a sense, who we are really comes down to those around us.22 Although Hood speaks of a self developing in a context of social (familial, cultural) interaction—​which seems to suppose pre-​existing selves with which the emerging self of a human infant interacts—​the basic story is biological and reductive. “The emergence of the self is epigenetic.” 20 21 22

Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 216. Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11. Hood, The Self Illusion, 115.

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In all of this writing, there is a more or less concerted attempt to ascribe some reality, at least at a phenomenological level, to the self. That level then gives way to a deeper level where metaphysical claims are made as to what really exists. What really exists can be more than “systems of particles”—​Strawson certainly gestures in that direction—​but it can’t be much more. The third person language game of science cannot express the first person point of view in other than third personal terms. Perhaps this is not a problem for science. But it is a problem for persons. To the extent that we want to get to some basic truth about ourselves, we need to hear whatever good science says. But even if all possible scientific questions were answered, as Wittgenstein remarked in the Tractatus (6:52), “the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” Unlike science and the philosophy that takes its lead from it, the language of faith allows us to touch the problems of life, especially of the life that we lead as selves. Trusting God In a poignant characterization of trust in God, and in its sorry contrary, trust in man, Jeremiah (17:5–​8) writes: Cursed is he who trusts (yivtach) in man, Who makes mere flesh his strength, And turns his thoughts from the Lord. He shall be like a bush in the desert, Which does not sense the coming of good: It is set in the scorched places of the wilderness, In a barren land without inhabitant. Blessed is he who trusts in the Lord, Whose trust (mivtacho) is the Lord alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, Sending forth its roots by a stream: It does not sense the coming of heat, Its leaves are ever fresh; It has no care in the year of drought, It does not cease to yield fruit. Trust in God is here associated with duration and flourishing. Natural imagery abounds. Desert shrubs live a harsh, uncertain life. Trees firmly rooted by a water source endure. They survive drought and are constantly renewed and

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fruitful. Like plants, human beings are vulnerable and dependent—​so the metaphor rings true. Unlike plants, they can choose their allegiances. They can choose that on which they can ultimately depend. To choose to rely or depend on someone is to trust. Trust reveals both an autonomous act of election and a limit to autonomy. We can trust freely but in trusting we circumscribe our freedom, joining our lives to another and entering a shared destiny. Jeremiah urges us to choose what is ultimately choice-​worthy and trustworthy: a God known to be good. The desert plant (or the one who trusts in man) does not know the ultimate good (tov). The deep rooted tree flourishing by the riverside knows the good in its very sap, in the reality of its flourishing. Jeremiah’s peroration is obviously not an argument (although it is argumentative). It assumes the basic facticity of nature, choosing selves, and a good God. Nonetheless, it points toward an argument as it clarifies the uniquely human place in nature. We need to get from brain to mind, from “cascading activation of neurons” to ontic, diachronic selfhood. We need to get from nature to human self-​consciousness, from the brute factual givenness of shrubs and trees to discerning, choosing, trusting persons. One story that we could tell relies on the concept of emergence, especially in its strong version. This is an old idea, going back at least to Aristotle, and developed by Neo-​Platonism and in the 19th century by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.23 What characterizes modern notions of emergence, however, is the attempt to work within the monistic metaphysics of science. “Emergentists” in neuroscience or neurophilosophy, for example, would argue that a unique, complex property like consciousness (and self-​ consciousness) emerges from the lower-​level properties of neurons. Neuronal activity itself is explicable, in principle, in terms of physics and chemistry, but consciousness, while dependent on that activity, is not explicable in the same terms. Mind emerges from brain, but its emergence creates novelty and irreducibility. It is as real as the neuronal electro-​chemical activity but at a different level, a level that might not have been predictable as a consequence of that activity. Strawson is working in this direction.

23

In the Metaphysics, Book viii, Chapter 6 1045a, Aristotle proposes the idea of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. For a history of the concept of emergence, see Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds. The Re-​Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–​34. An excellent analysis of the various concepts of emergence in play in modern philosophy and the sciences may be found in Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 143–​81.

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Emergence then posits a reality in which structures and properties have arisen out of, but continue to depend on, more fundamental structures and properties. Yet, at the same time, the higher levels of organization, owing to their novelty and irreducibility, are to some degree independent of the lower level ones. The mark of their independence is their own (so-​called downward) causal power.24 For reductionists, all of this is the equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Emergence seems too magical. It introduces a kind of causality that would violate the principle of causal closure, opening the door to Cartesian dualisms. If we admit downward causality, we would no longer believe that explanations relying on physical causes were sufficient. If the world as understood by science has causal closure, then emergent states, if there are any, must supervene on basal states. Changes in the basal states will affect the emergent states, but not vice versa. Emergent states are epiphenomena, not causal drivers. For emergent states to causally affect basal states violates the principle of causal closure. On the emergentist view, consciousness, for example, is an emergent property of the activity of the brain. Yet while depending on the organic processes of the brain, consciousness also shows independence from these processes by causing change back down at the physical, organic level.25 When I think, “I’m going to move my arm” and my arm moves, conscious desire and intention cause the relevant actions of muscles and nerves, bringing about change in the physical world.26 But a reductionist would dispute this. It’s not that properties 24

25

26

Angela Matthies, Andrew Stephenson, and Nick Tasker, “The Concept of Emergence in Systems Biology: A Project Report,” Oxford University Department of Statistics. Accessed June 1, 2018. http://​www.stats.ox.ac.uk/​_​_​data/​assets/​pdf_​file/​0018/​3906/​Concept_​of​ _Emergence.pdf Many neuroscientists and philosophers hold that consciousness or, in general, “mind” emerges from and is correlated with the neuronal activity of the brain and nervous system. The division here is between thoroughgoing reductive physicalists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, and non-​reductive physicalists among whom we may count John Searle. Other philosophers, such as Hilary Putnam, favor the view that consciousness amounts to fulfilling certain functions and that such functions may also be executed by “hardware” like computers or other algorithmic systems. Consciousness may still be described in emergent terms, but needn’t be correlated with brain activity strictly speaking. All of these views eschew dualism. See Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996), 187–​215; John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 133–​58; Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 75–​102. Or perhaps not. A famous series of experiments by Benjamin Libet purports to show that the conscious intention to initiate action occurs fractions of a second after the muscles have already begun to effectuate the action. This suggests that conscious intent, rather than causing action, is itself an emergent effect or concomitant of a more fundamental neurological process. For a description of the Libet experiments, see Hood, The

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at the emergent level downwardly affect the basal level. It’s that changes at the basal level are always behind alterations at the emergent one. There is, therefore, a great deal of doubt among scientists as well as philosophers of science and of mind as to whether the strongest version of emergentism—​ the emergence of novel and irreducible realities such as selfhood—​is necessary. Some have proposed that a weaker version is sufficient to take advantage of an emergentist perspective without going all in on its larger claims.27 I do not want to foreclose on the explanatory value of either strong or weak emergentism.28 I want, however, to explore another route toward securing the first person, self-​conscious, agential personhood that we, as persons, require. Another story that we could tell is a religious one. We let the neuro-​(and other) science run its course and grant that, when it does its work well, it teaches us valuable things about our corner of the universe. But we also insist that there is something irreducible about our personhood or selfhood. The emergentist story of how consciousness and self-​consciousness arises remains in the third person register; it can’t fully carry us to an adequate expression of our own mode of being. Nor can a purely first-​person affirmation such as Descartes makes suffice. (The latter is too exposed to modern assaults such as Wittgenstein’s private language argument.) Rather, we find ourselves to exist qua selves insofar as we are in relation to others, eminently to a divine Other. The relation with others gives us concreteness, keeps us within an intelligible world, and gives us language with which to make ourselves explicit. But this too might be an illusion, for others are, on the contemporary neuroscience story, also essentially brains and are therefore reducible in the same way that we are. We must then make the claim that what lies beyond every local “you” is an ultimate You, on whose reality the whole fabric of interaction depends. Martin Buber says as much. But Buber would fight shy of any claims as to God’s perfection. That implies a metaphysical idiom he would reject. Between Buber’s experiential approach and speculative metaphysics, there is an alternative. To trust that the world that we seem to inhabit and that the selves that

27 28

Self Illusion, 127–​30. For a criticism of this whole approach, see Raymond Tallis, Aping Humanity:  Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2011), 243–​76. See David Chalmers, “Strong and Weak Emergence,” in The Re-​Emergence of Emergence, 244–​56. Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico use emergentism to argue not only for the reality of selfhood, but for the reality of the soul. See their Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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we seem to be are real, is to repose trust in a Guarantor for this world and for ourselves. Perhaps we could just take the world and the self on without trust, as an acceptance of a disenchanted reality; an acceptance of brute and meaningless fact. But this does not seem to be the analysis that best accounts for the value that we find in being, in nature, in others, and in ourselves. We experience the world and our own presence in it as replete with value, as objects of wonder. We often feel gratitude for the chance to participate in being. (Nicholas Humphries would give a Darwinian explanation here. But this too would fail to persuade, when we take up the stance of wonder and gratitude from within.) The Guarantor in whom we repose our trust should be, if not perfect in a metaphysical sense, then at least absolutely trustworthy, and trustworthy because wholly good. To trust in such a God is to fully be ourselves. There is surely no proof for the existence of such a God here, only a kind of transcendental deduction for what God would have to be like in order to secure those conditions under which we recognize ourselves to be selves. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Arguably, our selves are groundless unless we trust in the God on whom all being rests and toward whom all being aspires. Bibliography Chalmers, David. “Strong and Weak Emergence.” In Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, The Re-​Emergence of Emergence. 244–​56. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Churchland, Patricia. “The Benefits of realizing that you’re just a Brain.” New Scientist. Accessed November 27, 2013. https://​www.newscientist.com/​article/​mg22029450-​ 200-​the-​benefits-​of-​realising-​youre-​just-​a-​brain/​. Churchland, Paul M. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996. Clayton, Philip and Paul Davies, editors. The Re-​Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Scribner, 1994. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Deacon, Terrence W. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Goodman, Lenn E. and D. Gregory Caramenico. Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Gazzaniga, Michael. Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco, 2012.

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Hood, Bruce. The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Matthies, Angela, Andrew Stephenson, and Nick Tasker. “The Concept of Emergence in Systems Biology: A Project Report.” Oxford University Department of Statistics. Accessed June 1, 2018. http://​www.stats.ox.ac.uk/​_​_​data/​assets/​pdf_​file/​0018/​3906/​ Concept_​of_​Emergence.pdf Mittleman, Alan. “Modeh Ani:  A Jewish Affirmation of Personhood.” In Modeh Ani, Edited by David Birnbaum and Martin Cohen. New York: Mesorah Matrix Publishing, 2017. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Searle, John. Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sellars, Wilfred. Science, Perception and Reality. Atascadero, CA:  Ridgeview Publishing, 1991. Strawson, Galen. “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 5/​6 (1997): 405–​28. Tallis, Raymond. Aping Humanity: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2011. Zawidzki, Taduesz. Oneworld Thinkers: Dennett. Oxford: One World Publications, 2007.

Chapter 8

Anger and Divine Perfection Edward C. Halper Insofar as God is perfect, man could do no better than to imitate Him. So, Divine Justice and Divine Mercy are standards against which we measure the lesser human versions, and the same could be said of other Divine attributes. Anger, however, is a troubling exception; for the Torah is clear that God gets angry, but man is, it seems, never justified in being angry. Maimonides, for example, speaks strongly against anger (esp. in Eight Chapters).1 He thinks passions should be experienced in the mean. Since anger is an extreme, he finds few if any circumstances in which genuine anger is justified. It is, therefore, a surprise that the Torah speaks frequently of God’s anger. In the lengthy “Admonition” (tokachah) in Deuteronomy, Israel is threatened with experiencing God’s anger if it does not follow His commandments (29:19–​27). Likewise, the prophets frequently threaten Israel with expulsion from the land and other manifestations of Divine anger (e.g., Jer 25:37–​38) for the failure of the Jewish people to observe the commandments properly. The traditional view is that the destructions of both Temples and of Jerusalem were manifestations of Divine anger that fulfilled these prophecies, rather than, say, the result of the superior military strength of the conquerors. To be sure, Divine anger is somehow moderated:  God is “slow to anger” (Exod 34:6), and his anger lasts only for an instant (Ps 30:6). The Talmud declares that it arises from transgressions of his law (Berachos 7a) and that it is improper to use the time of God’s anger for one’s own purposes (Sanhedrin 106b).2 The importance to the Torah of somehow moderating Divine anger indicates how surprising it is that God experiences what we usually take to be a character defect.

1 Moses Maimonides, Ethical Writings of Maimonides, ed. Raymond L.  Weiss and Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Dover, 1975), 72, 73–​74, 82. Nonetheless, he claims that a man who “continually weighs his actions and aims at the mean” will “come close to God and will attain what belongs to Him” (74). 2 All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004387980_010

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What is Divine anger? Is it confined to idolatry as Maimonides claims (Guide 1.36)?3 Why is it appropriate for God to get angry, but not man? If anger makes a man imperfect, must it not also make God imperfect (cf. Guide 1.26)? This paper argues, first, that the Torah’s approach to anger depends on whom it is who gets angry and for what reason. My claim is that what is imperfect for us is, indeed, a perfection for God. Second, the paper explains how the Torah can attribute anger to God without undermining His other perfections, like His being unchanging and merciful. Third, taking off from the case of anger, the paper explores the notion of perfection in a divine being. Whereas philosophers (including Maimonides) have understood perfection as completeness and self-​ sufficiency, the attributes that the Torah ascribes to God should be understood in terms of care and, in general, his relation to his creation. Anger as a Problem The most prominent description of Divine anger in the Torah is the lengthy admonition in Deuteronomy. The Torah threatens that God will unleash his anger if Israel sins, and it sketches in graphic detail how God will punish Israel. That these are not empty threats is clear from subsequent events in Jewish history. Inasmuch as the punishments described were actually inflicted, there is every reason to think that God was angry. Obviously, we cannot imagine God manifesting anger with the physical traits through which this attribute manifests itself in man: red face, heightened blood pressure, higher heart rate, etc. The Torah describes only the actions that God does in anger. This detail allows Maimonides to propose that the Torah speaks of God’s anger only because He acts in ways that people with anger would act.4 Were God to have anger as an attribute that is distinct from his essence, He would not be one.5 Maimonides contends that we know God only through his actions because we can understand actions without understanding the natures of the things that undertake them. This solves a metaphysical problem insofar as it allows God to act without our having to ascribe either a nature or an attribute to God. Still, intrinsic metaphysical issues remain because Maimonides requires us to trace an action back to a cause, but denies we can speak of the cause as 3 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (hereafter Guide), translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 82. 4 Maimonides, Guide, 126, cf. 124. 5 Maimonides, Guide, ­Part I, chapters 51–​52.

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having an ability, a trait, or any other feature that would enable it to be a cause. Maimonides skirts this latter issue by denying that we can know God. However, he also enjoins us to come to know God, and we cannot help but ascribe to God the characteristics that would allow him to perform the actions the Torah credits Him with. This is a well-​known problem with Maimonides’ account of divine attributes and not unique to anger. It is not my concern here because whether anger is an attribute of God or of His actions makes no difference to my issue here. At most, we could need to pose it differently: instead of asking why God rightly experiences anger when we should not even though we are to imitate God, Maimonides would have to ask, why do God’s actions manifest anger when ours should not, though our actions should imitate His, so far as possible? In other words, Maimonides would transform the problem from a question about God’s attribute of anger to a question about His angry actions. The question remains: how can God be perfect if His actions are angry? Before going any further, we should ask whether what the Torah describes as anger is truly anger. Usually, the term “anger” suggests either excess or impotence. Imagine that Shimon has borrowed money from Reuvain and now refuses to repay it. Reuvain would be justified in feeling disappointed or in feeling that Shimon has not treated him justly. If we heard that Reuvain was angry at Shimon, we would be likely to think that Reuvain was upset and disturbed. “Anger” suggests a disturbance that is disproportionate to the cause. Reuvain is right to want and to expect to be repaid by Shimon, but he is not right to lose his cool. On the other hand, if Reuvain’s anger manifests itself in his insulting or attacking Shimon, then Shimon may well suppose himself to be unjustly victimized, but to be angry is to be unduly upset. Whatever they might say or do in anger, the situation remains unchanged: Reuvain does not get repaid what he is owed. I think that people who feel unable to respond adequately to attacks or losses are more prone to the excess called “anger” than those who feel they have some means of defense. It is clear that God is not excessive in his responses, nor could he ever lack means to respond to an insult or a loss. Without these human motivations, God should never be angry. Why then does God become angry, and why does the Torah put so much stress on God’s anger? If Israel violates God’s commandments, it should be punished, but is the punishment a matter of anger or is it not, rather, a matter of justice? If the punishment went beyond what is appropriate to the transgression, it would be right to speak of God’s anger. It would be a matter of anger precisely because it was unjust. Clearly, though, God is just (e.g., Deut 32:4; Pss 145:17, 119:37). His punishments always match the transgression. Again, we must conclude that

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God could not get angry or act with anger. Why then does the Torah speak about God’s anger? What does “anger” add to justice? There are actually two admonitions in the Torah. In the shorter one in Leviticus, anger is barely mentioned. Here the focus is on the Sabbatical year (shmittah), and God warns Israel that if it does not allow the land to lie fallow every seventh year in accordance with Divine prescription, then the people will be exiled and the land will remain fallow (Lev 26:34–​35). So far as I can see there is only one possible suggestion that God is angry, namely, the claim that God will act with “violent opposition” or as, Rashi understands it, “violent casualness” (chmt kry) in fulfilling the commandments (mitzvot) (Lev 26:28; see Rashi on 26:21). In general, the emphasis is on the justice of the punishment, “measure for measure” (middah kneged middah): if Israel is casual in its observance of the commandments, God will be casual in fulfilling His part of the covenant; if Israel neglects to allow the land to lie fallow, Israel will be exiled and the land will remain fallow; if Israel rejects God’s commandments, God will reject Israel. In contrast, the admonition (tokachah) that occupies a large portion of Deuteronomy (chs. 11–​28) focuses prominently on God’s anger, but only at its end. Israel is carefully instructed on the commandments it must observe in the land it is coming to possess (Deut 12:1–​27:26). Next, the Torah recounts the actual blessings and curses in rather graphic detail (Deut 28:1–​29:8). As in the earlier passage, the discussion focuses on the justice of Israel’s reward or punishment as “measure for measure” (middah kneged middah): if Israel forsakes God by not following the commandments, then God will forsake Israel; if Israel fears God, then it will not fear its enemies, whereas if it does not fear God it will have what to fear from its enemies. The Torah then speaks of the prohibition of idolatry and, immediately afterward, refers to God’s anger and jealousy (29:19–​ 27). It seems from this passage that idolatry is what provokes God’s anger; but more likely, I think, the Torah takes idolatry to be the root cause of the people’s going astray. It is Israel’s lust after other gods that prevents it from properly observing God’s commandments. In the first admonition, the assumed cause of neglecting the commandments is a desire to overwork the land, that is, a desire for profit and, perhaps, a lack of trust in God. So, there, neglecting the commandments is punished and justice is thereby done. In the second admonition, the assumed motivation for straying is more insidious: it is the rejection of God and the embrace of the lesser powers represented by idols. Here God seems to be the jilted lover intent on revenge. Yet, this is obviously a metaphor. Could God’s anger interfere with his justice? If not, does anger add anything to the admonished consequences? Again, if Israel is to receive the appropriate reward or punishment for obeying or disobeying the commandments, the

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issue is one of justice. Why, then, dwell on anger? What does anger add over and above justice? Anger and Justice The reason that we should never be angry is that what happens in the world, even what seems to be accidental, is, Maimonides argues, the result of God’s will in as much as God is the first cause.6 For us to be angry is, then, to reject the judgment of God. Maimonides is thinking not merely of natural events, but also of what seems to be the result of human agency. That I did not win the lottery is in accordance with divine plan, as is my being struck with illness or being the victim of a robbery. (The robber chose freely, but that I would be his target depends on other causes and, thus, ultimately on God.) Such events are harsh, but we must accept them. In cases where anger is called for, Maimonides counsels that it be feigned. Thus, if a child carelessly drops a glass of milk or, worse, runs across the street without looking, the parent ought to act as if he were angry so that the child learns to act differently. It is easy to indulge young children, but Maimonides urges readers to adopt an attitude that better serves the child’s welfare. So, too, the belief that God is violently against those who do injustice is necessary if the believer is to acquire the moral quality of justice.7 The implication Maimonides wants us to draw is that God is never really angry. He only acts as if he were angry. This conclusion is bolstered by Maimonides’ contention that anger belongs among the “impulses of matter.”8 Since God has no matter, He simply cannot be angry. Since “commandments and prohibitions of the Law are only intended to quell” material impulses, the Law aims to make people more like God. Clearly, the requirement that people believe God to be angry at injustice is at odds with his never actually being angry. But, perhaps, it is no more puzzling than the Torah’s speaking of the material parts of an immaterial being. What is called God’s “anger” is nothing more than His justice graphically represented. The Torah says that God rebukes Israel as a father rebukes a child: “Just as a father will chastise his son, so the Lord, your God, will chastise you” (Deut 8:5). As the child fears the father’s chastisement, so Israel is to fear God’s anger. Yet, as the child matures, reason replaces fear, and he comes to realize that his parents’ rules are for his own good. Not all of Israel will come to a comparably 6 Maimonides, Guide, 409–​10. 7 Maimonides, Guide, 514. 8 Maimonides, Guide, 433–​34, 431.

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mature intellectual appreciation of God’s decrees and actions. So, it seems that the belief in God’s anger must be retained, but Maimonides aims to lead his readers to a more philosophical appreciation of God. As powerful as Maimonides’ position is, we should consider more carefully whether it does justice to Divine anger. A child who did not, upon maturity, develop the reason that allows him to see what motivates his parents’ rules would come to resent the imposition of parental power and authority. So, too, those people who are inherently incapable of appreciating the reasons for God’s decrees will rebel. Since, as Maimonides realizes, his justifications of those decrees will not be accessible to all, his account would inevitably leave some people estranged from Judaism More importantly, contrary to Maimonides, anger does signify more than the punishment of wrongdoing. As I said, the Torah says that God rebukes Israel as a father rebukes a child. The father, not the mother. The assumption is that the mother loves the child unconditionally, whereas the father’s love is coupled with expectations. The father lays down the rules and metes out punishments but also rewards. Because the mother loves unconditionally, she cannot reward:  for her, everything the child does is equally good. These sex roles are, of course, outmoded, nor were they ever universal. But the point is that the relation between Israel and God is one of both love and fear. Still, more strikingly: there is a relationship. A judge is, or should be, perfectly just and thereby a fit object of respect; she will do her job whatever the circumstances. A parent has a different perspective because of his relationship with the child, he can be an object of love or fear in a way that a judge cannot be. Imagine a father who never became angry at his children or never feigned being so. He could be perfectly fair in disciplining them for infractions and rewarding them for achievements. He might well seem to be the perfect parent, but his children would feel that something was missing. They would feel entitled to be not just the objects of his supervision, but also the objects of his love and care. My point is that a parent who is only just, even perfectly just, is still a deficient parent. Or, to put it in different terms, no one can do well as a parent who does not recognize that part of what he can justly give his children is his love. A judge is neutral when he dispenses judgment; a parent cannot be neutral because part of what the parent owes the child, part of the parent’s exercise of justice is to give the child love. A parent who aims only at neutral justice for the child fails to give the child the love that he justly owes the child. My analogy is clear: God’s justice to His children requires that He love them. Not with the unconditional love of a mother, but with love of someone dedicated to helping the child realize her potential, that is, with the love traditionally associated with the father. Just as the father encourages and rewards but

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also chastises and corrects, so God loves Israel but also chastises Israel. The chastisement is necessary because of the love. The father rebukes because he wants the child to succeed. In order for the rebuke to be effective, the child must fear the father. A young child fears the father’s punishment; a more mature child fears to make his father angry because that would distance him from the father and undermine the relationship. That is to say, the child’s fear presupposes his father’s love. Following out the analogy, we can infer that God’s anger cannot be reduced to justice or punishment but is an additional threatened consequence of violating the commandments. Israel’s failure to observe the commandments will be justly punished, of course, but it will also provoke the anger of God, threatening the relationship and undermining God’s love. If this line of reasoning is right, anger cannot be separated from love. God’s love of Israel lies in his giving Israel the Torah. His anger is provoked by Israel’s forsaking the Torah and, in particular, by the thorough uprooting of the Torah that is the consequence of turning to other gods. Reciprocal Love: the Antidote to Anger There are, though, a number of issues with this relatively simple formula. First, there is, ideally, a reciprocal love between God and Israel, not merely the one-​ sided relationship that I have mostly described. Israel’s love of God needs to be appreciated. Just as God gives Israel the law from love, Israel is to observe the law from love. Maimonides maintains that Israel loves God by seeking knowledge and that God’s love manifests itself by granting it.9 However, the Torah’s discussion of love applies much more straightforwardly to the observance of all the commandments. Love is reciprocal but also, in a way, self-​certifying because by observing the commandments out of love of God, a person comes to be exactly the sort of upright person who merits God’s love and respect. In other words, the love of God leads to the observance of the commandments and this, in turn, makes a person the worthy object of God’s love. Again, God’s love of Israel is justified not by any special characteristics Israel possesses, but principally by its observance of the commandments. So it is by loving God that Israel is loved in return: measure for measure (middah kneged middah). Unlike love, fear and anger are not reciprocal: Israel has fear; God can be angry. That is to say, Israel fears God’s anger because violating the commandments 9 Maimonides, Guide, 621.

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risks angering God; and God does get angry when Israel violates the commandments. Anger and fear here each depend on the other, but they are opposites. Ideally, mutual love holds actually, and the fear of God’s anger serves as the potential threat of the breakdown of love. One fears God in order to love. Given the connection of both anger and love with the commandments, it is clear that they are based on the relation of God and Israel. They are manifestations of God’s choice of Israel in particular to receive the Torah. This particularity poses another challenge to my proposal here that anger (like love) is a perfection of God. (1) Can the maker of all things rightly bestow his anger or his love on only a small portion of his creation? Would Divine perfection not have dictated that he extend the same love and the same anger to all of creation? Furthermore, (2)  if God manifests his love for the Jews by angrily expelling them from the land of Israel, must we not say that the Canaanites, who also incurred God’s wrath, were objects of love and, therefore, also of His anger? Did not God get angry at others before Israel? In other words, if the line of thought I have been following in this paper is on target, the issue of God’s anger is closely tied to the question of particularity, Israel’s chosenness; for God’s anger is the counterpart of his love. But it is mysterious why God would choose a single people upon which to bestow His love, and why (or, indeed, whether) He gets angry at Israel for doing things that he tolerates in other peoples? Does not a perfect God treat all his children equally? One can hear this issue in the well-​known midrash that God did offer the Torah to other peoples first, but all rejected it because it forbade activities that they wished to continue.10 The midrash suggests that all nations had an equal chance at the Torah and that, as it is sometimes said, it was not God who chose the Jews so much as the Jews who chose God. This explanation will hardly do for a solution because we want to know why any particular people should receive the Torah. Should it or, at any rate, the code of law not be the common heritage of mankind? Does a perfect being single out one nation for special treatment? The parallel question is: why does God get angry at Jews for idolatry and immorality but seems not to be bothered by the idolatry of other nations? The assumption implicit in the latter question can be challenged. God destroyed the world, saving only Noah and his family, because of immorality. The Canaanites were expelled from the land of Israel, and they were supposed to be completely annihilated because of their abominations. Sodom and Gomorrah were both destroyed because of their sins. It would seem that God’s anger is not confined to the people of Israel. 10

See Marty Jaffee, trans., Sifre Devarim (Seattle, WA: Stroum Center, 2016), 33:2, piska 343, 2.

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My response to this objection is that these other destructions were cases of just punishment that, so far as I can see, were executed without God’s being angry. Indeed, it is remarkable how dispassionately the Torah describes them. Noah is told that the world is filled with violence (chamas), and the world is violently destroyed (Gen 6:13). God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because their “outcry” and their “sin” is very great (Gen 18:20). Their destruction is simply a matter of justice. It seems to be much the same with Canaanites. Let me propose that the Torah uses a device to avoid the conclusion that God got angry at other occupants of the land of Israel. What we find instead are references to the holiness of the land like those at the end of the first admonition. We are to infer that it was not God who expelled the Canaanites, but the land itself that vomited them out. I  suggest that the Torah ascribes this peculiar agency to the Land of Israel in order to avoid the implication that God is angry with the Canaanites. God is angry with Israel for idolatry. When it comes to the Canaanites, God is an impartial judge. It was the Land that vomited them out: having never had a relationship with God, they could not lose it. Since the Canaanites did not have the Torah, far less was expected of them. God gets angry with Israel because Israel has the Torah and should, therefore, know better. Anger is thus predicated on God’s choice of a particular people to receive the Torah. To return to the earlier question (1), how can such a choice be reconciled with the universality intrinsic to God’s being the cause of everything? Cosmopolitanism has become popular, and both Christianity and Islam see themselves as universal religions, suited for everyone (e.g., catholic = katholou [universal]). At first glance a universal religion would seem a more appropriate way to worship a God who created all things. However, human beings are social and social relations are inevitably on a smaller scale. It should be obvious that we have special obligations to our family that we do not have to others. Likewise, we have obligations to our friends that we do not have to those with whom we are unacquainted. Equally so, we have obligations to our group, our tribe. Nonetheless, it has become common to hear people claim that we have the same moral obligations to every human being. This attitude may sound elevated at first hearing, but it is entirely wrong-​headed. Someone who imagines that his responsibility to care for an aging parent or a child is no stronger than a responsibility to care for others who are helpless or infirm neglects moral responsibilities that fall most properly to him. No single person can care for everyone who needs care. We must recognize our descending circles of moral responsibility: self, family, friends, community, tribe, world. The Torah clearly commands the people of Israel to obey God and to honor parents, and it is understood to demand that they give charity to their community. This latter is

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both the immediate community in which individuals dwell and the community of the people of Israel. My point is that in recognizing obligations to the community, the Torah is recognizing the importance of the community. As human beings, we live with particular people in particular communities. We have special obligations to others in our community that we do not have to people in general, for just as we rely on the community to sustain us, we are obliged to contribute towards sustaining it. The obligation is also an opportunity: close proximity to others enables us to appreciate what we can do to help them. Contributions range broadly from charity to active participation in communal institutions. In the community that the Torah envisions, the teaching of Torah is itself a contribution to the community. Indeed, this community is constituted by the Torah, for the Torah specifies ways in which people are to work together. So understood, the community is not a burden borne by its members, but a set of opportunities for the sort of moral behavior that constitutes the best human endeavors. In recognizing the importance of the community and in commanding the people of Israel to sustain it, the Torah is mandating moral action. So understood, the particularity of the community is not antithetical to a universal morality, but an additional sphere for the exercise of morality. In short, God’s love of Israel, the love that manifests itself with the giving of the Torah, makes Israel into a people and thereby creates the possibility for mutual love among the people governed by the Torah. We have seen that anger is often the other side of love. Along with the possibility that the people of Israel will love each other, there is the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, that individuals among this people will anger each other. It is in this context that I think Maimonides’ injunction never to be angry makes sense; for anger afflicts the one who bears it far more than the one who receives it, and it is the bearer who must seek a remedy. Nonetheless, I suggest that the Torah provides a better remedy for anger than Maimonides proposes. Just as God maintains the love of Israel despite His anger at Israel’s idolatry, so too people should recognize that anger presupposes love and that continuing to give charity and to contribute to the community is the best remedy for anger. This active response is, I suggest, the remedy that the Torah prescribes. It is sometimes thought that communal conflicts can be eliminated by eliminating the community, but my point is that communities are both necessary to human existence and opportunities for good. Nor could communal conflict be eliminated by imagining a universal peoplehood, for the relationships between people that are necessary for peoplehood are intrinsically interactions among particular individuals, and there must be some sort of bond between these individuals to make them a people. There are obviously other peoples

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besides the people of Israel, and their existence might also be a manifestation of Divine love. The Torah does not exclude other people’s having a relationship with God. My point is that particularity is intrinsic to the existence of individual peoples and that the latter is good. Thus, we cannot fault God for promoting particularity. Insofar as peoplehood is a value, a perfect God must promote it. This aspect of the Torah does not detract from Divine perfection. Nor does God’s anger stem from the sort of jealousy that is a defect in human beings. In the third part of the Guide, Maimonides explains many of the Torah’s statues (chuqim) by tracing them to historical forms of idolatry. I suggest that this interpretation reinforces his conclusion that, in the admonition in Deuteronomy, it is idolatry alone that arouses the anger of God, for to violate these statutes is tantamount to idolatry. This would explain why it seems to be Israel alone that provokes God’s jealousy, for only Israel has received specific laws against idolatry. It is not clear to me, however, that God’s anger is confined to idolatry. Rather, the Torah is identifying idolatry as a prime source for turning away from statutes and other laws. In my view, prohibitions against historical forms of idolatrous worship that are no longer current remain in force because they serve to promote the sort of communal life that, I  have been arguing, is necessary for the human good. They help to unite Israel into a people in a way that the practice of morality alone would not. This, I think, is the reason that God’s anger is inflamed when Israel does not keep the commandments. The laws that God bestows on Israel serve the important function of constituting the community along religious lines. By stressing God’s love in giving the laws and His anger should they be spurned, the Torah serves to keep the community together. Divine jealousy is a metaphor for turning away from the community that spurning the statutes entails. Insofar as the community is itself necessarily particular, the creation and sustenance of a community by the Torah is a manifestation of Divine love, and the fear of provoking God’s anger by undermining its laws and traditions helps to sustain this community. In short, the particularity of the Jewish community is not an argument against God’s anger, or His love, being a perfection. On the contrary, Israel’s relationship with God is precisely what makes it possible for the community itself to exist as it does: it is the community’s reason for being, and in fulfilling these laws Israel sustains this natural community. On the other hand, rejected Torah laws are, as it were, a spurned gift: the recipient not only loses the gift but the relationship with the giver. Punishment is not the only consequence of rejecting the Torah, and the higher stakes encourage Israel not to make this error.

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Conclusion Let me end by recounting the paper’s conclusions. The Torah assumes that human beings should aspire to the perfection of God. However, God gets angry, but man should not get angry. I resolve this apparent contradiction by arguing that God’s anger is not a defect but a perfection. It is the counterpart to God’s love as expressed in the giving of the Torah law. God would be imperfect if he were indifferent to the reception of this gift. His anger is the rebuke that the father has for his child, the rebuke that aims at the moral improvement of the child because of the father’s deep concern for the child’s well-​being. For us to appreciate the perfection of God along these lines, we must recognize that Torah law is not limited to universal morality (which is recognized by all people) but also aims to fulfill our basic human needs by forging Israel into a people and by spurring that people on to appreciate God’s nature and to investigate it, insofar as possible. There is a long-​standing Jewish tradition of holding God accountable for misfortunes that befall the Jewish people. Insofar as observance of the commandments surely falls short of perfection, God is not simply justified, but obliged to express his anger. As much as we want to say that the Divine anger displayed by the Holocaust and other disasters was disproportionate, we lack any way to make this calculus. This does not stop expressions of anger towards God. It is reassuring to realize that these expressions are the human counterparts to God’s anger: affirmations of the persistence of a relationship despite challenges. Bibliography Jaffee, Marty, Translator. Sifre Devarim. Seattle, WA: Stroum Center, 2016. Maimonides, Moses. Ethical Writings of Maimonides. Edited by Raymond L. Weiss and Charles E. Butterworth. New York: Dover, 1975. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Chapter 9

Omnipotence Is No Perfection: Rabbinic Conceptions of God’s Power, Knowledge, and Pursuit of Justice Alex Sztuden In Plato’s Republic, we are treated to a vision of immaterial and eternal Forms that serve as the standard by which to judge the fleeting phenomena of the material world. Whatever the similarity of Plato’s forms—​in particular the form of the Good—​may be to God,1 Philo of Alexandria read the God of the Bible at least partly in light of Platonic philosophy.2 Here then, in the clash of civilizations experienced by the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandra circa 40 c.e., and crystallized in the philosophy of Philo Judaeus, we can trace the origins of the gradual transformation of the corporeal, emotion-​laden and awesome God of the Bible into the abstract God of the philosophers—​immaterial, transcendent, impassible and entirely self-​sufficient. Philo—​the first religious philosopher according to Harry A.  Wolfson—​ attempted to integrate Greek philosophy with the Jewish tradition, and may have gone too far towards the submergence of the unique vision of the Jews into the form and substance of the Greeks. That may be why there are no explicit references to Philo in the Talmud, in which the conceptions of God are much less abstract.3 The rabbinic sages of the Talmud and Midrash understood God quite differently from how Philo did, and how eventually Maimonides would describe God in his Guide. For the rabbis, God was immanent in all His creation and entered into a covenantal relationship with the Children of Israel. 1 See Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions From Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion and Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4–​5. 2 See Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Volume 1, 2nd revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 200–​ 205. This does not mean that Philo equated the Good with God. Note that however much Philo borrowed from Plato, Wolfson makes it clear that Philo nevertheless “subordinated reason to faith” in many areas. Despite this subordination, Philo was rejected by the Jewish sages. For some reasons, see Louis H. Feldman, “Torah and Secular Culture: Challenge and Response in the Hellenistic Period,” Tradition 23, no. 2 (1988): 26–​40. 3 See David Winston, “Philo and Rabbinic Literature,” The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Adam Kamesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 231–​254.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004387980_011

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The rabbis too, however, understood God as incomparable in might, and transcendent. This essay attempts to fill in some details as to how the rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash understood God, in particular how they understood God’s foreknowledge, power, and transcendence. In doing so, I hope to show how they differ from the abstract, philosophical conception of God, and in what ways they are similar, and conclude with some possible directions for the re-​invigoration of our modern understanding of God, inspired by the rabbinic conceptions of God’s knowledge, power, and transcendence. Motivations for Abstract, Philosophical Monotheism Did Philo, and others after him, commit a historical blunder of momentous proportions when they transformed the God of the Bible into an abstract God, or are there good reasons for this transformation? Before depicting God as understood by the rabbis, it worth exploring some of the motivations for why it might be that God needed to be understood along more abstract lines so that we can better appreciate what is at stake in competing visions of the nature of God. Divine Simplicity Philo proclaimed that God is absolutely simple and unmixed and that “He has no wants, He needs nothing, being in himself all-​sufficient to himself.”4 The idea of God’s simplicity, worked out to its philosophical extreme, undermines any possibility that God can have a body, for bodies are composites and divisible. God also cannot have attributes, for subject and predicate are composites and God is an absolutely simple unity.5 What primarily drives the move towards an abstract God is the philosophical-​intellectual elaboration of the idea of that which must exist of necessity and hence must be its own cause. Once this entity is required to be “simple,” as Philo and others thought, it can admit of no composite elements and must be unlike everything else encountered in existence. So the primary reasons for the development of an abstract God were internal to philosophy as conceived of by Philo and others after him. In some of the other motivations that are described below, no claim is being made that other, less philosophically-​driven motivations are the “true” reasons 4 Wolfson, Philo, 203. 5 See Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought, trans. Joel Linsider (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 288–​298.

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for the positing of an abstract God. The requirements of a certain philosophical mindset should not be seen as “cover-​ups” for other ulterior motives for the construction of the God of the philosophers. Nevertheless, in addition to the philosophical working out of the idea of a cause of the world that played such a central role in the history of religious philosophy, below I sketch some related motivations for why the God of the philosophers split off from the God of the Bible. Gods of the Pantheon In his Saving God, the philosopher Mark Johnston excoriates all accounts of God that are based on the Bible alone.6 For Johnston, the God portrayed in the Bible constitutes no advance on pagan idolatry. Polytheism and the monotheism of the Bible are not essentially different. In his memorable words: First there is the polytheist’s pantheon of gods … then henotheism emerges … Then monotheism, relying essentially on the rhetoric of idolatrousness, clears the pantheon of the lesser gods, leaving only the top god as the one god. That kind of monotheism is just the limiting case of polytheism. Its one god is just the last remaining god of a polytheistic pantheon. … But here we have no deep religious transformation either of the last remaining god, or of his adherents. If it was idolatrous to worship the remaining god when he was one among the pantheon of gods, why does it cease to be idolatrous just because the other gods have been cleared from the pantheon?7 Johnston sees nothing of religious significance in the movement from many gods to one god, as this movement is only quantitative, and nothing substantial has changed. It would seem that something like Johnston’s concern also worried those laboring within the tradition of philosophical monotheism. Monotheism needed to be not just a doctrine of one god, but of the One God who is fundamentally and absolutely different than any other conception of God. So religious philosophers were pressed to show the radical difference that monotheism must make to our conception of God, and that radical difference is that, unlike the gods of the pantheon, the God of the philosophers is a perfect Being, possessing nothing in common with the discarded gods. The God

6 Mark Johnston, Saving God:  Religion after Idolatry (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2009). 7 Johnston, Saving God, 123.

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depicted in the Bible was simply too close to the gods of the pantheon. And nothing could be further from the pantheon than the God of the philosophers. Disinterestedness What does Johnston actually consider to be idolatrous in the polytheistic or even the essentially not-​much-​better monotheistic beliefs and practices of the Bible? For Johnston, the key to religious transformation lies in the individual and communal transformation from selfishness and narcissism to disinterested love, and he finds that the gods of the pantheon, including that of the Bible, while there are passages signaling this transformation, by and large still operate within the framework of what can the gods, or God, do for us as humans. We love God because he loves us and provides benefits to us—​that is a selfish love, not a disinterested one. And in contrast to this, the God of the philosophers is seen, starting with Aristotle, as the end of all things, that which we should strive to contemplate, not because He loves us back, but because He is both the cause and end of our beings. The personal God of the Bible is worshiped for selfish reasons, but the de-​personalized God of the philosophers, who does not love us back, is served from a disinterested love, which then spills out into the rest of His creation in an overflow. This movement towards a more mature form of worship is captured nicely by David Hartman in his book on Maimonides: Theoretical knowledge of God enables the individual to move from an observance based on self-​interest to a purer observance of commandments. Philosophy offers the individual a God who is sought for His perfection, and not only because He responds to man’s physical helplessness.8 Hartman’s statement encapsulates one of the central problems of making the God of the Bible the center of one’s religious life, for the personal God of the Bible seems in large part to be worshipped on account of what He can do for those who serve Him, and what will happen to those who would go astray. But a perfect God, without any needs or any emotions, is served out of love of the Perfect, and for no petty human motivations. A perfect God then, offers the

8 David Hartman, Maimonides:  Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia:  The Jewish Publication Society, 1986), 76. So even lofty conceptions of the relationship between God and the Jewish people, such as those based exclusively on mutual love, to the extent that they are based on reciprocity, such depictions would still fall short of the philosophical ideal of disinterestedness.

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hope of humans who will serve Him out of disinterested love, and not because they expect anything back. God as Reason; Wisdom versus Will In his recent book on Maimonides, Moshe Halbertal writes that one of the most fundamental transformations that Maimonides wrought was his emphasis on God’s wisdom, as opposed to His will: The second, no less radical element of the transformation of religious consciousness [wrought by Maimonides] was the placement of the natural and causal order at the center of divine revelation and presence. This fundamental change in religious sensibility away from miracle and toward causality, or, as Maimonides formulated it, from will to wisdom, required Maimonides to reinterpret some of Judaism’s most basic concepts.9 For Halbertal, nature’s lawfulness and governance is associated with wisdom, while miracles and supernatural elements in the universe are associated with arbitrary, non-​rational divine will. The problem is that the God of the Bible is often depicted as alien, acting capriciously, in unexpected ways, and by imposing His will on a recalcitrant people. In short, the God of the Bible is a personality, not subject to wholly predictable and rational laws, but wisdom entails action in accordance with inexorable laws and rational principles. For God to act entirely in accordance with wisdom, he must be divested of personality. We can see this point more clearly in Carlos Fraenkel’s discussion of God as Reason. Fraenkel claims that each of the three monotheistic religions have—​ to be sure, in their own ways—​had adherents of what he calls “philosophical monotheism”—​a version of monotheism where God is understood as Reason. And what is reason if not universal, and not particular, and impersonal in its judgments, requiring only the instantiation or application of universal principles in its governance of the world and of human affairs? Accordingly, the God of the philosophers needed to be shorn of its unique and partly-​inscrutable will, and turned into the vehicle of Reason—​abstract, universal and impersonal.10 If God is Reason expresses an identity without remainder, there can be nothing left over of God after the reduction to rational laws has been accomplished.

9 1 0

Halbertal, Maimonides, 2. See Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, 48–​51.

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The idea of God as Reason, or what amounts to the similar move of prioritizing God’s wisdom over His will, raises an important issue with respect to how we are to conceive of God’s perfection. Philosophers such as Maimonides have understood the concept of God’s perfection negatively. But the radical negative theology as practiced by Maimonides, where we can only say what God is not, and not what He is, lies in dire tension, if not outright contradiction with, claims that God is wise, or that we can see God’s wisdom in His created world, for the radical negative theologian must be committed to the proposition that the statement “God is wise” is as metaphorical as the statement that with “the finger of God” the tablets were written. Maimonides is fully alive to this tension between ascribing wisdom to God on account of the wisdom inherent in the created order, and his negative theology: On the one hand, there is a demonstration of His separateness, may He be exalted, from the world and of His being free from it; and on the other hand, there is a demonstration that the influence of his governance … exists. May He whose perfection has dazzled us be glorified.11 I raise this tension only to point out that there is another way to conceive of God’s perfection that does not precisely follow the trajectory of the negative theologian. Under this alternative conception, God’s perfections are to be understood in positive terms, not in negative ones. This view of God’s positive perfections, for instance, is elaborated upon by Robert M. Adams in his Finite and Infinite Goods, where he writes that: How can we characterize an excellence that lies beyond our cognitive grasp? The commonest move … has been to the negative. It is claimed that we cannot say what God is, but only what God is not … there is nothing God does not know, nothing God cannot do. This is the refinement and extension of familiar values. We cannot afford to do without these negative and universal claims altogether, but this strategy has had a harmful effect on our thinking both about God and about perfection in general.12 In contrast to the approach of negative theology, Adams writes that: 11 12

Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), I:72. Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51–​52.

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We should suppose that God’s superiority exceeds our cognitive grasp in a positive direction … The divine knowledge, love, beauty are not just free from defects that we can identify; they contain a richness we can hardly name.13 Philosophers such as Maimonides did not think that we should even attempt to describe this richness, so completely was it beyond our grasp. But the rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash did, and as we shall see, substituted concepts such as omnipotence for concrete elaborations of God’s incomparable power and might. Matter, Corporeality and Emotions Many contemporary adherents of the Jewish tradition, even if they don’t subscribe to the overly abstract version of philosophical monotheism, nevertheless take it for granted that God does not, literally, have a body. But in the same breath that they deny God’s corporeality, they affirm that He experiences emotions. In other words, the anthropomorphism of the Bible is taken as metaphor, while its anthropopathy is taken literally.14 But why should this be the case? For the philosophers, anthropomorphism and anthropopathy go together; you cannot deny the literal application of one without the other. Maimonides specifies this connection in the Guide when he writes that emotions are only possible for material entities.15 If it is true that emotions are dependent on matter, then those who would deny that God actually has a body should also deny that God is actually compassionate, or loving. In this account, anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language are twins, that either rise together, or fall together. So once we get rid of the idea that God has a body, we must also rid ourselves of the idea that God has emotions. The radical de-​personalization of God begins with, and follows inexorably from, His incorporeality, according to the philosophers. We have sketched a variety of related motivations for the development of the God of the philosophers. Some are purely intellectual and proceed solely

13 14

15

Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 52. While there are clear philosophical reasons for denying the corporeality of God, it is interesting to note that Philo also adduced some textual reasons. For instance, Philo asks, if God uses his eyes to see, and light is needed for eyes to function, how could God have seen before the light, or the sun, were created? Are we to suppose that God was blind prior to the creation of light or the sun? See Ronald Williamson, Jews in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, Ch. 1, and passim in the Guide.

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by the requirements of reason conceived as abstract and impersonal, while others arise from moral concerns regarding the conduct and depiction of the God of the Bible. The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, however, had no such qualms. It is true that they also redescribed much of the biblical source material, and the study of the differences between the biblical and rabbinic approaches to God’s nature would no doubt prove instructive. But despite their re-​wording of some of their source material, they upheld the central insight of the biblical narratives, that God has entered into a covenantal relationship with the Jewish people, and that on account of His rectitude and incomparable power, God is able to ensure the eventual flourishing of His people, and of the reign of justice here on earth. Rabbinic Conceptions of God’s Attributes Omniscience (and Other Attributes)16 That the Bible attributes emotions to God is a commonplace. One of the most famous passages in the Bible describes God’s disappointment, surprise, and regret that He had made man: And the Lord regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He became grieved in His heart. (Gen 6:6) Many commentators on this passage have not just focused on the emotions expressed by God, but on the passage’s apparent denial of His omniscience, for how can God be said to have regretted His decision to create human beings if He knew how they would turn out? Surprise, disappointment, and regret, on this understanding, are only possible if God does not know how His creations will develop.17 But that is not how the rabbis understood this passage: A heretic asked R. Joshua ben Korhah: “Do you people not maintain that the Holy One, blessed be He, foresees the future?” R. Joshua: “Yes.” The heretic: “But does Scripture not say, ‘And it grieved Him at His heart’?” R. Joshua:  “Was a son ever born to you?” The heretic:  “Yes.” R.  Joshua:  “What did you do?” The heretic:  “I celebrated and had all others

1 6 17

I discuss only foreknowledge here, which is a subset of omniscience. See Yoram Hazony, “Is God ‘Perfect Being’,” this volume, chapter one.

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celebrate.” R. Joshua: “Didn’t you know that in the end he would die?” The heretic: “Joy at the time of joy, mourning at the time of mourning.” R. Joshua: “Even such was the experience of the Holy One, blessed be He.”18 In the Midrash above, R. Yehoshua explicitly denies that this passage calls into question God’s foreknowledge. The rabbis, to my knowledge, never call into question God’s foreknowledge. The standard rabbinic doctrine is stated by R. Akiva: “Everything is foreseen, but free will is given to man.” And on purely inter-​textual grounds, we would need to understand how it can be that God would be unable to foresee how human beings would turn out, yet over and over again in the Bible, He is depicted as foretelling the future. One possible response might be that the prophetic pronouncements in the Bible are based on a naturalistic understanding of the course of nature and how events unfold, and the laws that human beings are subject to. In other words, prophecy assumes no miraculous kind of knowledge, only a profound grasp of events and their patterns. If this is the case, then it might be that this profound grasp of how the future will unfold does not extend into every aspect of the future, for there is a difference between predicting a specific future event based on a deep understanding of the past and the present and the prediction of how in general things will turn out when there has been no past. There can be no grasp of the patterns that human beings are subject to until those patterns emerge, and when God created human beings, no such large-​scale general patterns had developed. God’s understanding of human beings emerges alongside history, and is not prior to it. That is why God was not able, at the beginning of history, to foresee how human beings and their evil ways would predominate, despite His having created a world which He pronounced “very good.” Perhaps this is an acceptable harmonization of passages that clearly indicate God’s capacity to tell the future with God’s regret at having made human beings. But that is not how the rabbis conceived it. For the rabbis, trust in God’s eventual fulfillment of His promises to the Jewish people is predicated on his foreknowledge (and power, as we shall see). That is why the rabbis could not abandon it. Even while the rabbis upheld His omniscience, the Midrash above undermines several other properties of the God of the philosophers. God clearly experiences emotions, and so His impassibility is denied. Moreover, God experiences those emotions as events play out in time, and so God is not atemporal. Further, God’s emotions are responsive to human affairs, and so God is not self-​sufficient or completely self-​caused. And finally, the rabbinic attitude 18

Genesis Rabbah 27:4.

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expressed in this Midrash to divine immutability is dual-​edged. On the one hand, if immutability means that God does not change His mind, the rabbis uphold such immutability in this passage, for God’s regret does not mean that He changed His mind, but only that He experiences the emotion that is appropriate to that moment. But if immutability entails that God does not experience emotions because emotions come and go and therefore change, making God subject to change, certainly that understanding of immutability is undermined by the Midrash.19 In one Midrash about God’s regret, we can catch a glimpse of the rabbinic depiction of several divine attributes—​on the one hand they affirm God’s omniscience, and immutability with respect to changing His mind, but on the other hand they also assume that God experiences emotions that come and go in time and that are responsive to what happens on earth, thereby denying His atemporality, impassibility, aseity, and certain understandings of divine immutability. Omnipotence Even as the rabbis upheld divine omniscience, their attitude towards another of God’s perfections—​that of “omnipotence,” was much more complicated. The concept of omnipotence understood as an abstract perfection of God is not a theme present in classical rabbinic literature. Instead, what we do find are three specific exercises of God’s power that are essential for an understanding of how the rabbis viewed divine power. For the rabbis, God’s power is best described not by the concept of omnipotence, but by the particular exercise of His cosmic and redemptive powers, and in His capacity to realize justice on this earth. Cosmic Power The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). R. Jacob ben Zavdi told the parable of a mighty man who came to a certain city where the inhabitants did not know of his strength. A knowing man said, “You can tell his strength from the size of the

19

There have been attempts by analytic theists at separating divine immutability from divine impassibility in order to make room for God’s emotions without thereby denying His immutability. For instance, it is argued that God can still be immutable while experiencing emotions if He eternally experiences all appropriate emotions, without their coming and going. Note that this midrash denies that God’s experience of emotions is eternal, as its very point seems to be that each emotion is experienced in its proper time.

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stone he manages to roll.” Even so, we can tell the strength of the Holy One, blessed be He, from the heavens.20 The midrash above highlights two themes that are prominent in rabbinic literature. The first is that God’s power is first and foremost visible in His power to create and uphold the heavens and the earth. As against all other gods and rivals, it is only God Who created the entire world and exercises dominion over it. God as creator and continual establisher of the universe is an essential theme in how the rabbis understood the nature of God’s power. And the second point noted here is that human beings come to a realization of God’s power, not through abstract reasoning, but through experience, that is, we come to know God’s power through His works, i.e., through the entirety of the majestic created order.21 This cosmic power ensures that the world that exists is good, because it issues from God, and more importantly, that it is entirely in the control of God, who is therefore capable of ensuring the survival and flourishing of His people. That is, God’s cosmic power underwrites His power to redeem Israel. Redemptive Power In the opening phrase of the Ten Commandments, God’s claim to be the God of the Jewish people is predicated on the fact that it is God Who took them out of the Land of Egypt, for “I am the Lord Your God who took you out from out of the land of Egypt” (Exod 20:2). What is here being stated is that the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people is primarily based, not on God as the creator of the world, but on God as the One who saved the Jews from evil and destruction. This capacity to deliver the Jewish people from oppression is a recurring theme in the Talmud and Midrash and occupies a central place in the liturgy established by the rabbis. Power to Realize Justice That God possesses, and exercises, His power to save the Jewish people is really a subset of a broader use of His power that the rabbis stress over and over again—​the power of God to realize justice here on the earth:

20 21

Midrash Tehillim 25:6, cited in Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 506. See also Yoram Hazony, “Is God ‘Perfect Being’,” on how we come to know God. This volume, chapter one.

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R. Yohanan said: Wherever you find the power of the Holy One, blessed be He, mentioned in Scripture, you also find His condescension mentioned, a fact that is stated in the Five Books, repeated in the Prophets, and reasserted in the Writings. In the Five Books it is written, “For the Lord your God, He is God of gods,” etc. (Deut. 10:17), and directly after that, “He doth execute justice for the fatherless and the widow” (Deut. 1-​:18) … It is reasserted in the Writings: “Extol Him Who rideth upon the skies … (Psalm 68:5),” and directly after that, “A father of the fatherless, and a judge [protector] of the widows” (Psalm 68:6).22 God’s power, in this account, is not a perfection considered on its own or in isolation. Divine power matters because it is through that power that justice can be realized on this earth. This insight has important implications and represents an alternative view to those Who espouse omnipotence as a perfection of God that cannot be limited or constrained by His goodness. On the contrary, God’s power matters for the rabbis because it furthers the ends of God’s goodness. Divine power, for the rabbis, is indelibly linked to His justice and is not worthy of praise or admiration except when seen in that light.23 Omnipotence, considered in isolation, is no perfection.24 In addition to the three exercises of power noted above which form the core of the rabbinic understanding of God’s power, the midrashim also record dozens of other specific powers that God possesses, and what these Midrashim have in common is that they portray God’s specific powers, not as larger or more intense powers that humans also possess, but as powers that are qualitatively unique, different from, and of a higher order than the power of human beings. For instance, one Midrash states that while flesh and blood kings sit inside while their guards stand outside, God Himself does the opposite, and allows his servants to sit inside, while He stands and watches over them from the outside,25 while another midrash states that while when human beings make coins from the same die, they all resemble one another when God makes people from the mold of Adam, not one person is like his fellow.26

22 23 24 25 26

Megilla 31a. [All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.] The Euthyphro dilemma in Christian and Jewish sources is the theme of my upcoming research. See also Midrash Tehillim 52:6, “When can someone be called a mighty person? When that someone seizes the hand of an individual who is about to fall into a pit or when that someone sees another who has already fallen into a pit and lifts that person out.” Menachot 33b. Sanhedrin 37a.

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The rabbis then, never talk of God’s power in the abstract, but rather of his exercise of particular powers, powers that make Him unlike everything else in the world. And most importantly, divine power is celebrated by the rabbis, not because it is a perfection in its own right (it is not), but because it is the very source of this world; of the deliverance from evil of His people; and of His capacity to ensure that justice reigns supreme in the world He created. Spiritualization of Power The powers noted above are all material powers, but there is an entirely other dimension that the rabbis attributed to the meaning of God’s power. In Hebrew, the word that represents power is gevurah,27 and as Ephraim Urbach has pointed out, the rabbis often used the term gevurah when discussing the Revelation of God’s Torah: “And whence do we know that the Torah is called strength, for it is said” The Lord will give strength unto His people [i.e., He will give the Torah unto His people] (Psalms xxix 11).28 What is the significance of this reinterpretation of material power and might in terms of the revelation of God’s teachings and His laws? Urbach notes that this spiritualization of power finds parallels in Philo, for whom Wisdom is said to be “the highest and chiefest of His powers.” In Philo, the powers became spiritual and immaterial, an overturning of the usual manner is which we understand the term power. For the Jewish people too, this process of internalization took place, in particular after the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish people, when the rabbis posed the question: “Is it fitting to give the name ‘Mighty’ to One who sees the destruction of His house and remains silent?… whose children are in chains … where is His might?”29 Of course, the Sages’ internalization of power was not only reactive, but also affirmed the identification of power with wisdom and God’s laws. Nevertheless, the Sages questioned God’s power because it wasn’t always manifest, and its internalization provided a means by which to deal with, or escape from, the contradictions of their oppressed existence and the alleged power and might of their God. But the rabbis did not stop there, for in the end, they could not be content with a fully-​spiritualized, immaterial power. God, after all, was first the Creator of the heavens and the earth and material power mattered to the rabbis. And so while they could not see how God’s power and his justice went together, 2 7 28 29

Another term is Koach, and it would be worthwhile to explore the differences. Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 94. Berachot 11c, cited in Urbach, Sages, 95.

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they were confident that one day they would. When human beings repent, the full power and majesty of God will be visible in a unification of such power with His goodness. God’s power for the rabbis never became fully immaterial, for it was essential that it be exercised, eventually, if not now, in the realization of a just world.30 So for the rabbis, on the one hand, we find that they ascribe an incomparable power and might to God that is like nothing else on this earth. There are seemingly no limits to what God can do. In this respect then, even as they describe this power in concrete terms, we can see the resemblance of their understanding of God’s power to that of the concept of omnipotence. So we would not be correct in claiming that the rabbis denied God’s omnipotence. On the other hand, we see that God’s power sometimes seems hidden and spiritualized, and needs to be re-​activated so that God’s power will eventually vanquish evil and ensure justice. But this implies that somehow God is not exactly omnipotent, because His power seems muted at times. Dramatic Omnipotence Perhaps the best term to capture this tension and dialectic was introduced by the biblical scholar Jon Levenson. The theme that God’s potency is activated by human beings, is taken up at length by Levenson in his pioneering work of Biblical theology, Creation and the Persistence of Evil.31 It is not accurate to claim that the rabbis denied God’s omnipotence. But the rabbis did have a keen sense that if He was omnipotent, such powers needed to be re-​energized or activated by human conduct. In some mysterious fashion, omnipotence is to be won, not a given. God is fully capable of defeating evil, but the struggle is genuine, even as their faith was certain that God would triumph over all the evil forces in the world. As Levenson writes: In particular, a false finality or definitiveness is ascribed to God’s act of creation, and, consequently, the fragility of the created order and its vulnerability to chaos tend to be played down … the formidability and resilience of the forces counteracting creation are usually not given their due so that the drama of God’s exercise of omnipotence is lost, and a static idea of creation then becomes the cornerstone … The identification of “nothing” with a void rather than with chaos has certain affinities with 30 31

Urbach, Sages, 95–​96. See Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). While Levenson is engaged in biblical theology, some of his source material is drawn from rabbinic literature.

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the extreme forms of the theology of grace. Both have the indirect effect of denying the moral and interactive character of God’s action. When God creates something in a void, his act of creation is no longer a victory for justice and right order, nor can it be continued or reenergized by human action.32 The concept of dramatic omnipotence seeks to capture both the fact that God’s power is not limited, but also that it is in genuine struggle with forces of chaos that He did not create,33 and that in some mysterious way it requires human action to fully realize itself. Approaching his material from an entirely different vantage point than the biblical scholar Levenson, the Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod arrives at a parallel insight regarding God’s power. For Wyschogrod, God is dramatically affected by human beings: He is, of course, invulnerable. He remains in control with the outcome never in doubt. That, at least, is the predominant biblical line. But here and there we catch glimpses of something different. Perhaps it is the force of divine anger that makes us suspect vulnerability. Perhaps it is the depth of the divine hurt when it is abandoned by Israel that makes us wonder what it is that Israel has and Hashem needs … Is man’s power to frustrate Hashem an ultimate power, or is it temporary, with Hashem remaining in full control … so that the outcome is never really in doubt? But if that is so, is not Hashem playing a cat-​and-​mouse game, giving man the illusion of options …?34 While Wyschogrod does not use the term “dramatic omnipotence,” he is wrestling with the same dynamic as Levenson. On the one hand, it seems clear that God is in complete control as His mighty acts attest, but on the other hand, God seems affected by Israel, needs to be re-​energized by their acts in order to continue to impose His dominance, and if the battle that God fights is genuine, there cannot be certainty in its outcome. “Dramatic omnipotence” does justice to the biblical dialectic, and to the rabbinic sources that expand on the dialectic, both in highlighting and problematizing God’s incomparable power.

32 33 34

Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, xxvii–​x xix. Levenson is referencing a midrash where God does not create everything ex nihilo, but fashions order out of chaos. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983), 107.

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Transcendence For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways … For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways. (Isa 55:8–​9) The Bible, Talmud, and Midrashim depict a God who engages with the people of Israel and is immanent in the world He created. But alongside this depiction of God’s relationship to the world, the rabbis make it clear that God also transcends this world. For Plato, the Good is also transcendent in the sense that it is immaterial, eternal, and exists beyond the material world. But the notion of God’s transcendence for the rabbis includes all this and also contains another important element—​unknowability. In other words, God’s transcendence means that God is unknowable, and the more one emphasizes this transcendence, the more unknowable He becomes. There is unanimity among the rabbinic sages that despite His immanence, God also transcends the world.35 And within that broad consensus, there is an opinion that God’s transcendence is extreme. For R. Jose ben Halafta, “he is the place of this world, but the world is not His place,” overturning much Scriptural evidence that God does dwell, and is immanent, in the world. The same R. Jose also taught that the “Schekhina never [really] descended to earth, for the ‘heavens are the heavens of the Lord, and the earth hath he given to the sons of men.’ ”36 So God’s attributes regarding His relationship to the world as described by the rabbis must always be placed within the context of their continual recognition of the gap between God and the world. Yes, God is the creator of the world and has entered into a covenantal relationship with the people of Israel, but these claims were never meant to deny God’s transcendence. In this section, I want to explore why God’s transcendence matters, that is, what is the significance of the rabbinic recognition of God’s transcendence? To understand this question more clearly, it is worth contrasting God’s transcendence as understood by the rabbis with Spinoza. In his Ethics, Spinoza opens with an argument for a transcendent God, in the sense that he claims that God possesses infinite attributes, only two (thought and extension) of which are known to us.37 Despite the unknowability of the remaining infinite number of divine attributes, Spinoza reasons that they must exist. Yet Spinoza 3 5 36 37

See discussion in Urbach, Sages, 37–​79. Urbach, Sages, 49. Spinoza, Ethics, 1D6: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”

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is not generally classified as a theist or even a panentheist; sometimes he is considered a pantheist, and many consider him an atheist. And the reason for the atheistic classification, according to the Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler, is because these infinite, unknowable attributes play no significant role in the unfolding of his thought, and for Spinoza they do not and should not elicit the reactive religious attitudes of awe, devotion, or worship of this unknowable God.38 In other words, God’s transcendence, in the sense of His infinite unknowable attributes, is of almost no significance to Spinoza. Spinoza spends the rest of his metaphysical powers on elaborating the nature of the attributes that we do know about, namely—​thought and extension. But that is not the case with the rabbis, who considered God’s transcendence of paramount importance. Below, I sketch three implications of God’s transcendence as depicted by the rabbis, that is, of the significant role that God’s transcendence plays in the life and thought of the sages. Keeping the Commandments Scattered throughout the Talmud and Midrashic literature, we find that the rabbis often engaged in providing reasons for the commandments. The rabbis, by and large, believed that the commandments reflected the wisdom of God and were to the benefit of those who observed them.39 But alongside this quest to understand the purpose of the commandments, scholars as diverse as Ephraim Urbach and Jon Levenson have emphasized one overriding qualification to the search for the rationales of the commandments. As Urbach puts it: Notwithstanding all the divergences that we have found between the Tanaim and Amoraim in their attitude to the motivation of the precepts, one view is common to all, namely that the reasons are not a condition of the fulfillment of the precepts.40 Urbach supports his contention with the famous anecdote of Shimon Bar Yochai, who was known for providing reasons for many of the commandments.41 But in one exception, Yochanan ben Zakkai is asked by a gentile for how the purification ritual of the red heifer is supposed to work, and be Zakkai, after

3 8 39 40 41

Personal correspondence with Steven Nadler. See, for instance, Urbach, Sages, 365–​380. Urbach, Sages, 388. Nor is this only for pragmatic reasons, as philosophers might also counsel observance for the masses without the requirement for understanding. Urbach, Sages, 346

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dismissively answering the Gentile, tells his disciples that he does not understand how the ritual affects purification: By your life! The corpse does not defile nor the water purify; it is simply a decree of the Holy One, blessed be He. The Holy One, blessed be He, declared: I have ordained a statute, I have ordained a decree, and you may not transgress my decree—​This is the statute of the law.42 It is the same Yochanan ben Zakkai who both spends much of his time seeking out the reasons for the commandments and who nevertheless expresses his complete and unqualified allegiance to observance of the commandments even when their rationale escapes him.43 One is hard-​pressed to explain this attitude to those who identify God with Reason. On the contrary, while of course the Sages by and large thought that the laws reflect divine wisdom, there was a strong undercurrent that God transcends the bounds of human comprehension, and that insight was expressed in their unwavering fealty towards the commandments. Jon Levenson offers a similar observation, and explicitly highlights the role that God’s unknowability plays: Now we must note, in addition, that the presence of apodictic laws between man and God serves as a warning against identifying the Lord of the covenant with any rational principle. Reason is not the suzerain. This category of laws, the least palatable among people of a philosophical cast of mind, stands guard against any effort to depersonalize God. It is because the covenant relationship is founded upon personal fidelity that there can be laws whose only “explanation” is the unfathomable decree of God.44 In the above passage, Levenson combines God’s immanence and transcendence, both of which are needed to explain why a certain class of laws was upheld. On the one hand, observance of these laws served to establish, preserve, or strengthen the relationship to a personal God, that is, to a God engaged in a relationship with the Jewish people, and therefore an immanent God. But this God was also transcendent and unknowable, hence the supra-​rational 4 2 43 44

Cited in Urbach, Sages, 377. Urbach, Sages, 377. Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 53.

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element of certain “unfathomable” decrees of God. So the personhood of God is here combined with His transcendence and unknowability, yielding a rabbinic mindset of complete devotion to a personal God who both relates to the people of Israel, yet completely transcends them. The Problem of Evil We discussed earlier the view of the rabbis with respect to God’s power and justice. Justice is not readily visible in the world and in the historical arena and this posed a significant problem for the Jewish people. A shift took place in the religious consciousness of the Jews in post-​exilic times, when the idea of a precise correlation between the suffering of the Jewish people and their sins begins to show cracks and starts to break down.45 The problem in its sharpest formulation becomes how to preserve devotion to a just and almighty God even when the world He created does not seem to operate along His principles of justice.46 It is, therefore, no accident that perhaps what is the strongest or clearest formulation of divine inscrutability in the Pentateuch became for the rabbis the urgent question of the problem of evil. In Exodus, God tells Moses that, “You cannot see My face and live.” (Exod 33:20). Many commentators, such as Philo, seized on this phrase to argue for God’s complete transcendence. And it is striking that in the starkest formulation of divine transcendence found in the Pentateuch, the rabbis claimed that what Moses would not be shown is why the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer.47 For the rabbis, the most heart-​rending, urgent and unfathomable question is the problem of evil, and if they were to uphold both their commitment to both God’s justice and His power, as they certainly did, they needed to maintain God’s transcendence and inscrutability in this area. The rabbis affirmed over and over again God’s might and His power. That “no man can see My face and live” meant for the rabbis that God’s might and power go together in inscrutable and unknowable ways, ways that are not visible in the world or accessible to human reason. The rabbis could not then, abandon their belief in God’s transcendence without also abandoning their belief in either His goodness or His might. It is precisely through God’s unknowability that the rabbis were able to continue to espouse both His power and His justice at the same time. For 45 46

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Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 55–​56. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the rabbis abandoned the search for a correlation of justice with reward and punishment in this world, for the rabbis were constantly try to see justice working itself out and repeatedly attribute disease, illness and death to the moral lapses of individuals. See Berakhot 7a.

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the rabbis, divine transcendence is the glue that holds together divine power and divine goodness. God’s Silence and the Law The attentive reader will note that all of the examples from rabbinic literature in this essay have been drawn from the corpus of aggadic, or narrative, material, and not from the legal material, which constituted the prime focus of the rabbinic mind. In the Bible, narrative is more prominent than with the rabbis, and it is more integrated with, or is more organically connected to, the legal material, than the halakha and the aggada of the rabbinic age. The rabbinic turn even more towards law and codification testifies that they are living more in God’s absence than during the biblical period, where God as Person and His relationship to the Jewish people occupies a central place in the canonical texts. As Wyschogrod points out: To some degree, the estrangement had already begun in the rabbinic mind. The focus of that mind is the Torah … they lived in a time of the silence of God. The prophetic “Thus sayeth the Lord”48 is no longer being heard. Codification, as in the Mishnah, is the opposite of narration … The very fact that agadic literature tends to separate itself from the halakhic indicates a modification of consciousness. Such separation is less prominent in the Bible than in rabbinic thought.49 God’s transcendence is here understood as God’s relative absence and distance, whose presence is in large part taken up by the law. And this movement, Wyschogrod claims, laid the groundwork for the radical separateness and distance between man and God that was to come: [The gradual demarcation of the legal] prepares the ground for philosophic demythologization by creating the category of the legal detached from its narrative setting. Such a conception of law is an ideal medium of transition to the philosophic standpoint because it substitutes what is inherently systematic and abstract for the existentially particular and concrete of historical happening.50

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Hence the rabbinic claim that prophecy has ceased. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 85. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 85.

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It is then, in the rabbinic understanding of God’s transcendence, understood as His silence or His distance from us—​which vacuum is filled in by the proliferation of systematic and normative law (hence the equation of gevurah with Torah)—​that we can sense the beginnings of what was to become the more radical transcendence of God espoused by Maimonides. For Wychogrod, while the law did not completely sever itself from its historical-​existential roots in the direct encounter with God, in its drive for relative autonomy51 and systematicity, the Law became more self-​sufficient and a partial substitute for the continual and felt presence of the living God.52 Transcendence and Presence-​Immanence Wyschogrod claims that law and narrative start to come apart in the rabbinic mind. While Wyschogrod is no doubt correct that during the classical rabbinic period halakha and aggadah were not seen as a seamless whole, he may have overstated his case. An important example of this interweaving of law and narrative, that is, of normative commands and theology, is highlighted by the halakhic and aggadic material organized under the biblical verse in which man is depicted as being created in the image of God. As Yair Lorberbaum notes in his exhaustive study,53 the tannaim, for the most part,54 believed that being created in the image of God meant that the prototype (God) is actually present in its image or likeness.55 God is present in some real sense in human beings, who are an extension of God on earth. And Lorberbaum details how the aggadic-​theological narratives of being created in God’s image were reflected in halakhic-​legal norms.56 So despite what has been said above regarding 5 1 52

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Hence the rabbinic phrase “It is not in the Heavens.” We should not confuse this claim with Gershom Scholem’s assertion of a radical disconnect between the law and the existential encounter with God. Scholem goes much too far, as Wychogrod makes clear. Nevertheless, a shift between the biblical awareness with its organic mixing of law and narrative and the rabbinic transmutation into an overwhelming focus on law is certainly detectable. See Yair Lorberbaum, In God’s Image:  Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). There are important exceptions, such as R. Eliezer of Hyrcanus and possibly Shammai. See Lorberbaum’s discussion. Lorberbaum, In God’s Image, 6. This recognition of the divine presence in human beings should not be seen as window-​ dressing for what is purely and reductively a normative-​ethical system of rules, as the thesis of the complete substitution of the law for the divine presence would entail. Rather, that those rules flow from a prior ontological commitment regarding the divine presence, is brought out nicely in the following Midrash, which contrasts the views of Hillel and Shammai (Avot de-​Rabbi Nathan):  “ ‘I am going to the bathhouse’… Is that a mitzvah? [Hillell] replied: Yes, so in order to cleanse the body. Know that this is so, for in order to

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the rabbis’ recognition of God’s transcendence, and of their partial substitution of divine presence with the law, all of this existed alongside a contrasting acknowledgment of the real divine presence and resemblance in human beings.57 The rabbis held onto a complicated set of beliefs regarding both the transcendence, and immanence of God, and unlike the philosophers, even as they stressed God’s transcendence, they never lost sight of His relationship to, and presence in, human beings. Conclusions What might it mean today to recapture the view that the rabbis held of God, of His remoteness, incomparable power in the pursuit of justice, sometimes baffling silence, yet  also of His resemblance to human beings and intimate concern with our welfare? In “Is God ‘Perfect Being’,” Yoram Hazony answers quite straightforwardly: that we ought to understand and talk about God by reclaiming the metaphorical language of the Bible.58 What does it mean to speak of God metaphorically? For Maimonides, the Torah speaks to the masses of men, women and children, in a language understandable to them. On this view, metaphors are for those unable to grasp what would otherwise be a more accurate philosophical-​conceptual expression. This is a degrading view of metaphor. As against this, there is a view of some strong metaphors as generative, as describing a state of affairs that cannot be re-​described in literal translation without significant cognitive loss. The “hand of God” does not mean the same thing as God’s power and justice. It is not just that an evocative and memorable stylistic phrase has been replaced with a more boring literal re-​description. “John is a wolf” can be re-​described in literal language without loss of meaning. The re-​description may not result in pleasant language, but understanding would not suffer. But with a few lasting metaphors, their re-​description would result in a loss of cognitive content. Maps show us the terrain of the world better, and differently than propositions about

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cleanse the statutes that stand in the royal plaza, the officer appointed to cleanse and polish them is given an annual salary, and furthermore is raised to the status of the nobility of the kingdom. How much more so we, who have been created in the divine image and likeness, for it says, ‘For in the image of God did He make man!’ ” Shammai would not say it this way, rather [he would say]: “Let us fulfill our obligations from this body.” The rabbis discuss the dwelling of the shekhinah in a quorum for praying, and upon those who study the law. See Yoram Hazony’s discussion of metaphor in chapter one of this volume.

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that terrain. Lasting metaphors can also show us how things are in ways that are not reducible to more literal propositions.59 God’s hand, and His finger, and His image, which we bear, testify to a reality and confrontation with God’s personhood that cannot be captured in more precise or conceptual language. As Charles Taylor wrote of the meaning of the symbol: The symbol, unlike allegory, provides the form of language in which something, otherwise beyond our reach, can become visible … [the symbol] can’t be separated from what it reveals, as an external sign can be separated from its referent. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible.60 To say that human beings are created in the image of God is to say that despite God’s remoteness and transcendence, recognized by the rabbis and made so prominent by the philosophers, human beings genuinely do bear the imprint of the divine, Who relates to us and responds to us from the far reaches of His remoteness. The language of the rabbis testifies and points to a reality that lies beyond us, but that we cannot do without. Bibliography Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Black, Max. “More about Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought, Edited by Andrew Ortony. 19–​41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Feldman, Louis H. “Torah and Secular Culture: Challenge and Response in the Hellenistic Period.” Tradition 23, no. 2 (1988): 26–​40. Fraenkel, Carlos. Philosophical Religions From Plato to Spinoza:  Reason, Religion and Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Halbertal, Moshe. Maimonides: Life and Thought, Translated by Joel Linsider. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Halbertal, Moshe and Avishai Margalit. Idolatry, Translated by Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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See Max Black, “More about Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19–​41. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 377.

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Hartman, David. Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1986. Hazony, Yoram. “Is God ‘Perfect Being’?” In The Question of God’s Perfection, Edited by Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018. Johnston, Mark. Saving God: Religion after Idolatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Levenson, Jon D. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 1987. Lorberbaum, Yair. In God’s Image:  Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self:  The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Urbach, Ephraim E. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, Translated by Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975. Williamson, Ronald. Jews in the Hellenistic World. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989. Winston, David. “Philo and Rabbinic Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by Adam Kamesar. 231–​254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Volume 1, 2nd revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Wyschogrod, Michael. The Body of Faith. New York: The Seabury Press, 1983.

pa rt 4 Divine Attributes

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Chapter 10

On How Not to “Sublime” God’s Perfection Randy Ramal Methodological Considerations In this essay, I  approach the question of God’s perfection as a philosopher of religion rather than a biblical scholar or a theologian who might operate from a particular religious perspective. I am chiefly indebted to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein for my philosophical orientation, and here I suggest certain ways of discussing the question of God’s perfection by utilizing his later approach to religious discourse. I also value the hermeneutical approach of Paul Ricoeur and employ the consonance between him and Wittgenstein on the relation between philosophy and religion to help further the discussion regarding God’s perfection. Wittgenstein does not discuss the question of God’s perfection, and in his early major work on logic and ethics, Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, he struggles with how to give religious and ethical discourse intelligible space in language.1 But in his later works, starting with a 1929 lecture on ethics, Wittgenstein comes to see that ethics and religion must be allowed to speak for themselves when philosophers investigate the meaning of ethical and religious concepts.2 To let the concept of God’s perfection speak for itself here means to allow the originary contexts in which it has its natural home have the first word on what this concept means. This should be possible, as I  demonstrate in this essay, when the originary use made of the concept of God’s perfection is understood in relation to the regulative role this concept plays in its users’ lives. Like Wittgenstein, Ricoeur argues that originary modes of religious discourse are the primary contexts from which any proper investigation of religious concepts ought to be initiated. He states his method of investigation as follows:  “The first task of any hermeneutic is to identify these originary modes of discourse through which the religious faith of a community comes

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-​Logic-​Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, introd. Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922). 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Occasions: 1912–​1951, eds. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 36–​44.

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to language.”3 Since some of the originary references to God’s perfection count as expressions of faith, it makes sense to seek its meaning in these contexts if one agrees with Ricoeur’s perspective. My task here is to explore the question of God’s perfection in the Hebrew Bible and, in accordance with Wittgenstein’s and Ricoeur’s methodologies, I treat the Hebrew Bible as the originary context for this question. There are important methodological differences between Wittgenstein and Ricoeur, but my aim here is constructive and I  focus on the positive contributions their methodologies provide for investigating the question of God’s perfection. Both philosophers are in agreement that any a priori analysis of religious discourse leads to distortions of its meaning if the analysis is not faithful to the original contexts where this discourse belongs. Ricoeur distinguishes first-​order discourse from second-​order discourse to make his point, describing religion as first-​order discourse that gets reinterpreted and reappropriated by the second-​order discourse of philosophy and theology.4 From his perspective, to say God “exists,” “is immutable,” or “[is] all-​powerful” is to offer theological reinterpretations of originary, faith-​based expressions pertaining to God’s nature—​ones that are “embedded in such modes of discourse as narratives, prophecies, legislative texts, proverbs, and wisdom sayings, hymns, prayers, and liturgical formulas.”5 Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy suggests a similar perspective to Ricoeur’s on the question of first-​and second-​order discourses, although Wittgenstein does not take the hermeneutical, second-​order task beyond its elucidatory function in the way Ricoeur does.6 Wittgenstein refers to philosophy as a “grammatical” activity in that it is the activity of analyzing and elucidating the “grammar”—​or use—​of ordinary, first-​order discourse.7 If theology goes beyond its typically confessional nature and elucidates references to God by situating these references in the religious contexts where they have application, then it could also function as a second-​order grammatical activity for Wittgenstein.8

3 Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 37. 4 Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 37–​40. 5 Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 37. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.  E. M.  Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), paras.109, 124. 7 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras.90, 121, 126. 8 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para.373.

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The language Wittgenstein uses to describe how second-​order, grammatical reflections distort first-​order expressions is conveyed, in part, in his critique of the tendency “to sublime the logic of our [originary, ordinary] language.”9 I discuss this tendency in detail below. Wittgenstein’s overall point is that, in discussions of first-​order, everyday topics, whether in ethics, religion, politics, or science, philosophers and theologians oftentimes “sublime” the meaning of certain concepts in these topics when they ignore the plurality of their meanings and treat one meaning as the essential or the only possible meaning. This is a negative form of subliming that imposes false unity on the concepts under consideration, and it leads to the further imposition of meaning on them that does not belong to their ordinary use. As I show below, Anselm of Canterbury commits this form of distortion in regards to God’s perfection. The task of arriving at the correct meaning of the idea of God’s perfection in the Hebrew Bible is not plain to view, however. In the following section, I discuss some of the textual-​etymological difficulties in arriving at the sense that the Hebrew references to the idea of perfection have. I argue that these difficulties should make philosophers and biblical scholars open to accepting the existence of more than one conception of divine perfection in the Hebrew Bible. Philosophy could help in this context by comparing and contrasting various ordinary notions of divine perfection, both within the Hebrew Bible and outside of it. Thus, after first explicating some of the contexts addressing divine perfection in the Hebrew Bible, I then discuss their status in relation to references to God’s perfection in the New Testament and in relation to the idea of divine perfection in Homer’s Odyssey. Next, I explicate Wittgenstein’s warning against subliming discourse and the implications thereof to the accounts of God’s perfection in Anselm. Finally, I offer concluding remarks about how to avoid subliming the idea of God’s perfection. Identifying References to “Perfection” in the Hebrew Bible Tamim in the Hebrew Bible Context Let me start by considering whether or not the Hebrew word tamim, usually translated as “perfect” when referring to God, could be taken as a basis for finding what God’s perfection amounts to in the Hebrew Bible. When used in reference to God, as in Psalms 18:31 and 19:8, it is to God’s perfect path (hael, tamim darkho) and perfect laws (torat yehvah temimah) that the term applies. 9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para.38.

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But the word tamim is also used in reference to human beings who are described as righteous and blameless.10 Thus, in Genesis 6:8–​9, Noah is said to be tamim and to have found grace in the eyes of God. The context is the story of the flood and God’s regret in having created a world in which human beings turned wicked and evil. The nrsv translates the word tamim here as “blameless,” giving it the ethical context described in the flood story. The same translation is used in Psalm 18:24–​25 where David describes himself as tamim in contrast to those who violate God’s laws of justice. This ethical context is missing in Genesis 17:1, where God reiterates the covenant with Abraham to multiply his descendants, but Abraham is called upon by God there to be tamim, also translated as “blameless.” Two points need to be stated here. First, the choice itself to translate tamim in the nrsv as “blameless” in reference to human beings, and as “perfect” in reference to God, cannot be the justification for affirming the distinction unless the rationale behind the different translations is convincing. If the rationale here is that we should hesitate about ascribing the same kind of temimut—​“perfection,” “completeness,” or “blamelessness”—​to both God and human beings because of a difference of kind, rather than degree, between these forms of perfection, then the hesitation makes sense considering how God is depicted in the Bible as a whole. This reason is logical and textual, however, not etymological, and it may help in alleviating the ambiguity suggested in the etymology. Textual references to God’s glory in the Psalms and the book of Job suggest, for example, that God’s power is different in kind, not degree, from human power. It is never mentioned that the heavens declare the glory of human beings there, not even those of Abraham, Noah, and David. The etymological obstacle could also be confronted by noticing that whereas the word tamim is used in reference to God’s just path and law in Psalms 18 and 19, rather than to God’s own being, it is in reference to people’s being and character that the word is typically used. This fact is problematic, however, because it suggests that it would be logically possible to separate one’s own being from one’s own actions, whether the subject is God or human beings. As I show in my discussion of Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence below, this separation is logically fallacious and Anselm’s endorsement of it makes his account of God’s perfection problematic.

10

All references to the Hebrew Bible in this essay, including the original Hebrew, are from Mechon Mamre’s A Hebrew-​English Bible. References to the New Testament and to the English translation of the entire Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version (nrsv). Both references are listed in the bibliography.

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More importantly, and this is my second point in regards to the Hebrew use of the word tamim, the distinction between the kind of temimut (“perfection”) that human beings possess and that which belongs to God does not settle the question about the sense in which God is said to be perfect. Certainly, the fact that the word tamim is used in dealing with issues of justice—​blamelessness versus wickedness—​suggests a moral context for God’s perfection, a fact that is emphasized in the New Testament, as I show next. But the full details are still missing even if we reject the separation of God’s being from God’s actions. For example, the important question of whether or not the Hebrew Bible God is considered the measure of perfection, or vice versa, is not settled with the distinction between human “perfection” and divine perfection. To tackle these issues, it helps to look at how the New Testament addresses the question of divine perfection since the latter is understood on the background of the Hebrew Bible. Teleios in the New Testament Context There are numerous references to the idea of perfection in the New Testament, and most of them use the Greek word teleios to express what is usually translated with the English word “perfect.” Teleios has something to do with ­completeness, as the Hebrew tamim does, and the nrsv translates it as both “complete” and “perfect,” depending on the context. Thus, when James advises that trials test one’s faith and produce endurance, the latter is said to turn people into “mature and complete” persons when it is allowed to have “its full effect” (Jas 1:3–​4). James explains this completeness to mean “lacking in nothing” (Jas 1:4). But, in a later chapter, James’s use of teleios gets translated as “perfect” and it is given in the context of his definition of the “perfect” person as one who never stumbles when speaking or teaching (Jas 3:2). Interestingly, James also states that all people stumble, which suggests that he does not think human beings could become perfect, complete, or lacking in nothing As with the appellation tamim, teleios is used in reference to both God and human beings, but without the hermeneutical restriction of translating it as “perfect” only in reference to God. Thus, James 1:17–​:25 applies it also to God: all generous acts of giving that bring people closer to perfection originate in God’s teleios gift (Jas 1:17) and in accordance with God’s teleios laws of liberty (Jas 1:25). As I mentioned, however, there is no gloss in James over the actual difference between attributing perfection to human beings and attributing it to God, and this disparity between God and humans is also emphasized in the epistle to the Hebrews, where the author denies that “perfection” is attainable through the Levitical priesthood (Heb 7:11).

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It is fair to say, overall, that the New Testament invites people to strive to be perfect like God without the expectation that this could happen. I think this is also how Jesus’ call to his followers in Matthew 5:48 ought to be read. After informing his disciples that he did not come to abolish the Law or Prophets but to fulfill them in Matthew 5:17, for example, Jesus proceeds to draw five theses that deal with socio-​ethical issues discussed in the Hebrew Bible: murder (5:21–​26), adultery (5:27–​30), divorce (5:31–​32), swearing an oath (5:33–​37), and the rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (5:38–​42). Jesus makes direct references to passages dealing with the law in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, and the religious context from which he operates shows that he is calling upon people not only to be morally impartial in their dealings with conflicts between themselves and their fellow human beings, but also, in contradistinction from the Hebrew Bible, to take the extra step of loving their enemies. This is where the radical call to perfection is invoked in Matthew 5. First, there is the famous call to turn the other cheek when an evil occurs to one in Matthew 5:38–​41. In direct reference to Leviticus 19:18, Jesus states: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I  say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matt 5:43–​45). Then, in 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” As Ricoeur rightly states, Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies unconditionally is a radical break with the traditional, horizontal model of justice, and it is an impossible commandment.11 Ricoeur means something positive by the latter and he describes the new model as a vertical model that “begins by breaking the rule of reciprocity and requiring the extraordinary,” which is to gift love without expecting anything in return.12 From this perspective, the perfection of God in the New Testament, or at least in Matthew 5, has something to do with unconditional love, and it treats God as the maximal measure of greatness in this regard rather than maximal greatness as the measure of God. This means that the God of the New Testament cannot be held accountable to a measure of perfection independent of God. Whether the contradistinction from mere justice in the Hebrew Bible suggests that God is not the maximal measure of perfection in the latter is not immediately clear, however. Theoretically, this is not a necessary outcome because it could turn out that the God of the New Testament is intended to be the maximal measure of greatness in love and the God of the Hebrew Bible 11 12

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 481. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 481–​82.

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is intended to be the maximal measure of greatness in justice. Clarity in this matter is possible when we ask whether human judgment of God is allowed in the Hebrew Bible. If the answer is “Yes,” then the Hebrew Bible God would be different from the New Testament God in regards to the independence of divine perfection from the relevant measure of perfection. On my reading of it, the book of Job does not allow human judgment of God. In addition to Job’s admittance at the end of the book that he had uttered judgment about God without understanding (Job 42:3), there is also the repeated emphasis in the book on God’s glory and mystery, as well as on God’s aesthetic and ethical power. These forms of emphasis demonstrate God’s independence of human judgment, something that is echoed in the Psalms. But this idea of independence does not get full corroboration in other books of the Hebrew Bible. In Ecclesiastes, for example, where the main theme is vanity and emptiness, the idea that justice entails rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked is challenged, and the book could be read as a critique of God’s perfect justice. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, of the book of Tobit—​e.g., when the story is read with a focus on the sub-​plot of what happens to Sarah. If so, God could then be seen as held accountable to an independent measure of perfection that was not allowed in Job and in the Psalms. Interestingly, this is the model one typically finds in Greek thought, as Plato’s Euthyphro and Homer’s Odyssey demonstrate. I turn to these two Greek contexts, with a focus on the latter, to get further clarity on the nature of God’s perfection in the Hebrew Bible. Divine Perfection in the Odyssey In the dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates asks a priest by the name of Euthyphro whether the holy, or the pious, is holy because the gods say it is so or whether the gods say it is so because it is holy and pious independently of them. At first, Euthyphro makes holiness dependent on the will of the gods but, gradually, Socrates brings him to agree that there is objectivity in the matter so that the gods say it is holy because it is so.13 My point here is that the gods in Euthyphro are not the measure of holiness or perfection but vice versa. A  similar

13

Plato, “Euthyphro,” in Five Dialogues:  Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, 2nd ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 1–​20.

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suggestion is found in the Odyssey when Odysseus is offered divine immortality by Calypso if he agrees to stay with her on the island of Ogygia.14 Calypso does not describe the immortal life as one of perfection but, as Martha Nussbaum rightly suggests, her offer of immortality presupposes that transcending the conditions that make human life brief, chancy, and miserable leads into anthropomorphic perfection, a state of existence where life without toil and physical pain is gained.15 On this literary model, the gods are perfect because they live forever without toil—​i.e., not because the idea of immortality depends on the sense that the concept of a “perfect god” has, but because this concept depends for its sense on an anthropomorphic idea of immortality. Also, as with some parts of the Hebrew Bible, the gods are held to judgment on this account. For example, Athena condemns Calypso for forcing Odysseus to stay on Ogygia and asks Zeus to command her to let him go.16 When the messenger Argeophontes informs Calypso of Zeus’s command, she accuses the gods not only of being cruel and envious, but also of holding a grudge when things go against their way.17 The similarity between the Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible exists only at the level where God is subjected to an independent judgment, however, and the best philosophy can do here is analyze the available grammars of “perfection” in order to be faithful to the originary context of the Hebrew Bible. We can therefore say that the idea of perfection in Job and the Psalms makes God the measure of maximal perfection whereas other references suggest that God is held accountable in relation to an independent measure of perfection. In Job and the Psalms, the perfection of God has to do with more than justice since the divine mystery acknowledged in these contexts encompasses wisdom, power, and existential wonder. In Ecclesiastes and other texts, including Tobit, God’s perfection is questioned and it has to do with justice, as the New Testament also seems to emphasize. As I show next, making any one conception of perfection the only real perfection suitable of God, whether it is Job’s idea of perfection or that of the author of Ecclesiastes, sublimes that conception at the expense of other meaningful conceptions. On a personal level, this pick and choose policy might be inevitable, but on a philosophical level, this policy cannot be admissible since philosophy has to serve all meaningful discourse. 14 15 16 17

Homer, The Odyssey, trans. R. L. Eickhoff (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001), Book v, Verses 205–​14. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 365–​71. Homer, The Odyssey, Book v, Verses 14–​15. Homer, The Odyssey, Book v, Verses 116–​20.

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Wittgenstein and the Question of Subliming God’s Perfection Wittgenstein addresses the problem of subliming the meaning of words in everyday discourse in the Philosophical Investigations. He explains that if we understand the relation between language and the world along the lines of a “naming” relationship, where every word in the languages we speak stands as a “name” for an object in the world—​a label attached to a thing—​then we end up subliming the naming role as the essential role that language as such plays, which is confused.18 We can certainly point to a person or an object and describe them by using their names—​e.g., “This is Wittgenstein” or “That is a sycamore tree.” But not every word in our languages is a name, and language as such is not limited to one function, which is the naming function or the describing function. Wittgenstein’s attack on the naming view, which he associates to a certain degree with a picture of language that Augustine presents in the opening paragraphs of the Confessions, is part of a larger attack on several proposed ideas about the relation between language and the world. Augustine presents his readers with an essentialist picture of language where “individual words in language name objects—​[and where] sentences are combinations of such names,” Wittgenstein states.19 “In this picture of language,” Wittgenstein adds, “we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”20 But this view, along with other views that focus on a particular function held by some of its individual words, misconceives not only the diversity of functions that certain words have but also the nature of language as such. Language is akin to a toolbox, Wittgenstein states, where the functions of words in it are as diverse as the functions of the tools in the toolbox.21 The unity that the various uses of words have cannot be limited to the role that only certain words play in it, whether “naming,” “describing,” reporting about objects and events in the world, or forming hypotheses and speculating about the ultimate nature of the universe, among other things.22 These functions constitute various language-​uses—​“language-​games”—​that unite in “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and crisscrossing:  sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”23 But, from this perspective, the 18 19 20 21 22 23

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras.26–​28, 31–​38. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.23. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.66.

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unity of language is akin to the unity one finds in a family, where members of the family have “various resemblances” and not one essential thing that all of them must have in common—​e.g., eye color, gait, temperament, etc.24 In regards to its link with the world, language as such does not simply name objects in the world and it is not composed of a combination of names that stand for objects. As language speakers, we make descriptions of objects and events, or name them, in language, and we must not confuse the part here—​ i.e., the particular function—​for the whole. When we do so, Wittgenstein remarks, it is as if we baptized one function of language as its sublime essence, and, as already stated, this distorts not only the nature of language but also the specific meaning baptized.25 Thus, we can begin to teach someone what the king in chess is and what a circle is by pointing to them and saying “This is the king” and “That is a circle,” but how are we to account for the demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that” in these sentences? Could they count as names in the mentioned discursive contexts?26 Wittgenstein’s point is that no one in real life points to something and says “This is called ‘this’ ” or “That is called ‘this’ ” in the way one might do when referring to the king of chess or to a circle. To think otherwise is to turn language into an idle thing, to make it “go on holiday,” as he puts it.27 To avoid subliming the logic of our various discourses, we need to drop the essentialist perspective of treating all words as names and to accept the pluralism of linguistic use: “we call very different things ‘names’; the word ‘name’ is used to characterize many different kinds of use of a word, related to one another in many different ways;—​but the kind of use that ‘this’ has is not among them.”28 As we have seen, this pluralistic logic is also applicable to the concept of God’s perfection. There is simply more than one legitimate conception of divine perfection in the Hebrew Bible, and if we want to avoid subliming the logic of God’s perfection we need to let all legitimate conceptions speak for themselves while looking for the familial unity they have. The essentialist temptation to reject grammatical pluralism is strong, however, whether in regards to divine perfection or other concepts, and Wittgenstein shows that this temptation is rooted in not realizing the correct technique for analyzing the meanings of concepts. In his “Lectures on Religious Belief,” for example, Wittgenstein demonstrates how the wrong technique is 24 25 26 27 28

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.67. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.38. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras.31, 34. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.38. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parag.38.

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used when philosophers and other people treat religious “pictures” of God as if they were pictures of human beings and physical objects. “The word [God] is used like a word representing a person. God sees, rewards, etc.,” although if the question arises as to the existence of God the word “plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of.”29 For one thing, the existence of God is framed in the context of belief, Wittgenstein states, where one is judged if one claims not to believe but not if what is not believed is the existence of a certain person or physical object.30 The idea of judging people badly for not believing in God is obviously a contingent matter, depending on the religio-​cultural context in which one operates, but the point stands that confusion exists when people treat a religious matter as if it were an empirical issue. Think of how confused it would be to treat the idea of “the creator,” “maker” of heaven and earth, as if it were an idea of a different kind of maker, such as a carpenter or a builder or a steel manufacturer. Wittgenstein argues that in the case of human beings, or tropical plants, one could point to the human beings and plants pictured without the pictures themselves, but this is not the case with pictures of God because the latter are religious and spiritual pictures, not factual.31 “The word ‘God’ is amongst the earliest learnt—​pictures and catechisms, etc.,” Wittgenstein states, “[b]‌ut not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown [that which the picture pictured].”32 From this perspective, to treat Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” as if were a pictorial representation of God is to presuppose its similarity with pictures of human beings, which is absurd, even if the presupposition is undertaken unwittingly. “If we ever saw this [painting], we certainly wouldn’t think this is the Deity,” Wittgenstein states; “The picture has to be used in an entirely different way if we are to call the man in that queer blanket ‘God’, and so on. You could imagine that religion was taught by means of these pictures.”33 It should be clear that what Wittgenstein means by religious pictures here is something akin to what Ricoeur means by first-​order religious discourse—​ religious stories and parables, psalms, prophecies, and, for Wittgenstein, even religious paintings when the latter are properly understood.34 To treat

29 30 31 32 33 34

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley, CA: University of Los Angeles Press, 1972), 59. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 59. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 59, 63. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 59. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 63. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 59–​63.

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“picturing” as meaning only pictorial representation of something—​in the way an actual photograph represents something—​is to essentialize and sublime the use of “picturing” without regard to context. This is what it means for a picture to hold us captive, Wittgenstein states in a different context, and the solution he proposes is to ask oneself: “is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-​game which is its original home?”35 To avoid subliming the grammar of religious concepts, including the concept of God’s perfection, one needs to look at the role they play in people’s lives. This role is typically regulative, in the sense that when religious pictures are applied in people’s lives we find these people expressing themselves as being guided by these pictures—​e.g., when they speak of being rewarded, punished, loved, or shown mercy by God; or when they are willing to forgo pleasures and feel remorse about having committed an evil of some sort, fighting against temptations, etc.36 It is these kinds of reactions that make the latter religious, spiritual, moral, or otherwise. Wittgenstein mentions how pictures of suffering after death or the last judgment could be associated with the idea of ethical responsibility in this life because of how people apply these pictures—​ e.g., “A man would fight for his life not to be dragged into the fire. No induction. Terror.”37 Similarly, one could see how Wittgenstein might link the picture of God’s perfection with ideas of owing one’s life to God or with a sense of gratitude for one’s existence. “That is, as it were, part of the substance of the belief,” as Wittgenstein puts it in the context of believing in the last judgment.38 There are techniques to using different religious pictures, and the technique of using the picture of God’s perfection has to be put in its originary context if we are to avoid subliming its use. But what of sophisticated, grammatical attempts at picturing God’s perfection, such as Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence? Although one finds this argument in a more rudimentary form in previous writings, such as in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana or Al-​Farabi’s Iḥṣā’ al-​’Ulūm (The Enumeration of the Sciences), it is Anselm’s detailed version of it that became influential. I suggested above that Anselm sublimes the idea of God’s perfection, and I show why in the next section.39

35 36 37 38 39

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras.115–​16. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 53–​56. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 56, 70. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 56. Majid Fakhry, “The Ontological Argument in the Arabic Tradition: The Case of al-​Fārābi,” Studia Islamica 64 (1986): 6–​7, 11.

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Subliming God’s “Perfection”: Anselm’s Failure to Heed the Fool’s Perspective Anselm’s motive for pursuing the so-​called ontological argument for the existence of God is couched in his Credo ut intelligam or “I believe in order that I understand.”40 He seeks to theologize in second-​order language what he believes on a first-​order level, and he does not think a non-​believer, such as “the fool” in Psalm 14, can understand the true meaning of God’s existence. Without faith, Anselm states, God’s existence remains an idea in the understanding, not a perfect actuality consistent with a being who, by definition, is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.41 Yet faith requires the kind of understanding suggested by God’s definition, especially where God’s existence is seen as something necessary. On the surface, the emphasis Anselm puts on the biblical context should make it doubtful that he would either impose an externalist essentialist reading upon the biblical idea of God’s perfection, which is one way in which subliming that idea could occur, or transpose the biblical concept of God out of its naturally scriptural home into a different context, which is another way of subliming God’s perfection. After all, when arguing for God’s existence, Anselm refers to God as “the Creator,” a being who is “compassionate,” “just, truthful, blessed, and whatever is better to be than not to be.”42 He also addresses God directly, albeit somewhat explanatorily—​“thou art compassionate, because thou art supremely good”—​and further describes God as “a supreme good, requiring nothing else” for self-​existing, “the all-​just and supremely just God” who provides “great consolation to the wretched” and spares the wicked.43 But in connecting God’s existence with perfection, Anselm creates two kinds of gap between the God of religion he seeks to understand and the God of perfection he hypothesizes to exist. The first gap pertains to the relevance of his definition of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived to the fool’s thought that there is no God. As has been repeatedly observed, Anselm argues that a being who exemplifies the perfection suggested in his definition is the greatest only if that being exists in actuality and not merely as an idea in the understanding. If God’s existence is limited to the latter, then God’s existence is not the greatest because to exist in actuality is greater than to exist only in the understanding. 40 41 42 43

Anselm, Basic Writings, 2nd ed., trans. S. N. Deane, introd. Charles Hartshorne (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962), 48–​49. Anselm, Basic Writings, 53. Anselm, Basic Writings, 51–​52, 57. Anselm, Basic Writings, 61, 47, 60, 55, 59.

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An elaboration on this point from Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne suggests that necessary existence, not merely sheer existence, is required for Anselm’s God in order for his argument to be valid, and they argue that Anselm offers an argument for God’s necessary existence in Proslogion 3.44 As Malcolm puts it, sheer existence suggests contingency and temporal duration in God, rather than eternity, but only an eternal, necessary being could be perfect.45 Hartshorne’s account of God’s necessary existence is too elaborate to unpack here, but he and Malcolm are in agreement that necessary existence lifts God into the realm of perfection and prevents seeing God as a mere object among objects or a contingent being that comes to exist and passes away like other contingent beings. Malcolm also claims that Anselm’s emphasis on God’s necessary existence will lead all “fools” to cease saying in their hearts that there is no God although they might remain religiously untouched by the argument. But the question is whether Anselm’s definition of God has anything to do with the fool saying in his heart that there is no God. In Psalm 14, we are introduced to someone who looks around to make sense of the language of believing in God’s existence. If the latter entails doing good and following God’s path of justice, something that is suggested throughout the Psalms, then the fool is baffled: there was simply “none who does good, no, not one” (Ps 14:1–​3). The fool’s point, I take it, is that the reality of God’s existence is absent from a world where that existence is professed only on a verbal level. The fool wants to see pragmatic existence for God in order for anyone to be able to say that God exists, and no argument about God’s perfection could change that. If we take expressions of divine existence and perfection as statements of faith, and if the latter are the originary contexts in which God’s perfection ought to be investigated, then I think the fool has done a better job than Anselm in locating where the grammar of “God” belongs. Put differently, the fool could be suggesting that it does not make sense to speak of a God who is perfect independently of how the perfection is lived in religious people’s lives. Yet this is not the context in which Anselm operates. Instead, Anselm provides an intellectualized version of God’s perfection that is divorced from the pragmatic context where that God has a reality. The second gap that Anselm creates between the biblical God and his philosophical God pertains to the distinction he makes between God’s being and the attributes ascribed to God in the Bible. This gap comes into existence when 44 45

Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 45–​ 46; Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962), 26. Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” 46.

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Anselm, beginning in Proslogion 6, takes a sharper grammatical turn in his language and commences to describe God as a “sensible, omnipotent, compassionate, passionless” being.46 God’s sensibility is linked by Anselm with the ability to “cognise all things in the highest degree,”47 and God’s omnipotence is defined as the ability to do what is logically consistent with God’s nature.48 In these two cases, the sheer use of grammatical language is not problematic because it does not impose any new meaning on God’s nature not found in the Bible. But the situation changes when Anselm turns to discuss God’s compassionate nature. In discussing the potential inconsistency in claiming that God is both compassionate and passionless, for example, Anselm argues that God is compassionate in terms of our experience of God but passionless, or not compassionate, in terms of God’s own being.49 It might be that Anselm wants to avoid saying that God experiences the wretchedness that God beholds in the world and that beholding it is sufficient to make people experience it: “Truly, thou art so [i.e., compassionate] in terms of our experience, but thou art not so in terms of thine own. For, when thou beholds us in our wretchedness, we experience the effect of compassion, but thou dost not experience the feeling.”50 But Anselm is clear that what is experienced of God does not necessarily correspond to God’s experience in God’s own being. This means that people’s experience of God, including the experience of God as a perfect being, does not represent God’s own being. What Anselm’s account of God seems to presuppose is that God is a divine “person” of some sort who has certain religious attributes that, somehow, define God but without really defining God. Yes, God is passionless in God’s own being for Anselm—​which, as a reminder, is a necessary attribute not found in the Bible—​but God’s own being is independent of all the familiar attributes experienced by humans—​e.g., love, goodness, judgement, wisdom, beauty, power, compassion, and hiddenness, among other attributes. The logical conclusion to draw from this is that God’s metaphysical existence, or God’s own being/​self, is presupposed to exist necessarily and independently of these attributes. If Anselm wants only to say that God’s perfection is merely a grammatical conceptualization of what is experienced of God’s nature (by humans), how would the grammaticalized perfection apply to God’s own being? 46 47 48 49 50

Anselm, Basic Writings, 56. Anselm, Basic Writings, 57. Anselm, Basic Writings, 58–​59. Anselm, Basic Writings, 59–​60. Anselm, Basic Writings, 59.

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The problem here is not only the anthropomorphic picture one creates of God and which makes God akin to human beings on a logical level—​with the only difference that God’s attributes are necessary—​but also the logical suggestion that it makes sense to speak of a divine substance without any of the familiar, religious attributes we associate with God. As D. Z. Phillips rightly argues, “we do not presuppose God’s necessary existence in order to talk of his love and judgment. Rather, it is such talk which gives sense to talk of God’s necessary existence.”51 On this account, “God’s reality is synonymous with his divinity; God is divinely real.”52 My concern could be further elucidated with some help from Rush Rhees who adroitly states, in a different context, the following: Winston Churchill may be Prime Minister and also a company director, but I  might come to know him without knowing this. But I  could not know God without knowing that he was the Creator and Father of all things. That would be like saying that I might come to know Churchill without knowing that he had a face, hands, body, voice or any of the attributes of a human being.53 The point is not merely epistemic, about how we come to know God, but also about the logic of God’s ontology. In the same way that it does not make sense to speak of a “human being” without knowing what characteristic features define human beings, it also does not make sense to speak of God’s being as something independent of God’s religious attributes. Anselm’s logical separation between them is problematic and distorts not only the familiar, biblical descriptions of God but also his own personal language about God. This means that Anselm sublimes God’s existence and perfection by transposing the originary references to God’s greatness, or perfection, into a philosophical context that distorts their meanings. His belief in God does not get translated into a good account of God’s reality. It is true that the Hebrew Bible presents us with a God who is personal in some contexts—​e.g., as Elohim or El-​Shaddai in Genesis, the kind of being who creates the world and holds it in judgment—​but who is also a kind/​type of reality in other contexts, namely as Yihvah/​Yahweh. The latter is clear from the famous ahyeh asher ahyeh—​or “I am that I am”—​response that God gives to 51 52 53

D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 17. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion, 17. Rush Rhees, “Religion and Language,” in Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48.

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Moses after the latter asks for the name he should give to the Hebrews about which God sent him to free them from Egypt’s slavery (Exod 3:14). This reference suggests that God is not a being among other beings who happened to be more powerful than they are—​gods or humans—​but is, rather, being itself, a reality that is experienced on a personal level as Elohim or El-​Shaddai. Yet the two accounts cannot be separated into an either-​or case because, in their lives, people who worshipped Elohim also worshipped Yahweh as the same God. Put differently, the picture of Yahweh that Moses encounters in Exodus 3 is not of a being whose essence is logically independent from the personal being that guides him in his interaction with the Israelites and the Pharaoh in Egypt, and who gives him the Ten Commandments later. It is, rather, the God who also identifies the divine reality as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exod 3:15). No doubt, my reading of Anselm will be contested by those who argue that his analysis of God is faithful to the Judeo-​Christian tradition. For example, the Perfect Being theologian Katherin Rogers argues that Anselm “is cognizant of the fact that some of what he intends to say about God may conflict with someone’s prima facie reading of the Bible,” and she recognizes that some have read his picture of God as Neoplatonic rather than biblical.54 She claims, however, that the Bible needs to be interpreted on a deeper level than allowed by its first-​order discourse.55 When this is done, Rogers states in a different context, Anselm’s God will be seen as the standard of perfection, which demonstrates that God is compatible with Jesus’ picture of God as the standard of perfection.56 I think the etymological-​textual-​comparative analysis I provided, coupled with the reasons for accepting the methodological considerations from Wittgenstein and Ricoeur, prove that an in-​depth interpretation of the idea of God’s perfection demonstrates Anselm’s philosophical unfaithfulness to the biblical tradition. Claiming that Anselm’s God is the standard of perfection is helpful but it is not a sufficient condition to make his God the God worshipped in the biblical tradition as such, not even of the New Testament tradition. Not only that the perfection Jesus associates with God is one of radical love rather than mere justice or other metaphysical attributes, as we have seen, but Rogers herself thinks that unless we include all of God’s necessary attributes in affirming 54 5 5 56

Katherin Rogers, “Anselm’s Perfect God,” in Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, eds. Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2013), 133. Rogers, “Anselm’s Perfect God,” 133–​34; also n. 12. Katherin Rogers, “Anselm on Praising a Necessarily Perfect Being,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34, no. 1 (1993): 42.

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the reality of God—​e.g., omniscience, omnipotence, impassability, simplicity, and aseity—​we cannot say that God is the only being worthy of worship.57 Neither Jesus’s idea of perfection nor the ideas of perfection suggested in the books of Job, Tobit, or Ecclesiastes require these metaphysical attributes. Concluding Remarks I began my essay by giving favorable attention to the methodological approaches that Wittgenstein and Ricoeur advocate in their investigations of religious concepts. I suggested that to avoid subliming the idea of God’s perfection, philosophers of religion need to let the context where this idea has its originary home have the first word on what God’s perfection means. My investigation showed that there is more than one concept of divine perfection in the Hebrew Bible, a fact that came to light by comparing the Hebrew Bible context for divine perfection with the New Testament and the Odyssey contexts, on the one hand, and by considering the etymological roots for this question in the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand. Whereas the Greek context makes the idea of divine perfection dependent for its sense on an independent measure of perfection that embodies physical immortality without toil, I  argued, the New Testament reverses this dependence to make perfection dependent for its sense on the idea of divine love. I suggested that the Hebrew Bible embodies both notions of dependence and that whereas the idea of justice is the main context for God’s perfection, there is also the association with wonder, glory, and divine mystery. In showing the differences between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible notions of divine perfection, I did not mean to suggest that the Hebrew Bible idea of justice cannot incorporate ideas of divine love, however. As I mentioned, my focus here is methodological and the relation between love and justice requires an in-​depth analysis beyond the scope of this essay. To demonstrate how philosophy sublimes the discourse of divine perfection, I focused here on Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence. As a believer, I argued, his language is consistent with the biblical notions of divine perfection, but he departs from this faithfulness to the biblical context when he attempts to conceptualize God’s existence with an a priori method of argumentation. He not only creates an unnecessary gap between God’s being 57

Katherin Rogers and William Hasker, “Anselm and the Classical Idea of God: A Debate,” in Key Thinkers in the Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, ed. Jeffrey J. Jordan (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 9, 17.

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and the God experienced in the biblical traditions, ignoring thus the diverse ways in which God’s perfection is expressed in the latter, but also fails to heed the fool’s pragmatic approach to religious discourse. I argued that the latter is consistent with the approach introduced by Wittgenstein, where religious pictures of God, including the picture of God’s perfection, regulate people’s lives in many detectable and analyzable ways. How, then, to avoid subliming the idea of God’s perfection in the Hebrew Bible? If we are to give the originary context for God’s perfection the first word on the subject matter, then the etymological ambiguities should be seen as an opportunity to locate multiple notions of divine perfection instead of adopting a pick and choose policy that gives preferential semantic appropriation of one meaning of perfection over others. This could lead to not imposing one meaning of perfection over others, and to look at the regulative role that the religious grammar of God’s perfection plays in people’s lives in order to arrive at the truth in this matter. Bibliography Anselm. Basic Writings, 2nd edition, Translated by S. N. Deane. Introduced by Charles Hartshorne. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962. Bible. A Hebrew-​English Bible. http://​www.mechon-​mamre.org/​p/​pt/​pt0.htm. Last accessed October 31, 2017. Fakhry, Majid. “The Ontological Argument in the Arabic Tradition:  The Case of al-​ Fārābi.” Studia Islamica 64 (1986): 5–​17. Hartshorne, Charles. The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962. Homer. The Odyssey, Translated and edited by R. L. Eickhoff. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001. Malcolm, Norman. “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments.” Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 41–​62. nrsv. The Harper Collins Study Bible. New Revised Standard Version, Edited by W. A. Meeks, et al. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Phillips, Dewy Z. Wittgenstein and Religion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Plato. “Euthyphro.” In Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, 2nd edition, Translated by G. M. A. Grube, Revised by John M. Cooper. 1–​20. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000. Rhees, Rush. “Religion and Language.” In Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, Edited by D. Z. Phillips. 39–​49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, Edited by Mark I. Wallace, Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rogers, Katherin. “Anselm on Praising a Necessarily Perfect Being.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34, no. 1 (1993): 41–​52. Rogers, Katherin. “Anselm’s Perfect God.” In Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Edited by Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher. 133–​40. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2013. Rogers, Katherin and William Hasker. “Anselm and the Classical Idea of God: A Debate.” In Key Thinkers in the Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, Edited by Jeffrey J. Jordan. 7–​21. New York: Continuum, 2010. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “A Lecture on Ethics.” In Philosophical Occasions: 1912–​1951, Edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. 36–​44. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, Edited by Cyril Barrett. Berkeley, CA:  University of Los Angeles Press, 1972. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1958. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, Translated by C. K. Ogden, Introduced by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.

Chapter 11

Unifying the Name of God Joshua I. Weinstein The Jewish teaching about God is, on its face, strikingly straightforward. As repeated throughout liturgy—​one need only think of the Friday night qidush—​ God created heaven and earth and liberated Israel from Egypt. Numerous other aspects of Jewish teaching can readily be shown to follow from these. Since God is the creator of everything, he is radically different from any of the created things so that no likeness of him can be made in an image, carven, molten or otherwise. Since Israel owes God not only her freedom, but also her law and her land, it is almost trivial to declare God her king. We can then combine creator and king to yield, in turn, God as ruler of the world. This sort of coherence, in which brief declarations yield rich religious meaning, would seem to be the very fulfillment of the obvious sense of monotheism, that God is one.1 Such a rosy picture of straightforward clarity and unity is, unfortunately, not only simplistic but actually deceptive. It is hard to know, for example, where Lord Shadai, the actual God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, could fit into such a picture (e.g., Gen 17:1, 28:3, 35:11). Even worse, there seems little room here for God as the dark-​haired lover of the Song of Songs, nor consequently for his role as the jealous, vengeful and forgiving husband known to Hosea and Ezekiel. Rabbinic concepts such as the Blessed Holy One similarly appear homeless on such an account. The ruler of the world can be praised and thanked, but to unpack the deep dynamics of sin and repentance, of exile and deliverance requires having more to say about God—​more theology in the literal sense—​ than emerges from the serenity of Shabbat. An overly-​simplistic Jewish theology would also miss the way God is not equally known in the same way at all times. The sense in which God’s self-​ presentation changes is already explicit in the Biblical text itself, when he says to Moses: “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as Lord Shadai but by my 1 The qidush thus integrates the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of the fourth commandment. Emphasis on God as creator and as redeemer from Egypt is also prominent in Psalms (e.g., Pss 135 and 136). Simple as it is, even this view lacks a clear principle of unity and generates pressure to abandon one or the other. Deism, for example, can hold on to the notion of divine creation but faces difficulties in accounting for God’s role in historical events such as the Exodus.

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name Yhwh I did not make myself known to them” (Exod 6:3). This transition is just the beginning. 1 Samuel adds God’s appearance as Hordes—​commonly translated “hosts” (tzevaot), on which more below—​while the discourse of the Talmudic Sages introduces not just a single new name, but a whole new vocabulary for speaking of God: the Blessed Holy One (haqadosh barukh hu), the Location (hamaqom), Heaven (shamayim), etc. Similar novelties arise in  the medieval period, such as Maimonides’ First Existent (matsui rishon) and the  Kabbalah’s Lesser, or Shorter Face (ze’ir anpin) among many others, while the twentieth century brought both Lord of Israel’s Battalions (el ma’rakhot yisrael) and even, in some uses, Auschwitz, the God of silence and evil unopposed—​as in “From Auschwitz we have learned that …” This variety, of course, must still be understood in the context of Biblical monotheism. Declarations like “He is the god in the sky above and on the land below, there is no other” (Deut 4:39), and “I am first, I am last and there is no god other than me” (Isa 44:6) emphasize God’s uniqueness, aloneness. There are no other gods. It seems natural, then, to take the various divine names and manifestations as aspects or attributes of the single, unique God. But if this is not to make “God” a generic catch-​all label for “divinity in general,” we need to be able to see God as not merely unique but also as unified. Our goal then must be to explain how, together with the unity of monotheism, we can actually experience God in the many different ways that we do. An account of God’s unity that remains true to the genuine variety of religious experiences can be called, in a slogan, an empirical monotheism. This essay will present and defend a traditional rabbinic approach to empirical monotheism. First, we examine some popular but flawed approaches, based largely on the appearance/‌​‌reality distinction: that God “really” is only one, while our experience of divine multiplicity is merely apparent. A genuinely empirical monotheism, we argue, requires a better account of the relation between the appearances and the reality. We then turn to the exposition of different principles of unity, various ways of integrating the many and one, and the evaluation of their advantages and disadvantages. We focus in particular on an approach common in the literature of the Talmudic Sages, the distinction between din and rachamim as divine principles—​roughly, justice and kindness or harshness and goodness. Tension between these two, we argue, emerges as essential in accounting for phenomena prominent in Biblical narratives and in ongoing religious life: wrong-​doing, punishment and repentance, both individual and collective. Focusing on the narrative of the Golden Calf, we present a “triangle argument” that shows how, when God relates simultaneously to more than one moral agent, the opacity of thoughts and opinions leads to the need for distinguishing two divine principles of action. The moral struggle between

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these principles, we claim, is the most robust empirical monotheism, other views being either insufficiently empirical or insufficiently unified. Nevertheless, this view is imperfect in a specific sense: it takes the complete unity of God’s name as a not-​yet-​completed fact, one which can only be achieved by a transformation of the human world in some not-​yet-​actual future. Two Overly-​Easy “Solutions” Before examining some candidates for such an empirical monotheism—​as well as some of the deeper issues to which they lead—​it is worth noting the problems with two relatively common approaches. According to one possible account, all divine manifestations are exactly that: manifestations of the divine, and there is nothing more that can or need be said. On this view “the divine” functions as a sort of catch-​all bin into which, once we are confident that we are dealing with something divine, all such phenomena can safely be placed. This view might be called an “advanced” or “sophisticated” polytheism, perhaps one that has re-​understood itself in the light of criticisms with a monistic tendency. Declaring that all the many gods are, in fact, manifestations of the one, undifferentiated “divine,” generates a version of traditional polytheism that is safe from the sort of critiques that may go back to before Akhenaton.2 This position is actually rather common, and versions of it would likely have been welcome in Ancient Egypt, Greece and India—​indeed, it may still be a welcome view in (parts of) India.3 2 New Kingdom Egypt developed various expressions of the relation between the one and the many in the divine realm. Even before Akhenaton’s radical monotheism, the period of Amenophis iii saw the rise of what Assmann has called the “New Solar Theology,” while after Amarna, Ramesside theology developed the notion of a single, hidden god prior—​ temporally or ontologically—​to the “millions” of our empirical experience. For various approaches to these issues, see Jan Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 102–​139; Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1997), 168–​208; The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 10–​12, 189–​244; Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 170–​196; Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 87–​ 94, 121–​126. 3 The classical loci for this view in Ancient India are Ṛgveda 1.164.46 (“They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, Agni, and he is heavenly nobly-​winged Garutmān./​To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan.”) and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.1, in which Yājñavalkya is pressed to admit that the 3,306 gods are really 33, 6, 3, 2, one-​and-​a-​half, or, indeed, one. The many gods, in this account, are said to be “powers” or “expressions” (mahiman, 3.9.2) of the fewer. On the contemporary, popular level: “Thus side by side with Śiva

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For all its gracefulness, this account has, from a Jewish point of view, a decisive drawback. The Biblical injunctions against “other” gods—​whether these “gods” are to be understood as mere names that do not exist in any way, or as real but not to be worshiped, or as belonging to other nations but not to Israel—​require some room for the distinction between the sanctioned divinity of God and the prohibited divinity of “gods.”4 The sophisticated pagan position has no room for any such distinctions, regardless of their origin, content, or function. All gods (actual) are founded on or expressions of the divine (singular)—​pure empiricism as well as pure monotheism, it would seem. On such a view, however, the principle that unifies the category of the divine will lack discriminating content, allowing no consistent way to delineate the boundary between what is “really a god” and what is “a spurious manifestation which we could mistake for divinity.” An adherent of this sort of position might view this openness as a virtue of the position under consideration rather than a criticism. But some capacity to distinguish among purported “divinities” seems necessary for anything that resembles Judaism.5 Another, rather popular, position that reconciles religious empiricism with divine unity distinguishes between God as he really is “in himself” and God “as he appears to us.” God “in himself” is one, pure and simple; our sense that we experience him in many different ways is not strictly real, but rather only apparent and phenomenal, relative to us as subjective observers. Unity and empiricism thus occupy different levels, with unity strictly prior. The Kantian locutions of “phenomenal experience” as opposed to considering a “thing in itself” are parallel to R’ Haim of Volozhin’s distinction between God as viewed “from our side” and “from his side,” a distinction ultimately rooted in the Talmudic recognition that “Many have sought to expound the Divine Chariot and Viṣṇu and Devī one can see Jesus and Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha and Jīna Mahāvīra, Mahātmā Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others. But if questioned about the many gods, even illiterate villagers answered: bhagavān ek hai—​the Lord is One. They may not be able to figure out in theological terms how the many gods and the one god hang together and they may not be sure about the hierarchy obtaining among the many manifestations, but they know that ultimately there is only One and that the many figures somehow merge into the One.” (K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed., [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007], 116–​117). 4 Assmann refers to the distinction between true and false in religion as the “Mosaic distinction,” Moses the Egyptian, 1–​6. 5 The kind of henotheism evidenced in certain Vedic passages does not seem like a tenable Jewish position. This view allows “the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while one is talking to him.” Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11. But the Biblical God refuses to the Jew this kind of occasionalism, demanding comprehensive allegiance.

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even though they have never seen it … [because] the matter depends on the understanding of the heart” (be’ovanta deliba, Megilla 24b).6 This “two-​levels” position is both sophisticated and flexible, and cannot be disposed of summarily. But the main reason for which we should hesitate to see here a successful integration of empiricism and monotheism is that the conception of a thing as “in itself” or as independent of the limitations of our subjectivity is itself one of our conceptions and, indeed, an integral part of our subjective point of view and experience. In particular, as social and thinking beings, we have experience of others being misled or even deceived, as we see it, while yet believing themselves to be on the right path. Since we can readily remember or imagine the situation reversed, with ourselves so deceived, we reasonably find ourselves hoping for a view of things which is not susceptible to our own weaknesses.7 We thus imagine how things are apart from our perspective on them, how they are “in themselves;” but it is still we who so imagine them. We can try to factor ourselves out, as it were, but it is still we who are doing the factoring. All this applies to our view of God as well. Hoping for or imagining some intimation of how God is “in himself” is itself one of the ways in which we experience God—​indeed, one of the most pervasive and important: as hidden, as ineffable, as transcendent, etc.8 The problem of empiricism and monotheism, of course, now simply reappears: how is this peculiarly complex experience of God, conceived of as “in himself” or as “from his side” to be unified with all the other experiences we have of God?9 6

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R’ J. Isaac Lifshitz interprets R’ Haim of Volozhin’s Nefesh ha-​Haim as offering a sophisticated, dynamic alloy of objective and subjective theological perspectives. But this unification seems, ultimately, to have been available in practice only to the most extremely humble person of all, that is, to Moses. For this interpretation, as well as an invaluable review of the development of subjective-​objective theologies in rabbinic and medieval thought, see J. Isaac Lifshitz, One God, Many Images: Dialectical Thought in Hasidei Ashkenaz (Tel Aviv, Israel: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2015), 33–​61 [Hebrew]. The situation in which we view ourselves viewing God—​correctly or incorrectly—​ amounts to a triangular structure: Man (observing)-​Man (observing)-​God. Structures of this kind will play a central role in the argument below. The importance of the hidden One in Egyptian religion suggests that the “sophisticated polytheism” considered above may properly be understood as a version of this appearance/​reality solution. See references in note 2 above. Perhaps the most famous version of this view is found in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. There, our main experiences of God—​the basis of theological empiricism—​are accounted “actions proceeding from God … in reference to the world” (1.54, 65b), such as God’s kindness, grace, anger, and vengeance. However, “the meaning here is not that He possesses moral qualities, but that He performs actions resembling the actions that in us proceed from moral qualities.” By contrast, God in his essence cannot be approached except through the demonstration that positive attributes do not belong to him (1.58–​9),

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There is one more wrinkle of method that should be noted here. The hope that we might have meaningful access to the successes and failures of our own knowledge-​process from a point of view somehow allegedly outside of that very process has been scoffed at by McDowell as aiming for a “sideways-​on” view of our epistemological situation.10 On the view he urges, the realm of reason, with all its normative and structural delimitings, has no outside, no “extra-​rational” position, no duty-​free zone from which our rationality could be evaluated. Now, the above explication defends the legitimacy of a certain amount of “sideways-​on” analysis since we actually are sideways-​on to other would-​be knowers, others whom we have no reason to suppose are not in a situation analogous to our own. But, the moment we realize that this simple level of sideways-​on-​ness—​arguably, just a basic level of self-​understanding—​is itself a part of our basic equipment of knowledge, and therefore also part of the equipment of the other would-​be knower, whom we then consider sideways-​ on, we have a set-​up for open-​ended regress. We know that we have thought about our errors and limitations, and we wonder how one who possesses such knowledge of one’s own fallibility goes about knowing. But that just is the very position in which we actually are, sideways-​on, to other, epistemically self-​ aware persons—​others who are an awful lot like we ourselves. And so on. Self-​knowledge thus has a genuinely recursive structure. It can iterate to any depth we find interesting and is in no obvious way bounded. Any insight we might gain into others “sideways-​on” is an insight that these others could in principle share, as they gain in self-​knowledge—​which gains we can immediately apply back to ourselves. But whither does this lead? The basic character of such recursive processes was first decisively sketched in the 1870s and 1880s by Georg Cantor in his theory of transfinite ordinals and order-​types.11 Even the “limit point” perspective—​“We know that we, and others like us, could go on and on as far as we like, indeed, forever”—​this insight is itself the next step in the order, by no means the last. Someone with Hegelian tendencies might be happy to have arrived at such a point of what might be called “infinite

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possibly even including unity—​“He is one not through oneness,” (1.57, 70a)—​and being—​ “the term ‘existent’ is predicated of Him … and of everything else other than He, in a purely equivocal sense” (1.56, 69a). The only connection through which the God who is the object of negative speculation can be integrated with the God who “brings into existence and governs beings” (1.54, 66a) is some notion of causation, origination or proceeding, but it seems that Maimonides can coherently neither affirm nor deny any such notion. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35. For the background and development of the theory of transfinite ordinals and order-​ types, see Joseph Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 95–​107.

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self-​consciousness” and declare victory, but Cantorian analysis allows more, and still more—​not only infinitely more, but in many different senses of infinity, in infinitely numerous senses of infinity, ad infinitum. The theological upshot of all this is relatively simple. The moment Exodus quotes God as asserting that “Man cannot see me and live,” we are ushered into the loop of questioning: “What can we really know about God—​without dying?” followed by “What can we know about what we cannot know?” and so on. Cantorian transfinite analysis suggests that we should never hope to escape this loop and attain some final or complete self-​consciousness. There is no fully sideways-​ on view of our sideways-​on-​ness, as it were (perhaps this is the essence of McDowell’s point). But with no final view of ourselves and our limitations, there is no room to seek, as if by exclusion, some final view of God as he really is, independent of our view of him. The quest for God “in himself” is thus just one part of our religious experience, however unusual and however important. The workings of a fully empirical monotheism must, therefore, be sought elsewhere. Principles of Unity In Metaphysics Δ.6, Aristotle enumerates various senses of unity—​heavily inflected, of course, by his logic and ontology: the unity of a subject with an incidental predicate (e.g., Socrates happens to be one with paleness); the unity due to spatial or temporal continuity (e.g., twigs united unto a bundle); the unity of things that share a genus, a species, a definition or a substrate (e.g., such as unites wine and water); and of course the unity of a substance. Of these, we have already ruled out generic and specific unity as insufficient for Jewish purposes and can similarly reject predicative, spatial, and temporal unity as inappropriate; substantial unity we will consider below. But to make progress with understanding empirical monotheism, we need to expand our menu of candidates and options. How, then, might we explain the unity of the various manifestations of God? Limbs of Body What was described above as “advanced polytheism” comes in at least two main varieties. In one of these, the variety of experienced divinities is interpreted as the limbs or body of a single hidden god (in New Kingdom Egypt, the one who “becomes millions”).12 Thus Horus, the sun, is god’s right eye, while Thoth, the moon, is the left eye; other figures serve as the god’s ears and hands. This view 12

Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 200, 206.

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generates a very tight unity, since, though the various organs of a body are spatially and morphologically distinct, their functions are inter-​coordinated by a single mind or soul (Egyptian: ba). The “millions” of divine manifestations and their disparate actions can similarly be understood as functionally interconnected under the coherent plan or thought of the one hidden god. (Since this view takes seriously the reality of the various divinities, it differs from the “two levels” view discussed above, while providing a very specific answer to the relationship between the many and the one.) Substance or Object The other main version of “advanced polytheism,” which might be called Hindic—​or in some instances even Hellenic—​is the unity of a substance or even a material object. Every table has not only an upper surface, but also a lower one; every cup has both an inside and an outside. More complex objects, be they internal-​combustion engines, spiral galaxies, infinite-​dimensional Hilbert spaces or Husserlian eidetic objects, clearly have richer internal articulations. The world as a whole divides, on a common Hindic view, into sky, land and the intermediate region. Following forward this kind of approach, one can see the various divine manifestations that we experience as really just the one true divine existent seen in different contexts and from different perspectives. Apollo is “the god,” Poseidon is “the god” and (especially) Zeus is “the god.”13 Vishnu is brahman (the absolute? the All?), Shiva is brahman, and (on some grounds) even you are brahman.14 Some may wish to adopt a version of this view as the correct interpretation of the Trinitarian adjective homoousios. Political Institution Social institutions have an existence and unity of their own, be it legal, bureaucratic or political. When one speaks of, for example, “the Obama administration,” this refers not to the person of Barack Obama, nor of a group of people 13 14

Heraclitus fr. 102: “One, the only wise one, is both willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” One Vaiṣṇavite hymn puts it thus: “You are the universe, changeless one! Knowledge and ignorance, truth and untruth, poison as well as nectar, are you. You are the deed that leads to bondage and also the deed that leads to freedom as taught by the Vedas. The enjoyer, the means and the fruits of all actions are you, O Viṣṇu.” (Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1.19). On some interpretations, this is also the correct understanding of Egypt’s hidden Amun “becoming millions”; see references in note 2 above. The famed equation of ātman and brahman—​elusive in meaning, but at a minimum, some identification of macro-​and ­micro-​cosmos—​figures prominently in various of the Upanishads, perhaps most famously in Chāndogya 6.13.

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in direct contact with him or operating under his instructions. Rather, the unity of such a political institution is one of: (i) will and purpose, which can be expressed very abstractly—​e.g. “Obamacare”; (ii) causation—​those hired or appointed by those hired or appointed by … recursively back to Obama; and (iii) history and authority, both multiply articulated. This principle of unity, however, is not very tight, especially in comparison with the foregoing. Members and agents of such an administration are independent actors—​even or perhaps especially in their official roles—​who must therefore choose whether to promote, interpret, alter or perhaps even undermine the stated goals of the administration. This is not a failure but simply a consequence of the fact that the unity of a social institution like an administration is of a looser kind than that of the organs of a body or the aspects of a substance. Two conflicting divinities, like Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, might even be seen, as unified in the sense in which both a government and an opposition together can constitute a single assembly. The possibility of disobedient angels, recalcitrant demons or satanic rebellion also seems connected to the looseness of political institutions as a paradigm of unity.15 Moral Struggle A single person can feel torn among different possibilities for action: to drink when thirsty or to follow doctor’s orders? To enjoy the lurid sight or to abstain? To punish the guilty on the spot or to refrain due to larger considerations? Plato’s Republic brings these examples to show that the human soul is not a unity, but rather composed of parts (437b–​441c). But even on such a view, they are parts of a single soul, in which all parts share a single consciousness, knowledge, and self-​awareness, and are capable of both integrated unity in action or, less happily, the psychic “civil war” that arises from moral conflict. Moral struggle puts pressure on the full unity of the psyche, but it is only because of the prior, underlying unity of the soul that this is an internal struggle, rather than simply different activities going their separate ways, or interacting externally, in the way genuinely separate things interact.16 This picture applies to 15

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Different political structures can, of course, lead to different theologies, and polemics of the early Patristic age display some of the uses and disadvantages of the political paradigm of monotheism. See sources and discussion in Erik Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem” in Theological Tractates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), especially 81–​85. For the suggestion that co-​consciousness is the test of psychic unity here, see A. W. Price, “Are Plato’s Soul-​parts Psychological Subjects?” Ancient Philosophy 29.1 (2009): 1–​15.  For a richer analysis of the soul’s unity which precedes such integrative virtues as moderation and justice, and is therefore pre-​given rather than “earned,” see Eric Brown, “The Unity of

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the struggle in the human breast between the impulse to good and that to evil (yetser hatov and yetser hara), and also to conflicting divine attributes or tendencies: the famous rabbinic pair of the principle of justice and the principle of kindness (midat hadin and midat harachamim). Of this, more later. Masks of the Self If a Greek, instead of giving hospitality to a wandering stranger felt tempted to abuse him—​perhaps simply disposing of the victim and pocketing his possessions—​the fear might arise that this seemingly-​vulnerable foreigner was, in fact, Zeus himself, under his aspect of Zeus Xenios, protector of guests. But this is only one of Zeus’ many aspects and cults, for he is not only Zeus Olympios, but also Zeus Meilichios and Zeus Lykaios and so on. Such a variety of manifestations, which to us appears to undermine the unity of the god, was very much the rule in living religion, which later Greek intellectuals sought to organize and systematize.17 But it is unclear whether these are homonymous but separate deities or possibly aspects under which the same deity can reveal himself in different situations or even different geographical regions. A homologous feature applies, on some accounts, to the unity of the self as well. Even if we decline to follow Locke (inter alia) in lodging all of personal identity in the continuity of consciousness and memory, we still need to confront the genuine creativity and plasticity in the way we encounter others, and even ourselves. Goffman’s famous thesis about the theatricality of everyday social life entails that, to some degree, we put on a new mask in every new situation. Nietzsche presents a more radical version of this view, suggesting that this onion of masks within masks need not have any kernel to it.18 We might

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the Soul in Plato’s Republic” in R. Barney, T. Brennan, and C. Brittain, eds., Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2012), 53–​73. Walter Burkert explains the situation thus: “But a polytheistic world of gods is nevertheless potentially chaotic, and not only for the outsider. The distinctive personality of a god is constituted and mediated by at least four different factors: the established local cult with its ritual programme and unique atmosphere, the divine name, the myths told about the named being, and the iconography, especially the cult image. All the same, this complex is easily dissolved, and … the various elements are continually separated from one another and reformed in new combinations. So in Greece, very similar cults do in fact appear under the names of different gods … Conversely, the same name may cover very different cults … [Zeus’ various] epithets seem to break the contours of the divine personality. … Ancient philologists later established numbered homonyms to solve the difficulty:  three gods named Zeus, four named Hephaistos and five named Dionysos, Aphrodite, and Athena.” Greek Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 119–​120. While Locke distinguishes Humane Identity, which depends on the continuation of the same bodily life, from Personal Identity, this latter, he repeatedly insists, depends only on

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insist that there is shared consciousness or awareness in all these masks—​for otherwise, how do these mask the same “self”—​but clearly this is a looser kind of unity than Moral Struggle. In particular, we do not imagine one of the masks intervening in the doings of another. While the principle of masks might appear too loose for Judaic purposes, we still need to contend with God’s propensity to appear under new aspects and surprising names, and not even necessarily at his own instigation. Rabbinic tradition ascribes to Hannah the first appeal to God by the name Hordes or Hosts (tzeva’ot), and this primarily as part of her efforts to persuade and even shame God into granting her the child she so desperately wanted: “From all the hordes of armies you created in your world, is it so hard for you to give me one son?” (Berakhot 31b). A similar relation seems to hold between the tribal-​ Patriarchal name El Shadai and the national-​redemptive Yhwh, which explicitly comes to the fore at Exodus 6:3. If these are various masks of God, then they are more loosely unified with one another than are the aspects in moral struggle—​they need not be directly involved in the same issues and thus need not confront one another—​but since all the masks hear and know together, and cannot hide from or lie to

the continuity of consciousness and memory (An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 2.27.6, 9–​10, 20). Erving Goffman offers a general “dramaturgical” interpretation of interpersonal relations in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959), but then encounters difficulties in making room for “authentic” or non-​dramaturgical experience. His distinction of “regions” in which performances are cordoned off from one another allows for the concept of a “backstage” region, but he seems to equivocate as to whether this latter is strictly “relative to a given performance” or whether it really means that “the performer can relax … drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character” (112). Does the performer not merely step into a different character with a different front, speaking other lines? Nietzsche’s philosophy of masks is open to moderate and radical readings:  cf. W.  Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, Volume 2:  Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber (New  York:  McGraw-​Hill, 1980), 137–​164; and Jean Granier “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos” in The New Nietzsche, ed. D.  Allison (Cambridge, MA:  mit Press, 1977), 135–​141 as well as the rest of this collection. The more radical reading begins from texts like Nietzsche’s speculation that the type of “the actor” has its origins in “the lower classes who had to survive under changing pressures and coercions, in deep dependency … always adapting themselves again to new circumstances, who had to change their mien and posture until they learned gradually to turn their coat with every wind and thus virtually to become a coat—​and masters of … eternally playing hide-​and-​seek” (Gay Science, 361). Nietzsche immediately identifies this same shape-​shifting tendency also in Jews, in women, in upper-​class diplomats and, most importantly, in artists in general. The decisive role of art in Nietzsche’s thought supports the interpretation that he takes humans—​and likely, reality as a whole—​as masks “all the way down,” as it were.

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one another, their unity is tighter than that of a political structure. In other respects, however, it is also looser than a political unity, since, unlike an institution like an administration, the collection of the masks need not share any overarching policy or plan of action extending past simple co-​consciousness. Assessments While this list makes no claim to completeness, it sketches out a space of possibilities that is rich enough to be evaluated in at least a preliminary way. Limbs provides a unity which is too tight. If all divine actions are coordinated under one mind and purpose—​which is unitary, and hence, directly and unambiguously expressed in the world as a whole—​then that purpose is too rich and muddled to amount to much. Put differently, Limbs makes the cosmos holy, but amoral. Substance leads to similar results, though here we no longer have the worry—​as in Limbs—​of attributing evil not merely to divine effects but to deliberate divine agency. Also, Substance seems weak on resources for distinguishing between the divine and anything else, leading naturally either to a pantheism or to the problems of Hindic monism. We have already noted that where Masks allows for co-​ consciousness, and hence no intra-​divine lying, hiding or deceit, Institution allows for the larger scale, overall coherence of a unified plan or policy. Struggle attempts to preserve both of these advantages, allowing for the possibility not merely of plurality but conflict among divine purposes, but with the caveat that such conflict is truly internal and so will, upon resolution, lead to integrated and coherent action. Justice and Kindness in Rabbinic Theology One whose public prayer repeats “We thank, we thank” is to be silenced, for, the Talmud suggests, he appears to be praying to “two powers” (shetei reshuyot, Berakhot 33b). Though recent scholarship has trumpeted the connection of early Christology to binitarian tendencies in Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism, there is little doubt that such views were rejected by what eventually became the rabbinic mainstream.19 Instead, we find a distinction, not among divine 19

The rabbinic rejection of “Two Powers” is evident also at Mishnah Sanhedrin 4.4; Hagigah 15a; Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael Shira 4. Ba-​Hodesh 5; Sifrei Devarim Ha’azinu 329; Genesis Rabbah 1.7; Deuteronomy Rabbah Va’etchanan 2.13; and Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2.1.11. These passages, and others are examined by Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus:  How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2012), who goes so far as to speculate that early Christian and

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persons, but among divine attributes or principles—​literally, “measures” (midot), sometimes represented as thrones—​a distinction founded initially on the well-​known distinction between the title Elohim and the unique name, Yhwh: R’ Samuel bar Nachman said: Woe unto the wicked, for they reverse the principle of kindness (midat rachamim) into the principle of justice (midat hadin)—​for in all places where it says Yhwh, this is the principle of kindness, as it says “Yhwh, Yhwh, Lord gracious and kind, long abiding with much mercy” (chanun verachum, erekh apayim verav chesed, Exod 34:6);20 but it is also written: “Yhwh saw that human wickedness in the land was great … Yhwh regretted … Yhwh said: I will erase …” (Gen. 6:5–​7). And happy are the righteous, for they reverse the principle of justice into the principle of kindness—​for in all places where it says ‘Elohim this is the principle of justice, “Do not curse ‘Elohim” (Exod 22:27), “The matter of the two of them will come through to ‘Elohim” (Exod 22.8); but also “‘Elohim heard Leah” (Gen 30:17), “‘Elohim heard their groaning” (Exod 2:24), “‘Elohim remembered Noah” (Gen 8:1). (Genesis Rabbah 73.3) Judah b. R’ Nachman began: “‘Elohim has risen with a blast, Yhwh with a call of the horn” (Ps 47:5). In the hour the Blessed Holy One sits and rises onto the throne of justice, he arises with justice. How so? “‘Elohim has risen with a blast.” And in the hour Israel take their horns and blast them before him, the Blessed Holy One stands up from the throne of justice and sits on the throne of kindness—​as it is written: “Yhwh with the call of the horn”—​and becomes filled with kindness toward them, and shows them kindness and reverses the principle of justice

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early rabbinic concepts exercised mutual influence, with various intermediary figures such as Metatron, Adam, David, or the Messiah playing a theological role in the rabbinic context structurally parallel to that played by Jesus in pre-​Nicean (not-​yet-​ fully-​Trinitarian) Christianity. Though the evidence here is far from conclusive, his criticisms of the most focused earlier treatment of this theme—​Alan F.  Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden, The Netherlands:  Brill, 1977)—​appear sound. [All references are to the Babylonian Talmud in this volume.] While in Biblical Hebrew, the meaning of rachamim is closer to mercy than to kindness—​ the reverse is true of chesed—​the rabbinic usage is less discriminate. In particular, the abstraction midat harahamim, while it certainly includes mercy, extends to almost any expression of grace, love or generosity that is not founded on a calculus of reward or desert. The Biblical verse here is slightly mistranslated to accord with the rabbinic usage.

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to kindness. When? In the seventh month (Rosh Hashana). (Leviticus Rabbah, Emor 29.3) What does God pray? R’ Zutra bar Tovia said Rav said: May it be my will that my kindness conquers my anger, that my kindness dominates my principles, that I treat my children with the principle of kindness and that I hold them to less than the full demands of the law. (lifnim mishurat hadin, Berakhot 7a) The Talmudic Sages clearly take the straightforward philology of divine names seriously, though not as, unto itself, decisive. Here, midat hadin refers not merely to justice per se, but to any divine expression concerned with merit or desert—​ though most often in the context of punishing the guilty. By contrast, midat harachamim expresses, rather than a rejection or mitigation of such a calculus of merit, a spontaneous devotion to welfare and flourishing, independent of dessert or merit. A mother nurses her child from rachamim, not because the child deserves it—​nor even despite the fact that (perhaps) it does not.21 Now the Sages who made the Shema central to Jewish liturgy can hardly be suspected of laxity in their monotheism. Why, then, did they apparently hold out only limited aims in accounting for this divine unity? Reducing the empirical multiplicity of the divine to the two attributes of din and rachamim definitely constitutes progress, but attempting to complete the search by finally unifying God’s justice and kindness is a tricky business at best. While it is easy to assert that “God’s justice is his mercy,” this is very difficult to sustain.22 21

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The rabbinic source material related to this division of principles is vast. For further sources and discussion, see Schäfer, Jewish Jesus, especially 55–​58, 70–​73; and Efraim Urbach, The Sages:  Their Concepts and Beliefs (Jerusalem:  Magnes Press, 1975), especially 444–​448. One can see some of the difficulties here by examining the Talmudic attempts to “sort out” just which processes absolve one of various sins:  “Sin-​offerings and actual-​guilt-​ offerings atone. Death and the Day of Atonement atone when accompanied with repentance. Repentance atones for minor violations, both positive and negative; while for major violations, it suspends [punishment] until the Day of Atonement comes and atones. One who says:  ‘I will sin and repent, sin and repent,’ he will never succeed in repenting. One who says: ‘I will sin and the Day of Atonement atones,’ for him the Day of Atonement does not atone.” (Mishnah Yoma 8.8–​9). “R’ Matya b. Harash asked R’ Elazar b. Azaria in Rome: Did you hear the four divisions of atonement that R’ Yishmael would expound? He said: They are three, with repentance in each case. One who violated a positive commandment and repented, is already forgiven before he can move from there, as it says: ‘Repent wayward children’ (Jer 3:22). One who violated a negative commandment and repented, repentance suspends [punishment] and the Day of Atonement atones, as it says: ‘For on this day you will be atoned for all your sins’ (Lev 16:30). One who incurred ‘cutting off’ or capital punishment, and repented, repentance and the Day of Atonement

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Instead, we are offered a richer view, which, with reference to the preceding taxonomy of forms of unity, clearly takes the form of a moral struggle. God’s din and his rachamim vie for preeminence in a struggle so finely balanced that human action—​individual or collective—​can tip the momentary balance in one direction or another. Their unity is constituted precisely in this struggle, since only one of them can determine the active divine will. Biblical Narratives of Repentance Consideration of a few Biblical narratives involving wrong-​doing, punishment and repentance will clarify the reasons for viewing divine unity in terms of moral struggle. At a minimum, the principle of justice requires a nearly arithmetic accounting of one’s assets and liabilities:  “Know that all is according to the reckoning” (shehakol lefi hacheshbon, Mishnah Avot 4.22). But such accounting must refer to standards, so that, even on its own terms, it encounters difficulties in cases of incommensurability. For example, in terms of strict justice, it seems just as mandatory to punish the guilty as to acquit the innocent. But which is worse, acquitting the guilty or punishing the innocent? It is not clear that these are strictly commensurable, such that any calculation could resolve the matter, and yet the issue routinely arises in practical contexts of collective action—​from bureaucratic procedure, through criminal justice all the way to warfare. We see this problem at work when Abraham negotiates with God over the fate of Sodom and the other cities of the plain: Will you wipe out the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are fifty righteous ones in the city; will you nevertheless wipe it out and not bear up with the place for the sake of the fifty righteous within it? It would be a profanity for you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked,

suspend [punishment] and suffering cleanses, as it says: ‘I will appoint a rod for their guilt and diseases for their wrong-​doing’ (Ps 89:33). But one who has desecration of the Name on his hands, repentance cannot suspend, and the Day of Atonement cannot atone and suffering cannot cleanse. Rather, all of these suspend, and death cleanses, as it says: ‘The God of Hordes revealed in my ears that this wrong will not be atoned for you until you die’ ” (Isa 22:14). (Yoma 86a). These taxonomies are (clearly) incomplete and (probably) uncompletable and we may even detect in the last Mishnaic passage echoes of the general problems of rule-​ following. Such a positive or even prescriptive “system” of atonement, no matter how sensitive or broad-​minded, expresses too much of the spirit of midat hadin.

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so that the righteous will be just like the wicked. You, a profanity! Will the judge of all the earth not do justice (mishpat)!? (Gen 18:23–​25) This is, of course, only the opening round of negotiations, which, punctured by Abraham’s recurrent abasement, concludes with God agreeing not to destroy the cities if ten righteous ones are found. Nothing in the text suggests that Abraham has determined the “correct” number of the righteous to save the cities—​perhaps one would have been enough but Abraham was too timid to ask—​nor whether Lot would have qualified as that one. But it does make clear three things: (i) the rescue of Lot is attributed to God’s mercy (bechemlat Yhwh; Gen 18:16), not Lot’s merit; (ii) even though the whole episode is introduced by God’s interest in Abraham’s devotion to justice and righteousness (tzedaqa umishpat; Gen 18:19), God never criticizes Abraham’s views or proposals, neither for starting at the “incorrect” number of fifty, rather than at the final ten, nor for imputing to God injustice should he choose to kill some “wrong” number of righteous; (iii) the final terms to which Abraham and God agree—​ten or destruction—​are in fact acted upon. So that while this narrative does not show that justice, as entailing incommensurables, must always fail, it does show precisely how such questions arise even while refusing to answer them. Perhaps the most compact Biblical narrative of repentance is the book of Jonah. Once Jonah has (finally) arrived in Nineveh and prophesied its doom, the Ninevites repent, their punishment is commuted, and Jonah complains that, as he foresaw this outcome, his whole mission was actually pointless from the outset (4:1–​3). Now, neither he nor God—​nor indeed, the king of Nineveh—​ claims that Nineveh is innocent of great wrong-​doing or that divine destruction of the city would be unjust. Repentance after the announcement of this judgment does not retroactively alter the judgment’s validity, and no such claim is made. But after allowing Jonah to appreciate a gourd’s shade, and then arranging for the gourd to wilt, God expresses a different set of considerations: God said: You pitied the gourd, for which you did not work and which you did not grow, that appeared overnight and vanished overnight. But I should not pity the great city of Nineveh in which there are more than twelve myriads of humans who do not know their right from their left, and much cattle? (4:10–​11) Jonah is reminded that his attachment to the gourd—​for which he suggests he would be willing to die—​has no element of justice; he never worked for the gourd, and so he is, quite simply, owed nothing. But, God seems to imply, even when Nineveh, as a matter of justice, has no claim on him, he nevertheless

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pities it, just as Jonah pities the gourd.23 Pity is simply different from justice. Indeed, since Jonah was sent as a delegate of midat hadin, we can see in the friction between him and God a kind of dramatization of the struggle between the two divine principles. The Triangle Argument The narrative of the Golden Calf, though far more complex than the foregoing, allows sharper focus on the underlying structural issues. After the Israelites make the Golden Calf at Sinai, divine justice demands that they be obliterated in favor of a new people to be raised up from Moses (Exod 32:10). Moses then initiates several rounds of negotiation with God, invoking considerations incompatible with the various punishments deserved by the people: (i) what the Egyptians will say (Exod 32:12); (ii) divine commitments to the Patriarchs—​ with implications for the meaning of the present promise to Moses (Exod 32:13, cf. Berakhot 32a); (iii) Moses demands to be “erased” from God’s book (Exod 32:32). While (ii) could be interpreted in terms of competing claims of justice in need of balancing, it seems that (i) and especially (iii) require some principle of God’s interaction with humans not reducible to justice. Surely if God chooses to abandon the reputation he has made for himself in Egypt that is his prerogative? Similarly, if Moses chooses to forego some closeness to the divine—​or whatever being “erased” would mean—​is that not his right? Some principle other than justice must be at work for Moses’ claims to have any traction, and the conclusion of the story shows that they have so much leverage that God abandons the entirety of his (fully justified) complaints.24 The core of the issue here is the non-​transitivity or opacity of judgments. Even after the deaths of some three thousand Israelites (presumably ring-​ leaders), Moses acknowledges that the people are still guilty (Exod 32:28–​31); nevertheless, he does not seek to punish them as God does, but to absolve them. In this situation, therefore, God must contend not only with his own 23

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Might the preservation of Nineveh be founded on incommensurability in the standards of justice, of the sort we identified in the negotiations over Sodom? Perhaps the 120,000 ignorant people are as innocent as the cattle, and so are not worthy of destruction—​as a matter of justice? If this were the relevant consideration, however, then the repentance that begins with the king and, apparently, works its way down to include the cattle, should make no difference to the outcome. But this it avowedly does (Jon 3:10). That God’s final relenting is due to kindness is famously explicit at Exod 34:6–​7. God’s concern for his own name and reputation explicitly has the character of mercy (va’echmol) at Ezek 36:21.

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view of the people as liable for punishment but also with his second-​hand view of Moses’ independent view. Presumably, if God did not care about Moses, about Moses’ opinions or about the possibility of conflict or disagreement with Moses, then he could just go ahead with his plans to obliterate the people, regally ignoring any objections. But as long as God cares about Moses and therefore about agreement with him, there will emerge a struggle between two views of the people: God’s direct view justifying harshness, and God’s partiality to Moses and, derivatively, to Moses’ view that the people should be forgiven. “Love me, love my people.” The principle of God’s attachment to Moses cannot be simply distinct from that of his anger at the people; in this circumstance, the two must come into conflict as they cannot both be simultaneously satisfied. Put generally, triangular relations tend to generate conflicts of this kind. We already saw the sense in which Jonah-​God-​Nineveh and Jonah-​God-​gourd form non-​transitive triangles similar to that of God-​Moses-​Israel after the Golden Calf. The triangle Abraham-​God-​Sodom can be interpreted similarly—​ though, as we saw, it can also be interpreted in terms of multiple standards of justice. Perhaps most important, sin and repentance will generate the triangle God-​penitent-​sinner. God may aim to give the sinner his due and also to give the penitent his, but since they are, at this time, the same person, God cannot fully achieve both ends. The struggle over which will be decisive in action constitutes the unity of midat hadin and midat harachamim. Imperfect Conclusions In different circumstances, this struggle between din and rachamim can be tilted more to one side or another, so that there is great potential for carefully graded combinations and flexible expressions. For example, let us return to Hannah’s innovative appeal to God as Hordes (tzeva’ot): Hannah spoke before the Blessed Holy One: “Ruler of the World, from all the hordes of armies that you created in your world, is it so hard for you to give me a single child?” To what does this compare? To a king of flesh and blood who made a feast for his servants, but when a pauper came and stood at the entrance and asked: “Give me a morsel!” they paid him no mind. He pushed in and came before the king, and said to him: My lord king, from this whole feast that you made is it so hard for you to give me one morsel? (Berakhot 31a)

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Obviously, the picture of the pauper and the king makes this a story about kindness and charity. But the tone of impudence and plain old chutzpa is unmistakable; the king is not being called unjust in some strict sense, but the implication is thick that he is acting beneath what he should expect of himself, that, indeed, there is something shameful and inappropriate in his behavior (something which can only be implied to the king’s face, not to his functionaries). Thus Hannah uses the name Hordes to beg for pity and kindness, but also to put some sting of complaint and implied wrong into the request. While it is difficult to put a precise number to the proportion, this is clearly some idiosyncratic blend of justice and kindness.25 In other contexts, however, the Sages do not hesitate to assign a number to the proportion: I only know of the principle of retribution (midat hapuranut), that in the measure a man metes out, so is it meted out to him, from where do I know of the principle of goodness (midat hatov)? And you say that the principle of goodness is greater than the principle of retribution by five-​hundred to one. Regarding the principle of retribution, it is written: “Returning the iniquity of the parents to children, to children’s children, to the third and fourth generations”; but regarding the principle of goodness, it is written: “Doing kindness to thousands.” This means that the principle of goodness is greater than the principle of retribution by five-​hundred to one. (Tosefta Sotah 4.1) Since the minimum value of “thousands” of generations is 2,000 we can then divide this by four to yield 500, which then becomes a compact symbol for the overall balance between punishment and forgiveness.26 But since this drash 25

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Obviously there is a unique “flavor” in the name Hordes, which is not straightforwardly reducible to a certain combination of din and rachamim. Precisely as residuum, however, this “flavor” will play no active role in practical religious life and, while it does not fit under the rubric of moral struggle, it can unobjectionably be treated as a mere “mask” of God. More generally, since triangular intransitivity generates a two-​way distinction, we might wonder if four-​way interactions would require a three-​way division of principles—​ and so on. But it seems that, as in the case of Hordes, various combinations of the two principles will be sufficient to account for all such multi-​lateral interactions, no matter how complex, with any residua adequately accounted for under the rubric of masks. Numerical ratio or harmony might tempt us to see here a stronger unity than that of moral struggle. While the number 500 will feature prominently in the numerical dimensions of the Temple precinct (Midrash Middot 2.1), this seems to refer back to the present summary of the balance between justice and kindness. But without some specific meaning attached to the particular ratio, the unity of the number will be logically posterior to the struggle between the principles. If, on the other hand, we were to give some independent

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only establishes a lower bound, and only in particular circumstances, the potential for further specific combinations seems open-​ended. The din-​rachamim picture and the triangular dynamic from which it grows are so widespread and fundamental that the Sages attribute them to the creation as a whole. Compare this to a mortal king who had empty cups. “If I fill them with hot drink, they will explode; with cold, they will collapse.” What did he do? He mixed hot with cold, poured and the cups endured. Thus said the Blessed Holy One: “If I create the world through the principle of kindness, its sins will be great; if through justice, the world will not stand. Instead, I will create it through justice and through kindness, and may it only endure.” (Genesis Rabbah 12.15)27 This passage shows the robustness of the overall picture and also sharpens the assumptions needed for the triangle argument to go through. If the world consisted only of creatures which do no wrong to one another—​or at least, creatures whose wrong-​doing can be seen as ultimately limited—​then the world could be created and ruled through the principle of justice alone. But as long as there is enough multiplicity in the world that independent agents can do open-​ended wrong to one another, God must choose either to accept unbounded sinfulness, to acquiesce in the destruction of the world or else to remain in tension between his own kindness and his justice, united precisely by their conflicting relations to the one creation. Conversely, a fundamental change in the created order could alleviate the issue. Since triangular intransitivity generates the pressure for distinguishing divine principles, the elimination of such triangles should remove the pressure. Already at Sinai, the Sages take God to be revealing his unity to a single, unified Israel, that is, a people from which disputes have been eliminated—​if only for the moment—​and all are (amazingly) of one mind (chishvu kulam lev echad; Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael Yitro, BaChodesh 1). The difficulty of imaging such a turn of events points to uniqueness the rabbis attributed to the Sinai moment. We can then wonder whether such a moment could be repeated and even generalized. Isaiah proposes that messianic world peace would make this

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account for why the correct balance should be precisely, say, 500-​to-​one, this would effectively assign to each principle a proportionate role in some larger function, and therefore lead back to a unity resembling that of the limbs of a body (cf. Sotah 47a). Clearly, this passage is also explicating the shift in divine names between the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

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possible: “They will do no wrong or destruction in all my holy mount, for the land will be filled with knowledge of God as waters cover the sea” (11:9). If all are in agreement, for all know God and do no wrong, then there need be no distinction between God’s view of things and his view of the various human views. The need for distinguishing between din and rachamim would be removed. Suggested (imperfect) conclusion: Only when all of creation is unified, will God’s name be completely unified. On Zechariah’s view, even the distinction between night and day with which the Creation began will need to be dissolved (14:6–​7). Only then can he declare:  “God will become king of all the land; on that day God will be one and his name one” (9). The dependence of divine unity on human unity is further radicalized by the Sages: “Who builds in the skies his upper chambers and his bloc is founded on the land” (Amos 9:6). R’ Shimon b. Yochai says: Compare this to one who brought two ships, lashed them together with hooks and ropes, placed them in the middle of the sea and built a palace upon them. As long as the ships are tied to one another, the palace stands; if the ships go away, the palace cannot stand. Thus, when Israel performs the will of the Location, he builds his upper chambers in the skies; and when they do not perform his will, it is as if his bloc is founded on the land. (Sifrei Deuteronomy, 346.5) Any appearance of divine unity, this suggests, is dependent on comparable unity among creatures. More human unity means more divine unity, and only the complete fulfillment of the former will allow us to speak finally of the latter. In the meantime, the din-​rachamim struggle is the most robust empirical monotheism available as long as God’s unity is “in process,” or, in the technical terminology of the grammarians, imperfect. Bibliography Assmann, Jan. Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism. New York: Routledge, 1995. Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Assmann, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2001.

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Brown, Eric. “The Unity of the Soul in Plato’s Republic,” In Plato and the Divided Self, edited by R. Barney, T. Brennan, and C. Brittain, 53–​73. Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2012. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Dauben, Joseph. Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Doniger, Wendy. On Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2014. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959. Granier, Jean. “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” In The New Nietzsche, edited by D. Allison, 135–​141. Cambridge, MA: mit, 1977. Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt:  The One and the Many. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Hornung, Erik. Akhenaten and the Religion of Light. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1999. Lifshitz, J. Isaac. One God, Many Images: Dialectical Thought in Hasidei Ashkenaz. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2015. [Hebrew]. Kaufmann, Walter. Discovering the Mind, Vol. 2:  Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber. New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1980. Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Peterson, Erik. “Monotheism as a Political Problem,” In Theological Tractates. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Price, A. W. “Are Plato’s Soul-​parts Psychological Subjects?” Ancient Philosophy 29.1 (2009): 1–​15.  Schäfer, Peter. The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Segal, Alan F. Two Powers in Heaven:  Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1977. Urbach, Efraim. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975.

Chapter 12

Turning from the Perfection of God to the Wondrousness of God: Redirecting Philosophical-​ Theological Attention in Order to Preserve Humility Heather C. Ohaneson The purpose of this paper is to consider how a Tanakh-​grounded account of divine wondrousness should displace or, less strongly, supplement philosophically laden notions of perfection. In what way is wonder a more appropriate category than perfection for Jewish philosophical theology? I submit that biblical conceptions of wonder permit and even invite a degree of positive knowledge of the divine nature, including not only God’s wondrousness but also God’s might and holiness. Wonder makes room for this understanding while setting limits to what we can say about God. In particular, the fear of God will have an important role to play in moderating between healthy, humble wonder and haughty wondering of the sort that the Psalmist denies in Psalm 131:1b (“I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me”).1 That is, without foreclosing meaningful, metaphysical inquiry, wonder preserves humility—​a trait befitting scholars and religious believers alike. This chapter will unfold in five parts. In the first section, I will set forth concerns about Perfect Being Theology. In the second, I  will introduce various senses and uses of the language of wonder in the Hebrew Bible. In the third, I will turn to a smattering of philosophical issues. In addition to mentioning the role of wonder in ancient Greek thought, I will raise basic theoretical questions and touch upon the link between wonder and epistemic humility. From the forays into biblical word studies and philosophical musings, I will turn to biblical theology, loosely conceived. Thus, in section four, I will examine the story of the burning bush in Exodus 3, seeking to unite insights from the various disciplinary perspectives under a theological rubric: What can we ascertain about the nature or character of God from Moses’ encounter with the burning bush? I will toggle here between three instances or kinds of wonder: Moses’ cognitive-​emotional response to divine wondrousness as it is manifested in an

1 All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Translation in the New Oxford Annotated Bible.

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extraordinary anomaly of nature. Hence, Moses will be taken as the paradigm of a wondering Jew. In the fifth, concluding section I will return in a somewhat aporetic way to Perfect Being Theology.2 Perfect Being Theology It is worth touching upon Perfect Being Theology before I seek to set it aside in favor of a wonder—​or pele-​driven approach. Thus, to begin, I will unfold the three perfection-​grounded routes forward as I see them, were the discourse to stay centered on ideas of perfection.3 First, one might accept the stance that God is perfect and in the ways that ancient Greek philosophies set forth “perfection.” A particularly attendant issue here is hermeneutical:  over history, Jewish and Christian interpretations of scripture have been strained in the service of maintaining traits such as divine immutability and impassibility. Passages such as Genesis 6:6 (“And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart”) and 1 Chronicles 21:15 (“And God sent an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it; but when he was about to destroy it, the Lord took note and relented concerning the calamity; he said to the destroying angel, ‘Enough! Stay your hand.’ ”) have proven especially difficult to render philosophically respectable, where figures such as Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle have been taken as judges. Theologians, held in the thrall of this model for so long, may recoil at the risk of un-​tethering themselves from it.4 Two other perfection-​related paths appear, however. Secondly, there is the argument that God is perfect but that the meaning of perfection differs from the perspectives proffered in ancient Greek philosophy. In this modification of 2 Evidently, I  am attempting something multidisciplinary and broad in scope in this paper in order to draw attention to divine wondrousness as a way to advance philosophical-​ theological discourse while retaining humility; the paper’s brevity constrains the degree of detail and precision that would otherwise be possible in a sole treatment of one of these five points. 3 For a lucid introduction to the topic, see Katherin A. Rogers’s Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Other approaches to thinking about the divine nature include creation theology and providential theology. Michael J. Murray and Michael C. Rea, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7. 4 However, Roy Kearsley warns against the overly simplistic view that “the Greek view of God” was grafted onto a pristine Christianity. “The Impact of Greek Concepts of God on the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria,” 308. Quoted in Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 22n2.

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the Euthyphro dilemma, Jewish understandings of God do not have to be bent to external standards or expectations of what God is; rather, perfection is recognized in the ways of God. God is still taken to be perfect, but proponents locate the standard of perfection in the actions and attributes of God as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic sources. The seeming advantage of this second approach is that, in it, philosophy becomes subservient to Jewish theology, rather than Jewish thought scrambling to make itself square with foreign (Greek) ideals or a particular set of fallible human perceptions (viz., those of philosophers).5 Significant hermeneutical questions remain, however, even as there is room to argue from a prima facie biblical and rabbinic perspective. Surely, we would arrive at a different set of attributes of God through allegorical interpretations than literal ones, and we would need an internal principle for determining when to apply which interpretive framework. For example, this line of thought opens the possibility that responding to human suffering and need is precisely what constitutes divine perfection.6 Traditionally, such a stance has been eschewed or significantly modified in order to preserve the immutability of God. Let us be frank about a challenge of this second route. The range of the traits of perfection included in these sources and stories is wide. Perhaps divine vulnerability and adaptability are easier traits to countenance than, say, limited power and limited knowledge. It seems, then, that a radical intellectual transformation would be required on the part of some as they relinquish expectations of divine omniscience, omnipotence, and immutability; to make peace with this new, Tanakh-​driven view of divinity, such scholars would not only need to reevaluate classical Greek philosophical theology, “unlearning it” or regarding it with new eyes; they would need to acquire an internal measuring line for adjudicating cases—​which passages to interpret in which manner. Is it permissible on the basis of Exodus 3:14 to hold that God is incomplete and mutable, but impermissible to read verses including Exodus 15:6 and 33:20 and think that God literally has bodily features (e.g., hands, a face)? Why? Where within Jewish sources should we look for such a standard?7 Presuming that theologians would still want to deny corporeality of God, we would now be

5 “Perfect being arguments are fallible, not least because our intuitions about perfection are fallible.” Brian Leftow, “Why Perfect Being Theology?” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (2011): 111. 6 Consider Roberto Sirvent, Embracing Vulnerability:  Human and Divine (Eugene, OR:  Wipf and Stock, 2014). 7 How is Maimonides to be considered in this regard, given the strong influence of Aristotle on his views?

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faced with the question of the basis of such an insistence. Once the Platonic and Aristotelian standards are removed, questions about the problem of God having a body might arise.8 An intuition in favor of incorporeality might remain but in the absence of authoritative arguments for it. For these reasons, the second approach to perfection may be unhelpful on balance. Thirdly, we might entertain the possibility that God is imperfect (or, should this be too bold, perfectly imperfect).9 This case presents a number of philosophical and theological problems, including the definitional concern that whatever being provides the paradigm for perfection against which God is measured would itself deserve divine status. That is, who or what would set the standards according to which God would be deemed imperfect—​and would not that entity then usurp the place of God? Seeing the challenges, if not implacability, of these three routes, let us turn our focus to wonder. Wonder and wondrousness are worth pondering when considering the divine nature because the Hebrew term pele and its cognates inhere in the Bible.10 At the same time, wonder appears as a pertinent but not overdetermined notion within ancient Greek philosophy in the language of thaumasia.11 Moreover, in the Hebrew scriptures, the sense of wonder often adheres to God’s works rather than to God’s being, a grammatical structure that further serves to preserve a measure of divine inscrutability without totally canceling the possibility of knowing God through God’s actions and interactions in the world. Further, it is my contention that such theological redirection necessitates the virtue of intellectual humility. Because awe, worship, power, and unboundedness go along with divine wondrousness, safeguards are in place to constrain the arrogant and sometimes dangerous impetus of human thinkers 8

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In his defense of the doctrine of bodily resurrection, Augustine uses statements from the Timaeus to maintain that even Plato allowed for the gods to be embodied. City of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), xxii.26, 345–​349. And Gavrilyuk states that the Epicureans believed that the gods had immortal bodies. The Suffering of the Impassible God, 23. To hold that God is perfectly imperfect entails saying that God is incomplete (in the way a process theologian makes claims about the openness of God) but that such incompletion is not a flaw. Interestingly, such a view might allow for divine wondering—​that is, God taking joyous surprise in Godself or the world. Hannah Arendt emphasizes wonder as pathos, something to be suffered; on that logic, a wondering God would be passible. Life of the Mind, Vol. 1. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 143. See Job 37:5, Ps 40:6, and 1 Chr 16:2 and, for an important contrasting usage, Deut 30:11. This also bodes well for religious reasoning vis-​à-​vis philosophy, as it (i.e., religious reasoning) employs the concept of wonder. If, as both Plato and Aristotle maintain, philosophy begins in wonder, wonder—​by their own lights—​has priority.

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to set forth fixed definitions and to speak beyond our ken—​as Yoram Hazony warns against in his discussion of beauty and the sublime.12 Biblical Studies: Preliminary Traces of the Language of Wonder in the Tanakh While the Hebrew Bible speaks the language of perfection (tamim), requiring that animals without blemish be sacrificed to God, whose works are perfect (Deut 32:4), it also utilizes words stemming from pele. These terms take on a variety of meanings, including “to be wonderful,” “to do something wondrous,” and the nouns “wonder,” “miracle,” “marvel.”13 Among the numerous occurrences of these terms, references to the Lord’s wondrous deeds predominate. Representative of such usage is 1 Chronicles 16:9. Employing the verbal substantive, the verse reads, “Sing to him, sing praises to him, tell of all his wonderful works (nifle’otaiv; lxx: ta thaumasia).” Similar phrasing appears in Job (e.g., 5:9, 9:10, 37:14) and throughout the Psalms (e.g., 9:1, 26:7, 40:5, 71:17, 72:18, etc.). In these and like verses, God’s wondrous deeds are remembered or proclaimed, or all of the wonderful things God has done are upheld as the basis of God’s unique praiseworthiness. Other pertinent citations include Exodus 3:20 and 34:10, which describe God as performing wonders. Furthermore, the question that God poses to Abram and Sarai in Genesis 18:14 “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” becomes a statement in the mouth of Jeremiah: “Ah Lord God! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you” (32:17). Several patterns emerge in the passages that speak of God’s wondrousness. In addition to awe (e.g., Exod 34:10, Ps 139:14), divine wonder bears close association with the themes of the Lord’s glory (e.g., Deut 28:59, 1 Chr 16:24, Ps 78:4), holiness (e.g., Exod 15:11), and might (e.g., Deut 26:8). The language of sight—​seeing and beholding—​often appears alongside references to God’s wondrous acts (e.g., Pss 78:12, 119:18), even as hiddenness, concealment, or secrecy are not far off (consider, perhaps, Ps 139:11). Further, God is imagined to be incomparable—​unlike other gods and excelling them (e.g., 1 Chr 16:25 and Ps 136:4). Frequently, the context of references to divinely wrought wonders is one of worship and remembrance. Nature and history are taken as sites of God’s wondrous deeds, which may indicate that God is not inherently wondrous—​so 1 2 13

Yoram Hazony, “Is God ‘Perfect Being’,” chapter one, this volume. See J. Conrad’s entry on pele in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974).

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that divine wondrousness is intrinsically relational—​or that God’s wondrousness is refracted through spheres in which human beings participate. Pele is not applied exclusively to God. It has a wider application and register of meaning, as is seen in passages on sacrifices and vows in Leviticus (e.g., 27:2) and Numbers (e.g., 6:2; 15:3, 8). In those contexts, the sense of pele that is plausibly operative is that of separation, whereas related terms are again rendered as “wonder,” “impossibility,” or “difficulty” in non-​ritualistic human matters, including love and even rape. Thus, in 2 Samuel 1:26, David laments over Jonathan, “… your love to me was wonderful (nifleata), passing the love of women.” In the very different context of 2 Samuel 13:2, the narrator states that “… it seemed impossible (vayipale) to Amnon to do anything to her,” referring to Tamar, Amnon’s sister.14 The notion reappears adverbially when, for example, King Uzziah is said to be marvelously or wonderfully helped (2 Chr 26:15). In sum, even in the realm of non-​divine matters, things may be marvelous, full of wonder, surpassing the ordinary, or too hard, too difficult, and apparently or actually impossible. As I have said, as a noun pele refers to a wonder, marvel, or miracle. Further research is needed for separating, as it were, the connotations of wonders and miracles, particularly with respect to bafflement and cognition.15 There 14

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Two brief comments on this occurrence: First, what is described here as seeming impossible is shown to be quite tragically possible when Amnon rapes Tamar. Second, shifting the translation from “it seemed impossible” to “it seemed wonderful” (as in “it seemed wonderful to do anything to her”) would affect the reader’s understanding of the story. What at first seems wonderful to Amnon will eventually show itself as terrible. And, indeed, a parallel could be drawn in verse 15 between the slight distance between wonder and terror and the sudden outward transformation of Amnon’s lust into loathing. One intuition concerning this distinction is that wonders differ from miracles in that wonders puzzle. With wonders, there is a desire to know even as cognitive capabilities are being rebuffed. I  am unsure whether miracles evoke the same response, although “miracle” derives from the Latin mirari (to wonder or marvel at). One might stand in admiration and awe of God for the miracles that God works without the accompanying wish of intellection. Aquinas regards the definition of miracles and wonders otherwise in Summa theologica I: Q105, A7, where he writes, “Now the cause of a manifest effect may be known to one, but unknown to others. Wherefore a thing is wonderful to one man, and not at all to others: as an eclipse is to a rustic, but not to an astronomer. Now a miracle is so called as being full of wonder; as having a cause absolutely hidden from all: and this cause is God. Wherefore those things which God does outside those causes which we know, are called miracles.” Summa theologica, Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Vol. 1. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911), 520. This article is referenced in Mary-​Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 201n39. See also, R. W. L. Moberly, “Miracles in the Hebrew Bible,” in Cambridge Companion to Miracles, ed. Graham H. Twelftree (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57–​74.

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is some slippage in translation between parts of speech as wonders (nifla’ot) extend to wondrous things. Thus, the New Revised Standard Version employs the adjective “wondrous” in rendering Psalm 119:18 as “Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law,” though I believe it could have said “Open my eyes, so that I may behold the wonders out of your law.” It is not immediately clear to me what is at stake in that difference; at the very least it is indicative of the challenges and limitations of translation. A further example of knotty phrasing comes from Isaiah 9:6, a verse popular in December as Christians sing Handel’s Messiah. It refers to a Wonderful (pele) Counselor.16 Perhaps more pointedly for our interests, a wonder may prove hard to grasp intellectually or otherwise. The association between wonder and bafflement is especially evident in the book of Job in its two claims concerning God’s great deeds (see 9:10 and 37:5). Thus, in his third speech, Job refers to God as one “who does great things beyond understanding, and marvelous things without number” (9:10). And in ­chapter 37, Elihu informs Job that “God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend” (37:5).17 Philosophical Considerations At this juncture, I would like to step back to glance at the treatment of wonder in philosophy and to consider a few of the philosophical issues wrapped up in wonder, including the relationship between wonder and the transcendent, and the intertwining of thinking and feeling in experiences of wonder. To that end, I  will do several things, each in a highly provisional way:  I will gesture toward the seminal place of wonder in ancient Greek philosophy. I will draw on Martha Nussbaum’s claims concerning wonder and contemplation. And, I  will set forth a number of the questions that have arisen for me in thinking broadly about the nature of wonder. In the face of the humbling—​indeed, retarding—​spirit of wonder, the questions will rest open and at least temporarily unresolved. Wonder and its related concepts of awe and fear populate the Bible. At the same time, they hold an important place in ancient Greek writings, particularly in the language of thaumasia and thaumazein.18 Famously, thaumazein 16 17 18

It is curious that in the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Tanakh, the two instances of pele in Isaiah are rendered “grace” and “graciousness” (9:6, 25:1). Tanakh (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). Cf. Isa 29:14. Above, I set aside the Latin concept of admiratio in order to focus on thaumasia. Relatedly, Immanuel Kant expounds on the distinction between admiration (Bewunderung) and

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appears as the named starting point of philosophy in Plato’s Theaetetus (155c) and Aristotle’s Metaphysics (982b). And in Plato’s last dialogue, the Laws, human beings are imagined somewhat wondrously as the thaumaton or puppets of the gods—​reverberations of which may be heard “backwards” and “forwards,” in Psalm 139:14 as well as in Shakespeare.19 In her gloss on the Theaetetus and the Metaphysics, Vered Kenaan holds that wonder can render the divine present for human beings: “In wondering, we experience the limits of our human knowledge and thereby the presence of the transcendent.”20 Furthermore, in Kenaan’s reading, wonder reveals the hidden presence of the arche, the primordial beginning, the source of all things.21 Wonder alone is insufficient for knowledge, however; as Aristotle’s treatment of Hesiod shows, the mind needs the regulating principles of episteme in order for wonder to fulfill its philosophical promise.22 Mystics present a contrasting case insofar as they are willing in the face of the transcendent to forgo meaning and transcend understanding; in other words, for mystics, cognitive wonder is dissolved in union with God.23 Mary-​Jane Rubenstein in her stunning 2008 book, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, points to the rift between Plato and Aristotle’s attitude toward wonder, and traces how their contrasting paradigms reappear in the history of Western thought. In brief, Rubenstein explains that Plato’s Socrates values wonder as that which keeps inquiry pried

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amazement (Verwunderung) as follows: “Only a cast of mind of that sort is called noble … if it arouses not so much amazement (an affect [that occurs] when we present novelty that exceeds our expectation) as admiration (an amazement that does not cease once the novelty is gone), which happens when ideas in their exhibition harmonize, unintentionally and without art, without our aesthetic liking.” Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 133 (original emphasis). In short, admiration is amazement that outlasts novelty. Cf. 243. Plato, Laws, 644d–​645c, 803a–​804c, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN:  Hackett, 1997). Cf. the admirability of humanity in Hamlet, ii.2, quoted in Howard L.  Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30.1 (1969):  85. Rather than describe human beings as divine playthings, Aristotle includes self-​moving marionettes among the initial sources of people’s wondering—​before, that is, the knowledge of causation displaces wondering. Metaphysics, 1.2.983a, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995). Vered Lev Kenaan, “Thauma Idesthai,” in Philosophy’s Moods, ed. Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber (London: Springer, 2011), 14. Cf. Arendt on Homer: “In Homer, this wonder-​struck beholding is usually reserved for men to whom a god appears …” Life of the Mind, 1:142. Kenaan, “Thauma Idesthai,” 15. Kenaan, “Thauma Idesthai,” 17. Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” 95–​96.

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open, whereas Aristotle seeks to “cure” wonder through the acquisition of causal knowledge.24 In the framing of her investigation into wonder, Rubenstein describes the closeness of the philosophical and biblical (or theological) stances. On the similarity of yirah or fear and thaumasia, she writes: The terrified awe of yirah can therefore be said to be the theological mood par excellence. This origin in wonder is perhaps not surprising, considering Western theology’s near-​identity with philosophy until the early modern separation of the disciplines. Socrates tells Theaetetus that wonder is the origin of all philosophy. And the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job all name yirah as “the beginning of wisdom.”25 It is difficult to suss out the relationship between divinity, emotion, and cognition here. While feeling holy fear may be the proper response to the presence of the divine, it is unclear whether or how terror is compatible with wonder in its cognitive aspect. Yirah is the condition for wisdom and thaumasia is the origin of the love of wisdom only if mystical union is not experienced and terror is not total.26 These Greek and Hebrew notions are bridged in fascinating ways—​in the instance of wisdom as well as through the chaos of water, signaling the natural component in the phenomenon of wonder. To take the case of water: In Greek mythology, Thaumas is the name of the sea god, who is born of earth and sea, Gaia and Oceanus, respectively. Thaumas, in turn, marries Electra; they have Iris or “rainbow” and the Harpies.27 The biblical story of creation begins in Genesis with the imposition of order through divine wind or spirit on the unruly waters (Gen 1:2), and of course in the story of the flood, God will moderate God’s own terrifying power by promising to refrain from destroying the earth by waters, the sign of that covenant being the rainbow (Gen 9:12). What is the potential significance of the difference between the Greek identification of wonder with the sea and the Hebrew identification of God as the force that overshadows the chaos of the waters, the God for whom the monstrous sea beast Leviathan is a

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Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, 12. Cf. Henry Slonimsky, “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 237. Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, 10. “When detached imagination is overcome by emotion, such as great fear or terror, wonder disappears.” Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” 87. Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, 11. See M. L. West’s commentary to Hesiod’s Theogony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 235, line 237.

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mere plaything? In the case of the Hebrew Bible, God’s wondrousness exceeds that of unformed natural powers and is thereby heightened. To whatever extent human beings might be overwhelmed by earthly terrors, we would do well to feel fear before God. In fact, such a recognition leads to “life and the good,” as the fear of the Lord constitutes the beginning of wisdom, wisdom being the second bridge between Greek and Hebrew teachings on wonder. Kenaan’s claim that in ancient Greek poetry, “the appearance of wonder touches us in a manner that forces the beholder to respond emotionally and intellectually,” leads us to Martha Nussbaum’s investigation of wonder as an emotion in her 2001 tome, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.28 Under Nussbaum’s categorization, wonder is one of the least eudaimonistic emotions, which is to say that wonder is only minimally related to our telos of human flourishing. Thus, wonder: responds to the pull of the object, and one might say that in it the subject is maximally aware of the value of the object, and only minimally aware, if at all, of its relationship to her own plans. That is why it is likely to issue in contemplation, rather than in any other sort of action toward the object. Another related emotion would be reverence or awe: again, awe, for example in a religious context, is an acknowledgment of the surpassing value of the object, not just from the person’s point of view, but quite generally.29 Nussbaum’s footnote to this passage is worth quoting for its wonderful (i.e., beautifully pleasing) gesture of clarification: Wonder and awe are akin, but distinct: wonder is outward-​moving, exuberant, whereas awe is linked with bending, or making oneself small. In wonder I want to leap or run, in awe to kneel.30 Notice the subtlety of wonder’s relation to thinking. Wonder does not shut down intellection entirely but calls for contemplation precisely because the object’s value outweighs the subject’s sense of self. Being drawn to the wondrous is cognitively humbling (the supreme value of the object makes us forget 28 29 30

Kenaan, “Thauma Idesthai,” 20. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54, emphasis added. Cf. Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” 92–​94, on the receptive, active, and mixed modes of wonder. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 54n53.

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ourselves) and emboldening (we feel an exuberant curiosity that causes our minds to reach forward to something grand). Thus, in pondering the wondrous deeds of the Lord, we remain aware of our position relative to God. The moderating effect of awful wonder is manifest in particular with respect to human goals and self-​centered pursuits of happiness. For, on account of its prevention of complete rationalization, what is wondrous resists manipulation. What we cannot conquer with our minds we cannot instrumentalize. Rabbi Abraham Heschel makes a similar argument with respect to biblical man. Further resonances between Nussbaum and Heschel are sounded in passages from God in Search of Man in which Heschel addresses the relationship between wonder and cognition. Consider what value Heschel imparts to thinking as he credits wonder with persisting beyond knowledge. He writes: Is wonder the same as curiosity? To the prophets wonder is a form of thinking. It is not the beginning of knowledge but an act that goes beyond knowledge; it does not come to an end when knowledge is acquired; it is an attitude that never ceases. There is no answer in the world to man’s radical amazement.31 Heschel walks a line between lifting up the importance of thinking and delimiting it. A few pages later, Heschel reverses the direction of his thought (so to speak) by counterbalancing any tendency toward intellectual laziness with energetic questioning. He admonishes that “[t]‌he sense of wonder and transcendence must not become ‘a cushion for the lazy intellect.’ It must not be a substitute for analysis where analysis is possible; it must not stifle doubt where doubt is legitimate.”32 Heschel evinces a respectable moderation in his evaluation of wonder’s role in spiritual cognition. I would like to take these views on wonder, wisdom, and contemplation to claim that, in their greatness, divine deeds simultaneously command our attention and surpass our understanding. They cause us to kneel in awe even as we run toward the glorious source of our confusion. These are even definitional requirements for their wondrousness: if God’s wondrous deeds either failed to arrest us or if they admitted of total human comprehension, they would not be marvelously great. The pleasure of wonders lies to some extent in their mystery, the rational overcoming of which may dull the joyful sensation of bemusement. Heschel and Kant point to a cast of mind that surpasses knowledge 31 32

Abraham J.  Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 46, original emphasis. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 51.

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and novelty, respectively. Moreover, God’s wondrousness is the shared basis for the double movement that I am seeking to describe. In this double movement, the human mind is temporarily overwhelmed in the presence of a wondrous God because of God’s superlative nature, and yet there is a rightful return to cognitive function on the same grounds. In other words, the glitch in cognition that divine wonders cause becomes an occasion for thinking more; the motivation for wondering about God must be understood in light of the perception of God’s ultimate value. The wondrousness of God means paradoxically that we cannot think more and that we must think more. What do the dual aspects of wonder (being stymied and charging forward to figure things out) indicate about human nature? Possibly the two sides to human experiences of wonder arise from dual aspects of our humanity. Thus, in the grandeur of being made in the image of God, we would rightly incline to apply ourselves to the glorious task of seeking out concealed matters (Prov 25:2b). This would give rise to tenacious thinking in which we attempt to resolve or at least tarry with puzzles that may, in principle, be insoluble. By contrast, in the frailty of our earth-​to-​earth “dustiness,” we would confront the severe limitations of our mental powers.33 Under this lowly aspect of our humanity, we would likely be stunned in the presence of the marvelous. To draw from Howard Wettstein, sophistication is required in knowing “when there is an explanation to be had, and when, on the contrary, one need rest with the amazement.”34 In other words, wisdom is required for appreciating distinctions within itself, differences that wonder draws to the surface. Each aspect of wondering (i.e., from each side of our humanity, the grand and the lowly) has negative potentials. The former may easily slide into defiance, pride, and confusion (e.g., in thinking about things too wonderful for us); the latter may lead to despair at ever knowing God, sloth in failing to know what is knowable, or false worship should our wonder be directed to an unworthy object. Further, it is my contention that awe or fear (yirah) is what prevents wonder from shading into either the extreme of presumptuous speculating or the extreme of burying our heads in the sands of misunderstanding. Fear of God moderates human wonderings, preserving a spirit of human humility without foreclosing inquiry into divine being. Wonder bounded by the fear of God may still be metaphysically meaningful. Conversely, fear of God may bind 33 34

“The awe and humility sensed in the face of the mystery and grandeur of nature and history affected the Biblical understanding of the character, scope, and worth of human knowledge and wisdom.” Heschel, God in Search of Man, 73. Howard Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 37.

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our confusion, requiring and rewarding reflection on who God is. Under thaumasia or pele, epistemic boldness and epistemic humility touch. A series of questions unfolds before us:  Is wonder necessarily related to scale (either the vast or the tiny) and surprise? Even in God’s own wondrousness, may God be said to wonder? Wettstein confesses how he, in his more Midrashic moments, likes to think of God as in awe of God’s creation.35 Would God also wonder over Godself? Does God feel not only joy over God’s own being but also a pleasant bemusement over what God has done in the world? Would God’s love for God’s people, the marvelous works God created, be at all akin to the wonder a human parent feels over a newborn, which Wettstein also mentions? Is wonder necessarily a relational quality? Would it be proper to think of God as wondrous with respect to Godself, apart from any relation God has with human beings? Must we approach the quality of divine wondrousness by way of human experiences of wonder at God or at God’s deeds? What is the connection between being awestruck, thinking, and worshipping? Is it possible to worship while stupefied or does proper praise call for some measure of rationality and clear-​mindedness? A central question remains. What is the relationship between God’s wonders and God’s wondrousness? The adjective “wonderful” attaches primarily to God’s works rather than to God’s being, a grammatical structure that also serves to preserve a measure of divine inscrutability. From what I can tell, the Hebrew Bible does not refer directly to the wondrousness of God. Instead, it points readers to God’s wondrousness by way of 1) God’s own actions and 2) God’s interactions with human beings. Here, I would like to turn finally to a story of God’s interaction with Moses. Wondering before the wonders of the wondrous God is conjoined with humility in Moses, who will come to be described in Numbers 12:3 as “very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth.” Theological Reflection, Grounded in a Reading of Exodus 3 The dual tendencies of wondrous objects in calling forth attention and spurning our understanding are found in the story of Moses’ encounter with God at Horeb in Exodus 3. Within this call narrative, I will focus on verses 1–​6, though

35

Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience, 35.

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the continuation of the chapter is certainly relevant and important, particularly in providing other varieties of divine wondrousness.36 The text reads: (1) Moses was keeping the flock of his father-​in-​law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. (2) There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. (3) Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” (4) When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said “Here I am.” (5) Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (6) He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Among the layers of rich significance in this passage, one finds oscillation between looking and hiding, and in conjunction with that oscillation, the movement between God’s loving, even playful, invitation to Moses into knowledge of the divine Self, and God’s serious, frightful distancing from him. Further, there are the two sides of the impairment of reason and the exercise of reflection, as wonder yields to barefooted humility. When Moses meets God, he (not unlike Job) encounters “positive perplexity.”37 The scene is immediately curious. Rather than get straight to business and call Moses in a grave and direct manner, God appears to trigger an encounter with Moses by way of a natural anomaly—​the burning bush—​which is what I am taking to count as an instance of a wonder, even though the explicit language of pele is reserved for verse 20 (where God promises to strike Egypt with all his wonders).38 In short, what is the burning bush doing there? Is it God’s chosen way of getting Moses’ attention? What was the chain of Moses’ thinking upon encountering it? Had he been bored by the ordinary activities of shepherding and hiking? Was he first struck by the luminescence of the flame and

36 3 7 38

Bernard P. Robinson, “Moses at the Burning Bush,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 75 (1997): 111. Duncan Reyburn, “Footnotes to Job, Part 11—​Wonder,” Unorthodoxy, 2:10. Could it be that the greater sign of God’s wondrousness is God’s willingness to humble Godself to love and keep covenant with a people?

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then by the extraordinary fact that the bush was outlasting the fire?39 What are we to make of his insistence “I must turn aside” and his particular intention to see why the bush was not burned up, in verse 3? Is there a good reason for highly flammable material resisting consumption—​something that Moses would be justified in expecting to find as an explanation? And, if we may speak this way, what was God thinking? Was God trying Moses’ capacities for observation and investigation? What if Moses had walked past the burning bush, failing to notice its persistence despite the spectacular flame of fire? Would that have been a good reason to withhold a further manifestation of Godself from him? Was Moses’ ability to wonder at the angel in the bush a necessary precursor to his experiencing the fuller wonder of Godself?40 After all, God’s next move—​in verse 4—​of calling Moses by name appears to be the result of Moses’ decision to turn aside, what we might call Moses’ will to distraction. As the text states, “When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him …” It appears both that God initiated the encounter and that the full realization of the theophany depended on Moses’ reaction to the marvelous sign. Nevertheless, the scene is not one of entirely non-​threatening playfulness. The demonstration of divine might over natural forces has wide-​ranging implications; it may even be taken to signify God’s power over human history.41 In short, the dangers of holiness are nearby. Like wonder and fire, holiness both attracts and repels. Thus, there is a shift from Moses’ being beckoned to being rebuffed by God. Without putting the revelation to an end, God reasserts Godself in verse 5 in the firm pronouncement that Moses come no closer. Moses’ first, courageous step of turning is therefore followed by a second step of 39

40

41

Brevard Childs mentions the admixture of the ordinary with the extraordinary. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1974), 72. Related to the extraordinary is novelty, which is frequently mentioned in treatments of wonder. On surprise and the vivid feeling of novelty, see Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” 94. Commentators are quick to make the connection with Rudolf Otto’s phrase, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. E.g., Robinson, “Moses at the Burning Bush,” 114. See also, Alan Mittleman, “The Problem of Holiness,” Journal of Analytic Theology 3 (2015): 30, 32. Note that the humility affected by the divine presence (Exod 3:5) is not unrelated to the profound, great effects of the divine law (in Exod 20). Thus, William P. Brown observes that Moses follows God’s mysterium tremendum as it moves “[f]‌rom burning bush to burning mountain.” Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 50. William H. C. Propp addresses the quandary of the relationship between the angel and the Deity in vv. 2–​4, and writes, “God himself is within the bush.” Exodus 1–​18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 198. Robinson, “Moses at the Burning Bush,” 111–​112.

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humility: the fear of God compels him to hide his face. These two steps mirror Nussbaum’s claim about the leap of wonder and the genuflection of awe. Moses’ intense gaze, rightfully called for by the wonder of the bush whose flame hosted the angel of the Lord, eventually pushes him in verse 6 toward not-​ seeing, toward concealment. Note that it is not God here who hides but Moses. Although inquiry is encouraged, it is moderated by holy fear.42 Even still, God’s wondrousness baffles Moses without destroying him. As Heschel states, “The great marvels do not crush the soul; sublimity evokes humility.”43 God may set Moses in his place, but that place is a place of holiness. It is a place before God. Like the bush, Moses survives without being consumed.44 In fact, he will return to the mountaintop to encounter the Lord’s glory in what appeared to be consuming fire (Exod 24:17) and he proceeds, in boldness, to request a further manifestation of divine glory (Exod 33:18), showing what happens when the humility-​wonder cycle rolls on. Conclusion I fear that I will conclude on an anti-​Eliot note. Rather than find that the end is my beginning, I will use this final section to un-​read my beginning, namely to call into question my own opening assertion that one could sidestep some of the troubles of Perfect Being Theology (pbt) by shifting attention from the standard concerns of omniscience and omnipotence to the topic of the wondrousness of God. For, in the end, it may not be enough to turn one’s gaze in another direction, so entwined in divine wonder are notions of perfection and of perfect power and knowledge. The distinction between a wonder-​driven account of God and pbt may collapse in one or more of the following ways:  first, one may be inclined to claim that wondrousness is a great-​making property and that God is perfectly 42

43 44

Describing the relationship between shock and wonder in ancient Greek poetry, with an emphasis on sight, Kenaan writes, “Such singular and irregular visual experience leaves the beholder with a deep sense of gratitude for remaining alive after being exposed to the forbidden, inaccessible, hidden, or transcendental vision.” “Thauma Idesthai,” 20; cf. 23. By contrast, Arendt approaches ancient Greek experiences of admiring wonder in terms of familiarity and tranquility—​not fear. The Life of the Mind, 1:143. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 48. Robinson helpfully cites various readings (by Philo, Rashi, and Ibn Ezra) of the burning bush as a symbol of the Hebrew people. “Moses at the Burning Bush,” 115 n26. Brown posits that the “woeful wonder” of Sinai will be community forming; in his phrasing, Israel will be constituted “in the terror and the torah.” Sacred Sense, 52.

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or maximally wonderful. Whether or not it is phrased in terms of all conceivable beings, there is a lurking sense in such discourse about the ultimacy of God’s wondrousness.45 No one else or no other thing should arouse in us such feelings of puzzlement admixed with admiration as God. Consideration of absolute wondrousness is potentially advantageous, I suppose, as the quality of wonder could be used to fill in pbt-​analyses, in which case I would like to coin “omnipelaic” as the term for the all-​wondrous. Further, scale is a dimension of the wondrousness of God. Scholars may find resonance between biblical passages that point to the awe-​inspiring grandeur of God and extra-​biblical notions of power. Without making claims about divine omnipotence, passages such as Genesis 18:14 and Exodus 15:11 do raise questions concerning God’s unique or incomparable power. The gesture toward omnipotence is evident in the already-​cited question (“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”), which the Lord poses to Abram and Sara in the encounter near the tent (Gen 18:14). If anything were too wonderful, hard, or high for God, then God would be limited in power. The implication, given in and through the promise of a miraculous childbirth in the continuation of the Genesis scene, is that God is able to perform any wondrous deed, no matter its degree of marvelousness. In the case of the song that Moses and the Israelites sing upon crossing the Sea of the Reeds, the question is: “ ‘Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?’ ” (Exod 15:11). The seemingly limitless extent of God’s power is terrifying and mysterious, even as it is grand and—​when exercised on one’s behalf—​profoundly appreciated. A third case in which greatness of power is attached to the extent of God’s wondrousness appears in Jeremiah 32:17 and 32:27, quoted above. Again, a direct statement is made. Praying to the Lord, Jeremiah exclaims: “Nothing is too hard [or wondrous] for you.” This power imbalance extends to the realm of epistemology; it also relates to the way that God elicits responses of awe and wonder from human beings. An absolutely powerful being would have complete control not only over the knowing of secrets but also over the keeping of secrets and hence the issuing of revelations. While they do not necessarily entail divine omniscience, the partial hiddenness of God and God’s willingness to conceal God’s name and nature from humanity imply a chasm (perhaps an infinitely-​expanding one) between divine and human knowledge. We are necessarily limited in what we 45

The absolute extent of God’s wondrousness may mean that no being or earthly phenomenon is as wondrous as God is. Instead, or in addition, it may signify that God could not be more wonderful than God is. Moreover, there is the idea that God’s own ability to wonder is a great-​making property.

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can know, understand, or say about the all-​knowing. Epistemic humility is preserved. Where does this leave us? One possibility is that it prompts us to wonder reflexively at wonder, that is, to partake in what Heschel identified as radical amazement. In doing so, we transcend ourselves, which, on Heschel’s view and Shai Held’s reading, has the distinct advantage of foreclosing manipulation and exploitation.46 Or as Wettstein so beautifully writes, “Awe experiences, perhaps as a consequence of the [humbled but elevated] duality, characteristically engender a generosity of spirit, a lack of pettiness, increased ability to forgive and to contain anger and disappointment.”47 On the basis of this description, consider how different religious and scholarly communities might look if their practitioners increasingly exercised wonder. That would be a joy to behold.48 Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologica, Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Vol. 1. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. Arendt, Hannah. Life of the Mind. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Aristotle. Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Augustine. City of God, Translated by William M. Green. Vol. 7. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. New  York:  Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. Brown, William P. Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. Burger, Ariel. “Toward a Methodology of Wonder.” In Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives, Edited by Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen. 255–​263. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.

46 47 48

Shai Held, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 51. Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience, 32. Heartfelt thanks to Yoram Hazony for his vision in convening this conference and for his broad sense of its audience, and to Dru Johnson for his intellectual friendship, not to mention his editorial grace. I am also grateful to Lisa Cleath for her help with the Hebrew transliterations.

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Childs, Brevard S. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1974. Conrad, J. Pele’ in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren. Translated by John T. Willis, 15 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974. Davies, Oliver. “Reading the Burning Bush: Voice, World and Holiness.” Modern Theology 22.3 (2006): 439–​448. Fishbane, Eitan P. “Mystical Contemplation and the Limits of the Mind: The Case of ‘Sheqel ha-​Qodesh.’ ” The Jewish Quarterly Review 93.1 (2002): 1–​27. Friedman, Maurice Stanley. “Divine Need and Human Wonder:  The Philosophy of Abraham J. Heschel.” Judaism 25 (1976): 65–​78. Gavrilyuk, Paul L. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hallman, Joseph M. “The Mutability of God: Tertullian to Lactantius.” Theological Studies 42.3 (1981): 373–​393. Held, Shai. Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Heschel, Abraham J. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days, Edited by M.L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Kaplan, Edward K. “Mysticism and Despair in Abraham J. Heschel’s Religious Thought.” The Journal of Religion 57.1 (1977): 33–​47. Kearsley, Roy. “The Impact of Greek Concepts of God on the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria.” Tyndale Bulletin 43.2 (1992): 307–​329. Kenaan, Vered Lev. “Thauma Idesthai: The Mythical Origins of Philosophical Wonder.” In Philosophy’s Moods:  The Affective Grounds of Thinking, Edited by Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber. 13–​26. London: Springer, 2011. Leftow, Brian. “Why Perfect Being Theology?” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (2011): 103–​118. Mittleman, Alan. “The Problem of Holiness.” Journal of Analytic Theology 3 (2015): 29–​46. Moberly, R. Walter L. “Miracles in the Hebrew Bible.” In Cambridge Companion to Miracles, Edited by Graham H. Twelftree. 57–​74. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011. Morris, Thomas V. Our Idea of God. Contours of Christian Philosophy, edited by C. Stephen Evans. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2002.

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Mozley, John Kenneth. The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Murray, Michael J., and Michael C. Rea. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. New Oxford Annotated Bible, Edited by Michael D. Coogan. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought:  The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Parsons, Howard L. “A Philosophy of Wonder.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30.1 (1969): 84–​101. Plato. Complete Works, Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Propp, William H.C. Exodus 1–​18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Reyburn, Duncan. “Footnotes to Job, Part  11—​Wonder.” Unorthodoxy, Oct. 30, 2017. Podcast. Robinson, Bernard P. “Moses at the Burning Bush.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 75 (1997): 107–​122. Rogers, Katherin A. Perfect Being Theology. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Rubenstein, Mary-​Jane. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Sirvent, Roberto. Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014. Slonimsky, Henry. “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash.” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 235–​290. Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985. Vasalou, Sophia. Wonder: A Grammar. Albany, NY: suny Press, 2015. Wettstein, Howard. The Significance of Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Index Anselm of Canterbury 2, 92, 106, 108n3, 171–​72, 180–​86 Aquinas, Thomas 5, 49, 65, 67–​73, 76–​79, 92, 216n15 Aristotle 3, 6, 11, 12n12, 86, 100, 125, 145, 195, 212, 213n7, 214n11, 218–​19 Augustine 68, 84, 92, 177, 180, 214n8 Averroes 65 Berlin, Isaiah 31–​32 Buber, Martin 50–​51, 127 City of God, The 84 Confessions, The 68, 177 Darwin, Charles 25 Dennett, Daniel 116, 117, 120 Descartes, René 29, 114–​16, 127 Elisha, R. Yishmael ben Elisha: 11, 27, 44, 202n22, 208 Euclid 30 Euthyphro 175, 213, 153n23 Frankfurt, Harry 38–​39 Guide for the Perplexed, The 83, 86, 91–​92, 98, 131, 140, 142, 148 Ha-​Kohen, R. Meir Simhah 35, 37 Hegel, G. W. F. 125, 194 Hertz, R. J. H. 51 Heschel, Abraham 116, 221, 226, 228 Homer 6, 171, 175, 218n20 Hume, David 113, 121 Ishmael (High Priest) 28, 30, 32–​33, 36 Jubilees, Book of 47 Kabbalah 12n11, 45, 47n19, 50, 53, 190 Kant, Immanuel 121, 192, 217n18, 221 Locke, John 121, 198 Maimonides (also Rambam) 27–​28, 43, 45, 46n13, 49, 57, 65, 82–​83, 86, 90–​94, 98,

130–​32, 134–​36, 139–​40, 142, 145–​48, 162–​63, 190, 193n9, 213n7 Meschekh Hokhma 37 Metaphysics, The 195, 218 Midrash 11, 41, 45–​48, 52–​54, 56, 94, 97–​98, 137, 142–​43, 148–​53, 157–​58, 162n56, 233 Newton, Isaac 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich 40, 198, 199n18 Odyssey, The 6, 171, 175–​76, 186 Parmenides 3, 11, 85, 212 Philo of Alexandria 49, 60, 142–​43, 154, 160, 226n43 Plato 3, 11, 15–​16, 29, 54, 84–​86, 88, 92, 142, 157, 175, 197, 212, 214n8, 218 Plotinus 98 Proslogion 182–​83 Rambam  See Maimonides Rashi 45n9, 53, 58, 133, 226n44 Republic, The 15, 84, 85, 142, 197 Ricoeur, Paul 169–​70, 174, 179, 185–​86 Septuagint 49 Simplicius 84 Socrates 175, 218, 219 Spinoza, Baruch 98, 157–​58 Strawson, Galen 117–​20, 124–​25 Talmud 6, 9, 11, 16–​17, 22, 26–​28, 33, 41, 44, 53n39, 130, 142–​43, 148–​49, 152, 157–​58, 190, 200, 202 Tanakh 96, 211, 213, 215 Torah 37, 83, 86–​90, 98, 100, 130–​41, 154, 161–​63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 124, 127, 169–​71, 177–​80, 186–​87 Xenophanes 3, 10, 82, 84–​85 Yehoshua, R. 150 Yehudah, R. Eleazar ben 99 Zakkai, Yochanan ben 158–​59