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Notes
Midràsh Qohelèt Rabbatì, Jerusalem 1967, ch. 7, section 28.
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin Treatise, fol. 37 r.
Genesis, ch. 8, vs. 21: ‘the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth.’
Psalms, 144, vs. 4: ‘man is like a breath; his days, like a passing shadow.’
Job, ch. 25, vs. 6: ‘... man, who is but a maggot, the son of man, who is only a worm.’
Ibid., ch. 4, vs. 19: ‘those that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust.’
Exodus, ch. 33, vs. 20: ‘my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives.’
Moses Maimonides,The Guide of the Perplexed, translated by S. Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 442–443.
See S. Pines, ‘Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Maimonides and Kant’,Scripta Hierosolymitana XX, Jerusalem 1968, pp. 1–54 (and the bibliographical references cited on p. 3, notes 1 and 2).
B. Spinoza,Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, inOpera, vol. II, edited by J. van Vloten and J. Land (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1914), p. 247 (italics mine).
Spinoza,Tractatus, p. 230.
Maimonides,Guide: ‘If you consider the divine actions — I mean to saythe natural actions — the deity's wily graciousness and wisdom, as shown in the creation of living beings, in the gradation of the motions of the limbs, and the proximity of some of the latter to others, will through them become clear to you.... Many things in our Law are due to something similar to this very governance on the part of Him who governs, may He be glorified and exalted. For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed. As therefore God sentMoses our master to make out of usa kingdom of priests and a holy nation [Exodus, ch. 19, vs. 6] ... so that we should devote ourselves to His worship ... and as at that time the way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world ... consisted in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up ... His wisdom, may He be exalted, and His gracious ruse, which is manifest in regard to all His creatures, did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed. At that time this would have been similar to the appearance of a prophet in these times who, calling upon the people to worship God, would say: ‘God has given you a Law forbidding you to pray to Him, to fast, to call upon Him for help in misfortune. Your worship should consist solely in meditation without any works at all.’ Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name, may He be exalted, commanding us to practice them with regard to Him .... Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory ofidolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief — namely, the existence and oneness of the deity — was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance and were not repelled because of the abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed and than which no other mode of worship was known at that time.’ (pp. 525–27; first italics mine).
Spinoza,Tractatus, p. 163. Cf. alsoibid., p. 166: ‘Quidquid enim contra Naturam est, id contra Rationem est; et quod contra Rationem, id absurdum est, ac proinde etiam refutandum.’
Maimonides,Guide, p. 632.
See in this regard Y. Leibovitz,The Faith of Maimonides, Tel Aviv 1980, p. 49 (in Hebrew).
Spinoza,Tractatus, p. 134.
Ibid., p. 140 (italics mine).
Pines,Spinoza, Maimonides and Kant, p. 25: ‘in spite of the difference in the terms and the lack of a perfect equivalence in the concepts, there exists a certain similarity between the antithesis propounded by Spinoza which opposes faith to reason and the distinction made inThe Guide of the Perplexed between love and fear of God .... According to Maimonides love of God entails an endeavour to know Him, or rather, as He is unknowable, to know His operations in nature....Incidentally, I believe that reflection on this conception of love for God may have been the point of departure of Spinoza's doctrine concerning theamor Die intellectualis....’ The distinction betweenamor Dei andtimor Dei is in theGuide, Book III, ch. 52.Amor Dei is identified with the knowledge of rational truths, andtimor Dei with obedience and observance of laws given in the Scriptures: ‘...the intention [Kawwanah] ofall the words of this Law is one end, namely,that thou mayest fear the Name, and so on. The fact that this end is achieved through actions, you can learn from its dictum in thisverse: If thou wilt not care to observe [Deuteronomy, ch. 28, vs. 58].... As for the opinions that theTorah teaches us — namely, the apprehension of His being and His unity, may He be exalted — these opinions teach uslove .... For these two ends, namely,love andfear, are achieved through two things:love through the opinions taught by the Law, which include the apprehension of His being as He, may He be exalted, is in truth; whilefear is achieved by means of all actions prescribed by the Law ....’ (p. 630)
Pines,Spinoza, Maimonides and Kant, p. 6: ‘in his interpretation of Judaism Spinoza employed mainly categories deriving from Maimonides.’
Spinoza,Tractatus: ‘illa Respublica maxime libera est, cujus leges sana Ratione fundatae sunt; ibi enim unusquisque, ubi velit, liber esse potest’ (p. 263).
Ibid., p. 244.
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Sermoneta, J.B. Biblical anthropology in ‘The guide of the perplexed’ by Moses Maimonides, and its reversal in the ‘Tractatus theologico-politicus’ by Baruch Spinoza. Topoi 7, 241–247 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028424
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028424