B. The Idea Of God In Judaism
Chapter IX. God and the Gods
1. Judaism centers upon its sublime and simple conception of God. This lifts it above all other religions and satisfies in unique measure the longing for truth and inner peace amidst the futility and incessant changes of earthly existence. This very conception of God is in striking contrast to that of most other religions. The God of Judaism is not one god among many, nor one of many powers of life, but is the One and holy God beyond all comparison. In Him is concentrated all power and the essence of all things; He is the Author of all existence, the Ruler of life, who lays down the laws by which man shall live. As the prophet says to the heathen world: “The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, these shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.... Not like these is the portion of Jacob; for He is the Former of all things.... The Lord is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King; at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are not able to abide His indignation.”[124]
2. This lofty conception of the Deity forms the essence of Judaism and was its shield and buckler in its lifelong contest with the varying forms of heathenism. From the very first the God of Judaism declared war against them all, whether at [pg 053] any special time the prevailing form was the worship of many gods, or the worship of God in the shape of man, the perversion of the purity of God by sensual concepts, or the division of His unity into different parts or personalities. The Talmudic saying is most striking: “From Sinai, the Mount of revelation of the only God, there came forth Sinah, the hostility of the nations toward the Jew as the banner-bearer of the pure idea of God.”[125] Just as day and night form a natural contrast, divinely ordained, so do the monotheism of Israel and the polytheism of the nations constitute a spiritual contrast which can never be reconciled.
3. The pagan gods, and to some extent the triune God of the Christian Church, semi-pagan in origin also, are the outcome of the human spirit's going astray in its search for God. Instead of leading man upwards to an ideal which will encompass all material and moral life and lift it to the highest stage of holiness, paganism led to depravity and discord. The unrelenting zeal displayed by prophet and law-giver against idolatry had its chief cause in the immoral and inhuman practices of the pagan nations—Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon—in the worship of their deities.[126] The deification of the forces of nature brutalized the moral sense of the pagan world; no vice seemed too horrible, no sacrifice too atrocious for their cults. Baal, or Moloch, the god of heaven, demanded in times of distress the sacrifice of a son by the father. Astarte, the goddess of fecundity, required the “hallowing” of life's origin, and this was done by the most terrible of sexual orgies. Such abominations exerted their seductive influence upon the shepherd tribes of Israel in their new home in Canaan, and thus aroused the fiercest indignation of prophet and law-giver, who hurled their vials of wrath against those shocking rites, those lewd idols, and those who [pg 054] “whored after them.”[127] If Israel was to be trained to be the priest people of the Only One in such an environment, tolerance of such practices was out of the question. Thus in the Sinaitic law God is spoken of as “the jealous God”[128] who punishes unrelentingly every violation of His laws of purity and holiness.
4. The same sharp contrast of Jewish ethical and spiritual monotheism remained also when it came in contact with the Græco-Syrian and Roman culture. Here, too, the myths and customs of the cult and the popular religion offended by their gross sensuality the chaste spirit of the Jewish people. Indeed, these were all the more dangerous to the purity of social life, as they were garbed with the alluring beauty of art and philosophy.[129] The Jew then felt all the more the imperative duty to draw a sharp line of demarcation between Judaism with its chaste and imageless worship and the lascivious, immoral life of paganism.
5. This wide gulf which yawned between Israel's One and holy God and the divinities of the nations was not bridged over by the Christian Church when it appeared on the stage of history and obtained world-dominion. For Christianity in its turn succeeded by again dragging the Deity into the world of the senses, adopting the pagan myths of the birth and death of the gods, and sanctioning image worship. In this way it actually created a Christian plurality of gods in place of the Græco-Roman pantheon; indeed, it presented a divine family after the model of the Egyptian and Babylonian religions,[130] and thus pushed the ever-living God and Father of mankind into the background. This tendency has never been [pg 055] explained away, even by the attempts of certain high-minded thinkers among the Church fathers. Judaism, however, insists, as ever, upon the words of the Decalogue which condemn all attempts to depict the Deity in human or sensual form, and through all its teachings there is echoed forth the voice of Him who spoke through the seer of the Exile: “I am the Lord, that is My name, and My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images.”[131]
6. When Moses came to Pharaoh saying, “Thus speaketh JHVH the God of Israel, send off My people that they may serve Me,” Pharaoh—so the Midrash tells—took his list of deities to hand, looked it over, and said, “Behold, here are enumerated the gods of the nations, but I cannot find thy God among them.” To this Moses replied, “All the gods known and familiar to thee are mortal, as thou art; they die, and their tomb is shown. The God of Israel has nothing in common with them. He is the living, true, and eternal God who created heaven and earth; no people can withstand His wrath.”[132] This passage states strikingly the difference between the God of Judaism and the gods of heathendom. The latter are but deified powers of nature, and being parts of the world, themselves at one with nature, they are subject to the power of time and fate. Israel's God is enthroned above the world as its moral and spiritual Ruler, the only Being whom we can conceive as self-existent, as indivisible as truth itself.
7. As long as the pagan conception prevailed, by which the world was divided into many divine powers, there could be no conception of the idea of a moral government of the universe, of an all-encompassing purpose of life. Consequently [pg 056] the great thinkers and moralists of heathendom were forced to deny the deities, before they could assert either the unity of the cosmos or a design in life. On the other hand, it was precisely this recognition of the moral nature of God, as manifested both in human life and in the cosmic sphere, which brought the Jewish prophets and sages to their pure monotheism, in which they will ultimately be met by the great thinkers of all lands and ages. The unity of God brings harmony into the intellectual and moral world; the division of the godhead into different powers or personalities leads to discord and spiritual bondage. Such is the lesson of history, that in polytheism, dualism, or trinitarianism one of the powers must necessarily limit or obscure another. In this manner the Christian Trinity led mankind in many ways to the lowering of the supreme standard of truth, to an infringement on justice, and to inhumanity to other creeds, and therefore Judaism could regard it only as a compromise with heathenism.
8. Judaism assumed, then, toward paganism an attitude of rigid exclusion and opposition which could easily be taken for hostility. This prevailed especially in the legal systems of the Bible and the rabbis, and was intended primarily to guard the monotheistic belief from pagan pollution and to keep it intact. Neither in the Deuteronomic law nor in the late codes of Maimonides and Joseph Caro is there any toleration for idolatrous practices, for instruments of idol-worship, or for idolaters.[133] This attitude gave the enemies of the Jew sufficient occasion for speaking of the Jewish God as hating the world, as if only national conceit underlay the earnest rigor of Jewish monotheism.
9. As a matter of fact, since the time of the prophets Judaism has had no national God in any exclusive sense. While the Law insists upon the exclusive worship of the one God of [pg 057] Israel, the narratives of the beginnings in the Bible have a different tenor. They take the lofty standpoint that the heathen world, while worshiping its many divinities, had merely lost sight of the true God after whom the heart ever longs and searches. This implies that a kernel of true piety underlies all the error and delusion of paganism, which, rightly guided, will lead back to the God from whom mankind had strayed. The Godhead, divided into gods—as is hinted even in the Biblical name, Elohim—must again become the one God of humanity. Thus the Jew holds that all worship foreshadows the search for the true God, and that all humanity shall at one time acknowledge Him for whom they have so long been searching. Surely the Psalms express, not national narrowness, but ardent love for humanity when they hail the God of Israel, the Maker of heaven and earth, as the world's great King, and tell how He will judge the nations in justice, while the gods of the nations will be rejected as “vanities.”[134] Nor does the divine service of the Jew bear the stamp of clannishness. For more than two thousand years the central point in the Synagogue liturgy every morning and evening has been the battle-cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” And so does the conclusion of every service, the Alenu, the solemn prayer of adoration, voice the grand hope of the Jew for the future, that the time may speedily come when “before the kingdom of Almighty all idolatry shall vanish, and all the inhabitants of the earth perceive that unto Him alone every knee must bend, and all flesh recognize Him alone as God and King.”[135]
Chapter X. The Name of God
1. Primitive men attached much importance to names, for to them the name of a thing indicated its nature, and through the name one could obtain mastery over the thing or person named. Accordingly, the name of God was considered to be the manifestation of His being; by invoking it man could obtain some of His power; and the place where that name was called became the seat of His presence. Therefore the name must be treated with the same reverential awe as the Deity Himself. None dare approach the Deity, nor misuse the Name. The pious soul realized the nearness of the Deity in hearing His name pronounced. Finally, the different names of God reflect the different conceptions of Him which were held in various periods.[136]
2. The Semites were not like the Aryan nations, who beheld the essence of their gods in the phenomena of nature such as light, rain, thunder, and lightning,—and gave them corresponding names and titles. The more intense religious emotionalism of the Semites[137] perceived the Godhead rather as a power working from within, and accordingly gave it such names as El (“the Mighty One”), Eloha or Pahad (“the Awful One”), or Baal (“the Master”). Elohim, the plural form of Eloha, denoted originally the godhead as divided into a number of gods or godly beings, that is, polytheism. When [pg 059] it was applied to God, however, it was generally understood as a unity, referring to one undivided Godhead, for Scripture regarded monotheism as original with mankind. While this view is contradicted by the science of comparative religion, still the ideal conception of religion, based on the universal consciousness of God, postulates one God who is the aim of all human searching, a fact which the term Henotheism fails to recognize.[138]
3. For the patriarchal age, the preliminary stage in the development of the Jewish God-idea, Scripture gives a special name for God, El Shaddai—“the Almighty God.” This probably has a relation to Shod, “storm” or “havoc” and “destruction,” but was interpreted as supreme Ruler over the celestial powers.[139] The name by which God revealed Himself to Moses and the prophets as the God of the covenant with Israel is JHVH (Jahveh). This name is inseparably connected with the religious development of Judaism in all its loftiness and depth. During the period of the Second Temple this name was declared too sacred for utterance, except by the priests in certain parts of the service, and for mysterious use by specially initiated saints. Instead, Adonai—“the Lord”—was substituted for it in the Biblical reading, a usage which has continued for over two thousand years. The meaning of the name in pre-Mosaic times may be inferred from the fiery storms which accompanied each theophany in the various Scriptural passages, as well as from the root havah, which means “throw down” and “overthrow.”[140]
To the prophets, however, the God of Sinai, enthroned amid clouds of storm and fire, moving before His people in war and peace, appeared rather as the God of the Covenant, without image or form, unapproachable in His holiness. As the original meaning of JHVH had become unintelligible, they interpreted the name as “the ever present One,” in the sense of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, “I shall be whatever (or wherever) I am to be”; that is, “I am ever ready to help.” Thus spoke God to Moses in revealing His name to him at the burning bush.[141]
4. The prophetic genius penetrated more and more into the nature of God, recognising Him as the Power who rules in justice, mercy, and holiness. This process brought them to identify JHVH, the God of the covenant, with the One and only God who overlooks all the world from his heavenly habitation, and gives it plan and purpose. At the same time, all the prophets revert to the covenant on Sinai in order to proclaim Israel as the herald and witness of God among the nations. In fact, the God of the covenant proclaimed His universality at the very beginning, in the introduction to the Decalogue: “Ye shall be Mine own peculiar possession from among all peoples, for all the earth is Mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”[142] In other words,—you have the special task of mediator among the nations, all of which are under My dominion.
5. In the Wisdom literature and the Psalms the God of the covenant is subordinated to the universality of JHVH as Creator and Ruler of the world. In a number of the Psalms and in some later writings the very name JHVH was avoided probably on account of its particularistic tinge. It was surrounded more and more with a certain mystery. Instead, God as the “Lord” is impressed on the consciousness and adoration of men, in all His sublimity and in absolute unity. [pg 061] The “Name” continues its separate existence only in the mystic lore. The name Jehovah, however, has no place whatsoever in Judaism. It is due simply to a misreading of the vowel signs that refer to the word Adonai, and has been erroneously adopted in the Christian literature since the beginning of the sixteenth century.[143]
6. Perhaps the most important process of spiritualization which the idea of God underwent in the minds of the Jewish people was made when the name JHVH as the proper name of the God of the covenant was given up and replaced by Adonai—“the Lord.” As long as the God of Israel, like other deities, had His proper name, he was practically one of them, however superior in moral worth. As soon as He became the Lord, that is, the only real God over all the world, a distinctive proper noun was out of place. Henceforth the name was invested with a mysterious and magic character. It became ineffable, at least to the people at large, and its pronunciation sinful, except by the priests in the liturgy. In fact, the law was interpreted so as directly to forbid this utterance.[144] Thus JHVH is no longer the national God of Israel. The Talmud guards against the very suspicion of a “Judaized God” by insisting that every benediction to Him as “God the Lord” must add “King of the Universe” rather than the formula of the Psalms, “God of Israel.”[145]
7. The Midrash makes a significant comment on the words of the Shema: “Why do the words, ‘the Lord is our God’ precede the words, ‘the Lord is One’? Does not the particularism of the former conflict with the universalism of the latter sentence? No. The former expresses the idea that the Lord is ‘our God’ just so far as His name is more intertwined [pg 062] with our history than with that of any other nation, and that we have the greater obligation as His chosen people. Wherever Scripture speaks of the God of Israel, it does not intend to limit Him as the universal God, but to emphasize Israel's special duty as His priest-people.”[146]
8. Likewise is the liturgical name “God of our fathers” far from being a nationalistic limitation. On the contrary, the rabbis single out Abraham as the missionary, the herald of monotheism in its march to world-conquest. For his use of the term, “the God of heaven and the God of the earth”[147] they offer a characteristic explanation: “Before Abraham came, the people worshiped only the God of heaven, but Abraham by winning them for his God brought Him down and made Him also the God of the earth.”[148]
9. Reverence for the Deity caused the Jew to avoid not only the utterance of the holy Name itself, but even the common use of its substitute Adonai. Therefore still other synonyms were introduced, such as “Master of the universe,” “the Holy One, blessed be He,” “the Merciful One,” “the Omnipotence” (ha Geburah),[149] “King of the kings of kings” (under Persian influence—as the Persian ruler called himself the King of Kings);[150] and in Hasidean circles it became customary to invoke God as “our Father” and “our Father in heaven.”[151] The rather strange appellations for God, “Heaven”[152] and (dwelling) “Place” (ha Makom) seem to originate in certain formulas of the oath. In the latter name the rabbis even found hints of God's omnipresence: “As space—Makom—encompasses all things, so does God encompass the world instead of being encompassed by it.”[153]
10. The rabbis early read a theological meaning into the two names JHVH and Elohim, taking the former as the divine attribute of mercy and the latter as that of justice.[154] In general, however, the former name was explained etymologically as signifying eternity, “He who is, who was, and who shall be.” Philo shows familiarity with the two attributes of justice and mercy, but he and other Alexandrian writers explained JHVH and Ehyeh metaphysically, and accordingly called God, “the One who is,” that is, the Source of all existence. Both conceptions still influence Jewish exegesis and account for the term “the Eternal” sometimes used for “the Lord.”
Chapter XI. The Existence of God
1. For the religious consciousness, God is not to be demonstrated by argument, but is a fact of inner and outer experience. Whatever the origin and nature of the cosmos may be according to natural science, the soul of man follows its natural bent, as in the days of Abraham, to look through nature to the Maker, Ordainer, and Ruler of all things, who uses the manifold world of nature only as His workshop, and who rules it in freedom as its sovereign Master. The entire cosmic life points to a Supreme Being from whom all existence must have arisen, and without whom life and process would be impossible. Still even this mode of thought is influenced and determined by the prevalent monotheistic conceptions.
Far more original and potent in man is the feeling of limitation and dependency. This brings him to bow down before a higher Power, at first in fear and trembling, but later in holy awe and reverence. As soon as man attains self-consciousness and his will acquires purpose, he encounters a will stronger than his own, with which he often comes into conflict, and before which he must frequently yield. Thus he becomes conscious of duty—of what he ought and ought not to do. This is not, like earlier limitations, purely physical and working from without; it is moral and operates from within. It is the sense of duty, or, as we call it, conscience, the sense of right and wrong. This awakened very early in the race, [pg 065] and through it God's voice has been perceived ever since the days of Adam and of Cain.[155]
2. According to Scripture, man in his natural state possesses the certainty of God's existence through such inner experience. Therefore the Bible contains no command to believe in God, nor any logical demonstration of His existence. Both the Creation stories and those of the beginnings of mankind assume as undisputed the existence of God as the Creator and Judge of the world. Arguments appealing to reason were resorted to only in competition with idolatry, as in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah, and subsequently by the Haggadists in legends such as those about Abraham. Nor does the Bible consider any who deny the existence of God;[156] only much later, in the Talmud, do we hear of those who “deny the fundamental principle” of the faith. The doubt expressed in Job, Koheleth, and certain of the Psalms, concerns rather the justice of God than His existence. True, Jeremiah and the Psalms[157] mention some who say “There is no God,” but these are not atheists in our sense of the word; they are the impious who deny the moral order of life by word or deed. It is the villain (Nabal), not the “fool” who “says in heart, there is no God.” Even the Talmud does not mean the real atheist when speaking of “the denier of the fundamental principle,” but the man who says, “There is neither a judgment nor a Judge above and beyond.”[158] In other words, the “denier” is the same as the Epicurean (Apicoros), who refuses to recognize the moral government of the world.[159]
3. After the downfall of the nation and Temple, the situation changed through the contemptuous question of the [pg 066] nations, “Where is your God?” Then the necessity became evident of proving that the Ruler of nations still held dominion over the world, and that His wondrous powers were shown more than ever before through the fact of Israel's preservation in captivity. This is the substance of the addresses of the great seer of the Exile in chapters XL to LIX of Isaiah, in which he exposes the gods of heathendom to everlasting scorn, more than any other prophet before or afterward. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath “meted out the heavens with the span,” and “weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.” Before Him “the nations are as a drop of the bucket,” and “the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers.” “He bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by name,” “He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end.”[160] Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII, CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly be convinced by them.
4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of common sense.[161] Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars,—all worshiped by the pagans as deities—was considered a proof of God's omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.[162] In like manner, the apocryphal Book of Wisdom[163] [pg 067] says that true wisdom, as opposed to the folly of heathenism, is “to reason from the visible to the Invisible One, and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer.”
5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the “atheistic” views of materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God's existence from nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines the entire universe.[164] Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the inner experience of the soul.
6. Two proofs taken from nature owe their origin to Greek philosophy. Anaxagoras and Socrates, from their theory of design in nature, deduced that there is a universal intelligence working for higher aims and purposes. This so-called teleological proof, as worked out in detail by Plato, was the unfailing reliance of subsequent philosophers and theologians.[165] Plato and Aristotle, moreover, from the continuous motion of all matter, inferred a prime cause, an unmoved mover. This is the so-called cosmological proof, used by different schools in varying forms.[166] It occupies the foremost place in the systems of the Arabic Aristotelians, and consequently is dominant among the Jewish philosophers, the Christian scholastics, and in the modern philosophic schools down to Kant. It is based upon the old principle of causality, and therefore takes the mutability and relativity of all beings in the cosmos as evidence of a Being that is immutable, unconditioned, and absolutely necessary, causa sui, the prime cause of all existence.
7. The Mohammedan theologians added a new element to the discussion. In their endeavor to prove that the world is the work of a Creator, they pointed as evidence to the multiformity and composite structure, the contingency and dependency of the cosmos; thus they concluded that it must have been created, and that its Creator must necessarily be the one, absolute, and all-determining cause. This proof is used also by Saadia and Bahya ben Joseph.[167] Its weakness, however, was exposed by Ibn Sina and Alfarabi among the Mohammedans, and later by Abraham ibn Daud and Maimonides, their Jewish successors as Aristotelians. These proposed a substitute argument. From the fact that the existence of all cosmic beings is merely possible,—that is, they may exist and they may not exist,—these thinkers concluded that an absolutely necessary being must exist as the cause and condition of all things, and this absolutely unconditioned yet all-conditioning being is God, the One who is.[168] Of course, the God so deduced and inferred is a mere abstraction, incapable of satisfying the emotional craving of the heart.
8. While the cosmological proof proceeds from the transitory and imperfect nature of the world, the ontological proof, first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, the Christian scholastic of the XI century, and further elaborated by Descartes and Mendelssohn, proceeds from the human intellect. The mind conceives the idea of God as an absolutely perfect being, and, as there can be no perfection without existence, the conclusion is that this idea must necessarily be objectively true. Then, as the idea of God is innate in man, God must necessarily exist,—and for proof of this they point to the Scriptural verse, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God,” [pg 069] and other similar passages. In its improved form, this argument uses the human concept of an infinitely perfect God as evidence, or, at least, as postulate that such a Being exists beyond the finite world of man.[169]
Another argument, rather naïve in character, which was favored by the Stoics and adopted by the Church fathers, is called de consensu gentium, and endeavored to prove the reality of God's existence from the universality of His worship. It speaks well for the sound reasoning of the Jewish thinkers that they refused to follow the lead of the Mohammedans in this respect, and did not avail themselves of an argument which can be used just as easily in support of a plurality of gods.[170]
9. All these so-called proofs were invalidated by Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of Königsberg, whose critical inquiry into the human intellect showed that the entire sum of our knowledge of objects and also of the formulation of our ideas is based upon our limited mode of apperception, while the reality or essence, “the thing in itself,” will ever remain beyond our ken. If this is true of physical objects, it is all the more true of God, whom we know through our minds alone and not at all through our five senses. Accordingly, he shows that all the metaphysical arguments have no basis, and that we can know God's existence only through ethics, as a postulate of our moral nature. The inner consciousness of our moral obligation, or duty, implies a moral order of life, or moral law; and this, in turn, postulates the existence of God, the Ruler of life, who assigns to each of us his task and his destiny.[171]
10. It is true that God is felt and worshiped first as the supreme power in the world, before man perceives Him as [pg 070] the highest ideal of morality. Therefore man will never cease looking about him for vestiges of divinity and for proofs of his intuitive knowledge of God. The wondrous order, harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate belief in God. Still more do the consciousness of duty in the individual—conscience—and the progress of history with its repeated vindication of right and defeat of wrong proclaim to the believer unmistakably that the God of justice reigns. But no proof, however convincing, will ever bring back to the skeptic or unbeliever the God he has lost, unless his pangs of anguish or the void within fill his desolate world anew with the vivifying thought of a living God.
11. Among all the Jewish religious philosophers the highest rank must be accorded to Jehudah ha Levi, the author of the Cuzari,[172] who makes the historical fact of the divine revelation the foundation of the Jewish religion and the chief testimony of the existence of God. As a matter of fact, reason alone will not lead to God, except where religious intuition forms, so to speak, the ladder of heaven, leading to the realm of the unknowable. Philosophy, at best, can only demonstrate the existence of a final Cause, or of a supreme Intelligence working toward sublime purposes; possibly also a moral government of the world, in both the physical and the spiritual life. Religion alone, founded upon divine revelation, can teach man to find a God, to whom he can appeal in trust in his moments of trouble or of woe, and whose will he can see in the dictates of conscience and the destiny of nations. Reason must serve as a corrective for the contents of revelation, scrutinizing and purifying, deepening and spiritualizing ever anew the truths received through intuition, but it can never be the final source of truth.
12. The same method must apply also to modern thought and research, which substituted historical methods for metaphysics in both the physical and intellectual world, and which endeavors to trace the origin and growth of both objects and ideas in accordance with fixed laws. The process of evolution, our modern key with which to unlock the secrets of nature, points most significantly to a Supreme Power and Energy. But this energy, entering into the cosmic process at its outset, causing its motion and its growth, implies also an end, and thus again we have the Supreme Intelligence reached through a new type of teleology.[173] But all these conceptions, however they may be in harmony with the Jewish belief in creation and revelation, can at best supplement it, but can certainly neither supplant nor be identified with it.
Chapter XII. The Essence of God
1. An exquisite Oriental fable tells of a sage who had been meditating vainly for days and weeks on the question, What is God? One day, walking along the seashore, he saw some children busying themselves by digging holes in the sand and pouring into them water from the sea. “What are you doing there?” he asked them, to which they replied, “We want to empty the sea of its water.” “Oh, you little fools,” he exclaimed with a smile, but suddenly his smile vanished in serious thought. “Am I not as foolish as these children?” he said to himself. “How can I with my small brain hope to grasp the infinite nature of God?”
All efforts of philosophy to define the essence of God are futile. “Canst thou by searching find out God?” Zophar asks of his friend Job.[174] Both Philo and Maimonides maintain that we can know of God only that He is; we can never fathom His innermost being or know what He is. Both find this unknowability of God expressed in the words spoken to Moses: “If I withdraw My hand, thou shall see My back—that is, the effects of God's power and wisdom—but My face—the real essence of God—thou shalt not see.”[175]
2. Still, a divinity void of all essential qualities fails to satisfy the religious soul. Man demands to know what God is—at least, what God is to him. In the first word of the [pg 073] Decalogue God speaks through His people Israel to the religious consciousness of all men at all times, beginning, “I am the Lord, thy God.” This word I lifts God at once above all beings and powers of the cosmos, in fact, above all other existence, for it expresses His unique self-consciousness. This attribute above all is possessed by no being in the world of nature, and only by man, who is the image of his Maker. According to the Midrash, all creation was hushed when the Lord spoke on Sinai, “I am the Lord.”[176] God is not merely the supreme Being, but also the supreme Self-consciousness. As man, in spite of all his limitations and helplessness, still towers high above all his fellow creatures by virtue of his free will and self-conscious action, so God, who knows no bounds to His wisdom and power, surpasses all beings and forces of the universe, for He rules over all as the one completely self-conscious Mind and Will. In both the visible and invisible realms He manifests Himself as the absolutely free Personality, moral and spiritual, who allots to every thing its existence, form, and purpose. For this reason Scripture calls Him “the living God and everlasting King.”[177]
3. Judaism, accordingly, teaches us to recognize God, above all, as revealing Himself in self-conscious activity, as determining all that happens by His absolutely free will, and thus as showing man how to walk as a free moral agent. In relation to the world, His work or workshop, He is the self-conscious Master, saying “I am that which I am”; in relation to man, who is akin to Him as a self-conscious rational and moral being, He is the living Fountain of all that knowledge and spirituality for which men long, and in which alone they may find contentment and bliss.
Thus the God of Judaism, the world's great I Am, forms a complete contrast, not only to the lifeless powers of nature and destiny, which were worshiped by the ancient pagans, [pg 074] but also to the God of modern paganism, a God divested of all personality and self-consciousness, such as He is conceived of by the new school of Christian theology, with its pantheistic tendency. I refer to the school of Ritschl, which strives to render the myth of the man-god philosophically intelligible by teaching that God reaches self-consciousness only in the perfect type of man, that is, Christ, while otherwise He is entirely immanent, one with the world. All the more forcibly does Jewish monotheism insist upon its doctrine that God, in His continual self-revelation, is the supermundane and self-conscious Ruler of both nature and history. “I am the Lord, that is My name, and My glory will I not give to another,”—so says the God of Judaism.[178]
4. The Jewish God-idea, of course, had to go through many stages of development before it reached the concept of a transcendental and spiritual god. It was necessary first that the Decalogue and the Book of the Covenant prohibit most stringently polytheism and every form of idolatry, and second that a strictly imageless worship impress the people with the idea that Israel's God was both invisible and incorporeal.[179] Yet a wide step still intervened from that stage to the complete recognition of God as a purely spiritual Being, lacking all qualities perceptible to the senses, and not resembling man in either his inner or his outer nature. Centuries of gradual ripening of thought were still necessary for the growth of this conception. This was rendered still more difficult by the Scriptural references to God in His actions and His revelations, and even in His motives, after a human pattern. Israel's sages required centuries of effort to remove all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic notions of God, and thus to elevate Him to the highest realm of spirituality.[180]
5. In this process of development two points of view demand consideration. We must not overlook the fact that the perfectly clear distinction which we make between the sensory and the spiritual does not appeal to the child-like mind, which sees it rather as external. What we call transcendent, owing to our comprehension of the immeasurable universe, was formerly conceived only as far remote in space or time. Thus God is spoken of in Scripture as dwelling in heaven and looking down upon the inhabitants of the earth to judge them and to guide them.[181] According to Deuteronomy, God spoke from heaven to the people about Mt. Sinai, while Exodus represents Him as coming down to the mountain from His heavenly heights to proclaim the law amid thunder and lightning.[182] The Babylonian conception of heaven prevailed throughout the Middle Ages and influenced both the mystic lore about the heavenly throne and the philosophic cosmology of the Aristotelians, such as Maimonides. Yet Scripture offers also another view, the concept of God as the One enthroned on high, whom “the heavens and the heaven's heavens cannot encompass.”[183]
The fact is that language still lacked an expression for pure spirit, and the intellect freed itself only gradually from the restrictions of primitive language to attain a purer conception of the divine. Thus we attain deeper insight into the spiritual nature of God when we read the inimitable words of the Psalmist describing His omnipresence,[184] or that other passage: “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see? He that chastiseth the nations, shall He not correct, even He that teaches man knowledge?”[185]
The translators and interpreters of the Bible felt the need of eliminating everything of a sensory nature from God and [pg 076] of avoiding anthropomorphism, through the influence of Greek philosophy. This spiritualization of the God idea was taken up again by the philosophers of the Spanish-Arabic period, who combated the prevailing mysticism. Through them Jewish monotheism emphasized its opposition to every human representation of God, especially the God-Man of the Christian Church.
6. On the other hand, we must bear in mind that we naturally ascribe to God a human personality, whether we speak of Him as the Master-worker of the universe, as the all-seeing and all-hearing Judge, or the compassionate and merciful Father. We cannot help attributing human qualities and emotions to Him the moment we invest Him with a moral and spiritual nature. When we speak of His punitive justice, His unfailing mercy, or His all-wise providence, we transfer to Him, imperceptibly, our own righteous indignation at the sight of a wicked deed, or our own compassion with the sufferer, or even our own mode of deliberation and decision. Moreover, the prophets and the Torah, in order to make God plain to the people, described Him in vivid images of human life, with anger and jealousy as well as compassion and repentance, and also with the organs and functions of the senses,—seeing, hearing, smelling, speaking, and walking.
7. The rabbis are all the more emphatic in their assertions that the Torah merely intends to assist the simple-minded, and that unseemly expressions concerning Deity are due to the inadequacy of language, and must not be taken literally.[186] “It is an act of boldness allowed only to the prophets to measure the Creator by the standard of the creature,” says the Haggadist, and again, “God appeared to Israel, now as a heroic warrior, now as a venerable sage imparting knowledge, and again as a kind dispenser of bounties, but always in a [pg 077] manner befitting the time and circumstance, so as to satisfy the need of the human heart.”[187] This is strikingly illustrated in the following dialogue: “A heretic came to Rabbi Meir asking, ‘How can you reconcile the passage which reads, “Do I not fill heaven and earth, says the Lord,” with the one which relates that the Lord appeared to Moses between the cherubim of the ark of the covenant?’ Whereupon Rabbi Meir took two mirrors, one large and the other small, and placed them before the interrogator. ‘Look into this glass,’ he said, ‘and into that. Does not your figure seem different in one than in the other? How much more will the majesty of God, who has neither figure nor form, be reflected differently in the minds of men! To one it will appear according to his narrow view of life, and to the other in accordance with his larger mental horizon.’ ”[188]
In like manner Rabbi Joshua ben Hanania, when asked sarcastically by the Emperor Hadrian to show him his God, replied: “Come and look at the sun which now shines in the full splendor of noonday! Behold, thou art dazzled. How, then, canst thou see without bewilderment the majesty of Him from whom emanates both sun and stars?”[189] This rejoinder, which was familiar to the Greeks also, is excelled by the one of Rabban Gamaliel II to a heathen who asked him “Where does the God dwell to whom you daily pray?” “Tell me first,” he answered, “where does your soul dwell, which is so close to thee? Thou canst not tell. How, then, can I inform thee concerning Him who dwells in heaven, and whose throne is separated from the earth by a journey of 3500 years?” “Then do we not do better to pray to gods who are near at hand, and whom we can see with our eyes?” [pg 078] continued the heathen, whereupon the sage struck home, “Well, you may see your gods, but they neither see nor help you, while our God, Himself unseen, yet sees and protects us constantly.”[190] The comparison of the invisible soul to God, the invisible spirit of the universe, is worked out further in the Midrash to Psalm CIII.
8. From the foregoing it is clear that, while Judaism insists on the Deity's transcending all finite and sensory limitations, it never lost the sense of the close relationship between man and his Maker. Notwithstanding Christian theologians to the contrary, the Jewish God was never a mere abstraction.[191] The words, “I am the Lord thy God,” betoken the intimate relation between the redeemed and the heavenly Redeemer, and the song of triumph at the Red Sea, “This is my God, I will extol Him,” testifies—according to the Midrash—that even the humblest of God's chosen people were filled with the feeling of His nearness.[192] In the same way the warm breath of union with God breathes through all the writings, the prayers, and the whole history of Judaism. “For what great nation is there that hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is, whenever we call upon Him?” exclaims Moses in Deuteronomy, and the rabbis, commenting upon the plural form used here, Kerobim, = “nigh,” remark: “God is nigh to everyone in accordance with his special needs.”[193]
9. Probably the rabbis were at their most profound mood in their saying, “God's greatness lies in His condescension, as may be learned from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. To quote only Isaiah also: ‘Thus saith the High and [pg 079] Lofty One, I dwell in high and holy places, with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit.’[194] For this reason God selected as the place of His revelation the humble Sinai and the lowly thornbush.”[195] In fact, the absence of any mediator in Judaism necessitates the doctrine that God—with all His transcendent majesty—is at the same time “an ever present helper in trouble,”[196] and that His omnipotence includes care for the greatest and the smallest beings of creation.[197]
10. The doctrine that God is above and beyond the universe, transcending all created things, as well as time and space, might lead logically to the view of the deist that He stands outside of the world, and does not work from within. But this inference has never been made even by the boldest of Jewish thinkers. The Psalmist said, “Who is like the Lord our God, that hath His seat on high, that humbleth Himself to behold what is in heaven and on earth?”[198]—words which express the deepest and the loftiest thought of Judaism. Beside the all-encompassing Deity no other divine power or personality can find a place. God is in all; He is over all; He is both immanent and transcendent. His creation was not merely setting into motion the wheels of the cosmic fabric, after which He withdrew from the world. The Jew praises Him for every scent and sight of nature or of human life, for the beauty of the sea and the rainbow, for every flash of lightning that illumines the darkened clouds and every peal of thunder that shakes the earth. On every such occasion the Jew utters praise to “Him who daily renews the work of creation,” or “Him who in everlasting faithfulness keepeth His covenant with mankind.” Such is the teaching of the men of the Great Synagogue,[199] and the charge of the Jewish [pg 080] God idea being a barren and abstract transcendentalism can be urged only by the blindness of bigotry.[200]
11. The interweaving of the ideas of God's immanence and transcendency is shown especially in two poems embodied in the songs of the Synagogue, Ibn Gabirol's “Crown of Royalty” and the “Songs of Unity” for each day of the week, composed by Samuel ben Kalonymos, the father of Judah the Pious of Regensburg. Here occur such sentences as these: “All is in God and God is in all”; “Sufficient unto Himself and self-determining, He is the ever-living and self-conscious Mind, the all-permeating, all-impelling, and all-accomplishing Will”; “The universe is the emanation of the plenitude of God, each part the light of His infinite light, flame of His eternal empyrean”; “The universe is the garment, the covering of God, and He the all-penetrating Soul.”[201] All these ideas were borrowed from neo-Platonism, and found a conspicuous place in Ibn Gabirol's philosophy, later influencing the Cabbalah.
Similarly the appellation, Makom, “Space,” is explained by both Philo and the rabbis as denoting “Him who encompasses the world, but whom the world cannot encompass.”[202] An utterance such as this, well-nigh pantheistic in tone, leads directly to theories like those of Spinoza or of David Nieto, the well-known London Rabbi, who was largely under Spinozistic influence[203] and who still was in accord with Jewish thought. Certainly, as long as Jewish monotheism conceives of God as self-conscious Intellect and freely acting Will, it can easily accept the principle of divine immanence.
12. We accept, then, the fact that man, child-like, invests God with human qualities,—a view advanced by Abraham [pg 081] ben David of Posquieres in opposition to Maimonides.[204] Still, the thinkers of Judaism have ever labored to divest the Deity of every vestige of sensuousness, of likeness to man, in fact, of every limitation to action or to free will. Every conception which merges God into the world or identifies Him with it and thus makes Him subject to necessity, is incompatible with the Jewish idea of God, which enthrones Him above the universe as its free and sovereign Master. “Am I a God near at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?”[205] “To whom will you liken Me, that I should be equal?”[206]
Chapter XIII. The One and Only God
1. From the very beginning no Jewish doctrine was so firmly proclaimed and so heroically defended as the belief in the One and Only God. This constitutes the essence and foundation of Judaism. However slowly the people learned that there could be no gods beside the One God, and that consequently all the pagan deities were but “naught and vanity,” the Judaism of the Torah starts with the proclamation of the Only One, and later Judaism marches through the nations and ages of history with a never-silent protest against polytheism of every kind, against every division of the Godhead into parts, powers, or persons.
2. It is perfectly clear that divine pedagogy could not well have demanded of a people immature and untrained in religion, like Israel in the wilderness period, the immediate belief in the only one God and in none else. Such a belief is the result of a long mental process; it is attained only after centuries of severe struggle and crisis. Instead of this, the Decalogue of Sinai demanded of the people that they worship only the God of the Covenant who had delivered them from Egypt to render them His people.[207] But, as they yielded more and more to the seductive worship of the gods of the Canaanites and their other neighbors, the law became more rigid in prohibiting such idolatrous practices, and the prophets poured forth their unscathing wrath against the “stiff-necked people” [pg 083] and endeavored by unceasing warnings and threats to win them for the pure truth of monotheism.[208]
3. The God of Sinai proclaims Himself in the Decalogue as a “jealous God,” and not in vain. He cannot tolerate other gods beside Himself. Truth can make no concession to untruth, nor enter into any compromise with it without self-surrender. A pagan religion could well afford to admit foreign gods into its pantheon without offending the ruling deities of the land. On the contrary, their realm seemed rather to be enlarged by the addition. It was also easy to blend the cults of deities originally distinct and unite many divinities under a composite name, and by this process create a system of worship which would either comprise the gods of many lands or even merge them into one large family. This was actually the state of the various pagan religions at the time of the decline of antiquity. But such a procedure could never lead towards true monotheism. It lacks the conception of an inner unity, without which its followers could not grasp the true idea of God as the source and essence of all life, both physical and spiritual. Only the One God of revelation made the world really one. In Him alone heaven and earth, day and night, growth and decay, the weal and woe of individuals and nations, appear as the work of an all-ruling Power and Wisdom, so that all events in nature and history are seen as parts of one all-comprising plan.[209]
4. It is perfectly true that a wide difference of view exists between the prohibition of polytheism and idolatry in the Decalogue and the proclamation in Deuteronomy of the unity of God, and, still more, between the law of the Pentateuch and the prophetic announcement of the day when Israel's [pg 084] God “shall be King of the whole earth, and His name shall be One.”[210] Yet Judaism is based precisely upon this higher view. The very first pages of Genesis, the opening of the Torah, as well as the exilic portions of Isaiah which form the culmination of the prophets, and the Psalms also, prove sufficiently that at their time monotheism was an axiom of Judaism. In fact, heathenism had become synonymous with both image-worship and belief in many gods beside the Only One of Israel, and accordingly had lost all hold upon the Jewish people. The heathen gods were given a place in the celestial economy, but only as subordinate rulers or as the guardian angels of the nations, and always under the dominion of God on high.[211]
5. Later, in the contest against Græco-Egyptian paganism, the doctrine of God's unity was emphasized in the Alexandrian propaganda literature, of which only a portion has been preserved for us. Here antagonism in the most forcible form is expressed against the delusive cults of paganism, and exclusive worship claimed for “the unseen, yet all-seeing God, the uncreated Creator of the world.”[212] The Rabbinical Haggadah contains but dim reminiscences of the extensive propaganda carried on previous to Hillel, the Talmudic type of the propagandist. Moreover, this period fostered free inquiry and philosophical discussion, and therefore the doctrine of unity emerged more and more from simple belief to become a matter of reason. The God of truth put to flight the gods of falsehood. Hence many gentiles espoused the cause of Judaism, becoming “God-fearing men.”[213]
6. In this connection it seems necessary to point out the difference between the God of the Greek philosophers—Xenophanes and Anaxagoras, Plato and Aristotle—and the God of the Bible. In abandoning their own gods, the Greek [pg 085] philosophers reached a deistic view of the cosmos. As their study of science showed them plan and order everywhere, they concluded that the universe is governed by an all-encompassing Intelligence, a divine power entirely distinct from the capricious deities of the popular religion. Reflection led them to a complete rupture with their religious belief. The Biblical belief in God underwent a different process. After God had once been conceived of, He was held up as the ideal of morality, including both righteousness and holiness. Then this doctrine was continuously elucidated and deepened, until a stage was reached where a harmony could be established between the teachings of Moses and the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle. To the noble thinkers of Hellas truth was an object of supreme delight, the highest privilege of the sage. To the adherents of Judaism truth became the holiest aim of life for the entire people, for which all were taught to battle and to die, as did the Maccabean heroes and Daniel and his associates, their prototypes.
7. A deeper meaning was attached to the doctrine of God's unity under Persian rule, in contact with the religious system of Zoroaster. To the Persians life was a continual conflict between the principles of good and of evil, until the ultimate victory of good shall come. This dualistic view of the world greatly excels all other heathen religious systems, insofar as it assigns ethical purpose to the whole of life. Yet the great seer of the Exile opposes this system in the name of the God of Judaism, speaking to Cyrus, the king of Persia; “I am the Lord and there is none else; beside Me there is no God. I will gird thee, though thou dost not know Me, in order that the people shall know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none beside Me. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and also create evil, I am the Lord that doeth these things.”[214] This declaration of pure [pg 086] monotheism is incompatible with dualism in both the physical and the moral world; it regards evil as being mere semblance without reality, an opposing force which can be overcome and rendered a source of new strength for the victory of the good. “Out of the mouth of the Most High cometh there not the evil and the good?”[215]
8. The division of the world into rival realms of good and evil powers, of angelic and demoniacal forces, which originated in ancient Chaldea and underlies the Zoroastrian dualism, finally took hold of Judaism also. Still this was not carried to such an extent that Satan, the supreme ruler of the demon world, was given a dominion equal to that of God, or interfering with it, so as to impair thereby the principle of monotheism, as was done by the Church later on. As a matter of fact, at the time of nascent Christianity the leaders of the Synagogue took rigid measures against those heretics (Minim) who believed in two divine powers,[216] because they recognized the grave danger of moral degeneracy in this Gnostic dualism. In the Church it led first to the deification of Christ (i.e. the Messiah) as the vanquisher of Satan; afterwards, owing to a compromise with heathenism, the Trinity was adopted to correspond with the three-fold godhead,—father, mother, and son,—the place of the mother deity being taken by the Holy Ghost, which was originally conceived as a female power (the Syrian Ruha being of the feminine gender).[217]
9. The churchmen have attempted often enough to harmonize the dualism or trinitarianism of Christianity with the monotheism of the Bible. Still Judaism persists in considering such an infringement upon the belief in Israel's one and only God as really a compromise with heathenism. “A [pg 087] Jew is he who opposes every sort of polytheism,” says the Talmud.[218]
10. The medieval Jewish thinkers therefore made redoubled efforts to express with utmost clearness the doctrine of God's unity. In this effort they received special encouragement from the example of the leaders of Islam, whose victorious march over the globe was a triumph for the one God of Abraham over the triune God of Christianity. A great tide of intellectual progress arose, lending to the faith of the Mohammedans and subsequently also to that of the Jews an impetus which lasted for centuries. The new thought and keen research of that period had a lasting influence upon the whole development of western culture. An alliance was effected between religion and philosophy, particularly by the leading Jewish minds, which proved a liberating and stimulating force in all fields of scientific investigation. Thus the pure idea of monotheism became the basis for modern science and the entire modern world-view.[219]
11. The Mohammedan thinkers devoted their attention chiefly to elucidating and spiritualizing the God idea, beginning as early as the third century of Islamism, so to interpret the Koran as to divest God of all anthropomorphic attributes and to stress His absolute unity, uniqueness, and the incomparability of His oneness. Soon they became familiar with neo-Platonic and afterward with Aristotelian modes of speculation through the work of Syrian and Jewish translators. With the help of these they built up a system of theology which influenced Jewish thought also, first in Karaite and then in Rabbanite circles.[220] Thus sprang up successively the philosophical systems of Saadia, Jehuda ha Levi, Ibn Gabirol, Bahya, Ibn Daud, and Maimonides. The philosophical hymns and the articles of faith, both of which found a place in the liturgy [pg 088] of the Synagogue, were the work of their followers. The highest mode of adoring God seemed to be the elaboration of the idea of His unity to its logical conclusion, which satisfied the philosophical mind, though often remote from the understanding of the multitude. For centuries the supreme effort of Jewish thought was to remove Him from the possibility of comparison with any other being, and to abolish every conception which might impair His absolute and simple unity. This mental activity filled the dwellings of Israel with light, even when the darkness of ignorance covered the lands of Christendom, dispelled only here and there by rays of knowledge emanating from Jewish quarters.[221]
12. The proofs of the unity of God adduced by Mohammedan and Jewish thinkers were derived from the rational order, design, and unity of the cosmos, and from the laws of the mind itself. These aided in endowing Judaism with a power of conviction which rendered futile the conversionist efforts of the Church, with its arguments and its threats. Israel's only One proved to be the God of truth, high and holy to both the mind and the heart. The Jewish masters of thought rendered Him the highest object of their speculation, only to bow in awe before Him who is beyond all human ken; the Jewish martyrs likewise cheerfully offered up their lives in His honor; and thus all hearts echoed the battle-cry of the centuries, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” and all minds were illumined by the radiant hope, “The Lord will be King of the earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name shall be One.”
13. Under all conditions, however, the doctrine of unity remained free from outward compulsion and full of intrinsic vigor and freshness. There was still room for differences of opinion, such as whether God's life, power, wisdom, and unity are attributes—distinct from His being, and qualifying it,—or [pg 089] whether they are inherent in His nature, comprising His very essence. This controversy aimed to determine the conception of God, either by Aristotelian rationalism, as represented by Maimonides, or by the positive religious assumptions of Crescas and others.
This is Maimonides' statement of the unity: “God is one; that is, He is unlike any other unit, whether made one in point of numbers or species, or by virtue of composition, separation, and simplification. He is one in Himself, there being no multiplicity in Him. His unity is beyond all definition.”[222]
Ibn Gabirol in his “Crown of Royalty” puts the same thought into poetic form: “One art Thou; the wise wonder at the mystery of Thy unity, not knowing what it is. One art Thou; not like the one of dimension or number, as neither addition nor change, neither attribute nor quality affects Thy being. Thou art God, who sustainest all beings by Thy divinity, who holdest all creatures in Thy unity. Thou art God, and there is no distinction between Thy unity, Thy eternity, and Thy being. All is mystery, and however the names may differ, they all tell that Thou art but one.”[223]
14. Side by side with this rationalistic trend, Judaism always contained a current of mysticism. The mystics accepted literally the anthropomorphic pictures of the Deity in the Bible, and did not care how much they might affect the spirituality and unity of God. The philosophic schools had contended against the anthropomorphic views of the older mystics, and thus had brought higher views of the Godhead to dominance; but when the rationalistic movement had spent its force, the reaction came in the form of the Cabbalah, the secret lore which claimed to have been “transmitted” (according to the meaning of the word) from a hoary past. The older system of thought had stripped the Deity of all reality and had robbed religion of all positiveness; now, in [pg 090] contrast, the soul demanded a God of revelation through faith in whom might come exaltation and solace.[224]
Nevertheless the Maimonidean articles of faith were adopted into the liturgy because of their emphasis on the absolute unity and indivisibility of God, by which they constituted a vigorous protest against the Christian dogma. Judaism ever found its strength in God the only One, and will find Him ever anew a source of inspiration and rejuvenation.
Chapter XIV. God's Omnipotence and Omniscience
1. Among all the emotions which underlie our God-consciousness the foremost is the realization of our own weakness and helplessness. This makes us long for One mightier than ourselves, for the Almighty whose acts are beyond comparison. The first attribute, therefore, with which we feeble mortals invest our Deity is omnipotence. Thus the pagan ascribes supreme power over their different realms to his various deities. Hence the name for God among all the Semites is El—“the Powerful One.”[225] Judaism claims for God absolute and unlimited power over all that is. It declares Him to be the source and essence of all strength, the almighty Creator and Ruler of the universe. All that exists is His creation; all that occurs is His achievement. He is frequently called by the rabbis ha Geburah, the Omnipotence.[226]
2. The historical method of study seems to indicate that various cosmic potencies were worshiped in primitive life either singly or collectively under the name of Elohim, “divine powers,” or Zibeoth Elohim, “hosts of divine powers.” With the acceptance of the idea of divine omnipotence, these were united into a confederacy of divine forces under the dominion of the one God, the “Lord of Hosts.” Still these powers of heaven, earth and the deep by no means at once surrendered their identity. Most of them became angels, “messengers” of the omnipotent God, or “spirits” roaming in the realms where once they ruled, while a few were relegated as monsters to the region of superstition. The heathen deities, which [pg 092] persisted for a while in popular belief, were also placed with the angels as “heavenly rulers” of their respective lands or nations about the throne of the Most High. At all events, Israel's God was enthroned above them all as Lord of the universe. In fact, the Alexandrian translators and some of the rabbis actually explained in this sense the Biblical names El Shaddai and J.H.V.H. Zebaoth.[227] The medieval philosophers, however, took a backward step away from the Biblical view when, under the influence of Neoplatonism, they represented the angels and the spirits of the stars as intermediary forces.[228]
3. According to the Bible, both the Creation and the order of the universe testify to divine omnipotence. God called all things into existence by His almighty word, unassisted by His heavenly messengers. He alone stretched out the heavens, set bounds to the sea, and founded the earth on pillars that it be not moved; none was with Him to partake in the work. This is the process of creation according to the first chapter of Genesis and the fortieth chapter of Isaiah. So He appears throughout the Scriptures as “the Doer of wonders,” “whose arm never waxes short” to carry out His will. “He fainteth not, neither is He weary.” His dominion extends over the sea and the storm, over life and death, over high and low. Intermediary forces participating in His work are never mentioned. They are referred to only in the poetic description of creation in the book of Job: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”[229]
Proof of God's supreme power was found particularly in history, either in His miraculous changing of the natural order, or in His defeat of the mighty hostile armies which bade Him defiance.[230] Often the heathen deities or the celestial powers are introduced as dramatic figures to testify to the triumph of the divine omnipotence, as when the Lord is said to “execute judgment against the gods of Egypt” or when “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.”[231]
4. God's power is limited only by His own volition. “He doeth what He willeth.”[232] In man the will and the power for a certain act are far apart, and often directly conflicting. Not so with God, for the very idea of God is perfection, and His will implies necessarily the power to accomplish the desired end. His will is determined only by such factors as His knowledge and His moral self-restraint.
5. Therefore the idea of God's omnipotence must be coupled with that of His omniscience. Both His power and His knowledge are unlike man's in being without limitation. When we repeat the Biblical terms of an all-seeing, all-hearing, and all-knowing God, we mean in the first instance that the limitation of space does not exist for Him. He beholds the extreme parts of the earth and observes all that happens under the heavens; nothing is hidden from His sight. He not only sees the deeds of men, He also searches their thoughts. Looking into their hearts, He knows the word, ere it is upon the tongue. Looking into the future, he knows every creature, ere it enters existence. “The darkness and the light are alike to Him.” With one glance He surveys all that is and all that happens.[233] He is, as the rabbis express it, “the all-seeing Eye and the all-hearing Ear.”[234]
In like manner the distinctions of time disappear before Him. The entire past is unrolled before His sight; His book records all that men do or suffer, even their tears;[235] and there is no forgetfulness with Him. The remotest future also is open before Him, for it is planned by Him, and in it He has allotted to each being its days and its steps.[236] Yea, as He beholds events ere they transpire, so He reveals the secrets of the future to His chosen ones, in order to warn men of the judgments that threaten them.[237]
6. The idea of divine omniscience could ripen only gradually in the minds of the people. The older and more child-like conception still remains in the stories of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, where God descended from heaven to watch the doings of men, and repented of what He had done.[238] Obviously the idea of divine omniscience took hold of the people as a result of the admonitions of the prophets.
7. Philosophical inquiry into the ideas of the divine omnipotence and omniscience, however, discloses many difficulties. The Biblical assertion that nothing is impossible to God will not stand the test as soon as we ask seriously whether God can make the untrue true,—as making two times two to equal five—or whether He can declare the wrong to be right. Obviously He cannot overturn the laws of mathematical truth or of moral truth, without at the same time losing His nature as the Source and Essence of all truth. Nor can He abrogate the laws of nature, which are really His own rules for His creation, without detracting from both His omniscience and the immutability of His will. This question will be discussed more fully in connection with miracles, in chapter [XXVII].
Together with the problem of the divine omniscience arises the difficulty of reconciling this with our freedom of will and [pg 095] our moral responsibility. Would not His foreknowledge of our actions in effect determine them? This difficulty can only be solved by a proper conception of the freedom of the will, and will be discussed in that connection in chapter [XXXVII].
Altogether, we must guard against applying our human type of knowledge to God. Man, limited by space and time, obtains his knowledge of things and events by his senses, becoming aware of them separately as they exist either beside each other or in succession. With God all knowledge is complete; there is no growth of knowledge from yesterday to to-day, no knowledge of only a part instead of the whole of the world. His omniscience and omnipotence are bound up with His omnipresence and eternity. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”[239]
Chapter XV. God's Omnipresence and Eternity
1. As soon as man awakens to a higher consciousness of God, he realizes the vast distance between his own finite being limited by space and time, and the Infinite Being which rules everywhere and unceasingly in lofty grandeur and unlimited power. His very sense of being hedged in by the bounds and imperfections of a finite existence makes him long for the infinite God, unlimited in might, and brings to him the feeling of awe before His greatness. But this conception of God as the omnipresent and everlasting Spirit, as distinct from any created being, is likewise the result of many stages of growing thought.
2. The primitive mind imagines God as dwelling in a lofty place, whence He rules the earth beneath, descending at times to take part in the affairs of men, to tarry among them, or to walk with them.[240] The people adhered largely to this conception during the Biblical period, as they considered as the original seat of the Deity, first Paradise, later on Sinai or Zion, and finally the far-off heavens. It required prophetic vision to discern that “the heavens and the heavens' heavens do not encompass God's majesty,” expressed also in poetic imagery that “the heaven is My throne and the earth My footstool.”[241] The classic form of this idea of the divine omnipresence is found in the oft-quoted passage from Psalm CXXXIX.[242]
3. The dwelling places of God are to give way the moment His omnipresence is understood as penetrating the universe to such an extent that nothing escapes His glance nor lies without His dominion.[243] They are then transformed into places where He had manifested His Name, His Glory, or His Presence (“Countenance,” in the Hebrew). In this way certain emanations or powers of God were formed which could be located in a certain space without impairing the divine omnipresence. These intermediary powers will be the theme of chapter [XXXII].
The following dialogue illustrates this stage of thought: A heretic once said sarcastically to Gamaliel II, “Ye say that where ten persons assemble for worship, there the divine majesty (Shekinah) descends upon them; how many such majesties are there?” To which Gamaliel replied: “Does not the one orb of day send forth a million rays upon the earth? And should not the majesty of God, which is a million times brighter than the sun, be reflected in every spot on earth?”[244]
4. Nevertheless a conception of pure spirit is very difficult to attain, even in regard to God. The thought of His omnipresence is usually interpreted by imagining some ethereal substance which expands infinitely, as Ibn Ezra and Saadia before him were inclined to do,[245] or by picturing Him as a sort of all-encompassing Space, in accordance with the rabbis.[246] The New Testament writers and the Church fathers likewise spoke of God as Spirit, but really had in mind, for the most part, an ethereal substance resembling light pervading cosmic space. The often-expressed belief that man may see God after death rests upon this conception of God as a substance perceptible to the mind.[247]
A higher standpoint is taken by a thinker such as Ibn Gabirol, who finds God's omnipresence in His all-pervading will and intellect.[248] But this type of divine omnipresence is rather divine immanence. The religious consciousness has a quite different picture of God, a self-conscious Personality, ever near to man, ever scanning his acts, his thoughts, and his motives. Here philosophy and religion part company. The former must abstain from the assumption of a divine personality; the latter cannot do without it. The God of religion must partake of the knowledge and the feelings of His worshiper, must know his every impulse and idea, and must feel with him in his suffering and need. God's omnipresence is in this sense a postulate of religion.
5. The second earthly and human limitation is that of time. Confined by space and time, man casts his eyes upward toward a Being who shall be infinite and eternal. Whatever time begets, time swallows up again. Transitoriness is the fate of all things. Everything which enters existence must end at last. “Also heaven and earth perish and wax old like a garment. Only God remains forever the same, and His years have no end. He is from everlasting to everlasting, the first and the last.” So speak prophet and psalmist, voicing a universal thought[249]; and our liturgical poet sings:
“The Lord of all did reign supreme
Ere yet this world was made and formed;
When all was finished by His will,
Then was His name as King proclaimed.
“And should these forms no more exist,
He still will rule in majesty;
He was, He is, He shall remain,
His glory never shall decrease.”[250]
6. But the idea of God's eternity also presents certain difficulties to the thinking mind. As Creator and Author of the universe, God is the First Cause, without beginning or end, the Source of all existence; as Ruler and Master of the world, He maintains all things through all eternity; though heaven and earth “wax old like a garment,” He outlasts them all. Now, if He is to manifest these powers from everlasting to everlasting, He must ever remain the same. Consequently, we must add immutability as a corollary of eternity, if the latter is to mean anything. It is not enough to state that God is without beginning and without end; the essential part of the doctrine is His transcendence above the changes and conditions of time. We mortals cannot really entertain a conception of eternity; our nearest approach to it is an endless succession of periods of time, a ceaseless procession of ages and eons following each other. Endless time is not at all the same as timelessness. Therefore eternity signifies transcendence above all existence in time; its real meaning is supermundaneity.[251]
7. This seems the best way to avoid the difficulty which seemed almost insuperable to the medieval thinkers, how to reconcile a Creation at a certain time and a Creator for whom time does not exist. In the effort to solve the difficulty, they resorted to the Platonic and Aristotelian definition of time as the result of the motions of the heavenly bodies; thus they declared that time was created simultaneously with the world. This is impossible for the modern thinker, who has learned from Kant to regard time and space, not as external realities, but as human modes of apperception of objects. So the contrast between the transient character of the world and the eternity of God becomes all the greater with the increasing realization of the vast gap between the material world and the divine spirit.
At this point arises a still greater difficulty. The very idea of creation at a certain time becomes untenable in view of our knowledge of the natural process; the universe itself, it seems to us, extends over an infinity of space and time. Indeed, the modern view of evolution in place of creation has the grave danger of leading to pantheism, to a conception of the cosmos which sees in God only an eternal energy (or substance) devoid of free volition and self-conscious action.[252] We can evade the difficulty only by assuming God's transcendence, and this can be done in such a way as not to exclude His immanence, or—what is the same thing—His omnipresence.
8. Both God's omnipresence and His eternity are intended only to raise Him far above the world, out of the confines of space and time, to represent His sublime loftiness as the “Rock of Ages,” as holding worlds without number in “His eternal arms.” “Nothing can be hidden from Him who has reared the entire universe and is familiar with every part of it, however remote.”[253]
Chapter XVI. God's Holiness
1. Judaism recognizes two distinct types of divine attributes. Those which we have so far considered belong to the metaphysical group, which chiefly engage the attention of the philosopher. They represent God as a transcendental Being who is ever beyond our comprehension, because our finite intellect can never grasp the infinite Spirit. They are not descriptions, but rather inferences from the works of the Master of the world to the Master himself. But there are other divine attributes which we derive from our own moral nature, and which invest our whole life with a higher moral character. Instead of arising from the external necessity which governs nature in its causes and effects, these rest upon our assumption of inner freedom, setting the aims for all that we achieve. This moral nature is realized to some extent even by the savage, when he trembles before his deity in pangs of conscience, or endeavors to propitiate him by sacrifices. Still, Judaism alone fully realized the moral nature of the Deity; this was done by investing the term “holiness” with the idea of moral perfection, so that God became the ideal and pattern of the loftiest morality. “Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”[254]—This is the central and culminating idea of the Jewish law.[255]
2. Holiness is the essence of all moral perfection; it is purity unsullied by any breath of evil. True holiness can be [pg 102] ascribed only to Divinity, above the realm of the flesh and the senses. “There is none holy but the Lord, for there is none beside Thee,” says Scripture.[256] Whether man stands on a lower or higher level of culture, he has in all his plans and aspirations some ideal of perfection to which he may never attain, but which serves as the standard for his actions. The best of his doings falls short of what he ought to do; in his highest efforts he realizes the potentiality of better things. This ideal of moral perfection works as the motive power of the will in setting for it a standard; it establishes human freedom in place of nature's compulsion, but such an ideal can emanate only from the moral power ruling life, which we designate as the divine Holiness.
3. Scripture says of God that He “walketh in holiness,”[257] and accordingly morality in man is spoken of as “walking in the ways of God.”[258] “Walk before Me and be perfect!” says God to Abraham.[259] Moses approached God with two petitions,—the one, “Show me Thy ways that I may know Thee!” the other, “Show me, I pray Thee, Thy glory!” In response to the latter God said, “No man can see Me and live”, but the former petition was granted in that the Lord revealed Himself in His moral attributes.[260] These alone can be understood and emulated by man; in regard to the so-called metaphysical attributes God will ever remain beyond human comprehension and emulation.
4. In order to serve as vehicle for the expression of the highest moral perfection, the Biblical term for holiness, Kadosh, had to undergo a long process of development, obscuring its original meaning. The history of this term gives us the deepest insight into the working of the Jewish genius towards the full revelation of the God of holiness. At first the word [pg 103] Kadosh[261] seems to have denoted unapproachableness in the sense in which fire is unapproachable, that is, threatening and consuming. This fiery nature was ascribed by primitive man to all divine beings. Hence the angels are termed “the holy ones” in Scripture.[262] According to both priestly practice and popular belief, the man who approached one of these holy ones with hand or foot, or even with his gaze, was doomed to die.[263] Out of such crude conceptions evolved the idea of God's majesty as unapproachable in the sense of the sublime, banishing everything profane from its presence, and visiting with punishment every violation of its sanctity. The old conception of the fiery appearance of the Deity served especially as a figurative expression of the moral power of God, which manifests itself as a “consuming fire,”[264] exterminating evil, and making man long for the good and the true, for righteousness and love.
5. The divine attribute of holiness has accordingly a double meaning. On the one hand, it indicates spiritual loftiness transcending everything sensual, which works as a purging power of indignation at evil, rebuking injustice, impurity and falsehood, and punishing transgression until it is removed from the sight of God. On the other hand, it denotes the condescending mercy of God, which, having purged the soul of wrong, wins it for the right, and which endows man with the power of perfecting himself, and thus leads him to the gradual building up of the kingdom of goodness and purity on earth. This ethical conception of holiness, which emanates from the moral nature of God, revealed to the prophetic genius of Israel, must not be confused with the old Semitic conception of priestly or [pg 104] ritual holiness. Ritual holiness is purely external, and is transferable to persons and things, to times and places, according to their relation to the Deity. Hence the various cults applied the term “holy” to the most abominable forms of idolatry and impure worship.[265] The Mosaic law condemned all these as violations of the holiness of Israel's God, but could not help sanctioning many ordinances and rites of priestly holiness which originated in ancient Semitic usages. Hence the two conceptions of holiness, the priestly or external and the prophetic or ethical, became interwoven in the Mosaic code to such an extent as to impair the standard of ethical holiness stressed by the prophets, the unique and lofty possession of Judaism. Hence the letter of the Law caused a deplorable confusion of ideas, which was utilized by the detractors of Judaism. The liberal movement of modern Judaism, in pointing to the prophetic ideals as the true basis of the Jewish faith, is at the same time dispelling this ancient confusion of the two conceptions of holiness.
6. The Levitical holiness adheres outwardly to persons and things and consists in their separation or their reservation from common use. In striking contrast to this, the holiness which Judaism attributes to God denotes the highest ethical purity, unattainable to flesh and blood, but designed for our emulation.
The contemplation of the divine holiness is to inspire man with fear of sin and to exert a healthful influence upon his conduct. Thus God became the hallowing power in Judaism and its institutions, truly the “Holy One of Israel” according to the term of Isaiah and his great exilic successor, the so-called Deutero-Isaiah.[266] Thus His holiness invested His people with [pg 105] special sanctity and imposed upon it special obligations. In the words of Ezekiel, God became the “Sanctifier of Israel.”[267]
The rabbis penetrated deeply into the spirit of Scripture, at the same time that they adhered strictly to its letter. While they clung tenaciously to the ritual holiness of the priestly codes, they recognized the ideal of holiness which is so sharply opposed in every act and thought to the demoralizing cults of heathenism.[268]
7. Accordingly, holiness is not the metaphysical concept which Jehuda ha Levi considers it,[269] but the principle and source of all ethics, the spirit of absolute morality, lending purpose and value to the whole of life. As long as men do good or shun evil through fear of punishment or hope for reward, whether in this life or the hereafter, so long will ideal morality remain unattained, and man cannot claim to stand upon the ground of divine holiness. The holy God must penetrate and control all of life—such is the essence of Judaism. The true aim of human existence is not salvation of the soul,—a desire which is never quite free from selfishness,—but holiness emulating God, striving to do good for the sake of the good without regard to recompense, and to shun evil because it is evil, aside from all consequences.[270]
8. The fact is that holiness is a religious term, based upon divine revelation, not a philosophical one resting upon speculative reasoning. It is a postulate of our moral nature that all life is governed by a holy Will to which we must submit willingly, and which makes for the good. How volition and compulsion are with God one and the same, how the good exists in God without the bad, or holiness and moral purpose without unholy or immoral elements, how God can be exactly opposite to all we know of man,—this is a question which [pg 106] philosophy is unable to answer. In fact, holiness is best defined negatively, as the “negation of all that man from his own experience knows to be unholy.” These words of the Danish philosopher Rauwenhoff are made still clearer by the following observations: “The strength in the idea of holiness lies exactly in its negative character. There is no comparison of higher or lesser degree possible between man's imperfections and God's perfect goodness. Instead, there is an absolute contrast between mankind which, even in its noblest types, must wrestle with the power of evil, and God, in whom nothing can be imagined which would even suggest the possibility of any moral shortcoming or imperfection.”[271] As the prophet says, “Thou art too pure of eyes to look complacently upon evil,”[272] and according to the Psalmist, “Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.”[273]
9. The idea of holiness became the preëminent feature of Judaism, so that the favorite name for God in Rabbinical literature was “the Holy One, blessed be He,” and the acme of all ceremonial and moral laws alike was found in “the Hallowing of His name.”[274] If the rabbis as followers of the Priestly Code were compelled to lay great stress upon ritual holiness, they yet beheld in it the means of moral purification. They never lost sight of the prophetic principle that moral purity is the object of all human life, for “the holy God is sanctified through righteousness.”[275]
Chapter XVII. God's Wrath and Punishment
1. Scripture speaks frequently of the anger and zeal of God and of His avenging sword and judgment, so as to give the impression that “the Old Testament God is a God of wrath and vengeance.” As a matter of fact, these attributes are merely emanations of His holiness, the guide and incentive to moral action in man. The burning fire of the divine holiness aims to awaken the dormant seeds of morality in the human soul and to ripen them into full growth. Whenever we to-day would speak of pangs of conscience, of bitter remorse, Scripture uses figurative language and describes how God's wrath is kindled against the wrongdoing of the people, and how fire blazes forth from His nostrils to consume them in His anger. The nearer man stands to nature, the more tempestuous are the outbursts of his passion, and the more violent is the reaction of his repentance. Yet this very reaction impresses him as though wrought from outside or above by the offended Deity. Thus the divine wrath becomes a means of moral education, exactly as the parents' indignation at the child's offenses is part of his training in morality.
2. Thus the first manifestation of God's holiness is His indignation at falsehood and violence, His hatred of evil and wrongdoing. The longer men persist in sin, the more does He manifest Himself as “the angry God,” as a “consuming fire” which destroys evil with holy zeal.[276] The husbandman cannot [pg 108] expect the good harvest until he has weeded out the tares from the field; so God, in educating man, begins by purging the soul from all its evil inclinations, and this zeal is all the more unsparing as the good is finally to triumph in His eternal plan of universal salvation. We must bear in mind that Judaism does not personify evil as a power hostile to God, hence the whole problem is only one of purifying the human soul. Before the sun of God's grace and mercy is to shine, bearing life and healing for all humanity, His wrath and punitive justice must ever burst forth to cleanse the world of its sin. For as long as evil continues unchecked, so long cannot the divine holiness pour forth its all-forbearing goodness and love.
3. On this account the first revelation of God on Sinai was as “a jealous God, who visiteth the sins of the fathers upon the children and the children's children until the third and fourth generation.” So the prophets, from Moses to Malachi, speak ever of God's anger, which comes with the fury of nature's unchained forces, to terrify and overwhelm all living beings.[277] Thus Scripture considers all the great catastrophes of the hoary past,—flood, earthquakes, and the rain of fire and brimstone that destroys cities—as judgments of the divine anger on sinful generations. Wickedness in general causes His displeasure, but His wrath is provoked especially by violations of the social order, by desecrations of His sanctuary, or attacks on His covenant, and His anger is kindled for the poor and helpless, when they are oppressed and deprived of their rights.[278]
4. Thus the divine holiness was felt more and more as a moral force, and that which appeared in pre-prophetic times to be an elemental power of the celestial ire became a refining [pg 109] flame, purging men of dross as in a crucible. “I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger,” says the prophet, “for I am God and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee, and I will not come in fury.”[279] So sings the Psalmist, “His anger is but for a moment; His favor for a life-time.”[280] In the same spirit the rabbis interpreted the verse of the Decalogue, “The sin of the fathers is visited upon the children and children's children only if they continue to act as their fathers did, and are themselves haters of God.”[281]
The fact is that Israel in Canaan had become addicted to all the vices of idolatry, and if they were to be trained to moral purity and to loyalty to the God of the Covenant, they must be taught fear and awe before the flame of the divine wrath. Only after that could the prophet address himself to the conscience of the individual, saying:
“Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?
Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?
He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly;
He that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes,
That stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking upon evil;
He shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks;
His bread shall be given, his water shall be sure.
Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold a land stretching afar.”[282]
Here we behold the fiery element of the divine holiness partly depicted as a reality and partly spiritualized. The last of the prophets compares the divine wrath to a melting furnace, which on the Day of Judgment is to consume evildoers as stubble, while to those who fear the Lord He [pg 110] shall appear as the sun of righteousness with healing on its wings.[283]
5. The idea as expressed by the prophets, then, was that God's anger will visit the wicked, and particularly the ungodly nations of heathendom, and that He shall judge all creatures in fire.[284] This was significantly altered under Persian influence, when the Jew began to regard the world to come as promising to the righteous greater bliss than the present one. Then the day of divine wrath meant doom eternal for evil-doers, who were to fall into the fiery depths of Gehenna, “their worm is never to die and their fire never to be quenched.”[285] This became the prevailing view of the rabbis, of the Apocalyptics and also of the New Testament and the Church literature.[286] The Jewish propaganda in the Hellenistic literature, however, combined the fire of Gehenna with the Stoic, or pagan, view of a general world-conflagration, and announced a general doomsday for the heathen world, unless they be converted to the belief in Israel's one and holy God, and ceased violating the fundamental (Noachian) laws of humanity.[287]
6. A higher view of the punitive anger of God is taken by Beruriah, the noble wife of R. Meir,[288]—if, indeed, the wife of the saintly Abba Helkiah did not precede her[289]—in suggesting a different reading of the Biblical text, as to make it offer the lesson: “not the sinners shall perish from the earth, but the sins.” From a more philosophical viewpoint both Juda ha Levi and Maimonides hold that the anger which we ascribe to [pg 111] God is only the transference of the anger which we actually feel at the sight of evildoing. Similarly, when we speak of the consuming fire of hell, we depict the effect which the fear of God must have on our inner life, until the time shall come when we shun evil as ungodly and love the good because it is both good and God-like.[290]
Chapter XVIII. God's Long-suffering and Mercy
1. In one of the little known apocryphal writings, the Testament of Abraham, a beautiful story is told of the patriarch. Shortly before his death, the archangel Michael drove him along the sky in the heavenly chariot. Looking down upon the earth, he saw companies of thieves and murderers, adulterers, and other evil-doers pursuing their nefarious practices, and in righteous indignation he cried out: “Oh would to God that fire, destruction, and death should instantly befall these criminals!” No sooner had he spoken these words than the doom he pronounced came upon those wicked men. But then spoke the Lord God to the heavenly charioteer Michael: “Stop at once, lest My righteous servant Abraham in his just indignation bring death upon all My creatures, because they are not as righteous as he. He has not learned to restrain his anger.”[291] Thus, indeed, the wrath kindled at the sight of wrongdoing would consume the sinner at once, were it not for another quality in God, called in Scripture long-suffering. By this He restrains His anger and gives the sinner time to improve his ways. Though every wicked deed provokes Him to immediate punishment, yet He shows compassion upon the feeble mortal. “Even in wrath He remembereth compassion.”[292] “He hath no delight in the death of the sinner, but that he shall return from his ways and live.”[293] The divine holiness does not merely overwhelm and consume; its essential [pg 113] aim is the elevation of man, the effort to endow him with a higher life.
2. It is perfectly true that a note of rigor and of profound earnestness runs through the pages of Holy Writ. The prophets, law-givers, and psalmists speak incessantly of how guilt brings doom upon the lands and nations. As the father who is solicitous of the honor of his household punishes unrelentingly every violation of morality within it, so the Holy One of Israel watches zealously over His people's loyalty to His covenant. His glorious name, His holy majesty cannot be violated with immunity from His dreaded wrath. There is nothing of the joyous abandon which was predominant in the Greek nature and in the Olympian gods. The ideal of holiness was presented by the God of Israel, and all the doings of men appeared faulty beside it.
But its power of molding character is shown by Judaism at this very point, in that it does not stop at the condemnation of the sinner. It holds forth the promise of God's forbearance to man in his shortcomings, due to His compassion on the weakness of flesh and blood. He waits for man, erring and stumbling, until by striving and struggling he shall attain a higher state of purity. This is the bright, uplifting side of the Jewish idea of the divine holiness. In this is the innermost nature of God disclosed. In fear and awe of Him who is enthroned on high, “before whom even the angels are not pure,” man, conscious of his sinfulness, sinks trembling into the dust before the Judge of the whole earth. But the grace and mercy of the long-suffering Ruler lift him up and imbue him with courage and strength to acquire a new life and new energy. Thus the oppressive burden of guilt is transformed into an uplifting power through the influence of the holy God.
3. The predominance in God of mildness and mercy over punitive anger is expressed most strikingly in the revelation to Moses, when he had entreated God to let him see His ways. [pg 114] The people had provoked God's anger by their faithlessness in the worship of the golden calf, and He had threatened to consume them, when Moses interceded in their behalf. Then the Lord passed by him, and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation.”[294] Such a passage shows clearly the progress in the knowledge of God's nature. For Abraham and the traditions of the patriarchs God was the righteous Judge, punishing the transgressors. He is represented in the same way in the Decalogue on Sinai.[295] Was this to be the final word? Was Israel chosen by God as His covenant people, only to encounter the full measure of His just but relentless anger and to be consumed at once for the violation of this covenant? Therefore Moses wrestled with his God. Filled with compassionate love for his people, he is willing to offer his life as their ransom. And should God himself lack this fullness of love and pity, of which even a human being is capable? Then, as from a dark cloud, there flashed suddenly upon him the light of a new revelation; he became aware of the higher truth, that above the austerity of God's avenging anger prevails the tender forgiveness of His mercy; that beyond the consuming zeal of His punitive justice shines the sun-like splendor of His grace and love. The rabbis find the expression of mercy especially in the name JHVH (i.e. “the One who shall ever be”) which is significantly placed here at the head of the divine attributes. Indeed, only He who is the same from everlasting to everlasting, and to whom to-morrow is like yesterday, can show forbearance to erring [pg 115] man, because in whatsoever he has failed yesterday he may make good to-morrow.
4. Like Moses, the master of the prophets, so the prophet Hosea also learned in hard spiritual struggle to know the divine attribute of mercy and lovingkindness. His own wife had proved faithless, and had broken the marital covenant; still his love survived, so that he granted her forgiveness when she was forsaken, and took her back to his home. Then, in his distress at the God-forsaken state of Israel through her faithlessness, he asked himself: “Will God reject forever the nation which He espoused, because it broke the covenant? Will not He also grant forgiveness and mercy?” The divine answer came to him out of the depths of his own compassionate soul. Upon the crown of God's majesty which Amos had beheld all effulgent with justice and righteousness, he placed the most precious gem, reflecting the highest quality of God—His gracious and all-forgiving love.[296] Whether the priority in this great truth belongs to Hosea or Moses is a question for historical Bible research to answer, but it is of no consequence to Jewish theology.
5. Certainly Scripture represents God too much after human fashion, when it ascribes to him changes of mood from anger to compassion, or speaks of His repentance.[297] But we must bear in mind that the prophets obtained their insight into the ways of God by this very process of transferring their own experience to the Deity. And on the other hand, we are told that “God is not a man that He should lie, neither the son of man that He should repent.”[298] All these anthropomorphic [pg 116] pictures of God were later avoided by the ancient Biblical translators by means of paraphrase, and by the philosophers by means of allegory.[299]
6. According to the Midrashic interpretation of the passage from the Pentateuch quoted above, Moses desired to ascertain whether God ruled the world with His justice or with His mercy, and the answer was: “Behold, I shall let My goodness pass before thee. For I owe nothing to any of My creatures, but My actions are prompted only by My grace and good will, through which I give them all that they possess.”[300] According to Judaism justice and mercy are intertwined in God's government of the world; the former is the pillar of the cosmic structure, and the latter the measuring line. No mortal could stand before God, were justice the only standard; but we subsist on His mercy, which lends us the boons of life without our meriting them. That which is not good in us now is to become good through our effort toward the best. God's grace underlies this possibility.
Accordingly, the divine holiness has two aspects, the overwhelming wrath of His justice and the uplifting grace of His long-suffering. Without justice there could be no fear of God, no moral earnestness; without mercy only condemnation and perdition would remain. As the rabbis tell us, both justice and mercy had their share in the creation of man, for in man both good and bad appear and struggle for supremacy. All generations need the divine grace that they may have time and opportunity for improvement.[301]
7. Thus this conception of grace is far deeper and worthier of God than is that of Paulinian Christianity; for grace in Paul's sense is arbitrary in action and dependent upon the acceptance [pg 117] of a creed, therefore the very reverse of impartial justice. In Judaism divine grace is not offered as a bait to make men believe, but as an incentive to moral improvement. The God of holiness, who inflicts wounds upon the guilty soul by bitter remorse, offers also healing through His compassion. Justice and mercy are not two separate powers or persons in the Deity, as with the doctrine of the Church; they are the two sides of the same divine power. “I am the Lord before sin was committed, and I am the Lord after sin is committed”—so the rabbis explain the repetition of the name JHVH in the revelation to Moses.[302]
Chapter XIX. God's Justice
1. The unshakable faith of the Jewish people was ever sustained by the consciousness that its God is a God of justice. The conviction that He will not suffer wrong to go unpunished was read into all the stories of the hoary past. The Babylonian form of these legends in common with all ancient folk-lore ascribes human calamity to blind fate or to the caprice of the gods, but the Biblical narratives assume that evil does not befall men undeserved, and therefore always ascribe ruin or death to human transgression. So the Jewish genius beheld in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a divine judgment upon the depraved inhabitants, and derived from it a lesson for the household of Abraham that they should “keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice.”[303] The fundamental principle of Judaism throughout the ages has been the teaching of the patriarch that “the Judge of all the earth cannot act unjustly,”[304] even though the varying events of history force the problem of justice upon the attention of Jeremiah,[305] the Psalmists,[306] the author of the book of Job,[307] and the Talmudical sages.[308] “Righteousness and justice are the foundations of Thy throne”[309]—this is the sum and substance of the religious experience of Israel. At the same time man realizes how far from his grasp is the divine justice: [pg 119] “Thy righteousness is like the mighty mountains; Thy judgments are like the great deep.”[310]
2. The Master-builder of the moral world made justice the supporting pillar of the entire creation. “He is The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is He.”[311] There can be no moral world order without a retributive justice, which leaves no infringement of right unpunished, just as no social order can exist without laws to protect the weak and to enforce general respect. The God of Judaism rules over mankind as Guardian and Vindicator of justice; no wrong escapes His scrutinizing gaze. This fundamental doctrine invested history, of both the individual and the nation, with a moral significance beyond that of any other religious or ethical system.
Whatever practice or sense of justice may exist among the rest of mankind, it is at best a glimpse of that divine righteousness which leads us on and becomes a mighty force compelling us, not only to avoid wrongdoing, but to combat it with all the passion of an indignant soul and eradicate it wherever possible. Though in our daily experience justice may be sadly lacking, we still cling to the moral axiom that God will lead the right to victory and will hurl iniquity into the abyss. As the sages remark in the Midrash: “How could short-sighted and short-lived man venture to assert, ‘All His ways are just,’ were it not for the divine revelation by which the eyes of Moses were opened, so that he could gaze into the very depths of life?”[312] That is, the idea of divine justice is revealed, not in the world as it is, but in the world as it should be, the ideal cosmos which lives in the spirit.
3. It cannot be denied that justice is recognized as a binding force even by peoples on a low cultural plane, and the Deity is generally regarded as the guardian of justice, exactly as in Judaism. This fact is shown by the use of the oath in connection with judicial procedure among many nations. Both Roman jurisprudence and Greek ethics declare justice to be the foundation of the social life. Nevertheless the Jewish ideal of justice cannot be identified with that of the law and the courts. The law is part of the social system of the State, by which the relations of individuals are determined and upheld. The maintenance of this social order, of the status quo, is considered justice by the law, whatever injustice to individuals may result. But the Jewish idea of justice is not reactionary; it owes to the prophets its position as the dominating principle of the world, the peculiar essence of God, and therefore the ultimate ideal of human life. They fought for right with an insistence which vindicated its moral significance forever, and in scathing words of indignation which still burn in the soul they denounced oppression wherever it appeared. The crimes of the mighty against the weak, they held, could not be atoned for by the outward forms of piety. Right and justice are not simply matters for the State and the social order, but belong to God, who defends the cause of the helpless and the homeless, “who executes the judgment of the fatherless and the widow,” “who regardeth not persons, nor taketh bribes.”[313] Iniquity is hateful to Him; it cannot be covered up by pious acts, nor be justified by good ends. “Justice is God's.”[314] Thus every violation of justice, whether from sordid self-seeking or from tender compassion, is a violation of God's cause; and every vindication of justice, every strengthening of the power of right in society, is a triumph of God.
4. Accordingly, the highest principle of ethics in Judaism, the cardinal point in the government of the world, is not love, [pg 121] but justice. Love has the tendency to undermine the right and to effeminize society. Justice, on the other hand, develops the moral capacity of every man; it aims not merely to avoid wrong, but to promote and develop the right for the sake of the perfect state of morality. True justice cannot remain a passive onlooker when the right or liberty of any human being is curtailed, but strains every effort to prevent violence and oppression. It battles for the right, until it has triumphed over every injustice. This practical conception of right can be traced through all Jewish literature and doctrine; through the laws of Moses, to whom is ascribed the maxim: “Let the right have its way, though it bore holes through the rock”,[315] through the flaming words of the prophets;[316] through the Psalmists, who spoke such words as these: “Thou art not a God who hath pleasure in wickedness; evil shall not sojourn with Thee. The arrogant shall not stand in Thy sight; Thou hatest all workers of iniquity.”[317]
Nor does justice stop with the prohibition of evil. The very arm that strikes down the presumptuous transgressor turns to lift up the meek and endow him with strength. Justice becomes a positive power for the right; it becomes Zedakah, righteousness or true benevolence, and aims to readjust the inequalities of life by kindness and love. It engenders that deeper sense of justice which claims the right of the weak to protection by the arm of the strong.
5. Hence comes the truth of Matthew Arnold's striking summary of Israel's Law and Prophets in his “Literature and Dogma,” as “The Power, not ourselves, that maketh for righteousness.” Still, when we trace the development of this central thought in the soul of the Jewish people, we find that it arose from a peculiar mythological conception. The God of Sinai had manifested Himself in the devastating elements of [pg 122] nature—fire, storm, and hail; later, the prophetic genius of Israel saw Him as a moral power who destroyed wickedness by these very phenomena in order that right should prevail. At first the covenant-God of Israel hurls the plagues of heaven upon the hostile Egyptians and Canaanites, the oppressors of His people. Afterward the great prophets speak of the Day of JHVH which would come at the end of days, when God will execute His judgment upon the heathen nations by pouring forth all the terrors of nature upon them. The natural forces of destruction are utilized by the Ruler of heaven as means of moral purification. “For by fire will the Lord contend.”[318]
In this process the sense of right became progressively refined, so that God was made the Defender of the cause of the oppressed, and the holiest of duties became the protection of the forsaken and unfortunate. Justice and right were thus lifted out of the civil or forensic sphere into that of divine holiness, and the struggle for the down-trodden became an imperative duty. Judaism finds its strength in the oft-repeated doctrine that the moral welfare of the world rests upon justice. “The King's strength is that he loveth justice,” says the Psalmist, and commenting upon this the Midrash says, “Not might, but right forms the foundation of the world's peace.”[319]
6. Social life, therefore, must be built upon the firm foundation of justice, the full recognition of the rights of all individuals and all classes. It can be based neither upon the formal administration of law nor upon the elastic principle of love, which too often tolerates, or even approves certain types of injustice. Judaism has been working through the centuries to realize the ideal of justice to all mankind; therefore the Jew has suffered and waited for the ultimate triumph of the God of justice. God's kingdom of justice is to be established, not in a world to come, but in the world that now is, in the life of [pg 123] men and nations. As the German poet has it, “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht” (the history of the world is the world's tribunal of justice).
7. The recognition of God as the righteous Ruler implies a dominion of absolute justice which allows no wrongdoing to remain unpunished and no meritorious act to remain unrewarded. The moral and intellectual maturity of the people, however, must determine how they conceive retribution in the divine judgment. Under the simple conditions of patriarchal life, when common experience seemed to be in harmony with the demands of divine justice, when the evil-doer seemed to meet his fate and the worthy man to enjoy his merited prosperity, reward and punishment could well be expressed by the Bible in terms of national prosperity and calamity. The prophets, impressed by the political and moral decline of their era, announced for both Israel and the other nations a day of judgment to come, when God will manifest Himself as the righteous Ruler of the world. In fact, those great preachers of righteousness announced for all time the truth of a moral government of the world, with terror for the malefactors and the assurance of peace and salvation for the righteous. “He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity” becomes a song of joyous confidence and hope on the lips of the Psalmist.[320] This final triumph of justice does not depend, as Christian theologians assert, on the mere outward conformity of Israel to the law.[321] On the contrary, it offers to the innocent sufferer the hope that “his right shall break forth as light,” while “the wicked shall be put to silence in darkness.”[322] We must admit, indeed, that the Biblical idea of retribution still has too much of the earthly flavor, and [pg 124] often lacks true spirituality. The explanation of this lies in the desire of the expounders of Judaism that this world should be regarded as the battle-ground between the good and the bad, that the victory of the good is to be decided here, and that the idea of justice should not assume the character of other-worldliness.
8. It is true that neither the prophets, such as Jeremiah, nor the sages, such as the authors of Job and Koheleth, actually solved the great enigma which has baffled all nations and ages, the adjustment of merit and destiny by divine righteousness. Yet even a doubter like Job does not despair of his own sense of justice, and wrestles with his God in the effort to obtain a deeper insight. Still the great mass of people are not satisfied with an unfulfilled yearning and seeking. The various religions have gradually transferred the final adjustment of merit and destiny to the hereafter; the rewards and punishments awaiting man after death have been depicted glaringly in colors taken from this earthly life. It is not surprising that Judaism was influenced by this almost universal view. The mechanical form of the principle of justice demands that “with the same measure one metes out, it shall be meted out to him,”[323] and this could not be found either in human justice or in human destiny. Therefore the popular mind naturally turned to the world to come, expecting there that just retribution which is lacking on earth.
Only superior minds could ascend to that higher ethical conception where compensation is no longer expected, but man seeks the good and happiness of others and finds therein his highest satisfaction. As Ben Azzai expresses it, “The reward of virtue is virtue, and the punishment of sin is sin.”[324] At this point justice merges into divine holiness.
9. The idea of divine justice exerted its uplifting force in one more way in Judaism. The recognition of God as the righteous Judge of the world—Zidduk ha Din[325]—is to bring consolation and endurance to the afflicted, and to remove from their hearts the bitter sting of despair and doubt. The rabbis called God “the Righteous One of the universe,”[326] as if to indicate that God himself is meant by the Scriptural verse, “The righteous is an everlasting foundation of the world.”[327]
Far remote from Judaism, however, is the doctrine that God would consign an otherwise righteous man to eternal doom, because he belongs to another creed or another race than that of the Jew. Wherever the heathens are spoken of as condemned at the last judgment, the presumption based upon centuries of sad experience was that their lives were full of injustice and wickedness. Indeed, milder teachers, whose view became the accepted one, maintained that truly righteous men are found among the heathen, who have therefore as much claim upon eternal salvation as the pious ones of Israel.[328]
Chapter XX. God's Love and Compassion
1. As justice forms the basis of human morality, with kindness and benevolence as milder elements to mitigate its sternness, so, according to the Jewish view, mercy and love represent the milder side of God, but by no means a higher attribute counteracting His justice. Love can supplement justice, but cannot replace it. The sages say:[329] “When the Creator saw that man could not endure, if measured by the standard of strict justice, He joined His attribute of mercy to that of justice, and created man by the combined principle of both.” The divine compassion with human frailty, felt by both Moses and Hosea, manifests itself in God's mercy. Were it not for the weakness of the flesh, justice would have sufficed. But the divine plan of salvation demands redeeming love which wins humanity step by step for higher moral ends. The educational value of this love lies in the fact that it is a gift of grace, bestowed on man by the fatherly love of God to ward off the severity of full retribution. His pardon must conduce to a deeper moral earnestness.[330] “For with Thee there is forgiveness that Thou mayest be feared.”[331] R. Akiba says: “The world is judged by the divine attribute of goodness.”[332]
2. As a matter of course, in the Biblical view God's mercy was realized at first only with regard to Israel and was afterward extended gradually to humanity at large. The generation of the flood and the inhabitants of Sodom perished on account of their guilt, and only the righteous were saved. This attitude holds throughout the Bible until the late book of Jonah, with its lesson of God's forgiveness even for the heathen city of Nineveh after due repentance. In the later Psalms the divine attributes of mercy are expanded and applied to all the creatures of God.[333] According to the school of Hillel, whenever the good and evil actions of any man are found equal in the scales of justice, God inclines the balances toward the side of mercy.[334] Nay more, in the words of Samuel, the Babylonian teacher, God judges the nations by the noblest types they produce.[335]
The ruling Sadducean priesthood insisted on the rigid enforcement of the law. The party of the pious, the Hasidim, however,—according to the liturgy, the apocryphal and the rabbinical literature,—appealed to the mercy of God in song and prayer, acknowledging their failings in humility, and made kindness and love their special objects in life. Therefore with their ascendancy the divine attributes of mercy and compassion were accentuated. God himself, we are told, was heard praying: “Oh that My attribute of mercy may prevail over My attribute of justice, so that grace alone may be bestowed upon My children on earth.”[336] And the second word of the Decalogue was so interpreted that God's mercy—which is said to extend “to the thousandth generation”—is five hundred times as powerful as His punitive justice,—which is applied “to the third and fourth generation.”[337]
3. Divine mercy shows itself in the law, where compassion is enjoined on all suffering creatures. Profound sympathy with the oppressed is echoed in the ancient law of the poor who had to give up his garment as a pledge: “When he crieth unto Me, I shall hear, for I am gracious.”[338] In the old Babylonian code, might was the arbiter of right,[339] but the unique genius of the Jew is shown in adapting this same legal material to its impulse of compassion. The cry of the innocent sufferer, of the forsaken and fatherless, rises up to God's throne and secures there his right against the oppressor. Thus in the Mosaic law and throughout Jewish literature God calls himself “the Judge of the widow,” “the Father of the fatherless,”[340] “a Stronghold to the needy.”[341] He calls the poor, “My people,”[342] and, as the rabbis say, He loves the persecuted, not the persecutors.[343]
4. Even to dumb beasts God extends His mercy. This Jewish tenderness is an inheritance from the shepherd life of the patriarchs, who were eager to quench the thirst of the animals in their care before they thought of their own comfort.[344] This sense of sympathy appears in the Biblical precepts as to the overburdened beast,[345] the ox treading the corn,[346] and the mother-beast or mother-bird with her young,[347] as well as the Talmudic rule first to feed the domestic animals and then sit down to the meal.[348] This has remained a characteristic trait of Judaism. Thus, in connection with the verse of the Psalm, “His tender mercies are over all His works,”[349] it is related of Rabbi Judah the Saint, the redactor of the Mishnah, [pg 129] that he was afflicted with pain for thirteen years, and gave as reason that he once struck and kicked away a calf which had run to him moaning for protection; he was finally relieved, after he had taught his household to have pity even on the smallest of creatures.[350] In fact, Rabban Gamaliel, his grandfather, had taught before him: “Whosoever has compassion on his fellow-creatures, on him God will have compassion.”[351] The sages often interpret the phrase “To walk in the way of the Lord”—that is, “As the Holy One, blessed be He, is merciful, so be ye also merciful.”[352]
5. Thus the rabbis came to regard love as the innermost part of God's being. God loves mankind, is the highest stage of consciousness of God, but this can be attained only by the closest relation of the human soul to the Most High, after severe trials have softened and humanized the spirit. It is not accidental that Scripture speaks often of God's goodness, mercy, and grace, but seldom mentions His love. Possibly the term ahabah was used at first for sensuous love and therefore was not employed for God so often as the more spiritual hesed, which denotes kind and loyal affection.[353] However, Hosea used this term for his own love for his faithless wife, and did not hesitate to apply it also to God's love for His faithless people, which he terms “a love of free will.”[354] His example is followed by Jeremiah, most tender of the prophets, who gave the classic expression to the everlasting love of God for Israel, His beloved son.[355] This divine love, spiritually understood, forms the chief topic of the Deuteronomic addresses.[356] In this book God's love appears as that of a father for his son, who lavishes gifts upon him, but also chastises him for his own [pg 130] good.[357] The mind opened more and more to regard the trials sent by God as means of ennobling the character,[358] and the men of the Talmudic period often speak of the afflictions of the saints as “visitations of the divine love.”[359]
6. The sufferings of Israel in particular were taken to be trials of the divine love.[360] God's love for Israel, “His first-born son,”[361] is not partial, but from the outset aims to train him for his world mission. The Song of Moses speaks of the love of the Father for His son “whom He found in the wilderness”;[362] and this is requited by the bridal love of Israel with which the people “went after God in the wilderness.”[363] It is this love of God, according to Akiba's interpretation of the Song of Songs, which “all the waters could not quench,” “a love as strong as death.”[364] This love raised up a nation of martyrs without parallel in history, although the followers of the so-called Religion of Love fail to give it the credit it deserves and seem to regard it as a kind of hatred for the rest of mankind.[365] Whenever the paternal love of God is truly felt and understood it must include all classes and all souls of men who enter into the relation of children to God. Wherever emphasis is laid upon the special love for Israel, it is based upon the love with which the chosen people cling to the Torah, the word of God, upon the devotion with which they surrender their lives in His cause.[366]
7. Still, Judaism does not proclaim love, absolute and unrestricted, as the divine principle of life. That is left to the Church, whose history almost to this day records ever so many acts of lovelessness. Love is unworthy of God, unless it is guided by justice. Love of good must be accompanied by [pg 131] hate of evil, or else it lacks the educative power which alone makes it beneficial to man.
God's love manifests itself in human life as an educative power. R. Akiba says that it extends to all created in God's image, although the knowledge of it was vouchsafed to Israel alone.[367] This universal love of God is a doctrine of the apocryphal literature as well. “Thou hast mercy upon all ... for Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest nothing which Thou hast made.... But Thou sparest all, for they are Thine, O Lord, Lover of souls,” says the Book of Wisdom;[368] and when Ezra the Seer laments the calamity that has befallen the people, God replies, “Thinkest thou that thou lovest My creatures more than I?”[369]
8. Among the mystics divine love was declared to be the highest creative principle. They referred the words of the Song of Songs,—“The midst thereof is paved with love,”[370] to the innermost palace of heaven, where stands the throne of God.[371] Among the philosophers Crescas considered love the active cosmic principle rather than intellect, the principle of Aristotle, because it is love which is the impulse for creation.[372] This conception of divine love received a peculiarly mystic color from Juda Abravanel, a neo-Platonist of the sixteenth century, known as Leo Hebraeus. He says: “God's love must needs unfold His perfection and beauty, and reveal itself in His creatures, and love for these creatures must again elevate an imperfect world to His own perfection. Thus is engendered in man that yearning for love with which he endeavors to emulate the divine perfection.”[373] Both Crescas and Leo Hebraeus thus gave the keynote for Spinoza's “Intellectual love” as the cosmic principle,[374] and this has been echoed even [pg 132] in such works as Schiller's dithyrambs on “Love and Friendship” in his “Philosophic Letters.”[375] Still this neo-Platonic view has nothing in common with the theological conception of love. In Judaism God is conceived as a loving Father, who purposes to lead man to happiness and salvation. In other words, the divine love is an essentially moral attribute of God, and not a metaphysical one.
9. If we wish to speak of a power that permeates the cosmos and turns the wheel of life, it is far more correct to speak of God's creative goodness.[376] According to Scripture, each day's creation bears the divine approval: “It is good.”[377] Even the evil which man experiences serves a higher purpose, and that purpose makes for the good. Misfortune and death, sorrow and sin, in the great economy of life are all turned into final good. Accordingly, Judaism recognizes this divine goodness not only in every enjoyment of nature's gifts and the favors of fortune, but also in sad and trying experiences, and for all of these it provides special formulas of benediction.[378] The same divine goodness sends joy and grief, even though shortsighted man fails to see the majestic Sun of life which shines in unabated splendor above the clouds. Judaism was optimistic through all its experiences just because of this implicit faith in God's goodness. Such faith transforms each woe into a higher welfare, each curse into actual blessing; it leads men and nations from oppression to ever greater freedom, from darkness to ever brighter light, and from error to ever higher truth and righteousness. Divine love may have pity upon human weakness, but it is divine goodness that inspires and quickens human energy. After all, love cannot be the dominant principle of life. Man cannot love all the time, nor can he love all the world; his sense of justice demands that he hate [pg 133] wickedness and falsehood. We must apply the same criterion to God. But, on the other hand, man can and should do good and be good continually and to all men, even to the most unworthy. Therefore God becomes the pattern and ideal of an all-encompassing goodness, which is never exhausted and never reaches an end.
Chapter XXI. God's Truth and Faithfulness
1. In the Hebrew language truth and faithfulness are both derived from the same root; aman, “firmness,” is the root idea of emeth, “truth,” and emunah, “faithfulness.” Man feels insecurity and uncertainty among the varying impressions and emotions which affect his will; therefore he turns to the immovable Rock of life, calls on Him as the Guardian and Witness of truth, and feels confident that He will vindicate every promise made in His sight. He is the God by whom men swear—Elohe amen;[379] nay, who swears by Himself, saying, “As true as that I live.”[380] He is the supreme Power of life, “the God of faithfulness, in whom there is no iniquity.”[381] The heavens testify to His faithfulness; He is the trustworthy God, whose essence is truth.[382]
2. Here, too, as with other attributes, the development of the idea may be traced step by step. At first it refers to the God of the covenant with Israel, who made a covenant with the fathers and keeps it with the thousandth generation of their descendants. He shows His mercy to those who love Him and keep His commandments. The idea of God's faithfulness to His covenant is thus extended gradually from the people to the cosmos, and the heavens are called upon to witness to the faithfulness of God throughout the realm of life. Thus in both the [pg 135] Psalms and the liturgy God is praised as the One who is faithful in His word as in His work.[383]
3. From this conception of faithfulness arose two other ideas which exerted a powerful influence upon the whole spiritual and intellectual life of the Jew. The God of faithfulness created a people of faithfulness as His own, and Israel's God of truth awakened in the nation a passion for truth unrivaled by any other religious or philosophical system. Like a silver stream running through a valley, the conviction runs through the sacred writings and the liturgy that the promise made of yore to the fathers will be fulfilled to the children. As each past deliverance from distress was considered a verification of the divine faithfulness, so each hope for the future was based upon the same attribute. “He keepeth His faith also to those who sleep in the dust.” These words of the second of the Eighteen Benedictions clearly indicate that even the belief in the hereafter rested upon the same fundamental belief.
On the other hand, the same conception formed the keynote of the idea of the divine truthfulness. The primitive age knew nothing of the laws of nature with which we have become familiar through modern science. But the pious soul trusts the God of faithfulness, certain that He who has created the heaven and the earth is true to His own word, and will not allow them to sink back into chaos. One witness to this is the rainbow, which He has set up in the sky as a sign of His covenant.[384] The sea and the stars also have a boundary assigned to them which they cannot transgress.[385] Thus to the unsophisticated religious soul, with no knowledge of natural science, the world is carried by God's “everlasting arms”[386] and [pg 136] His faithfulness becomes token and pledge of the immutability of His will.
4. At this point the intellect grasps an idea of intrinsic and indestructible truth, which has its beginning and its end in God, the Only One. “The gods of the nations are all vanity and deceit, the work of men; Israel's God is the God of truth, the living God and everlasting King.”[387] With this cry has Judaism challenged the nations of the world since the Babylonian exile. Its own adherents it charged to ponder upon the problems of life and the nature of God, until He would appear before them as the very essence of truth, and all heathenish survivals would vanish as mist. God is truth, and He desires naught but truth, therefore hypocrisy is loathsome to him, even in the service of religion. With this underlying thought Job, the bold but honest doubter, stands above his friends with their affected piety. God is truth—this confession of faith, recited each morning and evening by the Jew, gave his mind the power to soar into the highest realms of thought, and inspired his soul to offer life and all it holds for his faith. “God is the everlasting truth, the unchangeable Being who ever remains the same amid the fluctuations and changes of all other things.” This is the fundamental principle upon which Joseph Ibn Zaddik and Abraham Ibn Daud, the predecessors of Maimonides, reared their entire philosophical systems, which were Aristotelian and yet thoroughly Jewish.[388]
Mystic lore, always so fond of the letters of the alphabet and their hidden meanings, noted that the letters of Emeth—aleph, mem and tav—are the first, the middle, and the last letters of the alphabet, and therefore concluded that God made [pg 137] truth the beginning, the center, and the end of the world.[389] Josephus also, no doubt in accordance with the same tradition, declares that God is “the beginning, the center, and the end of all things.”[390] A corresponding rabbinical saying is: “Truth is the seal of God.”[391]
Chapter XXII. God's Knowledge and Wisdom
1. The attempt to enumerate the attributes of God recalls the story related in the Talmud[392] of a disciple who stepped up to the reader's desk to offer prayer, and began to address the Deity with an endless list of attributes. When his vocabulary was almost exhausted, Rabbi Haninah interrupted him with the question, “Hast thou now really finished telling the praise of God?” Mortal man can never know what God really is. As the poet-philosopher says: “Could I ever know Him, I would be He.”[393] But we want to ascertain what God is to us, and for this very reason we cannot rest with the negative attitude of Maimonides, who relies on the Psalmist's verse, “Silence is praise to Thee.”[394] We must obtain as clear a conception of the Deity as we possibly can with our limited powers.
To the divine attributes already mentioned we must add another which in a sense is the focus of them all. This is the knowledge and wisdom of God, the omniscience which renders Him all-knowing and all-wise. Through this all the others come into self-consciousness. We ascribe wisdom to the man who sets right aims for his actions and knows the means by which to attain them, that is, who can control his power and knowledge by his will and bend them to his purpose. In the same manner we think of wisdom in view of the marvelous order, design, and unity which we see in the natural and the moral world. But this wisdom must be all-encompassing, comprising time and eternity, directing all the forces and beings [pg 139] of the world toward the goal of ideal perfection.[395] It makes no difference where we find this lesson. The Book of Proverbs singles out the tiny ant as an example of wondrous forethought;[396] the author of Job dwells on the working together of the powers of earth and heaven to maintain the cosmic life;[397] modern science, with its deeper insight into nature, enables us to follow the interaction of the primal chemical and organic forces, and to follow the course of evolution from star-dust and cell to the structure of the human eye or the thought-centers of the brain. But in all these alike our conclusion must be that of the Psalmist: “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all.”[398]
2. Accordingly, if we are to speak in human terms, we may consider God's wisdom the element which determines His various motive-powers,—omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness,—to tend toward the realization of His cosmic plan. Or we may call it the active intellect with which God works as Creator, Ordainer, and Ruler of the universe. The Biblical account of creation presupposes this wisdom, as it portrays a logical process, working after a definite plan, proceeding from simpler to more complex forms and culminating in man. Biblical history likewise is based upon the principle of a divinely prearranged plan, which is especially striking in such stories as that of Joseph.[399]
3. At first the divine wisdom was supposed to rest in part on specially gifted persons, such as Joseph, Solomon, and Bezalel. As Scripture has it, “The Lord giveth wisdom, out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.”[400] Later the obscure destiny of the nation appears as the design of an all-wise Ruler to the great prophets and especially to Isaiah, the [pg 140] high-soaring eagle among the seers of Israel.[401] With the progressive expansion of the world before them, the seers and sages saw a sublime purpose in the history of the nations, and felt more and more the supreme place of the divine wisdom as a manifestation of His greatness. Thus the great seer of the Exile never tires of illumining the world-wide plan of the divine wisdom.[402]
4. A new development ensued under Babylonian and Persian influence at the time when the monotheism of Israel became definitely universal. The divine wisdom, creative and world-sustaining, became the highest of the divine attributes and was partially hypostatized as an independent cosmic power. In the twenty-eighth chapter of the Book of Job wisdom is depicted as a magic being, far remote from all living beings of earth, beyond the reach of the creatures of the lowest abyss, who aided the Creator with counsel and knowledge in measuring and weighing the foundations of the world. The description seems to be based upon an ancient Babylonian conception—which has parallels elsewhere—of a divine Sybil dwelling beneath the ocean in “the house of wisdom.”[403] Here, however, the mythological conception is transformed into a symbolic figure. In the eighth chapter of Proverbs the description of divine wisdom is more in accordance with Jewish monotheism; wisdom is “the first of God's creatures,” “a master-workman” who assisted Him in founding heaven and earth, a helpmate and playmate of God, and at the same time the instructor of men and counselor of princes, inviting all to share her precious gifts. This conception is found also in the apocryphal literature,—in Ben Sira, the book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Hellenistic Book of Wisdom.[404]
From this period two different currents of thought appeared. The one represented wisdom as an independent being distinct from God, and this finally became merged, under Platonic influence, into the views of neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and the Christian dogma. The other identified the divine wisdom with the Torah, and therefore it is the Torah which served God as counselor and mediator at the Creation and continues as counselor in the management of the world. This view led back to strict monotheism, so that the cosmology of the rabbis spoke alternately of the divine wisdom and the Torah as the instruments of God at Creation.[405]
5. The Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as Saadia, Gabirol, and Jehuda ha Levi, followed the Mohammedan theologians in enumerating God's wisdom among the attributes constituting His essence, together with His omnipotence, His will, and His creative energy. But they would not take wisdom or any other attribute as a separate being, with an existence outside of God, which would either condition Him or admit a division of His nature.[406] “God himself is wisdom,” says Jehuda ha Levi, referring to the words of Job: “He is wise in heart.”[407] And Ibn Gabirol sings in his “Crown of Royalty”:
“Thou art wise, and the wisdom of Thy fount of life floweth from Thee;
And compared with Thy wisdom man is void of understanding;
Thou art wise, before anything began its existence;
And wisdom has from times of yore been Thy fostered child;
Thou art wise, and out of Thy wisdom didst Thou create the world,
Life the artificer that fashioneth whatsoever delighteth him.”[408]
Chapter XXIII. God's Condescension
1. An attribute of great importance for the theological conception of God, one upon which both Biblical and rabbinical literature laid especial stress, is His condescension and humility. The Psalmist says[409]: “Thy condescension hath made me great,” which is interpreted in the Midrash that the Deity stoops to man in order to lift him up to Himself. A familiar saying of R. Johanan is[410]: “Wherever Scripture speaks of the greatness of God, there mention is made also of His condescension. So when the prophet begins, ‘Thus saith the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place,’ he adds the words, ‘With him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.’[411] Or when the Deuteronomist says: ‘For the Lord your God, the great God, the mighty and the awful,’ he concludes, ‘He doth execute justice for the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger.’[412] And again the Psalmist: ‘Extol Him that rideth upon the skies, whose name is the Lord, a Father of the fatherless and a Judge of the widows.’ ”[413] “Do you deem it unworthy of God that He should care for the smallest and most insignificant person or thing in the world's household?” asks Mendelssohn in his Morgenstunden. “It certainly does not detract from the dignity of a king to be seen fondling his child as a loving father,” and he quotes [pg 143] the verse of the Psalm, “Who is like unto the Lord our God, that is enthroned on high, that looketh down low upon heaven and upon the earth.”[414]
2. This truth has a religious depth which no philosophy can set forth. Only the God of Revelation is near to man in his frailty and need, ready to hear his sighs, answer his supplication, count his tears, and relieve his wants when his own power fails. The philosopher must reject as futile every attempt to bring the incomprehensible essence of the Deity within the compass of the human understanding. The religious consciousness, however, demands that we accentuate precisely those attributes of God which bring Him nearest to us. If reason alone would have the decisive voice in this problem, every manifestation of God to man and every reaching out of the soul to Him in prayer would be idle fancy and self-deceit. It is true that the Biblical conception was simple and child-like enough, representing God as descending from the heavens to the earth. Still Judaism does not accept the cold and distant attitude of the philosopher; it teaches that God as a spiritual power does condescend to man, in order that man may realize his kinship with the Most High and rise ever nearer to his Creator. The earth whereon man dwells and the human heart with its longing for heaven, are not bereft of God. Wherever man seeks Him, there He is.
3. Rabbinical Judaism is very far from the attitude assigned to it by Christian theologians,[415] of reducing the Deity to an empty transcendental abstraction and loosening the bond which ties the soul to its Maker. On the contrary, it maintains these very relations with a firmness which betokens its soundness and its profound psychological truth. In this spirit a Talmudic master interprets the Deuteronomic verse: “For what great nation is there that hath God so nigh unto [pg 144] them, as the Lord our God is whensoever we call upon Him?”[416] saying that “each will realize the nearness of God according to his own intellectual and emotional disposition, and thus enter into communion with Him.” According to another Haggadist the verse of the Psalm, “The voice of the Lord resoundeth with power,”[417] teaches how God reveals Himself, not with His own overwhelming might, but according to each man's individual power and capacity. The rabbis even make bold to assert that whenever Israel suffers, God suffers with him; as it is written, “I will be with him in trouble.”[418]
4. As a matter of fact, all the names which we apply to God in speech or in prayer, even the most sublime and holy ones, are derived from our own sensory experience and cannot be taken literally. They are used only as vehicles to bring home to us the idea that God's nearness is our highest good. Even the material world, which is perceptible to our senses, must undergo a certain inner transformation before it can be termed science or philosophy, and becomes the possession of the mind. It requires still further exertions of the imagination to bring within our grasp the world of the spirit, and above all the loftiest of all conceptions, the very being of God. Yet it is just this Being of all Beings who draws us irresistibly toward Himself, whose nearness we perceive in the very depths of our intellectual and emotional life. Our “soul thirsteth after God, the living God,” and behold, He is nigh, He takes possession of us, and we call Him our God.
5. The Haggadists expressed this intimate relation of God to man, and specifically to Israel, by bold and often naïve metaphors. They ascribe to God special moments for wrath and for prayer, a secret chamber where he weeps over the [pg 145] distress of Israel, a prayer-mantle (tallith) and phylacteries which He wears like any of the leaders of the community, and even lustrations which He practices exactly like mortals.[419] But such fanciful and extravagant conceptions were never taken seriously by the rabbis, and only partisan and prejudiced writers, entirely lacking in a sense of humor, could point to such passages to prove that a theology of the Synagogue carried out a “Judaization of God.”[420]