The will of God is that we should follow the middle way and eat and drink and enjoy ourselves in moderation. To be sure, we must be always on our guard against slipping into the forbidden extreme, but it is not necessary for this purpose to inflict additional burdens upon ourselves or to practice mortification of the flesh and abstention from food and drink beyond what is prescribed in the Law. For many of the regulations in the Pentateuch have been laid down for this very purpose. The dietary laws, the laws of forbidden marriages, the laws of tithes, the laws prescribing that the corner of the field, the dropped and forgotten ears and the gleanings of the vintage should be left to the poor, the laws of the sabbatical year, the Jubilee, and the regulations governing charity—all these are intended to guard us against avarice and selfishness. Other laws and precepts are for the purpose of moderating our tendency to anger and rage, and so with all the other virtues and vices. Hence it is folly and overscrupulousness to add restrictions of one's own accord except in critical instances, as indicated above.
The purpose of all human life and activity is to know God as far as it is possible for man. Hence all his activities should be directed to that one end. His eating and drinking and sleeping and waking and motion and rest and pleasure should have for their object the maintenance of good health and cheerful spirits, not as an end in themselves, but as a means to intellectual peace and freedom from worry and care in order that he may have leisure and ability to study and reflect upon the highest truths of God. Good music, beautiful scenery, works of art, splendid architecture and fine clothing should not be pursued for their own sake, but only so far as they may be necessary to relieve the tedium and monotony of toil and labor, or as a curative measure to dispel gloom and low spirits or a tendency to melancholy. The same thing applies to the arts and sciences. Medicine is of assistance in maintaining bodily health and curing it of its ills. The logical, mathematical and physical sciences are either directly helpful to speculative theology, and their value is evident; or they serve to train the mind in deduction and analysis, and are thus indirectly of benefit for the knowledge of God.[288]
The ethical qualities similarly conduce to intellectual perfection, and the difference between one prophet and another is in large measure dependent upon relative ethical superiority. Thus when the Rabbis say that Moses saw God through a luminous mirror, and the other prophets through a non-luminous, the meaning is that Moses had intellectual and moral perfection, so far as a human being is capable of having them, and the only partition separating him from a complete vision of God was his humanity. The other prophets had other defects besides, constituting so many additional partitions obscuring the divine view.[289]
Some foolish astrologers are of the opinion that a man's character is determined in advance by the position of the stars at the time of his birth. This is a grave error, as can be shown from reason as well as tradition. The Bible as well as the Greek philosophers are agreed that a man's acts are under his own control, and that he himself and no one else is responsible for his virtues as well as his vices. It is true that a person's temperament, which is constitutional and over which he has no control, plays an important rôle in his conduct. There is no denying that men are born with certain tendencies. Some are born phlegmatic, some are passionate and hot-blooded. One man has a tendency to fearlessness and bravery, another is timid and backward. But while it is true that it is more difficult for the hot-blooded to develop the virtue of temperance and moderation than it is for the phlegmatic, that it is easier for the warm-tempered to learn courage than it is for the cold-tempered—these are not impossible. Virtue, we have seen before, is not a natural state, but an acquired possession due to long continued discipline and practice. One man may require longer and more assiduous practice than another to acquire a certain virtue, but no matter what his inherited temperament, he can acquire it if he undertakes to do so, or if properly trained. If man's character and conduct were determined, all the commandments and prohibitions in the Bible would be in vain, for without freedom command has no effect. Similarly there would be no use in a person's endeavoring to learn any trade or profession; for if it is determined beforehand that a given individual shall be a physician or a carpenter, he is bound to be one whether he studies or not. This would make all reward and punishment wrong and unjust whether administered by man or by God. For the person so rewarded or punished could not help doing what he did, and is therefore not responsible. All our plans and preparations would on this supposition be useless and without meaning, such as building houses, acquiring food, avoiding danger, and so on. All this is absurd and opposed to reason as well as to sense. It undermines the foundation of religion and imputes wrong to God. The Bible says distinctly, "See, I have set before thee this day life and the good, death and the evil ... therefore choose thou life...." (Deut. 30, 15, 19.)
There are some passages in the Bible which apparently lend color to the idea that a person's acts are determined from on high. Such are the expressions used in relation to Pharaoh's conduct toward the Israelites in refusing to let them go out of Egypt. We are told there that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh that he should not let the Israelites go. And he did this in order to punish the Egyptians. The criticism here is twofold. First, these expressions indicate that a person is not always free; and second, it seems scarcely just to force a man to act in a certain way and then to punish him for it.
The explanation Maimonides gives to this passage is as follows: He admits that in Pharaoh's case there was a restriction of Pharaoh's freedom. But this was a penal measure and exceptional. Normally a man is free, but he may forfeit this freedom if he abuses it. So Pharaoh's primary offence was not that he would not let the children of Israel go out of Egypt. His sin consisted in his tyrannical treatment of Israel in the past, which he did of his own accord and as a result of free choice. His loss of freedom in complying with Moses's request to let the Israelites go was already in the nature of a punishment, and its object was to let all the world know that a person may forfeit his freedom of action as a punishment for abusing his human privilege. To be sure God does not always punish sin so severely, but it is not for us to search his motives and ask why he punishes one man in one way and another in another. We must leave this to his wisdom.
Another argument against free will is that it is incompatible with the knowledge of God. If God is omniscient and knows the future as well as the past and the present, he knows how a given person will act at a given moment. But since God's knowledge is certain and not liable to error, the person in question cannot help acting as God long foreknew he would act, and hence his act is not the result of his free will. Maimonides's answer to this objection is virtually an admission of ignorance. He takes refuge in the transcendence of God's knowledge, upon which he dwelt so insistently in the earlier part of his work (p. [260 ff.]). God is not qualified by attributes as we his creatures are. As he does not live by means of life, so he does not know by means of knowledge. He knows through his own essence. He and his existence and his knowledge are identical. Hence as we cannot know his essence, we cannot have any conception of his knowledge. It is mistaken therefore to argue that because we cannot know a future event unless it is already determined in the present, God cannot do so. His knowledge is of a different kind from ours, and he can do what we cannot. [290]
The next problem Maimonides takes up is the doctrine of evil. The presence of evil in the world, physical as well as moral, was a stumbling block to all religious thinkers in the middle ages. The difficulty seems to find its origin in Neo-Platonism, or, farther back still, in Philo of Alexandria, who identified God with the Good. If he is the Good, evil cannot come from him. How then account for the evil in the world? The answer that was given was extremely unsatisfactory. It was founded on a metaphysical distinction which is as old as Plato, namely, of matter as the non-existent. Matter was considered a principle without any definite nature or actual being, and this was made the basis of all imperfection, death, sin. Evil partakes of the non-existence of matter, it is nothing positive, but only a negation or privation of good as darkness is the absence of light; hence it needs no creator, it has no efficient cause, but only a deficient cause. In this way physical evil was accounted for. Moral evil as the result of man's inhumanity to man could easily be explained by laying it to the charge of man's free will or even to the free will of the fallen angels as Origen conceives it. This removes from God all responsibility for evil. We shall find that Maimonides has nothing essentially new to contribute to the solution of the problem.
Strictly speaking, he says, only a positive thing can be made, negation or privation cannot. We may speak loosely of the negative being produced when one removes the positive. So if a man puts out a light, we say he made darkness, though darkness is a negation.
Evil is nothing but the negation of the positive, which is good. All positive things are good. Hence God cannot be said to produce evil. The positive thing which he produces is good; the evil is due to defect in the thing. Matter also is good so far as it is positive, i. e., so far as it causes continued existence of one thing after another. The evil in matter is due to its negative or privative aspect as the formless, which makes it the cause of defect and evil. All evil that men do to each other is also due to negation, namely, absence of wisdom and knowledge.