A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy

by Isaac Husik

Many people think there is more evil in the world than good. Their mistake is due to the fact that they make the experience of the individual man the arbiter in this question, thinking that the universe was made for his sake. They forget that man is only a small fraction of the world, which is made by the will of God. Even so man should be grateful for the great amount of good he receives from God, for many of the evils of man are self-inflicted. In fact the evils befalling man come under three categories.

1. The evil that is incident to man's nature as subject to genesis and decay, i. e., as composed of matter. Hence arise the various accidents to which man is liable on account of bad air and other natural causes. These are inevitable, and inseparable from matter, and from the generation of individuals in a species. To demand that a person of flesh and blood shall not be subject to impressions is a contradiction in terms. And with all this the evils of this class are comparatively few.

2. They are the evils inflicted by one man upon the other. These are more frequent than the preceding. Their causes are various. And yet these too are not very frequent.

3. These are the most common. They are the evils man brings upon himself by self-indulgence and the formation of bad habits. He injures the body by excess, and he injures the mind through the body by perverting and weakening it, and by enslaving it to luxuries to which there is no end. If a person is satisfied with that which is necessary, he will easily have what he needs; for the necessaries are not hard to get. God's justice is evident in affording the necessaries to all his creatures and in making all the individuals of the same species similar in power and ability.[291]

The next problem Maimonides discusses is really theoretical and should have its place in the discussion of the divine attributes, for it deals with the character of God's knowledge. The reason for taking it up here is because, according to Maimonides, it was an ethical question that was the motive for the formulation of the view of the opponents. Accordingly the problem is semi-ethical, semi-metaphysical, and is closely related to the question of Providence.

Observing that the good are often wretched and the bad prosperous, the philosophers came to the conclusion that God does not know individual things. For if he knows and does not order them as is proper, this must be due either to inability or to jealousy, both of which are impossible in God. Having come to this conclusion in the way indicated, they then bolstered it up with arguments to justify it positively. Such are that the individual is known through sense and God has no sensation; that the number of individual things is infinite, and the infinite cannot be comprehended, hence cannot be known; that knowledge of the particular is subject to change as the object changes, whereas God's knowledge is unchangeable. Against us Jews they argue that to suppose God knows things before they are connects knowledge with the non-existent; and besides there would be two kinds of knowledge in God, one knowledge of potential things, and another of actual things. So they came to the conclusion that God knows only species but not individuals. Others say that God knows nothing except his own essence, else there would be multiplicity in his nature. As the entire difficulty, according to Maimonides, arose from the supposed impropriety in the government of individual destinies, he first discusses the question of Providence and comes back later to the problem of God's knowledge.[292]

He enumerates five opinions concerning Providence.

1. The Opinion of Epicurus. There is no Providence at all; everything is the result of accident and concurrence of atoms. Aristotle has refuted this idea.

2. The Opinion of Aristotle. Some things are subject to Providence, others are governed by accident. God provides for the celestial spheres, hence they are permanent individually; but, as Alexander says in his name, Providence ceases with the sphere of the moon. Aristotle's doctrine concerning Providence is related to his belief in the eternity of the world. Providence corresponds to the nature of the object in question. As the individual spheres are permanent, it shows that there is special Providence which preserves the spheres individually. As, again, there proceed from them other beings which are not permanent individually but only as species, namely, the species of our world, it is clear that with reference to the sublunar world there is so much Providential influence as to bring about the permanence of the species, but not of the individual. To be sure, the individuals too are not completely neglected. There are various powers given to them in accordance with the quality of their matters; which powers determine the length of their duration, their motion, perception, purposive existence. But the other incidents and motions in individual human as well as animal life are pure accident. When a storm scatters the leaves of trees, casts down some trunks and drowns a ship with its passengers, the incident is as accidental with the men drowned as with the scattered leaves. That which follows invariable laws Aristotle regards as Providential, what happens rarely and without rule is accidental.

3. The View of the Ashariya. This is the very opposite of the preceding opinion. The Ashariya deny all accident. Everything is done by the will of God, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the death of a man. Everything is determined, and a person cannot of himself do or forbear. It follows from this view that the category of the possible is ruled out. Everything is either necessary or impossible. It follows also that all laws are useless, for man is helpless, and reward and punishment are determined solely by the will of God, to whom the concepts of right and wrong do not apply.