Aaron ben Elijah agrees with Maimonides that all the commandments of the Bible, including the ceremonial laws, have a purpose and are not due to the arbitrary will of God. The ceremonial laws are for the sake of the rational, serving a pedagogical and disciplinary purpose, and the Law as a whole is for the purpose of teaching the truth and inculcating the good. He goes further than Maimonides in vindicating the rational and ethical purpose of all the details of the various laws, and not merely of the several commandments as a whole (cf. above, p. [294]).[379]
A problem that occupied the minds of the Mutakallimun, Arabs as well as Karaites, but which Maimonides does not discuss, is the purpose of God's giving commandments to those who he knew would remain unbelievers, and refuse to obey. That God's knowledge and man's freedom co-exist and neither destroys the other, has already been shown.[380] If then God knows, as we must assume, that a given person will refuse to obey the commandments, what is the use of giving them to him? And granting that for some reason unknown to us they have been given, is it just to punish him for disobedience when the latter might have been spared by not giving the man in question any commandments?
Aaron ben Elijah answers these questions by citing the following parallel. A man prepares a meal for two guests and one does not come. The absence of the guest does not make the preparation improper, for the character of the act does not depend upon the choice of the guest to do or not to do the desire of the host. The invitation was proper because the host meant the guest's benefit. To be sure, the case is not quite parallel, and to make it so we must assume that the host expects that the guest will not come. His intention being good, the invitation is proper. In our problem knowledge takes the place of expectation. God does not merely expect, he knows that the man will not obey. But as God's desire is to benefit mankind and arouse them to higher things, the command is proper, no matter what the person chooses to do.
To punish the man for disobedience is not unjust because God intended to benefit him by the command. If he disobeyed, that is his lookout. If the benefit could have been had without the command, then the punishment would be unjust, but not otherwise.
If only good men were commanded and the rest ignored, the danger would be that the former being thereby assured of reward, might be tempted to do wrong; and the others in despair might be worse than they would be under ordinary circumstances. God saw that man has evil tendencies, and needs warning and guidance from without. And just as he gave men understanding and ability to believe though he knew that a given person would not avail himself thereof, so he gave all men commandments, though he knew that some would not obey.[381]
The rest of the book is devoted to such questions as reward and punishment after death, immortality of the soul, the problem of the soul's pre-existence, the nature of the future life, repentance—questions which Maimonides left untouched in the "Guide" on the ground that whatever religion and tradition may say about them, they are not strictly speaking scientific questions, and are not susceptible to philosophical demonstration.
Aaron ben Elijah proves that there must be reward and punishment after death. For as man is composed of body and soul, there must be reward for each according as man endeavors to maintain and perfect them. Thus if a man cares for his body alone, he will be rewarded in his body, i. e., in this world. The other man who looks out for both body and soul must have the same reward in this world as the other, since their physical efforts were similar. At the same time he must have something over and above the other in the nature of compensation for his soul, and this must be in the next world.
The prosperity of the wicked and the misery of the righteous are also to be explained in part, as we have seen (p. [376]), by reference to their respective destinies in the next world, where the inequalities of this world will be adjusted.
Finally, material reward cannot be the consequence of intellectual and spiritual merit; it would mean doing the greater for the sake of the smaller. And besides the soul is not benefited by physical goods and pleasures, and would remain without reward. Hence there must be another kind of reward after death. In order to deserve such reward the soul must become wise. At the same time the common people, who observe the ceremonial commandments, are not excluded from a share in the world to come, because the purpose of these laws is also intellectual and spiritual, as we said before (p. [382]), and hence their observance makes the soul wise, and gives it immortality. This last comment is clearly directed against the extreme intellectualism of Maimonides and Gersonides, according to whom rational activity alone confers immortality (p. [339]).[382]
The considerations just adduced imply the immortality of the soul, to which they lend indirect proof. But Aaron ben Elijah endeavors besides to furnish direct proof of the soul's continuance after the death of the body. And the first thing he does is to disarm the criticism of the philosophers, who deny immortality on the ground that the soul being the form of the body, it must like other material forms cease with the dissolution of the things of which they are the forms. He answers this by showing that the soul as the cause of knowledge and wisdom—immaterial faculties—is itself immaterial. Being also the cause of the body's motion, it is not itself subject to motion, hence not to time, and therefore not destructible like a natural form. Besides the composition of body and soul is different from that of matter and form in the ordinary sense. For in the former case each of the constituent parts is already a composite of matter and form. The body has both matter and form, and the soul has likewise. For the acquired intellect is the form of the soul, which is the matter. Other proofs are as follows: The rational soul performs its functions without help from the body, hence it is independent in its existence. The proof of the last statement is that the power of the rational soul is not limited, and does not become weary, as a corporeal power does. Hence it can exist without the body. Again, as the corporeal powers grow stronger, the intellectual powers grow weaker, and vice versa as the corporeal powers grow weaker in old age, the intellect grows stronger. Hence the soul is independent of the body, and when the physical powers cease entirely in death, the intellect is at its height.[383]