Spinoza vs. Maimonides: On the Relation of the Secular and the Religious

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

I want to thank Tom Clarke, A. J. Goldman, Mohamed Khimji, Nancy Levene, and Becky Winn for providing me with critical comments on my review-essay.

1. I want to point out here that, while Biale provides extensive notes and an index, the absence from his study of a critical bibliography is regrettable. Not only is it difficult to ferret out from the notes and the index the particular sources on which he draws, but also it is practically impossible to get a proper scholarly sense of the breadth and depth of those sources.

2. Biale shows that he has a shaky understanding of Christianity, and its relationship to Judaism, when he writes of “the dichotomous way Christian theologians saw the ‘City of God’ and the ‘Çity of Man’” and claims that “Judaism never made such a sharp distinction: the profane world is not irredeemably polluted” (4). He forgets, however, that Christian theologians hold that existence is created good and that human beings are created in the image of God. He forgets that Augustine celebrates sin in writing: O felix culpa: O happy sin (i.e., without the fall Christians would not be saved by Christ through love of neighbor). He also fails to deal adequately with Hegel's conception of Judaism and its relationship to Christianity when he writes that Hegel “discarded Judaism as a primitive religion superseded entirely by Christianity” (105). Yes, it is true that Hegel (like surely all Christian thinkers up to his time) failed to think through adequately the complex relationship of Christianity to Judaism (just as Jewish thinkers, as Biale himself shows, continue to have difficulty in providing a just assessment of the relationship of Judaism to Christianity). Still, when Hegel, in his lectures on the Philosophy of History and on the Philosophy of Religion, discusses the actual content of the Hebrew Bible (which, for Christians, constitutes the first part, or the root, of Christianity)—as found, for example, in the story of Adam and Eve, the prophets, and the psalms—it is clear that he does not dismiss the God of the ancient Hebrews as primitive: the God of the Hebrews is the Father of Jesus.

3. The Five Books of Moses, trans. Robert Alter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), Deut. 30.11–14.

4. I can only point out here, but not discuss, the irony that the ontological argument that Kant demolishes in the Critique of Pure Reason is not that of Anselm, Descartes, or Spinoza. Rather, he demonstrates that the ontological proof of God's necessary existence is spurious insofar as it is either merely logical, i.e., analytic a priori (being is necessary), or merely empirical, i.e., synthetic a posteriori (being is necessary). Kant shows, however, although silently (indirectly), consistent with his great predecessors (together with his great successors Hegel and Kierkegaard), that, even though the ontological argument is not theoretical (i.e., logical), it is practical (i.e., transcendental). When reason is comprehended, in truth, as practical, then we see that human beings constitute their existence as necessary, i.e., as free, in and through their rational, self-determining practice. It is little wonder, then, that Kant famously observes in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that he had to limit knowledge of things to objects of nature in order to make room for practical reason whereby self-determining subjects freely will the necessity of their existence as things (ends) in themselves, i.e., as persons.