Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 163 - Burnt Offerings - The Maimonides Controversy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Burnt Offerings, the Maimonides Controversy I've been wondering whether this podcast should have a minimum age restriction. I try to keep things family-friendly, but it isn't always easy to avoid adult themes. We've had some scenes of a sexual nature, with Plato's erotic dialogues and the cynics copulating in public, to say nothing of the steamy interaction of unity and multiplicity in Pythagorean metaphysics. There's been violence too, in late antiquity, with the brutal treatment meted out to the pagan Platonist hierarchies and the Christian theologian Maximus the Confessor, and more recently the Mongols' innovative method for killing the last of the Abbasid caliphs. As for philosophy itself, it certainly involves making things explicit. Nonetheless, I'm a firm believer that it is never too early to start doing philosophy. If you've ever discussed ethics or Zeno's paradoxes with a child, you'll know that they have some pretty good ideas. In fact, recently a listener got in touch to report his five-year-old son's solution to the Psorides paradox, and I bet that Chrysippus himself couldn't have done better at that age. So it's hard for me to hold onto my historian's sense of detachment when I consider what happened in Barcelona in the year 1305. In a foreshadowing of FC Barcelona's ban on letting the other team ever touch the ball, in that year the Jewish authorities laid down a ban on touching books about philosophy. Specifically, they stated that anyone under the age of 25 should be forbidden from reading Greek works on physics or metaphysics, either in Greek or in translation. Here we are, about 1700 years after the death of Socrates, and philosophy is still being accused of corrupting the youth. The rabbinic judge who imposed the ban was named Solomon ibn Adret, also known as Rashba, and he was responding to calls for help from southern France. Solomon ibn Adret and his French allies hoped this would set a good example and lead to a ban on philosophy there too. Not only did this fail to occur, but the Barcelona prohibition provoked other Jews in France into excommunicating anyone who tried to stop people from studying philosophy. Members of the pro-philosophy camp were duly targeted with a counter-excommunication amidst confusion about which decision carried legal force. The whole sorry event, more legal farce than legal force, ended when the very ironically named French king, Philip the Fair, decided to exile all the Jews from his realm in southern France. As a historian of philosophy, you wouldn't expect me to have much sympathy with Solomon ibn Adret and his allies, and you'd be right. Not only were they opponents of philosophy, but they weren't much good at learning from history. Their move against rationalist currents in Judaism was a reprise of a more famous sequence of events that happened back in the 1230s, the so-called Maimonidean controversy. That earlier dispute saw Maimonides's guide to the perplexed being burnt in the French city of Montpellier after it was denounced to Christian authorities by Jews who were opposed to the study of philosophy. The two controversies had several things in common. In both cases, Jews energetically and tragically attacked one another even as a far greater danger loomed in the form of the local Christian authorities. In both cases, the critics of philosophy were surprisingly polite about Maimonides himself, the leading figure of recent Jewish intellectual history. In fact, the supporters of the 1305 ban quoted Maimonides himself in favor of the prohibition in a passage where he had expressed the danger of exposing youthful readers to advanced philosophical ideas. And in both cases, conservatives were reacting against the spread of philosophical ideas among Jews, made possible because of translations of Maimonides, Aristotle, Averroes, and other authors into Hebrew. These controversies involved not just the place of philosophy in Judaism, but the question of whether different communities of Jews needed to have the same laws. Solomon ibn Adret was in fact reluctant at first to impose the ban on studying philosophy. This was not because he had a secret soft spot for Aristotle, but because as a Spanish rabbi he had misgivings about responding to a debate that began among Jews in France. The Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s likewise raged in both Spain and southern France. In fact, one can see the event as a reaction by conservative French Jews against the importation of philosophy from Andalusia. This process began already during Maimonides' lifetime, as did the controversy over Maimonides himself. He now occupies an unparalleled role in Jewish intellectual history, a leading authority not just in philosophy but also in rabbinic law, so it's a surprise to see how much hostility he was able to provoke in his contemporaries. His forbiddingly learned and provokingly rationalist works spread far and wide, winning adherents and opponents. One opponent was Samuel ben Ali, the Gaon or head of the Baghdad Rabbinic Academy. Samuel was shocked by what he took to be Maimonides' understanding of the afterlife as a mere metaphor. We've seen that many philosophers in the Islamic world, notably Avicenna and Averroes, saw life after death as a purely intellectual affair. Samuel took Maimonides to follow these ideas and to deny the possibility of a bodily resurrection. Maimonides himself replied to these charges with that characteristic subtlety that tended to leave lingering questions about his actual doctrine. On the one hand, said Maimonides, I do accept the resurrection of the body. On the other hand, even if I took talk of resurrection metaphorically, that would still preserve the doctrine's truth. In this debate, Maimonides made the point that our view on bodily resurrection should go hand in hand with our view on God's creation of the universe. If God created the universe from nothing, with a beginning in time, he may just as well recreate our bodies in the hereafter. On the other hand, if, as the philosophers think, the universe has existed eternally, then there is no reason to think God would suddenly start creating things from nothing just to give us a body again after we die. Well, exactly, his opponents might have responded, and we couldn't help noticing that the eternity of the universe is another topic on which you seem to be rather slippery. I mentioned when looking at Maimonides's discussion of eternity that some 20th century interpreters have suspected him of secretly accepting that the universe has already existed. This interpretation goes back to the time of Maimonides. In fact, one of his greatest supporters, Samuel ibn Tibbon, was probably an eternalist. On this and other topics, Samuel and other Maimonidians thought that a true understanding of the Guide of the Perplexed would reveal adherence to radically Aristotelian doctrines. Samuel ibn Tibbon was not just a careful reader and proponent of Maimonides's guide, he was also its translator. He was a member of a staggeringly productive family, which generated many translations from Arabic over the course of the 13th century. They were sort of like a medieval Jewish version of the Jackson Five, if the Jacksons had been spread over several generations instead of being brothers, and if Germain had specialized in rendering averroes into Hebrew. Their activity began with Samuel's father Judah ibn Tibbon, who translated authors like Sadia Gaon, Ibn Pakuda, and Judah Halevi, whose Kuzari is hardly a provocative piece of Aristotelian philosophy. With Samuel ibn Tibbon, the process of Hebrew translation ventured into more contentious territory. He produced a Hebrew version of the Guide in 1205, following this a few years later with the first Hebrew version of a work by Aristotle. Rather strangely, the text he chose for this was the Meteorology. Aristotle also wrote his own philosophical works. For instance, he composed a treatise on a question which I know has been bothering you for at least a hundred episodes. Why do some parts of the land stick up above the water of the seas, if, as Aristotle says, earth is heavier than water and thus has a greater tendency to move down towards the center of the universe? The family business was carried on by Samuel's son Moses ibn Tibbon, who carried the project on to averroes and his commentaries on Aristotle. We'll look at the consequences of this in the next episode. The upshot of all this activity was that Aristotelian and Maimonidean philosophy became widely available to Hebrew-reading Jews in Christian Europe, where previously such texts could be read only in Arabic, either in Spain or elsewhere in the Islamic world. This completed the process begun already in the 12th century by figures like Abraham ibn Ezra. As we saw a few episodes back, his Hebrew compositions brought astrology and other sciences from Andalusia to Italy and France. Those ideas too had provoked opposition and criticism, not least from ibn Ezra's colleague Judah Halevi. But now, in the 13th century, the stakes are higher. Not only is Aristotle and later the sophisticated body of commentaries by averroes, gradually finding its way into Jewish culture, but with Maimonides a figure of undisputed genius and standing in the Jewish community has come to embody philosophy. Maimonides' Hebrew writings, especially his major work of Jewish law, or halacha, the Mishnei Torah, did not of course need to be translated. So, during his lifetime, they were already being read by Jews. Some complained of the presumption of Maimonides' project, seeing his work as an attempt to replace the Talmud by rearranging and systematizing its contents. Yet most gratefully accepted the towering achievement of Maimonides' Mishnei Torah and other legal works. This helps to explain why even the anti-Maimonidians in the controversies had such nice things to say about the man himself. In fact, they bent over backwards to excuse him for writing the provocatively rationalist Guide for the Perplexed. In the first Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s, which led to the burning of the Guide in France, the leader of the critics was a man with the unbeatably biblical name Solomon ben Abraham. He's not to be confused with Solomon ibn Adret, protagonist of the later 1305 ban on teaching philosophy to the young. Solomon ben Abraham did not attack Maimonides for writing the Guide. He attacked those who had translated it and disseminated it widely among a French readership. It's not clear who was responsible for the burning of the Guide, probably in 1232 or 1233. Pro-Maimonidians blamed Solomon and his allies, but this charge has been questioned in modern scholarship. However the culprit was, it was a member of the Jewish community in southern France who appealed to the Christian authorities for help in stopping the spread of Maimonideanism from Spain. The clerical authorities who actually had the Guide burned were in fact involved in the violent suppression of a group called the Cathars, who were considered heretical Christians. So it may be that the conservative Jewish appeal to the local Christian bishop which resulted in the burning of Maimonides' books was a reaction to a general atmosphere of religious suppression. In fact, an author writing on behalf of the Maimonideans accused his opponents of having said to the Christians, since you are destroying heretics among you, destroy ours as well. The proponents of philosophy were infuriated. For a Jew to inform on other Jews to Christians was unprecedented, to say nothing of the outrage of subjecting the writings of the great Maimonides to such abuse. The philosophical camp's answer came from Spain, more specifically Saragossa, where a ban was pronounced against Solomon ben Abraham and his allies. What was needed clearly was a calm head. It turned out to belong to a man named Moses ben Nahman, usually known as Nahmanides, or Rambam. He was a relatively conservative legal scholar and a significant contributor to the burgeoning literature of Kabbalah, or tradition, an approach to Jewish scripture which we'll be looking at in more detail soon. In his writings, Nahmanides does not outright reject the possibility of using reason to understand the universe around us. But he insisted upon the possibility that God intervenes within nature to work his will. In fact, many events that we take to be mere chance occurrences or coincidences are, as Nahmanides puts it, hidden miracles, God working through the mechanisms of nature he has put in place. On the whole, his understanding of philosophy, or at least the application of philosophy to nature, is much like that of Al-Ghazali, at least according to the more rationalist reading of his Incoherence of the Philosophers. Like that version of Al-Ghazali, Nahmanides would accept explanations in terms of natural causes, but insist on the fact that God can always trump nature, and indeed is regularly doing so. Given this intellectual profile and his eminence in the community, Nahmanides seemed a natural ally for the critics of Maimonides. They wrote to him requesting him to join them in declaring war on the great eagle. But he replied by encouraging them to release the doves of peace. Nahmanides pointed to the admirable features of Maimonides's writings, not only his mastery of rabbinic law, but also his ability to show the appeal of Judaism for philosophically minded readers. Nahmanides understood that the purpose of Maimonides's guide was not to corrupt pious Jews by exposing them to philosophy, but on the contrary, to show those already in danger of such corruption that Aristotle could be reconciled with the Torah. Characteristically, Nahmanides made his point by paraphrasing a biblical passage, He was also mindful that it was politically awkward, and also legally dubious, for Jews in one area to act against the practices of other communities. The Talmud says that it is forbidden to declare a ruling on the population unless the majority of the population is able to abide by it. For Nahmanides, Maimonides might well fill a need among philosophy enthusiasts in Spain, and it wasn't the place of Jews in Provence to attack that local practice. One might compare this, for instance, to the fact that polygamy was at this time accepted among Jews living among Muslims, but not by those in Christian lands. Nahmanides was consistent and even-handed in his localism, and also chastised the pro-Maimonidians for their counterban against the anti-Maimonidean ringleaders of Provence. Of course, there's something slightly condescending about Nahmanides's attitude towards the philosophers. That's just how they do things down south. But he was fighting fire with fire, albeit in a more figurative sense than the book burners of Montpellier. The Maimonidians were, after all, more than a little condescending themselves, since they taught that no one can understand the Torah properly without a mastery of philosophy. During his lifetime, Maimonides had already provoked hostility by saying it is heresy to think that God has a body. This accusation is itself heretical, complained one rabbi of Provence. Of course it's true that God has no body, but that doesn't invalidate the faith of simple folk who cannot understand this fact. Here we have the key difference between radical Maimonidians like Samuel ibn Tibbon and men like Solomon ben Abraham who fretted about the corrosive effects of philosophy. The Maimonidians followed an idea pioneered in an Islamic context by a farabi and later embraced by a verroes that Aristotelian philosophy establishes with proof what religion can express only in persuasive symbols. On this view, it is not philosophy, but religion and the religious law that are local, since a prophetic revelation is tailored for a certain group of believers. For a particularly vivid example of a philosopher who adopted this verroes line on the relationship between reason and faith, we can turn briefly to the later 13th century thinker Isaac al-Balag. He was part of the process I've already mentioned in which philosophical works were translated from Arabic into Hebrew. He executed a Hebrew translation of Al-Ghazali's overview of Avicenna's thought, the intentions of the philosophers, and then indicated where he departed from its teachings in a work of his own, entitled Tikum ha-De'ot, meaning the correction of doctrines. Under the influence of a verroes, al-Balag was convinced that Aristotelian philosophy and science represented the greatest achievement of human reason. Its distinctive doctrines, such as the eternity of the universe, had been demonstrated by adamantine proofs. Maimonides was thus wrong to doubt the success of Aristotle's arguments and to assert that the question was one that could be settled only by revelation. Al-Balag's approach to scripture also followed the lead of a verroes. The Torah is written not for elite philosophers, but for the common folk. This means that its true meaning is hidden beneath the literal sense of the text. And it is, of course, the philosopher who is in the best position to determine that true meaning by showing that the Torah and philosophical demonstration teach the same lessons. On the other hand, al-Balag, unlike a verroes in his decisive treatise, allows for the possibility that the Torah may contain truths inaccessible to philosophy. The prophets of old may have been given knowledge by direct revelation, which we simply cannot understand by using our reason. In that case, all we can do is accept those teachings by faith without hoping to ratify them using our natural powers of reasoning. These ideas of Isaac al-Balag show that, in the battle over the value of philosophy for Jews, the Torah itself was at stake. Consider, for instance, the legal injunctions laid down in scripture and painstakingly expounded in them Mishnah and Talmud. As we saw in the episode on ethics in Jewish philosophy, Maimonides drew on Aristotle and Galen to argue that the purpose of the law is to encourage virtue. One might say that, for him, God plays the role played by the ideal human legislator in Aristotle. Both devise laws that will lead humans to perfection. This means that, at least in general terms, human reason can grasp the rationale underlying the divine law. For other Jewish legal scholars, these ideas of Maimonides smacked of arrogance. Like the Asharites in opposition to their fellow Muslim theologians, the Mu'tazilites, Maimonides's critics responded that the commands and ways of God are inscrutable to reason. In the end, the Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s was not ended by the peacemaking efforts of Maimonides or by a lasting consensus concerning such questions. That much is shown by the similar tensions surrounding the Barcelona ban on teaching philosophy some 70 years later. Instead, it seems that the community agreed to disagree, but more quietly, simply because they were horrified by the intervention of Christian authorities and the scandal that this intervention was provoked by Jews. As I've said, the participants in these events seemed tragically blind to the greater danger posed to them by Christian institutions. A decade or so after the burning of Maimonides's books, the Talmud itself would be publicly burned in Paris. But that isn't to say that Jewish philosophy could flourish only in the context of Islamic political rule. Philosophy among Jews continued in Spain after the Christian reconquest and was also pursued in France and Italy. In fact, a key development in philosophy of the 13th and 14th centuries involved both Jews and Christians living in Christian lands, the embrace of the Muslim philosopher and Aristotelian commentator, Averroes. One of Averroes's greatest exponents was a Jew who've hailed not from Muslim Spain, but from Christian Provence, epicenter of the Maimonidean controversy. If you liked Maimonides and Nahmanides, then you'll love Gersonides, our topic on the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.