Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
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ordinary being (Maimonides urges t hat even lit t le c hildren should be taught that
God is not a person) but a being of sheer perfec tion whose absolute and nec essary
existence... is made explic it when God reveals Himself t o Moses as “I AM T HAT I
AM,” an All-sufficiency encapsulated in the Tetragrammaton, whose letters are
those of the verb to be...
Maimonides, like Saadiah, defends c reation, but he warns against assuming
that either creation or eternity can be proved. Aristotle, who taught us the
difference between apodictic and dialectical arguments, reveals by his resort to
persuasive language that he knew his own arguments for the eternity of the natural
order were not rigorous proofs. T hey were in fac t projec t ions of an et ernalism
already implic it in t he Arist ot elian analysis of t ime and c hange, mat t er and
pot ent ialit y. But the defenses of creation proposed in the kalam proved too much,
making c ontinuous c reation a nec essity by dissolving the c ontinuities of nature,
splint ering t ime, and making sc ienc e impossible, freedom inc onc eivable, and t he
idea of c reat ion it self inc oherent.
In place of the certitude sought by the polemical exponents and adversaries of
c reat ion, Maimonides proposes only t hat c reat ion is more probable c onc ept ually and
preferable theologically to eternalism. For the eternalist scheme of emanation
without volit ion c annot explain how c omplexit y emerged (by some aut omat ism)
from divine simplic it y. And t he Arist ot elian c laim t hat nat ure has always been as it
is does not leave room for God’s determination to have made a difference – as the
voluntarism of Ibn Gabirol, Halevi, and al-Ghazali, suggested that it should. Indeed,
if Arist ot elian essent ialism and Neoplat onic emanat ionis m are t aken st ric t ly, c hange
would not seem possible at all.
Pondering the problems of evil, of providence, and of revelation – all questions
whic h involve t he limit s in God’s c reat ive manifest at ion – Maimonides finds prec ious
hints in the book of Job (1:6), where Satan, the adversary, is said to have c ome
“along wit h” the c hildren of God... Sat an, ac c ording t o one rabbinic gloss, is simply
sin, or deat h. But t he book of Job (whic h Maimonides reads as a fic t ional allegory of
the problem of evil) tells us that Job was innoc ent. Satan, whom he identifies with
met aphysic al “otherness,” alienat ion from God’s absolut e perfec t ion, is mat t er; and
Maimonides c hides t he Neoplat onist s for not rec ognizing in t heir own idea of mat t er
a solution to the problem of evil. For matter is a concomitant of creation. It is not a
posit ive realit y, a princ iple like t he divine ideas, t he forms and forc es t hat give
realit y t o nat ural beings, but it “c omes along with them,” in the sense that there
will be no gift of exist enc e wit hout alienat ion, no c reat ion wit hout separat ion.
Mat t er is t hus t he basis of evil, inc luding human differenc es and vulnerabilit ies. It is
not evil in it self, and indeed is not real, as t he Neoplat onic forms are. At onc e t he
heroic wife of Proverbs 31 and t he married harlot of Proverbs 7, never c ont ent wit h
just one form, matter in our own body is a rec eptivity that c an be turned upward or
downward, sinc e the soul has her own power to govern it.
We are, then, neither as abandoned to c irc umstanc e as, say, Alexander of
Aphrodisias suggests, nor as smothered by attentiveness as the kalam might have
it in assigning God t o superint end t he fall of every leaf. Providence comes to nature
through the forms, perfec tion sc aled to the c apac ities of finitude; but providenc e
does reac h individuals and is not c onfined t o spec ies... For Arist ot le himself t aught
us that universals exist only in their partic ulars. And the human form is not just a
pattern of life but a substantial entity, a rational soul, whose guidanc e is the