328 A History of Judaism
and to confirm them by visible, miraculous proofs, rather than by rational
demonstrations?’ To this question, with God’s help, we will give a com-
plete answer ... Thus we were obliged at once to accept the teachings of
religion, together with all that they implied, because they had been verified
by the testimony of the senses. (We are also obliged to accept them on the
grounds that they have been passed on to us fully authenticated by reliable
tradition, as we shall explain later.) But God commanded us to take our
time with our rational inquiries till we should arrive by argument at the
truth of religion, and not to abandon our quest till we have found convin-
cing arguments in favour of it and are compelled to believe God’s revelation
by what our eyes have seen and our ears heard. In the case of some of us
our inquiries may take a long time before they are completed, but that
should not worry us; no one prevented by any hindrance from pursuing
his investigations is left without religious guidance.Like the practitioners of the kalam, Saadiah claimed that creation had
been from nothing and that God’s existence can be inferred from cre-
ation. He described the Torah as revealed reason, and the purpose of
creation to be happiness, which is attained through the commandments
of the Torah. Saadiah’s philosophy thus underpinned his halakhic works
in that he distinguished between ethical commandments, which would
be observed without revelation since they conform to reason, and the
ceremonial commandments, which depend on revelation alone.^20
The influence of Saadiah on later rabbinic religious philosophy was
to be immense, but more through his introduction of Greek thought
into the rabbinic world than through the kalam. His contemporary in
Babylonia, David ibn Marwan Mukammis, followed kalam doctrine in
his proofs for the existence of God, in which he stressed that since divine
attributes differ from human, God’s attributions cannot affect his unity:
The Maker of the world is in every aspect unlike the world. This being so,
and since the world is composite, its Maker is not composite; since the
world contains a variety of things, there is no diversity in its Maker; since
the world is finite, its Maker is infinite; since the world is substance and
accident, its Maker is neither substance nor accident.Such rationalist thinking was brought by Saadiah into the mainstream
rabbinic world, along with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas which
Mukammis had taken from Christianity. Saadiah and Mukammis
were also cited by the moralist Bahya ibn Pakuda, whose ethical teach-
ings we have already noted, in eleventh- century Spain. But most of the