Читать книгу The Essential Agus - Steven T. Katz - Страница 41

THE TERM “Neo-Maimonism” is coined in the same manner and for the same reason as the well-known designations—Neo-Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, Neo-Thomism, Neo-Kantism and Neo-Hegelianism. Strictly speaking, we should speak of Neo-Maimonideanism, but we prefer the shorter form, for the sake of convenience.

There are only so many basic positions that a thinker can assume vis a vis the riddle of existence. And all serious scholars are aware of the historical roots of their thoughts. So, the ends of logical clarity and historical perspective are both advanced when a contemporary movement is described as a version of a well-known historical position.

In the case of Neo-Maimonism, this policy is all the more to be commended because the “Guide of the Perplexed” served as a touchstone of philosophic speculation ever since it appeared. To the religious liberals, it was the pillar of light, blazing a bold pathway through the arid wilderness of contending passions and superstitions. To the naive and the literalists, the philosophy of Maimonides was a snare and a delusion, even when they admitted that his Code was a most precious part of the sacred tradition. In a sense, the Maimonidean controversy continued unabated into our own time. While in the thirteenth century, the question for the literalists in regard to the “Guide” was “to burn, or not to burn,” the subsequent centuries rephrased the alternatives, but they continued the debate. The rise of Kabbalah and its triumph, after the expulsion from Spain, did not succeed in suppressing completely the influence of Jewish rationalism. And every new wave of enlightenment was powerfully assisted by the momentum of the Maimonidean philosophy. If Hassidism generally scorned the “Guide,” the Maskilim felt that it propelled them directly into the intellectual world of the end of the eighteenth century. Moses Mendessohn found that Maimonides prepared him to understand Spinoza, Descartes and Leibnitz. Solomon Maimon went directly from Maimonides to Kant. Several decades later, Nahman Krochmal and Samuel David Luzzatto defended opposing positions in regard to the place of Maimonides within authentic Judaism. In the past century and a half, when Jewish intellectuals were beguiled by the spirit of the times to move in different directions, drawn now to the nationalist-romanticist pole, now to the humanist-rationalist pole, it was the adequacy of the Maimonidean synthesis that they debated.

Our generation is called upon to undertake a basic reexamination of our convictions and goals. We are no longer driven by desperation to fight for sheer survival. In Israel and in the free world, we are sufficiently secure to face the ultimate questions and to take seriously Maimonides’ admonition to let our ideas grow out of the facts rather than to tailor our convictions to suit our peculiar situation.

On the other hand, we cannot gainsay the obsoleteness of Maimonides’ picture of the cosmos, with its basic categories of Matter and Form, its four earthly elements and the ethereal substance of the heavenly bodies, its many “spheres” and “intelligences,” and its deference to Aristotle’s authority in regard to all matters “below the moon.” Also his knowledge of comparative religion and of history was inevitably minute by our standards, though he pioneered the exploration of these themes for the understanding of the mizvot. Again, we cannot assent to his aristocratic disdain for the common people. Yet, if we transpose the living core of his thought into the structure of nature and history, as they appear to us, we arrive at a philosophy of life that is balanced and harmonious. Neo-Maimonism also harks back to Maimonides in terms of the approaches he rejected—the personalistic voluntarism of Ibn Gabirol, the ethnic romanticism of Judah Halevi, the “reductionism” of those who confined all thought within “the four ells of Halachah,” the imaginative exuberance of proto-Kabbalists and even the mild, superficial rationalism of Saadia. Each one of the rejected viewpoints has its counterpart in our time. Neo-Maimonism, therefore, is definable negatively, as well as affirmatively.