Maimonides' God and Spinoza's Deus sive Natura

MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 169 Maimonides’ God and Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura *CARLOS FRAENKEL INTRODUCTION ACCORDING TO H. A. WOLFSON, Spinoza played a crucial role in the history of philosophy. His work marks the end of “Philonic philosophy,” the period in which philosophy had served as ancilla theologiae. This period, in Wolfson’s view, begins with the Hellenistic-Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who revised “Greek philosophic concepts” in the light of Scripture. His interpretatio hebraica of Greek philosophy became the foundation of the common philosophy of the three religions with cognate Scriptures—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This triple religious philosophy . . . reigned supreme as a homogeneous, if not a completely unified, system of thought until the seventeenth century, when it was overthrown by Spinoza, for the philosophy of Spinoza, properly understood, is primarily a criticism of the common elements in this triple religious philosophy. (70)1 In the last chapter of his comprehensive study of Spinoza’s thought against the background of medieval philosophy, Wolfson sums up what he considers to be Spinoza’s most important innovation: [What had been] established by the intrepidity and daring of Spinoza was the principle of the unity of nature, which in its double aspect meant the homogeneity of the material of which it is constituted and the uniformity of the laws by which it is dominated.2 1 Harry A. Wolfson, “Philo Judaeus,” in: Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 60–70. Cf. his Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), in particular the last chapter: “What is new in Philo?”, vol. 2, 439–60. A good account of Wolfson’s concept of the history of philosophy is given by Warren Z. Harvey, “Hebraism and Western Philosophy in H. A. Wolfson’s Theory of History,” Daat 4 (1980): 103–10 (Heb.). 2 H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning [Spinoza], 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), here: vol. 2, 331. On the central purpose of Spinoza’s work according to Wolfson, see also vol. 1, 33–34. *Carlos Fraenkel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at McGill University. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 44, no. 2 (2006) 169–215 [169] 170 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 For philosophers previous to Spinoza, Wolfson notes, “the universe as a whole was . . . divided into two distinct realms, a material world and an immaterial God.” God as well as other immaterial beings “had nothing in common with bodies, not having matter as their substratum.”3 Wolfson’s assessment, I think, is in part right, and in part wrong. Wolfson is right insofar as Spinoza established the unity of “that eternal and infinite being that we call God, or Nature [quod Deum, seu Naturam appellamus]” (E IV, Praef. / G. II, 206).4 And “God, or Nature,” according to Spinoza, acts according to “laws and rules” (leges & regulae) that “are everywhere [ubique] and always [semper] the same” (E III, Praef. / G. II, 138). In my view Wolfson is wrong, however, in the historical role that he assigned to Spinoza. In this respect, I will argue, he presents a distorted picture. It does justice neither to the perception that Spinoza himself had of his relation to the medieval philosophical tradition nor to his role as it emerges from a comparison between his Deus sive Natura and the medieval doctrine of God. I will try to show that what in Wolfson’s view was a revolution in the history of philosophy, in Spinoza’s view was no more than the dispersion of a cloud.5 This paper is intended as a contribution towards the understanding of how Spinoza’s monism is related to the monotheism of a distinct tradition in medieval Aristotelianism. If we focus on Deus and disregard Natura, and if we translate monos theos not as “only one God exists” but as “only God exists,” then Spinoza’s position can also be described as “monotheistic.” What I wish to suggest, however, is not a word game. Rather, the translation “only God exists” in my view characterizes the monotheism of both Spinoza and the Aristotelians.6 I will argue for the following four points: First, Spinoza himself explicitly refers to the medieval doctrine as an anticipation of his concept of God. Second, the God of the Aristotelian tradition in question indeed shares the basic features of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. Third, Spinoza was familiar with all significant aspects of the medieval doctrine. Fourth, the steps leading from the medieval doctrine to Spinoza can be reconstructed on the basis of passages in his early works and in the Ethics. 3 Wolfson, Spinoza, vol. 2, 333. I quote Spinoza according to Carl Gebhardt’s edition: Opera, 4 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1925) [henceforth: G. (= Gebhardt) vol. no., page no.]. I will use the following abbreviations: CM = Cogitata Metaphysica; E = Ethica; Ep. = Epistolae; KV = Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en des Zelfs Welstand; PP = Renati Descartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I. & II.; TTP = Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. 5 Of course Wolfson was not the only scholar who credited Spinoza with a philosophical revolution. For other scholars emphasizing Spinoza’s break with the philosophical tradition, see my discussion in Appendix 1. 6 The Aristotelian tradition in question is certainly not the only tradition in medieval thought which crossed the boundary between monotheism and monism. In fact, this appears to be a common feature of a variety of intellectual currents, both philosophical and mystical, which in part draw on the same sources, most importantly Neoplatonic sources. Let me only mention the doctrine of “the unity of being ” central to the theosophy of Ibn al-‘Arabi (1164–1240), in which, among others, Neoplatonic and Sufi doctrines come together. In passing it may be noted that the relationship between God, God’s names and God’s creation in Ibn al-‘Arabi bears an interesting resemblance to the relationship between substance, attributes and modes in Spinoza’s ontology, no doubt due to Neoplatonic influences present in both their works. It is, however, not the purpose of this paper to present a comprehensive account of parallels between medieval doctrines of God and Spinoza’s metaphysics. 4 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 171 As for the Aristotelian tradition, my analysis will focus on Maimonides. It is important to emphasize that I do not maintain that the doctrine is specifically Maimonidean, or that Maimonides was Spinoza’s only source. All I suggest is that Maimonides holds the doctrine in question, that Spinoza knew Maimonides’ version of it, and that the doctrine influenced Spinoza. As S. Pines showed, among the doctrine’s main sources is the Neoplatonic interpretation of Aristotle’s divine nou'" in the paraphrase of Metaphysics XII written by the 4th century Byzantine commentator of Aristotle, Themistius.7 Themistius’s paraphrase influenced both directly and indirectly a wide range of medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian Aristotelians, some of whom Spinoza knew, and some of whom may have influenced him indirectly. The decision to focus on Maimonides is based on two considerations: one is that Maimonides fully adopted the doctrine in question, and thus is well suited to exemplify its radical implications; the other is that we have a sufficiently large amount of evidence to substantiate the general claim that Maimonides had a significant influence on different aspects of Spinoza’s thought.8 My purpose in this paper is, therefore, only to lay out the intellectual setting in which the relationship of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura to medieval Aristotelian metaphysics can be understood. I intend to complement it in the near future through a historical study, in which I will present a comprehensive survey of the Aristotelian thinkers in the Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions who played a role in the transmission of the doctrine from Themistius to Spinoza. With these qualifications in mind, the transformation of Maimonides’ God, defined as “intellectual activity” (Arabic: lq[la l[p) (Guide I, 68, 113),9 into the “active essence” (actuosa essentia) (E II, Prop. 3 Schol. / G. II, 87) of Spinoza’s 7 Shlomo Pines, “Some Distinctive Metaphysical Conceptions in Themistius’ Commentary on Book Lambda and Their Place in the History of Philosophy” [“Themistius”], in Shlomo Pines, Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy [= Collected Works, vol. 3], ed. Sarah Stroumsa (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1996), and see my brief discussion of a passage from Themistius’s paraphrase below. 8 On Spinoza’s knowledge of Maimonides, see Leon Roth, Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides [Spinoza] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 102–6. That Spinoza was thoroughly familiar with Maimonides’ philosophy by the time he wrote the Ethics is indirectly attested by the Theological-Political Treatise, on which he started working in 1665, interrupting his work on the Ethics. For the development and chronology of Spinoza’s work until the publication of the TTP, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life [Spinoza] (Cambridge, U.K. / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175–286. The use and critique of Maimonides in the TTP is that of a “careful and perspicacious reader” as S. Pines pointed out. Pines, “Spinoza’s Tractatus, Maimonides and Kant” [“Spinoza’s Tractatus”], Scripta Hierosolymitana 20 (1968), 3–54. See already Manuel Joel’s many references to Maimonides in his study of the sources of the TTP: Spinozas theologisch-politischer Traktat auf seine Quellen geprüft [Quellen] (Breslau: Schletter’sche Buchhandlung, 1870). A comprehensive bibliography of the scholarship on the relationship between Maimonides and Spinoza was prepared by Jacob Dienstag, “The Relation of Spinoza to the Philosophy of Maimonides,” Studia Spinozana 2 (1986), 375–416. Since L. Roth the most detailed argument for “a distinctive Maimonidean influence on Spinoza’s philosophy” has been presented by Warren Z. Harvey, “A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean” [“Portrait”], Journal of the History of Philosophy 19, No. 2 (1981), 151–72. Harvey arrives at the following conclusion: “The Spinoza who has been sketched . . . in the preceding portrait was a Maimonidean in the sense that fundamental elements of Maimonides’ philosophy recur as fundamental elements of his philosophy. This is true, as I have tried to show, with regard to questions of psychology, epistemology, ethics, anthropology, politics, metaphysics and true religion; that is with regard to Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole, including his speculations about God and the true worship of him.” (172) 9 Quotations from the Judeo-Arabic (i.e., Arabic in Hebrew characters) are from Dalalat al-Ha’irin, eds. S. Munk and I. Joel (Jerusalem: J. Junovitch, 1930–31). 172 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 God can be characterized as follows: Maimonides’ God is cognitive activity, in which res cogitans and res cogitata are identical. At the same time, Maimonides’ God constitutes the form of the physical world which, mutatis mutandis, becomes Spinoza’s res extensa. It is important to note that for Maimonides God and nature not only mirror each other. Rather, the same act determines the structure of God’s thought and the form of the physical world. To understand this better, let me recall that the two fundamental components of Aristotle’s universe are matter and form and that every object in the physical world, in both the sublunary and the supralunar realm, may be described as a “composite” (sunqetovn) of matter and form.10 The divine realm on the other hand, i.e., the realm of the separate intelligences, is pure form, whereby “pure” means “without matter” (a[neu u{lh").11 Aristotle’s universe thus may be said to contain two types of things: things composed of matter and form and things that are pure form. Whereas the former constitute the world of nature, the latter constitute the world of the divine. What I will attempt to show is that the intellectual activity of Maimonides’ God constitutes not only the realm of pure form but also the formal component of the physical world through one and the same act. The remaining dualism in Maimonides’ ontology (the inconsistency of which he pointed out himself) is due to the doctrine of God’s incorporeality. From the point of view of the physical world, God mysteriously is immanent and transcendent because, as incorporeal, he could be identified only with its form but not with its matter. The structure of Maimonides’ God is preserved in Spinoza’s God. Spinoza’s God, however, does not transcend the physical world. The transition from Maimonides’ God to Spinoza’s may be described as follows: In a first step the ontology of matter and form is replaced through an ontology of thought and extension which for Spinoza 10 Physics I, 7, 190b 11. Although the matter of things in the sublunary world is very different from the matter of things in the supralunary world, every “sensible substance” (aijsqhth̀ oujs iva), whether “eternal” or “corruptible,” is composed of matter and form. For a general account of the principles of “sensible substances,” see Metaphysics XII, 1–5. Compare Guide of the Perplexed II, Introduction, Premise 22: “Every body is necessarily composed of two things . . . .The two things constituting it are its matter and its form” (209). If not indicated otherwise quotations from the Guide are translated from Samuel ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew trans., ed. J. Even Shmuel (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1987). This is the translation used by Spinoza, who had the 1551 Venezia edition of the Guide (cf. Roth, Spinoza, 65, note 1). For a detailed description of this edition, see J. Dienstag, “Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Bibliography of Editions and Translations,” in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of Alexander Scheiber, ed. Robert Dan (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado / Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 97–98. 11 Metaphysics XII 6, 1071b 21; cf. XII 7, 1073a 4. For the possibility of a plurality of separate intelligences, see ibid., 8. Compare Maimonides, Sefer ha-Madda‘, Commandments concerning the Foundations of the Law [SM, Foundations] (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1993), chapter II, 3: “All that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in His world is divided into three parts: some are creatures that are a composite [ ] of matter and form and that are always subject to generation and corruption, such as the bodies of man and animal and the plants and the minerals. Some are creatures that are a composite of matter and form but do not change from body to body and from form to form as do the former . . . They are the spheres and the stars within them . . . Some creatures are form without any matter at all [ ]. They are the angels.” God is obviously without any matter as well. For God’s incorporeality, see ibid. I, 7. All things composed of matter and form are the object of the Account of the Beginning (ibid. IV, 10), which Maimonides identifies with “natural science” in Guide I, Introduction, 5. All things without matter, i.e., God and the angels, are the object of the Account of the Chariot (SM, Foundations, II, 11), which Maimonides identifies with “divine science” in Guide I, Introduction, 5. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 173 are neither conceptually nor causally related to each other.12 As a consequence of this separation the physical world is reduced to extension and its modes. Physical objects thus are not composed of extension and thought in the way physical objects are composed of matter and form in the Aristotelian tradition.13 More important, however, is the second step: the integration of the attribute of extension into God’s absolutely infinite being. For both Maimonides and Descartes, matter (respectively extension) in itself is passive and outside God’s nature.14 For Spinoza on the other hand extension as an attribute of God is one dimension of God’s active essence. In this sense Spinoza’s God is cognitive and extensive activity, i.e., one act that is both cognition and extension, and in which res cogitans and extendens are identical to res cogitata and extensa. Maimonides’ and Spinoza’s God thus share the same structure. But whereas Maimonides’ God is confined to thought, Spinoza’s God is extension as well. The move beyond the Aristotelian God allowed Spinoza to solve a number of problems resulting from the ontological assumptions of his predecessors, most importantly for the present context the problem of the causal relationship between God conceived as active but immaterial and matter conceived as passive in itself. According to Solomon Maimon this is a problem with which “all philosophers struggled.”15 It certainly was a problem that in Spinoza’s view neither Maimonides nor Descartes had solved.16 12 For a clear account of Spinoza’s view on the separation of thought and extension see Michael Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza [Mind-Body Problem] (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9–17. Of course the ontology of thought and extension in some way has its source in Descartes. See, e.g., Principia Philosophiae [Principia] I, 53 and I, 63, in Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery [AT], vol. 8 / 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1973). But Descartes’ account of substantia cogitans and substantia extensa had been modified by Spinoza in many respects. For some of the differences, see. R. S. Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz—The Concept of Substance in 17th Century Metaphysics [Substance] (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 28–51. See also below, note 23. 13 In fact, in a letter to H. Oldenburg, Spinoza calls “Substantial Forms and Qualities” a “childish and worthless doctrine” (Ep. 13 / G. IV, 64). 14 For the passivity of matter, see Maimonides’ quotation of Metaphyisics XII, 6, 1071b 29–30 in Guide II, Introduction: “Matter does not move itself.” For the exclusion of matter from God, see Guide I, 69. On the passivity of matter in Descartes, see Spinoza’s comment in a letter to W. von Tschirnhaus: “[F]rom extension as conceived by Descartes, to wit, an inert mass [molem quiescentem], it is not only difficult, as you say, but quite impossible to demonstrate the existence of bodies. For inert matter, as far as it is in itself, will remain in its inert state [in sua quiete perseverabit], and will not be set in motion except by a powerful external cause. For this reason I have not hesitated on a previous occasion to affirm that Descartes’s principles of natural things are useless not to say absurd” (Ep. 81 / G. IV, 332) Since Descartes conceives God as “uncreated thinking substance” (Principia I, 54), extension is excluded from God’s nature. 15 Salomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, in Gesammelte Werke [GW], ed. Valerio Verra, Reprographischer Nachdruck (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1965), vol. 2, 62. 16 Note that I sometimes deliberately use Spinoza’s terminology in an anachronistic way to characterize the relationship between God and nature in Maimonides in order to make visible the structural similarities and differences in their metaphysical projects. The opposition of God and the physical world, for example, disregards the chain of incorporeal intelligences emanating from God in Maimonides’ cosmology. Maimonides’ physical world, moreover, not only differs from Spinoza’s res extensa with regard to being composed of matter and form. It is also finite and subdivided into two essentially different realms: the world above and below the sphere of the moon, whereas Spinoza’s res extensa is infinite and one in essence. As important as these differences are, reflecting in part the transition from a pre-Copernican to a post-Copernican conception of the universe, they do not, in my opinion, affect the substance of my argument. Note also that I will usually refer to Spinoza’s God as if 174 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 I am certainly not the first to claim that the God of medieval Aristotelians in some way influenced Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. To the best of my knowledge, however, there is neither a precise account of the structure of their relation, nor of the steps leading from the former to the latter.17 Besides contributing to the clarification of the genesis of Spinoza’s monism, my analysis, if correct, permits two further interesting conclusions: It shows that, within Spinoza’s system, a modified version of the central metaphysical concept of the Aristotelian tradition survived the collapse of Aristotle’s cosmology and physics following the Copernican revolution, and it sheds light on the radical nature of the metaphysics of at least some medieval Aristotelians. Their “Spinozism,” if I may say so, is at least as interesting as Spinoza’s “Aristotelianism.” DISPERSING A CLOUD The most important passage showing that Spinoza was aware of the relation of his metaphysics to the metaphysics of medieval Jewish Aristotelians is E II, Prop. 7 and the scholium to the same proposition: E II, Prop. 7: The order and connection of ideas is the same [idem est] as the order and connection of things. Schol.: Here . . . we must recall what we showed above, namely that whatever can be perceived by an infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, all this pertains to only one substance [unicam tantum substantiam], and consequently that the thinking substance [substantia cogitans] and the extended substance [substantia extensa] are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this, now under that attribute [jam sub hoc, jam sub illo attributo comprehenditur]. So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways [sed duobus modis expressa]. (G. II, 89–90) The proposition states what is often called Spinoza’s ‘parallelism thesis.’ The text, however, suggests that ‘identity thesis’ would be a more appropriate term, since for Spinoza the order of ideas is the same as the order of things. From the scholium we learn that this identity is not confined to the order but extends to the ideas and things as well.18 In fact, the identity of the latter serves as explanation for the identity of the former: because ideas and things are one and the same entity, their order and connection is one and the same.19 Moreover, the scholium makes visible the ontological foundation of Spinoza’s concept of truth as correspondence:20 Ideas and things correspond to each other because they are only one entity perceived under two attributes—the attribute of extension and the at- he had only the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension. Although Spinoza’s thesis that God has an infinite number of attributes is important, it does not play a major role in the context of my discussion. Spinoza’s crucial step beyond medieval philosophical theology is certainly the attribution of extension to God. 17 I will discuss two important attempts to explain the relationship—by Leon Roth and Shlomo Pines—in Appendix 2. 18 Cf. E II, Prop. 21 Schol.; E III, Prop. 2, Schol. 19 Cf. Martial Gueroult, Spinoza [Spinoza], 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), vol. 2, 86. 20 See E I, Ax. 6 [G. II, 47]: “A true idea must correspond to the thing it represents” (Idea vera debet cum suo ideato convenire). MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 175 tribute of thought.21 This is perhaps the most explicit passage in the Ethics for Spinoza’s uncompromising monism or, in Wolfson’s words, for his “principle of the unity of nature.”22 It implies a clear rejection of Cartesian dualism: not two realms of being exist—substantia cogitans and substantia extensa—but one realm only that is perceived as cogitatio and extensio.23 This realm consists of one substance or natura naturans and its modifications or natura naturata.24 The scholium proceeds as follows: which some of the Hebrews appear to have seen as if through a cloud, who maintain that God, God’s intellect, and the things by him intellectually cognized are one and the same. (quod quidam Hebraeorum quasi per nebulam vidisse videntur, qui scilicet statuunt, Deum, Dei intellectum, resque ab ipso intellectas unum, & idem esse). (G. II, 90) Thus, in order to reach his ontological monism from the monotheism of “some of the Hebrews” all Spinoza had to do was to dissipate a “cloud.” It seems clear, therefore, that he did not consider his Deus sive Natura to be the result of an act of daring or of a philosophical revolution. If we imagine a philosophical debate between Spinoza and the “Hebrews” he has in mind in the above quoted passage, metaphysics would presumably not be a controversial issue. The only difference between them, according to Spinoza, concerns the clarity of their perception: What he himself conceives clare et distincte, his Hebrew predecessors conceived only “as if through a cloud.”25 Spinoza’s God of “some of the Hebrews” is, to be sure, not devoid of travesty. Looked at more closely, he turns out to be not the God of the Hebrews but the 21 This issue has been much debated in secondary literature, in particular the question if the numerical identity of ideas and things is compatible with the conceptual and causal barrier that according to Spinoza separates thought from extension. For a lucid recent discussion, see Della Rocca, Mind-Body Problem, chs. 7–9. For the purpose of this paper I do not need to solve the problems involved in Spinoza’s position. That he is, in fact, committed to the numerical identity thesis is in my opinion sufficiently clear from the text of the scholium (as well as from several parallel passages; see references in note 18). I do not subscribe to the so-called “subjective” interpretation of the attributes which was proposed by Wolfson (see Wolfson, Spinoza I, 142–57). Note that in CM II, 5 the distinction between God’s attributes is described as a “distinction of reason” (distinctio rationis). This means that the distinction does not exist in re, “but is only conceived by reason as if it existed” (sed tantum ratione quasi fieri concipitur) (G. I, 257–58). In the Ethics, however, Spinoza says that the attributes are conceived as “really distinct” (realiter distincta) (E I, Prop. 10, schol.). 22 For the unity of nature, see also the reference to this Scholium in E III, Prop. 2, Schol., in which “the mind and the body” are described as “one and the same thing” conceived under two attributes. “It follows that the order or connection of things is one whether nature is conceived under this attribute or that” (ordo, sive rerum concatenatio una sit, sive natura sub hoc, sive sub illo attributo concipiatur) (G. II, 141, emphasis added). 23 Cf. Descartes, Principia I, 53–54; I, 63. Descartes’s substance pluralism is, however, not limited to the dualism of substantia cogitans and substantia extensa. Thinking substance is in itself multiple. Thus, Descartes distinguishes between “created” and “uncreated” thinking substance; the latter is God and numerically one, the former consists in the human minds of which each constitutes an individual substance (see Principia I, 60). Extended substance on the other hand seems to be numerically one. Individual bodies are not substances but a “certain configuration” (certa configuratio) of extension (see the “Synopsis of the Meditations” in AT 7, 14). For Spinoza only one substance with infinite attributes exists, of which individual minds and bodies are modes. In the present paper, I am, however, not interested in a detailed account of the differences between Descartes’s and Spinoza’s ontology, but only in the way Spinoza abolishes Descartes’s dualism of thought and extension. 24 On these two terms see KV I, 8 and 9; E I, Prop. 29, Scholium. 25 Cf. Harvey, “Portrait,” 166. 176 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 God of the Greeks—more precisely the divine nou'" ultimately derived from Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII 7 and 9. From this we may infer that the alleged “Hebrews” were not primarily the Hebrews of Biblical times, but Jewish philosophers such as Abraham ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Gersonides or Leone Ebreo,26 who had transformed the God of Aristotle into the God of the Bible.27 Since the detailed studies of Spinoza’s Hebrew sources by M. Joel it is well known that he was acquainted with and extensively used the work of earlier Jewish thinkers. Among others, he was familiar with all four of the above-mentioned philosophers.28 They provided the divine nou'" with a Hebrew garb, and draped in that costume Spinoza made its acquaintance. Before I attempt to show why in my opinion Spinoza is justified to refer to the God of “some of the Hebrews” as a “clouded” anticipation of his Deus sive Natura, let me note that I am well aware that this thesis is controversial. I expect students of both Maimonides and Spinoza to raise objections against my interpretation. It will be of particular concern to them that I may be underestimating the thickness of the cloud which in Spinoza’s opinion obscured Maimonides’ vision. According to them, the difference between Maimonides’ God and Spinoza’s is much greater 26 Most commentators take “Hebrews” to be a reference to Maimonides. See Wolfson, Spinoza, vol. 2, 24–27; Harvey, “Portrait,” 165. The plural “Hebraeorum,” however, may well imply that Spinoza was thinking not only of Maimonides and, indeed, the formula is used frequently in medieval philosophical literature. See for example the Long Commentary on the Torah by Abraham ibn Ezra on Exodus 34:6; cf. the Short Commentary on Exodus 33:12; Gersonides, Wars of the Lord (Riva di Trento, 1560), Book V, part III, chapter 12, 46a; Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’Amore, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1929), 122b. On the other hand, neither does the plural preclude the possibility that Spinoza is referring to Maimonides only or primarily. In TTP I (G. III, 18), for example, he mentions quorundam Judaeorum in a passage which is clearly based on Guide II, 33 (cf. Joel, Quellen, 24 ff. and Pines, “Spinoza’s Tractatus,” 16). Harvey, “Portrait,” 165, note 76, suggests that the metaphor of the “cloud” is an allusion to Guide III, 9, where Maimonides describes matter as a cloud, which prevents beings composed of matter and form—such as humans and the celestial spheres— from apprehending “the separate intellect as it is in itself.” 27 Though Spinoza may also have had in mind the theology of the Hebrew Bible—not derived from a literal reading, to be sure, but from its medieval philosophical interpretation. That Spinoza was not particularly committed to the principles of his Biblical hermeneutics as set out in TTP VII is, I think, obvious from an attentive reading of the TTP itself. With regard to the God of the “ancient Hebrews,” a passage in Letter 73 is instructive: “I maintain an opinion on God and Nature far different from that which modern Christians are wont to uphold. For I maintain that God is of all things the immanent cause, as they say, and not the transitive cause [Deum enim rerum omnium causam immanentem, ut ajunt, non vero transeuntem statuo]. All things, I say, are in God and move in God, and this I affirm with Paul and perhaps with all ancient philosophers, though expressed in a different way, and I would even venture to say, with all the ancient Hebrews [cum antiquis omnibus Hebraeis], as far as may be conjectured from certain traditions, even if these have suffered manifold corruption” (G. IV, 307). On Maimonides’ God as causa immanens, see below. It is in this context important to note that in the KV Spinoza illustrates the concept of causa immanens through the relationship between the intellect and its intellecta. This adds plausibility to the thesis that in his statement about the “ancient Hebrew traditions,” Spinoza was guided by their medieval Aristotelian commentators. The “uncorrupted” message of Scripture here is as close to Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrines as the “uncorrupted” message of Scripture in TTP XII is close to his ethical doctrines. When he was younger Spinoza apparently took less trouble to point out the relation of his God to the God of the Bible. It seems that one claim leading to his excommunication in 1656 was “that there is no God except philosophically.” Cf. Nadler, Spinoza, 135–36. 28 Joel, Quellen; Idem, Zur Genesis der Lehre Spinozas [Genesis] (Breslau: Schletter’sche Buchhandlung, 1871). For Spinoza’s knowledge of Leone Ebreo, see C. Gebhardt, “Spinoza und der Platonismus,” Chronicon Spinozanum 1 (1921), 178–234. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 177 and more radical than I allow. I will discuss the two objections that seem to me the most important in Appendix 1. TWO ASPECTS OF SPINOZA’S MONISM What appears to be Spinoza’s break with the medieval philosophical tradition, as described by Wolfson, is the consequence of two features of his monism: First, he seems to abolish the traditional division of reality into an incorporeal God and a corporeal world, by transforming the incorporeal principle and the corporeal principle into two attributes of one substance, i.e., “thought” and “extension.” Second, he seems to abolish the traditional division of reality into creator and creation. The traditional view is assumed to be that God is transcendent—in Spinoza’s terminology causa transiens, i.e., a cause that produces its effects outside itself. Spinoza’s view is that God is causa immanens, i.e., a cause that produces its effects inside itself. In other words: natura naturata or creation is not outside natura naturans or the creator, but within it. The first characteristic can be derived from E I, Prop. 14, in particular its first corollarium, taken together with E II, Prop. 1 and 2. Spinoza defines God as “an absolutely infinite being [ens absolute infinitum], that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence” (E I, Def. 6 / G. II, 45). In the scholium to E I, Prop. 10, Spinoza claims that the coexistence of a plurality of “really distinct” attributes in one substance is possible. That God as defined in Def. 6 “necessarily exists” is demonstrated in E I, Prop. 11 (G. II, 52). Since according to Prop. 5 “in nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute” (G. II, 48), and since God possesses all attributes, Spinoza can conclude in Prop. 14 that only God exists:29 E I, Prop. 14: Besides God, no substance can be or be conceived. Cor. 1: From this it follows most clearly, first, that God is unique [unicum], i.e. (by Def. 6), that in the nature of things there is only one substance [in rerum natura non, nisi unam substantiam, dari], and that it is absolutely infinite. (G. II, 56) As ens absolute infinitum God contains all reality, which according to Spinoza is expressed in the infinite number of his attributes.30 It so happens that human beings apprehend only two segments of this reality: modes of thought and modes of extension. Now, modes can neither be nor be conceived without substance (cf. E I, Def. 5) and modes of a certain kind are caused by substance only insofar as it is conceived under the attribute of this same kind.31 We can, therefore, infer from our apprehension of modes of thought that “thought [cogitatio] is an attribute of 29 My intention here is not to provide a complete account of Spinoza’s argument. For an explanation of the steps leading to E I, Prop. 14 see: Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method—A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics [Geometrical Method] (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9–19. Cf. M. Della Rocca, “Spinoza’s Substance Monism,” in Spinoza—Metaphysical Themes [Metaphysical Themes], eds. Olli Koistinen and John Biro (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11–37, especially 13. 30 See for example E I, Prop. 10, Schol.: “Indeed nothing in Nature is clearer than that each being must be conceived under some attribute, and the more reality or being it has, the more it has attributes [quo plus realitatis, aut esse habeat, eo plura attributa] which express necessity or eternity and infinity” (G. II, 52). 31 Cf. E II, Prop. 5 and 6. 178 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 God, or God is a thinking thing,” and from our apprehension of modes of extension “that extension [extensio] is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing” (E II, Prop. 1& 2 / G. II, 86).32 Spinoza’s monism, therefore, abolishes the ontological dualism of medieval Aristotelians insofar as they conceived God as incorporeal intelligence that is “separate” from the corporeal world.33 Thought and extension become two of the infinite attributes of the one substance. The second characteristic is implied in E I, Prop. 15, and spelled out in E I, Prop. 18: Given that only one absolutely infinite substance exists, and given that modes can neither be nor be conceived without substance, it follows that nothing can exist outside or independently of God: E I, Prop. 15: Whatever is, is in God [Quicquid est, in Deo est], and nothing can be or be conceived without God. Dem.: Besides God, there neither is, nor can be conceived, a substance . . . .But modes (by Def. 5) can neither be nor be conceived without substance. Therefore, they can be in the divine nature alone [in sola divina natura esse], and can be conceived through it alone. (G. II, 56) Prop. 15 is then used in the demonstration of Prop. 18 which describes God as causa immanens (as against causa transiens): E I, Prop. 18: God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause [causa immanens, non vero transiens] of all things. Dem.: All things that are, are in God, and must be conceived through God (by Prop. 15), and so (by Prop. 16, Cor. 1) God is the cause of the things, which are in him [quae in ipso sunt]. (G II, 64) Already in KV I, 3 Spinoza stated that God “is an immanent [inblyvende] and not a transitive cause [overgaande oorzaake], since he does everything in himself, and not outside himself because outside him there is nothing [omdat buyten hem niets nied en is]” (G. I, 35). Although the monistic implications of Spinoza’s concept of Deus sive Natura— the unity of thought and extension, and God’s immanent causality—perhaps in some way can be derived from Descartes’s concept of God as “supremely perfect being” (ens summe perfectum),34 this does not change the fact that they are clearly non-Cartesian features. From a historical perspective, I think, these non-Cartesian features of Spinoza’s God can best be explained against the background of the 32 This is an a posteriori proof. Cf. Gueroult, Spinoza, vol. 2, 38 ff. See for example Metaphysics XII 7, 1073a 4–5: God is “a substance . . . separate [kecwrismevnh] from sensible things.” But here again a note of caution is in order. The description of God as incorporeal intelligence is certainly not uniform in the Aristotelian tradition. If Simplicius’s quotation from Aristotle’s lost treatise On Prayer is authentic, according to which “God is either intellect or also something beyond the intellect [ejpevkeinav ti tou' nou']” (Simplicii in Aristotelis De Caelo Commentaria, ed. Johan Ludvig Heiberg [Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1893 = CAG, vol. 7], 485), even Aristotle himself would not have been unambiguous on this question. As for medieval Aristotelians, to say that they consistently conceive God as incorporeal intelligence and hold a strict ontological dualism is certainly an oversimplification. In particular the Neoplatonic stratum in their thought requires qualifying both assertions. On the other hand, the opposition of incorporeal intelligence and corporeal world is a sufficiently recognizable feature of their thought to justify its use for contrasting it with Spinoza’s position. 34 See, e.g., Descartes, Principia I, 14 and I, 18. The relationship of Spinoza’s concept of God to Descartes’s has been described by Curley, Geometrical Method, 3–50. On Spinoza’s use of Descartes’s definition of God as a “supremely perfect being,” see in particular 19–23. 33 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 179 doctrine of God characteristic of the above mentioned tradition in medieval Aristotelianism.35 Scholars have for a long time noted that in order to “uncover the dialogue Spinoza was conducting with his predecessors,” it is legitimate to disregard the geometrical form of his exposition.36 In what follows, I will make use of this liberty, and present the Maimonidean version of the two aspects of Spinoza’s monism in inverse order. If my reconstruction is correct this would be the order in which the Aristotelian doctrine of God took shape in the understanding of Spinoza. MAIMONIDES’ GOD AS CAUSA IMMANENS OF ALL EXISTENTS In Guide I, 68 Maimonides presents what the “philosophers concerned with divine science . . . have demonstrated” regarding the nature of God. Only “ignoramuses,” according to Maimonides, “hold that the knowledge of the necessary truth concerning this [ ] is concealed from the minds” (140): You already know that this saying of the philosophers with regard to God, may He be praised, is generally admitted: the saying that He is the intellect as well as the subject of intellection and the object of intellection, and that these three notions are in Him, may He be praised, one notion, in which there is no multiplicity [ ]. We also have already mentioned in our great compilation, Mishneh Torah that this is a foundation of our religion, as we have made clear there; I mean the fact that He is only one and that no other thing can be added to Him. . . . For this reason it is said “by the living Lord [yy yj]” Î (1 Samuel 20:3; cf. ibid. 25:26) and not “by the life of the Lord [yy yje]”—because His life is not something other than His essence. (140) 35 On this point I disagree with Curley who believes “that we have much more to gain from considering Spinoza’s relation to Descartes and Hobbes than from examining his relation to any other previous authors” (Geometrical Method, xi). Ultimately the assessment of the influences on Spinoza seems to depend—at least to some degree—on the research interests of the scholar in question. L. Roth, for example, writes: “Where Spinoza rejected the lead of Descartes, he not only followed that of Maimonides, but based his rejection on Maimonides’ arguments, often, indeed, on his very words. . . . Maimonides and Spinoza speak throughout with one voice” (Spinoza, 143–44). In this paper I neither intend to participate in the competition for Spinoza’s sources, nor to evaluate the already existing contributions to this competition. Let me only briefly address three points concerning Spinoza’s relation to Descartes. First, I think, it is uncontroversial that Spinoza’s God has clearly non-Cartesian features. “The first and most important error” of Descartes, according to Spinoza, is that he went “far astray from cognition of the first cause and origin of all things” (Ep. 2 / G. IV, 8). Since for Spinoza all knowledge ultimately depends on the cognition of the first cause, he must have considered an error at this point as devastating for the philosophical system as a whole. Second, it is true, as Curley (Geometrical Method, 4) remarks, that Spinoza approved L. Meyer’s preface to the PP, in which Meyer describes Descartes as “the brightest star of our age,” who has brought us “out of the darkness and into light.” But whatever Spinoza may have thought of this somewhat flowery description, it is unmistakably Meyer’s not his. Thus Meyer, in his Philosophia sive S. Scripturae Interpres (1666), describes Descartes as “the greatest founder and propagator” of philosophy, who “illuminated the world of letters” (115). This is clearly not the Descartes of Spinoza’s second letter quoted above. Finally, Curley is also right in that Spinoza’s first published work is “a careful exposition of Descartes,” which he wrote “while he was writing the Ethics” (Geomtecrical Method, 4). But Spinoza published as appendix to PP the CM, which presents, as I will argue, a concept of God with clearly Maimonidean features. Moreover, CM apparently antedates PP. See below, Appendix 3. 36 Curley, Geometrical Method, xi. Cf. Wolfson’s methodological discussion in Spinoza, vol. 1, chs. 1 and 2. 180 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 God’s unity thus consists in the identity of “the intellect, the subject and the object of intellection [Arabic: lwq[mlaw lqa[law lq[la]” (112). As an example of this unity, Maimonides describes the intellectual cognition of a tree37 through a human intellect. When “a man . . . has stripped” the form of the tree “from its matter, and has represented to himself the pure form—this being the act of the intellect [lkçh l[wp]—at that time the man would become one who is intellectually cognizing in actu [l[wpb lykçm].” In an intellect in actu there is no distinction between intellect and apprehension for “the true being and essence of the intellect is apprehension [hgçh].” Maimonides contrasts this unity of an intellect in actu with the threefold nature of an intellectual cognition in potentia: “The man . . . who is the intellectually cognizing subject in potentia, the potentiality that is the intellect in potentia, and the thing apt to be intellectually cognized, which is the potentially cognizable object.” In the above given example these three “would be . . . man, hylic intellect, and the form of the tree” (141). Maimonides describes “apprehension” further as “the act of the intellect” (Arabic: lq[la l[p), and thus concludes that the act of the intellect is “its true reality and its substance” (141). This “act of the intellect,” therefore, constitutes the unity of the intellect, the subject and the object of intellection. At first view, Maimonides does not seem to go beyond what Aristotle says in Metaphysics XII, in particular in chapter 9 in which he discusses the aporiai arising from the question how nou'" must be, assuming that it is the “most divine” (qeiovtaton) entity (1074b 15–17), and reaches the conclusion that it must be intellection, which “intellectually cognizes itself” (auJto;n a[ra noei') (33–34). It is important to note that for Aristotle this means that the divine intellect cognizes only itself. The main steps of the argument leading to this conclusion may be summarized as follows:38 The question “what [the intellect] knows” allows for two disjunctive answers: either “itself” (auJto;n) or “something else” (e{teron) and if the latter, “either always the same object, or now this and now that [a[llo]” (21–23). Since the intellect is the “most divine” as well as the “most excellent” (kravtiston) (34), and since the object of intellection rather than the act of intellection determines its value,39 it cannot “intellectually cognize whatsoever [to; tucovn],” but must “intellectually cognize the most divine [qeiovtaton] and the most valuable [timiwvtaton]” (24–26). Thus, it can be ruled out that the intellect cognizes “now this and now that” object, for the cognition of any object other than the most divine and most valuable would imply a change “to the worse” (eij" cei'ron), which in turn would imply “motion” (kivnhsi"). As a consequence, such a cognition would be incompatible with Hebrew: ˜lya, Arabic: ’hbç’k, which means “piece of wood.” In what follows I will present my own understanding of what seems to me the core of Aristotle’s argument; I have considerably benefited from William D. Ross’s commentary on the chapter in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966, 5th edition), 396–99, as well as from Jacques Brunschwig’s discussion “Metaphysics D 9: A Short-Lived Thought-Experiment?” [“Thought-Experiment”] in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda—Symposium Aristotelicum, eds. Michael Frede and David Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 275–306. For the interpretation of Aristotle as excluding knowledge of anything other than itself from the divine intellect, see Brunschwig, who calls this “the Narcissus-like view of God” (304). 39 Cf. 1074b 31–33, and my discussion of this passage below. 37 38 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 181 the intellect’s excellence and unmoved state (26–27).40 But the intellect also cannot cognize an object other than itself which is always the same. Since what determines the intellect’s excellence is the object rather than the act of intellection— for “the act of intellection [novhsi"] will also belong to that which intellectually cognizes the worst”—and since the intellect must cognize the most divine and most valuable object, the cognition of something other than itself would imply that the “object of intellection” (noouvmenon) is “more valuable” (timiwvteron) than the intellect, which is incompatible with the intellect’s most divine and most excellent nature (29–33). Hence Aristotle’s conclusion: The intellect “intellectually cognizes itself, since it is what is most excellent, and this intellection is intellection of intellection [e[stin hJ novhsi" nohvsew" novhsi"]” (33–35). Although the conclusion is reached through the elimination of all alternatives, its first part may be read as containing an implicit positive inference: The intellect must intellectually cognize what is most excellent. What is most excellent is the intellect itself. Hence it must intellectually cognize itself. At the end of XII 9 Aristotle examines a further aporia that is important for our discussion because it appears to rule out also any internal structure of the divine intellect’s object of intellection, for if the latter were “composite” (suvnqeton), this would imply change in the intellect “while going through the parts of the whole” (1075a 5–7). Aristotle’s solution for this aporia is that the divine intellect’s object of intellection is “immaterial” and, therefore, “indivisible” (ajdiaivreton) (7). Now, if this is the background to Maimonides’ doctrine of divine unity as the identity of intellect, subject and object of intellection in God—how can Spinoza’s monism be derived from such a God absorbed in eternal self-contemplation?41 The example of the apprehension of a tree through a human intellect shows that for Maimonides the doctrine of the unity of the intellect, in principle, characterizes the “true reality of every intellect [lkç lk qwjb]” (142). The distinctive feature of God’s intellect, according to Maimonides, is that in God’s intellect, “there is absolutely no potentiality [ ]” (142), whereas the human intellect acquires knowledge by successively passing from potentiality to actuality. Before knowing the tree, it is intellect in potentia with regard to the tree; if it acquires knowledge of the tree, it becomes intellect in actu with regard to the tree, but remains intellect in potentia with regard to the horse, and so forth. The claim that in God’s intellect “there is absolutely no potentiality,” therefore, could be understood as implying that God is intellect in actu with regard to all objects of intellection.42 Indeed, two eminent readers of the Guide, Leibniz and Solomon Maimon, understood Maimonides’ statement in this sense. Leibniz writes: 40 An implicit assumption appears to be that no more than one most valuable and most divine object can exist. However, even if this assumption is not granted, the cognition of multiple objects of equal excellence would still appear to imply motion for Aristotle, and could thus be ruled out on this account (presupposing that the simultaneous cognition of multiple objects is impossible; cf. Aristotle’s argument for the simplicity of the object of cognition at 1075a 5–7 discussed below). 41 For a critical discussion of Shlomo Pines’s attempt to derive an almost pantheistic view from Guide I, 68, see Appendix 2. 42 That the act of the intellect is the intellect’s “true reality and substance” (141) holds for both the human and the divine intellect, but only the latter is actus purus (to use Thomas Aquinas’s terminology; see for example Summa Theologiae qu. 3, art. 2: Deus est actus purus, non habens aliquid de potentialitate), whereby actus purus is the kind of “actuality” (ejnevrgeia) that constitutes the substance 182 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 God is intellect, subject and object of intellection, and these three in him are one. An intellect that exists in actu is the same as the object of intellection: for example the abstracted form of a tree. But an intellect in potentia and the tree intellectually cognized in potentia are different things. But since God is always intellectually cognizing in actu without any potentiality with regard to all objects of intellection, therefore in him the subject and the object of intellection are always the same [sine ulla potentia respectu omnium intelligibilium ideo in eo semper idem intelligens et intelligibile].43 And similarly Solomon Maimon: Since in God there is no potentiality but everything thinkable (possible) is actually thought by him [Da nun in Gott kein Vermögen ist, sondern alles Vorstellbare (Mögliche) von ihm wirklich vorgestellt wird]; it follows from this, that God as thinking subject, his thought and the object of thought . . . are one and the same thing. Where this leads to the thinking reader can easily see.44 What will the “thinking reader” find out? If God’s apprehension comprises all objects of intellection, and if at the same time it is self-intellection, it follows that God is all objects of intellection. And since “the intellect is . . . His essence,” and the essence of the intellect is “the act of the intellect,” we must conclude that God’s essence, or the act of God’s intellect is all objects of intellection. In the passage of the Mishneh Torah, to which Maimonides refers at the beginning of Guide I, 68, God’s intellection of all existents is explicitly stated: The Holy One, blessed be He, apprehends His true reality [wtyma rykm], and knows it [htwa [dwyw] as it is. And He does not know with knowledge external to Himself, as we know. For we and our knowledge are not one. But as for the Creator blessed be He, His knowledge and His life are one [dja wyyjw wt[dw awh] in every respect, from all angles, and however we conceive unity. For assuming that He lived through life, and knew through knowledge external to Himself, there would be a plurality of deities: He, His life, and His knowledge. This, however, is not the case, but He is one in every of the eternal and unmoved first mover in Metaphysics XII 6. It is “pure” in the sense of being unmixed with potentiality, for potentiality would entail the possibility of non-being and thus would be incompatible with the first mover’s eternity (1071b17 ff.). This actuality, according to Metaphysics XII 7, is the divine intellect (cf. 1072b26 ff.). It is interesting to note that the description of the divine intellect as “actuality” does not occur in Metaphysics XII 9, which (among other arguments) led some scholars to suggest that XII 9 is earlier than XII 7. Cf. Bertrand Dumoulin, Analyse génetique de la Métaphysique d’Aristote (Montreal: Bellarmin, and Paris: Belles Lettres, 1986) and Brunschwig, “Thought-Experiment.” One significant difference between the two chapters, according to Brunschwig, is that “the doctrine of XII 9 is a Narcissus-like theology,” which is “substantially different from the doctrine of XII 7, which is a theology of God’s omniscience” (304). It would be interesting to examine whether Maimonides’ apparent deviation from Aristotle’s doctrine of God’s knowledge is due to the combination of elements from the two chapters. But, as we will see below, Maimonides’ main argument for attributing omniscience to God does not stem from XII 7. 43 G.W.F. Leibniz, “Observationes ad Rabbi Mosis Maimonidis librum qui inscribitur Doctor Perplexorum,” published in Louis Alexandre Foucher de Careil, La philosophie juive et la cabale, Paris, 1861. Reprinted as appendix to Maimonides, Doctor Perplexorum, Latin trans. J. Buxtorf (Basel, 1629; Reprint: Farnborough and Gregg, 1969), 2–46. The quotation is from the gloss on Guide I, 68, 10 (emphasis added). 44 Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, in Maimon, GW, vol. 1, 366 (emphasis added). Cf. Maimon, Give‘at ha-Moreh (eds. Samuel H. Bergman and Natan Rotenstreich [Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1965], on Guide I, 74. See also my forthcoming article: “Maimonides, Spinoza, Solomon Maimon and the Completion of the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy,” in Proceedings of the Colloquium: Sepharad in Ashkenaz—Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, in which I examine the relationship of Maimon’s concept of an “infinite intellect” to both Maimonides and Spinoza. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 183 respect, from all angles, and in every way unity is conceived. [Thus] you will say: He is the knowing subject and the known object and the knowledge itself—all these are one [dja lkh - hmx[ h[dh awhw [wdyh awhw [dwyh awh]. This is something that speech has no power to express, the ear no power to hear and the human mind no power to apprehend completely. For this reason [Scripture] says: “by the life of Pharaoh [h[rp yje]” (Genesis 42:15) and “by the life of your soul [ e]” (1 Samuel 25:26); and it does not say “by the life of the Lord [‘h yje]” but “by the living Lord [‘h yj]” Î (ibidem), for the Creator and His life are not two [things] as in the case of the life of living bodies or the life of angels. Hence He does not apprehend creatures and know them because of the creatures as we know them, but because of Himself He knows them. It is, therefore, because He knows himself that He knows everything, for everything is attached to Him with regard to its generation [ ].45 Here, as in the Guide, Maimonides emphasizes both the unity of the intellect, the subject and the object of intellection in God, as well as the identity of God’s self-intellection and God’s life. He goes, however, beyond the account in the Guide in that he explicitly links God’s self-intellection and his intellection of the created world. God’s knowledge of existents is presented as the consequence of God’s self-intellection and of the causal dependence of the created world on God: “It is, therefore, because He knows himself that He knows everything, for everything is attached to Him with regard to its generation.” Maimonides thus combines two characteristics of the divine intellect from Aristotle’s account in the Metaphysics: one is the characterization of the essence of the divine intellect as self-intellection;46 the other is the characterization of the function of the divine intellect as the first cause in the order of nature.47 From these two Aristotelian characterizations, Maimonides draws the non-Aristotelian inference that the object of God’s knowledge is not only God himself, but the created world as well. That Spinoza knew well the above quoted passage in the Mishneh Torah we learn from the chapter on God’s life in the Cogitata Metaphysica (II, 6). At the end of the chapter he states that God’s life is identical to his essence, because life is “the force through which things persevere in their being” and “the power by which God perseveres in his being [vis autem, qua Deus in suo esse perseverat] is nothing but his essence.” Then he adds: So they speak best who call God life [qui Deum vitam vocant]. Some theologians think that the Jews for this reason, i.e., that God is life, and is not distinguished from life said hwhy yj, Î living Jehova [vivus Jehova] when they swore, but not hwhy yje, the life of Jehova [vita Jehovae] (1 Samuel 20:3; cf. ibidem, 25:26), like Joseph, when he swore by the life of Pharaoh, said h[rp yje, life of Pharao [vita Pharaonis] (Gen. 42:15–16). (G. I, 260) There is little doubt in my view that this passage is based on the Mishneh Torah passage quoted above. In the following chapter, Spinoza discusses the nature of God’s intellect, which, as we shall see below, has the same structure as God’s intellect according to Maimonides’ account. But before we turn to Spinoza, the implications of the omniscience attributed to God by Maimonides require further ex45 SM, Foundations II, 10. Cf. Metaphysics XII 9 discussed above. 47 Cf. Metaphysics XII 6–7 and Physics VIII. 46 184 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 amination. Guide III, 21 gives a more detailed explanation of the genesis and structure of God’s knowledge of the created world. According to Maimonides, there is “a great disparity . . . with regard to that which exists taken as a whole in its relation to our knowledge, and His knowledge.” Whereas our knowledge is multiple and subject to renewal and change because it is a posteriori (derived from “looking at the beings”), God’s knowledge is one and immutable because it is a priori: [God’s] knowledge of things is not derived from them, so that there is multiplicity and renewal, but the things in question follow upon His knowledge, which preceded and established them as they are—either as a separate existence, or as the existence of an individual endowed with permanent matter, or as the existence of what is endowed with matter of changing individuals, following in an incorruptible and immutable order. Hence, with regard to Him, may He be praised, there is no multiplicity of cognitions and no renewal and change of knowledge. For through knowing the true reality of His own immutable essence, He knows the totality of what necessarily derives from all His acts [ ]. . . . For him who accepts the truth in his study of true reality it is, therefore, appropriate to believe that nothing at all is hidden from Him, may He be praised, but that everything is revealed to His knowledge which is His essence [ ]. (441–42) The difference, therefore, between God’s knowledge of the created world and human knowledge of the created world is that human knowledge is derived from the effects of God’s causal activity, whereas God’s knowledge is derived from the cause of existents, i.e., from God himself. God’s knowledge comprises the entire Aristotelian universe with its threefold structure: the separate intellects (the “separate existence”); the celestial spheres, (“the existence of an individual endowed with permanent matter”); the objects of the sublunary world, (“the existence of what is endowed with matter of changing individuals, following in an incorruptible and immutable order”). In the last sentence of the quotation Maimonides seems to affirm that God’s knowledge of the sublunary world is not confined to the universal forms—the genera and species of existents—but comprises the individuals within them as well. Guide III, 20 is yet clearer on this issue: “As there is a necessarily existing substance from which every existent necessarily derives . . . so do we say that this substance apprehends everything that is other than itself [twmx[h htlwz rça lk tgçm ayhh], nothing remaining hidden from it in any way from everything that it produced” (438).48 48 This claim is consistent with the fact that for Maimonides God’s causal activity determines not only the universal form of the sublunary existents but—through the mediation of the celestial spheres— also the particular features of every individual composed of matter and form. The non-essential, particularizing features of the individual are due to the disposition of the material substratum, in which the form inheres (cf. Guide II, 12). The substratum is moved “so as to predispose it to receive the form” (Guide II, Introduction, Premise 25). Both the four sublunary elements, which constitute the substratum, and their particular mixture, which determines its disposition, are the effect of the celestial spheres: The differentiation of prime matter into the four elements is a function of the distance of the regions of prime matter from the sphere of the moon (cf. Guide II, 19). The mixture of the four elements is caused by the motion of the celestial spheres. Cf. Guide II, 10, where Maimonides describes the impact of the spheres on the elements, and Guide III, 2–5, where he uses this theory for the interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot. In Guide II, 11 Maimonides gives an account of the causal chain leading from God to the sublunary world through the intermediary of the separate MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 185 Since, as we saw in Guide I, 68, Maimonides affirms the identity of the object of God’s knowledge with God’s essence, it follows that in some sense God’s essence for him is the threefold structure of the Aristotelian universe. Already in the 14th century Profiat Duran (Efodi) had drawn this conclusion in his commentary on the Guide, which was also printed in the edition used by Spinoza:49 In this chapter [Maimonides] solved a certain doubt without mentioning this doubt, viz., how God, exalted be He, knows all existents without being subject to change and multiplicity, and he solved the problem as follows: All the existents are inscribed in His essence, blessed be He, and His essence, exalted be He, is one form which comprises all existents according to their subdivisions [ ]: intellectual existents, spherical existents and terrestrial existents. (31b) Since God’s essence is described as “form,” I assume that by “all existents” Profiat Duran means the formal component of all existents, not their matter.50 The argument leading to the conclusion that the form of all existents is inscribed in God’s essence may be reconstructed as follows: 1. Premise: 2. Premise: Conclusion I: 3. Premise: Conclusion II: 4. Premise: Conclusion III: God is the first cause of the form of all existents. God cognizes himself. God cognizes the first cause of the form of all existents. The cognition of the cause entails the cognition of the effect.51 God cognizes the form of all existents, of which he is the cause. In God the subject of intellection and the object of intellection are identical. God and the form of all existents cognized by him are identical. As we saw above, God’s essence is his intellect, and the essence of the intellect is its activity, or “the act of the intellect.” It is, therefore, this “act of the intellect” which in some sense must be identical to the form of all existents. As a consequence, God’s intellectual activity comprises two components: God forms the idea of himself or his essence (self-intellection), and of all things that follow from his essence (intellection of the form of all existents). If this is so, God’s intellectual intellects and the celestial spheres. If God indeed knows the totality of what follows from his causal activity, his knowledge must include both the universal form and the particular features of every entity in the sublunary world. 49 On Spinoza’s edition of the Guide, see above, note 10. Profiat Duran, Commentary on Guide III, 21, printed in Moreh ha-Nevukhim, Warsaw, 1872. 50 If God were the cause of both form and matter of the created world, this would—in light of the argument that I am examining—lead to the conclusion that in some way God is the matter of physical objects as well. Taking into account Maimonides’ emphasis on God’s incorporeality this, to say the least, is problematic. Note that in Guide I, 69 God is described as the world’s efficient, formal and final cause, but not as its material cause. It is clear, however, that the ontological status of matter in Maimonides, as well as its relation to God, require further clarification. 51 Thomas Aquinas formulates this premise as follows: “The more perfectly some principle is known, the more its effects are known in it, for the caused things are contained in the power of the principle. It follows that since heaven and all of nature depend on the first principle which is God . . . it is clear that God, by knowing Himself, knows all things” (Quanto autem aliquod principium perfectius intelligitur, tanto magis intelligitur in eo effectus eius: nam principiata continentur in virtute principii. Cum igitur a primo principio, quod est Deus, dependeat caelum et tota natura ... patet, quod Deus cognoscendo seipsum, omnia cognoscat). Commentary on Metaphysics XII, Lectio 11, in Opera Omnia, 25 vols. (Parma: Ficcadori, 1852–73), vol. 20, 649. See also the application of this principle to God’s knowledge in Summa Theologiae, I, 1, qu. 14, in particular articles 5, 6 and 11. Cf. Pines, “Themistius,” 290. 186 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 activity must be conceived as a unity of the one and the multiple : the intellectual act, in which the intellect, the subject and the object of intellection are one, and the intellectual act which cognizes the multiple form of all existents. In Spinoza’s words, taken from the demonstration of E II, Prop. 3, we can describe this intellectual act as follows: God forms “the idea of his essence and of all things which necessarily follow from it” (ideam suae essentiae, & omnium, quae necessario ex ea sequuntur) (G. II, 87). Now, since Maimonides’ God is identical to the idea that he forms, its contents are clearly not effects outside himself. In other words: Maimonides’ God (no less than Spinoza’s God) is causa immanens—if not of natura naturata as a whole, at least of the form of the created world. How did the created world come into God’s mind on the way from Aristotle to Maimonides? As S. Pines has shown, the presumably most important source of this non-Aristotelian interpretation of the divine nou'" is Themistius’s paraphrase of Metaphysics XII.52 The Greek original of the paraphrase is lost. Extant are fragments of an abridged Arabic translation, a Hebrew translation based on a longer (probably complete) Arabic translation, and a 16th century Latin translation.53 Let us examine one important passage: First it [the divine intellect] cognizes itself, then something else . . . . It cognizes the intelligibles that are existent in it not in the way of [discursively] passing from one to the other; it cognizes all things suddenly at one and the same time. For it cognizes all existent things as they are and as they were made to exist by it as they are. . . . It cognizes all the existents not as being extraneous to its nature or as acts alien to it. But it is it that generates them and creates them, and they are it . For God is the Nomos and the cause of the order and the arrangement of the existent things. He is a living Nomos; such as a Nomos would be if it were animate, saw itself and cognized itself. (17–18)54 Pines drew attention to possible Neoplatonic sources of Themistius, in particular to Plotinus.55 A passage from the Enneads (not quoted by Pines) clearly supports his assumption. In this passage, Plotinus suggests that nou'" “is like the first Lawgiver [nomoqevth" prw'to"], or rather is itself the Law of being [novmo" aujto;" tou' ei\nai].”56 If Themistius’s interpretation of the Aristotelian concept was indeed influenced by Plotinus, then the unity of the one and the multiple in the divine intellect may ultimately reflect an effort to unify in the act of God’s self-intellection the first two hypostases of Plotinus’s ontological scheme: the “One” and the nou'".57 This may in part explain what appears to be a contradiction between 52 On the influence of the Paraphrase on Maimonides, see Pines, “Themistius,” 286–89. For more detailed information on the Paraphrase, see Rémi Brague’s introduction to his French translation: Thémistius—Paraphrase de la Métaphysique d’Aristote [Thémistius] (Paris: Vrin, 1999), 9–39. 54 Themistius, Paraphrase of Metaphysics XII 7. Arabic in Aristu ‘ind al-Arab, ed. Abd al-Rahman Badawi (Cairo, 1947), 12–21; 329–33. 55 Pines, “Themistius,” 277–79. 56 Enn. V 9, 5, 26–29, Plotini Opera, eds. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964–82), vol. 2, 293. Cf. Brague, Thémistius, 39. 57 I intend to examine in more detail the historical background of Themistius’s doctrine in a forthcoming paper. 53 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 187 Maimonides’ via negativa, according to which God is beyond apprehension and description, and his positive account of God as nou'".58 M A I M O N I D E S’ G O D A S T H E A C T I V I T Y O F T H E C R E AT E D W O R L D Not only is the form of the created world inscribed in God’s essence, but God’s activity also is the form of the created world. As I briefly recalled in the introduction, the Aristotelian universe is subdivided into a realm of pure form, viz., God and the separate intellects, and a realm composed of matter and form, viz., the physical world. The ultimate source of the forms of physical objects are God’s “actions.” In fact, for Maimonides “these actions are the forms” ( ). They are “the act of one who is not a body” and this act “is called overflow [[pç]” (Guide II, 12, 243). Because the world is caused by God in this manner the prophets describe him through metaphors such as the “fountain of life” (Psalm 36:10) which, according to Maimonides, “signifies the overflow of being” (ibid. 244). It is, therefore, not surprising that Maimonides frequently speaks about the apprehension of God through his “actions” in nature. But what precisely are these “actions” (la[pa in Arabic, the plural of l[p, which we saw in the expression “act of the intellect”)? According to Maimonides’ interpretation of the dialogue between God and Moses in Exodus 33:11–23, Moses made two requests: “One request consisted in his asking Him, may He be praised to let him know His essence and true reality [wttmaw wmx[]. The second request, which he made first, was to let him know His attributes [wyrat]. And He, may He be praised, answered his two questions by promising him to let him know all His attributes and that they are His actions [wytwlw[p]. And He let him know that His essence cannot be grasped as it really is” (Guide I, 54, 104). God’s “actions,” the apprehension of which was granted to Moses, are then described as follows: [Moses] received a [favorable] answer to the first request, i.e., “Show me Thy ways” (Exodus 33:13). For he was told “I will make all my goodness pass before thee” (Ex. 33:14). . . . This saying “all my goodness” is an allusion to the display to him of all existents [ ] of which it is said “And God saw everything He had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). By ‘display of them to him’ I wish to say that he will apprehend their nature and the way they are connected one to the other [ ], and he will know His governance of them 58 According to S. Pines, Maimonides presents “deux discours philosophiques entre lesquels il est malaisé ou impossible de faire l’accord.” S. Pines, “Dieu et l’être selon Maïmonide” [“Dieu”], in Celui qui est: Interprétations juives et chrétiennes d’Exode 3,14, eds. Alain de Libera and Emilie Zum Brunn (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 22. This thesis may be too strong. In Guide I, 53, for example, Maimonides attributes the structure of self-intellection to the God of the via negativa. As in I, 68 he emphasizes the unity of God’s knowledge and God’s life, and explains that this unity is due to the fact that God’s self-intellection is God’s life. The same apparent contradiction between two concepts of God appears in Avicenna, who had a considerable influence on Maimonides’ theology (cf. S. Pines, “Translator’s Introduction: The Philosophic Sources of The Guide of the Perplexed” [“Sources”], in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963], xcv–xcviii). Since Avicenna’s concept of God was equally influenced by Themistius, as Pines showed in his article on Themistius’s paraphrase, my suggestion regarding Maimonides may be valid for Avicenna as well. It would be interesting to examine in this context if my explanation could solve Alfred Ivry’s difficulty in relating Maimonides’ God consistently to the God of Plotinus due to his conceptual affinities to both the Plotinian “One” and nou'". See A. Ivry, “Neoplatonic Currents in Maimonides’ Thought” in Perspectives on Maimonides, ed. Joel L. Kraemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 127–28. 188 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 in general and in detail. To this notion He alluded by saying “He is trusted in all My house” (Numeri 12:7), i.e., that he has grasped the reality of all my world [ ] with a true and unshakable understanding. . . . The apprehension of these actions [ ], therefore, [is an apprehension of] His attributes through which He is known. . . . It thus became clear that the “ways” which he [Moses] asked to know, and which were made known to him, are the actions [twlw[ph] which come from Him, may He be praised. (105–6) God’s “actions” thus turn out to be the form of “all existents,” i.e., their nature and interconnection.59 Note that for Aristotle the primary sense of ‘nature’ (fuvs i") is the “essential form” (oujs iva) of a natural thing through which it is what it is.60 In short: the “actions” which were “made known” to Moses are the form of the created world. But this is precisely what God himself apprehends—only in inverse perspective: by knowing himself as the first cause of nature and thereby knowing everything that follows from himself. This seems to allow the following inference: In the manner which I just mentioned, God’s “actions” in nature are the object of his knowledge. The object of God’s knowledge is his essence. God’s essence, as we saw above, is the “act” of God’s self-intellection. Ergo God’s “act” of self-intellection is identical to his “actions” in nature. As far as the nature of “all existents” and their interconnection is concerned, God, therefore, is nature. One and the same act is God’s self-intellection, the intellectual cognition of all that follows from God, and the form of “all existents.” If Maimonides, in this context, uses the plural “actions” rather than the singular “act,” he apparently means the “act of the intellect” considered under the aspect of its multiple content. Ultimately, however, there is only one act that is perceived in two ways: as constituting God’s essence and as the form of “all existents.” In Guide II, 12 Maimonides in fact uses the singular: “[T]he universe is His act [ ]” (243, emphasis added). It would, moreover, hardly be compatible with God’s unity if his activity in nature were different from the act of self-intellection constituting his essence. As Maimonides himself stresses: “[A]ll His different acts [in nature], may He be exalted, are carried out by means of His essence, and not, as we have made clear, by means of a superadded notion” (Guide I, 52).61 Considering these implications it is not surprising to find Maimonides referring to God’s activity synonymously as “divine actions” and “natural actions”: 59 On God’s actions in nature, cf. Guide III, 53. Metaphysics V, 4 1015a 13–15. 61 Of course, my account of God’s actions blatantly contradicts Maimonides’ negative theology (Guide I, 50–60), in the course of which he explicitly asserts that the attributes of actions are “remote from the essence of the thing of which” they are “predicated” (Guide I, 52, 103). The essence of God, according to the via negativa, has nothing in common with the world, whereas the essence of God insofar as he is the act of self-intellection, according to my interpretation, is identical to the form of the world. If my interpretation is accurate this must be a contradiction due to “the seventh cause” (Guide I, Introduction, 16). Cf. Leo Strauss, “The literary character of The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), 38–94. That Maimonides’ account of God according to the via negativa appears to contradict his account of God as self-intellection has been noted long ago. See Pines, “Sources,” xcvii–xcviii. Already Hasdai Crescas pointed out that Maimonides’ presentation of the via negativa as a way of acquiring knowledge of God contains deliberate contradictions and is part of the Guide’s exoteric teachings. See W. Z. Harvey, Hasdai Crescas’s Critique of the Theory of the Acquired Intellect, Ph.D. Dissertation (Columbia University, 1973), Excursus I, 189–204. I will deal in more detail with this issue in Appendix 1. 60 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 189 If you contemplate the divine actions, I mean to say the natural actions [ ], God’s ruse [hwlah tmr[] and wisdom will become clear to you from them in the creation of the living being, and in the gradation of the motions of the limbs, and the proximity of some of them to others. (Guide III, 32, 484) Perhaps Spinoza would have read here actiones divinae sive naturales.62 Clearly for Maimonides there is only one set of actions, which considered from the point of view of God is the content of his intellectual apprehension, i.e., God’s wisdom, and considered from the point of view of the created world is the form of “all existents.” Maimonides’ concept of God’s activity is thus very close to Spinoza’s in E II, Prop. 3, Schol.: “God acts with the same necessity by which he intellectually cognizes himself [Deum eadem necessitate agere, qua seipsum intellegit], i.e., just as it follows from the necessity of the divine nature (as everyone maintains unanimously) that God intellectually cognizes himself [ut Deus seipsum intelligat], with the same necessity it also follows that God does infinitely many things in infinitely many modes [ut Deus infinita infinitis modis agat]” (G. II, 87). Maimonides’ God, although he does not do infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, does act in nature with the same necessity by which he intellectually cognizes himself. Let me note, however, that in order to reach Spinoza’s ordo idearum and ordo rerum from Maimonides’ actiones divinae sive naturales, the ontology of form and matter has to be replaced through the ontology of thought and extension. For Maimonides, God’s intellectual activity and his activity in nature are two aspects of a God confined to thinking. For Spinoza the ordo idearum and the ordo rerum are two sides of a God whose activity constitutes both thought and extension. Against this background, it becomes clear how Maimonides can claim that God’s power, will, and knowledge are identical to his essence. The same act, which constitutes God’s essence, is the act through which God forms an idea of himself and of everything that follows from himself, and through which he wills and establishes the order of nature:63 For this reason we, the community which truly professes unity, say: as we do not say that in His essence there is a further component [˜yn[] through which He created the heavens, another component through which He created the elements, and a third component through which He created the intellects—in the same way we do not say that in Him there is a further component through which He has power, another component through which He has will, and a third component through which He knows His creatures [ ]. But His essence is one and simple [fwçp dja wmx[], and in no respect is there an additional component in it. This essence created everything that it created and knows it, but absolutely not through a further component. (Guide I, 53, 104)64 62 Cf. Pines, “Sources,” xcvi, note 66. When Maimonides, therefore, in Guide II, 20 explains the necessity, with which according to Aristotle the world proceeds from God, as “somewhat like the necessity of the derivation of an intellectum from an intellect” (273) this seems to be more than just an analogy. Cf. Harvey, “Portrait,” 162, note 57. 64 Cf. Guide I, 69, 146. Note that before the above quoted passage in I, 53, Maimonides emphasizes the identity of God’s knowledge and God’s life, because “everyone who apprehends his own essence possesses both life and knowledge by virtue of the same thing. For we wished to signify by knowledge the apprehension of one’s own essence.” This passage clearly links the discussion of God’s unity in I, 53 to the account of God’s unity as the act of self-intellection in I, 68. 63 190 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 Moreover, we can understand now what Maimonides means when he speaks of God as the “form” or “essence,” as well as the “life” of the world. God’s life is identical to his essence, and at the same time the act that determines and constitutes the form of the world: God, therefore, is with regard to [the world] like the form with regard to the thing that has a form, through which it is what it is [ ]; and through the form its true reality and essence subsist—such is the relation of God to the world [ ]. . . . For this reason, [God] is called in our language the “Living of the world” [ ] (Daniel 12:7) meaning that He is the life of the world, as shall be made clear. (Guide I, 69, 145–46) God is thus related to the world as a form is related to a “thing.” Just as a thing is what it is due to its form—for example a tree is a tree due to the form of a tree— so the world is what it is due to God. Now, we answer the question “what is it?” with regard to a tree by naming its formal cause: “a tree.” With regard to the world, therefore, we would have to answer the same question with “God.” In this sense, therefore, the world is God. Note also that the description of God as “the life of the world” suggests that as the “fountain of life” God is not outside of that which “overflows” from him.65 No doubt, the thesis that the one and the multiple are unified in God’s act of self-intellection is an interesting claim. What it precisely means, however, is far from obvious. I do not think that Maimonides had a definite answer to this question. In order to explain how the multiplicity of nature in some sense is one as well, the best he was able to suggest was that nature has the unity of an organism:66 Know that this being as whole is one individual [ ] and nothing else. I mean to say that the sphere of the outermost heaven with everything that is within it is undoubtedly one individual. . . . And through this representation it will also become clear that the One has created one [ ]. (Guide I, 72, 159 / 162) As we already saw in the above quoted passage from Guide III, 32, God’s wisdom, or the act of God’s intellect, becomes manifest in actiones divinae sive naturales, which produce and structure “living beings,” i.e., organisms, and ultimately “this being as a whole.” The unity-in-multiplicity of the organism, therefore, characterizes both the structure of God’s intellect and the structure of the created word.67 That which unifies the created world is in a certain sense its teleological structure.68 In Guide III, 25 Maimonides explains what it means that according to “the Law of Moses our Master” all of God’s actions “are very good” (dam twbwf): 65 For God as the “fountain of life,” see Guide II, 12 quoted above. For a critical discussion of L. Roth’s account of Spinoza’s dependence on Maimonides with regard to the notion of unity of God and nature, see Appendix 2. 67 Once again in the final analysis Neoplatonic sources of Maimonides’ account become visible: Plotinus had explained the unity-in-multiplicity of the content of nou'" as the structure of Plato’s “allcomplete living being” (Timaeus 30c ff.). See, e.g., Enn. VI 2, 21, 53–59. As suggested above, Themistius’s interpretation of the divine intellect was influenced by Plotinus’s account. 68 See Aristotle’s teleological explanations of the parts of animals in De partibus animalium. The animal’s form in a sense may be said to entail the individual features of the animal. And see Maimonides’ comparison of the structure of the universe to the structure of the body of an animal in Guide II, 19, 270. 66 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 191 [Moses] says “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). And everything that He, may He be praised, has done for the sake of a thing is either necessary for the existence of the intended thing, or is very useful for it [ ]. . . . I mean to say that everything that is not artificial—they are actions through which some end [tylkt] is sought, regardless whether we do or do not know that end. (461–62)˜ For example “the nourishment of a living being is necessary for its preservation [wtdym[]” and “the existence of its two eyes is very useful for its preservation” (462). Thus the “natural actions” (twy[bfh twlw[ph) are “actions of great wisdom” (hlwdg hmkj twlw[p): they are “all well arranged and ordered and bound up with one another [ ], all of them being causes and effects” (463). The “ultimate telos” (˜wçarh ˜wwkmh)” of God’s activity in nature, according to Maimonides, is being itself: “to bring into being everything whose existence is possible, existence being indubitably a good [ ]” (464, emphasis added).69 Just as God thinks all possible things—since in his intellectual activity “there is absolutely no potentiality”—God also produces all possible things. And since the intellectual act and the creative act are the same act, which is God’s essence, God once again should be conceived as identical not only to the content of his act of intellection but also to the products of his act of creation. The equation of “being” and “good” underlying Maimonides’ explanation of the telos of God’s creation is stated clearly in Guide III, 10: All his acts, may He be praised, are an absolute good; for He only produces being, and all being is good [bwf twayxm lkw twayxm qr hçw[ wnya awh]. . . . Accordingly the true reality of the act of God in its entirety is good, because it is being [ ]. (396–97) In light of this equation we should also interpret Maimonides’ assertion in Guide III, 19: “No doubt it is a primary notion that all good things must exist in God” (434).70 If good things simply are things that are, then this assertion can easily be translated into Spinoza’s famous proposition: Quicquid est in Deo est (E I, Prop. 15, G. II, 56).71 I should emphasize, however, that Maimonides’ teleology is not anthropocentric.72 Every existent is created for the sake of being, that is: both for the sake of 69 This is a good illustration of what Arthur O. Lovejoy calls the “strange and pregnant theorem of the ‘fullness’ of the realization of conceptual possibility in actuality,” or, “the principle of plenitude.” The Great Chain of Being [Great Chain] (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 52. Lovejoy has well shown how this principle originated in Plato’s Timaeus and was mediated to the Middle Ages through the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato’s metaphysics. 70 The Arabic term that I translated as ‘good things’ is tary’kla (344). Ibn Tibbon translated it into Hebrew as twywmlç which should be rendered as ‘perfections.’ The Arabic term for ‘perfections,’ however, is On the semantic level, the distinction is not particularly important, for both ‘good’ and ‘perfect’ denote ‘being’ in the present context. Note that Maimonides uses ‘good’ (ry’k) also in the passage from Guide III, 10 quoted above when stating that the “true reality of the act of God in its entirety is good” (ary’k hlk hlla l[p ’hqyqj ˜wktp) (317). 71 On the equation of “being” and “good” in both Maimonides and Spinoza, see W. Z. Harvey, “Maimonides and Spinoza on the knowledge of good and evil” [“Knowledge”], Iyyun 28 / 4 (1978), 173–77 (Heb.). 72 For Maimonides’ explicit rejection of anthropocentrism, see particularly Guide III, 13. On the influence of Maimonides’ anti-anthropocentric position on Spinoza, cf. Harvey, “Portrait,” 162–65. But in contrast to Harvey, I would not describe Maimonides’ view as “antiteleological” (165). I see it as teleological in the non-anthropocentric sense I have described. 192 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 itself as this particular existent, and for the sake of God who somehow is the totality of existents.73 This is certainly not the concept of teleology that Spinoza criticizes in the Appendix to the first part of the Ethics. Rather, I believe, Maimonides would give the same answer as Spinoza to the question why God created things that from a human perspective appear as imperfections: “I answer only because he did not lack material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of his nature have been so ample that they sufficed for producing all things which can be conceived by an infinite intellect [ad omnia, quae ab aliquo infinito intellectu concipi possunt, producenda]” (G. II, 83).74 For Spinoza, as for Maimonides, God’s goodness or perfection75 means that he thinks and produces all possible things which in a sense means that he thinks and produces himself. The fundamental problem with which Maimonides was confronted was the doctrine of God’s incorporeality.76 In my view Maimonides was committed to God’s incorporeality for purely philosophical reasons. To abandon this doctrine would have meant to abandon the system of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics as a whole, on the premises of which not only the proofs for God’s incorporeality but also for God’s unity and existence were based.77 If on the other hand Spinoza had convinced him that a corporeal substance is conceivable which is active, indivisible and infinite, i.e., not subject to any of the deficiencies that a medieval Aristotelian associated with matter, I cannot see why Maimonides should have refused to accept extension as an attribute of God.78 An incorporeal God, however, who transcends the physical world, and who at the same time is the activity and form of the physical world, seems rather inconsistent. Maimonides clearly saw the problem, but he did not know how to solve it: And God, may He be praised, is not a power in the body of the world, but is separate from all parts of the world. But His governance, may He be praised, and His providence are connected to the world in its entirety through a connection, the end and true reality of which are hidden from us, and the faculties of human beings are insufficient to understand this [wt[dl twrxqm]. For the demonstration is valid that He, 73 Cf. Maimonides’ twofold exegesis of Proverbia 16:4 in Guide III, 13, and Harvey, “Portrait,” 164. God is “somehow” the totality of existents because for Maimonides he is immaterial. But if “all good things must exist in God,” and good things are simply things that are, the exclusion of matter from God seems to imply that matter in some sense is not being. For Themistius’s formulation that God is “somehow [pw`"] . . . the existents themselves [aujta; ta; o[nta],” translated as aliqualiter . . . ipsa entia by William of Moerbeke, see Pines, “Themistius,” 187 with note 44. Note also that if the good is being and if being is God, then this version of teleology does not compromise God’s freedom. His acts are determined through what is good, i.e., determined through himself and in this sense self-determined. God, therefore, is free in the sense of E I, Def. 7: “A thing is called free [libera] . . . if it is determined to act only through itself [a se sola ad agendum determinatur]” (G. II, 46). 74 Spinoza thus inherited the “principle of plenitude.” See Lovejoy, Great Chain, 151–55. Cf. his comments on Abaelard’s proximity to Spinoza, in Great Chain, 71–73. 75 On the synonymity of the terms ‘good’ and ‘perfect’ in this context, see below. Cf. Harvey, “Knowledge,” 176–77. 76 For a differing view, see Yossef Schwartz, “Ecce est locus apud me: Eckharts’ und Maimonides’ Raumvorstellung als Begriff des Göttlichen” [“Eckharts’ und Maimonides’ Raumvorstellung”], Miscellanea Mediaevalia 25 (1997), 348–64. 77 For the Aristotelian premises and proofs, see Guide II, Introduction and ch. 1. See also SM, Foundations, ch. 1. 78 I will deal with this issue in more detail in Appendix 1. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 193 may He be praised, is separate from the world and free from it, and the demonstration is valid that the acts of His governance and providence exist in every one of the parts of the world, however small and contemptible [ ]. May He whose perfection has defeated us be glorified! (Guide I, 72, 167) It is, therefore, the doctrine of God’s incorporeality which prevented Maimonides from completely unifying God and nature. Although the same activity determines and constitutes the structure of God’s intellect and the structure of the created world, they are not one and the same thing. This, I think, is the cloud, which according to Spinoza prevented Maimonides from apprehending God clearly and distinctly. As a consequence of God’s incorporeality, the world remains mysteriously inside and outside God, and God remains mysteriously inside and outside the world. T H E A R I S T O T E L I A N G O D I N T H E C O G I TATA M E TA P H Y S I C A: Spinoza’s account of the divine intellect and its relation to the world in the Cogitata Metaphysica comprises all significant features that we found in Maimonides’ account. Moreover, Spinoza is aware of the same problems and hints at the same solutions as the medieval Aristotelian. I should recall in this context that the chapter in which Spinoza discusses the divine intellect (De intellectu Dei) follows the chapter in which he discusses God’s life (De vita Dei). This chapter ends with the passage quoted above, attesting to Spinoza’s acquaintance with Maimonides’ discussion of God’s twofold knowledge in the Mishneh Torah. Let me, however, emphasize again that I do not claim that Maimonides was Spinoza’s only source for the doctrine in question. As already mentioned, Spinoza read works of several Jewish philosophers, from Abraham ibn Ezra to Leone Ebreo, in which the doctrine appears. Moreover, Latin translations of Avicenna, Ghazali, Averroes, and Maimonides introduced the doctrine into Christian Aristotelianism. Its impact can already be discerned in Albertus Magnus and through Thomas Aquinas it became part of the mainstream of Scholastic thought with which Spinoza was to some extent familiar.79 Although I will discuss the traits of Spinoza’s metaphysics only in light of Maimonides’ doctrine of God, I therefore do not intend to imply that they cannot be found in other texts which may in one way or another have influenced Spinoza. 79 For references to Jewish philosophers, see above, note 26. For the doctrine in Latin translations of medieval Muslim works, see, e.g., Avicenna Latinus, Liber de Philosophia Prima sive Scientia Divina, ed. Simone Van Riet, vol. 2, bk. 8, chs. 6–7 (Louvain: E. Peeters and Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980); the “Tractatus Tercius” in the Latin translation of the metaphysics of Ghazali’s Intentions of the Philosophers, in Algazel’s Metaphysics—A Medieval Translation, ed. J. T. Muckle (Toronto: The Institute of Medieval Studies, 1933), 62–89; Averroes’ long commentary on Metaphysics XII, in: Aristotelis Opera cum Averrois Comentariis, (Venetiis apud Junctas, 1562–1574; Reprint: Frankfurt a. Main: Minerva, 1962), vol. 8, 290v–340r (note that Averroes also critically discusses Themistius’s doctrine of God’s knowledge as presented in the Paraphrase on Metaphysics XII quoted above; see, e.g., 336v); Maimonides, Dux Neutrorum seu dubiorum, ed. Augustinus Justinianus, anonymous Latin trans. (Paris, 1520; Reprint: Frankfurt a. Main: Minerva, 1964 [published under the title: Dux seu Director dubitantium aut perplexorum]). For Thomas Aquinas, see Summa Theologiae I, 1, qu. 15; Summa contra Gentiles I, ch. 49. Cf. also Pines, “Themistius.” On Spinoza’s knowledge of Scholasticism, see Jacob Freudenthal: “Spinoza und die Scholastik” [“Scholastik”], in Philosophische Aufsätze—Eduard Zeller zu seinem fünfzigjährigen Doctor-Jubiläum gewidmet (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887), 85–138. 194 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 The status of the CM in Spinoza’s work, and, in particular, the question to which degree it represents a stage in the evolution of his thought, continues to be debated among scholars.80 For my purpose, it is sufficient that the CM is evidence for Spinoza’s familiarity with the doctrine of the divine intellect as it was adopted by Maimonides.81 All I claim, therefore, is that Spinoza knew the doctrine in question, not that he accepted it as true. I do think on the other hand that important aspects of this doctrine recur in Spinoza’s own concept of God. The latter claim I will attempt to substantiate in the next section. For now let us see how the features of Maimonides’ God reappear in the CM: (i) Just as Maimonides, Spinoza in the CM describes God as self-intellection: [O]utside God there is no object of his knowledge, but he himself is the object of his knowledge or rather, is his own knowledge [ipse sit scientiae suae objectum, imo sua scientia]. (CM II, 7 / G. I, 262) (ii) Like Maimonides’ God, who is essentially intellectual activity, in which “there is no potentiality,” Spinoza describes God as “pure act” (actus purus) (CM II, 3 / G. I, 254). Spinoza also speaks of God’s “active essence” (essentia actuosa) which is explained by attributes such as “understanding, will, life, omnipotence etc.” (CM II, 11 / G. I, 275). Note that Spinoza uses the peculiar term essentia actuosa to describe God’s activity also in the Ethics, in a key passage for my argumentation that I will examine below. (iii) In God, subject and object of intellection are one and the same. God’s idea of himself is one, absolutely simple and identical to his essence: Finally . . . we must satisfactorily consider the question . . . whether in God there are many ideas, or only one and absolutely simple. To this I reply that the idea of God through which he is called omniscient is unique and absolutely simple [unica, & simplicissima]. For indeed, God is called omniscient for no other reason than because he has the idea of himself [quia habet ideam sui ipsius], and this idea or cognition has always existed together with God. For it is nothing but his essence [nihil enim est praeter ejus essentiam]. (CM II, 7 / G. I, 263) (iv) Spinoza draws the same distinction as Maimonides between the genesis of ideas in the human intellect a posteriori, and in the divine intellect a priori. Just as for Maimonides created “things . . . follow upon His knowledge which preceded 80 For a discussion of the place of the CM in Spinoza’s work, see Appendix 2. According to M. Joel, the CM reflects the distinctive influence of medieval Jewish philosophy on Spinoza’s thought. The work has einen eigentümlichen Charakter, den ich dahin bestimmen zu müssen glaube, dass er in ihnen die Lesefrüchte aus jüdischen Philosophen, natürlich mit selbständigem Geiste, dazu verwendet, um innerhalb des Cartesianischen Systems solche Fragen zu lösen, die bei Cartesius entweder gar nicht oder nur kurz berührt werden (Joel, Genesis, 47). Freudenthal, however, after examining in detail Spinoza’s terminology and concepts in the CM, draws attention to numerous parallels in the Schriften älterer und jüngerer Scholastiker, which attest to the more significant influence (direct or indirect) of scholastic sources, both medieval and of the 17th century—in particular Heerebord, whom Spinoza mentions in CM II, 12, and who possibly was his teacher at the university of Leiden (“Scholastik,” 102–38). Given the ample evidence Freudenthal adduces, his general conclusion can hardly be disputed. It should be noted, however, that with regard to the particular passages that concern us here, Freudenthal usually did not indicate scholastic sources, or at least indicated Jewish sources as well. This is especially true for the chapter on the divine intellect (CM II, 7). With regard to this specific issue, the literary evidence, as well as the manifold structural parallels, in my view sufficiently show that Maimonides was among Spinoza’s most important sources. 81 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 195 and established them as they are,” so for Spinoza God’s intellectual activity is the cause of the existence and essence of everything that he has created: From God’s perfection it also follows that his ideas are not determined, as ours are, by objects placed outside God [ab objectis extra Deum positis]. On the contrary, the things which have been created by God outside God are determined through God’s intellect [a Dei intellectu determinantur]. . . . The things with regard to essence and existence are produced [fabricatae sunt] from his intellect or will. (CM II, 7 / G. I, 261–62) Hence for Spinoza as well, knowledge of the cause entails knowledge of the effect. By knowing himself God knows the first cause of nature, and as a consequence everything that follows from his causal activity. In this sense “God’s intellect . . . intellectually cognizes the created things” (intellectum Dei . . . res creatas intelligit) (CM II, 7 / G. I, 261). (v) Spinoza, like Maimonides, denies that God’s knowledge is confined to “eternal things.”82 God apprehends everything that depends on his causal activity, and, therefore, also “singular things”: But in the meantime we must not leave out the error of certain [writers] who state that God cognizes nothing but eternal things, such as angels and heavens, which they have imagined as not being subject to generation or to corruption by their nature [Deum nihil praeter res aeternas cognoscere, ut nempe angelos, & coelos, quos sua natura ingenerabiles, & incorruptibiles finxerunt]. . . . These seem almost with enthusiasm to want to go astray and to invent the greatest absurdities. For what is more absurd than to deprive God of the cognition of singular things, which cannot subsist even for a moment without God’s concurrence? . . . We, on the contrary, attribute cognition of singular things to God [Nos autem contra Deo singularium cognitionem tribuimus]. (CM II, 7 / G. I, 262–63) (vi) Since God, as we saw, is identical to the object of his knowledge, it follows that he must also be identical to the created things he apprehends. Just as in Maimonides, therefore, God’s essentia actuosa in the CM must be conceived as a unity of the one and the multiple : the act in which the intellect, the subject and the object of intellection are one and absolutely simple, and the act through which God cognizes all existents of which he is the cause. Hence, the God of the CM, like Maimonides’ God, is causa immanens—if not of natura naturata as a whole at least of the form of the created world. (vii) Spinoza, I believe, would certainly not object to describing the activity of the God in the CM as both divina and naturalis. For him, as for Maimonides, the same act which constitutes God’s essence is the act through which God forms an idea of himself and of everything that follows from himself and through which he 82 This is one of the views attributed by Maimonides to the “philosophers” in Guide III, 20. According to this view God “only knows the permanent immutable things” because the claim that his knowledge extends to individuals is incompatible with the assumption that it cannot have for its object either a non-existent thing or the infinite. The “permanent immutable things” are the separate intellects, which Maimonides also describes as angels (see, e.g., Guide II, 6), and the celestial spheres, i.e. precisely the two entities mentioned by Spinoza in the quotation below. A second view described by Maimonides denies even knowledge of permanent immutable things of God because the multiplicity that such knowledge seems to entail is considered incompatible with God’s unity. This, of course, is Aristotle’s view in Metaphysics XII 9 discussed above. 196 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 wills and establishes the order of nature. A note to the passage quoted above, in which Spinoza states that all things “created by God, are determined by God’s intellect,” draws the following conclusion: “From this it clearly follows that God’s intellect [intellectum Dei], through which he intellectually cognizes the created things [res creata intelligit], and his will and power [voluntatem, & potentiam], through which he determines them, are one and the same” (CM II, 7 / G. I, 261). The identity of God’s will, power and intellect is again clearly stated in CM II, 8: Will and Power with regard to external things are not distinguished from God’s intellect [Voluntas, & Potentia quoad extra non distinguuntur a Dei intellectu], as is already sufficiently clear from what was said above. For we have shown that God not only decreed that things exist, but also that they exist with such a nature, that is, that their essence and their existence must depend on the will and power of God. From which we perceive clearly and distinctly that God’s intellect and his power and will, through which he has created, intellectually cognized, and preserves, or loves, created things, are not distinguished from one another in any way, but only with regard to our thoughts [sed tantum respectu nostrae cogitationis]. (G. I, 264) (viii) The reconciliation of unity and multiplicity in God’s intellect which as we saw posed a problem to Maimonides is likewise presented as a problem in the CM. And the solution that Spinoza suggests is the same as that of the medieval Aristotelian: But God’s cognition concerning created things cannot properly be referred to God’s knowledge [At cognitio Dei circa res creatas non adeo proprie ad scientiam Dei referri potest]. . . . It should be asked whether this properly or improperly so-called cognition of created things is multiple or one. But, so we could reply, this question is in nothing different from the questions asking whether God’s decrees and volitions are many or not and whether God’s omnipresence, or the concurrence through which he preserves singular things, is the same in all things. Concerning these questions we already said that we can have no distinct cognition. Nevertheless we know most evidently that in the same way as God’s concurrence, if it is referred to God’s omnipotence, must be unique, although it becomes manifest in different ways in the effects, so also God’s volitions and decrees (for so it pleases us to call his cognition concerning created things), considered in God are not many, although they are expressed in different ways through created things, or better: in created things. Finally, if we attend to the proportion of the whole of nature, we can consider it as one being, and consequently there will only be one idea of God, or decree with regard to created nature [si ad analogiam totius naturae attendimus, ipsam, ut unum ens, considerare possumus, & per consequens una tantum erit Dei idea, sive decretum de natura naturata]. (CM II, 7 / G I, 263–64)83 (ix) Like Maimonides, Spinoza in the CM describes the structure of natura naturata as teleological:84 But God is called supremely good, because he acts to the benefit of all [Deus vero dicitur summe bonus, quia omnibus conducit], by preserving through his concurrence [suo concursu conservando] the being of each thing, compared to which nothing is dearer. (CM I, 6 / G. I, 247) 83 Cf. CM II, 9. That this passage is important for the understanding of Spinoza’s relation to Maimonides, was also noted by Harvey, “Knowledge,” 176–77. 84 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 197 Hence, the “benefit” (i.e. the good) of all, in view to which God acts due to his supreme goodness is the preservation of his creatures. Similarly, we saw that, for Maimonides, God’s goodness becomes manifest in that he provides every being with what is “necessary” or “useful” for its “preservation.” In the KV as well, Spinoza allows for God to be described as the “greatest good” if this is understood to mean that he is the “cause of all things” (orzaak van alle dingen) (G. I, 45). Thus both the bringing into existence and the preserving of all things are due to God’s goodness. Moreover, ‘good’ in this context is used synonymously with ‘perfect.’ In this sense Spinoza can speak of God as “doing good or bringing about perfection” (KV I, 4 / G. I, 37, emphasis added). Now, “by perfection” he understands “only reality [realitatem], or being [esse]” (PP I, Prop. VII, Schol., Lemma 1, Note 2 / G. I, 165).85 In this sense “it is a perfection to exist, and to have been produced by God” whereas the “greatest imperfection of all is not being” (KV I, 4 / G. I, 37). Given the equation of being and goodness that, as we saw, is maintained by Maimonides as well,86 the ultimate telos guiding God’s productive activity becomes being itself, and thus in a sense God himself of whom “infinite perfection” is predicated, “that is, infinite essence or infinite being [infinitum esse]” (CM I, 6 / G. I, 249). Like Maimonides’ God, the God in the CM thinks everything, does everything, and in a sense is everything. (x) Spinoza’s God in the CM, however, cannot truly be everything, because he has the same ontological limitation as the God of Maimonides. He is res cogitans but not res extensa: “We have divided substances into two highest kinds [summa genera], extension and thought; thought we have divided into created, or the human Mind, and uncreated, or God” (CM II, 1 / G. I, 250). Like Maimonides, Spinoza is aware that the simultaneous transcendence of the unextended divine intellect and its immanence in the physical world is unintelligible: Now, of course, for God’s omnipresence or presence in each thing [Dei ubiquitas aut praesentia in singulis rebus] to be properly understood, it would be necessary for us to know fully the inmost nature of the divine will, by which he has created things and continually produces them. Since this is beyond man’s grasp, it is impossible to explain how God is everywhere [cum humanum captum superet, impossibile est explicare, quomodo Deus sit ubique]. (CM II, 3 / G. I, 254) Hence, the same cloud, which prevented Maimonides from apprehending God clearly and distinctly, also obscures the concept of God in the Cogitata Metaphysica. Since God is only thought and not extension, the world is mysteriously inside and outside God, and God is mysteriously inside and outside the world. Only with the attribution of extension to God the problem of God’s “omnipresence” is solved. As Spinoza notes in the KV: “That God is . . . omnipresent” is “attributed to him in consideration of the attribute of extension” (KV I, 7, Note / G. I, 44). 85 86 Cf. E II, Def. 6. Cf. Guide III, 10, quoted above. 198 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 T H E T R A N S F O R M AT I O N O F T H E A R I S T O T E L I A N G O D : FROM THE CM TO THE ETHICS As we have seen, the Cogitata Metaphysica contains much evidence for Spinoza’s familiarity with the doctrine of the divine intellect that was adopted by Maimonides. In what follows, I intend to sketch what I think is the metamorphosis of the God of Maimonides into the God of Spinoza. I should emphasize that it is not more than a sketch of what I see as the fundamental pattern shared by both doctrines of God. The full implications of this thesis remain to be examined in more detail. In the Short Treatise, which represents an early stage of Spinoza’s own philosophical system, God is conceived as a substance, “of which all, or infinite, attributes are predicated, each of which is infinitely perfect in its own kind” (KV I, 2 / G. I, 19).87 God, therefore, is a being of absolute infinite reality as Spinoza will define him in the Ethics (cf. E I, Def. 6). God’s infinite attributes include extension: “It is clear that we maintain that extension is an attribute of God” (KV I, 2 / G. I, 24). Thus, this God is clearly not the divine intellect of medieval Aristotelianism. As we will see, however, Spinoza conceives the structure of God’s activity according to the “model” (voorbeeld) of the intellectual activity of Maimonides’ God. In KV I, 2 Spinoza discusses the question “what God is.” He is described as a supremely perfect being, and it is important to bear in mind that ‘perfection’ is used in a purely ontological sense, synonymously with ‘reality’ or ‘being.’ In the first Dialogue of the chapter, “Love” (Liefde) poses the question to “Intellect” (Verstand) whether “you have conceived a supremely perfect being.”88 Intellect 87 Spinoza probably began to work on the KV in late 1660 or early 1661, and was still revising it when he conceived, and possibly started writing what would become the Ethics in late 1661. Cf. Nadler, Spinoza, 175–200. 88 The relation of the dialogue to the rest of the KV remains controversial. See Curley’s first note in The Collected Works of Spinoza [Collected Works], vol. 1, ed. and Eng. trans. E. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 73. Curley follows Freudenthal against Avenarius: According to the latter, “this dialogue antedated the rest of the Short Treatise and represented a very early stage of Spinoza’s thought in which he was primarily under the influence of Bruno.” According to the former, both dialogues in the chapter “are later than the main body of the work, whose doctrines they presuppose.” Curley later changed his mind in favor of the assessment of Pierre Lachieze-Rey, according to which “the first dialogue is earlier than the main text” [Les origines cartésiennes du Dieu de Spinoza, Paris: Vrin, 1950]. The arguments which convinced him were that “the influence of Descartes is reduced to a minimum . . . and that the dialogue shows the influence of a fundamental conviction of the unity of nature which Spinoza did not owe to Descartes, and which transformed the materials he did take from Descartes.” As a consequence, Curley suggests excluding the dialogue from Spinoza’s “earliest substantial written works.” For Curley, Spinoza’s “substantial” intellectual period starts only after his encounter with Descartes. When his “system began to take shape as a rational expression of that original intuition [concerning the unity of nature], it relied heavily on Cartesian assumptions to derive antiCartesian conclusions” (Geometrical Method, 140, note 2). I do not find Curley’s suggestion plausible. First, the dialogue does reflect a Cartesian conceptual setting: the discussion focuses on the concepts of thought, extension and God (or a third substance “which is perfect”), and on the question whether they can be integrated into one being. In other words, Spinoza in this dialogue is trying to unify Descartes’s multiple substances (cf. note 23 above). Second and more importantly: even if the influence of Descartes were minimal, I see no good reason to describe non-Cartesian elements in Spinoza’s thought as an “original intuition” that found its “rational expression” only later thanks to the encounter with Descartes, and that, therefore, belongs to a non-substantial stage of Spinoza’s intellectual development. I hope that my paper contributes to a correction of this judgment. As I will argue below, the main reason for an early dating of the dialogue relative to the rest of the work is that it presents extension and thought as modes, and not as attributes of substance. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 199 refers to “Nature” (Natuur) as such a being, and asks “Reason” (Reede) to explain what this means. Since ‘perfection’ means reality, Nature is absolutely infinite reality. This implies that no reality can exist independent of Nature and limit its being: “Everything,” claims Reason, is “contained in it” (in de zelve begreepen). In this sense Nature is both “infinite” (oneyndig) and “eternal Unity” (eeuwige Eenheid). Against this account “Lust” (Begeerlykheid) raises a number of objections, of which the most important maintains that the claim of “Unity” is incompatible “with the Diversity [Verscheidentheid] I see everywhere in Nature” (G. I, 28). Reason replies to this objection: “O Lust! I tell you that what you say you see—that there are distinct substances [verscheide zelfstandigheeden]—is false” (G. I, 29). The diversity to which Lust points, does not exist on the level of substance or natura naturans, but only on the level of modes or natura naturata. It is important to note that in contrast to the Ethics and to other parts of the KV, Spinoza in this dialogue apparently has not yet conceived his doctrine of divine attributes. The distinction of res cogitans and res extensa is not due to the perception of substance under different attributes expressing its essence (cf. E I, Def. 4), but thought and extension here are modes that relate to substance in the same way as modes of thought such as will, sense-perception and understanding relate to thought: Reason: . . . And in the same way as willing, sensing, understanding, loving, etc., are different modes [verscheide wizen] of what you call a thinking substance [denkende zelfstandigheid], all of which you lead back to one, making one of all of these, so I also infer, by your own proof, that infinite extension and thought [oneyndige uytgebreidheid, en denking], together with other infinite properties [oneyndige eigenschappen]89 (or as you would say, substances) are nothing but modes [wizen] of that unique, eternal, infinite Being, existing through itself; and of all these we make, as we have said, One Unique [being] or Unity, outside which one cannot conceive anything. (G. I., 29– 30) Lust, however, raises two further objections against this explanation of unity: Multiplicity remains, according to her, on the one hand, because substance as a whole is composed of parts, and on the other hand, because substance as a cause produces a plurality of effects outside itself: Lust : In this way of speaking that you have, I think I see a very great confusion. For you seem to want the whole to be something outside or separate from its parts [dat het geheel iets zoude zyn buyten of zonder syn deelen], which is indeed absurd. . . . Moreover, as I gather from your example, you confuse the whole with the cause [vermengt gy het geheel met de oorzaak]; for as I say, the whole consists only of or through its parts [het geheel bestaat alleen van of door syn deelen]; that is why you imagine the thinking power as a thing on which the intellect, love, etc., depend. And you cannot call it a whole, but a cause of the effects you have just named. (G. I, 30) For the explanation of the unity of the alleged multiplicity affecting the relationship between substance and modes, Spinoza recurs to the relationship between the intellect and the objects of intellection. In order to understand his argument, let us recall the main traits of Maimonides’ account of the intellect in 89 Eigenschap is also used for ‘attribute’ in the technical sense, e.g., KV I, 7, Note (G. I, 44). But since Spinoza, when he wrote this dialogue, did not yet seem to have conceived the notion of attribute in this sense, I decided to translate the term here as ‘property.’ 200 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 Guide I, 68. According to this account the intellect in actu is defined as that which it apprehends, for “the very being and true reality of the intellect is apprehension.” ‘Apprehension’ again is defined as “the act of the intellect,” which is the “true reality and the essence of the intellect.” The divine intellect, therefore, is the intellectual act of apprehending, and what it apprehends is, as we saw, at the same time one and multiple: God’s essence and everything that follows from it. With this in mind, let us turn to Reason’s reply to Lust: Reason: . . . You say, then that since the cause is a producer of its effects, it must be outside them. You say this because you know only of the transitive [overgaande] and not of the immanent [inblyvende] cause, which does not in any way produce something outside itself. For example, the intellect is the [immanent] cause of its concepts; that is why I called the intellect a cause (insofar as, or in the respect that its concepts depend on it); and on the other hand, I call it a whole, because it consists of its concepts. Similarly, God is, in relation to his effects or creatures, no other than the immanent cause, and also a whole, because of the second consideration [By voorbeeld, het verstand, het welk oorzaak is van syn begrippen, en daarom word ook het verstand van my (voor zoo veel, of in opzigt syne begrippen daar van afhangen) genoemt een oorzaak: En wederom in opzigt het bestaat van syne begrippen een geheel. Alzoo ook God en is met syne uytwerzelen of schepzelen geen ander, als een inblyvende oorzaak, en ook een geheel, in opzigt van de tweede aanmerkinge]. (KV I, 2 / G I, 29–30)90 Spinoza here explains the unity of God with regard to both the relationship of cause and effects and the relationship of whole and parts according to the model of intellectual activity.91 Intellectual activity is one because as immanent cause the intellect produces the objects of intellection in itself, and because the intellect is identical to the objects of intellection.92 Spinoza, therefore, seems to have preserved the structure of God conceived as intellectual activity while at the same time expanding the ontological scope of this activity: God in the passage above is no longer confined to intellectual activity that produces objects of intellection in itself, but God is also “extending” activity, which produces extended objects in itself, as well as an infinite number of other activities unknown to us, each of which produces infinitely many effects of its kind in itself. The structure of the activity of Maimonides’ divine intellect is the structure of the activity of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura also in the Ethics. As we saw above, in E II, 90 Cf. Ibid. (G. I, 26), where the production of concepts through intellectual activity is also used to illustrate immanent causality. 91 It is interesting to note that Johannes Colerus illustrates Spinoza’s concept of immanent causality in a similar way: “An immanent cause [inblyvende oorzaak] is one that produces an effect in itself. . . . As when our soul thinks [denkt] . . . it is and remains in these thoughts . . . . Likewise Spinoza’s God is the cause of the universe and at the time is in it and not outside of it.” See his biography of Spinoza in J. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1899), 78. Wolfson misunderstood this passage as implying an analogy between God as immanent cause and the soul’s immanence in the body (Spinoza, vol. 1, 322, n. 1). But Colerus’s analogy is the same as the one used by Spinoza in the passage under discussion. 92 He probably did not have in mind exclusively the God of medieval Aristotelianism. Heerebord, for example, defined causa immanens as the cause “which produces an effect in itself, in the way in which the intellect is said to be the cause of its concepts” (quae producit effectum in se ipsa, sic dicitur intellectus causa suorum conceptuu). Cf. Gueroult, Spinoza, vol. 1, 246, n. 10. On Heerebord’s relationship to Spinoza, see above, n. 81. But even if Heerebord was Spinoza’s immediate source for the terminology used in this context, the medieval discussion certainly must have come back to his mind. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 201 Prop. 1 and 2 Spinoza infers from the fact that we apprehend modes of thought and extension, that God is res cogitans and res extensa. God as substance or natura naturans is, therefore, perceived under the attribute of thought and under the attribute of extension. In E II, Prop. 3 Spinoza then turns to a discussion of the modes, or natura naturata, of God perceived as res cogitans: E II, Prop. 3: In God there is necessarily an idea both of his essence and of all things necessarily following from his essence [tam ejus essentiae, quam omnium, quae ex ipsius essentia necessario sequuntur]. Dem.: For God (by Prop. 1) can think infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, or (what is the same, by E I, Prop. 16) can form the idea of his essence and of all things necessarily following from it [ideam suae essentiae, & omnium, quae necessario ex ea sequuntur, formare potest]. But whatever is in God’s power necessarily exists (by E I, Prop. 35); therefore there is necessarily such an idea, and (by E I, Prop. 15) it is only in God, Q.E.D. (G. II, 87) Thus, the structure of God conceived as res cogitans corresponds precisely to the structure of Maimonides’ God conceived as intellectual activity:93 God as cogitatio forms an idea of his essence and of everything that follows from his essence. Since for both Maimonides and Spinoza in God there is “absolutely no potentiality,”94 the fact that God can form this idea entails that God does form this idea. Spinoza’s God as agent forming the idea (i.e. as natura naturans perceived under the attribute of thought) is the subject of intellection in Maimonides’ doctrine of the divine intellect. Spinoza’s God as the formed idea (i.e. as natura naturata perceived under the attribute of thought) is the object of intellection in Maimonides’ doctrine of the divine intellect.95 The difference between Maimonides’ God and Spinoza’s is that the latter is not only cogitatio but also extensio, as well as an infinite number of other things. For this reason the scholium to Prop. 3 expands the scope of God’s activity from cogitatio to God’s absolutely infinite being:96 Schol.: . . . [In] E I, Prop. 16 we have shown that God acts with the same necessity by which he intellectually cognizes himself [Deum eadem necessitate agere, qua seipsum intellegit], i.e., just as it follows from the necessity of the divine nature (as everyone maintains unanimously) that God intellectually cognizes himself, with the same necessity it also follows that God does infinitely many things in infinitely many modes [infinita infinitis modis agat]. Then we have shown in E I, Prop. 34 that God’s power is nothing except God’s active essence [Dei potentiam nihil esse, praeterquam Dei actuosam essentiam]. And so it is impossible for us to conceive that God does not act as it is to conceive that he does not exist. (G. II, 87) 93 It is interesting that Freudenthal, in “Scholastik,” 134–35, considered this proposition as somewhat displaced in Spinoza’s argument, and suggested that it belongs to an earlier stage of Spinoza’s intellectual development reflecting the influence of medieval philosophy on his thought: Man geht schwerlich fehl, wenn man annimmt, dass Spinoza den Begriff des göttlichen Selbstbewusstseins oder der idea Dei der mittelalterlichen Philosophie entlehnt habe, dass es ihm aber nicht gelungen sei, diesen Gedanken mit dem eigenen System in vollständigen Einklang zu bringen. 94 E I, Prop. 34 states that “God’s power [potentia] is his essence itself” (G. II, 76), and E I, Prop. 35 infers from this that “whatever we conceive to be in God’s power, necessarily exists” (G. II, 77). Cf. E I, Prop. 17, Schol.: “God’s omnipotence has been actual [actu] from eternity and will remain in the same actuality to eternity” (G. II, 63). 95 For a discussion of E I, Prop. 31, which appears to pose a problem to my reconstruction, see Appendix 4. 96 Cf. Wolfson, Spinoza, vol. 2, 13–18. 202 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 I think it is plausible to assume that what Spinoza calls here essentia actuosa Dei—God’s active essence—corresponds to the structure of the intellectual activity that according to Maimonides in Guide I, 68 constitutes God’s essence. But Spinoza once again applies this structure to God’s absolute infinite being. The fact that he used, as we saw above, the same unusual term, essentia actuosa, in CM II, 11 to characterize God’s being conceived only as cogitatio, in my view strongly supports this suggestion. The reference to E I, Prop. 16, moreover, is of considerable importance for understanding the genesis of Spinoza’s concept of God’s causal activity, for neither in Prop. 16 nor in its demonstration is the medieval model of God’s self-intellection used to explain the necessity by which God “does infinitely many things in infinitely many modes”: E I, Prop. 16: From the necessity of the divine nature [Ex necessitate divinae naturae] there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect). (G. II, 60) Note that the reference to the infinite intellect in this context serves to explain the scope of that which follows from the causal necessity of the divine nature, not that causal necessity itself. Let us now recall what Spinoza writes in the scholium to E II, Prop. 7: “[T]he thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that. So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways.” It is clear, therefore, that the expansion of the ontological scope of God’s activity, in Spinoza’s view does not affect its unity. God’s activity as thinking thing is not distinct from God’s activity as extended thing or from God’s activity as all the other things which his absolute infinite being comprises. It is one activity perceived under an infinite number of attributes. And the same is true for the effects which this activity produces in itself. Let us finally turn to the question of how Spinoza reconciles in the Ethics the apparent plurality of modes with God’s unity. E II, Prop. 4 addresses this problem with regard to the modes of thought: E II, Prop. 4: God’s idea [Idea Dei] from which infinitely many things follow in infinitely many modes must be unique [unica]. Dem.: An infinite intellect comprehends nothing but God’s attributes and his affections (by E I, Prop. 30). But God is unique [unicus] (by E I, Prop. 14, Cor. 1). Therefore God’s idea, from which infinitely many things follow in infinitely many modes, must be unique, Q.E.D. (G II, 88) God’s idea, Spinoza maintains, must be one because God is one. If God’s idea were not one, it would not adequately represent God and since “a true idea must correspond to the thing it represents” (idea vera debet cum suo ideato convenire) (E I, Ax. 6 / G. II, 47), it would follow that God’s idea, i.e., the idea which God forms of himself, is false. This argument, however, seems more like a petitio principii than a satisfactory explanation for the unity of the multiple. Ultimately, I think, Spinoza’s solution in the Ethics is not different from the solution suggested in CM II, 7, according to which the analogia totius naturae allows us to consider it as unum ens—a solution, which, as we saw, he shares with and possibly adopted from Maimonides, who writes in Guide I, 72: “Know that this being as whole is one MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 203 individual and nothing else. . . . By means of this representation it will also be made clear that the One has created one being.” This in any case is precisely the kind of unity which Spinoza attributes to the modes of extension. The “simplest bodies” form individuals which, despite their composition, preserve always the same nature. These individuals become components of individuals of a higher order, which again are simultaneously composite and one: E II, Lemma 7, Schol.: But if we should further conceive a third kind of individual, composed of this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways, without any change of its form [absque ulla ejus formae mutatione]. And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual [totam naturam esse Individuum, cujus partes, hoc est omnia corpora infinitis modis variant, absque ulla totius Individui mutatione]. (G. II, 102) Given the identity of extension and thought according to E II, Prop. 7, it follows that the unity of the order of extended modes is also the unity of the order of modes of thought. In this sense “God’s idea, from which infinitely many things follow in infinitely many modes,” could indeed in some way be conceived as “unique.” FROM MAIMONIDES TO SPINOZA—CONCLUDING REMARKS We have seen that, according to Wolfson, Spinoza’s philosophy marks the dramatic end of “Philonic philosophy,” the medieval philosophical tradition, in which Maimonides played an important role. In contrast, my analysis agrees with what I think is Spinoza’s own assessment: that the transition from the God of quidam Hebraeorum, i.e., of medieval Jewish Aristotelians, to his Deus sive Natura can be described as the dispersion of a cloud. Let me now briefly summarize my argumentation. Spinoza’s monism appears to break with the medieval philosophical tradition in mainly two ways: by abolishing the division of reality into an incorporeal God and a corporeal world, and by abolishing the division of reality into creator and creation. The former is achieved through the transformation of the incorporeal principle and the corporeal principle into two attributes of Deus sive Natura; the latter is achieved through the concept of God as causa immanens, i.e., as a cause that produces its effects inside itself. On the basis of my examination of Maimonides’ metaphysics—which I chose with the aim of illustrating a distinct tradition in medieval Aristotelianism that can be traced back to Themistius—I suggest that there is no fundamental break between the medieval doctrine of the Aristotelian God and Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. First I showed that Maimonides’ God too is causa immanens of the form of the created world. “All the existents are inscribed in God’s essence,” as Profiat Duran aptly put it, because the act of divine self-intellection comprises both God’s essence and everything that follows from God’s essence, and because intellect, subject and object of intellection are identical in God. Hence, one and the same intellectual act is both God’s essence and the form of the created world. Then I showed that the form of the created world is not only “inscribed in God’s essence,” but God’s essence is also the form of the created world. The same activity 204 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 that determines the structure of God’s intellect is apprehended as God’s “actions” in nature. It is this aspect of Maimonides’ God that, mutatis mutandis, becomes Spinoza’s attribute of extension. When Maimonides uses “divine actions” and “natural actions” synonymously he means that there is only one set of actions, which considered from the point of view of divine intellection is the ordo idearum and considered from the point of view of the created world is the form of “all existents.” But whereas for Spinoza in E II, Prop. 7 ordo idearum and ordo rerum are identical, because they are one order perceived under two attributes, for Maimonides they are not. For this reason Maimonides, in Spinoza’s view, apprehended God only “as if through a cloud,” whereas he himself apprehended God clearly and distinctly. The cloud consisted in the doctrine of God’s incorporeality which prevented Maimonides from unifying the intellectual act producing the ordo idearum in God with the actions constituting the physical world. The consequence of confining God to intellectual activity was that from the point of view of the physical world, God’s essentia actuosa is at the same time immanent and transcendent, and from the point of view of God, the same is true with regard to the essentia actuosa of the physical world. Although Maimonides was aware of the resulting ontological inconsistency, he did not have the philosophical tools to solve it. Due to the doctrine of incorporeality, Maimonides’ God could only be the form but not the matter of nature. The main difference between the “nebulous” medieval doctrine and Spinoza’s doctrine resulted from the attribution of extension to God. In a first step, Spinoza replaced the medieval Aristotelian ontology of matter and form through an ontology of thought and extension which for him are neither conceptually nor causally related to each other. As a consequence, he no longer conceived the physical world as composed of active form and passive matter, but reduced it to extended substance and its modes. In a second step, Spinoza integrated extension as an attribute into God’s active essence. As a divine attribute, extension for Spinoza is indivisible, simple, infinite, and active, i.e., has none of the features that prompted medieval Aristotelians to exclude matter from God.97 Finally, Spinoza unified God’s cognitive activity, through which he forms an idea of his essence and of everything that follows from his essence, and God’s “extending” activity through which he produces the physical world. As a consequence, Spinoza was now in a position to give a consistent account of God’s activity as one act perceived as thought and extension. In this sense Spinoza modified the God of the Aristotelian tradition. This, however, certainly does not justify Wolfson’s claim that, for the medieval philosophers, God and other immaterial beings “had nothing in common with bodies, not having matter as their substratum.”98 On the contrary: Maimonides’ God has everything in common with his creation except for its material substratum. I should point out that the philosophical tools that Spinoza used for solving the inconsistency in Maimonides’ ontology were not forged by Descartes, but by Hasdai Crescas, 97 98 I will deal with this point in more detail at the end of Appendix 1. Wolfson, Spinoza, vol. 2, 333; emphasis added. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 205 the medieval Jewish critic of the Aristotelian tradition.99 Descartes not only maintains the existence of “the extended thing [res extensa] that we call body [corpus] or matter [materiam].”100 He also maintains that God is the cause of res extensa, that the perfection (i.e., reality) of the cause must at least be equal to, if not “more eminent” than the perfection of the effect, and that nonetheless “God is not a body” (Deum non esse corpus).101 For Spinoza, we may therefore conclude, Descartes apprehended God through the same cloud as the medieval Aristotelians. The indignation expressed in the scholium to E I, Prop. 15, in fact, could be directed against either: “[T]hey clearly show that they completely remove [omnino removere] corporeal or extended substance . . . from the divine nature, and moreover they claim that it was created by God [a Deo creatam]. But from which divine power [potentia] it could have been created—this they entirely ignore [prorsus ignorant], which clearly shows that they do not understand [non intelligere] what they themselves say” (G. II, 57).102 Both literary evidence and a significant number of parallels show that Spinoza was familiar with Maimonides’ doctrine of God, and that it influenced his account of God in the Cogitata Metaphysica. In the Korte Verhandeling, Spinoza preserves the structure of the “act of the intellect” but expands its ontological scope. Moreover, he uses the identity of intellect and intellecta as a model to explain the 99 On Spinoza’s use of Crescas’s arguments against the first premise of Guide II, Introduction (according to which the existence of an infinite magnitude is impossible), see M. Joel, Don Chasdai Creskas religionsphilosophische Lehren (Breslau: Schletter’sche Buchhandlung, 1866), in particular 21– 25; Wolfson, Spinoza I, 262–95. Let me note in passing that Crescas takes “place” to be a “metaphor” for God, most prominently in the rabbinical dictum that God “is the place of His world and the world is not His place” (Tehillim Rabbah 90, 10; cf. Bereshit Rabbah 68, 9), “for as the dimensions of the void permeate through those of the body and its fullness, so His glory, blessed be He, permeates through all the parts of the world and the fullness thereof” (Or Adonai, ed. Shlomo Fischer [Jersualem, 1990], I 2, 1, p. 69. This passage has been much discussed, see most recently: W. Z. Harvey, Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas [Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1998], 23–30). Precisely the same rabbinical dictum is used by the 19th century Maskil, Meir Letteris, to show that “the system of the scholar Spinoza regarding the deity was founded on the pillars of our Sages of blessed memory, in whom there is no deceit and guile . . . because there is an established principle for the maxim which comprises his entire system: The all is one and the one is all.” M. Letteris, “The Biography of the Sage and Scholar Baruch de Spinoza of Blessed Memory,” Bikkurei ha-‘ittim he-hadashim, 1845, 32 (Heb.). In light of Wolfson’s evaluation of Spinoza’s role in the history of philosophy, it is, therefore, not devoid of irony that this rabbinical dictum is apparently derived from no other than Philo of Alexandria, according to whom God may be called “place” (tovpo") because “of His containing everything, and being contained by nothing whatsoever” (De Somniis I, 62–63). On Philo’s probable influence on the rabbinical dictum, see Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages—Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 [3]), 73–75. 100 Descartes, Principia II, 1. 101 Descartes, Principia I, 23. About God as the “creator of all things” (rerum omnium creator), see I, 22; about the relationship of cause and effect, see I, 17. Note that also the creatio ex nihilo solution for the problem of matter is not open to Descartes, since he accepts the principle that “nothing is made out of nothing” (a nihilo nihil fieri) (I, 18). 102 Cf. Harvey, “Portrait,” 165–66, who reads Spinoza as addressing Maimonides’ statement that in God “there is absolutely no potentia.” But Spinoza certainly had Descartes in mind as well. Cf. his remark on PP I, Prop. 21, according to which Descartes’s claim that “the extended thing . . . does not pertain to God’s nature . . . but can be created by God” must remain unintelligible to the reader, if he does not put aside “as prejudices, all the reasons he previously had for believing that body exists” (G. I, 179–80). 206 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 unity of Deus sive Natura. The same case for structural analogy and expanded ontological scope can be made for the concept of God in the Ethics. In addition, Spinoza speaks here of God’s essentia actuosa, using a term which not only recalls Maimonides’ “act of the intellect,” but which he himself used in the CM to characterize a God confined to cogitatio. Spinoza, therefore, did not have to grind new lenses in order to apprehend Deus sive Natura clearly and distinctly. He only had to polish the lenses inherited from the medieval Aristotelian tradition in order to perceive God’s essentia actuosa not as thought alone but as thought and extension. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD APPENDIX 1: 207 HOW THICK IS THE CLOUD? OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES It is clear that in my view the distance separating Maimonides’ God from Spinoza’s is rather small. If we imagine a discussion between the two philosophers I would not expect metaphysics to be a very controversial issue. This claim is likely to raise objections from students of both Maimonides and Spinoza. The “cloud” which obscured Maimonides’ apprehension of God is, according to them, considerably thicker than I have presented it. The difference between Maimonides’ nebulous doctrine and Spinoza’s clear and distinct notion of God is not one of degree but the result of a radical transformation. For Wolfson the view attributed to “some of the Hebrews” in the scholium to E II, Prop. 7 indicates that Spinoza was not fully aware of his radical departure from “traditional theology. . . . Spinoza seems to have been under the delusion that he was . . . only seeing in a truer light that which others before him had seen, to use his own expression, ‘as if through a mist.’”103 According to M. Gueroult that same view “est loin de coïncider avec celle de Spinoza.”104 Similarly, E. Curley thinks that the Jewish philosophers referred to in the scholium “would have understood the doctrine very differently from the way Spinoza does.”105 More generally, Zeev Levy finds an “essential and irreconcilable discrepancy” between “Spinoza’s conception of God as Deus sive Natura” and “the traditional theological notion of God who is distinct from the world created by him.” The latter notion, according to Levy, is “endorsed by Maimonides.”106 For Y. Yovel, Spinoza became the “founder” of the “philosophy of immanence, effecting an intellectual revolution no less momentous and consequential than Kant’s.”107 The denial of transcendence in Yovel’s view is the “heresy” of the “Marrano of reason” marking his rupture not only with Judaism and Christianity but also with the “accepted philosophical tradition.”108 Even L. Roth who, as we saw, emphasizes Spinoza’s proximity to Maimonides, seems convinced that Maimonides “could never have . . . affirmed” that “the universe as a totality is God” since for Maimonides “outside and beyond” the “order demanded by the universal claims of the thinking mind” there “exists an immaterial intelligence.”109 These examples should suffice to indicate that many distinguished scholars would expect a debate between Maimonides and Spinoza on metaphysics to unfold much less peacefully than I have suggested. Of course I hope that, after reading my paper, they would change their mind. I could proceed by quoting a number of equally distinguished scholars who would agree with me on the undramatic character of the imagined discussion. For some of them Maimonides’ doctrine of God is even closer to Spinoza’s than I have suggested.110 Instead, let me briefly address what are in my view the two main objections that I 103 Wolfson, Spinoza, vol. 2, 347. Gueroult, Spinoza, vol. 2, 85, note 74. Note that Gueroult again alludes to E I, Prop. 31: “Spinoza “récuse énergiquement . . . l’identité de l’essence de Dieu et de son entendement.” On Gueroult’s problematic use of this proposition, see below, Appendix 4. 105 Curley, Collected Works, 451, n. 11. 106 Zeev Levy, Baruch or Benedict—On Some Jewish Aspects of Spinoza’s Philosophy [Baruch or Benedict] (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 104. 107 Yirmiahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics [Spinoza] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), vol. 2, 170. 108 Ibid., vol. 1, 5. 109 See my discussion of Roth in Appendix 2. 110 For scholars who would agree with me, see, e.g., the references to Letteris, Pines, and Harvey in the notes above. For scholars who would go even further than I, see, e.g., Schwartz, “Eckharts’ und Maimonides’ Raumorstellung” who argues that Maimonides attributed spatiality to God. See also Lenn E. Goodman, “What does Spinoza’s Ethics contribute to Jewish Philosophy,” Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, eds. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 17–89. Goodman writes: “Maimonides had long before tied matter and form to God by treating both as expressions of the divine. His rejection of the Neoplatonic exclusion of matter from the power and ken of God led directly to Spinoza’s inclusion of extension, along with thought, among God’s attributes” (27). Cf. his “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy,” in A Straight Path: Studies in Honor of Arthur Hyman (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 86–97. 104 208 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 44:2 APRIL 2006 expect to be raised against my thesis. One is that my account of Maimonides’ God appears to be incompatible with God’s radical transcendence advocated in Maimonides’ negative theology. The other is that even if we disregard the implications of Maimonides’ negative theology, a God confined to thought and identical to the world’s form but not to its matter, is radically different from a God who is both thought and extension. (i) The first objection may well be valid. According to Maimonides’ uncompromising negative theology, God is indeed absolutely transcendent.111 This, moreover, is a doctrine which should “be inculcated in virtue of traditional authority [hlbqb]” upon the “multitude,” including “children, women, stupid ones, and those of a defective natural disposition.” Everyone is required to believe that “there is absolutely no likeness in any respect whatever between Him and the things created by him [˜wymd ˜ya llk wyawrb ˜ybw wnyb]” and that “everything that can be ascribed to God, may He be blessed, differs in every respect from our attributes, so that no definition can comprise them [ ]” (Guide I, 35, 68–69). Zeev Levy quotes this passage to illustrate Maimonides’ commitment to “the traditional theological notion” of a transcendent God.112 It is certainly a legitimate question how Maimonides, on the background of such statements, could have maintained that God is the immanent cause of the world and identical to the form of all existents. Long ago S. Pines already noted that Maimonides’ negative theology and his “conception of God’s intellectual activity . . . appear to be contradictory,” and that he presents the latter in a way “that brings out . . . its incompatibility with” the former.113 It is important to recall in this context that the literary character of the Guide may be compared to a Vexierbild, a magic picture with features that change depending on the angle from which the observer looks at it. In a similar way the perception of the Guide’s content is determined through the differing levels of intellectual perfection of its readers. Among the devices Maimonides used to obtain this effect are deliberate contradictions: In speaking about very obscure matters [ ] it is necessary to conceal parts of them and to disclose others. Sometimes necessity requires, in the case of a certain dictum, that the discussion proceed according to a certain premise, and in another place necessity requires that the discussion proceed according to another premise contradicting [trtws] the first. In such cases the multitude must in no way become aware of the contradiction between them and the author must use some device [hlwbjt] to conceal it in every respect. (Guide I, Introduction, 16) Now, all issues relevant to our discussion appear to require this particular caution: The discussion concerning attributes and the way they should be negated with regard to Him, and the meaning of the attributes that may be ascribed to Him, as well as the discussion concerning His creation of that which He created, the character of His governance of the world, and how His providence [extends] to what is other than He, and the notion of His will, His apprehension, and His knowledge of all that He knows . . . all these are obscure matters [ ], and they are truly the ‘mysteries of the Torah’ and the secrets constantly mentioned in the books of the prophets and in the dicta of the Sages, may their memory be blessed. (Guide I, 35, 68–69) Whereas God’s transcendence “ought to be inculcated” upon the “multitude,” including “children, women, stupid ones, and those of a defective natural disposition,” God’s immanence is nowhere explicitly stated in the Guide, although we saw how it necessarily follows from Maimonides’ premises. It seems, therefore, quite obvious that the doctrine of God’s transcendence is part of Maimonides’ exoteric teaching and the doctrine of God’s immanence part of his esoteric teaching. It may, therefore, be correct that one cannot reach Spinoza from Maimonides’ negative theology. But the simple reason for this is that the way leading to Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura has the doctrine of the divine intellect as its point of departure, to which he explicitly refers in the scholium to E II, Prop. 7. 111 For Maimonides’ negative theology, see Guide I, 50–60. Levy, Baruch or Benedict, 101–2. 113 Pines, “Sources,” xcvii. According to Pines, “Dieu,” 22, Maimonides presents “deux discours philosophiques entre lesquels il est malaisé ou impossible de faire l’accord.” 112 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 209 Scholars insisting on the incompatibility of Maimonides’ and Spinoza’s metaphysics have in my opinion not realized that they, so to speak, took the wrong turn at a crucial junction of the Guide. If Spinoza’s “philosophy of immanence” is to be perceived as a “revolution” it comes as no surprise that Y. Yovel opposes him as “the most paradigmatic philosopher of immanence” to Maimonides, “the most radical philosopher of transcendence.”114 The failure to recognize that Maimonides holds two doctrines of God is also the source of some confusion in Gueroult’s attempt to prove that Maimonides’ God must have appeared “absurd” to Spinoza. The alleged absurdity, according to Gueroult, is the consequence of God’s “incompréhensibilité totale” affirmed “dans la théologie negative” (277).115 For the purpose of the discussion above it is not necessary to examine in detail how Maimonides’ two accounts of God are related to each other, or to solve the problems stemming from these two accounts. It is sufficient to see that what appears to be a contradiction between the transcendent God of negative theology and the concept of God as the act of self-intellection is not due to my misinterpretation of Maimonides’ doctrine, but is characteristic of the way this doctrine is presented in the Guide. (ii) The second objection to my view is not valid. From the outset Spinoza emphasizes that the attribution of extension to God does not imply any form of vulgar materialism. “Nothing more absurd . . . can be said of God” than that he “is corporeal” (corporeum esse) if “by body we understand any quantity, with length, breadth, and depth, limited by some certain figure” (E I, Prop. 15, Schol. / G. II, 57).116 God’s extension as conceived by Spinoza preserves God’s infinity, indivisibility, and simplicity, as well as his supreme perfection, ruling out that he can in any form be passive. According to Spinoza, those who deny extension as an attribute of God, have simply not understood what extended substance means. Instead of conceiving extension intellectually they were misled by their imagination: [If] we attend to quantity as it is in the imagination [prout in imaginatione est], which we do often and more easily, it will be found to be finite, divisible, and composed of parts; but if we attend to it as it is in the intellect [prout in intellecto est], and conceive it insofar as it is a substance, which happens with great difficulty, then, as we have already sufficiently demonstrated, it will be found to be infinite, unique and indivisible. (ibid. 59) As I have mentioned at the end of my paper, Wolfson has convincingly shown that Spinoza’s defense of extension as an attribute of God is based on arguments which he found in the work of Hasdai Crescas, the medieval critic of the Aristotelian tradition. These arguments were developed as a response precisely to the objections that a medieval Aristotelian such as Maimonides would raise. If Maimonides had been convinced of the soundness of Spinoza’s argumentation I cannot see what should have prevented him from accepting it—all the more since Spinoza’s attribute of extension does not subject God to the deficiencies of matter that originally motivated the Aristotelian doctrine of incorporeality. On the contrary: I believe he would have welcomed Spinoza’s concept of God as a solution for the inconsistency in his ontology to which the doctrine of incorporeality had led. To be sure, Maimonides’ God is not Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. But the transition from a God into whose intellectual essence the form of all existents is inscribed to a God whose active essence comprises both thought and extension is the result of the solution of a problem, not of a radical transformation. 114 Yovel, Spinoza, vol. 1, 136. Compare my discussion of Gueroult’s view below, Appendix 4. 116 Cf. letter 73, where Spinoza describes as “quite mistaken” the “view of certain people that the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the identification of God with Nature” as long as “by the latter they understand a kind of mass or corporeal matter” (per quam massam quandam, sive, sive materiam corpoream intelligent) (G. IV, 307). 115 210 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY APPENDIX 2: 44:2 APRIL 2006 L. ROTH AND S. PINES ON MAIMONIDES’AND SPINOZA’S DOCTRINES OF GOD Among the attempts to explain the relationship between Maimonides’ God and Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, the two most important were in my view Leon Roth’s and Shlomo Pines’s. In this appendix I will briefly discuss their arguments, and point out the issues on which I disagree with them. (i) In 1924 Roth published his influential book, Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides. For his thesis that “the monism of Spinoza is a direct derivative of the characteristic form which the monotheistic idea . . . had assumed in the mind of Maimonides” (145), Maimonides’ claim concerning the unity of both God and nature (see my discussion of Guide I, 72 above where Maimonides states that “the One has created one”) plays a particularly important role. The proximity between the doctrines of the two philosophers, according to Roth, is based on two related properties of Maimonides’ monotheism: (i) God’s unity is the condition for the unity and intelligibility of the order of nature (“The pursuit of knowledge presupposes a real unity in Nature; and the unity of Nature springs out of the unity of God,” 84); and (ii) The apprehension of the order of nature is the only way to the apprehension of God (“[I]t is only by knowing and through the knowledge of the facts of the physical universe that we can claim to know anything of God,” 92). For Spinoza too, according to Roth, the intelligibility of the order of nature has as its condition the unity of God (“The two orders of the logic, therefore, the order of ideas and the order of things, are two expressions of one and the same unity, which is Deus sive Natura,” 57). Moreover, Spinoza shares with Maimonides “the conception of the universe as a totality through which alone it is possible to know God” (105). Summing up his thesis, Roth writes: It is from the one Nature that we learn the one God; and the one God can only be interpreted in and through the one Nature. It was this fundamental metaphysical idea which Spinoza used with such consistency and such effect against the whole movement of the Cartesian logic, and it was the same fundamental metaphysical idea which was the mainspring of Maimonides’ attack on the Kalam. (105 ff.) In principle, I think, Roth’s thesis is pointing in the right direction. Upon closer examination, however, the argument he provides to support it lacks plausibility. He recognizes that the reciprocal dependence of unity and intelligibility of God and nature in Spinoza is based on their identity. For Maimonides, on the other hand, God, according to Roth, remains transcendent in relation to the natural order: “That the universe as a totality is God could never have been affirmed by Maimonides” (105). This difference, however, does not seem crucial to Roth: Whether the order demanded by the universal claims of the thinking mind be equated with God, as in the developed philosophy of Spinoza; or whether outside and beyond this order there exists an immaterial intelligence, as argued by Maimonides . . . is . . . from the point of view of logic of no practical relevance. The issue between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ is therefore only apparent. . . . It is not at all clear that Spinoza . . . effected a complete fusion between ‘natura naturans’ and ‘natura naturata.’ (105 with note 2) Roth, therefore, apparently did not see that Maimonides does equate “the order demanded by the universal claims of the thinking mind” with God, which in my opinion is the key to understanding the relationship of his God to Spinoza’s. Instead of working out the monistic implications of Maimonides’ position, Roth suggests that Spinoza may after all have been a dualist. His contention that “the issue between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ is therefore only apparent” seems to me clearly mistaken. God’s immanence is of fundamental importance for the whole of Spinoza’s philosophical project. With regard to the doctrine of God of his opponents, Spinoza expresses his hope that they will “completely reject” it once they find out that it is “a great obstacle to science” (magnum scientiae obstaculum) (E I, Prop. 33, Schol. 2 / G. II, 75). His own doctrine of God certainly is conceived with the goal of liberating science from this magnum obstaculum, constituted by a transcendent God beyond human grasp. Such a God destroys the unity of MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 211 nature and thereby renders impossible a unified scientific account of nature. Both consequences clearly contradict Spinoza’s concept of nature and natural laws: [N]ature is always the same [est namque natura semper eadem], and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must be the same, i.e., through the universal laws and rules of nature [per leges, & regulas naturae universales]. (E III, Pref. / G. II, 138) (ii) According to Pines, the implications of Maimonides’ concept of God in Guide I, 68 allow us to infer that his God is “something coming perilously close to Spinoza’s attribute of thought (or to his ‘Intellect of God’).” Pines’s intuition, I think, is in principle correct. As I have tried to show in this paper, Maimonides’ God as subject of intellection corresponds to Spinoza’s God conceived under the attribute of thought, and Maimonides’ God as object of intellection corresponds to Spinoza’s infinite intellect of God. The argument, however, that Pines adduces for his suggestion seems to me mistaken. In his view Maimonides in I, 68 links Aristotle’s account of God as novhsi" nohvsew" novhsi" in Metaphysics XII 9 and the account of the intellection of nou'" in De anima III, 4 and 5, according to which the intellect and the object of intellection are identical. Maimonides’ interpretation of God’s knowledge, according to Pines, introduces a significant modification into the Aristotelian concept of divine intellect: In Aristotle’s Metaphysics this conception [of God as novhsi" nohvsew" novhsi"] ties up with the idea that God only cognizes Himself, because all other things are unworthy of being known by Him. If, in accordance with a probable intention of Aristotle, the last statement is interpreted as excluding God’s cognition of the ideas or the universals, the content of God’s cognition would be most strictly circumscribed. . . . Though Maimonides does not explicitly say so, it follows from the analogy he draws between God’s and man’s intellectual activity that God’s knowledge is not only confined to his own essence, if the latter is conceived as not including the forms that are also the objects of human science. However, if He does cognize the system of forms (and we may add, using a later term, of natural laws) subsisting in the universe, He must be held (in virtue of the Aristotelian thesis stressed by Maimonides) to be identical with these forms and laws, i.e., with the scientific system of the universe. This would make Him out to be something coming perilously close to Spinoza’s attribute of thought (or to his ‘Intellect of God’).117 In Maimonides the identity of the divine intellect with “the scientific system of forms subsisting in the universe” thus follows for Pines from two things: (i) from the analogy between human and divine intellection, which shows that Maimonides conceived (probably in contrast to Aristotle) the divine intellect as apprehending not only himself but also the universe’s formal structure, and (ii) from the Aristotelian thesis in the De anima concerning the identity of subject and object of intellection. Pines’s account, I think, is unconvincing because the analogy between the apprehension of the human and the divine intellect does not yield the conclusion that he suggests. In order to illustrate the formula novhsi" nohvsew" novhsi" Aristotle likewise uses the identity of the “object and of the subject of intellection” in the human intellect, which is found in both the “producing sciences,” and the “theoretical sciences” (Metaphysics XII 9, 1075a 1–5). In my opinion neither in Aristotle nor in Maimonides does the analogy between human and divine intellect support the conclusion that God apprehends the formal structure of the universe and is identical to it. There is, on the other hand, ample textual support for my suggestion that God’s knowledge of things other than himself follows for Maimonides from his apprehension of himself as their cause (see my discussion in the body of the paper). 117 Pines, “Sources,” xcvii–xcviii. 212 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY APPENDIX 3: 44:2 APRIL 2006 T H E P L A C E O F T H E C O G I TATA METAPHYSICA IN SPINOZA’S WORK K. Fischer’s thesis that Spinoza presents in the CM essentially his own views with the purpose of clarifying how they differ from the views of Descartes, has been discussed in detail, and, at first view, justly rejected by Freudenthal in the article quoted above.118 It seems to me, however, that the last word has not yet been spoken in this debate and I will come back to Fischer’s thesis at the end of this Appendix. Freudenthal showed in particular that one cannot simply attribute the doctrines of the CM to Spinoza, and oppose them to the doctrines of PP as those of Descartes. Both works were dictated to Caesarius, Spinoza’s student, “to whom he was teaching the Cartesian philosophy.”119 As Freudenthal shows, the CM antedate the PP, and the references to the PP in them can be explained through the fact that Spinoza “corrected and added to them” as Meyer informs us in the preface. Thus, Spinoza could not have written the CM with the goal to set his own views apart from those exposed in the PP.120 But even assuming that Fischer’s thesis is mistaken, the question concerning the place of the CM in Spinoza’s work has not been satisfactorily settled. Meyer writes in the preface that in the CM Spinoza deals “with some of the principal and more difficult questions which are disputed in Metaphysics, and had not yet been resolved by Descartes” (G. I, 130). Later he claims that not only in the PP, “but also in the Metaphysical Thoughts our Author has only set out the opinions of Descartes and their demonstrations, insofar as these are found in his writings, or are such as ought to be deduced validly from the foundations he laid. For since he had promised to teach his pupil Descartes’ philosophy, he considered himself obliged [religio ipsi fuit] not to depart a hair’s breadth [latum unguem] from Descartes’ opinion, nor to dictate to him anything that either would not correspond to his doctrines or would be contrary to them. So let no one think that he is teaching here either his own opinions or only those which he approves of. Though he judges that some of the doctrines are true, and admits that he has added some of his own [quaedam de suis addita], nevertheless there are many that he rejects as false, and concerning which he holds a very different opinion. (G. I, 131–32) Apart from being inconsistent (Spinoza did not “depart a hair’s breadth from Descartes’s opinion,” and at the same time “added some of his own” doctrines), it is not clear whether all of what Meyer says in this passage applies equally to the PP and the CM. As far as I can see, scholars agree that the CM are not merely a discussion of metaphysical issues in a Cartesian spirit.121 In a recent discussion of the doctrines of the CM, C. Huenemann characterized them as “a philosophy a young Spinoza might have espoused after rejecting the religion in which he was raised and before reaching his final views.”122 While I agree with the characterization of the CM as a “philosophy a young Spinoza might have espoused,” I do not think that the rejection of his religion was in any form a necessary condition to do so. The PP, with the CM as appendix, were published in 1663. Spinoza, therefore, apparently wrote the KV before the CM.123 From this we can infer that he was certainly not committed to all of the positions presented in the CM, since with regard to a number of doctrinal differences between the two works, the KV presents Spinoza’s doctrines that later recur in the Ethics (e.g., the attribution of extension to God). Why, then, did he bother to write and publish the CM at all? As an exercise in metaphysical problems, which he had already solved differently for himself, the treatise seems a little odd. 118 Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der Neueren Philosophie [Geschichte] (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1898 [4th rev. ed.]), I, 2, p. 291 ff.; for Freudenthal, see note 81. 119 L. Meyer, “Preface” to PP (G. I, 130). 120 See also Curley’s “Editorial Preface” to PP and CM in Collected Works, 221–24. 121 See Freudenthal, “Scholastik,” 102; Curley, Collected Works, 221–22. 122 Charles Huenemann, “The Middle Spinoza,” in Metaphysical Themes, eds. Koistinen and Biro, 210. 123 See above, note 87. MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 213 The solution to this puzzle in my view is to be sought in the different purpose and audience of the KV and the CM. The KV is an esoteric work, written for a circle of friends and not intended for publication: “And as you are also aware of the character of the age in which we live, I would ask you urgently to be very careful about communicating these things to others.” (G. I, 112). The CM, on the other hand, was intended for publication and composed originally for Spinoza’s student Caesarius, whom he characterizes as follows: No one is more troublesome to me, and there is no one with whom I have to be more cautious [cavere curavi]. So I should like to warn you and all your friends not to communicate my views to him until he has reached greater maturity. He is still too childish and unstable, striving more for novelty than for truth. But I hope that in a few years he will correct these childish vices. Indeed, as far as I can judge from his innate ability [ingenio], I am almost certain that he will. So his talents induce me to like him. (Ep. 9 / G. IV, 42) The CM thus were written for a student from whom Spinoza feels he must conceal his true views because he judges him immature, but concerning whom he at the same time is confident that he will develop the required intellectual maturity to deal with them in the future. Spinoza, therefore, may have designed the CM as a kind of bridge, a work leading the intelligent student from more or less familiar and traditionally phrased doctrines to Spinozistic solutions to the problems under discussion. That the content of the CM in part reflects strategic considerations is confirmed by Spinoza’s correspondence. In a letter to Oldenburg he points out that one purpose of publishing the PP and the CM was to pave the way for making his own writings “available to the public without risk of trouble” (Ep. 13 / G. IV, 64). The letters written to Meyer, while Meyer was preparing the publication of the two treatises, reveal Spinoza’s concern to avoid anything that could be perceived as offensive. His aim is “to make this little work welcome to all” (ut hoc opusculum omnibus gratum sit) and to invite “men in a benevolent spirit to take up the study of the true philosophy” (Ep. 15 / G. IV, 73; cf. Ep. 12). It is clear in any case that Spinoza in the CM frequently speaks ad captum vulgi, alluding to and at the same time concealing his true opinions.124 See, for example, his remarks about “Sacred Scripture” (CM II, 8), God’s “extraordinary power” to perform miracles (II, 9) and “human freedom” (II, 11). It is interesting to note in this context that one of Freudenthal’s criticisms of Fischer’s thesis about the Spinozistic character of the CM is that the latter based his conclusions not on what Spinoza openly states, but on the consequences that can be derived from his words.125 If my suggestion with regard to the purpose of the CM is correct, Fischer would have followed Spinoza’s indications in precisely the way intended by the author. Finally, let me note that Fischer did not accept Freudenthal’s critique and responded to it in a long note to the revised edition of his book.126 There is no doubt in my view that Fischer, both in his original account and in his response to Freudenthal, exaggerated the Spinozistic character of the CM. He claims that the Deus sive Natura doctrine is already present in the CM, God being conceived as the “eternal and necessary unity” of “thought and extension,”127 or that the statement that Scripture teaches the same truth as reason foreshadows Spinoza’s arguments in the TTP.128 As far as I can see, neither is the case. Fischer in part seems to have misunderstood Spinoza. Concerning a number of other issues, however, Fischer’s suggestions seem to me essentially correct. I also see no reason to reject his assumption that Spinoza expected “the attentive and penetrating reader” (der aufmerksame und eindringende Leser), who had learned “to count until three” (bis drei zu zählen), to be capable of discerning his opinions even when they had not been explicitly stated.129 124 For this “rule of living,” see the Tractactus de Intellectus Emendatione (G. II, 9). Freudenthal, “Scholastik,” 99. 126 Fischer, Geschichte, n. 1, 306–10. 127 Ibid., 302 and 309, para. 11 of the note. 128 Ibid., 304 and 308, para. 9 of the note. 129 Ibid., 307–8. 125 214 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY APPENDIX 4: 44:2 T H E P R O B L E M O F E I, P R O P . APRIL 2006 31 The structural analogy that I suggested exists between Maimonides’ divine intellect and Spinoza’s God as res cogitans in my view does not contradict E I, Prop. 31, according to which “the actual intellect, whether finite or infinite, like will, desire, love etc. must be referred to natura naturata” (G. II, 71). To start with, the distinction that Spinoza makes in the demonstration between “absolute thinking” and “intellect” as a “certain mode of thinking” is far from clear. It seems to rely on the assumption that intellect, will, desire and love are different modes of thinking. But elsewhere affects such as desire and love are described as ideas and thus should be part of the content of the infinite intellect which comprises the totality of ideas. Gueroult has already clearly stated this problem.130 The solution he suggests depends on a passage in the CM and in my opinion is not convincing, but I cannot examine his argument here in detail. Let me only note that Gueroult’s defense of the validity of the demonstration seems at least in part to be motivated by the fact that Prop. 31 is crucial for his claim that Spinoza’s God as res cogitans is fundamentally different from a God conceived as what he describes as “entendement créateur.” I will discuss this point further below. Moreover, Spinoza’s attribution of intellect, will, desire and love to natura naturata must in my view be seen in the context of his rejection of the doctrine of God’s freedom, expressed as absolute will and as purposeful activity which he subjects to an elaborate critique in E I, Prop. 17, Schol., E I, Prop. 33, Schol. 2, and E I, Appendix. But this doctrine does not correspond to the medieval Aristotelian concept of God as it was adopted by Maimonides. On the contrary, Maimonides illustrates what he takes to be the Aristotelian notion of causal necessity through “the necessary derivation of an intellectum from an intellect [lkçhm lkçwmh bwyj], for the intellect is the agent [l[wp] of the intellectum in respect of its being intellectum” (Guide II, 20, 273). Note that Maimonides contrasts this notion of causal necessity with the notion of will and purpose, whereby “purpose” (hnwwk) refers “to a nonexisting thing the existence of which is possible in the way it was purposed . . . and which can also not exist in this way” (ibid). There are good reasons to assume that Maimonides agreed with Aristotle on the issue of causal necessity versus purpose and will with regard to the nature of God’s activity.131 The doctrine of God acting according to purpose and will thus corresponds to the doctrine criticized by Spinoza. This doctrine, I suggest, and the notion of divine omnipotence that it presupposes (a mistaken notion in Spinoza’s opinion), form the background to E I, Prop. 31. In the TTP, moreover, Spinoza considered a God who is pure intellectual activity and in whom intellect and will are identical, as sufficient for establishing the causal necessity by which God determines the laws of nature. Since the TTP is not a strictly philosophical treatise Spinoza saw no need to go beyond the God of the Aristotelian tradition in order to reject a God who miraculously intervenes in the natural order. He explains the proposition “that nothing can occur against nature, but nature preserves an eternal fixed and immutable order” as follows: [A]ll that God wills or determines involves eternal necessity and truth; for we have demonstrated from the fact that God’s intellect is not distinguished from God’s will [Dei intellectus a Dei voluntate non distinguitur], that we affirm the same thing when we say that God wills something as when we say that God understands that thing. By the same necessity, therefore, by which it follows from the divine nature and perfection that God understands some thing as it is, it follows that God wills that thing as it is. But since nothing is necessarily true except by the divine decree alone, it most clearly follows that the universal laws of nature are merely God’s decrees, which follow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. If anything would occur in nature that contradicted nature’s universal laws, it would also necessarily contradict the decree, intellect and nature of God. (TTP VI, G. III, 82–83)132 130 Gueroult, Spinoza, vol. 1, 359–60. Cf. W. Z. Harvey, “A Third Approach to Maimonides’ Cosmogony-Prophetology Puzzle,” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981), 298. 132 For the identity of God’s intellect and will, see for example TTP IV, G. III, 62. 131 MAIMONIDES AND SPINOZA ON GOD 215 For M. Gueroult on the other hand, E I, Prop. 31 becomes the chief evidence for what he takes to be a fundamental difference between Spinoza’s doctrine of God as res cogitans and the doctrine “de l’entendement créateur,” which he attributes, among others, to Maimonides. See, e.g., his discussion of E I, Prop. 17, Schol. in: Spinoza, vol. 1, 272–86 and of E I, Prop. 30–33, in ibid., 353–74. In light of the fact that he himself drew attention to the weakness of this proposition’s demonstration (see above) this is somewhat surprising. Although I cannot discuss his argument in detail here, I would like to point out two problems. One is that Gueroult’s account of Maimonides’ position is distorted because he failed to distinguish between Maimonides’ negative theology and Maimonides’ doctrine of God as intellectual activity (on this issue, see Appendix 1). The other is that his insistence on what he believes to be the difference between Maimonides and Spinoza forces him to ascribe to Spinoza the (in my view absurd) thesis that God forms an idea of himself with which he has nothing in common. God as res cogitans “produit nécessairement l’intelligence infinie, c’est à dire l idée de Dieu . . . ce par quoi Dieu se connaît.” But since God is the cause of the infinite intellect or idea of himself, the latter has “rien de commun” with God. Thus, according to Gueroult, “Dieu et son entendement” are incommensurable (Spinoza, vol. 1, 279). Since for Spinoza a “true idea must agree [convenire] with its object” (E I, Ax. 6 [G. II, 47]), God would have conceived a false idea of himself. As a tentative conclusion I would suggest that E I, Prop. 31 is part of Spinoza’s argument against a doctrine of divine freedom, will, and omnipotence which is not related to Maimonides’ doctrine of the divine intellect as I have presented it in this paper. This proposition, therefore, should not prevent us from recognizing the structure of the divine intellect in Spinoza’s account of God as res cogitans. Spinoza’s infinite intellect on the other hand, insofar as it is the idea of God’s essence and of all things necessarily following from God’s essence, does not correspond to Maimonides’ divine intellect as a whole but only to its object of intellection.133 133 I wish to thank Stephen Menn for his particularly careful reading of and detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also wish to thank Gad Freudenthal and Martin Ritter for helpful comments. I am grateful for their feedback to the participants and the audience of the panel “Spinoza’s Medieval Sources” at the AJS Conference in 2001, as well as Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and the participants of his colloquium at the Philosophisches Institut, FU Berlin where I presented earlier versions of the paper. Finally, I derived some benefit from the comments of the paper’s two anonymous referees.