והנה טוב זה יצר הטוב, מאד זה יצר הרע, וכי יצר הרע טוב הוא מאד?! אלמלא יצר הרע לא בנה אדם בית ולא נשא אשה ולא הוליד בנים ובנות.

כבר בארו החכמים (מו"נ ג טו) כי לנמנעות יש טבע קיים, אינם מפעולות פועל. ובארו החוקרים בדעתם איזה דברים מן הנמנעות (שם), ותכלית דעתם שהנמנע הוא לקבץ שני הפכים בנושא אחד, ודבר זה לא יצויר בחכמה והשגה כלל. ולפיכך לא יתואר עליו, כי אין זה מעשה לקבץ הפכים. והנה מי שיאמר שיעשה הקדוש ברוך הוא אדם צדיק ירא חטא, הוא שני הפכים בנושא אחד, כי ענין ירא חטא - שהוא ירא חטא מעצמו, והוא ירא את הקדוש ברוך הוא. שאם ירא מחמת שהקדוש ברוך הוא נותן כך בדעתו ועשה אותו ירא חטא, אין זה יראת שמים, שהרי הוא מוכרח לכך, ואין זה ירא שמים. וכמו שלא יקרא 'חוטא' אם הוא מוכרח ואנוס על החטא, כן אינו ירא שמים כשהוא מוכרח להיות צדיק. ואם כן, לעשות אותו ירא חטא - הוא ב' הפכים בנושא אחד, כי ירא חטא אינו ירא חטא רק שירא מעצמו. ואם עשאו הקדוש ברוך הוא - אינו ירא חטא.

והמאמר הזה במסכת כתובות, ושם אמרו (ל.) גם כן 'הכל בידי שמים חוץ מצינים פחים'. וראוי לדקדק בזה, למה הכל בידי שמים חוץ מאלו שני דברים. דע, כי היראה הוא במתפעל, שהוא מתירא מן אשר מתירא ממנו, ומפני שהוא מתירא ממנו - הוא נבדל ממנו, שהרי כל מי שמתירא - נבדל ממנו, ואין זה דבוק. וזהו היפך האהבה, כי אהבה הוא מתדבק עם האוהב עד שנעשה אחד עם האוהב, והיפך זה המתירא, שהוא נבדל מן אותו שהוא מתירא, וזהו עצם היראה. וכל עוד שמבדיל עצמו ממנו - היראה יותר, וזה ידוע. דרך משל, מי שראה מלך בשר ודם, כל עוד שיתקרב אליו, ויש לו קירוב ושייכות אליו, אין היראה כל כך. ולפיכך היראה היא במקבל היראה, כאשר הוא נבדל ממנו מן אשר הוא מתירא. ולפיכך אי אפשר שיהיה הוא יתברך פועל היראה במקבל היראה, שכל פועל אשר יפעל באחר - הן יפעל בו לרע או לטוב - הרי יש דביקות לפועל במתפעל. והרי אמרנו כי אין היראה רק מה שנבדל בעל היראה מן אשר מתירא ממנו. ואף על גב כי אותו אשר מתירא מראה איך הוא גדול, ויש בידו להרע או להטיב, וראוי להתירא ממנו, מכל מקום עצם היראה, דהיינו שיקבל המקבל יראה ממנו יתברך, אינו ביד השם יתברך, כי היראה הוא מה שהמקבל היראה נבדל מן המתירא. ודבר זה בודאי שני הפכים בנושא אחד, שאם יתן לו דבר - יש כאן התיחסות בין הנותן והמקבל, שאף אם יפעל רע בנמצאים, הנה הוא גם כן מצד אשר פניו אליהם לרעה, מכל מקום יש כאן התיחסות. אבל היראה הוא מצד אשר המקבל היראה זולת אשר ירא ממנו.

לכך אמר גם כן 'הכל בידי שמים חוץ מצינים פחים', וזה מפני כי הצינה אינה פועלת, וכן החום אינו פועל, אבל האדם הוא מתפעל מן החום והקור, ודבר זה אינו ביד הפועל התפעלות של המקבל הפעולה. אבל כאשר היה פועל דבר מה, יהיה מה שיהיה, יאמר בזה שהוא ביד השם יתברך. אבל דבר שאינו פועל, שאין צינה פועל, אבל האדם הוא מתפעל ממנו בלבד. ולפיכך כיון שאין הצינה פועל באדם, אינה ביד השם יתברך, במה שאינה מפעולת פועל. ואלו שני דברים, האחד, דהיינו יראת שמים מקבל המקבל ממנו בעצמו היראה, ואינו בפועל רק במקבל. וצינים ופחים, מקבל האדם על ידי אמצעים, שהם צנים ופחים. ולא תמצא יותר מאלו שני דברים. ודברים אלו דברים ברורים מאד, לא ימאן אותם האדם אלא אם לא יבין דברי חכמה.

And indeed this constitutes the great comfort in this imperfect state of man, that even the Deity cannot do everything. For he cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good. Nor can he make mortals immortal, or recall to life those who are dead; nor can he effect, that he who has once lived shall not have lived, or that he who has enjoyed honours shall not have enjoyed them; nor has he any influence over past events but to cause them to be forgotten. And, if we illustrate the nature of our connexion with God by a less serious argument, he cannot make twice ten not to be twenty, and many other things of this kind. By these considerations the power of Nature is clearly proved, and is shown to be what we call God

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity

It is difficult enough for me to reconcile myself with the idea that every actual evil, every evil that has ever occurred in our world, is compatible with God’s existence. The inherent implausibility of that concept can be measured roughly by the sheer amount of theodicy written by people who were trying to come to grips with it. And that is just when the scope of the problem is restricted to the actual world: now imagine things infinitely worse. What is the worst possible world? Is even that compatible with the goodness of God?

The problem of evil seems to result from two distinguishable functions that the idea of God has. It is an ultimate source of explanations of why things are as they are; it is also the embodiment of the very standard by which many of them are found wanting

למה היה אדם הראשון דומה? לחולה שניכנס הרופא אצלו, הרופא אמר לו דבר פלוני אכול ודבר פלוני לא תאכל, וכיון שעבר על דבריו גרם מיתה לעצמו. ניכנסו קרוביו אצלו אמרו לו תאמר שהרופא עובר עליך מידת הדין. אמר להם חס ושלום, אני הוא שגרמתי מיתה לעצמי, כך היה מצוה אותי ואומר לי דבר פלוני אכול ודבר פלוני לא תאכל, וכיון שעברתי על דבריו גרמתי מיתה לעצמי. כך ניכנסו כל הדורות אצל אדם הראשון, אמרו לו תאמר שהקב״ה עובר עליך מידת הדין, אמר להם חס ושלום אני הוא שגרמתי מיתה לעצמי, כך היה מצוה אותי ואומר לי מכל עץ הגן אכול תאכל ומעץ הדעת טוב ורע לא תאכל ממנו (בראשית ב יז), וכיון שעברתי על דבריו גרמתי מיתה לעצמי, דכתיב כי ביום אכלך ממנו מות תמות (שם).

מי אני האט געשריבן:לגבי די געדאנק פונעם חילוק בין צער בע"ח לצער בני אדם איז דאס וואס דער טעאלאג דר. עדווארד פעסער און דר. קענעט פּירס שרייבן (לגבי משווה זיין די פאזיציע צו עלימינעטיוו מאטעריעליזם):

הקובץ המצורף Feser.jpg לא זמין יותר.

הקובץ המצורף Kenneth Pearce.jpg לא זמין יותר.

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green

it seems to me that if the word "God" is to be of any use, it should be taken to mean an interested God, a creator and lawgiver who has established not only the laws of nature and the universe but also standards of good and evil, some personality that is concerned with our actions, something in short that it is appropriate for us to worship. This is the God that has mattered to men and women throughout history. Scientists and others sometimes use the word "God" to mean something so abstract and unengaged that He is hardly to be distinguished from the laws of nature. Einstein once said that he believed in "Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." But what possible difference does it make to anyone if we use the word "God" in place of "order" or "harmony," except perhaps to avoid the accusation of having no God? Of course, anyone is free to use the word "God" in that way, but it seems to me that it makes the concept of God not so much wrong as unimportant

Metaphorically speaking, existence as the act of overcoming nothingness is never fully successful in its effort and lays down conditions, therefore, on all that would possess it. As a consequence, nothingness is never entirely overcome. Actual existents (being) temporarily overcome nothingness at the cost of future and total annihilation. God overcomes nothingness by incorporating it into the divine existence; God is thereby emptied of actuality and must forever remain possibility. The godhead, so to speak, is a compromise between being and nothingness. The ground of being overcomes nothingness to exist as the enduring possibility of being, but, in this uneasy victory, defect is assimilated into the godhead

The status of God's existence as the enduring possibility of being leads to a further consequence: God cannot exist without the world. God has no meaning without being, being cannot arise without God. God's existence is not absolute; the enduring possibility of being exists as a correlative of being. The world was not created by a God who arbitrarily willed it so; rather the world exists because the divine existence is unconditionally dependent upon it. Of creation ex nihilo, we have no evidence. In experience, God coexists with finites in a process of continuous interaction. In this process, as we are justified in concluding from the regular and orderly character of natural causal sequence, the possibility of future being is derived from present being. So to speak, the existence of God resides in every present moment of being and is realized in every future moment. In this sense: God is the ground of being and being is the ground of God

A further consequence of God's nature as possibility is the relation that obtains between the godhead and humankind. In hylotheism, where the godhead is subject to the conditions exacted by existence, it is the nature of actual entities, by reason of the finity or encompassing boundary that is intrinsic to their existence, to be cut off from the ground of their being. To be actual is to be alone. To be finite is to be severed from the enduring.

As a consequence, the relation between the godhead and humankind is one of muted communication. There exists, accordingly, no infallible revelation or other certain knowledge, nor can there be such knowledge, because humankind, necessarily and substantially separated from the ground of being, has no sure relation to this ground. Equally, the omniperfect providence of theistic absolutism, with its messiahs and eschatologies of everlasting life, has no place in a world where the enduring exists only as possibility and every actual existent is always finite

. . .

Hylotheism provides a theological explanation that meets the test of coherence:

The existence of dysteleological surds. A dysteleological surd is defined as a kind of evil that by any reasonable standard from the human standpoint is inherently and irreducibly evil, containing within itself no principle of development or improvement. An evil that is a dysteleological surd serves in absolutely no sense as an instrumental good; it is not expressible in terms of good (as retribution or otherwise) no matter what operations are performed upon it. The concept of the dysteleological surd is fundamental to theological inquiry. A theology stands or falls depending upon whether it can give a credible account for the occurrence of dysteleological surds. Instances of dysteleological surds can be enumerated without end, but two examples suffice to illustrate the concept: the Holocaust, and a child born with AIDS who lives a life of sickness and dies in infancy. As these examples underscore, it is not the quantity of an evil that determines its nature as a dysteleological surd, but its quality: no purpose other than evil is served

Hylotheism provides this explanation for dysteleological surds. The nature of the possibilities that constitute the godhead is determined ultimately by that which is necessary for the godhead to overcome nothingness and, thereby, exist as the ground of being or actualities. The nature of the actualities that exist is in turn determined by the possibilities of the ground of being from which they are realized. The possibilities required by the godhead to prevail over nothingness are of such a nature that actualities that are dysteleological surds arise from them. As the actuality principle states, the purpose of actual existence is to provide for the existential need of deity, and dysteleological surds as actualities serve this end. Thus, dysteleological surds exemplify the equivalence principle. No matter how dysteleological surds may horrify humans, the worth of an actual existent, dysteleological surd or otherwise, for deity is the same: it provides for the continued existence of the godhead. Figuratively described, prevailing over nothingness exacts from deity the price of dysteleological surds

Existence only through destruction. Existence through destruction is clearly exemplified by the fact that all living beings, other than non-carivorous plants, must kill other living beings in order to exist. It may well be argued that the fact of "existence only through destruction" extends even further to include non-carnivorous plants and inanimate objects. For it has been demonstrated by the natural sciences that non-carnivorous plants and inanimate systems from subatomic particles to galaxies must by incorporation destroy either the structures or the integrity (that is, the independent or pure condition) of other entities in order to exist. What is the reason for a poverty of existence so great that existence only through destruction of other entities is a pervasive characteristic of the universe? Certainly it should be understood as an evil - if not a dysteleological surd - that the universe is constructed this way. Given the principles of hylotheism, existence only through destruction by virtue of the poverty of existence flows inexorably. The quantity of possible existence is limited by the ability of the godhead to prevail over nothingness. Consequently, the quantity of existence available to actualities is also limited with the result that, to exist, one actuality must take existence from another by destroying it

I claim that it is very plausible that retributive justice is essential to God and therefore couldn't be overridden but must be met. The demands of retributive justice belong to God's very essence and would need to be satisfied

As an acknowledged pantheist and in later life a materialist, Strauss proceeded, like the Rationalists before him, from the assumption that miracles are impossible in principle. According to Strauss, this is not a presupposition requiring proof; on the contrary, to affirm that miracles are possible is a presupposition which requires proof. God acts immediately on the universe only as a whole, but not on any particular part; on any particular part he acts only mediately through the causal laws of all other parts of nature. Hence, with regard to the resurrection, God's interposition in the regular course of nature is 'irreconcilable with enlightened ideas of the relation of God to the world.' Thus, any purportedly historical account of miraculous events must be dismissed out of hand; 'indeed no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles

Voltaire exemplified this incredulous attitude. In his Dictionary article on miracles, he asserts that a miracle is, properly speaking, something admirable; hence, 'The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around millions of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles. But according to accepted usage, 'A miracle is the violation of mathematical, divine, immutable, eternal laws; therefore, it is a contradiction in terms. But, it is said, God can suspend these laws if he wishes. But why should he wish so to disfigure this immense machine? It is said, on behalf of mankind. But is it not 'the most absurd of all extravagances to imagine that the infinite Supreme Being would on behalf of three or four hundred emmets on this little atom of mud 'derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe? Voltaire's God, indeed the God of all Deists, was the cosmic architect who engineered and built the machine, but who would not be bothered to interfere in the trivial affairs of man. In this light miracles simply became unbelievable

Spinoza attempts to establish four points: (1) nothing happens contrary to the eternal and unchangeable order of nature; (2) miracles do not suffice to prove God's existence; (3) biblical 'miracles' are natural events; and (4) the Bible often uses metaphorical language concerning natural events so that these appear miraculous. I shall leave (3) and (4) to my colleagues in biblical studies, but the first two contentions merit closer exposition here. (1) Spinoza argues that all that God wills or determines is characterized by eternal necessity and truth. Because there is no difference between God's understanding and will, it is the same to say God knows or wills a thing. Therefore the laws of Nature flow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So should some event occur which is contrary to these laws, that would mean the divine understanding and will are in contradiction with the divine nature. To say God does something contrary to the laws of Nature is to say God does something contrary to his own nature, which is absurd. Therefore, everything that happens flows necessarily from the eternal truth and necessity of the divine nature. What is called a miracle is merely an event that exceeds the limits of human knowledge of natural law. (2) Spinoza maintains, in rationalist tradition, that a proof for the existence of God must be absolutely certain. But if events could occur to overthrow the laws of Nature, then nothing is certain, and we are reduced to scepticism. Miracles are thus counter-productive; the way in which we are certain of God's existence is through the unchangeable order of Nature. By admitting miracles, which break the laws of Nature, warns Spinoza, we create doubts about the existence of God and are led into the arms of atheism! And at any rate, an event contrary to the laws of Nature would not warrant the conclusion to God's existence: the existence of a lesser being with enough power to produce the effect would suffice. Finally, a miracle is simply a work of Nature beyond man's ken. Just because an event cannot be explained by us, with our limited knowledge of Nature's laws, does not mean that God is the cause in any supernatural sense

Hume supplies four reasons, which are a catalogue of typical Deist objections to miracles, why in fact the evidence for miracles is so negligible: (1) No miracle in history is attested by a sufficient number of men of good sense and education, of unimpeachable integrity so as to preclude deceit, of such standing and reputation so that they would have a good deal to lose by lying, and in sufficiently public a manner. (2) People crave the miraculous and will believe absurd stories, as the multitude of false miracles shows. (3) Miracles only occur among barbarous peoples. (4) All religions have their own miracles and therefore cancel each other out in that they support irreconcilable doctrines

Less argues: (1) Because nature is the freely willed order of God, a miracle is just as possible as any event. Therefore, it is just as believable as any event. (2) Testimony to an event cannot be refuted by experiences and observations. Otherwise we would never be justified in believing anything outside our present experience; no new discoveries would be possible. (3) There is no contradiction between experience and Christian miracles. Miracles are different events (contraria) from experience in general, but not contradictory events (contradictoria) to experience in general

It will be remembered that the world view that formed the backdrop to the Deist controversy was a model of the universe as a Newtonian world-machine that bound even the hands of God. So ironclad a view of natural law is, however, untenable. Natural law is today understood essentially as description, not prescription. This does not mean that it cannot serve as a basis for prediction, for it does; but our formulation of a natural law is never so certain as to be beyond reformulation under the force of observed facts. Thus an event cannot be ruled out simply because it does not accord with the regular pattern of events. The advance of modern physics over the Newtonian world-machine is not that natural law does not exist, but that our formulation of it is not absolutely final

Perhaps Pascal was right in maintaining that God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed

The most glaring limitation of the irredeemable culture argument concerns the seemingly gratuitous slaughter of infants and small children. In response, Copan offers his "mercy killing" argument: "What then of the children? Death would be a mercy, as they would be ushered into the presence of God and spared the corrupting influences of a morally decadent culture." In short, Copan would have us believe that the Israelites were saving the Canaanite children from their own fate, rather like the marines in the film Aliens who mercifully kill the pitiful wretches that are incubating alien spawn. But if we have no guidelines to determine when a culture is irredeemable, then we cannot determine when a mercy killing is justified since the latter is dependent on the former. Hence, these two arguments fall together. In addition, the claim that an infant could be so formed by its culture that it would have to be killed is most doubtful

Copan seems to progress from a relatively uncontroversial claim to a very contentious one. We may grant Copan the following:
‏(a) God can rightly allow creatures to die
‏(b) God can rightly allow creatures to be killed
‏(c) God can rightly kill creatures
‏(d) God can rightly direct some creatures to kill other creatures

‏But even granting (a)-(d), it is by no means obvious that we must also accept (e):
‏(e) God can rightly direct a human being to kill a healthy baby

‏Not only is this by no means obvious; it seems to me obviously false

John Barton warns (Ethics and the Old Testament, 1998) that there can be no “simple route” to dealing with Old Testament ethics. Bruce Birch (Let Justice Roll Down, 1991) considers Old Testament ethics as something of a “patchwork quilt.” Any treatment of the Hebrew Bible with regard to ethics, especially as an ethical resource to contemporary communities, must acknowledge the impediment created by the simple fact that these texts are rooted in a cultural context utterly unlike our own, with moral presuppositions and categories that are alien and in some cases repugnant to our modern sensibilities. (See Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 125, where he notes that there is no "clear-cut answer" on how to do biblical ethics)

While the new atheists are correct in pointing out moral flaws and horrendous actions of Old Testament characters, they often imply that "if it's in the Bible, it must be approved by the author." Yet we see that many of Israel's stories involving stubbornness, treachery, and ingratitude are vivid negative role models to be avoided. The OT's "is" does not amount to "ought." (Christopher Hitchens's remarks about "the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel" is quite right!) OT descriptions are not necessarily normative. Moreover, the hero status given by the OT to Abraham, Moses, David is rooted not in their moral perfection but more so in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of God and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries

If there is a robust sense in which the cosmos belongs to God, then God's moral standing from the outset is radically unequal to ours. ... Arguably our rights [to, say, property or privacy or even life] are at least hedged if the ownership of God is taken seriously. Being thus beholden to God would not seem to entitle God to create beings solely to torment them, but if life is indeed a gift from God which no creature deserves . … then certain complaints about the created order may be checked

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it

God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up. See all I've made," said God. "The hills, the sea, the sky, the stars." And I, with some of the mud, had got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. "Nice going God! Nobody but you could have done it God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor!" Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw

Language is an abstraction based on man's capacity, through speech, to manipulate that part of his environment composed of other organisms like himself and to discriminate between stimuli occurring within his environment which take the form of speech. Some people talk to cats and some to trees and some to gods without receiving answers in speech, so communication, the interaction between two organisms utilizing the same speech behavior, is not the only use of speech. It would be inaccurate to suggest that we spend our lives talking to ourselves, however. It would be more correct to state that we talk from ourselves, and that repertoires of speech patterns are shaped and inaintained by environmental consequences following speech behavior

Once they have committed language, two organisms are no longer independent of each other. The instances cited of people talking to cats, trees, and gods are not really exceptions, since the individuals concerned are anthropomorphizing their respective cats, trees, and gods, and playing both social roles

I personally am comfortable removing God from almost everything that takes place in the world... While my view is certainly a break from what is often expressed among the Orthodox, Maimonides... and other thinkers of his time believed that the world generally functions according to the laws of nature and humans act in an autonomous fashion. They did not assume that religiosity meant seeing God's hand in everyday events or that God was continually pulling the strings of this world... With such an approach, theodicy, among other things, is no longer the burning problem it usually is for believers.

...my theology... is probably not the sort of approach that would work well in a communal setting. When a family is grieving... they want to be told... that their loss is part of some higher purpose and that it fits into some larger plan. Being told that bad things happen to good people because, well, sometimes bad things happen to good people, will probably not be of much comfort

Spinoza’s philosophy is founded upon a rejection of the God that informs the Abrahamic religions. His God lacks all the psychological and moral characteristics of a transcendent, providential deity. The Deus of Spinoza’s philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics (1677), is not a kind of person. It has no beliefs, hopes, desires or emotions. Nor is Spinoza’s God a good, wise and just lawgiver who will reward those who obey its commands and punish those who go astray. For Spinoza, God is Nature, and all there is is Nature (his phrase is Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’). Whatever is exists in Nature, and happens with a necessity imposed by the laws of Nature. There is nothing beyond Nature and there are no departures from Nature’s order – miracles and the supernatural are an impossibility

There are no values in Nature. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad, nor does Nature or anything in Nature exist for the sake of some purpose. Whatever is, just is. Early in the Ethics, Spinoza says that ‘all the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end; for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God’

The elimination of a providential God helps to cast doubt on what Spinoza regards as one of the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religions: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgment it will undergo in some world-to-come. If a person believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one’s life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect, fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is, in Spinoza’s terms, a life of ‘bondage’ rather than a life of rational freedom

Spinoza attacked the belief in the afterlife of an immortal soul. For Spinoza, when you’re dead, you’re dead. There might be a part of the human mind that is ‘eternal’. The truths of metaphysics, mathematics, etc, that one acquires during this lifetime and that might now belong to one’s mind will certainly remain once one has passed away – they are, after all, eternal truths – but there is nothing personal about them. The rewards or benefits such knowledge brings are for this world, not some alleged world-to-come

The more one knows about Nature, and especially about oneself as a human being, the more one is able to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to navigate the obstacles to happiness and wellbeing that a person living in Nature necessarily faces. The result of such wisdom is peace of mind: one is less subject to the emotional extremes that ordinarily accompany the gains and losses that life inevitably brings, and one no longer dwells anxiously on what is to come after death. As Spinoza eloquently puts it, ‘the free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’

The violence of war disturbed ancient people, as it does modern people. Often the wars were for the glory of the king and his court, and of little benefit to the average citizen, whose family members might be called up to fight or might be subject to the predations of counter-offensives. Therefore, to justify war, ancient kings and their scribes believed that it was the will of the gods. Biblical Israel was no different, in this regard

. . .

The ancient world waged wars constantly, causing great loss to human and animal life, alongside terrible economic destruction. Thus, the ancients explained wars using religious language, claiming that the god or goddess joined in the war, that the enemy was judged by the deity to be deserving of destruction, or even that the war was commanded by the deity. Such explanations could not change the terrible realities of war, the destruction of cities and the loss of life, but they allowed kings to continue with their constant wars without taking moral responsibility. In the end, it was all up to the gods

By this exegetical license the Sages annulled the plain sense of the law and the narrative, and conformed the Scriptures to their conception of "the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just"

The policy of the Sages serves us as a guide, with this difference: our nullification of the authority of these biblical passages is not by what Y. Heineman called "creative [midrashic] exegesis" but by historical exegesis. We understand these passages as reflecting (1) a war measure customary in the biblical period (see the Mesha inscription), which because of its prevalence did not jar with the sense of justice of the biblical authors; (2) the extreme anxiety of those authors over the survival of biblical religion as an island in a sea of paganism

From a theological viewpoint, the herem may be classed as an instance of the medieval dictum "the Torah speaks in human language" - that is, the divine word accommodates itself to the level of the recipients to whom it is directed. Only whereas the Jewish intellectual tradition applies this dictum to language about God's attributes (to remove the scandal of anthropomorphism), we extend it to moral issues as well. The herem law was the brutal embodiment, coarse and brutal as were those times, of a praiseworthy concern lest biblical religion and morality be undermined by pagan enticements. By late antiquity that embodiment was out of line with the moral sense of the Jewish Sages. But the exegetical remedy they devised (by which Joshua is made to give warning before making war on the Canaanites) does not go far enough for us. For although the Sages introduced a measure of justice into the procedure for the herem, they did not and could not erase the law itself and the story of its fulfillment in the book of Joshua. In the Bible and in Maimonides' code they stand as models of zealous piety, expressions of devotion to God

(A historical critique of the biblical texts indicates that the war-herem as legislated by Deuteronomy and purportedly executed wholesale by Joshua belongs to the realm of theory rather than to historical reality. This may salve our consciences, but only aggravates the problem - that, under no pressure of facts, the biblical authors found compatible with their faith a divine command to commit genocide, whose fulfillment does credit to Joshua and his army!)

Jews, a people massacred systematically on the basis of an ideology that justified genocide, cannot regard as timeless torah an ideological legitimation of mass killing. Our historical experience forbids us to admit such concepts into the treasury of eternal values of our heritage. In the face of our history, to suggest that the war-herem concept remains in any way valid is to merit the contempt of civilized mankind, to become a model of what must be avoided rather than a model of what deserves to be emulated, and to defame Judaism

Our biblical ancestors, out of extreme anxiety over the survival of their faith in its purity, conceived and received the herem as a divine commandment. The Sages, trusting in their sense of justice, partially annulled the Scriptures dealing with it. Jews of today, out of extreme anxiety over the purity of our faith, and in obedience to the lesson of our history, must with the same confidence annul the present authority of that concept in all its forms. When we teach the herem passages in school (and given the pivotal nature of the book of Joshua we cannot avoid teaching them) we must explicitly neutralize them (e.g., by stressing their specific ancient context, their obsolete motivation, and the annulling precedent set by the Sages, along the lines suggested above). It must be made clear to pupils that our general regard for the Bible as a treasury of enduring values does not extend to these passages. The urgency of such a repudiation corresponds to the evidence that the new empowerment of Israel stirs atavistic longings to act out what existed throughout all of Jewish history (and, on the scale depicted in the Bible, in its time as well) only in the imagination

In his book “Biblical Prose Prayer,” from 1983, Professor Greenberg examined every instance of people praying in the Bible and concluded that their prayers were what he called “a vehicle of humility, an expression of un-self-sufficiency”

“Many of those who prayed in the Bible were commoners; you don’t have to be a priest in the Bible to pray,” Professor Sarna said. “Greenberg shows how the biblical concepts influenced the subsequent history of Jewish prayer, that Jews don’t need an intermediary”

Professor Tigay added: “He reasoned that the frequency of spontaneous prayer must have sustained a constant sense of God’s presence and strengthened the egalitarian tendency of Israelite religion, which led to the establishment of the synagogue”

In my view, however, there are crucial differences between Maimonides and Mendelssohn’s perspectives. While it is true that both hold that God cannot be rendered more perfect by human actions, for Mendelssohn this reflects divine perfection, but not indifference as God creates the world in order to promote the perfection and happiness of every individual human being. In contrast, for Maimonides divine perfection involves God being largely indifferent to the fate of individual human beings who in any case are not very important in the cosmic schema

God is present everywhere, or everything is open to his view; for if people believed that some things were hidden from him, they would have doubts about the fairness of his justice in governing the universe, and if they merely weren’t aware that he sees everything, they wouldn’t be aware of the fairness of his justice

Like Maimonides, Spinoza does not regard morality as an apodictic demand of reason. And Spinoza follows Maimonides’ understanding of the different ways that elite philosophers and the masses relate to moral obligation. Philosophers understand the conventional status of morality and so they embrace moral action as most consistent with a life lived according to reason while the masses who are dominated by their passions are tempted to evade moral obligations wherever this will allow them to better indulge their passions. Since teachings such as that God commands the moral law and punishes those who disobey it are necessary for the masses to be good citizens, like Maimonides, Spinoza regards certain minimal theological beliefs as of instrumental value in promoting moral obedience. But since Spinoza rejects Maimonides’ view that the Bible seeks to inculcate knowledge of metaphysical truth, Spinoza experiences no tension regarding whether or not the Bible’s metaphysical teachings are true

This similarity and difference between Spinoza and Maimonides helps explain their different approaches to religious dogma. As we have seen, Maimonides presents thirteen roots of Judaism, which include both true teachings about God as well as beliefs needed to undergird the authority of halakha, which cannot be demonstrated. In contrast, Spinoza presents seven universal dogmas of faith that all societies must teach to ensure that the masses act morally but which have no necessary connection to truth and some of which Spinoza likely regarded as false

The appreciation of beauty, which is a form of aesthetic perfection, depends on our sense perceptions. Characteristic of beauty is the sensation of perfection, which involves perceiving unity in multiplicity. This involves a cooperation between sensation and intellect. Through sensation we perceive an object obscurely as a whole, while our intellect discerns the parts of the object. Given the element of obscurity in the appreciation of beauty, Mendelssohn notes that aesthetic perfection “rests upon limitation, inability.”Since God does not possess sense perceptions and knows truth with absolute clarity, the perception of beauty is unavailable to God — it is a distinctively human perfection. So for Mendelssohn human finitude enables human beings to achieve a unique perfection not shared by God

Mendelssohn argues that without belief in the immortality of the soul, the rational ethical law can become contradictory. He begins his argument by accepting Aristotle’s definition of human beings as Zoon Politikon, that is, political animals. Mendelssohn interprets this to mean that without society a person can achieve neither safety nor perfection as perfection includes both culture and enlightenment, which cannot be achieved in the state of nature. But for a society to be able to protect itself, it must have a moral right to demand that its citizens sacrifice their lives if the state requires this for its continued existence. According to Mendelssohn, without belief in the immortality of the soul one’s life on earth becomes the “highest good.” But if the highest law of morality is to seek perfection and this world is the only place in which perfection can be achieved, one has an “exactly opposite right” to preserve one’s own life and so to refuse any request to lay down one’s life for the state. Indeed, Mendelssohn goes so far as to claim that if one does not believe in the immortality of the soul, then one is within one’s right and perhaps even obligated “to cause the destruction of the entire world if this can help prolong one’s life.” But if one recognizes in this circumstance contradictory moral demands, this calls the rationality of morality into question. Hence moral reason demands that we posit the immortality of the soul

Second, theological beliefs are needed in order to be motivated to act ethically. Mendelssohn notes that while people generally recognize that morality is binding, they often notice the suffering of the righteous and the prospering of the wicked, which can cause them to despair of morality. For it often seems that righteousness is an impediment to prosperity as the wicked person who takes moral shortcuts is able to get ahead faster. As such, benevolence can come to be seen as “a foppery into which we seek to lure one another so that the simpleton will toil while the clever man enjoys himself and has a good laugh at the other’s expense.” While in truth benevolence is a crucial component of perfection and hence is its own reward, in actual fact people often experience benevolence as a sacrifice that demands compensation. Since people do not see this compensation in this world, they require the belief that this injustice is rectified in the next world to be motivated to act ethically

So like Spinoza, Mendelssohn holds that the tenets of natural religion are needed for morality, but his understanding of why this is the case diverges from Spinoza. For Spinoza, the tenets of natural religion are imaginative doctrines, which the ignorant masses who are dominated by their passions need to be taught in order to keep them obedient. Elite philosophers, however, do not require these doctrines to act morally as they recognize moral action as being most in accord with a life of reason. For Mendelssohn, however, the tenets of natural religion are rational doctrines needed by both the masses and the elite to actualize their natural drives for perfection. So while Spinoza’s dogmas of faith are imaginative principles of obedience, Mendelssohn’s tenets of natutral religion are rational principles of freedom

Although Spinoza’s God is quite different from Maimonides’, these [anti-anthropomorphic] arguments are squarely in the Maimonidean tradition: it is inadmissible to attribute to God any human qualities, since God and humans are literally incommensurable. It is therefore likely that it was Maimonides, as well as Maimonides’ disciples — especially Levi ben Gershon [Gersonides] and Moses Narboni — who were Spinoza’s main medieval interlocutors. One might say that Spinoza took over the divine attributes of action from Maimonides and argued that they are all that there is to God. There is no essence outside of them, no transcendence beyond their immanence. God is the universe — and nothing else. One might also say that once the transcendent God became so abstract that he could not be grasped; he vanished from sight, leaving only the universe. Maimonides’ negative theology collapsed on itself with Spinoza, turning into its precise opposite: radical transcendence begat pure immanence

This radical “dehumanizing” of God leads Spinoza to positions that generations of readers have found uncomfortable. In the last part of the Ethics, he writes: “God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain. . . . Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone.” Therefore: “He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.” The intellectual love of God that Spinoza taught must of necessity remain unrequited, for the beloved in question is not like a human lover. One can and must love nature without expecting anything in return

Because nothing can exist outside of the one substance, it is impossible to speak of God as acting out of his free will upon the world. Instead, the very laws of the universe are the actions of God, and as laws, these actions are necessary and determined. Since God is nature, the only laws that he can give are the laws of nature (of course, since Spinoza denied that God had volition, he could not actually “give” anything). Thus, the revelation at Mount Sinai could not have been divine. The difference between natural and biblical laws lies in the necessity of the former and the contingency of the latter: a biblical law can be transgressed, a law of nature cannot. So, for example, God’s commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a true law because had it been, they could not have violated it, any more than that they could have violated the law of gravity

In light of this view of nature, Spinoza was probably the most deterministic of any philosopher since Aristotle, and even more than Aristotle who allowed for accidents or contingencies. Medieval scholars had debated long and hard about God’s powers and whether he could suspend the laws of physics (e.g., cause the sun to stand still), mathematics (make 2 + 2 = 5), or logic (suspend the law of excluded middle, i.e., that a proposition is either true or false). While the doctrine of biblical miracles required that God be able to do the first, the second two were generally regarded as impossible. But even miracles requiring the suspension of the laws of physics seemed to many to be problematic, and there were those, such as Maimonides, who held that God took miracles out of “the realm of the possible” rather than suspended the laws of nature

The desire to explain the biblical miracles by resorting to naturalistic explanations was not, then, an entirely modern idea. But Spinoza took it to a new extreme. Not only are the laws of nature immutable, but everything that happens within nature happens necessarily and without an external cause. Calling an event within nature a miracle is nothing but an admission that one doesn’t understand its immanent cause. Or, as he puts it:

If there were to occur in Nature anything that did not follow from her laws, this would necessarily be opposed to the order which God maintains eternally in Nature through her universal laws. So this would be contrary to Nature and Nature’s laws, and consequently such a belief would cast doubt on everything and would lead to atheism

Far from proving the existence of God, miracles undermine it! The real atheists are those who mistake the Bible’s stories for truth, not the scientists who give them naturalistic explanations. That the Bible revels in such miracles is but one piece of evidence that it was written not by a philosopher but by a prophet who spoke the uneducated language of his audience

Spinoza’s position on the immortality of the soul remained ambiguous. The only explicit statement he made on the afterlife in the Ethics is this: “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal.” A great deal of debate has arisen over this passage, with some claiming that Spinoza did believe in personal immortality, while others see this statement as evidence that after death the mind becomes one again with the mind of God. In the latter case, the mind separated from the body loses its individuality. But if this was Spinoza’s position, it puts him surprisingly in a medieval tradition, especially that associated with Levi ben Gershon, or Gersonides (1288–1344). Gersonides held that the immortality of the soul lies in the congruence between the “acquired intellect” (that is, the knowledge that one’s mind has acquired) and the “active intellect” (the eternal truths of God). Insofar as the contents of one’s mind unite with the active intellect, one becomes immortal, but this is a form of immortality that would appear to be impersonal and, in this sense, similar to Spinoza’s doctrine

Maimon’s ideas about miracles were equally radical. As with Spinoza, the world is thoroughly rational in the sense that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. But this rationality is from the point of view of the infinite understanding, which, as we have now seen, can only be approached but never attained by our limited understanding. The rationality of the world is in the mind of God. For God, the world is like the triangle in our example above: when he thinks it, he simultaneously constructs it. Its reality is in his mind. From this point of view, what we call “matter” is a product of our limited understanding, since it only reflects one possibility, while God’s mind encompasses all possibilities. From God’s vantage point, there is no matter, only ideas. Thus, when we see something that seems to contradict the laws of nature, we are responding to our limited view of the world. Since we can never comprehend all the laws of nature — something only available to God — we can never determine whether a given event ought to be called a miracle. This agnosticism with respect to miracles parallels Maimon’s agnosticism about God’s existence. But its net effect is to make the whole question of miracles moot, a brilliant move in light of the long history of debate on the issue

One of [Einstein’s] most evocative aphorisms was: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” When asked by a colleague what he meant, he replied: “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of a ruse.” If the universe was constructed by a “ruse,” it might have been inaccessible and would therefore appear to function miraculously. Einstein’s God does not use miracles but rather uses laws that, no matter how subtle, we can hope to decipher. Interestingly enough, Maimonides claims the opposite: that God used a “ruse” (ormat ha-shem) to wean the Israelites away from idolatry, but this ruse was a nonmiraculous historical process. Seemingly in agreement about the lawfulness of the world, Maimonides and Einstein described it using opposite language

Hermann Cohen himself recoiled from his own secular theology at the end of his life by suggesting a new idea: a personal God in whom a suffering individual can find solace. But this existentialist God — similar in a way to the God of the Bible — could only be embraced by throwing off nearly a millennium of rationalist philosophy

A book with similar doubts [as Ecclesiastes] about the divine is Job, which radically challenges prophetic theology. The prophets had taught that punishment is the direct consequence of sin. Job’s friends articulate the same argument in an attempt to understand his suffering, but he rejects their explanations. He has committed no sin to justify his downfall. The theology that might be called the hallmark of biblical Judaism now turns out to be a conventional cliché, irrelevant to man’s true predicament. It is Job’s questioning of God that is authentic, not the pious and self-satisfied pontificating of his friends. In the end, of course, God does reveal himself to Job, but his answer is anything but theologically satisfying: “Where were you when I created the world?” Indeed, God’s answer, although delivered in words, is more a demonstration of power than it is an argument

[left]Spinoza's attack on the credibility of the biblical Hebrews is entirely persuasive only to those who share his belief that natural law is inviolable. Believers in the possibility of miracles, on the other hand, will not follow Spinoza's rejection of the testimony of the ancient Israelites simply because they were so credulous as to believe they had witnessed miracles. Nevertheless, Spinoza's critique reminds even the orthodox that their confidence in the literal truth of the biblical narrative ultimately rests on faith alone

This faith is not dead. However, it is, for the most part, absent from the hearts of the leading representatives of modern Jewish thought. They have followed not Maimonides but Spinoza, and have abandoned the idea of a God who has the power to contravene nature. As a result, they have also accepted the validity of Spinoza's attempt to distinguish between the opinions of the ancient Israelites and the events they actually observed. But that is where the similarity ends. They do not share Spinoza's scorn for the Israelites' unsophisticated response to their experiences. In general, they agree with Mordecai Kaplan that "the mere fact that we cannot accept as historical the record of miraculous events in the Bible and elsewhere does not imply that we regard the miracle stories as of no significance in our thinking about God and human life." They differ, however, in their analysis of the religious significance of the miracle stories

Kaplan believes that we need the tradition affirming miracles in order
to realize that we have come upon our present idea of God after considerable groping and searching for the truth. That tradition records the gropings and searchings which went on in the consciousness of our ancestors. Would we want to forget our own childish notions? Are they not essential to our experiencing our personal identity? Likewise, our tradition is indispensable as a means to our experiencing our continuity with our ancestry and our Jewish people. If we study that tradition carefully, we are bound to discover nuances and anticipations of attitudes toward life that are not only tenable but well worth cultivating[/left]

[left]All such opinions spring from the notion commonly entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view. It is accepted as certain, that God himself directs all things to a definite goal (for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he might worship him). I will, therefore, consider this opinion, asking first, why it obtains general credence, and why all men are naturally so prone to adopt it? secondly, I will point out its falsity; and, lastly, I will show how it has given rise to prejudices about good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and the like. However, this is not the place to deduce these misconceptions from the nature of the human mind: it will be sufficient here, if I assume as a starting point, what ought to be universally admitted, namely, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, that all have the desire to seek for what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of such desire. Herefrom it follows, first, that men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. Secondly, that men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek. Thus it comes to pass that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own. Further, as they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in the search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, etc., they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences. Now as they are aware, that they found these conveniences and did not make them, they think they have cause for believing, that some other being has made them for their use. As they look upon things as means, they cannot believe them to be self-created; but, judging from the means which they are accustomed to prepare for themselves, they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the universe endowed with human freedom, who have arranged and adapted everything for human use. They are bound to estimate the nature of such rulers (having no information on the subject) in accordance with their own nature, and therefore they assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of man, in order to bind man to themselves and obtain from him the highest honor. Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc.: so they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth.

I have now sufficiently explained my first point. There is no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments.[/left]

Nevertheless, a number of further observations regarding the relationship of divine omnipotence to the problem of evil bear mention.

While most of the medieval Jewish philosophers stressed divine omnipotence
as a crucial feature of a self-sufficient perfect God, the notion of
divine omnipotence seems either unknown or irrelevant to biblical and to
rabbinic theology. Certainly, biblical and rabbinic sources discussed the
"power" of God, but omnipotence, as it was understood by many of the jewish philosophers, does not seem to have been a characteristic of jewish
thought until the Middle Ages, when it was probably introduced through
Islamic philosophical influence.

The understanding of the divine nature reflected throughout Scripture,
particularly in the classical prophetic writings, and amplified in rabbinic
literature, particularly in texts where God is called Shekhinah (divine Presence), emphasizes divine pathos and not divine omnipotence. In this view, God is a participant in human suffering and a victim of moral evil.

From the assumption that God is not omnipotent, that God is affected by
evil human deeds, flows the claim that God's power in the world is contingent
upon the nature and the quality of human acts. Thus, "anthropodicy"
replaces theodicy as the issue at hand. Rather than trying to justify God's
deeds and evil human deeds that God might prevent, the problem becomes
the justification of human deeds vis-a-vis other people and vis-a-vis God.

A number of rabbinic and kabbalistic texts are oblivious to the problem
of how to reconcile divine omnipotence with the existence of evil. Instead,
they assume that God, not being omnipotent, relies upon human efforts to
increase what power he does have. Human deeds can serve either to
enhance or to reduce divine power in the world. Evil in the world becomes
a reality for human beings to ameliorate by means of sacred deeds, rather
than a concept to be made consistent with the doctrine of divine omnipotence. Those midrashic and kabbalistic sources that describe the divine reliance upon human beings took seriously the statement in Psalms 68:35
"Give strength to God." For example, a midrash reads: "Hence Moses's
plea: 'And now, I pray thee, let the strength of the Lord be enhanced' [Num.
14: 17].... When men do not do His will, then, if one dare say such a thing,
'The Rock that begot thee, thou dost weaken' [Deut. 32: 18].... Whenever
Israel do the Holy One's will, they enhance the power of the Almighty"
(Midrash Pesikta De Rab Kahana, 25: 1, ed. B. Mandelbaum, 1962, 380; tr.
Braude and Kapstein, 1975, 386-87). In the words of the Zohar (Vilna ed.,
2, 65b), "The Holy One, as it were, said: When Israel is worthy below My
power prevails in the universe; but when Israel is found to be unworthy she
weakens My power above."

One must finally conclude that the many attempts at a theodicy betray
the impossibility of formulating a conceptually acceptable solution to the
problem of evil, a solution that would also prove acceptable to the afflicted
and suffering

[left]The resolution of the prima facie tension between God’s justice and apparent disorder in the distribution of flourishing is to be found in the generality of God’s ways – or, more particularly, in the universal and lawlike order that God has established in nature. When we see a virtuous person suffer, it is not because God has directly chosen to inflict punishment on this individual, with an ad hoc intention; his suffering is not the result of what Philo calls “immediate providence” (kata pronoian). Rather, his suffering is a result of the general manner in which nature works. God’s providential ways are not directed toward the well-being of particular individuals but to the overall well-being of the system and the general welfare of creatures. Thus, it may sometimes happen that an operation of nature that is, on the whole, for the best (and was chosen by God for that reason) has consequences that, from the perspective of one individual or another, are not optimal. God looks to the goodness of the whole, not its particular constituents, some of whom may (unjustly, it seems) get swept along by the course of events.

In pestilential diseases, it is necessary that some of those who are not guilty should be involved in the destruction . . . It is inevitable that those who are exposed to a pestilential atmosphere must become diseased just as all persons who are exposed to a storm on board a ship must all be exposed to equal danger.

God does not intend for the virtuous individual to suffer; his suffering is, in this sense, “accidental,” one of “the results and consquences of the operations of nature.” Indeed, it is the person himself who is to blame for his suffering, because it is his responsibility to take care within the course of nature and be on guard against any disasters that may be coming his way. Later Jewish thinkers will demonstrate how the pursuit of virtue does, in fact, afford one some relief and protections from the vicissitudes of nature.[/left]

[left]One possible, even natural way of conceiving the divine modus operandi in providence for Maimonides needs to be ruled out from the start. There are passages in which Maimonides speaks as if God, seeing the virtues and vices of particular human beings, actively and intentionally chooses to reward and punish them as individuals – perhaps in just the way that the multitude think of providence, with God sending a thunder bolt against one person while snatching another person from the jaws of death (e.g., in the lions’ den). Thus, just as Maimonides insists that the people are on board the ship because of the “divine will in accordance with the deserts of those people as determined in His judgments,” so he elsewhere notes how the fate met by many people is “due not to neglect and the withdrawal of providence, but was a punishment for those men because they deserved what befell them.” It is clear that this anthropomorphic way of acting, with God intervening to save or punish a person as if through a miracle, is inconsistent with what Maimonides considers the proper conception of God; such language may be only an element of Maimonides’ exoteric (vs. esoteric) writing, geared for the philosophically unsophisticated reader.

Rather, God’s role in providence is, so to speak, much more passive. God has put a system in place that is there for individual human beings to take advantage of or not, as they choose. It is the virtuous – understood as those who pursue intellectual virtue, and not merely moral virtue – who choose to do so, whereas all others are left without its protection.

Maimonides distinguishes between general providence, which is constituted by the species’ characteristics oriented to its preservation and is (barring unusual circumstances) provided equally to all member of the species, and individual providence, which is particularized to individuals and distributed only according to merits. Both varieties of providence are understood in highly naturalistic and Aristotelian terms. The latter, however, comes into play only in the realm of human agency.

. . .

‏Despite Maimonides’ claim that the suffering of many is “due not to neglect and the withdrawal of providence, but was a punishment for those men because they deserved what befell them,” it seems clear that it is precisely through approach and withdrawal – that is, the human being’s willful approaching to and withdrawing from the overflow – that providence operates. As long as one is actively enjoying the epistemic connection to the divine overflow, one is ipso facto protected; providence is watching over such a person. On the other hand, when one is not attending to God (either because one has never made the effort or because, having achieved the connection, one has temporarily become distracted, perhaps by the pleasures of the senses), one is abandoned to chance and left to one’s own devices. The person who is not experiencing the overflow is not enjoying its benefits. He is at the mercy of nature’s elements and his well-being is subject to whatever may or may not come his way. Providence is no longer watching over him – not because God is actively punishing him, but because through his own actions he has taken himself outside of the care that providence (the overflow) offers.

. . .

There is some ambiguity as to just what is the nature of the protection that, according to Maimonides, divine providence provides. Commentators, from Maimonides’ time onward, have found a tension between two ways of reading his account. On one reading, what the knowledge brought to the human intellect by the divine overflow gives to the righteous person is a way actually to escape the evils around him. The overflow carries information about nature, among other things, just the kind of understanding that allows an individual to successfully navigate his way around the obstacles to his well-being that the world presents. Thus, a person who has perfected his intellect in the proper way will know not to get on the doomed ship (e.g., because he knows a storm is coming). At one point Maimonides says of the intellectually perfected person that “no evil at all will befall him.” If he should find himself in the midst of a pitched battle, then “even if one thousand were killed to your left and ten thousand to your right, no evil at all would befall you.”

On another reading, however, the person who attends to God, while not literally avoiding the evils that naturally come his way – especially the physical evils of the first kind and the moral evils of the second kind, which tend to be due to circumstances well beyond one’s control – will be less troubled by them. His mind is fixated on the true and lasting good, and he becomes immune to the lure of mutable goods and inured to the travails of his body. He has achieved a lasting state of spiritual well-being and happiness, one that is not subject to the vagaries of chance. Maimonides says that this is the condition of Job at the end of the story. In his first speech, as Maimonides reads it, Job adopts the Aristotelian view: God is not watching over individuals and is causing suffering for no good reason at all, “because of his contempt for the human species and abandonment of it.” After God has spoken, however, Job achieves a state of understanding: “He knew God with a certain knowledge, he admitted that true happiness, which is the knowledge of the deity, is guaranteed to all who know Him and that a human being cannot be troubled in it by any of all the misfortunes in question.” It is not that the good person experiences no loss or harm in his life; after all, Job lost practically everything. Rather, consumed with his bond with God and possessing true happiness, he cares less about those losses. He may see evils in his lifetime, but they will not constitute an “affliction” for him. The lesson Maimonides sees here is a Stoic one.

On either reading, providence does not consist in the active and willful intervention of God in human affairs; it is not that God chooses in particular to reward the person who has united himself to the overflow. Rather, somewhat naturalistically, the knowledge acquired by the virtuous person through the overflow affords him an advantage in the world. “The overflow of the divine intellect . . . guides the actions of righteous men, and perfects the knowledge of excellent men with regard to what they know.”

. . .

When the bond with the overflow is broken, the virtuous person is no better off than the wicked person. They are both on their own, abandoned to the world, come what may.

Yet an impediment may prevent from some time [the overflow] reaching the excellent and good man in question, or again it was not obtained at all by such and such imperfect and wicked man, and therefore the chance occurrences that befell them happened.

Full responsibility for the disconnection from the divine overlow lies with the individual, not God: “It is clear that we are the cause of this ‘hiding of the face,’ and we are the agents who produce this separation.”

Similarly, the prosperity of the wicked person is not a true flourishing, because this person is not enjoying the highest good, intellectual perfection. Moreover, the prosperity that has come his way is totally undeserved and does not represent a reward from God for anything he has done. Rather, being unprotected and at the mercy of nature, it so happens that chance has brought some apparently fine things his way. His possession and enjoyment of them is equally subject to fortune and certain to be short-lived.[/left]

[left]See, I ask you, how the matter has turned out in the end! Among so many conveniences in nature they had to find many inconveniences: storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc. These, they maintain, happen because the Gods (whom they judge to be of the same nature as themselves) are angry on account of wrongs done to them by men, or on account of sins committed in their worship. And though their daily experience contradicted this, and though infinitely many examples showed that conveniences and inconveniences happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike, they did not on that account give up their longstanding prejudice. It was easier for them to put this among the other unknown things, whose use they were ignorant of, and so remain in the state of ignorance in which they had been born, than to destroy that whole construction, and think up a new one. So they maintained it as certain that the judgments of the Gods far surpass man’s grasp.[/left]

I invite you to reflect with me on the meaning of the Book of Job and of
Maimonides’ comments on it in the Guide to the Perplexed. This exercise in interpretation offers the pleasures inherent in any attempt to decipher a difficult text, a pleasure doubled here by the fact that we have two difficult texts. Maimonides’ discussion of the Book of Job is at least in some ways as
puzzling as the work it analyzes

For Maimonides,
effort and merit are rewarded and God makes prophets of (virtually
all) those who by themselves have achieved the moral and intellectual capacity for it. That God cannot make anyone a prophet should not be understood as a limiting condition upon the divine. Given that prophecy requires intellectual excellence as a necessary condition for
its existence, an ignoramus cannot, by definition, be a prophet. God
is not, and cannot be, constrained by what is an impossibility

[left]In support of the thesis that God’s knowledge of particulars extends equally to providence, it can be argued that God withholds providence when God knows that I am distracted. On this reading, my suffering or benefiting from providence is the direct result of God’s knowledge of me qua particular. This position is supported by the statement that “outside the mind nothing exists except individuals . . . consequently providence watches only over these individuals” (GP 3.18). I suggest that this reading is more consistent with Maimonides’ own statements pertaining to the extent of divine omniscience. But, of course, we are left with two problems: first of all, God is ultimately responsible for the suffering of the righteous, and secondly, God’s providence, coupled with His omniscience, do affect my ability (yekholet) to board or not board the ship. On this reading, humans do not have free choice in light of God’s knowledge of future contingent events.[/left]

שהדברים אשר ירצם האלוק יעשו בהכרח ואין שם מונע ימנע מהעשות רצונו, אלא שהוא ית' לא ירצה אלא אפשר, ולא כל אפשר - אלא מה שגזרה חכמתו להיות כך.

Maimonides' absolute transcendence concept of [the] deity is made more explicit by drawing the full implications of the above statements and concretizing them with specific examples. Thus denying that God in any way is an object of human knowledge means that there is no being called God that the human person can understand or believe in. The very statement "God exists" is empty of content [1:56] since the human mind has no idea of the entity referred to, and even if it did, would not know what existence in the case of such an entity means. Moreover, the fact that God has no relation to any being other than Himself, and can be affected by no other being means, for example, that when humans pray they do not encounter God, or enter into any other relation with Him, and their prayers produce no effect upon Him. Furthermore, one cannot even say that God is aware of the human race - let alone that He intervenes in human affairs - since knowledge of humans entails entering into an epistemological relation with them. Similarly, God cannot be considered the "father" of human persons, a common liturgical notion, but a relation that Maimonides explicitly denies exists between deity and any of his creatures (1:52). Finally, since God has no emotions He cannot be said to possess a quality such as mercy or compassion for His creatures, emotions commonly attributed to God in the Bible.

Absolute transcendence, one must bear in mind, puts forth a concept of [a] deity who is completely unknowable, who relates to nothing other than Himself, who cannot be said to know of humans or exercise providence over them, who cannot be related to through prophecy, prayer, or other actions, and who cannot be called upon in time of distress.

...

The absolute transcendence concept of deity implies both the belief that God is not aware of humans and that He does not dispense reward and punishment to them. Maimonides states that the former belief disheartens pious persons and the latter belief leads to social disorder (III:19, 17; cf. 11:23). Accordingly, since the absolute transcendence concept has potentially destructive social consequences it must be withheld from the multitude.

כן המציא דבר מגושם לא מחומר כלל הוא מכת האפשר אצלנו ומכת הנמנע אצל הפילוסופים. וכן יאמרו הפילוסופים שהמציא מרובע שאלכסונו כצלעו או זוית מגושמת שיקיפו בה ארבע זוית פשוטות נצבות וכיוצא בהם - כל אלה מכת הנמנע; וקצת מי שיסכול החכמות הלימודיות ולא ידע מאלה הענינים רק המלות לבד לא ציור ענין יחשבם אפשריים.

Maimonides is not saying that God is vindictive, or that God singles out individuals for punishment. In Maimonides’ view, Divine Providence is consequent upon the perfection of human intellect and reflects the causal and ontological grid whereby God orders reality. In this respect it differs from [the fifth view in Ch. 17] which did not emphasize the importance of intellectual perfection.

For it seems a greater miracle if God always governs the world with one and the same fixed and immutable order, than if, on account of human folly, he abrogates the laws which (as only one thoroughly blinded could deny) he himself has most excellently decreed in nature, from sheer freedom.

God created Nature so ineffective and prescribed for her laws and rules so barren that he is often constrained to come once more to her rescue if he wants her to be preserved, and the course of events to be as he desires. This I consider to be utterly divorced from reason.

God’s decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s providence, are in truth nothing but Nature’s order; that is to say, when Scripture tells us that this or that was accomplished by God or by God’s will, nothing more is intended than that it came about by accordance with Nature’s law and order, and not, as the common people believe, that Nature for some period has ceased to act, or that for some time its order has been interrupted.

Spinoza’s naturalistic understanding of divine providence in the Treatise can also accommodate, in some sense, an important feature of the common religious view of providence, namely, that which sees God as managing a system of rewards and punishments. The providential God of the Abrahamic traditions ensures that, at least in the very long run, human virtue and vice receive their just deserts. This is the moral dimension of providence directed at individuals that earlier Jewish philosophers called “special providence,” to distinguish it from the “general providence” that runs through the laws of nature and endows each species with characteristics essential for survival (for example, rationality in human beings or speed in gazelles). What Spinoza cannot allow, however, is that there is a distribution of rewards for virtue carried out by an intelligent moral agent, a kind of person, freely and actively dispensing them from on high.

In the Ethics, Spinoza shows that the virtuous person pursues and acquires true and adequate ideas, a deep rational understanding of Nature and its ways. As we have seen, this intellectual knowledge, unlike information that comes by way of the senses or the imagination, provides insight into the essences of things and especially the ways in which they depend necessarily on their highest causes in Nature. Spinoza insists that this knowledge of God or Nature and how things relate to it is of the greatest benefit to a human being in two ways.

First, he suggests that an understanding of Nature’s essences and laws provides the virtuous individual with the tools needed to navigate life’s obstacle course. The ways of Nature are transparent to the intellectually perfected person. His capacity to manipulate things and avoid dangers is greater than that of the person who is governed by the senses and imagination and thus subject to chance and whatever may happen. The virtuous person has greater control over events; others are more at the mercy of luck. A deep knowledge of things benefits one in this very practical manner.

Second, and more important, true knowledge is, for the virtuous person, the source of an abiding happiness and peace of mind that is resistant to the vicissitudes of fortune. When a person understands Nature, he sees the necessity of all things, and especially the fact that the objects that he values are, in their comings and goings, not under his control. More precisely, he sees, for example, that all bodies and their states and relationships - including the condition of his own body - follow necessarily from the essence of matter (Extension) and the universal laws of physics; and he sees that all ideas, including all the properties of minds, follow necessarily from the essence of Thought and its universal laws.

Such insight can only weaken the power that the irrational passions have over an individual. Herein lie the natural benefits or rewards of virtue. When a person achieves a high level of understanding of Nature and realizes that he cannot control what it brings his way or takes from him, he becomes less anxious over things, less governed by the affects of hope and fear over what may or may not come to pass. No longer obsessed with or despondent over the loss of his possessions, he is less likely to be overwhelmed with emotions at their arrival and passing away. Such a person will regard all things with an even temper and will not be inordinately and irrationally affected in different ways by past, present, or future events. His life will be tranquil and not given to sudden disturbances of the passions. The result is self-control and a calmness of mind.

The more this knowledge that things are necessary is concerned with singular things, which we imagine more distinctly and vividly, the greater is this power of the Mind over the affects, as experience itself also testifies. For we see that Sadness over some good which has perished is lessened as soon as the man who has lost it realizes that this good could not, in any way, have been kept. Similarly, we see that [because we regard infancy as a natural and necessary thing] no one pities infants because of their inability to speak, to walk, or to reason, or because they live so many years, as it were, unconscious of themselves.

What Spinoza calls the “free person” - the virtuous individual who “lives according to the dictate of reason alone” - bears the gifts and losses of fortune with equanimity, does only those things that he believes to be “the most important in life,” refuses to chase after or be anxious about ephemeral goods, and is not overly concerned with death. His understanding of his place in the natural scheme of things brings him happiness and true peace of mind.

Virtue, then, has its rewards. The natural consequence of the striving for and acquisition of understanding and knowledge is well-being. Our freedom, our physical and psychological flourishing are directly dependent on our knowledge of Nature, including our understanding both of the necessity of all things and of our place in the world. Virtue is a source of an abiding happiness that is free from chance. Such is the true but entirely natural benefit of virtue. This, if anything, constitutes a special kind providence within Spinoza’s system, one that is available only to rational beings.

אני אומר באמונה שלימה
שהתפלות קדמו לאלקים.
התפלות יצרו את האלקים
האלקים יצר את האדם
והאדם יוצר תפלות
שיוצרות את אלקים שיוצר את האדם.

Leaman has set up a strawman as the Jewish philosophers' God, wrongly taking them to believe in a being of absolute omniscience and omnipotence (as well as unqualified benevolence, which they did accept).

Levi Ben Gerson’s solution [over what constitutes God’s Knowledge and its extent], whatever we may think of its scientific or philosophic value, is surely very bold as theology, we might almost say it’s a theological monstrosity.

וראוי שתדע בעניין הנחש שהוא מחוייב שנודה שהוא משל, לפי שהוא מגונה מאד שנאמר שיהיה הב״ח ההוא מתחלת הבריאה מדבר ואח״כ הושם לו טבע שני ישוב בזה המדרגה הפחותה אשר הוא בה וזה מבואר מאד עד שהאריכות בביאורו מותר. ואולם בענין חוה, אין בכאן סבה תחייב שיהיה לפי המשל כמו שאתה רואה מדברינו ר״ל שכבר נמשך לנו באור זה הספור עם הניחנו חוה הנקבה, שנבראת עם האדם. וכבר יתבאר ג״כ שאינה לפי המשל ממה שהמשיכה התורה לזה הסיפור שכבר הולידה חוה קין והבל ושת שאי אפשר שהיה משל. ואולם הרב המורה נראה שהבין כי ענין חוה, הוא ג״כ משל לכח אחד מכחות הנפש האנושי ולא נתבאר מדבריו אי זה כח הוא זה הכח שישלם בו הסתת הנחש וס״מ שהוא רכוב עליו. והנה אחר התבוננות היטב יתבאר למי שידע הנפש וכוחותיה שזה בלתי אפשר שימשך על זה האופן כשיונח העניין לפי מה שבא בזה הספור. כי לא ימצא שום כח יאות בו מה שנאמר בכאן בחוה עם הנחת כח יאות ממה שנאמר בכאן הנחש. וכבר טעו מזה קצת גדולי החכמים המתאחדים ועשו ציורים בענין קין והבל ושת והפסידו בזה כונת התורה. וראוי שתדע שאין ראוי שיעשה ציור בדברי תורה אם לא במקומות אשר יחוייב שיהיו משל. שאם היה זה השעור מסור ביד האנשים הנה תפול התורה בכללה ולא יגיע ממנה התועלת המכוון ממנה, וזה מבואר מאד עד שהאריכות בביאורו מותר.

Like his intellectual Jewish teachers, Maimonides and Gersonides, Spinoza affirms a God who is perfectly good and powerful and denies the reality of evil. However, his interpretation of these three claims stands in intentional and explicit opposition to their religious Jewish solutions of the problem of theodicy. What he objects to is their judgment that the world is good. Rather, Spinoza constructs a model for understanding where reality is morally neutral. The issue is not theodicy. It is science. And the source of the disagreement is how Spinoza interpreted what it meant for the Creator of the Universe to be perfect. The tradition of classical Jewish philosophy had argued that the universe and everything in it are perfectly what they are, which entails that they are not absolutely perfect. Spinoza understood this judgment to mean that everything is the way it is because it must be that way. An absolutely perfect God must always do what is absolutely perfect, and since there is nothing else that can influence or modify what an absolutely perfect agent does, this universe is a necessary one, i.e., the only one that is logically and causally possible. Hence, there are no genuine options in the universe, and, without options, it makes no sense to say that what happens in the universe happens for a purpose. God does what He does not to bring something about; God does what He does simply because He is God. This position also is a solution to the problem of theodicy. Like Maimonides Spinoza claims that what appears to be evil only appears so because of the inadequacy of human knowledge. However, Spinoza's solution - viz., to posit a non-moral universe - stands outside the dominant tradition of Jewish religious thought, which, as we shall see, makes ethics primary over ontology.

מי אני האט געשריבן:מ׳האט מיר מעורר געווען איבער א טעות וואס מ'קען האבן אין וואס איך שרייב אינעם ארטיקל:

און דערפאר "קען ער נישט" מאכן דעם מענטש אז ער זאל זיין ממש א מענטש און ממש א מלאך באותו זמן [שני הפכים בנושא אחד וברגע אחד].

ווייל דער רמב"ם שרייבט דאך אין ח"ג פל"ב:

לא אמרתי זה מפני שאני מאמין ששינוי טבע כל אחד מבני אדם קשה עליו ית' אך הוא אפשר ונופל תחת היכולת אלא שהוא לא רצה כלל לעשות זה ולא ירצהו לעולם כפי הפינות התוריות; ואילו היה מרצונו לשנות טבע כל איש מבני אדם למה שירצהו ית' מן האיש ההוא היה בטל שליחות הנביאים ונתינת התורה כולה

והיינו אז ער קען דאך יא?

וויל איך מברר זיין אז וואס איך האב געמיינט איז נישט אז ער קען נישט "פארוואנדלען" דעם מענטש אין צו א מלאך, וואס פון דעם רעדט דער רמב"ם דארט. וועלכע קיבוץ שני הפכים איז דא דערין? נאר אז ער קען נישט מאכן אז ער זאל זיין סיי א מענטש מיט אלע דעם מענטשנ'ס אומפערפעקשאנס, און סיי א מלאך מיט אלע דעם מלאך'ס פערפעקשאנס, במקום אחד. דאס איז בבירור א קיבוץ בין שני הפכים.

מי אני האט געשריבן:דער שם טוב האלט אויך אין פי״ח אז דעת אריסטו בהשגחה איז באמת דעת הרמב״ם ע״ש.

מי אני האט געשריבן:ואגב, פון עונש קין איז נישט קיין ראיה, ווייל די דורות זיינע זענען געווען רשעים בעצם אליין, און טאקע נעמה בתו של למך מבני קין, וואס איז נישט אזוי געווען, האט איבערגעלעבט, וכרש״י בבראשית ד כב עפ״י המדרש.

וספר מה שאמר למך לנשיו להורות על מיעוט פחדו מעונש השם ושהוא לא היה משתדל לשוב אל השם יתעלה בכל כוחו כדי שיסור חרון אף השם מעליו כי בלי ספק אם היה עושה כך היה נמלט מהרע הנגזר לבא עליו כי חנון ה׳ ונחם על הרעה.

Spinoza’s account of human nature is accompanied by a psychology that reflects the various ways in which human beings are affected by the world around them and that investigates the striving to persevere in existence in the face of these external forces that characterizes human beings’ (and any being’s) essence. Human mental life is made up of various passions and actions. The former are our affective responses to the ways in which external objects causally impinge on us; the latter derive from our own inner resources. Both represent ways in which our powers are increased or decreased by the causal nexuses within which we exist. The picture of human life that emerges from Spinoza’s catalogue of the passions is a tormented one in which a person is emotionally tossed about and at the mercy of things and forces beyond his or her control.
The remedy for such a life mired in the passions lies in virtue, that is, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. No human being can ever be entirely free from the passions, since all beings are necessarily a part of Nature and always subject to external influences. Human beings can, however, achieve some degree of autonomy and freedom from their turmoil to the extent that they are active and guided by reason and thereby acquire an understanding of the way in which everything in Nature must happen as it does, including acts of human volition. In this way, the power of the passive affects is at least diminished.

Human power is very limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. So we do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use. Nevertheless, we shall bear calmly those things which happen to us contrary to what the principle of our advantage demands, if we are conscious that we have done our duty, that the power we have could not have extended itself to the point where we could have avoided those things, and that we are a part of the whole of nature, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by understanding, i.e. the better part of us, will be entirely satisfied with this, and will strive to persevere in that satisfaction. [Ethics IV]

The ideal of the free, rational individual presented in the Ethics provides a model for a virtuous human life liberated from various illusions and seeking what is truly in its best interest (as opposed to those things that merely cause transitory pleasure).

The highest form of knowledge, “as difficult as it is rare,” is a thorough understanding of Nature and its ways. This includes an intellectual intuition of how the essence of anything (especially of oneself and all of one’s mental and bodily states) follows from Nature’s most universal elements - or, since God and Nature are one and the same, how the essence of anything relates to God. Spinoza concludes the Ethics with an examination of the ultimate benefits of such deep insight. The true rewards of virtue, he insists, lie not in some otherworldly recompense for an immortal soul. There is no such thing as personal immortality; it is a fiction used by manipulative ecclesiastics to keep us in a perpetual condition of hope and fear and thus control us. Rather, “blessedness” and “salvation” consist in the well-being and peace of mind that understanding brings us in this life. The virtuous person sees the necessity of all things, and is therefore less troubled by what may or may not come his way. He regards the vicissitudes of fortune with equanimity, and his happiness is not subject to circumstances beyond his control.