God of Abraham

385 Pages·1996·25.21 MB·English

by  Lenn Evan Goodman

God of Abraham
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God of Abraham
L. E. Goodman
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1996 by Lenn E. Goodman
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Lenn Evan, 1944—
God of Abraham / L. E. Goodman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508312-1
1. God (Judaism)—History of doctrines. 2. Monotheism.
3. Philosophy, Jewish. I. Title.
BM610.G66 1996
296.3'11—dc20 94-36970
CIP
Printing (last digit): 987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Hear me, ye who pursue justice, ye who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock whence ye were hewn,
To the quarry whence ye were dug—
Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah, who bore you. . . .
Isa. 51:2
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Preface
Late Monday night, November 23, 1654, Blaise Pascal, mathematician, naturalist,
skeptic, and bon vivant, underwent a religious experience that profoundly changed
his life. On a piece of parchment, later found sewn into his clothing, he wrote: "From
about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight. Fire. 'God of Abraham,
God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty, cer-
tainty, heartfelt joy, peace."1 Yet things are never quite so simple. In Jewish tradi-
tion, the God of Abraham is the God of the philosophers and scholars, and Pascal's
dichotomy between simple faith and reasoned inquiry is a false one. Just as the same
mind that felt this fire could devise the barometer and confirm Torricelli's proofs of
the reality of the vacuum, pioneer the calculus of probability, design and build the
adding machine to aid his father's fiscal work, write witty polemics against the Jesuits,
and plan the first horse-drawn omnibus as cheap transportation for the Parisian poor
and a source of funding for charity hospitals, so the God of Abraham is more than
the apparition; and Abraham, the intimate of God, is a figure less of simple faith than
of radical departures. For it was Abraham who was called to leave the land and ways
of his father's house (Gen. 12:1) and seek a new life and new understanding. Thus
the Rabbis see in Abraham not the resigned and docile follower but the founder of a
new and irreplaceable religious vision that would not have arisen without the ques-
tioning of a youthful iconoclast—as the Midrash, with characteristic vividness, pic-
tures him. Philo sees in Abraham the self-taught philosopher, whose insight and
character grew without instruction in a preexisting canon and led him to the good
life and toward the highest goal of understanding.2 And Maimonides, in keeping with
the Rabbinic stories of Abraham's progressive disillusionment with all mere surro-
gates, sees Abraham as the prototype of the natural theologian, whose idea of God is
cemented by the inner affinity of the human mind with God himself.
This is a book of natural or philosophical theology. Its arguments do not presup-
pose the veracity of Scripture or tradition but work from our common human under-
standing toward an apprehension, insofar as this is possible, of truths about God, his
relation to nature in general, and his expectations of humanity in particular. Yet, unlike
many works of philosophy, this book does not employ the dramatic fiction of writ-
ing as though nothing had been said before on its chosen topic. A philosopher can
learn from the tradition that has long been the intellectual nerve and moral sinew of
the people Abraham founded. None of us for the last four thousand years has needed
viii Preface
to feel quite so alone as an Abraham when he made the first faltering steps toward
apprehension and, indeed, communion with the one true God.
I cite the Jewish sources often here, and the sister traditions as well, frequently
alongside the somewhat younger but formidable philosophical literature. But I do
not believe at any point that I have argued from authority. If my themes are those
that give meaning to Jewish commitment, I seek that meaning not by presuming such
commitment and surveying the sources to shape its content—or lay out its options,
cafeteria style—but by exploring the issues themselves. If my arguments are sound,
they may lend credence to some of the ideas of the tradition that has enriched them.
But equally often they contribute to a philosophical appreciation of the canon or an
enlargement of our understanding of the philosophic options. Indeed, the synthesis
of scriptural and Rabbinic themes with the kindred insights of the common human
heritage, whether they seem hostile or sympathetic at first blush, can foster under-
standing as well as critical appropriation. For such cross-checking is a powerful means
of revealing the potentialities of our ideas, the soundness of our reasoning, and the
merit of our assumptions.
Despite its numerous descriptive statements, then, this is not a descriptive book.
It is no more part of my intention to catalog the full array of notions mooted and
images projected in Jewish sources than it is to survey and type the historic philo-
sophical options. Either of those tasks is a worthy one, and both are widely prac-
ticed. But what I have attempted here is the more normative task of defining what
seems reasonable to me and what I hope will seem reasonable to others, discerning,
as the argument unfolds, the congruities and continuities of a corresponding reason-
ableness in the sources that can be clearly traced against their striking differences of
idiom and imagery.
The subject of this book is the nexus between God and values. The idea of the
divine, I will argue, is from the outset a value concept, reflective of our value no-
tions, but for that very reason also capable of informing them. Yet, although I argue
that all ideas of divinity are value notions, I do not think that God is a mere projec-
tive or subjective idea. For I find highly dubious the claim that all values are subjec-
tive. Among other flaws, it is self-refuting, for it sets up a standard of objective truth
or reality against which to disparage value judgments, while expecting us not to notice
that objectivity, reality, and truth are also values.
Some values, I believe, are real, and I find it hard to see how any values can be
imputed—truths upheld, actions undertaken, or even entertained—without assum-
ing that this is so. At least some value judgments must be true if any claims are to be
made out. It is often said that there are no values without a valuer. This I find doubt-
ful, since I think there would plainly be a value in being, even if there were no one to
behold it—not a value to or for anyone but the intrinsic value and beauty of there
being something rather than nothing, the goodness, in whatever kind or degree, of
that something in itself and to itself.
But if that claim seems controversial, I find it much less so to claim that there is
no value to a valuer unless there is something in which that value can inhere, some-
thing of which a valuation may be true or false, or sound or skewed, adequate, or
narrow. Even if one only judges that a thing is bad or worthless, there must be some
other thing, to which or for which it is bad or worthless, and of which, then, value is
Preface ix
predicated, in order for it to provide a standard or be a judge. As Erazim Kohak puts
it, "How can a relation between two intrinsically worthless entities give rise to value?"3
If any value judgments are true, then, I would argue, there must be some real objects
of value about which they are true.
Religion is the human response to extraordinary value, and monotheism is the
religious mode that finds incoherence in the assignment of such value to disparate or
competing beings but seeks the source of all values—moral, aesthetic, even ontic—
in a single locus, IheMakom, the Place, as the Rabbis often called God; the Good, in
Plato's language, in terms of whose goodness all lesser and more specific goods are
predicated, and from whose act all lesser goods derive.
What about evil? Does it have no source? A central insight of the monotheist
tradition is the nullity of evil. This does not mean that evil is not a fact. It means that
is not a power. The religious impulse is misdirected when it singles out for celebra-
tion or emulation anything less than the highest good; and that good will be found
only through the purgation of all evil from our idea of the divine. This means that
many of our fond or frightened notions of sheer might or implacability—even many
of our notions of love, if they are vicious or meretricious—have no place in our idea
of God.
But the purgation of our concept of divinity, although it demands a moral cour-
age not unknown to Abraham and his successors in every generation, is not profoundly
difficult intellectually, since such notions as vicious love or confusions, say, of ex-
ploitation or expropriation with justice—or brutality with discipline, creativity with
arbitrariness, or clarity with aridity—are inherently unstable. They are sustained only
by extraneous interests and readily dissolved by more adequate ideas wherever human
thought is free to explore the inner dynamics and practical impacts of values and ideas.
It is for this reason that I say that the idea of God is self-righting. The natural human
drive for coherence and integration follows the inner dynamic of the very idea of
value toward the purgation of evil from the idea of the divine; and the conception of
God's absolute unity is part of the intellectual advance which the purification of that
idea makes possible.
The heritage of Abraham is deeply suspicious of all lesser absolutes, whether in
the form of a state, a party, a pantheon, or an image of man himself. There are, of
course, pagan virtues. For a pagan ethos prizes many goods, just as it serves many
gods. But it offers no principled way of excluding evil, or violence, or ex parte val-
ues, from sacralization. Thus paganism has long been a negative regulative idea for
monotheists, much as, say, solipsism is in philosophical epistemology, orienting a
critical response and guiding constructive work. The Rabbis liked to say that avoid-
ance of idolatry was tantamount to the entire Torah,4 and Maimonides, accordingly,
plots a trajectory from Abraham's iconoclasm to the full-blown law of Moses:
Abraham our father initiated the critique of these notions, in halting proofs and
preaching, winning people over and drawing them to allegiance by his kindnesses
to them—so that the master of all prophets might receive his prophecy and perfect
the intent. (Guide III 29)
Maimonides draws this line from Abraham to Moses partly to rationalize the con-
quests of the warlike tribes of ancient Israel, whose history was bound up with a