Gersonides Discrepancies

Aryeh Sklar

Understanding the Deviations Between Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord and His Biblical Commentaries

A perusal of Gersonides’ magnum opus, The Wars of the Lord (also called in Hebrew Milhamot Adonai), and his biblical commentaries, yields a surprising conclusion. For all of Gersonides’ talk of clarity and true positions, there are several instances where his two major works differ from each other, creating contradictions. In noting this, different scholars have adopted three main positions, which we shall call the three Ps, or P3 - political/religious, practical, or pedagogical. A fourth possibility will be explored in this paper, another P, which we shall call “parallelism.”

The first such approach is to declare the differences generally irreconcilable, and these were intended, perhaps for political reasons. Julius Guttmann writes in his Philosophy of Judaism that these discrepancies can be explained with a proverbial wave of the hand.

“There [in his commentaries to the Bible], we come across deviations from positions outlined in the Milhamot, but we must not conclude that Gersonides’ true doctrine is expounded in the commentaries; in these, he conscious or unconsciously adapted himself more to the traditional religious viewpoint, but it cannot be doubted that the proper source of his major views is in the Milhamot.”

As noted by Robert Eisen in Gersonides on Providence, Covenant, and the Chosen People, “Guttmann... offers no evidence for his far-reaching claim. Moreover, he is the only scholar, to my knowledge, who holds this view.” Further, we note, Guttmann does not explain what motivation there would be for Gersonides to adapt himself for a more religious viewpoint, and this lends an air of speculation to his opinion.

We could offer some suggestions to what he may mean. One that readily comes to mind is putting Gersonides in Maimonides camp when it comes to contradictions. As in, if we were to align this with one of the categories in Maimonides regarding why a writer might contradict himself, it would be with Maimonides’ seventh cause, and indeed what Maimonides claims he would use in his work, in his introduction to the Guide for the Perplexed. There, he states that a write might conceal some ideas that he is required to, applying to this the religious dictum of not relating metaphysical truths to the uninitiated. So too, Guttmann may mean that Gersonides did not want to reveal truths to the uninitiated religious folk who would misunderstand him. Another possibility is that, as others claim about Maimonides, it was a political problem; his theological solutions are actually heretical theories that place him outside the scope of traditional religious medieval society. Any attempt to relate Gersonides to Maimonides when it comes to these issues is very difficult to accept, as we will proceed to show.

On the other hand, Jacob Staub, in The Creation of the World According To Gersonides, argues that the discrepancies can be attributed to differences in writings forms between a philosophy book and a commentary. The reason why Gersonides allows for seeming contradictions, posits Staub, is because the needs of exegesis cannot accomplish what Gersonides can do in essay form in The Wars. He writes, “[Gersonides’ biblical commentary] is not systematic and has the structural disadvantage of moving from passage to passage of the Biblical text…” Instead, he assumes that these inconsistencies can be resolved through close readings. “Working with the assumption that he was a competent and consistent thinker, [we will] attempt to resolve apparent inconsistencies and errors by referring them to other of his statements and by seeking to construct the common assumptions which underlie all of those statements.” In this, we might place Staub’s Gersonides within the fourth cause of contradiction: a practical necessity of describing the same thing in different ways

This assumption of Gersonides’ unitary integrity can also be found in the works of Seymour Feldman on Gersonides, with a major difference. He writes, in his introduction to his translation of The Wars of the Lord, that Gersonides meant his biblical commentaries for a more general audience, and so philosophical ideas would be presented in a less technical fashion. Instead of aligning the biblical commentaries with “traditional religious viewpoints” and seeing this as a conflict, like Guttmann does, or Staub’s promise of absolute reconciliation between the two works, Feldman describes them as “a popular introduction to or substitute for The Wars,” and “companion pieces to several of the books of The Wars.”  In Feldman’s Gersonides: Judaism Within the Limits of Reason, he states further, “The reader of Gersonides’ biblical commentaries can acquire from them an accurate, if simplified, version of his general philosophical position…” And to be even more outright, Feldman declares, “There is here no dualism between the philosophical author of the Was and the exegete of the biblical commentaries… The mutual cross-referencing… reveals...a unified system.” Thus, we might say that the contradictions or discrepancies found between the books would be described as fitting in with Maimonides’ fifth cause of contradiction: pedagogical necessity to allow the student to first understand the matter in a looser sense the technical truth, before the student can tackle the technical truths.

To summarize these three approaches, we can put it in the following fashion: the discrepancies found in Gersonides’ works are either caused by reasons political/religious (as per Guttmann), practical (as per Staub), or pedagogical (as per Feldman). However, as stated above, there is a fourth P we should like to offer in this essay. We will call it “parallelism,” and it explores the possibility that Gersonides believed in two parallel tracks for his readers when faced with the religious drive and the philosophical search - the importance of belief in conclusions, and the knowledge of the demonstration toward that truth. We are suggesting that Gersonides accepted both as important tracks of religious and philosophical life, and that a fully religious and philosophical student would need to encompass both tracks to be successful.

Thus, in the course of this essay, we will show that the most compelling approach is P4. It is our contention that Gersonides believed in an inherent contradiction and tension between religious life which requires belief in religious conclusions, and philosophical life, which requires knowledge of how one arrives at those conclusions. By maintaining this tension in his writings, he can allow different people who balance the two aspects at different stages to perfect themselves by allowing for the contradictions to remain. In this way, synthesis between the approaches above can be maintained, wherein the contradictions are indeed irreconcilable, but being purposeful to Gersonides, who wanted his various readers to arrive at the same truths in different ways, and allowed for the tension inherent in such a project. Since we are limited to the scope of this paper, we will explore the issue of esotericism. Since this encompasses both The Wars and his Commentary, and especially since it impacts the topic under discussion, it is ripe for exploration with regard to this paper.

It seems from Gersonides’ introduction to The Wars as if the book was written for an exclusively philosophically sophisticated audience. He certainly believed that to be able to fully understand his book, his reader must be well-versed in scientific knowledge. He writes, “Now it is without a doubt essential that the reader of this book be familiar with the mathematical sciences, the natural sciences, and metaphysics.” Already we sense an elitist attitude, a la Maimonides. Further, he explicitly tells the reader that he cares not for those who will object based on inherited opinions from others, but aren’t interested in philosophical argumentation. Regarding them, he writes, “[W]e are not concerned with these people; for it is sufficient for them to believe, not to know. We are concerned with those who are deeply perplexed by these questions…”

What does Gersonides mean by the phrase, “it is sufficient for them to believe, not to know?” At first glance, it is a reference to the need for esotericism when writing and teaching certain topics to those unable to handle the explanations, since those students lack the intellectual background to do so. Towards this can be marshalled an interesting passage from Gersonides, in his introduction to his commentary to Song of Songs:

It [i.e., the Torah] hinted at this end and commanded it-it being cleaving to God-and referred to many of the wonderful speculative matters in some of the narratives and commandments, and in describing the sanctuary and its implements, as if guiding the elite to [the realization that] the rest of the commandments are for this end. However, it said for the multitudes, concerning many of the commandments, that they who observe them will thereby achieve length of days and many [other] fanciful felicities, and the opposite concerning those who do not observe them, even though the Torah commandments are not for this purpose. This is so since the multitudes cannot picture the purpose of the Torah commandments, since a man will not desire to perform some action if he cannot picture some advantage for himself; thus, the Torah guided [the multitudes] to fulfill these commandments first for this purpose, and through performing this worship first not for its own sake they will be guided to doing it afterwards for its own sake.

This would indeed indicate Gersonides belief in certain “necessary truths” meant for the ignorant public, and the Torah’s “true opinion” hidden for the advanced intellectual. Gersonides also goes on to describe other books of the Bible as meant for different audiences, some for the masses, some exclusively for the elite (such as Song of Songs), and some for both on different levels. Again, it would seem that Gersonides supports a kind of esotericism, and sees the Torah as engaging in such tactics. Further, in his commentary to Proverbs 11:13, he calls the person who “gives away” divine secrets “repugnant” because he “causes great harm to his people.” If we only saw these quotes, we should rightly conclude that Gersonides supports an elitist esotericism because of how it may damage those unable to handle the truth. Guttmann, then, would have something to hang his hat on.

But here is the more significant point. Gersonides, by explicitly distinguishing and describing the two messages meant for both audience in his Torah commentary, undoes the esoteric nature of such tactics. If indeed the different approaches are spelled out, the ignorant person and the elite individual are put on the same playing field; the belief of the masses and the knowledge of the intellectual are allowed to occupy the same space. Eisen points out in his discussion of Gersonides’ esotericism that one would expect Gersonides in his exegetical writings to make frequent reference to this distinction between the divergent messages in certain books meant for both the elite and the masses. In point of fact, he scarcely does so. However, one of his rare cases is significant to us. As Eisen summarizes Gersonides’ interpretation of Deuteronomy 6:4’s, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one”:

Gersonides sees in this imperative a double meaning. To the elite, Moses is commanding that one comprehend God's existence and oneness by means of philosophical verification. For the masses, who cannot achieve this kind of philosophical understanding, the commandment is an imperative to believe in those same concepts but without rational justification.

Thus, we again see the distinction between the requirement to believe, meant for the masses on one hand, and the requirement to know, meant for the elite on the other. But again, each type of reader reading that very interpretation would be made aware of the very message meant for the other. If Gersonides wrote his Commentary for both, then by putting them together in the same comment, he has put them on a spectrum. The masses are simply people not yet reaching the knowledge of the elite, but very capable of believing in the conclusions. Put a different way, the student seeking to become elite must first occupy the place of the masses, since at that point he can only believe in truths without being able to demonstrate them. These lives of tension are what contradictions in Gersonides represent.

To this point, we return back to The Wars, where we find statements not at all supporting an esotericism. There, Gersonides provides an altogether different approach as to why he wrote a book of Jewish philosophy. To him, “[I]t is not proper for someone to withhold what he has learned in philosophy from someone else. This would be utterly disgraceful. Indeed, just as this entire universe emanated from God for no particular advantage to Him, so too is it proper for someone who has achieved some perfection to try to impart it to someone else. In this way he is imitating God as best he can.” Thus, to teach what he has learned is a function of imitatio dei. It would seem that this would not allow him, either in The Wars or the Commentary, to deviate from imparting perfection to others. Indeed, he notes his hesitancy to write a book at all, since there are those “who are fools but wise in their own eyes, especially on these profound topics.” Still, he is determined to write, since it his “strong desire to remove the obstacles that block the man of inquiry from attaining the truth…” What we see here is that Gersonides simply does not believe in hiding knowledge. Gersonides is emphasizing here the equality of all students seeking truth, and the requirement of the religious teacher desiring imitatio dei to fulfill that search.

Additionally, Gersonides does not believe there is an issue with interpreting the Torah in a manner contrary to its literal meaning, even though this may raise the ire of some religious readers. He writes, “It is… evident that if reason causes us to affirm doctrines that are incompatible with the literal sense of Scripture, we are not prohibited by the Torah to pronounce the truth on these matters, for reason is not incompatible with the true understanding of the Torah.”  It is in this context that we start to see that no matter where he would write, he would not avoid the philosophical standpoint even if it conflicted with religious doctrine. On the other hand, he seems to contradict this statement with a chapter at the end of the first book of The Wars, entitled, “Some Hints To Our Readers So That They Do Not Abandon What Religion Affirms Because Of What Philosophy Seems To Teach.” He writes there, “If there appears to be a problem concerning which our view differs from the accepted view of religion, philosophy should be abandoned and religion followed.” In the first quote, not only is imparting philosophical knowledge an act of imitatio dei, but, to Gersonides, the very content of that knowledge cannot possibly conflict with the true intended interpretation of the Torah. Yet in the second, there is a tension and one is advocated to follow belief, not philosophy. But in fact, if we view Gersonides as keeping in mind two type of people and two balances, both are true, depending on the person. In such declarations, belief and knowledge converge. There are times that emphasis on belief is appropriate, and times that emphasis on knowledge is appropriate.

It seems to this writer that Gersonides viewed Maimonides as living in this tension, but in certain instances did succeed in rising to the correct philosophical conclusion. The way he describes Maimonides’ errors are exactly on this point. For example, he states, “It seems to us that Maimonides’ position on this question of divine cognition is not implied by any philosophical principles; indeed, reason denies us this view… It seems that theological considerations have forced him to this view.” To Gersonides, Maimonides is not wrong for having considered theological issues. But the fact that reason does not require the believer to believe false doctrines, and Maimonides’ approach emphasizes the theological over the philosophical, allows Gersonides to argue and “right the balance,” so to speak, to the benefit of the religious philosopher. Again, Gersonides writes of Maimonides, “It is evident that the dispute with them [the philosophers] should be philosophical and not from the Torah only.” These criticisms show that Gersonides viewed Maimonides as placing emphasis on Torah conclusions to the detriment of the philosophical push.

To summarize what we have seen at this point, Gersonides seems to support an esotericism that delineates what the elite individual cannot and should not teach to the ignorant masses, yet opens The Wars to all who wish to read it, and also explains passages in his Commentary to the Torah according to both the masses and the elite. In other words, the very contradictions in positions present in Gersonides’ works reaches even to the depths of what he will share to the masses and to the elite! The approaches of Guttmann, Staub, and Feldman, are only small pieces of the bigger picture of Gersonides intentions between the two books. For purposes practical, pedagogical, and religious, Gersonides wrote a different book in the Commentary as he did in The Wars. That said, the very audience is not different. Both books are meant for both the masses and the elite, who are really on the same spectrum, in the same way that Gersonides views the Torah as being written for both audiences.

Towards this, Eisen has relevant explanation of this phenomenon in Gersonides. He suggests that Gersonides believed that the ignorant individual, given the right education, could reach philosophical heights, and Gersonides did not want to deny him this. He finds this most important in Gersonides' commentary on Numbers, in which he explains why the Tetragrammaton was pronounced only within the confines of the Temple. Eisen writes:

Normally, the masses should not have been exposed to the divine name because they might have misconstrued its philosophical meaning. However, the presence of philosophically trained priests safeguarded the uninitiated from any harm. Here we see quite clearly Gersonides' conviction that the masses can be taught philosophical truths, so long as there is proper philosophical guidance available.

This approach does not fully help us resolve the contradictions between both works. Either the Commentary should be a simpler version of The Wars, like Feldman proposes, or each book should contain the same education-building curriculum, like Eisen suggests. We would add to this that it may be true that might be an educational philosophy here of the willingness to teach the masses on their level to help them reach the elite status. However, it would seem that Gersonides is content with most of the masses staying as the masses. We’ve seen that when someone of the masses views the Torah as contradicting philosophic reason, he should support the Torah interpretation. And Gersonides does not combat such an approach to religious life. Stated differently, Gersonides wants the reader to stay in his level. He does not combat Maimonides because of what he views as Maimonides’ loyalty to theological positions, but certainly sees his positions as Torah-based, and not philosophically based. Instead, Gersonides recognizes that Maimonides, and indeed every reader, struggled, as every religious person does, with philosophy, and the need to speak to both sides exists throughout his writings.