How to Think Politically Read online

What is Al-Farabi’s legacy today? If his goal was to create an honoured place for philosophical enquiry within the schools of Islam, he was certainly successful – at least during the medieval period. If his goal was to make philosophy central to Islamic religion and politics, then he was less so. Islam, like Judaism, is fundamentally a religion of law, whose highest authorities have always been jurists. In Islam, jurisprudence, not theology or philosophy, is the queen of the sciences.

  Partly because of Al-Farabi, medieval Islamic political philosophy was Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Why does this matter? Whatever his own ideals, Aristotle’s Politics contains many arguments for democratic rule by the people. Partly because of the absence of an Aristotelian political science in Arabic, these arguments never entered the debates among medieval Islamic philosophers – indeed, arguments for popular government were very rare in the Muslim world until the nineteenth century. Perhaps this helps to explain the challenges that democratic institutions face across the Islamic world today.

  The more things change, the more they remain the same. Medieval Islam was divided between religious fundamentalists and rationalist sceptics just as is today’s Islam. Secular humanists during the twentieth century were convinced that religion would soon fade along with ignorance and poverty. But religion is not going to fade any time soon. Al-Farabi pioneered a middle path between religious fundamentalism and secular humanism. His Islamic humanism paved the way for the later Jewish humanism of Moses Maimonides and the Christian humanism of Thomas Aquinas. Each of these philosophers, in different ways, argued that religion must be reformed in the light of reason and that reason must be infused with the light of religion. Since the Middle Ages, we have experienced a great deal of political violence coming from religious fundamentalists as well as from secular fascists and communists. Al-Farabi, Maimonides and Aquinas all believed that religious humanism offers the best foundation for a moderate and decent politics. History has not yet proven them wrong.

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  Maimonides: The Lawgiver

  As a Jewish rabbi living in Fez, Morocco, in the early 1160s, Moses Maimonides faced a horrible dilemma. The fanatical new Almohad rulers of southern Spain and the north African Maghreb demanded that all Christians and Jews either convert to Islam or die. According to one historian at the time, Maimonides feigned conversion to Islam, reciting Muslim prayers, studying the Qur’an and attending mosque. After reaching the safety of Cairo, where Judaism was tolerated, Rabbi Maimonides wrote a letter of advice to his Jewish brethren still suffering persecution in the Maghreb. Some Jews chose martyrdom rather than deny their faith, but many others converted, sincerely or not, to Islam. Maimonides compassionately argued that martyrdom, though sometimes admirable, was not required. He insisted that one could fulfil the requirements of Islamic law without repudiating one’s Jewish faith. Still, he insisted that even after having ‘converted’ to Islam, Jews were obliged to leave their homes and journey to a land where Judaism was tolerated. God would not forsake them. No one can accuse Maimonides of hypocrisy: his words and deeds were in perfect accord.

  Named after the first great Jewish lawgiver of the Bible, Moses Maimonides is widely revered today as the greatest of Jewish philosophers and jurists. But he aspired to be even more than that: he attempted to revoke and replace the whole Jewish legal tradition with his own code and, by doing so, to become the second Moses. For his presumption, Jewish traditionalists in Europe banned his writings and even burned his books.

  Maimonides was born in 1138 in Cordoba, Spain – then the largest and wealthiest city in Europe as well as the centre of Islamic and Jewish learning. Two centuries of enlightened and tolerant Islamic rule had created a mecca there for scholarly and artistic exchange among Jews, Christians and Muslims. As the son of a famous scholar, Maimonides the boy quickly absorbed Jewish law and Islamic philosophy. But when he was only ten years old his Spanish utopia was destroyed by the new Almohad rulers, who suppressed Christianity and Judaism. His family spent the next 18 years fleeing from city to city within Andalusia and then from country to country across north Africa, before settling in Cairo, where his father, with whom Maimonides had originally studied the Torah, died. After leaving Cordoba, he never again enjoyed a community of intellectual peers. Even after living happily for 30 years in Cairo – where he ultimately served as court physician to the sultan, Saladin – Maimonides still referred to himself as a Spaniard.

  What is surprising is not that there are very few Jewish political philosophers but that there are any. Political philosophy, after all, is a practical study of the art of ruling. Yet, for most of history, Jews have been a stateless people, ruled by foreigners. For this reason, most Jewish thought about politics has been about the internal politics of the Jewish people: how to maintain local communities within gentile polities and how to foster national identity across those polities. Jews may not have had their own political communities, but they did have their own law, courts and authorities.

  Maimonides was in this sense the exemplary Jewish political leader. Soon after arriving in Cairo, he was made the head of the whole Jewish community in Egypt, responsible not only for managing Jewish life but also for maintaining close ties to other Jewish communities, especially in the Levant. True, Maimonides did not exercise full political sovereignty: he never commanded an army or a navy or ruled a state. But he levied taxes, organized relief for the poor, reformed religious liturgies and served at the head of a court of appeal to settle disputes not only within Egypt but across the Jewish Levant. Although he served only a few years in office, Maimonides acquired more political experience than most major philosophers.

  Like Al-Farabi before him and Thomas Aquinas after him, Maimonides attempted to steer a middle path between religious fundamentalism and rational scepticism. He can rightly be viewed as a bridge from the Neoplatonism of the Muslim Al-Farabi to the Neo-Aristotelianism of the Christian Thomas Aquinas. It has been said of Maimonides that his heart was in Jerusalem (the original home of his faith) while his head was in Athens (the original home of philosophy). Indeed, he has been accused of using Aristotle to undermine Judaism and of using Judaism to undermine Aristotle. Scholars still cannot agree where his ultimate loyalty lay. But Maimonides himself saw no deep conflict: he insisted that Judaism was already implicitly Aristotelian and that Aristotle was implicitly Jewish. After all, Aristotle argued that the pinnacle of human excellence is the intellectual love of God – which, says Maimonides, is also the essence of Jewish law.

  Following Augustine and anticipating Aquinas, Maimonides insists that biblical faith inherently seeks rational understanding. Belief in God tends to provoke philosophical questions such as ‘Who is God?’ and, ‘If He is so good and powerful, then why is there so much evil?’ Biblical faith has always engaged in such critical self-reflection. The Hebrew prophets are already would-be philosophers, who subject biblical law and promises to scathing criticism and analysis. The whole tradition of Jewish commentary on biblical law strives to uncover the general moral principles that animate particular biblical statutes. Maimonides, then, denies that Greek philosophy is truly external to the Jewish tradition.

  Faith seeks understanding, and the pinnacle of human understanding, according to Maimonides, is Aristotle. Aristotle insists that God is pure thought, with no visible properties or even emotions. According to Maimonides, so is the biblical God, who condemns all visible depictions of the divine as rank idolatry. But if the biblical God is pure thought, then why does the Bible frequently describe God in human terms, as having a ‘right arm’ and a ‘throne’ and being full of ‘wrath’? According to Maimonides, most people lack the intellectual capacity to grasp invisible divine reality, so they imagine God in human terms. Like Aristotle, Maimonides insists that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. But most people, he says, will not seek virtue or avoid vice unless they fear God’s wrath – even though, says Maimonides, God actually has no emotions. Maimonides was not known for his humour, but he does observe
: ‘if we ascribe wrath to God, we run the risk of making Him angry!’

  Some scholars argue that Maimonides was purely Jewish in his explication of Jewish law but purely Aristotelian in his philosophy. But it is easy to show that Maimonides was Aristotelian in his jurisprudence and Jewish in his philosophy. Aristotle argued that some laws are natural – that is, universally rational – such as ‘honour your parents’ or ‘pay your debts’. Other laws are merely conventional and differ from polity to polity, such as what animals to sacrifice to the gods. Maimonides uses these Aristotelian ideas to analyse Mosaic laws, some of which, he says, are natural or rational (such as the prohibitions on killing and stealing), while others are purely conventional, such as those laws defining what animals to sacrifice and how many. Aristotle claims that we can understand the rational purpose of natural law but not of all conventional laws. Maimonides agrees, insisting that we can discern the rational purpose of many biblical laws, such as the prohibitions against killing and stealing, but that we shall never grasp the rationale of other biblical laws, such as the prohibitions against mixing milk and meat, or linen and wool. In short, we obey natural biblical laws because reason (as well as God) demands it, while we obey conventional biblical laws only because God demands it. Aristotle turns out to be a superb guide to Jewish law, according to Maimonides.

  Just as Maimonides uses Aristotle to revise traditional Judaism, so he also uses Jewish faith to revise Aristotle. According to Aristotle, all true virtues are a mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency. For example, he insists that virtuous self-regard is a mean between the vices of arrogance (excessive self-regard) and humility (insufficient self-regard). But Maimonides insists, based on the Bible, that one cannot be too humble, since any degree of pride is a denial of God. The Bible in a sense ‘teaches’ Aristotle that some virtues are not means but extremes. Most controversially, Maimonides rejects Aristotle’s argument that the world is eternal and insists that reason alone cannot prove whether the world is eternal or was created. In all of these ways, and in many more, he uses the light of biblical faith to revise the arguments of the philosophers, just as he uses philosophy to revise biblical faith.

  Aristotle had distinguished the intellectual perfection of the philosopher from the moral perfection of the statesman. Al-Farabi then insisted that the true prophet realizes both intellectual and moral perfection, making him higher than either the philosopher or the statesman. Moreover, says Al-Farabi, the prophet combines the intellectual perfection of the philosopher with the imaginative perfection of the poet, since the prophet must be able to dress up abstract truths in vivid rhetoric, to reach all kinds of people. Maimonides develops Al-Farabi’s theory of the prophet by also distinguishing intellectual from imaginative perfection. Intellectual perfection alone produces the philosopher; imaginative perfection alone produces the statesman; only the prophet combines the intellectual perfection of the philosopher with the imaginative perfection of the statesman. In other words, the prophet alone is qualified to be a philosopher-king – making the prophetic Moses a true Platonic ruler. Like Al-Farabi, Maimonides argues that a prophet is not someone arbitrarily granted miraculous powers by God but one who makes himself divine by perfecting his intellectual and moral virtue. What would be miraculous is for God to deny such a person divine revelation. Whereas Al-Farabi compares Muhammad to Moses and to Jesus as true prophets, Maimonides insists that Moses alone is the supreme prophet and lawgiver.

  Centuries of commentary on the laws of Moses were compiled into books called the Talmud, which report the rabbinic debates, votes and decisions about how to apply the law to particular cases. Maimonides had the audacity (or arrogance) to attempt to systematize this vast, sprawling mass of legal material into a logically rigorous classification according to general principles. No one before or since has ever attempted comprehensively to systematize the whole of Jewish law. Maimonides’s 14-volume achievement, the Mishnah Torah, can be compared only to the codification of ancient Roman law by the Emperor Justinian or the codification of modern French law by Napoleon – and those feats required the work of dozens of jurists.

  Justinian’s and Napoleon’s codes were formally enacted and intended to revoke and replace all previous legislation, judicial decisions and commentary. Maimonides lacked the political authority to impose a new code of law upon the Jewish community. Thus, his codification presents itself as a mere digest or logical summary of Jewish law. But many Jewish jurists, then and now, suspect that Maimonides intended his new code to revoke and replace the whole of the Talmudic legal tradition – making him the new Moses, the second great Jewish lawgiver. Indeed, the title of his code, Mishnah Torah, means the Repetition of the (Mosaic) Law.

  The political writer Machiavelli contrasted the founders of a political regime with its later reformers, whom he called ‘re-founders’. In American history, we can use this distinction to contrast the ‘founding fathers’ of the American regime with Abraham Lincoln, who radically reformed and ‘re-founded’ the United States upon the principles of racial equality and strong national government. According to Machiavelli, a re-founder reforms a regime by returning it to its original principles, as Lincoln claimed he was doing by returning the United States to the principle that ‘all men are created equal’.

  Similarly, if Moses was the founder of ancient Israel as a political community, then Moses Maimonides aspired to be its re-founder. Just as Moses violently suppressed the idolatry of the Israelites who worshipped the golden calf, so too Maimonides violently condemned the idolatry of worshipping human images of God. The biblical Moses sought to purify the religion of the Israelites with a new code of law, just as Maimonides – the second Moses – did. Although Maimonides was not able to revoke the Talmudic tradition, his code changed for ever the way that Jewish law was to be interpreted and applied. And although Maimonides was not able to purify popular Jewish piety of its biblical imagery, he opened the door for radical philosophical critiques of biblical religion as well as radical biblical critiques of philosophy.

  Today, the state of Israel finds itself deeply divided between secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, between those who seek truth only in science and philosophy and those who seek truth only in biblical law. As a revered Jewish rabbi who was also a great philosopher, Maimonides sought truth by the light of natural reason as well as by the light of revelation. Israel also finds itself in conflict with its Muslim neighbours. As a Jewish thinker who wrote his philosophical works in Arabic, Maimonides built bridges between Jews and Muslims. His work is marked by a respectful dialogue across traditions and faiths that offers hope for even the most intractable of conflicts.

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  Thomas Aquinas: The Harmonizer

  When Thomas Aquinas was 19 years old, in the year 1244, he decided to take holy orders in the recently founded Dominican order of preachers. His fellow students and teachers in Naples were shocked by the sight of a young nobleman assuming the habit of an impoverished friar. Dominic founded his order to preach the Gospel and to combat heresy. For this reason, the Dominicans were at the forefront of intellectual life during the thirteenth century. Aquinas’s mother opposed her son’s chosen vocation and insisted that he assume his duties as the noble lord of a major estate. His brothers, who were knights in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, kidnapped Thomas and imprisoned him in the family castle at Roccasecca for nearly two years in an attempt to force him to change his mind. They even sent young women into his cell to test his chastity. By all accounts, young Thomas’s devotion to his religious vocation was unshakeable, and his family finally relented.

  Aquinas, who was permitted to read philosophy and theology during his house arrest, resumed his formal studies at Paris and Cologne. Later, as an eminent theologian and philosopher, he became a confidant and adviser to King Louis IX of France and to several popes. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argued that the authority of parents over children should be limited: parents, he said,
have no right to veto a grown child’s decision to marry or to join a religious order.

  The Middle Ages are often referred to as the ‘age of authority’, but they are better understood as the age of authorities, since there were several competing sources of influence. The two primary sources of intellectual authority in the thirteenth century had their origins in Athens and in Jerusalem. From ancient Greece, medieval Europe inherited the philosophy and science of Plato and Aristotle; from ancient Israel came the legacy of biblical religion, especially Christianity. Indeed, the works of Aristotle, with extensive Jewish and Islamic commentary, had just arrived in western Europe during the twelfth century. When the young Aquinas went to Cologne to study with the pioneering Aristotelian scientist and philosopher Albert the Great, he embarked upon his lifelong project of attempting to synthesize the science and philosophy of Aristotle with the claims of biblical religion. Indeed, Western civilization is best defined as a compound of Hebraism and Hellenism.

  The competing claims of Athenian philosophy and the faith of Jerusalem were hotly contested in medieval Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Following in the footsteps of Al-Farabi and Maimonides, Aquinas argued that God is the author both of human reason and of revelation. Therefore, what we learn from the ‘book of nature’ by means of science cannot in principle contradict what we learn from the book of Scripture by means of faith. If what science teaches seems to contradict what the Bible teaches, then we must be mistaken about either the claims of science or those of the Bible. Aquinas devoted his whole intellectual life to showing that the truths found in Aristotle were consistent with the truths found in the Bible. His effort to unite Athens and Jerusalem created a third position between secular humanism and religious fundamentalism called ‘Christian humanism’. Thirteenth-century scholasticism was one flowering of Christian humanism, and the Italian Renaissance was another.