In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Before reaching The Guide, Melvyn asked Peter Adamson to outline some of the influences on Maimonides. There was Aristotle, who would have been known to him to some extent thanks to the Greek–Arabic translations that were done in the ninth century. He was also deeply influenced by philosophers writing in Arabic who were influenced by Aristotle, such as Al-Farabi, a tenth-century Platonist and Aristotelian, and Avicenna and his contemporary Averroes. There was also the strong influence on him from the rabbinical tradition.

  PETER ADAMSON: This giant of Jewish philosophy and legal scholarship is also influenced in various ways by Islamic theology. He talks extensively about the schools of speculative theology in Islam, which are known as Kalam, which means ‘word’, or Ilm al-Kalām, ‘science of the word’; he’s actually very critical of them. He doesn’t like the fact that they present this world that is not amenable to rational analysis, because God can, effectively, do whatever he wants. God can turn you into a frog and then turn you back again, there’s nothing impossible about that.

  Like Averroes, Maimonides thought that was a very unsettling kind of doctrine because it limited human ability to find the world intelligible and to explain the world using philosophy.

  It is clear that, from his attempt to write his Commentary on the Mishnah, Maimonides already had his life work planned for him. It was a preparation for distilling all the oral law, as found in the Mishnah in the Talmud, and putting it together into one code, the Mishnah Torah, literally the second law or the second to the written law.

  A draft of Maimonides’ legal code, the Mishnah Torah, in his own hand.

  SARAH STROUMSA: And, as he himself tells us in the introduction to Mishnah Torah, his intention was to write a concise code, not really a vade mecum but something that would be concise enough, which will put together all the traditions, cut through all the accumulated debates and disagreements and diversity of opinions, and present, in Hebrew, in Mishnaic Hebrew, the end result: what is the law regarding every single matter?

  These laws covered such things as the first prayer in the morning to the prayer to be said over the dead, the laws of what would happen when the third temple was built, and ‘laws of sacrifices that were as relevant then as they are today, which means completely irrelevant’. In Jewish tradition, as in Islamic tradition, before getting to a legal decision, rabbis would first go through all the literature, starting from the Bible, then the commentaries, the Mishnah, the Talmud, which would offer various opinions and then perhaps they would come to a decision.

  SARAH STROUMSA: Maimonides says this is a waste of time. You can learn it in order to sharpen your brain, but this is not what you are made to be. As a person, as a Jew, you were made to get to behave correctly, which is what the law is for, and then to think and to sharpen your brain in order to get to intellectual achievements.

  Really Maimonides was looking in two directions, John Haldane thought, one to Judaism and one to philosophy. With regard to Judaism, he shared the idea that this people uniquely possess a revelation from God and they stand in this special relationship to God, and Maimonides is very respectful of that. With regard to Jewish philosophical thought, he is looking for a way of understanding reality, not just the question of what has been given in revelation, but in the broader sense.

  JOHN HALDANE: And there he’s looking to Greek philosophy in one way or another. Some of the great Christian writers, such as Augustine, are commonly influenced by this Neoplatonic tradition, which is a very strong intellectual tradition. Aristotelianism is very naturalistic; Neoplatonism is very speculative.

  This issue about philosophy and the law was really embodied in the Mishnah Torah, Peter Adamson suggested, in a section called ‘The Book of Knowledge’. A lot of this is a résumé of Aristotelian philosophy, in which Maimonides goes through Aristotle’s cosmology, his theory of the four elements, his ethics. He presents the virtues as the golden mean, where courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness.

  PETER ADAMSON: He doesn’t slavishly follow Aristotle by any means. For example, he says that, on some points, you want to adopt the extreme rather than the mean, so a good Jew should always be meek, for example, and you should not just be the right amount meek, but as meek as possible. He’s not a thoroughgoing Aristotelian, but it’s really significant that he sees Aristotelian philosophy as a basis for which you could study Jewish law.

  It was important to distinguish the two tracks that Maimonides tried to present. One was for the nation – the question of how to build a righteous nation – and, for that, the Mishnah Torah presented the code.

  SARAH STROUMSA: There is also the way that the individual can take and, for the individuals, there might be other ways. We can see that he had two ideals for two models for human perfection. One was obviously Moses, who had it all, who had revelation, who had knowledge and who understood as much as a person can understand. And the other model for human perfection was Aristotle.

  An individual could reach the ideal without going through the Mishnah Torah and all the Halakhot or laws, and, for that, you had to be an exceptional individual. Maimonides thought of the Jewish law as the perfect setting for a group of people, as this would prepare as many as possible.

  Maimonides’ masterpiece is thought to be The Guide for the Perplexed, which he wrote c. 1190. While it is a very complex work, John Haldane found it relatively easy to say who the perplexed were. The Guide was not for the person who was simply observing the law and whose conduct was straightforward and who was untroubled.

  JOHN HALDANE: Nor is it for the philosopher who’s thought matters through in their own way. The perplexed is much more like somebody in the present day who’s a well-educated person but feels a tension between what they’re learning from science, what they’re learning from philosophy and what they’re hearing in a church or in a synagogue or in a mosque. They’re perplexed: ‘How can you reconcile the learning of the day with the religious teachings of the day?’

  The perplexed was the honest doubter, Melvyn suggested. What Maimonides was trying to do, John Haldane continued, was to provide a reconciliation and this was going to get Maimonides into trouble with some people. He was going to treat a lot of scripture as allegorical.

  JOHN HALDANE: He’s going to say, ‘Look, you have to understand that this was produced for people at a certain stage in development. The first thing that Moses had to do was get the people to believe in a single God. The imagery of that is talk to God as if God were a lordly master somewhere, in another place. That’s a stage you go through but what you’re proceeding to is the more philosophical understanding.’

  God, Maimonides argued, was beyond any category of language or sense of a thing; God is not a being in that sense, God is being.

  In Sarah Stroumsa’s view, Maimonides’ assumption was that you could not be a true believer if you were an ignoramus.

  SARAH STROUMSA: In order not to be an ignoramus, you have to understand the reality as it is. Which means that you have to know logic in order to think correctly and you have to study the reality, and take it for what it is and not force the truth on the reality – the truth should be what is reflected in reality.

  One of the things that was important to see in The Guide, she said, was that it was not just a reconciliation of the law of Moses with philosophy, it was also the reconciliation of the law of Abraham with philosophy. Maimonides tried to show that, if you studied the reality of the world, you would get away from pagan superstitious beliefs and get to understand that there is a single God, which you cannot really perceive, you can only get closer by understanding what he is not.

  This negative theology, Peter Adamson explained, was the view that it was not possible to say anything about God, and perhaps not think anything about God either. This tradition ran back to the Neoplatonists and was also something the Almohads said, which raised interesting questions about possible influences. Maimonides took this in a new direction, with an unusually rigorous line.

  PETER AD
AMSON: He really thinks you can’t say anything true about God, you cannot say anything positively about God and have it come out true. The reason it would be misleading is that it would put God on a par with us or other created things. So, for example, Sarah and John know a lot about Maimonides, so they’re knowing, but you cannot say that God is knowing, because then you’d be putting God on a par with John and Sarah.

  Peter Adamson explained that Maimonides says therefore that you should interpret everything in scripture about God either just allegorically or symbolically as a concealed negation. If it says that God is knowing, you should take that to mean he does not lack knowledge that we might have. Alternatively, it is what Maimonides calls an attributive action. For example, to say God is providential sounds like a comment about God, but actually it is talking about the world, that it is providentially ordered, and not a statement about God.

  One point that John Haldane wanted to emphasise was the monotheism of Judaism.

  JOHN HALDANE: The whole richness of the Jewish people is that they passed from the phase of polytheism of the people that surrounded them to a belief in a single deity and an all-powerful transcendent deity. Christianity, for example, introduces Trinity; it looks like it’s breaking up the unity of God.

  The question was, John Haldane continued, what were people to do to perfect themselves? If we believe we are made as images of God, we have intellect, we have will, then we are to engage in this imitation of the divine by becoming, to the extent that we can, godlike, transforming the world that God has expressed out of his nature back into mind through our knowledge of it. The world is a creation out of mind and it is a reception into mind, and that idea, John Haldane thought, was a fantastic and enduring contribution, although it left a question about the humble, who were incapable of that, which was a problem.

  The mind is the soul for Maimonides, but only, Sarah Stroumsa said, when he spoke to the multitudes. When he spoke to the initiate, he always distinguished between the soul and the upper part of the soul, which was the intellect.

  SARAH STROUMSA: For him, the whole purpose of human existence is the perfection of the intellect not just the soul. The soul is a complicated entity, it has baser parts and these are the parts that we have to feed and that we have to take care of, but these are not the parts of which we, as human beings, should be proud. The part of the soul that makes us really what we are, humans, is the intellect.

  The Guide was translated into Hebrew around the end of Maimonides’ life, and it proved controversial for some. Peter Adamson mentioned that, while there were those who liked the rationalist approach and wanted to take it further, others thought it had gone too far. In France in 1230, rabbis asked the Dominicans to burn Maimonides’ works because they thought he was being too radical, too Aristotelian.

  When he called his Mishnah Torah ‘second to the law’, Maimonides wanted to canonise his book, Sarah Stroumsa said, and she thought he achieved that.

  SARAH STROUMSA: You can interpret it away, but you cannot discard it. People read the Mishnah Torah as if it really is the second to the law. People, as mentioned in the beginning, come up to Tiberias; if he is buried there, he would turn in his grave. People think of him as the topmost Jewish thinker.

  THE BALTIC CRUSADES

  From the twelfth century, the popes approved a series of crusades on the Baltic lands, principally Prussia and regions now covered by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia. The Teutonic Order led the fight to convert so-called pagans to Christianity and, if the pagans refused, it was no sin to kill them. Over the next 100 years, the Teutonic Knights ran their own state based in Prussia. Many German speakers settled these lands claimed for Christendom, and they built ports on the newly secured Baltic Sea, which, through the Hanseatic League, transformed trade in northern Europe. There was rarely peace during these crusades, and the changes in who lived in the region and how they lived had great significance for the history of Europe.

  A wall mural from a cathedral in Poland depicting leaders of the Teutonic Knights.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Baltic crusades were: Aleks Pluskowski, associate professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Reading; Nora Berend, reader in European history at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge; and Martin Palmer, visiting professor of religion, history and nature at the University of Winchester.

  Martin Palmer began this history with events in the first half of the twelfth century, when the Church in Rome wanted to establish that Europe was now the land of Christ, that the pope was his appointed representative, and that secular and religious authority should reside within the papacy.

  MARTIN PALMER: This was coming out of a period where it was quite dubious whether Christianity would actually make it to the twelfth century. You had the Vikings and the northern invasions of pagan communities that devastated Christianity in England, Scotland, Ireland, across the northern parts of France and Spain, and you also had the Muslim rise coming up from north Africa, the conquest of Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and also the fact that piracy and slave trading meant that the Mediterranean, or the northern part of it, was extremely dangerous – in fact, many cities ceased to function on the coastline.

  This immense trial had lasted for about 300 years and the Church was now establishing itself. The papacy had also brought in the Peace of God, which was an attempt to control the feuding that was going on, by saying that the Church would now determine what was a just war.

  MARTIN PALMER: You also had a sense of a real threat that was coming into this Christendom, because you then had the heresies. You had the Bogomils coming in from eastern Europe, spreading their notion of a sort of Manichean dualistic religion, that this world was essentially evil, that only the spiritual world was true and was godly, which led to the Albigensians, a famous heretical sect in the twelfth century down in the south of France.

  There was also a sudden sense that paganism was dangerous, and there was a fear of the Orthodox Church because there had been a schism between the western and eastern churches in 1054. There was then an incentive to claim the Baltic before the Orthodox Church did. Crusade was called against the Baltic pagans in 1147 as part of the momentum behind the Second Crusade and the preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard argued that there were lands in the Baltic that could be taxed for the papacy. He also broke a rule of the Catholic Church at that time by saying that the pagans could not be left to live in peace.

  There was a series of tribal societies dominating the eastern Baltic who were about to be attacked, and these were subdivided broadly into two linguistic groups, Balts and Finno-Ugric, which meant Estonians and Livs.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: They are relatively small-scale in terms of their territories, except for Lithuania, which has formed the Grand Duchy by this point. But the others are small-scale, extended-kinship groups based on an aristocratic hierarchy, male-dominated and militarised and focused on powerful families, based in strongholds that litter the landscapes of the eastern Baltic.

  There had long been inter-tribal feuding, which the crusaders were to take advantage of, especially in Livonia. There had been Prussian tribal expansion to the south and west at the borders of Pomerania and the kingdom of Poland, with raids across the border on monasteries, on towns like Gdansk, and this caused a lot of tension on the Polish frontier, but, overall, the land was thinly populated.

  The targets of the crusades were to be pagans, people who invested spirituality in the natural environment such as in trees, rocks, prominent boulders, lakes or rivers. These places were the focus of cultic activity with the leaving of offerings, and cemeteries were also important sites connected to ancestor worship. Something that marked out the Balts particularly from the first century to the thirteenth, was a ritual that developed in north-eastern Poland in the region of Masuria associated with a Prussian Galindian group later on.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: Here we have the living burial of horses, developing as a specific ritual within a funerary context. It
is most likely associated with a cult of the sun or some solar symbolism, particularly in terms of how the horses are aligned across the entire region. By the Viking age, we see huge numbers of horses being sacrificed and buried, hundreds and hundreds in some cases.

  Even before the crusades were called, there was warfare in the region. In 1108, a Flemish cleric in the Baltic region wrote a letter asking Germans to come to the aid of this land.

  NORA BEREND: Very specifically, [he] said, ‘Follow the example of your brothers from Gaul, the French, who went to Jerusalem to liberate Jerusalem, and come here to liberate this land.’ So, precrusade, there is justification that is very similar: that the pagans are killing Christians in particularly cruel ways. They talk about disembowelling Christians and very gruesome images in this letter.

  The crusade on the Baltic people might then be a way of helping Christians who were already there. There was also the idea of conversion behind the crusade, and it was fairly novel to tie the cause of a crusade very specifically to converting the local populations. That was the context for the idea of ‘converting or exterminating’ that came in from Bernard of Clairvaux. There was also another idea, borrowed from the Holy Land.

  NORA BEREND: By the very early thirteenth century, Livonia is seen as the land of the Virgin Mary. Bishop Albert of Riga writes to Pope Innocent III asking him not to abandon the land of the mother when he cares for the land of the son. Jerusalem, the Holy Land, is the patrimony of Christ, and Livonia is the patrimony of the Virgin Mary, his mother. [That] is a complete invention.

  There was absolutely no historical background for placing the Virgin Mary in Livonia, and initially there were no holy sites or places of pilgrimage in the Baltic at all.