The Sechel - Part I

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The Intellect According to the Rambam and Chasidism
Maimonides taught that the highest form of service of God is to know with certainty via rational proofs all that is possible to be known about the divine.(Guide III:51.) People who believe in and practice the Torah merely because of their acceptance of tradition are further away from God. The intellect in itself is what binds man to God. Rambam accepts some of the ideas developed by the Arabic expositors of Aristotle. Firstly that there is one Intellect that brings out from potential to actuality the minds of human beings and also provides the forms for all objects in this world. They named this the active intellect and it is closely identified with God. They also posited the unity of the intellect, the thinking subject and the object of thought. (I 68) Namely, that when one understands a piece of intellect he is in essence becoming one with that intellect, which is entity unto itself. Based on this doctrine we can say that when one thinks of God he is becoming united with Him. This does not however include all types of thinking. The Rambam explains that only a person who arrived to the knowledge of God through rational cognition is considered as knowing God. Someone whose idea of God came to him through the faculty of the imagination is not knowing God rather he knows a fictitious invention of his own heart. (III: 51.)
Although the Rambam is adamant about the rationalistic path it would a mistake to say that the ultimate religious goal is dry logical speculation about God. As David Blumethal pointed out, many passages in the Guide reveal that the rational perception of the Divine is not the end of the road. After one arrived at the truth then he must meditate on the idea and hold it in his mind. As the Rambam writes, “This kind of worship ought to be engaged in after intellectual conception has been achieved............... This love is to be so intense that the awareness of God in the mind and the joy in the heart do not ever cease, even when that person is involved in discussions with other people. Furthermore, the person who practices this type of commmunion for many years will gradually become so overcome with love and pleasure that his soul will leave his body just as it happened to Moses Aaron and Miriam.

Blumenthal names this communion Philosophic Mysticism. He also cites passages from the Guide that show that at this point the mind moves beyond intellectual categories. For example, “Apprehension of him consists in the inability to attain the ultimate apprehension of Him... ‘Silence is praise to You’(Ps. 65:2)...Accordingly, silence is preferable - and limiting oneself to [the modes of] apprehension of the intellects - just as the perfect ones have enjoined and said, ‘commune with with your own heart upon your bed and be still’(Ps.4:5.)” (I:????) Meaning that there is a stage of inner silence and stillness that is more true than that apprehended with cognitive activity.

The mind is what connects people with the Active Intellect, therefore the more one is thinking about divinity the stronger the influence of the Active Intellect and the more he will be protected from the accidents of this world. The Rambam even goes so far as to state that nothing bad can ever befall somebody while his mind is bound to the divine. Any time that the scripture tells of a prophet was harmed in some way, it must be that this prophet’s mind momentarily forgot about God causing the Intellect’s protection to leave him and hence he became susceptible to harm. This doctrine demonstrates how seriously Maimonides took the act of thinking. Thinking is not merely a lonely activity of the brain, it is a act with metaphysical effects. The mind, when its potential becomes realized, binds with the Intellect which consequently protects the thinker.
Acquiring this intellectual, (or supra-intellectual according to Blumanthal,) knowledne of God is the goal of all religious life. All the mitzvot are meant to prepare and enable the person to attain unity with the intellect, and thus be able to survive death. According Maimonides, and in line with Aristotelian thinking, the only part of the person that can possibly survive after death is the intellect, more specifically the ‘acquired intellect’. This is achieved through the communion with the intellects and with God by way of knowing them, and since they are eternal the intellectual part of the soul that joined with them lives on too.

This doctrine has been accepted by later Jewish thinkers like Gersonides, but there is one thinker who explicitly rejected it, that is R. Hasdai Crescas. Crescas argued that the reward in the after life cannot be only for the strictly intellectual part of the personality. The intellect can not feel pleasure it can only understand. This is particularly true if this human intellect loses all of its individual identity and become incorporated into the universal intellect, leaving no person to experience the bliss of immortality. Moreover, says Crescas, immortality is not the exclusive lot of the philosophers rather it is the reward of those who serve God with love even if they have not arrived at the abstract philosophical subtleties.

to be continued.