105 119 147 171 177 197 - Interpretation: A Journal of Political ...

1 4 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 38 / Issue 2
of God as a means to that end. Knowledge of God, however, or the intellectual
assimilation to God, is identified with prophecy (75–76). At this point
in the argument piety is absorbed into prophecy and evaporates entirely.
For Maimonides, piety leads to prophecy only in this sense. Thus prophecy,
understood as divine science or wisdom, is, according to Maimonides, the
way to a genuine proximity to God (77). This wisdom is at the greatest possible
remove from piety as it is characterized by the divine law (78). The sages
of the tradition have expressed their views on the respective merits of wisdom
and lawful piety in no uncertain terms. Such wisdom is a manifestation
of pride or arrogance, and
in praise of modesty they said: What wisdom made into a crown for its
head, modesty made into a heel for its sole, meaning, for its boot. As it
is written, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…,” this is the
proof that fear of the Lord is greater than wisdom and it is the cause
of its existence. And he said, “As a consequence of modesty, fear of the
Lord [will ensue]…,” that is to say that fear of the Lord will be found
in the train of modesty. This being so, modesty is much greater than
wisdom. (Maimonides 1968, 66)
During the course of the first four chapters of the Eight
Chapters Maimonides guides his reader toward a clear distinction between
the tradition of the sages, or the fathers, and the teachings of the wise, or
the philosophers. Having done so he invites his readers to follow Aristotle’s
advice in regard to what is due to each (Ethics 1164a34–1165a35). To act in
accordance with this advice, on the basis of one’s own understanding of the
soundness of this advice, is to begin the “treatment” whose ultimate goal is
the cure of “the eye of the soul.”
Addenda
1. It will prove to be the case that, though certainly the
philosophy of the ancients (Plato and Aristotle) is everywhere in the background
of the treatise, it is above all Alfarabi on whom Maimonides relies
and through whom he reads the ancients. The “whole passages” from the
works of others that Maimonides takes over as his own are almost entirely
derived from Alfarabi’s Selected Aphorisms or Aphorisms of the Statesman.
Maimonides’s Eight Chapters proves, therefore, to constitute a dialogue with
Alfarabi and his Aphorisms. The two authors speak to one another from
across the divide established by the two competing and contradictory laws
which each is compelled to acknowledge—Torah and Koran. Maimonides