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Part One · Chapter Thirty-Three — Why Metaphysics Must Not Be Taught First
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Know that to begin with this science — I mean the divine science — is very harmful, and likewise the explaining of the meanings of the prophetic parables and the calling of attention to the metaphors employed in the rhetorical style with which the books of prophecy are filled. Rather, the young should be reared, and those who fall short confirmed, according to the measure of their apprehension. He whom you see of perfect mind, prepared for this high rank — the rank of demonstrative speculation and the true intellectual inferences — should be raised up step by step until he attains his perfection, whether by one who alerts him or by himself.
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But when one begins with this divine science, there arises not only confusion in beliefs but sheer disabling. And I have no comparison for that save the comparison of one who feeds a suckling infant wheat bread and meat and the drinking of wine: he kills it without doubt — not because these are bad foods, unnatural for man, but because of the weakness of the one taking them to digest them so as to be benefited by them. Likewise these correct opinions were not hidden, and made riddling, and every learned man devised every device to teach them without explicit statement — not because they contain some evil interior, nor because they undermine the foundations of the Law, as the ignorant suppose who imagine they have reached the rank of speculation — but rather they were hidden because of the deficiency of the intellects at the start in receiving them, and were hinted at so that the perfect man might know them; and therefore they are called 'secrets' and 'mysteries of the Torah,' as we shall explain.
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And this is the reason that the Torah 'speaks in the language of men,' as we have explained — because it is offered for the young, women, and all people to begin with and learn, and it is not in their capacity to understand things according to their reality; therefore it was restricted, for them, to acceptance on authority in every correct opinion that is preferred to be believed, and in every conception by which the mind is set straight toward its existence, not toward the reality of its quiddity. When the individual becomes perfect and 'the mysteries of the Torah are transmitted to him' — whether from another or from himself, when some of them alert him to others — he reaches a degree at which he assents to those correct opinions by the true methods of assent: either by demonstration, where demonstration is possible, or by strong arguments, where that is possible. And so he conceives by their realities those matters of which he had had imaginings and likenesses, and understands their quiddity.
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It has been repeated to you several times in our discourse their saying, 'nor [expound] the Account of the Chariot to an individual, unless he be wise and understands of his own knowledge; and then one transmits to him the chapter headings.' Therefore no one should be opened to in this subject save according to his capacity, and on these two conditions: the one, that he be wise — I mean that he has acquired the sciences from which the premises of speculation are taken; and the second, that he be understanding, sagacious, of keen nature, perceiving the meaning at the slightest hint — and that is the meaning of their saying 'understands of his own knowledge.'
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And I shall explain to you the reason for withholding from the multitude instruction by the true methods of speculation, and for taking them by way of conceiving the quiddities of things as they are, and that this is a necessary, indispensable matter — that it cannot be otherwise — in a chapter after this; so I say: