II:1 · One Creator — Emunot v'Deot in Judeo-Arabic

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Maamar II: The One Who Brings Things Into Being Is One.

Preamble. The Second Maamar: That the Creator of Things Is One, Blessed and Exalted.

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I open this maamar by saying: the starting-points of the sciences are coarse, and their ends are subtle;

and that they arrive at a final object of knowledge beyond which there is no further object of knowledge;

and that a person ascends in his knowledge from one level to another;

so that every level he arrives at is necessarily more subtle and refined than the one before it,

until the final level becomes the most subtle and refined of all objects of knowledge;

and when a person arrives at it in that refined state, that is precisely what he sought;

so he may not try to make it coarse;

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for if he attempts this, he is only attempting to return to the first object of knowledge from which he started, or to the second with which he proceeded;

and even though he has gone through the ranks of knowledge and passed them by — whenever he sets about coarsening the final object of knowledge, he is setting about annulling his inquiry;

indeed, he is annulling his very knowledge and reverting to ignorance of it.

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I must explain whence I derived these six propositions, and then follow that with the reason that led me to place them at the opening of this maamar.

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First I explain that the starting-points of the sciences are coarse, and I say: because they begin from the perceptible,

and everything that sense falls upon is the common thing in which people do not differ from one another — no one is superior to another in it — nor indeed are they distinguished by it over

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...the beasts — for we find that they perceive through sight and hearing just as humans do; and a thing in which humans and beasts are equal cannot be anything more coarse.

When a person stops at this perceptible thing, he knows it is a body; then, by the subtlety of his intellect, he sees that it has accidents —

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for he sees it turn black at one time and white at another, warm at one time and cold at another.

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Then he refines his inquiry further and sees in it a quality that is a quantity — namely, when he grasps the meanings of length, width, and depth.

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Then he refines further still and sees in it a quality that accompanies its position — namely, place — and that is its juxtaposition to other things.

Then, continuing with the refinement of his inquiry, he arrives at the fact that it has a quality that accompanies it — namely, time — and that is its persistence.

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Along this path he never ceases to push further and reach higher, carried along by his thinking and discernment, until he arrives at the furthest extent of what he can grasp,

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and that final thing will be the most subtle of all that has accrued to him, just as the first was the most coarse of all that had accrued to him.

It is from this that I concluded that the last of the objects of knowledge is the most subtle.

I said that a person ascends from one object of knowledge to another until he reaches an object of knowledge beyond which there is no further — and this for three reasons:

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First: since the human being is a bounded, finite body, all his faculties must be finite — and the faculty of knowledge is one of them;

and as I said concerning the heavens, the duration of their persistence must be finite.

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Second: knowledge accrues to a person only because it has an end-point; if one supposes that it has no end, its possibility of accrual is nullified,

and when that is nullified, the possibility of anyone knowing it is also nullified.

Third: the source from which all the sciences arise —

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...I mean sense-perception — is finite without doubt; so it is impossible for that which arises from it to be infinite, for that would make the branch contradict its source.

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I said that a person ascends through them from state to state, because all the sciences have a source from which they arise;

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whereas ignorance has no source from which it arises — ignorance is simply the privation of knowledge;

as we explained in the matter of darkness: it is the privation of light, not its contrary;

and just as we showed there — that if darkness were the contrary of light, the darkened air could not turn and become light —

so likewise we say here: if ignorance were a source like the sciences, it would be impossible for the ignorant person to turn and become knowing;

rather, knowledge and ignorance would meet in a single instance and mutually repel each other;

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it is from this that I said a person ascends in knowledge from state to state, because it arises from a source and branches out,

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whereas it is impossible to ascend in ignorance from state to state, for ignorance has no levels to traverse — it is merely the successive abandonment and privation of knowledge, thing after thing.

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I said that the final level becomes more refined and subtle than all — let me illustrate: we observe that snow descends from the mine of the air and we see it like a stone; then we refine our inquiry and learn that it is water;

then we refine our thinking further and learn that this water could only have ascended by way of evaporation and rising,

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so we concluded that it began as vapor; then we delved further and said: this vapor must have had a cause that raised it —

and it became clear that the cause we finally arrived at is the more subtle —

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...more subtle than the vapor, which is itself more subtle than the water, which is more subtle than the snow — and this subtle cause is what the person aimed to reach, and he reached it.

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I said that whoever tries to make the last of his objects of knowledge like the first wrongs them, as I have clarified from their definitions and ordering.

I said: indeed, he corrupts his knowledge and retreats from what he sought;

like one who insists that the cause raising the vapor from the earth must be snow — like the snow he started with —

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then he has lost what he was seeking; for if what he sought was merely snow, the snow was already at hand without any seeking;

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and if he has not explicitly demanded that it be snow or water but says: 'I want to see it, otherwise I will not accept it' —

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then he is in effect saying he demands it as snow, or water, or vapor — but is demanding it in words other than the original word;

for in this domain one can encounter nothing other than these things;

and if he goes back and nullifies the cause of the vapor — because he cannot see it empirically — and says 'there is no cause' —

then he has nullified a meaning that had become established for him, out of a false craving or a corrupt view.

Now that I have completed these explanations, I must make clear the reason that led me to place them here at the start;

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and I say: when I arrived at the chapter of knowing the Maker, I found a group of people who reject this knowledge — perhaps because they have not seen it —

and others on account of its obscurity and the obscurity of its meaning, and its subtlety beyond all subtlety;

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and others who demand that there be another object of knowledge after knowing Him, and others who try to conceive of Him as a body in their imaginations, and still others —

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...who do not explicitly corporealise Him, but demand of Him quantity, or quality, or place, or time, or the like.

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These demands of theirs are precisely the demand for a body, since these attributes are the very meanings of corporeality;

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so I placed this preamble first, to dispel their misconceptions and give the mind relief from the burden of them,

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and to establish that the Creator's meaning being at the utmost limit of subtlety is precisely its correctness — and that our finding Him through our intellects, more refined than any object of knowledge, is its true reality.

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As for those who say 'we affirm only what our eyes see' and thus nullify the sciences — I have already replied to them in my discussion of the school of the Eternalists and the stubborn withholders, and what is there is sufficient;

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and if one needs to consider it further, let him return to reflect on what I said there.

And those who reject it on account of its subtlety and obscurity have abandoned their second object of knowledge after the first;

for you know that I explained in the chapter on the creation of the world that we ventured into a matter that is deep, subtle, refined, and obscure — the like of which has never been seen —

and I said that Scripture says of it: 'Remote is all that came to be, and exceedingly deep — who can find it?' (Qohelet 7:24)

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and you have seen how others imagined that meaning as like dust, or hair-strands, or the indivisible part — while for us something from nothing came out.

If this is the state of the known in that level, then necessarily the state of the known in the level that follows — I mean the Creator (mighty and exalted) — is more subtle than anything subtle,

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more obscure than anything obscure, more refined than anything refined, deeper than anything deep, mightier than anything mighty, more exalted than anything exalted —

such that it is entirely impossible to comprehend His how-ness at all — and Scripture says regarding this —

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...of this Scripture says: 'Can you find the deep things of God? Can you find the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven — what can you do? Deeper than Sheol — what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.' (Job 11:7–9)

And those who demanded that we show them Him as a body — let them awaken from their heedlessness.

Was it not the body that was the first of our objects of knowledge, and through the traces within it we examined and investigated until we arrived at knowledge of its Maker?

How then do they go back — as it were to A, B, C — and try to make Him a body?

And was the body for which we sought a Maker some specific known individual — such that its Maker could be some other specific individual beside it?

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We sought only a Maker for every body we saw and grasped by intellect; so every body that enters our thought — this Maker made it — and He Himself is outside all that.

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As for those who sought something beyond Him — we have already refuted what they sought, from the angle of the knowing human being and the necessity of his knowledge being finite by virtue of his finite faculties;

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and from the angle of the known — that if it does not reach a termination and end, it cannot accrue to the soul; and from the angle of the source on which all the sciences are built.

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Let me add a further explanation here. Perhaps someone supposes it possible for there to be another object of knowledge beyond this one — and that some person's thought has simply not reached it, or that their combined thoughts have not attained it.

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I say: this is a corrupt fancy — because all objects of knowledge are known only by the mediation of the body, as I stated at the outset of the book;

so once the known transcends being a body or mediated by a body, it is entirely impossible for there to be any further object of knowledge beyond it.

As for those who did not demand the proof of His corporeality —

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...but who demanded that He have motion or rest, anger or satisfaction, or the like —

— they in truth demanded His corporeality, via the meaning and not via the word;

they resemble one who says: 'I don't demand of Reuven a hundred dirhams — I demand of him the square root of ten thousand;'

for he has only removed the word 'hundred' from Reuven while its meaning remains fixed.

So when the demand for Him to be a body is ruled out, the demand for anything among the accidents of the body is entirely lifted along with it;

I have dwelt on this preamble at length, despite my habitual brevity, in order to give it its full explanation;

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for it is the foundation and axis of the entire book — a small dwelling-time in it spares much toil afterward.

If someone asks: how did this subject come to require such great effort and such extensive discourse? —

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We say: this is for two reasons. First, because anything precious requires greater, more intense, and more expansive care in its attainment than care for something easy;

just as it is well known that finding glass is easier than finding a gem.

Second: those who wade into this subject proliferate their theories —

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and the cause of this is either dimness of vision, or deliberate refutation, or negligence and laziness, or an inclination toward desire — as I stated at the outset of the book —

and so I needed to expose their errors along with what I needed to clarify the truth.

Now that I am done with these preliminaries, I begin the maamar itself and say:

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Section 1. We know our Lord (mighty and exalted) — according to the word of His prophets — to be One, Living, Omnipotent, All-Knowing; nothing resembles Him, and nothing resembles His acts;

and they established for us concerning this —