From Monotheism to Scepticism and Back Again

Although it is customary to view monotheism and scepticism as opposite, I want to argue that they are closely related – so closely that if you understand monotheism correctly, you will see that a certain form of scepticism is an inevitable consequence. The key to this connection is to recognize that monotheism is more than a claim about number of God; it is also a claim about the uniqueness or incomparability of God. The latter raises a central question: How do you characterize something that is incomparable to everything else? Looking at Maimonides and Aquinas, I argue that to a great extent, you cannot characterize it. Thus Maimonides concluded that silence is the best praise we can offer to God. While Aquinas tried to avoid such a radical conclusion, even he admitted that the words we use to signify God leave the thing signified incomprehensible. Let us now take the next step. If God is the source of all existence, and God is incomprehensible, then scepticism about existence is unavoidable. In the words of Emmanuel Levinas: “The infinite affects thought by devastating it.” It should be clear to anyone who has read the Hebrew Bible in a critical way that monotheism did not emerge all at once and that in many cases it is doubtful whether its major characters would be considered monotheists in our sense of the term.1 Ancient traditions, both rabbinic and philosophic, held that Abraham was the first person to reject idolatry and embrace monotheism.2 The truth is, however, that the Bible has very little to say about Abraham’s theology except that he trusted in God and was accounted righteous as a result (Genesis 15:6). But as anyone can see, to trust in God is not to say that God is the only deity. For all we know, Abraham thought there were other gods who, though not as reliable as his, are still forces to be reckoned with. Much the same could be said of Moses. While the Second Commandment tells us that there should be no other gods before YHWH, it is unclear whether this means that the other gods are not as important as YHWH or that they are nothing but figments of the human imagination. By the same token, the fact that one cannot make or serve an image of God leaves open the question of whether it is impossible to represent an immaterial God in plastic form or whether it is possible but conflicts with how God wants to be worshipped. Recently the biblical scholar Benjamin Sommer wrote that the evidence that the God of the Hebrew Bible has a body is overwhelming.3 In fact, according to Sommer: “God has many bodies located in sundry places in the world that God created.” If God does have a body, then there is no reason why a person could not represent God in plastic form if God were to allow it. Even a casual reader of the Bible knows that it does not hesitate to * Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. Email: k-seeskin@northwestern.edu 1 For further treatment of some of the issues discussed in this essay, see Kenneth Seeskin, “What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach us About God,” in Imagining the Jewish God, ed. Kenneth Koltun-Fromm and Len Kaplan, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming), and Kenneth Seeskin, “No One can See My Face and Live,” in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, ed. Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 2 Genesis Rabbah, §38:13; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book I, §§154-68, 77-81; Philo, “On Abraham,” §§69-71. 3 Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 12 (2015) 6 describe God in anthropomorphic terms. At Exodus 24:10, it goes so far as to say that the elders of Israel actually saw God. The question we must ask is whether the original audience would have followed later traditions in viewing this language as metaphorical or whether they would have understood it literally. Most bible scholars, including Sommer, assume that the more literal we are, the closer we are to how the original audience would have responded. The reason for this is that the original audience knew nothing of philosophy and the lengths to which later generations would go to bring the Bible into conformity with strict monotheism. But lack of training in philosophy is one thing, literal interpretation of epic narratives, dream scenes, and poetry quite another. My own suspicion is that people who claim to know how audiences in the ancient Near East would have understood what are by any estimation colourful and highly ambiguous passages are overreaching themselves. Even today, with well-established historical methods at our disposal, we have difficulty determining how literally or loosely legal documents, ethical codes, or training manuals should be interpreted. For example, the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits Congress from abridging freedom of speech. Should “speech” be interpreted narrowly to mean verbal communication or broadly to include such things as photography, dance, or music? Similarly, any ethical code will tell you that lying is immoral. Must one make a verbal utterance to lie or could one lie with a hand gesture, facial expression, or bodily movement? Even in natural science, often regarded as the pinnacle of literal discourse, metaphorical language, e.g. atom, cell wall, or big bang, is common. That the original audience for the Bible was not monotheistic in our sense of the term is hardly controversial. But this too leaves open an important question: Is the reason that they were not monotheistic in our sense of the term that they had a predilection to literal understanding of literary texts or is it rather that the meaning and implications of monotheism were not yet clear to them? One reason to opt for the latter is the ambiguity in the language that the Bible uses to talk about God. This is particularly true of words like “spirit” (ruach), “glory” (kavod), and “name” (shem). What does it mean to say that the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters? Is it that God himself was physically present, that a manifestation of God was present, or that God was mindful of the amorphic state of the waters? What does it mean to say that the whole earth is full of God’s glory? Is God’s glory a synonym for God himself, a blazing light that emanates from God, a mask or shield that protects people from the light, or a way of referring to the honour or respect that is due to God? Unfortunately, biblical Hebrew gives us no reliable way to answer these questions. A similar ambiguity applies to God’s name. Granted that anyone who shows disrespect for God’s name shows disrespect for God himself; the precise nature of the relation between the name and the bearer is never made clear. While Psalm 145.21 (“All creatures shall bless his holy name forever and ever”) implies that God and his name are one, Deuteronomy 26.2 (“You shall go to the place where the LORD your God will choose to establish his name”) implies that they are separate. Our inability to answer these questions with any degree of certainty testifies to the fact that the language needed to give a precise definition of monotheism had yet to be developed. The distinctions between substance, essence, and accident were not worked out until Aristotle. The concept of a hypostasis did not arise until Plotinus. To impose this FROM MONOTHEISM TO SCEPTICISM AND BACK AGAIN (SEESKIN) 7 terminology on biblical discourse would be to engage in an egregious form of anachronism. Again, while the original audience knew that YHWH did not want to be worshipped by having people bow down to plastic representations, it is far from clear that anyone knew or even asked the question of why. From a modern perspective, the first person to see what strict monotheism required may have been Second Isaiah, a prophet thought to have flourished around the time that Babylonia fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. I say this because it is Second Isaiah who raises the question: “To whom will you liken me that I should be compared?” If mighty armies, the cedars of Lebanon, and the great nations of the world are not suitable comparisons, what is? The obvious answer is nothing. Next to God, everything is as nothing. It is from this insight that we derive the claim that there is more to monotheism than belief in a single deity. Or, to put it another way, there is a principled difference between monotheism and monolatry. Not only is YHWH the only deity there is, but he is unique in the sense that nothing else resembles him or can stand as a rival to him. In simple terms, God is perfect or absolute, conditioned by nothing. In addition to ruling out a god who yields to natural forces like wind or rain, this view rules out one who faces anything in the way of restriction or limitation. Hermann Cohen expressed this as the difference between einheit and einzigkeit.4 With this distinction in mind, we are in a position to ask what I take to be the central question of any monotheistic religion: How do you characterize something that is unique? Since all comparisons are ruled out from the beginning, it will not do to say that God is a bigger, better, or more exalted version than something else. Nor will it do to put God in a category to which something else belongs. How, then, can we say anything substantive about God? Medieval philosophers like Maimonides and Aquinas tried to answer this question by making a principled distinction between what God is and that God is. Although we can achieve a reasonable degree of certainty about the latter, according to them, we can achieve no certainty about the former. This means that in proving the existence of God, we cannot start with knowledge of God but must start instead with knowledge of the creatures God has brought into being. In scholastic terms, it means that in proving the existence of God, we have to rely on a demonstration quia rather than a demonstr