Natural Law

Natural law links moral and legal theory with natural theology and science. It is critical to thinking about God’s sovereignty and human freedom. Tracing the roots of the natural law idea, I defend the approach against conventionalism and legal positivism. For they leave human norms ungrounded. Chapter 7 opens by disarming Hume’s elenchus about ‘is’ and ‘ought’. I do not deny the reality of a naturalistic fallacy, but I do argue that facts make rightful claims on us and that the unity of reality and value central to Jewish thinking and to the philosophical great tradition does not confuse facts with values but does appreciate the preciousness of being—of life and personhood most pointedly. Once again here transcendence consorts with immanence. For we find God’s law writ subtly in nature, not least when we discover what it means to perfect ourselves as loving and creative human beings.

Who Is Like God?

Chapter 3 voices disappointment in learned efforts to “remythologize” the idea of God. Seeking to take scriptural imagery seriously, such efforts mistake the images for the God they intend. The mixed metaphors characteristic of biblical poetry reveal the elusiveness of the Transcendent and confess more eloquently than dry talk about ineffability how hard it is for words to capture any aspect of divinity. Yet, halting as their tropes may be, biblical poetics mark out a pathway. We must not assume the Torah’s authors, or their audience, spoke more slowly than we do—lest we cultivate a spiritual diglossia in our own minds and fail to integrate what we believe with what we know. Efforts to bring God closer to hand by allowing that He forgets, regrets, or learns by trial and error may hope to elevate our understanding but risk transforming the Mosaic God into a Deweyan “fellow learner.”

Holiness in Its Constellation

Chapter 1 discusses the notion that immanence and transcendence meet in the idea of God. Morally we find holiness in kindness (hesed), mirroring the generosity of God’s act of creation and the ongoing work of emergence, salient in evolution but dynamic throughout the cosmos. Intellectually holiness can be found, perhaps where least expected, in the sciences. For reason is our link with God, not cold but very much alive in the spontaneity and creativity that make it God’s image within us. Nature is no inert passivity but active and conative, a living theater in which God’s creativity tells its tale. And the transcendence visible in the liveliness that is God’s hallmark in nature can be emulated, as God commands: You shall be holy, for I the LORD thy God am holy (Leviticus 19:2). For God is the infinite Source of being, goodness, truth, and beauty. Every finite good points in the direction of its unbounded Source.

To Make a Rainbow

Turning to thoughts of God’s activity in nature, in Chapter 4 we take emergence as the broadest expression of God’s work (and play!) in the cosmos. Biological evolution and the rise of consciousness are striking instances. The worldly ambience of the Book of Esther, where God, notoriously, remains offstage, affords precious insights as to the interplay of divine and human agency. Across the warp of history we weave the weft. Freedom is the watchword of God’s covenant. We did not create ourselves, but we do, in some measure, chart our own course. Understanding how God might work through nature, not against it, is critical to adult religiosity. We cannot confine divine action to the neverland of sacred history or let superstition displace personal piety and responsibility. The capricious gods are vanished. We cannot restore them to the domain from which natural science and its ancient, often unacknowledged ally, natural theology, have banished them.

God and Evil

In Jewish sources, paradigmatically in the Book of Job, the problem of evil centers on the suffering of innocents and the seeming prosperity of the wicked. Central to my response in Chapter 5 is the recognition that the very idea of evil is parasitic on that of the good, just as evil itself preys upon goodness. The rise of life and thought and love, and the triumph of their survival, are the earnest of God’s blessing—presence of the Holy in this world and the attainability of holiness in this life by finite beings in the varied ways by which they seek it.

The Presence of the Holy

Chapter 2 speaks of how the idea of God works like a value concept, purging notions of worth that fail to cohere. Love, truth, and beauty fuse in the idea of God. Violence, cruelty, and deceit are purged. Pursuing the logic of perfection, we look to the idea of a perfect being, argued as a matter of theory by Plato. The Torah goes a step further, suppressing the myths of fractious and priapic gods. Justice is indissoluble from God’s identity. Grace and love become guides for our moral aspirations. Pursuing the idea of God’s goodness, we consider the binding of Isaac. Where sacrifice might have seemed the paradigm of piety, or arbitrary commands might seek to set God beyond mere goodness, I see a turning point: Abraham must choose between presuming that the highest devotion demands sacrifice of any lesser love, and the recognition that God’s absoluteness rests in goodness.

Revelation

Chapter 8 addresses the nexus of God’s perfection to the Torah’s charge. Since prophecy is inevitably poetic, it demands hearers who are intellectually alive and can see that God’s perfection invites emulation, through a union of moral strength with intellectual depth. Jewish sages find a key to such wisdom in God’s Anokhi, the “I” that opens the Decalogue, or even in the opening aleph of that word, read as a sign for God since aleph stands for singularity. One sage read that aleph as a kind of mandala, its form suggesting a face made up of two yods, a traditional marker of God’s name, the two letters facing each other like two eyes, as if to remind us that we find God when we find ourselves—and to suggest a thought as old as Socrates and as fresh as Levinas: that we find ourselves when we discover one another.

What Is Positive in Negative Theology?

Does the negative theology inspired by thoughts of God’s transcendence reduce to vacuity, leaving only atheism or agnosticism as its residue? Maimonides helps us frame an answer. The “lexicon” of biblical anthropomorphisms he surveys in the first seventy chapters of the Guide to the Perplexed prepare one for the discipline of apophatic theology by mapping an ontological, axiological, and epistemological hierarchy oriented by an axis stretching away from physicality and toward the intellectual and ever more real. God surmounts its summit. We enrich our grasp of God’s infinite perfection as our appreciation grows of the myriad ways in which perfection shows itself in nature. So broader experience can give content to our thoughts of God’s absoluteness and guide us in pursuit of a perfection of our own. Reaching beyond Maimonides’ hylomorphic axis of perfection, the Chapter 6 seeks to bring matter itself in from the cold.