In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Aryeh Botwinick about his article “Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Aryeh Botwinick
Ludwig Wittgenstein tells us in On Certainty: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.”[1] I want to begin this paper with a mini-genealogy of Maimonides’s negative theology—which declares that we can only endlessly say what God is not, but not what He is—that traces it to a specific and recurring Talmudic source. I will then go on to argue that Machiavelli, who is one of the great theorists of power in the Western intellectual tradition, structures his argument about power in a manner that is directly analogous to Maimonides’s argument about God. I will be drawing the practical implications of this association throughout the paper. My starting point for the development of this argument is arbitrary. One can trace the argument of negative theology to numerous Greek, Islamic, and rabbinic sources. However, the vein of interpretation that I am mining here is relatively underdeveloped, so I think that it deserves special mention.
Perhaps the most immediate and most compelling Talmudic precursor for Maimonides’s negative theology is Rabbi Akiva, about whom the Talmud famously tells us: “Rav Johanan said: The author of an anonymous Mishnah is Rav Meir; of an anonymous Tosefta, Rav Nehemiah; of an anonymous dictum in the Sifra, Rav Yehudah; in the Sifre, Rav Shimon; and all are taught according to the views of Rabbi Akiva.”[2] All of the prime Talmudic collections of Tannaitic (earlier rabbinic) rulings and exegeses were compiled and organized by Rabbi Akiva’s star pupils. Rashi (the prime medieval rabbinic commentator on both the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud) in his gloss on this Talmudic passage says: “From what they learned from Rabbi Akiva they formulated the statements that constitute the substance of these collections.”
Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, the author of the Aruch HaShulchan (a classic nineteenth-century codification and interpretation of Jewish law), attributes to Rabbi Akiva a conception of the relationship between the possible and the impossible that has immediate and profound implications for the status of negative theology in rabbinic understanding.[3] Rabbi Epstein claims that Rabbi Akiva subscribes as a general principle to the view that one cannot infer or deduce the possible from the impossible, and that this shapes his understanding of the subject matters dealt with in both the legal and homiletical and philosophical portions of the Talmud. This principle of the non-inferrability of the possible from the impossible represents a kind of methodological condensation and translation of the principles of negative theology so as to render them applicable for the fashioning and construing of halakhic rules and Aggadic (homiletic, nonlegal) material as a whole. Negative theology comes up against the limit that in order for God to serve as our ultimate “explanatory” concept, He has to embody a principle of difference so radically dissimilar to things human that He cannot explain anything at all in a literal sense. The theological upshot of monotheism (according to the critique offered by negative theology) is that we cannot make sense of the possible (our daily familiar selves and world) by invoking the impossible (God). Rabbi Akiva applies this principle of not drawing inferences to the possible from the impossible as a general meta-halakhic norm and decision-making rule—as well as a hermeneutical principle for interpreting nonlegal formulations in the Talmud. Rabbi Epstein adduces two examples in support of this reading of Rabbi Akiva—and I would like to add more examples to this list and to consider their epistemological and theological implications. The scholarly upshot of this investigation is to be able to show how Maimonidean negative theology has strong rabbinic roots—and that aside from the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Islamic influences that are doubtless present in his work and that have been amply documented by scholars over the last century and a half, it is perhaps the shaping influence of rabbinic texts that most poignantly legitimates the pursuit of negative theology by Maimonides and establishes the right degree of equivalence between rabbinic thought and secular, largely Platonic understandings that provides him with the psychic equilibrium to pursue his project with vigor and confidence.
Here are the Aruch HaShulchan‘s examples, followed by my own limited series of examples, of Rabbi Akiva’s adherence to the principle of Ein Danin Efshar M’Dei Efshar, i.e., one cannot deduce the possible from the impossible, which is a large background premise supporting negative theology—that one cannot say what the infinite God is—but only what He is not:
1. A braita[4] cited in the Talmudic tractate of Sukkah 11b says the following: “‘For I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths’:[5] These [the booths] were clouds of glory, so Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Akiva says, They made for themselves real booths.”[6] Apparently, according to Rabbi Akiva, the physical artifact called “booth” can in no way be compared to the “Divine artifact” called “clouds of glory.” Since there is no way to traverse or to close the space between the possible and the impossible, the biblical model for the halakhic requirement that Jews build and reside in a booth during the festival of Sukkot has to be the physical booths that the Jewish community constructed for themselves during their sojourn in the desert, rather than the “impossible” “clouds of glory,” which we cannot comprehend and therefore cannot duplicate. Rabbi Eliezer, by contrast, permits inferences across the chasm that separates the possible from the impossible. He could conceivably be adhering to a realist position in comparison with Rabbi Akiva’s implicit nominalism—so that a general term and concept like God need not be answerable to the rationalistic constraints on patterns of derivation from discrete particulars to universals that might inhibit Rabbi Akiva from extrapolating from “clouds of glory” (which cannot be deconstructed into discrete, humanly accessible particulars) to literal, physical booths. From Rabbi Eliezer’s perspective, as rationally unencompassable as the term God is, it can still be realistically (in the sense of philosophical realism) postulated and we can draw whatever inferences we deem appropriate.
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1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), aphorism no. 471, p. 62e.
2. Hebrew–English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud: Sanhedrin, trans. Jacob Shachter and H. Freedman (London: Soncino Press, 1987), 86a.
3. Yechiel Michel Epstein, Aruch Ha-Shulchan (New York: Jonathan Publishing Company, 1961), Orach Chaim, vol. 3, Siman 625, para. 2, p. 63.
4. A braita consists of Tannaitic statements that were not officially codified and included by Rabbi Judah the Prince in the Mishnah.
5. Lev. 23:43.
6. Hebrew–English Edition of The Babylonian Talmud: Sukkah, trans. Israel W. Slotki (London: Soncino Press, 1984).
