Isaac Husik

“ The fact that we praise and blame and love and hate a person according to his deliberate conduct is another proof of freedom. We do not blame a natural or accidental cause. We do not blame a child or a person asleep when they cause damage, because they did not do the damage deliberately and with intention. If those who deny freedom are consistent, they must either refrain from being angry with a person who injures them deliberately, or they must say that anger and praise and blame and love and hate are delusive powers put in our souls in vain. ”

“ Thou art God, who by thy Divinity supportest all things formed; and upholdest all creatures by thy Unity. Thou art God, and there is no distinction between thy godhead, unity, eternity or existence; for all is one mystery; and although each of these attributes is variously named, yet the whole point to one end. ”

“ The only difference is that the emanation from God takes place without motion and without time.
The union of universal form and universal matter must be thought of as a stamping of the form upon the matter. Matter has in itself no actual or definable existence. It serves merely as a tabula rasa, as a potential background, as an empty receptacle, as a reflecting mirror for form to be written, filled out, impressed or reflected therein or upon. Hence we may view God as the spectator, universal matter as the mirror, and universal form as the reflection of the spectator in the glass. ”

“ God's knowledge is identical with his essence, which these same philosophers insist is unlike anything else, and unknowable. Surely it follows that his knowledge is also without the least resemblance to our knowledge and the name alone is what they have in common. Hence all the objections of the philosophers fall away at one stroke. We cannot in one act of knowing embrace a number of things differing in species; God can, because his knowledge is one. We cannot know the non-existent, for our knowledge depends upon the thing known. ”

“ We might as well argue that man is rational because solid is continuous. If the word knowledge means a totally different thing in God from what it means in us, how do we know that it is to be found in God? If we have absolutely no idea what the term means when applied to God, what reason have we for preferring knowledge as a divine attribute to its opposite or negative? If knowledge does not mean knowledge, ignorance does not mean ignorance, and it is just the same whether we ascribe to God the one or the other. ”

“ Thou art united with me and embracest me more closely than my intellect and soul."
He who knows most of the secret of the Creator, knows least; and he who knows least, knows most. As the limbs of the body and the senses cannot know the intelligible ideas because the latter are superior to them, so the intellect cannot know the essence of the Creator because he is above the sphere of the intellect. Although the intellect is spiritual, it cannot comprehend the Creator because he is above all intellectual powers, and is infinite. ”

“ Hence it was necessary to speak of him as body, for this is the only thing that suggests real existence to the masses. It was necessary to endow him with motion, as this alone denotes life; to ascribe to him seeing, hearing, and so on, in order to indicate that he understands; to represent him as speaking, in order to show that he communicates with prophets, because to the minds of common people this is the only way in which ideas are communicated from one person to another. As we are active by our sense of touch, God, too, is described as doing. He is given a soul, to denote that he is alive. ”

“ It cannot be matter, for form, the actual and superior, cannot come from the potential and inferior. It cannot be form, for then form would proceed from form by way of genesis and dissolution, which is not true. Matter is the cause of generation and dissolution, not form. We are thus forced to the conclusion that the soul is one and eternal, one in substance and number; and that it becomes many only per accidens, by virtue of the multiplicity of its receiving subjects, comparable to the light of the one sun, which divides into many rays. ”

“ The highest good of man is to develop his reason. As the traveller and the captive long to return to the land of their birth and be with their family, so the rational soul is eager to rise to the upper world which is not made of clay. This it can do only if it purifies itself from the uncleanness of corporeal desire which drags it down, and takes pains to know its own nature and origin, with the help of Wisdom whose eyes are undimmed. Then she will know the truth, which will remain indelibly impressed upon her when she separates from the body, where she was put for her own good. ”

“ All the evils and complaints of life are due to the fact that people are not considerate of one another, and everyone grabs for himself all that he can, more than he needs. One should examine anew the ideas one has from childhood to be sure that he understands them in the light of his riper intellect. He should also study again the books of the Bible and the prayers which he learned as a child, for he would see them now in a different light. He must try to make his soul control his body, strengthening it with intellectual and spiritual food for the world to come. ”

“ God is one—so Al Mukammas sums up the results of his previous discussions—not in the sense in which a genus is said to be one, nor in that in which a species is one, nor as the number one is one, nor as an individual creature is one, but as a simple unity in which there is no distinction or composition. He is one and there is no second like him. He is first without beginning, and last without end. He is the cause and ground of everything caused and effected. ”

“ As for the nature of reward and punishment more particularly, we may say that the soul of the wicked loses all the glory promised to her and descends to a position lower than was hers originally. She is expelled from the land of life and remains in darkness forever, without returning to her original station. Knowing what she has lost, she will feel continuous distress, sorrow and fear, for the power of imagination remains with the soul after death. But there is no physical burning with fire. On the other hand, the soul of the righteous will return to God. ”

“ He who must overcome temptation before he can subject his lower nature to his reason is rewarded in the next world in a manner bearing resemblance to the goods and pleasures of this world, and described as precious stones and tables of gold laden with good things to eat. On the other hand, the reward of the naturally perfect who is free from temptation is purely spiritual, and bears no earthly traces. These men are represented as "sitting under the Throne of Glory with their crowns on their heads and delighting in the splendor of the Shekinah." ”

“ And one could quote besides in favor of freedom the direct statement in Deuteronomy 30, 19, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed." ”

“ The good on the other hand attracts us by its inherent goodness, not for an ulterior end. If the good were done only for the sake of deriving some benefit external to the good itself, God, who is self-sufficient, would not do anything either good or evil. God does the good always and not the bad, because in his wisdom he sees the difference between them. It was a deed of generosity in God to have created the world and given life to his creatures, but it was not a duty.
This conception of the nature of good and evil leaves on our hands the problem of evil. ”

“ There are many things from which the soul is bidden to abstain, such as theft, adultery, and so on, which it desires, and abstention from which causes it pain. Surely there must be reward awaiting the soul for this suffering. Often the soul suffers hatred, persecution and even death for pursuing justice as she is bidden to do. Surely she will be rewarded. Even when a person is punished with death for a crime committed in this world, the same death is inflicted for one crime as for ten crimes. Hence there must be another world where all inequalities are adjusted. ”

“ We do not create things; we only modify matter already existing.
Again, if God created the world for his own benefit, then either he was always in need of the world, or the need arose at the time of creating. If he was always in need of the world, it would have existed with him from eternity, but we have already proved that the world is not eternal. If the need arose in him at the time of creation, as heat arises in a body after cold, or motion after rest, then he is like created things, and is himself "new" and not eternal. ”

“ Unity precedes the unitary object as heat comes before the hot object. Unity alone is self-subsistent. Numerical unity is prior to two, and is the very root and essence of number. God's unity is above all other unities, hence it cannot be described, because it has no cause, being the cause of everything else. As our eye cannot see the sun by reason of its very brilliance, so our intellect cannot comprehend God because of the extreme perfection of his existence. The finite and imperfect cannot know the infinite and perfect. ”

“ Not having been privileged to receive the sacred Law, which is the source of all wisdom and the origin of rectitude, they cannot tell us in concrete fashion just what a man must know and what he must do in order to raise his soul to the highest degree possible for it to attain. And if they were to tell us what they understand by wisdom and right conduct, we should not listen to them. Our authority is the Bible, and we must test the views of the philosophers by the teaching of the Bible. ”

“ If the soul is, as they say, an intellectual substance not limited in place and for this reason not subject to genesis and decay, there is no way to distinguish one soul from another, since it is matter which constitutes individual existence. How then can my soul be distinguished from yours, or from the Active Intellect and the other Intelligences, or from the First Cause itself? The souls of Plato and Aristotle should become one so that the one should know the secret thoughts of the other. ”

“ In man soul and spirit stand between intellect and body.
Hence a man must know himself before he can know the universe, else he is like a person who feeds other people while he is himself hungry. To know the Creator, the soul must first know herself, and this is one of the definitions of philosophy, to know one's own soul. He who can strip his soul of his corporeal senses and worldly desires, and rise to the sphere will find there his reward. ”

“ All science and philosophy opened before the impoverished schoolmen, famished for want of new ideas. And they threw themselves with zeal and enthusiasm into the study of the new philosophy. The Church took alarm because the new Aristotle constituted a danger to accepted dogma. He taught the eternity of the world, the uniformity of natural law, the unity of the human intellect, denying by implication Providence and freedom and individual immortality. ”

“ The first is absolutely necessary for the young, the women and those of weak intellectual power. To worship God not merely because the law prescribes it, but because reason itself demands it denotes a spiritual advance, and puts one in the grade of prophets and pious men chosen of God. In this world their reward is the joy they feel in the sweetness of divine service; in the next world they attain to the spiritual light which we cannot declare or imagine. ”

“ Maimonides and his school endeavor to obviate the criticisms of the philosophers, who are opposed to all attributes, by excluding all but negative terms. But this does not help the matter in the least. A negative attribute is in reality no different from a positive, and in the end leads to a positive. Thus if we say "not mineral," "not plant," we clearly say "animal." The advocates of negative attributes answer this criticism by saying that they understand pure negation without any positive implications, just as when we say a stone is "not seeing," we do not imply that it is blind. ”