Thursday, January 10, 2008

Whose God Is This? Who Wrote This?

The following quote was written by a universally recognized great man. I wonder if my readers can guess who it is? I found it indirectly through an article that was brought to my attention by Nativ.


This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokratwr , or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God1 usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent puts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him2 are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always, and every where. Whence also he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, or touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final cause: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from. the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.

13 comments:

  1. Sir Isaac Newton, from the very end of his Principia. Amazing how far he rose above his society!

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  2. Interestingly, Leibniz may have been even greater in this area.

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  3. Correct! Re Leibniz - you are referring to his exchange with Newton's friend Clarke. I think that Newton's focus on Dominion, which is parallel to Ol Malchut Shamayim in our parlance is quite amazing. After all it is not an empirical belief but rather revelatory.

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  4. Mysticism and religion make up about 90% of Newton's writing. Yes, it's part of being a man of his era, but what a tragic waste of a mind like his. He'll be remembered forever for the 10%, the rest only dug up by people clinging to the part of the past that wasted so much of his prodigous potential.

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  5. I would have thought that his prodigious potential was actuated by his passionate curiousity about fundamental principles and first causes. In any case, his usefulness to science is not the only measure of whether his life was well-spent. Maybe every man's first and foremost duty to himself is to think about why we are all here. And even if no such duty exists, once the question arises, there is no choice but to pursue it. After all, as Camus suggested, the rational mind, faced with the abyss of meaninglessness, might be well advised to bring about its own end.

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  6. How does that apply to his speculations about the layout of the Beis Hamikdash and it's connection to some mystical nonsense? His vast writings on alchemy?

    First cause? Whatever.

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  7. I assume you agree that one does not justify one's existence by figuring out how the physical world functions. And that the enjoyment of the elegance and complexity of physics and mathematics does not make life meaningful. And I guess you to agree that his drive to seek metaphysical enlightenment, while not having any value to the rest of us, was a spiritual odyssey at least as important as any other fields of interest. I agree that he wasted a lot of time in his wild goose chases. I am just saying that it is only retroactively that we can see it as a waste of time. But if he had no such interests he would have been a lesser person. On the contrary: it seems to me that he stands as a paragon to the concept that even the greatest investigative and analytical scientific minds should know that in some areas, revealed truth and spiritual faith is paramount.

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  8. Rabbi Guttmann:

    "Correct! Re Leibniz - you are referring to his exchange with Newton's friend Clarke."

    I've heard of that correspondence but I haven't ever seen it ... but there's plenty of Leibniz!

    "I think that Newton's focus on Dominion, which is parallel to Ol Malchut Shamayim in our parlance is quite amazing. After all it is not an empirical belief but rather revelatory."

    If so, how do you understand Abraham's intellectual journey prior to "Lech L'cha"?

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  9. >If so, how do you understand Abraham's intellectual journey prior to "Lech L'cha"?

    Who says that was his first experience with revelation? See the 11 levels of nevua in MN.

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  10. AH

    Let me explain better. POrophecy is not necessarily seeing the future but is a natural human capability to use one's rational faculty and intuition to understand things without going through sequential logical steps. It as a way of having correct insights. There are many (infinite) levels of such experiences based on the state of the person at a particular time. Avraham like anybody elase on a similar quest would have moved from level to level. The torah just tells us certain experiences but Lech Lecha did not occur in a vacuum but was a step where he felt compelled to act based on the insights he had. That probably is what the Rabbis mean with the story of Ur Kasdim that his life was threatened for his beliefs which Rambam quotes with a variation in the first perek of hil Avoda Zara.

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  11. AH

    Let me explain better. POrophecy is not necessarily seeing the future but is a natural human capability to use one's rational faculty and intuition to understand things without going through sequential logical steps. It as a way of having correct insights. There are many (infinite) levels of such experiences based on the state of the person at a particular time. Avraham like anybody elase on a similar quest would have moved from level to level. The torah just tells us certain experiences but Lech Lecha did not occur in a vacuum but was a step where he felt compelled to act based on the insights he had. That probably is what the Rabbis mean with the story of Ur Kasdim that his life was threatened for his beliefs which Rambam quotes with a variation in the first perek of hil Avoda Zara.

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  12. Could you connect your last remarks about Avraham and prophecy with your earlier ones about Newton and "dominion"? I'm uncomfortable with the dichotomy you seemed to draw between 'revelation' and 'empirical belief'. If I take 'empirical' to mean 'that which can be experienced', then, e.g., what's empirical for Newton is not necessarily empirical for me.

    Thank you.

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  13. empirical means that I can prove a logical conclusion by showing that it is true (scientific proof or irrefutable logical,)revelatory deals with issues that cannot yet or can never be proven in such a way. Existence of God belongs to the first creatio ex nihilo belongs to the second

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