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How To Read

24 Sunday Dec 2017

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December is the season of lists – resolutions for next year, favourite movies of the year, most interesting Twitter handles discovered, places visited, governments toppled, and so on. Several book lists are also floated around the same time. Some, usually from academics, are short and focused on their specialty. Others meander and are sometimes probably too long to have truly done their readers any good – as if they were more to secure bragging rights rather than be helpful recommendations. More is not necessarily better, and neither is quicker.

How we read is strongly correlated to why we read, which also defines what we read. I suspect more of us will become discerning regarding our choices when we realise that the majority of us will get to read only about slightly over 3,600 books over our entire lives – this is assuming one starts a serious reading habit by the age of 10, reads a book a week for the rest of one’s life, and lives until 80. This limit to our reading adds a different perspective – perhaps adds a tinge of urgency or importance – to what we read and how we read it.

There is a sense of satisfaction, I will admit, in reviewing a long list of books you have ploughed through over the year. A couple of years ago, I caught myself slipping into this false sense of achievement, conflating quantity with quality because it offered a soothing empiricism that really could not exist. Reading three to four books a week, however, left little time for contemplation. I could get away with reading quickly in graduate school because all my friends were either professors or other graduate students. Constant discussion and debate reduced the need for private rumination. Now, however, the lack of deep experience of the book, a total immersion in the subject matter, left me unhappy with my reading. In order to live more, I had forgotten to live well.

It was by deliberately immersing myself in a book I regained the pleasure of reading. Careful and slow reading with deep attention and sometimes repetition, gives the reader more time to explore the nuances of the author’s words. This is easier said than done: study after study tells us that the average attention span these days has shrunk and fewer readers make it to the conclusion of an article. In order to read more, we have also become less attentive to details and argument. Nothing exemplifies the crisis in reading more than a 2007 book by French professor of literature, Pierre Bayard – Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (How To Talk About Books That You Have Not Read). Deliberate readers of books, then, are a rare species.

What this means is that readers today have become good accumulators of factoids but their comprehension skills, attention to context and relations, and contemplation have all suffered. Reading skills that were commonplace even in the early 1990s such as oral performance, memorisation, a critical eye, and annotation have all but disappeared. Studies have shown that committing poetry or even particularly poignant prose to memory, beyond its purely aesthetic appeal, has significant benefits in terms of language acquisition and expression.

Another advantage of reading slowly is its effect on writing. Allowing well-written text to gestate in the mind enables an integration of interesting turns of phrase or sentence patterns into the reader’s own style. We have long been told that the best way to improve our writing is to read well; that applies not just to what we read but also how we read. Skimming, as most people are wont to do nowadays, is not conducive to fostering this absorption of ideas and style.

Of course, the fast-slow dichotomy is an over-simplified model of how we read. There are different kinds of books as there are several types of readers. Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers, for example, is an excellent book that is more data-heavy than Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which is again in a different class from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Then there are works like the Aeneid, Mahabharata, or the Pirkei Avot, which merit several re-reads over the years. We read for education, entertainment, or for joy and our speed and attention varies with each of these.

Regardless, the implicit hope in reading is that we imbibe and process the knowledge and values books offer and gain a modicum of maturity and wisdom. There is no profit to be had from becoming a foremost scholar of Jewish philosophy if at least some of the ideas of Moshe ben Maimon, Baruch Spinoza, or some other thinker do not enrich your own life. That admonition you have heard all your life – do not judge a book by its cover – was not entirely wrong but it was horribly phrased. It is simply impossible to read all the books you want to and filters must weed out the mountain of books that might be interesting or useful to make room for those that will certainly add value. Of course, care would be advised to ensure that our selecting process is based on criteria other than ideology for well-rounded development.

Given the limits to our reading, it is not wise to read books we do not like simply because we are “suppose to know them.” I have never been a fan of Victorian literature (including the Regency), for example, and the only works I have read from that period are the ones that were forced upon me in school. It is not a lacuna in my reading because I compensated with literature I do like, and those who made time for Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy could not for Goethe, Leopardi, Poquelin, and Rilke. Our sense of what we are “supposed to know” is fluid and depends on language and geography.

A healthy reading plan should balance books for the here-and-now with books that will stay with you for the rest of your life. It is inevitable that some of our reading is spent on learning more about the world: what is the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict?; what is France’s place in NATO?; how did ancient civilisations get intoxicated?; what does a manned mission to Mars entail? As food for the soul, there should also be some books that ask the bigger questions: what is beauty?; do we have souls?; how should society be structured?; is all life equal? The first part is more defined, easier to comprehend, and the books have helpful titles. The second part, however, is challenging and usually gleaned from a lifelong reading of philosophy and literature.

Like any good habit, a healthy reading habit takes effort. One hears that technology has not made reading any easier, providing ample distractions and training us to think only 280 characters at a time. There is some truth to this, but careless reading is a problem that goes back much further than the 21st century – Shakespeare’s First Folio urged us to read the playwright “again and again” until we understand him. Friedrich Nietzsche called himself “a teacher of slow reading” in 1886, and Ivor Richards popularised close reading in the 1920s.

So for the coming year, if one of your resolutions is to read more books, remember – it is better to read slowly, critically, and engage with the text and understand the author than to acquire a passing familiarity with a catalogue of books. Read what you enjoy and diversify your selections; read for the mind as well as the soul. Much like food, good books read well will stay with you for life. After all, reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

The Greatest Empire of Them All

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Opinion and Response

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Who was the greatest empire of them all? Ask a dozen people that question and you will get a baker’s dozen answers! Of course, everyone has their favourites and it is hard to accept that there were any shortcomings in our precious darlings but how does one go about bringing even a semblance of objectivity to the discussion? What are the criteria by which one might evaluate empires?

Almost every discussion on this topic starts with a comparison of military might. “Rome dominated the world,” someone would say. “Surely, the irresistible onslaught of the Mongol horde is something to be feared,” someone else would counter. “Agincourt!” blurts out the incorrigible Anglophile. “Waterloo,” they grin further as the Italo-Gallics imperceptibly roll their eyes at those “northerners” who did not even learn to take a bath daily until well into the 19th century. “But what about Alexander the Great?” squeaks the lonely classicist.

Two things immediately stand out in this conversation: first, this is still a largely Western conversation without any serious inclusions of Eastern empires. One wonders if the Mongols would have made the list had they not invaded Poland and threatened Central Europe. Second, what exactly is an empire? Is it defined merely by size or does it consider the nature of the political, social, and economic relationship between the conquerors and the conquered? Before I kill all the fun in this exercise, I will just state that the way the ancients understood empire was through political fealty and allegiance: weaker kings and chiefs would swear oaths of loyalty to an emperor and send annual tributes in exchange for their continued local rule. This worked well for the emperor too in an era where difficulty in communications and travel meant that authority and distance from the imperial capital were inversely related.

Does the size of an empire contribute to its greatness? If so, the British were the greatest empire ever. This same yardstick would also knock Rome out of the Top 25 and cede greater importance to Brazil than to the Achaemenid, Mauryan, or Mughal empires. Clearly, territory is important but not all-important; after all, one hardly refers to Israel as an empire for its dominion over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By the same token, population, economic wealth, and raw military power are complicated indicators because later empires will always have an advantage with regard to these features. Even comparing contemporarily, there was hardly any technological difference between the Romans and the Greeks at Asculum or between the French and the Austrians at Austerlitz. While these indicators do matter in a broad sense, they are of little use when differentiating among an already elite group of empires.

Related to size is duration. How great is an empire, really, if it collapses even before the ashes of its creator have cooled? Alexander the Great comes to mind here, for he shaped an empire in 13 years that did not last as many months after he was gone. However, in that short yet intense period, Alexander did as much to spread Greek influence around the known world as the many great kings and philosophers before him. How can an empire leave its mark on history if it lasts but for a fleeting moment? If duration is the primary criterion, Rome would undoubtedly reign as the primus inter pares of empires – even though considered an empire only after the fall of the republic in 27 BCE, Rome was among the mightiest powers around the Mediterranean since the 3rd century BCE. From this early date, it lived on in some form or another, until the collapse of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 – almost 1,700 years. Yet survivability is also an imperfect measure – who remembers the Kush in eastern Africa that lasted for nearly 1,400 years? Or how seriously are the Venetian and Holy Roman Empires taken, both of which lasted about a thousand years?

Surely culture must have a role to play in how empires are remembered and evaluated? After conceding the approximate criteria of size and duration, does culture offer a better yardstick by which to measure empires? This is a complicated question, for it immediately raises the question of who does the remembering. There is no doubt that the more popular Romans and Abbasids built great empires but in what cultural way do the Cholas or the Guptas fail to measure up to them? Memory depends on where one stands; for Europe, Greece was the cradle of civilisation but to people further east in Sumeria, Iran, and India, Homer and Aristotle were relatively late to the game. Should we judge an empire by how much cultural influence it wielded in its own time or should the measure be how much of it trickled down to the present? Do Rome and Greece not have an unfair advantage in that their influence was carried forth since the 1500s by the bayonets of those who wished to claim their lineage than by the merits of their own empires? In other words, had India colonised Europe in the 1500s, would the referent empires not have been the Harappans, Guptas, and Cholas? How much sense does it make to tear these cultures out of their historical context and evaluate them clinically for their contributions to humanity?

There is also the problem of making sense of the contributions each civilisation made to human knowledge. If utility is considered, we run into problems with Indian science which offered remarkable explanations of the natural world but did not always translate into technology. The same could be said of the metaphysics of Aristotle by a modern atheist. Another consideration, veracity, is of little help either. Modern states and empires will always have an advantage over older ones because the nature of discovery and invention is such that it builds on earlier work. A millennium down the road, our descendants might consider our lifetimes a total waste because so many of our theories might have been disproved by then. Influence is perhaps a better measurement, however imprecise: Parmenides and Aristotle laid down the framework in the West of how science and philosophy ought to be done. Many of their theories were not challenged until the 1500s, some even as late as the 1800s. The Greek plays are still used as metaphor to capture complex human emotions and characteristics in an easily understandable way. Similarly, the power of Sanskrit and its literature over Indian writing was enormous until the Raj systematically dismantled native systems in favour of creating brown Englishmen.

Given a threshold military capability and size, an empire, then, is made great by its science, philosophy, and culture. Monuments are usually good indications of an empire’s achievements for they at once represent wealth, administrative acumen, and technical and aesthetic brilliance. Neither Abu Simbel nor Ellora nor Angkor Wat could have been built by, to use a modern term, failed states. This also supports the idea that as a thinking species, humans find greater value in the higher pursuits than in crude physical strength. The greatest empire, then, is one that is closest to – forgive the borrowing of the atrocious phrase – “having it all.” With these criteria, who do you think is the greatest empire of them all?

This post first appeared on Swarajya on May 28, 2015.

Ruminations on the Book of Job: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

09 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Theory & Philosophy

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The Book of Job is one of the older books in the Hebrew Bible that is categorised along with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as “wisdom literature.” These books do not focus on elements of the greater Jewish narrative such as the Exodus, the Temple, the covenant, or the people and land of Israel. However, the three books differ starkly from one another: Proverbs suggests that righteous people are rewarded and do not suffer, Ecclesiastes is sceptical of the utility of wisdom, while Job is the story of a just but unwise man who seems to suffer at the hands of a capricious God. Named after its protagonist, the Book of Job draws on a variety of traditions and genres that were known throughout the ancient Middle East. Similar archetypal tales exist in Sumerian and Mesopotamian literature as well as Hindu literature (for the traditions of Mesopotamia, see The Babylonian Theodicy and for Hindu parallels, see the Markandeya Purana). The story raises many thorny issues, such as the role of God in the daily functioning of our world, the purpose of life, and the nature of Man’s relationship to God. Job himself, however, a non-Israelite, hails from the land of Uz, and is established in the religious canon when the prophet Ezekiel mentions him along with Noah and Dan’el who saved others by their righteousness.

My aim, in what follows, is to reflect upon the great Jewish scholar Maimonides’ interpretation of Job in Book Three of his Guide to the Perplexed against the traditional reading which, reductively, addresses the inevitability of rewards for living an upright life and the refutation of the idea that human suffering is always deserved. A vulgar way of phrasing the central question in Job is, “Why does God allow the righteous to suffer while the wicked prosper?” Maimonides does not like the presuppositions this question makes and explains the book with his typical Aristotelian rationality. For Maimonides, it is not important even if Job existed — he prefers to see Job as symbolic of wonderful things, things which are the mystery of the universe. Maimonides tries to balance evil and God’s divinity and perfection in his exposition of Job, for this is what the book ultimately challenges.

Summary

The prologue to the Book of Job alternates the venue of the plot between heaven and earth five times. It begins with the description of Job as a man from Utz, a man “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” (Job 1.1) Job was a rich man, in fact the “greatest of all the people of the east.” (Job 1.3)  Meanwhile, in heaven, Satan comes before the Lord and declares that Job is the epitome of piety because of all the comforts God has lavished upon him (clearly, Satan has not yet gained his reputation as Old Nick). Were Job to lose God’s bounty, he would curse Him to His face. (Job 1.11) In response, God put all that Job had in Satan’s power, with the exception of Job himself.

Immediately, Job loses his offspring and his wealth. Job grieves, but does not curse God. Satan then declares to God that it is his personal comfort that keeps Job from straying. So God inflicts terrible boils on Job’s skin. As Job bemoans his fate, his wife asks him to “curse God and die.” (Job 2.9) But Job does not curse God with his lips (this phrasing of Job’s response creates an ambiguity about what Job was feeling in his heart. In light of his subsequent complaints against God, one wonders what Job was feeling). By now, hearing of what had happened, three of Job’s friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Tzofar the Naamathite come to see him. After sitting with them in silence for a few days, Job begins his lamentations. Job curses the day he was born and his friends remonstrate with him to recant his words and ask God for forgiveness. Eliphaz believes that only the wicked suffer, Bildad argues that God is just and Job’s sons died for their own transgressions, and Tzofar indicates that Job is receiving less suffering than he deserves, for God is just and Job must have done something to merit God’s punishment. Job’s friends are aghast at Job’s presumption to demand a trial, implying that God had somehow done something wrong and his own (Job’s) sense of morality was superior to God’s. Job’s responds to their arguments by demanding an explanation of his supposed wickedness — of which his friends are at a loss as much as he.

Finally, Elihu speaks. He takes issue with Job’s claim of innocence and offers that God often uses various means to keep man from death, including chastening with pain.  Therefore Job should be looking at suffering as a disciplinary measure from a loving God, not as a punitive measure from one’s enemy. Elihu is concerned with God’s majesty and justice, which he feels Job has maligned.  Elihu charges Job with multiplying his sins by uttering words against God without knowledge. (Job 34.37)

Suddenly, God appears before Job in the form of a whirlwind and accepts his challenge for a trial. God humbles Job with his power and majesty, and asks if he could truly contend with God or rebuke him. Job accepts that he cannot possibly understand the complexity of the universe and recants his words, apologising for speaking without full understanding. Now that Job has seen God, he abhors himself.

God then turns on Job’s three friends and admonishes them for speaking of things about God which were false. The book ends with God ordering them make an offering for their transgressions and God returning to Job his offspring and granting him a long life. God also returns to Job his riches twice over. A point of much debate, there is some ambivalence whether God restores Job’s health.

Suffering

What does Maimonides make of this tale? On the surface of it, this is undoubtedly a chronicle of unjustified suffering. It can be assumed that Job was indeed a pure man because God returns everything Job had lost to him twofold. But if Job was just, why did he suffer upon the whims of God? The primary issue here is God’s justice, and Maimonides believes that Job’s fate had nothing to do with God: evil, Maimonides argues, is a corollary of matter which exists as the condition of finitude. It has no dominion over the soul, a direct emanation of God. Maimonides identifies different schools of thought in the speeches of Job and his friends, which all agree in the notion of a just God. Again, the problem arises as to the justification of Job’s plight at the hands of a just God. Maimonides argues that this question presupposes that the purpose of life is the reduction of pain and consequently the pursuit of pleasure. He rejects this Epicurean notion because it according to him, human beings have a purpose to their existence: to become closer to God. Pain and pleasure are but subsidiary issues to this greater telos. As a physician himself, Maimonides was sensitive to the problem of pain and suffering. Therefore, Maimonides accepts Galen’s view that the body will decay and fail because that is the nature of the human body, and therefore pain and pleasure, like evil, are part of the material realm. It does not have anything to do with God. The idea that heaven and hell exist to recompense for sufferings and rewards on earth comes from Razi through Saadya, but Maimonides wonders what gain is it to view this as the ultimate standard on which life should be valued. On the contrary, Maimonides proposes that the goal of life foe human beings is to become more perfect by coming closer to God through the use of intellect, the once characteristic that sets Man apart from the rest of God’s creation. Although Maimonides eventually upholds the duality of Man and God, he believes that human beings can come closer to God in an asymptotic relationship, i.e., become closer to God through better understanding but never quite becoming God. Maimonides sees this in the Book of Job because God says to Job’s friends, “For you did not speak rightly of Me as did my servant Job.” (Job 42.7) The implication is that Job’s Aristotelian approach to life and to God is the correct one.

Furthermore, the Epicurean understanding of evil seems to imply that the universe was created for Man. Maimonides finds this idea ridiculous and a misrepresentation — although the Bible says Man is to rule over the fish does not mean that fish were created to serve Man’s needs; it just happens to be a consequence of creation. Similarly, the stars in the heavens surely do not exist for Man. If creation were meant to serve Man, why would it rain on the sea as well as the land? If Man is not the centre of the universe, then pain and pleasure are mere events that occur to Man and it is not a sign of divine judgement. Thus, Job’s fate is not a divine commentary upon his life.

Bildad, the second of Job’s friends to speak, speaks like a Mutazilite, upholding the belief that all suffering in this world will be compensated for in the hereafter. Maimonides finds this troubling, that one must suffer in this realm to receive rewards in the next. By this logic, if a just man does not suffer in this life, he cannot gain rewards in the next. This idea has some sympathy within Jewish thought as Maimonides knows. The Mutazilite reasoning runs that a person might be born with an infirmity without having sinned or that an excellent man might perish as part of God’s plan. This happens not as punishment but as a benefit though we may not be able to understand what the benefit consists in. In the case of the excellent man who perishes, it is presumably that he may have a greater reward in the life to come. In the case of the man born with the infirmity, it is probably to strengthen other qualities in him that would make him more qualified to understand God, but in either case, we may not understand God’s reason. Thus, according to the Mutazilite way of thinking, Job’s undeserved suffering is actually deserved because God’s wisdom requires it so that Job may be rewarded in some other way. Maimonides’ problem with this reasoning is that it contradicts itself in that holds that God knows everything and Man has the ability to act. How can this doctrine reconcile the two antithetical positions of predestination and free will?

Tzofar, the third speaker represents the Asharites. He holds that God’s actions are beyond human comprehension, and it is not possible — wrong — to hold God accountable to human moral standards. Moreover, Asharite theory reacts strongly against the idea that anything might happen by chance.  Everything that happens, happens through the will of God. Therefore, God must have willed for Job to suffer, and Tsofar implores Job to think of what sins he may have committed. Maimonides rejects Asharite cosmology out of hand because it obviates the existence of law and morality. If God controls everything, then how can Man be held accountable for anything, in which case, what is the purpose of law?

When God finally does show up as a whirlwind and challenges Job to stand up to his legalistic accusations against God, it is to be noted that God rebukes Job for his insolence in speaking of God without knowledge. But God then proceeds to rebuke Eliphaz, Bildad, and Tzofar as well for they spoke wrongly of God despite their good intention to defend His justice. It seems, as Maimonides points out, God prefers a questioning follower than one who does not understand. It is not possible for humans to comprehend the general purpose of existence, Maimonides contends, and this is not something that should concern us. However, like Aristotle, Maimonides does think that each species can have a purpose. However, that should not be interpreted to put Man as the pinnacle of creation for whom everything was created.

An Interventionist God?

Maimonides’ position on Job raises the thornier issue of whether God would (or could) intervene in the daily functioning of human beings. If God does not involve Himself with the world, creating it and then abandoning it, what is the purpose of human piety? Maimonides responds that this is an incorrect way of analysing the situation. God is great beyond comprehension — God is absolute, infinite, and perfect. So why would God need or even care whether we worship him or not? Worship does not serve God’s needs but ours, because it helps us to reach a better understanding of God.

Maimonides still has to grapple with the argument put forward by some that an atemporal God cannot delve into temporal matters, for how can a timeless being know about temporal events? Maimonides thinks that this problem arises because the philosophers have lost their nerve, for it was the same school that had earlier differentiated between divine perfection and the world’s imperfection. Maimonides reminds them that God’s knowledge of the world is a priori, not a posteriori: not experiential as it is for humans. Thus, God’s governance over the world is also different: God acts through intermediaries to oversee the world but commits to no direct involvement; hence the need for prophets and the existence of emanation. God uses nature as his vehicle. For example, if God needs to burn, he burns through fire. It is through the nature of things that God governs, thus maintaining his atemporal infinity and yet governing the world.

Maimonides walks a fine line between a conventional theistic understanding of God’s governance and an Aristotelian rationality where God is the universe where rational exploration of nature will take us closer to God. It is interesting to see that Maimonides, despite his devotion to rationality, seems to fear the consequences upon the masses of a rational and detached God — hence his warning to the reader to continue only if he is qualified to approach the issues Maimonides discusses. However, a clockwork universe, an existence that God programs and lets run on its own, seems an acceptable balance between an interventional and non-interventional God.

What does this mean for poor Job? God’s providence seems to have left him only to be restored, but without answering Job’s accusations. Maimonides seems to argue that balance has been restored, and the pain that Job felt was contingent upon his existence. Just as the consequence of life is death, it is but natural for Job to have some suffering. Besides, Job’s attitude, contrary to the expression “the patience of Job,” is not very patient. Job challenges God and demands a trial — a demand for equality, for trials happen only between equals. God’s infinity does not allow for this, and therefore the author must write that God does not answer Job. In this, the nature of God is explained — to “see” God humbles Job because Job has acquired a deeper understanding of God and His ways. As Maimonides explains in the Guide, earthly language is insufficient to describe the divine and we therefore resort to approximations. “Seeing” meant comprehending for Job. Thus is the story explained that comprehension of divinity is Man’s purpose. After his comprehension, Job is more content in life. He is richer and he lives longer. Maimonides does not fall victim to the Epicurean notion that life is about pleasure, but the material gain Job experiences is symbolic, Maimonides would argue, of his greater contentedness once he has come closer to God.

Conclusion

What Maimonides is interested in is what Einstein pondered on many centuries later: Did God have a choice in how He made the universe? For Maimonides, faith has to be rational: justice must be codified in law, and law implies a system. Consequently, God’s law implies a divine system. Systems have an inherent logic, and therefore God’s law must have a logic. Religion is therefore not anything one chooses to believe, but an understanding of divine logic. Maimonides’ concept of prayer, therefore, is of silent contemplation upon the nature of God.

The Book of Job raises questions of providence, suffering, divine intervention, and the purpose of existence. Maimonides clubs the first and the third by advocating a universe that is independent and stable without constant divine creative intervention. This allows science, philosophy, and theology to coexist in harmony. God’s creative breath is imparted upon the universe only at its time of creation: thereafter, the essence of things provides for stability in the universe. This view reconciles the two often opposed concepts of free will and God’s intervention in the universe.

Similarly, Maimonides discusses the second and fourth questions in relation to each other. If suffering is a consequence of existence, it has nothing to do with divine punishment. The purpose of existence is, for Maimonides, a clearer apprehension of God’s divine plan. Mortality by definition implies suffering and death and is therefore not an indication of God’s opinion on someone. Satan serves as a symbol of Job’s vulnerability — or perhaps corporeality — and the vulnerability of human beings at large. Thus the dialogue in heaven is only indicative of the nature of things, of how God has created existence. Pain and pleasure afflict all men by virtue of their being born. Again, Elihu’s escape from God’s censure is demonstrates the veracity of his belief in the Universe. It is essential for Maimonides that religion be a means of questioning metaphysics than blind superstition, for Maimonides is a man of religion as well as one of science. He sees no need to divorce one from the other. The greatest wonder in this universe is the universe itself and its Creator. Why should we seek to occlude this understanding with irrational beliefs?