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Man and the Cosmos (1)

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What is Man, That You Should Remember Him?  (Psalms 8:5)

 

            One of the central issues raised in the first half of the Kuzari is the marvel of God's relationship with man: is it possible that "the Creator of the bodies and spirits and the souls and the intelligences and the angels, who is too sublime and holy and exalted to be comprehended by the intelligences, still less so by the senses, has a connection with this lowly creature, composed of despicable matter?" [1:68].

 

            This question is clearly a central one: can it be possible that a relationship exists between God, the most exalted of all beings, and man?  The Chaver does not answer this question, because he feels that the Kuzari himself has already answered it.  The question is based on a mistaken assumption.  How do we know that man is a lowly being?  What principle guides us in judging what is important?  Our tests of significance are usually greatly mistaken.

 

            Sometimes we err on the side of grandiosity; sometimes on the side of a misplaced inferiority complex.  A grandiosity complex can be discerned in various philosophical positions, particularly in idealistic approaches.  In contrast, science has in various periods created a kind of inferiority complex within us.  This conflict gained momentum during the Copernican revolution.  It grew and expanded still more later on.  With the astronomical revolution that took place in the beginning of the modern age, when the vastness of the cosmos was spread before us, this conflict acquired a particular character.  Scientists informed us that the world is not the center of the universe; it is merely a satellite circling one of the many suns in our galaxy, itself one of many galaxies.  In such a vast universe, how could it be possible that God would show an interest in minuscule man?

 

            This question is not merely a philosophical one.  It connects to a circumstance which took place at the beginning of the modern era and which became the prototype of the conflict between science and religion: the story of Galileo.

 

            The popular description of this conflict is well known.  The discoveries and theories of Copernicus and Galileo transformed the earth from the center of the cosmos to a planet which serves a master, the sun.  This was a complete cosmological revolution.  The conceptual world modeled after Dante's Divine Comedy collapsed, and with it the theology that had been built upon this position.  Can man in fact be viewed as the center of the world?  "What is man that You should remember him, the son of man that You should take notice of him?" (Psalms 8:5).  Now we must speak not of angels, as Rihal did, but of planets and constellations.  The inner reason for the breakdown, which explains the fact that Galileo's books were banned by the Catholic church (and were removed from the index of forbidden books only in 1835), was indeed the sense that man was no longer the crown of creation; he had become a mere reed growing on the banks of an ocean which was rapidly spreading into infinity.

 

            This became the accepted position, and it is this view that stands in the background of Rav Kook's response to the problem, as we saw in last week's lecture.  Rav Kook defines  Judaism's object as the wish to proclaim that "despite the vastness of creation, man is not despicable to the extent that his ethical behavior should be regarded as worthless; rather, man's ethical creation is very important, immeasurably more so than the other creatures who are greater than him in number."  According to this approach, the conflict between religion and science as typified by the case of Galileo is only an illusory problem.  Its severity stemmed only from an inherited tradition of idolatry which did not differentiate between matter and spirit.  Man must overcome this complex.  Our generation is uniquely equipped to understand the meaninglessness of size, while understanding that two oceans stretch before us: one is the ocean of the ever widening reality, and the other is the ocean of the microscopic reality which is continually growing and unfolding before us.

 

            However, this opinion was not alien to Jewish philosophy in the middle ages.  Actually this issue had already been discussed, in a different form, in Jewish philosophy.  We will illustrate this below by viewing sections from 'Bechinat Olam,' a well-known philosophical poem by Rabbi Yedaiah Hapnini.  The position of medieval Jewish philosophy was entirely different from the position which fought against Galileo.  The problem of man in the universe was strongly felt by them, and from their perspective man's place at the center of the cosmos was not at all a place of honor.  Thus, in his Guide for the Perplexed (I:72), the Rambam compares the cosmos to man: "Know that all that exists is like one person ... that the outermost sphere with all that it contains is one person."  These spheres are the heart of the world, "and just as if the heart were to rest for the blink of an eye, the person would die and all his movements and powers would be nullified, so too if the spheres were to rest it would cause the death of the world in its entirety and the nullification of all that is contained in it".

 

            Not all the details contained in this analogy are correct, and in fact the Rambam lists three central differences.  The second is relevant to our discussion:

 

            "And the second, that the heart of every being possessed of a heart, is in the center [of its body] ... [whereas] in the world in general the opposite is true, the important [element] surrounds the insignificant ... and [therefore] the state of the world in general is that the closer the physical elements are to the center of the world, the more turbid their essence, heavy their movements, and [the more] their radiance and clarity departs."

 

            As can be proven from these lines, the geometrical center of the world is not in any way associated in the Rambam's thought with the "metaphysical" center, or what we might call the center of merit.  And indeed, the question regarding man's place in the cosmos arose even then, and demanded an answer.

 

            A beautiful expression of this response can be found in Rabbi Yedaiah Hapnini's philosophical poem, "Bechinat Olam" (chapter 12).  While looking at the cosmos, the poet proclaims:

 

"And when I raise my eyes and behold their loftiness, wondrous  beyond my comprehension

And their myriad battalions

Which bedeck myself and my people at the extremity of the cave

Sitting at the end of a minute point, the lowest of places...

My place is the size of a gnat in relation to my size

And the shelter of my small roof unifies the houses of a small city...

How may a weakling such as I scorn those who dig my grave before I come into existence...

How may the youngest of flies, clipped of wing be proud

Sunken in prison, quashed in a cage

While all the celestial bodies stand above him on my right and my left

How may my time release me

From the fear of one of the small snares

Which are quarried at my feet from above

Which from the moment of creation lay in wait to lead me to  them..."

            The heavenly bodies make human life possible:

And in addition

With ability their Creator imbued them...

Which compels them to affect the lowliest

In the movement of dead bodies at rest...

To return a shamefaced human from his nakedness..."

            However, we must not draw the conclusion that the heavenly bodies serve man and that he is the crown of creation:

"Not that they were created for this purpose

To serve bewildered creatures

Whom they exceed in significance and loftiness

Heaven forbid that their Creator should humble the exalted    before the lowly

And the upright before the bewildered.

And he would not be considered a wise artisan

Who prepares vessels weighing ten thousand silver coins

To make one iron needle

Rather [He] created them with wisdom known only to Him..."

            However, in contrast to man's physical lowliness, we must emphasize his intellectual prowess:

"[Scaling the] skies to their heights and earth to its depths

[Bearing the] unfathomable width of a wise heart

He who loves to explore the roots of the quarry of his  humanity

There is no fathoming his wisdom

Many are the secrets of the heart that he holds...

Can the heart of heaven penetrate

Can the heart of the seas fathom

The knowledge encompassed within the walls of a heart

Can the wings of the wind encompass the wind of wisdom

Which hovers over still waters and Arcadian streams

Can the expanses of earth encompass

A thought whose [resting] place is... small as a man's palm

Behold this is man's divine endowment

And the divine part of his world.

God rules in heaven and this being alone on the earth

Strides forth and probes texts of truth

Great are his actions in religion and law

Were he not beset by the terrors of his time

Nor terrorized by the winds of his day

He would not be hindered from riding the heavens

From embracing the entire world

Until he become as God, knowing good."

            This medieval thinker could never have understood the metaphysical problem which was seemingly created with the new heliocentric hypothesis, which transformed the world into the sun's satellite.  He dealt with the problem through the astronomy in which he believed, and solved the problem in his own way, a way which holds significance for us as well.

 

(This lecture was translated by Gila Weinberg.)

 

Copyright (c)1997 Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, Yeshivat Har Etzion.  All rights reserved.

 

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