Imagination and Its Gender in Maimonides' Guide

Imagination and Its Gender in Maimonides . Guide Imagination and Its Gender in Maimonides' Guide Ruth Birnbaum Dr. Ruth Birnbaum retired from the faculty of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the summer of 1996. Her publications on Jewish philosophy, history, and religion have appeared in various scholarly journals-Judaism. Hibbert Journal. The Personalist, and several others. She has also lectured and participated as a panel member at various academic conferences and religious institutions, and has currently been commissioned by a quarterly journal to do a reevaluation of Martin Buber. 13 Maimonides explicates the Bible with a philosophic plumb line to probe its rational depths. The truth of the Bible for Maimonides is in fact a philosophical truth, but since the unsophisticated masses ofpeople could not grasp this truth in its abstract nakedness, the Bible used veiled language to transmit its message. For those with a strong rational bent, however, the dictates of reason made it difficult to accept biblical passages literally. For them the truths of Scripture had to be reconciled with the logical truths of reason. Towards this end, Maimonides wrote The Guide ofthe Perplexed, explaining biblical terms and parables to enable his kinsmen to hold fast to their integrity in both domains. Maimonides anchors his synthesis in the Aristotelian system in which all things in nature are specified by form and matter. To fathom this understanding in the Bible, Maimonides follows a chain of traditional usage in ascribing gender to concepts ofform and matter. The gender of imagination as a faculty of the body was clearly established by the ancient philosophers and scholars. "Plato and his predecessors designated Matter as the female and Form as the male."1 Form, as distinct from the weaknesses and corruptions ofmatter, is the intellectual faculty ofthe soul which humans share with the Divine. Whereas intellect is able to distinguish the universal from the particular and the essential from the accidental, imagination cannot obtain a purely immaterial image of an object. "Imagination is in no way able to hold itself aloof from matter.,,2 This accounts for the anthropomorphisms and the physical presence of angels in the Bible. Bemg unable to form an idea of a spiritual being, the masses endow forces and energies I Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1.17, p. 43. However, see Translator's Introduction, p. lxxvi (top). 2Guide 1.73, The Tenth Premise, pp. 209-10. 14 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No. I with material bodies. "All this follows imagination, which is also in true reality the evil impulse."3 Matter, moreover, is in a constant state of privation, continually divesting one form for another. As scriptural proof for the pervasive evidence of philosophic ideas, Maimonides demonstrates this ongoing process ofprivation in matter as follows: How extraordinary is what Solomon said in his wisdom when likening matter to a married harlot, for matter is in no way found without form and is consequently always like a married woman who is never separated from a man and is never free. However, notwithstanding her being a married woman, she never ceases to seek for another man to substitute for her hi/sband, and she deceives and draws him on in every way until he obtains from her what her husband used to obtain. This is the state ofmatter.4 Philo of Alexandria, the progenitor of the allegorical method of interpretation of the Bib)e, similarly equated mind with man and the bodily senses with woman in his exposition On the Creation, portraying the corrosive control of matter over mind through the womanly wiles of the senses: Pleasure, being a courtesan and a wanton, eagerly desires to meet with a lover, and searches for panders, by whose means she shall get one.... It is the senses that act as panders for her and procure the lover. When she has ensnared these she easily brings the Mind under her control.5 Regarding Solomon's proverbial wisdom, "A woman of virtue who can find?" (Prov. 31:10), Maimonides explains that the virtuous woman is philosophically and figuratively understood as matter in...