Azure no. 43, Winter 5771 / 2011

A Tradition to Reason With

By Jonathan Jacobs

Why medieval rabbis welcomed rationalism into the tent of Abraham, and what we may learn from them.


“Tradition,” said R. Akiva, “is a safeguarding fence around the Torah.”1 Indeed, tradition has always played an elemental role within Judaism. Traditions of exegesis and traditions of practice have shaped and defined Jewish life for many centuries, and continue to do so today. One cannot imagine the survival and prosperity of the Jewish people without them.
Yet nowadays, the very concept of tradition has come under heavy criticism. Major schools of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought reject tradition for its alleged failure to meet the standards of rational justification. It has been widely argued that, in contrast to the universal validity of reason, the authority of tradition is confined to certain peoples and particular periods. A great part of modern philosophy reiterates the claim that tradition is irreconcilable with reason, and that the latter has no need of the former.
This notion resonates throughout much of contemporary ethical discourse. Two antithetical approaches have had an especially pronounced influence on modern ethics. The first approach, exemplified most famously by Immanuel Kant, maintains that moral requirements are justified by pure practical reason. According to Kant, it is reason, and reason alone, that both determines the ethically valid principle of action and motivates the individual to act upon it; any other extraneous motivation, whether passion or custom or whim, is potentially corrupting, and detracts from the moral worth of the act. “But since moral laws should hold for every rational being as such,” he wrote, “the principles must be derived from the universal concept of a rational being generally. In this manner all morals, which need anthropology for their application to men, must be completely developed first as pure philosophy, i.e., metaphysics, independently of anthropology…. That is, the will is a faculty of choosing only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as practically necessary, i.e., as good.”2 Moral law is therefore not inscrutable, inaccessible, or opaque. The validity and bindingness of an ethical requirement is rationally evident, i.e., established exclusively by the appeal to common human reason.
This approach has been developed in a number of ways, and has become one of the most prominent aspects of Enlightenment thought. Kant’s philosophy laid the groundwork for the modern insistence that the conditions of moral imperatives be conformable to human reason, and that objective judgment require no guidance from any extraneous source—such as revelation.3
The Kantian approach also has a distinctly political dimension, demanding that the structuring principles of political order satisfy conditions of “public reason.” Any other political arrangement constitutes a violation of reason and an illiberal imposition on the individual’s self-legislation and self-determination.
The second approach holds that, quite to the contrary, tradition is extremely important to one’s ethical life. According to proponents of this view, often associated with moral relativism, ethical requirements are not rationally justified in an objective sense. Relativists deny that there are objective justifications for ethical judgments. Given such an absence, some argue, it is tradition—with its moral perspectives, attitudes, strategies of reasoning, and conceptions of right and wrong—that allows ethical ideals and values to be transmitted through the generations. Tradition thus fulfills the role ascribed by the first approach to reason, lending authority and a sense of obligation to what are (mistakenly) perceived as rationally justified norms and attitudes. Of course, for members of the community in question, the moral tradition—contingent though it may be—has all the authority that objectivity might be alleged to supply it with. Even if, from an outsider’s perspective, it appears that the community’s values and practices are not rationally justified, within the community people do not think of them as merely relative or discretionary. They are thought to be objective and obligatory.
This is not to say that tradition is necessarily rigid and unreceptive to changes from the outside. True, certain traditions are fiercely dogmatic, brooking very little criticism and prizing above all the purity of transmission of their doctrine and practice. Yet many other traditions are more open to critical reflection and, consequently, the possibility of change. A tradition may include, may indeed be constituted upon, creative interaction with exterior forces and the constant need for reinterpretation.
The two positions we have roughly delineated regard rationality and tradition—specifically, religious tradition—as opposed to one another. Morality may be based on reason and counterpoised to faith, or it may be grounded in faith and counterpoised to reason; but in either case, tradition is altogether removed from the realm of rational thought.
There is, however, a third view, one that places reason and tradition in a relation of mutual reinforcement rather than opposition. According to this approach, which for many years went largely unaddressed in contemporary ethical discourse, moral requirements may be rationally justified even if they are not rationally evident. In other words, rational justification for ethical judgment and action need not be fully evident in an immediate, axiomatic sense, but rather understood on the basis of experience and reflection. One of the key factors in acquiring such understanding is, precisely, tradition.
This sophisticated conception of morality was articulated with extra-ordinary subtlety by a group of medieval Jewish philosophers. These thinkers’ conception of the relation between tradition, reason, and morality offers us a unique perspective from which to approach some of the most important issues of moral theorizing. The present essay touches upon some of the main features of this theory, in an attempt to open new directions for the exploration of the relationship of tradition and rationality, and the role each plays in our moral understanding.4



II
Can contemporary moral thought benefit from the insights of medieval philosophy, in which revelation has a central place? Can such a view contain rationally defensible elements? For modern secularist thinkers or ethicists of a Kantian persuasion, the answer is clearly negative. And yet, not all thinkers would be so quick to dismiss tradition as a path to rational understanding. According to the arguments of such contemporary thinkers as Alasdair MacIntyre, the fact that a tradition is not based upon rationally evident principles does not necessarily detract from its rationality. MacIntyre argues that a tradition may be considered rational inasmuch as it is able to respond to what he calls “epistemological crises”—challenges, objections, and alternatives to its own claims and norms of justification. “It is in respect of their adequacy or inadequacy in their responses to epistemological crises,” writes MacIntyre, “that traditions are vindicated or fail to be vindicated.”5 Hence, a rational tradition is one that is willing to explore and reflect upon long-held assumptions, drawing upon both internal and external sources to address difficulties raised by experience and rival belief systems. The Jewish tradition, of course, assigns a key role to revelation; still, if the content of what is allegedly revealed may be rationally justified, then the claim of revelation does not undermine its rational authority.
MacIntyre’s analysis provides a helpful frame of reference for assessing the philosophical project of medieval Jewish rationalism, particularly as it is presented in the thought of three of its leading representatives: Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and Bahya Ibn Pakuda.6 All three, we shall see, endorse certain fundamental beliefs of the Jewish tradition; these beliefs, though in no way rationally evident, are nevertheless posited as rationally justified—the justification attainable through the religious agent’s intellectual and practical engagement with the tradition. Thus, while these thinkers’ theology is openly grounded in historical origins, all held that the main elements of Jewish tradition are supported by reason.
Indeed, there is a rationalistic aspect to the thought of Saadia, Bahya, and Maimonides, inasmuch as they regard reason as the distinctive feature of human nature and the best means of understanding the commandments and how they bring man closer to God. At the same time, however, this rationalist disposition is tempered by a kind of intellectual humility. For all of its greatness, human reason is still finite, fallible, in need of aid and guidance. Tradition is that aid and guidance. As such, it is not a rival to reason, and does not seek to render reason unnecessary. Maimonides, for instance, saw tradition as that through which truth is accessible, provided man fully exercise his intellectual faculties. Even those incapable of grasping the abstractions and complexities of philosophical theorizing may still enlarge and deepen their understanding through reflection on the commandments and on tradition:
The law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body. As for the welfare of the soul, it consists in the multitude’s acquiring correct opinions corresponding to their respective capacity. Therefore some of them [namely, the opinions] are set forth explicitly and some of them are set forth in parables. For it is not within the nature of the common multitude that its capacity should suffice for apprehending that subject matter as it is.7
Tradition, argued Maimonides, can speak to each man at his level, employing parable and allegory for the multitudes and deeper intellectual truths for the rational elite. Whatever one’s mental capacity may be, the study of the tradition—which is an inseparable part of the fulfillment of its requirements—leads to fuller understanding of God.
Though the medievals privileged human reason, they were not rationalists in the sense of claiming that human understanding can attain a complete, fully evident comprehension of the world. True, they were heavily influenced by Aristotle’s concept of human perfection, by which the highest of human activities is the contemplation of the intelligible order. At the same time, they departed from Aristotle in interpreting this perfection as the imitation of God, who is not only a divine mind that thinks itself, but a wise, benevolent, and providential creator. Hence, to know God, one must walk in his ways, i.e., must achieve ethical virtue as well as intellectual excellence. In this vein, Bahya claims that “Whoever ascends from the stage [of unfailingly performing the commandments] to obedience by way of the mind’s persuasion reaches the stage of the prophets and the saints chosen by God.”8 Maimonides, too, saw the practice of the commandments as a means of facilitating both theoretical truth and virtuous action. In The Guide of the Perplexed, he writes,
You know to what extent the Torah lays stress upon love. With all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. For these two ends, love and fear, are achieved through two things: love through the opinions taught by the law, which include the apprehension of his being as he, may he be exalted, is in truth; while fear is achieved by means of all actions prescribed by the law, as we have explained…. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, mention likewise that man is required first to obtain knowledge of the Torah, then to obtain wisdom, then to know what is incumbent upon him with regard to the legal science of the law—I mean the drawing of inferences concerning what one ought to do. And this should be the order observed: The opinions in question should first be known as being received through tradition; then they should be demonstrated; then the actions through which one’s way of life may be ennobled should be precisely defined.9
For medieval philosophers, the notion that intellectual and ethical perfection are intimately intertwined seemed far less problematic than it appears to many modern thinkers. This notion was anchored in a widely held view during Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, according to which moral value is objectively grounded, and may be attained through reflection upon the world order, God, and human nature. The good is both an object of understanding and the objective of virtuous activity.10 These two notions are inextricably linked; contemplation of the good must always precede its realization.
Thus, for medieval thinkers such as Maimonides, Saadia, and Bahya, there was intrinsic good in the created order; God, after all, “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10). Chief among the things for which we are to be grateful to God, said Maimonides, is the wisdom and benevolence by which the natural world is ordered, the exquisitely fine arrangement of parts and processes:
If you consider the divine actions—I mean to say the natural actions—the deity’s wily graciousness and wisdom, as shown in the creation of living beings, in the gradation of the motions of the limbs, and the proximity of some of the latter to others, will through them become clear to you. Similarly his wisdom and wily graciousness, as shown in the gradual succession of the various states of the whole individual, will become clear to you.11
Maimonides assumes that there is genuine, objective good, intelligible through study of Torah and actualized in the fulfillment of its commandments. By rationally contemplating the wisdom of the law, and informing their actions with such knowledge, human beings may both comprehend and actualize objective good. The better one understands the commandments in theory, the greater the good that may be realized in practice.
This spiral of mutual reinforcement between intellectual and ethical activity reflects the medievals’ profound insight into human nature. On the one hand, they understood that just as, for Aristotle, habituation is necessary for an agent to acquire practical wisdom—i.e., to grasp what makes a virtuous action virtuous—so a life governed by Jewish law is vital for ascertaining a complete, integrated understanding of human excellence.12One cannot come to know the good by theoretical comprehension alone, however lucid that comprehension may be. Real understanding is not a purely cognitive matter, wholly separate from one’s other dispositions and traits; it requires practical engagement, the continuous shaping of one’s character through ethical behavior. On the other hand, the medieval rationalists recognized that religious practice can heighten one’s understanding of the commandment, validating it in a way that blind obedience never can. Tradition transmits wisdom, but only if we become wise enough to recognize and appreciate it.



III
The marriage of the intellectual and the ethical is perhaps most evident in the theological question of the reasons for the commandments. After all, as we have noted, action and understanding go hand in hand: To properly fulfill the commandments, one must strive to comprehend their reasons, and, to comprehend their reasons properly, one must engage in continuous, committed fulfillment of the commandments.
To be sure, our medieval thinkers all, to one extent or another, believed in the existence of an underlying rationale for the law and, moreover, in the value of the human search for it. Saadia, for instance, held that there was some discernible utility in all laws. There are, he said, a number of rationally evident commandments that serve as the basis for many of the others. Hence, even when the reason seems obscure, it may be discovered through study of the commandments. “Thus [God] has enjoined us to accept these matters as binding and observe them. He has furthermore informed us, however, that, if we would engage in speculation and diligent research, inquiry would produce for us in each instance the complete truth, tallying with his announcements to us by the speech of his prophets.”13
Maimonides maintained that the reasons for the laws could not all be comprehended, but that they exist nevertheless.14 God would not impose requirements without reason. Indeed, Maimonides was critical of Muslim and Jewish thinkers who held that God’s will is so unconstrained by reason that his commands could not be anything but rationally inscrutable.15 The law, he asserted, is not a test of thoughtless obedience. Its rationale may be beyond our grasp, but each generation can at least transmit an enhanced understanding of the commandments to the next. “Our intellects,” Maimonides claims, “are incapable of apprehending the perfection of everything that he has made and the justice of everything he has commanded”; nevertheless, “You will never cease discovering the clear and evident manifestation of justice in all the commandments of this law, if you consider them carefully.”16 In observing the law, however arcane, we can be sure we are enhancing both our own intellectual and moral capacities and the good of the community:
Every commandment from among these six hundred and thirteen commandments exists either with a view to communicating a correct opinion, or to putting an end to an unhealthy opinion, or to communicating a rule of justice, or to warding off an injustice, or to endowing men with a noble moral quality, or to warning them against an evil moral quality. Thus all [the commandments] are bound up with three things: opinions, moral qualities, and political civic action.17
The rational justification for the commandments also served as a standard by which the medievals distinguished different types of laws. Saadia spoke of laws of reason and laws of revelation. Maimonides, similarly, differentiated between mishpatim (ordinances) and hukkim (statutes):
Those commandments whose utility is clear to the multitude are called mishpatim, and those whose utility is not clear to the multitude are called hukkim. They [the talmudic sages] always say with regard to the verse: For it is no vain thingAnd if it is vain, it is because of you; meaning that the legislation is not a vain matter without a useful end and that if it seems to you that this is the case with regard to some of the commandments, the deficiency resides in your apprehension.18
Even the hukkim are not to be interpreted as arbitrary or irrational. According to Maimonides, though we may not be able to ascertain the rationales of the hukkim in detail, they are nonetheless like the mishpatim insofar as they are not without rational justification. We can therefore achieve at least some understanding of their wisdom.
According to one view, popular among medieval thinkers, many of the more enigmatic commandments were designed as a response to the actual circumstances of the People of Israel, turning them progressively away from idolatry and toward God through means to which they could relate. The likeness of the commandments to the now-obsolete pagan practices (hence their obscurity to the modern mind19) rendered their reception far more feasible for the people. As Maimonides noted, “a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed…. [S]o did this group of laws derive from a divine grace, so that they should be left with the kind of practices to which they were accustomed and so that consequently the belief, which constitutes the first intention [of the law], should be validated in them.”20 Hence God, generously taking human nature into account, commanded Israel to act in ways that did not require abrupt, radical adjustment, even though the meaning of the commandments was profoundly different, inculcating the people with new theological perspectives and ethical dispositions. At one and the same time, the People of Israel both carried on in their familiar ways and changed their orientation from paganism to the worship of God, gradually becoming “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).
It must, however, be noted that this susceptibility to idolatry never quite disappears; thus, the commandments against it are never rendered null.21 We may think ourselves safely and fully distanced from idolatry, and for that reason, we may judge it safe to relax the obligation of many of the commandments. The medievals regarded this as a dangerous mistake. Maimonides, for instance, argues that the commandments are fundamentally suited to human nature, which does not change. Individuals can strive to acquire and exercise virtue, but their natural disposition, with its inclinations and susceptibility to sin, is never radically transformed.22 Saadia, for his part, writes that “the repetition by the prophets of the injunction already dictated by reason served to put man on his guard, and make him beware, and take the necessary precautions in the fulfillment of these precepts.”23 However much one deepens one’s understanding of the commandments, they continue to be authoritative. Intellectual virtue does not obviate the need for ethical virtue, nor does it in any way detract from the obligation to obey the law. Even if the reasons for a commandment were to be comprehended fully, it would still remain as binding as ever.
And indeed, the study and legal elaboration of the law is not a finite process, but an ongoing, ever-relevant progression. The transmission of the commandments across the generations both preserves their unique origin and develops ethical and intellectual virtue. As lives led in accordance with the tradition meet with new circumstances and challenges, the law is elaborated and our understanding further developed, even by the use of sources external to the tradition (we are, said Maimonides, to “Hear the truth from whoever says it”24). Yet we must always strive to stay true to its foundational principles.
 

 
IV
The view outlined here never became the official doctrine of Judaism. Judaism, after all, was not in the habit of formulating doctrines, and did not develop a single, fixed theological or philosophical catechism. Yet it is a central stream of thought within the Jewish tradition, one that was important in its time, and that has significant ramifications for both Jewish thought and moral theory today.
There are, admittedly, striking differences between our time and the Middle Ages; there are key elements of the medieval ethics and metaphysics that we no longer accept (the Aristotelian notion of an Active Intellect determining world order and intelligibility, for example). Nevertheless, certain insights articulated by medieval thinkers remain deeply relevant for contemporary problems and dilemmas. Some of the medievalists’ most critical issues—issues concerning reason and faith, knowledge and action, law and ethics—are no less pertinent today than they were a millennium ago. The notion that tradition can be a mode of access to important truths and an approach to attaining human excellence remains strongly relevant.
The attempt of medieval Jewish thinkers to reconcile the genuineness and authority of tradition with the demands of rational justification may serve to broaden the horizons of today’s philosophical discourse, caught as it is in a deadlock between those who identify morality with reason but not with tradition, and those who see morality as grounded in tradition but not in reason. It also allows for the acceptance of an ethics that is rationally non-evident (in contrast to those approaches inspired by Kant) yet objectively justified by reason (in contrast to the relativists). This view is far less certain of human beings’ rational self-sufficiency than the former, and far more intellectually demanding than the latter; it offers a conception of morality for which both intellectual humility and intellectual aspiration are essential. Man, it says, is limited and finite, but he is also a creature of immense potential, and must strive to realize that potential to its fullest—both intellectually and ethically. In the words of Bahya, “Wisdom is the life of [human beings’] soul, the light of their mind, their way to the favor of God.”25
In its rationalistic conceit, much of modern thought regards tradition as intellectual fetters, chaining the individual to religious authority, putting needless, arbitrary limits on rational self-determination. Our medieval thinkers, however, saw things in an entirely different light. Tradition, they maintained, is the means through which we—finite and imperfect though we are—can imitate God, a means for us to come closer to his presence. The medieval Jewish view holds that we need tradition in order to fully actualize our distinctive human potential. Human beings are not self-sufficient, and are not likely to attain their highest ends unaided. Tradition, then, is the point of departure from which man may advance toward holiness, toward ethical and intellectual virtue, toward the ideal of “In all your ways know him” (Proverbs 3:6).
If critical and alert participation in a tradition enlarges understanding, makes ethical truths intelligible, and encourages the development of moral virtues, then there are good grounds to assume that this tradition is not at odds with human reason. True, this argument may only seem compelling to one who is already within the tradition; it is almost impossible to render the elements of a tradition rationally convincing to one who regards it as foreign, or as merely one of several possibilities. For morality to be rational it is not necessary that its elements be fully evident to reason, or that it be constructed from the truths of reason alone. Indeed, it is not at all clear that such an approach could succeed. For ethical requirements to be well suited to human beings, facts about human nature and about the ways in which rational justifications can be achieved are vitally important. Many of these facts cannot be ascertained a priori.
So, if we are concerned with rational vindication, we must inquire into the ethical and intellectual virtue promoted by the tradition: Does the Jewish tradition champion the values, ideals, principles, and practices that make for a life well-lived? Do those who fulfill its commandments acquire virtues that may be valued by standards external to that particular tradition? Are these commandments especially effective in encouraging human excellence, even if in ways not obvious and apparent? Affirmative answers to these questions would indicate that there is real wisdom in the Jewish tradition—wisdom that, according to the tradition, should be sought and actualized in our way of life. Admittedly, this would not establish the Jewish tradition as the exclusive path to virtue or show us exactly how it can serve as such a path. It would, however, demonstrate that ancient and medieval wisdom is still relevant in many important ways, and that tradition, far from being the enemy of reason, can in fact speak to us in a clear, rational voice.

 

Jonathan Jacobs is director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics and a professor of philosophy at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

 
  
Notes
1. Mishna Avot 3:13.
2. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), pp. 28-29.
3. There is, we must note, a much less rationalistic version of this approach, which we might call the “subjectivist” version of the insistence on the individual’s own autonomy and authority over moral value. Here, too, the emphasis is on self-legislation, but without the formal requirements of Kantian rationalism. Rather, the individual agent is the author of the commitments and values that give shape to moral life, and he is the one who must take responsibility for them. According to this view, there are no necessary rational measures by which one’s choice of values can be judged; the agent’s authenticity or integrity is the ultimate touchstone of moral worth. Though this subjectivist version is very much at odds with Kant’s rational self-legislation, both approaches agree in assigning the agent a constitutive role in ethical judgment, and are thus both typically modern.
4. The main theses of this discussion are developments of arguments and themes presented in Jonathan Jacobs, Law, Reason, and Morality in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford, 2010), and Jonathan Jacobs, “The Epistemology of Moral Tradition: A Defense of a Maimonidean Thesis,” The Review of Metaphysics 64:1 (September 2010), pp. 55-74.
5. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ill. Notre Dame, 1988), p. 366.
6. See, in particular, Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963); Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven: Yale, 1948); and Bahya Ibn Pakuda, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, trans. Menahem Mansoor (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004).
7. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:27, p. 510.
8. Bahya, Direction to the Duties of the Heart, p. 187.
9. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:53-54, pp. 630-634. (Emphases in the original.) Maimonidean scholar Isadore Twersky has noted in this context that “the reciprocity of action and knowledge, of moral virtue and intellectual virtue, appears in Maimonidean writing with the emphatic regularity of a poetic refrain.” See Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven: Yale, 1980), p. 478.
10. For a discussion of the Greek influence on—and contrasts to—medieval Jewish philosophy on this subject, see Jacobs, Law, Reason, and Morality, especially the first three chapters.
11. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:32, p. 525.
12. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, where he argues that right ethical understanding depends upon the proper predisposition. Without a dispositional orientation to what is good, one will not be able to clearly comprehend why it is good. In book 6, he goes on to say that practical wisdom requires the various virtues of character, and that those virtues are not full-fledged if the person lacks practical wisdom.
13. Saadia, Beliefs and Opinions, p. 28.
14. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:26, pp. 507-509.
15. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:31, pp. 523-524.
16. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:49, p. 605.
17. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:31, p. 524.
18. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:26, p. 507.
19. According to Maimonides, “if we knew [the ancient pagan practices] and were cognizant of the events that happened in those days, we would know in detail the reasons of many things mentioned in the Torah.” Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:50, p. 615.
20. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:32, pp. 526-528. Contemporary theologian David Hartman similarly observes that “Mishpatim reflect the constant in human nature; hukkim reflect it under the influence of Sabean idolatry. Nothing in biblical law necessarily reflects the non-rational intrusion of the divine will in human history.” David Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977), p. 172.
21. See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:26, p. 507, where he discusses the utility of commandments that keep people from turning toward the distractions from the true and the good, distractions that lead to false beliefs.
22. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:32, p. 529.
23. Saadia, Beliefs and Opinions, p. 192.
24. Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” in Raymond Weiss and Charles Butterworth, eds., Ethical Writings of Maimonides (New York: Dover, 1983), p. 60.
25. Bahya, Direction to the Duties of the Heart, p. 85.