Page:Eight chapters of Maimonides on ethics.djvu/120

100 imperfect. If thou sayest that God does not know in advance, then great absurdities and destructive religious theories will result." Listen, therefore, to what I shall tell thee, reflect well upon it, for it is unquestionably the truth.

It is, indeed, an axiom of the science of the divine, i. e. metaphysics, that God (may He be blessed!) does not know by means of knowledge, and does not live by means of life, so that He and His knowledge may be considered two different things in the sense that this is true of man; for man is distinct from knowledge, and knowledge from man, in consequence of which they are two different things. If God knew by means of knowledge, He would necessarily be a plurality, and the primal essence would be composite, that is, consisting of God Himself, the knowledge by which He knows, the life by which He lives, the power by which He has strength, and similarly of all His attributes. I shall only mention one argument, simple and easily understood by all, though there are strong and convincing arguments and proofs that solve this difficulty. It is manifest that God is identical with His attributes and His attributes with Him, so that it may be said that He is the knowledge, the knower, and the known, and that He is the life, the living, and the source of His own life, the same being true of His other attributes. This conception is very hard to grasp, and thou shouldst not hope to thoroughly understand it by two or three lines in this treatise. There can only be imparted to thee a vague idea of it.

Now, in consequence of this important axiom, the Hebrew language does not allow the expression Ḥe Adonai (the life of God) as it does Ḥe Fara'oh (the life of Pharaoh), where the