Maimonides on Angels
“Maimonides, taking as his guide Aristotle, who places the “Intelligences” as intermediate beings between the Prime Cause and existing things—by the agency of which is produced the motion of the spheres on which all existence depends—declares the Biblical angels to be the beings with whom God consults before taking action (Gen. R. viii.). Differing, however, from Aristotle, whose “Intelligences” are coexistent with the First Cause, he asserts that the angels are created by God, and endowed with the power of governing the spheres; that they are conscious beings possessed of a free will, but that, unlike human beings, they are in constant action and without evil (“Moreh,” ii. 6-7). Far from accepting Scripture in its literal meaning, when angels are introduced, he finds the term “angel” applied to men, to elements, and to animals, as well as to ideals perceived by the Prophets. “Natural forces and angels are identical. When the rabbis (Midr. Eccl. x. 7) say: ‘When man sleeps, his soul speaks to the angel, and the angel to the cherub,’ man’s imaginative faculty is called angel, and his intellectual faculty is called cherub. The form in which angels appear characterizes the mental vision of the seer.” He thus distinguishes between angels endowed with eternal life—such as the Spheric Intelligences—and the perishable phenomena.”
The Illiterate Tide
Spirituality (in my case Kabbalah), in essence, is all about indirectly figuring out the nature of the (assumed) unseen parts of the universe. To do this, it sometimes requires a feat of misdirection. See, while you were reading about pots, the writer was building up a prediction model, a metaphor. This is child’s play to most, but metaphors used to be a well-regarded form of reality alteration. Now, people put faith in words themselves and their various meanings. We believe in Truth, Justice, and Liberty. But we are also seeing the dark side of the word, and how it can just as easily conceal malicious intent through propaganda and manipulation by media. Peace can mean war, freedom can mean slavery, and so on. Like all new technologies, at first legacy components are poorly integrated with the new functions. As time goes on, it becomes so commonplace that we scarcely notice it. Metaphor is essentially the imposition of a narrative onto a problem in order to predict an outcome. This skill was highly prized in pre-literate cultures and remains a valuable skill. However, the integration between pre-literate skills and post-literate skills is still going on in our culture today.
“Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,†whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.†Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.”
In the current landscape, we can see a return by some to pre-literate forms of thought, despite our culture being primarily literate. This backlash is a two-pronged strike toward further integration. One group retrieves the valuable skills of pre-literacy while the other forges ahead, further into literacy in order to create in-roads for integration. Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis are the three steps in this waltz.
In the meantime, Western literacy is oft-maligned as less valid than oral culture, but I think this is a fundamentally nihilistic viewpoint designed to slow the adoption of the “new” (an evolutionary throwback of sorts). Progress (or extropy, as I see it) is an incredibly strong force. You cannot force a country into a form of government that is not already acceptable to the consciousness of the majority of its natives, whether more or less advanced than their current system. For a time, there may be a system of control that artificially depresses or controls, but these do not seem to have historically fared well or fared at all for long. It is true that a people will have the government that they deserve, but that is not to say that the same is true of each individual member of the group.
In the same way, media can distract with story and glitter, but in the end, we still ponder abstractions in the dark of night, when all is quiet and the spectacle has dimmed. The loud, vainglorious clashing of cymbals does not win in the end, for the still soft voice of lucidity is still with us and within us, ready to question our values and test our desire for idealistic futures.
So, to all those who fear for the future of humanity or country (due to foolish youths or manipulative elders), be at ease. We are not now, nor perhaps will we be soon, in line for true utopia, but we are still moving forwards, with awkward gait and rambling pace. Let us remember that hope is still mankind’s greatest achievement, and its singular redeeming quality.
