Q&A: Why Did the First Human Sin According to Maimonides?
Why Did the First Human Sin According to Maimonides?
Question
2 questions occurred to me בעקבות a rereading of chapter 2 in part 1 of Guide of the Perplexed.
1) If I understand correctly, according to Maimonides, the human being was created in the image of God; that is the intellectual faculty in a person, and by means of this faculty a person distinguishes between truth and falsehood. Afterward, the human fell from this level of being a creature of intellect and was drawn after his fantasies, desires, and so on. If I understand the story in the Garden of Eden as a story with a sequence of events (first the human was an intellectual creature and then fell to become a creature that chases fantasies), how could a person who is a purely intellectual being have been able in the first place to fall into that pursuit? He should have judged reality correctly and not fallen.
One answer that comes to mind, together with combining this with chapter 30 of part 2, is that this is not an event with a chronological sequence, but rather an allegorical description of human nature, which contains the male, who is the intellectual faculty, and the female, who expresses the material aspect in him, and the serpent, which is the force of divination that misleads him. If so, the whole story is really an allegory about each and every human being from the beginning of human creation, and there was never an act here that changed his essence; rather, this is how he always was.
2) My second question is about free will in a person. It seems, as stated, that a person is supposed to strive to be a being who rules his imagination by means of his intellect. Can such an ideal person have free will? If in every situation he is bound to act according to his intellect and according to truth and falsehood, does that not make the meaning of human choice redundant? As I understand it, choice is something that stems from the fact that a person has an evaluative judgment about reality connected to good and evil as he perceives them, and therefore he chooses values that appear good in his eyes. Can a purely intellectual being, lacking this human judgment of good and evil, have choice?
Answer
0. There was a column here about Adam’s sin according to the Guide (conventional notions and intelligibles). There I explained that in my opinion Maimonides is not talking about values but about social conventions.
1. A question many have asked. Some claimed that the sin was a rigged game from the outset (the governance of “awesome in plot,” in the thought of the author of Leshem). But it can be explained that the human sinned in the realm of intelligibles and not because of his impulse, because for some reason he thought it was possible to do so. And it may be that this was not a black-and-white change. The human had a weak impulse, and after the sin it grew stronger. Therefore, from the outset there was already a possibility of sin.
2. I didn’t understand the question. That itself is the result of choice. A person who makes his intellect rule over imagination and impulse chooses this very thing. It’s not a state that just comes into being in him, and from that point on these are free lunches.