rah, where he says "Not immortality, but the power to win
eternal life through the knowledge and the love of God is implanted in the
human soul. If it has the ability to free itself from the bondage of the
senses and by means of the knowledge of God to lift itself to the highest
morality and the purest thinking, then it has attained divine bliss, true
immortality, and it enters the realm of the eternal Spirit together with
the angels. If it sinks into the sensuousness of earthly existence, then
it is cut off from eternal life; it suffers annihilation like the beast.
In reality this life eternal is not the future, but is already potentially
present and invariably at hand in the spirit of man himself, with its
constant striving toward the highest. When the rabbis speak of paradise
and hell, describing vividly the delights of the one and the torments of
the other, these are only metaphors for the agony of sin and the happiness
of virtue. True piety serves God neither from fear of punishment nor from
desire for reward, as servants obey their master, but from pure love of
God and truth. Thus the saying of Ben Azai is verified, 'The reward of a
good deed is the good deed itself.'(978) Only children need bribes and
threats to be trained to morality. Thus religion trains mankind. The
people who cannot penetrate into the kernel need the shell, the external
means of threats and promises."(979) These splendid words of the great
thinker require supplementing or modification in only one direction, and
that has been afforded by the keenest critic among Jewish philosophers,
Hasdai Crescas. Too deeply enmeshed in the Aristotelian system, Maimonides
found the happiness and immortality of man solely in the acquired
intellectual power which becomes part of the divine intellect, and the
mere knowledge of God is to him tantamount to the blissful enjoyment of
the pious in the radiance of God's majesty. Consequently those who strive
and soar heavenward through their moral conduct and noble aspirations,
without at the same time being thinkers, receive no reward. Against this
Aristotelian one-sidedness Crescas emphasizes God's love and goodness for
which the righteous yearn, and in whose pursuit man finds perfection and
happiness. Not for the sake of attaining bliss shall we love God and
practice virtue and truth, but to love God and practice virtue is itself
true bliss. This is the nearness of God referred to by the Psalmist and
declared to be ma