Esoteric writing and the true-versus-necessary belief distinction: should the Guide's deepest teachings be concealed from the unprepared reader, and may some Torah beliefs be politically necessary without being metaphysically true?

Maimonides, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The Guide is written esoterically by my own admission, and I have given the reader the seven causes of contradiction in the introduction so that the careful reader can read what I have hidden. The Account of the Chariot — ma'aseh merkavah, the inner meaning of the divine — is committed to writing only in chapter headings, in violation of the Mishnaic prohibition (Hagigah 2:1) on teaching it except orally to one student at a time, because the alternative was that the inner meaning would die with me, and that conduct would be extremely cowardly with regard to you and everyone who is perplexed (Guide III, Introduction).¹²

The distinction between true beliefs and necessary beliefs is real and is published in Guide III:28: some beliefs are required because their truth is the perfection of the soul (the existence, unity, knowledge, power, will, and eternity of the deity); other beliefs are required for the sake of political welfare, because their assimilation by the masses produces the ordered society without which philosophical inquiry is impossible.

The example I give is God's anger against transgressors — not metaphysically true (God has no soul, no anger), but politically necessary (the fear of His anger restrains the would-be transgressor). The community that has not been initiated into philosophy must be addressed in the language it can absorb; the philosopher who has been initiated reads the Torah's references to divine will in light of the Guide's teaching on attributes.³⁴

Sources

1. The Guide is then devoted primarily and chiefly to the explanation of the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot.

   Guide of the Perplexed Vol 1, pp. xiv–xv

2. For the first purpose of this Treatise is to explain what can be explained of the Account cif the Beginning and of the Account of the Chariot. We shall put in this chapter after we have first set forth two preambles of general import. One of these is as follows: Not everything mentioned in the Torah concerning the Account of the Beginning is to be taken in its external sense as the vulgar imagine.

   Guide of the Perplexed Vol 2, p. 347

3. This is the end to which my discussion of prophecy, I its parables, and its expressions, has finally led me; and that is the sum of what I shall tell you regarding this subject in this Treatise. We shall go on t6 other subjects with the help of the Almighty [Shaddai}.

   Guide of the Perplexed Vol 2, pp. 415–416

4. Its first premise is the old Jewish premise that being a Jew and being a philosopher are two incompatible things. Philosophers are men who try to give an account of the whole by starting from what is always accessible to man as man; Maimonides starts from the acceptance of the Torah.

   Guide of the Perplexed Vol 1, p. xiv

Where the argument is made

• Guide of the Perplexed, Introduction to Part I (the seven causes of contradiction, the deliberate writing for the perplexed advanced student)
• Guide, Introduction to Part III (the self-disclosure on writing the Account of the Chariot in chapter headings only)
• Guide III:28 (the distinction between true beliefs and necessary beliefs, with the example of God's anger as a necessary belief that is not metaphysically true)
• Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 (the prohibition on teaching the Account of the Chariot to more than one student, only orally, only to one capable of apprehending it)
• Pereq Heleq (the principles formulated as binding for the masses)

How the argument was received

Genuinely held, openly disclosed (not concealed) in the Guide's introductions, defended throughout the authorship, and at the heart of how I write. The esoteric mode is continuous with the Mishnaic tradition that withholds the Account of the Chariot from the unprepared; it is not a Greek philosophical secret imported into Judaism. The true-versus-necessary distinction is published in Guide III:28 plainly, with God's anger as the worked example. What I reject is the Straussian inference that the religious framework as a whole is a necessary belief — that creation, prophecy, providence, reward and punishment are political fictions concealing a private Aristotelian secret. The religious framework is the substance of my teaching. The esoteric mode preserves it from the misuse of the unprepared, but does not reduce it to instrumental fiction.