Zera Yacob · Philosophy
Zera Yacob turns his criterion on the religious law itself: fasting that starves the poor, monastic celibacy against the created order, the subordination of women, and slavery - testing each against reason to separate what is God’s from what is only human addition.
Having made reason the judge of what to believe, Zera Yacob turned the same test on what the religions command people to do. The laws of fasting, of celibacy and monastic vows, of ritual purity, of the treatment of women and slaves - all were handed down as the will of God. But Zera Yacob asked of each the question he asked of every doctrine: does this actually come from the Creator, or is it a human rule that men have attached to God’s name? His criterion is the created order. God, being good and wise, made human beings with a nature and set them in a world with a design; a law that truly comes from God will fit that nature and serve that design, helping human life to flourish. A rule that works against the way God made us - that harms the body, frustrates the purpose of our nature, or destroys love and mutual help - cannot really be God’s command, however solemnly it is preached. It is, he says, a human addition. With that single test he proceeds to weigh the great commandments one by one.
Zera Yacob’s first target is the elaborate fasting the churches imposed. He does not object to moderation, but to the doctrine that God commanded people to abstain from food, sometimes to the point of weakening the body and, for the poor who had little to begin with, real suffering. His argument is direct: God the Creator gave us food so that we might live and sustain ourselves by it, not so that we might refuse it and harm ourselves. To claim that the Giver of food commands us to injure ourselves by shunning it is to make God contradict his own creation, which is absurd. The Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, he says, did not understand the work of God when they built these laws of fasting and then blamed them on him. The point generalizes: whenever a religious rule turns a good gift of the Creator into an occasion of harm, that rule exposes itself as human invention. Reason, reading the obvious purpose of food, overrules the accumulated authority of the fasting calendars.
Zera Yacob pressed his standard into territory where it cut against the deepest assumptions of his age. He argued that the laws treating menstruating women as impure, and the wider subordination of women, could not be from God: such rules, he reasoned, burden and diminish the whole life of a woman, obstruct marriage, hinder the raising of children, and destroy the mutual help and love that God built into the bond of man and woman - so they fight the created order rather than serve it. Since God created man and woman with equal nature, the law that lowers women is human, not divine. He reasoned similarly about slavery and about violence: to seize and own another human being, or to harm them, violates the equality and the golden rule that reason reads in creation - do not do to another what you would not want done to yourself. These were not commonplace views in the 17th century anywhere; Zera Yacob reached them not by consulting the moral fashions of his time but by following his one principle wherever it led. Whatever destroys love, equality, and mutual help among the people God made equal is a human corruption of God’s law.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Zera Yacob judged the received laws of religion by reason and the created order, defending marriage and the equality of man and woman while rejecting harmful fasting, the superiority of monasticism, the impurity rules that burden women, and slavery, on the ground that God’s law cannot contradict God’s…
Leads to Benedict de Spinoza.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.