Chasidut על בבא בתרא 149:10

The Reshit Chochma dwelt on this point at length (shaar hakedusha, ch. 12). These are his holy words. “Just as we are required to believe in the whole Torah of Moshe, so are we required to believe in the words of the later halachic authorities (divrei sofrim), and in what they explained concerning the legends of the Torah (agadot). And even if one thinks that it is impossible, we are to ascribe the deficiency on our own understanding and not on their words. Anyone who derides any of their words shall be punished. This is as is written in the Gemara (Eruvin, 21b), ‘Rav Papa said in the name of Raba bar Ula, whosoever derides the words of the sages shall be sentenced to a hell of boiling dung.’ So too do we find in told in Gittin (57a) that a student of Rabbi Yochanan was punished for scoffing at Rabbi Yochanan for saying that in the future the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring precious gems thirty by thirty cubits in size.” In mentioning this Gemara, the Be’r haGolah (be’r 6, Rosh HaShanna, ch. 15) said, “how many piles of bones were made of this scoffer, in punishment for all that he did not believe.” When a man finds the words of the sages strange, he may then go on to assert that they are inventions. If a student were to ascend from level to level until God showed him the supernal angels, he would certainly believe in the words of the sages and their explanations. Yet he did not even believe in the simple meaning of their homilies. He rather turned them around in his mind to fit a certain intention, so Rabbi Yochanan gazed upon him and reduced him to a pile of bones. It would be well to see the Mahar”shal’s explanation of this story, who said that this man who did not believe was a heretic until he saw the angels. And so, a man must believe that even the simple explanations of the words of the sages are true. This is as the Ramban wrote in his Sefer Emuna V’Bitachon (ch. 9), “When the sages said that any given verse does not depart from the simple meaning, this does not mean that it can only be interpreted according to its simple meaning. We have leaned that though there are seventy “faces” to the Torah, not one of them may contradict the simple meaning.” This is just as the Ramban explained in his Hasagot on the Sefer HaMitzvot, that all that is written in the Torah, its explanations and the explications of its explanations which flow from a faithful source, are all expressing the truth of the Torah at all levels of truth. And our entire hold on the tradition of the Torah requires that we grasp the hem of the mantle of the Rishonim. For if we know and recognize that the Rishonim were like angels, then we are like men. And if we are to contend that the Rishonim were merely men like us, and therefore we can give our own critique and opinion of the validity of their teachings, then we are like donkeys, but not as the donkey of Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair.