God

In his discussion of God’s essence Maimonides combines Neoplatonic and Aristotelian ideas. Maimonides’ God is the absolute One from whom all positive attributes must be negated. These not only include attributes belonging to the Aristotelian categories pertaining to material beings, such as quantity, quality, place, time, relation etc., but even such attributes as living and powerful. Anything that entails change or multiplicity in God cannot be ascribed to Him. For Maimonides all corporeal descriptions of God in Scripture should be interpreted figuratively and all positive attributes attributed to God should be understood as either negative attributes or attributes of action. When Scripture says, for example, that God is alive and powerful, the intent is not to attribute the attributes of life and power to God but to indicate that God is not dead or powerless. Descriptions of God as merciful or vengeful are not meant to ascribe to Him these human emotions but to describe the divine actions which when translated into the human sphere are most often seen as stemming from such emotion. Hence, war and famine are ascribed to divine wrath, while plentiful crops are traced to divine mercy. Numerous and even contradictory actions, Maimonides argues, can stem from a single essence without entailing multiplicity, just as fire by virtue of a single quality blackens, bleaches, cooks, burns, melts, and hardens.

Together with the doctrine of negative attributes Mai-monides appears to maintain the view that God lives, knows, and is powerful in some positive sense. His solution to the problems raised by this position is to argue that God lives, but not through life; knows, but not through knowledge, etc. That is to say, in reference to God these are not attributes superadded to the divine essence but all are one with the essence. God’s knowledge, thus, is totally different from our knowledge, having nothing in common with it, and hence completely incomprehensible to us.

Maimonides’ God is also Avicenna’s Necessary Existent. Like Avicenna, Maimonides treats existence as an attribute superadded to essence. God is the one existent whose essence necessitates existence. All other existents attain their existence from an external cause; hence, their existence is only possible by nature. If their cause did not bring them into existence they would not exist.

In addition to viewing God as the absolute One who possesses no positive attributes and whose essence is unfathomable, as well as the Necessary Existent, Maimon-ides continues to uphold the Aristotelian view of God as Self-intellecting intellect, thereby treating God’s essence as intellect. According to Maimonides, God’s self-intellection encompasses all existence in a single thought, since God is the cause of all existence. The transcendent deity is at the same time the ultimate efficient, final, and formal cause of the world, the world being regarded by him as a single organism. Maimonides insists that while the world’s existence is completely dependent upon God - the world could not exist even for a fleeting second without God existing - God’s existence is in no manner dependent upon the world. All apparent contradictions entailed by these diverse views of God are reconciled by God’s absolute, unfathomable ‘‘otherness.’’