The Book of the Lamp cements a religious philosophy about the interpretation of faith and the Talmud; it was followed by the Mishneh Torah (ca. 1180), which conducts a similar inquiry into the workings of Jewish law. The Mishneh Torah took Maimonides over 10 years to compose, and he continued to revise it until his death. In it, he presents a summary and explanation of the entirety of Jewish law.
The importance of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah lies in its applicability to the entire contemporary Jewish community. Many of the early rabbinical interpretations of the law were no longer useful on a wide scale—they were too specific to certain communities, locales, or political circumstances. Maimonides tried to present his discussion of the law in such a way that it strengthened the foundational assertion that the law, as given to the Jewish people by Moses, is significant for Jews of all times and places.
Maimonides’s own assessment of his task in writing the Mishneh Torah was that he was merely recording a compendium of the Talmud and its contents alongside a collated collection of commentaries and his own notes. It is ostensibly a personal notebook, but it quickly gained an authoritative status among Maimonides’s followers and, eventually, in the wider Jewish diaspora.
Maimonides’s own commentaries and interpretations took into account the Greek ideas that were so prevalent in contemporary gentile philosophy. He often uses Aristotelian logic and metaphysical ideas derived from philosophers like the founder of Islamic Sufism, al-Gazali, to comment on aspects of the Mishneh. More conservative scholars of Jewish law derided Maimonides for this synthesis of non-Jewish philosophy, taking particular aim at his incorporation of Aristotelian ideas. But the reception of the Mishneh Torah was largely laudatory, and it inspired Talmudic scholars from throughout the Jewish world; many letters between Maimonides and those who wanted to know more survive today.
The Mishneh Torah was Maimonides’s greatest contribution to Jewish thought and rabbinical scholarship, but his influence was by no means limited to a Jewish milieu. A devoted scholar of Aristotle, Maimonides is relevant in a wider context for his ideas about the relationship between philosophy and religion; he was an early proponent of a system of thought now known as “rational religious philosophy,” and it is in this guise that he endures in the broader intellectual history of the Middle Ages. Together, the Book of the Lamp and the Mishneh Torah would set the stage for the composition of the Guide for the Perplexed (1190), which further explores the rationality behind the principles of faith and law from a combined philosophical and religious perspective.
MAIMONIDES THE PHILOSOPHER: THE GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
Of the Maimonidean canon, no work is as influential as the Guide, which displays Maimonides’s full genius as an expert in Jewish law and a great thinker whose hallmark was the synthesis of traditional Talmudic ideas with the rational principles that dominated medieval philosophical discourse. In an effort to show that ultimate truths were the same whether arrived at through scripture or human reason, he draws extensive parallels between those ideas that he considered to have been “revealed” and those that had been arrived at through man’s careful consideration.
The Guide was composed at the request of one of Maimonides’s brightest students, who had reached a crossroads of his academic career and could not decide whether he should proceed with rabbinical religious study or secular philosophy. At the opening of the Guide, Maimonides outlines his objective, which is to promote “the true understanding of the real spirit of the Law, to guide those religious persons who, adhering to the Torah, have studied philosophy and are embarrassed by the contradictions between the teachings of philosophy and the literal sense of the Torah.” Maimonides based the Guide on the premise that the two need not be exclusive and that some sort of synthesis can be achieved through the figurative interpretation of scripture.
The sage’s reply to his student is written in epistolary form and divided into three parts, each containing separate treatises on aspects of biblical interpretation. The first of these presents an argument against any literal understanding of God, using a complex discussion of homonyms and allegorical interpretations to support this stance. Maimonides warns his student against the spiritual dangers of attempting to understand God in any literal sense. Focusing on the attributes of God, especially if those attributes are literal and computed in human terms, leads to idolatry.
Maimonides vehemently disagrees with the tendency to anthropomorphize the figure of the Creator in Talmudic commentary by assigning it human characteristics. He dedicates several chapters to the enumeration of terms used to describe God in the Bible, and he construes these as homonyms in order to show how they are indicative of qualities that are outside the realm of corporeal existence; to Maimonides, there was no way to know the “figure” of God, because that entity is immaterial and imperceptible except through allegorical reasoning. For example, he reinterprets instances in which the prophets are said to have “seen” or “heard” God as indicative of instances of intellectual, rather than sensory, sight and comprehension. This intellectual rapport with the Creator and source of truth is, to Maimonides, the goal of all philosophy, Jewish or otherwise.
Still, the renowned scholar whose religious advice had been sought by members of the community for decades by the time he wrote the Guide is well aware of the reasons behind the tendency toward literal interpretation of the Bible. He acknowledges that the Torah “speaks the language of man” and that although it is ultimately misleading, to some extent literal interpretation is a necessary first step in the realization of truth—for the ancient biblical writers, the use of parables offered an effective way of expressing God’s truth to the common, uneducated, and unsophisticated person.
But to Maimonides, true spiritual awareness and the correct interpretation of revelation can be arrived at only through the abandonment of this simple methodology and the adoption of a reasoned, allegorical approach. He offers many examples of how allegorical interpretations of the Bible can rectify the contradictions between rational philosophy and conclusions based on literal and anthropomorphic interpretation.
Maimonides advocates the Aristotelian quest for the complete acquisition of knowledge, but he theorizes that the import of this is ultimately that knowledge is a prerequisite for spiritual development. Furthermore, he acknowledges limits in the extent of man’s ability to really comprehend the truths of the universe. Maimonides posits that this is impossible, and that the capacity for human knowledge is a limited one; we must work within the limits of our abilities and accept that there are things that only God knows. Still, he asserts that in order to truly love God, the soul must first realize all that man is capable of knowing.
However, the sage stresses that man can come closer to the divine nature of God (even if he will never fully understand it) through the application of extreme negation in his perceptions of it. The essential attributes of God— which he identifies as existence, life, power, wisdom, and will—do not carry the same meaning as they do when they are applied to aspects of creation. For example, when it is said that “God exists,” the existence being referred to is essentially different from that which is applicable to the laws of nature and man. When man exists, he is born, goes through a chronology of events, and dies—but God is not born, nor is he affected by time or death. Maimonides’s concept of negation holds that when man says that “God exists,” what he really means is “God does not not exist, but his existence cannot be compared to other things.”
Following Aristotelian proofs of a similar idea, Maimonides portrays God as being without time, change, or form. This negative conceptualization of God is characteristic of Maimonides’s philosophy of the uselessness of applying a human paradigm to God—time, change, and form affect mankind and creation, but Maimonides does not accept that they have any bearing on the nature of the Creator itself. Maimonides thus advocates the consideration of the deity through negative, rather than positive attributes. For the same reasons that God cannot be conceived literally, a scale meant to measure human achievements cannot be applied to the divine—because the essence of God is incomparable to that of man, it cannot be perceived in the same terms.
Jewish Philosophical Tradition and Aristotelian Knowledge
For Maimonides, the disparity between Aristotelian truth and that which seemed to be represented in the Bible was a consequence of the history of the
Jewish people. The scholar maintains that knowledge about the universe— called “metaphysical knowledge”—which his contemporaries attributed to the Greeks had been a characteristic of Judaism from the beginning. In the Guide, he portrays Adam as the perfect embodiment of metaphysical knowledge, and he says that although this intimate knowledge of God was lost at some point in early history, it was regained by Abraham and passed down to Isaac and Jacob before being lost again during the Israelites’ captivity in Egypt. According to Maimonides, this metaphysical knowledge had been obscured by centuries of a desire to make the unknowable God more palatable to the average person through anthropomorphization and literal interpretation, but remnants of it are still found through the correct understanding of scripture. This historiographical worldview meant that Maimonides believed that the philosophical truths uncovered by Aristotle and the Greeks merely constituted a reemergence of knowledge that had already been revealed to the Jewish people.
According to Maimonides, only through proper mental—and, consequently spiritual—preparation can we come to realize the greater truths of the universe. The first book of the Guide contains a warning to those who might be considering the frivolous pursuit of metaphysical knowledge; in no uncertain terms, Maimonides advises against the teaching of metaphysics to “the multitude”—common people unprepared to understand the real import of the secrets encoded in the Torah. By way of explanation, he offers an analogy:
He. . . who begins with Metaphysics, will not only be confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity. I compare such a person to an infant fed with wheaten bread, meat and wine; it will undoubtedly die, not because such food is naturally unfit for the human body, but because of the weakness of the child, who is unable to digest the food, and cannot derive benefit from it. The same is the case with the true principles of science.2
Citing the difficulty of the subject, the inherent limits of man’s knowledge, and the need for intense preparation, Maimonides concludes that, in the words of scripture itself, metaphysical knowledge should be reserved for the “privileged few.”
The Primal Cause and the Concept of Eternity
Maimonides proposes that a distinction between Greek philosophy and its Jewish counterpart was largely a semantic one; he likens the Jewish “account of the beginning”—the understanding of the genesis of the universe—to the Greek idea of physics. The second part of the Guide is largely concerned with this aspect of Maimonides’s philosophy.
In the second part of his treatise, Maimonides offers philosophical proofs for those ideas that he advocates as truths—the existence, unity, eternity, and incorporeality of God. Of course, this articulation of truths follows the doctrine set out for Jewish articles of faith that are found in the Book of the Light. Maimonides begins this section of the Guide by listing the Aristotelian proofs for the existence of God. This is followed by a fuller discussion of the nature of God and its relation to the universe, paying particular attention to the philosophical analysis of a concept known to Aristotelians as “the Primal Cause.”
Aristotle’s philosophy suggests that a being or an event cannot cause itself; there must be something that precedes it. Theoretically, we could follow the “trail” of these causations all the way back into history. But the concept of the Primal Cause acknowledges that, at some point, there must have been an exception to this rule—everything in the world is dependent on causation except that thing that started the chain of causation in the first place; we might think of the Primal Cause as a pendulum that strikes a domino and sets off a reaction that is far-reaching both in time and space.
To someone like Maimonides, who believed in a single, fundamentally incomprehensible God, subscribing to the Aristotelian ideas about the Primal Cause was relatively easy because the Cause could be interpreted as the God who created the universe out of nothing; this understanding would impact the theological ideas of medieval Jews and Christians alike.
But Maimonides’s examination of the Aristotelian Primal Cause leads to a condemnation of other parts of the Aristotelian theory of the creation of the universe, which presupposes the eternity of all existence. The most important argument in the Aristotelian doctrine of eternal existence, based on the observation that the universe is dictated by fixed laws, is that nature does not change—because of this, it stands to Aristotelian reason that a universe incapable of changing must have always existed in this way. But Maimonides points out that Aristotle himself had failed to provide scientific proofs for his ideas about the eternity of existence and that the astronomer Ptolemy had already proven the theorem to be false.
The Aristotelian understanding of the universe held that the universe is composed of various spheres (heavens) and Intelligences (uncorporeal, entirely spiritual presences), which are eternal and entirely governed by natural laws. However, Maimonides suggests that the observation that such laws are unchangeable is really just an observation of the current stage in universal development; the Jewish philosopher notes that there is no logical connection between the state of the universe as it is observed by humans now (in its fully evolved manifestation) and the principles that governed it at the moment of its creation. If natural law is unchangeable, then Maimonides concludes that all of the things in the universe must have been created out of nothing from a state of complete nonexistence and that the natural laws that we recognize now are a later development in the process of creation; this doctrine would come to be known as creatio ex nihilo by Maimonides’s Latin commentators.
The philosopher identifies three dominant theories about the creation of the universe. He begins with the creatio ex nihilo theory in the Law of Moses, which holds that:
Everything except God has been brought by Him into existence out of non-existence. In the beginning God alone existed, and nothing else; neither angels, nor spheres, nor the things that are contained within the spheres existed. He then produced from nothing all existing things, such as they are.3
As we will see, with these assertions Maimonides sets himself and his Mosaic law up for an ideological collision with the ideas of Platonist and Aristotelian philosophers.
Neither the Platonist nor the Aristotelian theory of creation can accept that anything can be created out of nothing. In these philosophies, matter—and therefore the universe—is considered to be eternal, and therefore must have coexisted with the creator of the universe. Maimonides describes the Platonic theory of the relationship between the creator God and matter as one of the potter and his clay—both are in existence simultaneously, but this coexistence does not mean that they are equal.
Furthermore, Plato and his cohorts held that the universe is ultimately capable of destruction—the same matter that “became” the spheres and Intelligences in the beginning could eventually devolve from its current form into something akin to nonexistence. This follows the observable patterns of the life cycles of human beings, who are “created” from cellular structures, take corporeal human form, and then decay into dust, but still “exist” in some sense of the word. To the Platonists, the heavens were just as transient as the things that exist within them.
In contrast, the Aristotelian theory of creation and its eternity holds that nothing in the cosmological universe is transient and that everything that is in existence has always been and will always be in existence. Aristotelian thought also excludes the possibility of universal destruction; Maimonides seems to share this position in the second book of the Guide, when he dismisses the idea that the Torah teaches that the universe will be destroyed and lists scriptural references to eternity.
But in the end, this seems to be one of those things that Maimonides feels is unknowable to man, as he reminds his reader that, because the universe depends not on natural laws but on the will of God, “He may, according to His desire, or according to the decree of His wisdom, either destroy it, or allow it to exist, and it is therefore possible that He will preserve the Universe forever.”4 Maimonides seems to tentatively accept the possibility that Aristotle and Plato were right in their ideas about the eternity of the universe, even if he differed in his conception of its creation and remained open to its potential for destruction; indeed, on some level he seems to accept Plato as a substandard alternative to the Mosaic theory.
Cosmology and the Heavenly Intelligences
As we have seen, the Greek philosophers posited the idea that in the beginning God coexisted with other entities—the spheres and the Intelligences. Maimonides acknowledges the existence of both of these, and identifies the angels in scripture as the Intelligences—but he has different views about their agency.
Maimonides challenges the Aristotelian ideas about astronomy and cosmology. Aristotelian thinkers held that the universe consists of 10 Intelligences and 9 spheres, and in the Middle Ages most people related the manifestation of God to self-awareness. Many of Maimonides’s philosophical contemporaries thus believed that the universe originated when God, who is eternal, manifested Himself in the first heavenly Intelligence. In turn, the Intelligence was capable of having awareness both of itself and of God; this awareness led to the creation of the second Intelligence and the outermost sphere of the universe. The second Intelligence attained awareness and was thus capable of generating one more Intelligence and another sphere—and so it went until the entire universe was created. The spheres themselves were thought to move continuously toward the Intelligence that created them.
So for Aristotle and his followers, although the Primal Cause was the originator of this entire chain of causation, it was not directly responsible for anything except the original manifestation as the first Intelligence. God is only indirectly responsible for anything that came after this, and the laws of nature assign the Intelligences with the power to be the more immediate causes of the subsequent creations of Intelligences.
Aristotelian thought held that most of the cosmos exists without the direct influence of God and entirely in accordance with natural laws. But for Maimonides, those laws were part of creation. He argues that there is no rational way that a single, unified God could be the cause of the complexity of the Aristotelian universe. In the second book of the Guide Maimonides composes a dialogue between his viewpoint and that of Aristotle, concluding that his predecessor’s knowledge of the universe and astronomy is faulty and unfounded.
Much of his argument for this rests on the incompatibility of Aristotelian cosmology, with its understanding that the spheres move in a determined manner toward the Intelligence, and the fixed position of the stars, which connote an interaction with a physical plane. If the matter and form of the stars suspended in the spheres is constant, and observably follow different courses throughout the sky, then it cannot hold true that the spheres act according to the laws of nature alone; if that were the case, then all of the stars in the sky would move in exactly the same way. Maimonides notes the many scriptural instances in which the prophets rely on the position of stars and would have of course been well aware of the use of astronomy for navigation. He points out that none of this would be possible based on Aristotelian cosmology, and he concludes that only God could have created the variety found on the level of the spheres themselves:
To say that the Intelligences have determined it is of no use whatever: for the Intelligences are not corporeal, and have no local relation to the spheres. Why then should one sphere in its desire to approach the Intelligence move eastward, and another westward? . . . [O]r why does one move with great velocity, another slowly? . . . We must then say that the nature and essence of each sphere necessitated its motion in a certain direction, and in a certain manner, as the consequence of its desire to approach the Intelligence. . . . [W]e ask, Since the substance of all things is the same, what made the nature of one portion different from another? Why has this sphere a desire which produces a motion different from that which the desire of another sphere produces? This must have been done by an agent capable of determining.”5
Because Aristotelian natural laws would dictate conformity among the spheres, which emanated consecutively from the Intelligences, Maimonides concludes that God must have been responsible for assigning each of the spheres its own nature and agenda.
Maimonides also comments on the scriptural presence of the Intelligences, which at length he shows can be understood as being one and the same with the Torah’s angels. To support his proposition that angels did not coexist with the Primal Cause and his insistence that they were created, he points to the biblical description of God as “Lord of Angels.” This appellation also provides evidence for his argument about the function of angels in the universe, which he defines as the carrying out of God’s will.
The Jewish sage turns to scripture as he elucidates the exact meaning of what can be understood by the term “angel.” In the basest sense of the word, Maimonides suggests although it is loosely translated as “messenger,” it more accurately refers to anyone entrusted with a mission. Maimonides identifies a variety of manifestations that rely on a broader understanding of angelic nature, which he ultimately defines as action on behalf of God. He theorizes that the host of angels was crucial in the genesis of mankind, acting directly on divine will in order to fashion human beings—he explains that biblical phrases that refer to God in the plural are references to this role of angels in man’s creation. Even more broadly, Maimonides shows how the angelic category of creation includes the physical elements and other natural principles.
These angelic functions and manifestations are outside the realm of man, but Maimonides highlights those instances in which man is entrusted with a mission from God. He gives examples of the ideals revealed by prophets and instances in which men have been endowed with superhuman powers, and he even describes how man’s creative and intellectual faculties are, in fact, angels. Toward the end of his treatise on angels, Maimonides draws his student’s attention to the supposition that “the term ‘angel’ signifies nothing but a certain action, and that every appearance of angel is part of prophetic vision, depending on the capacity of the person that perceives it.”6 Furthermore, for Maimon-ides, the actions themselves have no agency of their own and are precipitated and governed by God. All of this, of course, contrasts with the Aristotelian idea that those things that existed with God in the beginning—the spheres and Intelligences/angels—act only according to natural law.
The Limits of Man
Books One and Two of the Guide for the Perplexed concern complex theological, rhetorical, and philosophical ideas, but the third part of the composition moves toward even more immediate and temporal matters of civil, social, and spiritual conduct. Here Maimonides identifies man as the source of his own misfortunes, as well as of all the evil in the world. He attributes man’s inability to attain spiritual perfection to his essential material makeup, describing corporeality as a “partition” between man and God.7
The philosopher draws attention to the role of man’s corporeality in relation to his spiritual imperfections. According to Maimonides, the function of the Law is to help man avoid the spiritual pitfalls of sensual indulgence:
It is well known that it is intemperance in eating, drinking, or sexual intercourse that people mostly rave and indulge in; and these very things counteract the ulterior perfection of man, impede at the same time the development of this first perfection, and generally disturb the social order of the country and the economy of the family.8
Thus Maimonides warns that willful gluttony and lust hinders not only physical development, but also the spiritual growth and the advancement of community and society.
Toward the end of the Guide we get a glimpse of Maimonides as the Talmudic scholar whose religious consultations were so prized by members of his community. He prescribes interpretations of the Talmud’s different classifications of Jewish law, addressing spiritual issues like morality, prayer, and charity; communal ones like the observations of diets and festivals; and social ones like marriage. He advocates the ability of the law to ensure well-being through the restriction of sensual indulgence and the application of its moral and social truths.
In the final chapter of the Guide, Maimonides once again becomes a philosopher. He pronounces the intersection of gentile and biblical wisdom:
[T]he truths contained in the Law are taught by way of tradition, not by a philosophical method[;] the knowledge of the Law, and the acquisition of true wisdom, are treated in the books of the Prophets and in the words of our Sages as two different things; real wisdom demonstrates by proof those truths which Scripture teaches us by way of tradition.9
For Maimonides, true human perfection can be attained only when man has examined divine truths and come to some knowledge of God. Although there are other senses of perfection—material, corporeal, and moral—Maimonides states that man’s ultimate goal should always be the possession of knowledge and intellectual faculties.
But knowledge alone is not enough; it must concretely manifest through one’s actions. Maimonides advises his student that:
The perfection, in which man can truly glory, is attained by him when he has acquired—as far as this is possible for man—the knowledge of God, the knowledge of his Providence, and of the manner in which it influences his creatures in their production and continued existence. Having acquired this knowledge he will then be determined always to seek loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, and thus to imitate the ways of God.10
For Maimonides, philosophy can be a means to an end for man’s attainment of knowledge, but ultimately such knowledge is imperfect if its truths go unheeded.
The Guide for the Perplexed is a cornerstone text in the study of rational religious philosophy, and its influence is palpable in the writings of a number of prominent medieval theologians and scholars. Many accepted the Guide for its synthesis of Greek philosophy and Jewish tradition, but there were also some factions who desired to see the work suppressed, denying that Aristotelian theory should have any bearing on Jewish thought. In 1233, the Jewish community at Montpellier staged a mass burning of copies of the Guide, and a similar scene may also have been enacted in Paris around the same time.
The Book of the Lamp, Mishneh Torah, and Guide for the Perplexed allow us to consider Moses Maimonides as a meticulous, careful scholar whose engagement with thought and inquiry was inexhaustible. In the earliest of these texts, Maimonides performed a survey of all of the dominant philosophical and religious trends of his time and used them in order to compile an authority on Talmudic matters. Having completed this, Maimonides composed the Mishneh Torah in order to further process the material in the Book of the Lamp, resulting in a definitive interpretation of the Mishneh. The final work of his major canon, the Guide for the Perplexed, provides an examination of the religious suppositions of the Mishneh Torah from a secular philosophical perspective. The three texts are in some ways representative of a lifelong project, three facets of a particularly thorough inquiry of the true meaning of Jewish law. And even this wasn’t enough for Maimonides, who never got around to providing his own Hebrew translations of these works because he continued to revise them until his death.
World History
