ABSTRACT
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Moses son of Maimon), known to us as ‘Maimonides,’ was born in Cordoba, Spain in 1135/8 and died in 1204. At a young age he wrote a treatise on logic and an innovative commentary to the Mishnah, the core corpus of Jewish law. Later he wrote the Book of Commandments listing and explaining the proverbial 613 commandments of the Jewish religion. His most important works were his Mishneh Torah, an unprecedented, monumental compendium of Jewish law, and his philosophical magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed, written for the philosophically sophisticated who were perplexed by the apparently non-rational character of Rabbinic Judaism. He also wrote a number of epistles on such topics as the resurrection of the dead (ostensibly ‘for’) and astrology (soundly ‘against’). As a physician, he wrote various medical treatises as well. His stature and in uence in Judaism have been immense. A dominant issue in Jewish philosophy after Maimonides was whether one agreed or disagreed with Maimonides on one point or another. And Jewish mystical Kabbalah incorporated ideas, and even language, from Maimonides, as well as consciously departed from some of his teachings. Among the Jews there is a saying: ‘From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses.’ Maimonides had a strong in uence on Christian thought, for example as ‘Rabbi Moses’ to Aquinas and Dun Scotus (see Burrell 1986), on Christian mysticism, as in Meister Eckhart, and on modern thought, especially with Leibniz and Spinoza (see Wolfson 1969; Goodman 1980). When presenting Maimonides’ philosophy of religion, we come up against two obstacles. The rst pertains to medieval thinkers in general and relates to the dif culty of teasing out Maimonides’ philosophy of religion from his theology. Of course, he made no such distinction and his theology and philosophy of religion are intertwined throughout. The second obstacle is more formidable. Maimonides’ writing is far from Aquinas’s masterful, architectural philosophizing. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed is a convoluted record of his thought, which goes off into long tangents, doubles back on itself, scatters topics to different locations, and seems to contain several inconsistencies. Indeed, in the ‘Introduction,’ Maimonides tells the reader that the work contains contradictions. Furthermore, Maimonides sprinkled philosophical ideas into
frameworks intended for purposes other than philosophy. Thus, some of his important philosophizing, including one of his central discussions of free will, appears in his commentary to the Mishnah, almost exclusively a legal work. Maimonides’ views on prophecy, for another, are spread throughout his writings (see Kreisel 2001). His monumental codi cation of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, contains many philosophical observations, some consistent with, yet others ostensibly contravening, the Guide. Differences exist between what Maimonides wrote in different works, evidencing that during his lifetime he changed his mind on various issues. For example, early on he seemed to be much more opposed to a supernatural interpretation of miracles than later in life (Langerman 2003). Already in medieval times Jewish thinkers argued vociferously over how to understand the ‘Great Eagle,’ as he later came to be known, and what were his true views. In modern scholarship, Maimonidean experts are divided between the ‘esoterists,’ who believe Maimonides presented both an exoteric and an esoteric philosophy (Strauss 1952: 38-94) and the ‘harmonizers,’ who discern a uni ed, though admittedly hard to get clear, philosopher (Hartman 1976; Manekin 2005). Others think that Maimonides simply wrote at different philosophical levels for different audiences, with no hidden doctrines. Thus, Oliver Leaman writes, ‘Maimonides intends to present clear and decisive arguments in favor of his theses. . . . We must address ourselves fully to Maimonides’ arguments and not to any putative hidden doctrines which owe far more to the imagination of most commentators than to anything we can nd in the text’ (Leaman 1990: 17). Regarding many of Maimonides’ key views, scholars are widely divided over how to understand him and whether he was expressing his true view in any given passage. The extraordinary dif culty in pinning Maimonides down has led one scholar to quip: ‘There are many “Maimonides” – There is my-monides, your-monides, and their-monides!’ Here are some examples. Maimonidean scholars are divided over Maimonides’ true view of creation, being at odds over whether he believed in creation ex nihilo, in the eternity of a xed world, as did Aristotle, or an eternal world that God arranged from chaos, as did Plato (for the various views, see Samuelson 1991: 249-71). Likewise, scholars disagree over whether Maimonides believed in libertarian free will or accepted that determinism was compatible with free will (see Gellman 1989: 139-50). Scholars argue over whether Maimonides thought prophecy was a natural phenomenon, or that God had to grant prophecy, or that while God did not have to grant prophecy, he could prevent a person from becoming a prophet (Altmann 1978: 1-19; Kreisel 2001). Finally, Maimonides’ concept of God is a morass of contention between scholars. On the one hand, Maimonides proclaims a severe negative theology according to which we can know only what God is not, not what God is (more about this later). On the other hand, Maimonides quali es this severe philosophical stance, especially pertaining to God’s knowledge. For example, in Guide 3: 21, although careful to say that God’s knowledge is nothing like ours, nevertheless Maimonides gives us many details about God’s knowledge, including that God knows all particulars through knowing God’s own essence. And in Guide 1: 68 Maimonides seems to say that God’s
knowledge and human knowledge are one in being knowledge. This situation has led to an array of intricate interpretations of Maimonides’ concept of God (for an especially elegant version, see Manekin 2005). In light of the above, we would do best not to present Maimonides’ philosophy of religion by way of very speci c views he held about God, creation, free will, and the like, since these have been so variously understood, even in medieval times. We would do better to concentrate on Maimonides’ unique approach to the status and meaning of the elements of religious life. This approach consists in the following twofold Maimonidean project:
demarcating a radical distinction between philosophical religion and popular religion (that is, the religion of the ‘multitudes’);
and
determining which elements of popular religion must be replaced by philosophical religion and which elements should remain.
