ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century appropriates Moses Maimonides’s theorizing of the monotheistic God for purposes of affirming a completely secular, this-worldly universe, in which the pursuit of “felicity” and “commodious living,” descriptively and normatively speaking, predominate. Monotheism is also a doctrine of radical critique that simultaneously presupposes and denies a stable subject, namely, God. Conceiving the relationship between monotheism and skepticism in this way opens new vistas for interpreting the Western intellectual tradition and the relationship between modernity and post-modernity. For Maimonides, the origin of the monotheistic God who is depicted as being wholly other from man arises out of the need to achieve release from philosophical anxiety by postulating an entity as first cause that embodies absolute difference. The conjunction of the “monotheistic” construal of God’s creating the world in time with the literal construal of the world’s subsisting forever yields the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe, while registering a formal rejection of it.
