Jewish negative theology (Maimonides, Bahya)

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Jewish negative theology is the medieval doctrine, worked out chiefly in Judeo-Arabic, that God can be spoken of truthfully only by saying what God is not. To call the divine wise, living, or powerful in the ordinary sense — the argument runs — is to measure it against creatures and so to falsify it. What survives the denial is not a smaller God but a being held to lie past the reach of every category the mind brings to it.

The premise is older than the medieval philosophers who sharpened it. Scripture itself sets the standard in the prophetic refrain that asks to whom God could be likened — that nothing in heaven or earth is comparable to the maker of both. A God who has no peer in the order of things has, strictly, no genus; and a being without genus cannot be defined, because definition works by placing a thing among its kind and marking how it differs. From the other side of the inheritance came the Greek intuition of a first principle beyond being — the One of Neoplatonism, which Plotinus placed above thought and predication as the source from which all determinate reality flows. The two streams met early. Philo of Alexandria, reading Moses through Middle Platonist eyes in the first century, already held that God’s existence can be grasped but not God’s essence — that the what of the divine is forever hidden, and that the names of scripture are accommodations to the limits of human speech. That coupling of an incomparable biblical God with a Greek absolute beyond the categories is the seedbed of everything that follows.

The Andalusian opening: Bahya ibn Paquda

The doctrine’s first sustained Jewish statement belongs to eleventh-century Muslim Spain. Bahya ibn Paquda, a rabbinic judge at Zaragoza, wrote in Judeo-Arabic a manual of inward religion he called al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb — the Guidance to the Duties of the Hearts — distinguishing the duties of the limbs, the outward commandments, from the duties of the hearts — the inner dispositions of intention, trust, and love without which the outward acts are empty. The book opens not with conduct but with metaphysics: a long first treatise, the Gate of Divine Unity, on what it means to say that God is one.

Bahya’s argument is that the unity confessed in the Shema is not the unity of a counted thing. The one of arithmetic is the first of a series and shares a genus with the two that follows it; created things are one only relatively, being divisible, composite, subject to accident and change. God’s oneness is unity in an absolute sense that no composite can share — without parts, without attributes that would divide the essence into a bearer and its qualities, without any plurality whatever. From this it follows that the attributes scripture assigns are concessions to human speech. They do not describe God as God is; they remove imperfections, denying of God the defects that finite minds would otherwise impute. To call God wise is to deny ignorance; to call God living is to deny death and inertness; to call God one is to deny composition and number. Bahya distinguished the essential attributes — existence, unity, eternity — which he read as negations dressed in positive language, from the attributes of action drawn from God’s works in the world, which describe the deeds and not the doer.

Bahya wrote with the devotional literature of Islamic pietism open beside him. His vocabulary of inward purification, his examination of the soul, his ladder of ascent toward the love of God draw on the Sufi ascetic tradition of his milieu — a borrowing developed further in the next generation within Judeo-Sufism. This is the lasting paradox of the Duties of the Hearts: a book whose opening gate empties the divine of every nameable quality became one of the most widely read works of piety in the whole of Judaism, copied, translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon within a century, and pressed into the hands of the unlettered as a guide to the love of a God it declares unknowable. The negative theology was not, for Bahya, a barrier to devotion but its purification: only when the worshipper stops imagining a God the size of a creature does the love that is owed become possible.

The rigorous form: Maimonides

The doctrine reached its most uncompromising form a century later, in Moses Maimonides — Moshe ben Maimon, born at Córdoba in 1138, court physician at Fustat under Saladin’s vizier, and head of the Egyptian Jewish community until his death in 1204. His Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn, the Guide of the Perplexed, composed in Judeo-Arabic and completed around 1190, devotes its central chapters (Book I, 50 through 60) to the doctrine of divine attributes, with the fifty-eighth chapter as the hinge. The argument is driven by divine simplicity: a God who is absolutely one can have no attribute distinct from the essence, for any such attribute would introduce multiplicity into what reason and revelation alike require to be undivided. To predicate wisdom or power or will of God as qualities God possesses is therefore not merely imprecise but false — it composes the simple and so describes some other being.

Maimonides allowed only two kinds of true statement about the divine. The first is the attribute of action: language that does not describe God’s nature at all but names the effects of God in the world — that the same God whose workings men call merciful or just produces, through nature and providence, what a merciful or just person would produce, while nothing in God answers to the human passion the words name. The second is the attribute of negation, which says of God only what God is not. To say that God is living means, strictly, that God is not dead or inert; to say that God is one means that God is not multiple; to say that God exists means that God’s non-existence is impossible. Each affirmation is a denial wearing affirmative dress. Pushed to its limit the method consumes its own speech: the more truly one grasps the divine, the fewer words remain, until the fittest worship is silence — Maimonides reads the Psalm’s praise of God as, at the summit, a praise best rendered without words. He took the cost without flinching. Those who imagine a God with describable qualities, he held, do not merely think imprecisely about God; they have lost the object altogether and address something else under the divine name.

What stood visibly behind this rigor was the Islamic philosophical tradition — the falsafa of al-Farabi and Avicenna, whose analysis of the Necessary Existent as that whose essence is identical with its existence, simple and uncaused, supplied the conceptual machinery Maimonides turned to scriptural ends. He was no less indebted to, and no less critical of, the Mutakallimūn, the practitioners of Islamic dialectical theology, whose proofs of God’s attributes he dismantled at length. The continuity with the Arabic philosophers is not in dispute. What scholarship has long weighed is its degree and intent — how far Maimonides meant the negative way to void positive language entirely, and how much of his deepest teaching he concealed beneath an orthodox surface, a question bound up with the esoteric reading of the Guide and the controversies his work provoked. Some read him as a thinker whose true doctrine was a guarded philosophical radicalism; others as a sincere believer holding reason and revelation reconcilable. The text is esoteric in some measure by his own declaration; what the esoteric content amounts to remains a live and unsettled dispute among his readers, and the negative theology sits at its center, since how empty one takes his negations to be decides how much of God’s knowability he was prepared to surrender.

Maimonides and Bahya stand at the two poles of the same tradition, and both remain venerated within it: the one a manual of the loving heart that begins by denying the divine every quality, the other a philosopher’s discipline that ends in learned silence. Pietism and rationalism inherited the same hard premise and put it to different work — Bahya toward devotion, Maimonides toward the limits of demonstration.

The afterlife in Kabbalah

The negative way did not end the conversation; within Judaism it provoked a lasting reply. The Kabbalists who arose in Provence and Catalonia in the generation around the Guide’s composition kept the unknowable God of the philosophers — they called it Ein Sof, the limitless, the Infinite without name or attribute, of which, in the most radical Zoharic formulation, not even existence can properly be affirmed. To that extent they conceded everything the negative theologians demanded. But beneath the hidden God they set a structure of ten emanated powers, the sefirot, through which the concealed could after all be approached, named, and acted upon — a move that preserved the denial at the summit and then quietly worked around it lower down.

The arrangement was not stable, and the instability is the measure of how much weight the apophatic premise carried. Moses Cordovero, systematizing the doctrine in sixteenth-century Safed, treated the sefirot as instruments or vessels through which Ein Sof acts while remaining itself beyond them; the Lurianic school after him introduced the tzimtzum, a primordial self-contraction by which the Infinite withdrew to make room for a finite world — an apophatic moment more drastic than anything in the philosophers, since here the unknowable God acts by absenting itself. To a strict Maimonidean this theosophy of an articulated Godhead looked like a relapse into the very multiplicity the negative way had labored to expel; to the Kabbalist the philosopher’s God, purified into pure negation, was a God one could not pray to. The two camps shared the conviction that the divine essence is unsayable and divided over what may be built on that silence — a tension the Maimonidean controversies carried into the streets and synagogues of thirteenth-century Provence and Spain, and one the tradition never fully resolved so much as learned to hold open.

The same grammar of unsaying runs through the neighboring traditions without becoming one doctrine. The Christian via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius negates predicates of a triune God whose hidden being grounds the procession of names, and surpasses even its own negations into silence; Nicholas of Cusa gathered that inheritance into the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance in which the mind knows God precisely as the unknown. The Sufi doctrine of tanzīh guards the unknowable Essence behind the divine Names. Each performs negation as a discipline rather than a claim, and each means by the beyond-all-predicates something its own metaphysics decides. The shared procedure is real; the Gods at the end of it are not interchangeable.

Texts and scholarship

The two foundational works are widely available. Maimonides’ Guide reached English chiefly through Michael Friedländer, whose annotated three-volume edition of 1881–1885 and revised single-volume The Guide for the Perplexed (London: Routledge, 1904) remain the standard public-domain text; the chapters on the attributes occupy Book I, 50–60, with chapter 58 on the negative attributes at the center. Salomon Munk’s Le Guide des égarés (Paris, 1856–1866) gives the critical Judeo-Arabic text with French translation. Bahya’s Duties of the Hearts survives in PD English in Edwin Collins’s The Duties of the Heart (London: John Murray, 1909), which translates the apophatic Gate of Divine Unity in full, and in Moses Hyamson’s facing Hebrew–English edition (New York: Bloch, beginning 1925); the work is freely available in the Collins translation online. The Neoplatonic background is best read in Plotinus’ own treatise on the One, Ennead VI.9, in the MacKenna translation hosted in the library here.

For the doctrine itself the indispensable modern studies are Harry Austryn Wolfson’s essays on the divine attributes (collected in his Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Harvard University Press, 1973–1977) and Kenneth Seeskin’s Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides (Oxford University Press, 2000), which reconstructs the via negativa as the heart of Maimonidean theology; Josef Stern’s The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Harvard, 2013) develops the skeptical reading on which the negations mark the limits of metaphysical knowledge. The accessible scholarly overviews are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Maimonides, which treats the attributes of action and negation directly, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s parallel entry. For the Kabbalistic afterlife the older PD synthesis is the Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on En Sof, which records the Zohar’s reduction of the divine name to the bare designation of the limitless — God so far past comprehension as to be, in that idiom, scarcely sayable at all.

What the tradition reached for was a way to honor a God it held to be real without shrinking that God to the size of the human words for it. The negative theologians answered that the honest description is the one that keeps retracting itself. Whether such a God can be loved, and not merely conceded, was the problem their devotional readers inherited.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) — the Neoplatonic source

→ Related: Jewish Philosophy · Islamic Falsafa · Judeo Sufism · Neoplatonism · The One · Apophatic Theology · Ein Sof · Philo Of Alexandria · Al Farabi · Avicenna · Kabbalah · Emanation · Moses Cordovero · Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism · Maimonidean Rationalism · Maimonidean Controversies · Philosophical Jewish Esotericism · Saadia Gaon · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Nicholas Of Cusa