Maimonidean Rationalism

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Maimonidean rationalism is the tradition of Jewish religious thought descended from Moses ben Maimon — the Rambam, Latinized as Maimonides (1138–1204) — and above all from his Guide of the Perplexed, which set out to show that the Torah, read rightly, demands nothing the trained mind must reject. The work was written in Judeo-Arabic late in his life, for a reader already schooled in philosophy and unsettled by the apparent collision between scripture and the science of the age.

The man who wrote it had made the collision his own. Born in Córdoba in 1138, Maimonides fled the city as a boy after the Almohad conquest, crossed the Maghreb and the Holy Land, and settled at last in Fustat, the old quarter of Cairo, where he served as physician to the household of Saladin’s vizier and as head of the Jewish community. He was a working jurist before he was a known philosopher: his Arabic Commentary on the Mishnah and his vast Hebrew code, the Mishneh Torah, organized the whole of rabbinic law for the ordinary believer. The Guide was the last and strangest of his books, and the only one he did not write for the community at large. It was addressed, chapter by chapter, to a single former student, Joseph ben Judah, who had outgrown the faith of childhood without yet acquiring the discipline that might steady it. The book was sent to one man and overheard, ever after, by everyone.

The problem of God’s body

The collision Maimonides addressed was, in the first place, a problem about language. Scripture speaks of God’s hand, God’s anger, God seated on a throne; Aristotle’s God is incorporeal, changeless, beyond passion. His solution was the doctrine of negative attributes: of God, properly speaking, nothing positive can be said. To call God wise or living is not to ascribe a quality but to deny its opposite — to say what God is not. Every anthropomorphism in the text is figure, addressed to those who could not yet think without images, and the philosopher’s task is to read through the figure to what it guards.

The argument runs deepest in the chapters from I.50 to I.60 of the Guide, and its hinge is I.58. A positive attribute, on this account, always smuggles in multiplicity and resemblance: to predicate wisdom of God as one predicates it of a sage is to set the divine alongside creatures and so to compound and to limit it. What survives the denial is not a diminished God but one held to lie past the reach of any name. To say that God is wise means, strictly, that God is not ignorant — a denial of a privation, leaving the essence itself untouched and unspoken. The fuller anatomy of this doctrine, and its Judeo-Arabic kin in the work of Bahya ibn Paquda, belongs to Jewish negative theology; here it is enough to mark its place. It is the architecture on which the whole rationalist edifice rests, and it sets the school squarely within the wider current of apophatic theology that runs from late Greek thought through the Neoplatonic tradition into Islam and Christendom alike. The road of negation is a way of guarding, not abolishing, the divine: it clears away every idol the mind would set in God’s place.

Around this stood a broadly Aristotelian frame, received partly through the Arabic philosophers. The Aristotle Maimonides inherited was already a composite — the corpus read through the great commentators and the falsafa of the Islamic world, Avicenna above all and, named in a celebrated letter as the philosopher to study before any other, al-Farabi. From this Islamic philosophy he took a layered cosmos of spheres and separate intelligences, the doctrine of the intellect, and — most consequentially for a religion built on revelation — an account of prophecy as a natural perfection. The prophet, on this reading, is the rare human in whom a trained intellect and a powerful imagination together receive the overflow of the Active Intellect; prophecy is the mind’s highest reach, withheld from the qualified only by an act of grace, never granted to the unprepared. Against this Maimonides set the kalām — the dialectical theology of the Muslim schoolmen — whose proofs he dismantles at length, preferring the philosophers’ demonstrations to the theologians’ premises. One question alone he left visibly open: whether the world is eternal, as Aristotle taught, or created in time, as scripture declares. Maimonides argued that neither could be demonstrated, that he accepted creation on the authority of the text, and that had eternity been proved he would have read Genesis accordingly. Whether this was his settled belief or his most careful concealment has divided readers ever since.

One truth, two registers

What Maimonides held was not that reason replaces revelation but that the two, correctly understood, cannot conflict — because both issue from the one truth. The principle is exact and asymmetrical. Where a verse seemed to contradict a demonstrated conclusion, the verse was to be read otherwise; where the matter was undemonstrated — eternity against creation being his own chief example — scripture stood. Demonstration trumps the letter; mere argument does not. This is the discipline that earns the school its name: not reason exalted over faith, but a refusal to believe against proof and a refusal to abandon the text on anything less.

He gave this discipline a daring scriptural warrant. The Mishnah forbids the public teaching of two subjects — maaseh bereshit, the Account of the Beginning, and maaseh merkavah, the Account of the Chariot — restricting the chariot to the lone student who is wise and understands of his own knowledge. Maimonides identified these guarded mysteries with the two highest sciences of the philosophers: the Account of the Beginning is physics, the natural science of the cosmos; the Account of the Chariot is metaphysics, the science of the divine and the separate intelligences. The secrets of the Torah, at their summit, are the very subjects the Greeks pursued. The move cuts two ways at once. It makes Jewish esotericism philosophical — the hidden things of scripture turn out to be demonstrable doctrine — and it makes philosophy Jewish, recasting physics and metaphysics not as foreign imports but as a lost inner stratum of Israel’s own learning, scattered in exile. In the third part of the Guide he ventures, with extravagant apology for breaking the rabbinic seal, an interpretation of Ezekiel’s chariot as the architecture of the Aristotelian heavens.

A book built to be misread

The Guide was therefore written to be misread by the unready, its difficulties deliberate, its order broken on purpose so that it would yield its meaning only to those equipped to receive it. Maimonides says as much in his introduction. The deepest matters, he warns, cannot be set down in plain continuous prose; they appear like lightning and are gone, and the writer can offer only scattered hints, chapter-headings rather than a system. He closes the introduction with an enumeration of seven causes by which contradictions enter any book, and he declares openly that two of them operate in his own: the fifth, by which a teacher states a matter loosely at first and corrects it later, and the seventh, by which an author conceals one side of an obscure question and reveals the other, scattering the parts so that the unprepared reader never perceives the contradiction at all. To read the Guide is therefore to be enlisted in a kind of detective work the author designed: to notice the seams, gather the dispersed flashes, and assemble a teaching the surface never states. Whether what lies assembled is an orthodox synthesis pedagogically veiled, or a philosophical radicalism concealed beneath a pious shell, is the question that has organized the reading of the book for eight centuries.

The storm and the rival map

The reception was a storm. The bans and counter-bans, the burned books and the shifting alliances of the thirteenth-century Maimonidean controversies — Provence against the rabbis of northern France, the herem of 1232, the public burning of the Guide by friars at Montpellier, the later Barcelona ban on philosophy for the young — form their own long history. What matters here is the fault line they exposed. To one party the Guide was the summit of Jewish thought; to another it was a door opened to unbelief, an allegorizing solvent that threatened to dissolve the commandments into ideas.

The deepest rival, though, was not a faction but a counter-map of the divine. In the very regions and generations where the Guide circulated, the early Kabbalah took form — in the Provençal and Geronese circles, and by the late thirteenth century in the Castilian Zohar that tradition ascribes to Moses de León. Where Maimonides reached the same restricted mysteries by negation and proof, the Kabbalists reached them by symbol and emanation. The God of the philosophers is approached by stripping every attribute away; the God of the sefirot — the ten graded radiances within the Godhead — is approached by a dense and living symbolism in which the commandments themselves act upon the divine life. Where Maimonidean rationalism offers an austere, imageless point past all naming, theosophical Kabbalah offers an inner world of names. Much of later Jewish mysticism defined itself partly against the cool remoteness of the Maimonidean God, and historians have read the rise of Kabbalah in part as a counter-move — an effort to reclaim the inner meaning of Torah from the philosophers by furnishing those same guarded subjects with a wholly different, mythic content. The relation was never simply oppositional: the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia took the Guide as a foundational text, and Maimonides’ own son led a pietist circle of Sufi cast that claimed continuity with his father. But the dominant outcome was two rival esotericisms, each claiming to hold the true secret of the same verses.

Esotericist and synthesizer: a living debate

Among scholars the Guide’s own teaching remains contested: how far its author meant the philosophical reading to be the true one, and how far the pious surface was itself the message. The twentieth century sharpened the question into a standing controversy. Leo Strauss, reading the seventh cause as a deliberate art of writing under conditions of orthodoxy, took Maimonides for a closet radical whose secret doctrine lay close to the Aristotle of the Islamic philosophers, the Torah functioning as a divinely sanctioned law for the ordering of society rather than a literal record of supernatural events. Strauss’s long introductory essay to the standard English translation made this reading the dominant frame — and the dominant target — of later scholarship.

Against the maximal reading a range of positions has formed, and the field has not converged. Herbert Davidson argued that Maimonides knew his Aristotle largely at second hand, through Avicenna and Arabic paraphrase, and that the supposed buried heresies are simply the commonplaces of medieval science, with no dissimulation to uncover. Others, defending a synthetic reading, hold that Maimonides sincerely believed reason and revelation reconcilable and concealed no heterodoxy at all. Between the poles, a careful middle has granted that the Guide is esoteric in some real sense — its author says as much — while declining the closet-Averroist conclusion, distinguishing kinds of concealment and locating the book’s deepest teaching in the very limits of metaphysical knowledge. Whether the esoteric content is a thoroughgoing philosophical heterodoxy beneath an orthodox surface, or a sincere but guarded attempt to wed Aristotelian science to rabbinic Judaism, is a question with strong advocates on every side and no verdict in sight. A late-medieval legend that Maimonides repented his rationalism and embraced Kabbalah on his deathbed belongs to reception, not biography — a measure of the prestige his name carried across both camps, not a fact about his end.

Across the frontier of Judaism

His influence ran past Judaism. The Latin schoolmen knew him as Rabbi Moses and read him closely; Thomas Aquinas drew on him by name on the eternity of the world, on the divine attributes, and on the proofs of God’s existence, finding in the rabbi of Cairo a fellow laborer at the same wall between revelation and the philosophers. Through the scholasticism of the Middle Ages the Guide entered the common stock of Western theology, and in the seventeenth century a more radical heir, Spinoza, would turn its own allegorical method against the supernatural claims the Guide had labored to preserve. Maimonidean rationalism is thus less a sealed school than a long argument, carried forward by jurists, mystics’ rivals, and Christian doctors alike.

Text and scholarship

The Guide reached later readers through a chain of translations. Two Hebrew versions followed within a generation of the original — the precise, literal Moreh ha-Nevukhim of Samuel ibn Tibbon, prepared in consultation with the author, and the freer, more literary rendering of Judah al-Harizi. The standard critical edition of the Judeo-Arabic, with a French translation, is Salomon Munk’s Le Guide des égarés (Paris, 1856–1866). The first complete English translation, by Michael Friedländer, appeared in three annotated volumes in 1881–1885 and in a one-volume revised form, with the notes stripped, in 1904; the revised text is freely available and now reads the title as Guide for the Perplexed. It can be consulted in full at Project Gutenberg and, with the medieval Hebrew and later commentaries set alongside it, at Sefaria. The scholarly translation of record, by Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963), carries Strauss’s introductory essay and remains under copyright.

The secondary literature is vast and contentious. The doctrines summarized above — negative attributes, the natural account of prophecy, the eternity question, the art of contradiction — are surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, both of which set the Guide within its Aristotelian and Arabic-philosophical sources. The Straussian reading, the historicist counter-reading, and the studies of the Guide’s esoteric method form a running scholarly conversation that shows no sign of closing.

The wager that holds the whole school together is also its unhealed wound. To say that the Torah read rightly demands nothing the trained mind must reject is to stake everything on a single identity: that the changeless point past all naming, reached by the philosopher’s negations, and the God who spoke at Sinai, who is angry and merciful and seated on a throne, are not two beings but one — the second the figure, the first the truth it guards. The negative attributes hold that identity open by refusing to let either side close it: the God of scripture is never abolished, only read through, and the God of the demonstrations is never quite spoken, only approached. For the school that takes his name, the work of the mind is to keep walking that road of denial toward the one it cannot reach — and to find, at every station, that the God it has cleared of every image is the same God the verse had named.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Middle Ages · Torah · Aristotle · Jewish Mysticism · Maimonidean Controversies · Jewish Negative Theology Maimonides Bahya · Kabbalah · Thomas Aquinas · Prophecy · Avicenna · Al Farabi · Apophatic Theology · Islamic Philosophy · Scholasticism · Moses De Leon