 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode The Great Eagle Maimonides In Judaism there's a saying, from Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses. I guess you won't need me to tell you who the first Moses was. The second Moses is the subject of today's episode, the Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known in Hebrew with the honorific acronym Rambam, and known in English usually by his Latinized name Maimonides. Whether you call him Moses Rambam or Maimonides, this is a man with some claim to being the most important figure of medieval Judaism. As we've already seen, Maimonides had predecessors who fused philosophy with Jewish religious teachings, but none of these predecessors reached Maimonides's importance philosophically and none of them attained his standing as a rabbinic scholar. In short, Maimonides was both the greatest Jewish religious authority of the medieval period and the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, perhaps the greatest of all time, though Spinoza provides some stiff competition. Maimonides was an almost exact contemporary of the great Aristotelian commentator of Aroes. They died only six years apart, and they both hailed from Cordoba. Maimonides was born in 1138 into the family business, which was Jewish law. His father, Maimon, was an authoritative legal scholar, which helps to explain how it is that Maimonides was already able to write vastly learned works on rabbinic law by the time he was in his 20s. By that time, the family had left Cordoba and transplanted itself to Fes in Morocco. They seemed to have left Spain in hopes of finding a climate more hospitable to Jews. During Maimonides's childhood, Al-Andalus had been invaded by the Almohads. As you might remember, they had a very strict understanding of Islam, but they created an atmosphere which was hospitable to philosophy, as we saw with the Verroes and the somewhat older Im Tufail. But the Almohads were not as hospitable to Jews and Christians as they were to Muslim philosophers. There is good evidence that they even required Jews to convert to Islam or be exiled. This may help to explain why Maimonides's family moved to Fes. Actually, the Almohads also controlled Morocco, which had been their launching pad for the invasion of Spain, but conditions there may have been slightly less repressive for Jews. Alternatively, it is alleged in some sources that Maimonides and his family pretended to be Muslims for some years, before finally traveling across the Mediterranean to Jerusalem and settling in Cairo. It was here that Maimonides spent the latter part of his life, and here that he wrote his greatest works of law and philosophy. Needless to say, it's a somewhat sensitive question whether Maimonides, honored as the great eagle of Judaism, ever hid his faith under the guise of Islam. Scholars have argued the point in both directions. Some hold that it's inconceivable that his family could have survived in Almohad territory for so long, living openly as Jews. Others say that the evidence for forced conversions is not overwhelmingly strong anyway, and that the historical testimony in favor of Maimonides's counterfeit Islam is found only in Muslim authors, who can hardly be trusted on this point. Be all that as it may, it was in Cairo that Maimonides came into his own and earned his well-deserved reputation as a great rabbinic scholar. This calling defined him as a thinker at least as much as his interest in philosophy. As a young man, he already wrote a commentary on the Mishnah. This commentary, like most of Maimonides's works, was written in Judeo-Arabic. But Maimonides used Hebrew to write his greatest work on Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, a work whose ambition is in proportion to its importance. As we've seen in previous episodes, Jewish law is based not only on the Hebrew Bible, and especially the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, but also on the tradition of oral that was enshrined in the Mishnah, and the Talmud which was written to explicate and expand on the Mishnah. Navigating this vast textual terrain was no easy matter, even for so highly expert a scholar as Maimonides. So Maimonides set out to produce a work that would make it possible for Jews to find clear guidance on all matters of ritual and observance, without trawling through the deep and majestic waters of the classical texts. This is not to say that Maimonides sought to supplant the Mishnah and Talmud, or to render them obsolete. He would have considered it a great spiritual calling to study the classical texts in detail. But his Mishneh Torah would gather together the teachings of these texts, eliminating apparent contradictions and providing the tacit general principles underlying the law. Thus, the title of the work, Mishneh Torah, means the Second Law. He is happy to give his reader the impression that for most religious purposes, this Second Law will provide clear and sufficient guidance. Trying to decide a fine point of dietary law, or the rules governing property or marriage? Look no further than the Mishneh Torah, which gathers together all the legal instructions into one convenient package. It's common to see Maimonides as a thinker with two sides, the rabbinic and the philosophical. But in fact, his religious thought is not easily separated from his philosophy, nor can we separate his philosophy from his teachings on the Bible and the rabbinic tradition. We saw in the last episode that ethical remarks in his rabbinic writings are obviously grounded in Aristotle's teachings on ethics. We even find him saying that intellectual perfection is the highest fulfillment of human nature. Thus, the valorization of philosophy, which we found all the way back in Aristotle's Ethics, is presented by Maimonides as the core of an even older tradition. The revealed texts of the Jewish Bible and the teachings of the rabbinic tradition. One might wonder how Maimonides could reconcile Aristotelian ethics with his own project of setting out the requirements of legal theory. One is tempted to say to him, which is it? Am I supposed to devote my life to following the halacha, the law set down in the Jewish tradition, or to achieving Aristotelian virtue and ultimately theoretical contemplation? But Maimonides saw no tension here. For him, the Jewish law offers a kind of training instituted by divine providence in order to bring us closer to our highest end. Even pagan ancient philosophers believed that one needed to condition the soul to make it virtuous and self-controlled, and that this was a precondition for intellectual perfection. Maimonides agrees, and sees in the law an elaborate and well-designed system for this conditioning of our souls. So, for Maimonides there is no tension between spiritual devotion and a devotion to Aristotelian philosophy. This is never more clear than in the Book of Knowledge, the first part of the Mishnei Torah, which lays down certain principles that serve as a foundation for the legal teachings in the rest of the work. The Book of Knowledge is, in large part, a distillation of Aristotelian philosophy as it was known to Maimonides. He surveys not only ethics, but also cosmology, the theory of the four elements, and a rationalist conception of God as simple and immaterial. Like Iverroes, if less explicitly, Maimonides seems to hold that the truths of religion and the truths of philosophy are one and the same. If the rabbis taught truth, as they surely did, and if Aristotelian philosophy discovers truth, as it surely does, despite some limitations which we'll discuss shortly, then the sages among the Jews, even those who lived well before Aristotle, must already have understood the core truths of the Aristotelian system. For instance, Maimonides teaches that Aristotle's idea of matter underlying form can be found lurking in the Bible and rabbinic literature. This is how he understands a biblical reference to a married harlot. Matter, like this adulterous wife, is promiscuous in that it takes on one form after another. Just as Maimonides's monumental guide for religious practice drew on philosophy, so his philosophy takes the form of a guide for understanding religious texts. And when I say guide, I mean it. Maimonides gave his greatest philosophical work the title, Guide for the Perplexed. This title makes the work sound like a self-help book, but if so, it's help for a very particular kind of person. The guide was written to dispel not just any old kind of perplexity, but the specific perplexity that arises for students of philosophy. Such students learn from philosophical argument certain truths that look incompatible with Scripture. In particular, they learn that God has no body, is utterly transcendent, completely unlike His creation by being simple and perfect in every way. Well, might they be perplexed when they turn to their Bible and find it saying that God has a face, or a back, or gets angry, or sits upon a throne? The guide is addressed to a student of Maimonides named Joseph and promises to solve this apparent contradiction between philosophy and Scripture for Joseph and any other reader in his position. The central problem of the guide is thus familiar to us from our discussion of several Muslim authors and movements. In particular, the Mu'tazilites held that God's simplicity and uniqueness make it impossible for us to describe Him with the language we use for created things. Maimonides was no fan of Islamic speculative theology, but on this point he was basically in agreement with Mu'tazilites. Incidentally, he was also in agreement with the Almohads, whose repression of the Jews of Spain led Maimonides to comment in one letter, Despite his disdain for Islam as a religion, he agreed with Muslim theological hardliners in upholding the absolute simplicity, immateriality, and transcendence of God. Unlike Iverroes, Maimonides considered this rationalist understanding of God to be of paramount importance for all believers. The fact that God has no body needs to be understood by all Jews, not only an elite group of philosophers. So what are we to do with those passages in the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts which seem to say otherwise? Here, Maimonides has a three-fold strategy. First, he explains that many apparently positive statements about God are in fact concealed negations. For instance, if we say that God is powerful, this indicates merely that He is not weak. And if we say that He is all-knowing, this indicates merely that He is not ignorant. But hang on, if God isn't ignorant, then mustn't He have knowledge? No, because to say that something has knowledge would be to put it at the level of creatures. You or I can have knowledge, God cannot. He is exalted above this very notion. But that doesn't mean that He lacks knowledge, as would be implied by claiming that He is ignorant. Of course, not all the problematic statements about God in Scripture lend themselves to this kind of analysis, but Maimonides is ready with his second strategy. The remaining statements may seem to be about God, but actually, they are about what God has created. For instance, if we say that God is providential, what we mean is that the world is well-ordered and well-designed. If we say that God is angry, what we mean is that things are happening here in the created world which are unfriendly to us. When things seem more conducive to our happiness, we say God is merciful. Strictly speaking, though, God Himself is neither providential, nor angry, nor merciful. These are properties that you or I might have, but God is too transcendent to possess such attributes. Finally, the third strategy. There are certain other statements about God which just need to be taken allegorically or symbolically. For instance, when we are told that God sits upon a throne, this is meant simply to convey symbolically that God is the ruler of the world. Of course, we can't really say that God is the ruler of the world either. This must in turn be understood either negatively, for instance by saying that God is not subject to any authority, or as a concealed description of what God has created, rather than of God. This analysis of theological discourse may seem to us rather disappointing. It seems to suggest that the language of Scripture is empty, that it tells us nothing about God. No less a philosopher than Thomas Aquinas criticizes Maimonides's account on more or less these grounds. But Maimonides anticipates this objection and tries to respond to it. The attributes that refer to God's actions, that He is providential, for instance, are not empty, because they tell us something true about creation, in this case that it is well designed. What about the negative attributes, for instance that God is strong in the sense of not weak, or knowing in the sense of not ignorant? Maimonides explains that even negations can be informative, giving the example of a ship. Imagine that someone is trying to describe a ship to me, but using only negations and denials. I am told that this unnamed thing is neither animal, nor plant, nor human, nor small, nor made of stone, and so on and so forth. I will, according to Maimonides, get steadily closer to the idea of a ship. Of course, the difference is that in the case of the ship, there is some positive concept I could also have. In fact, in this rather perverse version of 20 Questions, the game could end when I say, oh, okay, I think I know, it's a ship. In God's case, that isn't possible. Process of elimination is all we have. In the end, wisdom consists in eliminating everything and being left with nothing, a transcendent nothing that is superior to all other things, rather than being simply the lack or absence of those things. This seems to impose a significant limitation on the power of human reason to know God, but maybe that's just tough. Who says that human reason should be able to know God, any more than a giraffe can understand trigonometry? You might be disappointed by Maimonides' theory, but disappointment doesn't count as a valid objection. Besides, Maimonides can point to something else that should dispel our disappointment. In our perplexity, we have received guidance, not just from Maimonides, but from prophets, first and foremost among them, Moses. Like the ancient Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides considered his namesake, the original Moses, to be the greatest of prophets. Indeed, Maimonides devoted much of his life to the correct exposition of the Mosaic prophetic revelation. Yet he adhered to what may seem a surprisingly naturalistic explanation of prophecy. He used allegorical interpretation to diffuse any suggestion in the Bible that God literally spoke to prophets, or that he was seen by them. Prophets received truth intellectually, not through the senses, as a kind of natural emanation upon the prophet. Following such Islamic thinkers as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, Maimonides believed that prophecy occurs in the person who was adequately prepared for such a bestowal. In fact, he argued that God would need to intervene miraculously to prevent such a suitably prepared person from receiving prophetic insight, rather than having to intervene to make it happen in the first place. It might seem strange that God would do such a thing, but Maimonides suggests that it could occur if there was some greater good in view. More generally, he accepted the possibility of miracles. Yet he sought to protect Aristotelian science from the potentially disastrous implications of such an admission. As we saw, in commenting on Al-Ghazali's discussion of miracles and the incoherence of the philosophers, Maimonides's fellow Andalusian, Averroes, worried that the universality and necessity of science could be undermined by the existence of miracles. Maimonides insightfully shrugs this off by pointing out that, for Aristotle, the truths of natural philosophy hold always or for the most part. Aristotle did not mind the occasional accidental departure from nature, the odd five-legged giraffe. But if such exceptions can be allowed, or rather ignored, by the Aristotelian natural philosopher, then surely there would also be room for the occasional miracle. Here, one wants to object that a miracle is not just an accidental departure from nature, where things have gone badly, but a deliberate violation of nature and its laws at the hands of God. In one work, Maimonides suggests that in fact, nature contains within it the seeds of miracles. It is somehow a part of the Red Sea's nature to part at just the right time to allow the Israelites passage to the other side. Elsewhere, though, he admits that the natures of things do change in a miracle, but only temporarily. With all these issues—divine attributes, prophecy, miracles—we again see Maimonides negotiating between Judaism and Aristotelianism. He sees these two traditions as fundamentally in but tensions constantly threaten to arise. In episodes to come, we will find later Jewish philosophy oscillating between the poles of Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism. Many Jews will try to recruit Maimonides to their own outlook by emphasizing either the philosophical underpinning of his rabbinic teaching, or the more skeptical side of his thought, which is emphasized in the guide. Others will condemn Maimonides for his philosophical excesses, which led him to depart from a literal understanding of Scripture. But Maimonides was in fact neither a radical Aristotelian nor an anti-rational skeptic. Rather, he sought carefully to determine not only the truths accessible to reason, but also the line beyond which reason cannot pass. In its own proper sphere, reason reigns supreme. Aristotelian ethics is accepted as fundamental for understanding the Jewish law, and as we'll see next time, Maimonides also holds that Aristotelian physics is a perfectly adequate science regarding the earthly world below the heavens. Yet the heavens themselves, to say nothing of God, outstrip our understanding. This is only to be expected. It would be wrong to demand that the world or its Creator is fully intelligible to us, and wrong to expect ourselves to understand everything. As Maimonides says in the ethical section of his Book of Knowledge, the Torah does not demand more of us than we can manage, and neither does Maimonides. This modest and moderate approach is on full display in his treatment of one of the most contentious issues of medieval philosophy—the question of whether the world is eternal. But as it turns out, the question of what Maimonides thought about this issue is itself contentious. I'd be eternally grateful if you join me next time to find out why. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.