Maimonides

Moses ben Maimon (the Rambam)

Maimonides wrote his greatest book for one person, and that person was in pain. Picture a devout Jew who has also studied philosophy, who loves the Torah and cannot unlearn what reason has shown him, and who has been quietly coming apart, because the two will not fit together. The Torah speaks of God's outstretched arm, his anger, his walking in the garden in the cool of the day; philosophy has convinced this reader that the ultimate reality cannot possibly have arms or moods or a place to stroll. So the believer faces an agonizing choice: betray his reason and believe what he knows to be crude, or betray his faith and walk away from the tradition that holds his whole life together. Maimonides knew this person, taught this person, and wrote The Guide for the Perplexed to rescue him. The entire vast book is an act of intellectual mercy aimed at a single conviction: that you do not have to choose, that the supposed war between a mature faith and a rigorous reason is a misunderstanding, and that the cure begins with learning how to read.

God has no body. The first and most urgent lesson is about language. The Torah is full of talk of God's hand, God's face, God's anger, God coming down to look; and a great many believers, then and now, picture exactly that, an enormous person in the sky who happens to be in a mood. Maimonides regarded this as not merely a mistake but something close to idolatry, the worship of a God-shaped idea in place of God. For if God is the infinite source of all being, then he has no body, no parts, no location, no passions that rise and fall; to pin those on him is to drag the infinite down to the size of a large human being. So the bodily language of scripture, he insists, is wholly figurative, written that way on purpose for ordinary people who cannot think in abstractions and need vivid pictures to hold on to anything at all. The first part of the Guide is accordingly a long dictionary, teaching the reader how each physical word for God is to be re-read: "hand" means power, "comes down" means a turning of attention, and so on. Learn to read the pictures as pictures, and the apparent war between scripture and reason starts to dissolve.

What you cannot say. Then Maimonides goes much further, into the most rigorous and vertiginous idea in his book. It is not only God's body we must stop attributing; it is, strictly, every positive quality whatever. We say God is wise, good, powerful, living. But each of these, Maimonides argues, smuggles in the very thing it means to deny, because to say that God has wisdom, as a property, is to picture a God who is one thing plus a quality, a composite, when the infinite must be utterly simple, without parts of any kind. The truth is that God's "wisdom" is not a feature he possesses but is identical with his very being, of which we have no concept at all. So what can we truthfully say? Only, Maimonides answers, what God is not. We can say God is not ignorant, not powerless, not many, not bodily, and each negation, by stripping away one more false picture, carries us a step closer, not by adding to our knowledge but by purifying our ignorance. The highest knowledge of God turns out to be a disciplined awareness of how little we can know, the silence at the end of a long subtraction. It is one of the boldest claims any theologian ever made: that the ultimate reality is not merely hard to describe but lies, in principle, beyond every concept the human mind possesses.

The silence in the inner room. Where does such a faith end up, if its God cannot even be described? Maimonides answers with a parable. Imagine a great king in his palace. Some people live far off in the countryside and never so much as face the palace; some reach the city but never find the gate; some walk the length of the outer wall; some enter and wander the antechambers; and a very few make it into the inner room, into the presence of the king himself. These are not social ranks but degrees of understanding, of how truly a mind has come to know the God beyond images. And the worship proper to the inner room, Maimonides suggests, is not loud prayer or busy ritual but silent contemplation, the mind resting in an awareness of the divine that has passed beyond words. Yet he is no escapist. The same man wrote the most comprehensive code of Jewish law ever assembled, and insisted that the commandments are not arbitrary divine whims but have reasons, purposes that serve the moral, social, and intellectual health of a community. The life he describes is a single long arc: the disciplined practice of the law and the ethical virtues forms the kind of person who can, at the summit, fall silent before what cannot be said.

Rabbi Moses. Maimonides's reach ran far past his own people, which is its own quiet rebuke to anyone who files him as a narrowly Jewish thinker. When Aquinas, the master of Christian theology, sat down to think about whether God's existence can be proved, or how we can speak of the divine at all, or whether the world had a beginning, he had the Guide open in front of him, and he cited its author respectfully, hundreds of times, simply as "Rabbi Moses." The negative theology that Maimonides pressed to its limit shaped how Christian and later thinkers framed the whole question of God-talk. And his most radical heir was the one who went furthest of all. The young Spinoza was raised inside a Maimonidean world, read the Guide closely, and then followed its logic clean past the breaking point: if God cannot be a person, cannot have a body or passions or even properties, then perhaps "God" names not a being set apart from the universe but the infinite order of nature itself. The boldest heresy of early modern Europe grew, in part, out of taking Maimonides's reverent caution about the words for God with complete seriousness.

The refusal to shrink the infinite. The room reads the Guide in an older English translation, cited by part and chapter; it is a strange and difficult book, written, as Maimonides openly admits, to half-conceal its boldest teachings from readers not ready for them, so it rewards slow and active reading more than almost any other. What it offers a modern reader is not a set of doctrines to adopt but a discipline, and a rare one in any age: the refusal to shrink the infinite to a size the mind can pocket. We are forever doing the opposite, cutting God, or the universe, or the truth, down to something small enough to have a comfortable opinion about and argue over at dinner. Maimonides will not let you. He drives you, negation by negation, toward the edge of what can be thought, and then asks you to stand there in honest silence rather than fill the space with a reassuring picture. It is bracing, humbling work, and its use reaches well past religion, because the temptation to mistake our model of a thing for the thing itself is the oldest error there is, and the hardest to stop committing.

There is something moving in the fact that the most rigorous theologian of the Middle Ages wrote his masterpiece not to win an argument but to keep a single frightened mind from tearing itself in half. Maimonides believed that the deepest faith and the most honest reason were not rivals but, rightly understood, the same love of truth followed to its limit, and that no one should ever have to amputate one in order to keep the other. In a world that still likes to force that choice, that still tells people they must pick between their intelligence and their deepest commitments, the old physician of Cairo remains a steady and demanding voice, insisting that the choice is a false one, that you were built to use all of yourself, and that the truth, however far past your concepts it finally lies, is one.