Maimonides · Theology
Maimonides’s radical claim that we can say nothing positive about God’s essence - only what God is <em>not</em> - to guard the divine unity from every human image.
Moses Maimonides - the towering medieval Jewish philosopher, physician, and legal scholar - was haunted by a danger he saw everywhere in popular religion: that in describing God with human qualities, people quietly turn God into a creature. We call God ‘mighty,’ ‘wise,’ ‘living,’ ‘merciful’ - and before long we are imagining a very large, very powerful person. For Maimonides this was close to idolatry. His Guide for the Perplexed set out to purify our idea of God by a startling discipline: we may say almost nothing positive about what God is.
How can saying what something is not give knowledge? Maimonides offers an analogy. Imagine someone who knows a ‘ship’ only as a word. Tell them it is not an accident (not a quality), not a mineral, not a plant, not an animal, not a simple flat object - and with each negation they rule out a vast class of wrong ideas and draw nearer to the right one, until they have a fair notion of a ship without ever being told positively what it is. So with God: each negation (not a body, not subject to change, not ignorant, not powerless, not multiple) strips away a false conception and draws the mind closer to the transcendent reality, by elimination rather than description.
Behind the whole doctrine stands Maimonides’s passion for the absolute unity of God - the bedrock of Jewish faith, ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ For Maimonides this oneness is not merely numerical (one God, not many) but metaphysical simplicity: God has no parts, no composition, no distinction between essence and attributes. Any positive attribute would compromise this, introducing a duality of God-plus-quality. Negative theology is the rigorous defence of divine unity against the constant human tendency to fragment and humanise God. To protect the Oneness, Maimonides will sacrifice our pretension to describe God at all.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Maimonides allows only negative attributes of God. Explain why he thought positive attributes are dangerous, and what negation leaves us able to say, in your own words.
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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