Maimonides · Theology
Maimonides’s great attempt to reconcile the Torah with the philosophy of Aristotle - for the believer torn between faith and reason.
Maimonides wrote his Guide not for the simple believer, nor for the pure philosopher, but for a specific anguished soul: the educated Jew who deeply believed the Torah and had studied Greek philosophy - and found them seeming to collide. Scripture says God has a hand, sits on a throne, grows angry, created the world in six days; philosophy says God is incorporeal, unchanging, beyond emotion. Such a person is ‘perplexed’ - unable to abandon either the Law they love or the reason they cannot deny, and tormented by the apparent contradiction. The whole book is written to rescue them.
Underlying Maimonides’s method is a frank, and to modern ears uncomfortable, distinction between the masses and the philosophical elite. The Torah, he holds, teaches truth on two levels at once: a plain, literal level that the multitude can grasp and that secures right belief and conduct for society, and a deeper, hidden level - the ‘secrets of the Torah’ - accessible only to those prepared by philosophy. The same text feeds both. This is why Maimonides wrote the Guide obscurely, in deliberately scattered hints, even contradicting himself in places: he wanted to convey the deeper truths to those ready for them while not disturbing the faith of those who were not.
Maimonides’s deepest conviction was that truth is one, so the Torah (rightly understood) and philosophy (rightly practised) cannot ultimately conflict - both come from the same God, the author of revelation and of the reason that reads nature. Apparent contradictions therefore signal a misreading, on one side or the other, to be resolved by honest interpretation. The goal was to make it possible to be, without contradiction, both a faithful Jew and a rigorous philosopher - to keep the educated from having to choose between their religion and their reason, a choice Maimonides feared would cost the faith its finest minds. It is the same project Aquinas would undertake for Christianity and al-Ghazali (more cautiously) for Islam: the great medieval labour of reconciling Athens and Jerusalem.
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 wrote for those caught between Torah and philosophy. Explain his strategy for reconciling them and one risk it carried, in your own words.
Leads to Benedict de Spinoza.
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