The Guide for the Perplexed

Must a believer who has learned that God has no body give up the Bible that speaks of God's face, hand and throne? Maimonides answers that the reader has misread the words, not the faith.

Maimonides takes the Bible's bodily words for God one at a time, face, hand, place, sitting, coming down, and shows that each Hebrew term also carries a sense that fits a God without a body. His rule comes from the rabbis: the Torah speaks in the language of human beings, so that everyone can at least grasp that God exists. A wise saying, he adds, is like a golden apple inside silver filigree. The silver is worth having, but the gold is seen only through its small openings, by a reader who looks closely.

• scriptural interpretation
• biblical interpretation
• hermeneutics
• language
• divine incorporeality
• idolatry
• religious law

If every positive word we use divides God into parts, what can a believer truly say of God? The answer Maimonides gives leaves praise closer to silence than to speech.

Calling God wise, powerful or living, Maimonides argues, smuggles in attributes added to God's being, and anything with added parts is not one. Only negations are safe: God is not powerless, not ignorant, not like anything made. Knowledge grows by subtraction, as with a ship. One person knows only the word, another learns that a ship is not a mineral, another that it is not a plant, until the tenth nearly has the thing. Hence his favourite verse from the Psalms: silence is praise to you.

• divine attributes
• negative theology
• divine simplicity
• divine unity
• knowledge of god
• theology

Did the world have a beginning, or has it always been as Aristotle taught? Maimonides finds that reason cannot settle the question and asks what a believer should do when proof runs out.

Against the Kalam theologians, who built their whole theology on proofs of creation, Maimonides argues that all of those proofs have weak points. Against Aristotle's followers, he shows that Aristotle himself knew he had not proved the world eternal. With the scales level, he chooses creation from nothing, because only a world brought into being by will leaves room for a God who chooses, for miracles and for a law given at a particular time. Creation, he writes, is the foundation of the faith, and time itself was created with the world.

• creation
• cosmology
• causation
• aristotle
• teleology
• divine will
• metaphysics

What does a prophet have that a philosopher or a gifted politician lacks? Maimonides treats prophecy as the summit of human perfection, which still depends on God's will.

Truth, the introduction says, reaches human beings like lightning on a dark night: for some the flashes come one after another until the night is almost day, for most prophets at long intervals, and for some only once. Prophecy itself needs a perfect intellect and a perfect imagination together. Statesmen, lawgivers and diviners have the imagination without the intellect, and philosophers the intellect without the imagination. In Maimonides' reading the Bible's angels are often these faculties at work, and Moses stands above every other prophet.

• prophecy
• intellect
• imagination
• angels
• epistemology
• knowledge

Does God watch over each human being equally, and why do good people suffer? Maimonides reads the Book of Job as a debate about exactly this.

Maimonides rejects both Aristotle, for whom good people drowning in a sinking ship are no different from a falling leaf, and the theologians for whom even the leaf falls by decree. Providence over individuals, he argues, is proportional to intellect: the more a person knows of God, the more closely they are watched over. He notices that the Book of Job calls Job upright but never wise, and reads Job's friends as voices of rival theories of providence. Most of the evils people complain of, he adds, they bring upon themselves and then blame on God.

• divine providence
• divine knowledge
• human nature
• knowledge of god
• intellect