The Guide for the Perplexed is a journey toward knowledge of God. Its path to knowing God begins with cleaning up religious language. In the Rambam’s view, misunderstanding the language of the Bible is a major cause of misconceptions about God. Scripture entraps its readers with anthropomorphic, physical images of the divine. People forget that these are merely images and not the reality of God.
One of the most startling insights the Guide offers is that the Torah, which was supposed to purge human consciousness of idolatry, actually played a role in strengthening a certain kind of idolatrous consciousness, by entrenching in people’s minds the anthropomorphic images that it uses. This idea is repeated a number of times in the Guide:
Several groups of people pursued the likening of God to other beings and believed Him to be a body endowed with attributes. Another group raised themselves above this consequence and denied His being a body, but preserved the attributes. All this was rendered necessary by their keeping to the external sense of the revealed books as I shall make clear in later chapters that will deal with these notions. (Guide, 1:51)
Misreading of the Holy Scriptures themselves can cause misleading ideas to enter human consciousness.
The Rambam views efforts to describe God in human language as being even worse than idol worship:
[One who believes] that He is a body, or that He is subject to affections; or again that he ascribes to God some deficiency or other. Such a man is indubitably more blameworthy than a worshipper of idols. (Guide, 1:36)1
Relating to God as a physical being is a serious error in the Rambam’s eyes, but it is also a human weakness. People tend to believe in a corporeal God because, to them, existence usually means physical existence. If you say to them that God is not physical, it is difficult to understand this statement except as a denial that God exists. It is very hard for humans to free themselves from ingrained patterns of speech. In this case, we are talking about linguistic habits that have become entrenched over many years and that condition the way people think.
A profound change in human consciousness almost always happens gradually. As we saw, the Rambam argued that the Torah sanctioned the offering of sacrifices because it is futile to wage a frontal assault against powerful, long-standing practices. Similarly, the Torah could not destroy in one stroke the human inclination to represent God in human terms. The Torah appropriated anthropocentric language to reach the pagan mentality that conceives of Him as corporeal (“The minds of the multitude were accordingly guided to the belief that He exists by imagining that He is corporeal” [Guide, 1:46]).
The same paradigm we used to explain the reasons for the Torah’s commandments concerning sacrifices also helps us to understand the issue of anthropomorphic language. The Torah used humanizing language to describe God in order to educate the masses about His existence. The ultimate goal, however, was to enable people to free themselves from the pagan mind-set. The Torah seized the weapons of its intellectual adversary in order to defeat the opposing worldview. However, in the Rambam’s view this move had not been wholly successful. When he attempted to explain the pull to conceive of God in physical form, he eschewed psychological explanations and instead identified the cause as literal reading of scripture:
The reasons that led those who believe in the existence of attributes belonging to the Creator to this belief are akin to those that led those who believe in the doctrine of His corporeality to that belief. For he who believes in this doctrine was not led to it by intellectual speculation; he merely followed the external sense of the texts of the Scriptures. This is also the case with regard to the attributes. For inasmuch as the books of the prophets and the revealed books existed, which predicated attributive qualifications of him, may He be exalted, these were taken in their literal sense; and He was believed to possess attributes. (Guide, 1:53)2
God is beyond language, yet the Torah has no medium other than words to represent God. An ancient Eastern parable tells of a teacher who points his finger at the moon, causing people around him to look at the finger. Similarly, the Torah uses words to gesture at God, who transcends language. So the first task of the Guide in paving a way to know God was to free human thought from limiting linguistic habits by reinterpreting traditional, corporeal language applied to the divine.
Part 1 of the Guide is dedicated to this task of freeing human consciousness from the misleading effects of religious language. The early chapters of part 1 focus on the ways that language distorts our conception of God. The Rambam’s discussion of an exalted God who is absolutely separate from the world reaches its purest expression in the doctrine of negative attributes, which we discussed in chapter 1. Every word that is used to talk about God effectively places God and the world in the same category. Removing God from language expresses His absolute otherness from the world.
But the negation of God-language is not the Rambam’s last word about God in the Guide. After developing his theory of a God who utterly transcends words, Maimonides surprises his readers with a quite different definition of the divine: God as intellect.
The Rambam also presents a positive definition of God—God is the intellect that is perfectly united with its knowledge:
You already know that the following dictum of the philosophers with reference to God, may He be exalted, is generally admitted: the dictum being that He is the intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject, and the intellectually cognized object. And that those three notions form, in Him, may He be exalted, one single notion in which there is no multiplicity. We have mentioned this likewise in our great compilation, since this, as we have made clear there, is one of the great foundations of our Law; I mean the fact that He is one only and that no other thing can be added to Him, I mean to say that there is no external thing other than He. (Guide, 1:68)
Understanding, according to Aristotle and his interpreters, is the intertwining of intellect with its objects. When a person understands something, his consciousness unites with the things that are understood. However, after a person completes the act of understanding, the gap between consciousness and its object reappears.
When we are speaking about God, however, the gap never reappears. God is the intellect that is always active. God is one with all the objects of God’s understanding; it is impossible to make any distinction between God and what God knows. This is not the place for an in-depth exploration of the Aristotelian concept of intellect;3 nevertheless, it is clear that this theory, which the Rambam appropriates, presents us with an additional way of understanding God; God as intellect, or, in the language of the Middle Ages, “intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject, and the intellectually cognized object.”
There is a close connection between the Rambam’s discussion of God as intellect in part 1, chapter 68 of the Guide and in the opening chapter of the book. In chapter 1, Maimonides defines man as intellect; in chapter 68, he defines God as intellect. In chapter 1, he characterizes intellect as divine, as the image of God in man; in chapter 68, he describes the divine intellect by analogy with human processes of understanding. This concept, which has been called “intellectual pantheism,”4 brings God and humanity very close together; we are essentially intellect, and so is God. The difference is that God’s intellect is absolutely united with its knowledge, whereas human intellect is not united in this way with what it knows.
The Rambam gave his readers two different versions of God. The first utterly transcends intellect, while the second is intellect. The first is totally beyond language, while the second can be encapsulated in a concise definition. The first is absolutely other, while the second is highly accessible. This glaring contradiction baffled generations of readers, scholars, and interpreters. Throughout history, many attempts have been made to resolve it.5
The concept of God as an intellect that is wholly united with its knowledge opened the door to new directions in theology. In his Ethics, Spinoza suggested that his radical, pantheistic ideas about the unity of God and the world had Jewish roots. He likely was referring to Maimonides, one of the figures who influenced him most profoundly. Apparently, one should understand Spinoza’s interpretation of the Guide as follows: the Rambam appropriated the Aristotelian idea that in thought the intellect unites with its objects, but rejected the notion that God thinks Himself.6 Rather, God thinks the world. That is to say, God, who is the intellect that is united with its knowledge of the world, is essentially God who is united with the world. Maimonides did not say this explicitly. However, taking his words one small step further would push his identification of God with intellect into identification of God with the world and turn Rambam the Aristotelian into a Spinozan.
The two theological options advanced by the Guide are at opposite ends of the spectrum of Jewish ideas about God. The first option, God as intellect, is a mere step away from pantheism, the identification of God with the world, while the second option, the doctrine of negative attributes, creates an absolute separation between God and the world.
I do not believe that the pantheistic approach represents the Rambam’s true opinion. It seems to me that the dominant approach in the Guide is the doctrine of negative attributes. Yet, although the Rambam did not subscribe to the view that identified God with intellect, it was nevertheless important to him to present this view to the reader.
The “two Gods” of the Guide reflect the influence of two great philosophical traditions of the Middle Ages: the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic schools. Aristotle conceived God as the intellect that is fully united with its knowledge, whereas the sources for the doctrine of negative attributes may be found in the writings of the third-century Neoplatonic thinker Plotinus, who was influenced by both Plato and Aristotle.
One of the main subjects of Plotinus’s thought is the structure of existence. Plotinus argued that the universe has one source, in which everything began and from which everything flows. The source of everything is the One. Plotinus’s description of the One echoes the Rambam’s concept of God in several respects. As we discussed in part 1, the Rambam believed that the oneness of God is qualitatively different from anything else that we call “one.” Anything in our physical reality that appears to us as one can in fact be divided. This is true of everything in the world, whereas God is ultimate, irreducible oneness. Plotinus is the source of this aspect of the Rambam’s thought. Indeed, he was not just the source of inspiration for the doctrine of negative attributes; he was also the first to articulate the idea in the form in which the Rambam later presented it.
From here, one who negates any description of the One and does not give any definition of it, simply assumes its existence, without attributing anything to it (as do those preachers whose praises actually diminish its honor, as their praises are beneath its dignity, because they are incapable of finding fitting words).7
To reinforce his position, the Rambam quoted the talmudic story about a prayer leader who used a long string of adjectives to describe God. Like the Talmud, the Rambam harshly attacked the man in the story. Attributing a mass of adjectives to God does not add to His glory; it detracts from it. Silence is the only fitting praise for God. Negative theology, which took its first steps in the writings of Plotinus, reached maturity in the thought of medieval thinkers like Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, and it was central to Maimonides, who placed it at the center of his thinking.
Much of medieval philosophy derives from Aristotelianism and the Neoplatonic thought originated by Plotinus. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the two, both because Plotinus himself was an important interpreter of Aristotle who integrated Aristotelian ideas into his thought, and also because in the Middle Ages, syntheses of Aristotle and Plotinus emerged. For most of the medieval period, the Neoplatonic stream dominated Jewish thought. However, in the twelfth century the Aristotelian element became more prominent, for example, in the writings of Ibn Daud and, of course, Maimonides. Julius Guttman has demonstrated that the best indicator of whether a philosopher is closer to Aristotle or to Neoplatonism is that thinker’s conception of God.8 Aristotelians tended to identify God as the intellect that thinks itself, whereas the Neoplatonists described God as other and utterly transcendent. Both of these conceptions may be found in the Guide. However, the Rambam neither compared nor attempted to integrate these opposing viewpoints. He simply presented them in different parts of his book.
The first part of the Guide was constructed with particular care and precision. The chapter about God’s transcendence (developing the doctrine of negative attributes) is juxtaposed with two chapters (1 and 68) that talk about God’s intimacy with people. The Rambam deliberately set up a tension between discussions of God’s distance from us and assertions of God’s closeness. Brick by brick, the Rambam built a wall separating God from humanity, only to knock it down in the space of one chapter where he restored the idea of God’s intimacy with human beings who are created in God’s image.
We have seen that the Guide did not resolve the debate between those who believed the world had been created and those who believed the world was eternal; instead, it presented both sides. The Rambam inclined toward the idea of creation, but he did not decisively reject the possibility that the world has existed eternally. Now we see that Maimonides took the same approach to the issue of God. He presented his readers with both a God who is beyond intellect and a God who is intellect. The Rambam inclined toward the doctrine of negative attributes, but he did not entirely reject the notion of God as intelligence. The arguments that resonated throughout the medieval period between the followers of Aristotle and Plotinus are not decided in the Guide, but both sides are represented. The Guide served as an arena for the conflict between some of the most influential philosophical ideas of the Middle Ages, and the battle is not brought to a clear conclusion. The reader remains in a state of perplexity.9
In his treatment of both of these big questions about the world and God, Maimonides challenged his readers’ confidence that there was one, unequivocally correct answer. Rather, he invited his audience to participate in his own intellectual struggles. The Guide led its readers to a place of uncertainty. The question is, what is the theological and psychological role of uncertainty in the Guide? This will be the subject of the next chapter.