Maimonides Pt. II: What God is Not

According to Maimonides, God is essentially a unity.  God is one.  Plato is famous for arguing that nothing physical can truly be one because all physical things are theoretically divisible.  Even if there are practical limitations on our ability to actually divide something, we can still break it down into smaller parts theoretically. Maimonides notes further that the only true oneness is a simple essence without complexity (p.149).  In other words, to be truly one is to lack any divisible features or individuated characteristics--even conceptual distinctions are impossible.  Any characteristic or feature would be an addition or multiplication of the concept of God.  

There are four kinds of attributes that cannot be predicated of God (149-53).

• essence--God cannot be defined
• part of an essence--God is not a composite thing
• qualities--only composite things have qualities
• relations--God has no relation to anything else
• God is incorporeal, so he cannot be related to a place
• God is outside of time and space, so He is not related to time
• relations can only exist between things of the same kind, so God cannot be related to creations

We CAN attribute actions to God (153-56).  Even if a thing is simple (is not a composite), it is possible for that simple thing to perform different actions.  To talk about a number of different actions of God is not to talk about a number of different features of God.  Maimonides uses the analogy of fire.  A fire may burn one thing and melt another, but this difference of effects is not indicative of the powers of the fire itself.  The same fire has many different consequences.  Maimonides also uses an analogy with human rationality.  He notes that our ability to reason allows us to do a broad number of different things, but our ability to reason is one single thing.  So it makes sense to think that one single power (such as God's) can bring about a number of different actions.  These analogies are useful, but Maimonides is careful to warn the reader not to take the analogies too literally.  

Maimonides thinks that God cannot be like anything else.  Since similarity is a kind of relation, God cannot be similar because He cannot be in relation to anything else.  This is, however in direct conflict with Genesis 1:26.  One response is that the claim that humans are made in God's "image" is not to be taken literally.  We can be similar to God insofar as we are rational.  Only humans share this capacity with God.  But Maimonides notes that even this is not a true comparison (Book I, ch. 1).  True comparisons can only be made when the words used to make the comparison are not equivocal.  Indeed, even to say that God exists is to equivocate.

The basic upshot of Maimonides's negative theology is that we cannot say anything that God is.  Rather, we can only say what God is not (p.165).  In fact, Maimonides thought that to anthropomorphize God is tantamount to idolatry, since you are not thinking about God as God but you are thinking about God as some human-like idol (p.174).  Aquinas responds to this concern by noting that some words we use to talk about God should be understood only as negations (incorporeal, infinite), but "good" should be understood as an analogy.  In this way, Aquinas tries to argue that we can say "God is good" without equivocating.    

Maimonides also tries to offer a guide about how humans can attain human perfection (176-81).  The most important perfection for humans is intellectual.  We should have correct beliefs about God.  Being perfect in this way is the only way to achieve the ultimate goal of human life: immortality.  Moral perfection is only useful for living with other people.  Moral perfection is a necessary condition for intellectual perfection, but intellectual perfection is much more important.