Moses Maimonides AKA Moshe ben Maimon AKA Rambam

Moses Maimonides, known as Moshe ben Maimon or the Rambam, has influenced other religious thinkers such as Aquinas, who agreed that we can only have knowledge of what God is not (rather than what God is); Spinoza, who agreed that God does not directly punish or reward people, but disagrees that we can attribute miracles and creation to God and Newton, who agreed that God is a transcendent unity and that Scripture has riddles that can only be solved by intellectuals.  Maimonides thought that God is the One, which is entirely outside of the world of being (the real world, our world).  Because the One is outside of our realm of existence, we can identify no attributes or characteristics of the One.  This idea that the divine is something entirely out of our realm of existence is one influenced by Platonism.  Indeed, if God is outside our realm of experience, then we cannot say things about God.  The central idea of negative theology is that we can never say what God is.  We can only ever say what God is not.  Maimonides is still known as a proponent of negative theology.

Maimonides was raised in Muslim Cordova (now Spain).  His father was an intellectual, and he passed on Rabbinic teachings to Moses.  Moses was a physician, logician and theologian.  He died in 1204 at the age of 66.

Maimonides considered the role of dogma in Judaism.  He asked whether there are certain things a person must believe in order to be a Jew.  For Rabbinic Judaism, being a Jew was a matter of being born of a Jewish mother and of following rules.  In his Commentary on the Mishnah, Maimonides claimed that there are 13 principles that Jews ought to believe.  There is still debate today about whether religious dogma itself is contradictory to the spirit of Judaism and about whether Maimonides himself believed these 13 principles.

The Guide of the Perplexed was written for religious believers with background in philosophy and Talmudic Law.  The goal of the Guide is to consider whether educated, philosophical thinkers must abandon commitments to dogma and Law.  An important point of the work is that there are limits to understanding God.  Certain things cannot be known by human beings because we are limited.  We can only "glimpse" truths.  Other truths, however, are only accessible to the educated elite.  Since Maimonides work itself was intended to be understood by this group of intellectual elite, it is unclear even today whether Maimonides actually thought that philosophy and religion are at odds or whether philosophy is only at odds with naive religious thinking.

The main idea of the Guide is that God is utterly unique.  There is nothing else that exists which is anything like God.  Because God is so entirely different and unique, there are problems when it comes to learning about God.  In particular, we have problems learning about God by reading about God in Scripture, which was written by humans (p.154).  We can know that God is One, that He is incorporeal and that He exists, but we cannot know any positive facts about God.  We cannot attribute any characteristics or qualities to God.

This leads to many puzzles:

• If we are made in God's image, as stated in Genesis, this seems puzzling.  If God is incorporeal and lacks any physical qualities, how can we be made in the image of nothing?  
• Isn't it impossible to even describe something that is incorporeal?
• Even to ascribe non-physical traits to God (such as goodness) is to attribute a quality to God.  Since God is "one", we cannot describe Him as a multiplicity  We cannot describe him as a collection of different attributes.
• Even to say that God exists is to equivocate about the word "exists", since we usually use this word to mean that something exists in our own world.  Things that exist in our world are composite entities (made up of many qualities) and exist accidentally as a combination of those qualities (we can go in and out of existence).  God, on the other hand, is a unity which exists necessarily and independently of any qualities.   

The main upshot is this.  Usually, when we describe things, we try to figure out what kinds of categories a thing falls into.  God, however, is so unique that He does not fall into any categories.  We can only say what categories God does not fit into.