Maimonides: Reason and Faith in the Guide for the Perplexed — The Philosophy of Moses ben Maimon

In the heart of the twelfth century, amid Andalusian mosques, North African synagogues, and Egyptian Islamic courts, a rabbi, physician, and philosopher undertook one of the most daring intellectual syntheses of the Middle Ages: to show that philosophical reason and biblical revelation do not contradict each other but are, in fact, complementary. His name was Moses ben Maimon — in Hebrew, Rambam; to the Latin West, Maimonides. No other medieval Jewish thinker exerted so deep and lasting an influence — within Judaism and far beyond it, shaping Christian and Islamic thought in ways that still resonate today.

This article examines Maimonides’ life, the core of his philosophy, the structure and arguments of the Guide for the Perplexed, his doctrine of negative theology, and his decisive impact on Christian Scholasticism — particularly on Thomas Aquinas, who cited him as “Rabbi Moyses.”

1. Life and Historical Context

1.1 Córdoba and Exile

Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Muslim Spain (Al-Andalus), in 1138 — though some sources give the year as 1135. His father, Maimon ben Joseph, was a rabbinical judge and Talmudic scholar. The young Moses grew up in an environment of intellectual ferment where Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared access to Greek philosophical texts translated into Arabic.

In 1148, when Maimonides was roughly ten years old, the Almohads — a Berber dynasty of fundamentalist orientation — conquered Córdoba and imposed forced conversion to Islam or exile. The family fled and wandered for years across North Africa. This uprooting left a deep mark on the young philosopher: the experience of religious persecution reinforced his conviction that faith needs solid rational foundations to survive the trials of history.

1.2 Fez and Egypt

After sojourns in Almería and Fez (Morocco), the family emigrated to Egypt in 1165. Maimonides settled in Fustat (old Cairo), where he became the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and physician at the Ayyubid court, serving al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s vizier, and later Sultan al-Afdal. It was there that he produced his major works: the Commentary on the Mishnah (1168), the monumental Mishneh Torah (1170–1180), and the Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh Nevukhim, c. 1190).

He died on December 13, 1204, in Fustat. According to tradition, his body was taken to Tiberias, in the Land of Israel, where his tomb is visited to this day.

2. The Philosophical Project: Harmonizing Aristotle and the Torah

2.1 The Problem

Maimonides’ central challenge was the same one that had occupied the Islamic philosophers Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes: how can Greek philosophy — especially Aristotle’s — be reconciled with monotheistic revelation? The biblical tradition speaks of a personal God who freely creates the world, intervenes in history, commands, and prohibits. Aristotelian philosophy describes an eternal, impersonal Unmoved Mover who does not act in the world and for whom the universe has always existed.

For Maimonides, to ignore philosophy would be an intellectual disgrace; to ignore revelation, a betrayal of the divine covenant. Nor could the solution be the “double truth” that the Latin Averroists would later propose — the idea that something can be true in philosophy and false in theology. For him, truth is one: when reason and Scripture appear to clash, it is because we have not properly understood one of them, or both.

2.2 The Hermeneutic Strategy

Maimonides’ answer is hermeneutic in nature: biblical texts possess a literal sense (peshat) and a deeper sense (sod). Passages that attribute a body, emotions, movement, or regret to God are metaphors intended for the understanding of ordinary people — those who could not grasp abstract philosophical truths. The qualified philosopher must look beyond the letter to reach the intellectual meaning the text conceals.

This approach had precedents in Philo of Alexandria (1st century CE) and in the Islamic Mu’tazilites, but Maimonides brought it to a level of rigor and systematicity unprecedented in the Jewish tradition.

3. The Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh Nevukhim)

3.1 Audience and Purpose

Written in Arabic using Hebrew characters (a common practice among Jewish intellectuals in the Islamic world), the Guide for the Perplexed was composed around 1190 and dedicated to Joseph ibn Aknin, a disciple of Maimonides. The ideal reader is the scholar who has mastered the philosophy and science of his time but feels perplexed by the apparent contradictions between what reason demonstrates and what Scripture affirms.

The work is not addressed to the layperson or the zealot. It is deliberately difficult: Maimonides warns that he has scattered intentional contradictions throughout the text to protect dangerous truths from irresponsible dissemination — a technique that Leo Strauss, in the twentieth century, would call “esoteric writing.”

3.2 Structure

The Guide is divided into three parts:

1. Part I — Analysis of anthropomorphic biblical terms (hand, eye, face, throne of God, etc.) and demonstration that they must be understood metaphorically. Introduction to negative theology.
2. Part II — Proofs of God’s existence, unity, and incorporeality. Discussion of the creation of the world versus its eternity. Theory of prophecy.
3. Part III — Divine providence, the problem of evil, the commandments of the Torah and their rational justification. The ultimate end of humankind: intellectual perfection.

3.3 The Question of Creation

One of the most original points in the Guide is the treatment of the eternity of the world. Aristotle maintained that the universe is eternal — without beginning or end. The Torah states that God created the world in time. Maimonides argues that neither position is philosophically demonstrable: reason alone cannot prove either eternity or temporal creation. Faced with this indeterminacy, it is legitimate — and preferable — to accept creation, because it preserves divine freedom and will, without which miracles, prophecy, and divine law would lose their foundation.

This strategy is remarkable: Maimonides does not reject Aristotle out of fideism but reveals the internal limits of the Aristotelian demonstration and, from within those limits, opens space for faith. Reason does not prove creation, but neither does it refute it — and there are philosophical reasons to prefer it.

4. Negative Theology

4.1 What Can We Say about God?

Negative theology is perhaps Maimonides’ most influential contribution to the history of philosophy. The problem is this: if we say “God is wise,” are we using the word “wise” in the same sense we apply it to a human being? If so, we are anthropomorphizing God — reducing him to an enlarged version of ourselves. If not, the word loses its meaning and the statement becomes empty.

Maimonides’ solution is radical: we can only say of God what he is not. God is not ignorant (therefore he is “wise” in a sense that surpasses all human understanding). God is not weak (therefore he is “powerful” in an incommensurable way). God is not multiple (therefore he is “one” in an absolute sense). Each negative attribute brings us closer to God — not by telling us what he is, but by eliminating what he is not.

4.2 Attributes of Action

Maimonides does allow, however, that we can speak of attributes of action: we can describe what God does (creates, sustains, governs) without thereby defining what God is. These attributes do not reveal the divine essence but rather its effects in the world — just as we can describe the effects of fire (it heats, illuminates, burns) without thereby knowing the ultimate nature of fire.

This distinction between essence and action allowed Maimonides to maintain a functional religious language without falling into anthropomorphism: believers can pray and speak of God legitimately, provided they understand that all language about God is approximate and, ultimately, inadequate.

5. Prophecy and Human Perfection

5.1 A Naturalistic Theory of Prophecy

For Maimonides, prophecy is not an arbitrary miracle: it is the natural result of the joint perfection of intellect and imagination. When a human being develops both faculties to the utmost, he becomes receptive to the emanation of the Active Intellect — the cosmic intelligence that, in Aristotelian-Avicennian cosmology, illuminates the human mind.

The prophet, then, is a philosopher-imaginative: he possesses the same truth as the philosopher but conveys it through images, parables, and visions accessible to the people. The prophecy of Moses, however, is exceptional: Moses received divine communication directly, without the mediation of imagination — which is why the Torah holds a unique status among all Scriptures.

5.2 The Ultimate End of Humankind

In the final chapter of the Guide (III, 54), Maimonides distinguishes four types of human perfection, in ascending order:

1. Perfection of possessions — material goods (the most fragile and extrinsic).
2. Perfection of the body — health and physical vigor.
3. Perfection of character — ethical virtues (necessary but insufficient, since they depend on relationships with others).
4. Perfection of the intellect — knowledge of God and metaphysical truths. This alone is genuinely human perfection, for it belongs to the rational soul and does not depend on external conditions.

The ultimate end of humankind is therefore the contemplation of God — not a mystical ecstasy but the supreme exercise of reason that grasps, insofar as possible, the divine nature and the order of the cosmos.

6. The Mishneh Torah: Codifying the Law

Before the Guide, Maimonides had already accomplished a monumental feat: the Mishneh Torah (“Repetition of the Law”), composed between 1170 and 1180. It is a systematic codification of all Halakha (rabbinic law), organized in fourteen thematic books, written in clear, direct Hebrew — in contrast to the technical Aramaic of the Talmud.

The first book, Sefer ha-Madda (“Book of Knowledge”), is significant: it begins with the philosophical foundations of faith — the existence and unity of God, the obligation to study, ethical principles — before moving on to practical laws. For Maimonides, religious practice without intellectual understanding is incomplete; law and philosophy form an organic unity.

7. Influence on Medieval Philosophy

7.1 Within the Jewish Tradition

The reception of Maimonides in the Jewish world was paradoxically turbulent. While he was hailed as the greatest teacher since Moses — “from Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses” — he also provoked the Maimonidean Controversy (1230–1235), in which conservative rabbis in southern France and Spain denounced his philosophical works as dangerous to faith. In 1233, his books were even burned in Montpellier.

In the long run, however, his authority was established beyond dispute. His Thirteen Principles of Faith (formulated in the Commentary on the Mishnah) became the most widely accepted dogmatic formulation in Judaism. Later Jewish philosophers such as Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410) and Joseph Albo (c. 1380–1444) defined their own positions in critical dialogue with Maimonides — even when they challenged him, he remained the point of reference.

7.2 In Christian Scholasticism

Maimonides’ influence on medieval Christian philosophy is one of the most remarkable episodes in the cross-cultural transmission of ideas. The Guide for the Perplexed was translated into Latin (Dux Neutrorum) as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century and circulated widely in European university centers.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is the most prominent case. In the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas cites Maimonides dozens of times as “Rabbi Moyses,” treating him as a philosophical authority of the first rank. The debt is visible on several points:

• Negative theology: Aquinas adopts Maimonides’ position that we cannot know God’s essence directly, though he modifies it with the doctrine of the analogia entis — divine attributes are neither univocal (same meaning as for humans) nor equivocal (entirely different meaning) but analogous (proportionally similar).
• Proofs for God’s existence: Aquinas’ Five Ways echo arguments found in the Guide, especially the proof from motion (Unmoved Mover) and from contingency.
• Creation and eternity: Aquinas agrees with Maimonides that natural reason cannot demonstrate either the creation or the eternity of the world — temporal creation is known only through faith (though Aquinas argues that Aristotle, too, failed to prove eternity).
• Biblical interpretation: the Maimonidean distinction between literal and deeper meaning influenced medieval Christian biblical hermeneutics.

Other Scholastics who read and discussed Maimonides include Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great (Aquinas’ teacher), Meister Eckhart, and Duns Scotus.

7.3 In Modern Philosophy

Maimonides’ influence did not end with the Middle Ages. Spinoza (1632–1677), who was educated in the Jewish tradition of Amsterdam, read the Guide for the Perplexed attentively and inherited from Maimonides both the rationalist impulse and the practice of biblical criticism — though he radicalized both to the point of breaking with tradition. Leibniz and the English Deists also show traces of Maimonidean negative theology. In the twentieth century, Leo Strauss devoted fundamental studies to Maimonides’ technique of esoteric writing, placing him once again at the center of the debate on philosophy and revelation.

8. The Continuing Relevance of Maimonides

Maimonides’ work endures for several reasons. His defense of the idea that faith does not require the abdication of reason — but, on the contrary, presupposes it — is an argument that continues to resonate in debates over religion and rationality. His negative theology anticipates concerns in contemporary philosophy of language about the limits of predication and reference. His insistence on intellectual perfection as the ultimate end of humankind places education and study at the center of the ethical life — a conviction deeply rooted in Jewish culture that Maimonides elevated to the level of philosophical principle.

For the student of philosophy, Maimonides is an indispensable link: without him, one cannot fully understand either the medieval reception of Aristotle, the genesis of Thomas Aquinas’ natural theology, or the roots of modern rationalism.

9. Principal Works

← Articles