Maimonidean Rationalism

Moses Maimonides wrote the Guide of the Perplexed for a student caught between two convictions he refused to treat as opposites, that the created world is exactly as Aristotelian philosophy describes it and that the Torah is the word of God. His method was negative theology carried to its logical end: since any positive attribute predicated of God implies composition, and God is absolutely one, the only true statements about God describe what God is not. Scriptural language that appears to contradict this, God's hand, God's anger, God walking in the garden, is read as accommodation to ordinary understanding rather than literal report.

This was not merely an abstract exercise. Maimonides held rabbinic office as a physician and communal leader in Fustat, and he intended the Guide as a practical resolution for readers who had studied philosophy and found themselves unable to reconcile it with a plain reading of scripture. The resolution satisfied some and alarmed others. Within a generation of his death, the Maimonidean controversies split Jewish communities in southern France and Spain: rationalist successors defended the study of philosophy as a religious obligation, while traditionalist critics, including some who sought and won a ban on the Guide from Christian authorities, argued that philosophical inquiry corroded the plain sense of the law it was meant to serve.

The controversy never fully closed, but the tradition it produced did not stay confined to Jewish thought. Thomas Aquinas cited Maimonides by name as Rabbi Moses, and later Jewish rationalists from Gersonides to Spinoza wrote in a vocabulary the Guide had made available to them, whether they accepted its conclusions or not.

Alongside the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides made a second and in some ways more disruptive rationalist intervention: he tried to fix Judaism's creed. In his commentary on the Mishnah's tractate Sanhedrin, in the section known as Perek Chelek, he set out thirteen principles he argued every Jew was obligated to affirm, the existence and unity of God, the rejection of divine corporeality, the eternity of the Torah, reward and punishment, the coming of the messiah and the resurrection of the dead among them, presented as necessary beliefs in something close to the Aristotelian sense, truths a rational person is compelled to hold once the premises are understood.

The attempt was controversial precisely because Judaism had never had an official creed of that kind, and critics, medieval and modern, have argued that turning belief into an enumerated list borrowed a category from Aristotelian philosophy that rabbinic Judaism had gotten along without for a thousand years, privileging correct belief over correct practice in a tradition usually read the other way around. The controversy never fully resolved the question of whether the principles bind or merely describe Maimonides' own considered view, but the list outlived the argument: reworked into rhymed liturgical form as the hymn Yigdal, probably in the fourteenth century, it is still sung in synagogues today, a philosopher's attempt at systematic theology surviving in popular memory as a piece of music rather than as the argument that produced it.