Justified True Belief

(●) The rabbi and court physician whose books the Christian schoolmen read under the name Rabbi Moses. + Moses ben Maimon spent his working life as a doctor in Cairo, writing at night, and he is the most quoted Jew in medieval Christian theology. The schoolmen who read him, the teachers of the new medieval universities, who worked by putting a question, arguing it out from both sides and only then answering it, called him simply Rabbi Moses. When Thomas Aquinas needed to explain why the Old Testament asked for old turtledoves and young doves and not the other way round, he wrote "as Rabbi Moses observes" and gave the answer he had found in a Jewish book. Albert the Great cited him. Meister Eckhart drew on him all through his commentary on Exodus. For roughly a century the Latin West treated a rabbi from Cordoba as one of the authorities you consult, alongside Augustine, Aristotle and Avicenna. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that he thought harder than almost anyone before him about what human language can and cannot do when it turns toward God, and the answer he gave has shaped Christian talk about God ever since, partly by being adopted and partly by being argued with. The second is that his doctrine of God is built in a way that rules out what Christians confess at the centre, that God took flesh, and that his account of the world to come stops short of the raised and kept body Christians hope for. He is at once the ally who taught Christians to be careful and the opponent who told them their central claim was impossible. One fact about him stands out above the others: he wrote both the standard code of Jewish law and a work of philosophy that Christian theologians went on reading for centuries, and nobody else in Jewish history has done both. The saying carved over his tomb at Tiberias, a much later tribute rather than anything he said of himself, runs: from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses. His birth year is not settled. He himself noted, at the end of his Commentary on the Mishnah, that he was thirty when he finished it in Egypt, which puts his birth in 1138. An older tradition going back to his own grandson gives 1135, and that date still sits in many library catalogues. His own note is the better witness, and the dates that follow are counted from 1138.

(●) 1138 AD: Born in Cordoba to a family of judges, in the last years of a Jewish golden age in Spain. + Cordoba in the 1130s was the sort of city where a boy could grow up hearing three languages before breakfast. Under the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus, Jews and Christians lived as dhimmi, protected minorities: second-class in law, taxed for the privilege, and left alone to run their own communities and courts. It was not equality, and nobody pretended it was. But for two centuries it had been good enough that Jewish poetry, medicine, grammar and philosophy flourished in Spain as they had nowhere else since antiquity. His father, Maimon ben Joseph, was a dayyan, a judge in the rabbinical court, and traced a line of judges back several generations. That is the household Moses was raised in: a boy learning Talmud, the long rabbinic record of debate about the law, from a man who used it professionally, in a city where the medical texts were in Arabic and the science was the best in the Western world. He read Aristotle in Arabic translation, and he read the Muslim philosophers who had already spent two hundred years trying to fit Aristotle to a revealed religion. Nothing he later wrote is intelligible without that library behind it.

(●) 1148 AD: The Almohads took Cordoba, and his family spent the next twelve years with no home. + The Almohads were a Berber reform movement out of the Atlas Mountains, and they came north convinced that the Islam of Spain had gone soft. One of the arrangements they judged soft was the arrangement that had let Jews and Christians live. When Cordoba fell in 1148 the choice offered to non-Muslims was conversion, exile, or death. Maimonides was about ten. What followed was roughly a decade of moving: through southern Spain, then across to North Africa. Around 1160 the family settled in Fez, which is strange at first glance, because Fez was Almohad territory too. The likeliest explanation is the one scholars generally give, that they were living outwardly as Muslims while remaining Jews at home, which was survival and was also, to many rabbis, apostasy. That charge is the occasion of his first important piece of writing. A rabbi elsewhere had ruled that a Jew who spoke the Muslim confession of faith under threat had cut himself off from Israel, and that his prayers were worthless. Maimonides answered him in the Epistle on Forced Conversion, and the answer is worth remembering when you meet the severe systematizer of his later books. He said the ruling was cruel and wrong. A man who says the words with a knife at his throat and keeps every commandment he can keep is not an apostate; he is a Jew under duress, and the right counsel is not to despise him but to get him out to a place where he can practise openly. Then he took his own advice and left.

(●) 1165 AD: He crossed the sea to Palestine and then to Egypt, and buried his father soon after landing. + The family sailed in the spring of 1165 and reached Acre on 16 May, after a crossing so bad that Maimonides kept a private fast on its anniversary for the rest of his life and made the day one of thanksgiving for his household. They stayed about five months in the crusader kingdom, went up to Jerusalem, and prayed at Hebron. Then they sailed again, to Egypt, and settled at Fustat, the old city just south of Cairo. His father died not long after they arrived. Maimonides was in his late twenties, in a new country, with the family’s legal standing and its reputation now resting on him. He kept working. The Commentary on the Mishnah, begun in his early twenties during the years of wandering, was finished in Egypt in 1168. That book had a job to do, and the job is not obvious from the title. The Mishnah is the oldest layer of rabbinic law, compiled around AD 200, and it is famously terse: rulings stacked one on another with the reasoning left out. A student normally reached it through the Talmud, an enormous later commentary that argues with itself for pages before settling anything. Maimonides wrote a running explanation in Arabic, the spoken language of Egyptian Jews, that told a reader what each ruling meant and which opinion the law actually followed. It was the first time anyone had done that.

(●) c. 1177 AD: His brother drowned with the family money, and the scholar became a working physician. + His younger brother David was a gem merchant, and the arrangement in that household was the ordinary one in a scholarly family: David travelled and traded, and Moses studied. On a voyage in the Indian Ocean, David’s ship went down. He drowned, and the money went with him, including funds that belonged to other people. The year is not certain; the sources put it somewhere between 1169 and 1177. Years later Maimonides wrote about it to a judge in Acre named Japheth, and the letter is the least guarded thing he ever wrote. He said he lay in bed for about a year with fever and inflammation and confusion of mind, and that from the day the news came until the day he was writing, about eight years, he had not stopped grieving. Anything he touched that had been David’s handwriting, he said, undid him again. He would not live on the community’s money. He had ruled, and would rule again in the Mishneh Torah, that a scholar must not make the Torah a spade to dig with, and he applied it to himself. So he practised medicine, and he was good at it: physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, the vizier who ran Egypt for Saladin, and then to the royal household, where his patient was Saladin’s son al-Afdal. In a letter of 1199 to Samuel ibn Tibbon, the man translating the Guide into Hebrew, he described the shape of an ordinary day. He rode to Cairo in the morning to attend the court, came back to Fustat in the afternoon to find the anterooms full of patients, ate one meal in twenty-four hours, treated people until night, and was often too exhausted at the end of it to speak. Only on the Sabbath did he get to teach.

(●) 1180 AD: He finished the Mishneh Torah, and put the whole of Jewish law into fourteen books of plain Hebrew. + Ten years of night work went into it. Imagine every law of a country scattered across a thousand years of court transcripts, with the arguments preserved and the verdicts often left implicit, and then imagine one man sorting the whole of it by subject and writing down, in clean sentences, what the law is. That is the Mishneh Torah: fourteen books, about a thousand chapters, covering everything from the nature of God to the rules for a broken oven, in a clear Hebrew modelled on the Mishnah rather than in the Arabic he usually wrote. Its other name, Yad ha-Hazakah, the Strong Hand, is a small joke: the Hebrew letters of yad add up to fourteen. He also did something that made half the rabbinic world furious. He left out the sources. No "Rabbi Meir says," no chain of debate, just the ruling. His stated aim was that a person should be able to read the written Torah and then this one book and need nothing else to know what God requires. Critics answered that a code without its reasoning cannot be checked, and that he had made himself the tradition rather than a witness to it. The most formidable of them, Abraham ben David of Posquieres, wrote objections into the margins that are printed alongside the text to this day. The argument never really ended, and the book won anyway. It is still on the shelf of every serious student of Jewish law. The first of the fourteen books is the one a Christian reader will find most surprising, because it does not begin with law at all. It begins with God: his existence, his unity, his incorporeality, which is to say that he has no body of any kind, then the created intellects, the angels as the philosophers described them, minds with no matter in them, and finally what a human being can and cannot know. He put the metaphysics first on purpose. Everything else, he thought, is downstream of getting that right.

(●) 1190 AD: He finished the Guide for the Perplexed, written for one student who could not hold Aristotle and Moses in the same head. + The Guide has a reader, and he has a name. Joseph ben Judah came to Egypt from Ceuta, studied with Maimonides, and then moved away, and the book began as letters written to him. That is why it is shaped the way it is: not a treatise marching from first principles, but a long, patient, deliberately unsystematic answer to a young man who had read philosophy, believed the Torah, and could not see how both could be true at once. Maimonides says plainly at the outset who he is writing for. Not the simple believer, who is better off left alone, and not the philosopher who has already given up on revelation. The reader he wants is the one who is firm in his religion and genuinely disturbed by the literal sense of the words, the man who has read that God came down on Sinai and knows that a being who comes down has a location, and a size, and is therefore not what philosophy means by God. The first part of the book is mostly a dictionary. He takes the Hebrew words that make the trouble, image, place, descend, sit, hand, eye, face, and shows from Scripture itself that each already carries a non-physical sense somewhere in the text. The second part deals with creation and prophecy, the third with providence, evil, the reasons behind the commandments, and what a finished human life looks like. He also knew exactly what he was risking. He wrote in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic written out in Hebrew letters, the everyday language of the Jews he lived among, scattered the argument on purpose so that a careless reader would not assemble it, and said as much. Within forty years of his death the book was in Latin as the Dux neutrorum, and Christian theologians were mining it. Within forty years it was also being denounced by rabbis in Provence, and in the early 1230s copies were burned by the Dominicans, at Montpellier according to the account that has come down. He had guessed both reactions.

(●) 1204 AD: He died worn out at Fustat, and was carried to Galilee for burial. + He died on 20 Tevet 4965, the twelfth or thirteenth of December 1204, at about sixty-six. The medical practice had been killing him for years and he had said so in his letters. In the years after the Guide he wrote a short defence of himself against the charge of denying the resurrection, a letter to the rabbis of southern France explaining why astrology is not a science, and a run of medical treatises for Saladin’s son and for the vizier. The largest of the medical books, the collection of aphorisms drawn from Galen, occupied him to the end. Later Jewish accounts describe public mourning in Egypt and in Palestine, and say the Jews of Fustat and their Muslim neighbours grieved together; how much of that is memory and how much is tribute is not now recoverable. His body was taken to Tiberias in Galilee, where the tomb is still visited. His son Abraham succeeded him as head of the Egyptian Jewish community and spent much of his life defending his father’s books. He needed to. The quarrel over the Guide ran through the thirteenth century, with bans and counter-bans from Provence to Baghdad, and the burning of his books in the early 1230s was its ugliest moment. It settled the way such quarrels usually settle: the book stayed, the ban did not.

What He Taught

(T1) God has no body, and every hand and eye and throne in Scripture is a figure of speech. + Ask an ordinary congregation what God is like and you will get pictures. He looks down. He stretches out his arm. He sits enthroned. The pictures come from Scripture, and Maimonides thought that a person who takes them literally has not merely made a small mistake about God; he is not worshipping God at all, because the thing he has in mind is a very large and powerful item inside the universe, and God is not an item inside the universe. His argument is short, and it does not depend on any theology. Anything with a body is made of parts, since a body is matter arranged in a form, and those are two different things. Think of a bronze statue: there is the bronze, and there is the shape the bronze has been given, and neither one on its own is the statue. Anything with a body has size as well, and anything with size can be divided in thought into a left half and a right half. So a body is always a composite, always in principle divisible, and therefore never simply one. If God is one in the full sense meant by the Shema, the confession Israel says every day, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), then God has no body. Unity does the work, and incorporeality follows from it. What about the verses? Here his method is the one Christians will recognise from their own commentators. Scripture speaks in human language because human beings are the audience, and the same Hebrew words that describe bodies are used elsewhere in the text in ways nobody reads physically. The Torah itself makes the point at Sinai, where Israel hears a voice and is told carefully that they saw no shape: "You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice" (Deuteronomy 4:12). If the text warns you not to picture him, the pictures elsewhere in the text are not offering you a portrait. He pressed this further than most of his contemporaries were willing to go, listing belief in a corporeal God among the beliefs that put a person outside the faith of Israel. Rabbis who thought ordinary people could not be expected to think so abstractly objected, and the objection has a point. But no mainstream Jewish or Christian theology since has taught that God has a body, and within Judaism the settling of that question owes more to this argument than to any other.

(Q) "Without incorporeality there is no unity, for a corporeal thing is in the first case not simple, but composed of matter and form which are two separate things by definition, and secondly, as it has extension it is also divisible." + Source: Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I, 35 (Friedländer translation). The chapter is about who may be taught what. Most of the deep questions, Maimonides says, should be opened only to a prepared student. This one is the exception: that God has no body must be taught to everybody, children included, on the same footing as the fact that he is one.

(T2) What we can truly say about God is what he is not. + Maimonides asks you to picture a man who has heard the word ship and has no idea what one is. Tell him a ship is not a mineral, not a plant, not an animal, not flat like a board, not a sphere, not solid, and so on for ten denials in all, and at the end he has arrived at something long and hollow and put together out of many pieces of wood. He is very close to a ship, and nobody has told him one thing a ship is. That is his own example, and it is how he thinks all our true knowledge of God works. The reasoning behind it runs like this. When we say a man is wise, we are describing something he has: a quality added to him, which he might have lacked. He was not born wise, and he could have gone his whole life without ever becoming so. Say it of God and you have quietly divided him into a subject and a property, which is exactly what the argument for his unity forbids (T1). So the positive statements have to be re-read. "God lives" means God is not like a stone. "God is powerful" means God is not weak, not blocked, not incapable. "God knows" means God is not ignorant. Each denial rules something out and leaves the reader with less error than before, and Maimonides holds that this is genuine progress: every proof that establishes what God is not brings you nearer, while every fresh positive description takes you further away by handing your imagination something to work with. This position has a name in later theology: the via negativa, the way of negation, the practice of approaching God by ruling out what he cannot be. It is not a modern invention and it is not distinctively Jewish. Christian writers had been saying something in the neighbourhood since Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, and Maimonides was reading Muslim philosophers who had said it before him. What he did was push it to its limit and refuse the usual softenings. He knows what it costs. If nothing positive can be said, then prayer is in trouble, since prayer is mostly praise, and praise is mostly positive statements. His answer is that we are permitted the words the Torah and the prophets themselves used and no more, and that even those are a concession to human weakness. He quotes with approval a story from the Talmud about a man who prayed, piling up adjectives for God, and was stopped by Rabbi Hanina and asked whether he had finished praising his Master. Imagine praising a king who owns millions of gold coins by admiring his silver, the rabbi said. Every compliment is a diminishment. The verse Maimonides thinks says it best is Psalm 65:1, which he takes, against the way the English Bibles render it, as "Silence is praise to Thee." Christian readers should feel both the pull and the problem. The pull is that Scripture says much the same about the gap: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord" (Isaiah 55:8), and "Can you find out the deep things of God?" (Job 11:7). The problem is what happens if the rule is absolute. Christians want to say that God is love, and to mean it, not merely to mean that God is not indifferent (1 John 4:8). That disagreement is where Aquinas will part company with him.

(Q) "It will now be clear to you, that every time you establish by proof the negation of a thing in reference to God, you become more perfect, while with every additional positive assertion you follow your imagination and recede from the true knowledge of God." + Source: Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I, 59 (Friedländer translation). The chapter answers an obvious objection to the whole method: if nobody can know what God is, how can Moses have known God better than a beginner does? Maimonides replies that knowledge of God is measured by how much a person has ruled out on good grounds, so there really is progress, and it runs in the direction of saying less. He adds, in the same chapter, that all generations have agreed "that our knowledge consists in knowing that we are unable truly to comprehend Him."

(T3) The world was made and did not always exist, and Aristotle never proved otherwise. + This is the hinge of the whole Guide, and Maimonides says so: everything depends on this question, note it. Here is the difficulty he faced. Aristotle held that the universe had no beginning. It has always been here, running as it runs, by necessity. Maimonides had spent hundreds of pages showing that Scripture’s physical language about God can be read figuratively, so an obvious challenge presents itself. If "the hand of the Lord" need not be literal, why must "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) be literal? Why not re-read Genesis as poetry too, and keep Aristotle? His answer is one of the most honest things in medieval philosophy, and it turns on a distinction between a proof and an argument. He re-read the physical language about God, he says, because the incorporeality of God is demonstrated: there is an argument for it that anyone who follows it has to accept, and when a demonstration collides with a literal reading, the literal reading yields. The eternity of the world is in a different case. Aristotle offered considerations, and good ones, but nothing that closes the question, and Maimonides does not think Aristotle himself claimed more. Where the evidence is genuinely balanced, a text is not overturned by the losing side of an open argument. So he takes Genesis as it stands. Then he adds the reason it matters, which is not really about physics. On Aristotle’s picture everything happens by fixed necessity, and if that is right there are no miracles, no revelation, and no point in asking why God commanded this rather than that, because there was no choosing. Grant creation and all of it becomes possible at once. A God who freely made the world at a time of his choosing is a God who can act in it. Maimonides notes, in fairness, that Plato’s version of an everlasting world would not have cost him this, since Plato’s universe is shaped by a craftsman and could have been otherwise. It is necessity, not eternity by itself, that he cannot live with. A Christian reader who knows the medieval debates will recognise this exact position, because Thomas Aquinas took it. Reason alone does not settle whether the world had a beginning; that it did is held on the authority of Scripture. Aquinas does not name Rabbi Moses at the place where he says so, but he had read him closely and cites him by name elsewhere, and the ruling has the same shape.

(Q) "But the Eternity of the Universe has not been proved; a mere argument in favour of a certain theory is not sufficient reason for rejecting the literal meaning of a Biblical text, and explaining it figuratively, when the opposite theory can be supported by an equally good argument." + Source: Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed II, 25 (Friedländer translation). He has just conceded something his opponents would not have expected: that if he wanted to read Genesis figuratively he could, and perhaps with less strain than it took him to explain away the anthropomorphisms, the passages that give God a hand, an eye, a throne to sit on. The chapter closes: "I have thus shown that all depends on this question. Note it."

(T4) The faith of Israel can be set down in thirteen principles, and God’s oneness is a oneness like no other. + Judaism had gone a thousand years without a creed. It had law in abundance, and argument about law, but no numbered list of things a Jew must believe. Maimonides wrote one, tucked into his commentary on a chapter of the Mishnah about who has a share in the world to come, and it stuck. The thirteen run roughly like this. God exists and everything else depends on him. He is one. He has no body. He is before everything. He alone is to be worshipped. Prophecy is real. Moses stands above all other prophets. The Torah came from heaven. It will not be replaced. God knows what people do. He rewards and punishes. The Messiah will come. The dead will be raised. Two of them do work that a Christian reader should notice. The second, on unity, is not the bland claim that there is one God rather than several. It is a claim about the kind of oneness: not one of a class, the way one horse is one of many possible horses, and not one thing made of parts that could be counted separately. God’s oneness has no analogy at all. Written in the twelfth century by a Jew living between Christians and Muslims, that principle is aimed, and everyone at the time knew where. The ninth, that the Torah will never be superseded, is aimed the same way at both of Judaism’s daughter religions. He was hard on those who would not have it. A man who holds all thirteen is inside the community of Israel and to be loved even if he sins badly, he wrote; a man who rejects one of them has put himself outside. That is a severe rule, and it drew fire from other rabbis in his own century, some of whom thought a list of required beliefs was itself a foreign import. The list won anyway. Recast as the hymn Yigdal and the confession Ani Ma’amin, "I believe with perfect faith," the thirteen principles are sung in synagogues every week, which is a strange afterlife for a passage of technical commentary.

(Q) "The Unity of God. This implies that this cause of all is one; not one of a genus nor of a species, and not as one human being who is a compound divisible into many unities; not a unity like the ordinary material body which is one in number but takes on endless divisions and parts. But he, the exalted one, is a unity in the sense that there is no unity like his in any way." + Source: Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10, the second Principle of Faith (Abelson translation, 1906). The principle is anchored, in his own text, to the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Christians agree with every word of the sentence and then say something Maimonides held to be ruled out by it, that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The disagreement is not about arithmetic, and both sides have always known it (T4).

(T5) Knowing God is not the end of the road; the one who knows him goes and acts like him. + A man who has read the Guide to the end has spent three books learning how little can be said about God. It would be easy to assume the destination is a kind of educated silence, a scholar alone in a room having successfully thought his way past every wrong picture. Maimonides closes the book by saying it is not. His last chapter takes up a verse from Jeremiah that lists the things people boast in, wisdom, strength and riches, and dismisses all three in favour of knowing God. He points out that the prophet does not stop there. The verse names what God does: "that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth" (Jeremiah 9:24). So the knowledge worth having is knowledge of God’s ways, and knowledge of God’s ways is not information. It is a pattern to copy. The person who has really understood what God is like will be found doing kindness and judgment and righteousness, and doing them here, on the ground, in the earth, which is Maimonides’ other point about that verse: God’s care does not stop at the moon. The same instinct shows up in his law, most famously in a passage that has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. Charity, he ruled, has eight levels. Giving grudgingly when asked is the lowest that still counts. Giving without knowing who receives, and receiving without knowing who gave, ranks near the top. Highest of all is the gift that ends the need for gifts: a loan, a partnership, a job, anything that puts a person back on his own feet and out of the queue. Half the modern conversation about aid is a footnote to that ruling. That last chapter also answers a common misreading of him. He is often filed as the man who turned a religion of commandments into a religion of correct opinions, and his own last word runs the other way. The opinions matter because they are true, and because a person who thinks God has a body is worshipping something else; but the point of arriving at the truth about God is to become like him, and you cannot tell whether a man has arrived by examining his metaphysics. You look at what he does in the earth.

(Q) "Having acquired this knowledge he will then be determined always to seek loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, and thus to imitate the ways of God." + Source: Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed III, 54 (Friedländer translation). The last substantive paragraph of the book. The three words are the three in Jeremiah 9:24, and Maimonides has just argued that the prophet added them deliberately, so that nobody would mistake the knowledge of God for a private achievement.

(Q) "In this work, however, I address those who have studied philosophy and have acquired sound knowledge, and who while firm in religious matters are perplexed and bewildered on account of the ambiguous and figurative expressions employed in the holy writings." + Source: Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Introduction (Friedländer translation). He is explaining why this book exists and why it is not the Mishneh Torah, where he had set out the principles of faith briefly and moved on. The reader he wants is a believer in difficulty, not a doubter looking for permission to leave. Within two generations that description fitted a great many Christians, who had just met Aristotle in Latin and were facing the same collision. They picked up a Jewish book about it because it was the best one available.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Latin West met him as Rabbi Moses, and read him as an authority rather than an opponent. + Something unusual happened to the Guide. Within roughly forty years of Maimonides’ death it had been translated into Latin, by way of a Hebrew version, under the title Dux neutrorum, the guide of the undecided. Christian masters in Paris began citing it, and they cited it the way they cited Augustine or Avicenna: as a source you consult when you want to know the answer, not as an enemy position to be refuted. The reason is not sentiment. It is that the thirteenth-century Latin faculties had just inherited the whole of Aristotle in translation and were in exactly the crisis Maimonides had written for. Here was a body of philosophy that looked true and appeared, at several points, to contradict revelation: an eternal world, a God who does not know particulars (the individual people and things and events that make up a life, as against timeless general truths), no personal survival after death. Christians opening that problem in 1240 found that a rabbi in Cairo had opened it in 1190 and had worked out a discipline for handling it. Albert the Great used him. Thomas Aquinas used him constantly. Meister Eckhart quoted him page after page in his commentary on Exodus. Duns Scotus argued with him by name. The borrowings are specific enough to see. When Aquinas explains why the Old Law commanded the sacrifices it did, he names Rabbi Moses and takes the reasons from him: why the birds to be offered were old turtledoves and young doves, since turtledoves improve with age and doves do not and nothing but the best is offered to God, and why the manner of slaughter was fixed as the one least painful to the animal (Summa Theologiae I-II, question 102, article 3). A Christian account of the ceremonial law, running on a Jewish commentary, is an odd and rather good thing to find in the middle of the thirteenth century.

(†) Aquinas took his caution about naming God, and then refused his silence. + The most important exchange between them is one Maimonides never knew about, since Aquinas was born some twenty years after he died. Aquinas accepted a great deal. He agreed that God is not one item among others, that our words are stretched past their ordinary use when we apply them to him, and that the argument about the world’s beginning does not end in a demonstration. That last agreement matters more than it looks. Aquinas held, against many of his own colleagues, that reason cannot prove the world had a first moment and that Christians hold it by faith on the authority of Genesis. It is the same shape as the ruling in the Guide, reached by a man who had read the Guide. Then he set out the theory of divine names and stopped. He states Maimonides’ position accurately, that saying God lives means only that God is not like an inanimate thing, names it, and rejects it (Summa Theologiae I, question 13, article 2). His objection is worth having in plain form. If every statement about God is only a denial, then nothing explains why we say God is good rather than saying God is a body, since both would be equally far from his essence and equally uninformative. And when a believer says God is good, that is simply not what he means. He does not mean God is not bad. He means something positive, and if he means nothing positive he is not praying. Aquinas’ alternative is analogy: our words apply to God really but not in the same sense they bear of us, as "healthy" is said truly of a person and truly of a diet, in related but different senses. That doctrine has been standard in Western theology ever since, and it was worked out with Rabbi Moses in view. The Christian doctrine of how we can speak of God is, in part, the record of a long argument with a rabbi from Cordoba, and both sides came out of it better. The Christian stake in the argument is not abstract. Scripture does not keep the reverent distance the via negativa recommends. It says God is love (1 John 4:8), and it says something far more startling: "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9). A theology that can only deny cannot say those sentences and mean them.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who took a body, a body that is raised, and words about God that can be meant. + He knew the Christian claims and rejected them, and it would be dishonest to soften that. Each of the disagreements here is drawn from what he himself wrote. - God cannot become a man. Everything in his doctrine of incorporeality is built to rule out a God who has a location, a size, a face (T1). The Christian confession is not that God is like a man but that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and that in Christ the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). Christians answer that the eternal Son did not stop being incorporeal by taking a human nature, and that this is precisely why the Incarnation is a mystery rather than a contradiction. Maimonides would not have accepted the answer, and the argument between synagogue and church has largely been about it ever since. - Oneness that excludes the Trinity. His second principle says God’s unity admits no parts and no likeness of any kind (T4). Christians affirm the Shema with him, and hold that the one God is Father, Son and Spirit, three who are not three gods and not three parts. He judged that impossible, and in the Mishneh Torah he classed Christians with idolaters on account of it, while ruling that Muslims are not idolaters. He was writing law, and he meant it. - Jesus. In the laws of kings he wrote that Jesus of Nazareth thought himself the Messiah and was condemned by the court, and that the outcome was a stumbling block to Israel. In the same passage he granted Christianity and Islam a use in God’s providence, saying that both had carried the words of Torah and the expectation of a Messiah to the ends of the earth and so were preparing the world. Christian censors cut the passage out of printed editions for centuries, which tells you they read it as an attack, correctly. - The body at the end. Under pressure he affirmed the resurrection of the dead, the thirteenth of his principles, and wrote a whole treatise in 1191 defending himself against the charge that he did not believe it. But his considered view is that the resurrection is not the final state. Bodies rise and die again, and the world to come is the life of the intellect without a body. Christian hope stops somewhere else: the body is raised transformed and kept. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44), and the risen Christ is the first instance of it rather than an exception to it (1 Corinthians 15:20). - Saying nothing, well. Pressed to its limit, his rule about divine language leaves a believer unable to affirm anything of God at all, and Aquinas said so. Scripture does not hold the line he draws. Israel is told what God is like, in words, on purpose, and told to repeat them to children. None of this makes him an adversary to be scored off. He is the most serious Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, he taught Christians a discipline about God that they badly needed, and the objections he pressed are the ones a thoughtful Jew still presses. Paul’s way of holding both facts at once is still the right one: to Israel belong the covenants and the giving of the law, and from that same race, according to the flesh, comes the Christ (Romans 9:4–5).