The Maimonidean Controversies and the Limits of Rationalism

Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon, 1138–1204) died in Fustat, Egypt, having produced in the Mishneh Torah (completed c. 1180) and the Guide of the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Ha'irin, written in Judeo-Arabic and completed around 1190) the most systematic attempt in medieval Jewish thought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy, as mediated by Islamic falasifa such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, with biblical and rabbinic revelation. The Guide argued that biblical anthropomorphisms must be read as figurative accommodations to the untrained multitude, that the account of creation could be harmonized with Aristotelian cosmology up to a point, and that prophecy was best understood as a natural overflow (fayd) of the divine intellect onto a prepared human mind rather than as a supernatural interruption of the natural order. This esoteric, philosophically demanding hermeneutic, aimed explicitly at an intellectual elite capable of handling the tension between Torah and philosophy without losing faith, proved combustible once popularized among readers lacking Maimonides's own careful qualifications.