Maimonides and the Limits of God-Talk

Moses Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by the acronym Rambam, 1138-1204), born in Córdoba but forced by Almohad religious persecution to flee with his family, eventually settling in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, where he served as physician to the Ayyubid court and as the foremost rabbinic authority of his generation, composed his central philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Ha'irin, written in Judeo-Arabic around 1190), for students troubled by apparent conflicts between philosophy and the Hebrew Bible. Maimonides argues, in a rigorous apophatic or negative theology indebted to both Islamic kalam and Aristotelian-Neoplatonic philosophy, particularly al-Farabi and Avicenna, that God's absolute unity and simplicity rule out any positive attribute being predicated of God in the same sense such attributes apply to creatures: to say 'God is wise' as one would of a human being would introduce composition into the divine essence, which is strictly one and simple. Instead, Maimonides holds that all true statements about God's essence must ultimately be understood negatively, while statements that sound positive, such as descriptions of divine mercy or anger, should be understood as 'attributes of action,' describing effects God produces in the world rather than anything in the divine nature itself.