. Moses Maimonides, who was born in Cordova, Spain, in 1135, and died in Cairo, Egypt, in 1204, was the greatest medieval Jewish theologian and one of the most important medieval Aristotelians. The later Latin scholastics called him Rabbi Moyses instead of the quidam (“a certain person”) that they generally used for contemporaries, thus showing the esteem in which they held his opinions.
With the exception of the Hebrew Mishneh Torah, his codification of Jewish law (introduced by a Sefer ha-madda, or “Book of Knowledge,” which treats important physical and metaphysical topics), Maimonides’s works were written in Arabic. He is most famous for the Dalalat al-Ha’irin (“Guide to the Perplexed”), known to scholastics as Dux neutrorum. Here, Maimonides discusses at length the problem of the relationship of the God of Aristotle and the philosophers to the God of the Old Testament and the relationship of reason to faith. He maintains not only that God’s revelation in the Bible and the Averroistic interpretation of Aristotelian thought are compatible but that the Bible already contains in it the germs of natural reason, from which the Greek philosophic tradition develops. The second important point that Maimonides raises is that of “negative theology”; he explains that when God is named or described, these words have only a causal significance, saying nothing about God but only about that which he causes to exist. Both points can be readily found in many Latin scholastics in French schools and universities of the later Middle Ages.
William of Auvergne (ca. 1180–1249), who worked along the lines of the Platonizing thought of Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm of Bec, was most interested in the ideas of the newly accessible Muslim and Jewish Aristotelian tradition. His work helped prepare the way for the synthesis of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. He must be credited with introducing Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Maimonides to thinkers in medieval France, although he does not mention Maimonides by name, presumably because he knew him to be Jewish. Vincent de Beauvais (ca.1190-ca.1264) uses the Dux neutrorum a number of times in his Speculum naturale, particularly for the cosmology of the first chapter of Genesis. Maimonides was read by Alexander of Hales (ca. 1185–1245), who quotes him not by name but as quidam expositor, licet non sanctus.
After 1230, Maimonides is quoted increasingly by name, apparently first by Roland of Cremona, who was trained at Toulouse ca. 1230–34. Aspects of Maimonides’s thought were condemned in Giles of Rome’s Errores philosophorum, but this did not keep Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas from using his ideas for the development of their philosophical systems. Albert in particular is intent on only using him as a philosophus, and he is evidently straining his intentions when he calls Maimonides’s system prophetia naturalis. It is in the context of the “natural” proofs for God’s existence that Thomas Aquinas seems to have been thinking of Maimonides in the formulation of his “third way.” Systematic and extensive use was made of Maimonides’s Dux neutrorum, and especially of the aspects of his “negative theology,” by the German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-ca. 1328), who was often in Paris. At the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, Maimonides was still being used by such scholars as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Michael Servet, and Jean Bodin.
Bacher, Wilhelm, Marcus Brann, David Simonsen, and Jacob Guttman, eds. Moses ben Maimon: Sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss. 2 vols. Leipzig: Fock, 1908–14.
Haberman, Jacob. Maimonides and Aquinas: A Contemporary Appraisal New York: KTAV, 1979.
Kraemer, Joel L., ed. Perspectives on Maimonides: Philosophical and Historical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Pines, Shlomo, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. Maimonides and Philosophy: Papers Presented at the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, May 1985. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986.
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