178 CHAPTER SIX
fabric of human society in general and of his own audience in par ticular.
Maimonides is a sharp observer of human nature, an open- eyed and re-
alistic idealist. Like his namesake Moses, he may feel the urge to use his
staff: to force the sea to give way, to make the rock let out the water of
life. Moses’ model, however, is also a cautioning reminder of the punish-
ment for succumbing to impatience: being banned from entering the
Promised Land. Maimonides therefore practices restraint in the use of his
power, including the power of words. His supple writing meanders be-
tween saying and hinting, always aiming at the highest level his reader
can reach, and then some, and always aware of his readers’ potential as
well as of their limits. A truly contextual reading of Maimonides must
therefore be the reading of the historian, which takes into account the
writer, the audience, and the way the moment works on both.
As I have argued above, I believe that Maimonides was familiar with
Averroes’s works. He mentions explicitly Averroes’s commentaries, but
his own work suggests that he also read Averroes’s theological works. In
hisDecisive Treatise, Averroes argues that the Quran speaks in different
ways to the three levels of society: the multitudes, the theologians, and
the phi losophers, and that the spiritual leader or phi losopher should try
to follow this model. In his Kashf al- adilla, Averroes tries to some extent
to show how this triple approach might work. Maimonides did not write
any strictly philosophical book. The genre of writing on philosophy as
commentaries was perfected in his time by Averroes, and Maimonides
might have felt that the extensive works of the commentator Averroes
made any addition superfl uous. In the same way, we fi nd him saying in
the “Premise” (muqaddima) he introduces into Guide 2.2 that he has no
intention of writing a scientifi c work, since there are enough such works,
to which he has nothing original to add. His own original contribution
was the attempt to show how Jewish sources work with philosophy, how
one can be Jewish and yet at peace with one’s rationality. Mutatis mutan-
dis, one can say that Maimonides’ major contribution was to write an
extensive and full- blown Jewish version of the Kashf.
Like Averroes, Maimonides attempts to show the multiple voices of
the religious tradition. This is not a “double truth,” or the cunning
speech of a politician speaking from the two sides of his mouth. The
Straussian dichotomy of esoteric versus exoteric writing does not do jus-
tice to Maimonides’ context- sensitive rhetoric, which covers a broad
scale of tones.
With this understanding, we can go back to Strauss’s above- mentioned
observation, that the Treatise on Resurrection is “the most authentic
commentary on the Guide.” There are indeed several parallels between
Maimonides’ most philosophic work, the Guide of the Perplexed, and
theTreatise on Resurrection, which is presented as the least philo-