rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 333
There are three opinions of human beings, namely, of all those who believe
that there is an existent deity, with regard to the eternity of the world or
its production in time. The first opinion, which is the opinion of all who
believe in the Law of Moses our Master, peace be on him, is that the world
as a whole – I mean to say, every existent other than God, may He be
exalted – was brought into existence by God after having been purely and
absolutely non- existent, and that God, may He be exalted, had existed
alone, and nothing else – neither an angel nor a sphere nor what subsists
within the sphere. Afterwards, through His will and His volition, He
brought into existence out of nothing all the beings as they are, time itself
being one of the created things. For time is consequent upon motion, and
motion is an accident in what is moved.
Maimonides’ Guide was to have immense impact on his Jewish con-
temporaries, but less for his technical discussion of specific issues (such
as his proofs for the existence, incorporeality and unity of God, and his
interpretation of the nature of providence which claims that free will is
not affected by God’s omniscience and foreknowledge) than for his gen-
eral justification for using philosophy as a guide to religion and a way
to understanding the apparently irrational parts of the Bible. The Guide
tackled how to speak about God in human language. It squared the
anthropomorphism in the Bible with a philosophical understanding of
the nature of the divine, and demonstrated that the commandments of
the Torah have a rational purpose, to develop the moral and intellectual
potential of men. Maimonides’ role in bringing Aristotle to Jews was to
be paralleled in the next century among Christians by Aquinas.^28
Philosophy underlay all of Maimonides’ contributions to the history
of Judaism, despite their great variety. Before the age of twenty- three he
had written a treatise on logic. His codification of halakhah in the Mish‑
neh Torah, discussed above, insisted that ‘a man should never cast his
reason behind him, for the eyes are set in front, not in back’. His insist-
ence on clarity of ideas as the base of Judaism was encapsulated in his
Commentary on the Mishnah, which he had completed by the age of
thirty, soon after his arrival in Egypt. It was within this Commentary, in
a discussion of a brief portion of the Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin which
categorized sinners who will not inherit a portion of the world to come,
that Maimonides first laid out thirteen fundamental principles of the
Torah, which he enumerated as follows:
- The existence of the Creator: There is a being who exists in the most
perfect mode of existence, and he is the cause of the existence of all other