The Matter and Form of Maimonides’s Guide by Josef Stern (review)

In a 1979 article Shlomo Pines proposed that Maimonides secretly rejects the possibility of metaphysical knowledge and considers the true perfection of humans to lie in the ethical, rather than the intellectual, sphere. For the past thirty years Josef Stern has been developing a portrait of Maimonides, which, though partially inspired by Pines’s reading, places Maimonides’s statements on the limitations on human knowledge within a skeptical tradition running from the ancients to Hume. The result is the present work, a highly original and creative interpretation of the Guide of the Perplexed.

The chief source of what Stern sees as Maimonides’s skepticism is human corporeality, since matter is a “strong veil” that prevents the scientific apprehension of celestial and immaterial entities. Unlike Pines, Stern claims that the life of the mind remains the ideal for Maimonides, not as a set of Aristotelian “dogmatic” assumptions, but as a “regulative idea” that is unachievable in actuality, since humans can have no real metaphysical knowledge, or even possess truths about God (because of their inability to achieve a concept of God).

Stern concedes that beliefs concerning the existence of God, His unity, and incorporeality are demonstratively certain for Maimonides. So how does Maimonides manage simultaneously to be “skeptical” about God’s existence and to hold that God can be believed to exist with certainty through genuine demonstration? Stern answers that Maimonides’s “skepticism” on this point consists of denying that we have causal/explanatory demonstrations for God’s existence. So even though Maimonides considers his proof for God’s existence “indubitable, certain, indisputable, and necessary” it does not provide humans with the kind of knowledge that Maimonides, according to Stern, requires for human perfection. Instead, “Maimonides wants to encourage the moderate, intellectual activity that, through discipline, will indeed expand the possibilities accessible to one’s power of demonstration, thereby transforming the inquirer and enabling him to transcend his intellectual horizons” (190).

What makes Stern’s work an exegetical tour de force is his many interpretations of Maimonides’s philosophical readings of scripture and the sages in accordance with his skeptical reading. Stern claims that Maimonides has a worked-out theory of parabolic speech in which every text that constitutes a parable has a three-fold semantic structure: the first is the vulgar external meaning, which is of no consequence for either communal welfare or the perfection of the individual; the second is the external parabolic meaning, which contains useful (and not generally true) beliefs for communal welfare; and the third is the internal parabolic meaning, which contains wisdom relevant to individual perfection. The external/internal parabolic distinction should not be confused with the exoteric/esoteric distinction made so much of by Leo Strauss and his followers, although it seems to this reviewer that both distinctions allow Strauss and Stern to claim, respectively, that what Maimonides teaches externally differs occasionally from what he intends to communicate to the careful reader.

According to Stern, Maimonides departs from the Arabic Aristotelian philosophers even when he appears to be putting forth a dogmatic position, and these departures are best explained in the light of a general and consistent skeptical position toward the knowledge of metaphysics by embodied humans. It seems to this reviewer, however, that the main doctrines in the Guide where Maimonides explicitly departs from the philosophers—prophecy, providence, creation, and God’s knowledge of particulars—share in common an expressed, theological motivation that relates either to God’s will or to His knowledge and guidance of particular humans. Maimonides’s criticism of Aristotelian celestial science forms part of his theological attack against the “disgraceful” theological conception that the world proceeds from God necessarily, rather through an act of will (Guide 2:25). According to Stern, Maimonides’s depiction of God as a “necessary existent” or a “particularizer” who wills the world into existence simply “baptizes our lack of understanding and knowledge of their reference, the ultimate cause.” Stern’s skeptical reading of...