Aquinas and Maimonides on the Possibility of Knowledge of God: An Examination of the Quaestio de attributis. (review)

In this work, Mercedes Rubio argues that St. Thomas Aquinas’s In I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3 is his final reading of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed on the topic of the knowledge of God. According to Rubio, this text reveals the influence of the Guide on Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine attributes, his understanding of the role of faith and his Five Ways.

Rubio’s central thesis is most likely to be met with skepticism, since many scholars who work on both Aquinas and Maimonides readily acknowledge Maimonides’ influence on the development of a number of Aquinas’s ideas, including the Five Ways. With respect to her central thesis, then, Rubio painstakingly reconstructs the history of the Quaestio, arguing that it was written around 1266, roughly fourteen years after the original Commentary was composed, and then inserted back in the Commentary on the Sentences. Rubio argues further that Aquinas wrote the Quaestio in order to respond to allegations against the writings of Peter of Tarantasia (later Pope Innocent V) to the effect that Tarantasia was teaching that a “real multiplicity” existed in God’s essence. Aquinas knew that his Commentary had been a primary source for Tarantasia’s writings and so he penned the Quaestio to clarify his own views and placed it in the Commentary after article 2.

The primary strengths of the volume are Rubio’s defense of her central thesis and the fact that she includes the Latin text of this work in Appendix II, although some readers will share my disappointment that her translation is included in the footnotes rather than on facing pages. Rubio also includes a critical edition of several passages of Maimonides’ Dux Neutrorum in Appendix III and offers a review of some of the literature on the manuscript tradition of this work.

A weakness of the volume is Rubio’s puzzling claims about Aquinas’s view of the divine perfections (36). As she glosses it, Aquinas believes that the differences between perfections occur both on the part of the intellect and “also on the part of the divine nature” (37). Her interpretation thus gives rise to the (erroneous) impression that Aquinas held that the divine perfections differ from one another in God and thus that there is diversity on the part of the divine nature. More puzzling still, Rubio’s gloss appears to be at odds with both her translation and the Latin original, which mention “the thing’s own nature” where “thing” could be plausibly understood as referring to the perfection itself and not to the divine nature (36). Rubio doesn’t offer an explanation or an argument as to why she identifies the thing in question as being the divine nature, and she repeats this assertion in other passages (30, 55). But this is clearly mistaken and at odds with other passages such as Responsio de 108 articulis, in which Aquinas states explicitly that there is no multiplicity on the part of the divine nature but rather there is multiplicity in the ratione of the perfections (40). Also, Rubio both affirms (30, 49, 53, 80) and denies (81) that the ratio of a perfection is in God.

With the exception of the Quaestio, Rubio’s presentation of the texts of both Maimonides and Aquinas on the divine essence and on how to name God is largely uncontroversial, though readers familiar with those texts and the voluminous secondary sources surrounding them will find little new here. Her conclusion that Aquinas’s interpretation of Maimonides remains consistent across all of his works indicates that there will be few, if any, surprises in her volume and this is confirmed (85). However, Aquinas’ discussion of divine causality and the ratio of perfections in the Quaestio is somewhat more detailed than in his other texts, and so scholars will likely find these topics of...