Medieval Europe · c. 900 – 15th c.
Medieval Jewish philosophy
The Torah, rightly read, agrees with demonstrated reason; much of its language about God is figurative, because God is beyond all human description.
How should a believer read scripture in light of philosophy?
Jewish communities living in the Islamic world wrote in Arabic and shared its intellectual life. Challenged by Muslim theologians, Karaites, sceptics and Aristotelian science, rabbis set out to show that Jewish belief was rational.
God is one and incorporeal, so biblical phrases about God’s hand or anger cannot be literal. The safest way to speak of God is negatively, saying what God is not; where reason cannot decide, as on whether the world is eternal, scripture may.
- Reason and revelation, properly understood, agree.
- We can say only what God is not.
- Scripture’s bodily language about God is figurative.
Maimonides became a standard authority in Jewish law and thought, and Latin scholastics, including Aquinas, read him closely.
Thinkers
882–942Saadia GaonEgyptian-born head of the Sura academy in Babylonia1138–1204Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon)Rabbi, physician and philosopher from Córdoba, later in CairoKey texts
Where it came from
Borrowed fromKalām (Muʿtazila & Ashʿarism)Saadia built his proofs of creation and divine unity with the methods of Muʿtazili kalām.Borrowed from
Falsafa (Arabic Aristotelianism)Maimonides worked within the Aristotelianism of al-Fārābī and Avicenna, and urged his translator to read al-Fārābī above all.
What it led to
Borrowed byScholasticismAquinas cites “Rabbi Moses” (Maimonides) on negative theology and on why the world’s eternity cannot be disproved.