Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/324

The above account of Maimonides's doctrine of attributes shows us that he followed the same line of thought as his predecessors. His treatment is more thorough and elaborate, and his requirements of the religionist more stringent. He does not even allow attributes of rela- tion, which were admitted by Ibn Daud. Negative attributes and those taken from God's effects are the only expressions that may be applied to God. This is decidedly not a Jewish mode of conceiving of God, but it is not even Aristotelian. Aristotle has very little to say about God's attributes, it is true, but there seems no warrant in the little he does say for such an absolutely transcendental and agnostic conception as we find in Maimonides. To Aristotle God is pure form, thought thinking itself. In so far as he is thought we may suppose him to be similar in kind, though not in degree, to human thought. The only source of Maimonides's ideas is to be sought in Neo-Platonism, in the so-called Theology of Aristotle which, however, Maimonides never quotes. He need not have used it himself. He was a descendant of a long line of thinkers, Christian, Mohammedan and Jewish, in which this problem was looked at from a Neo-Platonic point of view; and the Theology of Aristotle had its share in forming the views of his predecessors. The idea of making God transcendent appealed to Maimonides, and he carried it to the limit. How he could combine such transcendence with Jewish prayer and ceremony it is hard to tell; but it would be a mistake to suppose that his philosophical deduc- tions represented his last word on the subject. As in Philo so in Mai- monides, his negative theology was only a means to a positive. Its purpose was to emphasize God's perfection. And in the admission, nay maintenance, of man's inability to understand God lies the solu- tion of the problem we raised above. Prayer is answered, man is pro- tected by divine Providence; and if we cannot understand how, it is because the matter is beyond our limited intellect.

Having discussed the existence and nature of God, our next prob- lem is the existence of angels and their relation to the "Separate Intelligences" of the philosophers. In this matter, too, Ibn Daud anticipated Maimonides, though the latter is more elaborate in his exposition as well as criticism of the extreme philosophic view. He adopts as much of Aristotelian (or what he thought was Aristotelian) doctrine as is compatible in his mind with the Bible and subject to