Course XXV - Teaching 6: Aristotelianism of Maimonides

Maimonides, Rabi Moses ben Maimon, was born in Cordoba, Spain, on March 30, 1135.
His first master was a disciple of the great philosopher Ibn Badra, and his companion of studies were the Great Vizier Abu Bevier and the son of the famous astronomer of Seville Abu Maimad Drabar.
Maimonides introduces the Aristotelianism among Jewish sages and this way it is possible to adapt the Greek culture to the religious world. Doubtless he opens the way for Christians to achieve along with Saint Thomas Aquinas the great work of Aristotelian knowledge adapted to the Christian dogma.
In 1148 he had to escape from his home city, taken by the Almohads and from there his long pilgrimages began.
As early as at the age of 23, he wrote a commentary about the Mischna. He lived in Jez, North Africa, and urged Jews to abandon the religion of their ancestors.
His activity in the field of medicine was so well known that Richard Coeur de Lion invited him to England.
He died on December 13, 1204 at the age of 70.
Truly, if we judge Maimonides’ work and leave only aside certain studies on the healing art, all the rest is esoteric. Perchance is there not somewhat occult in the study of the soul, its virtues and vices, its powers and weaknesses, and its eventual diseases and remedies?
Is not esoteric the study of the Providence and its form of being manifest on beings and things?
And what can be said about the detailed and limpid reasoning about the existence of God?
But Don Moses ben Maimon reveals in his work two aspects: exoteric and esoteric.
The former is especially seen in the Mischne Torah, a compendium of the oral law, conveyed from one from generation to another until his days, and a juridical classification of the contents scattered in the two Talmuds and in writings of studious successors of rabbis, until his time.
The other aspect is in the depth of the vigorous thought posed by Maimonides in his “Guide of the Astray”, a true arcane of his system, made with Hellenic and Arabian philosophy and Bible prophecy. It was the twelfth century. Long time had already passed since the expulsion of the Jewish people from Palestine and their dispersion throughout the world.
A great community had settled in Spain and another in North Africa and Asia Minor. Some of them had entered France and extended toward North Europe.
Jewish communities of Spain were linked with Judea and Babylon where large religious and spiritual centers would work; but persecutions victimized and forced them to migrate continuously, and led them to disperse and to move away from the focus that kept them united by their monotheistic religion, by their faith in the coming of the Messiah and by injunctions of the Torah.
Then it was necessary for a great spirit to concentrate around him the anguished glance of the people; and this spirit should not only have a privileged intelligence but also an intense faith in Jehovah and his highest prophet, since his mission also would be to unite the Hebrew family around the postulates of their religion and renew entirely the Judaism by infusing new and more rational convictions that would enable it to fight. So, he should grant to the Jewish religion a scientific-philosophic content that until then it did not possess in a global and organic form, but that was scattered in Talmudic lucubration and polemics of Tanaim and Rabbis. In short: a capable spirit to comprise this work must be an Initiate, such as Maimonides was.
But his work is not only Jewish. It belongs to the whole Humanity. So, one can explain his influence on Jewish philosophy of the thirteen century and following, his tracks in Christian scholastics and also in some of the highest manifestations of modern philosophy. The esoteric face is perhaps found in that part of his work that, out of the limited frame of religion, has comprised far greater proportions and only could be understood by his disciples or by knowledgeable beings in esoteric teachings.
Fundamentally the Maimonides’ system does not belong to him; he took it from Aristotle, whom he knew through Arabian philosophers, and he followed him in certain parts, but not accepting other parts that contradicted the dogma or revelations of the Mosaic Law.
Thence his rationalism, his deep logic and his scientism so wonderfully applied to the study of the Torah, Talmud and oral tradition.
But Maimonides’ merit is not precisely the interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy or the application of his system to the study of Judaism. His value lies on the moral consequence he found in Aristotelian premises, to which he associated an idea of Arabian source by taking all of them to their most extreme end.
“All bodies under the sky are composed of matter and form”. The “natural form”, is the essence of things, is that through which a thing “is what it is” and differentiates itself from others that are not of its kind. “You never see matter without form and form without matter, but man, by his intellect, distinguished the two elements of every existing body and knows that it is composed of matter and form”. Matter is of a form that does not remain constantly in matter, but continuously takes a form off and assumes another.
The soul of every thing is its form, and the body is the matter that this form assumes. Therefore, when a body made of elements disintegrates, the soul perishes, since it only exists along with the body and has not any more a permanent existence in the species as other forms.
The soul is one but develops multiple activities are commonly named parts of the soul but that are not such because the soul is one. In this sense, parts of the soul are five: nutritious, sensitive, imaginative, appetizing and intellectual. The first four are common to man and to other species of animals because every species of animal has a soul. The fifth is exclusive of man.
As a result of all this, there is only a difference between the individual human soul and souls of animals, and this difference is that the first is richer, has intellect; but in their essence as much one as another are forms adhered to matter with which they perish, and with latter even the intellectual part disintegrates.
If Maimonides had stopped in the above-mentioned Aristotle’s ideas, the world would be without his great ethical system, his new table of moral values. But he had used an idea of the Arabs whose consequences he led far beyond the supposition of their very authors. Conceptually, it consisted of potential o primordial intellect, intellect in action or acquired and separate intellect.
At birth, a man has an intellectual part –the intellectual part of the soul– that perishes along body. This force is a predisposition that makes a man able to apprehend intelligible things. It deteriorates, as we said, if it is preserved in the state of predisposition, not translated into action. But if a man uses it by comprehending intelligible things, then the intellect passes from potency to action and acquires “its own eternal and permanent existence” as the perception that it has collected and “is only one part with him”. Then we have the primordial intellect that is energy in the body, and the acquired intellect that is not a bodily force and therefore does not suffer with it, but is eternal as “separate intellects” in the superior world.
If a natural form is the essential substance because of which every being is such as he is and distinguished from others, an acquired intellect gives its owner an eternal existence, and is the substance of being and its true form. The common form to all beings is the soul subject to sufferings of the body, the soul of the birth. The soul of a being who has acquired intellect is just a kind of matter and his essential form is the supplementary knowledge, a form of the soul.
Maimonides, following the Arabs, begins distinguishing in the human kind two species, and these are his conclusions: man is different from animals because of his particular form, while the character of his form is analogous to that of the form of other animal species, all of which end in the individual, while the particular form of a person that has acquired intellect has an special character: it lives eternally, even separated from matter.
Also Maimonides marks out the contents and way of the intelligence through which a man reaches the acquired intellect.
If a comprehension of the intelligible and the formation between intellect and the, from only one unity takes the intellect from potency to action and makes the being eternal, the intelligible must contain objects existing in action and with eternal extension. So, Maimonides excludes from the complex of the intelligible, abstract sciences that do not explain existing things –such as logic and mathematics– and sciences that teach what is non-existent, but what should be done to reach certain ends, such as ethics and aesthetics, as well as knowledge of individual forms whose duration is transient since they adhere to matter.
The intelligible, whose knowledge brings the intellect into action, contain the true and eternal reality, such as forms of the species, heavenly substances and separate forms, and Gods and angels, who are eternal.
Maimonides establishes in regard to the way of intelligence that man can understand things through the very intellect, through reason, not only by faith, because precisely the mutual influence of intellect with the intelligible would be absent.
Keeping in mind what Aristotle taught about form and matter, about the adoption of sense of the form to that of the intellect with its different grades and about the Aristotelian view that man is the near end of all beings of the lower world, Maimonides gets the following moral conclusions:
The end of human existence is to produce the most perfect thing that could be produced.
This perfect entity is the man that possesses acquired intellect.
The highest moral duty is, then, that man may reach the end for which he was created.
The moral good is the achievement of this end.
An action is good or bad inasmuch as helps or disturbs man in his efforts to achieve the end of his existence, that is: his intellect translated into deed.
All human actions only aim at sustaining resistance so that a being may fulfill this only action.
But besides a necessary intellectual work to achieve the end, moral improvement is a condition sine-qua-non. So on the scale of good actions, two directions are marked: the first toward the speculative aspect; the other toward the practical one, action. In the first part, studies of indispensable sciences to know the world, and in the practical aspect, those human works leading to moral improvement are important Virtues are not then extremes of any of the enumerated aspects but the mean way bringing him near the end.
Maimonides has introduced the social element into his ethics.
If Humanity can be divided into two species, that of intellect in potency and that of intellect in action, and if the second species is made of a progressive ascension, very long and hard, for very few, what is the end of the existence for the greater part of Humanity that remains in state of potential intellect? One cannot attribute to the nature spoiled experiences and by observing the harmony and order prevailing on it, forcefully one has to accept an end in the existence of the majority. And Maimonides finds the end of this majority on the evolutionary scale leading to the perfect existence; a scale that also is an instrument for the continuity of man after he is perfect. These beings in potency exist to serve a perfect being in those multiple activities that he must develop and in the formation of the “society for sages” so that they are not alone.
So, while in the select minority the most perfect form is achieved, the majority implies the instrument to create necessary conditions for the existence of this minority.
So, a moral criterion is established, more extended and feasible than the above-mentioned, and more popular: a social criterion.
Everything that is useful in society as motive of its existence or mission is morally good; everything that is harmful becomes evil. Neither majority nor minority can avoid this criterion. Majority because their existence has not any end out of a participation in the social work whose object has been established. And minority because they must watch over social improvement, since the more perfect is society, the more often the individual emancipation of intellect in action and in higher proportion must be.
All human activities that contribute to social improvement have moral importance inasmuch as they help creating a necessary environment for a more perfect form eventually brought up to date. Society is between the two “species” of men, and intertwines them.
These conclusions enabled Maimonides to approach rationally the ancient Hebrew conception would attribute to the universal life the end of the particular life.