Maimonides on negative theology

Negative theology (also known as apophatic theology) is the approach to understanding the divine nature that emphasizes that what we know about God is what he is not rather than what he is.  One might take the strong view that all of our knowledge of God’s nature is negative in this way, or the weaker position that much (but not all) such knowledge is negative.  The medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) is among the most famous of negative theologians.  He takes the stronger position.  More precisely, his view is that when we predicate something of God, we are describing either his effects in the world of our experience, or the divine nature itself, and in the latter case we must understand our predications in a purely negative way.

For example, suppose we say that God is merciful toward the righteous and takes vengeance on the wicked.  For Maimonides, the right way to understand this is as saying that God causes the righteous to be rewarded and the wicked to be punished.  It is a statement about the effects of God’s actions, not about the divine nature itself.  Or suppose we say that God is omnipotent.  For Maimonides, this should be understood as a statement to the effect that there are in God no limitations of the kind that constrain the power of created things.  It is a statement about the divine nature, but only about what is not true of it, rather than a positive attribution. 

In his famous The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides defends Aristotelian arguments for the existence of a divine first cause.  He also defends the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God is in no way composed of parts.  It is in light of this fact about the divine nature, says Maimonides, that we can see that our knowledge of it can only be negative.  He argues as follows:

It has been proved that God exists by necessity and that He is non-composite… and we can apprehend only that He is, not what He is.  It is therefore meaningless that He should have any positive attribute, since the fact that He is is not something outside of what He is, so that the attribute might indicate one of these two.  Much less can what He is be of a composite character, so that the attribute could indicate one of the parts.  Even less can He be substrate to accidents, so that the attribute could indicate these.  Thus there is no scope for any positive attributes in any way whatsoever.  (Book I, Chapter LVIII, at p. 80 of the abridged Rabin translation)

Let’s unpack this.  In this passage, it seems, Maimonides tries to show that divine simplicity all by itself entails an exclusively apophatic theology.  How so?  Start with the point he makes in the middle of the paragraph, concerning the proposal that to speak of a divine positive attribute “could indicate one of the parts” of God.  Obviously this would be ruled out by divine simplicity, which denies that God has any parts.  Nor, as he says at the end of the passage, could a positive attribute be an accident inhering in the divine substrate, because divine simplicity also rules out any distinction in God between substrate and accidents.

The third option Maimonides considers and rules out is the proposal that a divine positive attribute might be identifiable with either “the fact that He is” or “what He is” – that is to say, with either God’s existence or his essence.  The idea here seems to be that someone who thinks we can predicate positive attributes of God might suppose that God’s existence is a positive attribute distinct from his essence, which we can predicate of that essence; or that God’s essence is a positive attribute distinct from his existence, which we can predicate of that existence.  And the trouble with this proposal, Maimonides says, is that given divine simplicity, there is no distinction between God’s essence and his existence.  They are one and the same thing.

The argument, then, seems to be that these three proposals would be the only ways to make sense of positive divine attributes, but all three are ruled out by divine simplicity; therefore, as he concludes at the end of the passage, “there is no scope for any positive attributes in any way whatsoever.”

The reader might wonder, though, exactly why we should regard these three as the only options.  Some remarks Maimonides makes earlier in Book I of the Guide indicate the answer.  In Chapter LI, he writes:

It is thus evident that an attribute must be one of two things.  Either it is the essence of the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an explanation of a term… Or the attribute is different from the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an idea added to that thing.  Consequently that attribute is an accident of that essence.  (p. 67)

It is not hard to see why Maimonides would deny that God has attributes in the second sense, for that would be ruled out by the thesis that there is, given divine simplicity, no distinction in God between substrate and accidents.  But what about attributes in the first sense, that is to say, an attribute understood as “the essence of the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an explanation of a term”?  And what exactly does Maimonides mean by this?

He illustrates the idea with the example of asserting that “Man is a reasoning animal.”  When we predicate of man the attribute of being a reasoning animal, we are really just picking out the essence of man, and thereby giving an “explanation of [the] term” (i.e. the term “man”).  The attribute in this case is nothing different from the essence or nature of the thing to which we are ascribing the attribute.  To predicate of God a positive attribute in this sense, then, would be to explain the meaning of “God” by stating the divine essence.  Yet Maimonides says that even here, “this kind of attribute we reject with reference to God” (p. 67).  Why?

The subsequent chapter of the Guide, Chapter LII, indicates the reason.  Suppose we try to define God, in something like the way we define man as a reasoning animal.  This, Maimonides says, would imply that God has “pre-existing causes,” which as first cause he cannot have (p. 68).  How so?  Maimonides’ meaning here seems to be this.  When we define man as a reasoning animal, we are identifying him as belonging to a certain genus (namely, animal) and as set apart from other things in that genus by a differentia (namely, reasoning).  Now, in a sense, animality and rationality are thus prior to man, and thus they are causes, of a sort, of his being.  Since God is uncaused, then, he cannot be defined in terms of a genus and a differentia.  (Again, this seems to me to be what Maimonides is getting at, though he doesn’t spell it out in the relevant passage in Chapter LII.) 

Maimonides then says that another thing we might be doing when predicating an attribute of something in the sense of defining it is describing it in terms of part of its essence.  We do this, for example, when we say that man is an animal.  But this too cannot be what we’re doing in the case of God, because given divine simplicity, there are no parts to God’s essence.

Thus does Maimonides claim to show that we can say nothing positive about the divine nature.  But some readers may think he would still need to say more in order to make the case.  And they would be right.  For consider Aquinas’s alternative position.  Like Maimonides, he strongly affirms divine simplicity, holds that we cannot strictly define the divine essence, and takes much of our knowledge of God’s nature to be negative.  But he rejects the extreme claim that we can say nothing positive about him. 

Aquinas argues that Maimonides’ position does not adequately account for talk about God’s goodness, wisdom, and the like.  He notes that the view that attributing goodness to God is really just a way of saying that God is the cause of good things cannot explain why we say that God is good but not that God is a physical object – for, after all, God is the cause of physical objects too.  Aquinas continues:

When we say, “God is good,” the meaning is not, “God is the cause of goodness,” or “God is not evil”; but the meaning is, “Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God,” and in a more excellent and higher way.  Hence it does not follow that God is good, because He causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, He causes goodness in things because He is good. (Summa Theologiae I.13.2)

To be sure, this is not because there is some common genus to which God and other good things belong.  Nor does Aquinas think we have a clear idea of the nature of God’s goodness.  Nor, given divine simplicity, does he think that God’s goodness is distinct from his wisdom or his power or any of his other attributes.  Still, when we say that God is good, we are in Aquinas’s view saying something positive about him, and something literally true.

How can this be?  The answer has to do with Aquinas’s famous view that not all literal language is either univocal or equivocal, but that some is analogical, and that this is the case with predications of the divine attributes.  When we say that God is good, we are not saying that he is good in exactly the same sense in which we are good (which would be to use “good” in a univocal way), nor are we saying that he is good in some completely unrelated sense (which would be to use “good” in an equivocal way).  We are saying that there is something in God that is analogous to what we call “goodness” in us, even if it is not exactly the same thing.

Maimonides would disagree.  For him, when we apply to God’s nature the same terms we use to describe created things, we speak equivocally.  This is true even when we say that God exists, for God “shares no common trait with anything outside Him at all, for the term ‘existence’ is only applied to Him as well as to creatures by way of homonymy and in no other way” (The Guide of the Perplexed, Book I, Chapter LII, at p. 70).

This is not a dispute I will explore here.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that while Maimonides writes as if the controversy over whether God has positive attributes hinges on whether or not one accepts divine simplicity, that is not in fact the case.  Rather, it hinges on whether or not one accepts that we can truly speak of God in analogical terms.

Related posts:

Dharmakīrti and Maimonides on divine action

Tugwell on St. Albert on negative theology

McCabe on the divine nature

Lao Tzu’s negative theology