How can we speak about God?

What praise assumes

Imagine a neighbor paying for a stranger’s meal. You call her generous, but what exactly do you mean? Perhaps that she performed a generous act; perhaps that generosity belongs to her character. The same word can make different claims, and one generous act does not yet tell us what the giver is generally like.

Maimonides asks a more radical question about calling God wise, powerful or merciful. Do these words describe qualities like ours? If they do, have we understood God, or only enlarged a human picture? [1]

A Jewish philosophical problem

Moses ben Maimon, usually called Maimonides, was a Jewish legal scholar, philosopher and physician. Born in Córdoba, he later settled in Fustat, in Egypt, and died in 1204. His Guide of the Perplexed, written in Arabic, is addressed to a reader committed to Jewish teaching whose philosophical studies have made some familiar readings of scripture hard to accept. [2]

He had Jewish predecessors. In the tenth century, Saadia Gaon, an Egyptian-born rabbi who led the academy at Sura, defended the place of reason alongside revelation and tradition, and his Book of Doctrines and Beliefs argues for divine unity within an intellectual world that included Muslim theological debate. Saadia’s work is an earlier Jewish attempt, with aims of its own, to bring reason and inherited teaching into conversation. [3]

Augustine, too, pursued philosophical questions through scripture, but his text, interpretive tradition and argument are different. Understanding either author means attending to those differences; it does not mean sharing his faith.

Reading beyond a bodily picture

In Guide I.1 (part one, chapter one), Maimonides considers Genesis’s description of humanity made in God’s image. He argues that “image” here concerns intellectual perception, not the shape of a body, while warning against equating human and divine perception. A philosophical interpretation has to explain what the language means; announcing that it is figurative is not enough. [1]

In I.26 he appeals to the principle that scripture speaks in human language: bodily descriptions can help readers grasp that God exists without establishing that God has limbs or moves through space. For Maimonides, correcting a literal reading can be a way of keeping faith with Jewish teaching. That purpose does not by itself establish that his interpretation is correct.

Why unity constrains language

An attribute is something said of a subject: wise, living or powerful, for example. Maimonides thinks divine unity rules out treating God as the bearer of several distinct qualities. God must be simple, without constituent parts of any kind, including a division between an underlying being and properties added to it. “Simple” here does not mean easy to understand. [1]

Recall Avicenna’s distinction between essence, what something is, and existence, whether it is. Maimonides warns against speaking as though God’s essence were one thing and wisdom another thing attached to it, and merely declaring that the two are one does not remove the division from our picture of God.

This is a demanding account of unity. A critic might ask why several true descriptions must introduce divisions into their subject, and Maimonides’s answer depends on his account of what descriptions of an essence would imply. We can understand that motivation without treating his premise as established.

Learning through negation

Negative theology approaches God by denying descriptions that would mislead us. In I.58, Maimonides interprets divine life through the denial of death and divine wisdom through the denial of ignorance. This is not a way of quietly restoring the ordinary human quality, as if God were being placed at the top of our scale. [1]

A negation can remove an error without supplying a picture to replace it. Suppose someone wrongly imagines a musical instrument as a solid block. Learning that it is not solid corrects the mistake while leaving its shape and construction unknown. The example illustrates correction; it cannot establish how human language applies to God.

In I.59–60, Maimonides insists that progress requires reasons for denying an attribute: a longer list of denials gets us nowhere unless we can justify them. He also warns that heaping up extravagant praises can heap up misconceptions.

Describing what God does

There is one further possibility: attributes of action. These describe effects attributed to God without assigning God the human emotions that might produce similar effects. In I.54, Maimonides reads the divine mercy revealed to Moses in Exodus through the care shown in creation, so calling God merciful need not mean that God undergoes a feeling of pity. [1]

The same chapter treats punitive acts and defends severe collective punishments. Understanding its account of language does not require endorsing those judgments, and calling something an attribute of action does not prove that an event is just.

The neighbor’s gift helps here, since we already distinguish an action from the disposition behind it. Maimonides goes further: he denies that God has human emotional dispositions at all.

What can negation teach us?

If negations never reveal God’s essence, how do they amount to knowledge? Maimonides argues that someone who has ruled out a mistaken conception has advanced beyond someone who still holds it. An objector can still ask what justifies each negation and how far the advance reaches, and his own demand for proof keeps that question alive. [1]

This is one philosophical interpretation within Jewish thought. Maimonides’s work provoked controversy, and its influence does not make it the belief of every Jewish person or community. [2]

Try the distinction

Noam says: “Maimonides denies that God is ignorant, so he means God learns everything as we do, only faster. Calling God merciful proves that God feels pity. Since Maimonides is a major Jewish thinker, these must be universal Jewish beliefs.”

How would you correct these three claims? Would those corrections establish Maimonides’s account as true?

Read a possible response

Noam turns a negation into a familiar human process: in denying ignorance, Maimonides does not describe a faster learner. He also distinguishes effects called merciful from an emotion in God, and the first does not establish the second. Finally, a thinker’s importance does not make his position universal. These corrections show what the selected account means and how to attribute it, but they do not establish it as true: they do not prove its premises, settle the interpretation of scripture or require you to adopt a belief about God.

Carry this forward

Speaking carefully sometimes means explaining what our words do not establish. In Reasoning across faith and nature, Aquinas works through objections and replies to ask whether we can know that a cause exists without fully knowing its nature.

Sources and limits

[1] Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, M. Friedländer’s revised English translation, second edition 1904, reprinted 1910, George Routledge & Sons (Project Gutenberg text), for scriptural language, divine attributes and negation. These chapters were read complete, with their printed-page markers:

• Humanity in God’s image: I.1, markers 13–14.
• Scripture in human language: I.26, markers 34–35.
• Unity and attributes: I.50–52, markers 67–72.
• Attributes of action: I.54, markers 75–78.
• Negation: I.58–60, markers 81–89.

Also read: the opening three paragraphs on the work’s purpose, p. 2, and both translator prefaces. The earlier preface credits Joseph Abrahams with the Introduction and H. Gollancz with I.1–25. The revised edition removes the earlier explanatory notes and removes or transliterates the Hebrew. Those omitted notes were not consulted. Page numbers come from the transcription; no scan or original-language collation was performed.

[2] Kenneth Seeskin, “Maimonides”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), revised 18 November 2024, for Maimonides’s setting, the controversy over his work and the interpretation of negation. The main text of §§1 and 4 was read complete; the linked notes and the monographs it cites were not.

[3] Sarah Pessin, “Saadya [Saadiah]”, SEP, first published 6 May 2003, for Saadia as a predecessor; the main text of §§1, 2, 7 and 9 was read complete. Saadia’s primary work was not read directly. The predecessor context does not establish that Maimonides borrowed a particular argument from him.

The neighbor, the instrument, the objections and the Noam exercise are original teaching material. No complete work or systematic second primary translation was read. The lesson has not undergone independent specialist or learner review, and its reading time has not been measured. It presents selected philosophical arguments, not a survey of all Jewish beliefs or of Maimonides’s entire thought.