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Aaron ben Elijah agrees with Maimonides that God's wisdom rather than his arbitrary will, as the Ashariya maintain, must be appealed to in answering the question of the purpose of the world.
Providence is the other related problem, which is derived from the dogma of Reward and Punishment. There is nothing that is new in Albo's treatment of knowledge and Freedom. He insists like Maimonides that God must be omniscient, and on the other hand the contingent cannot be denied, and neither can freedom. He gives the stock arguments, which it is not necessary to reproduce at this late hour.
But what is obtained by quotations from Maimonides more than from Alexander Hales, or any other Schoolman of the same age? The metaphysics of the learned Jew are derived from the same source, namely, Aristotle; and his object was the same, as that of the Christian Schoolmen, namely, to systematize the religion he professed on the form and in the principles of the Aristotelian philosophy.
And his solution is that of Maimonides that in God human freedom and divine Omniscience are reconcilable because God's knowledge is not our knowledge. Nor is there anything original in Albo's discussion of the problem of Providence.
Here we have again the testimony of Maimonides, who, however, is not inclined to credit this circumstance to the intelligence and judgment of his predecessors, but to chance.
After Maimonides the only philosopher who deviates from the prescribed path and endeavors to uproot Aristotelian authority in Judaism is Crescas. All the rest stand by Aristotle and his major domo, Maimonides. This may seem like a purely formal and external mode of characterizing the development of philosophical thought. But the character of mediæval philosophy is responsible for this.
No Rabbanite after Maimonides would think of going back to the old arguments made popular by the Mutakallimun the theory of atoms, of substance and accident in the Kalamistic sense of accident as a quality which needs continuous creation to exist any length of time, the denial of law and natural causation, the arguments in favor of creation and the existence of God based upon creation, the doctrine of the divine will as eternal or created, residing in a subject or existing without a subject, the world as due to God's will or to his wisdom, the nature of right and wrong as determined by the character and purpose of the act or solely by the arbitrary will of God these and other topics, which formed the main ground of discussion between the Muʿtazilites and the Ashariya, and were taken over by the Karaites and to a less extent by the early Rabbanites in the tenth and eleventh centuries, had long lost their significance and their interest among the Rabbanite followers of Maimonides.
But there were lacking in the Maimonist Creed all emotional elements. On the one hand, Maimonides, rationalist and anti-Mystic as he was, makes no allowance for the doctrine of the Immanence of God. Then, owing to his unemotional nature, he laid no stress on all the affecting and moving associations of the belief in the Mission of Israel as the Chosen People.
And he himself wrote a number of books on mathematics and astronomy in Hebrew at the request of his friends in France who could not read Arabic. Abraham bar Hiyya is the first of the writers we have treated so far who composed a scientific work in the Hebrew language. All the others, with the exception of Abraham ibn Ezra, wrote in Arabic, as they continued to do until and including Maimonides.
It was here, as we have seen, that Maimonides stopped short in his devotion to Aristotle and took pains to show that the arguments of the latter in favor of eternity are not valid, and that Aristotle knew it.
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