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Updated: May 2, 2025
Gersonides, on the other hand, was a truer Aristotelian than Maimonides and he decided in favor of the eternity of matter, though not of this our world. The Jewish Mutakallimun, as we have seen, proved the existence of God from the fact that a created world implies a creator.
His fame rests on his work in theory and practice as a physician; and as such he is mentioned by the Arab annalists and historians of medicine. To the Christian scholastics of mediæval Europe he is known as the Jewish physician and philosopher next in importance to Maimonides.
Maimonides is right in saying that if one took into account the littleness of man in relation to the universe one would comprehend clearly that the predominance of evil, even though it prevailed among men, need not on that account occur among the angels, nor among the heavenly bodies, nor among the elements and inanimate compounds, nor among many kinds of animals.
He therefore accepts free will with its consequences, at the risk of limiting God's knowledge to events which are determined by the laws of nature. Maimonides was less consistent, but had the truer theological sense, namely, he kept to both horns of the dilemma. God is omniscient and man is free. He gave up the solution by seeking refuge in the mysteriousness of God's knowledge.
The rest of the book is devoted to such questions as reward and punishment after death, immortality of the soul, the problem of the soul's pre-existence, the nature of the future life, repentance questions which Maimonides left untouched in the "Guide" on the ground that whatever religion and tradition may say about them, they are not strictly speaking scientific questions, and are not susceptible to philosophical demonstration.
The greatest beauty of the city, of course, had come, and some of it had gone, before Maimonides' time. So much remains in spite of time and war, and many unfortunate influences, that we can have some idea how beautiful it must have been in his youth seven centuries ago, and how even more beautiful in the foretime. Of the great mosque writers of travel can scarcely say enough. Mr.
Maimonides was, then, in his own time one of the world teachers, and, in a certain sense, he must always remain that, as representing a special development of what is best in human nature. In order to understand the place of the Arabs in medicine and in science, a few words as to the rise of this people to political power, and then to the cultivation of literature and of science, are necessary.
They record our triumphs; they solace our affliction. Great orators are the creatures of popular assemblies; we were permitted only by stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers, the catalogue is not blank. What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides? And as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza.
Besides, the entire principle of Maimonides that there is no relation of resemblance between God's attributes and ours, that the terms wise, just, and so on, are pure homonyms, is fundamentally wrong. We attribute knowledge to God because we know in our own case that an intellect is perfected by knowledge.
While it is true that all the Jewish thinkers of the middle ages were for a great part apologetes, this did not prevent a Maimonides or a Gersonides from making a really thorough and disinterested study of science and philosophy; and often their scientific and philosophic conviction was so strong that the apologia was pro philosophia sua rather than pro Judaismo.
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