For Those Who Are Perplexed

A physician in Fustat writes a guide for readers caught between philosophy and the Law. The mind has to know how not to smash one with the other.

Fustat (Cairo)
Twelfth-century Egypt
30.01°N 31.23°E

A closed book. What may not be said?

Philosophy Sacred Traditions

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Fustat, near Cairo, after 1185. Moses Maimonides, Mūsā ibn Maymūn, physician to the Ayyubid court and from 1177 leader of the Jewish congregation, writes in Arabic with Hebrew letters to a student who has left. Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta came from Alexandria to study logic, mathematics, astronomy, and the Prophets. He left before the course on the Prophets was finished. The book goes out part by part. It is Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn, The Guide of the Perplexed. Perplexity, here, is not a mood. It is an honorable state of a trained mind that will not smash philosophy with the Law, or the Law with philosophy.

Maimonides was born in Córdoba in 1138, fled the Almohads, and made a life in Egypt as judge, physician, and writer. The Mishneh Torah is another work, a code of law, not this book. The Guide is a letter that became a book, in Judeo-Arabic, for someone who already knows too much to be simple and not enough to be at rest. Negative attributes: of God one speaks more truly by saying what God is not. This is not atheism. It is a discipline of speech, so that the mind does not make an idol out of its best sentence.

Source

The Guide of the Perplexed. Written in Fustat, sent in installments, c. 1185–1190. Shlomo Pines’s English (Chicago, 1963) is a standard door. Sefaria holds a public English. Samuel ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew, Moreh ha-Nevukhim, 1204, is the first translation. The work is not the Mishneh Torah. Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta is the named addressee.

Joseph is not simply convinced. Later letters between them argue in figures. Samuel ibn Tibbon translates with the author’s advice. Later readers will fight over how far the unsaying goes, and over whether the Guide’s secrets are for philosophers only. Those fights are the book’s afterlife. They are not why it was sent, part by part, to a student who had already walked away. The Cloud of Unknowing will, in another century and language, also unsay. They are not one apophatic. One is a rabbinic philosopher in Ayyubid Egypt, writing for a student of Aristotle and Torah. One is an English contemplative telling a student to forget even holy thoughts. They can sit on the table. They do not agree by being placed there.

Interpretation

Perplexity here is an honorable state of a trained mind, not a crisis to be soothed. Later readers will fight over how far the unsaying goes. Those fights are the book’s afterlife. They are not why it was sent, part by part, to Joseph.

Question

Whether a mind can know a God it cannot describe is the Guide’s open ridge.

Distant echoes

Echo

Abbasid / Seljuk world · Baghdad, then Damascus and Tus

When knowledge would not sit still

Ghazālī and Maimonides both write after philosophy has unsettled inherited speech. They do not write the same book.

Echo

Fourteenth-century England · The Midlands, on the page

A cloud of forgetting

Two unsayings. One is a rabbinic guide for the perplexed. One is an English cloud. They can sit on the table.

One question remains

Knowledge · What counts as knowing?

If the truest speech is unsaying, what is the knowing that remains?