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On Moses Maimonides' 'Letter on Astrology'
| Article
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12653 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
2,512 Words |
| Author
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Jules Gleicher
Jules Gleicher is associate professor of political science at
Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois. |
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), better known to posterity as Moses Maimonides, is widely regarded as the greatest of medieval Jewish philosophers. His religious commentaries are a mainstay of the Talmudic tradition. His development of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian strands of medieval Islamic thought earned him a place of respect within the Muslim world. (The 850th anniversary of his birth two years ago received public recognition not only in Israel, but in Egypt and Pakistan as well.) His attempted synthesis of Greek, philosophy with revealed religion influenced similar inquiries in the Christian West during the thirteenth century. To Saint Thomas Aquinas, for whom Saint Paul was "the Apostle" and Aristotle "the Philosopher," Maimonides was "the Rabbi," the very personification of Jewish philosophic wisdom.
Maimonides' early years were spent in the city of Cordoba, at a time when the entire Spanish peninsula was under Muslim rule. In general, this rule had been religiously tolerant, but in 1148 a fundamentalist Muslim sect, the Aristotle-Mohad, gained local ascendancy. After living for eleven years in a state of quasi-apostasy--adopting the outward customs of their Muslim neighbors, but not pretending to convert to Islam--the Maimon family emigrated in 1159, first to Fez, then to Palestine, finally settling in Egypt in 1165. Maimonides spent the remainder of his life in Cairo, where he practiced medicine, becoming court physician to Saladin, and rose to prominence as a leader of that city's sizable Jewish community and as an authority among the Mediterranean rabbinate. It was there that he labored for the greater part of the decade of the 1180s on his monumental Guide of the Perplexed, on the basis of which his philosophic reputation principally rests. It was there too, in 1194, that the wrote the "Letter on Astrology."
Defining the Knowable
A threshold question occurs when we approach Moses Maimonides' famous letter to the rabbis of Marseilles: why should we twentieth-century sophisticates concern ourselves with a work on so discredited a topic? Though not a question that Maimonides himself poses, it is one that he, oddly enough, answers. What makes this doubly noteworthy is that the letter manifestly attempts to discredit astrology. To discredit something, however, is not the same as to dismiss it out of hand. Our first task, in which he assists us, is therefore to see the serious side of what may be a powerful error.
Maimonides' letter is not only about astrology. It is also a kind of epistemological precis, a set
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