When the great rabbinic scholar, philosopher, and physician Moses Maimonides died in 1204, he was succeeded by his son Abraham as head of the Egyptian Jewish community. Abraham also continued his father’s legacy by authoring numerous works on theology, biblical exegesis, halakhah, and medicine in both Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. David Fried reviews a recent book about these two towering figures:
Anyone familiar with the writings of Abraham Maimonides knows that he frequently presents himself as the faithful heir to his father’s teachings. Scholars, though, have seldom taken this self-perception seriously. Conventional wisdom is that Moses Maimonides is the Aristotelian philosopher and his son the Sufi mystic. Only in the last several decades has the Maimonidean scholarship really begun to seriously look at the phenomenology of Moses Maimonides’ religious encounter, and perhaps even mystical inclinations, and not merely his philosophical content.
Diana Lobel is one of the scholars who takes this work seriously, and her new book, Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine, offers us a far more nuanced comparison of Abraham and Moses Maimonides than we have previously seen. Lobel presents a valuable portrait of the interplay between [the elder] Maimonides’ philosophy and his inner religious life and spiritual practices. . . . Lobel is able to point out very real differences between [father and son] in both the spiritual and philosophical realms without resorting to facile tropes of saying that one is a philosopher and the other a mystic.
Perhaps the most significant distinction between father and son that Lobel points out relates not to philosophical doctrine but to the spiritual role of philosophy itself. For Moses Maimonides, the study of physics and metaphysics is a spiritual exercise. Meditating upon natural science is the path to love and fear God and an important rung on the ladder (if not the ultimate one) towards God’s inner court. Abraham more or less agrees with the content of his father’s science and philosophy, but does not see its study as a primary path to Divine encounter.
Read more on Lehrhaus: https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/the-philosopher-and-the-mystic/