Maimonides The Guide Of The Perplexed

Summary of The Guide of the Perplexed

Maimonides is a twelfth century, Jewish, medieval philosopher, author of The Guide of the Perplexed. In the essay, Maimonides explains how educated individuals with knowledge of the divine science are to understand God’s secrets. He states that the secrets are explained through parables and riddles. Those who explain the secrets cannot fully describe them so they must use obscure language. In the text, Maimonides explains how important the metaphor of the flashing light is in accordance with how God wants humans to achieve knowledge and understanding.

The treatise is meant to clarify the meanings of the words used in prophecy. Equivocal terms are open to one or more meanings while univocal means when a

He means that the vulgar choose to not look any deeper than the surface. He states this as only having an external sense rather than an internal. This causes the man to feel great perplexity and confusion as to what the parables mean. Maimonides reaffirms that this treatise will not remove all difficulties, but its purpose is to help the already educated make sense of the parables in a way they could understand. So no man can tell Maimonides he is wrong, he makes it clear that no one should expect him to give a perfect explanation of the parables, as no man could give a perfect explanation, but to rather focus on the chapters. To understand all natural science is to know that not everything can be explained. According to Maimonides, those matters are too closely connected with the secrets of divine

The secrets are not similar to those already known to natural science. The light would flash for him and then disappear, leaving the man without words, because the concepts are so obscure and great. Maimonides gives this as the reason as to why Sages spoke of truth only in parables and riddles. Because Maimonides believes that a man would perceive the subject of a parable to be two different things, the subject of a parable would either be placed in the beginning, middle, or end. Sages and men with wisdom are drawn to teach parables of obscure situations so that they are only understood as brief and obscure parables. Maimonides believes that God wants the perplexed to be improved by His laws regarding actions, but only if they can realize they can only understand God’s secrets to a certain capacity through natural and divine science. Maimonides believes they need these subjects to be taught on a level the perplexed can comprehend, even if the subjects are weakly represented in obscure