Maimonides Moses - The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume 1

THE GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED

Moses Maimonides

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

SHLOMO PINES

With an Introductory Essay by

LEO STRAUSS

VOLUME I

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1963 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 1963.

Published with the aid of the Bollingen Foundation

Designed by Andor Braun

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 15 16 17 18 19

Vol. 1:

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50226-7 (e-book)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50230-4 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-50230-9 (paper)

Vol. 2:

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50227-4 (e-book)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50231-1 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-50231-7 (paper)

LCN: 62-18113

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

SPONSORS

CHARLES AARON

MAXWELL ABBELL

BARNEY BALABAN

MICHAEL BRAUDE

MORRIS DeWOSKIN

MORRIS FEIWELL

MIRIAM AND HAROLD B. FUERSTENBERG

JOSHUA B. GLASSER

SAMUEL N. KATZIN

SAM LAUD

NATHAN SCHWARTZ

LESTER SELIG

MARVIN N. STONE

MORTON B. WEISS

RABBI MARTIN M. WIRTZ

ABE WINTER

SAMUEL WOLBERG

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To Professor Ralph Lerner of the University of Chicago we wish to express our deepest thanks for the most valuable editorial task he has performed. He has contributed greatly to giving this translation an English style that reflects Maimonides subtle prose. This contribution involved repeated recourse to both the Arabic and Hebrew versions of the Guide in order to verify the consistency and clarity of the translation. While we must absolve him of any responsibility for such defects as may still exist, we are very much obliged to Professor Lerner for his devoted labors, skill, patience, and wise understanding of the problems.

Shlomo Pines

Leo Strauss

PREFACE

EVERYONE connected with the production of this translation of Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed has long felt that such a new translation was necessary. The legitimate demand that must be made of any translation is not satisfied by any of the existing modern language translations of the Guide. We rightly demand that a translation should remain as close as is practicable to the original, that within the limits of the possible it should give the reader an impressionboth in general and in detailresembling the impression offered by the original. In the present translation, pains have been taken to meet this demand. As far as was compatible with intelligibility, every Arabic technical term has been rendered by one and the same English term. Wherever the original is ambiguous or obscure, the translation has preserved or attempted to preserve that very ambiguity or obscurity. A special effort has been made to reproduce the artful interplay of Maimonides Arabic text with his Hebrew and Aramaic quotations from the classic Jewish sources. Besides, considerable progress has been made, within the last generation, in the understanding of the Guide. These advances have, of course, been based on a close study of the original text, and as always in such cases, by virtue of these advances the existing translations prove now to be less adequate than they had appeared to be before. In other words, to the extent that earlier translators were not sufficiently sensitive to certain facets of the Guide, their translations failed to disclose those facets. A single example must suffice: where Maimonides speaks of political, previous translators speak of social; where Maimonides says city, they translate state; where Maimonides speaks of political civic actions, they speak of social conduct. A moments reflection shows that an entirely different perspective is provided when the political is mentioned, rather than the social.

The present translation is based on the Arabic text established by S. Munk (Le Guide des gars; 3 vols.; Paris, 185666) and edited with variant readings by Issachar Joel (Dallat al-irn; Jerusalem: J. Junovitch, 5691 [1930/31]). Where the readings adopted by Munk and Joel have not been followed, this has been noted. The pagination of the Munk edition is indicated by thin vertical lines in the body of the text and by bracketed numerals in the running head. These numerals refer to those pages of the Arabic text whose beginnings are denoted by the first and last vertical lines occurring on the two facing pages. Italic type in the text has been reserved to indicate Maimonides use of words that are clearly identifiable as being Hebrew or Aramaic. The division of the text into parts and chapters is Maimonides. The Arabic text has no paragraphing, very little punctuation, and, of course, no capitalization; the translator is responsible for such features in this volume.

Shlomo Pines

Leo Strauss

HOW TO BEGIN TO STUDY

The Guide of the Perplexed

I BELIEVE that it will not be amiss if I simply present the plan of the Guide as it has become clear to me in the course of about twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study. In the following scheme Roman (and Arabic) numerals at the beginning of a line indicate the sections (and subsections) of the Guide while the numbers given in parentheses indicate the Parts and the chapters of the book.

A. Views (I 1III 24)

A. Views regarding God and the angels ()

1. Biblical terms applied to God ()

. Terms suggesting the corporeality of God (and the angels) ()

1. The two most important passages of the Torah that seem to suggest that God is corporeal ()

2. Terms designating place, change of place, the organs of human locomotion, etc. ()

3. Terms designating wrath and consuming (or taking food) that if applied to divine things refer to idolatry on the one hand and to human knowledge on the other ()

4. Terms designating parts and actions of animals ()

. Terms suggesting multiplicity in God ()

5. Given that God is absolutely one and incomparable, what is the meaning of the terms applied to God in nonfigurative speech? ()

6. The names of God and the utterances of God ()

)

II. Demonstrations of the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God (

1. Introductory ()

2. Refutation of the Kalm demonstrations ()

3. The philosophic demonstrations (II 1)

4. Maimonides demonstration (II 2)

5. The angels (II 312)

6. Creation of the world, i.e., defense of the belief in creation out of nothing against the philosophers (II 1324)

7. Creation and the Law (II 2531)

III. Prophecy (II 3248)

1. Natural endowment and training the prerequisites of prophecy (II 3234)

2. The difference between the prophecy of Moses and that of the other prophets (II 35)

3. The essence of prophecy (II 3638)

4. The legislative prophecy (of Moses) and the Law (II 3940)

5. Legal study of the prophecy of the prophets other than Moses (II 4144)

6. The degrees of prophecy (II 45)

7. How to understand the divine actions and works and the divinely commanded actions and works as presented by the prophets (II 4648)