There are two surprises in this book, relative to the prevailing mainstream of scholarship, both in the articles about Maimonides. Daniel Frank addresses the standard difference between the dualists, who see two “Maimonideses”: one the esoteric Aristotelian, and the other the exoteric pious Jew, and the “coherentists,” who see a seamless Maimonides. Frank comes down solidly on the coherentist side, echoing Ralph McInerny’s understanding of Aquinas, that the latter was using the language of Aristotle for his own purpose, but was not an “Aristotelian.” Maimonides’ Aristotelianism, believes Frank, always had to answer to Maimonides’ conviction of an historical revelation Therefore, Frank takes Maimonides at face value when he departs from orthodox Aristotelian teachings in favor of traditional Jewish ones: concerning his not being convinced by the arguments for the world’s eternity, his not taking prophecy as an entirely natural phenomenon, and his tempering his elitist intellectualism by mandating moral and political action
The second surprise is in Tzvi Langerman’s piece on Maimonides and the sciences. Scholars are divided over whether Maimonides believed miracles were possible at all or whether he merely severely restricted their occurrence. Langerman offers a novel approach. When Maimonides was young, Langerman writes, and impressed by the “scientific enterprise,” he rejected miracles when understood as interventions into the natural order. As Maimonides matured, however, he “became more receptive to the need for miracles as well as their possibility,” because of dampened enthusiasm for the explanatory power of science. Instead, Maimonides countenances deviations from a fixed order due to the activity of the “divine will” in the world
The theses of Frank and Langerman beg further elucidation. Regarding Frank, we want to know how the proposed Maimonidean positions, entailing an active divine will, can square with Maimonides’ via negativa conception of God. In particular, we want to know how Maimonides could have thought of the “divine will” as an efficient, rather than a final cause of world events, given what appears to be his view of God. Regarding Langerman, Maimonides could not have simply changed his mind about miracles without that having reverberations for his concept of God. Since it is hard to detect such a change in the latter, it might be more plausible to suggest that what changed was not Maimonides’ view of miracles, but his view of what beliefs were necessary, in his technical sense
