A Vanished World by Chris Lowney

Author:Chris Lowney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Maimonides’ twelfth-century analysis of sacred texts and religious belief foreshadowed an approach that discomfits many twenty-first-century believers committed to literal interpretation of Scripture: God said what God meant, and humans should not question but simply obey. The Maimonidean Controversy prefigured a struggle that became only more challenging across centuries as scientific method, literary deconstruction, archaeology, and historical criticism developed and evolved. It was one thing for Maimonides to suggest that God didn’t literally mold Adam with divine hands; many of his contemporaries had already relinquished literal interpretation of this passage. But where draw the line? It became quite another thing some four centuries later when Galileo argued from natural reason that the earth revolved around the sun, defying a scriptural worldview stubbornly defended by Catholic churchmen. Or when modern Muslims reject coreligionists who entice would-be suicide bombers with the promise of literally passing to a place populated by “ Companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes” (much less whether anyone will get there by taking his or her own life and that of innocent humans).

Maimonides encourages us to believe that faith need not fear reason. Applying God’s extraordinary gift of intellect to dearly held beliefs does not affront the Creator, but praises God. Yet, at the same time, he teaches the limits of our intellectual capabilities. The genius Maimonides who ultimately falls silent before the Creator God gives pause to all who would make man the measure of all things.

The struggle to marry faith and reason gripped not only twelfth-and thirteenth-century Judaism, but Islam and Christianity as well. Two ingenious Spanish Muslims were to ignite in Islam the same intense intellectual friction that the Maimonidean Controversy sparked in Judaism. Indeed, in the course of a century, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity would each be wracked—and forever changed—by the struggle to reconcile faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and, in a sense, modernism and orthodoxy. One Spanish Muslim, Averroes, would distinguish himself as his era’s foremost thinker, surpassing even Maimonides and out-thinking any contemporary philosopher in Christendom. Utterly rejected by his own Muslim community, he would inspire the most creative generation of Christian thinkers in a millennium.

Averroes would be brought to prominence by a friend and mentor, Ibn Tufayl, whose only surviving complete work, a slender allegorical tale, challenged his Muslim coreligionists and warns of the awesome responsibility humans inherit as stewards of God’s creation.

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