Love, desire, and enjoyment are the best natural candidates for an understanding of mystic love. Grounded in these natural capacities, mystic love bestows a spiritual orientation upon them that they cannot give to themselves. Mystic love has everything in common with a passionate love; that is to say, a love consumed by desire. However, it also consists in a painful transformation of this self-destructive passion into a pure love; that is to say, a love without desire—which is another word for the highest contemplative prayers. The mystic way that brings about this transformation possesses a triadic structure. The first stage begins with the humble forms of meditative prayer and ends with the spectacular prayers of rapture and ecstasy. The suffering of the mystic night is the turning point, preparing the prayer of mystic union with God in which the soul loves all there is as it is.

Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the ethical responsibility of the face-to-face relation offers an illuminating context or clearing within which we might better appreciate the work of Simone Weil. Levinas’s subjectivity of the hostage, the one who is responsible for the other before being responsible for the self, provides us with a way of re-encountering the categories of gravity and grace invoked in Weil’s original account. In this paper I explore the terrain between these thinkers by raising the question of eating as, in part, an ethical act. Weil’s conception of grace refers to the state of decreation in which the utter humility of the self moves toward a kind of disintegration and weightlessness. This weightlessness, which Weil contrasts to the gravity of terrestrial weight, might be thought of in terms of the subject’s fundamental responsibility for the other, especially in terms of the injunction “Thou shalt neither kill nor take the food of thy neighbour.” Taking the place of the other, taking the food from the mouth of the other, is the ethical dilemma facing the subject as hostage and an elaboration of this situation may provide us with steps toward a radical questioning of anorexia as—at least inpart—an ethical rather than purely medical condition.

This essay consists of (a) an exploration of the relation between Aquinas and Heidegger as this is discussed in the work of John Caputo, and (b) an attempt, in the light of what is learned from the previous discussion, to rethink the essence of Thomistic metaphysics in a way that is both faithful to the spirit of Thomism, remaining attentive to its mystical source, and alive to the mystery of Being in a Heideggerian sense. In this way the argumental structure central to that metaphysics is treated as a Wittgensteinian ladder that we can kick away, that is, which auto-deconstructs, thereby placing us before unlimited, unqualified existence, the Difference between existence and nothingness. The essay ends with a suggestion for a transformation of Heidegger’s Denken along lines suggested by this rethinking of Thomism. A reply by John Caputo follows the essay.

Maimonides’ negative theology has generated controversy ever since it was advanced in The Guide of the Perplexed. Unlike Aquinas,Maimonides does not allow predication by analogy or anything else that compromises the radical separation between God and creatures. The standard objection to Maimonides is that his view is so extreme that it undermines important features of religious life, most pointedly the institution of prayer. I argue that Maimonides was well aware of the problems caused by negative theology and provides us with ingenious ways to handle them. Overall I attempt to show that for Maimonides, religious language is not referentialbut heuristic: rather than depict the structure of an underlying reality, its function is to prepare the mind for a particular kind of reflection.

Guide I: 68 presents two challenges to Maimonides’ negative theology. In I: 50–60 Maimonides insists that we cannot ascribe positiveattributes to God; however, in I: 68, he affirms that God is intellect. Second, I: 56 and III: 20 assert that divine and human knowledge have nothing in common; “knowledge” is a purely equivocal term. However, I: 68 emphasizes that both divine and human knowledge exhibit a unity between subject, object, and the act of intellection. Guide I: 53 and I: 58 offer a resolution to the first contradiction: intellect can be seen as an attribute of action. Guide I: 57 offers a resolution to the second problem: Maimonides describes a similarity between God’s knowledge and ours through “looseness of expression” [tasāmuh], which directs the mind towards a mystery it cannot fully grasp. Looseness of expression, attributes of action, and the way of negation ensure that the being we worship is truly God, and make room for genuine religious experience.

In various writings Maimonides claims that God’s knowledge encompasses sublunar things, including human affairs, that we are incapable of understanding the nature of this knowledge, and that the term “knowing” is equivocal when said of God and of humans. In the fourteenth century these claims were given widely divergent interpretations. According to Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344), Maimonides was compelled by religious considerations to maintain that God knows sublunar particulars in all their particularity, and to adopt a position that was diametrically opposed to the Aristotelian one. By contrast, Moses of Narbonne (Narboni, d.1362) found Maimonides’ views on divine knowledge to be identical with those of the “ancient philosophers,” that is to say, the Peripatetics, as presented by Averroes. Whether ultimately convincing or not, Narboni’s Averroist interpretation forces the reader to admit that Maimonides shares a great deal more in common with Averroes on this topic than is often thought. By examining briefly the view of Maimonides and Averroes on these matters I hope to make Narboni’s interpretation appear less far-fetched.

This study shows how, in its overall ability to shed light on the vexing complexity of human being, Maimonides’ discourse on matter—treated via metaphors or seen as itself a metaphor—emerges as a venerable guide, pointing the careful reader to the most important truths about perfected humanity within the Guide of the Perplexed. After examining and harmonizing Maimonides’ dual metaphors of matter (matter as the married harlot and the woman of valor) in this way, I show how metaphor as a literary form is itself an illustration of matter’s positive role in the life of the soul. Following upon this consideration of the importance of metaphorical discourse, I end by briefly suggesting how the metaphysics of matter may itself quite generally be characterized as a kind of metaphor.

Maimonides’ moral psychology undergoes development, which this essay attempts to detail. In the early Shemonah Peraqim (Eight Chapters) Maimonides charts out a seemingly anti-Aristotelian view that underscores the specificity of each part of the human soul and the utter distinctiveness of the human species. Human beings share nothing with non-human animals, prima facie not even the most “animalistic” features. Over time, however, a change in Maimonides’ position is to be noted. In his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides adopts a more Aristotelian position, understanding human beings as sharing with nonhumananimals certain sub-rational faculties, but differing from them in their ratiocinative capacities. As in Aristotle, human beings turn out to be essentially rational animals.

There has been a long controversy about the opinions of Aristotle and Maimonides on the best way of life for human beings. They often seem to emphasize a life based on intellectual pursuits as the highest form of existence and to deprecate more social but less rationally demanding forms of existence. This is particularly problematic for Maimonides, for it would imply that the life of a pious person is of little value unless it is combined with intellectual excellence. It is argued that this is not the view of Maimonides, and that he has enough resources in his system to show how a whole gamut of human activities and the lifestyles which go along with them are worthy of respect.

Maimonides is regularly thought to have seen the ideal human as nothing more than a rational animal. In this essay I show that this picture of Maimonides is insufficiently nuanced and reflects a notion of intellectualism thinner and more pallid than that actually held by him. But first I adduce evidence for the standard view from Maimonides’ positions on perfected and imperfected human beings, and from his discussions of immortality, morality, providence, prophecy, and the distinction between humans and animals. Maimonides’ universalism and his messianic vision are also shown to reflect his intellectualism. In the second half of the essay I argue that Maimonides holds that knowledge is transformative. Through an analysis of his discussions of human perfection, prophecy, and love of God, it is shown that learning carried out properly transforms the learner into a new kind of person.

Maimonides uses Aristotelian philosophical idiom to articulate his moral philosophy, but there are fundamental differences between his and Aristotle’s conceptions of moral psychology and the nature of the moral agent. The Maimonidean conception of volition and its role in repentance and ethical self-correction are quite un-Aristotelian. The relation between this capacity to alter one’s character and the accessibility of ethical requirements given in the Law is explored. This relation helps explain why for Maimonides practical wisdom is not recognized as a virtue, and why ethical perfection (a requirement for human perfection) is achievable even by those long-established in ethically unsound dispositions. The power of will to “restore the soul” (by following the prescriptions of the Law) when character is disordered is a significant departure from Aristotelian philosophical anthropology.