Aquinas and Maimonides on the Possibility of the Knowledge of God: An Examination of The Quaestio de attributis [Hardcover]

Purpose Moses Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed is pervaded by a p- manent tension regarding the possibility and extent of the knowledge of God by a created intellect, which lies at the roots of the 13th century controversy over Maimonides writings. While Maimonides asserts that its purpose is to give indications to a religious man for whom the validity of our Law has become 1 established in his soul and has become actual in his belief, one of its early opponents, Meshullam ben Solomon, writes referring to him: Those who deny the proper attributes of God speak out 2 until faith has been drained out of man. He will instead claim to be determined to know the God of my fathers and my 3 thoughts are continuously of Him. Meshullam understands that despite Maimonides interest in preserving his readers faith, he leads them to skepticism by denying the possibility of any positive knowledge of the essence of God.The Dispute on the Divine Attributes.- Aquinas and Maimonides on the Divine Names.- The Quaestio de Attributis and Zechariah 14, 9.- The Quaestio de Attributis and the Limits of Natural Knowledge.- The Knowledge of the Existence of God.

Thomas Aquinas wrote a text later known as Quaestio de attributis and ordered it inserted in a precise location of his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard more than a decade after composing this work. Aquinas assigned exceptional importance to this text, in which he confronts the debate on the issue of the divine attributes that swept the most important centres of learning in 13^th Century Europe and examines the answers given to the problem by the representatives of the four mainstream schools of his time: the Greek mystic Dionysius Areopagita, the Latin Saint Anselm of Canterbury, the Jewish rabbi Moses Maimonides and the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina.
This in-depth study of Thomas Aquinas Quaestio de attributis (lƒÈ