A peripheral glance at the mountain of Maimonides scholarship reveals that some things do not change—the contention over the ‘real’ Maimonides, the fires of controversy (4) and the claims of intellectual kinship remain as alive today as they ever were (though admittedly, I don’t know of any recent burning of his work—we are perhaps pacified by merely raking him over the coals.)

To the philosophers he was and will always be the philosopher. To the mystics, his partnership with philosophy meant only that he was an un-confessed mystic. In fact, many of the Chassidic masters have weighed in on the issue and stated unequivocally that Maimonides came to Kabbalah late in his life. Some even suggest that he acknowledged that if he had been aware of certain formal kabbalistic discourses, he would have chosen to have written the Guide for the Perplexed in that superior idiom.

Now, we may, whatever our proclivities may be, enjoy the best of both worlds in that the newly risen category of “philosophic mysticism” has come into vogue—tailor made, it would seem, for the man himself. Surely a mark of true genus is to leave an intellectual legacy that may be marked both “pious” and “agnostic,” “traditional” and “revolutionary,” “medieval” and “modern,” by the scholarly community. David Blumenthal captures a certain grand irony in observing that Maimonides “became a kind of Jewish Kant.” (5) For others, who welcome an opportunity to brandish new labels, emblazon him with innovative characterizations as a “post-rational individual.” Excessive rationality that unexpectedly became mysticism may yet prove to be par for the course.

The Guide, far from merely “rationalizing the Jewish religion” (6) as so many of the critics would say, may ultimately celebrate Homo mystics. (7) As a natural outgrowth of relentless rationalistic pursuits, the prophetic door can swing open ushering in a new spirit of companionship to replace that old sense of “philosophy and mysticism as competing ideological systems.” (8)

Seeing that, as Ivry observes, Maimonides is deeply reliant on “psychological processes and structures that are only partially disclosed,” (9) he further raises the question of intentional deception and contradiction highlighting the introduction to the Guide and the seven principles in play for resolving such difficulties. It should be noted that Ivry refers to the case of “obscure matters” which invite questions about the nature of contra-diction—a foreshadowing of the linguistic turn in modern philosophy where what I can know may be limited by what I can express.

A significant comparison that plays upon this “partial disclosure” comes from Elliot Wolfson’s essay “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle: Maimonides and Thirteenth Century Kabbalah,” which erodes many of the once thought iron-clad divisions between Jewish philosophy and mysticism. True to many postmodern tendencies that open philosophy to a more elastic definition than the classical guidelines permit—Wolfson follows a trajectory that slices across Maimonides and  medieval Kabbalah right on through until the philosophic circus of this past century. More radically still, Wolfson goes onto erase this flight plan and encourages a phenomenological perspective whose supreme allegiance to the “lived time of lived experience” occasions one to reflect how “in the arcade of mind, what comes before may be the effect of what comes after.” (10)

In short what Ivry finds to be an impoverished account of Maimonides’ epistemology and its involvement of psychological processes, may, in Wolfson’s view, follow from a “hermeneutics of esotericism and the ontology of ecstatic experience” shared by philosophy and Kabbalah alike.

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