Reason, scripture, and the limits of language › How to read the limits of language

The Guide gives us several questions for any proposed description of God. Does the language attribute a body? Does it describe an action or claim to disclose an essence? Does a positive predicate preserve a human meaning that the argument has ruled out? If a negation is offered instead, what establishes it? These questions follow from the distinctions developed in Part I.

They also expose the account's difficulty. If our positive concepts do not disclose God's essence, how much understanding remains? Maimonides answers through existence, justified negation, and knowledge of actions. A critic may judge those resources insufficient. Another reader may find that removing a misleading image is itself a substantial intellectual and religious achievement.

The question about God's hand was therefore a beginning. A person can reject bodily imagery while continuing to describe God as an enlarged human subject. Maimonides asks the reader to examine the assumptions built into the description itself. His account of inquiry aims at understanding that can acknowledge its limits without replacing thought with an unexamined picture.