Reason, scripture, and the limits of language › Why positive attributes create a problem

An attribute is something predicated of a subject: for example, calling a person learned or patient. In ordinary cases, we distinguish the person from the quality. Someone can acquire knowledge, lose patience, or possess one quality without possessing another. Maimonides asks what happens if that structure is applied to God.

His concern is divine unity. If God consists of an essence together with distinct properties added to it, the account seems to introduce composition. God would be understood through elements or features whose relationship requires explanation. For Maimonides, this conflicts with the uncompounded unity that an adequate account of God must preserve.

In Part I, chapters 50–60, he examines the difficulty through different kinds of attribution. The criticism is especially directed at positive descriptions of the divine essence. It should not be summarized as a ban on every grammatical sentence beginning “God is.” The question is what that sentence means and what kind of knowledge it claims to convey.

Nor is the solution to imagine a human quality enlarged without limit. Infinitely much human knowledge would still be described through the kind of property humans possess. Maimonides challenges the assumption that the familiar meaning can simply be magnified until it becomes adequate to God. The issue concerns the kind of predication, rather than merely its degree.

These arguments depend on substantial premises. A critic can question whether predicating a perfection really introduces composition, or whether there are ways to use positive language without dividing its subject into parts. The Guide offers a position within that dispute. It does not make objections disappear by calling divine unity a mystery.