What Were They Thinking?: The Philosophies of Maimonides and Aquinas

Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas are the two pre-eminent Jewish and Christian thinkers of the medieval period. They shared a passion for applying the rationalist methods of Aristotle to questions of belief. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed sought to provide the minority Jewish community with the intellectual instruments to understand God in a context in which they contended with the much more populous and politically powerful Christian and Muslim majorities.

In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas set out to address every conceivable issue that defined Christian thinking up to his time—from the question of God’s existence to the nature of good and evil to the treatment of non-Christians. Join Ori Z. Soltes, author and Georgetown University professor, in a consideration of how these two gigantic thinkers differ and where they share common ground, both generally and in particular—and how they offer relevance to our own world of thought and action.

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