So much has been written about Maimonides's Mishneh Torah that one might wonder whether any paradigm-shifting insights could still be added. It is certainly difficult to imagine an intriguing original thesis that explains the whole Mishneh Torah in an entirely new way. Yet David Gillis has produced just such a work. Gillis's thesis is that the structure of the Mishneh Torah emulates the cosmic structure of the universe as described by Maimonides in “Laws of the Foundations of the Torah.”
The fourteen books of the Mishneh Torah imitate the ten astronomical spheres and the four elements that make up life as we know it, according to the Islamic Aristotelian description of the universe. The ten astronomical spheres themselves correspond to ten separate intellects that emanate from God. This hierarchical depiction of the universe understands God to affect each level of existence, whether separate intellect, sphere, or material being, even as each level of existence directly affects the level below it. Each level (except for the first, God) is thus lower than the one above it, but affected by the higher level to become like it, that is, in Gillis's language, to return to it. Gillis understands the entire Mishneh Torah to follow a similar schema: the Book of Knowledge, the first of the Mishneh Torah’s fourteen books, affects the structure of all subsequent books, even as each book follows directly from the previous book. Indeed, Gillis divides up the Book of Knowledge, and, while it is harder for me to see the cosmic significance of its five treatises, its first section, the “Laws of the Foundations of the Torah,” is said to resonate throughout the whole first book and indeed through the remaining fourteen books. Gillis identifies the first ten books of the Mishneh Torah as concerning laws between man and God, and he connects these books to the cosmic emanation. This emanation plays out in such legal concepts as love (which decreases as one is removed from the Book of Knowledge), fear (which increases with that removal), and holiness (which becomes less internal and personal as one is removed from the Book of Knowledge and more external, relating, e.g., to the temple). The final four books of the Mishneh Torah constitute a kind of return to the source of emanation. They begin with criminal law and move to a description of the messianic, or as Gillis puts is, “from Dystopia to Utopia” (278–85). On the whole, then, the Mishneh Torah presents a microcosm of divine emanation and return to the original divine source. Gillis's presentation sets up his readers to ask whether that return is truly rational or is itself, somehow, less than rational and so less adequate. Consequently, his readers may ask: Is the connection to God provided to Jewish society by the Law a true connection, or must an individual take up the purely rational connection to the divine sought in the Guide of the Perplexed on his own?
Unfortunately, Gillis's writing style is an obstacle to his intriguing thesis. The book reads more like a dissertation that intends to show off the breadth of the author's knowledge than a focused argument. Thus the introduction is a seventy-nine-page account of art and literary models that is really not necessary for the thesis, particularly since the author's account of art is derived more from romanticism and twentieth-century art history than the Aristotelian notions of technē or mimēsis that may have influenced Maimonides through his Arabic sources. Additionally, chapter 5 presents a stimulating discussion of the midrashic sources behind the Mishneh Torah’s laws pertaining to destroying divine names and the accounts of Jacob's ladder; yet this discussion is not clearly connected to the rest of the book. Perhaps it would have been better as a separate article? The text of the book is also very repetitive; arguments and claims appear numerous times—even large block quotations are repeated (e.g., Mishneh Torah I.3.9 appears on pp. 123, 168, and 212 and Mishneh Torah X.11.12 appears on pp. 126 and 262). This is regrettable because with some serious editing the volume could have been much easier to read.
Unfortunately, the book is also problematic when it comes to source material. The argument of the work concerns an emanation schema that the author frequently calls “Neoplatonic.” Yet this term is never adequately explained; while the author attributes the notion to Plotinus and al-Farabi, he does not compare the primary sources. Rather, he reads Plotinus primarily through Alfred Ivry and Richard Wallis, and al-Farabi through Herbert Davidson and Majid Fakhry. This is significant because even though the emanation schema of the Mishneh Torah is supposed to be derivable from its own principles (see pp. 295–302), there may be aspects of emanation that present-day readers could miss that could be quite clear in the works of medieval and ancient authors. Moreover, the argument that the Mishneh Torah is derived from its own principles is itself derived from Eileen Sweeney's account of axiomatic form in Proclus. How do we know if Maimonides had this concept of axiomatic form? According to Sweeney (in “Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2015 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/medieval-literary/), the axioms that Proclus draws on are Neoplatonic metaphysical principles. Even if Maimonides adopted axiomatic form in the Mishneh Torah he does not explain those axioms there and one would still need to study his Neoplatonic sources in order to understand them.
Gillis, though, is a Big Idea person. He develops a schema that describes the entire Mishneh Torah, even while many details of the sources of the schema are still not understood. He does not get bogged down in the intricacies of Jewish law, like Jacob Levinger, Isadore Twersky, or Moshe Halbertal, but examines each book from a bird's-eye view, from which he draws perspective on the whole. His arguments are original, ambitious, and generally interesting, even if they require more detailed analyses.
