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1 3 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 38 / Issue 2
rational power. This sickness is untreatable. The soul doctor who specializes
in improving the moral habits of the appetitive power cannot be in the business
of curing what Aristotle calls “the eye of the soul.” What would the soul
doctor do with the young who belong potentially to the highest class of the
human? To whom would he, as it were, refer them?
The difficulty involved in initiating the soul doctor’s treatment
is significant. Those who are treated must seek treatment voluntarily;
to do so, however, they must recognize the defective character of their own
condition. Yet “those with sick souls…do not recognize their illness, but
imagine they are healthy” (66). Maimonides pretends that this is not a universal
condition of the sick soul, but if all imagine the bad they pursue to be
good and the good they shun to be bad, it seems that it must be (Lerner and
Mahdi 1963, 39). How is the soul doctor to establish a clientele? Can the soul
doctor come to the aid of anyone?
The soul doctor plies his art on the basis of the understanding
of moral virtue articulated in Aristotle’s Ethics. Behind the figure of
the soul doctor stand Aristotle and his teaching. Above all it is Aristotle’s
teaching regarding the noble or beautiful virtues—courage, moderation,
liberality, great-souledness, and so forth (Ethics 1106b36–1108b10, 1115a25–
b13, 1119b15–17, 1120a25–27, 1123a35–b7, 1124a2–4)—that is the basis of his
practice. Justice is never referred to as a virtue instilled by the cure of the
soul that the soul doctor effects (see Addendum 6). Maimonides, therefore,
is able to represent all moral virtues and virtuous states of soul in terms of
a mean between two extremes, both of which are equally species of vice.
Maimonides, however, has modified Aristotle’s teaching in certain crucial
respects: he follows Alfarabi and parts company with Aristotle by including
modesty and humility as among the virtuous states of character (67). Modesty
is the equivalent of Aristotle’s “sense of shame”—but, says Aristotle, though
a sense of shame appears to be a mean between shamelessness and shyness, it
is not a virtue (1108a31–35). Humility seems to have taken the place both of
Aristotle’s great-souledness and his virtuous love of honor (see Addendum 7).
The inclusion of shame or modesty among the virtues and
the substitution of humility for a noble pride indicate the pressure that the
Mosaic law exerts on the understanding of moral virtue. According to Aristotle’s
account, the great-souled man rightly demands the honors due him,
honors equivalent to those we give the gods (Ethics 1123b3–25). He demands
such honors because he understands himself to embody the completion
of moral virtue and understands moral virtue in its completion to be the