Two short texts about the creation of the world by Moses Maimonides and Meister Eckhart: comparison of approaches to the philosophical hermeneutics of the biblical myth

The article compares the interpretations of two medieval philosophers – Moses Maimonides and Meister Eckhart – on the first verse of the book of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." An attempt is made to understand to what extent Maimonides' point of view influenced Johann Eckhart. Maimonides claiming a philosophical justification for the creation of the world ex nihilo actually justifies with the help of reason not the logical and philosophical consistency and persuasiveness of the concept of creation but the philosophical certainty of the biblical story of creation. However, Meister Eckhart offers a variant of philosophical exegesis based to a much greater extent on logical argumentation. He is not afraid to recognize the numerical multiplicity of things in the universe which at the same time is one in its various parts since the Creator is one. The analysis shows that monotheism has a theoretical core common to Judaism and Christianity but the variants of its understanding arising as a result of the hermeneutics of the text fundamentally separate the medieval philosophy of Judaism and Western Christian scholasticism from each other.