  Here, we have a uniquely modified set of Plotinian insights that feature prominently in Maimonidean thought. For Plotinus (following Plato’s own highlighting of a Form of the Good over and above the Form of Being), God is himself a pure One identical to goodness per se, and is as such entirely above and beyond intellect and even entirely above and beyond being. In the Theology of Aristotle tradition God is identified with pure unity and goodness, but is as such also identified with a pure grade of being. And while the Theology of Aristotle itself describes God as the maker of Intellect, as we move into the reception of this tradition into al-Farabi and Avicenna, we find that qua pure being and goodness God is also a pure intellect—a point which adds a decidedly Aristotelian element to the description of God. Thinkers such as Maimonides working within the Theology of Aristotle and Aristotle traditions in this way combine Plotinian and Aristotelian insights about God, mutually highlighting the Plotinian sense of God as pure unity and the Aristotelian sense of God as self-knowing intellect. Working within this set of parameters, Maimonides and others are also helped to a sense of God as the ultimate cause of all being (and not simply a picture of God as a cause of motion, as one finds in Aristotle proper).