Maimonides · Theology
Maimonides’s bold, naturalistic theory that prophecy is the highest perfection of the human mind and imagination - a state most people could, in principle, attain.
What is a prophet? The simple picture is of an ordinary person suddenly seized by God and made a mouthpiece - prophecy as a bolt from the blue, given arbitrarily to whomever God chooses. Maimonides found this picture inadequate. In the Guide, he offers a far more sophisticated, and surprisingly naturalistic, theory: prophecy is not an arbitrary miracle but the highest perfection a human being can reach - the natural flowering of a mind, imagination, and character developed to their utmost, which then becomes capable of receiving the divine overflow.
Is this, then, a purely human achievement, with God left out? Not quite. Maimonides holds that prophecy occurs when the divine influence - the ‘overflow’ or emanation from God, mediated through what the philosophers called the Active Intellect - flows into a mind and imagination prepared to receive it. The preparation is human (the long perfecting of intellect, imagination, and character); the overflow is divine. A perfectly prepared person becomes capable of prophecy, like a polished mirror capable of catching the light - but the light itself comes from God. God’s role, strikingly, is mainly to withhold prophecy from those otherwise prepared, if He wills; the overflow comes naturally to the ready unless God prevents it.
Maimonides was careful to set Moses entirely apart from all other prophets - a distinction central to Judaism. Ordinary prophecy, on his theory, works through the imagination: it comes in dreams and visions, clothed in images and parables, which is why the prophets ‘saw’ symbolic scenes that needed interpreting. But Moses, Maimonides held, prophesied without the imaginative faculty at all - receiving truth directly through the perfected intellect, ‘face to face,’ while fully awake, without parable or vision. Moses’s prophecy was thus of a categorically higher and clearer kind: pure intellectual apprehension rather than imaginative vision. This guarded the unique authority of the Torah given through Moses, even within Maimonides’s naturalistic framework.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Maimonides gave a largely naturalistic account of prophecy as human perfection plus divine emanation. Reconstruct the faculties he thought a prophet must perfect, and what made Moses unique, in your own words.
Leads to Abu Nasr al-Farabi.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.