This article addresses two critical questions concerning Maimonides's views on human perfection at the end of his Guide of the Perplexed.Footnote 1 The first is: For those who have reached the highest category of perfection—intellectual perfection, apprehension of the divine, the divine scienceFootnote 2 —what prescription does Maimonides offer for perfecting that perfection, for solidifying the bond between them and God?Footnote 3 I will argue: 1) that there is more than one method—that Maimonides indeed specifies two distinct methods—for stabilizing and intensifying the highest kind of perfection; 2) that the two methods yield two distinct ranks of perfect individuals; and 3) that Maimonides, in his attempt to perfect his own perfection, adopts the second method but achieves only the rank of those who employ the first.
The second question is: What is the significance and purpose of the imitatio dei with which the Guide concludes and which characterizes the life of perfected individuals who are “truly to be praised”? I will contend that imitatio dei represents not a fifth and higher category of perfection—the highest category of perfection remains the intellectual apprehension of the divine—but the meritorious response of some perfected individuals to having attained, in addition to apprehension of the divine, knowledge of God's providence and governance—in particular, knowledge of their limits. What perfected individuals understand is that God's providence and governance reach on their own no further than the species level, so that only human beings can extend divine governance to individuals—by exercising, with respect to them, loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment. For perfected individuals, however, these interpersonal interactions are not morally motivated. They constitute an enhanced form of worship impelled by a desire to serve God and, through this service, to draw still closer to him.
I. Intellectual Perfection
Human perfection resides for Maimonides in intellection of the divine.Footnote 4 The intellectual nature of love of God and closeness to God is a theme that pervades the Guide, all the way through to its final chapter, 3.54. In this closing chapter Maimonides enumerates four categories of perfection: 1) perfection of possessions, 2) bodily perfection, 3) moral perfection, and 4) intellectual perfection; and he pronounces intellectual perfection the highest by far: it is “the ultimate perfection” (635).Footnote 5 With respect to this fourth and highest perfection Maimonides says: “This ultimate perfection pertains to you alone”—that is, it is through this perfection that “man is man”—and, he continues,
Therefore, you ought to desire to achieve this thing, which will remain permanently with you, and not weary and trouble yourself for the sake of others, O you who neglect your own soul so that its whiteness has turned into blackness through the corporeal faculties having gained dominion over it. (635–36)
Knowledge of God is, then, tout court, the highest category of perfection a human being can reach. In the famous parable of the palace in 3.51, intellectual achievement—the correctness or incorrectness of the metaphysical beliefs one holds and the depth of understanding with which one holds them—determines proximity to the “ruler” who is the stand-in for God. Neither observance of the Torah's commandments nor even moral excellence is relevant.Footnote 6
The centrality of knowledge is highlighted also in 1.54:123–24, where, in interpreting Moses's request of God, “Make known to me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee” (Exod 33:13), Maimonides explains that the next set of words in the verse, “that I may find grace in Thy sight,” indicates
that he who knows God finds grace in His sight and not he who merely fasts and prays, but everyone who has knowledge of Him. Accordingly, those who know Him are those who are favored by Him and permitted to come near Him, whereas those who do not know Him are objects of His wrath and are kept away from Him. [italics added]
Even the prophets, Maimonides declares, value only one perfection: “knowledge of Him, may He be exalted, which is the true science” (3.54:636). Although Maimonides in 3.54 cites the prophet Jeremiah, who goes on to identify knowledge of God with knowledge of his loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness (637), we observe that Maimonides himself, in citing Jer 9:22–23, initially stops midway through verse 23, at precisely the point where, he notes, Jeremiah might have stopped but did not. Maimonides indeed aborts the Jeremiah quotation at “that he understandeth and knoweth Me.”Footnote 7 Moreover, Maimonides observes that Jeremiah, in ranking the three acquisitions for which people are to be praised,Footnote 8 reflects not his own view but “the opinion of the multitude.” For it is the multitude that assigns riches to the highest rank, might to the second, and wisdom to the lowest—where wisdom, ḥoḵmah, is taken to mean specifically the moral virtues on account of which an individual is held in high esteem by the multitude. Maimonides reminds us that, even for the prophets, the true ḥoḵmah, the end toward which morality is a mere means, is “the apprehension of Him” (636).
II. Two Techniques
In 3.51 Maimonides turns his attention to “those who set their thought to work after having attained perfection in the divine science” (620), that is, to those who have reached the fourth and highest category of perfection and wish to secure and stabilize their intellectual connection with God.Footnote 9 His concern is with individuals whose intention is
to set their thought to work on God alone after they have achieved knowledge of Him. . .. This is the worship peculiar to those who have apprehended the true realities; the more they think of Him and of being with Him, the more their worship increases. . .. This kind of worship ought only to be engaged in after intellectual conception has been achieved. (620) [italics added]
The purpose of this worship, Maimonides says, is to “strengthen the bond between you and Him—that is, the intellect” (620).
In the discussion that follows, two sets of techniques are identified as means of perfecting the perfection that is apprehension of God, two methods by which those who have already achieved knowledge of him strengthen their bond with the God they now know. The first set of practices, those Maimonides initially recommends, includes: emptying one's mind of everything else while reciting the Šema‘; keeping one's thought free of distraction while reflecting on Torah passages which one is either reading oneself or listening to when they are read aloud by another; occupying one's thought with worldly things only while one is engaged with worldly things; performing the commandments enjoined by the Torah without thinking about anything else while performing them; and, when alone and awake in bed—in those few precious moments—thinking of nothing other than “that intellectual worship consisting in nearness to God and being in His presence” (622–23).Footnote 10 The ends of nearness to God and being in his presence are attainable by “those of the men of knowledge who have rendered their souls worthy of it by training of this kind” (623).
As the chapter continues, however, Maimonides turns to a second group of individuals, those who “through their apprehension of the true realities and their joy in what they have apprehended, achieve a state in which they talk with people and are occupied with their bodily necessities while their intellects are wholly turned toward God” (623).Footnote 11 These exceptional human beings are identified as Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose intellects are united with God through apprehending him and loving him.Footnote 12 The method, however, by which these men reach their heightened state of perfection, that is, the form of worship in which they engage following apprehension—a form Maimonides calls “pure worship of great import” (624)—is not the same as the set of practices Maimonides has just listed. Indeed, what these four men of the second group do, the method or technique they employ for drawing near to God, is one of “spread[ing] the doctrine of the unity of the Name in the world” and “guid[ing] people to love Him.” It is through their guidance of others, through their efforts to promote and disseminate the love of God,Footnote 13 that they cause or “necessitate” (awjaba)Footnote 14 the “permanent state of extreme perfection” that they ultimately enjoy. It is not the other way around. To quote the text:
The fact that these four were in a permanent state of extreme perfection in the eyes of God, and that His providence watched over them continually even while they were engaged in increasing their fortune . . . was necessarily brought about by the circumstance that in all these actions their end was to come near to Him, may He be exalted; and how near! (624) [italics added]
As the text continues, it becomes clear that these four men pursue their final end—“their end . . . to come near to Him”—by directing their efforts toward the achievement of a proximate end, namely, “the end . . . to bring into being a religious community that would know and worship God . . . to spread the doctrine of the unity of the Name in the world and to guide people to love him, may He be exalted” (624). And it is because of these efforts (“Therefore”) that their unique rank “befitted them.” Motivated by their end of drawing nearer to God, they expend efforts to create a community of God-loving people (this constitutes their “pure worship of great import” [624]); as a result of these efforts they achieve their goal: they draw so near to God (“and how near!” [624]) that they alone are able to conduct their daily affairs “with their limbs only.”
For Maimonides, both sets of those who attain perfection and continue afterwards to “set their thought to work” and “turn wholly toward God” qualify as prophets (620). It does not appear, however, that “prophet” in this context denotes one whose divine overflow continues its flow from the intellect onto the imagination (2.36); rather, it seems to indicate one who yearns for closeness to God, a closeness that surpasses basic intellectual apprehension. Nevertheless, the way in which Maimonides amplifies “setting their thought to work” and “turning wholly toward God” (620) makes this post-apprehension orientation appear as drily intellectual as the mastery of the “divine science” itself. Maimonides explains that those who have attained perfection in the divine science will now “direct all the acts of their intellect toward an examination of the beings with a view to drawing from them proof with regard to Him, so as to know His governance of them in whatever way it is possible” (620). Although the fervor and passion of the perfected individual's yearning for closeness to God—albeit a closeness that remains always essentially intellectual—comes to the fore almost immediately, as Maimonides notes the “great joy” Moses experienced when “he was there with the Lord” (Exod 34:28) (620), and persists throughout the rest of 3.51, it remains the case that the first thing Maimonides sees fit to say about perfected individuals post-apprehension is that that to which they turn their attention in their desire to come near to God is the drawing of proof regarding his governance. In Section V, I offer a suggestion as to why, for Maimonides, knowledge of divine governance is the step that follows apprehension of the divine science but precedes engagement in practices that constitute imitatio dei.
III. Two Ranks of Perfected Human Beings
Although the first method—the practices Maimonides outlines for drawing ever nearer to God, practices culminating in concentration on the divine during precious stolen moments of solitude—is effective in strengthening the bond between perfected human beings and God (“you can do so” [621]), and thus is capable of producing individuals of a rather extraordinary rank, it is nevertheless the second method, the one that neither requires nor recommends seclusion and solitude, that is responsible for the emergence of the patriarchs and Moses.Footnote 15 To sharpen the distinction, we may contrast the case of Solomon with that of Moses and the patriarchs. David encourages his son Solomon to: 1) endeavor to apprehend God, and 2) endeavor to worship him after apprehension. But, with respect to the latter Maimonides adds: “Mostly this is achieved in solitude and isolation. Hence every excellent man stays frequently in solitude and does not meet anyone unless it is necessary” (621). Solomon is thus enjoined by his father to become a perfected person of the first group, whose members can concentrate exclusively on God only when they withdraw from the world, those “excellent men” who “begrudge the times in which they are turned away from Him by other occupations” (621–22). By contrast, perfected individuals of the second group can concentrate exclusively on God no matter what worldly pursuits they are engaged in and so have no need for seclusion. Those in this latter group are noted for their experience of joy and their rejoicing (623, 625, 627);Footnote 16 and they, unlike those in the first group, are constantly in God's presence and not only intermittently so. By devoting themselves to creating a community of believers for the sake of drawing near to God and by exerting themselves out of love for him, they bring about for themselves an unprecedented and unparalleled closeness to God, a state in which they perform all their worldly actions “with their limbs only” (624).Footnote 17
Both groups must make an extra effort (3.51:618) to catapult themselves out of the state of merely having entered the inner part of the dwelling, as outlined in the parable of the palace, and into a state in which they are in the presence of the ruler.Footnote 18 The extra effort of the first group consists in the practices outlined by Maimonides, those having to do with the Šema‘, prayer, Torah reading, the performance of miṣvot,Footnote 19 the attention to worldly occupations in circumscribed times, and, finally, the securing of moments of withdrawal and solitude for concentration on God. The extra effort of the second group, however, consists in spreading the doctrine of God's unity and guiding people to love him; they engage in “pure worship of great import” (624).Footnote 20
IV. Maimonides's Method and Rank
According to Maimonides, then, the fostering of the love of God in others is itself a means to the attainment of the higher rank within the highest category of perfection. This higher rank—not a higher category of perfection but a higher level within that highest category—is permanent immersion in God and unwavering union with him, the level achieved, Maimonides says, by Moses and the patriarchs. It is also, he says, a level that will forever elude people like him.
What Maimonides says so poignantly about himself is, in Pines's translation: “This rank is not a rank that, with a view to the attainment of which, someone like myself may aspire for guidance” (624). Although Pines, followed by Schwarz, recognizes two possible meanings of this ambiguous sentence—either 1) “Someone like myself cannot aspire to be guided with a view to achieving this rank” or 2) “Someone like myself cannot aspire to guide others with a view to their achieving this rank” (624, n. 32)Footnote 21 —I think a third possibility is likely the correct one, namely, 3) “Someone like myself cannot aspire to guide others with a view to my achieving this rank.” Since Maimonides is one who guides and not one who is guided, the first reading, reading 1, seems improbable. Reading 2 is problematic as well, for the contrast Maimonides draws is surely between the rank that the patriarchs and Moses achieve and the rank that a person like himself can achieve. Would it not be odd for him to be contrasting the rank of those he guides with the rank achieved by the patriarchs and Moses who do the guiding? If we therefore adopt the reading I propose, reading 3, then what Maimonides is lamenting is that, despite the fact that he, too, like Moses and the patriarchs, guides others, seeking to bring them to the recognition of the truth about God and to the love of him, he cannot aspire to that to which Moses and the patriarchs could aspire, namely, to guiding others with a view to attaining for themselves the end of drawing so near to God that they are permanently and uninterruptedly in his presence and under his providence.Footnote 22 Although Maimonides adopts their method—that of “guiding people to love God”—he does not attain their success. And so he continues: “But one may aspire to attain that rank which was mentioned before this one through the training that we described.” In other words, although Maimonides pursues the guidance track in seeking to draw closer to God, nevertheless, the highest rank he (and others like him) can aspire to is that of those on the miṣvot track.Footnote 23
That Maimonides guides others is beyond doubt. First, of course, is the obvious fact that he names his book Guide of the Perplexed. Beyond that, the Epistle to R. Joseph with which the Guide opens states Maimonides's intention to offer guidance to R. Joseph in the study of texts. 3.51 begins with the guidance it will provide to those who have attained apprehension of God (618) and concludes with the following remark: “This guidance is sufficient in view of the purpose of this treatise” (628) [italics added]. In addition, in the middle of 3.51, at 3.51:622, Maimonides says: “From here on I will begin to give you guidance with regard to the form of this training so that you should achieve this great end” [italics added]. It is furthermore a plain fact that Maimonides devotes much of his time and energy to composing voluminous works, not for himself but for those who need his guidance: “A man endowed with knowledge,” he says in 2.37, “does not set anything down for himself in order to teach himself what he already knows” (375).Footnote 24
Maimonides indeed labored intensively for the whole of his life to help others come to embrace correct beliefs about God and to observe the Torah's laws properly. Even if in the Guide his main target is R. Joseph and others of his caliber, other works Maimonides wrote were aimed at a broader audience. Moreover, he ministered to his community as legal decisor and spiritual advisor. He was keenly aware of the great need for religious leadership and was singularly unimpressed by the quality of the Jewish leaders of his time. He witnessed the unreflective acceptance by the leaders—no less than by the laity—of crude religious views, as well as their widespread trust in the efficacy of vain and foolish superstitious rites. In his Introduction to the Guide (16), Maimonides indeed points to the exigency of the times to justify his writing a book that contains secrets of the Torah, which are normally not permitted to be discussed openly or publicly. He quotes Psalm 119:126: “It is time to act for the Lord; they have made void Thy Torah.” And in the Introduction to his Mishneh Torah he articulates the source of his concern and his response to it, as follows:
At this time inordinate sufferings befell us and the urgency of the moment pressed upon us all. The wisdom of our wise men and the intelligence of our intelligent men was hidden from us. . .. On these grounds, I [compiled] this work.
It would seem, then, that Maimonides emulated Moses and the patriarchs, engaging in the form of training that should yield the second, higher, rank. Yet he achieves for himself by this guidance no more exalted rank than that of those who spend their time concentrating on the Šema‘, on prayer, on Torah reading, and on miṣvot, those who focus on worldly affairs while tending to worldy affairs and who, only in special moments, fix their thoughts on God alone. In his practice, then, Maimonides resembles the men of the higher rank—though, sadly, he falls short of their achievement. That is to say, Maimonides fails to attain the closeness to God that would enable him to keep his thoughts trained on God always, rather than only in rare moments of seclusion and solitude.
V. Imitatio Dei in 3.54
As we have noted, Maimonides in the final chapter of the Guide, 3.54 (635–36), explicitly endorses intellectual perfection as the highest category of human perfection, by comparison with which moral virtue pales.Footnote 25 Yet this is not his last word.Footnote 26 Just two pages later, Maimonides appears to insist that “the perfection of man for which he may truly be praised”Footnote 27 is one that entails not only that the individual apprehend God but also that he “always have in view . . . loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, through assimilation to His actions, may He be exalted” (638). Since it cannot be that this imitatio dei simply replaces intellection—indeed Maimonides makes clear, twice, on the final page of the Guide (3.54:638) that the pursuit of loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment is to follow the acquisition of “apprehension of Him”—might it represent a higher achievement, as some scholars have thought?Footnote 28
Maimonides rests his conclusion on the two verses he has quoted from Jeremiah, 9:22–23. They read as follows:
(v. 22) Thus saith the Lord: Let not the wise man be praised for his wisdom, neither let the mighty man be praised for his might, let not the rich man be praised for his riches; (v. 23) but let him that is praised be praised for this, that he understandeth and knoweth Me; that I am the Lord who exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth, for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.
As we saw earlier, in Section I, Maimonides initially stops mid-verse, after “that he understandeth and knoweth Me” (636), although he eventually completes v. 23, on 637. He observes that Jeremiah might have stopped there and that indeed he would have stopped there had he thought the “noblest ends” were limited to apprehension of God (637). Moreover, Maimonides notes, if the reason Jeremiah continues beyond that point is in order to amplify “understandeth and knoweth Me,” he might have specified: “that I am One” or “that I have no image” or “that there is no one like Me” (637). Instead, however, Maimonides continues, Jeremiah parses “understandeth and knoweth Me” as a matter of knowing God's attributes—his actions—as explicated by Maimonides himself in 1.54 in his interpretation of Moses's plea before God to “Make known to me now Thy ways” (Exod 33:13). As Maimonides understands God's “ways,” they are the thirteen divine attributes listed in Exod 34:6–7, and it is these—God's acts of loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness—that Jeremiah enjoins the people to know and imitate. According to Jeremiah, then, it is in our compassionate and just deeds that the Lord delights. And Maimonides seems to agree—even though, as we have noted, Maimonides himself does initially stop at “that he understandeth and knoweth Me” (3.54:636). Perhaps it would be fair to conclude that for Maimonides, even though apprehension of God remains the highest perfection for man—and that, no doubt, is why he aborts the quotation from Jeremiah at “understandeth and knoweth”—there may still be some important reason for God's perfect ones to imitate his ways.
The break Maimonides introduces into the quote from Jeremiah is surely significant, as is his suggestion as to how Jeremiah might have interpreted—but did not—the first part of the quotation, “that he understandeth and knoweth Me.” According to Maimonides, Jeremiah might have specified the essentials, the fundamentals, of what God is, the things one knows in knowing God: that He is one, unique, without image. Instead Jeremiah continues by identifying what Maimonides calls attributes of action—features that attach not to God but to his actions, or, one might say, to the effects of God in the world. We have, then, in Jeremiah's verse two different sorts of things one may know with respect to God: 1) things true of him, and 2) things true of his actions. By inserting a break in 9:23, Maimonides separates the two from one another.
As 3.54 draws to a close, it repeats this division by way of commenting further upon the verses in Jeremiah:
It is clear that the perfection of man for which he may truly be praised is the one acquired by him who has achieved, in a measure corresponding to his capacity, apprehension of Him, may He be exalted, and who knows His providence extending over His creatures as manifested in the act of bringing them into being and in their governance as it is. (638) [italics added]
The two apprehensions contained in this passage are, first, “apprehension of Him,” and, second, knowledge concerning his providence and governance. It is the latter apprehension, “this apprehension” (638), which directly precedes the perfection “for which one may truly be praised,” namely, the perfection whereby one “will always have in view loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment.” The sequence of events is, then, as follows: first, there is apprehension of him (which, as we have seen, may be stabilized and intensified either through miṣvot or through guiding others); second, there is knowledge of his providence and governance; and third, human actions follow, actions manifesting loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment in imitation of God's actions.Footnote 29 It is once one apprehends God that one is able to know his providence and governance. But these are grasped as a corollary to what is apprehended as true of God himself: that he is one, unique, and without figure. By the same token, it would seem that the value of and necessity for imitatio dei is a corollary of what one understands with respect to God's providence and governance.
Observe that the distinction between these apprehensions—the one, of God; the other, of God's providence and governance—which appears twice in 3.54 reprises the same distinction found in 3.51 flagged earlier. In 3.51 Maimonides had said that
those who set their thought to work after having attained perfection in the divine science, turn wholly toward God, may He be cherished and held sublime, renounce what is other than He, and direct all the acts of their intellect toward an examination of the beings with a view to drawing from them proof with regard to Him, so as to know His governance of them in whatever way it is possible. (620) [italics added]
In other words, those who go on to cement their bond with God after attaining perfection in the divine science, turn their attention forthwith to the matter of divine governance. We have then the same idea expressed in 3.51 as is found twice in 3.54: that there are two apprehensions, the first, of God, the second, of God's providence and governance.Footnote 30 Yet 3.54 takes an additional step, from the second apprehension to imitatio dei.
Interestingly, Maimonides calls 3.51, a chapter that comes three chapters before the actual concluding chapter, 3.54, “a kind of conclusion.”Footnote 31 And, to be sure, it is a kind of conclusion, for it completes—and concludes—the discussion of providence begun primarily in 3.17 and 3.18. Yet, it is no more than a kind of conclusion, insofar as resolving the matter of providence does no more than pave the way—though it does indeed pave the way—for Maimonides's final word, for his consideration of the place of imitatio dei in the life of the intellectually perfected person.
The resolution Maimonides arrives at in 3.51 with respect to the problem of divine providence and governance, which he calls, just a bit later on in this chapter, his “most extraordinary speculation” (624), is that individual human beings, just like individual members of all species, are vulnerable to chance (625–26), that God's providence extends no further than the maintenance of species, and that the only escape from natural evils is the total immersion in God that renders one immune to bodily sufferings.Footnote 32 In other words, Maimonides embraces in 3.51 the Aristotelian view he flatly rejects in 3.17 (464–66). Events in the natural world are, after all, products of chance (625, 626); the righteous and the wicked are equally vulnerable to evils; the only escape from misfortune is total intellectual absorption in God. There is indeed no difference between a cat's coming across a mouse and devouring it or a spider's devouring a fly, on the one hand, and a ravenous lion's meeting and devouring a prophet, on the other (3.17:466)—so long as the prophet is not, at the moment, absorbed in God but is “distracted.” Having established the moral blindness of nature's order at the level of the individual—whether human or not—its indiscriminate wreaking of havoc on deserving and undeserving alike, and having enthroned chance as sovereign on earth at the level of the individual, Maimonides is in a position, in bringing his Guide to its true conclusion, to treat the matters of divine providence and governance in a way consonant with God's uncompromised transcendence.
As 3.54 draws to a close, and with it the Guide itself, Maimonides turns once again to divine providence and governance. He denies for a second time (the first was in 3.17) the opinion of the “overbold,” the Aristotelian position, according to which divine providence “terminates at the sphere of the moon” so that “the earth and that which is in it are neglected” (637). He spurns the view expressed in Ezek 9:9 that “The Lord hath forsaken the earth,” in favor of the competing assertion by Moses that “The earth is the Lord's” (Exod 9:29).Footnote 33 As Maimonides interprets Moses's utterance, however, it signals, not that God's providence extends over the earth in the same way that it extends over the heavens, but rather that his providence “extends over the earth in the way that corresponds to what the latter is, just as His providence extends over the heavens in the way that corresponds to what they are” (637). In other words, divine providence extends over the earth differently from how it extends over the heavens. Its supervision with respect to the earthly realm of flux and change is, of necessity, unlike its supervision with respect to the permanent and stable heavens. And what is the nature of divine supervision of the earth? The answer to this question is implicit in Maimonides's interpretation of the clause, “For in these things I delight, saith the Lord,” the clause with which, as Maimonides puts it, Jeremiah “completes” the thought he expresses in 9:22–23, the idea that God governs with loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness. According to Maimonides, the meaning of this clause is that “it is My purpose that there should come from you loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness” (637) [italics added]. Maimonides's unmistakable message here is that the way in which God's providence extends to the earth is via those human beings who are able to act in it—as he is not—with loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment.Footnote 34
The perfection that “truly” merits praise derives, as we have seen, from something the person who has apprehended God knows beyond this apprehension, namely, that God's providence as it extends “over His creatures” is “manifested in the act of bringing them into being and in their governance as it is” (638) [italics added]. Having apprehended God (as one and incorporeal), what this individual now knows in addition is that God's providence is limited. It is “this apprehension” (638) [italics added], that is, of the necessarily indirect or vicarious divine governance “in the earth,” that leads perfected individuals who may “truly be praised” always to “have in view loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, through assimilation to His actions, may He be exalted” (638).Footnote 35 “Assimilation to His actions” can refer, for Maimonides, only to the effortful, gracious, and just human governance of peopleFootnote 36 that mimics, yet differs from, God's effortless, gracious, and just governance as evidenced in the heavens and in the establishment of the natural order and in the preservation of and provision for the various species. With respect to the earth, all that God can and does do, according to 1.54:125–26, is bring the whole into being when it has no claim to this benefaction, and give his creatures life and equip them with the necessary means for survival—though all of these are gifts to which they can lay no claim. It is on account of these benefactions that he is called merciful and gracious.Footnote 37 In addition, he introduces into the world both things that appear good to us and things that appear bad to us: on account of the latter he is called jealous, avenging, keeping anger, and wrathful, when in fact he metes out justice as deserved.Footnote 38 In 3.53 God's loving-kindness is associated with his bringing into being “this reality as a whole,” his righteousness with his mercy toward the weak—that is, his governing of living beings through the means of survival with which they are equipped—and his judgment with the occurrence, “consequent upon wisdom,” of relative good and bad things in the world (631–32). None of the kindnesses with which God is credited descends further than the species level—not even judgment. Whereas in 1.54 unwelcome events are associated with the meting out of punishment as deserved, in 3.53 punishment and desert are gone, and unwelcome events are simply “consequent upon wisdom”: the intervening 3.51 has effectively eradicated the idea that God is in the business of punishing the guilty. It falls, then, to perfected human beings—of the fourth category, at whichever rank (“in a manner corresponding to his capacity” [638])Footnote 39 —to extend that macro-level management of the earth to the micro level. In a world otherwise left to chance, in which only those who are immersed in God—and only during the time they are immersed—are subject to divine providence, only perfect individuals whose actions exhibit the traits of divine actions can extend God's providence to the earth in the appropriate way. These perfect human beings are the ones best equipped to mete out mercy-inflected justice in a world in which direct divine judgment is absent. By doing locally what God does cosmically, those who are perfected do on earth the things God cannot do. Those who imitate God's attributes of action, those who after apprehension of those attributes respond to people with loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, ensure that the earth is not, as Ezekiel claims, forsaken by God (Ezek 9:19), but that instead, as Moses declares (Exod 9:29), “The earth is the Lord's.”Footnote 40
VI. Prophecy
The end of the Guide is not especially forthcoming in explaining why some individuals attain the perfection that “may truly be praised” and others do not, why some people who have achieved apprehension of God's providence and governance do take it upon themselves to extend that providence and governance into the earth and others do not. The reader in search of an answer to this question is driven back to the discussion of prophecy in 2.37. There we find a remarkable and illuminating account of what it is that impels some people but not others to go beyond concern for their own personal perfection to tend to the perfecting of others. In 2.37, Maimonides distinguishes three classes of recipients of intellectual overflow: 1) those in whom the divine intellectual overflow reaches only the rational faculty—these are the wise who engage in speculation; 2) those in whom the overflow reaches both the rational and the imaginative faculties—these are prophets; and 3) those in whom the intellectual overflow reaches only the imaginative faculty—these are legislators, soothsayers, augurs, and dreamers of veridical dreams.
Maimonides further subdivides each of the first two classes. In each, the quantity of the divine overflow either may be such as to render the individual perfect but to have no further effect, or may be such that the measure “overflows from rendering him perfect toward rendering others perfect” (375). Note that it is not by quantity of divine overflow that prophets are distinguished from the wise who engage in speculation. Among both prophets and the wise there are those who receive more than the amount of divine overflow needed for their own perfection and those who receive just enough. Not all prophets, then, need be capable of bringing their prophecy to the people. According to Maimonides, those of the wise who do have the surfeit of overflow are “moved of necessity” or “compelled” “to compose works and to teach.” A prophet in this condition will “address a call to the people, teach them, and let his own perfection overflow toward them” (375).
According to Maimonides, the difference between those with an amount of overflow sufficient for the perfecting only of themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who have extra overflow with which to perfect others, is that the members of the first group lack both the ability and the desire to reach out to others,Footnote 41 whereas those in the second group experience a compelling desire to do so (374–75). But why, we must wonder, should additional divine overflow, if it is intellectual, motivate, compel, or create a desire to perfect others? To be sure, such extra overflow might account for the ability to do more than perfect oneself, but why would it “of necessity” move a person to do so? It is striking that of the two—ability and desire—it is the latter in particular that Maimonides credits to the second group. Perhaps that group's greater ability can be assumed: one could not do what one lacks the ability to do.
Let us consider a parallel case. In Guide 2.11, to which Maimonides clearly alludes in 2.37 (375), the overflow that emanates from God onto the separate intellects and from them onto the Active Intellect and beyond is compared to the way in which the overabundance of wealth that a very rich man has is passed on to a second man and then to a third:
It is as if you said, by way of example, that there is an individual who has wealth sufficing only for his own necessities, no residue being left over from it from which someone else might receive a benefit; and that there is another individual who has enough wealth for a residue to be left over from it for the enrichment of many people, so that this one may give a measure of it to another individual through which this second would also become rich, while a residue is left over from it that suffices for the enrichment of a third individual. (275)
In this analogous case, although the man who possesses excess wealth has enough money for it to flow from him to a second and then on to a third, there is no implication that the first man will want to, be moved to, or, a fortiori, feel compelled to, share his wealth with the second and third. Indeed, Maimonides acknowledges in Mishneh Torah, Laws concerning Moral Conduct 1.1, that there is “one type of individual who is so greedy that all the money in the world would not satisfy him. Of him it is said: ‘For one who loves silver, no amount of silver will suffice’ (Eccl 5:9).”
Just as Maimonides recognizes that simply having more silver than one needs does not in itself create the desire to part with the surplus, he must surely also see that the wise who write books and teach, and prophets who address a call to the people and seek to lead them to perfection, are moved by something other than surplus intellect.Footnote 42 What is true of God, namely, that his excess intellect simply spills over from him down the chain of intellects to the Active Intellect, is not true of human beings who must purposefully choose to direct their excess intellect to others. Composing works and teaching and addressing a call and leading people to perfection does not happen by itself; it is anything but automatic.Footnote 43
What is it, then, that spurs some of the wise, but not others who are equally able, to compose written works? What is it that inspires some prophets but not others—even if they are equally perfect in intellect and imagination—to reach out to the people? Just as there is something that induces some abundantly wealthy people to share their wealth while others hoard theirs, there must be something that motivates some intellectually able persons to act on their ability to perfect others while others do nothing. Although Maimonides points to “this divine overflow” as responsible for “moving them and by no means letting them be quiet, even if they met with great misfortunes” (375), it is evident that “overflow,” in the case of human beings, signals a fierce passion to serve God. Maimonides indeed quotes Jer 20:8–9, where Jeremiah confesses that, after suffering reproach and derision all day, he made up his mind not to continue to speak in God's name—but he could not stick to his resolve: “There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I weary myself to hold it in, but cannot.” Not all perfected individuals, however, discover within themselves so powerful a desire for imitatio dei, so compelling a wish to serve God by extending his governance into the earth. And so, not everyone achieves the perfection “for which one may truly be praised.”Footnote 44
VII. A Final Question
One question still remains: if Maimonides, as 2.37 certainly suggests, prefers those perfect individuals who treat others with loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, to those who do not, and if he believes, as in 3.54, that only the former “may truly be praised,” why does he in 3.54, in discussing the third category of perfection, namely, moral perfection, so harshly disparage it and caution specifically against “wearying and troubling yourself for the sake of others”?
This perfection regarding moral habits is, as it were, only the disposition to be useful to people; consequently it is an instrument for someone else. . . . Therefore you ought . . . not weary and trouble yourself for the sake of others, O you who neglect your own soul so that its whiteness has turned into blackness through the corporeal faculties having gained dominion over it. (635–36)
The answer, it would seem, lies in the phrase “for the sake of others.”Footnote 45 For whereas Maimonides clearly approves of wearying and troubling oneself with respect to others, he apparently disapproves of wearying and troubling oneself “for the sake of” others.Footnote 46 The two commendable reasons to engage in imitatio dei are, as we have seen: 1) for the sake of bringing oneself closer to God; and 2) in service to God, as a way of completing for God the task of governing that he himself cannot complete.Footnote 47 The severity of Maimonides's reproach to those who weary and trouble themselves for the sake of others should decisively dispel any illusion that in the end the Guide recommends service to others as a third-category moral activity. The exercise of loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment that is encouraged as the Guide comes to a close is firmly rooted in the fourth category: it requires apprehension of (the limits of) God's providence and governance; and it is driven by a passion to draw ever nearer to him.
VIII. Conclusion
The ultimate perfection of man is surely intellectual. Yet it comes with a demand: to extend God's providence into the earth. Any person whose apprehension of God, “in a measure corresponding to his capacity” (3.54:638), proceeds beyond apprehension of God to the discovery of the nature of divine governance can take up the charge. It is not, then, as Pines would have it, that the limits of human knowledge make the political life the highest form of existence possible for human beings,Footnote 48 but rather that an additional apprehension, beyond apprehension of God, namely, knowledge of the nature and limits of divine governance, a knowledge attained only after attainment of the divine science, calls upon those who know to serve God through imitatio dei.Footnote 49 Those who answer this call are arguably the most praiseworthy human beings,Footnote 50 insofar as they not only know God and his providence and governance, but translate their knowledge into action—for his sake.
