Preface: Theocracy and the Rule of God

This study recovers the theocratic project of medieval Judaism’s most important philosopher and jurist, Moses Maimonides. Maimonides himself never uses the term “theocracy.” Nor does he anticipate its contemporary social-scientific meaning, traceable to Max Weber, where a predatory clerical elite governs in God’s name – a “hierocracy.”Footnote ⁴ What Maimonides does do, I will argue, is orient human thought and action around the original theocratic idea: the rule of God. This definition – and the term theokratia – was first introduced by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, who identified theocracy as Judaism’s authentic political theory and described it in Greek philosophical terms.Footnote ⁵ Yet the idea of divine rule predates this Hellenistic formulation. The Hebrew Bible often portrays God as Israel’s king. And in the text’s prophetic critique of monarchy, purely secular power is framed as illicit, even idolatrous: “It is Me they have rejected as king,” says God, famously, to Samuel.Footnote ⁶ Here and elsewhere in the biblical narrative, the very request for human sovereignty signals spiritual decay. God alone should reign – not only in heaven but on earth.Footnote ⁷

This definition also gives rise to a paradox. In theory, God’s sovereignty eliminates the need for earthly ethics and politics. In practice, something like human agency always remains necessary. The deity, after all, does not punish criminals, collect taxes, defend borders, or feed the hungry; these tasks must be performed by people. But if that is so, what does it actually mean for God to rule? How can we recognize such rulership in practice? And by what means, if any, can it be realized?

My principal aim in this study is to describe how Maimonides answers these questions. By reconstructing the theocratic project implicit in Maimonides’ writings, I aim to shed new light on Jewish political thought and medieval political philosophy, as well as contribute to current debates about theocracy’s meaning and implications. At the same time, my ancillary aim is to suggest that Maimonides’ response to the theocratic paradox offers resources for thinking about theocracy today. This is a work of comparative political theory; while interpretive and historical in method, it also seeds a normative ground. Maimonides’ complex account of divine rule – and humanity’s role in effecting it – has the potential to, if not resolve, then at least complicate the common portrait of theocracy and democracy as irreconcilable foes.

Introduction: The Return of Theocracy and Maimonides’ Politics Reconsidered

“In a liberal democracy,” writes Jürgen Habermas, “state power has lost its religious aura … It is hard to see on which normative grounds the historical step toward the secularization of state power could ever be reversed.”Footnote ⁸ Habermas’ words reflect a more general thesis: A core feature of modernity is the uncoupling of political legitimacy from religious authority.Footnote ⁹ One aspect of this thesis is sociological. By this view, the secularization of politics should be couched in larger historical shifts – in the collapse of a unified cosmos or the “disenchantment of the world.”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet as historians of political thought have long known, secularization was not only a sociological process but a normative project.Footnote ¹¹ The creation of an autonomous political sphere, one liberated from theology and governed by its own raison d’état, was an aim shared by thinkers as diverse as Hobbes and Locke, Sieyès and Constant, Marx and Mill, Rawls and Nozick. And as Habermas’ words show, this trend continues. Theocracy has been marked for extinction. With rare exceptions, political theory, like politics itself, no longer grounds its claims in God.

God, however, is increasingly on the march. Over the past several years, movements with theocratic aspirations have gained in both intellectual influence and real power throughout the world. In 2014, ISIS declared itself an Islamic “caliphate,” and at one point controlled broad swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. In Israel, a political party openly calling for replacing democracy with religious rule sits in the present governing coalition. And in the United States, the rise of Christian nationalism has brought dominion theology and Catholic integralism into the political mainstream. Such punctures in the secularization thesis have prompted a range of scholarly responses. Political scientists have produced a rich empirical literature on religion and democratic citizenship.Footnote ¹² Sociologists have investigated the phenomenology of “post-secularism” and “desecularization.”Footnote ¹³ And political theorists, often building on Carl Schmitt’s theory of “political theology,” have uncovered theological sources behind modernity, human rights, liberalism, democracy, and solidarity.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet an important theoretical lacuna remains: the normative and conceptual analysis of theocracy itself.Footnote ¹⁵ One might be tempted to dismiss theocracy’s rise as a political-psychological aberration – an outgrowth of contemporary anomie, fracture, and conspiratorial thinking. But theocracy is also a political theory; it makes fundamental claims about justice, morality, and authority; and it has a long and complex intellectual history. Thus if theocracy truly is emerging as a rival to liberal democracy, Habermas’ confident assertions should be reposed as questions: In age in which political legitimacy is understood in almost universally secular terms, why do theocratic ideas retain their appeal? Are there, in fact, “normative grounds” for de-secularizing governance? What, in short, has theocracy meant, and what might it still mean today?

In this study, I contribute a new perspective to these questions by elucidating Maimonides’ theocratic project. Maimonides has been the subject of a vast scholarly literature, including first-rate studies of his political thought in general, and on specific issues such as kingship, required beliefs, social ethics, messianism, and the philosophy of law.Footnote ¹⁶ He is a central figure not only in Jewish studies but in philosophy, where his influence on a diverse range of thinkers – in the West and in Islam, from the Middle Ages through the present – has been well-documented.Footnote ¹⁷ Even so, he has only rarely been interpreted as theorist of theocracy.Footnote ¹⁸ And with few and notable exceptions (which I address below), he is not frequently read by political theorists.Footnote ¹⁹ This oversight is understandable: While there are political arguments throughout Maimonides’ corpus, his philosophical masterpiece, The Guide to the Perplexed, is framed as addressing not rule and collective governance, but theological puzzles (how can we know a transcendent God, the existence of evil) and individual tensions (philosophy and Judaism, contemplation and action). His legal writings, including his monumental Mishneh Torah [Code of Law, lit. “Repetition of the Torah”], encompass the whole range of Jewish law and belief, much of it having no connection to politics. His ethical texts are concerned with cultivating virtue. He left us no explicit work of political theory.

Yet by revisiting Maimonides’ debt to the Islamic philosopher al-Fārābī, I argue that among Maimonides’ core aims was to transform the meaning of God’s rule – and, especially, humanity’s role in realizing it. Theocracy is often thought to quash human agency: It evokes an overpowering God and Weber’s repressive clerics (or Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor). Likewise in Maimonides’ own time, many thinkers, including Jewish ones, sought to zealously guard God’s omnipotence – minimizing human freedom, insulating revelation from reason, and making God the author of every natural cause and individual choice. For Maimonides, by contrast, individual providence is up to us. Gifted with free will, we can discipline ourselves, cultivate our virtue, and, through the careful study of the sciences and philosophy, attain theoretical knowledge of God. And when we succeed, we come not only to know and love God; we serve as agents of divine rule on earth, acting on insights gleaned from accessing the Active Intellect, the lowest level in Maimonides’ Neoplatonic cosmology. In its highest form, therefore, human reason is identical with revelation, human action with providence. Maimonides, to be sure, thought this achievement was rare. But just as the intellect has gradations, from true belief to real knowledge, so too does providence. Divine rule is delegated: Theocracy – the governance of God – requires, rather than reduces, human agency. Whether God rules is in our hands.

To be clear, my aim here is not a wholesale revision of Maimonides. To advance my thesis, I sometimes take sides in interpretative disagreements without being able to fully argue for my position (though I do try to cite these disputes where possible). And perhaps the best-known of these debates – about whether and how Maimonides’ Guide should be read esoterically – originates from his most famous reader in political theory, a thinker who likewise regarded Maimonides’ project (or “teaching”) as both indebted to al-Fārābī and deeply, though covertly, political: Leo Strauss.

Strauss first argued that the Guide has a secret message in two essays which appeared within a year of one another in the mid-1930s.Footnote ²⁰ Both are premised on a basic assumption: the unbridgeable gap between law and philosophy, revelation and reason, Jerusalem and Athens. Maimonides, according to Strauss, regarded philosophy as alien to the Torah. He “took it for granted that being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive.”Footnote ²¹ Consequently, the Guide, for Strauss, cannot be about its overt aims – philosophy, theology, ethics, or even religion. Its true aims instead are “political,” based on a “necessary connection between politics and metaphysics (theology),” rooted in Plato, and transmitted via the “Platonizing politics of al-Fārābī.”Footnote ²² What is the nature of this politics? According to Strauss, the metaphysical discussions we find in Plato’s Laws, al-Fārābī’s The Political Regime, and Maimonides’ Guide are merely rhetoric designed to sustain social order for the sake of a philosophical elite. Indeed cultivating obedience, according to Strauss (and following Spinoza), was the Torah’s chief aim too: “the teaching of these philosophical disciplines … is identical with the secret teaching of the Bible.”Footnote ²³ “Law” is imposed on the vulgar; “philosophy” is practiced by the wise. The two groups should be kept separate. And Maimonides, perceiving an unbridgeable gap between the active and contemplative life, sought to secure, via the Guide, a situation where the latter could persist.Footnote ²⁴

Fully addressing Strauss’ thesis would require tracing it back through his analyses of medieval Islamic thought and Plato, something beyond the scope of this study.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, one of the characteristics of esoteric reading is that it cannot be disproven: Any data point one might cite against it can be reinterpreted as further evidence in its favor – evidence, in Herbert Davidson’s words, for “how deep the plot ran.”Footnote ²⁶ My aim vis-à-vis Strauss will thus be a more modest one: to show that a theocratic reading of the Guide is just as viable as one based on “Platonic politics.”Footnote ²⁷ Strauss, I believe, was importantly right about both the political nature of Maimonides’ project and his debt to al-Fārābī. Where he erred was in interpreting that project as a secret critique of Judaism and his reading of al-Fārābī as esoteric. Whatever al-Fārābī’s own intentions, Maimonides, I will argue, took his predecessor’s thought as providing a serious metaphysical and political roadmap for manifesting divine rule. And he saw in the center of that map not a route toward contemplative withdrawal, but one where true knowledge, identified with revelation, manifests in moral and political action. Maimonides does distinguish between the philosophical elite and ordinary people. He was not an Enlightenment thinker and did not write in such a context. But neither does he try to dupe the masses into serving the privileged. He seeks to bring both, according to their abilities, to true ideas about God.

I begin by examining the role of al-Fārābī’s “first ruler,” a philosopher-prophet-legislator who, by imitating divine governance, acts as God’s viceroy on earth. Maimonides, I show through a close reading of the introduction to his youthful Commentary on the Mishnah, applies al-Fārābī’s template to Israel’s rabbinic leaders and legal texts. He then applies it again in the Guide to Moses and the Torah itself. While God exercises a general providence through the natural cycles of form and matter, he delegates individual providence to us. God’s rule on earth, in other words, requires human rule – an imitation of God. Yet while al-Fārābī, an eternalist, models his imitatio dei on Plato’s Timaeus, I argue that Maimonides, who in the Guide incorporates important elements of theological voluntarism, draws on his own concept of God. In doing so he broadens the scope of divine rule: Maimonides makes it the task not only of a sui generis “first ruler”, but of anyone whose knowledge of God motivates his love of God. A critical but concealed aim of the Guide is thus to identify, train, and motivate such individuals. And this finding, already unorthodox, suggests an even more striking implication: Maimonides’ project was not only to describe God’s rule; it was to realize it. Maimonides’ ideas, I conclude, suggest innovative ways by which theocracy and democracy might, counterintuitively, be reconciled.

1 “God’s Governance in Another Way”: Delegating Divine Rule in Al-Fārābī

Maimonides’ debt to al-Fārābī has been known since at least Salomon Munk’s nineteenth-century French translation of the Guide, and following the appearance of Strauss’ essays, scholars have tracked it across a range of Maimonidean themes and texts.Footnote ²⁸ Strauss pinned it to al-Fārābī’s The Principles of Beings – a work which, as Strauss noted, bears the “authentic title” The Political Regime, and which Maimonides, in a famous letter to his translator, singled out by name: “All that al-Fārābī wrote, and in particular the Treatise on the Principles of Beings, is entirely without fault … for he excelled in wisdom.”Footnote ²⁹ Here I will argue for the equally formative effect of a different Farabian text: his Book of Religion. While Maimonides drew from across al-Fārābī’s oeuvre, Religion is distinctive in describing how human rule, properly constituted, can serve as an extension of divine rule. God, for al-Fārābī, governs on earth through human beings. In this way, he gives Maimonides the language to frame and articulate his theocratic aims.

Toward the end of Religion, al-Fārābī discusses the purpose and methods of “political science,” a discipline focused on different ranks of human and divine “rulership.” He concludes by linking the two together:

Al-Fārābī is a complex and enigmatic thinker, and the full meaning of this passage is not easy to discern at first blush.Footnote ³¹ My first task is thus to elucidate it – to explain al-Fārābī’s terms, and, in particular, to make sense of what he means in saying that God governs the virtuous city “in another way.” How al-Fārābī defined these terms was, we will see, also critical for Maimonides’ own understanding of divine rule: emanation, revelation, providence, happiness, and especially, the “first ruler” and religion.Footnote ³²

For al-Fārābī, as for many medieval thinkers, not only were “metaphysics” and “theology” bound together as a single discipline; both were infused with a political dimension: To study God’s providence was to study His “rule” or “Lordship.”Footnote ³³ The means of such rule, above all, was “emanation.” In Neoplatonic philosophy – originating in figures like Plotinus and Proclus and then adopted, via the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, by many Islamic philosophers and by Maimonides – emanation explains how the world can exist independently of God while remaining tethered, in some sense, to the divine.Footnote ³⁴ Unlike an occasionalist model in which God materially controls (indeed recreates) every atom at every moment, emanation stresses the deity’s role not in matter but form. Through the unfolding of ideas, God bestows reality on all creatures. He sustains their essence: Given that matter cannot exist on its own, a thing without form would cease to be. For an emanationist, therefore, what defines things are ideas. And human beings, consequently, retain a path to knowing both the world and the divine. When we cognize something’s form we call this insight – a fulfilled or actualized mind. And when we develop our insight sufficiently, through knowledge of physics, metaphysics, and theology, we attain the “Active Intellect.” This is the lowest rank in the heavenly hierarchy. But it is nonetheless connected, through emanation, to God (the “First Cause”).Footnote ³⁵

Emanation allows al-Fārābī to divide divine rule between general and particular providence, and, in this way, to open an important space for human agency. God’s providence over the order of nature, via emanation to the supernal intellects and spheres, is ineluctable. Over human beings, however, divine rule is not guaranteed.Footnote ³⁶ The ethereal intellects always choose the good. Human beings err: We may not know how we should act; or we may choose, based on our free will, to act in the wrong way. Bad actions arise when we prioritize “the pleasant and the useful, honor, and similar things.” Good ones arise when we instead prioritize something al-Fārābī calls “happiness.” When we make happiness our ultimate end, he writes, “everything a human being generates is good.”Footnote ³⁷

If happiness is the linchpin of divine rule, how can we attain it? Here Neoplatonism’s revision of Aristotle becomes crucial. Aristotelian cosmology is sometimes portrayed as abandoning human beings to their fate; the First Cause, thinking only the most perfect thoughts (and therefore only about itself), is utterly unconcerned with the “sublunary” realm – that is, with people.Footnote ³⁸ Emanation transforms this dynamic. For by virtue of our contact with the Active Intellect, we retain a link to the deity. And this leads to a radical implication: In its most highly developed form, our mind approaches unity with the divine mind.Footnote ³⁹ It is this experience of fully actualizing the intellect – of fusing one’s mind with the Active Intellect – that al-Fārābī refers to as “happiness”: “When the human intellect achieves its ultimate perfection, its substance comes close to being the substance of this [divine] intellect.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Attaining happiness is thus an essentially cognitive endeavor: It requires knowledge of the “superior science” of metaphysics. Indeed al-Fārābī emphasizes that all other intellectual pursuits and individual virtues – including moral virtue – have value only in so far as they contribute toward this end: “These sciences merely follow the example of that [metaphysical] science, which is supreme happiness.”Footnote ⁴¹

At the same time, al-Fārābī argues that happiness translates not only to the highest form of theoretical insight but also practical knowledge. It tells us how to act. And this is critical, because human social organization often impedes human perfection. Al-Fārābī’s question is how these barriers might be dismantled – how the achievement of happiness by one remarkable individual might propagate happiness more broadly. He finds his answer by transposing his ideas into a religious register:

In philosophy, writes al-Fārābī, the source of happiness is the Active Intellect; in religion, we call it the “holy spirit” or “trustworthy spirit.”Footnote ⁴³ In philosophy, the Active Intellect bestows theoretical knowledge via the flow of ideas emanating from the first cause; in religion, we call such a flow “revelation.” And this leads to a final, remarkable, conclusion. While philosophy would term one who achieves the Active Intellect a “perfect philosopher,” in religion, he goes by another name: the “supreme” or “first” ruler.Footnote ⁴⁴

2 “The Philosopher, Supreme Ruler, Prince, Legislator, and Imam Is but a Single Idea”: Al-Fārābī’s “First Ruler”

As many have observed, the first ruler is al-Fārābī’s version of Plato’s “philosopher king”: an individual who, having experienced the truth, is tasked with returning to the cave in order to enlighten his people – to bring them to “happiness.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed for al-Fārābī, only by having a capacity for rule can one be a philosopher in the fullest sense: “To be a truly perfect philosopher one has to possess both the theoretical sciences and the faculty for exploiting them for the benefit of all others according to their capacity. Were one to consider the case of the true philosopher, he would find no difference between him and the supreme ruler.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Importantly, this means that while a first ruler will be a founding figure, the qualifier “first” marks his intellectual-political rank rather than temporal position. One first ruler might closely follow another, or arise generations later, or never appear again.Footnote ⁴⁷ What distinguishes him is philosophy: the extent to which he has fully actualized his intellect.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus when al-Fārābī argues, in the passage quoted earlier, that the first ruler is responsible for realizing God’s governance on earth, it is the “truly perfect philosopher” who he has in mind. Or as he puts it elsewhere, “the Philosopher, Supreme Ruler, Prince, Legislator, and Imam is but a single idea.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In effecting popular happiness, however, the philosopher hits a number of obstacles. One is circumstantial: resistance from his own society. By himself, a person may have all it takes to transform his philosophy into rulership. Yet “if after reaching this stage no use is made of him” – if his insights are shunned – he will simply retreat into a contemplative life.Footnote ⁵⁰ Three other obstacles are more pervasive. First, for people to grow in knowledge, their society must unify its norms, practices, and institutions around this end. How can such a harmony be achieved? Second, philosophy’s insights are universal; yet every group of people is inexorably particular, differing from one another in time, place, and history. By what means can theoretical claims be fit to national forms? Finally, there are wide variations in human reason between different people: In some, it is as robust as can be; in others, it is fledgling and frail. Is it possible to translate complex ideas from physics, metaphysics, and theology into a medium accessible to all? Al-Fārābī’s response to each of these questions is the same: the development and dissemination of religion – or, as he calls it in Religion, the “kingly craft.”Footnote ⁵¹

For al-Fārābī, the kingly craft is the means by which a nation’s first ruler directs his people toward ultimate happiness and divine rule. He describes it as a kind of imitation of God applied to politics:

In al-Fārābī’s description, the individual providence effected by the first ruler should mirror God’s general providence. Both tasks are compared to the body: Just as a human being’s parts harmonize into a single organism, so does God harmonize the cosmos, and a first ruler harmonize the nation. I will have more to say about al-Fārābī’s political imitatio dei, and how it compares to Maimonides’ own, further on. For now, it is enough to note that while al-Fārābī’s body-politic metaphor is Platonic, its practical upshot reflects the innovations of Islamic philosophy: a “common religion,” one which “brings together [a people’s] opinions, beliefs, and actions.”Footnote ⁵³

Forging such a religion, and so removing the obstacles to popular happiness and divine rule, requires that a first ruler have two primary qualities. The first is “deliberative virtue” or “what the Ancients call ‘prudence’”: an ability to tailor philosophy’s universal insights to the character, dispositions, lifeways, and experiences of a particular people.Footnote ⁵⁴ Acquiring this faculty, al-Fārābī stresses, does not come through philosophical contemplation. It requires “experience arising from long involvement” in “single cities and nations.”Footnote ⁵⁵ To be a first ruler, in other words, a philosopher cannot just have theoretical insights. He has to spend time in the cave. Consequently, even holding philosophy constant, religion is going to look different based on its time, place, and context.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet such differences, for al-Fārābī, are consistent with universality. So long as a religion achieves social harmony toward the end of happiness, it is “virtuous,” regardless of its particular laws, rituals, and practices.Footnote ⁵⁷

The first ruler’s second virtue is excellence “in persuasion and in representing things through images” – that is, in “imagination.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Imagination is necessary because of the wide intellectual gap between philosophers and everyone else.Footnote ⁵⁹ Consider the attainment of happiness. For a philosopher, gaining theoretical knowledge means developing his mind, via mastery of the sciences, to actualize his potential intellect, join the Active Intellect, and so receive emanation from the First Cause. For an ordinary person, however, such a framework is hopelessly abstract. He needs terms which personalize the deity and dramatize the experience. Thus instead of knowledge we have “revelation,” coming from a state of spiritual elevation, via divine volition, to contact the “holy spirit,” and so receive prophecy from God. Both descriptions, al-Fārābī argues, refer to one and the same experience. Yet from the first ruler’s perspective, “the images and persuasive arguments are intended for others, whereas as far as he is concerned, these things are certain.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The philosopher, in other words, has demonstrative proofs for his ideas; others have “unexamined opinions”: correct views about the conclusions of philosophy but without their underlying reasons.Footnote ⁶¹

Did al-Fārābī truly seek to enlighten ordinary people and realize the rule of God? Or was his theocratic philosophy merely an elaborate ruse, a “rhetoric” of metaphysics to be deployed by a philosophical elite for securing obedience?Footnote ⁶² Strauss believed the latter. And in Strauss’ view, this reading was shared by Maimonides and influenced him profoundly.Footnote ⁶³ It is true that al-Fārābī was aware of an esoteric tradition of writing.Footnote ⁶⁴ He did sometimes dissemble about what he actually believed.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nonetheless, he appears earnest about his primary aims. Someone who fails to strive for happiness, for al-Fārābī, is not merely a misguided commoner; he has “sickness of soul” and should seek moral counsel.Footnote ⁶⁶ The philosopher’s theoretical knowledge takes priority; but he is also obligated to “facilitate instruction of the multitude.”Footnote ⁶⁷ And what the first ruler legislates is not merely his own arbitrary will. His intellect, perfectly realized through philosophy, is effectively indistinguishable from the Active Intellect. He is directly connected to what most people call God. The laws he makes are God’s laws; his rule is God’s rule.

Today we cannot but read al-Fārābī after Machiavelli, Dostoevsky, and Marx. Yet doing so may also tint our vision, turning what is undoubtedly a paternalistic project into an entirely cynical one. Indeed, Strauss, in his essay, seems to suggest that al-Fārābī was secretly channeling Nietzsche: “Al-Fārābī had rediscovered in the politics of Plato the golden mean equally removed from a naturalism which aims only at sanctioning the savage instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master and the conqueror; and from a supernaturalism which tends to become the basis of slave morality.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Whatever al-Fārābī truly intended, I will argue in the rest of this study that Maimonides took his predecessor’s theocratic project seriously. In al-Fārābī’s thought, he saw both the desired end – the actualized rule of God – and the means of achieving it – the organization of society around the pursuit of happiness: theoretical knowledge for the philosophically adept, true beliefs for others. And as we have seen, the most important of these means, for al-Fārābī, is religion – or what he sometimes refers to, more simply, as “law.”Footnote ⁶⁹

3 “Judgement Is God’s”: Law and Philosophy in Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah

Maimonides first hints at human beings’ role in divine rule in a middle chapter of the introduction to his Mishnah Commentary.Footnote ⁷⁰ He does not mention al-Fārābī by name in this work. But in a colophon at the Commentary’s conclusion, he notes that while composing it he had been actively studying philosophy and the sciences – a curriculum which would have surely included al-Fārābī. Maimonides’ stated task in this section is to explain the Mishnah’s structure: why certain tractates were placed where and what they are fundamentally about. Among the most well-known of these is Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers], an aphoristic text about ethical and pietistic virtues. One might expect to find Avot at the beginning or end of the Mishnah – as a framework for approaching the law or for making sense of its totality. Instead, it is located after tractates on civil law, the high court, and punishment. Why?

In answering, Maimonides draws a straight line between divine and human judgment:

Maimonides here is referring to Avot’s opening, which famously traces how the Torah, after being received by Moses at Mount Sinai, was transmitted to Joshua, the elders, the prophets, and each generation’s leaders in a continuous chain. In a straightforward sense, then, the narrative is about the nature of the law: as revealed, and hence authoritative. This is how Maimonides reads it too. The text’s first function, he writes, is “to inform that the consensus and the received tradition are true and correct.”Footnote ⁷²

Yet in his gloss, Maimonides also quietly interpolates a more radical conclusion about judges themselves. When a judge adjudicates a point of Jewish law he is not merely doing his best to arrive at a correct ruling. In his capacity as judge, he is actually playing the part of God. His judgment is God’s: “it is all one judgment.” What we find here, therefore, is an echo of al-Fārābī’s account of the dependence of divine rule on human rule. Just as a first ruler, for al-Fārābī, serves as a necessary agent of God’s governance, so too, for Maimonides, does a judge. He is an instrument of divine will and wisdom.

Does Maimonides really mean that judges realize the rule of God? Here two objections might be raised. First, there is an important difference between the legal horizon faced by al-Fārābī’s first ruler and any comparable figure in Maimonides’ thought: the immutability of the law. For al-Fārābī, first rulers are made by philosophy, not chronology; while rare, they are not sui generis. And since the law expresses the first ruler’s theoretical knowledge – shaped, via prudence, to the history and context of a given people – he, or a first ruler who follows him, can change it based on his judgment.Footnote ⁷³ Maimonides, by contrast, repeatedly stresses both the Torah’s permanence and Moses’ incomparable status as legislator.Footnote ⁷⁴ Second, one might suspect that Maimonides’ words here are meant metaphorically. By this view, he is doing something like what Carl Schmitt would later call ‘political theology’: drawing an analogy between judge and God in order to understand the former’s role.Footnote ⁷⁵ Schmitt thought the sovereign was akin to God, not an actual deity. Maimonides, accordingly, would be making a claim about the judge’s authoritative position, not his ontological status.

Maimonides, I will now show, responds implicitly to both of these objections in his Mishnah Commentary introduction. To begin with, while the written law of the Torah is indeed fixed, the relative fluidity of the oral law permits moments of codification which, in practice, function as new foundings. The text of the law and its legal authority are retained. But changes can be effectively introduced in its interpretation and underlying rationale.Footnote ⁷⁶ After concluding his catalogue of the Mishnah’s contents, Maimonides signals that Jewish history has seen three such founding moments, each associated with one of Israel’s greatest figures:

Moses established the written law; Judah the Prince compiled the oral law; and Rav Ashi composed the Babylonian Talmud.Footnote ⁷⁸ One might think that the latter two cases were simply clarifications of what came earlier – that the law, once revealed, existed in its full form, and all that was needed was a reorganization. Yet when Maimonides had discussed the Mishnah’s codification earlier in his introduction, he had noted a “secret” [sod] in the transmission of the oral law. “Explanations that were transmitted from the mouth of Moses have no disagreement about them in any way”; in all other cases, however, the law is a product of applying hermeneutic principles to the scriptural texts.Footnote ⁷⁹ Only a fraction of the oral law, in other words, was given to Moses. The rest had to be created. Its present form is the result, in large part, of human reasoning.

On its own this might not seem especially remarkable; law, by its nature, must be interpreted. Yet since there are, in fact, very few oral laws which are untouched by disagreement, several important implications follow. First, the scope of the Sinai revelation narrows dramatically. What God gave Moses was limited: the written law, the oral law’s general principles, and the means to extrapolate their details, along with a limited number of “laws of Moses from Sinai” which cannot be derived hermeneutically (like units of measure).Footnote ⁸⁰ Second, the formation of Jewish law is now conceived as an essentially dynamic, creative, and agential process. As Maimonides remarks about the pre-Mishnaic period: “There was no time that there was not contemplation and innovation of the matters.”Footnote ⁸¹ Or as he writes about the centuries before the Talmud’s codification: “One generation after another did not cease from reflecting upon it, and investigating and explaining it.”Footnote ⁸² Third, rational arguments, rather than claims to revelation, take center stage. The law unfolds through “research and reasoning”; decisions follow “the words of one thousand and one sages, not … the words of one thousand glorious prophets.”Footnote ⁸³ Fourth, laws can change, sometimes dramatically, between different codifications. Maimonides never states such a view explicitly. But he comes close in the Guide through his analysis of the lex talionis: “One who causes loss of a limb must lose the like member. … Don’t worry that we [today, in rabbinic law,] assess damages here. My present aim is just to warrant the biblical laws, not our jurisprudence.”Footnote ⁸⁴

These four implications point to a final and critical one: Moments of codification not only assemble and clarify the law but effectively produce it.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Mishnah and Talmud both retain multiple legal views and reasonings. Yet by excluding certain opinions, and carefully curating others, the scope of juridical possibility is dramatically narrowed. The law is further specified. And in the process, jurisprudence is transformed and adapted for changed circumstances – something closely resembling what al-Fārābī called “prudence.” Consider Maimonides’ description in the Mishneh Torah of what motivated Judah the Prince’s codification of the Mishnah: “Fresh calamities were continually happening, the wicked Government was extending its domain and increasing in power, and Israelites were wandering and emigrating to distant countries. He therefore composed a work to serve as a handbook [lit. ‘to be a hand for all’].”Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the Mishnah was hardly just a handbook; it became, in effect, the law itself. The same is true with each subsequent codification: The new text, rather than the ebb and flow of oral argument, is transformed into the source of study and authority. The Sinai theophany becomes one founding moment – the most important, to be sure, in both philosophical principle and popular consciousness, but by no means the only one in the practical development of the law to Maimonides’ day.Footnote ⁸⁷

Even with these remarkable powers, however, Judah the Prince and Rav Ashi are not yet first rulers in al-Fārābī’s sense. They seem instead to embody what he called “jurists”: unphilosophical successors to the first ruler who personify the religion’s virtues, espouse its true beliefs, and faithfully apply the law.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet in continuing his Mishnah Commentary introduction, Maimonides suggests a deeper purpose for their projects, and with it, a deeper dimension to their nature. After offering three juridical reasons for Rav Ashi’s composition of the Talmud – explaining disputes, rendering decisions, and justifying legal innovations – he turns to a fourth: including derashot, parables. These stories, Maimonides is quick to clarify, are not merely homilies. “When one observes these narratives with intellectual observation, [matters] of the true good – about which there is nothing higher – are understood from them. And from them are revealed theological matters and true things … that the philosophers attained over the generations.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Foremost among these matters: The “Ma‘aseh Bereshit” and the “Ma‘aseh Merkavah” – what he will later identify, in the Guide, with physics and metaphysics.Footnote ⁹⁰ Here the echoes of al-Fārābī begin to grow louder. The sages, Maimonides seems to imply, were not merely jurists. They were philosophers.

4 “The Holy One Has in His World Only the Four Cubits of the Law”: Knowledge, Providence, and Human Agency

Rav Ashi’s inclusion of derashot becomes a springboard for Maimonides to launch a lengthy digression on the centrality of philosophy for religious leadership. Israel’s sages, he argues, devoted every effort to pursuing theoretical knowledge – what al-Fārābī called “happiness.” And like al-Fārābī’s first rulers, they used their imaginations: They embedded philosophical insights into parables, hinting at truths without prompting the masses, “according to the shortcomings of their natures,” to recoil from philosophy’s rigors.Footnote ⁹¹ The greatest of Israel’s sages were thus masters of both law and philosophy – instruments of God’s governance.

Maimonides prefaces his discussion by citing a well-known saying from the Talmud, Tractate Berachot: “The Holy One, blessed be He, only has in His world the four cubits of the law (halacha) alone.”Footnote ⁹² Standardly interpreted, this aphorism stresses the centrality of Torah study: God cannot be apprehended like the world’s other phenomena, so if you want to know Him, study His law. For Maimonides, however, such a reading cannot be correct. It implies that in the pre-Sinaitic age “there was no share to the Holy One,” that “the law alone [is] the appropriate focus and the other wisdoms and traits are thrown behind His back.”Footnote ⁹³ And the truth is just the opposite. The Sages, Maimonides insists, actually saw other disciplines merely as steps “through which to get to theology.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The latter was their chief occupation, something to “pore over” night and day, the “end of wisdom.”Footnote ⁹⁵ It is only because such “wisdom has disappeared” from Israel that philosophy’s true import, and central place in Torah, is no longer recognized.Footnote ⁹⁶ The passage from Berachot must therefore be read another way: “But if you investigate this matter intellectually, you will see in it a wonderful thing from the wisdoms. … And I will elucidate them for you in order that it be an example for the rest of what comes to your hand. And hence, place your heart to it as is fit.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Maimonides’ words, still oblique, become intelligible as he unfolds his analysis in the next chapter. His discussion centers around teleology and “the ancients,” a likely reference to Aristotle.Footnote ⁹⁸ These philosophers, he writes, saw man’s ultimate end as the comprehension of “intellectual secrets” – a movement from the potential to actual intellect.Footnote ⁹⁹ And “the most honored of the ideas,” he continues, is “the unity of the Holy One … knowledge of Divinity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet contemplation is not man’s only telos. The “purpose of the world,” Maimonides writes, is a man who is not only “wise” but “good.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ He then explains his meaning:

Tikkun is a form of the verb le-taken, which literally means “repair,” “correct,” or “set right.” But readers familiar with Maimonides’ later writings will recall another place where he invokes the term: the Mishneh Torah’s “Laws of Kings and their Wars.” Le-taken ha-‘olam is the activity by which Israel’s kings establish public order and justice.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is also the activity which identifies the true messiah – a man who brings the whole world to know and serve God: “He arranges the whole world [le-taken et ha-‘olam kulo] to serve God as one.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yoshar, from the root for “straightness,” connotes integrity, honesty, and equity. And Maimonides, notably, uses the word only one other time in his Mishnah Commentary introduction: to describe the ideal judge, whose rulings should be “acts of yoshar.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Maimonides thus brings us full circle. “The four cubits of the law” are not means by which we know God. They are means for turning us – or more precisely, those human beings who acquire knowledge of the deity through physics, metaphysics, and theology – into agents of God. Just as in al-Fārābī (a “sage of the transitory nations”) true philosophy manifests in action: the “kingly craft” of religion, and especially, religious law. In Maimonides’ earlier metaphor, “heart” – what we would call “mind” – will extend one’s “hand” – a metaphor for “deed.” It will lead to tikkun and yoshar, actions which bring order and harmony to the world. When fully developed, therefore, human judgment for Maimonides is not only akin to God’s judgment; it is His judgment. God rules the world through virtuous laws made, interpreted, and applied by exceptionally wise human beings – those who have achieved a measure of providence.

Indeed Maimonides, fittingly, concludes his discussion by returning to Rav Ashi. After noting that he has “digressed from the matter we were involved in,” Maimonides explains that it was nonetheless valuable to “edify the faith and stimulate the pursuit of wisdom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And then he describes Rav Ashi’s completion of the Talmud: “The greatness of his composition and its powerful utility were testimony that the spirit of the Holy God was in him.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Rav Ashi, we are meant to infer, was not only a jurist but a true philosopher. While he did not change the law, he did refound the nation. He was a first ruler for Israel.

In his Mishnah Commentary, Maimonides does not give us a complete picture of how theoretical knowledge produces this kind of providential agency. A discussion of such theological details, he writes, would be “very lengthy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ We, however, can fill them in from later texts, and especially from the Guide.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Through emanation, God exercises His direct providence over the intellects and spheres and His general providence over nature.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But “in His world,” the achievement of individual providence is up to us. It depends on the extent to which we develop our rational faculties, attain the Active Intellect, and so receive the stream of divine emanation:

As in al-Fārābī, emanation thus plays a key role in Maimonides’ understanding of both knowledge and providence. By emanating the forms, God creates and continually sustains the world. And when we use our reason to form true ideas or concepts about the world – when our subjective apprehension rises to the level of truth and objectivity – we apprehend nature, in effect, just as God does.Footnote ¹¹² We call this “revelation”Footnote ¹¹³

The existence and extent of our providential agency, in turn, depends on the quality of our knowledge, something Maimonides stresses in a well-known discussion in the Guide of free will. In a chapter about which he tells us to give “special attention, beyond any other,” Maimonides explains that while many causes are “ascribed scripturally to God,” in truth the deity delegates causation to both supernal and human forces: the intellects (“angels”) for nature, and free will for human beings. God, Maimonides writes, “imposed that choice on this rational animal.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Readers who were influenced by Strauss, including translator Shlomo Pines, saw this phrase as Maimonides’ covert rejection of free will – a hint that even our apparently free choices can be traced, causally, back to God. Accordingly, he renders the relevant words as “necessitated this particular free choice.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ As Lenn Goodman demonstrates, however, this misconstrues the Arabic. Maimonides here follows Aristotle’s distinction between two forms of agential actions: those that are “voluntary” by virtue of stemming from our will (a capacity we share with animals), and those that are genuinely free because they reflect rational choice.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Thus what God “necessitated” was not what we decided. It was that we need to decide freely. Far from denying free will, Maimonides actually insists that human beings cannot but choose freely, with the quality of our choices depending on the caliber of our reason.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Reason, as we have seen, is itself of divine provenance via emanation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ And so individual providence, reflected in our free choices, differs based on the extent of one’s rational development: “It varies with our perfection as human beings.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Just as for al-Fārābī, therefore, for Maimonides divine rule depends on human knowledge. The deity governs both heaven and earth. But he governs the latter in “another way”: through us. Just as God delegates cosmic governance to the spheres, he delegates self-governance to us via our free will. The greater our knowledge of God, the more providence we have.Footnote ¹²⁰ The more providence we have, the more our actions can be said to reflect God’s wisdom. And insofar as our actions reflect God’s wisdom, God can be said to rule. Maimonides alludes to this idea later in his Mishnah Commentary, in his essay on Avot itself (“Eight Chapters”). A man’s goal, he writes, should be to “subordinate all the faculties of his soul to reason”; he should “keep his mind’s eye fixed constantly upon one goal, namely, the attainment of the knowledge of God.”Footnote ¹²¹ Yet such knowledge is not idle. For Maimonides, quoting Avot, it manifests in action: “Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven.”Footnote ¹²² Commonly interpreted, this aphorism is about piety and intention: A person should strive to do the right thing for the right reasons. But we are now positioned to read it differently. For when our actions are the result of true knowledge, Maimonides has shown us, they are not ours alone. They are “for the sake of heaven” – contributions to a theocratic project. They amount, in effect, to the governance of God.

5 “God Governs This World by Way of Angels”: Moses in the Guide to the Perplexed

The bond Maimonides forges between philosophy, action, and divine rule has implications well beyond his Mishnah Commentary. Foremost among them are his views on leadership. This is especially true in the Guide, where, as a number of scholars have observed, Maimonides depicts Moses in a form closely resembling al-Fārābī’s first ruler and Plato’s philosopher king.Footnote ¹²³ For Strauss, Maimonides’ Moses is a “philosopher and statesman … and at the same time a diviner and magician.”Footnote ¹²⁴ His mode is “Platonic politics”: the imposition of a law to achieve obedience for the many and free inquiry for the few.Footnote ¹²⁵ Non-Straussian readings, by contrast, tend to stress his pedagogical role. Maimonides’ Moses becomes a kind of mirror for Maimonides himself, a figure who, by virtue of his unparalleled cognitive attainments, is uniquely positioned to lead his people to greater knowledge of God.Footnote ¹²⁶ What have been passed over between these two appraisals, and what I will seek to bring out here, are his specifically theocratic dimensions. For Maimonides, Moses not only sought to bring Israel to true beliefs about God. He aimed to transform it, as a nation, into an instrument for divine rule.

Maimonides signals Moses’ singular role by reimagining him as an “angel.” “Angels” may be foreign to today’s political thought but they are a central to Maimonides’ scheme for delegating divine governance. The Muslim dialectical theologians (mutakallimūn) fervently shielded the deity’s omnipotence by asserting His miraculous volition over all of reality. They eliminated the natural order.Footnote ¹²⁷ Maimonides, by contrast, argues that God governs the world through the forces of nature. In philosophy, these forces are the Neoplatonic intellects: incorporeal agents which rotate the sphere, regulate the seasons, and function as what we might call natural laws. In the Bible, they are angels.Footnote ¹²⁸ Maimonides notes, however, that angels can also be people: “You can see how an angel might be a human messenger. … And the word is applied to prophets. … He sent His angel and brought us out of Egypt (Numbers 20:16).”Footnote ¹²⁹ In its original context, these words are conveyed by Moses to the people of Edom as part of a plea to transit their territory. A plain reading of the passage thus suggests that the “angel” is one of the supernal beings who helped redeem Israel – the “angel of death” or the “pillar of fire.” Yet Maimonides subtly, but unmistakably, wants us to identify him as a prophet: Moses himself. What are the stakes here?

At issue is nothing less than the crux of theocracy itself: whether any human government can truly serve as an extension of God’s rule. The question hinges on the relationship we have seen between free will, reason, and providence. Not only human beings but also the intellects, Maimonides argues, are conscious agents. They “know what they do and use will and choice in exercising the powers of governance God gives them by emanation, just as we can voluntarily in what emanation empowers us to do.” Even so, their choices are “not like ours.” Whereas human beings frequently err, angels, in the fullness of their reason, always decide correctly. Whereas human choices concern “transient events,” angelic ones regard permanent things, like the motions of the cosmos.Footnote ¹³⁰ Yet this contrast raises a serious problem: How can a revealed law reflect God’s infinite wisdom rather than one person’s partial wisdom? By what means can it realize God’s just rule rather one person’s arbitrary rule? Maimonides’ answer is to again turn Moses into an angel. Ostensibly referring to the intellects, he quotes from Exodus: “Heed him, harken to his voice. Do not defy him. He will brook no trespass from you. For My name is in him (Exodus 23:20–21).”Footnote ¹³¹ The verse right before the quoted passage clarifies that the “him” is an “angel” (malach). It also strongly implies that this angel is Moses. Moses, we thus learn, did not have free will in the way that others do. Like the intellects, it was also involved in ‘exercising the powers of governance’ given to him by God.

The theocratic implications of Maimonides’ comparison emerge even more strongly in light of his theory of prophecy. A prophet disseminates philosophical truths: He translates the emanative flow of ideas he receives from the Active Intellect into accessible words, symbols, and exhortations.Footnote ¹³² Yet Moses’ prophecy, Maimonides repeatedly stresses, was different. He grasped God’s purpose “unmediated by the imagination.”Footnote ¹³³ He “attained to the angelic rank and became included in the order of the angels … he remained a pure intellect only.”Footnote ¹³⁴ And this suggests a startling conclusion. In Religion, al-Fārābī had compared the first ruler’s task in harmonizing his people with God’s in harmonizing the world. “What corresponds to that,” he wrote, “becomes clear to anyone who contemplates the organs of the human body.”Footnote ¹³⁵ In the middle of his discussion of angels, Maimonides uses the same example of bodily organs.Footnote ¹³⁶ And he highlights the role of one angel in particular: the “Active Intellect … the angel, ‘vice-regent of the world’ constantly cited by the Sages” and from whom “all forms stem.”Footnote ¹³⁷ The implication is plain: Moses was no ordinary angel. Elevated to the “rank” of the intellects, he too was a “vice-regent” of God. He was positioned to govern the human world in the same way that the Active Intellect governs the natural world. Likewise, consider how Maimonides, after another oblique scriptural reference to Moses, describes the angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder in the mold of Plato’s philosopher kings: “After rising to a certain rung comes descent with what was gained, to govern and teach those on earth.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Moses was not only connected to the Active Intellect; he was fused with it. Everything he thought and did – the whole content of the Torah – directly channeled divine wisdom. Moses wrote the law; God dictated. Moses legislated; God governed.Footnote ¹³⁹

6 “This Law Is Divine”: The Torah as “Kingly Craft”

By placing Moses on par with the incorporeal intellects, Maimonides can ascribe angelic qualities to the Mosaic legislation: Just as angels’ acts are “ever good,” so are the Torah’s laws; just as angels deal in permanent things, so will the Torah never be replaced. In this way, he can intimate how Moses’ “kingly craft” – the Torah itself – surmounts each of the obstacles to realizing theocracy outlined by al-Fārābī: harmonizing society, rendering philosophy’s insights accessible, and adapting universal ideas for particular contexts. Put another way, in the Guide Maimonides applies the same Farabian template to the Bible that he had to rabbinic texts in the Mishnah Commentary. He shows how it harbors both philosophical truths and practical means for realizing divine rule.

The initial obstacle a first ruler must overcome is forging a social unity directed at “happiness” – that is, knowledge of God. Most human governments, Maimonides argues, only strive to create order. They care “not a whit if people’s views are sick or sound,” but are “concerned only to manage relations in whatever way the ruler thinks promotes happiness as he sees.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A government based on revealed law, by contrast, is also directed toward higher things. Its norms not only secure “bodily welfare” but impart “wholesome beliefs” and “sound views, first about God and then about the angels.” The law’s vital aim, in other words, is to cultivate true beliefs, or ideally theoretical knowledge: People should hold accurate ideas about the divine realm; if they are able, they can then seek out the rational foundations for these ideas. When legislation is so oriented, one can be assured “this law is divine.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Governance thus occupies an invaluable place in Maimonides’ broader teleological understanding of human activities. Unlike Aristotle, who describes the polis as part of nature, Maimonides emphasizes that “law is not natural.” It responds to a paradox: On the one hand, we cannot subsist on our own; on the other, our natural differences generate antagonism.Footnote ¹⁴² The law’s most essential function, therefore, is to create a homogenized layer of shared norms and conventions to smooth our unsociability into “well-ordered community.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Inhabitants of law-governed societies can begin the next stage of human development: cultivating moral virtue. Maimonides details these virtues in a number of places, including most famously in the Mishneh Torah’s tractate on “Human Dispositions” [Hilchhot De’ot]. In the Guide, he divides them into three categories: quelling the appetites and passions; cultivating gentleness and amiability; and achieving purity, sanctity, and holiness.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Yet like social order, moral growth of this kind is only instrumentally valuable. Humanity’s highest rung, “our true end as human beings,” is philosophy: the “contemplation of ideas, the highest and most lasting being of God and the angels.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Accomplishing this end poses a problem, however: Most people are not capable of philosophy.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Like al-Fārābī, Maimonides separates the intellectually adept from the unlearned masses. And while the fixity of this division is a matter of interpretive debate, the stakes, as we have seen, are not merely personal – whether this or that individual will develop fully – but collective and political, a point he hints at in citing al-Fārābī’s lost commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “It is those able to advance morally that Plato said enjoy more of God’s providence.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The path leading from political order to moral virtue to divine knowledge, in other words, is about more than just wisdom. It is about achieving individual “providence” – “God’s governance by another way.” Disseminating philosophy, at a national scale, serves the ends of theocracy. Means must therefore be found to make theoretical ideas accessible to the masses.

Maimonides finds these means in the Torah itself. He sees the Torah’s language as reflecting, in effect, the end product of a Farabian first ruler’s imaginative faculty. It codes philosophical knowledge in religious forms like words, symbols, and images:

Maimonides never credits such images to Moses; he always attributes them to the Torah itself, or to God. Yet those familiar with philosophy – as Maimonides assumes his intended readers will be – will trace their authorship. They will ascribe them to Moses as a first ruler, and their purpose to his “kingly craft”: Israel’s religion.

As a first ruler, Moses draws on his faculty of imagination to render abstract philosophical insights accessible in religious terms and so bring his nation, step by step, to knowledge of God. This education begins with true beliefs. “If we did not receive some ideas somehow by faith,” Maimonides explains, “rather than having to think purely conceptually … everyone would die before learning even whether God exists.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Some of these beliefs, like God’s “existence and unity, knowledge and power, will and eternity,” state truths directly but do not justify them, appealing to authority rather than reason. Others are true only when understood metaphorically but are “critical to civic life”: the “belief that God is filled with wrath toward those who flout His authority,” or the corporeal resurrection of the dead.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Some Straussian readers, noting the parallel between “necessary beliefs” and Plato’s “noble lies,” have argued that they are evidence for Maimonides’ “Platonic politics.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Such beliefs do help sustain social order. Yet as Maimonides repeatedly stresses, their larger point is pedagogical: Over time, some will move past them to real knowledge.Footnote ¹⁵² Through the diligent pursuit of moral virtues and a curriculum of logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences, they will finally reach the study of theology.Footnote ¹⁵³ They will understand bodily resurrection as metonymizing the intellect’s immortality, reward and punishment as poeticizing God’s general providence.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This achievement, granted, will not be reached by many. Yet as with al-Fārābī, this does not imply that the Torah’s simulacrums of philosophy have a cynical aim. They are meant to educate and enlighten, not discipline and oppress, a point Maimonides hammers home by comparing their effect to nurturing children. To teach metaphysics to the unprepared, he writes, “seems no different from feeding meat and bread to a nursling, or giving him wine to drink. That would kill him, of course. … Just so, these true beliefs were veiled … not because they harbor some deep seated ill. … These themes were introduced obliquely because a mind cannot absorb them right from the start.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Maimonides’ more important debt to Plato, therefore, is arguably the distinction in the Meno between knowledge and belief.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ For most people most of the time, true beliefs work as well as knowledge. Israel’s teachers and leaders, however, need sound explanations rooted in philosophy. This is what motivated Rav Ashi’s decision to include derashot in the Talmud, as we have seen. It is also what informed Moses’ choice to begin the Torah with the Account of Creation [Ma’aseh Bereshit]:

Maimonides again mutes the attribution, but those who have seen the Guide through to its end are positioned to understand its meaning. Moses was a philosopher who gained theoretical knowledge of God. But like a true philosopher in al-Fārābī’s sense, this knowledge did not remain confined to itself. It manifested in action: laws which “improve us and enhance our lives in society.” In the Mishnah Commentary, these are assembled in the Mishnah and codified in the Talmud. In the Guide, they are written in the Torah.

To assemble Israel’s religion, Moses also draws upon a second of al-Fārābī’s virtues: prudence or the “deliberative virtue,” the ability to shape philosophy’s universal findings to the mold of a particular people. A first ruler’s fundamental aim is to grow his people’s knowledge. Yet what will be required to effect this aim will differ widely based on time and place. Varied circumstances yield varied obstacles; different nations manifest different characteristics. In the Torah’s context, Maimonides contends, the most important challenge Israel faced was religious: the temptation to idolatry. Idolatry is certainly a grave moral problem, and Maimonides highlights its depraved practices.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ But it is also an epistemological one: By imagining a world of multiple gods and demonic forces, it turns people away from fundamental truths in physics, metaphysics, and theology.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ It derails religion’s eidetic purpose. A major task of Moses’ kingly craft, therefore, was to “free us from those sick ideas” and eliminate the idolatrous practices which sustain them: “The core of our entire Torah and the axis on which it turns is to erase such notions from the mind and efface all trace of them in the world.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Yet in accomplishing this task, Moses had to confront an additional challenge: the distinctive qualities and experiences of Israel itself. A people born in slavery and accustomed to Egyptian polytheism could not be made, overnight, into a nation of philosophers. So, Moses settled for the next best alternative: He “preserved these ways of worship” – a cultus centered on sacrifices – “but shifted them to His name rather than objects manmade or imagined.” Sacrifice, in other words, was retained as a concession to Israel’s religious infancy. Spoken prayer is better; silent meditation is best of all. But just as God does not miraculously change the order of nature, He “does not use miracles to change human nature.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

Maimonides historicization of the sacrifices is well-known, and was one of the Guide’s most controversial arguments. Yet he also makes another, subtler point concerning the sacrifices which, while less frequently observed, is in many ways more revealing:

Maimonides here is quietly advancing a radical claim. Not only was the written Torah revealed only gradually, at different points along the Sinai journey. The content of its revelation was shaped by its contingent history.Footnote ¹⁶³ Originally, Moses wrote the Torah’s civil laws and instituted Shabbat. The former framed the social order, while the latter supplied true beliefs – God’s ex nihilo creation and ongoing providence. Only once the people showed their incapacity for unadorned monotheism was a sacrificial cult finally instituted. These laws were “secondary.”

Like Judah the Prince with the Mishnah or Rav Ashi with the Talmud, Moses attuned his text to his people’s needs. He used his imagination to embed philosophical truths in its stories.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ He applied his prudence to tailor its laws to its time and place. By virtue of his angelic intellect, God “created the words”; but the Law was written “in his own hand.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ He was Israel’s founding first ruler. The Torah was his kingly craft.

7 “Love Depends on Knowing”: Imitating God

Handed only what we have seen, readers of the Guide might conclude that Israel could never produce another great leader. Moses is a singular, incomparable figure – an angel. How could anyone set out to be one of the intellects? Consequently, many interpreters have understood Maimonides as championing the contemplative life. For Strauss and like-minded commentators, the Guide is a coded message sent from one philosophical mountaintop to another. Others, while not necessarily sharing Strauss’ views, have still seen it as following Arabic Neoplatonists like Ibn Bājjah in elevating thought over deed.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ There have been some who read the text as making space for action.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Yet they have often limited this to a rarified few – the prophets, patriarchs, and Moses – and identified it, following al-Fārābī, with politics and legislation.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ I believe Maimonides’ theocratic aims point in a different direction. We should all strive for maximal knowledge of God. We should all try to obtain individual providence. But the status attained by Moses – a fully actualized intellect – is not a prerequisite for action; it is a regulative idea. Anyone whose knowledge of God inspires love of God will seek to emulate God. And what we imitate about God, above all, are His attributes involved in rule.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

The link Maimonides forges between imitation and divine governance is grounded in two key psychological claims, the first being that knowledge of God leads to love of God. One might assume the opposite: Doesn’t studying something require that I care about it first? Yet the kind of love people often associate with piety, Maimonides argues, is not really love. It misapprehends its object: To love God without first knowing Him is, at best, to love the bare outline drawn by true beliefs; at worst, it is to love a version of God who does not exist – one who has a body, emotions, or positive attributes.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ “Love,” he writes, in a chapter which he calls the “seal” of the Guide, “depends on knowing.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ It is what the Sages call “worship of the heart,” where heart, properly understood, means mind.Footnote ¹⁷² Maimonides acknowledges that such love is rare. Most people serve God out of fear of punishment or promise of reward.Footnote ¹⁷³ But he also makes clear that it is not limited to sui generis figures like Abraham and Moses. In the Mishneh Torah’s commandment list, loving God comes third, following on the first, knowing God.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ And Maimonides later expounds upon it in universal, not elitist terms: “One only loves God with the knowledge with which one knows Him. … A person ought therefore to devote himself to the understanding and comprehension of those sciences and studies which will inform him concerning his Master.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Maimonides’ second psychological claim is that people emulate what they love; true love of God, therefore, inspires imitatio dei. In Plato’s Theaetetus, imitating the divine is framed as a duty: We should strive to become as like to God as we can.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Maimonides, too, sometimes uses this language of obligation. “One who governs a state,” he writes, “must emulate His ‘attributes’ to ensure that his actions as a leader are appropriate.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Elsewhere, however, he describes imitating God as a natural outgrowth of love. If God is a being “from whom good ever flows,” a person will want to be such a being too.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Yet as many readers have pointed out, imitating God seems paradoxical for Maimonides. The Guide’s core theological lesson is that God’s essence is unknowable, separated from human cognition by an unbridgeable chasm. What is there to imitate?

The answer, for Maimonides, are God’s attributes of action. God exercises His general providence through nature. As a person delves deeper into nature’s logic, therefore, he earns more insight into divine wisdom.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ He discovers that the cosmological order is good: Ills mostly result from our own free choices – starting wars, oppressing neighbors, drinking to excess.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Where they do come from nature, they are part of the cycle of creation and destruction which gives rise to life itself, in the way a forest fire clears the ground for new shoots.Footnote ¹⁸¹ From nature’s general course we can then cull more specific features to imitate:

Even so, an important issue remains. How can God’s attributes be recognized as such? Nature, after all, is filled within innumerable “acts.” Ewes nurture their newborns; but hawks carry off lambs for dinner. Both are equally natural. Which of the two should we imitate?

Maimonides responds by citing the Torah: “Moses saw all His good, all His works, but Scripture confines itself to these thirteen ‘attributes,’ since they reflect the acts by which He governs humankind.”Footnote ¹⁸³ The Torah itself, in other words, specifies those elements of God’s general providence which we should emulate – the ones concerned with rule, or more generally, “those expressive of our good traits and dispositions.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ It was precisely how “[God] governs humankind,” Maimonides writes, which “was the ultimate object of Moses’ request. Hence his closing words: and know Thee, that I may find favor in Thine eyes. For this nation is Thy people (Exodus 33:13) – whom I must govern, by modeling my ways on Yours.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Still, that cannot be the full story. Moses, as we have seen, was a true philosopher in al-Fārābī’s sense – a first ruler. He arrived at theoretical knowledge of God. The attributes he assigned to God in the Torah were thus derived, presumably, from this knowledge. They had a basis in not merely in tradition but philosophy. Yet even if philosophy is universal, it is not uniform. Unlike the findings of mathematics, those of philosophy and theology are the shakiest and most generative of controversy.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ So it is not enough to say that Moses found God through reason.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ We have to ask: Which God? Who was the deity philosopher Moses discovered and whose rule he sought to imitate?

One might assume that Maimonides’ Moses shares his God with al-Fārābī. Not only did al-Fārābī provide the template for Maimonides’ theocratic project, as we have seen; he makes imitatio dei central to defining the first ruler’s place and functions. Al-Fārābī develops his account of divine imitation from the Timaeus, what he calls Plato’s book on “Lordship” [al-rububiyya].Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Plato here presents the human mind as a kind of microcosm emulating the macrocosm:

Becoming godlike, in the Timaeus, means emulating the divine cosmology. Like the spheres, our minds should be self-sufficient. Our thoughts should be intellectual. Our motions should be volitionless and eternal, propelled not by will but cosmic harmony. Al-Fārābī portrays the first ruler’s imitatio dei in very similar terms:

In al-Fārābī’s description, the first ruler is a distant, almost passive figure. Like the First Cause, he sustains the regime through ideas sent down the ranks of a political order whose harmony closely mirrors that of the cosmos. He does not will; he emanates. He does not command; he “intimates.” He impinges on the world in a purely delegated way.Footnote ¹⁹¹

Maimonides’ Moses, by contrast, is a kind of theological voluntarist.Footnote ¹⁹² He sees the world as created ex nihilo, and only afterward arranged into the delegated harmony of intellects, spheres, and human beings.Footnote ¹⁹³ His God “willed the world to be that once did not exist but now has come to be, by His will.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ And it is this willing and creating deity which he renders, through his kingly craft, into the Torah’s model for emulation.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Plato’s portrait of divine mimesis in the Timaeus neither demands nor implies anything from us morally. How we treat other people – or indeed, how we interact with the physical world itself – is entirely derivative. Everything, quite literally, takes place inside our heads. Moses’ God, by contrast, does not dwell at the heights of heaven. He is actively involved in the world: sewing clothes for Adam and Eve, raining fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, and providing Abraham and Sarah with a son in their old age.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ True, many of the Torah’s narratives are not, for Maimonides, meant to be taken literally. Yet neither are they noble lies. They are religious translations of philosophical ideas: God really could intervene in the world as a manifestation of his Goodness.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ So, by extension, should we.

8 “The Human Attainment Rightly Gloried in Is Ruling Them as He Does”: Rule of God, Rule of the Good

Al-Fārābī, an eternalist, limits imitatio dei to the first ruler, the human embodiment of Aristotle’s First Cause. While the first ruler does delegate his rule, ultimately “God’s governance in another way” is his responsibility. Everyone else obeys him. Maimonides, by contrast, broadens imitatio dei to anyone who genuinely knows and loves God. He does this by carving out a space for divine will: In practice, the natural order is “fixed”; in principle, God could use the same power with which He created the universe to miraculously overturn any aspect of it. It is this principle of divine volition which the Torah’s stories and homilies convey. And it is this principle – not the practice of God’s restraint and mediation – which underlies our imitatio dei. Maimonides does not democratize divine rule in the way Martin Buber later would.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ True “worship of the heart” is rare. But he does open it up to anyone who diligently pursues wisdom. By emulating qualities attributed to God’s Goodness – justice (mishpat), righteousness (tzedakah), and kindness (chesed) – we become, in effect, worldly agents of the voluntarism God opts not to express.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ And through us, the rule of God, Maimonides’ theocratic project, takes on a distinctive form: rule of the Good.Footnote ²⁰⁰

Maimonides confronts al-Fārābī’s view in the midst of a series of chapters on Aristotle’s eternalism. Al-Fārābī, Maimonides argues, believed the world’s permanence was proven, and ridiculed those, like Galen, who considered the issue unresolved.Footnote ²⁰¹ This certainty, in turn, shaped al-Fārābī’s understanding of prophecy. Prophecy posed a key challenge for Muslim and Jewish Neoplatonists: How can God limit revelation? If prophesizing is identical to attaining the Active Intellect, shouldn’t it be possible, in principle, for anyone? Al-Fārābī agrees. The only thing which holds back prophecy is the disposition, knowledge, and training of the potential prophet.Footnote ²⁰² Maimonides takes a different position. Citing al-Fārābī’s On the Intellect, he notes that his predecessor is “clearly right” about the Active Intellect. Where he and all eternalists err is in making the same inferences about God. Ultimately, divine will and wisdom are one and the same; reasons underly all created things. From our limited perspective, however, many elements in the universe, like the precise location of the stars, seem arbitrary, so we assign them to God’s will. The same goes for prophecy: God can withhold it at his will.Footnote ²⁰³

Maimonides’ defense of divine volition holds important lessons for imitatio dei as well. The God of al-Fārābī (and Aristotle) might “stand at the highest, most perfect rank of being.” But He cannot be said to have a “purpose” in His creation. Emulating such a God, by extension, means cauterizing our volition. It means affirming the world as it is: “Notions of intending and determining apply only to what does not yet exist but might or might not, depending on what is determined by the purpose of a subject.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ Indeed for al-Fārābī, the achievement of happiness, in its highest form, requires leaving this flawed world behind. It comes only in dying.Footnote ²⁰⁵ The Torah of Moses, by contrast, is about what we can do in life – for ourselves, and for the sake of heaven. In his Mishnah Commentary, Maimonides had conveyed this idea by reinterpreting the Talmudic saying: “The Holy One has in His World Only the Four Cubits of the Law.” In the Guide, he subtly inverts this aphorism to communicate the same message:

The earth is not just an antechamber. Human beings should not just passively accept the world’s injustices, study philosophy, and wait for death. We have a higher purpose.

Maimonides seals the link between imitatio dei and divine rule in the Guide’s concluding chapter. In the pages just prior, he had reiterated that knowledge of God should be our supreme aim. We should strive for the “intellectual virtues,” not fleeting pursuits like “wealth, health, and character,” a point about which the philosophers and prophets agree: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Let not the wise man glory in his might nor the rich man in his wealth, but let him who would glory glory in this: that he understandeth and knoweth me” (Jeremiah: 22–23).Footnote ²⁰⁷ Maimonides’ elevation of theoretical knowledge has led some readers to argue that his final position, in the Guide, favors the contemplative life. This is understandable: Maimonides does define all other pursuits as means to wisdom. While the Torah’s “acts of piety and morality” are highly valuable, they “hold not a candle to this ultimate goal.” By the end of the chapter, however, this seems to shift. Maimonides returns to the verse from Jeremiah and completes it: “Jeremiah does not stop at naming our highest goal, knowledge of God. … The verse specifies the actions we must know and emulate: kindness, justice, and righteousness (chesed, mishpat, and tzedakah).” This turn has long occupied Maimonides’ interpreters: Is it a “strange” shift in perspective?Footnote ²⁰⁸ A rhetorical device to deceive nonphilosophers?Footnote ²⁰⁹ A return from the fields of philosophy back to the thickets of halacha?Footnote ²¹⁰

What we have seen of Maimonides’ theocratic project suggests an alternative reading. Knowledge is indeed our ultimate end. But knowledge, as we have seen, is neither inert nor idle. It begets action. To be a true philosopher, for al-Fārābī, is also to be a first ruler. To be a “complete” man, we saw in the Mishnah Commentary, means “mind” and “deed,” being “wise” and “good.” Such were men like Judah the Prince and Rav Ashi. And as we learn in the Guide, so too was Moses. Yet what, in practice, does such agency entail? If we can’t be first rulers like Moses, can we still advance God’s governance? Al-Fārābī said no. If a true philosopher’s stature is not recognized by his people, “the fact that he is of no use to others is not his fault.”Footnote ²¹¹ Let the world continue as it may – the philosopher should withdraw, devote himself to contemplation, tend his own garden.

Maimonides, by contrast, believes God’s rulership is a project open, in principle, to all. The Mosaic legislation is immutable; but “every human being may become righteous like Moses.”Footnote ²¹² He explains how in concluding the Guide, reflecting on Jeremiah:

The God of Israel is not the First Cause of Aristotle. He has not abandoned us to our fate. His providence guides both heaven and earth. But He rules over each domain according to what “befits it.” For the intellects and spheres, it is assured. For human beings, God’s governance proceeds by “another way”: through us. What God showed Moses, in the chapter Maimonides refers to here, was “His Good” (Exodus 33:19) – the goodness inherent in God’s general providence, and the goodness by which God exercises providence on earth.Footnote ²¹⁴ What is this latter goodness? Our actions in imitating him. The cosmological order cannot but be good. We, by contrast, have to make this world good by acting with the attributes the Torah assigns to God: justice, righteousness, and kindness. We know God, love God, and emulate God. We give “being” to the world and “rule” over it just as He does.

And this is not only a task for high politics. True, there is a sense in which divine mimesis, for Maimonides, is a “political imitatio dei”: This is what emulating God looked like for Moses.Footnote ²¹⁵ But we should not allow the idiom of “rule” to limit what is in fact a far broader concept. Knowledge of God cannot be switched on or off based on context. It is something a person carries wherever he goes, a “great majesty who is always with him and in touch with him, greater than any human king.”Footnote ²¹⁶ And such awareness, through love, transforms even his most mundane acts. Moses and the Patriarchs could be “engaged as leaders, or in acquiring property,” while “their minds never left His presence.”Footnote ²¹⁷ Some have interpreted Maimonides here to suggest a kind of existential dualism: The greatness of these men was that they could philosophize even while stooping to baser matters.Footnote ²¹⁸ This might accord with Ibn Tufayl, Plotinus, or Plato. Yet Maimonides, in concluding the passage, points us in a different direction: “The aim of their efforts, lifelong, was to found a nation that knew and served God.”Footnote ²¹⁹ By infusing all of their actions, from the profound to quotidian, with knowledge and love of God, Moses and the Patriarchs turned every activity, every moment, into an opportunity to imitate God. They engaged with the world because of their wisdom, not in spite of it. They sought to manifest goodness and inspire others to do the same.Footnote ²²⁰ Contra Strauss, then, Moses was not a Schmittian tyrant imposing his arbitrary will on a beguiled people. He was just the opposite: an instrument of God’s rule – an agent for the Good.Footnote ²²¹

Maimonides begins the Guide by invoking the same passage from Avot, which he had linked, in his Mishnah Commentary, to humanity’s role in realizing divine rule: “Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven.”Footnote ²²² He concludes it with two passages from Isaiah, the first of which reads: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf be unstopped (Isaiah 35:5).”Footnote ²²³ Taken in isolation, this verse is about knowledge for its own sake. But in context – one Maimonides surely expects us to know – it is about redemption: “Say to the anxious of heart, / ‘Be strong, fear not; / Behold your God! / Requital is coming, / The recompense of God – He Himself is coming to give you triumph.’”Footnote ²²⁴ We are now positioned to postulate about its meaning. Through reason, our minds can access the same divine emanation which flows through the order of nature. And when this flow is strong enough – when we attain the Active Intellect – our actions become God’s actions. We transform into agents of providence; knowledge turns into rule. Maimonides then adds one more quote from Isaiah: “The nation that walked in darkness shall see a great light. On those who live in the land of deep gloom a light shall dawn!” (9:1).Footnote ²²⁵ This, perhaps, was Maimonides’ aim with the Guide itself: By restoring philosophy to its rightful place in Israel, he sought to restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations.

Coda: Democracy and the Rule of God

I began this study with two questions derived from Jürgen Habermas: What has theocracy meant historically? What might it still mean today? I have offered an answer to the first by reconstructing Maimonides’ theocratic project. For Maimonides, the heart of divine rule is the Neoplatonic idea of “emanation.” God exercises general providence by imbuing the governing elements of the cosmos – the incorporeal intellects and heavenly spheres – with form. He effects particular providence through us. When the human mind approaches the pinnacle of reason, our actions in essence become divine actions; in joining with the Active Intellect, we attach ourselves cognitively to God. Yet the upshot of this connection is not only noetic. Maimonides, I showed, follows al-Fārābī in arguing that one who has achieved such an intellectual level epitomizes both thought and leadership, “mind” and “deed.” As a philosopher, he grasps truths in their pure rational form. As a legislator, he translates those truths into laws, morals, rituals, and beliefs. Thus contra Strauss, I argued that Maimonides’ intention in the Guide was not “Platonic politics” – mass obedience for the sake of a philosophical elite. It was theocratic politics: an effort to realize the rule of God. The highest purpose of a leader is to guide his people – according to their particular history, context, and frailties – to genuine knowledge, or at least true beliefs, about the deity. In the divine division of labor, therefore, the “good” of the world depends on our moral and intellectual development. The goodness of nature is ineluctable, a pure manifestation of divine wisdom. The goodness of humanity is a product of the extent that we know, love, and imitate God. The more that we succeed, the more God can be said to rule.

What could theocracy mean today? Can Maimonides help us answer this question too? Theocracy, as I have referred to it here, refers not to priestly domination (hierocracy) but to how the divine being exercises sovereignty over the universe. This definition cannot aid the empirical study of religion and politics. Even so, I believe it has important normative implications. Are theocracy and democracy necessarily incompatible? Or can there be a place for the rule of God even within a democratic political order? These are the questions I will explore in concluding this study. And while I will not presume to answer them fully, I do think that Maimonides’ approach may hold special relevance in our own time. Movements seeking to replace democracy with clerical rule claim to speak in God’s name. Maimonides’ thought, I believe, shows us one way we might respond. In extrapolating his ideas – albeit in ways he could not have anticipated, and might not have accepted – we find intriguing and neglected means by which elements of theocracy might coexist with, or even complement, democratic legitimacy.

Any attempt to associate Maimonides with democracy will strike many as far-fetched. Governance in his writings is nearly synonymous with kingship. Indeed while Aviezer Ravitzky identifies no less than four Maimonidean models of rule, each of these, from the “illegitimate sovereign” to the “ideal leader,” is monarchical.Footnote ²²⁶ The Talmud debates whether kingship is mandated by the Torah or merely optional. Maimonides unambiguously sides with the former view.Footnote ²²⁷ Moreover, normative political order in Maimonides is of a distinctively anti-modern type: the juridical unity of religion and state. Contemporary democracy rests on competitive elections and what Michael Walzer has called liberalism’s “art of separation”: within government, the division of powers; beyond it, the stratification of different layers of life (state, civil society, family) and spheres of value (politics, economics, ethics, aesthetics). Yet as Menachem Lorberbaum has shown, Maimonides – in contrast to certain later rabbinic figures – saw all of the polity’s laws and institutions, civil and religious, as uniformly governed by halacha (Jewish law).Footnote ²²⁸ Finally, royalism plays a central role in Maimonides’ messianism. Even as he drains the messianic age of supernatural elements and the messiah himself of miraculous powers, and even as he exhorts people not to focus on the fantastic events traditionally associated with its advent (such as the prophet Elijah’s return), Maimonides stresses that the Messiah will be a “king … from the house of David” who “re-establish[es] the monarchy.”Footnote ²²⁹

Maimonides’ monarchism has likewise been a touchstone for certain strands of religious Zionism. Early thinkers associated with this movement confronted a dilemma. On the one hand, they sought to interpret the Zionist project and the state of Israel in messianic terms – the “first flowering of redemption” – or at the very least as legitimate forms of Jewish political expression. On the other hand, Israel is not a monarchy; it has no direct biblical or rabbinic analogue. How can such a state claim religious imprimatur? One response, as Alexander Kaye has shown, was not to abandon Maimonides’ normative-legal requirement of kingship, but to reinterpret it. Maimonides describes the procedure for appointing kings as via a Sanhedrin (high court) of seventy elders accompanied by a prophet.Footnote ²³⁰ But as neither king nor Sanhedrin nor prophet were available in the twentieth century, some rabbinic figures sought to recast all three in democratic terms. Ideally, Jewish kings are elected by a consent of the majority. Only in circumstances where such consent is denied can the Sanhedrin override the people. And if political authority actually adheres foremost in the people, then references to “monarchy” in biblical and rabbinic texts need not be understood literally. They function as placeholders for all forms of government approved by popular consent, including democracy.Footnote ²³¹

This approach is undoubtedly innovative; yet aside from being a tendentious way to read Maimonides, it also remains deeply problematic from the perspective of democracy. First, monarchy is retained as a viable political option. While democratic institutions were chosen at Israel’s founding, there is nothing to guarantee their permanence. The people – or someone claiming to speak in their name – may one day opt for something else. This leads to a second problem: “Democracy,” as invoked here, bears only limited resemblance to the term’s contemporary meaning. Modern liberal democracies restrain state power, protect individual rights from the majority, and hold regular elections. Popular consent is conceived as continuous process, not a single event. The form of democracy read into classical Jewish texts, by contrast, more closely tracks Thomas Hobbes’ description of Leviathan’s founding: a total transfer of sovereignty from a group of people to a king or counsel, with no retained rights or powers.Footnote ²³² And this points to a final problem: This approach does not truly advocate for democracy, even in this limited Hobbesian form. Despite using the term “democracy” – rule of the “demos” or populace – neither the people nor their basic rights retain ultimate authority. Halacha reigns supreme. Whatever laws the people might institute, they are inevitably secondary to the Torah’s laws. Political authority depends on religious authority, secular law on divine law. This religious Zionist view thus represents what John Rawls called a “modus vivendi” commitment to democracy: a temporary settlement to be replaced, when the time is ripe, with religious rule.Footnote ²³³

In the remainder of these reflections, I will propose an alternative way we might draw upon Maimonides in relating democracy to divine rule. The religious Zionist view I noted grounds itself in Maimonidean jurisprudence: Because the halacha calls for monarchy, it assumes that Maimonides would mandate, if not kingship itself, then at least a conception of state power that accords with it. The hallmark of Jewish theocracy is thus a halachic state; God is sovereign when Jewish law reigns. I will not contest the authority Maimonides assigns to halacha. He makes plain not only the immutability of the written (Torah) law but the incontestable status of legislation derived from or instituted by the rabbinic sages.Footnote ²³⁴ What I will propose instead is a shift in emphasis. Maimonides, as we have seen, does not see law as humanity’s highest aim. Halacha should be studied, revered, and followed. Yet in the last analysis it is not an end in itself, but rather a means for realizing greater ends: social order, individual discipline, moral virtue, and, ultimately, knowledge of God, manifesting in love and imitatio dei – our part in realizing divine rule. “Our ultimate goal in every context,” Maimonides writes, in an especially direct expression of this idea in the Guide, “is to know God. … All those biblical practices – the acts of piety and morality so beneficial in our human interactions – hold not a candle to this ultimate goal but only pave the way to it.”Footnote ²³⁵

The question, then, is this: If we take Maimonides’ teleological account of human life seriously – if everything we do in ethics, politics, and ordinary life should be directed toward acquiring divine wisdom – does realizing this telos actually require human kingship? Can our “ultimate goal” of knowing God be achieved without a halachic state? God, as we have seen, can be said to rule when we know Him. Can He rule just as well in a liberal democracy? I believe the answer is yes. If we consider Maimonides’ political program in light of his teleology, it becomes possible to see how divine rule might be realized in a genuinely democratic context. Theocracy and democracy need not be adversaries. The former can exist – even thrive – within the latter.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is an answer Maimonides himself would give. Maimonides lived out his whole life in the political and intellectual milieu of medieval Islam; he would recognize neither liberalism nor democracy as viable forms of political order.Footnote ²³⁶ More generally, it is impossible to speculate how a figure transported across vast developments in thought, culture, and politics would react to these changes. Yet neither, I think, should this keep us from asking the question. Ideas, while nurtured in a particular context, grow to take on their own identity. Maimonides continues to draw readers because his ideas continue to speak to us. They remain vital for thinking about our own lives and place in the world. And, after centuries of sitting quietly on the shelves of pious scholars and recondite philosophers, they have been brought out, loudly and prominently, into a new world of Jewish politics, acquiring renewed meaning, greater stakes, and practical urgency. What I aim to do here, therefore, is not claim to speak for Maimonides himself. It is to offer one version, in modesty, of how his thought might be logically extended into our own time.

While Maimonides ascribes a number of purposes to government, each of these, I believe, can be achieved within a liberal democratic framework. Political order in general for Maimonides is needed because of an inherent tension in human sociability: On the one hand, we are not Robinson Crusoes; we need society to fulfill our needs.Footnote ²³⁷ On the other hand, our natural differences generate friction and antagonism. A principal function of law, therefore, is to render these differences irrelevant by unifying our conventions: It “corrects” deficient human actions; “reins in” excessive ones; “ordains” others; and “fosters strains of character” toward the end of forming a “well ordered community” characterized by a “common and consistent ethos.”Footnote ²³⁸ Liberals have historically held diverse views about our social tendencies. Still, Maimonides’ empirical account strongly anticipates one of the most prominent, Immanuel Kant’s “unsocial sociability:” While we cannot but exist in society with others, our proximity generates jealousy, antagonism, and domination, justifying the need for coercive juridical order.Footnote ²³⁹

What about the normative functions of government? Maimonides ascribes to the Torah two broad aims: “spiritual well-being,” referring to how we learn truths about the world, either in the form of real knowledge or true beliefs; and “material well-being,” referring to how we form a society grounded in legal justice (“quelling wrongdoing”) and moral virtue (“acquiring traits of character beneficial to society and conducive to the civic order”). While both are important, the former is “higher and weightier” – the Torah’s true end – while the latter is merely a means.Footnote ²⁴⁰ In one sense, then, what Maimonides prescribes takes him far from liberalism. The idea that a state should direct its citizens’ moral and intellectual development reflects exactly the kind of infantilizing stance that liberal theorists from Kant to J.S. Mill, John Rawls, and Judith Shklar rejected so vehemently.Footnote ²⁴¹

Yet upon closer inspection, this gap narrows or even disappears. The critical distinction again is between ends and means, telos and technē. To begin with, liberal states also provide for legal order and social stability. To invoke Maimonides’ own example, they are ones in which frail money changers need not fear hulking brutes.Footnote ²⁴² More deeply, while liberals have historically rejected the state as an instrument for inculcating virtue, many have not abandoned the end of realizing ethical life and solidarity. Communitarians and nationalists often charge liberals with splitting us into social atoms. Yet as Bryan Garsten has recently argued, liberalism is best understood as a modification of rule – an attenuation of concentrated power – not a “self-sufficient way of life, philosophy or ideology … meant to stand on its own.” Indeed liberals, contrary to caricature, most often assume the opposite of a “possessive individualism”: Human beings will naturally form communities within which they will cultivate moral personality (including Jewish religious communities regulated by halacha).Footnote ²⁴³ In Maimonides’ terms, they will “foster strains of character.” And while the virtues they acquire will come not from the state but civil society, the result they achieve will be the same. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously argued, within such associations “[s]entiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed.”Footnote ²⁴⁴

This has been among the Enlightenment’s great discoveries: With the right structures and institutions, ethical and intellectual life can emerge spontaneously. A heavy-handed state is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Counterintuitively, societies can achieve greater moral and rational development from organic pluralism than coerced uniformity. Maimonides could never have anticipated this development. His ideas can accommodate it. Indeed while Maimonides sometimes describes Torah law as propelling our progress in virtue and wisdom, elsewhere he quietly elides this intermediate step: “Our highest human attainment is fulfillment as a rational being, to have a mind that actually thinks and knows all that a human being can know about everything we can know. … Only once bodily wellbeing is secured can one reach that doubtless higher level of perfection.”Footnote ²⁴⁵

A seemingly higher obstacle is Maimonides’ messianism; yet here too, it is possible to envision a reconciliation with liberal democracy. As we have seen, Maimonides’ messiah is a human king, and in this capacity he is assigned a definitive role in realizing the messianic age. At the same time, a careful study of Maimonides’ words suggest additional room for maneuver. Maimonides legally mandates monarchy. But he consistently describes the king’s functions in instrumental terms. While a king may raise taxes, levy soldiers, and conquer lands, he may only do so to “promote the true religion, fill the world with righteousness, break the arm of the wicked, and fight God’s war.” He must act “for the sake of Heaven” – an echo of the passage from Avot with which Maimonides opens the Guide and which, as we have seen, he associates with divine rule.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Thus if, as Maimonides stresses, “we do not, a priori, appoint a king except to execute justice and fight wars,” it is unclear, at least logically, why government must be monarchial. These functions can be performed by democratic states too.Footnote ²⁴⁷

The same point can be applied to Maimonides’ account of the messianic advent. Maimonides follows traditional sources in documenting the messiah’s attributes and actions: He is a king of the Davidic line, learned in Torah, and teaches its precepts to others; he defeats Israel’s enemies, rebuilds the Temple, and gathers in the exiles.Footnote ²⁴⁸ In describing the fully developed age itself, however, the messiah himself quietly falls away. His role and rule cease to be relevant. What we find instead is a world in which politics has run its teleological course toward disseminating and elevating knowledge of God:

Here is nothing less than divine rule manifest on earth. Political order creates the conditions for cultivating moral virtue, which in turn allows for the diligent pursuit of wisdom. We achieve individual providence through our intellectual elevation. We model our actions on God’s “goodness.” And insofar as we know and imitate Him, God can be said to rule. The messianic age, in other words, is Maimonidean theocracy in completed form.

This is undoubtedly a utopian image; is it one whose realization depends on the particularities of Maimonides’ political program? One element which might be necessary is national independence. In the Guide, Maimonides links Israel’s loss of prophecy to its exile: Summitting the intellect requires intense self-development in discipline, virtue, and knowledge, and this is hardly feasible, on a national level, in the “infinite danger” of statelessness.Footnote ²⁵⁰ The messiah himself, however, seems to be a figure of provisional rather than intrinsic significance. Twice in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides invokes a well-known dictum from the rabbinic sages which, in effect, broadens the possible pathways toward the messianic age and deemphasizes its preconditions: “The only difference between the present and the Messianic era is that political oppression will then cease.”Footnote ²⁵¹ It is hard to imagine hunger, violence, and social pathology finally disappearing. It is equally difficult to envision people devoting all their energies to wisdom and imitatio dei. A messianic king could conceivably bring about each of these outcomes. But this is an article of faith and an inheritance of tradition, not an inference of reason. In short: Monarchy, for Maimonides, might be a halachic requirement of Jewish messianism. In his teleological account, however, it is not a practical one.

There is a well-known moral concern about Maimonides’ teleology: If the real point is to know God, why do we still have to be good? Or grant that we need moral virtue to climb philosophy’s ladder; having reached the top, can’t we just kick it away? Lenn Goodman, connecting his own theory of justice to Jewish sources, describes Maimonides’ answer as the “virtuous circle” of the messianic age.Footnote ²⁵² Our intellectual objective is to know God. But as we have seen, knowledge of God inspires not withdrawal from the world, but love of it. It stirs us to emulate divine goodness. As we practice justice (mishpat), righteousness (tzedakah), and kindness (chesed), we come to see these very qualities reflected in the cosmological design. Our greater wisdom then deepens our love, taking us back around the circle. In Maimonides’ words, “according to the knowledge, will be the love.”Footnote ²⁵³

Our final question, therefore, is this: Under what conditions will we pursue knowledge of God? What will make us more likely to love Him? Maimonides does admit the practical need, historically, for threats of punishment and promises of reward. As he writes in his tractate on “Repentance” [Hilchot Teshuva], only the rare individual “does what is true because it is true.” Nonetheless, all should strive for something higher: to serve God out of love, the “standard which God, through Moses, bid us to achieve.”Footnote ²⁵⁴ Advocates for a halachic state believe legal enforcement is necessary for theocracy. If the law itself is the point, then only when the law is obeyed will God truly be crowned as sovereign. Maimonides’ ideas, I have tried to show, take us in a different direction. In today’s open societies, science, philosophy, and theology – our pathways, for Maimonides, to divine wisdom – are not the possession of a cloistered elite; they circulate in public reason.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Religious coercion might have contributed to social order in the past. But in a post-Enlightenment age, it would lead to neither knowledge nor love of God. Imposing halacha would pour water on the pursuit of wisdom and smother the sparks of affection. It would transform our actions into products of fear, conditioning, and servitude. Far from bringing about divine rule, it would turn God into a tyrant.

Maimonides, as evidenced by his discussion of sacrifices, believes in humanity’s intellectual progress. Perhaps he would accept this account of our moral progress too: Rather than a theocracy in which halacha is forced upon us, we should seek one in which human beings freely choose, from their growing knowledge of the world, to voluntarily love and emulate the divine being; a theocracy where the true hallmarks of God’s sovereignty – justice, righteousness, and kindness – are nurtured by liberal guarantees of stability, equality, and freedom for all; a theocracy set not in opposition to democracy, but alongside it. Whether God rules in heaven is assured. Whether He does here – whether the Good does here – is in our hands.