In his 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant argues that religious believers who obey traditional authorities are essentially infantile. They refuse to grow up. Like little children who are not responsible for their own thoughts or actions, Kant claims, believers hand over responsibility for their lives to others. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” he declares. Enlightened people do not let rabbis or priests decide for them but rather decide to grow up and think for themselves.
The view of religion as infantilizing has become a staple of the contemporary polemic against religion.1 Atheists look at believers and see overgrown children whose thinking was arrested in infancy. Maimonides, I believe, poses a serious challenge to Kant’s perspective. According to Maimonides we do not need to outgrow religion; our religious beliefs can and should mature with us as we grow. The Guide for the Perplexed was a bold attempt to set out a grown-up religion.
In part 1 of this book we saw the immensity of the Rambam’s view of God. We saw how this view required him to expand some of the key ideas of religion, such as prophecy, providence. and redemption, in order to match the extent of his thinking about the divine. In part 2 we move from God to Torah and address a similar question: How does the Rambam ask us to expand our conception not just of God but also of the Torah? This part of the book will investigate the Guide’s profound understanding of Scripture, exploring the reasons for the commandments and also the nature of the revelation that produced them.
Before the Hebrew version of this book appeared in Israel, I worried about how the traditional religious community would react to the way I presented the Rambam’s view of God. To my surprise, the response to that part of the book was very positive. However, some readers were angered by the section on the Torah. Many claimed that I had written that according to the Rambam, the Torah is not from God. In the light of that controversy, I should like to make clear that in the following section I do not argue against the divine nature of the Torah. I only attempt to explain how the Rambam understood the Torah’s divinity.