In this chapter, Maimonides explains how and why God is “the intellectus, ens intelligens, and ens intelligible” (al-‘aql wa al-‘aqil wa al-ma’qul العقل والعاقل والمعقول). His reasoning goes like this

  • Comprehension, for us, first exists in potentia; we have the ability to comprehend the idea of an object before we actually comprehend it. At this point, the three — (1) the comprehender (to the extent that he or she is a thinking being), (2) the power of comprehension, and (3) the idea of a tree — are undoubtedly distinct
  • When comprehension moves from being in a state of potentiality to actuality, i.e., when we actually comprehend the idea of a tree, these three become one; this process is not particular to God, but according to Maimonides is the very nature of intellect. Thus, when (and to the extent that) the intellect is in action, it is identical with the ens intelligens and the ens intelligible.
  • God is never in a state of potentiality:

    Now, it has been proved that God is an intellect which always is in action, and that — as has been stated, and as will be proved hereafter — there is in Him at no time a mere potentiality, that He does not comprehend at one time, and is without comprehension at another time, but He comprehends constantly; consequently, He and the things comprehended are one and the same thing, that is to say, His essence … God is therefore always the intellectus, the intelligens, and the intelligible.

This quality, of course is peculiar to God; ordinary intellects such as those belonging to humans do not constantly comprehend ideas, but instead are always moving between potential comprehension and actual comprehension.

From Kenneth Seeskin

Didn’t Maimonides just tell us that you can’t make any positive statement about God at all? Then why is he telling us stuff about God? Kenneth Seeskin, in ‘Shlomo Pines and the Rediscovery of Maimonides’ (from Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in Translation, ed. Stern, Robinson, and Shemesh), writes about

what may well be the central issue of Maimonides’ metaphysics: how to reconcile the negative theology asserted in GP I:51-59 with the theory of intellection set forth at GP I 68. … Trying to reconcile these passages creates two problems. First, Guide I 68 makes God the subject of true metaphysical statements that purport to tell us something positive about His essence. Second, at I 68 Maimonides goes on to say that the same theory of intellection applies to human beings. … This contradicts the negative theology chapters, which say that there is no point of similarity.

Seeskin then reminds us that Pines [in his essay The Philosophical Sources of the Guide]

shows his true colors by referring to negative theology as “mere quibbling” and a “smoke screen” that may not hold up to scrutiny. … As he rightly sees, the view expressed at I 68 means that God is self-thinking thought that enjoys perfect awareness of itself. But if we add to this — as Maimonides clearly would — that God is also aware of the order and structure of the universe, it would follow that God is identical with the order and structure of the universe, exactly what humans investigate when they study the universe scientifically. If this is true, then, as Pines concludes, it makes Maimoindes’ God “something perilously close to Spinoza’s attribute of thought.”