In this chapter, Maimonides continues his project of ‘naturalizing’ Prophecy by stating that the intuitive faculty (القوة الشعور) — which all of us possess to a certain extent — must have existed in the prophets to an extraordinary degree.

Thus you may yourself guess correctly that a certain person said or did a certain thing in a certain matter. Some persons are so strong and sound in their imagination and intuitive faculty that, when they assume a thing to be in existence, the reality either entirely or partly confirms their assumption. Although the causes of this assumption are numerous, and include many preceding, succeeding, and present circumstances, by means of the intuitive faculty the intellect can pass over all these causes, and draw inferences from them very quickly, almost instantaneously. This same faculty enables some persons to foretell important coming events.

Maimonides does not ‘rationalize’ prophecy entirely, though. According to him,

true prophets undoubtedly conceive ideas that result from premisses which human reason could not comprehend by itself; thus they tell things which men could not tell by reason and ordinary imagination alone” … he conceives ideas which are confirmed by reality, and are so clear to him as if he deduced them by means of syllogisms.

Another concern of the author, in this chapter, is to show that the Prophets’ perfection of the imaginative faculty was ancilliary to, and followed from, the perfection of their intellect (or logical faculty).

It is through the intellect that the [divine] influence reaches the imaginative faculty. How then could the latter be so perfect as to be able to represent things not previously perceived by the senses, if the same degree of perfection were withheld from the intellect … ?

Commentary

Maimonides is convinced that the Prophets were not merely endowed with imaginative or rhetorical prowess, but that their intellect too had reached a state of perfection. This is where Spinoza would have disagreed, for Spinoza had no compunction in stating that “Joshua was no astronomer”, and that the Prophets did not have sound philosophical knowledge.