In this chapter, Maimonides further fleshes out his views on Divine Providence. He explains that the Law teaches that there is a ‘hierarchy’ of Providence, i.e., a hierarchy of the degree to which people are affected by, and receive, the Divine فيض. This hierarchy means that the closer a person gets to God, the more he receives the Divine influence that protects and nurtures him; the farther he strays from closeness-to-God and adopts his earthly, animal nature, the farther away he becomes from Divine Providence and the more he becomes subject to chance the way non-human animals always are. At the top of this hierarchy are the Prophets, to whom God promised his specific favours; these favours are not available to everyone, but are according to “the merits of man”.

He claims that this view of Providence is in agreement with ‘philosophical research’, citing Farabi, Aristotle, and Plato. It is interesting to note that he does not here mention the degree to which a person strives to follow the Law, but instead the degree to which a person ‘approaches God’, emulating Godly characteristics and perfecting virtue. These terms appear to be used in a religion-neutral sense in this chapter, even if the examples of those closest to God are, unsurprisingly, the Hebrew Prophets; indeed, “Divine Providence is in each case proportional to the person’s intellectual development” (al-inayat tabi’at lil-‘aql العناية تابعة للعقل).

Finally, Maimonides is concerned with showing that he is opposed to the position held by “some philosophical schools” بعض مذاهب الفلأسفة, that Providence extends to the species but not to the individual. For Maimonides, this is true for animals and plants, etc., but not for humans. One piece of his argument is the point that only individuals exist in reality, and species only exist in our minds, and that the Divine فيض extends to humans not through some abstract Intelligence but through each of our individual Intelligences.