Reason, scripture, and the limits of language › Prophecy and preparation

Part II, chapter 32 considers several accounts of prophecy. One imagines that God can choose almost anyone regardless of intellectual preparation. Another treats prophecy as the result that must follow when the relevant human capacities are perfected. Maimonides presents a third position as the religious view he accepts.

For prophecy other than Moses's, the account requires intellectual and moral preparation together with the requisite natural excellence of imagination. Yet preparation does not guarantee prophecy. God may withhold it. The point of difference is essential: a necessary condition is something without which the result does not occur; a sufficient condition is something that guarantees the result. His accepted account does not make human preparation sufficient.

Consequently, calling his account simply a natural explanation of prophecy loses the exception he expressly preserves. Calling it an arbitrary selection that ignores human capacities loses the preparation he insists upon. The argument holds divine initiative together with an account of human development, and the tension between them is part of the position.

The discussion also shows why his philosophical vocabulary needs interpretation in its own historical setting. The faculties he analyzes belong to his account of how knowledge and imagination operate. They should not be presented as modern experimental findings about the psychology of religious experience. Understanding a theory and confirming it empirically are different tasks.