The Piety of Socrates and Maimonides: Doing God's Work on Earth

Socrates and Maimonides are paragons of piety. They devote their lives to divine service, notwithstanding their perception that an unbridgeable chasm separates the divine from the human. At great personal cost they take on God’s tasks—that is, the tasks that God would do if only He weren’t God. For Socrates, that work is to persuade people of the great value of their souls and consequently of the importance of justice and truth. For Maimonides, it is to encourage meticulous observance of Jewish law in its ritual and moral aspects, and to banish false and noxious views of God from the beliefs of even ordinary people. Neither Socrates nor Maimonides is content to foster only his own intellectual perfection—and therein lies their piety.