Jewish Philosophy - Alexander Altmann

Part II

In Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1020-1050, possibly A.D. 1070), poet and philosopher, this Neoplatonic philosophy found a deep echo. His magnum opus, Mekor Hayyim ("Fountain of Life") became known to the Latin world through the translation made of it under the title, Fons Vitae by Dominicus Gundissalinus in collaboration with Abendeath, a baptized Jew of Toledo. Owing to the corruption of Gabirol’s name into Avicebron or Avicembrol, he was held by the mediaeval schoolmen to be a Christian. His work exercised a notable influence on the scholasticism of the 13th and 14th centuries. Gabirol’s system is interesting from two aspects. Firstly, it introduces Aristotle’s distinction of Matter and Form into the very heart of theology by deriving the dual structure of all being from a duality inherent in God Himself. Gabirol, though uneasy about his daring step, was driven to it by the consideration that both Matter and Form must have their ultimate source in the supreme Reality of God. Secondly, he describes the formative principle in God as the Divine Will. For Plotinus, Will is but a name for God’s freedom and necessity. That God is free does not mean that He could have acted otherwise than He did. As Dean Inge put it, "The Absolute is all necessity, as being subject to no necessity." Absolute freedom is equal to absolute necessity. This concept could hardly be regarded as compatible with the Biblical notion of a Creator-God who was all Will and Power, and who had called the universe into being by His Word and Command. Gabirol therefore introduces into the Neoplatonic system of necessity the Biblical concept of Divine Will. He identifies this Divine Will with the formative principle in God, and opposes it, as it were, to the essence of God which is the source of Matter. The freedom and spontaneity of the Divine Creative act is thus limited by the dark nature of God’s essence. The dialectic involved in the human artist’s creation—resistance of matter to form and the triumph of form over matter—is thus foreshadowed in the nature of Divine creation. Gabirol’s differentiation between the essence and Will of God is not strictly maintained. At times, he describes the Will as mediator between Matter and Form; sometimes he obliterates the duality of the two aspects in God by identifying the Will of God with the Divine Wisdom. The latter term denotes obviously the element of essence rather than of Will, seeing that in God’s Wisdom or Intellect the essences of beings are foreshadowed. Yet in spite of the obscurity which surrounds Gabirol’s notion of the Will of God, it has brought to light the fundamental cleavage between the Neoplatonic and the Biblical view of Creation.

The most popular among mediaeval Jewish thinkers in Gabirol’s contemporary Bahya Ibn Pakudah whose The Duties of the Heart (written between A.D. 1080 and 1090) has become the standard work on Jewish moral philosophy and a manual of the spiritual life. The "duties of the Heart" such as sincerity of faith, humility, and love of God should inspire the "duties of the Limbs," i.e., the ceremonial observances. There is a sprinkling of asceticism in Bahya’s ideal of the devotional life, which is due, in some part, to the influence of Islamic mysticism, and has its immediate source, as I. Heinemann has shown, in an Arabic treatise of Hermetic origin. The much-debated question as to whether Bahya was also influenced by Ghazali, the great Islamic mystic, has been settled in the negative. Gnostic influence is pronounced in the treatise On the Nature of the Soul which has been wrongly attributed to Bahya, and which probably belongs to about the same period. In describing the descent of the soul through the celestial spheres and zones of elements until it reaches earth and enters the body, the book shows itself under the spell of Gnostic sources, especially in their Hermetic form.

Abraham bar Hiyya of Barcelona (in the early part of the 12th century) is the first mediaeval Jewish thinker to employ Hebrew as a medium for philosophic discussion. Before him Arabic had been exclusively used for this purpose. He adopts the usual Neoplatonic triad of World, Soul and Intellect, but adds two more stages, which he calls the Worlds of Light and Dominion (Speech). The latter term is possibly a variant of the Logos, as Julius Guttmann has suggested. Of great interest is his attempt to establish a philosophy of history, modeled on Talmudic, Gnostic, Christian, and Islamic concepts. The periods of world history are said to correspond to the Seven Days of Creation described in the Book of Genesis; man’s corruption through the Fall of Adam has been remedied only in one particular line of his descendants, i.e., the people of Israel, in whom the rational soul is preserved in its original purity. Abraham Hiyya’s naturalistic interpretation of the peculiar character of Israel as the "Chosen People" is influenced by the Islamic version of the Gnostic Anthropos myth, and merely gives it a Jewish coloring. Strangely enough, a similar concept prevails in the otherwise deeply spiritual philosophy of Jehudah Hallevi, the celebrated poet-philosopher (c. 1085-c. 1141), whose dialog Kuzari ranks as the most popular philosophic presentation of Judaism. It bears, in the Arabic original, the title Book of Arguments and Proofs in Defence of the Despised Religion, and is almost contemporary with the Abelard’s Dialogue between a jew, a Philosopher and a Christian. Jehudah Hallevi, like Ghazale, places the intuitive knowledge of the prophet above the speculative knowledge of the philosopher. The "God of Aristotle" is the Deity of rational theology, a mere "First Cause," the "God of Abraham" is the personal, living God of religious experience, the God of revelation. The prophet is endowed with a suprarational disposition which enables him to reach the "angelic" stage, and to commune with God.

From about the middle of the 12th century the influence of Alfarabi and Avicenna became more pronounced, and Jewish philosophy took a turn towards a stricter form of Aristotelianism. The first work in which the new trend found expression is Abraham ibn Daud’s The Exalted Faith (1161) which contains a spirited attack upon Gabirol. It was soon eclipsed by Moses Maimonides’ (1135-1204) famous Moreh Nebukhim ("Guide of the Perplexed"), the most important work of mediaeval Jewish philosophy, which exercised a profound influence on all subsequent Jewish thought and, through Latin translations, on Christian scholasticism as well as on European philosophers in the periods of the Renaissance and of modern Aufklarung. It shares neither the naïve rationalism of Kalam whose principles it closely analyses and refutes, nor the mystical faith of the earlier Neoplatonists, but clearly delineates the respective provinces of demonstrable and revelational truths. It breaks new ground in Theology by its incisive treatment of the doctrine of Divine attributes; in cosmology by joining issue with Aristotle’s theory of the eternity of the world; and in the interpretation of Jewish Law and ritual by evolving the novel viewpoint of comparative religion. Maimonides, like his predecessor, Abraham ibn Daud, recognizes in Aristotle the principal philosophic authority. His arguments for the existence of God follow the Aristotelian pattern. In addition, he develops an argument, first suggested by Avicenna, which postulates, on logical grounds, a necessary Being whose existence follows from its essence, and is transcendent to all contingent being. This Necessary Being is an absolute Unity. Following the Neoplatonic tradition of negative theology, Maimonides explains in his elaborate doctrine of attributes that no positive statement, except that of existence, can be made of God. Two kinds of attributes only are admitted, those of "negation," which exclude imperfections from God, and those of "action," which describe His relation to the world without impinging on the mystery of His essence. The latter, which includes God’s moral attributes, are the ones that matter most from the aspect of religion.

Maimonides’ conflict with Aristotle concerns the problem of Creation. The alternative between the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world and the Jewish concept of Creatio ex nihilo is tantamount to the choice between an impersonal God, from whom the world emanates by necessity, and a personal God, endowed with will, who creates the world freely. Neither of these doctrines can be rationally demonstrated, and the decision is therefore to be left to the authority of prophecy. Maimonides argues against Aristotle that the law of causal necessity which operates within the created world does not apply prior to creation. God remains in control of the physical laws of nature. The possibility of miracles is thus safeguarded, but Maimonides tends to allegorize the miracles narrated in the Bible.

The core of Maimonides’ philosophy is his theory of prophecy. The prophet is superior to the philosopher, but not as Jehudah Hallevi had it, on account of a suprarational disposition. There exists no faculty higher than the rational, but as a result of supreme intellectual training and moral conduct a person whose mind is concentrated on "God and the angels" may receive flashes of intuition, which illumine both the rational and imaginative faculties of his soul and give it insight into metaphysical truths denied to the discursive thinking of the ordinary philosopher. The overpowering vision of the prophet requires for its absorption and expression the use of symbolic images. Hence the pictorial character of prophetic speech and the necessity to interpret it allegorically. In addition to being a perfect philosopher, the prophet is also the lawgiver of the ideal state, and thus represents Maimonides’ version of Plato’s "philosopher-king," following the precedent of Alfarabi and, ultimately of Philo.

Although Maimonides was a younger contemporary of Averroes, there is no evidence that he was acquainted with the works of this most radical of the Islamic Aristotelians at the time when he wrote the Guide. If he knew them, he certainly took little notice of them. For in all points at issue between Avicenna and Averroes, he adopts the views of the former. During the last phase of mediaeval Jewish Philosophy, however, Averroes comes increasingly to the fore. His popularity among Jews is best illustrated by the fact that of his numerous writings almost all were translated into Hebrew, some of them more than once, and that a host of commentaries were written on them by Jews. The outstanding Jewish Averroist of the late mediaeval period is Levi ben Gershom, known as Gersonides (1288-1344) whose The Wars of the Lord—by its opponents mockingly called "The Wars Against the Lord"—attempts a fresh reconciliation of Judaism and Philosophy on a strictly Aristotelian basis. Creation means that the plurality of Forms contained in God is released and imparted to the prima materia, the substratum of being. Gersonides thus upholds the concept of Creation in Time, but sacrifices the Biblical notion of a Creatio ex nihilo which Jewish Philosophy from Saadya to Maimonides had been so eager to defend. The activity of God is spent in the act of Creation; the governance of the world is regulated by natural causality. Prophecy is knowledge of causal necessity applied to a concrete situation. Like Aristotle, Gersonides sees in God the Prime Mover who is absorbed in the thinking of His own thinking. The problem as to how such a notion can be reconciled with the Biblical concept of Divine Providence did not escape Him. If God is entirely Self-Thinking Intellect, how can He have knowledge of particular and individual things? The answer given by Gersonides is that God does not know the individual qua individual, but only in so far as it is embraced and conditioned by the universal order of things.

Gersonides also reverts to the Aristotelian position when he comes to the problem of Divine attributes. That problem had played a major part in Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, and held a place similar to the one occupied by the problem of the Universals in Latin thought. Maimonides’ negative theology had followed the Neoplatonic tradition. It was built primarily on Alfarabi’s and Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence, which implied that in the case of all created beings existence was accidental to essence whereas in God essence and existence were one. Hence, God’s nature was essentially different from ours, and terms such as existence, unity, and intellect applied to Him were mere homonyms without a positive content. It is true, distinction between essence and existence had already been suggested by Aristotle. As W Jaeger suggested, one may see in it a residue of Aristotle’s former Platonism. But the Islamic Neoplatonists went much beyond what was implied in Aristotle’s logical distinction by assigning to the essence a reality of its own outside the visible world. Averroes rejects this distinction. Existence, he holds, is not an accident of Being. Each individual thing is one and the same with its essence. There is therefore, no such absolute cleavage between God and the created beings, as negative theology would suggest. The difference between the essence of God and the essences of created beings is one of infinite degree rather than of quality. God and man share alike in the common properties of Being and Intellect precisely because man derives his being and intellect from God. In God, they form His very essence and are primary; in men they are imparted and derivative. Hence positive and, at the same time, essential attributes are permissible. In following Averroes view, Gersonides breaks the monopoly of Neoplatonism in Jewish Philosophy, and paves the way for a positive theology more akin to the Biblical outlook without, however, giving his positive theology a content acceptable to Judaism. For the God he conceives is essentially the God of Aristotle whose nature is absorbed in the act of Self-Thinking rather than in his active relationship with the world.

The extreme Aristotelianism of Gersonides is made the target of attack by Hisdai Crescas (c. 1340-1410) in his The Light of the Lord, one of the profoundest works of mediaeval Jewish Philosophy. Crescas continues the line of discussion followed by Gersonides, but relentlessly endeavors to show that far from settling the problems it had set out to solve, it had only increased them. He argues that Gersonides’ attempt to limit the knowledge of God to the universal order of things had excluded from the range of Divine cognition not only individual and particular things, but also the variety of species and of the stellar motions. Crescas ascribes to God both the knowledge and fore-knowledge of individual things and happenings, and thus re-establishes, in philosophic terms, the Biblical notion of Divine Providence. But he can do so only at the price of abandoning the concept of human freedom. God has accurate and definite knowledge of events by knowing the possible not only as possible, but as the inevitable result of human choice which is itself determined.

Crescas’ theology also joins issue with Gersonides on the problem of Divine attributes. He goes much farther than his predecessor in upholding the possibility of positive attributes. Jewish Philosophy from Saadya to Gersonides had insisted that God’s essence was one, simple and undefinable. There had been universal agreement that God does not possess any attributes as distinct from His essence. Crescas affirms the compatibility of Divine unity with Divine attributes unidentical, and yet one, with the Divine essence. A plurality of attributes does not imply plurality and composition of essence if these attributes form an essential unity among themselves and are one with the essence by inner necessity. God is not composed of qualities separable from one another but contains qualities forming an essential unity. Crescas was thus on his way to establishing the concept of God as an integrated personality rather than a "principle" in the sense of rational theology. The Divine attributes are but mental modifications of one single attribute, that of Goodness. They are, as it were, variations of one single theme, and express, in so many words, the sum-total of all perfections. But crescas also assumes an unknowable Divine essence beyond the sphere of the attributes, and thus the strange concept arises of an absolutely hidden and unaccessible essence of God behind the knowable essential attributes.

Part III will be published in the next issue.

© "History of Philosophy Eastern and Western" by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, published by George Allen & Unwin Limited, Ruskin House, Museum Street, London. Part I of this article appeared in Splendour, September 2003 issue.

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