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.

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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