HISTORY OF ISRAEL LIBRARY

MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

ISAAC HUSIK

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. Isaac Israeli

II. David ben Merwan Al Mukammas

III. Saadia ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi

IV. Joseph Al-Basir and Jeshua ben Judah

V. Solomon Ibn Gabirol

VI. Bahya Ibn Pakuda

VII. Pseudo-Bahya

VIII. Abraham Bar Hiyya

IX. Joseph Ibn Zaddik

X. Judah Halevi

XI. Moses and Abraham Ibn Ezra

XII. Abraham Ibn Daud

XIII. Moses Maimonides

XIV. Hillel ben Samuel

XV. Levi ben Gerson

XVI. Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia

XVII. Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas

XVIII. Joseph Albo

Conclusion

CHAPTER V . SOLOMON IBN GABIROL

With Gabirol the scene of Jewish intellectual activity changes from the east to the west. Prior to the middle of the tenth century the centre of Jewish learning was in Babylonia. The succession of Geonim in the Talmudical schools of Sura and Pumbadita, and particularly the great fame of Saadia, made all the other Jewish communities of the world look to Babylonia as the spiritual centre. They considered it a privilege to contribute to the support of the great eastern academies and appealed to their spiritual heads in cases of doubt in religious matters. Some of this glory was reflected also upon the neighboring countries under Mohammedan domination, Palestine, Egypt, and Kairuan or northern Africa to the west of Egypt. Thus all the men, Rabbanites as well as Karaites, whom we treated so far lived and flourished in the east in one of the four countries mentioned. Christian Europe was intellectually on a low level, and as far as scientific studies were concerned, the Jews under Christian rule were no better than their temporal rulers.

But a new era dawned for Jewish literature with the accession to power of the Umayyad caliph Abd al Rahman III, as head of Mohammedan Spain or Andalusia. He was a liberal man and a patron of learning. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a cultured and high-minded Jew, was his trusted adviser, and like his royal patron he protected and encouraged Jewish learning, Talmudical as well as scientific. When Moses ben Enoch, a learned emissary from the Babylonian Academy, was ransomed by the Jewish community of Cordova and made the head of a Talmudical school in that city, the beginning of the end of Babylonian Jewish supremacy was at hand. Moses ben Enoch the Talmudist, Menahem ben Saruk, the grammarian and lexicographer, and Dunash ben Labrat, the poet—all three under the distinguished patronage of Hasdai ibn Shaprut—inaugurated the long line of Spanish Jewish worthies, which continued almost five centuries, constituting the golden era of Jewish literature and making of Spain the intellectual centre of all Jewry.

Solomon ibn Gabirol was not merely the first Jewish philosopher in Spain, he was the first Spanish philosopher, that is, he was the first philosophical writer in Andalusia. Ibn Badja, the first Mohammedan philosopher in Spain, was born at least a half century after Gabirol. The birth of Gabirol is generally placed in 1021 and his death in 1058, though some have put it as late as 1070.

The fate of Gabirol in the history of Jewish literature was a peculiar one. Highly celebrated as a synagogal poet in the Sephardic as well as Ashkenazic community, his fame as a great philosopher was early overshadowed by his successors, and his chief work, the “Fountain of Life”, was in the course of time quite forgotten. The Arabic original was lost and there was no Hebrew translation. The Tibbonides, Judah, Samuel and Moses, who translated everything worthwhile in Jewish philology, science and philosophy from Arabic into Hebrew, either did not know of Gabirol’s masterpiece or did not think it important enough to translate. To judge from the extant fragments of the correspondence between Samuel ibn Tibbon and Maimonides, it would seem that both were true; that is that Samuel ibn Tibbon had no access to Gabirol’s “Fons Vitae”, and that if he had had such access, Maimonides would have dissuaded him from translating it. Maimonides actually tells his translator that the only books worth studying are those of Aristotle and his true commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Averroes. Alfarabi and Avicenna are also important, but other writings, such as those of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hermes, Porphyry, represent a pre-Aristotelian philosophy which is obsolete, and are a waste of time. The books of Isaac Israeli on the “Elements” and on “Definitions”, are no better, seeing that Israeli was only a physician and no philosopher. He is not familiar with the “Microcosmus” of Joseph ibn Zaddik, but infers from a knowledge of the man that his work is based upon the writings of the “Brothers of Purity”; and hence, we may add, not strictly Aristotelian, and not particularly important. Not a word is here said about Gabirol, apparently because Samuel ibn Tibbon had not inquired about him. But from Maimonides’s judgment concerning the works of “Empedocles”, we may legitimately infer that he would have been no more favorable to Gabirol; for, as we shall see, Gabirol’s system is also based upon a point of view similar to that of the so-called “Empedocles”. What the Tibbonides left undone was, however, partially accomplished about a half century later by the commentator and critic Shem Tob Falaquera (1225-1290). Apparently in agreement with Abraham ibn Daud that Gabirol’s profuseness in his philosophic masterpiece made it possible to reduce it to a tenth part of its size, Falaquera did not find it necessary to translate the whole of the “Mekor Hayim” into Hebrew, giving us instead a translation of selected parts, which in his estimation contained the gist of Gabirol’s teaching. The absence of a complete Hebrew translation of Gabirol’s philosophical work meant of course that no one who did not know Arabic could have access to Gabirol’s “Mekor Hayim”, and this practically excluded the majority of learned Jews after the first half of the thirteenth century. But the selections of Falaquera did not seem to find many readers either, as may be inferred from the fact that so far only one single manuscript of this translation is known.

En revanche, as the French would say, the Christian Scholastics of the thirteenth century made Gabirol their own and studied him diligently. His fundamental thesis of a universal matter underlying all existence outside of God was made a bone of contention between the two dominant schools; the Dominicans, led by Thomas Aquinas, opposing this un-Aristotelian principle, the Franciscans with Duns Scotus at their head, adopting it as their own. “Ego autem redeo ad sententiam Avicembronis”, is a formula in Duns Scotus’s discussion of the principle of matter.

The translation of Gabirol’s philosophy into an accessible language, which was not considered desirable by Jews, was actually accomplished by Christians. About a century before Falaquera a complete translation into Latin was made in Toledo of Gabirol’s “Fountain of Life”, under the title “Fons Vitae”. This translation was made at the instance of Raymond, Archbishop of Toledo in the middle of the twelfth century, by Dominicus Gundissalinus, archdeacon of Segovia, with the assistance of a converted Jewish physician, Ibn Daud (Avendehut, Avendeath), whose name after conversion became Johannes Hispanus or Hispalensis. Unlike the Hebrew epitome of Falaquera this translation was not neglected, as is clear from the rôle Gabirol’s philosophy plays in the disputations of the schools, and from the fact that there are still extant four manuscripts of the complete translation, one of an epitome thereof, and there is evidence that a fifth manuscript existed in 1375 in the Papal library. As Ibn Sina was corrupted by the Latin writers into Avicenna, and Ibn Roshd into Averroes, so Ibn Gabirol became in turn, Avencebrol, Avicembron, Avicebron; and the Scholastics who fought about his philosophy had no idea he was a Jew and celebrated as a writer of religious hymns used in the synagogue. He was regarded now as a Mohammedan, now as a Christian.

This peculiar circumstance will help us to get an inkling of the reason for the neglect of Gabirol’s philosophy in the Jewish community. It is clear that a work which, like the “Fons Vitae”, made it possible for its author to be regarded as a Mohammedan or even a Christian, cannot have had the Jewish imprint very deeply stamped upon its face. Nay more, while the knowledge of its having been translated from the Arabic may have been sufficient in itself to stamp the author as a Mohammedan, there must have been additional indications for his Scholastic admirers to make them regard him as a Christian. An examination of the work lends some semblance of truth to these considerations.

Gabirol nowhere betrays his Jewishness in the “Fons Vitae”. He never quotes a Biblical verse or a Talmudic dictum. He does not make any overt attempt to reconcile his philosophical views with religious faith. The treatise is purely speculative as if religious dogma nowhere existed to block one's way or direct one's search. Abraham Ibn Daud, the author of the philosophical treatise “Emunah Ramah” (The Exalted Faith), and the predecessor of Maimonides, criticises Gabirol very severely, and that not merely because he disagrees with him in the conception of matter and finds Gabirol's reasoning devoid of cogency and logical force—many bad arguments, he says, seem in the mind of Gabirol to be equivalent to one good one—but principally because Gabirol failed to take a Jewish attitude in his philosophizing, and actually, as Ibn Daud tells us, maintains views dangerous to Judaism.

This will easily account for the fact that Gabirol, celebrated as he was as a poet, was lost sight of generally as a philosopher. The matter is made clearer still if we add that his style in the “Mekor Hayim” is against him. It is devoid of all merit whether of literary beauty or of logical conciseness and brevity. It is diffuse to a degree and frequently very wearisome and tedious. One has to wade through pages upon pages of bare syllogisms, one more flimsy than another.

Finally, the point of view of Gabirol was that of a philosophy that was rapidly becoming obsolete, and Maimonides, the ground having been made ready by Ibn Daud, gave this philosophy its death-blow by substituting for it the philosophy of Aristotle.

We now understand why it is that, with few exceptions here and there, Gabirol’s philosophical work was in the course of time forgotten among the Jews, though his name Avicebron as well as some of his chief doctrines were well known to the Scholastic writers. To be sure, even students of Scholastic literature had no direct access to Gabirol's treatise as it was never printed and no one knew whether there were still any manuscripts of it extant or not. The only sources of information concerning Avicebron's philosophy were Aquinas's refutations, and Duns Scotus's defence, and other second-hand references in the writings of the Scholastics. Who Avicebron was no one knew. It was not until 1819 that Amable Jourdain, in tracing the history of the Latin translations of Aristotle, came to the conclusion that more must be known about the philosophy of Avicebron’s “Fons Vitae” if we intended to understand the Scholastics. In 1845 Solomon Munk discovered in the national library at Paris the epitome of Falaquera mentioned above, and comparing it with the views of Avicebron as found in the discussions of the Scholastics, made the important discovery that the mysterious Avicebron was neither a Mohammedan nor a Christian but a Jew, and none other than the famous poet Solomon ibn Gabirol. Then began a search for copies of a Latin translation, which was rewarded amply. Both Munk and Seyerlen discovered manuscript copies of the “Fons Vitae”, and now both the Hebrew epitome of Falaquera and the Latin translation of Gundissalinus are accessible in print. So much for the interesting history of Gabirol. Now a word as to his views.

Shem Tob ibn Falaquera, in the brief introduction which he appends to his epitome of the “Mekor Hayim” says, “It seems to me that Solomon ibn Gabirol follows in his book the views of the ancient philosophers as we find them in a book composed by Empedocles concerning the ‘Five Substances’. This book is based upon the principle that all spiritual substances have a spiritual matter; that the form comes from above and the matter receives it from below, i. e., that the matter is a substratum and bears the form upon it”. He then adds that Aristotle attributes a similar view to his predecessors, but that this view is inconsistent with Aristotle’s own thinking. For in his opinion what is material is composite and possessed of potentiality. Hence only those things have matter which are subject to generation and decay, and in general change from one state to another.

Without going into detail as to the nature of this work of Empedocles named by Falaquera as the source of Gabirol’s views—expositions of these so-called Empedoclean views and fragments from Empedocles’s book have been found in Arabian and Hebrew writers—it is sufficient for us to know that it has nothing to do with the real Empedocles, the ancient Greek philosopher; that it was another of the many spurious writings which circulated in the middle ages under famous names of antiquity; and that like the “Theology of Aristotle”, and the “Liber de Causis”, mentioned in the Introduction , it was Neo-Platonic in character.

Thus Gabirol was a Neo-Platonist. This does not mean that he did not adopt many important Aristotelian conceptions. Neo-Platonism itself could not have arisen without Aristotle. The ideas of matter and form, and potentiality and actuality, and the categories, and so on, had become the fixed elements of philosophical thinking, and no new system could do without them. In this sense Plotinus himself, the founder of Neo-Platonism, is an Aristotelian. When we speak of Gabirol as a Neo-Platonist, we mean that the essence of his system is Neo-Platonic. He is not a dualist, but a monist. God and matter are not opposed as two ultimate principles, as they are in Aristotle. Matter in Gabirol is ultimately identified with God. In this he goes even beyond Plotinus. For whereas in Plotinus matter occupies the lowest scale in the gradation of being as it flows from the One or the Good, and becomes equivalent to the non-existent, and is the cause of evil, in Gabirol matter is the underlying substance for all being from the highest to the lowest, with the one exception of the Creator himself. It emanates from the essence of the Creator, forming the basis of all subsequent emanations. Hence the spiritual substances of the celestial world, or, to use a more technical and more precise term—since spirit is not located in heaven or anywhere spatially—the intelligible world, have matter underlying their form. In fact, matter itself is intelligible or spiritual, not corporeal. Corporeality and materiality are two different things. There are various gradations of matter, to be sure; for the prime matter as it emerges from the essence of the Creator pervades all existence from highest to lowest, and the further it extends from its origin the less spiritual and the more corporeal it becomes until in the sublunar world we have in the matters of its particular objects, corporeal matter, i. e., matter affected with quantity and magnitude and figure and color. Like Plotinus, Gabirol conceives of the universe as a process of a gradually descending series of existences or worlds, as the Kabbalistic writers term them; these cosmic existences radiating or flowing out of the superabundant light and goodness of the Creator. The two extremes of this graded universe are God at the one end, and the corporeal world at the other. Intermediate between these are the spiritual substances, Intelligence, Soul and Nature. Man as a microcosm, a universe in little, partakes of both the corporeal and intermediate worlds, and hence may serve as a model of the constitution of the macrocosm, or great universe. His body is typical of the corporeal world, which consists of the lowest matter, viz., that which has no other form except that of corporeality, or extension, and the forms of figure, color, and so on, borne on top of the extension.

Body as such is at rest and is not capable of action. To act it needs an agent. Hence it needs an agency to compose its parts and hold them together. We call this agency Nature. Man’s body also grows, is nourished and propagates its kind as do plants. This likewise must have its non-corporeal cause. This we call vegetative soul. Man has also sense perception and local motion like the animals. The principle or substance causing this is the animal soul. Man also thinks and reasons and reflects. This is brought about by the rational soul. Finally, man has a still higher function than discursive thought. The latter has to search and to pass from premise to conclusion, whereas the apprehension of the intelligence takes place “without seeking, without effort, and without any other cause except its own essence, because it is full of perfection”. In other words, it is immediate intellectual intuition of which Gabirol speaks here. The Intelligence is capable of this because it has in itself, constituting its essence, all the forms of existence, and knowledge means possession of the forms of the things known.

As man is typical of the universe, it follows that there are cosmic existences corresponding to the principles or powers just enumerated in man, and the relation of the latter to the former is that of the particular to the general. Hence there is a cosmic Intelligence, a cosmic soul embracing the rational, the animal and the vegetative parts, and a cosmic nature. Of these the more perfect is the cause of the less perfect; hence the order in which we named them represents the order of causation or of emanation from the prime source.

The lowest of these emanations is the matter which sustains extension or magnitude, and with it the process ceases. This matter is no longer the source of an additional form of existence. The various qualities and attributes which inhere in this corporeal matter are caused by the spiritual substances above. For like the prototype of all generosity and goodness the First Essence or God, every one of the spiritual substances proceeding from him has the same tendency of imparting its form or forms to the substance next below it. But the forms thus bestowed are no longer the same as they are in the essence of the bestowing substance, as it depends upon the recipient what sort of form it will receive. An inferior receiving substance will receive a superior form in an inferior way. That is, the form which in the substance above the one in question is contained in a spiritual and unitary manner, will be transformed in the substance below it into something less spiritual, less unified, and more nearly corporeal, i. e., visible and tangible. Hence the visible and tangible, and in general the sensible qualities of particular things in the sublunar world, are in reality descended from a line of spiritual ancestors in the forms of the simple substances, Intelligence, Soul and Nature. But it is their distance from the prime source, which increases with every transmission of influence, together with the cruder nature of the receiving substance, that makes the resulting forms corporeal and sensible. The matter may be made clear if we use the analogy of light, which is invisible as long as it is in air because it penetrates it, but becomes visible when it comes in contact with a gross body which it cannot penetrate. It then remains on the surface condensed, and becomes visible to the senses.

We thus see that the higher substance acts upon the lower and contains all that is found in the latter, though in a more perfect and simple manner. The lower substances flow from the higher and yet the latter are not diminished in their essence and power.

That ordinary material objects are composed of matter and form is admitted and we need not now prove it, as we have already discussed the subject in the Introduction, where we gave an outline of the Aristotelian philosophy. The principle peculiar to Gabirol is that not merely the material objects of the sublunar world, but that the intelligible or spiritual substances also are composed of matter and form. Whenever two things have something in common and something in which they differ, that which they have in common is the matter, that in which they differ is the form. Two things absolutely simple must be prime to each other, i. e., they must have nothing in common, for if they have anything in common they have everything in common, and they are no longer two things but one. Hence a spiritual substance must be composite, for it must have something by which it differs from a corporeal substance, and something, viz., substantiality, which it has in common with it. In the same way the intelligible substances, Intelligence and Soul, have their substantiality in common, and they differ in form. Hence they are composed of matter and form, and the matter must be the same in all the intelligible substances; for their differences are due to their forms, hence if their matters also differed, they would have to differ in form, but matter as such has no form. Hence matter in itself is everywhere the same.

As the Intelligence is the highest existence next to God, and is composed of matter and form, these are respectively the universal matter and universal form, embracing all subsequent matters and forms. Hence the Intelligence in knowing itself knows everything, as everything is contained in it. And as it is prior to everything and the cause of everything it has an immediate knowledge of all things without effort or searching.

But what is the origin of universal matter and universal form which, in constituting Intelligence, are the fundamental principles of all existence? The answer is they come from the First Essence, God. Unity comes before duality or plurality, and there is no true unity except in God. Whatever issues from him is ipso facto, as a product which is not God, affected with duality. Matter and Form is this duality. Their union is necessary and real, and it is only in thought that we can keep them apart. In reality they form a unit, their union varying in perfection according as they are nearer or further away from their origin. Hence the union is closest in Intelligence, the first divine emanation, and least close in corporeal objects of the sublunar world, where plurality is the order of the day.

This process by which universal matter and form issue from God may be called creation. But we must conceive of it on the analogy of water flowing from a fountain in continued and uninterrupted succession. The only difference is that the emanation from God takes place without motion and without time.

The union of universal form and universal matter must be thought of as a stamping of the form upon the matter. Matter has in itself no actual or definable existence. It serves merely as a tabula rasa, as a potential background, as an empty receptacle, as a reflecting mirror for form to be written, filled out, impressed or reflected therein or upon. Hence we may view God as the spectator, universal matter as the mirror, and universal form as the reflection of the spectator in the glass. God himself does not enter the glass, only his reflection is outlined therein. And as matter and form are really the whole world, it would follow that the universe is a reflection of God, though God remains in himself and does not enter the world with his essence.

We may also picture to ourselves this impression of form upon matter on the analogy of speech. The speaker's words impress ideas upon the soul of the listener. So God speaks and his Word or Will impresses form upon matter. The world is created by the Word or the Will of God.

In all these similes matter appears as something external to God, upon which he impresses form. But this is not strictly true, since matter has no real existence without form, and has never so existed. The existence of matter and form is simultaneous, and both come from God, matter from his essence, form from his attribute, or his Wisdom, or his Word, or his Will. And yet in God, who is a perfect unity, es sence and attribute are one. It is the Will of God, not God himself, that must be regarded as the spectator, whose outline is reflected in the mirror of matter in the above simile. It is the Will of God that writes form upon the chart of matter, and thereby produces a world. It is in virtue of the Will that God is said to be in everything.

But what is this will of God as distinguished from God himself, since in God there can be no duality of any kind? Gabirol’s answer is not clear or satisfactory. The will, he says, is identical with God if we consider it apart from its activity; considered as active it is different from the divine essence. Exactly to describe it is impossible, but the following is an approximation. It is a divine power producing matter and form, binding them together, pervading them throughout their extent above and below, as the soul pervades the body, and moving and ordering everything.

God himself, or the First Essence, can be known only through the Will as pervading everything, i. e., through his effects in the world. And in this way too only his existence can be known but not his essence as he is in himself, because God is above everything and infinite. The soul may know Intelligence because though the latter is above the soul there is some similarity between them. But the First Essence has no similarity to Intelligence, therefore no intelligence can know it.

There is a kind of mystic knowledge by which man may come in touch with the spiritual substances and rise even to universal matter, which is above Intelligence. “If you wish to form a picture of these substances”, the master says to the disciple in the “Fons Vitae”, “you must raise your intellect to the last intelligible, you must purify it from all sordid sensibility, free it from the captivity of nature and approach with the force of your intelligence to the last limit of intelligible substance that it is possible for you to comprehend, until you are entirely divorced from sensible substance and lose all knowledge thereof. Then you will embrace, so to speak, the whole corporeal world in your being, and will place it in one corner of your soul. When you have done this you will understand the insignificance of the sensible in comparison with the greatness of the intelligible. Then the spiritual substances will be before your eyes, comprehending you and superior to you, and you will see your own being as though you were those substances. Sometimes it will seem to you that you are a part of them by reason of your connection with corporeal substance; and sometimes you will think you are all of them, and that there is no difference between you and them, on account of the union of your being with their being, and the attachment of your form to their forms”. The pupil assures the teacher that he has followed this advice and seen the whole corporeal world floating in the spiritual substances as a small boat in the sea, or a bird in the air. “When you have raised yourself to the first universal matter”, replies the teacher, “and illumined its shadow, you will see there the wonder of wonders. Pursue this therefore diligently and with love, because this is the purpose of the existence of the human soul, and in this is great delight and extreme happiness”.

But Gabirol does not promise a knowledge of the Most High even through this royal road of ecstasy, unless we suppose that in the promise of seeing in universal matter the wonder of all wonders there may be a covert allusion to a glimpse of the deepest secret of all, the essence of God.

All knowledge is according to Gabirol embraced in the following three topics, (1) Matter and Form, (2) the Active Word or Will, (3) the First Essence or God. By far the larger part of the “Fons Vitae” is devoted to the first subject. Only brief hints are given of the second and third, and Gabirol refers us to a special work of his on the Will, which he says he wrote. There is no trace of any such treatise. At any rate it is clear from the little that is contained on the Divine Will in the “Fons Vitae” that the Will forms an important element in Gabirol’s philosophy. This is the more remarkable because it is not an essential element in Neo-Platonism, upon which Gabirol’s system is based. Nay, the doctrine of a divine will scarcely has any place in the form of emanation taught by Plotinus. The cosmic process is conceived there as necessary and impersonal. And but for the introduction of the Will in the “Fons Vitae” we should be forced to understand Gabirol in the same way. The difficulty in Neo-Platonism is that God is at the same time transcendent and, through his powers or emanations, immanent in the world. God is above all being and at the same time is the cause of and pervades all existence. Gabirol must have felt not merely this purely philosophical difficulty, but as a Jew, Pantheism as well as impersonalism must have been objection able to him. Hence he mitigates both by introducing the divine will as mediating between God and the world. This brings God in closer and more personal touch with his creation. The cosmic process is not a necessary and impersonal flow or radiation but a voluntary activity having a purpose. The solution is unsatisfactory, as all such solutions are bound to be, because it introduces as many difficulties as it solves. The nature of this divine Will is ambiguous. If it is God's will, and God is the One in whom there can be no distinctions, we have only a new word, and nothing is solved. If on human analogy we are inclined to take the will seriously, we are endangering God's unity. This dilemma Gabirol does not succeed in removing. His system still has a strong flavor of Pantheism, and moreover his identification of the Will of God with the Wisdom and the Word of God, and his hypostatization of the latter as in a sense a being distinct from God, reminds us strongly of Philo's Logos, which became the Logos of Christianity, the second person in the Trinity. This is the reason why William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, regarded Avicebron as a Christian. And these same reasons were no doubt adequate to estrange Jewish readers, as Abraham ibn Daud expressly tells us about himself, though his terms are general .

Gabirol is also the author of an ethical work which he composed in 1045. Though of little importance philosophically, or perhaps because of this, the “Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh” (Improvement of the Qualities of the Soul) fared much better than its more important companion, the “Mekor Hayim”. Not only did it have the privilege of a Hebrew translation at the hands of the father of translators, Judah ibn Tibbon, but the original Arabic itself is still extant and was recently published with an English translation by Stephen S. Wise (1901). The Hebrew translation also had the good fortune of being reprinted several times. This is due to the fact that the “Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh” is a popular work, dealing with morals, and does not go into metaphysical questions. It is full of Biblical citations, which stamps it as Jewish; and there are also in it quotations from Arabic writers serving to illustrate the argument and lending variety and interest to the style.

The larger question of the aim of human life is touched on in the “Fons Vitae”. We are told there that the ultimate aim of man’s existence is that the soul should unite with the upper world to which it belongs. The particular human soul is according to Gabirol a part, though not in a physical sense, of the cosmic soul, which is one of the universal spiritual substances . Hence its own real existence is spiritual and eternal, and independent of the body. Its entrance into the body obscures its spiritual vision, though it does not lose all touch with the higher world from which it came. The senses and the data of sense perception are not an end in themselves; they are only a means for the soul through them to recall the higher knowledge which was its own in its spiritual existence, and thereby win its return to the intelligible world. Man’s duty therefore in this world is to strive to attain this higher life for his soul. This is brought about by means of knowledge and practice. This knowledge has to do with knowing all things as they really are, and particularly the intelligible substances and the Prime Essence. Practice signifies to keep away as far as possible from things of sense, which are foreign to the soul and might injure it. What more particularly the things are which are beneficial to the soul, and what are injurious, we learn from Gabirol’s ethical treatise. Man’s soul has a higher and a lower nature. The higher power is the reason or rational soul, the lower is the animal or vegetative soul; and man's business is to see that the reason rules over the lower nature.

Gabirol does not give us any test by which we can tell whether a given act or feeling belongs to the lower or higher nature except to say that the appetites are diseases of the body which must be cured; that they do not belong to the rational soul, and to satisfy them is not the attainment of a good. Gabirol’s method of treating virtue and vice, or rather the virtues and the vices, is to relate them to the five senses and the four humors in man, which in turn correspond to the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, and the four primitive qualities, hot, cold, moist, dry. This division of the elements, the humors, the qualities and the senses was a commonplace of the physiological and medical science of the time. We have met it in Isaac Israeli, and it goes back to Aristotle and Galen and Hippocrates. The originality, though a queer one to be sure, of Gabirol is to bring the ethical qualities of man into relation with all these. The approximations are forced in every instance and often ludicrous. Instead of attempting to give a psychological analysis of the qualities in question, he lays stress on their physical basis in one of the five senses, as we shall see presently.

The great world, we are told, was created out of the four elements, and similarly man, the microcosm, also consists of four natures corresponding to the elements. Thus the four humors, upon the harmonious combination of which the health of man's body depends, viz., blood, phlegm, black gall, and red gall, correspond respectively to air, water, earth, fire. Man is endowed besides with five senses. If he is wise he will use his senses properly and in the right measure, like a skilful physician who calculates carefully what proportion of each drug should be prescribed.

The sense of sight is the noblest of the senses, and is related to the body as the sun to the world. The philosophers have a wonderful saying concerning the eye that there are spiritual tints in the soul which are visible in the movements of the eyelids—pride and haughtiness, humility and meekness. Accordingly the ethical qualities due to the sense of sight are pride, meekness, modesty and impudence, besides the subordinate qualities derived from these.

Pride is common in a person of a warm disposition in whom the red gall predominates. Many wise men exhibit this quality out of place, fools adopt it until they are mastered by it, and it is prevalent in youth. It may be useful when it keeps a man away from vice and unworthy things, inspiring him to rise to nobility of character and the service of God. But generally it is useless and leads to many evils, especially if it causes one to be self-opinionated, refusing to seek the advice of anyone. When a man sees this quality gaining mastery over him, he should consider the origin and end of existing things. When he sees that all things are destined to pass away, and himself likewise, his pride will change to humility.

Meekness is closer to virtue than the quality mentioned before, because he who possesses it withholds his desire from seeking gratification. It is a quality manifested by the prophets and leads to honor. “The fruits of lowliness”, a philosopher has said, “are love and tranquility”. Contentment is of a kind with meekness. The greatest riches are contentment and patience. He who esteems his rank but lightly enhances man's estimation of his dignity. A wise man has said, “Be humble without cringing, and manly without being arrogant. Arrogance is a wilderness and haughtiness a taking refuge therein, and altogether a going astray”.

Modesty is connected with humility but is superior to it, for it is a sister of reason, and reason, as everybody knows, is the most important quality, which separates man from beast and brings him near to the angels. You never see a modest person without sense, or a person of good sense who is not modest. A man must be modest not only before others but also to himself. Modesty and faithfulness, it is said, are closely related, and the one cannot be had truly without the other.

The impudent man is disliked by God and by man, even if he be wise and learned. If one has this quality it is the duty of his friend and associate to break him of it by reproving him. It is of value only when used in defence of the Torah and in behalf of God and the truth.

Space will not permit us to treat in detail of the other senses and the virtues and vices depending upon them, but we shall indicate briefly Gabirol’s method of relating the ethical qualities to the physical senses.

Thus the sense of hearing, which is next in importance to sight has as its qualities hate, love, mercy and cruelty. It takes some fine insight, he says, to see the connection of these qualities with the sense of hearing, but the intelligent and discerning reader will find this hint sufficient. I hope he will not blame me, Gabirol continues, if I do not bring together all the reasons and the scriptural passages to prove this, for human flesh is weak, especially in my case on account of my vexatious experiences and disappointments. We find in the Bible love associated with hearing: “Hear, O Israel ... and thou shalt love the Lord thy God” (Deut. 6, 4). Hate follows hearing in the phrase: “When Esau heard the words of his father ... and Esau hated Jacob” (Gen. 27, 34-41). Mercy is related to hearing in Exod. (22, 26), “And I will hear for I am merciful”. Finally cruelty is to refuse to listen, as we find in the case of Pharaoh (Ex. 9, 12), “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them”.

In a similar manner Gabirol proves that the sense of smell has four qualities, anger, favor, envy, wide-awakeness; the sense of taste, the four qualities, joy, sorrow, regret, calmness; while liberality, niggardliness, courage and cowardice are related to the sense of touch.

The relation of the ethical qualities to the senses, humors, elements and primitive physical qualities is exhibited in the following table, as it appears in the Arabic text of the “Aslah al-Ahlak”, the original title of Gabirol’s ethical work.

Among Gabirol’s religious poems there is one which interests us particularly because it bears traces of the philosophy of the “Fons Vitae”. It is the most important of his hymns and is found in the prayer-book of the Sephardic ritual for the Day of Atonement. “The Royal Crown”, as the poem is entitled, is an appeal to God for mercy and forgiveness, and is based upon the contrast between the greatness of God and the insignificance of man. The first part is therefore devoted to a poetical description of God's attributes and the wonders of the cosmic system, as conceived in the astronomical science of the day. A few quotations will give us an idea of the style and character of the hymn and its relation to the “Fons Vitae”.

“Thine are the mysteries, which neither fancy nor imagination can comprehend; and the life, over which dissolution hath no power. Thine is the Throne exalted above all height; and the habitation concealed in the eminence of its recess. Thine is the existence, from the shadow of whose light sprung every existing thing; of which we said, under its protecting shadow shall we live....

“Thou art One, the first of every number, and the foundation of all structure. Thou art One, and in the mystery of the Unity all the wise in heart are astonished; for they cannot define it. Thou art One, and thy Unity can neither be lessened nor augmented; for nothing is there wanting or superfluous. Thou art One, but not such a one as is estimated or numbered; for neither plurality, nor change, form, nor physical attribute, nor name expressive of thy quality, can reach thee....”

In the same way he treats God’s other attributes, existent, living, great, mighty. Then he continues:

“Thou art light, and the eyes of every pure soul shall see thee; for the clouds of iniquity alone hide thee from her sight.... Thou art most high, and the eye of the intellect desireth and longeth for thee; but it can only see a part, it cannot see the whole of thy greatness....

"Thou art God, who by thy Divinity supportest all things formed; and upholdest all creatures by thy Unity. Thou art God, and there is no distinction between thy godhead, unity, eternity or existence; for all is one mystery; and although each of these attributes is variously named, yet the whole point to one end.

"Thou art wise, and wisdom, which is the fountain of life, floweth from thee; and compared with thy wisdom, the knowledge of all mankind is folly. Thou art wise; and didst exist prior to all the most ancient things; and wisdom was reared by thee. Thou art wise; and hast not learned aught from another, nor acquired thy wisdom from anyone else. Thou art wise; and from thy wisdom thou didst cause to emanate a ready will, an agent and artist as it were, to draw existence out of non-existence, as light proceeds from the eye. Thou drawest from the source of light without a vessel, and producest everything without a tool”.

Then follows a description of the constitution of the sublunar world, the terrestrial sphere consisting of part earth, part water, and being surrounded by the successive spheres of air and fire. Then follow in order the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the spheres of the fixed stars, and the outermost sphere embracing all and giving to the entire heaven the diurnal motion from east to west. He then continues:

“Who can understand thy tremendous mysteries, when thou didst exalt above the ninth orb, the sphere of the Intelligence; that is the inner temple; for the tenth shall be holy to the Lord. This is the sphere which is exalted above all the highest, and which no imagination can reach; and there is the hiding-place, wherein is the canopy for thy glory....

“O Lord! who can come near thy understanding, when thou didst place on high above the sphere of the Intelligence the Throne of thy glory, where is the glorious dwelling of the hiding-place; there also is the mystery and the foundation (matter); so far the intellect may reach and no further; for above this art thou greatly exalted upon thy mighty throne, where no man may come up to thee....

"Who can comprehend thy power, when thou didst create from the splendor of thy glory a pure lustre? From the rock of rocks was it hewn, and dug from the hollow of the cave. Thou also didst bestow on it the spirit of wisdom, and didst call it soul. Thou didst form it hewn from the flames of intellectual fire, so that its spirit burneth as fire within it. Thou didst send it forth to the body to serve and guard it; it is as fire in the midst of it, and yet doth not consume it; for from the fire of the soul the body was created, and called into existence from nothing, because the Lord descended thereto in fire”.

Here we see the Intelligence spoken of as standing above the heavenly spheres. This clearly represents the cosmic Intelligence as a creation of God, “which is exalted above all the highest”, hence the first product of God’s light. And yet the Throne of Glory is said to be placed even above the sphere of the Intelligence. He speaks of it as the mystery and the foundation (Yesod), beyond which the intellect cannot reach. This is apparently a contradiction, but becomes clear when we learn what is meant by the Throne of Glory, and by “foundation”. In the “Fons Vitae” Gabirol tells us that matter receives form from the First Essence through the medium of the Will, which latter therefore, as it bestows form upon matter, sits in it and rests upon it. And hence, he says, matter is as it were the stool (cathedra) of the One. The word “yesod” (foundation) which Gabirol applies in the “Keter Malkut” (Royal Crown) to the Throne of Glory is the same that Falaquera uses for matter throughout in his epitome of the “Mekor Hayim”. Hence it is clear that the Throne of Glory which is above the Intelligence is nothing else than Gabirol’s matter. And we know from the “Fons Vitae” that matter is really prior to Intelligence as it exists in the knowledge of God, but that in reality it never was, as a creation, without form; and that with form it constitutes the Intelligence. Finally there is also a reference in the poem to the will as emanating from God’s wisdom, and like an “agent and artist drawing existence out of non-existence as light proceeds from the eye”. The process of creation is thus compared with the radiation of light in the sentence just quoted, and likewise in the following: "Thou drawest from the source of light without a vessel, and producest everything without a tool."

We do not know whether Gabirol wrote any commentaries on the Bible—none are extant, nor are there any references to such works—but from his exegetical attempts in his ethical work discussed above and from citations by Abraham ibn Ezra of Gabirol’s explanations of certain passages in Scripture, we gather that like Philo of Alexandria before him and Maimonides and a host of philosophical commentators after him, he used the allegorical method to reconcile his philosophical views with the Bible, and read the former into the latter.

Thus we are told that Eden represents the presence of God, the garden planted in Eden stands for the angelic beings or, according to another interpretation, for the world of sense. By the river which flows out of Eden is meant prime matter which issues from the essence of God according to the “Fons Vitae”. The four divisions of the river are the four elements; Adam is the rational soul, Eve, as the Hebrew name indicates, the animal soul, and the serpent is the vegetative or appetitive soul. The serpent entices Adam to eat of the forbidden tree. This means that when the lower soul succeeds in controlling the reason, the result is evil and sin, and man is driven out of the Garden, i. e., is excluded from his angelic purity and becomes a corporeal being.

It is clear from all this that Gabirol’s omission of all reference to Jewish dogma in the “Fons Vitae” was purely methodological. Philosophy, and religion or theology should be kept apart in a purely philosophical work. Apologetics or harmonization has its rights, but it is a different department of study, and should be treated by itself, or in connection with exegesis of the Bible.

While it is true that Gabirol’s influence on subsequent Jewish philosophy is slight—at most we find it in Moses and Abraham ibn Ezra, Abraham ibn Daud and Joseph ibn Zaddik—traces of his ideas are met with in the mysticism of the Kabbala. Gabirol’s “Fons Vitae” is a peculiar combination of logical formalism with mystic obscurity, or profundity, according to one's point of view. The latter did not appeal to pure rationalists like Ibn Daud or Maimonides, and the former seemed unconvincing, as it was employed in a lost cause. For Neo-Platonism was giving way to Aristotelianism, which was adopted by Maimonides and made the authoritative and standard philosophy. It was different with the Kabbala. Those who were responsible for its spread in the thirteenth century must have been attracted by the seemingly esoteric character of a philosophy which sees the invisible in the visible, the spiritual in the corporeal, and the reflection of the unknowable God in everything. There are certain details also which are common to both, such as the analogies of irradiation of light or flowing of water used to represent the process of creation, the position of the Will, the existence of matter in spiritual beings, and so on, though some of these ideas are common to all Neo-Platonic systems, and the Kabbala may have had access to the same sources as Gabirol.

CHAPTER VI

BAHYA IBN PAKUDA

All that is known of the life of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda is that he lived in Spain and had the office of “Dayyan”, or judge of the Jewish community. Not even the exact time in which he lived is yet determined, though the most reliable recent investigations make it probable that he lived after Gabirol and was indebted to the latter for some of his views in philosophy as well as in Ethics. So far as traditional data are concerned we have equally reliable, or rather equally unreliable statements for regarding Bahya as an older contemporary of Gabirol (eleventh century), or of Abraham ibn Ezra (1088-1167). Neither of these two data being vouched for by any but their respective authors, who lived a long time after Bahya, we are left to such indirect evidence as may be gathered from the content of Bahya’s ethical work, the “Duties of the Hearts”. And here the recent investigations of Yahuda, the latest authority on this subject and the editor of the Arabic text of Bahya’s masterpiece (1912), force upon us the conclusion that Bahya wrote after Gabirol. Yahuda has shown that many passages in the “Duties of the Hearts” are practically identical in content and expression with similar ideas found in a work of the Arab philosopher Gazali (1059-1111). This leaves very little doubt that Bahya borrowed from Gazali and hence could not have written before the twelfth century.

To be sure, there are arguments on the other side, which would give chronological priority to Bahya over Gabirol, but without going into the details of this minute and difficult discussion, it may be said generally that many of the similarities in thought and expression between the two ethical works of Gabirol and Bahya rather point in favor of the view here adopted, namely, that Bahya borrowed from Gabirol, while the rest prove nothing for either side. In so far as a reader of the "Duties of the Hearts" recognizes here and there an idea met with in Gabirol’s “Fons Vitae”, there can scarcely be any doubt that the latter is the more original of the two. Gabirol did not borrow his philosophy or any part thereof from Bahya. Despite its Neo-Platonic character the “Fons Vitae”of Gabirol is the most independent and original of Jewish medieval productions. The “Duties of the Hearts” owes what originality it has to its ethics, which is the chief aim of the work, and not at all to the introductory philosophical chapter. As we shall see later, the entire chapter on the existence and unity of God, which introduces the ethical teachings of Bahya, moves in the familiar lines of Saadia, Al Mukammas, Joseph al Basir and the other Jewish Mutakallimun. There is besides a touch of Neo-Platonism in Bahya, which may be due to Gabirol as well as to Arabic sources. That Bahya did not borrow more from the “Fons Vitae” than he did is due no doubt to the difference in temperament between the two men. Bahya is not a mystic. Filled as he is with the spirit of piety and warmth of heart—an attitude reflected in his style, which helped to make his work the most popular moral-religious book in Jewish literature—there is no trace of pantheism or metaphysical mysticism in his nature. His ideas are sane and rational, and their expression clear and transparent. Gabirol’s high flights in the “Fons Vitae”have little in common with Bahya’s modest and brief outline of the familiar doctrines of the existence, unity and attributes of God, for which he claims no originality, and which serve merely as the background for his contribution to religious ethics. That Bahya should have taken a few leading notions from the “Fons Vitae”, such as did not antagonize his temperament and mode of thinking, is quite possible, and we shall best explain such resemblances in this manner.

As Abraham ibn Ezra in 1156 makes mention of Bahya and his views, we are safe in concluding that the “Duties of the Hearts” was written between 1100 and 1156.

As the title of the work indicates, Bahya saw the great significance of a distinction made by Mohammedan theologians and familiar in their ascetic literature, between outward ceremonial or observance, known as “visible wisdom” and “duties of the limbs”, and inward intention, attitude and feeling, called “hidden wisdom” and “duties of the hearts”. The prophet Isaiah complains that the people are diligent in bringing sacrifices, celebrating the festivals and offering prayer while their hands are full of blood. He informs them that such conduct is an abomination to the Lord, and admonishes them to wash themselves, to make themselves clean, to put away the evil of their deeds from before God's eyes; to cease to do evil; to learn to do well, to seek for justice, to relieve the oppressed, to do justice to the fatherless, to plead for the widow (Isa. 1, 11-17). This is a distinction between duties to God and duties to one's fellow man, between religious ceremony and ethical practice. Saadia makes a further distinction—also found in Arabic theology before him—between those commandments and prohibitions in the Bible which the reason itself approves as right or condemns as wrong—the rational commandments—and those which to the reason seem indifferent, and which revelation alone characterizes as obligatory, permitted or forbidden—the so-called “traditional commandments”.

Bahya’s division is identical with neither the one nor the other. Ethical practice may be purely external and a matter of the limbs, quite as much as sacrifice and ceremonial ritual. On the other hand, one may feel profoundly moved with the spirit of true piety, love of God and loyalty to his commandments in the performance of a so-called “traditional commandment”, like the fastening of a “mezuzah” to the door-post. Bahya finds room for Saadia’s classification but it is with him of subordinate importance, and is applicable only to the “duties of the limbs”. Among these alone are there some which the reason unaided by revelation would not have prescribed. The “duties of the heart” are all rational. Like all precepts they are both positive and negative. Examples of positive duties of the heart are, belief in a creator who made the world out of nothing; belief in his unity and incomparability; the duty to serve him with all our heart, to trust in him, to submit to him, to fear him, to feel that he is watching our open and secret actions, to long for his favor and direct our actions for his name's sake; to love those who love him so as to be near unto him, and to hate those who hate him. Negative precepts of this class are the opposites of those mentioned, and others besides, such as that we should not covet, or bear a grudge, or think of forbidden things, or desire them or consent to do them. The common characteristic of all duties of the heart is that they are not visible to others. God alone can judge whether a person's feeling and motives are pure or the reverse.

That these duties are incumbent upon us is clear from every point of view. Like Saadia Bahya finds the sources of knowledge, particularly of the knowledge of God’s law and religion, in sense, reason, written law and tradition. Leaving out the senses which are not competent in this particular case, the obligatory character of the duties of the heart is vouched for by the other three, reason, law, tradition.

From reason we know that man is composed of soul and body, and that both are due to God's goodness. One is visible, the other is not. Hence we are obliged to worship God in a two-fold manner; with visible worship and invisible. Visible worship represents the duties of the limbs, such as prayer, fasting, charity, and so on, which are carried out by the visible organs. The hidden worship includes the duties of the heart, for example, to think of God's unity, to believe in him and his Law, to accept his worship, etc., all of which are accomplished by the thought of the mind, without the assistance of the visible limbs.

Besides, the duties of the limbs, the obligation of which no one doubts, are incomplete without the will of the heart to do them. Hence it follows that there is a duty upon our souls to worship God to the extent of our powers.

The Bible is just as emphatic in teaching these duties as the reason. The love of God and the fear of God are constantly inculcated; and in the sphere of negative precepts we have such prohibitions as, “Thou shalt not covet” (Exod. 20, 17); “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge” (Lev. 19, 18); “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart” (ib. 17); “You shalt not go astray after your own heart” (Num. 15, 39); “Thou shalt not harden thy heart nor shut thy hand from thy needy brother” (Deut. 15, 7), and many others.

Rabbinical literature is just as full of such precepts as the Bible, and is if possible even more emphatic in their inculcation. Witness such sayings as the following: “Heaven regards the intention” (Sanh. 106b): “The heart and the eye are two procurers of sin” (Jer. Berak. 1), and many others, particularly in the treatise Abot.

The great importance of these duties is also made manifest by the fact that the punishment in the Bible for unintentional misdeeds is more lenient than for intentional, proving that for punishment the mind must share with the body in the performance of the deed. The same is true of reward, that none is received for performing a good deed if it is not done “in the name of heaven”.

They are even more important than the duties of the limbs, for unlike the latter the obligation of the duties of the heart is always in force, and is independent of periods or circumstances. Their number, too, is infinite, and not limited, as are the duties of the limbs, to six hundred and thirteen.

And yet, Bahya complains, despite the great importance of these duties, very few are the men who observed them even in the generations preceding ours, not to speak of our own days when even the external ceremonies are neglected, much more so the class of precepts under discussion. The majority of students of the Torah are actuated by desire for fame and honor, and devote their time to the intricacies of legalistic discussion in Rabbinic literature, and matters unessential, which are of no account in the improvement of the soul; but they neglect such important subjects of study as the unity of God, which we ought to understand and distinguish from other unities, and not merely receive parrot fashion from tradition. We are expressly commanded (Deut. 4, 39), “Know therefore this day, and reflect in thy heart, that the Eternal is the God in the heavens above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else”. Only he is exempt from studying these matters whose powers are not adequate to grasp them, such as women, children and simpletons.

Moreover Bahya is the first, he tells us, among the post-Talmudical writers, to treat systematically and ex professo this branch of our religious duties. When I looked, he says, into the works composed by the early writers after the Talmud on the commandments, I found that their writings can be classified under three heads. First, exposition of the Torah and the Prophets, like the grammatical and lexicographical treatises of Ibn Janah, or the exegetical works of Saadia. Second, brief compilations of precepts, like the works of Hefez ben Yazliah and the responsa of some geonim. Third, works of a philosophico-apologetic character, like those of Saadia, Al Mukammas and others, whose purpose it was to present in an acceptable manner the doctrines of the Torah, to prove them by logical demonstration, and to refute the criticisms and erroneous views of unbelievers. But I have not seen any book dealing with the "hidden wisdom."

Here we see clearly the purpose of Bahya. It is not the rationalization of Jewish dogma that he is interested in, nor the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. It is the purification of religion itself from within which he seeks to accomplish. Sincerity and consistency in our words and our thoughts, so far as the service of God is concerned, is the fundamental requirement and essential value of the duties of the heart. To be sure this cannot be attained without intelligence. The knowledge of God and of his unity is a prerequisite for a proper understanding and an adequate appreciation of our religious duties. Philosophy therefore becomes a necessity in the interest of a purer and truer religion, without reference to the dangers threatening it from without.

Having found, he continues in the introduction to the "Duties of the Hearts," that all the three sources, reason, Bible and tradition, command this branch of our religious duties, I tried to think about them and to learn them, being led from one topic to another until the subject became so large that I feared I could not contain it all in my memory. I then determined to write the subject down systematically in a book for my own benefit as well as for the benefit of others. But I hesitated about writing it on account of my limitations, the difficulty of the subject and my limited knowledge of Arabic, the language in which I intended writing it because the majority of our people are best familiar with it. But I thought better of it and realized that it was my duty to do what I could even if it was not perfect; that I must not yield to the argument springing from a love of ease and disinclination to effort; for if everyone were to abstain from doing a small good because he cannot do as much as he would like, nothing would ever be done at all.

Having decided to compose the work, he continues, I divided the subject into ten fundamental principles, and devoted a section of the book to each principle. I endeavored to write in a plain and easy style, omitting difficult expressions, technical terms and demonstrations in the manner of the dialecticians. I had to make an exception in the first section dealing with the existence and unity of God, where the sublet of the subject required the employment of logical and mathematical proofs. For the rest I made use of comparisons or similes, adduced support from the Bible and tradition, and also quoted the sages of other nations.

We have already seen in the introduction that Bahya was indebted for his ideas to the ascetic and Sufic literature of the Arabs, and Yahuda, who is the authority in this matter of Bahya’s sources, has shown recently that among the quotations of the wise men of other nations in Bahya’s work are such as are attributed by the Arabs to Jesus and the gospels, to Mohammed and his companions, to the early caliphs, in particular the caliph Ali, to Mohammedan ascetics and Sufis.

In selecting the ten general and inclusive principles, Bahya lays down as the first and most fundamental the doctrine of the deity, or as it is called in the works of the Kalam, the Unity. As God is a true unity, being neither substance nor accident, and our thought cannot grasp anything except substance or accident, it follows that we cannot know God as he is in himself, and that we can get a conception of him and of his existence from his creatures only. The second section is therefore devoted to an examination of creation. Then follow in order sections treating of the service of God, trust in God, action for the sake of God alone, submission to God, repentance, self-examination, separation from the pleasures of the world, love of God.

In his discussion of the unity of God, Bahya follows the same method as Saadia, and the Kalam generally, i. e., he first proves that the world must have been created; hence there must be a creator, and this is followed by a demonstration of God's unity. The particular arguments, too, are for the most part the same, as we shall see, though differently expressed and in a different order. The important addition in Bahya is his distinction between God’s unity and other unities, which is not found so strictly formulated in any of his predecessors, and goes back to Pseudo-Pythagorean sources in Arabian literature of Neo-Platonic origin.

In order to prove that there is a creator who created the world out of nothing we assume three principles. First, nothing can make itself. Second, principles are finite in number, hence there must be a first before which there is no other. Third, every composite is “new”, i. e., came to be in time, and did not exist from eternity.

Making use of these principles, which will be proved later, we proceed as follows: The world is composite in all its parts. Sky, earth, stars and man form a sort of house which the latter manages. Plants and animals are composed of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth. The elements again are composed of matter and form, or substance and accident. Their matter is the primitive “hyle”, and their form is the primitive form, which is the root of all forms, essential as well as accidental. It is clear therefore that the world is composite, and hence, according to the third principle, had its origin in time. As, according to the first principle, a thing cannot make itself, it must have been made by someone. But as, in accordance with the second principle, the number of causes cannot be infinite, we must finally reach a first cause of the world before which there is no other, and this first made the world out of nothing.

Before criticising this proof, from which Bahya infers more than is legitimate, we must prove the three original assumptions.

The proof of the first principle that a thing cannot make itself is identical in Bahya with the second of the three demonstrations employed by Saadia for the same purpose. It is that the thing must either have made itself before it existed or after it existed. But both are impossible. Before it existed it was not there to make itself; after it existed there was no longer anything to make. Hence the first proposition is proved that a thing cannot make itself.

The proof of the second proposition that the number of causes cannot be infinite is also based upon the same principle as the fourth proof in Saadia for the creation of the world. The principle is this. Whatever has no limit in the direction of the past, i. e., had no beginning, but is eternal a parte ante, cannot have any stopping point anywhere else. In other words, we as the spectators could not point to any definite spot or link in this eternally infinite chain, because the chain must have traversed infinite time to reach us, but the infinite can never be traversed. Since, however, as a matter of fact we can and do direct our attention to parts of the changing world, this shows that the world must have had a beginning.

A second proof of the same principle is not found in Saadia. It is as follows: If we imagine an actual infinite and take away a part, the remainder is less than before. Now if this remainder is still in finite, we have one infinite larger than another, which is impossible. If we say the remainder is finite, then by adding to it the finite part which was taken away, the result must be finite; but this is contrary to hypothesis, for we assumed it infinite at the start. Hence it follows that the infinite cannot have a part. But we can separate in thought out of all the generations of men from the beginning those that lived between the time of Noah and that of Moses. This will be a finite number and a part of all the men in the world. Hence, as the infinite can have no part, this shows that the whole number of men is finite, and hence that the world had a beginning.

This proof is not in Saadia, but we learn from Maimonides (“Guide of the Perplexed”) that it was one of the proofs used by the Mutakallimun to prove the absurdity of the belief in the eternity of the world.

The third principle is that the composite is “new”. This is proved simply by pointing out that the elements forming the composite are prior to it by nature, and hence the latter cannot be eternal, for nothing is prior to the eternal. This principle also is found in Saadia as the second of the four proofs in favor of creation

We have now justified our assumptions and hence have proved—what? Clearly we have only proved that this composite world cannot have existed as such from eternity; but that it must have been composed of its elements at some point in time past, and that hence there must be a cause or agency which did the composing. But there is nothing in the principles or in the demonstration based upon them which gives us a right to go back of the composite world and say of the elements, the simple elements at the basis of all composition, viz., matter and form, that they too must have come to be in time, and hence were created out of nothing. It is only the composite that argues an act of composition and elements preceding in time and by nature the object composed of them. The simple needs not to be made, hence the question of its having made itself does not arise. It was not made at all, we may say, it just existed from eternity.

The only way to solve this difficulty from Bahya’s premises is by saying that if we suppose matter (or matter and form as separate entities) to have existed from eternity, we are liable to the difficulty involved in the idea of anything having traversed infinite time and reached us; though it is doubtful whether unformed matter would lend itself to the experiment of abstracting a part as in generations of men.

Be this as it may, it is interesting to know that Saadia having arrived as far as Bahya in his argument was not yet satisfied that he proved creation ex nihilo, and added special arguments for this purpose.

Before proceeding to prove the unity of God, Bahya takes occasion to dismiss briefly a notion which scarcely deserves consideration in his eyes. That the world could have come by accident, he says, is too absurd to speak of, in view of the evidence of harmony and plan and wisdom which we see in nature. As well imagine ink spilled by accident forming itself into a written book. Saadia also discusses this view as the ninth of the twelve theories of creation treated by him, and refutes it more elaborately than Bahya, whose one argument is the last of Saadia’s eight.

In the treatment of creation Saadia is decidedly richer and more comprehensive in discussion, review and argumentation. This was to be expected since such problems are the prime purpose of the “Emunot ve-Deot”, whereas they are only preparatory, though none the less fundamental, in the “Hobot ha-Lebabot”, and Bahya must have felt that the subject had been adequately treated by his distinguished predecessor. It is the more surprising therefore to find that in the treatment of the unity of God Bahya is more elaborate, and offers a greater variety of arguments for unity as such. Moreover, as has already been said before, he takes greater care than anyone before him to guard against the identification of God’s unity with any of the unities, theoretical or actual, in our experience. There is no doubt that this emphasis is due to Neo-Platonic influence, some of which may have come to Bahya from Gabirol, the rest probably from their common sources.

We see, Bahya begins his discussion of the unity of God, that the causes are fewer than their effects, the causes of the causes still fewer, and so on, until when we reach the top there is only one. Thus, the number of individuals is infinite, the number of species is finite; the number of genera is less than the number of species, until we get to the highest genera, which according to Aristotle are ten (the ten categories). Again, the causes of the individuals under the categories are five, motion and the four elements. The causes of the elements are two, matter and form. The cause of these must therefore be one, the will of God. (The will of God as immediately preceding universal matter and form sounds like a reminiscence of the “Fons Vitae”.)

God’s unity is moreover seen in the unity of plan and wisdom that is evident in the world. Everything is related to, connected with and dependent upon everything else, showing that there is a unitary principle at the basis.

If anyone maintains that there is more than one God, the burden of proof lies upon him. Our observation of the world has shown us that there is a God who made it; hence one, since we cannot conceive of less than one; but why more than one, unless there are special reasons to prove it?

Euclid defines unity as that in virtue of which we call a thing one. This means to signify that unity precedes the unitary thing by nature, just as heat precedes the hot object. Plurality is the sum of ones, hence plurality cannot be prior to unity, from which it proceeds. Hence whatever plurality we find in our minds we know that unity precedes it; and even if it occurs to anyone that there is more than one creator, unity must after all precede them all. Hence God is one.

This argument is strictly Neo-Platonic and is based upon the idealism of Plato, the notion that whatever reality or attributes particular things in our world of sense possess they owe to the real and eternal types of these realities and attributes in a higher and intelligible (using the term in contradistinction to sensible) world in which they participate. In so far as this conception is applied to the essences of things, it leads to the hypostatization of the class concepts or universals. Not the particular individual whom we perceive is the real man, but the typical man, the ideal man as the mind conceives him. He is not a concept but a real existent in the intelligible world. If we apply it also to qualities of things, we hypostatize the abstract quality. Heat becomes really distinct from the hot object, existence from the existent thing, goodness from the good person, unity from the one object. And a thing is existent and one and good, because it participates in Existence, Unity and Goodness. These are real entities, intelligible and not sensible, and they give to our world what reality it possesses.

Plotinus improved upon Plato, and instead of leaving these Ideas as distinct and ultimate entities, he adopted the suggestion of Philo and gathered up all these intelligible existences in the lap of the universal Reason, as his ideas or thoughts. This universal Reason is in Philo the Logos, whose mode of existence is still ambiguous, and is rather to be understood as the divine mind. In Plotinus it is the first stage in the unfoldment of the Godhead, and is a distinct hypostasis, though not a person. In Christianity it is the second person in the Trinity, incarnated in Jesus. In Israeli, Gabirol and the other Jewish Neo-Platonists, it occupies the same place as the Nous in Plotinus. In Bahya, whose taint of Neo-Platonism is not even skin deep, there is no universal Reason spoken of. But we do not really know what his ideas may have been on the subject, as he does not develop them in this direction.

To return to Bahya's arguments in favor of the unity of God, we proceed to show that dualism would lead to absurd conclusions. Thus if there is more than one creator, they are either of the same substance or they are not. If they are, then the common substance is the real creator, and we have unity once more. If their substances are different, they are distinct, hence limited, finite, composite, and hence not eternal, which is absurd.

Besides, plurality is an attribute of substance, and belongs to the category of quantity. But the creator is neither substance nor accident (attribute), hence plurality cannot pertain to him. But if he cannot be described as multiple, he must be one.

If the creator is more than one, it follows that either each one of them could create the world alone, or he could not except with the help of the other. If we adopt the first alternative, there is no need of more than one creator. If we adopt the second, it follows that the creator is limited in his power, hence, as above, composite, and not eternal, which is impossible. Besides, if there were more than one creator, it is possible that a dispute might arise between them in reference to the creation. But all this time no such thing has happened, nature being always the same. Hence God is one. Aristotle also agrees with us, for he applies in this connection the Homeric expression, “It is not good to have many rulers, let the ruler be one”.

So far as Bahya proves the unity of God he does not go beyond Saadia, some of whose arguments are reproduced by him, and one or two of a Neo-Platonic character added besides. But there is a decided advance in the analysis which follows, in which Bahya shows that there are various kinds of unity in our experience, and that the unity of God is unique.

We apply the term one to a class, a genus, a species, or an individual. In all of these the multiplicity of parts is visible. The genus animal contains many animals; the species man embraces a great many individual men; and the individual man consists of many parts and organs and faculties. Things of this sort are one in a sense and many in a sense.

We also apply the term one to an object in which the multiplicity of parts is not as readily visible as in the previous case. Take for example a body of water which is homogeneous throughout and one part is like another. This too is in reality composed of parts, matter and form, substance and accident. It is in virtue of this composition that it is subject to genesis and decay, composition and division, union and separation, motion and change. But all this implies plurality. Hence in both the above cases the unity is not essential but accidental. It is because of a certain appearance or similarity that we call a thing or a class one, which is in reality many.

Another application of the term one is when we designate by it the basis of number, the numerical one. This is a true one, essential as distinguished from the accidental referred to above. But it is mental and not actual. It is a symbol of a beginning which has no other before it.

Finally there is the real and actual one. This is something that does not change or multiply; that cannot be described by any material attribute, that is not subject to generation and decay; that does not move and is not similar to anything. It is one in all respects and the cause of multiplicity. It has no beginning or end, for that which has is subject to change, and change is opposed to unity, the thing being different before and after the change. For the same reason the real one does not resemble anything, for resemblance is an accident in the resembling thing, and to be possessed of accidents is to be multiple. Hence the true one resembles nothing. Its oneness is no accident in it, for it is a purely negative term in this application. It means not multiple.

We have now shown that there is a creator who is one, and on the other hand we have analyzed the various meanings of the term one, the last of which is the most real and the purest. It remains now to show that this pure one is identical with the one creator. This can be proved in the following way. The world being everywhere composite contains the one as well as the many—unity of composition, plurality of the parts composed. As unity is prior by nature to plurality, and causes do not run on to infinity, the causes of the world's unity and multiplicity cannot be again unity and multiplicity of the same kind forever. Hence as multiplicity cannot be the first, it must be unity—the absolute and true unity before which there is no other, and in which there is no manner of multiplicity. But God is the one cause of the universe, as we have shown, hence God and this true unity are the same.

We can show this also in another way. Whatever is an accidental attribute in one thing is an essential element in some other thing. Thus heat is an accidental attribute in hot water. For water may lose its heat and remain water as before. It is different with fire. Fire cannot lose its heat without ceasing to be fire. Hence heat in fire is an essential element; and it is from fire that hot water and all other hot things receive their heat. The same thing applies to the attribute of unity. It is accidental in all creatures. They are called one because they combine a number of elements in one group or concept. But they are really multiple since they are liable to change and division and motion, and so on. Hence there must be something in which unity is essential, and which is the cause of whatsoever unity all other things possess. But God is the cause of the universe, hence he is this true and absolute unity, and all change and accident and multiplicity are foreign to him.

This unity of God is not in any way derogated from by the ascription to him of attributes. For the latter are of two kinds, “essential” and “active”. We call the first essential because they are permanent attributes of God, which he had before creation and will continue to have when the world has ceased to be. These attributes are three in number, Existing, One, Eternal. We have already proved every one of them.

Now these attributes do not imply change in the essence of God. They are to be understood in the sense of denying their opposites, i. e., that he is not multiple, non-existent or newly come into being. They also imply each other as can easily be shown, i. e., every one of the three implies the other two. We must understand therefore that they are really one in idea, and if we could find one term to express the thought fully, we should not use three. But the three do not imply multiplicity in God.

The “active” are those attributes which are ascribed to God by reason of his actions or effects on us. We are permitted to apply them to him because of the necessity which compels us to get to know of his existence so that we may worship him. The Biblical writers use them very frequently. We may divide these into two kinds: First, those which ascribe to God a corporeal form, such as (Gen. 1, 27), “And God created man in his image”, and others of the same character. Second, those attributes which refer to corporeal movements and actions. These have been so interpreted by our ancient sages as to remove the corporeality from God by substituting the “Glory of God” for God as the subject of the movement or act in question. Thus, (Gen. 28, 13) “And behold the Lord stood above it”, is rendered by the Aramaic translator, “and behold the glory of God was present above it”. Saadia deals with this matter at length in his “Emunot ve-Deot”, in his commentary on Genesis, and on the book “Yezirah”. So there is no need of going into detail here. We are all agreed that necessity compels us to speak of God in corporeal terms so that all may be made to know of God’s existence. This they could not do if the prophets had spoken in metaphysical terms, for not everyone can follow such profound matters. But having come to the knowledge of God in this simpler though imperfect way, we can then advance to a more perfect knowledge of him. The intelligent and philosophical reader will lose nothing by the anthropomorphic form of the Bible, for he can remove the husk and penetrate to the kernel. But the simple reader would miss a very great deal indeed if the Bible were written in the language of philosophy, as he would not understand it and would remain without a knowledge of God.

Despite its predominant anthropomorphism, however, the Bible does give us hints of God's spirituality so that the thoughtful reader may also have food for his thought. For example, such expressions as (Deut. 4, 15), “Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of form on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire”, and many others are meant to spur on the discriminating reader to further thought. The same applies to all those passages in which the word “name” is inserted before the word God as the object of praise to indicate that we do not know God in his essence. An example of this is, “And they shall bless the name of thy glory” (Neh. 9, 5). For the same reason the name of God is joined in the Bible to heaven, earth, the Patriarchs, in such phrases as the God of the heavens, the God of Abraham, and so on, to show that we do not know God's essence but only his revelation in nature and in history. This is the reason why after saying to Moses, “I am sent me unto you” (Ex. 3, 14), he adds (ib. 15), tell them, “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob sent me unto you”. The meaning is, if they cannot understand God with their reason, let them know me from history and tradition.

In Bahya’s treatment of the divine attributes we already have in brief the main elements which Maimonides almost a century later made classic, namely, the distinction between essential and active attributes, and the idea that the former are to be understood as denying their opposites, i. e., as being in their nature not positive but negative. The outcome therefore is that only two kinds of attributes are applicable to God, negative and those which are transferred or projected from the effects of God's activity as they are visible in nature. Saadia had already made the distinction between essential and active attributes, but it was quite incidental with him, and not laid down at the basis of his discussion, but casually referred to in a different connection. Al Mukammas speaks of negative attributes as being more applicable to God than positive, as Philo had already said long before. But the combination of these two, negative and active, as the only kinds of divine attributes is not found in Jewish literature before Bahya.

It is worth noting also that Bahya does not lay down the three attributes, Power, Wisdom and Life as fundamental or essential in the manner of the Christians, the Arab Mutakallimun, and the Jewish Saadia. Bahya, as we have seen, regards as God's essential attributes, existence, unity, eternity. Herein, too, he seems to anticipate Maimonides who insists against the believers in essential attributes that the attributes, living, omnipotent, omniscient, having a will, are no more essential than any other, but like the rest of the qualities ascribed to God have reference to his activity in nature.

We have now gone through Bahya’s philosophical chapter giving us the metaphysical basis of his ethico-religious views. That his purpose is practical and not theoretical is clear from his definition of what he calls the "acknowledgment of the unity of God with full heart," not to speak of the title of the book itself, the meaning of which we explained at the beginning of this section, and the nine chapters in Bahya's work following upon the first, which constitute its real essence and purpose. To acknowledge the unity of God with full heart means, he tells us, that one must first know how to prove the existence and unity of God, to distinguish God's unity from every other, and then to make his heart and his tongue unite in this conception. It is not a matter of the intellect merely, but of the heart as affecting one's practical conduct. The adequacy of the conception is destroyed not merely by thinking of God as multiple, or by worshiping images, sun, moon and stars; it is made null and void likewise by hypocrisy and pretence, as when one affects piety before others to gain their favor or acquire a reputation. The same disastrous result is brought about by indulging the low physical appetites. Here the worship of the appetites is brought into competition and rivalry with devotion to the one God.

Our object being to trace the philosophical conceptions in medieval Jewish literature, we cannot linger long in the study of the rest of Bahya’s masterpiece, which is homiletical and practical rather than theoretic, and must content ourselves with a very brief résumé of its principal contents.

In studying the nature and attributes of God we reached the conclusion that while a knowledge of him is absolutely necessary for a proper mode of life, we cannot form an idea of him as he is in himself, and are left to such evidence as we can gather from the world of which he is the author. It becomes our duty, therefore, to study nature, as a whole and in its parts, conscientiously and minutely, in order to realize clearly the goodness and wisdom of God as exhibited therein. For various reasons we are apt to neglect this study and miss the insight and benefits arising therefrom. Chief among these hindering circumstances are our excessive occupations with the pleasures of this world, and the accidents and misfortunes to which mortal is heir, which blind him to his real good, and prevent him from seeing the blessing in disguise lurking in these very misfortunes.

But it is clear that man has a duty to study the divine goodness and wisdom as exhibited in nature, else of what use is his faculty of reason and intelligence, which raises him above the beast. If he neglects it, he places himself below the latter, which realizes all the functions of which it is capable. Bible and Talmud are equally emphatic in urging us to study the wonders of nature.

The variety of natural phenomena and the laws they exhibit give evidence of the personality of God and the existence of his will. A being without will, acting by necessity of nature, acts with unswerving uniformity.

Heaven and earth, plant and animal, all creatures great and small, bear witness, in their structure and relations, in their functions and mutual service and helpfulness, to the wisdom and goodness of God. Above all is this visible in man, the highest of earthly beings, the microcosm, the rational creature, the discoverer and inventor of arts and sciences. In the laws and statutes which were given to him for the service of God, and in the customs of other nations which take the place of our divine law, we see God's kindness to man in securing his comfort in this world and reward in the next.

Pride is the great enemy of man, because it prevents him from appreciating what he owes to God's goodness. Pride makes him feel that he deserves more than he gets, and blinds him to the truth.

We all recognize the duty of gratitude to a fellow man who has done us a favor, although all such cases of benefit and service between man and man, not excepting even the kindness of a father to his child, will be found on examination to be of a selfish nature. The benefit to self may not in all cases be conscious, but it is always there. It is a father's nature to love his child as part of himself. Moreover, these human favors are not constant, and the person benefited stands comparatively on the same level of existence and worth as his benefactor. How much greater then is the duty incumbent upon us to appreciate God's favors which are not selfish, which are constant, and which are bestowed by the greatest of all beings upon the smallest of all in respect of physical strength.

The only way in which man can repay God for his kindness, and show an appreciation thereof is by submitting to him and doing those things which will bring him nearer to God. In order to realize this it is necessary to abandon the bad qualities, which are in principle two, love of pleasure and love of power. The means enabling one to obtain this freedom are to abstain from too much eating, drinking, idling, and so on, for the first, and from too much gossip, social intercourse, and love of glory for the second. It may be difficult to do this, but one must make up one's mind to it, like the invalid who is ready to lose a limb in order to save his life.

The problem of free will is perplexing indeed and interferes with the proper attitude toward God and his worship. The best way out of the difficulty is to act as if we were free, and on the other hand to have confidence in God as the author of everything.

We have seen that the reason bids us recognize our duty to God in return for his goodness to us. At the same time we are not left to the suggestions and promptings of the reason alone. We have a positive law prescribing our conduct and the manner and measure of expressing our gratitude to God. This is made necessary by the constitution of man's nature. He is a composite of body and spirit. The former is at home in this lower world and is endowed with powers and qualities which tend to strengthen it at the expense of the spirit, a stranger in this world. Hence the necessity of a positive law to cure the spirit from the ills of the body by forbidding certain kinds of food, clothing, sexual indulgence, and so on, which strengthen the appetites, and commanding such actions as prayer, fasting, charity, benevolence, which have the opposite tendency of strengthening the reason.

The positive law is necessary and useful besides because it prescribes the middle way, discouraging equally the extremes of asceticism and of self-indulgence. It regulates and defines conduct, and makes it uniform for old and young, intelligent and unintelligent. It institutes new occasions of worship and thanksgiving as history reveals new benefactions of God to his people in various generations. The law also contains matters which the reason alone would not dictate, and of which it does not understand the meaning. Such are the “traditional commandments”. The reason why the law prescribes also some of the principles of the “rational commandments” is because at that time the people were so sunk in their animal desires that their minds were weakened, and there was need of putting both classes of commandments on the same level of positive prescription. But now the intelligent person observes them in accordance with their distinct origin, whereas the masses simply follow the law in both.

The admonition of the positive law serves as an introduction to the suggestions of our own reason and prepares the way for the latter. The first is absolutely necessary for the young, the women and those of weak intellectual power. To worship God not merely because the law prescribes it, but because reason itself demands it denotes a spiritual advance, and puts one in the grade of prophets and pious men chosen of God. In this world their reward is the joy they feel in the sweetness of divine service; in the next world they attain to the spiritual light which we cannot declare or imagine.

One of the duties of the heart is to trust in God. Apart from the Bible which commands us to have trust in God, we can come to the same conclusion as a result of our own reflection. For in God alone are combined all the conditions necessary to confidence. He has the power to protect and help us, and the knowledge of our needs. He is kind and generous and has a love for us and an interest in our welfare, as we have shown in a previous discussion. Trust in God is of advantage religiously in giving a person peace of mind, independence and freedom to devote himself to the service of God without being worried by the cares of the world. He is like the alchemist who changes lead into silver, and silver into gold. If he has money he can make good use of it in fulfilling his duties to God and man. If he has not, he is grateful for the freedom from care which this gives him. He is secure against material worries. He does not have to go to distant lands to look for support, or to engage in hard and fatiguing labor, or to exploit other people. He chooses the work that is in consonance with his mode of life, and gives him leisure and strength to do his duty to God and man.

The suffering of the good and the prosperity of the bad, which apparently contradicts our conclusion, is a problem as old as the world, and is discussed in the Bible. There is no one explanation to cover all cases, hence no solution is given in the Bible. But several reasons may be brought forward for this anomaly. The righteous man may suffer by way of punishment for a sin he has committed. He may suffer in this world in order that he may be rewarded in the next. His suffering may be an example of patience and goodness to other people; especially in a bad generation, to show off their wickedness by contrast with his goodness. Or finally the good man may be punished for not rebuking his generation of evil doers. In a similar way we may explain the prosperity of the wicked.

Trust in God does not signify that one should neglect one's work, be careless of one's life, health and well-being, or abandon one's effort to provide for one's family and dependents. No, one must do all these things conscientiously, at the same time feeling that if not for the help of God all effort would be in vain. In the matter of doing one's duty and observing the commandments, whether of the limbs or the heart, trust in God can apply only to the last step in the process, namely, the realization in practice. He must trust that God will put out of the way all obstacles and hindrances which may prevent him from carrying out his resolutions. The choice and consent must come from a man's own will, which is free. The most he may do is to trust that God may remove temptations.

While it is true that good deeds are rewarded in this world as well as in the next, a man must not trust in his deeds, but in God. It may seem strange that there is no reference in the Bible to reward in the hereafter. The reasons may be the following. Not knowing what the state of the soul is without the body, we could not understand the nature of future reward, and the statement of it in the Bible would not have been a sufficient inducement for the people of that time to follow the commandments. Or it is possible that the people knew by tradition of reward after death, hence it was not necessary to specify it.

As knowledge of nature and of God leads to trust in him, so ignorance leads away from it. It is as with a child, who develops in his manner of trusting in things; beginning with his mother’s breast and rising gradually as he grows older and knows more, until he embraces other persons and attains to trust in God.

We said before that the duties of the limbs are imperfect unless accompanied by the intention of the heart. A man's motive must be sincere. It must not be his aim to gain the favor of his fellowmen or to acquire honor and fame. The observance of the prescribed laws must be motived by the sole regard for God and his service. This we call the “unity of conduct”. The meaning is that a man’s act and intention must coincide in aiming at the fulfilment of God's will. In order to realize this properly one must have an adequate and sincere conception of God's unity as shown above; he must have an appreciation of God's goodness as exhibited in nature; he must submit to God's service; he must have trust in God alone as the sole author of good and evil; and correspondingly he must abstain from flattering mankind, and must be indifferent to their praise and blame; he must fear God, and have respect and awe for him. When he is in the act of fulfilling his spiritual obligations, he must not be preoccupied with the affairs of this world; and finally he must always consult his reason, and make it control his desires and inclinations.

Humility and lowliness is an important element conducive to “unity of conduct”. By this is not meant that general helplessness in the face of conditions, dangers and injuries because of ignorance of the methods of averting them. This is not humility but weakness. Nor do we mean that timidity and loss of countenance which one suffers before a superior in physical power or wealth. The true humility with which we are here concerned is that which one feels constantly before God, though it shows itself also in such a person's conduct in the presence of others, in soft speech, low voice, and modest behavior generally, in prosperity as well as adversity. The truly humble man practices patience and forgiveness; he does good to mankind and judges them favorably; he is contented with little in respect to food and drink and the needs of the body generally; he endures misfortune with resignation; is not spoiled by praise, nor irritated by blame, but realizes how far he is from perfection in the one case, and appreciates the truth of the criticism in the other. He is not spoiled by prosperity and success, and always holds himself under strict account. God knows it, even if his fellowmen do not.

Humility, as we have described it, is not, however, incompatible with a certain kind of pride; not that form of it which boasts of physical excellence, nor that arrogance which leads a man to look down upon others and belittle their achievements. These forms of pride are bad and diametrically opposed to true humility. Legitimate mental pride is that which leads a person blessed with intellectual gifts to feel grateful to God for his favor, and to strive to improve his talents and share their benefits with others.

Humility is a necessary forerunner of repentance and we must treat of this duty of the heart next. It is clear from reason as well as from the Law that man does not do all that is incumbent upon him in the service of God. For man is composed of opposite principles warring with each other, and is subject to change on account of the change of his mental qualities. For this reason he needs a law and traditional custom to keep him from going astray. The Bible also tells us that “the imagination of the heart of man is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8, 21). Therefore God was gracious and gave man the ability and opportunity to correct his mistakes. This is repentance.

True repentance means return to God’s service after having succeeded in making the reason the master of the desires. The elements in repentance are, (1) regret; (2) discontinuance of the wrong act; (3) confession and request for pardon; (4) promise not to repeat the offence.

In respect to gravity of offence, sins may be divided into three classes: (1) Violation of a positive commandment in the Bible which is not punished by “cutting off from the community”. For example, dwelling in booths, wearing fringes, and shaking the palm branch. (2) Violation of a negative commandment not so punished. (3) Violation of a negative commandment the penalty for which is death at the hands of the court, and being “cut off” by divine agency; for example, profanation of the divine name or false oath. In cases of the first class a penitent is as good as one who never sinned. In the second class he is even superior, because the latter has not the same prophylactic against pride. In the third class the penitent is inferior to the one who never sinned.

Another classification of offences is in two divisions according to the subject against whom the offence is committed. This may be a human being, and the crime is social; or it may be God, and we have sin in the proper sense of the term. Penitence is sufficient for forgiveness in the latter class, but not in the former. When one robs another or insults him, he must make restoration or secure the pardon of the offended party before his repentance can be accepted. And if the person cannot be found, or if he died, or is alive but refuses to forgive his offender, or if the sinner lost the money which he took, or if he does not know whom he robbed, or how much, it may be impossible for him to atone for the evil he has done. Still if he is really sincere in his repentance, God will help him to make reparation to the person wronged.

Self-examination is conducive to repentance. By this term is meant taking stock of one's spiritual condition so as to know the merits one has as well the duties one owes. In order to do this conscientiously a man must reflect on the unity of God, on his wisdom and goodness, on the obedience which all nature pays to the laws imposed upon it, disregard of which would result in the annihilation of all things, including himself. A man should review his past conduct, and provide for his future life, as one provides for a long journey, bearing in mind that life is short, and that he is a stranger in this world with no one to help him except the goodness and grace of his maker. He should cultivate the habit of being alone and not seek the society of idlers, for that leads to gossip and slander, to sin and wrong, to vanity and neglect of God. This does not apply to the company of the pious and the learned, which should be sought. He should be honest and helpful to his friends, and he will get along well in this world. All the evils and complaints of life are due to the fact that people are not considerate of one another, and everyone grabs for himself all that he can, more than he needs. One should examine anew the ideas one has from childhood to be sure that he understands them in the light of his riper intellect. He should also study again the books of the Bible and the prayers which he learned as a child, for he would see them now in a different light. He must try to make his soul control his body, strengthening it with intellectual and spiritual food for the world to come. These efforts and reflections and many others of a similar kind tend to perfect the soul and prepare it to attain to the highest degree of purity, where the evil desire can have no power over her.

In self-examination temperance or abstemiousness plays an important rôle. Let us examine this concept more closely. By abstemiousness in the special sense in which we use it here we do not mean that general temperance or moderation which we practice to keep our body in good order, or such as physicians prescribe for the healthy and the sick, bidding them abstain from certain articles of food, drink, and so on. We mean rather a more stringent abstemiousness, which may be called separation from the world, or asceticism. We may define this to mean abstention from all corporeal satisfactions except such as are indispensable for the maintenance of life.

Not everyone is required to practice this special form of temperance, nor is it desirable that he should, for it would lead to extinction of the human race. At the same time it is proper that there shall be a few select individuals, ascetic in their habits of life, and completely separated from the world, to serve as an example for the generality of mankind, in order that temperance of the more general kind shall be the habit of the many.

The object of God in creating man was to try the soul in order to purify it and make it like the angels. It is tried by being put in an earthy body, which grows and becomes larger by means of food. Hence God put into the soul the desire for food, and the desire for sexual union to perpetuate the species; and he made the reward for the satisfaction of these desires the pleasure which they give. He also appointed the “evil inclination” to incite to all these bodily pleasures. Now if this “evil inclination” gets the upper hand of the reason, the result is excess and ruin. Hence the need of general abstemiousness. And the ascetic class serve the purpose of reinforcing general temperance by their example.

But in the asceticism of the few there is also a limit beyond which one should not go. Here too the middle way is the best. Those extremists who leave the world entirely and live the life of a recluse in the desert, subsisting on grass and herbs, are farthest from the middle way, and the Bible does not approve of their mode of life, as we read in Isaiah (45, 18) “The God that formed the earth and made it; he that hath established it,—not in vain did he create it, he formed it to be inhabited”. Those are much better who without leaving for the desert pass solitary lives in their homes, not associating with other people, and abstaining from superfluities of all kinds. But the best of all are those who adopt the mildest form of asceticism, who separate from the world inwardly while taking part in it outwardly, and assisting in the ordinary occupations of mankind. These are commended in the Bible. Witness the prayer of Jacob (Gen. 28, 20), the fasting of Moses forty days and forty nights on the mount, the fasting of Elijah, the laws of the Nazirite, Jonadab ben Rechab, Elisha, prescriptions of fasting on various occasions, and so on.

The highest stage a man can reach spiritually is the love of God, and all that preceded has this as its aim. True love of God is that felt toward him for his own sake because of his greatness and exaltation, and not for any ulterior purpose.

The soul is a simple spiritual substance which inclines to that which is like it, and departs from what is material and corporeal. But when God put the soul into the body, he implanted in it the desire to maintain it, and it was thus affected by the feelings and desires which concern the health and growth of the body, thus becoming estranged from the spiritual.

In order that the soul shall attain to the true love of God, the reason must get the upper hand of the desires, all the topics treated in the preceding sections must be taken to heart and sincerely and conscientiously acted upon. Then the eyes of the soul will be opened, and it will be filled with the fear and the love of God.

CHAPTER VII

PSEUDO-BAHYA

It had been known for a number of years that there was a manuscript treatise in Arabic on the soul, which was attributed on the title page to Bahya. In 1896 Isaac Broydé published a Hebrew translation of this work under the title “Torot ha-Nefesh”, (“Reflections on the Soul”). The original Arabic was edited by Goldziher in 1907. The Arabic title is “Maani al-Nafs”, and should be translated “Concepts of the soul”, or “Attributes of the soul”.

There seems little doubt now that despite the ascription on the title page of the manuscript, the treatise is not a work of Bahya. It is very unlikely that anything written by so distinguished an author as Bahya, whose “Duties of the Hearts” was the most popular book in the middle ages, should have been so thoroughly forgotten as to have left no trace in Jewish literature. Bahya as well as the anonymous author refer, in the introductions to their respective works, to their sources or to their own previous writings. But there is no reference either in the “Duties of the Hearts” to the “Attributes of the Soul”, or in the latter to the former. A still stronger argument against Bahya as the author of our treatise is that derived from the content of the work, which moves in a different circle of ideas from the “Duties of the Hearts”. Our anonymous author is an outspoken Neo-Platonist. He believes in the doctrine of emanation, and arranges the created universe, spiritual and material, in a descending series of such emanations, ten in number. The Mutakallimun he opposes as being followers of the “Naturalists”, who disagree with the philosophers as well as the Bible. Bahya, on the other hand, is a strict follower of the Kalam in his chapter on the “Unity”, as we have seen, and the Neo-Platonic influence is very slight. There is no trace of a graded series of emanations in the “Duties of the Hearts”.

The sources of the “Attributes of the Soul” are no doubt the various Neo-Platonic writings current among the Arabs in the tenth and eleventh centuries, of which we spoke in the Introduction and in the chapter on Gabirol. Gabirol himself can scarcely have had much influence on our author, as the distinctive doctrine of the “Fons Vitae” is absent in our treatise. The reader will remember that matter and form, according to Gabirol, are at the basis not merely of the corporeal world, but that they constitute the essence of the spiritual world as well, the very first emanation, the Universal Intelligence, being composed of universal matter and universal form. As we shall see this is not the view of the “Attributes of the Sou”l. Matter here occupies the position which it has in Plotinus and in the encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity. It is the fourth in order of emanations, and the composition of matter and form begins with the celestial sphere, which is the fifth in order. Everything that precedes matter is absolutely simple. At the same time it seems clear that he was familiar with Gabiro’'s doctrine of the will. For in at least two passages in the "Attributes of the Soul" we have the series, vegetative soul, spheral impression, [psychic power], universal soul, intellect, will.

The “Categories” of Aristotle is also clearly evident in the “Attributes of the Soul”. It is the ultimate source of the definition of accident as that which resides in substance without being a part of it, but yet in such a way that without substance it cannot exist. The number of the species of motion as six points in the same direction. This, however, does not prove that the author read the "Categories." He might have derived these notions, as well as the list of the ten categories, from the writings of the Brethren of Purity. The same thing applies to the statement that a spiritual substance is distinguished from a corporeal in its capacity of receiving its qualities or accidents without limits. This probably goes back to the De Anima of Aristotle where a similar contrast between the senses and the reason is used as an argument for the “separate” character of the latter. The doctrine of the mean in conduct comes from the ethics of Aristotle. The doctrine of the four virtues and the manner of their derivation is Platonic, and so is the doctrine of reminiscence, viz., that the soul recalls the knowledge it had in its previous life.

Ibn Sina is one of the latest authors mentioned in our work; hence it could not have been written much before 1037, the date of Ibn Sina’s death. The terminus ad quem cannot be determined.

As the title indicates, the anonymous treatise is concerned primarily with the nature of the soul. Whatever other topics are found therein are introduced for the bearing they have on the central problem. A study of the soul means psychology as well as ethics, for a complete determination of the nature of the soul necessarily must throw light not only upon the origin and activity of the soul, but also upon its purpose and destiny.

The first error, we are told, that we must remove concerning the soul, is the doctrine of the “naturalists”, with whom the Mutazilites among the Arabs and the Karaites among the Jews are in agreement, that the soul is not an independent and self-subsistent entity, but only an "accident" of the body. Their view is that as the soul is a corporeal quality it is dependent for its existence upon the body and disappears with the latter. Those of the Mutazilites who believe in “Mahad” (return of the soul to its origin), hold that at the time of the resurrection God will bring the parts of the body together with its accident, the soul, and will reward and punish them. But the resurrection is a distinct problem, and has nothing to do with the nature of the soul and its qualities.

The true opinion, which is that of the Bible and the true philosophers, is that the soul is a spiritual substance independent of the body; that it existed before the body and will continue to exist after the dissolution of the latter. The existence of a spiritual substance is proved from the presence of such qualities as knowledge and ignorance. These are opposed to each other, and cannot be the qualities of body as such, for body cannot contain two opposite forms at the same time. Moreover, the substance, whatever it be, which bears the attributes of knowledge and ignorance, can receive them without limit. The more knowledge a person has, the more capable he is of acquiring more. No corporeal substance behaves in this way. There is always a limit to a body's power of receiving a given accident. We legitimately conclude, therefore, that the substance which bears the attributes of knowledge and ignorance is not corporeal but spiritual.

To understand the position of the soul and its relation to the body, we must have an idea of the structure and origin of the universe. The entire world, upper as well as lower, is divided into two parts, simple and composite. The simple essences, which are pure and bright, are nearer to their Creator than the less simple substances which come after. There are ten such creations with varying simplicity, following each other in order according to the arrangement dictated by God's wisdom. As numbers are simple up to ten, and then they begin to be compound, so in the universe the ten simple substances are followed by composite.

The first of these simple creations, which is nearest to God, is called in Hebrew “Shekinah”. The Torah and the Prophets call it “Name” (Exod. 23, 21), also “Kabod”, Glory (Is. 59, 19). God gave his name to the nearest and first of his creations, which is the first light, and interpreter and servant nearest to him. Solomon calls it “Wisdom” (Prov. 8, 22); the Greeks, Active Intellect. The second creation is called by the Prophets, “the Glory of the God of Israel” (Ezek. 8, 9); by the Greeks, Universal Soul, for it moves the spheres through a natural power as the individual soul moves the body. The soul partakes of the Intelligence or Intellect on the side which is near to it; it partakes of Nature on the side adjoining the latter. Nature is the third creation. It also is an angel, being the first of the powers of the universal soul, and constituting the life of this world and its motion.

These three are simple essences in the highest sense of the word. They are obedient to their Creator, and transmit in order his emanation and the will, and the laws of his wisdom to all the worlds. The fourth creation is an essence which has no activity or life or motion originally, but only a power of receiving whatever is formed and created out of it. This is the Matter of the world. From it come the bodies which possess accidents. In being formed some of its non-existence is diminished, and its matter moves. It is called “hyle”, and is the same as the darkness of the first chapter in Genesis. For it is a mistake to suppose that by darkness in the second verse of the first chapter is meant the absence of the light of the sun. This is accidental darkness, whereas in the creation story the word darkness signifies something elemental at the basis of corporeal things. This is what is known as matter, which on account of its darkness, i.e., its imperfection and motionlessness, is the cause of all the blemishes and evils in the world. In receiving forms, however, it acquires motion; its darkness is somewhat diminished, and it appears to the eye through the forms which it receives.

The fifth creation is the celestial Sphere, where for the first time we have motion in its revolutions. Here too we have the first composition of matter and form; and the beginning of time as the measure of the Sphere's motion; and place. The sixth creation is represented by the bodies of the stars, which are moved by the spheres in which they are set. They are bright and luminous because they are near the first simple bodies, which were produced before time and place. The last four of the ten creations are the four elements, fire, air, water, earth. The element earth is the end of “creation”. What follows thereafter is “formation” and “composition”. By creation is meant that which results through the will of God from his emanation alone, and not out of anything, or in time or place. It applies in the strictest sense to the first three only. The fifth, namely the Sphere, already comes from matter and form, and is in time and place. The fourth, too, enters into the fifth and all subsequent creations and formations. Still, the term creation is applicable to the first ten, though in varying degrees, until when we reach the element earth, creation proper is at an end. This is why in the first verse in Genesis, which speaks of heaven and earth, the term used is “bara” (created), and not any of the other terms, such as “yazar”, “asah”, “kanah”, “paa”l, and so on, which denote formation.

From earth and the other elements were formed all kinds of minerals, like rocks, mountains, stones, and so on. Then plants and animals, and finally man.

Man who was formed last bears traces of all that preceded him. He is formed of the four elements, of the motions of the spheres, of the mixtures of the stars and their rays, of Nature, of the Universal Soul, the mother of all, of the Intellect, the father of all, and finally of the will of God. But the order in man is reversed. The first two creations, Intellect and Soul, appear in man last.

The soul of man, embracing reason and intellect, is thus seen to be a divine emanation, being related to the universal soul and Intellect. On its way from God to man it passes through all spheres, and every one leaves an impression upon her, and covers her with a wrapper, so to speak. The brightness of the star determines the ornament or “wrapper” which the soul gets from it. This is known to the Creator, who determines the measure of influence and the accidents attaching to the soul until she reaches the body destined for her by his will. The longer the stay in a given sphere the stronger the influence of the sphere in question; and hence the various temperaments we observe in persons, which determine their character and conduct. For at bottom the soul is the same in essence and unchangeable in all men, because she is an emanation from the Unchangeable. All individual differences are due to the spheral impressions. These impressions, however, do not take away from the soul its freedom of will.

In the rest of his psychology and ethics the anonymous author follows Platonic theories, modified now and then in the manner of Aristotle. Thus we are told that the soul consists of three powers, or three souls, the vegetative, the animal and the rational. We learn of the existence of the vegetative soul from the nourishment, growth and reproduction evidenced by the individual. The animal soul shows its presence in the motions of the body. The existence of the rational soul we have already shown from the attributes of knowledge and ignorance.

The vegetative soul comes from certain spheral influences, themselves due to the universal soul, and ultimately to the will of God. It is the first of the three to make its appearance in the body. It is already found in the embryo, to which it gives the power of motion in its own place like the motion of a plant or tree. Its seat is in the liver, where the growth of the embryo begins. Its function ceases about the twentieth year, when the growth of the body reaches its limit.

The animal soul springs from the heart. Its functioning appears after birth when the child begins to crawl, and continues until the person loses the power of locomotion in old age. The rational soul resides in the middle of the brain. She knows all things before joining the body, but her knowledge is obscured on account of the material coverings which she receives on her way down from her divine source.

The virtue of the vegetative soul is temperance; of the animal soul, courage; of the rational soul, wisdom. When these are harmoniously combined in the individual, and the two lower souls are controlled by the higher, there results the fourth virtue, which is justice, and which gives its possessor the privilege of being a teacher and a leader of his people. In Moses all these qualities were exemplified, and Isaiah (11, 1-4) in describing the qualities of the Messianic King also enumerates these four cardinal virtues. "The spirit of wisdom and understanding" represents wisdom, "the spirit of counsel and strength" stands for courage; "the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord" denotes temperance; and justice is represented in the phrase, "and he will judge the poor with righteousness."

Virtue is a mean between the two extremes of excess and defect, each of which is a vice. Thus an excess of wisdom becomes shrewdness and cunning and deceit; while a defect means ignorance. The true wisdom consists in the middle way between the two extremes. Similarly courage is a mean between foolhardiness and rashness on the side of excess, and cowardice on the side of defect. Temperance is a mean between excessive indulgence of the appetites on one side and utter insensibility on the other. The mean of justice is the result of the harmonious combination of the means of the last three. If the rational soul has wisdom and the two other souls are obedient to it through modesty and courage, their substance changes into the substance of the rational soul, i.e., their bad qualities are transformed into the four virtues just mentioned. Then the two lower souls unite with the rational soul and enjoy eternal happiness with it. On the other hand, if the rational soul follows the senses, its wisdom changes into their folly, its virtues into their vices, and it perishes with them.

The immortality of the soul is proved as follows. Things composed of elements return back to their elements, hence the soul also returns to its own origin. The soul is independent of the body, for its qualities, thought and knowledge, are not bodily qualities, hence they become clearer and more certain after the soul is separated from the body than before, when the body obscured its vision like a curtain. The fact that a person's mind is affected when his body is ill does not show that the soul is dependent in its nature upon the body; but that acting as it does in the body by means of corporeal organs, it cannot perform its functions properly when these organs are injured.

Since death is a decree of God, it is clear that he has a purpose in changing the relations of body and soul. But if the soul comes to an end, this change would be a vain piece of work of which he cannot be guilty. Hence it follows that the destruction of the body is in order that we may exist in another similar form, similar to the angels.

The purpose of the soul’s coming into this world is in order that she may purify the two lower souls; also that she may know the value of her own world in comparison with this one, and in grieving for having left it may observe God’s commandments, and thus achieve her return to her own world.

In the matter of returning to their own world after separation from the body, souls are graded according to the measure of their knowledge and the value of their conduct. These two conditions, ethical and spiritual or intellectual, are requisite of fulfilment before the soul can regain its original home. The soul on leaving this world is like a clean, white garment soaked in water. If the water is clean, it is easy to dry the garment, and it becomes even cleaner than it was before. But if the water is dirty, no amount of drying will make the garment clean.

Those souls which instead of elevating the two lower souls, vegetative and animal, were misled by them, will perish with the latter. Between the two extremes of perfection and wickedness there are intermediate stages, and the souls are treated accordingly. Those of the proud will rise in the air and flying hither and thither will not find a resting place. Those which have knowledge, but no good deeds, will rise to the sphere of the ether, but will be prevented from rising higher by the weight of their evil deeds, and the pure angels will rain down upon them arrows of fire, thus causing them to return below in shame and disgrace. The souls of the dishonest will be driven from place to place without finding any rest. Other bad souls will be punished in various ways. Those souls which have good deeds but no knowledge will be placed in the terrestrial paradise until their souls recall the knowledge they had in their original state, and they will then return to the Garden of Eden among the angels.

CHAPTER VIII

ABRAHAM BAR HIYYA

Abraham bar Hiyya, the Prince, as he is called, lived in Spain in the first half of the twelfth century. He also seems to have stayed some time in southern France, though we do not know when or how long. His greatest merit lies not in his philosophical achievement which, if we may judge from the only work of a philosophical character that has come down to us, is not very great. He is best known as a writer on mathematics, astronomy and the calendar; though there, too, his most important service lay not so much in the original ideas he propounded, as in the fact that he was among the first, if not the first, to introduce the scientific thought current in the Orient and in Moorish Spain into Christian Europe, and especially among the Jews of France and Germany, who devoted all their energies to the Rabbinical literature, and to whom the Arabic works of their Spanish brethren were a sealed book.

So we find Abraham bar Hiyya, or Abraham Savasorda (a corruption of the Arabic title Sahib al-Shorta), associated with Plato of Tivoli in the translation into Latin of Arabic scientific works. And he himself wrote a number of books on mathematics and astronomy in Hebrew at the request of his friends in France who could not read Arabic. Abraham bar Hiyya is the first of the writers we have treated so far who composed a scientific work in the Hebrew language. All the others, with the exception of Abraham ibn Ezra, wrote in Arabic, as they continued to do until and including Maimonides.

The only one of his extant works which is philosophical in content is the small treatise “Hegyon ha-Nefesh”, Meditation of the Soul. It is a popular work, written with a practical purpose, ethical and homiletic in tone and style. The idea of repentance plays an important rôle in the book, and what theoretical philosophy finds place therein is introduced merely as a background and basis for the ethical and religious considerations which follow. It may be called a miniature “Duties of the Hearts”. As in all homiletical compositions in Jewish literature, exegesis of Biblical passages takes up a good deal of the discussions, and for the history of the philosophic movement in medieval Judaism the methods of reading metaphysical and ethical ideas into the Bible are quite as important as these ideas themselves.

The general philosophical standpoint of Abraham bar Hiyya may be characterized as an uncertain Neo-Platonism, or a combination of fundamental Aristotelian ideas with a Neo-Platonic coloring. Thus matter and form are the fundamental principles of the world. They existed potentially apart in the wisdom of God before they were combined and thus realized in actuality. Time being a measure of motion, came into being together with the motion which followed upon this combination. Hence neither the world nor time is eternal. This is Platonic, not Aristotelian, who believes in the eternity of motion as well as of time. Abraham bar Hiyya also speaks of the purest form as light and as looking at and illuminating the form inferior to it and thus giving rise to the heavens, minerals and plants. This is all Neo-Platonic. And yet the most distinctive doctrine of Plotinus and the later Neo-Platonists among the Arabs, the series of emanating hypostases, Intellect, Universal Soul, Nature, Matter, and so on, is wanting in the “Hegyon ha-Nefesh”. Form is the highest thing he knows outside of God; and the purest form, which is too exalted to combine with matter, embraces angels, seraphim, souls, and all forms related to the upper world. With the exception of the names angel, seraphim, souls, this is good Aristotelian doctrine, who also believes in the movers of the spheres and the active intellect in man as being pure forms.

To proceed now to give a brief account of Abraham bar Hiyya’s teaching, he thinks it is the duty of rational man to know how it is that man who is so insignificant was given control of the other animals, and endowed with the power of wisdom and knowledge. In order to gain this knowledge we must investigate the origins and principles of existing things, so that we may arrive at an understanding of things as they are. This the wise men of other nations have realized, though they were not privileged to receive a divine Torah, and have busied themselves with philosophical investigations. Our Bible recommends to us the same method in the words of Deuteronomy (4, 39), "Know therefore this day, and reflect in thy heart, that the Lord is God in the heavens above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else." This means that if you understand thoroughly the order of things in heaven above and the earth beneath, you will at once see that God made it in his wisdom, and that he is the only one and there is no one beside him. The book of Job teaches the same thing, when it says (19, 26) "And from my flesh I shall behold God." This signifies that from the structure of the body and the form of its members we can understand the wisdom of the Creator. We need not hesitate therefore to study the works of the ancients and the wise men of other nations in order to learn from them the nature of existence. We have the permission and recommendation of Scripture.

Starting from a consideration of man we see that he is the last of created things because we find in him additional composition over and above that found in other creatures. Man is a “rational animal”. “Animal” means a body that grows and moves and at last is dissolved. "Rational" refers to the power of knowledge, of inferring one thing from another, and discriminating between good and evil. In this man differs from other animals. Descending in the scale of existence we find that the plant also grows and dies like the animal, but it does not move. Stones, metals and other inanimate bodies on the earth, change their forms and shapes, but unlike plants they have no power of growing or increasing. They are the simplest of the things on the earth. They differ from the heavenly bodies in that the latter never change their forms. Proceeding further in our analysis, we find that body, the simplest thing so far, means length, breadth and depth attached to something capable of being measured. This definition shows that body is also composed of two elements, which are theoretically distinct until God's will joins them together. These are “hyle” (matter)—what has no likeness or form, but has the capacity of receiving form—and form, which is defined as that which has power to clothe the hyle with any form. Matter alone is too weak to sustain itself, unless form comes to its aid. Form, on the other hand, is not perceptible to sense unless it clothes matter, which bears it. One needs the other. Matter cannot exist without form; form cannot be seen without matter. Form is superior to matter, because it needs the latter only to be seen but can exist by itself though not seen; whereas matter cannot exist without form. These two, matter and form, were hidden in God, where they existed potentially until the time came to produce them and realize them in actu.

Matter is further divided into two kinds. There is pure matter, which enters into the composition of the heavens, and impure matter, forming the substance of terrestrial bodies. Similarly form may be divided at first into two kinds; closed and sealed form, too pure and holy to be combined with matter; and open and penetrable form, which is fit to unite with matter. The pure, self-subsistent form gazes at and illuminates the penetrable form, and helps it to clothe matter with all the forms of which the latter is capable.

Now when God determined to realize matter and form in actu, he caused the pure form to be clothed with its splendor, which no hyle can touch. This gave rise to angels, seraphim, souls, and all other forms of the upper world. Not all men can see these forms or conceive them in the mind, because they do not unite with anything which the eye can perceive, and the majority of people cannot understand what they cannot perceive with their corporeal senses. Only those who are given to profound scientific investigations can understand the essence of these forms.

The light of this pure form then emanated upon the second form, and by the word of God the latter united with the pure matter firmly and permanently, so that there is never a change as long as they are united. This union gave rise to the bodies of the heavens (spheres and fixed stars) which never change their forms. Then the form united with the impure matter, and this gave rise to all the bodies in the sublunar world, which change their forms. These are the four elements, and the products of their composition, including plants.

So far we have bodies which do not change their places. Then a light emanated from the self-subsisting form by the order of God, the splendor of which spread upon the heaven, moving from point to point, and caused the material form (i.e., the inferior, so-called penetrable form) to change its place. This produced the stars which change their position but not their forms (planets). From this light extending over the heaven emanated another splendor which reached the body with changing form, giving rise to the three species of living beings, aquatic, aerial and terrestial animals, corresponding to thethree elements, water, air, earth; as there is no animal life in fire.

We have so far therefore three kinds of forms. (1) The pure self-subsistent form which never combines with matter. This embraces all the forms of the spiritual world. (2) Form which unites with body firmly and inseparably. These are the forms of the heavens and the stars. (3) Form which unites with body temporarily. Such are the forms of the bodies on the earth. The forms of the second and third classes cannot exist without bodies. The form of class number one cannot exist with body. To make the scheme complete, there ought to be a fourth kind of form which can exist with as well as without body. In other words, a form which unites with body for a time and then returns to its original state and continues to exist without body. Reason demands that the classification should be complete, hence there must be such a form, and the only one worthy of this condition is the soul of man. We thus have a proof of the immortality of the soul.

These are the ideas of the ancient sages, and we shall find that they are drawn from the Torah. Thus matter and form are indicated in the second verse of Genesis, “And the earth was without form (Heb. Tohu) and void (Heb. Bohu)”. “Tohu” is matter; “Bohu signifies that through which matter gains existence, hence form. “Water” (Heb. Mayim) is also a general word for any of the various forms, whereas “light” (Heb. Or) stands for the pure subsistent form. By “firmament” (Heb. Rakia) is meant the second kind of form which unites with the pure matter in a permanent and unchangeable manner. “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters” (Gen. 1, 6) indicates that the “firmament” is embraced by the bright light of the first day, that is the universal form, from which all the other forms come. “And let it divide between water and water” (ib.) signifies that the “firmament” stands between the self-subsistent form and the third kind of form above mentioned, namely, that which unites with body and gives rise to substances changing their forms, like minerals and plants. The “luminaries” (Heb. Meorot) correspond to the second light mentioned above. We shall find also that the order of creation as given in Genesis coincides with the account given above in the name of the ancient sages.

It would seem as if the self-subsisting form and the two lights emanating from it are meant to represent the Intellect, Soul and Nature of the Neo-Platonic trinity respectively, and that Abraham bar Hiyya purposely changed the names and partly their functions in order to make the philosophical account agree with the story of creation in Genesis.

With regard to the intellectual and ethical condition of the soul and its destiny, the speculative thinkers of other nations, arguing from reason alone and having no divine revelation to guide or confirm their speculations, are agreed that the only way in which the soul, which belongs to a higher world, can be freed from this world of body and change is through intellectual excellence and right conduct. Accordingly they classify souls into four kinds. The soul, they say, may have health, sickness, life, death. Health signifies wisdom or knowledge; sickness denotes ignorance. Life means the fear of God and right conduct; death is neglect of God and evil practice. Every person combines in himself one of the two intellectual qualities with one of the two ethical qualities. Thus we have four classes of persons. A man may be wise and pious, wise and wicked, ignorant and pious, ignorant and wicked. And his destiny after death is determined by the class to which he belongs. Thus when a man who is wise and pious departs this world, his soul by reason of its wisdom separates from the body and exists in its own form as before. Owing to its piety it will rise to the upper world until it reaches the pure, eternal form, with which it will unite for ever. If the man is wise and wicked, the wisdom of the soul will enable it to exist without body; but on account of its wickedness and indulgence in the desires of this world, it cannot become completely free from the creatures of this world, and the best it can do is to rise above the sublunar world of change to the world of the planets where the forms do not change, and move about beneath the light of the sun, the heat of which will seem to it like a fire burning it continually, and preventing it from rising to the upper light.

If the man is ignorant and pious, his soul will be saved from body in order that it may exist by itself, but his ignorance will prevent his soul from leaving the atmosphere of the lower world. Hence the soul will have to be united with body a second, and a third time, if necessary, until it finally acquires knowledge and wisdom, which will enable it to rise above the lower world, its degree and station depending upon the measure of intellect and virtue it possesses at the time of the last separation from the body. The soul of the man who is both ignorant and wicked cannot be saved from the body entirely, and dies like a beast.

These are the views of speculative thinkers which we may adopt, but they cannot tell us what is the content of the terms wisdom and right conduct. Not having been privileged to receive the sacred Law, which is the source of all wisdom and the origin of rectitude, they cannot tell us in concrete fashion just what a man must know and what he must do in order to raise his soul to the highest degree possible for it to attain. And if they were to tell us what they understand by wisdom and right conduct, we should not listen to them. Our authority is the Bible, and we must test the views of the philosophers by the teaching of the Bible.

If we do this we find authority in Scripture also for belief in the immortality of the soul. Thus if we study carefully the expressions used of the various creations in the first chapter of Genesis, we notice that in some cases the divine command is expressed by the phrase, “Let there be ...”, followed by the name of the thing to be created; and the execution of the command is expressed by the words, “And there was ...”, the name of the created object being repeated; or the phrase may be simply, “And it was so”, without naming the object. In other cases the expression “Let there be” is not used, nor the corresponding “And there was”.

This variation in expression is not accidental. It is deliberate and must be understood. Upon a careful examination we cannot fail to see that where the expression "Let there be" is used, the object so created exists in this world permanently and without change. Thus, "Let there be light" (Gen. 1, 3). If in addition we have the corresponding expression, "And there was," in connection with the same object and followed by its name, it means that the object will continue its everlasting existence in the next world also. Hence, "And there was light" (ib.). In the creation of the firmament and the luminaries we have the expression, "Let there be"; the corresponding expression at the end is in each case not, "And there was ...," but, "And it was so." This signifies that in this world, as long as it lasts, the firmament and luminaries are permanent and without change; but they will have no continuance in the next world. In the creation of the sublunar world we do not find the phrase, "Let there be," at all, but such expressions as, "Let the waters be gathered together" (ib. 9), "Let the earth produce grass" (ib. 11), and so on. This means that these things change their forms and have no permanent existence in this world. The phrase, "And it was so," recording the realization of the divine command, signifies that they do not exist at all in the next world.

The case is different in man. We do not find the expression, "Let there be," in the command introducing his formation; hence he has no permanence in this world. But we do find the expression, "And the man became (lit. was) a living soul" (ib. 2, 7), which means that he will have permanent existence in the next world. The article before the word man in the verse just quoted indicates that not every man lives forever in the next world, but only the good. What manner of man he must be in order to have this privilege, i. e., of what nation he must be a member, we shall see later. This phase of the question the speculative thinkers cannot understand, hence they did not investigate it. Reason alone cannot decide this question; it needs the guidance of the Torah, which is divine.

Consulting the Torah on this problem, we notice that man is distinguished above other animals in the manner of his creation in three respects. (1) All other living beings were created by means of something else. The water or the earth was ordered to produce them. Man alone was made directly by God. (2) There are three expressions used for the creation of living things, "create" (Heb. bara), "form" (Heb. yazar), and "make" (Heb. asah). The water animals have only the first (ib. 1, 21), as being the lowest in the scale of animal life. Land animals have the second and the third, "formed" and "made" (ib. 1, 25; 2, 19). Man, who is superior to all the others, has all the three expressions (ib. 26, 27; 2, 7). (3) Man was given dominion over the other animals (ib.. 1, 28).

As man is distinguished above the other animals, so is one nation distinguished above other men. In Isaiah (43, 7) we read: "Every one that is called by my name, and whom I have created for my glory; I have formed him; yea, I have made him." The three terms, created, formed, made, signify that the reference is to man; and we learn from this verse that those men were created for his glory who are called by his name. But if we inquire in the Bible we find that the nation called by God's name is Israel, as we read (ib. 1), "Thus said the Lord that created thee, O Israel, Fear not; for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine," and in many other passages besides. The reason for this is their belief in the unity of God and their reception of the Law. At the same time others who are not Israelites are not excluded from reaching the same degree through repentance.

There is no system of ethics in Abraham bar Hiyya, and we shall in the sequel select some of his remarks bearing on ethics and pick out the ethical kernel from its homiletical and exegetical husk.

Man alone, he tells us, of all animal creation receives reward and punishment. The other animals have neither merit nor guilt. To be sure, their fortune in life depends upon the manner in which they respond to their environment, but this is not in the way of reward and punishment, but a natural consequence of their natural constitution. With man it is different, and this is because of the responsible position man occupies, having been given the privilege and the ability to control all animal creation.

The psychological basis of virtue in Abraham bar Hiyya is Platonic in origin, as it is in Pseudo-Bahya, though we do not find the four cardinal virtues and the derivation of justice from a harmonious combination of the other three as in the Republic of Plato, to which Pseudo-Bahya is ultimately indebted.

Man has three powers, we are told, which some call three souls. One is the power by which he grows and multiplies like the plants of the field. The second is that by which he moves from place to place. These two powers he has in common with the animal. The third is that by which he distinguishes between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between a thing and its opposite, and by which he acquires wisdom and knowledge. This is the soul which distinguishes him from the other animals. If this soul prevails over the lower two powers, the man is called meritorious and perfect. If on the other hand the latter prevail over the soul, the man is accounted like a beast, and is called wicked and an evil doer. God gives merit to the animal soul for the sake of the rational soul if the former is obedient to the latter; and on the other hand imputes guilt to the rational soul and punishes her for the guilt of the animal soul because she did not succeed in overcoming the latter.

The question of the relative superiority of the naturally good who feels no temptation to do wrong, and the temperamental person who has to sustain a constant struggle with his passions and desires in order to overcome them is decided by Abraham bar Hiyya in favor of the former on the ground that the latter is never free from evil thought, whereas the former is. And he quotes the Rabbis of the Talmud, according to whom the reward in the future world is not the same for the two types of men. He who must overcome temptation before he can subject his lower nature to his reason is rewarded in the next world in a manner bearing resemblance to the goods and pleasures of this world, and described as precious stones and tables of gold laden with good things to eat. On the other hand, the reward of the naturally perfect who is free from temptation is purely spiritual, and bears no earthly traces. These men are represented as “sitting under the Throne of Glory with their crowns on their heads and delighting in the splendor of the Shekinah”.

His theodicy offers nothing remarkable. He cites and opposes a solution frequently given in the middle ages of the problem of evil. This is based on the assumption that God cannot be the cause of evil. How then explain the presence of evil in the world? There is no analysis or classification or definition of what is meant by evil. Apparently it is physical evil which Abraham bar Hiyya has in mind. Why do some people suffer who do not seem to deserve it? is the aspect of the problem which interests him. One solution that is offered, he tells us, is that evil is not anything positive or substantial. It is something negative, absence of the good, as blindness is absence of vision; deafness, absence of hearing; nakedness, absence of clothing. Hence it has no cause. God produces the positive forms which are good, and determines them to stay a definite length of time. When this time comes to an end, the forms disappear and their negatives take their place automatically without the necessity of any cause.

Abraham bar Hiyya is opposed to this solution of the problem, though he gives us no philosophic reason for it. His arguments are Biblical. God is the cause of evil as well as good, and this is the meaning of the word "judgment" (Heb. Mishpat) that occurs so often in the Bible in connection with God's attributes. The same idea is expressed in Jeremiah (9, 23) "I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness, judgment and righteousness in the earth." Loving kindness refers to the creation of the world, which was an act of pure grace on the part of God. It was not a necessity. His purpose was purely to do kindness to his creatures and to show them his wisdom and power. Righteousness refers to the kindness of God, his charity so to speak, which everyone needs when he dies and wishes to be admitted to the next world. For the majority of men have more guilt than merit. Judgment denotes the good and evil distributed in the world according to the law of justice. Thus he rewards the righteous in the next world, and makes them suffer sometimes in this world in order to try them and to double their ultimate reward. He punishes the wicked in this world for their evil deeds, and sometimes he gives them wealth and prosperity that they may have no claim or defence in the next world. Thus evil in this world is not always the result of misconduct which it punishes; it may be inflicted as a trial, as in the case of Job. Abraham bar Hiyya's solution is therefore that there is no reason why God should not be the author of physical evil, since everything is done in accordance with the law of justice.

CHAPTER IX

JOSEPH IBN ZADDIK

Little is known of the life of Joseph ben Jacob ibn Zaddik. He lived in Cordova; he was appointed Dayyan, or Judge of the Jewish community of that city in 1138; and he died in 1149. He is praised as a Talmudic scholar by his countryman Moses ibn Ezra, and as a poet by Abraham ibn Daud and Harizi, though we have no Talmudic composition from his pen, and but few poems, whether liturgical or otherwise. His fame rests on his philosophical work, and it is this phase of his career in which we are interested here. "Olam Katon" or "Microcosm" is the Hebrew name of the philosophical treatise which he wrote in Arabic, but which we no longer possess in the original, being indebted for our knowledge of it to a Hebrew translation of unknown authorship. Maimonides knew Joseph ibn Zaddik favorably, but he was not familiar with the "Microcosm." In a letter to Samuel Ibn Tibbon, the translator of his "Guide of the Perplexed," Maimonides tells us that though he has not seen the "Olam Katon" of Ibn Zaddik, he knows that its tendency is the same as that of the Brothers of Purity . This signifies that its trend of thought is Neo-Platonic, which combines Aristotelian physics with Platonic and Plotinian metaphysics, ethics and psychology.

An examination of the book itself confirms Maimonides's judgment. In accordance with the trend of the times there is noticeable in Ibn Zaddik an increase of Aristotelian influence, though of a turbid kind; a decided decrease, if not a complete abandonment, of the ideas of the Kalam, and a strong saturation of Neo-Platonic doctrine and point of view. It was the fashion to set the Kalam over against the philosophers to the disadvantage of the former, as being deficient in logical knowledge and prejudiced by theological prepossessions. This is attested by the attitude towards the Mutakallimun of Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Averroes. And Ibn Zaddik forms no exception to the rule. The circumstance that it was most likely from Karaite writings, which found their way into Spain, that Ibn Zaddik gained his knowledge of Kalamistic ideas, was not exactly calculated to prepossess him, a Rabbanite, in their favor. And thus while we see him in the manner of Saadia and Bahya follow the good old method, credited by Maimonides to the Mutakallimun, of starting his metaphysics with proofs of the world's creation, and basing the existence of God, his unity, incorporeality and other attributes on the creation of the world as a foundation, he turns into an uncompromising opponent of these much despised apologetes when he comes to discuss the nature of God's attributes, of the divine will, and of the nature of evil. And in all these cases the target of his attack seems to be their Karaite representative Joseph al-Basir, whose acquaintance we made before.

He laid under contribution his predecessors and contemporaries, Saadia, Bahya, Pseudo-Bahya, Gabirol; and his sympathies clearly lay with the general point of view represented by the last, and his Mohammedan sources; though he was enough of an eclectic to refuse to follow Gabirol, or the Brethren of Purity and the other Neo-Platonic writings, in all the details of their doctrine; and there is evidence of an attempt on his part to tone down the extremes of Neo-Platonic tendency and create a kind of level in which Aristotelianism and Platonism meet by compromising. Thus he believes with Gabirol that all things corporeal as well as spiritual are composed of matter and form; but when it comes to defining what the matter of spiritual things may be, he tells us that we may speak of the genus as the matter of the species—a doctrine which is not so Neo-Platonic after all. For we do not have to go beyond Aristotle to hear that in the definition of an object, which represents its intelligible (opposed to sensible) essence, the genus is like the matter, the difference like the form. Of the universal and prime matter underlying all created things outside of God, of which Gabirol says that it is the immediate emanation of God's essence and constitutes with universal form the Universal Intelligence, Ibn Zaddik knows nothing. Nor do we find any outspoken scheme of emanation, such as we see in Plotinus or with a slight modification in the cyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, or as it is presupposed in the “Fons Vitae” of Gabirol. Ibn Zaddik does refer to the doctrine of the divine Will, which plays such an important rôle in the philosophy of Gabirol and of the Pseudo-Empedoclean writings, which are supposed to have been Gabirol's source. But here, too, the negative side of Ibn Zaddik’s doctrine is developed at length, while the positive side is barely alluded to in a hint. He takes pains to show the absurdity of the view that the divine will is a momentary entity created from time to time to make possible the coming into being of the things and processes of our world—a view held by the Mutakallimun as represented by their spokesman al-Basir, but when it comes to explaining his own view of the nature of the divine will, and whether it is identical with God or not, he suddenly becomes reticent, refers us to the writings of Empedocles, and intimates that the matter is involved in mystery, and it is not safe to talk about it too plainly and openly. Evidently Ibn Zaddik was not ready to go all the length of Gabirol's emanationism and Neo-Platonic mysticism.

The Aristotelian ideas, of which there are many in the “Microcosm”, are probably not derived from a study of Aristotle's works, but from secondary sources. This we may safely infer from the way in which he uses or interprets them. An Aristotelian definition is a highly technical proposition in which every word counts, and requires a definition in turn to be understood. In the Aristotelian context the reader sees the methodical derivation of the concept; and the several technical terms making up the definition are made clear by illustrative examples. Aside from the context the proposition is obscure even in the original Greek. Now conceive an Arabic translation of an Aristotelian definition taken out of its context, and you do not wonder that it is misunderstood; particularly when the interpreter's point of view is taken from a school of thought at variance with that of Aristotle. This is exactly what happens to Ibn Zaddik. He quotes approvingly Aristotle's definition of the soul, and proceeds to interpret it in a manner not intended by the author of the De Anima. If he had read the context he could not have misunderstood the definition as he did.

Unlike his predecessors, Ibn Zaddik did not confine himself to a special topic in philosophy or to the metaphysical aspects of Judaism. Isaac Israeli and Gabirol discuss special questions in Physics and Metaphysics without bringing them into relation with Judaism or the text of the Bible. Saadia takes cognizance of philosophical doctrine solely with a view to establishing and rationalizing Jewish dogma, and only in so far as it may thus be utilized. Bahya and Abraham bar Hiyya confine their philosophical outlook within still narrower limits, having Jewish ethics as their primary concern. All of the latter make a feature of Biblical interpretation, which lends to their work the Jewish stamp and to their style the element of homeliness and variety. To this they owe in a measure their popularity, which, however, cannot be said for Abraham bar Hiyya, whose “Hegyon ha-Nefesh” was not printed until the second half of last century. The “Microcosm” of Ibn Zaddik is the first compendium of science, philosophy and theology in Jewish literature. And yet it is a small book; for Ibn Zaddik does not enter into lengthy discussions, nor does he adorn his style with rhetorical flourishes or copious quotations from Bible and Talmud. The “Olam Katon” is clearly meant for beginners, who require a summary and compendious view of so much of physics, psychology, metaphysics and ethics as will give them an idea of the position of man in the world, and his duties, theoretical and practical, in this life, that he may fulfil his destiny for which he was created. It is very possible that Ibn Zaddik modelled his work on the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, leaving out all that he regarded as unessential or objectional and abridging the rest.

Accordingly, the “Microcosm” is divided into four parts. The first part treats of what is called in the Aristotelian classification of the sciences Physics, i.e., the principles and constitution of the corporeal world and its processes. The second treats of man, including anthropology and psychology. The third is devoted to a discussion of the existence, unity, incorporeality and other attributes of God, based upon the doctrine of the creation of the world. This bears the stamp of the Kalam, and is indebted to the writings of Saadia, Bahya and Joseph al-Basir. It covers the topics usually treated by the Mutakallimun in the division of their works, known by the name of "Bab al Tauhid," treatise on Unity. The fourth part corresponds to the "Bab al Adi" of the Kalam, i.e., the second division of Kalamistic works devoted to theodicy, or vindication of God's justice in his dealings with mankind. Hence it includes theological questions of an ethical nature, like freedom of the will, reasons for divine worship, the nature of reward and punishment, and so on.

The book was written, Ibn Zaddik tells us, in answer to the question of a pupil concerning the meaning of such terms as "perfection" and "permanent good," used by philosophers. They are not of this world these men say, and yet every man of intelligence should seek them. This is a very difficult subject, made more so by the small number of persons engaged in its study. Particularly in our own generation is this true, that the value of knowledge and investigation is not recognized. People are Jews in name only, and men only in outward appearance. Former ages were much superior in this regard.

Two fundamental requisites are necessary for the knowledge of our subject. They are the knowledge of God, and performance of his will. For this purpose we must understand the works of the philosophers. But these in turn require a knowledge of the preliminary sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and logic. This takes a long time and is likely to weary the student, especially the beginner. I have therefore made it my purpose to show how a man can know himself, for from a knowledge of self he will come to a knowledge of all. Man is called "Microcosm," a world in miniature, because he has in him represented all the elements of the universe. His body resembles the corporeal world; his rational soul the spiritual world. Hence the importance of knowing himself, and hence the definition of philosophy as a man's knowledge of himself. Philosophy is the science of sciences and the end thereof, because it is the path to a knowledge of the Creator.

Here we see at the outset Ibn Zaddik’s Neo-Platonic tendency to make a short cut to knowledge through the study of man instead of the painful and laborious mastery of the preliminary sciences. And so it was that the Neo-Platonists added little to Aristotle's study of nature, concentrating their attention upon the intelligible or spiritual world.

The first thing we must do then is to show that the human body is similar to the corporeal world. This will require an analysis of the structure of the latter. But before examining the objects of knowledge, we must say a word about the process of knowing. Man perceives things in two ways—through sense and through intellect. His senses give him the accidents of things, the shell or husk, so to speak. He perceives color through sight, sound through hearing, odor through smell, and so on. It takes reason to penetrate to the essence of an object. Take as an example a book. The sense of sight perceives its color, and through the color its form. This is then apprehended by the power of imagination or representation. The latter in turn hands it over to the cogitative power of the rational soul, from the reflection of which results the spiritual reality of the object, which is its knowledge. So we see that the reason knows the essence and reality of a thing, whereas the senses know only its husk and its accidents. This same thing is stated by the philosopher in another form. The senses, he says, know only the particular, the universal can be known by the intellect only. This is because the soul is fine and penetrating, while the body is gross, and can reach the surface only.

We may also classify knowledge from another point of view as necessary (or immediate), and demonstrated (or mediate). Necessary knowledge is that which no sane man can deny. Such knowledge may be of the senses, as the sight of the sun or the sound of thunder; or it may be of the reason, such as that the whole is greater than its parts. We may then enumerate four kinds of things known directly without the help of other knowledge, (1) The percepts of the senses. (2) Truths generally admitted by reason of their self-evidence. (3) Traditional truths, i.e., truths handed down by a reliable and wise man, or by a community worthy of credence. (4) First principles or axioms. These four can be easily reduced to two; for traditional truths ultimately go back to the testimony of the senses; while first principles or axioms are included in self-evident propositions. We thus have two kinds of necessary or immediate knowledge, the data of sense, and self-evident propositions. The latter kind is superior to the former, because man shares sense knowledge with the lower animals; whereas rational propositions are peculiar to him alone.

Demonstrated knowledge is built upon necessary knowledge, and is derived from it by means of logical inference.

We may now proceed to discuss the principles of the corporeal world. Matter is the foundation and principle of a thing. All things, natural as well as artificial, are composed of matter and form. Wood is the common matter of chair and bed. Their forms are different. So the common matter of the four elements is the prime matter endowed with the form of corporeality, i. e., with the capacity of filling place. This form of corporeality makes the prime matter corporeal substance. Matter is relative to form, form is relative to matter.

Spiritual things also have matter and form. In corporeal artificial things like ring or bracelet, the matter is gold, the form is the form of ring or bracelet, the efficient cause is the art of the goldsmith, the final cause or purpose is the adornment. In spiritual things we may compare genus to matter, species to form, specific difference to efficient cause, the individual to the final cause.

Everything exists either by itself (per se) or in something else. Matter exists by itself, form exists in something else, in matter. Matter is potentially substance; after it assumes a form it becomes actual substance. In reality there is no matter without form, but in thought we can remove the form and leave the matter.

Substance may be described as that which bears opposite and changing qualities. No substance can be the opposite of another substance through its substantiality, but through its accidents; for opposition resides in quality. Matter receiving form is substance. Absolute substance is simple and spiritual, for it cannot be perceived through the five senses. When the philosophers say that all body is substance, and that the individual is a substance, they use substance in contradistinction to accident, meaning that the individual exists by itself, and needs not another for its existence, unlike accidents, which must have something to exist in.

This absolute substance, which is simple and spiritual, seems to be identical with Gabirol’s “substantia quae sustinet decem prædicamenta”, the substance which supports the ten categories. Gabirol means by it that which remains of a corporeal substance when we take away from it everything that qualifies it as being here or there, of a particular nature or size, in a given relation, and so on.

The expression corporeal world includes the celestial spheres and all which is under them. To be sure, the body of the sphere is different from the other bodies in matter and form and qualities. It consists of a fifth nature, different from the four elements. It is not cold, or it would move downward like earth and water. It is not warm, or it would move upward like air and fire. It is not wet, for it would then roll like the waves of the sea. Nor is it dry, for it would condense and not move at all. Not being any one of these qualities, which constitute our four elements, the sphere is not a composite of them either; for the simple is prior to the composite, and we cannot regard the elements of the sublunar world as prior and superior to the spheres.

The sphere is neither light nor heavy. For light and heavy are relative terms. An object is heavy when out of its natural place, light when in its natural place. Thus a stone is heavy when it is away from the earth, which is its natural place, but is light when it comes to rest where it belongs. The sphere is never out of its place or in its place, as it moves constantly in a circle. Hence it is neither light nor heavy.

Ibn Zaddik’s definition of light and heavy as being relative, and dependent on the relation of the object to its natural place is peculiar, and would lead him to say that fire and air are also heavy when out of their natural place, which is outside of, and above earth and water. But this does not seem in consonance with the Aristotelian use of these terms. According to Aristotle an object is heavy if its tendency is to move to the centre of the world; it is light if it moves away from the centre to the circumference. Hence earth and water are heavy, fire and air are light. The natural place of a body or element is that to which it has a tendency to move, or in which it has a tendency to rest, when left to itself. Hence a body will always move to its natural place when away from it and under no restriction; and its heaviness or lightness does not change with its position.

To continue, the sphere moves in a circle, the most perfect of all motions, having neither beginning nor end. It is more perfect than all bodies, and the knowledge of God is not hidden from it as it is hidden from us. Whatever moves in a circle must move around a body at rest; for if it moves around another moving body, this second body must have another body around which it moves, and this third body another, and so on ad infinitum, which is impossible. Hence the sphere moves around a body at rest. This is the earth.

The four elements of the sublunar world are, fire, air, water, earth. In their purity these elements have neither color nor taste, nor odor nor any other sensible property. For the elements are simple bodies, whereas the sensible qualities are the result of the composition of the elements. If air had color, we should see it as we see all colored things; and all other things would appear to us in the color of air, as is the case when we look through a colored glass. The same argument applies to water.

The elements change into each other. We see water changing under the effect of heat into vapor, and the vapor condenses again under the influence of cold and changes back to water, namely, rain. Air changes into fire when flint strikes iron. Fire cannot exist here unless it has something to take hold of; otherwise it changes into air. Earth and water change into each other very slowly, because earth is hard to change.

The basis of the four elements is a substance filling place as a result of its assuming the form of corporeality, i.e., extension in three directions. Filling place, it moves; moving, it becomes warm. When its motion is completed, it necessarily comes to rest and becomes cold. Heat and cold are the active powers, wet and dry are the passive qualities, wet being associated with heat, dry with cold. The mixture of these qualities with the corporeal basis results in the four elements.

The three natures, mineral, plant, animal are composed of the four elements. When a seed is put in the ground it cannot grow without water, and sunshine and air. These form its food, and food is assimilated to the thing fed. Our bodies are composed of the four elements, because they are nourished by plants. The general process of the sublunar world is that of genesis and dissolution. The genesis of one thing is the dissolution of another. The dissolution of the egg is the genesis of the chicken; the dissolution of the chicken is the genesis of the four elements; for in the living being the elements are potential, and they become actual when the animal dies. This continuous process of genesis and dissolution proves that this world is not permanent, for the basis of its processes is change.

The human body corresponds to the corporeal world, and is similar to it in its nature and matter. Man's body is subject to genesis and decay like other objects. It is composed of the elements and returns to them. It has in it the nature of minerals, plants and animals. It has the power of growth, sustenance and reproduction like plants. Man is like animal in having motion and sensation. He has the spirited power and the appetitive like other animals. His body is perfect because it has resemblances to all kinds of plants and animals. His body as a whole resembles great trees, his hair is like grass and shrubs. Animals have various qualities according to the relation of the animal soul to the body. Thus the lion has strength, the lamb meekness, the fox shrewdness, and so on. Mankind includes all of these qualities. In the same way various animals have various instincts resembling arts, such as the weaving of the spider, the building of the bird and the bee, and so on. They also subsist on various foods. Man alone combines all arts and all kinds of food.

The human body has three dimensions like inanimate bodies. It is also similar to the bodies of plants and animals, and at the same time is distinguished alone among animals by its erect position. This is due to the fact that man's nature is proportionate, and his body is purer and finer than other bodies. Thus we see when oil is pure, its flame rises in a straight line; when the oil is impure the flame is not straight. Another thing proving that man's nature is superior to that of other animals is that the latter live in that element which is akin to their constitution—fish in water, birds in air, quadrupeds on land. Man alone can inhabit all three. Another reason for man's erect position is that he is a plant originating in heaven. Hence his head, which is the root, faces heaven.

Man has three souls, a plant soul, an animal soul and a rational soul. He must have a plant soul to account for the fact that man grows like other plants and dies like them. For if he can grow without a plant soul, plants can do the same. And if this too is granted, then there is no reason why mountains and stones should not grow also. Again, if man can grow without a plant soul, he can live without an animal soul, and know without a rational soul, which is absurd.

The faculty of the vegetative soul is the appetitive power, whose seat is in the liver. Its subordinate powers are those of nutrition and growth. Through it man feels the need of food and other natural desires. He has this in common with the lower animals. It is the first power that appears in man while he is still in his mother's womb. First comes the power which forms the combined seed of the male and the female into a human being in its proper form and nature. In doing this it requires the assistance of the "growing" power, which begins its activity as soon as the first member is formed, and continues until the period of youth is completed. This power in turn needs the assistance of the nourishing power, which accompanies the other two from the beginning of their activity to the end of the person's life. All this constitutes the plant soul, and it must not be supposed that these powers are separated from one another, and that one is in one place and another in another place. They are all spiritual powers derived from the universal powers in the upper world.

When the form of the being is complete, the animal soul makes its appearance. This soul is carried in the spirit of the animal or man, which is found in the pure blood of the arteries. There are two membranes in every artery, making two passages, one for blood and the other for the spirit or wind. The seat of the animal soul is in the heart, and it is borne in the pure red blood. This is why we see in the heart two receptacles; in one is spirit, in the other, blood. Hence after death we find congealed blood in the one, while the other is empty. Death happens on account of the defective "mixture" of the heart. This means that the four humors of which the body is composed, namely, blood, yellow and black gall and phlegm, lose the proper proportionality in their composition, and one or other of them predominates. An animal does not die unless the mixture of the heart is injured, or the heart is wounded seriously. Death is also caused by disease or injury of the brain. For the brain is the origin of the nerves which control the voluntary activities by means of contraction and expansion. If the chest does not contract, the warm air does not come out; if it does not expand, the cold air does not come in; and if the air does not come in or out, the heart loses its proportionality, and the animal dies. The functions of the animal soul are sensation and motion. This motion may be active as well as passive. The active motions are those of the arteries, and the expansion and contraction of the chest which results in respiration. The passive motions give rise to the emotions of anger, fear, shame, joy, sorrow.

Anger is the motion of the spirit within the body toward the outside, together with the blood and the humors. This is found in animals also. Fear is the entrance of the soul within, leaving the surface of the body, and causing the extremities to become cold. Shame is a motion inward, and forthwith again outward. Sorrow is caused in the same way as fear, except that fear is sudden, while sorrow is gradual. This is why fear sometimes kills when the body is weak. Joy is motion outward. Joy may kill too, when it is very great, and the person is weak and without control. Joy is of the nature of pleasure, except that pleasure is gradual, while joy is sudden.

Pain is that feeling we have when we are taken out of our natural state and put into an unnatural. Pleasure is felt when we are restored to the natural. Take, for example, the heat of the sun. When a person is exposed to it, the sun takes him out of his natural state. Heat is then painful, and pleasure is produced by the thing which restores him to his natural state; in this case a cold spring and a drink of cold water. Similarly a person walking in the snow and cold air feels pain by reason of the cold taking him out of his natural state. Heat then gives him pleasure by restoring him. The same thing applies to hunger and thirst, sleeping and waking, and other things which give us pleasure and pain. Without pain there is no pleasure, and the pleasure varies in accordance with the antecedent pain.

Life is the effect of the animal soul. The disappearance of the effect does not necessarily involve the disappearance of the cause, as the disappearance of the smoke does not require the cessation of the fire. Death means simply the separation of the soul, not the destruction thereof. It does not follow because the human soul remains after the death of the body, that the soul of the ox and the ass continues likewise, for the two souls are different. Animals were created for the sake of man, whereas man exists for his own sake. Moreover, man’s life is ultimately derived from his rational soul. For if the animal soul of man were the ultimate source of life, the rational soul too would be dependent for its life upon the former, and hence would be inferior to it, which is absurd. It remains then that the rational soul gives existence to the animal soul in man.

Sleep is the rest of the senses, as death is their entire cessation. The purpose of sleep is to give the brain rest so that the "spirit" of the soul should not be dissolved and the "mixture" of the body injured suddenly and cause death. The heart rests continually between contraction and expansion, hence it needs no special rest at night. Waking is the activity of the senses and the exercise of their functions to satisfy the desires of the body. The motions of the soul in the waking state are in the interest of the needs of the body. During sleep the soul looks out for itself, for its better world, being then free from the business of the body. If it is pure and bright, and the body is free from the remnant of food, and the thought is not depressed by sorrow and grief—then the soul is aroused in its desire for the future, and beholds wonderful things.

No one can deny that man has a rational soul because speech is an attribute which man has above all other animals. The soul is not a corporeal thing, for if it were it would have to occupy place like body, and would have color and form and other qualities like body. Moreover, it would require something else to give it life like body. In other words, the soul would require another soul, and that soul another soul, and so on ad infinitum, which is impossible. Hence the soul is not a corporeal thing.

Nor can we say that the soul is in the body. For if it were, it would itself be body; since only body can fill the empty place in another body, as water fills a jar.

The soul is a substance and not an accident. An accident is a quality which makes its appearance in something else, and has no permanence. If then the rational soul is an accident of the body, it has no permanence, and man is sometimes rational and sometimes not. This is absurd, for in that case there could be no purpose in giving him commandments and statutes.

There are inseparable accidents to be sure, like the color of the Ethiopian's skin. But in that case we know the color is an accident despite its inseparability, from the fact that in other things color is an accident and may be removed. This will not apply to the reason. For we do not find anything in which reason is a removable accident. The moment you remove reason, you remove man, for reason is essential to man. The fact that as a result of an injury a man may lose his reason is no argument against us, for this happens only when an injury is inflicted on the brain, which is the reason's instrument. This accounts for the fact, too, that men in good health if given henbane to drink lose their reason, because the drink affects the brain. On the other hand, we see that those afflicted with a certain disease of the intestines, which causes their death, are more rational and brighter at the time of death than ever before, showing that the soul cannot be an accident depending upon the "mixture" of the body.

To regard the soul as an accident, while the body is a substance, would make the soul inferior to the body. This is absurd. For we have the body in common with the beasts; whereas it is in virtue of the reason that we are given commandments, and reward and punishment in the world to come.

If the soul is neither a corporeal thing nor an accident of body, it must be a spiritual substance. And the best definition of the soul is that of Aristotle, who says it is a substance giving perfection to a natural organic body, which has life potentially. Every phrase in this definition tells. "Substance" excludes the view that the soul is an accident. "Giving perfection" signifies that the soul is that which makes man perfect, bringing him to the next world, and being the purpose not merely of his creation and the composition of his body, but of the creation of matter as well. "Natural organic body" indicates that the body is an organon, or instrument in the function of the soul, the latter using the body to carry out its own purposes. The rational soul is like a king; the animal soul is like an official before the king, rebuking the appetitive soul.

In the discussion of the last paragraph we have a good example of the uncritical attitude of Ibn Zaddik toward the various schools of philosophical thought, particularly those represented by Plato and Aristotle. This attitude is typical of the middle ages, which appealed to authority in philosophy as well as in theology, and hence developed a harmonistic attitude in the presence of conflicting authorities. Aided by their defective knowledge of the complete systems of the ancient Greek philosophers, by the difficulties and obscurities incident to translations from an alien tongue, and by the spurious writings circulating in the name of an ancient Greek philosopher, the precise demarcation of schools and tendencies became more and more confused, and it was possible to prove that Plato and Aristotle were in entire agreement. Thus Ibn Zaddik has no scruple in combining (unconsciously, to be sure) Platonic and Neo-Platonic psychology with the Aristotelian definition representing quite a different point of view. The one is anthropological dualism, regarding the soul as a distinct entity which comes to the body from without. The other is a biological monism, in which the soul is the reality of the body, the essence of its functioning, which makes the potentially living body an actually living body. We cannot enter here into a criticism of the elements of the Aristotelian definition of the soul as rendered and interpreted by Ibn Zaddik, but will merely say that it misses completely the meaning of Aristotle, and shows that Ibn Zaddik did not take it from the De Anima of Aristotle, but found it without its context in some Arabic work.

To return from our digression, the three souls, Ibn Zaddik tells us, are spiritual powers; every one of them is a substance by itself of benefit to the body. The rational soul gets the name soul primarily, and the others get it from the rational soul. The Intellect is called soul because the rational soul and the Intellect have a common matter. And hence when the soul is perfected it becomes intellect. This is why the rational soul is called potential intellect. The only difference between them is one of degree and excellence. The world of Intellect is superior, and its matter is the pure light, Intellect in which there is no ignorance, because it comes from God without any intermediate agency.

Here we see just a touch of the Neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation, of which the Universal Intellect is the first. But it is considerably toned down and not continued down the series as in Plotinus or the Brethren of Purity.

The accidents of the soul are spiritual like the soul itself. They are, knowledge, kindness, goodness, justice, and other similar qualities. Ignorance, wrong, evil, and so on, are not the opposites of those mentioned above, and were not created with the soul like the others. They are merely the absence of the positive qualities mentioned before, as darkness is the absence of light. God did not create any defect, nor did he desire it. Evil is simply the result of the incapacity of a given thing to receive a particular good. If all things were capable of receiving goods equally, all things would be one thing, and the Creator and his creatures would be likewise one. This was not God's purpose.

There is a tacit opposition to the Mutakallimun in Ibn Zaddik’s arguments against the view that the soul is an accident, as well as in his statement in the preceding paragraph that the bad qualities and evil generally are not opposites of the good qualities and good respectively, but that they are merely privations, absences, and hence not created by God. This is a Neo-Platonic doctrine. Pseudo-Bahya, we have seen , and Abraham bar Hiyya adopt the Kalamistic view in the latter point, and solve the problem of evil differently.

The function of the rational soul is knowledge. The rational soul investigates the unknown and comprehends it. It derives general rules, makes premises and infers one thing from another. Man alone has this privilege. It is in virtue of the rational soul that we have been given commandments and prohibitions, and become liable to reward and punishment. Brute animals have no commandments, because they have no reason. The soul has reason only potentially, and man makes it actual by study. If the reason were actual originally in the soul, there would be no difference between the soul's condition in its own world and in this one; and the purpose of man, which is that he may learn in order to choose the right way and win salvation, would have no meaning.

The existence of many individual souls, all of which have the soul character in common, shows that there is a universal soul by virtue of which all the particular souls exist. This division of the universal soul into many individual souls is not really a division of the former in its essence, which remains one and indivisible. It is the bodies which receive the influence of the universal soul, as vessels in the sun receive its light according to their purity. Hence the existence of justice and evil, righteousness and wrong. This does not, however, mean to say that the reception of these qualities is independent of a man’s choice. Man is free to choose, and hence he deserves praise and blame, reward and punishment.

The rational soul is destined for the spiritual world, which is a pure and perfect world, made by God directly without an intermediate agency. It is not subject to change or defect or need. God alone created this spiritual world to show his goodness and power, and not because he needed it. The world is not like God, though God is its cause. It is not eternal a parte ante, having been made out of nothing by God; but it will continue to exist forever, for it cannot be more perfect than it is. It is simple and spiritual. This applies also to the heavenly spheres and their stars.

Man is obliged to reason and investigate, as all nations do according to the measure of their capacities. No animal reasons because it has not the requisite faculty. But if man should neglect to exercise the power given him, he would lose the benefit coming therefrom and the purpose of his existence. There would then be no difference between him and the beast.

The first requisite for study and investigation is to deaden the animal desires. Then with the reason as a guide and his body as a model, man acquires the knowledge of the corporeal world. From his rational soul he comes to the knowledge of the existence of a spiritual world. Finally he will learn to know the Creator, who is the only real existent, for nothing can be said truly to exist, which at one time did not exist, or which at some time will cease to exist. When a man neglects this privilege which is his of using his reason, he forfeits the name man, and descends below the station of the beast, for the latter never falls below its animal nature.

It is very important to study the knowledge of God, for it is the highest knowledge and the cause of human perfection. The prophets are full of recommendations in this regard. Jeremiah says (31, 33), "They shall all know me, from the least of them even unto their greatest." Amos (5, 6) bids us "Seek for the Lord and you shall live." Hosea likewise (6, 3) recommends that "We may feel it, and strive to know the Lord."

The first loss a man suffers who does not study and investigate is that he does not understand the real existence of God, and imagines he is worshipping a body. Some think God is light. But this is as bad as to regard him body. For light is an accident in a shining body, as is proved by the fact that the air receives the light of the sun, and later it receives the shadow and becomes dark. And yet these people are not the worst by any means, for there are others who do not trouble to concentrate their minds on God, and occupy their thoughts solely with the business and the pleasures of this world. These people we do not discuss at all. We are arguing against those who imagine they are wise men and students of the Kalam. In fact they are ignorant persons, and do not know what logic is and how it is to be used.

Before giving our own views of the nature and existence of God, we must refute the objectionable doctrines of these people. Joseph al-Basir in a work of his called "Mansuri" casts it up to the Rabbanites that in believing that God descends and ascends they are not true worshippers of God. But he forgets that his own doctrines are no better. Anyone who believes that God created with a newly created will and rejects by means of a newly created rejection has never truly served God or known him. Just as objectionable is their view that God is living but not with life residing in a subject, powerful but not with power, and so on. We shall take up each of these in turn.

The Mutakallimun refuse to believe that God's will is eternal, for fear of having a second eternal beside God. And so they say that whenever God wills, he creates a will for the purpose, and whenever he rejects anything he creates a "rejection" with which the objectionable thing is rejected. But this leads them to a worse predicament than the one from which they wish to escape, as we shall see. If God cannot create anything without having a will as the instrument in creating, and for this reason must first create a will for the purpose—how did he create this will? He must have had another will to create this will, and a third will to create the second, and so on ad infinitum, which is absurd. If he created the first will without the help of another will, why not create the things he wanted outright without any will? Besides, in making God will at a given time after a state of not willing, they introduce change in God.

As for the other dictum, that God is “living but not with life”, “powerful but not with power”, “knowing but not with knowledge”, and so on; what do they mean by this circumlocution? If they say “living” to indicate that he is not dead, and add “but not with life”, so as to prevent a comparison of him with other living things, why not say also, “He is body, but not like other bodies”? If the objection to calling him body is that body is composite, and what is composite must have been composed by someone and is not eternal, the same objection applies to "living." For "living" implies "breathing" and "possessed of sensation," hence also composite and created. If they reply, we mean life peculiar to him, we say why not also body peculiar to him? You see these people entangle themselves in their own sophisms, because they do not know what demonstration means.

Having disposed of the errors of the Mutakallimun, we must now present our own method of investigation into the nature of God. To know a thing, we investigate its four causes—material, formal, efficient and final. What has no cause but is the cause of all things, cannot be known in this way. Still it is not altogether unknowable for this reason. Its essence cannot be known, but it may be known through its activities, or rather effects, which suggest attributes. We cannot therefore know concerning God what he is, nor how he is, nor on account of what, nor of what kind, nor where, nor when. For these can apply only to a created thing having a cause. But we can ask concerning him, whether he is; and this can best be known from his deeds.

We observe the things of the world and find that they are all composed of substance and accident, as we saw before . These are correlative, and one cannot exist without the other. Hence neither precedes the other. But accident is "new" (i. e., not eternal), hence so is substance. That accident is new is proved from the fact that rest succeeds motion and motion succeeds rest, hence accidents constantly come and go and are newly created.

Now if substance and accident are both new there must be something that brought them into being unless they bring themselves into being. But the latter is impossible, for the agent must either exist when it brings itself into being, or not. If it exists it is already there; if it does not exist, it is nothing, and nothing cannot do anything. Hence there must be a being that brought the world into existence. This is God.

God is one, for the cause of the many must be the one. If the cause of the many is the many, then the cause of the second many is a third many, and so on ad infinitum; hence we must stop with the one. God is to the world as unity is to number. Unity is the basis of number without being included in number, and it embraces number on all sides. It is the foundation of number; for if you remove unity, you remove number; but the removal of number does not remove unity. The one surrounds number on all sides; for the beginning of number is the one, and it is also the middle of number and the end thereof. For number is nothing but an aggregate of ones. Besides, number is composed of odds and evens, and one is the cause of odd as well as even.

If there were two eternal beings, they would either coincide in all respects, and they would be one and not two. Or they would differ. In the latter case, the world is either the work of both or of one only. If of both, they are not omnipotent, and hence not eternal. If of one only, then the other does not count, since he is not eternal, and there is only one.

By saying God is one we do not mean that he comes under the category of quantity, for quantity is an accident residing in a substance, and all substance is "new." What we mean is that the essence of God is true unity, not numerical unity. For numerical unity is also in a sense multiplicity, and is capable of multiplication and division. God's unity is alone separate and one in all respects.

God is not like any of his creatures. For if he were, he would be possessed of quality, since it is in virtue of quality that a thing is said to be like another, and quality is an accident contained in a substance.

God is self-sufficient and not in need of anything. For if he needed anything at all, it would be first of all the one who created him and made him an existent thing. But this is absurd, since God is eternal. We might suppose that he needs the world, which he created for some purpose, as we sometimes make things to assist us. But this, too, is impossible. For if he were dependent upon the world for anything, he could not create it. It is different with us. We do not create things; we only modify matter already existing.

Again, if God created the world for his own benefit, then either he was always in need of the world, or the need arose at the time of creating. If he was always in need of the world, it would have existed with him from eternity, but we have already proved that the world is not eternal. If the need arose in him at the time of creation, as heat arises in a body after cold, or motion after rest, then he is like created things, and is himself "new" and not eternal. To say the need was always there, and yet he did not create it until the time he did would be to ascribe inability to God of creating the world before he did, which is absurd. For one who is unable at any given time, cannot create at all. It remains then that he does not need anything, and that he created the world by reason of his goodness and generosity and nothing else.

The question of God's will is difficult. The problem is this. If God's will is eternal and unchanging, and he created the world with his will, the world is eternal. If we say, as we must, that he created the world after a condition of non-creation, we introduce a change in God, a something newly created in him, namely, the will to create, which did not exist before. This is a dilemma. My own view is that since God's creating activity is his essence, and his essence is infinite and eternal, we cannot say he created after a condition of non-creation, or that he willed after a condition of non-willing, or that he was formerly not able. And yet we do not mean that the world is eternal. It was created a definite length of time before our time. The solution of the problem is that time itself was created with the world; for time is the measure of motion of the celestial sphere, and if there are no spheres there is no time, and no before and after. Hence it does not follow because the world is not eternal that before its creation God did not create. There is no before when the world is not.

We objected to the view of the Mutakallimun, who speak of God creating a will on the ground that if he can create a will directly he can create the world instead. Our opinion is therefore that God's will is eternal and not newly created, for the latter view introduces creation in God. There is still the difficulty of the precise relation of the will to God. If it is different from God we have two eternals, and if it is the same as God in all respects, he changes when he creates. My answer is, it is not different from God in any sense, and there is no changing attribute in God. But there is a subtle mystery in this matter, which it is not proper to reveal, and this is not the place to explain it. The interested reader is referred to the book of Empedocles and other works of the wise men treating of this subject .

God created the world out of nothing, and not out of a pre-existent matter. For if the matter of the world is eternal like God, there is no more reason for supposing that God formed a world out of it than that it formed a world out of God.

The world is perfect. For we have repeatedly shown that its creation is due entirely to God's goodness. If then it were not perfect, this would argue in God either ignorance or niggardliness or weakness.

Most of the ancients avoided giving God attributes for fear of making him the bearer of qualities, which would introduce plurality and composition in his essence. The proper view, however, is this. As God's essence is different from all other essences, so are his attributes different from all other attributes. His attributes are not different from him; his knowledge and his truth and his power are his essence. The way man arrives at the divine attributes is this. Men have examined his works and learned from them God's existence. They then reflected on this existent and found that he was not weak; so they called him strong. They found his works perfect, and they called him wise. They perceived that he was self-sufficient, without need of anything, and hence without any motives for doing wrong. Hence they called him righteous. And so on with the other attributes. All this they did in order that people may learn from him and imitate his ways. But we must not forget that all these expressions of God's attributes are figurative. No one must suppose that if we do not say he has life, it means he is dead. What we mean is that we cannot apply the term living to God literally, in the sense in which we apply it to other living things. When the Bible does speak of God as alive and living, the meaning is that he exists forever. The philosopher is right when he says that it is more proper to apply negative attributes to God than positive.

Taking a glance at Ibn Zaddik's theology just discussed in its essential outlines, we notice that while he opposes vigorously certain aspects of Kalamistic thought, as he found them in al-Basir, the Karaite, his own method and doctrine are not far removed from the Kalam. His proof of the creation of the world from its composite character (substance and accident) is the same as one of Saadia, which Maimonides cites as a Kalamistic proof. We have already spoken of the fact that the method of basing one's theology upon the creation of the world is one that is distinctive of the Kalam, as Maimonides himself tells us. And this method is common to Saadia, Bahya and Ibn Zaddik. In his discussion of the attributes Ibn Zaddik offers little if anything that is new. His attitude is that in the literal and positive sense no attribute can be applied to God. We can speak of God negatively without running the risk of misunderstanding. But the moment we say anything positive we do become thus liable to comparing God with other things; and such circumlocutions as the Kalamistic "Living without life," and so on, do not help matters, for they are contradictory, and take away with one hand what they give with the other. The Biblical expressions must be taken figuratively; and the most important point to remember is that God's essence cannot be known at all. The manner in which we arrive at the divine attributes is by transferring them from God's effects in nature to his own essence. All this we have already found in Bahya much better expressed, and Bahya is also without doubt the source of Ibn Zaddik's discussion of God's unity.

We must now review briefly the practical part of Ibn Zaddik's philosophy as it is found in the fourth part of the "Microcosm." In the manner of Bahya he points out the importance of divine service and obedience to the commandments of God, viewing man's duties to his maker as an expression of gratitude, which everyone owes to his benefactor. Like Bahya he compares God's benefactions with those of one man to another to show the infinite superiority of the former, and the greater duty which follows therefrom.

The commandments which God gave us like the act of our creation are for our own good, that we may enjoy true happiness in the world to come. As it would not be proper to reward a person for what he has not done, God gave man commandments. The righteous as well as the wicked are free to determine their own conduct, hence reward and punishment are just.

Like Saadia and Bahya before him, Ibn Zaddik makes use of the distinction (or rather takes it for granted) between rational and traditional commandments; pointing out that the latter also have a cause and explanation in the mind of God even though we may not know it. In some cases we can see the explanation ourselves. Take for instance the observance of the Sabbath. Its rational signification is two-fold. It teaches us that the world was created, and hence has a Creator whom we worship. And in the second place the Sabbath symbolizes the future world. As one has nothing to eat on the Sabbath day unless he has prepared food the day before, so the enjoyment of the future world depends upon spiritual preparation in this world.

In his conduct a man must imitate God's actions by doing good and mercy and kindness. Without the knowledge of God a person's good deeds are of no account and no better than the work of idolaters. In fact it is not possible to do good deeds without a knowledge of God, for he is the source of all good, and there is no true good without him. When a fool is seen with good qualities such as mercy and benevolence, they are due to the weakness of his animal soul, the spirited part of his nature. Similarly if this fool abstains from pleasures, it is because of the weakness of his appetitive soul.

Thus we see that knowledge comes first in importance; for knowledge leads to practice, and practice brings reward in the world to come. As the purpose of man's creation is that he may enjoy the future life, wisdom or knowledge is the first requisite to this great end.

The four principal qualities constituting goodness or virtue are (1) knowledge of God's attributes; (2) righteousness or justice; (3) hope; (4) humility. All other good qualities are derived from these. Jeremiah names some of them when he says (9, 23), “I am the Lord who exercise kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord”. Similarly Zephaniah (2, 3) bids us, “Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, who have fulfilled his ordinances; seek righteousness, seek meekness”.

The four qualities of wisdom or knowledge, righteousness, hope and humility are without doubt modified descendants of the four Platonic virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, which we still find in their original form and in their Platonic derivation and psychological origin in Pseudo-Bahya.

Reward and punishment of the real kind, Ibn Zaddik thinks, are not in this world but in the next. In this way he accounts for the fact of the prosperity of the wicked and the sufferings of the righteous. Another proof that this world cannot be the place of final reward and punishment is that pleasure in this world is not a real good, but only a temporary respite from disease. Pain and pleasure are correlative, as we saw before. In fact pleasure is not a good at all; for if it were, then the greater the pleasure, the greater the good, which is not true. Reward in the next world is not a corporeal pleasure at all.

The evil which happens to the righteous in this world is often a natural occurrence without reference to reward and punishment, and may be compared to the natural pleasures which men derive from the sense of sight and the other senses, and which have nothing to do with reward and punishment. Sometimes, too, this evil is inflicted upon the good man to forgive his sins. Real reward and punishment are in the future life, and as that life is spiritual, the reward as well as the punishment is timeless.

The Mutakallimun think that animals and little children are also rewarded in the next world for ill treatment, suffering and death which are inflicted upon them in this world. So we find in Joseph al Basir’s Mansuri. But this is absurd. If the killing of animals is a wrong, God would not have commanded us to do it, any more than he ordered us to kill human beings in order that he may reward them later. Moreover, we should then deserve punishment for killing animals if that is wrong, and there would follow the absurdity that God commanded us to do that for which we deserve punishment. Besides, if the animals deserve reward and punishment, they should have been given commandments and laws like ourselves. If this was not done because animals are not rational, reward and punishment are equally out of place for the same reason.

When the soul leaves the body in death, if she exercised her reason in the pursuit of knowledge, she will continue her existence forever in the upper world. This is her happiness, her reward and her paradise, namely, to cleave to her own world, and to shine with the true light emanating from God directly. This is the end of the human soul. But if she did not exercise her reason and did not pursue right conduct, she will not be able to return to the spiritual world, for she will have lost her own spirituality. She will be similar to the body, desiring this world and its pleasures. Her fate will be to revolve forever with the sphere in the world of fire, without being able to return to her world. Thus she will be forever in pain, and homeless.

When the Messiah comes, the pious men of our nation, the Prophets, the Patriarchs and those who died for the sanctification of the name, i.e., the martyrs, will be brought back to life in the body, and will never die again. There will be no eating and drinking, but they will live like Moses on the mountain basking in the divine light. The wicked will also be joined to their bodies and burned with fire.

CHAPTER X.

JUDAH HALEVI

In Judah Halevi the poet got the better of the rationalist. Not that Judah Halevi was not familiar with philosophical thinking and did not absorb the current philosophical terminology as well as the ideas contained therein. Quite the contrary. He shows a better knowledge of Aristotelian ideas than his predecessors, and is well versed in Neo-Platonism. While he attacks all those views of philosophers which are inconsistent to his mind with the religion of Judaism, he speaks in other respects the philosophic language, and even makes concessions to the philosophers. If the reason should really demand it, he tells us, one might adopt the doctrine of the eternity of matter without doing any harm to the essence of Judaism. As for the claims of reason to rule our beliefs, he similarly admits that that which is really proved in the same absolute manner as the propositions in mathematics and logic cannot be controverted. But this opinion need cause one no difficulty as there is nothing in the Bible which opposes the unequivocal demands of the reason. He cannot consistently oppose all philosophy and science, for he maintains that the sciences were originally in the hands of the Jews, and that it was from them that the Chaldeans borrowed them and handed them over to the Persians, who in turn transferred them to Greece and Rome, their origin being forgotten. At the same time he insists that philosophy and reason are not adequate means for the solution of all problems, and that the actual solutions as found in the writings of the Aristotelians of his day are in many cases devoid of all demonstrative value. Then there are certain matters in theory as well as in practice which do not at all come within the domain of reason, and the philosophers are bound to be wrong because they apply the wrong method. Revelation alone can make us wise as to certain aspects of God’s nature and as to certain details in human conduct; and in these philosophy must fail because as philosophy it has no revelation. With all due respect therefore to the philosophers, who are the most reliable guides in matters not conflicting with revelation, we must leave them if we wish to learn the truth concerning those matters in which they are incompetent to judge.

This characterization of Judah Halevi’s attitude is brief and inadequate. But before proceeding to elaborate it with more detail and greater concreteness, it will be well to sketch very briefly the little we know of his life.

Judah Halevi was born in Toledo in the last quarter of the eleventh century. This is about the time when the city was taken from the Mohammedans by the emperor Alphonso VI, king of Leon, Castile, Galicia and Navarre. At the same time Toledo remained Arabic in culture and language for a long while after this, and even exerted a great influence upon the civilization of Christendom. The Jews were equally well treated in Toledo by Mohammedan emir and Christian king. The youth of Halevi was therefore not embittered or saddened by Jewish persecutions. It seems that he was sent to Lucena, a Jewish centre, where he studied the Talmud with the famous Alfasi, and made friends with Joseph ibn Migash, Alfasi’s successor, and Baruh Albalia, the philosopher. A poet by nature, he began to write Hebrew verses early, and soon became famous as a poet of the first order in no manner inferior to Gabirol. His living he made not from his verses, but like many others of his day by practicing the art of medicine. Later in life he visited Cordova, already in its decline through the illiberal government of the Almoravid dynasty. The rulers were strict religionists, implicit followers of the “fukaha”, the men devoted to the study of Mohammedan religion and law; and scientific learning and philosophy were proscribed in their domains. Men of another faith were not in favor, and the Jews who, unlike the Christians, had no powerful emperor anywhere to take their part, had to buy their lives and comparative freedom with their hard earned wealth. Here Halevi spent some time as a physician. He was admitted in court circles, but his personal good fortune could not reconcile him to the sufferings of his brethren, and his letters give expression to his dissatisfaction. He wrote a variety of poems on subjects secular and religious; but what made him famous above all else was his strong nationalism, and those of his poems will live longest which give expression to his intense love for his people and the land which was once their own. That it was not mere sentiment with Judah Halevi he proved late in life when he decided to leave his many friends and his birthplace and go to Palestine to end his life on the soil of his ancestors. It was after 1140 that he left Spain for the East. Unfavorable winds drove him out of course to Egypt, and he landed at Alexandria. From there he went to Cairo at the invitation of his admirers and friends. Everywhere he was received with great honor, his fame preceding him, and he was urged to remain in Egypt. But no dissuasion could keep him from his pious resolve. We find him later in Damietta; we follow him to Tyre and Damascus, but beyond the last city all trace of him is lost. We know not whether he reached Jerusalem or not. Legend picks up the thread where history drops it, and tells of Judah Halevi meeting his death at the gates of the holy city as with tears he was singing his famous ode to Zion. An Arab horseman, the story goes, pierced him through with his spear.

This sketch of Halevi’s life and character, brief and inadequate as it is, will prepare us to understand better his attitude to philosophy and to Judaism. His was not a critical intellect whose curiosity is not satisfied until the matter in dispute is proved in logical form. Reason is good enough in mathematics and physics where the objects of our investigation are accessible to us and the knowledge of their nature exhausts their significance. It is not so with the truths of Judaism and the nature of God. These cannot be known adequately by the reason alone, and mere knowledge is not enough. God and the Jewish religion are not simply facts to be known and understood like the laws of science. They are living entities to be acquainted with, to be devoted to, to love. Hence quite a different way of approach is necessary. And not everyone has access to this way. The method of acquaintance is open only to those who by birth and tradition belong to the family of the prophets, who had a personal knowledge of God, and to the land of Palestine where God revealed himself.

We see here the nationalist speaking, the lover of his people and of their land and language and institutions. David Kaufmann has shown that Judah Halevi’s anti-philosophical attitude has much in common with that of the great Arab writer Al Gazali, from whom there is no doubt that he borrowed his inspiration. Gazali began as a philosopher, then lost confidence in the logical method of proof, pointed to the contradictions of the philosophers, to their disagreements among themselves, and went over to the Sufis, the pietists and mystics of the Mohammedan faith. There are a number of resemblances between Gazali and Halevi as Kaufmann has shown, and there is no doubt that skepticism in respect of the powers of the human reason on the one hand, and a deep religious sense on the other are responsible for the point of view of Gazali as well as Halevi. But there is this additional motive in Halevi that he was defending a persecuted race and a despised faith against not merely the philosophers but against the more powerful and more fortunate professors of other religions. He is the loyal son of his race and his religion, and he will show that they are above all criticism, that they are the best and the truest there are. Maimonides, too, found it necessary to defend Judaism against the attacks of philosophy. But in his case it was the Jew in him who had to be defended against the philosopher in him. It was no external enemy but an internal who must be made harmless, and the method was one of reconciliation and harmonization. It is still truer to say that with Maimonides both Judaism and philosophy were his friends, neither was an enemy. He was attached to one quite as much as to the other. And it was his privilege to reconcile their differences, to the great gain, as he thought, of both. Judah Halevi takes the stand of one who fights for his hearth and home against the attacks of foreign foes. He will not yield an inch to the adversary. He will maintain his own. The enemy cannot approach.

Thus Halevi begins his famous work “Kusari”: “I was asked what I have to say in answer to the arguments of philosophers, unbelievers and professors of other religions against our own”. Instead of working out his ideas systematically, he wanted to give his subject dramatic interest by clothing it in dialogue form. And he was fortunate in finding a historical event which suited his purpose admirably.

Some three or four centuries before his time, the king of the Chazars, a people of Turkish origin living in the Caucasus, together with his courtiers and many of his subjects embraced Judaism. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish minister and patron of learning of Cordova, in the tenth century corresponded with the then king of the Chazars, and received an account of the circumstances of the conversion. In brief it was that the king wishing to know which was the true religion invited representatives of the three dominant creeds, Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, and questioned them concerning the tenets of their respective faiths. Seeing that the Christian as well as the Mohammedan appealed in their arguments to the truth of the Hebrew Bible, the king concluded that Judaism must be the true religion, which he accordingly adopted. This story gave Halevi the background and framework for his composition. He works out his own ideas in the form of a dialogue between the Jewish Rabbi and the king of the Chazars, in which the former explains to the king the essentials of the Jewish religion, and answers the king’s questions and criticisms, taking occasion to discuss a variety of topics, religious, philosophical and scientific, all tending to show the truth of Judaism and its superiority to other religions, to philosophy, Kalam, and also to Karaism.

The story is, Halevi tells us, in the introduction to his book, that the king of the Chazars had repeated dreams in which an angel said to him, “Your intentions are acceptable to God, but not your practice”. His endeavors to be faithful to his religion, and to take part in the services and perform the sacrifices in the temple in person only led to the repetition of the dream. He therefore consulted a philosopher about his belief, and the latter said to him, “In God there is neither favor nor hatred, for he is above all desire and purpose. Purpose and intention argue defect and want, which the fulfilment of the intention satisfies. But God is free from want. Hence there is no purpose or intention in his nature.

“God does not know the particular or individual, for the individual constantly changes, whereas God’s knowledge never changes. Hence God does not know the individual man and, needless to say, he does not hear his prayer. When the philosophers say God created man, they use the word created metaphorically, in the sense that God is the cause of all causes, but not that he made man with purpose and intention.

“The world is eternal, and so is the existence of man. The character and ability of a person depend upon the causes antecedent to him. If these are of the right sort, we have a person who has the potentialities of a philosopher. To realize them he must develop his intellect by study, and his character through moral discipline. Then he will receive the influence of the ‘Active Intellect’, with which he becomes identified so that his limbs and faculties do only what is right, and are wholly in the service of the active Intellect.

“This union with the active Intellect is the highest goal of man; and he becomes like one of the angels, and joins the ranks of Hermes, Aesculapius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. This is the meaning of the expression ‘favor of God’. The important thing is to study the sciences in order to know the truth, and to practice the ethical virtues. If one does this, it matters not what religion he professes, or whether he professes any religion at all. He can make his own religion in order to discipline himself in humility, and to govern his relations to society and country. Or he can choose one of the philosophical religions. Purity of heart is the important thing, and knowledge of the sciences. Then the desired result will come, namely, union with the active intellect, which may also result in the power of prophecy through true dreams and visions”.

The king was not satisfied with the statement of the philosopher, which seemed to him inadequate because he felt that he himself had the necessary purity of heart, and yet he was told that his practice was not satisfactory, proving that there is something in practice as such apart from intention. Besides, the great conflict between Christianity and Islam, who kill one another, is due to the difference in religious practice, and not in purity of heart. Moreover, if the view of the philosophers were true, there should be prophecy among them, whereas in reality prophecy is found among those who did not study the sciences rather than among those who did.

The king then said, I will ask the Christians and the Mohammedans. I need not inquire of the Jews, for their low condition is sufficient proof that the truth cannot be with them. So he sent for a Christian sage, who explained to him the essentials of his belief, saying among other things, We believe in the creation of the world in six days, in the descent of all men from Adam, in revelation and Providence, in short, in all that is found in the law of Moses and in the other Israelitish Scriptures, which cannot be doubted because of the publicity which was given to the events recorded therein. He also quoted the words of the gospel, I did not come to destroy any of the commandments of Israel and of Moses their teacher; I came to confirm them.

The king was not convinced by the Christian belief, and called a Mohammedan doctor, who in describing the specific tenets of Mohammedanism also mentioned the fact that in the Koran are quoted the Pentateuch and Moses and the other leaders, and the wonderful things they did. These, he said, cannot be denied; for they are well known.

Seeing that both Christian and Mohammedan referred to the law of Moses as true, and as evidence that God spoke to man, the king determined to call a Jewish sage also, and hear what he had to say.

The Jewish “Haber”, as Judah Halevi calls him, began his discourse by saying, We Jews believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who took the children of Israel out of Egypt, supported them in the wilderness, gave them the land of Canaan, and so on.

The king was disappointed and said, I had determined not to consult the Jews in this matter at all, because their abject condition in the world did not leave them any good quality. You should have said, he told the Jew, that you believe in him who created the world and governs it; who made man and provides for him. Every religionist defends his belief in this way.

The Jew replied, The religion to which you refer is a rational religion, established by speculation and argument, which are full of doubt, and about which there is no agreement among philosophers, because not all the arguments are valid or even plausible. This pleased the king, and he expressed a wish to continue the discourse. The Rabbi then said, The proper way to define one's religion is by reference to that which is more certain, namely, actual experience. Jews have this actual experience. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spoke to Moses and delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. This is well known. God gave Israel the Torah. To be sure, all others not of Israel who accept the Law will be rewarded, but they cannot be equal to Israel. There is a peculiar relation between God and Israel in which the other peoples do not share. As the plant is distinguished from the mineral, the animal from the plant, and man from the irrational animal, so is the prophetic individual distinguished above other men. He constitutes a higher species. It is through him that the masses became aware of God’s existence and care for them. It was he who told them things unknown to them; who gave them an account of the world's creation and its history. We count now forty-five hundred years from the creation. This was handed down from Adam through Seth and Enos to Noah, to Shem and Eber, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Moses, and finally to us. Moses came only four hundred years after Abraham in a world which was full of knowledge of heavenly and earthly things. It is impossible that he should have given them a false account of the division of languages and the relations of nations without being found out and exposed.

The philosophers, it is true, oppose us by maintaining that the world is eternal. But the philosophers are Greeks, descended from Japheth, who did not inherit either wisdom or Torah. Divine wisdom is found only in the family of Shem. The Greeks had philosophy among them only during the short time of their power. They borrowed it from the Persians, who had it in turn from the Chaldeans. But neither before nor after did they have any philosophers among them.

Aristotle, not having any inherited tradition concerning the origin of the world, endeavored to reason it all out of his own head. Eternity was just as hard to believe in as creation. But as he had no true and reliable tradition, his arguments in favor of eternity seemed to him to be the stronger. Had he lived among a people who had reliable traditions on the other side, he would have found arguments in favor of creation, which is more plausible than eternity. Real demonstration cannot be controverted; and there is nothing in the Bible which opposes what the reason unequivocally demands. But the matter of eternity or creation is very difficult. The arguments on one side are as good as those on the other. And tradition from Adam to Noah and Moses, which is better than argument, lends its additional weight to the doctrine of creation. If the believer in the Torah were obliged to hold that there is a primitive eternal matter from which the world was made, and that there were many worlds before this one, there would be no great harm, as long as he believes that this world is of recent origin and Adam was the first man.

We see now the standpoint of Judah Halevi, for the “Haber” is of course his spokesman. Philosophy and independent reasoning on such difficult matters as God and creation are after all more or less guess work, and cannot be made the bases of religion except for those who have nothing better. The Jews fortunately have a surer foundation all their own. They have a genuine and indisputable tradition. History is the only true science and the source of truth; not speculation, which is subjective, and can be employed with equal plausibility in favor of opposite doctrines. True history and tradition in the case of the Jews goes back ultimately to first hand knowledge from the very source of all truth. The prophets of Israel constitute a higher species, as much superior to the ordinary man as the ordinary man is to the lower animal, and these prophets received their knowledge direct from God. In principle Judah Halevi agrees with the other Jewish philosophers that true reason cannot be controverted. He differs with them in the concrete application of this abstract principle. He has not the same respect as Maimonides for the actual achievements of the unaided human reason, and an infinitely greater respect for the traditional beliefs of Judaism and the Biblical expressions taken in their obvious meaning. Hence he does not feel the same necessity as Maimonides to twist the meaning of Scriptural passages to make them agree with philosophical theories.

According to this view Judah Halevi does not find it necessary with the philosophers and the Mutakallimun painfully to prove the existence of God. The existence of the Jewish people and the facts of their wonderful history are more eloquent demonstrations than any that logic or metaphysics can muster. But more than this. The philosophical view of God is inadequate in more ways than one. It is inaccurate in content and incorrect in motive. In the first place, they lay a great deal of stress on nature as the principle by which objects move. If a stone naturally moves to the centre of the world, they say this is due to a cause called nature. And the tendency is to attribute intelligence and creative power to this new entity as an associate of God. This is misleading. The real Intelligence is God alone. It is true that the elements, and the sun and moon, and the stars exert certain influences, producing heat and cold, and various other effects in things material, by virtue of which these latter are prepared for the reception of higher forms. And there is no harm in calling these agencies Nature. But we must regard these as devoid of intelligence, and as mere effects of God’s wisdom and purpose.

The philosopher denies will in God on the ground that this would argue defect and want. This reduces God to an impersonal force. We Jews believe God has will. The word we use does not matter. I ask the philosopher what is it that makes the heavens revolve continually, and the outer sphere carry everything in uniform motion, the earth standing immovable in the centre? Call it what you please, will or command; it is the same thing that made the air shape itself to produce the sounds of the ten commandments which were heard, and that caused the characters to form on the Tables of Stone.

The motive of the philosopher is also different from that of the believer. The philosopher seeks knowledge only. He desires to know God as he desires to know the exact position and form of the earth. Ignorance in respect to God is no more harmful in his mind than ignorance respecting a fact in nature. His main object is to have true knowledge in order to become like unto the Active Intellect and to be identified with it. As long as he is a philosopher it makes no difference to him what he believes in other respects and whether he observes the practices of religion or not.

The true belief in God is different in scope and aim. What God is must be understood not by means of rational proofs, but by prophetic and spiritual insight. Rational proofs are misleading, and the heretics and unbelievers also use rational proofs—those for example who believe in two original causes, in the eternity of the world, or in the divinity of the sun and fire. The most subtle proofs are those used by the philosophers, and they maintain that God is not concerned about us, and pays no attention to our prayers and sacrifices; that the world is eternal. It is different with us, who heard his words, his commands and prohibitions, and felt his reward and his punishment. We have a proper name of God, Jhvh, representative of the communications he made to us, and we have a conviction that he created the world. The first was Adam, who knew God through actual communication and the creation of Eve from one of his ribs. Cain and Abel came next, then Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and so on to Moses and the Prophets, who came after him. All these called him Jhvh by reason of their insight. The people who received the teaching of the Prophets, in whom they believed, also called him Jhvh, because he was in communication with men; and the select among them saw him through an intermediate agency, called variously, Form, Image, Cloud, Fire, Kingdom, Shekinah, Glory, Rainbow, and so on, proving that he spoke to them.

As the sun’s light penetrates different objects in varying degrees, for example, ruby and crystal receive the sun's light in the highest degree; clear air and water come next, then bright stones and polished surfaces, and last of all opaque substances like wood and earth, which the light does not penetrate at all; so we may conceive of different minds varying in the degree to which they attain a knowledge of God. Some arrive only as far as the knowledge of “Elohim”, while others attain to a knowledge of Jhvh, which may be compared to the reception of the sun’s light in ruby and crystal. These are the prophets in the land of Israel. The conception involved in the name “Elohim” no intelligent man denies; whereas many deny the conception of Jhvh, because prophecy is an unusual occurrence even among individuals, not to speak of a nation. That is why Pharaoh said (Exod. 5, 2), “I know not Jhvh”. He knew “Elohim”, but not Jhvh, that is a God who reveals himself to man. “Elohim” may be arrived at by reasoning; for the reason tells us that the world has a ruler; though the various classes of men differ as to details, the most plausible view being that of the philosophers. But the conception of Jhvh cannot be arrived at by reason. It requires that prophetic vision by which a person almost becomes a member of a new species, akin to angels. Then the doubts he formerly had about “Elohim” fall away, and he laughs at the arguments which led him to the conception of God and of unity. Now he becomes a devotee, who loves the object of his devotion, and is ready to give his life in his love for him, because of the great happiness he feels in being near to him, and the misery of being away from him. This is different from the philosopher, who sees in the worship of God only good ethics and truth, because he is greater than all other existing things; and in unbelief nothing more than the fault of choosing the untrue.

Here there is clearly a touch of religious poetry and mysticism, which reveals to us Halevi’s real attitude, and we have no difficulty in understanding his lack of sympathy with what seemed to him the shallow rationalism of the contemporaneous Aristotelian, who fancied in his conceit that with a few logical formulæ he could penetrate the mysteries of the divine, when in reality he was barely enabled to skim the surface; into the sanctuary he could never enter.

Though, as we have just seen, Halevi has a conception of God as a personal being, acting with purpose and will and, as we shall see more clearly later, standing in close personal relation to Israel and the land of Palestine, still he is very far from thinking of him anthropomorphically. In his discussion of the divine attributes he yields to none in removing from God any positive quality of those ascribed to him in the Bible. The various names or appellatives applied to God in Scripture, except the tetragrammaton, he divides, according to their signification, into three classes, actional, relative, negative. Such expressions as “making high”, “making low”, “making poor”, almighty, strong, jealous, revengeful, gracious, merciful, and so on, do not denote, he says, feeling or emotion in God. They are ascribed to him because of his visible acts or effects in the world, which we judge on the analogy of our own acts. As a human being is prompted to remove the misery of a fellowman because he feels pity, we ascribe all instances of divine removal of misery from mankind to a similar feeling in God, and call him merciful. But this is only a figure of speech. God does remove misery, but the feeling of pity is foreign to him. We call therefore the attribute merciful and others like it actional, meaning that it is God’s acts which suggest to us these appellations.

Another class of attributes found in the Bible embraces such expressions as blessed, exalted, holy, praised, and so on. These are called relative, because they are derived from the attitude of man to God. God is blessed because men bless him, and so with the rest. They do not denote any essential quality in God. And hence their number does not necessitate plurality in God. Finally we have such terms as living, one, first, last, and so on. These too do not denote God's positive essence, for in reality God cannot be said to be either living or dead. Life as we understand it denotes sensation and motion, which are not in God. If we do apply to God the term living, we do so in order to exclude its negative, dead. Living means not dead; one means not many; first means not having any cause antecedent to him; last means never ceasing to be. Hence we call these attributes negative.

We see that Judah Halevi is at one with Bahya and Joseph ibn Zaddik in his understanding of the divine attributes. The slight difference in the mode of classification is not essential.

This God chose Israel and gave them the ten commandments in order to convince them that the Law originated from God and not from Moses. For they might have had a doubt in their minds, seeing that speech is a material thing, and believe that the origin of a law or religion is in the mind of a human being, which afterwards comes to be believed in as divine. For this reason God commanded the people to purify themselves and be ready for the third day, when they all heard the word of God, and were convinced that prophecy is not what the philosophers say it is—a natural result of man’s reason identifying itself with the Active Intellect through the help of the imagination, which presents true visions in a dream—but a real communication from God. Not only did they hear the word of God, but they saw the writing of God on the Tables of Stone.

This does not mean that we believe in the corporeality of God; Heaven forbid, we do not even think of the soul of man as corporeal. But we cannot deny the things recorded, which are well known. Just as God created heaven and earth, not by means of material tools as a man does, but by his will, so he might have willed that the air should convey articulate sounds to the ear of Moses, and that letters should be formed on the Tables of Stone to convey to the people the ideas which he wanted them to know. They might have happened in a still more wonderful way than I have been able to conceive.

This may seem like an unwarranted magnifying of the virtues of our people. But in reality it is true that the chain of individuals from Adam to Moses and thereafter was a remarkable one of godly men. Adam was surely a godlike man since he was made by the hand of God and was not dependent on the inherited constitution of his parents, and on the food and climate he enjoyed in the years of his growth. He was made perfect as in the time of mature youth when a person is at his best, and was endowed with the best possible soul for man. Abel was his successor in excellence, also a godly man, and so down the line through Seth and Noah, and so on. There were many who were unworthy and they were excluded. But there was always one in every generation who inherited the distinguished qualities of the Adam line. And even when, as in the case of Terah, the individual was unworthy in himself, he was important as being destined to give birth to a worthy son, who would carry on the tradition, like Abraham. Among Noah’s sons, Shem was the select one, and he occupied the temperate regions of Palestine, whereas Japheth went north and Ham went south—regions not so favorable to the development of wisdom.

The laws were all given directly to Moses with all their details so that there is no doubt about any of them. This was absolutely necessary, for had there been any detail left out, a doubt might arise respecting it which would destroy the whole spiritual structure of Judaism. This is not a matter which philosophical reasoning can think out for itself. As in the natural generation of plant and animal the complexity of elements and conditions is so great that a slight tilting of the balance in the wrong direction produces disease and death, so in the spiritual creation of Israel the ceremonies and the laws are all absolutely essential to the whole, whether we understand it or not, and none could be left to speculation. All were given to Moses.

Moses addressed himself to his own people only. You say it would have been better to call all mankind to the true religion. It would be better also perhaps that all animals should be rational. You have forgotten what I said about the select few that worthily succeeded Adam as the heart of the family to the exclusion of the other members, who are as the peel, until in the sons of Jacob all twelve were worthy, and from them Israel is descended. These remarkable men had divine qualities which made them a different species from ordinary men. They were aiming at the degree of the prophet, and many of them reached it by reason of their purity, holiness and proximity to the Prophets. For a prophet has a great influence on the one who associates with him. He converts the latter by awakening in him spirituality and a desire to attain that high degree which brings visible greatness and reward in the world to come, when the soul is separated from the senses and enjoys the heavenly light. We do not exclude anyone from the reward due him for his good works, but we give preference to those who are near to God, and we measure their reward in the next world by this standard. Our religion consists not merely in saying certain words, but in difficult practices and a line of conduct which bring us near to God. Outsiders too may attain to the grade of wise and pious men, but they cannot become equal to us and be prophets.

Not only is Israel a select nation to whom alone prophecy is given as a gift, but Palestine is the most suitable place in the world for communion with God, as a certain spot may be best for planting certain things and for producing people of a particular character and temperament. All those who prophesied outside of Palestine did so with reference to Palestine. Abraham was not worthy of the divine covenant until he was in this land. Palestine was intended to be a guide for the whole world. The reason the second Temple did not last longer than it did is because the Babylonian exiles did not sufficiently love their fatherland and did not all return when the decree of Cyrus permitted them to do so.

Israel is the heart among the nations. The heart is more sensitive than the rest of the body in disease as in health. It feels both more intensely. It is more liable to disease than the other organs, and on the other hand it becomes aware sooner of agencies dangerous to its health and endeavors to reject them or ward them off. So Israel is among the nations. Their responsibility is greater than that of other nations and they are sooner punished. “Only you have I loved out of all the families of the earth”, says Amos (3, 2), “therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities”. On the other hand, God does not allow our sins to accumulate as he does with the other nations until they deserve destruction. “He pardons the iniquities of his people by causing them to pass away in due order”. As the heart is affected by the other organs, so Israel suffers on account of their assimilation to the other nations. Israel suffers while the other nations are in peace. As the elements are for the sake of the minerals, the minerals for the sake of the plants, the plants for the sake of the animals, the animals for the sake of man, so is man for the sake of Israel, and Israel for the sake of the Prophets and the pious men. With the purification of Israel the world will be improved and brought nearer to God.

Associated with Israel and Palestine as a third privilege and distinction is the Hebrew language. This is the original language which God spoke to Adam. The etymologies of Biblical names prove it. It was richer formerly, and has become impoverished in the course of time like the people using it. Nevertheless it still shows evidence of superiority to other languages in its system of accents which shows the proper expression in reading, and in its wonderful system of vowel changes producing euphony in expression and variation in meaning.

The highest type of man, we have seen, is the Prophet, for whose sake Israel and the whole of humanity exists. He is the highest type because he alone has an immediate knowledge of Jhvh as distinguished from “Elohim”, the concept of universal cause and power, which the philosopher also is able to attain. Jhvh signifies, as we have seen, the personal God who performs miracles and reveals himself to mankind through the prophet. We wish to know therefore how Judah Halevi conceives of the essence and process of prophetic inspiration. We are already aware that he is opposed to the philosophers who regard the power of prophecy as a natural gift possessed by the man of pure intellect and perfect power of imagination. To these Aristotelians, as we shall have occasion to see more clearly later, the human intellect is nothing more than an individualized reflection, if we may so term it, of the one universal intellect, which is—not God, but an intellectual substance wholly immaterial, some nine or ten degrees removed from the Godhead. It is called the Active Intellect, and its business is to govern the sublunar world of generation and decay. As pure thought the Active Intellect embraces as its content the entire sublunar world in essence. In fact it bestows the forms (in the Aristotelian sense) upon the things of this world, and hence has a timeless knowledge of all the world and its happenings. The individualized reflection of it in the human soul is held there so long as the person is alive, somewhat as a drop of water may hold the moon until it evaporates, and the reflection is reabsorbed in the one real moon. So it is the Active Intellect which is the cause of all conceptual knowledge in man through its individualizations, and into it every human intellect is reabsorbed when the individual dies. Some men share more, some less in the Active Intellect; and it is in everyone’s power, within limits, to increase and purify his participation in the influence of the Active Intellect by study and rigorous ethical discipline. The prophet differs from the ordinary man and the philosopher in degree only, not in kind. His knowledge comes from the influence of the Active Intellect as does the knowledge of the philosopher. The difference is that in the prophet’s case the imagination plays an important rôle and presents concrete visions instead of universal propositions, and the identification with the Active Intellect is much closer.

This conception of prophecy, which in its essentials, we shall see, was adopted by Abraham ibn Daud, Maimonides and Gersonides, naturally would not appeal to Judah Halevi. Prophecy is the prerogative of Israel and of Palestine. The philosophers have nothing to do with it. A mere philosopher has no more chance of entering the kingdom of prophecy than a camel of passing through the eye of a needle. Have the philosophers ever produced prophets? And yet, if their explanation is correct, their ranks should abound in them. Prophecy is a supernatural power, and the influence comes from God. The prophet is a higher species of mortal. He is endowed with an internal eye, a hidden sense, which sees certain immaterial objects, as the external sense sees the physical objects. No one else sees those forms, but they are none the less real, for the whole species of prophetic persons testify to their existence. In ordinary perception we tell a real object from an illusion by appealing to the testimony of others. What appears to a single individual only may be an illusion. If all persons agree that the object is there, we conclude it is real. The same test holds of the prophetic visions. All prophets see them. Then the intellect of the prophet interprets the vision, as our intellect interprets the data of our senses. The latter give us not the essence of the sensible object, but the superficial accidents, such as color, shape, and so on. It is the work of the reason to refer these qualities to the essence of the object, as king, sun. The same holds true of the prophet. He sees a figure in the form of a king or a judge in the act of giving orders; and he knows that he has before him a being that is served and obeyed. Or he sees the form in the act of carrying baggage or girded for work; and he infers that he is dealing with a being that is meant for a servant. What these visions really were it is not in all cases possible to know with certainty. There is no doubt that the Prophets actually saw the hosts of heaven, the spirits of the spheres, in the form of man. The word angel in the Bible (Heb. Malak) means messenger. What these messengers or angels were we cannot tell with certainty. They may have been specially created from the fine elementary bodies, or they belonged to the eternal angels, who may be the same as the spiritual beings of whom the philosophers speak. We can neither reject their view nor definitely accept it. Similarly the expression, “The Glory of Jhvh”, may denote a fine body following the will of God and formed every time it has to appear to a prophet, or it may denote all the angels and spiritual beings, Throne and Chariot and Firmament, and Ofannim and Galgalim, and other eternal beings constituting, so to speak, the suite of God.

Even such phrases as, “They saw the God of Israel” (Exod. 24, 10), “He saw the form of Jhvh” (Num. 12, 8), the Rabbinic expression “Maase Merkaba” (work of the divine chariot), and the later discussions concerning the “Measure of the divine stature” (Shiur Komah), must not be rejected. These visual images representative of God are calculated to inspire fear in the human soul, which the bare conception of the One, Omnipotent, and so on, cannot produce.

As Judah Halevi is unwilling to yield to the philosophers and explain away the supernaturalism of prophecy, maintaining rather on the contrary that the supernatural character of the prophetic vision is an evidence of the superior nature of Israel as well as of their land and their language, so he insists on the inherent value of the ceremonial law, including sacrifices. To Saadia, and especially to Bahya and Maimonides, the test of value is rationality. The important laws of the Bible are those known as the rational commandments. The other class, the so-called traditional commandments, would also turn out to be rational if we knew the reason why they were commanded. And in default of exact knowledge it is the business of the philosopher to suggest reasons. Bahya lays the greatest stress upon the commandments of the heart, i.e., upon the purity of motive and intention, upon those laws which concern feeling and belief rather than outward practice. Judah Halevi's attitude is different. If the only thing of importance in religion were intention and motive and moral sense, why should Christianity and Islam fight to the death, shedding untold human blood in defence of their religion. As far as ethical theory and practice are concerned there is no difference between them. Ceremonial practice is the only thing that separates them. And the king of the Chazars was told repeatedly in his dreams that his intentions were good but not his practice, his religious practice. To be sure the ethical law is important in any religion, but it is not peculiar to religion as such. It is a necessary condition of social life, without which no association is possible, not even that of a robber band. There is honesty even among thieves. Religion has its peculiar practices, and it is not sufficient for an Israelite to observe the rational commandments alone. When the Prophets inveigh against sacrifices; when Micah says (6, 8), “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God”, they mean that the ceremonies alone are not sufficient; but surely a man is not fully an Israelite if he neglects the ceremonial laws and observes only the rational commandments. We may not understand the value of the ceremonial laws, the meaning of the institution of sacrifices. But neither do we understand why the rational soul does not attach itself to a body except when the parts are arranged in a certain manner and the elements are mixed in a certain proportion, though the reason needs not food and drink for itself. God has arranged it so, that only under certain conditions shall a body receive the light of reason. So in the matter of sacrifices God has ordained that only when the details of the sacrificial and other ceremonies are minutely observed shall the nation enjoy his presence and care. In some cases the significance of certain observances is clearer than in others. Thus the various festivals are also symbolic of certain truths of history and the divine government of the world. The Sabbath leads to the belief in the exodus from Egypt and the creation of the world; and hence inculcates belief in God.

In his views of ethics Judah Halevi is more human than Bahya, being opposed to all manner of asceticism. The law, he says, does not demand excess in any direction. Every power and faculty must be given its due. Our law commends fear, love and joy as means of worshipping God; so that fasting on a fast day does not bring a man nearer to God than eating and drinking and rejoicing on a feast day, provided all is done with a view to honoring God. A Jewish devotee is not one who separates himself from the world. On the contrary, he loves the world and a long life because thereby he wins a share in the world to come. Still his desire is to attain the degree of Enoch or Elijah, and to be fit for the association of angels. A man like this feels more at home when alone than in company of other people; for the higher beings are his company, and he misses them when people are around him. Philosophers also enjoy solitude in order to clarify their thoughts, and they are eager to meet disciples to discuss their problems with them. In our days it is difficult to reach the position of these rare men. In former times when the Shekinah rested in the Holy Land, and the nation was fit for prophecy, there were people who separated themselves from their neighbors and studied the law in purity and holiness in the company of men like them. These were the Sons of the Prophets. Nowadays when there is neither prophecy nor wisdom, a person who attempted to do this, though he be a pious man, would come to grief; for he would find neither prophets nor philosophers to keep him company; nor enough to keep his mind in that high state of exaltation needed for communion with God. Prayer alone is not sufficient, and soon becomes a habit without any influence on the soul. He would soon find that the natural powers and desires of the soul begin to assert themselves and he will regret his separation from mankind, thus getting farther away from God instead of coming nearer to him.

The right practice of the pious man at the present day is to give all the parts of the body their due and no more, without neglecting any of them; and to bring the lower powers and desires under the dominion of the higher; feeding the soul with things spiritual as the body with things material. He must keep himself constantly under guard and control, making special use of the times of prayer for self-examination, and striving to retain the influence of one prayer until the time comes for the next. He must also utilize the Sabbaths and the festivals and the Great Fast to keep himself in good spiritual trim. In addition he must observe all the commandments, traditional, rational, and those of the heart, and reflect on their meaning and on God's goodness and care.

Judah Halevi has no doubt of the immortality of the soul and of reward and punishment after death, though the Bible does not dwell upon these matters with any degree of emphasis. Other religions, he admits, make greater promises of reward after death, whereas Judaism offers divine nearness through miracles and prophecy. Instead of saying, If you do thus and so, I will put you in gardens after death and give you pleasures, our Law says, I will be your God and you will be my people. Some of you will stand before me and will go up to heaven, walking among the angels; and my angels will walk among you, protecting you in your land, which is the holy land, not like the other nations, which are governed by nature. Surely, he exclaims, we who can boast of such things during life are more certain of the future world than those whose sole reliance is on promises of the hereafter. It would not be correct, the Rabbi says to the king of the Chazars, who was tempted to despise the Jews as well as their religion because of their material and political weakness, to judge of our destiny after death by our condition during life, in which we are inferior to all other people. For these very people, like the Christians and Mohammedans, glory in their founders, who were persecuted and despised, and not in the present power and luxury of the great kings. The Christians in particular worship the man who said, “Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if a man ... take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also” (Matth. 5, 39). Accordingly our worth is greater in the sight of God than if we were prosperous. It is true that not all of us accept our miserable condition with becoming humility. If we did, God would not keep us so long in misery. But after all there is reward awaiting our people for bearing the yoke of the exile voluntarily, when it would be an easy matter for any one of us to become a brother to our oppressors by the saying of one word.

Our wise men, too, have said a great deal about the pleasures and sufferings awaiting us in the next world, and in this also they surpass the wise men of other religions. The Bible, it is true, does not lay stress on this aspect of our belief; but so much is clear from the Bible also, that the spirit returns to God. There are also allusions to the immortality of the soul in the disappearance of Elijah, who did not die, and in the belief of his second coming. This appears also from the prayer of Balaam, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and may my last end be like his” (Num. 23, 10), and from the calling of Samuel from the dead. The idea of paradise (Gan Eden) is taken from the Torah, and Gehenna is a Hebrew word, the name of a valley near Jerusalem, where fire always burned, consuming unclean bones, carcases, and so on. There is nothing new in the later religions which is not already found in ours.

An important ethical problem which Judah Halevi discusses more thoroughly than any of his predecessors is that of free will, which he defends against fatalistic determinism, and endeavors to reconcile with divine causality and foreknowledge. We have already seen that this was one of the important theses of the Mutazilite Kalam. And there is no doubt that fatalism is opposed to Judaism. A fatalistic determinist denies the category of the contingent or possible. He says not merely that an event is determined by its proximate cause, he goes further and maintains that it is determined long in advance of any of its secondary causes by the will of God. It would follow then that there is no way of preventing an event thus predetermined. If we take pains to avoid a misfortune fated to come upon us, our very efforts may carry us toward it and land us in its clutches. Literature is full of stories illustrating this belief, as for example the story of Oedipus. Against this form of belief Judah Halevi vindicates the reality of the contingent or possible as opposed to the necessary. No one except the obstinate and perverse denies the possible or contingent. His preparations to meet and avoid that which he hopes and fears prove that he believes the thing amenable to pains and precautions. If he had not this belief, he would fold his hands in resignation, never taking the trouble to supply himself with arms to meet his enemy, or with water to quench his thirst. To be sure, we may argue that whether one prepare himself or omit to do so, the preparation or neglect is itself determined. But this is no longer the same position as that maintained at the outset. For we now admit that secondary causes do play a part in determining the result, whereas we denied it at first. The will is one of these secondary causes. Accordingly Judah Halevi divides all acts or events into four classes, divine, natural, accidental and voluntary. Strictly divine events are the direct results of the divine will without any intermediate cause. There is no way of preparing for or avoiding these; not, that is, physically; but it is possible to prepare oneself mentally and morally, namely, through the secrets of the Torah to him who knows them.

Natural events are produced by secondary causes, which bring the objects of nature to their perfection. These produce their effects regularly and uniformly, provided there is no hindrance on the part of the other three causes. An example of natural events would be the growth of a plant or animal under favorable conditions. Accidental events are also produced by secondary causes, but they happen by chance, not regularly and not as a result of purpose. Their causes are not intended for the purpose of bringing perfection to their chance effects. These too may be hindered by any one of the other three causes. An example of a chance event might be death in war. The secondary cause is the battle, but its purpose was not that this given person might meet his death there, and not all men die in war.

Finally, voluntary acts are those caused by the will of man. It is these that concern us most. We have already intimated that the human will is itself a secondary cause and has a rôle in determining its effect. It is true that the will itself is caused by other higher causes until we get to the first cause, but this does not form a necessary chain of causation. Despite the continuous chain of causes antecedent to a given volition the soul finding itself in front of a given plan is free to choose either of the two alternatives. To say that a man’s speech is as necessary as the beating of his pulse contradicts experience. We feel that we are masters of our speech and our silence. The fact that we praise and blame and love and hate a person according to his deliberate conduct is another proof of freedom. We do not blame a natural or accidental cause. We do not blame a child or a person asleep when they cause damage, because they did not do the damage deliberately and with intention. If those who deny freedom are consistent, they must either refrain from being angry with a person who injures them deliberately, or they must say that anger and praise and blame and love and hate are delusive powers put in our souls in vain. Besides there would be no difference between the pious and the disobedient, because both are doing that which they are by necessity bound to do.

But there are certain strong objections to the doctrine of freedom. If man is absolutely free to do or forbear, it follows that the effects of his conduct are removed from God's control. The answer to this is that they are not absolutely removed from his control. They are still related to him by a chain of causes.

Another argument against free will is that it is irreconcilable with God's knowledge. If man alone is the master of his choice, God cannot know beforehand what he will choose. And if God does know, the man cannot but choose as God foreknew he would choose, and what becomes of his freedom? This may be answered by saying that the knowledge of a thing is not the cause of its being. We do not determine a past event by the fact that we know it. Knowledge is simply evidence that the thing is. So man chooses by his own determination, and yet God knows beforehand which way he is going to choose, simply because he sees into the future as we remember the past.

Judah Halevi’s discussion of the problem of freedom is fuller than any we have met so far in our investigation. But it is not satisfactory. Apart from his fourfold classification of events which is open to criticism, there is a weak spot in the very centre of his argument, which scarcely could have escaped him. He admits that the will is caused by higher causes ending ultimately in the will of God, and yet maintains in the same breath that the will is not determined. As free the will is removed from God’s control, and yet it is not completely removed, being related to him by a chain of causes. This is a plain contradiction, unless we are told how far it is determined and how far it is not. Surely the aspect in which it is not determined is absolutely removed from God's control and altogether uncaused. But Judah Halevi is unwilling to grant this. He just leaves us with the juxtaposition of two incompatibles. We shall see that Hasdai Crescas was more consistent, and admitted determinism.

We have now considered Judah Halevi's teachings, and have seen that he has no sympathy with the point of view of those people who were called in his day philosophers, i. e., those who adopted the teachings ascribed to Aristotle. At the same time he was interested in maintaining that all science really came originally from the Jews; and in order to prove this he undertakes a brief interpretation of the “Sefer Yezirah” (Book of Creation), an early mystic work of unknown authorship and date, which Judah Halevi in common with the uncritical opinion of his day attributed to Abraham. Not to lay himself open to the charge of inconsistency, he throws out the suggestion that the Sefer Yezirah represented Abraham's own speculations before he had the privilege of a prophetic communication from God. When that came he was ready to abandon all his former rationalistic lucubrations and abide by the certainty of revealed truth. We may therefore legitimately infer that Judah Halevi's idea was that the Jews were the originators of philosophy, but that they had long discarded it in favor of something much more valid and certain; whereas the Greeks and their descendants, having nothing better, caught it up and are now parading it as their own discovery and even setting it up as superior to direct revelation.

Natural science in so far as it had to do with more or less verifiable data could not be considered harmful, and so we find Judah Halevi taking pains to show that the sages of Rabbinical literature cultivated the sciences, astronomy in connection with the Jewish calendar; anatomy, biology and physiology in relation to the laws of slaughter and the examination of animal meat (laws of “Terefa”).

But so great was the fascination philosophy exerted upon the men of his generation that even Judah Halevi, despite his efforts to shake its authority and point out its inadequacy and evident inferiority to revelation, was not able wholly to escape it. And we find accordingly that he deems it necessary to devote a large part of the fifth book of the Kusari to the presentation of a bird’s eye view of the current philosophy of the day. To be sure, he does not give all of it the stamp of his approval; he repeatedly attacks its foundations and lays bare their weakness. At the same time he admits that not every man has faith by nature and is proof against the erroneous arguments of heretics, astrologers, philosophers and others. The ordinary mortal is affected by them, and may even be misled for a time until he comes to see the truth. It is therefore well to know the principles of religion according to those who defend it by reason, and this involves a knowledge of science and theology. But we must not, he says, in the manner of the Karaites, advance all at once to the higher study of theology. One must first understand the fundamental principles of physics, psychology, and so on, such as matter and form, the elements, nature, Soul, Intellect, Divine Wisdom. Then we can proceed to the more properly theological matters, like the future world, Providence, and so on.

Accordingly Judah Halevi gives us in the sequel a brief account such as he has just outlined. It will not be worth our while to reproduce it all here, as in the first place Judah Halevi does not give it as the result of his own investigation and conviction, and secondly a good deal of it is not new; and we have already met it in more or less similar form before in Joseph ibn Zaddik, Abraham bar Hiyyah, and others. We must point out, however, the new features which we did not meet before, explain their origin and in particular indicate Judah Halevi’s criticisms.

In general we may say that Judah Halevi has a better knowledge of Aristotelian doctrines than any of his predecessors. Thus to take one example, which we used before, Aristotle’s famous definition of the soul is quoted by Isaac Israeli, Saadia, Joseph ibn Zaddik as well as by Judah Halevi. Israeli does not discuss the definition in detail. Saadia and Ibn Zaddik show clearly that they did not understand the precise meaning of the definition. Judah Halevi is the first who understands correctly all the elements of the definition. And yet it would be decidedly mistaken to infer from this that Judah Halevi studied the Aristotelian works directly. By a fortunate discovery of S. Landauer we are enabled to follow Judah Halevi's source with the certainty of eyewitnesses. The sketch which he gives of the Aristotelian psychology is taken bodily not from Aristotle's De Anima, but from a youthful work of Ibn Sina. Judah Halevi did not even take the trouble to present the subject in his own words. He simply took his model and abridged it, by throwing out all argumentative, illustrative and amplificatory material. Apart from this abridgment he follows his authority almost word for word, not to speak of reproducing the ideas in the original form and order. This is a typical and extremely instructive instance; and it shows how careful we must be before we decide that a mediæval writer read a certain author with whose ideas he is familiar and whom he quotes.

In the sketch of philosophical theory Judah Halevi first speaks of the hyle or formless matter, which according to the philosophers was in the beginning of things contained within the lunar sphere. The “water” in the second verse of Genesis (“and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water”) is supposed by them to denote this primitive matter, as the “darkness” in the same verse and the “chaos” (“Tohu”) in the first verse signify the absence of form and composition in the matter (the Aristotelian στέρησις). God then willed the revolution of the outermost sphere, known as the diurnal sphere, which caused all the other spheres to revolve with it, thereby producing changes in the hyle in accordance with the motions of the sphere. The first change was the heating of that which was next to the lunar sphere and making it into pure fire, known among the philosophers as “natural fire”, a pure, fine and light substance, without color or burning quality. This became the sphere of fire. The part that was further away changed as a result of the same revolution into the sphere of air, then came the sphere of water, and finally the terrestrial globe in the centre, heavy and thick by reason of its distance from the place of motion. From these four elements come the physical objects by composition. The forms (in the Aristotelian sense) of things are imposed upon their matters by a divine power, the “Intellect, and Giver of Forms”; whereas the matters come from the hyle, and the accidental proximity of different parts to the revolving lunar sphere explains why some parts became fire, some air, and so on.

To this mechanical explanation of the formation of the elements Judah Halevi objects. As long as the original motion of the diurnal sphere is admittedly due not to chance but to the will of God, what is gained by referring the formation of the elements to their accidental proximity to the moving sphere, and accounting for the production of mineral, plant and animal in the same mechanical way by the accidental composition of the four elements in proportions varying according to the different revolutions and positions of the heavenly bodies? Besides if the latter explanation were true, the number of species of plants and animals should be infinite like the various positions and formations of the heavenly bodies, whereas they are finite and constant. The argument from the design and purpose that is clearly visible in the majority of plants and animals further refutes such mechanical explanation as is attempted by the philosophers. Design is also visible in the violation of the natural law by which water should always be above and around earth; whereas in reality we see a great part of the earth’s surface above water. This is clearly a beneficent provision in order that animal life may sustain itself, and this is the significance of the words of the Psalmist (136, 6), “To him that stretched out the earth above the waters”.

The entire theory of the four elements and the alleged composition of all things out of them is a pure assumption. Take the idea of the world of fire, the upper fire as they call it, which is colorless, so as not to obstruct the color of the heavens and the stars. Whoever saw such a fire? The only fire we know is an extremely hot object in the shape of coal, or as a flame in the air, or as boiling water. And whoever saw a fiery or aëry body enter the matter of plant and animal so as to warrant us in saying that the latter are composed of the four elements? True, we know that water and earth do enter the matter of plants, and that they are assisted by the air and the heat of the sun in causing the plant to grow and develop, but we never see a fiery or aëry body. Or whoever saw plants resolved into the four elements? If a part changes into earth, it is not real earth, but ashes; and the part changed to water is not real water, but a kind of moisture, poisonous or nutritious, but not water fit for drinking. Similarly no part of the plant changes to real air fit for breathing, but to vapor or mist. Granted that we have to admit the warm and the cold, and the moist and the dry as the primary qualities without which no body can exist; and that the reason resolves the composite objects into these primary qualities, and posits substances as bearers of these qualities, which it calls fire, air, water and earth—this is true conceptually and theoretically only. It cannot be that the primary qualities really existed in the simple state extra animam, and then all existing things were made out of them. How can the philosophers maintain such a thing, since they believe in the eternity of the world, that it always existed as it does now?

These are the criticisms of their theory of the elements. According to the Torah God created the world just as it is, with its animals and plants already formed. There is no need of assuming intermediate powers or compositions. The moment we admit that the world was created out of nothing by the will of God in the manner in which he desired, all difficulties vanish about the origin of bodies and their association with souls. And there is no reason why we should not accept the firmament, and the waters above the heaven, and the demons mentioned by the Rabbis, and the account of the days of the Messiah and the resurrection and the world to come.

Another theory he criticizes is that developed by Alfarabi and Avicenna, the chief Aristotelians of the Arabs before Averroes. It is a combination of Aristotelianism with the Neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation, though it was credited as a whole to Aristotle in the middle ages. We have already seen in the Introduction that Aristotle conceived the world as a series of concentric spheres with the earth in the centre. The principal spheres are eight in number, and they carry in order, beginning with the external sphere, (1) the fixed stars, (2) Saturn, (3) Jupiter, (4) Mars, (5) Mercury, (6) Venus, (7) Sun, (8) Moon. To account for the various motions of the sun and the planets additional spheres had to be introduced amounting in all to fifty-six. But the principal spheres remained those mentioned. Each sphere or group of spheres with the star it carries is moved by an incorporeal mover, a spirit or Intelligence, and over them all is the first unmoved mover, God. He sets in motion the outer sphere of the fixed stars, and so the whole world moves. There is nothing said in this of the origin of these spheres and their intelligible movers. On the other hand, in the Neo-Platonic system of Plotinus all existence and particularly that of the intelligible or spiritual world issues or emanates from the One or the Good. Intellect is the first emanation, Soul the second, Nature the third and Matter the last.

On account of the confusion which arose in the middle ages, as a result of which Neo-Platonic writings and doctrines were attributed to Aristotle, Alfarabi and Avicenna worked out a scheme which combined the motion theory of Aristotle with the doctrine of emanation of Plotinus. The theory is based upon a principle alleged to be Aristotle’s that from a unitary cause nothing but a unitary effect can follow. Hence, said Avicenna, God cannot have produced directly all the world we see in its complexity. He is the direct cause of the first Intelligence only, or first angel as Judah Halevi calls him. This Intelligence contemplates itself and it contemplates its cause. The effect of the latter act is the emanation of a second intelligence or angel; the effect of the former is a sphere—that of the fixed stars, of which the first Intelligence is the mover. The second Intelligence again produces a third Intelligence by its contemplation of the First Cause, and by its self-contemplation it creates the second sphere, the sphere of Saturn, which is moved by it. So the process continues until we reach the sphere of the moon, which is the last of the celestial spheres, and the Active Intellect, the last of the Intelligences, having in charge the sublunar world.

This fanciful and purely mythological scheme arouses the antagonism of Judah Halevi. It is all pure conjecture, he says, and there is not an iota of proof in it. People believe it and think it is convincing, simply because it bears the name of a Greek philosopher. As a matter of fact this theory is less plausible than those of the "Sefer Yezirah"; and there is no agreement even among the philosophers themselves except for those who are the followers of the same Greek authority, Empedocles, or Pythagoras, or Aristotle, or Plato. These agree not because the proofs are convincing, but simply because they are members of a given sect or school. The objections to the theory just outlined are manifold. In the first place why should the series of emanations stop with the moon? Is it because the power of the First Cause has given out? Besides why should self-contemplation result in a sphere and contemplation of the First Cause in an Intelligence or angel? It should follow that when Aristotle contemplates himself he produces a sphere, and when he contemplates the First Cause he gives rise to an angel. Granting the truth of the process, one does not see why the mover of Saturn should not produce two more emanations, one by contemplating the Intelligence immediately above it, and the other by contemplating the first Intelligence, thus making four emanations instead of two.

In his outline of the philosophers’ psychology, which as we have seen is borrowed verbally from Avicenna, what is new to us is the exposition of the inner senses and the account of the rational faculty. We must therefore reproduce it here in outline together with Judah Halevi’s criticism.

The three kinds of soul, vegetative, animal and rational, we have already met before. We have also referred to the fact that Judah Halevi analyzes correctly the well-known Aristotelian definition of the soul. We must now give a brief account of the inner senses as Judah Halevi took it from Avicenna. The five external senses, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting, give us merely colors, sounds, touch sensations, odors and tastes. These are combined into an object by the common sense, known also as the forming power. Thus when we see honey we associate with its yellow color a sweet taste. This could not be done unless we had a power which combines in it all the five senses. For the sense of sight cannot perceive taste, nor can color be apprehended by the gustatory sense. There is need therefore of a common sense which comprehends all the five external senses. This is the first internal sense. This retains the forms of sensible objects just as the external senses present them. Then comes the composing power or power of imagination. This composes and divides the material of the common sense. It may be true or false, whereas the common sense is always true. Both of these give us merely forms; they do not exercise any judgment. The latter function belongs to the third internal sense, the power of judgment. Through this an animal is enabled to decide that a given object is to be sought or avoided. It also serves to rectify the errors of reproduction that may be found in the preceding faculty of imagination. Love, injury, belief, denial, belong likewise to the judging faculty together with such judgments as that the wolf is an enemy, the child a friend. The last of the internal senses is that of factual memory, the power which retains the judgments made by the faculty preceding.

In addition to these sensory powers the animal possesses motor faculties. These are two, the power of desire, which moves the animal to seek the agreeable; and the power of anger, which causes it to reject or avoid the disagreeable. All these powers are dependent upon the correal organs and disappear with the destruction of the latter.

The highest power of the soul and the exclusive possession of man (the faculties mentioned before are found also in animals) is the rational soul. This is at first simply a potentiality. Actually it is a tabula rasa, an empty slate, a blank paper. But it has the power (or is the power) of acquiring general ideas. Hence it is called hylic or material intellect, because it is like matter which in itself is nothing actual but is potentially everything, being capable of receiving any form and becoming any real object. As matter receives sensible forms, so the material intellect acquires intelligible forms, i. e., thoughts, ideas, concepts. When it has these ideas it is an actual intellect. It is then identical with the ideas it has, i.e., thinker and thought are the same, and hence the statement that the actual intellect is “intelligent” and “intelligible” at the same time. As matter is the principle of generation and destruction the rational soul, which is thus shown to be an immaterial substance, is indestructible, hence immortal. And it is the ideas it acquires which make it so. When the rational soul is concerned with pure knowledge it is called the speculative or theoretical intellect. When it is engaged in controlling the animal powers, its function is conduct, and is called the practical intellect. The rational soul, i.e., the speculative intellect, is separable from the body and needs it not, though it uses it at first to acquire some of its knowledge. This is proved by the fact that whereas the corporeal powers, like the senses, are weakened by strong stimuli, the reason is strengthened by hard subjects of thought. Old age weakens the body, but strengthens the mind. The activities of the body are finite; of the mind, infinite.

We must also show that while the rational soul makes use of the data of sense perception, which are corporeal, as the occasions for the formation of its general ideas, it is not wholly dependent upon them, and the sense data alone are inadequate to give the soul its intellectual truths. Empirical knowledge is inductive, and no induction can be more general and more certain than the particular facts from which it is derived. As all experience, however rich, is necessarily finite, empirical knowledge is never universally certain. But the soul does possess universally certain knowledge, as for example the truths of mathematics and logic; hence the origin of these truths cannot be empirical. How does the soul come to have such knowledge? We must assume that there is a divine emanation cleaving to the soul, which stands to it in the relation of light to the sense of sight. It is to the illumination of this intellectual substance and not to the data of sense perception that the soul owes the universal certainty of its knowledge. This divine substance is the Active Intellect. As long as the soul is united with the body, perfect union with the Active Intellect is impossible. But as the soul becomes more and more perfect through the acquisition of knowledge, it cleaves more and more to the Active Intellect, and this union becomes complete after death. Thus the immortality of the soul is proved by reason. It is based upon the conviction that the soul is an immaterial substance and that its perfection lies in its acquisition of intellectual ideas.

Judah Halevi cannot help admitting the fascination such speculation exercises upon the mind of the student. But he must warn him against being misled by the fame of such names as Plato and Aristotle, and supposing that because in logic and mathematics the philosophers give us real proofs, they are equally trustworthy in metaphysical speculation. If the soul is, as they say, an intellectual substance not limited in place and for this reason not subject to genesis and decay, there is no way to distinguish one soul from another, since it is matter which constitutes individual existence. How then can my soul be distinguished from yours, or from the Active Intellect and the other Intelligences, or from the First Cause itself? The souls of Plato and Aristotle should become one so that the one should know the secret thoughts of the other. If the soul gets its ideas through divine illumination from the Active Intellect, how is it that philosophers do not intuit their ideas at once like God and the Active Intellect, and how is it they forget?

Then as to their ideas about immortality. If immortality is a necessary phenomenon due to the intellectual nature of the soul and dependent upon the degree of intellectual knowledge it possesses, how much knowledge must a man have to be immortal? If any amount is sufficient, then every rational soul is immortal, for everybody knows at least the axioms of logic and mathematics, such as that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, that a thing cannot both be and not be, and so on. If a knowledge of the ten categories is necessary, and of the other universal principles which embrace existence conceptually, though not practically, this knowledge can be gotten in a day, and it is not likely that a man can become an angel in a day. If on the other hand one must know everything not merely conceptually but in detail, no one can ever acquire universal knowledge and no one is immortal The philosophers may be excused because this is the best they can do with the help of pure reason. We may commend them for their mode of life in accordance with the moral law and in freedom from the world, since they were not bound to accept our traditions. But it is different with us. Why should we seek peculiar proofs and explanations for the immortality of the soul, since we have promises to that effect whether the soul be corporeal or spiritual? If we depend upon logical proof, our life will pass away without our coming to any conclusion.

Judah Halevi takes issue also with the Mutakallimun. These, as we know, were Mohammedan theologians who, unlike the philosophers, were not indifferent to religion. On the contrary their sole motive in philosophizing was to prove the dogmas of their faith. They had no interest in pure speculation as such. Judah Halevi has no more sympathy with them than with the philosophers. Owing to the fact that the Karaites were implicit followers of the Kalam and for other reasons, no doubt, more objective, he thinks less of them than he does of the philosophers. The only possible use, he tells us, of their methods is to afford exercise in dialectics so as to be able to answer the arguments of unbelievers. To the superficial observer the Mutakallim may seem to be superior to the prophet, because he argues, whereas the latter affirms without proving. In reality, however, this is not so. The aim of the Mutakallim is to acquire the belief which the prophet has by nature. But his Kalam may injure his belief instead of confirming it, by reason of the many difficulties and doubts it introduces. The prophet, who has natural belief, teaches not by means of dialectic discussion. If one has a spark of the true belief in his nature, the prophet by his personality will benefit him by a slight hint. Only he who has nothing of true belief in his nature must have recourse to Kalam, which may benefit him or injure.

Judah Halevi follows up this general comment by a brief sketch of the system of the Kalam, but we need not enter into this matter as there is little there that we do not already know, and there is no detailed criticism on the part of Judah Halevi.

The Rabbi concludes his discourse with the king of the Chazars by declaring his intention to leave the land in order to go to Jerusalem. Although the visible Shekinah is no longer in Palestine, the invisible and spiritual presence is with every born Israelite of pure heart and deed; and Palestine is the fittest land for this communion, being conducive to purity of heart and mind.

CHAPTER VI

BAHYA IBN PAKUDA

HISTORY OF THE JEWS