Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/249

Rh Through the instrumentality of the heavenly bodies, the angels form the lower world. This amounts to saying that the corporeal world is the last stage in the descending series of emanations from the One, and is preceded by the heavenly bodies and the Intelligences. The angels are also the immediate agents in prophetic inspiration.

Not all mention of angels in the Bible, however, must be identified with a separate Intelligence or a spheral soul (for the latter too is called angel by Ibn Ezra). There are instances of the expression angel which refer to a momentary, special creation of a light or air for the special benefit of the people. This explains a number of theophanies in the Bible, such as the burning bush, "the glory of the Lord," the cloud in the wilderness, and so on.

The intermediate world of spheres is also eternal and consists of nine spheres, that of the Intelligences making up the perfect number ten. The nine spheres are arranged as follows, the spheres of the seven planets, the sphere of the fixed stars, and the diurnal sphere without stars, which gives the motion from east to west to the whole heaven.

The lower world, the sublunar and corporeal world of generation and decay, was created in time. This, however, does not mean that there was time before this creation, for time exists only with motion and change. Creation here signifies the formation of the chaotic matter. As God cannot come in contact with the material and changeable (we have already seen that he cannot know it as such), it follows that this lower world was not made directly by him, but by the angels, hence the word "Elohim" is used in the first chapter of Genesis, which means primarily the angels, and secondarily God as acting through the angels.

In this lower world man is the noblest creature. By means of his soul he may attain eternal life as an individual like God and the angels (i. e., the Intelligences), whereas all other creatures of the lower world are permanent in species only but not as individuals. This is the meaning of the expression in Genesis, "Let us make man in our image," in the image, that is, of God and the angels. Man is a microcosm, a universe in little, for like the great universe he consists of a body animated by a soul.

As the noblest part of man is his soul, it becomes his duty to know