Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/447

Rh upon theoretical ideas. Speculative study made the soul; and an intellect thus constituted was immortal, for it was immaterial. The heavenly world, consisting of the separate Intelligences and cul- minating in God, was also in its essence reason and intellect. Hence thought and knowledge formed the essence of the universe. By thought is man saved, and through thought is he united with the Most High. All else that is not pure thought acquires what value it has from the relation it bears to thought. In this way were judged those divisions of Judaism that concerned ceremony and ethical practice. Their value consisted in their function of promoting the ends of the reason.

Judah Halevi, influenced by Al Gazali, had already before Maimonides protested against this intellectualistic attitude in the name of a truer though more naive understanding of the Bible and Jewish history. But Judah Halevi's nationalism and the expression of his poetical and religious feelings and ideas could not vie with the dom- inating personality of Maimonides, whose rationalistic and intellectual- istic attitude swept everything before it and became the dominant mode of thinking for his own and succeeding ages. It remained for Hasdai Crescas (born in Barcelona, in 1340), who flourished in Chris- tian Spain two centuries after Maimonides and over a half century after Gersonides, to take up the cudgels again in behalf of a truer Judaism, a Judaism independent of Aristotle, and one that is based more upon the spiritual and emotional sides of man and less upon the purely intellectual, theoretical and speculative. Himself devoid of the literary power and poetic feeling of Judah Halevi, Crescas had this in common with the mediaeval national poet that he resented the domination of Jewish belief and thought by the alien Greek specula- tion. In a style free from rhetoric, and characterized rather by a severe brevity and precision, he undertakes to undermine the Aristotelian position by using the Stagirite's own weapons, logical analysis and proof. His chief work is the "Or Adonai," Light of the Lord.386

Agreeing with all other Jewish writers that the existence of God is the basis of Judaism, he sees in this very fact a reason why this principle cannot be regarded as one of the six hundred and thirteen commandments. For a commandment implies the existence of one who commands. Hence to regard the belief in the existence of God as a