Page:Jewish Encyclopedia Volume 2.pdf/83

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THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA

SlIDlP^an,

the

philosopher par

Arabic and Jewish thinkers.

excellence

among

This tendency

to-

ward

Aristotle was no less marked in the Byzanand Latin-Christian scholasticism than in the Arabian and Jewish systems, the last of which conformed to the Arabic. Among the Arabs there was a continual and gradual ascent through Tendencies Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn of the Koshd toward an ever purer and exPhiacter presentation of the genuine Arlosophy. istotle; in the last the ascent was through Saadia, Bahya ben Joseph Ibn Pakuda, Judah ha-Levi, Abraham ibn Daud, Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas. Throughout this school Aristotle remained the model and arbiter. tine

(2)

The second

school

was

al-Mokammez (about

900), and especially Joseph alfound their system exclusively upon the Motazilite Kalam, the latest straggler of them all, the philosophizing Karaite, Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia (fourteenth century), reverts, in his " 'Ez Hay-

Basri,

yim, " to Aristotle. place by himself must be assigned to Avice(3) bron (Avicebrol), long venerated as an authority by Christian scholasticism, but proved by Munk to be identical with the Jewish poet- philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol (died about 1070). Gabirol was influenced by Plato exactly as Maimonides was by Aristotle. In Gabirol's work Plato is the only philosopher referred to by name; while in Maimonides' "Moreh Nebukim," Plato is quoted only four times in the whole course of the book once from the " Timseus " (II. ch. xiii. Munk, II. ch. cix.), probably the only Platonic work with which Maimonides was ac-

A

—



quainted. ides

Aristotle,

knows

on the contrary, whom Maimon-

so thoroughly,

is

named

at the outset

D'DIDI^Sn E'SO ("The Chief of Philosophers"), and in II. ch. xvii. (Munk, II. ch. xxii. (I.

ch. v.) as

179) occurs the unqualified declaration that " everything that Aristotle teaches of sublunary matters is the unconditioned truth " (see also book II. ch. xix.

and

xxiv.).

Ibn Gabirol's relation to Plato is similar to that of Philo, and that without his suspecting even the existence of the Alexandrian thinker. Characteristic of the philosophy of both is the conception of a Middle Being between God and the world, between species and individual. Aristotle had already formulated the objection to the Platonic theory of Ideas, that it lacked an intermediary or third Gabirol's being (Tpirog avBpuiroc) between God Conception and the universe, between form and of Inter- matter. This " third man," this link mediary between incorporeal substances (ideas) Beings, and idealess bodies (matter, the nv 6v), is, with Philo, the " Logos " with Gabirol it is the divine will. Philo gives the problem an intellectual aspect while Gabirol conceives it as a matter of volition, approximating thus to such modern thinkers as Schopenhauer and Wundt. For the rest, Gabirol suffered precisely the same fate as his predecessor, Philo; his philosophy made not the slightest impression on Judaism. Among Jews he is esteemed as a poet; while Christian scholasticism, in



the persons of its two chief representatives, Albertus Magnus and his pupil, Thomas Aquinas, defers to him quite as frequently and gratefully as in their time the Gnostics and the Church Fathers— particu-

Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose to the Logos doctrine of Philo. (4) Cabala, or the Jewish mysticism. This " secret lore " has always claimed descent from ages of hoary antiquity. There is some slight warrant for this larly

—did

assertion, since faint traces of cabalistic

modes of

thought have been detected by Fran-

Jewish kel and by Munk among the Essenes. Mysticism Nor may it be denied that the work and the that is at the foundation of the Zohar, Cabala.

namely "Sefer Yezirah," the

that of the Karaite dis-

ciples of the Kalam. An analogous development is discernible with them. "While David ben Merwan

Arabic-Jewish Philosophy

"

Book

of Creation

tains material reaching

back

to

so-called

" (see article),

an older

con-

tradition.

In sequence of thought, the Cabala is as completely

dominated by Pythagoras— or rather by the Neopythagorean school—as Jewish Hellenism was by Plato, or the Arabic-Jewish Philosophy by the sage of Stagira. It matters really little whether the rise of the Jewish Cabala and of Christian mysticism, the MvariK?/ Oeofoyia of Diony sius the Areopagite, be dated a few centuries back or forward its vital elements are always the Pythagorean number-symbolism on the one hand, and the Neoplatonic emanation-theory on the other. Its distinguishing feature is the combination of both elements. The Cabala also looks for "middle beings," exactly as Philo and Gabirol do,

upon

whom

it

may

But while Philo

be dependent.

found these intermediaries in the diThe Cabala vine Logos, and Gabirol in the divine and Num- will, the Cabala sought them in fan-

ber-Sym-

tastie arithmetic.

The Unlimited

bolism.

("

En

Sof"), or God, is the originally undifferentiated unity of the cosmos, entirely identical with the Indian Nirvana and the ndvra bjiov of the Greeks. Differentiation began with the archetypal Man (Adam Kadmok) compounded of ten light-circles, spheres, or intelligences (Seflrot: to wit, Keter, Hokhmah, Binah, Hesed, Din, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkut). God dissolves Himself into attributes. This feature is peculiar to the whole of the Middle Ages. Natural forces are transformed into attributes of God and attributive thought takes the place of substantive. While in antiquity every natural force was a divinity, and while Monotheism condensed all these divinities into one personality, recourse was now had to the expedient of degrading the forces of nature into attributes of God. Trinity, Tritheism, Logos-doctrine, and Seflrot are the stammering utterances of ancient and medieval thought, endeavoring to explain the relation of multiplicity to unity, of natural forces to nature itself, of the attributes of God to God Himself. The cabalists, however, occupied a proportionately small space in the history of Arabic-Jewish Philosophy. They were far more numerous in southern France or Languedoc than in Moorish Spain. There are no independent cabalistic works written in Arabic, though the philosophical works of the Arabic-Jewish philosophers were written in Arabic, the vernacular of every -day life in Moorish Spain. There seems to have been a certain system in the employ;