Jewish Neoplatonism

The claim

Everything except God is composed of matter and form, including souls and angels — universal hylomorphism. And the divine will stands between God and the emanated order, so creation is neither necessary overflow nor arbitrary decree.

What it held

Ibn Gabirol wrote the Fountain of Life as a philosophical dialogue with no Jewish content in it whatsoever — no scripture, no Hebrew, no reference to the Torah. It was translated into Latin as the Fons Vitae, its author's name garbled to Avicebron, and for three centuries the scholastics argued with him assuming he was a Muslim or a Christian. Solomon Munk identified him in 1846.

The doctrine that made him controversial in Latin was universal hylomorphism: everything other than God, including spiritual substances, is composed of matter and form. Aquinas rejected it and Bonaventure adopted it, so the Franciscan-Dominican split runs partly through a Jewish poet from Málaga.

Bahya ibn Paquda took the tradition in a different direction with Duties of the Heart, arguing that the commandments people actually neglect are the inward ones — trust, gratitude, humility, self-examination — and that these are obligations in the same sense as the outward ones. It became one of the most widely read Jewish books ever written.

How it argued

Emanation schemes argued philosophically, without scriptural proof-texting in Ibn Gabirol's case, and with it in Bahya's.

What it was arguing against

Aristotelian accounts on which spiritual substances are pure form, and any account making creation a necessary consequence of God's nature.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether universal hylomorphism is coherent. Whether the divine will in Ibn Gabirol is God or something between God and the world — he does not say clearly.

Common misconceptions

That the Fountain of Life is a Jewish book. It contains nothing identifiably Jewish, which is precisely why its author's identity was lost for eight hundred years.

How it began

Al-Andalus, where Jewish intellectuals wrote in Arabic and read the same Greek philosophy in the same translations as their Muslim contemporaries.

What became of it

Displaced by Aristotelianism after Maimonides, whose success made emanationist Neoplatonism look old-fashioned.

Lasting influence

Latin scholasticism through Avicebron. Kabbalah drew on the emanation structure heavily. Bahya's book has never been out of print in Hebrew.

Why it still matters

It is the clearest case of a philosophical work travelling entirely free of its author's religious identity, and of what that costs and enables.

Put another way

A fountain, which is the same water at every level and further from the source at each.

Where to start

Duties of the Heart. It is warm, practical and does not require the metaphysics.

The surprising bit

For eight centuries Christian philosophers argued with Avicebron without knowing he was a Hebrew poet whose liturgical verse they would have found in any synagogue.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Neoplatonism, Philonism

Opposed by

Thomism

Influenced

Lurianic Kabbalah

The verdict

A philosophy that succeeded by concealing where it came from, and was recovered by a scholar going blind.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy