CHAPTER III
SAADIA BEN JOSEPH AL-FAYYUMI (892-942)
Saadia was the first important Jewish philosopher. Philo of Alexandria does not come within our purview as he was not mediæval. Besides his work is not systematic, being in the nature of a commentary on Holy Writ. Though Philo was a good and loyal Jew, he stood, so to speak, apart from the real centre of Jewish intellectual and spiritual development. He was on the one hand too closely dependent on Greek thought and on the other had only a limited knowledge of Jewish thought and tradition. The Bible he knew only in the Greek translation, not in the original Hebrew; and of the Halaka, which was still in the making in Palestine, he knew still less.
It was different with Saadia. In the tenth century the Mishna and the Talmud had been long completed and formed theoretically as well as practically the content of the Jew's life and thought. Sura in Babylonia, where Saadia was the head of the academy, was the chief centre of Jewish learning, and Saadia was the heir in the main line of Jewish development as it passed through the hands of lawgiver and prophet, scribe and Pharisee, Tanna and Amora, Saburai and Gaon. As the head of the Sura academy he was the intellectual representative of the Jewry and Judaism of his day. His time was a period of agitation and strife, not only in Judaism but also in Islam, in whose lands the Jews lived and to whose temporal rulers they owed allegiance in the East as well as in Spain.
In Islam we saw in the introduction how the various schools of the Kadariya, the Muʿtazila and the Ashariya arose in obedience to the demand of clarifying the chief problems of faith, science and life. In Judaism there was in addition to this more general demand the more local and internal conflict of Karaite and Rabbanite which centred about the problem of tradition. Saadia found himself in the midst of all this and proved equal to the occasion.
We are not here concerned with the vicissitudes of Saadia's personal life or of his literary career as opponent of the Karaite sect. Nor can we afford more than merely to state that Jewish science in the larger sense begins with Saadia. Hebrew grammar and lexicography did not exist before him. The Bible had been translated into several languages before Saadia's day, but he was the first to translate it into Arabic, and the first to write a commentary on it. But the greatest work of Saadia, that which did the most important service to the theory of Judaism, and by which he will be best remembered, is his endeavor to work out a system of doctrine which should be in harmony with the traditions of Judaism on the one hand and with the most authoritative scientific and philosophic opinion of the time on the other. Israeli, we have seen, was interested in science before Saadia. As a physician he was probably more at home in purely physical discussions than Saadia. But there is no evidence that he had the larger interest of the Gaon of Sura, namely, to construct a system of Judaism upon the basis of scientific doctrine. Possibly the example of Islam was lacking in Israeli's environment, as he does not seem to be acquainted with the theories and discussions of the Mutakallimun, and draws his information from Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic sources. Saadia was in the very midst of Arab speculation as is evident from the composition of his chef d'œuvre, "Emunot ve-Deot," Beliefs and Opinions.[37]
The work is arranged on the Muʿtazilite model. The two main divisions in works of this character are Unity and Justice. The first begins with some preliminary considerations on the nature and sources of knowledge. It proceeds then to prove the existence of God by showing that the world cannot have existed from eternity and must have been created in time. Creation implies a creator. This is followed by arguments showing that God is one and incorporeal. The rest is devoted to a discussion of the divine attributes with the purpose of showing that God's unity and simplicity are not affected by them. The section on unity closes with a refutation of opposing views, such as those of the dualists or Trinitarians or infidels. The section on Justice centres about the doctrine of free will. Hence psychology and ethics are treated in this part of the work. To this may be added problems of a more dogmatic nature, eschatological and otherwise. We shall see in the sequel that Saadia's masterpiece is modeled on the same plan.
But not merely the plan and arrangement of his work give evidence of the influence upon Saadia of Islamic schools, many of his arguments, those for example on the existence of God and the creation of the world, are taken directly from them. Maimonides, who was a strong opponent of the Mutakallimun, gives an outline of their fundamental principles and their arguments for the existence, unity and incorporeality of God.[38] Some of these are identical with those of Saadia. Saadia, however, is not interested in pure metaphysics as such. His purpose is decidedly apologetic in the defence of Judaism and Jewish dogma. Hence we look in vain in his book for definite views on the constitution of existing substances, on the nature of motion, on the meaning of cause, and so on. We get a glimpse of his attitude to some of these questions in an incidental way.
The Mutakallimun were opposed to the Aristotelian theory of matter and form, and substituted for it the atomic theory. God created atoms without magnitude or quality, and he likewise created qualities to inhere in groups of atoms. These qualities they called accidents, and one of their important discussions was whether an accident can last more than a moment of time. The opinions were various and the accidents were classified according to their powers of duration. That is, there were some accidents which once created continued to exist of their own accord some length of time, and there were others which had to be re-created anew every moment in order to continue to exist. Saadia does not speak of matter and form as constituting the essence of existing things; he does speak of substance and accident,[39] which might lead us to believe that he held to the atomic theory, since he speaks of the accidents as coming and going one after the other, which suggests the constant creation spoken of by the Mutakallimun. On the other hand, when he answers an objection against motion, which is as old as Zeno, namely, how can we traverse an infinitely divisible distance, since it is necessary to pass an infinite number of parts, he tells us that it is not necessary to have recourse to the atomic theory or other theories adopted by some Muʿtazilites to meet this objection. We may believe in the continuity and infinite divisibility of matter, but as long as this divisibility is only potentially infinite, actually always finite, our ability to traverse the space offers no difficulty.[40] Finally, in refuting the second theory of creation, which combines Platonism with atomism, he argues against an atomic theory primarily because of its implications of eternity of the atoms, but partly also on other grounds, which would also affect the Kalamistic conceptions of the atoms.[41] These points are not treated by Saadia expressly but are only mentioned incidentally in the elucidation of other problems dealing with the creation of the world and the existence of God.