Finally, voluntary acts are those caused by the will of man. It is these that concern us most. We have already intimated that the human will is itself a secondary cause and has a rôle in determining its effect. It is true that the will itself is caused by other higher causes until we get to the first cause, but this does not form a necessary chain of causation. Despite the continuous chain of causes antecedent to a given volition the soul finding itself in front of a given plan is free to choose either of the two alternatives. To say that a man's speech is as necessary as the beating of his pulse contradicts experience. We feel that we are masters of our speech and our silence. The fact that we praise and blame and love and hate a person according to his deliberate conduct is another proof of freedom. We do not blame a natural or accidental cause. We do not blame a child or a person asleep when they cause damage, because they did not do the damage deliberately and with intention. If those who deny freedom are consistent, they must either refrain from being angry with a person who injures them deliberately, or they must say that anger and praise and blame and love and hate are delusive powers put in our souls in vain. Besides there would be no difference between the pious and the disobedient, because both are doing that which they are by necessity bound to do.
But there are certain strong objections to the doctrine of freedom. If man is absolutely free to do or forbear, it follows that the effects of his conduct are removed from God's control. The answer to this is that they are not absolutely removed from his control. They are still related to him by a chain of causes.
Another argument against free will is that it is irreconcilable with God's knowledge. If man alone is the master of his choice, God cannot know beforehand what he will choose. And if God does know, the man cannot but choose as God foreknew he would choose, and what becomes of his freedom? This may be answered by saying that the knowledge of a thing is not the cause of its being. We do not determine a past event by the fact that we know it. Knowledge is simply evidence that the thing is. So man chooses by his own determination, and yet God knows beforehand which way he is going to choose, simply because he sees into the future as we remember the past.[200]
Judah Halevi's discussion of the problem of freedom is fuller than any we have met so far in our investigation. But it is not satisfactory. Apart from his fourfold classification of events which is open to criticism, there is a weak spot in the very centre of his argument, which scarcely could have escaped him. He admits that the will is caused by higher causes ending ultimately in the will of God, and yet maintains in the same breath that the will is not determined. As free the will is removed from God's control, and yet it is not completely removed, being related to him by a chain of causes. This is a plain contradiction, unless we are told how far it is determined and how far it is not. Surely the aspect in which it is not determined is absolutely removed from God's control and altogether uncaused. But Judah Halevi is unwilling to grant this. He just leaves us with the juxtaposition of two incompatibles. We shall see that Hasdai Crescas was more consistent, and admitted determinism.
We have now considered Judah Halevi's teachings, and have seen that he has no sympathy with the point of view of those people who were called in his day philosophers, i. e., those who adopted the teachings ascribed to Aristotle. At the same time he was interested in maintaining that all science really came originally from the Jews; and in order to prove this he undertakes a brief interpretation of the "Sefer Yezirah" (Book of Creation), an early mystic work of unknown authorship and date, which Judah Halevi in common with the uncritical opinion of his day attributed to Abraham.[201] Not to lay himself open to the charge of inconsistency, he throws out the suggestion that the Sefer Yezirah represented Abraham's own speculations before he had the privilege of a prophetic communication from God. When that came he was ready to abandon all his former rationalistic lucubrations and abide by the certainty of revealed truth.[202] We may therefore legitimately infer that Judah Halevi's idea was that the Jews were the originators of philosophy, but that they had long discarded it in favor of something much more valid and certain; whereas the Greeks and their descendants, having nothing better, caught it up and are now parading it as their own discovery and even setting it up as superior to direct revelation.
Natural science in so far as it had to do with more or less verifiable data could not be considered harmful, and so we find Judah Halevi taking pains to show that the sages of Rabbinical literature cultivated the sciences, astronomy in connection with the Jewish calendar; anatomy, biology and physiology in relation to the laws of slaughter and the examination of animal meat (laws of "Terefa").[203]
But so great was the fascination philosophy exerted upon the men of his generation that even Judah Halevi, despite his efforts to shake its authority and point out its inadequacy and evident inferiority to revelation, was not able wholly to escape it. And we find accordingly that he deems it necessary to devote a large part of the fifth book of the Kusari to the presentation of a bird's eye view of the current philosophy of the day. To be sure, he does not give all of it the stamp of his approval; he repeatedly attacks its foundations and lays bare their weakness. At the same time he admits that not every man has faith by nature and is proof against the erroneous arguments of heretics, astrologers, philosophers and others. The ordinary mortal is affected by them, and may even be misled for a time until he comes to see the truth. It is therefore well to know the principles of religion according to those who defend it by reason, and this involves a knowledge of science and theology. But we must not, he says, in the manner of the Karaites, advance all at once to the higher study of theology. One must first understand the fundamental principles of physics, psychology, and so on, such as matter and form, the elements, nature, Soul, Intellect, Divine Wisdom. Then we can proceed to the more properly theological matters, like the future world, Providence, and so on.
Accordingly Judah Halevi gives us in the sequel a brief account such as he has just outlined. It will not be worth our while to reproduce it all here, as in the first place Judah Halevi does not give it as the result of his own investigation and conviction, and secondly a good deal of it is not new; and we have already met it in more or less similar form before in Joseph ibn Zaddik, Abraham bar Hiyyah, and others. We must point out, however, the new features which we did not meet before, explain their origin and in particular indicate Judah Halevi's criticisms.
In general we may say that Judah Halevi has a better knowledge of Aristotelian doctrines than any of his predecessors. Thus to take one example, which we used before (p. [138]), Aristotle's famous definition of the soul is quoted by Isaac Israeli, Saadia, Joseph ibn Zaddik as well as by Judah Halevi. Israeli does not discuss the definition in detail.[204] Saadia and Ibn Zaddik show clearly that they did not understand the precise meaning of the definition. Judah Halevi is the first who understands correctly all the elements of the definition. And yet it would be decidedly mistaken to infer from this that Judah Halevi studied the Aristotelian works directly. By a fortunate discovery of S. Landauer[205] we are enabled to follow Judah Halevi's source with the certainty of eyewitnesses. The sketch which he gives of the Aristotelian psychology is taken bodily not from Aristotle's De Anima, but from a youthful work of Ibn Sina. Judah Halevi did not even take the trouble to present the subject in his own words. He simply took his model and abridged it, by throwing out all argumentative, illustrative and amplificatory material. Apart from this abridgment he follows his authority almost word for word, not to speak of reproducing the ideas in the original form and order. This is a typical and extremely instructive instance; and it shows how careful we must be before we decide that a mediæval writer read a certain author with whose ideas he is familiar and whom he quotes.
In the sketch of philosophical theory Judah Halevi first speaks of the hyle (ὕλη) or formless matter, which according to the philosophers was in the beginning of things contained within the lunar sphere. The "water" in the second verse of Genesis ("and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water") is supposed by them to denote this primitive matter, as the "darkness" in the same verse and the "chaos" ("Tohu") in the first verse signify the absence of form and composition in the matter (the Aristotelian στέρησις). God then willed the revolution of the outermost sphere, known as the diurnal sphere, which caused all the other spheres to revolve with it, thereby producing changes in the hyle in accordance with the motions of the sphere. The first change was the heating of that which was next to the lunar sphere and making it into pure fire, known among the philosophers as "natural fire," a pure, fine and light substance, without color or burning quality. This became the sphere of fire. The part that was further away changed as a result of the same revolution into the sphere of air, then came the sphere of water, and finally the terrestrial globe in the centre, heavy and thick by reason of its distance from the place of motion. From these four elements come the physical objects by composition. The forms (in the Aristotelian sense) of things are imposed upon their matters by a divine power, the "Intellect, and Giver of Forms"; whereas the matters come from the hyle, and the accidental proximity of different parts to the revolving lunar sphere explains why some parts became fire, some air, and so on.