A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy

by Isaac Husik

This, as we see, is decidedly a different point of view from that of Judah Halevi. The difference between them is not due to a difference in their age and environment, but solely to personal taste and temperament. Toledo was the birthplace of Ibn Daud as it was of Halevi. And the period in which they lived was practically the same. Judah Halevi's birth took place in the last quarter of the eleventh century, whereas Ibn Daud is supposed to have been born about 1110, a difference of some twenty-five or thirty years. The philosopher whom Judah Halevi presents to us as the typical representative of his time is an Aristotelian of the type of Alfarabi and Avicenna. And it is the same type of philosophy that we meet in the pages of the "Emunah Ramah" (Exalted Faith), Ibn Daud's philosophical work.[223] Whereas, however, Judah Halevi was a poet by the grace of God, glowing with love for his people, their religion, their language and their historic land, Ibn Daud leaves upon us the impression of a precise thinker, cold and analytical. He exhibits no graces of style, eloquence of diction or depths of enthusiasm and emotion. He passes systematically from one point to the next, uses few words and technical, and moves wholly in the Peripatetic philosophy of the day. In 1161, the same year in which the Emunah Ramah was composed, he also wrote a historical work, "Sefer Hakabala" (Book of Tradition), which we have; and in 1180, regarded by some as the year of his death, he published an astronomical work, which is lost. This gives an index of his interests which were scientific and philosophic. Mysticism, whether of the poetic or the philosophic kind, was far from his nature; and this too may account for the intense opposition he shows to Solomon Ibn Gabirol. On more than one occasion he gives vent to his impatience with that poetic philosopher, and he blames him principally for two faults. Choosing to devote a whole book to one purely metaphysical topic, in itself not related to Judaism, Gabirol, we are told by Ibn Daud, gave expression to doctrines extremely dangerous to the Jewish religion. And apart from his heterodoxy, he is philosophically incompetent and his method is abominable. His style is profuse to the point of weariness, and his logic carries no conviction.[224]

While Abraham Ibn Daud is thus expressly unsympathetic to Gabirol and tacitly in disagreement with Halevi (he does not mention him), he shows the closest relation to Maimonides, whose forerunner he is. We feel tempted to say that if not for Ibn Daud there would have been no Maimonides. And yet the irony of history has willed that the fame of being the greatest Jewish philosopher shall be Maimonides's own, while his nearest predecessor, to whose influence he owed most, should be all but completely forgotten. The Arabic original of Ibn Daud's treatise is lost, and the Hebrew translations (there are two) lay buried in manuscript in the European libraries until one of them was published by Simson Weil in 1852.[225]

Abraham Ibn Daud is the first Jewish philosopher who shows an intimate knowledge of the works of Aristotle and makes a deliberate effort to harmonize the Aristotelian system with Judaism. To be sure, he too owes his Aristotelian knowledge to the Arabian exponents of the Stagirite, Alfarabi and Avicenna, rather than to the works of Aristotle himself. But this peculiarity was rooted in the intellectual conditions of his time, and must not be charged to his personal neglect of the sources. And Maimonides does nothing more than repeat the effort of Ibn Daud in a more brilliant and masterly fashion.

The development of the three religious philosophies in the middle ages, Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan, followed a similar line of progression. In all of them it was not so much a development from within, the unfolding of what was implicit and potential in the original germ of the three respective religions, as a stimulus from without, which then combined, as an integral factor, with the original mass, and the final outcome was a resultant of the two originally disparate elements. We know by this time what these two elements were in each case, Hellenic speculation, and Semitic religion in the shape of sacred and revealed documents. The second factor was in every case complete when the process of fusion began. Not so the first. What I mean is that not all of the writings of Greek antiquity were known to Jew, Christian and Mohammedan at the beginning of their philosophizing career. And the progress in their philosophical development kept equal step with the successive accretion of Greek philosophical literature, in particular Aristotle's physical, psychological and metaphysical treatises, and their gradual purgation of Neo-Platonic adhesions.

The Syrian Christians, who were the first to adopt Greek teachings, seem never to have gone beyond the mathematical and medical works of the Greeks and the logic of Aristotle. The Arabs began where their Syrian teachers ended, and went beyond them. The Mutakallimun were indebted to the Stoics,[226] the Pure Brethren to the Neo-Platonists; and it was only gradually that Aristotle became the sole master not merely in logic, which he always had been, but also in physics, metaphysics and psychology. Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes represent so many steps in the Aristotelization of Arabic philosophy.

Christian mediæval thought, which was really a continuation of the Patristic period, likewise began with Eriugena in the ninth century under Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences. Of Aristotle the logic alone was known, and that too only in small part. Here also progress was due to the increase of Aristotelian knowledge; though in this case it was not gradual as with the Arabs before them, but sudden. In the latter part of the twelfth and the early part of the thirteenth century, through the Crusades, through the Moorish civilization in Spain, through the Saracens in Sicily, through the Jews as translators and mediators, Aristotle invaded Christian Europe and transformed Christian philosophy. Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam are the results of this transformation.

The same thing holds true of the Jews. Their philosophizing career stands chronologically between that of their Arab teachers and their Christian disciples. And the line of their development was similar. It was parallel to that of the Arabs. First came Kalam in Saadia, Mukammas, the Karaites Al Basir and Jeshua ben Judah. Then Neo-Platonism and Kalam combined, or pure Neo-Platonism, in Bahya, Gabirol, Ibn Zaddik and the two Ibn Ezras, Abraham and Moses. In Judah Halevi, so far as philosophy is represented, we have Neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. Finally in Ibn Daud and Maimonides, Neo-Platonism is reduced to the vanishing point, and Aristotelianism is in full view and in possession of the field. After Maimonides the only philosopher who deviates from the prescribed path and endeavors to uproot Aristotelian authority in Judaism is Crescas. All the rest stand by Aristotle and his major domo, Maimonides.

This may seem like a purely formal and external mode of characterizing the development of philosophical thought. But the character of mediæval philosophy is responsible for this. Their ideal of truth as well as goodness was in the past. Knowledge was thought to have been discovered or revealed in the past,[227] and the task of the philosopher was to acquire what was already there and to harmonize contradictory authorities. Thus the more of the past literature that came to them, the greater the transformation in their own philosophy.

The above digression will make clear to us the position of Ibn Daud and his relation to Maimonides. Ibn Daud began what Maimonides finished—the last stage in the Aristotelization of Jewish thought. Why is it then that so little was known about him, and that his important treatise was neglected and practically forgotten? The answer is to be found partly in the nature of the work itself and partly in historical circumstances.

The greatest and most abiding interest in intellectual Jewry was after all the Bible and the Talmud. This interest never flagged through adversity or through success. The devotion paid to these Jewish classics and sacred books may have been fruitful in original research and intelligent application at one time and place and relatively barren at another. Great men devoted to their study abounded in one country and were relatively few in another. The nature of the study applied to these books was affected variously by historical conditions, political and economic; and the cultivation or neglect of the sciences and philosophy was reflected in the style of Biblical and Talmudical interpretation. But at all times and in all countries, under conditions of comparative freedom as well as in the midst of persecution, the sacred heritage of Israel was studied and its precepts observed and practiced. In this field alone fame was sure and permanent. All other study was honored according to the greater or less proximity to this paramount interest. In times of freedom and of great philosophic and scientific interest like that of the golden era in Spain, philosophical studies almost acquired independent value. But this independence, never quite absolute, waned and waxed with external conditions, and at last disappeared entirely. If Ibn Daud had made himself famous by a Biblical commentary or a halakic work, or if his philosophic treatise had the distinction of being written in popular and attractive style, like Bahya's "Duties of the Hearts," or Halevi's "Cusari," it might have fared better. As it is, it suffers from its conciseness and technical terminology. Add to this that it was superseded by the "Guide of the Perplexed" of Maimonides, published not many years after the "Emunah Ramah," and the neglect of the latter is completely explained.