Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism

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Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism is the name modern scholars give to a strand of Jewish philosophy, running from roughly the tenth through the twelfth century, that explained the relation between God and the world through the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation: all things flowing, level by level, from a single source that lies beyond being and beyond description. It was not a school with a roster or a doctrine its members signed. It was a shared set of instruments — the One, the descending hierarchy, the soul’s ascent — taken up by thinkers writing mostly in Judeo-Arabic, within the wider Islamic philosophical world, and turned to the work of reading Torah.

A philosophy received at second hand

The materials reached these writers by a roundabout road, and under the wrong names. The Arabic translation movement of the eighth through tenth centuries had carried most of Aristotle’s logical and physical works, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and a body of late-antique Platonism into Arabic, and the most consequential of those transmissions was the Theology of Aristotle (Uthūlūjiyā Arisṭāṭālīs) — not a work of Aristotle at all, but a paraphrase of portions of Plotinus’s Enneads IV through VI, attributed to the wrong philosopher and circulated in two recensions, a shorter Vulgate and a Longer recension preserved in part through Ismaili and Jewish channels. Through this text, through the pseudo-Empedoclean writings, through the metaphysical treatises of al-Kindī, and through the encyclopedic Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ), a Jewish reader could meet the whole architecture of the Enneads without ever learning whose architecture it was: the One overflowing into Intellect, Intellect into Soul, Soul into Nature, with form, matter, and a divine Will set between an absolutely simple First Principle and the multiplicity of the world. Scholars call this corpus the Plotiniana Arabica — the Arabic Plotinus — and it is the substrate on which the whole current rests.

What arrived, then, was Neoplatonism detached from its label and fused with other things. The same recovery had already happened once, in a different key: Philo of Alexandria had read the God of Genesis through Platonic categories a thousand years earlier, but his works survived in Christian hands and were largely lost to the medieval Jewish world, so the Arabic philosophers were not continuing Philo — they were doing his work over again, from new sources, in a new language. The structure they inherited was the standard descending hierarchy of emanation: from the One beyond being proceeds the divine Intellect, from Intellect the universal Soul, and downward through the spheres to the world of generation and decay. The work of the Jewish writers was to take this scheme — built by pagans to read Plato, and reshaped by Muslims to read the Qurʾan — and make it carry the God of Israel.

Isaac Israeli — the first of the line

Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (Yiṣḥaq ben Shelomoh ha-Yisreʾeli, c. 855–c. 955) is conventionally counted the earliest of the Jewish Neoplatonists. He served as court physician to the Aghlabid and then Fatimid rulers of Qayrawān, in what is now Tunisia, and was famous in his own day and long after for Arabic treatises on fevers and on dietetics that circulated in Latin medicine for centuries. As a philosopher his standing is more modest, and modern study — above all the edition of Alexander Altmann and Samuel M. Stern — has shown that his philosophical works are largely a reworking of al-Kindī and of an anonymous Neoplatonic source rather than an original synthesis. His Book of Definitions (Kitāb al-Ḥudūd), Book of Substances, Book on Spirit and Soul, and Book of the Elements set out a graded emanative cosmology: from the First, through a first matter and first form, to a universal Intellect, and thence to the rational, animal, and vegetative souls and the elements. His importance lies less in what he discovered than in what he transmitted. The Latin versions of his definitions, made by Constantine the African and others, gave the Christian schoolmen their earliest direct taste of Jewish Neoplatonic vocabulary, while the Hebrew renderings carried his terminology into the Iberian tradition that would produce its central figure.

Ibn Gabirol and the Fountain of Life

Solomon ibn Gabirol (Shelomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol, c. 1021/22 Málaga – c. 1057/58 Valencia) is the central figure of the current, and a strange one, because he lived two lives that for centuries no one knew belonged to the same man. In one he was among the supreme Hebrew liturgical poets of any age, author of Keter Malkhut (“The Royal Crown”), a meditative poem in forty cantos that opens by praising the divine attributes through a sequence of Thou art… (and not)… predications, then climbs through the cosmological hierarchy of spheres, intelligences, soul, and the Throne of Glory before returning to confession — a poem that puts the emanative cosmos into the register of prayer and entered the Sephardi synagogue rite. In the other life he was a metaphysician writing in Arabic, author of the Fons Vitae.

The Fons Vitae (Arabic Yanbūʿ al-Ḥayāt, Hebrew Meqor Ḥayyim, “The Fountain of Life”) was composed in the mid-eleventh century as a dialogue between a master and a pupil, in five treatises, on universal matter and form, on spiritual substance, on the simple substances mediating between body and God, and on the divine Will. Two of its doctrines fixed its place in the history of thought. The first is universal hylomorphism: everything other than God — including the separate intelligences and the rational soul — is composed of matter and form. Matter here is not the principle of corporeality but the principle of receptivity and limitation; form the principle of intelligibility. There is, then, a spiritual matter as well as a bodily one, the latter only a contraction of the former. The second is the doctrine of the divine Will (al-irāda, Hebrew raṣon): between the absolutely simple First and the duality of universal matter and form stands the Will, neither identical with God’s essence (which would compromise the divine unity) nor a created thing (which would need its own ground), but a unique principle of mediation — what the contemporary scholar Sarah Pessin has named a mystical Neoplatonism of Will. From the Will proceed form and matter; from their union, the whole descending order. The hylomorphism and the Will are the two devices by which Ibn Gabirol guards the One’s absolute simplicity while still accounting for a graded world — the same problem that drove every Neoplatonist, solved in a way distinctly his own.

The Avicebron mistake

The afterlife of that book is one of the more remarkable cases of mistaken identity in the history of philosophy. The Arabic original is lost but for fragments quoted by Moses ibn Ezra; the work survived in a complete Latin translation made in twelfth-century Toledo by Dominicus Gundissalinus and Johannes Hispanus, and in a thirteenth-century Hebrew abridgment by Shem Tov ibn Falaquera. Because the Latin Fons Vitae carried no biblical or rabbinic citation and went under the Arabicized name “Avicebron” (also “Avencebrol,” “Avicembron”), the Christian schoolmen for some six centuries took its author to be a Muslim or an Arab Christian. The Franciscan-Augustinian school — William of Auvergne, Bonaventure, and in his own way Duns Scotus — adopted universal hylomorphism to explain how angels and souls could be created and individuated; Thomas Aquinas devoted sustained arguments in De ente et essentia and De substantiis separatis to refuting “Avicebron,” restricting matter to the sublunar world and locating the individuation of the separate substances in form alone. Not until the nineteenth century was the puzzle solved: the French-Jewish scholar Salomon Munk (1805–1867), working from a Paris manuscript of Falaquera’s Hebrew extracts, demonstrated in 1846 and definitively in his Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (1857–1859) that the Latin Fons Vitae, the Hebrew Meqor Ḥayyim, and a synagogue poet of eleventh-century Spain were one and the same. “Avicebron” was Ibn Gabirol. The recovery is a founding moment of the Wissenschaft des Judentums — the discovery that one of the philosophers the Latin Middle Ages had argued with for centuries had been a Jew all along, and a poet of the liturgy at that.

The discipline turned inward — Bahya ibn Paquda

The same sensibility could be turned from metaphysics toward the inner life, and that is what Bahya ibn Paquda (c. 1050–c. 1120, Zaragoza) did in his single celebrated work, the Duties of the Heart (Kitāb al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb), composed in Judeo-Arabic around 1080 and given its enduring Hebrew form, Ḥovot ha-Levavot, by Judah ibn Tibbon between 1161 and 1180. Bahya’s governing distinction is between the duties of the limbs — the outward ritual and ethical acts the rabbinic tradition had elaborated in vast detail — and the duties of the heart: the inward dispositions, intentions, and cognitions that, he charged, no one had yet treated whole. The book is built as ten gates, and the sequence is an ascent: from the rational establishment of God’s unity, in a first gate that argues apophatically by stripping away every attribute that would compromise simplicity, through the contemplation of the created order as evidence of divine wisdom, through the integration of inner motive with outer act and the moral discipline of the self, to the soul’s progressive detachment from the world and its consummation in the love of God. The architecture is the Neoplatonic itinerary — contemplation, purification, return — rendered as a program a person could actually live. Behind the discipline of attention stands the emanationist picture: the soul as a fragment of a higher order, whose proper end is reunion with its source. Where Ibn Gabirol gives the cosmology, Bahya gives the practice. Through the Tibbon translation the Duties of the Heart became one of the most printed and most read works in all of Jewish religious literature, recited in the penitential season and absorbed into the later musar tradition of moral cultivation.

How far is it Neoplatonism?

How much of this counts as Neoplatonism proper is a question scholarship keeps live, and for good reason. These writers worked from fragments transmitted under false titles, fused with Aristotelian and Islamic material and bent to ends Plotinus never had in view. Some of their most characteristic moves are not Plotinian at all: Ibn Gabirol’s spiritual matter has no clear counterpart in the Enneads, and his divine Will introduces an element of freedom and personality into the descent that the Plotinian One, overflowing by sheer necessity, does not possess. That Will is the place where the God of scripture — who creates, commands, and chooses — pushes back against the impersonal source of the philosophers, and reshapes the scheme to fit. The current also runs alongside, and into, the strictly Aristotelian philosophy that al-Farabi and his successors had built in Arabic, and that would culminate, two generations after Ibn Gabirol, in the Aristotelian synthesis of Maimonides — whose negative theology and intellectualist account of prophecy mark a turn away from emanation toward a more austere apophatic rationalism. The Jewish current also stands in close kinship with the Islamic Neoplatonism of its own milieu and the Fatimid Neoplatonism of the Ismaili thinkers under whose rulers Israeli served, and with the Christian Neoplatonism of the Latin schools that read Ibn Gabirol without knowing his name. “Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism,” in the end, is a convenience of classification, not a membership held by a society — a label scholars use to mark a family resemblance among writers who would not have recognized it.

The passage into Kabbalah

The vocabulary the current standardized did not stay within philosophy. Its language of emanation, of a graded descent from a source beyond name, of divine simplicity guarded against multiplicity, passed in the following centuries into the imagery of the Kabbalah. The ten sefirot — the configuration of divine potencies through which the hidden God, the Ein Sof (“the Infinite,” literally “without end”), unfolds toward the world — are read by many scholars as a Jewish reworking of the descending hierarchy, the emanative scheme reabsorbed into a theosophy of the inner life of God. Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, argued that Ibn Gabirol’s metaphysics of Will and of universal matter left a mark on the early Kabbalah of Provence and Catalonia — a thesis still debated, since the early Kabbalists cited Gabirol the poet far more readily than Gabirol the philosopher. The lineage is real but indirect, a matter of inherited vocabulary and shared structure rather than of doctrine handed down intact; and it runs onward into the whole later world of Jewish mysticism, including the ecstatic and prophetic Kabbalah of letters and divine names that sought not to map the descent but to climb back up it.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship {#research}

The current survives in a difficult textual condition: its central work lost in the original, read for centuries under a false name, recovered only by nineteenth-century philology. The Fons Vitae exists in no complete English translation in the public domain; readers needing the complete text rely on the 2014 English of John A. Laumakis (Marquette University Press). The foundational critical edition is the Latin of Clemens Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons Vitae (Münster: Aschendorff, 1892–1895), made from the Toledo translation; the Avicebron–Ibn Gabirol identification itself was published by Salomon Munk in his Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (Paris: A. Franck, 1857–1859), which also prints Falaquera’s Hebrew extracts and a French translation. Ibn Gabirol’s poetry, including Keter Malkhut, is available in Israel Zangwill’s verse translation, Selected Religious Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol (Jewish Publication Society, 1923), hosted in full at sacred-texts.com. The standard study of the earliest figure remains Alexander Altmann and Samuel M. Stern, Isaac Israeli: A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1958). For the field as a whole, Isaac Husik’s A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (Macmillan, 1916) gave the English-reading world its first survey and is in the public domain; the modern standards are Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism (1933; English 1964), and Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1985). The most influential recent study of Ibn Gabirol is Sarah Pessin’s Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which recovers the Will-and-matter doctrine in its mystical-Neoplatonic register; her synthesis is condensed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ibn Gabirol, with companion entries on Isaac Israeli and on the influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on Judaic thought. The nineteenth-century article literature, much of it still useful on biography and reception, is gathered in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901–1906 (on Ibn Gabirol, Bahya, and Isaac Israeli). The source tradition behind all of it is Plotinus himself, read here in Stephen MacKenna’s English Enneads.

The achievement of the current is best measured by what it managed to do with a borrowed instrument. A pagan diagram of how the many flow from the One, arriving under a forged title and stripped of its author’s name, was fitted to the task of reading scripture: the gap between an unnameable God and a created world was filled with a graded descent, the soul was given a way home, and the divine unity was kept intact against every threat of multiplicity. Ibn Gabirol’s Will made the impersonal source command and choose; Bahya’s ten gates turned the metaphysics into a discipline of the heart; Keter Malkhut made the whole cosmology singable in the synagogue. The descent that Plotinus had described as a necessity of being became, in their hands, the structure of a world that a God had wanted.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) — the source tradition

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation · The One · Nous · Jewish Philosophy · Islamic Neoplatonism · Fatimid Neoplatonism · Christian Neoplatonism · Apophatic Theology · Jewish Negative Theology Maimonides Bahya · Kabbalah · Ein Sof · Kabbalah Ecstatic Prophetic · Philo Of Alexandria