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CHAPTER 4

Philosophical Eclecticism

In the thirteenth century, Aristotelian Jewish philosophy had been at a peak. The translation into Hebrew of, among many other works, ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle and the immensely influential Guide of the Perplexed led to what has been called “the consolidation of Spanish rationalism under the banner of Maimonides.”¹ By the end of the century, Aristotelianism was dominant among the majority of philosophically inclined writers, and in many cases was considered identical with philosophy itself. Kabbalists, too, like Isaac ibn Latif (c. 1210–1280) and Abraham Abulafia (1240–c. 1291), were influenced by Aristotelian ideas.²

A hundred years later, however—which is to say, by the time Duran was active—new generations of Provençal and Iberian Jewish philosophers had developed more eclectic systems of thought, many of which prominently featured Neoplatonic ideas. In a sign of the general shift away from radical Aristotelianism, both Abraham ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, two earlier thinkers influenced by such ideas, would enjoy something of a vogue in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

That ibn Ezra’s writings were intensely studied and commented on, including by Duran, was indicative both of deepening interest in astrological theory and of the increasing incorporation of Neoplatonic elements into Aristotelian thought.³ Similarly inspired in great part by ibn Ezra was the radically naturalist Neoplatonism developed by a circle of philosophers in Castile.⁴ Judah Halevi’s writings, themselves strongly influential in Duran’s work, also enjoyed a revival at the turn of the fifteenth century, exemplified in the effort by a group of Provençal commentators on the Kuzari to work out a heavily astrological version of Jewish philosophy.⁵

In this chapter I trace some of the same philosophical tendencies examined in Duran’s commentary on the Guide as they appear in his early philosophical responsa, a number of which are still extant. Of these epistles, two (which I have termed “On the Hebdomad” and “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar,” respectively) were copied by Meir Crescas into his manuscript collection of Duran’s writings discussed in Chapter 2. In that manuscript Meir reports that “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar” was a response to a question of his (Meir’s), and that “On the Hebdomad” was a response to a question merely “that was asked of him [Duran].”⁶ A third philosophical letter (which I have called “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation”) can be found copied elsewhere, is usually collected together with the other two, and is also sometimes said to have been written to Meir Crescas.⁷

None of the three has been dated, though both “On the Hebdomad” and “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar” are signed by Duran with his preconversion name: Profayt Duran ha-Levi. The third is not signed at all—and that, plus the fact that it does not appear in Meir Crescas’s manuscript collection, suggests either that it was not written to Meir Crescas but to another individual and later collected with the others or that it was written later, after Meir’s manuscript was completed. If this last suggestion is right, it would have been composed while Duran was living as a Christian.

After surveying Duran’s general facility with philosophical argumentation, I consider a point of possible contact between Duran and Hasdai Crescas on the issue of Jewish dogma, and then turn to Duran’s eclectic incorporation, into his Maimonidean system, of terminology and ideas drawn from Judah Halevi on divine emanation and from Abraham ibn Ezra on astrology.

PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

I begin with the one philosophical letter definitely written by Duran to his student Meir Crescas.⁸ In it Duran explains human perfection, and does so in purely philosophical terms. Meir Crescas had asked about a confusing phrase in a book called Sefer ha-Tamar, an Arabic divination text by Abu Aflaḥ of Syracuse, translated into Hebrew in fourteenth-century Provence.⁹ In copying this letter into his manuscript, his pride rather touchingly shining through, Meir notes that it is “the answer of the great sage, my perfect teacher maestre Profayt Duran ha-Levi, to me the writer, the smallest of his students.”¹⁰

One of a series of aphorisms attributed in the text to Suleiman (King Solomon) had proved obscure: “The hearts inclined to the desire, and the desire to the temperament, and the temperament to the divine will, and the divine will, its solution is aggadah, and the solution of aggadah is emanation and the solution of emanation is perfection and the solution of perfection is hidden.” In his reply, Duran interprets this phrase as a wonderfully concise expression of “the final felicity of man and the purpose of the perfection that is possible for him to attain and the causes that bring him to it and the path to this [end].” He acknowledges the controversy over the details of this perfection among “sages of investigation,” but also notes, rather approvingly, that the phrase encapsulates “what the important philosophers said about it and where the opinions of the great ones agree.”¹¹

Duran propounds three introductory principles before turning to interpret the words from Sefer ha-Tamar as expressing them. For our purposes it is necessary only to look at the introductory principles. The first is a thoroughly philosophical view of what constitutes human perfection:

The ultimate perfection of man occurs in the part of the soul by which [man] is particularized and that [part of the soul] is the intellectual faculty and it [occurs] when [the soul] is perfected by the apprehension of those intelligibles that are attainable. [Aristotle] has written about this in one [of the chapters of] the Book of the Qualities [Nicomachean Ethics] and [al-Ghazali] in his preface to The Intentions [Maqāṣid], and most of the philosophers have agreed on this [principle]. Indeed, as for the quality of this perfection, one sect thinks that the hylic intellect turns into the acquired intellect and that the more intelligibles one acquires, the more one’s intellect is perfected. And [another] sect thinks that there is a higher level [than this] and it is [achieved] when this hylic intellect, after its perfection, is unified with the separate [intellect] and conjoins with it [in] a conjunction [by means of] apprehension. And ibn Rushd has written at length about this and upholds this possibility in his treatise called The Possibility of Conjunction,¹² and the true prophets arrived at this level while they yet lived. Maimonides has explained this in his chapter about prophecy, Guide II.37.¹³

Duran explains human perfection in intellectual terms: the rational faculty apprehends intelligibles while the body lives. And afterward? There are two opinions on the nature of immortality: some, according to Duran, believe that it consists in the sum total of the intelligibles apprehended in life, the Gersonidean view. The more eternal truths one has learned over the course of one’s life, the more blissful (or at least interesting), presumably, immortality will be. Others believe that there is yet a higher level of immortality, namely, that the perfected human intellect becomes conjoined with the agent intellect after death, presumably enjoying all of the intelligibles comprehended in the agent intellect. Duran refers us to the Guide II.37, where Maimonides discusses the intellectual overflow “through which we have intellectual cognition” and its different effects on different men, among them men of science and prophets.¹⁴ Presumably Duran understands Maimonides to hold the second opinion with respect to this conjunction.

Then Duran turns to the nature of prophecy itself: “Second, the prophesying soul is particularized by three virtues [that differentiate it] from the rest of the human souls: one, knowledge of the future; two, subjugation of the matter of the world; three, and this is the most considerable, knowledge of the secrets of existence. And truth emanates suddenly without intermediate boundaries, and this happens to it because of the conjunction with the separate [intellect]. [Al-Ghazali] already wrote this in The Intentions and The Balance of Inquiries,¹⁵ and [Maimonides] hinted about it in his estimable book.”¹⁶ Just as the human soul is differentiated from that of animals by the intellectual faculty, so too the prophet’s soul is differentiated from the soul of regular humans by three virtues, or abilities. First, the prophet can see the future; second, he can control matter, that is, perform miracles; third, he knows “the secrets of existence.” Duran is evidently alluding to knowledge about the created world that can be attained only by prophecy, as discussed above in Chapter 3. If we follow Duran’s position there, we might include among these “secrets of existence” knowledge of the nature of celestial matter and some partial knowledge of the separate intellects. Prophetic knowledge is therefore of two types: knowledge of sublunar events before they happen and knowledge about the universe that cannot be attained through the unaided use of human reason.

Finally, Duran turns to the requirements for prophecy:

Third, this perfection, however it comes to be, will indeed come with perfection of the temperament and its equability and the disposition particular to it, and with choice [free will] and intellection to bring the intellect from potentiality to actuality by the apprehension of the sciences. And with these two causes, [Aristotle] thinks that this [makes] achieving [prophecy] possible. But according to the opinion of the men of Torah, there is a third cause here and it is the divine will. [Maimonides] has explained this in [Guide] II.32. And if what is intended by the “divine will” is what some of the later sages understood, namely, what is written in the Book of Adam Rishon,¹⁷ about which the master hinted (according to their opinion) at the end of [Guide] II.33, then the philosophers acknowledge this reason also.¹⁸

As Duran describes it here, an individual must first be physically perfect, as measured by the equability of his temperament. That is to say, the humors and qualities in the body should be perfectly balanced. This equable temperament allows the development of a disposition toward intellection. And the perfection of the intellect itself is achieved through the study of the sciences. According to the philosophical view, prophecy is automatically and necessarily attained once all these requirements have been met. As Duran himself notes, this is the view expressed in Guide II.32, where Maimonides describes the philosophical opinion thus: “when in the case of a superior individual who is perfect with respect to his rational and moral qualities, his imaginative faculty is in its most perfect state, and when he has been prepared in the way that you will hear, he will necessarily become a prophet, inasmuch as this is a perfection that belongs to us by nature.”¹⁹

According to Maimonides, however, this is not the approved Jewish view—that of the “men of Torah.” Instead, these men hold that prophecy can be withheld even from someone who is physically and intellectually prepared, if God so wills it: “It may happen that one who is fit for prophecy and prepared for it should not become a prophet, namely, on account of the divine will.”²⁰ In the final line of the extract above, Duran cites the argument of some later interpreters of the Guide to the effect that when Maimonides speaks of “divine will” in this context, he means secretly to indicate something other than what is usually considered to be the divine will. According to this interpretation, Maimonides believes the two positions—the philosophical position and the position of the Torah—to be entirely congruent, but exoterically explains them as disparate.

Duran’s description of the path to perfection according to the philosophers is thus consistent with his Maimonideanism, in that he accepts the philosophical understanding of prophecy as Maimonides explains it in the Guide while implicitly (“according to their opinion”) distancing himself from the more radical interpretation of Maimonides as having been secretly in agreement with the Aristotelian view. In passing, we may note with some amusement that Duran is choosing to read an obscure sentence attributed to Solomon in a text of magical practices as a description of a philosophically conventional view of prophecy.

* * *

In this letter as in his other philosophical responsa, Duran reveals a broad and detailed familiarity with philosophical arguments as well as a confidence in deploying them. The letter “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation” is another fine example of his approach. In it, he responds to the question “whether, according to our faith, some individual souls have immortality and eternal salvation, and whether a soul that sins a particular sin receives punishment and pain and eternal cutting off.”²¹ The question has two parts: first, whether there is such a thing as eternal salvation, and second, whether there is also eternal damnation. Duran answers as a philosopher, with arguments based on logical premises and scarcely a biblical proof text to be seen until he is at least halfway through. For Duran, the philosophical approach to questions of religious doctrine was no merely rhetorical exercise. It is his home ground, and, by implication, the home ground of his intended audience as well.

For Duran, the first part of the question hardly merits discussion, for in his opinion it has already been settled by the philosophers as well as by “men of Torah.” In this case, both groups admit eternal salvation. Even Aristotle, according to Duran, believed in the immortality of the soul and, he notes, established it in De anima. The only disagreements among philosophers have concerned not the fact but only the nature of the soul’s immortality. And since immortality and salvation exist, so, too, do their opposites: what Duran calls “cutting off and eternal punishment.”

This reasoning he bases on an Aristotelian syllogism: given two states opposed to each other, if one exists, so does the other. If there is such a thing as “black” in the world, then there is such a thing as “white.” Therefore, if immortality and eternal salvation exist, eternal cutting off and destruction exist as well. Duran’s first proof text is taken not from the Bible but from al-Ghazali’s (c. 1058–1111) Maqāṣid, which he cites by its translated Hebrew title, Kavvanot ha-Filosofim (“Intentions of the Philosophers”). This work consists of a summary of positions held by the “philosophers,” collected by al-Ghazali originally for the purpose of refuting them. As was common by the fourteenth century, however, Duran appears to assume that al-Ghazali was not a critic but a proponent of these same theories:²² “The sage al-Ghazali [lit. Abuḥamid] acknowledged it also in the Intentions. This is his expression: ‘and a being shall die without reaching the desired object, and desire shall remain and consciousness, and that is the great pain which has no limit to it.’ And the intended [meaning] of this is: that [the great pain] is of infinite duration, for that which is of infinite intensity is impossible.”²³

Duran parses al-Ghazali carefully, commenting that, in saying that after death one suffers great pain with “no limit to it,” al-Ghazali cannot intend by this something impossible—that is, that the intensity of the pain is infinite. What al-Ghazali must mean instead is that the pain the soul experiences after death is of finite intensity but of infinite duration. Duran’s reading of al-Ghazali’s words here is strikingly similar to Moses Narboni’s in his commentary on the Maqāṣid. According to Narboni, al-Ghazali believed that the pain suffered by a soul after death refers to being denied conjunction with the agent intellect. Narboni, like Duran, specifies that from this we can learn that al-Ghazali believed in postmortem reward and punishment. Narboni also makes the point that al-Ghazali appears to agree here with the rabbis.²⁴

* * *

Duran has often been grouped together with Hasdai Crescas and his students Zeraḥyah Halevi and Abraham ben Judah Leon.²⁵ A slightly older contemporary of Duran, Crescas was a highly important figure in late fourteenth-century Catalonia in both philosophical (or antiphilosophical) thought and anti-Christian polemics. Crescas’s single great work of religious philosophy, Or ha-Shem, was written too late for Duran to have read it in its final form before composing his own works. Or ha-Shem was completed in 1412, though an earlier version came out two years earlier,²⁶ whereas Duran’s last known dated work is from 1403. On the issue of how to categorize Jewish doctrine, however, there are distinct similarities between them.

In the second half of “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation,” Duran addresses the question of whether, if someone disagrees with the argument he has just given about eternal punishment, that person is then himself “cut off and eternally punished.” And in the process Duran sketches out a threefold system categorizing the various types of heresy, following the listing of Jewish dogma in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance:²⁷ “The first is denial of something which depends on divine statute for His existence and His unity and other things—and this is the particular thing by the name of ‘heresy’ [minut] and about this scripture says: ‘And they shall go out and look upon the carcasses of the men who have rebelled against me.’ (Is. 66:24) And it does not say ‘who have rebelled absolutely’—it means that they sinned in what depended on it.”²⁸ The first kind of heretics, according to Duran, consists of those who fall into the category of minut. These minim appear often in the Talmud; in English, the word is often rendered as “sectarians.” According to Duran, they reject matters that are dependent on “His existence and His unity”—that is, doctrines dependent on there being a divinity, that he exists, and that he is One. To reject any one of these doctrines is by implication to reject the existence or unity of God.²⁹

Duran’s second category: “The second is denial of that which depends on belief in prophecy, in its existence and the [uniqueness] of the prophecy of Moses our Teacher, upon him be peace, and this is the particular thing that goes by the name ‘unbelief’ [apikorsut], a name derived from denier [kofer] after karos in the Greek language, and as Galen wrote in the first chapter of his book, On the Natural Faculties.”³⁰ These, therefore, are doctrines for which, if one rejects one of them, one has rejected the possibility of prophecy (revelation).³¹ Finally, Duran’s third category is “denial of what depends on the law of the Torah, in its being from heaven and that it will not change, and that is the specific thing that goes by the name denial.”³² These are dogmas for which, if one rejects them, one has rejected the word of the Torah itself, its divine source, or its unchangeable nature.³³

The important thing to note in this list is that Duran phrases the issue by, as it were, working backward. By defining the denial of a doctrine, he is in fact constructing a threefold or, actually, fourfold positive division of Jewish doctrine: fourfold because, by excluding the particular issue of eternal reward and punishment from the three categories of heresy, he implicitly adds a fourth positive category to the list: namely, nonheresy.³⁴

One significant aspect of this fourfold categorization of Jewish doctrine is that while Duran is very clearly drawing from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, his shaping of this material is almost perfectly echoed in the division of Jewish doctrines found in Hasdai Crescas’s Or ha-Shem. The first division enumerated by Duran consists of those things that depend on the existence and oneness of God. According to Crescas, the first category of doctrines includes roots or first principles without which one cannot imagine revelation of a divine law: that is to say, they are the “first principles of the divine Torah” that depend on “belief in the existence of God.”³⁵ The second category for Duran is made up of those things that depend on prophecy and revelation, again matched in Crescas’s category of, in this case, ideas the acceptance of which makes possible belief in revelation in general. Duran’s third category depends on the actual, unchangeable word of Torah; for Crescas, the third section is made up of true doctrines, namely, doctrines actually taught by the Torah: “true beliefs which we who believe in the divine Torah believe and which are such that one denying any one of them is called a sectarian.”³⁶

As for the fourth category: in introducing the issue of heresy, Duran defines it by implication: “I say that if we imagine one who contradicts this hypothesis—[saying,] that is, that there is no cutting off and eternal punishment—it is not proper according to our faith that heresy [minut] be attributed to him.”³⁷ This can be compared profitably with Crescas’s own fourth category, which consists of doctrines and theories about which the Torah gives no definitive teaching and “one who does not believe in them is not called a heretic.”³⁸ This last category takes up the final quarter of Or ha-Shem, where Crescas gives his own opinion on all of these various matters, including the particular topic at hand in Duran’s responsum—that is, punishment after death—which appears in Crescas under the title “Paradise and Hell.”³⁹ Finally, one should note that Crescas himself denies that all souls survive death.⁴⁰

Since Duran’s letter is undated, could it possibly have been written after 1410 or 1412, in which case he would likely have known Or ha-Shem? If that were the case, one might think he would simply have followed the straightforward positive categorization used by Crescas. One wonders, too, to whom this letter was written in the first place. It is addressed rather perfunctorily to “the lord scholar” (“ha-adon ha-ḥoqer”), which is certainly tantalizing. Sadly, however, we know too little about this text to do more than speculate.

But let me note one more possible point of contact. In Ma‘aseh Efod, as we will see in Chapter 11, Duran’s scheme for meditating on the text of the Hebrew Bible focuses on that text’s power when held in the memory. Duran’s favorite term for this inner contemplation of the Bible is “keeping in the heart” (shemirah ba-lev, or shemirah ba-levavot); it is a concept that engrosses him throughout the introduction to Ma‘aseh Efod, usually coupled with the term “remembering” (zikhronah). In order to keep the Torah in the heart, one needs to know it, and to that crucial end, Duran in Ma‘aseh Efod lays out fifteen rules for enhancing the memory.⁴¹ For as he explains in introducing them, proper study and comprehension of the Bible can be effectuated only when one knows the material by heart.⁴²

I am tempted to see an echo of Duran’s emphasis on memorization, and even meditation, in Hasdai Crescas’s introduction to Or ha-Shem, where he notes that one cannot perform the commandments without knowing them, and continues:

Since knowing the commandments of the Torah is the straight path that brings [one] to [ultimate] perfection, it is therefore proper that knowing [them] be attained in the most perfect fashion possible; perfecting [one’s] knowledge of the words and reviewing them, which should be done in three [ways]: with careful examination of them, and with simple understanding, and with keeping and remembering them…. And keeping and remembering them is either by abbreviating them, or by presenting qualities that are the foundations and cornerstones of the Oral Torah in the form of signs [simanim], [since] one of the mnemonic techniques [ofnei ha-zekhirah ha-takhbuliyit] is to make signs for subjects so that one does not forget them. And all the more so with that which the Torah commanded about meditating on them always, for all this is the root and great foundation of keeping and remembering them.⁴³

That is to say, the salvific “knowing the commandments of the Torah” is a matter of learning the words and turning them over in your mind, which should be achieved in three areas, first by careful examination, which means learning the words accurately, then through a general grasp of their meaning, and then by “keeping and remembering” them. This last phrase, as Crescas goes on to elaborate, is associated with memorization and, in particular, mnemonic techniques. True, where Duran focuses on the text of the Hebrew Bible, Crescas is concerned with knowing the Law. But it would not be surprising if Crescas had read Ma‘aseh Efod and associated the phrases used by Duran with advice for improving one’s memory of halakhah.