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And here the recent investigations of Yahuda, the latest authority on this subject and the editor of the Arabic text of Bahya's masterpiece , force upon us the conclusion that Bahya wrote after Gabirol. This leaves very little doubt that Bahya borrowed from Gazali and hence could not have written before the twelfth century.
Gazali began as a philosopher, then lost confidence in the logical method of proof, pointed to the contradictions of the philosophers, to their disagreements among themselves, and went over to the Sufis, the pietists and mystics of the Mohammedan faith.
There are a number of resemblances between Gazali and Halevi as Kaufmann has shown, and there is no doubt that skepticism in respect of the powers of the human reason on the one hand, and a deep religious sense on the other are responsible for the point of view of Gazali as well as Halevi.
He could not abide the philosophic exclusion from their natural theology of all that was racial and national and historic in religion, which was to him its very heart and innermost essence. In this attitude, too, we find an Arab prototype in the person of Al Gazali, who similarly attacked the philosophers on their own ground and found his consolation in the asceticism and mysticism of the Sufis.
He asks the question so often asked before, How can multiplicity come from unity? And after giving Ibn Sina's scheme of the emanation of the Intelligences one after the other, and criticizing it in the manner of Gazali and Maimonides, he gives his own solution that the variety and multiplicity of the world tends to one end, which is the order of the world.
David Kaufmann has shown that Judah Halevi's anti-philosophical attitude has much in common with that of the great Arab writer Al Gazali, from whom there is no doubt that he borrowed his inspiration.
Judah Halevi, influenced by Al Gazali, had already before Maimonides protested against this intellectualistic attitude in the name of a truer though more naive understanding of the Bible and Jewish history.
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