United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To return to Bahya's arguments in favor of the unity of God, we proceed to show that dualism would lead to absurd conclusions. Thus if there is more than one creator, they are either of the same substance or they are not. If they are, then the common substance is the real creator, and we have unity once more.
In Bahya's treatment of the divine attributes we already have in brief the main elements which Maimonides almost a century later made classic, namely, the distinction between essential and active attributes, and the idea that the former are to be understood as denying their opposites, i. e., as being in their nature not positive but negative.
Neither of these two data being vouched for by any but their respective authors, who lived a long time after Bahya, we are left to such indirect evidence as may be gathered from the content of Bahya's ethical work, the "Duties of the Hearts."
The reader will recognize in this two-fold classification Saadia's division of the laws into rational and traditional, and Bahya's classification of duties of the heart and duties of the limbs. This second class includes Ibn Ezra's second and third classes, tongue and action. The problem of evil Ibn Ezra solves by saying that from God comes good only.
Gabirol's high flights in the "Fons Vitæ" have little in common with Bahya's modest and brief outline of the familiar doctrines of the existence, unity and attributes of God, for which he claims no originality, and which serve merely as the background for his contribution to religious ethics.
We have already seen in the introduction that Bahya was indebted for his ideas to the ascetic and Sufic literature of the Arabs, and Yahuda, who is the authority in this matter of Bahya's sources, has shown recently that among the quotations of the wise men of other nations in Bahya's work are such as are attributed by the Arabs to Jesus and the gospels, to Mohammed and his companions, to the early caliphs, in particular the caliph Ali, to Mohammedan ascetics and Sufis.
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.
Bahya's division is identical with neither the one nor the other. Ethical practice may be purely external and a matter of the limbs, quite as much as sacrifice and ceremonial ritual.
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.
That his purpose is practical and not theoretical is clear from his definition of what he calls the "acknowledgment of the unity of God with full heart," not to speak of the title of the book itself, the meaning of which we explained at the beginning of this section, and the nine chapters in Bahya's work following upon the first, which constitute its real essence and purpose.
Word Of The Day