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Updated: June 26, 2025
But there is a decided advance in the analysis which follows, in which Bahya shows that there are various kinds of unity in our experience, and that the unity of God is unique. We apply the term one to a class, a genus, a species, or an individual. In all of these the multiplicity of parts is visible.
There seems little doubt now that despite the ascription on the title page of the manuscript, the treatise is not a work of Bahya. It is very unlikely that anything written by so distinguished an author as Bahya, whose "Duties of the Hearts" was the most popular book in the middle ages, should have been so thoroughly forgotten as to have left no trace in Jewish literature.
The Kalamistic proofs for the unity of God are similarly identical for the most part with those found in Saadia, Bahya and others, and we need only mention Maimonides's criticism that they are inadequate unless we assume with the Mutakallimun that all atoms in the universe are of the same kind.
Bahya as well as the anonymous author refer, in the introductions to their respective works, to their sources or to their own previous writings. But there is no reference either in the "Duties of the Hearts" to the "Attributes of the Soul," or in the latter to the former.
The proof of the first principle that a thing cannot make itself is identical in Bahya with the second of the three demonstrations employed by Saadia for the same purpose. It is that the thing must either have made itself before it existed or after it existed. But both are impossible. Before it existed it was not there to make itself; after it existed there was no longer anything to make.
We see that Judah Halevi is at one with Bahya and Joseph ibn Zaddik in his understanding of the divine attributes. The slight difference in the mode of classification is not essential. This God chose Israel and gave them the ten commandments in order to convince them that the Law originated from God and not from Moses.
The Sabbath leads to the belief in the exodus from Egypt and the creation of the world; and hence inculcates belief in God. In his views of ethics Judah Halevi is more human than Bahya, being opposed to all manner of asceticism. The law, he says, does not demand excess in any direction. Every power and faculty must be given its due.
We have followed its ascending curve from Saadia through Gabirol, Bahya and Ibn Daud to its highest point in Maimonides, and we likewise traced its descent through Gersonides, Crescas and Albo. We took account of its essential nature as being a serious and conscientious attempt to define a Jewish Weltanschauung in the midst of conflicting claims of religions and philosophies.
But the combination of these two, negative and active, as the only kinds of divine attributes is not found in Jewish literature before Bahya. It is worth noting also that Bahya does not lay down the three attributes, Power, Wisdom and Life as fundamental or essential in the manner of the Christians, the Arab Mutakallimun, and the Jewish Saadia.
In the manner of Bahya he points out the importance of divine service and obedience to the commandments of God, viewing man's duties to his maker as an expression of gratitude, which everyone owes to his benefactor. Like Bahya he compares God's benefactions with those of one man to another to show the infinite superiority of the former, and the greater duty which follows therefrom.
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