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Updated: June 26, 2025
In Israeli, Gabirol and the other Jewish Neo-Platonists, it occupies the same place as the Nous in Plotinus. In Bahya, whose taint of Neo-Platonism is not even skin deep, there is no universal Reason spoken of. But we do not really know what his ideas may have been on the subject, as he does not develop them in this direction.
In selecting the ten general and inclusive principles, Bahya lays down as the first and most fundamental the doctrine of the deity, or as it is called in the works of the Kalam, the Unity.
The third is devoted to a discussion of the existence, unity, incorporeality and other attributes of God, based upon the doctrine of the creation of the world. This bears the stamp of the Kalam, and is indebted to the writings of Saadia, Bahya and Joseph al-Basir.
Then Neo-Platonism and Kalam combined, or pure Neo-Platonism, in Bahya, Gabirol, Ibn Zaddik and the two Ibn Ezras, Abraham and Moses. In Judah Halevi, so far as philosophy is represented, we have Neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. Finally in Ibn Daud and Maimonides, Neo-Platonism is reduced to the vanishing point, and Aristotelianism is in full view and in possession of the field.
It had been known for a number of years that there was a manuscript treatise in Arabic on the soul, which was attributed on the title page to Bahya. The original Arabic was edited by Goldziher in 1907. The Arabic title is "Maʿani al-Nafs," and should be translated "Concepts of the soul," or "Attributes of the soul."
And yet, Bahya complains, despite the great importance of these duties, very few are the men who observed them even in the generations preceding ours, not to speak of our own days when even the external ceremonies are neglected, much more so the class of precepts under discussion.
He does not seem to favor the atomic theory, but he devotes no special treatment to the subject, and in his arguments for creation as opposed to eternity he makes use of the Kalamistic concepts of substance and accident and composition and division. The same is true of Bahya Ibn Pakuda.
Saadia also discusses this view as the ninth of the twelve theories of creation treated by him, and refutes it more elaborately than Bahya, whose one argument is the last of Saadia's eight. In the treatment of creation Saadia is decidedly richer and more comprehensive in discussion, review and argumentation.
But as, in accordance with the second principle, the number of causes cannot be infinite, we must finally reach a first cause of the world before which there is no other, and this first made the world out of nothing. Before criticising this proof, from which Bahya infers more than is legitimate, we must prove the three original assumptions.
He laid under contribution his predecessors and contemporaries, Saadia, Bahya, Pseudo-Bahya, Gabirol; and his sympathies clearly lay with the general point of view represented by the last, and his Mohammedan sources; though he was enough of an eclectic to refuse to follow Gabirol, or the Brethren of Purity and the other Neo-Platonic writings, in all the details of their doctrine; and there is evidence of an attempt on his part to tone down the extremes of Neo-Platonic tendency and create a kind of level in which Aristotelianism and Platonism meet by compromising.
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