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Updated: June 11, 2025
This latter statement Crescas does not wish to be taken in its literal strictness, nor should the analogy with the burning fire be pressed too far. For it would then follow even if a person is physically compelled to do evil that he would be punished, just as the fire would not refrain from burning a person who was thrown into it by force.
The other sense of the word unity Crescas proves by reason. If a particular commandment is not a principle, which means that a fundamental or derivative dogma cannot itself be a commandment, but must lie at the basis of all commandments, the question arises whence come these principles, and who is to warrant their truth.
The Arabs made use of this suggestion and endeavored to bring the phenomenon of prophecy under the same head. The Jewish philosophers, with the exception of Judah Halevi and Hasdai Crescas, followed suit. The suggestion that prophecy is a psychological phenomenon related to true dreams is found as early as Isaac Israeli. Judah Halevi mentions it with protest.
Hasdai Crescas went still farther and entirely repudiated the authority of Aristotle, substituting will and emotion for rationalism and logical inference. Not knowledge of God as logically demonstrated is the highest aim of man, but love of God. But even in his opposition Crescas leans on Maimonides's principles, which he takes up one by one and refutes.
There is still another alternative, viz., that one agent controls the whole world and the other does nothing. Here speculation can go no further, and we must have recourse to Scripture, which says, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." We see here that Crescas is interested in discrediting the logic chopping of the philosophers.
He follows the beaten track, reviews the classic views of Maimonides, takes advantage of the criticisms of Gersonides and Crescas, and settles the problems sometimes one way sometimes another, without ever suggesting anything new. Accordingly it will not be worth our while to reproduce his discussions here. It will suffice briefly to indicate his position on the more important problems.
Among the laws, too, the conventional law takes its principles, freedom and purpose, from political philosophy. Whence does divine law take its principles? The existence of God can be demonstrated philosophically from premises going back to axioms and first principles. But this is not true of Prophecy and Providence. The answer Albo gives to this question is that of Judah Halevi and Crescas.
One other phase must be mentioned to complete the parallelism of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and that is the anti-philosophic attitude adopted by Judah Halevi and Hasdai Crescas.
It remains then for Crescas to give his own views on this problem which, he says, the philosophers are unable to solve satisfactorily, and the Bible alone is to be relied upon. At the same time he does give a logical proof which in reality is not different from one of the proofs given by Maimonides himself.
Having thus defined his attitude and purpose, Albo proceeds to criticize the list of dogmas laid down by Maimonides and modified by Crescas, and then defends his own view.
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