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Updated: June 25, 2025
Ibn Zaddik does refer to the doctrine of the divine Will, which plays such an important rôle in the philosophy of Gabirol and of the Pseudo-Empedoclean writings, which are supposed to have been Gabirol's source. But here, too, the negative side of Ibn Zaddik's doctrine is developed at length, while the positive side is barely alluded to in a hint.
The true God, urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been the governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the origin of the term Jew," says Dion Cassius, born in the second century.
But there is not the same evidence in the earlier writings of Isaac Israeli, Saadia, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Gabirol, Bahya Ibn Pakuda, Judah Halevi. They had picked up Aristotelian ideas and principles, but they had also absorbed ideas and concepts from other schools, Greek as well as Arabian, and unconsciously combined the two.
There are certain details also which are common to both, such as the analogies of irradiation of light or flowing of water used to represent the process of creation, the position of the Will, the existence of matter in spiritual beings, and so on, though some of these ideas are common to all Neo-Platonic systems, and the Kabbala may have had access to the same sources as Gabirol.
Gabirol himself can scarcely have had much influence on our author, as the distinctive doctrine of the "Fons Vitæ" is absent in our treatise.
If it is God's will, and God is the One in whom there can be no distinctions, we have only a new word, and nothing is solved. If on human analogy we are inclined to take the will seriously, we are endangering God's unity. This dilemma Gabirol does not succeed in removing.
But the selections of Falaquera did not seem to find many readers either, as may be inferred from the fact that so far only one single manuscript of this translation is known. En revanche, as the French would say, the Christian Scholastics of the thirteenth century made Gabirol their own and studied him diligently.
What he said or wrote could not be ignored whether people liked it or not. They could afford to ignore a Gabirol even, or an Ibn Daud. But Maimonides must be reckoned with. The greater the man, the greater the alertness of lesser, though not less independent, spirits, to guard against the enslavement of all Judaism to one authority, no matter how great.
We have in these pages followed their ideas Saadia, Gabirol, Ibn Zaddik, Abraham Ibn Daud. The latter in particular anticipated Maimonides in almost all his ideas. None had the effect of upsetting the theological equilibrium of Jewry. Everyone had his admirers, no doubt, as well as his opponents.
Those examples which I must present are given in a new and hitherto unpublished translation by Mrs. Lucas. These lovers' tears often meet us in the Hebrew poems. Ibn Gabirol speaks of his tears as fertilizing his heart and preserving it from crumbling into dust.
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