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Updated: June 25, 2025
Shem Tob ibn Falaquera, in the brief introduction which he appends to his epitome of the "Mekor Hayim" says, "It seems to me that Solomon ibn Gabirol follows in his book the views of the ancient philosophers as we find them in a book composed by Empedocles concerning the 'Five Substances. This book is based upon the principle that all spiritual substances have a spiritual matter; that the form comes from above and the matter receives it from below, i. e., that the matter is a substratum and bears the form upon it."
This absolute substance, which is simple and spiritual, seems to be identical with Gabirol's "substantia quæ sustinet decem prædicamenta," the substance which supports the ten categories. Gabirol means by it that which remains of a corporeal substance when we take away from it everything that qualifies it as being here or there, of a particular nature or size, in a given relation, and so on.
In the Neo-Platonic writers, such as Isaac Israeli, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Moses Ibn Ezra, Pseudo-Bahya, Abraham Bar Hiyya, and so on, we also find reference to the World Soul and its emanation from Intelligence.
Not only the sublunar things, subject to generation and decay, but the higher incorporeal things, also, are in essence two, i. e., are composed of two elements, subject and predicate. God alone is One; he is subject only and not predicate. And Ibn Ezra also has some allusion to the divine Will as taught by Gabirol.
The cosmic process is conceived there as necessary and impersonal. And but for the introduction of the Will in the "Fons Vitæ" we should be forced to understand Gabirol in the same way. The difficulty in Neo-Platonism is that God is at the same time transcendent and, through his powers or emanations, immanent in the world.
In so far as a reader of the "Duties of the Hearts" recognizes here and there an idea met with in Gabirol's "Fons Vitæ," there can scarcely be any doubt that the latter is the more original of the two. Gabirol did not borrow his philosophy or any part thereof from Bahya.
For an act without a purpose is vain and hence bad. This purpose cannot have been egoistic, since God is without need, being above pleasure and pain. The purpose must therefore have been the well-being of his creatures. With Gabirol the scene of Jewish intellectual activity changes from the east to the west. Prior to the middle of the tenth century the centre of Jewish learning was in Babylonia.
These men composed an encyclopædia of fifty-one treatises in which is combined Aristotelian logic and physics with Neo-Platonic metaphysics and theology. In turn such Jewish writers as Ibn Gabirol, Bahya, Ibn Zaddik, Judah Halevi, Moses and Abraham Ibn Ezra, were much indebted to the Brethren of Purity. This represents the Neo-Platonic influence in Jewish philosophy.
I hope he will not blame me, Gabirol continues, if I do not bring together all the reasons and the scriptural passages to prove this, for human flesh is weak, especially in my case on account of my vexatious experiences and disappointments. Mercy is related to hearing in Exod.
Thus God as a Being absolutely unknowable, of whom negations alone are true just because he is the acme of perfection and bears no analogy to the imperfect things of our world; matter in our world as the origin of evil, and the existence of matter in the intelligible world all these ideas will meet us again in Ibn Gabirol, in Ibn Daud, in Maimonides, some in one, some in the other.
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