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For our purpose it will not be necessary to reproduce the minute arguments here. We will select a few of the more important topics and state briefly Crescas's attitude. The doctrine of creation formed the central theme in Maimonides and Gersonides.
At this point Gersonides steps in in defence of human logic and sanity. He accuses Maimonides of not being quite honest with himself. Maimonides, he intimates, did not choose this position of his own free will a position scientifically quite untenable he was forced to it by theological exigencies. He felt that he must vindicate, by fair means or foul, God's knowledge of particulars.
If a man has merits and demerits, his good and evil deeds are balanced against each other, and the surplus determines his reward or punishment according to its nature. The influence of Aristotle on Jewish thought, which began as early as Saadia and grew in intensity as the Aristotelian writings became better known, reached its high water mark in Ibn Daud, Maimonides and Gersonides.
In the case of Gersonides this is easily explained. It seems he could read neither Latin nor Arabic and there was no Hebrew translation of the text of Aristotle. Averroes had taken in the fourteenth century the place of the Greek philosopher and instead of reading Aristotle all students read the works of the Commentator, as Averroes was called.
Gersonides, on the other hand, was a truer Aristotelian than Maimonides and he decided in favor of the eternity of matter, though not of this our world. The Jewish Mutakallimun, as we have seen, proved the existence of God from the fact that a created world implies a creator.
Among the men who devoted themselves to philosophical investigation in the century and a half after Maimonides's death, the greatest and most independent was without doubt Levi ben Gerson or Gersonides, as he is also called.
Levi ben Gerson does not labor in the expression of his thought. His linguistic instrument is quite adequate and yields naturally to the manipulation of the author. Gersonides, the minute logician and analyst, has no use for rhetorical flourishes and figures of speech.
Though a great admirer of Maimonides, on whose "Guide" he wrote a commentary, and whose thirteen articles of the creed he defended against the strictures of Crescas and Albo, he was nevertheless an outspoken opponent of the rationalistic attitude and has no phrases strong enough for such men as Albalag, Gersonides, Moses of Narbonne and others, whom he denounces as heretics and teachers of dangerous doctrines.
The most original contribution of Crescas to philosophical theory is his treatment of the ever living problem of freedom. So fundamental has it seemed for Judaism to maintain the freedom of the will that no one hitherto had ventured to doubt it. Maimonides no less than Judah Halevi, and with equal emphasis Gersonides, insist that the individual is not determined in his conduct.
He endeavored to show, moreover, that the doctrine of creation can be made more plausible than its opposite, and hence since creation is essential to Judaism, it must be regarded as a fundamental dogma. Gersonides could not see his way clear to accepting creation ex nihilo, among other things because as matter cannot come from form, the material world cannot come from God.
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