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Updated: September 2, 2025
A problem that occupied the minds of the Mutakallimun, Arabs as well as Karaites, but which Maimonides does not discuss, is the purpose of God's giving commandments to those who he knew would remain unbelievers, and refuse to obey. That God's knowledge and man's freedom co-exist and neither destroys the other, has already been shown.
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.
Of the twelve propositions of the Mutakallimun enumerated by Maimonides as the basis of their doctrine of God, we shall select a few of the most important. The Theory of Atoms. The entire universe is made up of indivisible bodies having no magnitude. Their combination produces magnitude and corporeality. They are all alike.
The Mutakallimun refuse to believe that God's will is eternal, for fear of having a second eternal beside God. And so they say that whenever God wills, he creates a will for the purpose, and whenever he rejects anything he creates a "rejection" with which the objectionable thing is rejected. But this leads them to a worse predicament than the one from which they wish to escape, as we shall see.
But the combination of these two, negative and active, as the only kinds of divine attributes is not found in Jewish literature before Bahya. It is worth noting also that Bahya does not lay down the three attributes, Power, Wisdom and Life as fundamental or essential in the manner of the Christians, the Arab Mutakallimun, and the Jewish Saadia.
Maimonides is the first who takes deliberate account of the Mutakallimun, gives an adequate outline of the essentials of their teaching and administers a crushing blow to their principles as well as their method.
This was not the case with the system of philosophic doctrine. There we can see a development from Kalam through Neo-Platonism to Aristotelianism, and we accordingly classified the Jewish thinkers as Mutakallimun, Neo-Platonists or Aristotelians, or combinations in varying proportions of any two of the three systems mentioned.
As we shall see later, the entire chapter on the existence and unity of God, which introduces the ethical teachings of Bahya, moves in the familiar lines of Saadia, Al Mukammas, Joseph al Basir and the other Jewish Mutakallimun. There is besides a touch of Neo-Platonism in Bahya, which may be due to Gabirol as well as to Arabic sources.
It was the fashion to set the Kalam over against the philosophers to the disadvantage of the former, as being deficient in logical knowledge and prejudiced by theological prepossessions. This is attested by the attitude towards the Mutakallimun of Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Averroes. And Ibn Zaddik forms no exception to the rule.
Having disposed of the errors of the Mutakallimun, we must now present our own method of investigation into the nature of God. To know a thing, we investigate its four causes material, formal, efficient and final. What has no cause but is the cause of all things, cannot be known in this way. Still it is not altogether unknowable for this reason.
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