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Updated: May 28, 2025
Its spirit was antagonistic to the simplicity of the faith, and so, as it prevailed, was an influence much to be dreaded, and called forth the greatest energies of the Alexandrian school, in order to defeat it and nullify it. But its dangerous seeds remained to germinate a rationalistic theology, especially when united with the Neo-Platonic philosophy.
Such a way of conceiving redemption was far more dramatic, poignant, and individual than the Neo-Platonic; hence it was far more popular and better fitted to be a nucleus for religious devotion.
There is no doubt that this emphasis is due to Neo-Platonic influence, some of which may have come to Bahya from Gabirol, the rest probably from their common sources. We see, Bahya begins his discussion of the unity of God, that the causes are fewer than their effects, the causes of the causes still fewer, and so on, until when we reach the top there is only one.
Both were attributed to Aristotle in the middle ages by Jews and Arabs alike, but it has been shown recently that the former represents extracts from the works of Plotinus, the head of the Neo-Platonic school of philosophy, while the latter is derived from a treatise of Proclus, a Neo-Platonist of later date.
The philosophy of each school includes a view of the system of things as a whole. The philosopher still regarded the universe of knowledge as his province. But I must not pass it by without pointing out that the Neo-Platonic philosopher undertook to give an account of the origin, development, and end of the whole system of things.
This signifies that its trend of thought is Neo-Platonic, which combines Aristotelian physics with Platonic and Plotinian metaphysics, ethics and psychology. An examination of the book itself confirms Maimonides's judgment.
Plotinus left a successor in his disciple Porphyry, born at Tyre or at Batanea in Syria in 233. You see they were all West Asians, at least by birth: the first spiritual fruits of the Crest-Wave's influx there. In 273 he returned, Plotinus had died three years before, and opened a Neo-Platonic School of his own.
In the earliest times the mystic doctrine appears to have been a form of Jewish Gnosticism, speculation about the nature of God and His connection with the world. But it was not till the Middle Ages that Jewish mysticism received definite and separate literary expression, and by that time it was mixed up with a number of neo-Platonic and magical fancies and foreign theosophies.
This was the crucial point for the Gnostics. Some settled it in one way, some in another. The essential point common to them all was that to arrive at a true understanding of the Christ-idea, mere historical tradition was not enough, but that it must be sought either in the wisdom of the Mysteries, or in the Neo-Platonic philosophy which was derived from the same source.
It would seem as if the self-subsisting form and the two lights emanating from it are meant to represent the Intellect, Soul and Nature of the Neo-Platonic trinity respectively, and that Abraham bar Hiyya purposely changed the names and partly their functions in order to make the philosophical account agree with the story of creation in Genesis.
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