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Updated: June 24, 2025
The latter tells us that David Al Mukammas is said to have associated with Saadia, who learned a good deal from him, but the matter is not certain. If this account be true we have a second Jewish philosopher who preceded Saadia. Petersburg.
Besides, if there were more than one creator, it is possible that a dispute might arise between them in reference to the creation. But all this time no such thing has happened, nature being always the same. Hence God is one. So far as Bahya proves the unity of God he does not go beyond Saadia, some of whose arguments are reproduced by him, and one or two of a Neo-Platonic character added besides.
Israeli, we have seen, was interested in science before Saadia. As a physician he was probably more at home in purely physical discussions than Saadia. But there is no evidence that he had the larger interest of the Gaon of Sura, namely, to construct a system of Judaism upon the basis of scientific doctrine.
Sura in Babylonia, where Saadia was the head of the academy, was the chief centre of Jewish learning, and Saadia was the heir in the main line of Jewish development as it passed through the hands of lawgiver and prophet, scribe and Pharisee, Tanna and Amora, Saburai and Gaon. As the head of the Sura academy he was the intellectual representative of the Jewry and Judaism of his day.
The division of the soul into the three faculties of reason, spirit and desire is Platonic, as we have already seen, and the attempt to base an ethic on the proper relation between the powers of the soul also goes back to Plato. But Saadia tries to show that the Bible too favors this conception. His meaning is that it is vain to pursue any one thing to the exclusion of every other.
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.
Possibly the example of Islam was lacking in Israeli's environment, as he does not seem to be acquainted with the theories and discussions of the Mutakallimun, and draws his information from Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic sources. Saadia was in the very midst of Arab speculation as is evident from the composition of his chef d'œuvre, "Emunot ve-Deot," Beliefs and Opinions.
Saadia is strongly opposed to any such doctrine. It is unlikely, he says, that an eternal substance having neither form, condition, measure, place or time, should change into a body or bodies having those accidents; or that a wise being, not subject to change or influence, or comprehensibility should choose to make himself into a body subject to all of these.
And thus while we see him in the manner of Saadia and Bahya follow the good old method, credited by Maimonides to the Mutakallimun, of starting his metaphysics with proofs of the world's creation, and basing the existence of God, his unity, incorporeality and other attributes on the creation of the world as a foundation, he turns into an uncompromising opponent of these much despised apologetes when he comes to discuss the nature of God's attributes, of the divine will, and of the nature of evil.
In respect to the details of ethical doctrine and the classification of the virtues, we find at first the Platonic virtues and their relation to the parts of the soul, in Saadia, Pseudo-Bahya, Joseph Ibn Zaddik and even Abraham Ibn Daud. In combination with this Platonic basis expression is given also to the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean.
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