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Updated: June 24, 2025
For while it is true that the early Rabbanite thinkers like Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Zaddik and others moved in the circle of ideas of the Mohammedan Mutakallimun, that period had long since been passed. Judah Halevi criticized the Kalam, Ibn Daud is a thorough Aristotelian, and Maimonides gave the Kalam in Jewish literature its deathblow.
Be this as it may, it is interesting to know that Saadia having arrived as far as Bahya in his argument was not yet satisfied that he proved creation ex nihilo, and added special arguments for this purpose. Before proceeding to prove the unity of God, Bahya takes occasion to dismiss briefly a notion which scarcely deserves consideration in his eyes.
"My house," he says, "was an assembly place for the wise ... in my abode and within my walls were wealth and fame for the Torah and for those made great in its lore." Naturally, the active statesman had less leisure for his books than the exiled, fallen minister. So, too, with an earlier Jewish writer, Saadia. It is beyond our province to enter into his career, full of stress and storm.
This is proved simply by pointing out that the elements forming the composite are prior to it by nature, and hence the latter cannot be eternal, for nothing is prior to the eternal. This principle also is found in Saadia as the second of the four proofs in favor of creation. We have now justified our assumptions and hence have proved what?
Saadia does not speak of matter and form as constituting the essence of existing things; he does speak of substance and accident, which might lead us to believe that he held to the atomic theory, since he speaks of the accidents as coming and going one after the other, which suggests the constant creation spoken of by the Mutakallimun.
Second, brief compilations of precepts, like the works of Hefez ben Yazliah and the responsa of some geonim. Third, works of a philosophico-apologetic character, like those of Saadia, Al Mukammas and others, whose purpose it was to present in an acceptable manner the doctrines of the Torah, to prove them by logical demonstration, and to refute the criticisms and erroneous views of unbelievers.
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