According to Israeli, God creates through his will and power. The two things that were created first were form, identified with wisdom, and matter, which is designated as the genus of genera (the classes of things) and which is the substratum of everything, not only of bodies but also of incorporeal substances. This conception of matter apparently was derived from the Greek Neoplatonists Plotinus (205–270) and Proclus (c. 410–485), particularly from the latter. In Proclus’s opinion, generality was one of the main criteria for determining the ontological priority of an entity (its place in the hierarchy of being). Matter, because of its indeterminacy, obviously has a high degree of generality; consequently, it figures among the entities having ontological priority. According to the Neoplatonic view, which Israeli seems to have adopted, the conjunction of matter and form gives rise to the intellect. A light sent forth from the intellect produces the rational soul, which in turn gives rise to the vegetative soul.
Israeli was perhaps the first Jewish philosopher to attribute prophecy to the influence of the intellect on the faculty of imagination. According to Israeli, this faculty receives from the intellect spiritual forms that are intermediate between corporeality and spirituality. This explanation implies that these forms, “with which the prophets armed themselves,” are inferior to purely intellectual cognitions. Solomon ibn Gabirol
In its essentials, the schema of creation and emanation propounded by Isaac Israeli and his Neoplatonic source (or sources) was taken over by Solomon ibn Gabirol, a celebrated 11th-century Hebrew liturgical poet who was also the earliest Jewish philosopher of Spain. His chief philosophical work, written in Arabic but preserved in full only in a 12th-century Latin translation titled Fons vitae (“Fountain of Life”), makes no reference to Judaism or to specifically Jewish doctrines and is a dialogue between a disciple and a master who teaches him true philosophical knowledge. Despite its prolixity and many contradictions, it is an impressive work. Few medieval texts so effectively communicate the Neoplatonic conception of the existence of a number of planes of being that differ according to their ontological priority, the derivative and inferior ones constituting a reflection in a grosser mode of existence of those that are prior and superior.
One of Ibn Gabirol’s central concerns was the divine will, which appears to be both part of and separate from the divine essence. Infinite according to its essence, the will is finite in its action. It is described as pervading everything that exists and as being the intermediary between the divine essence and matter and form. Will was one of the traditional terms used by medieval theologians to identify the entity intermediate between the transcendent Deity and the world or the aspect of the Deity involved in creation. According to a statement in Fons vitae, matter derives from the divine essence, whereas form derives from the divine will. This suggests that the difference between matter and form has some counterpart in the Godhead and also that universal matter is superior to universal form. Some of Ibn Gabirol’s statements seem to support the superiority of universal matter; other passages, however, appear to imply the superiority of universal form.
Form and matter, whether universal or particular, exist only in conjunction. All things, with the sole exception of God, are constituted through the union of the two, the intellect no less than corporeal substance. In fact, the intellect is the first being in which universal matter and form are conjoined. The intellect contains and encompasses all things. It is through the grasp of the various planes of being, through ascending in knowledge to the world of the intellect and apprehending what is above it—the divine will and the world of the Deity—that humans may “escape death” and reach “the source of life.” Judah ha-Levi
Judah ben Samuel ha-Levi (c. 1075–1141), another celebrated Hebrew poet from Spain, was the first medieval Jewish thinker to base his thought consciously and consistently on arguments drawn from Jewish history. His views are set forth in an Arabic dialogue, al-Hazari (Hebrew Sefer ha-Kuzari), the full title of which is translated as “The Book of Proof and Argument in Defense of the Despised Faith.” This work is usually called Kuzari—i.e., “the Khazar.”
Basing his narrative on the historical conversion to Judaism of the Khazars (c. 740), a Turkic-speaking people in central Eurasia, ha-Levi relates that their king, a pious man who did not belong to any of the great monotheistic religions, dreamed of an angel who said to him, “Your intentions are pleasing to the Creator, but your works are not.” To find the correct way to please God, the king sought guidance from a philosopher, from a Christian, from a Muslim, and finally—after hesitating to invite a representative of a people degraded by historical misfortune—from a Jewish scholar, who then converted him to Judaism. The angel’s words in the king’s dream may be regarded as a kind of revelation. Ha-Levi used this element of the story to suggest that it is not the spontaneous activity of reason that impels human beings to undertake the quest for the true religion but the gift of prophecy—or at least a touch of the prophetic faculty (or a knowledge of the revelations of the past).
The argument of the philosopher whose advice is sought by the king confirms this point. This disquisition is a brilliant piece of writing that lays bare the essential differences between the Aristotelian God, who is wholly indifferent to human individuals, and the God of the Jewish religion. The God of the philosophers, who is pure intellect, is not concerned with the works of human beings; moreover, the cultural activities to which the angel clearly refers—activities that involve both mind and body—cannot, from a philosophical point of view, either help or hinder humans in the pursuit of the philosophers’ supreme goal, the attainment of union with the active intellect, a “light” of the divine nature. This union was supposed to confer knowledge of all intelligible things on the individual; the supreme goal, therefore, was purely intellectual in nature.
In opposition to the philosopher’s faith, the religion of the Jewish scholar in the Kuzari is based on the fact that God may have a close, direct relationship with humans, who are not conceived primarily as beings endowed with intellect. The postulate that God can have intercourse with a creature made of the disgusting materials that compose the human body is scandalous to the king and prevents his acceptance of the doctrine concerning prophecy, expounded by the Muslim sage (just as the extraordinary nature of the Christological dogmas deters him from adopting Christianity).
The Jewish scholar argues that it is contemplation not of the cosmos but of Jewish history that procures knowledge of God. Ha-Levi was aware of the odium attached to the doctrine of the superiority of one particular nation; he held, however, that this teaching alone explains God’s dealings with humanity, which, like many other things, reason is unable to grasp. The controversies of the philosophers serve as proof of the failure of human intelligence to find valid solutions to the most important problems.
Ha-Levi’s dialogue was also directed against the Karaites. He shows the necessity and celebrates the efficacy of a blind, unquestioning adhesion to tradition, which the Karaites rejected. Yet he expounds a theology of Jewish exile that seems to have been influenced by Karaite doctrine. According to ha-Levi, even in exile the course of Jewish history is not determined like that of other nations by natural causes, such as material strength or weakness; the decisive factor is whether the Jews are religiously observant or disobedient. The advent of Christianity and Islam, in his view, prepares other nations for conversion to Judaism, an event that will occur in the eschatological period at the end of history. Other Jewish thinkers, c. 1050–c. 1150