Philosophers of the Middle Ages

Aristotle's psychology was also adopted in part, the soul being conceived of as the form or entelechy of the body and not as a pre-existing and distinct entity which was placed in the body, as the Platonic view has it. The different parts and fac ulties of the soul, the senses—internal and external—etc., were also understood in the Aristotelian manner. And similarly Aris totle's doctrine of dreams and divination and his conception of the Active Intellect were adapted to the Jewish doctrines of prophecy and immortality. Prophecy was explained on psycho logical principles as being a combination of reason and imagina tion, Moses alone being an exception in that his prophetic gift was wholly supernatural; while the immortality of the soul was ascribed only to the intellect or reason, which is immaterial. The Active Intellect of Aristotle, which could be conceived of in various ways, since Aristotle's description of it is obscure, was, in Arabic fashion, identified with the mover or spirit of the lunar sphere, and was regarded by Gersonides as the bestower of the prophetic information upon the reason of the human individual. The surviving human reason is after death absorbed in the Active Intellect, to whose illumination it owes all its theoretical knowl edge, the natural knowledge of the philosopher as well as the supernatural of the prophet.

The ethics of Aristotle played a less important part in Jew ish philosophy, as it did not come in direct conflict with any specific Biblical or Rabbinic doctrine. Nevertheless Maimonides made use of Aristotle's ideas in his commentary on the ethical treatise of the Mishnah called Abot. In his introduction to his commentary he lays down the Aristotelian analysis of the facul ties of the human soul as the basis of his ethical doctrine and takes over from Aristotle the definition of virtue as the rational activity of the soul acquired as a permanent possession, the divi sion of the virtues into theoretical and practical, and the doc trine of the mean, namely, that in those fields of human conduct to which the terms virtue and vice can be applied, excess and defect are both vices, while virtue is represented by the mean. Thus in the matter of spending money, excess in spending is ex travagance, a vice, defect in spending is niggardliness, also a vice, moderation in spending is the virtue, and the same holds true in other lines of conduct.

More important, however, than the borrowing of these specific ethical doctrines is the general spirit of Aristotelian rationalism.

which Maimonides and others apply to the laws of the Penta teuch. Despite the statement in the Talmud that the so-called "statutes" (Heb. hukkim) represent the arbitrary will of God and should not be enquired into nor explained in a humanitarian spirit where no such interpretation is given in the Bible itself, Mai monides devotes a large part of his Guide to a rationalization and ethicization of the Pentateuchal laws. And where either seems im possible, as in the elaborate institution of sacrifices, he makes bold to brand the whole as superstition. The Israelites of that time, he says, under the influence of custom and the example of the surrounding nations, were attached to the sacrificial rites which they practised in honour of strange gods. It would have been impossible to wean them away from idol worship and to convert them to the worship of the true God if sacrifices were abolished. Hence a concession was made to the customs of the people and they were told to offer sacrifices to the Lord, in the hope that in the course of time as the true faith would educate them and purify and refine their conception of God, the sacrifices would fall away of themselves.

An important problem which pertains equally to ethics and theology was the doctrine of free will in its relation to the Di vine attribute of omniscience. The doctrine of freedom is a neces sary consequence of Divine justice. Reward and punishment, a fundamental dogma of Judaism, cannot be justified if man is not free to determine his will to do or to abstain. But if man is free, God's knowledge is limited in so far, because freedom means in the last analysis causelessness, and the causeless is from the nature of the case unknowable in advance of its occur rence. Maimonides's solution is that this argument does not hold of the Divine Being who is transcendent. He can know the un knowable. Ibn Daud and Gersonides admit that the causeless is as such unknowable and hence unknown to God also, but om niscience must not be understood in a sense which would make its meaning contradictory and absurd, any more than the attri bute of omnipotence can be taken to mean that God can now make that which happened yesterday not to have happened, or to make a tree grow artificial flowers. Hasdai Crescas, whom we class

among the anti-rationalists, saves God's omniscience by limiting human freedom, yet maintains the justice of reward and punish ment by pointing out that such is the law of things, and there is a necessary connection between wrong-doing and suffering as there is between swallowing poison and death.

The Anti-Rationalists.

Among those who were conversant with the philosophical views of the day, neo-Platonic and Aris totelian, but refused to make of them a procrustean bed upon which to stretch the doctrines of Judaism, the foremost are Judah Halevi (fl. I 2th century) and Hasdai Crescas. Judah Halevi was a poet and had no confidence in the theories and arguments of the philosophers. In the first place he distinguished between the method and aim of philosophy on the one hand and those of Judaism on the other. The philosopher uses the discursive reason and his aim is knowledge. Whether his subject matter is God or the shape and size of the earth, or the identity and number of the elements, his methods and aims are alike. Judaism is not a rationalistic philosophy, its purpose is not to impart theoretical information. Judaism is a mode of life based upon the historic fact of the Divine revelation to Moses and Israel on Sinai and His election of the people of Israel to bear testimony to His ex istence and will. The prophets are the teachers of Israel and not the philosophers. The prophets knew God directly and not through logical inference. They were in communion with God, having personal experience of Him, and were attached to Him in love and devotion. They speak of Him with enthusiasm and their enthusiasm is contagious and makes disciples. The prophets of Israel constitute a higher species of being than the ordinary Israelite. Judah Halevi does not therefore subscribe to the Maimonidean conception of prophecy which attempts to ap proximate it to the natural phenomena of the acquisition of knowledge. Judah Halevi maintains the wholly supernatural character of prophecy and the objective reality of the prophetic visions. What these visions actually were he does not attempt to say. The messengers or angels who appeared to the prophets may have been specially created, he says, from the fine elemen tary bodies, or they may have been the spirits of the spheres or abstract Intelligences of which the philosophers spoke. Halevi maintains a wholesome restraint and abstains from dogmatism as to the precise nature of these theophanies, but he has no doubt of their objective reality, since all the prophets testify to having seen them. We apply the same test, he says, to the phenomena appearing to our senses. We test the objective reality of such appearances by the testimony of the generality of mankind. Prophetic visions, similarly, are tested by their appearance to all members of the prophetic guild.

Nor does Halevi find it necessary to find human reasons for the ritual and ceremonial laws of the Pentateuch. The sacrifices are not objectionable to him, nor inconsistent with the nature of God. It is presumptuous to say that because we do not under stand the significance of sacrifices as determining spiritual health, they must be given a symbolic meaning or rejected altogether. For neither do we know what determines the physical health of plant and animal, and why a certain proportion of elementary mixture constitutes health and a slight deviation therefrom disease and even death. Israel is superior to other nations, Palestine to other countries and Hebrew to all other languages. Prophecy is inseparable from Palestine and Israel alone had prophets. No philosopher ever achieved prophetic inspiration.

Judah Halevi passes in review all the principal doctrines of the philosophy current in his day and subjects them to a rigorous and unsympathetic criticism. Some of these theories, he shows, are arbitrary and without any evidence, while others are clearly untenable as they do not account for the facts. He is particularly opposed to the philosophic doctrine of immortality, that it is due to the intellectual nature of the soul and is dependent upon the knowledge which the soul possesses. The philosophic re quirement for immortality, Halevi objects, is either too small or too great, according to the meaning one attaches to the word knowledge.