Problems of Jewish Philosophy

PROBLEMS OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY Judeo-Alexandrian School.—The main philosophical prob lem in Philo, apart from the general one of the relation between revelation and reason, which was discussed above, is the nature and attributes of God. Here Philo, Under the cultural influences of his day which are only vaguely understood, deviated from the classical Greek philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics whom in eclectic fashion he ordinarily follows, as well as from the Old Testament. And herein consists his original contribution to philo sophic and theologic thought. The Biblical conception of God is in many parts frankly anthropomorphic. The classic philosophy of the Greeks depersonalized God to a great extent and thought of Him as disembodied thought or reason. Philo, on the other hand, conceived of God as transcendent, i.e., altogether unlike anything in human experience and hence unknowable and inconceivable to the human mind. His transcendence, moreover, makes it impos sible for Him to mould matter into a world, and hence His rela tion to the world is only indirect. Certain powers emanate from Him, constituting subordinate beings or divinities through which the world has taken shape. Chief among these and embracing them all is the Logos, which represents God's reason, though it is at the same time a distinct personality and is once referred to as the Son of God. It is through this Logos that the transcendent God moulds matter into a world and rules it as the soul rules the body.

This doctrine of the Logos, which must have been a stumbling block to the Jews, impairing, as it seemed, the basic monotheism of the Jewish religion, was eagerly accepted by the Church, and thereafter, in all Christian theology, patristic as well as scholastic, the Logos, incarnate in Jesus, was identified with the second per son of the Trinity. This was perhaps the reason why Philo's philosophy was never more than an episode in Jewish thought.

The Mediaeval Period.

In the loth century Judaism was divided into two sects, the Rabbinite and Karaite. They were divided on the question of the authority of the Rabbinic tradi tion. The Mishnah and the Talmud were rejected by the Karaites as authoritative interpretations of the Bible. To the Rabbinites, on the other hand, the Oral Law, as tradition was called, was coeval with the Written Law of Scripture and hence equally authoritative. Both of these schools of Judaism followed the example of the Arabs, who, in the East and later in Spain, were so enamoured with Greek scientific and philosophic thought that they assimilated the various phases of it with enthusiasm, and in the course of three or four centuries (from the 9th to the 12th) developed a rich literature of their own on the subjects of logic, ethics, metaphysics, mathematics, natural science and medicine. It stands to reason

that the Karaites, who were not bound by tradition, found their philosophic path less beset with difficulties than the Rabbinites, but on the whole the progress of the two was more or less parallel, since the fundamental theological and metaphysical dogmas were the same.

The main problems which concerned the Jewish philosophers in the middle ages may be classed under the following heads: God, the World, Man, his Soul, Conduct, Revelation, Reward and Pun ishment. All other problems of logic, physics and metaphysics were merely auxiliary or instrumental. They were studied as means to an end, the end being a true understanding of God and His relation to the world and particularly to man. As the pre dominant philosophy among the Arabs changed, so did the Jew ish thinkers pass from one point of view to another. And the Arabs, too, advanced from one mode of conceiving metaphysical problems to another according as more of ancient Greek philo sophical literature became known to them in Arabic transla tion. The succession of schools, therefore, in Arabic and Jew ish philosophy was not the same as among the Greeks, since it did not represent, as in the case of the originators, an immanent development based to a great degree on logical necessity and only incidentally affected by historical circumstances. Among the Arabs and the Jews, historical circumstances played a greater role than logical necessity. Thus the neo-Platonic point of view, which was the last stage in Greek thought, preceded, among the Arabs and the Jews, the Aristotelian stage, which was separated from neo-Platonism in the land of Greece by the intervening schools of the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics. At the same time it cannot be denied that there must have been an inher ent reason why the phase of philosophic thought which became permanent among the three religions in the middle ages was Aristotelianism. Peoples as unlike as the European Christians, the Mohammedan Arabs and the Jews agreed in making Aris totle the supreme authority where reason was concerned, and not Plato or Plotinus. It was probably because the rationalism of Aristotle was the extreme antithesis to the supernaturalism and mysticism of the several religions that the great desideratum was to harmonize them. Such harmony alone was able to produce the satisfaction that is felt in unity.