rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 329
philosophical theory which underlay Bahya’s pious guide to spirituality
was derived from the Neoplatonic tradition: for Bahya, the soul of each
individual had been placed in the body by divine decree, and it is the
task of a spiritual life to enable the soul to grow, despite the temptations
of the body, through the inspiration of both reason and the Torah.^21
The penetration of Neoplatonic notions into Jewish thought reached
a peak with the philosophical musings of Bahya’s contemporary in
Spain, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, whose literary output in a short and obscure
life was astonishing. Ibn Gabirol’s main work of philosophy, the Fons
Vitae (‘The Fount of Life’), was originally composed in Arabic but,
apart from a few passages of the original Arabic quoted by Moses ibn
Ezra, it is preserved only in a Latin translation and a few passages trans-
lated into Hebrew in later centuries. Its contents are so purely concerned
with metaphysics that, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread use
of the Latin version by Christians under the name ‘Avicebron’, it was
identified as a Jewish text only in the nineteenth century. Ibn Gabirol
tackled the existence of the material world despite the entirely spiritual
nature of God by postulating that the world had been created by a chain
of emanations in which the initial divine will still has some presence.
The notion of man as a microcosm, in whom part of the intelligible
world subsists alongside the corporeal, enabled ibn Gabirol to argue
that men have the ability to grasp spiritual forms by their own power.
Neither ibn Gabirol’s metaphysical philosophy nor his secular Heb-
rew poetry on wine and friendship was closely connected to previous
Jewish traditions, and it is perhaps therefore unsurprising that his trea-
tise on ‘the improvement of moral qualities’ argued for an ethical system
which would be valid for all religious traditions:
We have named our work, ‘The Improvement of the Qualities’, for the ben-
efit largely of the masses, in order that they may gain a knowledge of the
nature of the noble, and understand this matter through various methods of
expression. We have introduced in the following whatever logical and dem-
onstrable arguments have occurred to us; and, furthermore, as far as we are
able, have adduced Scriptural verses. Nor, after first giving these, do I see any
harm in briefly citing some utterances of the wise; and I shall follow this by
adorning (what I have said) with verses of litterateurs, and some verses from
the poets, and anything uncommon that occurs to me, and whatever else I
can recall, so that my book may be complete in all its parts.Such ethical literature, in the same genre as Saadiah’s ethical treatise a
century earlier (see p. 280), sought to define not just correct behaviour, as