unreachable through the exercise of our minds. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 5, Duran believed that the study of the celestial orbs, at least by means of astronomy, was worth much time and effort.
* * *
If the commentary on the Guide was written, as it seems, when Duran was relatively quite young, it is possible he was still working out his own philosophical approach. Duran’s exceptional sensitivity not only to issues of doctrine but to infelicities of expression in the Hebrew and clunky and unclear syntax may well suggest that his glosses emerged out of a pedagogical engagement with the text. But whether he was responding to student difficulties or to his own perceptive examination of the textual confusions, or even both, is hard to say. It is striking that in this work he does not refer to Judah Halevi at all, suggesting, as I argued in Chapter 1, that he had not yet encountered the Kuzari, a book that seems to have made a deep impression on his later writing.
But it also seems Duran had read at least some key parts (if not all) of Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord first. If so, it might explain his conviction that Maimonides believed that the world was created, for Gersonides took a far more positive view toward this issue, arguing against Maimonides that it was not only true, but indeed a provable proposition. To Gersonides, there was one philosophical theory that fit with both philosophy and Judaism, namely, creation out of preexistent matter. This matter, which Duran adduced in his comments on Guide II.24, was without form, neither in motion nor at rest. Similarly, for Gersonides, the universe has no end, even if it had a beginning—perhaps another reason why Duran attempted to read this as Maimonides’ “secret position.” As we saw, Duran’s defense of Ptolemaic astronomy against Maimonides is easily traceable to Gersonides as well, and in general Duran’s apparent epistemological optimism may also have its source there. In this sense, then, the commentary straddles the line between Duran’s own learning experiences and his teaching, reflecting an element of both activities. Thus, as a student might do, Duran picks and chooses from his predecessors, and seems finally to approach Maimonides from a Gersonidean viewpoint.
Duran, a member of the Iberian Jewish urban elite, and in particular of the philosophically educated medical profession, participated in an intellectual world that was grounded in an assumption of the fundamental validity of rational thought. At the same time, this world was consciously Jewish. By adhering to the Maimonidean synthesis of the Jewish religious tradition with scientific knowledge and the ideal of reason, the two sides could cohere. In a number of different ways, rationalism could be absorbed into Judaism. As we have seen, Duran, for one, seems to have been comfortable with that synthesis, and even with some of its more radical versions.
CHAPTER 4
Philosophical Eclecticism
In the thirteenth century, Aristotelian Jewish philosophy had been at a peak. The translation into Hebrew of, among many other works, ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle and the immensely influential Guide of the Perplexed led to what has been called “the consolidation of Spanish rationalism under the banner of Maimonides.”1 By the end of the century, Aristotelianism was dominant among the majority of philosophically inclined writers, and in many cases was considered identical with philosophy itself. Kabbalists, too, like Isaac ibn Latif (c. 1210–1280) and Abraham Abulafia (1240–c. 1291), were influenced by Aristotelian ideas.2
A hundred years later, however—which is to say, by the time Duran was active—new generations of Provençal and Iberian Jewish philosophers had developed more eclectic systems of thought, many of which prominently featured Neoplatonic ideas. In a sign of the general shift away from radical Aristotelianism, both Abraham ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, two earlier thinkers influenced by such ideas, would enjoy something of a vogue in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
That ibn Ezra’s writings were intensely studied and commented on, including by Duran, was indicative both of deepening interest in astrological theory and of the increasing incorporation of Neoplatonic elements into Aristotelian thought.3 Similarly inspired in great part by ibn Ezra was the radically naturalist Neoplatonism developed by a circle of philosophers in Castile.4 Judah Halevi’s writings, themselves strongly influential in Duran’s work, also enjoyed a revival at the turn of the fifteenth century, exemplified in the effort by a group of Provençal commentators on the Kuzari to work out a heavily astrological version of Jewish philosophy.5
In this chapter I trace some of the same philosophical tendencies examined in Duran’s commentary on the Guide as they appear in his early philosophical responsa, a number of which are still extant. Of these epistles, two (which I have termed “On the Hebdomad” and “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar,” respectively) were copied by Meir Crescas into his manuscript collection of Duran’s writings discussed in Chapter 2. In that manuscript Meir reports that “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar” was a response to a question of his (Meir’s), and that “On the Hebdomad” was a response to a question merely “that was asked of him [Duran].”6 A third philosophical letter (which I have called “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation”) can be found copied elsewhere, is usually collected together with the other two, and is also sometimes said to have been written to Meir Crescas.7
None of the three has been dated, though both “On the Hebdomad” and “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar” are signed by Duran with his preconversion name: Profayt Duran ha-Levi. The third is not signed at all—and that, plus the fact that it does not appear in Meir Crescas’s manuscript collection, suggests either that it was not written to Meir Crescas but to another individual and later collected with the others or that it was written later, after Meir’s manuscript was completed. If this last suggestion is right, it would have been composed while Duran was living as a Christian.
After surveying Duran’s general facility with philosophical argumentation, I consider a point of possible contact between Duran and Hasdai Crescas on the issue of Jewish dogma, and then turn to Duran’s eclectic incorporation, into his Maimonidean system, of terminology and ideas drawn from Judah Halevi on divine emanation and from Abraham ibn Ezra on astrology.
PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY
I begin with the one philosophical letter definitely written by Duran to his student Meir Crescas.8 In it Duran explains human perfection, and does so in purely philosophical terms. Meir Crescas had asked about a confusing phrase in a book called Sefer ha-Tamar, an Arabic divination text by Abu Aflaḥ of Syracuse, translated into Hebrew in fourteenth-century Provence.9 In copying this letter into his manuscript, his pride rather touchingly shining through, Meir notes that it is “the answer of the great sage, my perfect teacher maestre Profayt Duran ha-Levi, to me the writer, the smallest of his students.”10
One of a series of aphorisms attributed in the text to Suleiman (King Solomon) had proved obscure: “The hearts inclined to the desire, and the desire to the temperament, and the temperament to the divine will, and the divine will, its solution is aggadah, and the solution of aggadah is emanation and the solution of emanation is perfection and the solution of perfection is hidden.” In his reply, Duran interprets this phrase as a wonderfully concise expression of “the final felicity of man and the purpose of the perfection that is possible for him to attain and the causes that bring him to it and the path to this [end].” He acknowledges the controversy over the details of this perfection among “sages of investigation,” but also notes, rather approvingly, that the phrase encapsulates “what the important philosophers said about it and where the opinions of the great ones agree.”11
Duran propounds three introductory
