syllogism: given two states opposed to each other, if one exists, so does the other. If there is such a thing as “black” in the world, then there is such a thing as “white.” Therefore, if immortality and eternal salvation exist, eternal cutting off and destruction exist as well. Duran’s first proof text is taken not from the Bible but from al-Ghazali’s (c. 1058–1111) Maqāṣid, which he cites by its translated Hebrew title, Kavvanot ha-Filosofim (“Intentions of the Philosophers”). This work consists of a summary of positions held by the “philosophers,” collected by al-Ghazali originally for the purpose of refuting them. As was common by the fourteenth century, however, Duran appears to assume that al-Ghazali was not a critic but a proponent of these same theories:22 “The sage al-Ghazali [lit. Abuḥamid] acknowledged it also in the Intentions. This is his expression: ‘and a being shall die without reaching the desired object, and desire shall remain and consciousness, and that is the great pain which has no limit to it.’ And the intended [meaning] of this is: that [the great pain] is of infinite duration, for that which is of infinite intensity is impossible.”23
Duran parses al-Ghazali carefully, commenting that, in saying that after death one suffers great pain with “no limit to it,” al-Ghazali cannot intend by this something impossible—that is, that the intensity of the pain is infinite. What al-Ghazali must mean instead is that the pain the soul experiences after death is of finite intensity but of infinite duration. Duran’s reading of al-Ghazali’s words here is strikingly similar to Moses Narboni’s in his commentary on the Maqāṣid. According to Narboni, al-Ghazali believed that the pain suffered by a soul after death refers to being denied conjunction with the agent intellect. Narboni, like Duran, specifies that from this we can learn that al-Ghazali believed in postmortem reward and punishment. Narboni also makes the point that al-Ghazali appears to agree here with the rabbis.24
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Duran has often been grouped together with Hasdai Crescas and his students Zeraḥyah Halevi and Abraham ben Judah Leon.25 A slightly older contemporary of Duran, Crescas was a highly important figure in late fourteenth-century Catalonia in both philosophical (or antiphilosophical) thought and anti-Christian polemics. Crescas’s single great work of religious philosophy, Or ha-Shem, was written too late for Duran to have read it in its final form before composing his own works. Or ha-Shem was completed in 1412, though an earlier version came out two years earlier,26 whereas Duran’s last known dated work is from 1403. On the issue of how to categorize Jewish doctrine, however, there are distinct similarities between them.
In the second half of “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation,” Duran addresses the question of whether, if someone disagrees with the argument he has just given about eternal punishment, that person is then himself “cut off and eternally punished.” And in the process Duran sketches out a threefold system categorizing the various types of heresy, following the listing of Jewish dogma in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance:27 “The first is denial of something which depends on divine statute for His existence and His unity and other things—and this is the particular thing by the name of ‘heresy’ [minut] and about this scripture says: ‘And they shall go out and look upon the carcasses of the men who have rebelled against me.’ (Is. 66:24) And it does not say ‘who have rebelled absolutely’—it means that they sinned in what depended on it.”28 The first kind of heretics, according to Duran, consists of those who fall into the category of minut. These minim appear often in the Talmud; in English, the word is often rendered as “sectarians.” According to Duran, they reject matters that are dependent on “His existence and His unity”—that is, doctrines dependent on there being a divinity, that he exists, and that he is One. To reject any one of these doctrines is by implication to reject the existence or unity of God.29
Duran’s second category: “The second is denial of that which depends on belief in prophecy, in its existence and the [uniqueness] of the prophecy of Moses our Teacher, upon him be peace, and this is the particular thing that goes by the name ‘unbelief’ [apikorsut], a name derived from denier [kofer] after karos in the Greek language, and as Galen wrote in the first chapter of his book, On the Natural Faculties.”30 These, therefore, are doctrines for which, if one rejects one of them, one has rejected the possibility of prophecy (revelation).31 Finally, Duran’s third category is “denial of what depends on the law of the Torah, in its being from heaven and that it will not change, and that is the specific thing that goes by the name denial.”32 These are dogmas for which, if one rejects them, one has rejected the word of the Torah itself, its divine source, or its unchangeable nature.33
The important thing to note in this list is that Duran phrases the issue by, as it were, working backward. By defining the denial of a doctrine, he is in fact constructing a threefold or, actually, fourfold positive division of Jewish doctrine: fourfold because, by excluding the particular issue of eternal reward and punishment from the three categories of heresy, he implicitly adds a fourth positive category to the list: namely, nonheresy.34
One significant aspect of this fourfold categorization of Jewish doctrine is that while Duran is very clearly drawing from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, his shaping of this material is almost perfectly echoed in the division of Jewish doctrines found in Hasdai Crescas’s Or ha-Shem. The first division enumerated by Duran consists of those things that depend on the existence and oneness of God. According to Crescas, the first category of doctrines includes roots or first principles without which one cannot imagine revelation of a divine law: that is to say, they are the “first principles of the divine Torah” that depend on “belief in the existence of God.”35 The second category for Duran is made up of those things that depend on prophecy and revelation, again matched in Crescas’s category of, in this case, ideas the acceptance of which makes possible belief in revelation in general. Duran’s third category depends on the actual, unchangeable word of Torah; for Crescas, the third section is made up of true doctrines, namely, doctrines actually taught by the Torah: “true beliefs which we who believe in the divine Torah believe and which are such that one denying any one of them is called a sectarian.”36
As for the fourth category: in introducing the issue of heresy, Duran defines it by implication: “I say that if we imagine one who contradicts this hypothesis—[saying,] that is, that there is no cutting off and eternal punishment—it is not proper according to our faith that heresy [minut] be attributed to him.”37 This can be compared profitably with Crescas’s own fourth category, which consists of doctrines and theories about which the Torah gives no definitive teaching and “one who does not believe in them is not called a heretic.”38 This last category takes up the final quarter of Or ha-Shem, where Crescas gives his own opinion on all of these various matters, including the particular topic at hand in Duran’s responsum—that is, punishment after death—which appears in Crescas under the title “Paradise and Hell.”39 Finally, one should note that Crescas himself denies that all souls survive death.40
Since Duran’s letter is undated, could it possibly have been written after 1410 or 1412, in which case he would likely have known Or ha-Shem? If that were the case, one might think he would simply have followed the straightforward positive categorization used by Crescas. One wonders, too, to whom this letter was written in the first place. It is addressed rather perfunctorily to “the lord scholar” (“ha-adon ha-ḥoqer”), which is certainly tantalizing. Sadly, however, we know too little about this text to do more than speculate.
But let me note one more possible point of contact. In Ma‘aseh Efod, as we will see in Chapter 11, Duran’s scheme for meditating on the text of the Hebrew Bible focuses on that text’s power when held in the memory. Duran’s favorite term for this inner contemplation of the Bible is “keeping in the heart” (shemirah ba-lev, or shemirah ba-levavot);
