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Platonic Themes in Gersonides' Commentary on Song of Songs

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Platonic Themes in Gersonides' Commentary on Song of Songs Yehuda Halper The Sex Life of a Metaphysical Sceptic: Platonic Themes in Gersonides’ Commentary on Song of Songs In his bestselling book Born to Kvetch, the popular Yiddishist Michael Wex recounts how, as pupils at a religious yeshivah, he and his friends learned of Rashi’s explana- tion of the first reference to breasts in the Song of Songs as, in fact, referring to Moses and Aaron, who were responsible for nourishing the Children of Israel in the desert. In his account, the boys then proceeded to notice the “Moses and Aaron” on various women around town and one would expect that they could hardly suppress giggles at any mention of Moses and Aaron in any other context.1 Rashi’s de-eroticization of Song of Songs thus had as a side effect that it simultaneously eroticized Moses and Aaron precisely among the impressionable youth whom he had intended to shield. De-eroticization is a tricky business; comparison of the erotic to the non-erotic tends rather to eroticize the non-erotic. Whether Rashi was aware of this effect I leave to the scholars of that pious man of Troyes. Gersonides, however, who lived 200 years after Rashi and much further South, was certainly aware of how eros can spread from the allegory to the allegorized. Ger- sonides explains that the expressions of love between the interlocutors of the Song of Songs are allegories of the soul’s path to intellectual perfection, a path that moves from ethical perfection, to the perfection of imagination and thought, to mathemat- ics, to the physical sciences, and, finally, to metaphysics.2 Far from removing eros from the picture, Gersonides uses Song of Songs’ highly erotic language to describe the desire of the soul, its faculties, and even the hylic intellect for the active intel- lect. These desires are described not only as teshuqah (desire), but especially by the term ḥesheq, which refers to an erotic desire, particularly in the context of the Song of Songs.3 Realization of such desires leads to pleasure (taʽanug), joy (simḥah), embraces 1 Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 88–90. 2 A critical edition of Gersonides’ Commentary on Song of Songs appeared as Rabbi Levi ben Gershom, Commentary on Song of Songs [Heb.], ed. Menachem Kellner (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003). An English translation was published as Levi ben Gershom, Commentary on Song of Songs, trans. Menachem Kellner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Quotations from the Com- mentary will list the Hebrew edition first, followed by the English translation. 3 Note, however, that the term ḥesheq does not appear in the Song of Songs itself. Yet it was also associated with the Song of Songs by Gersonides’ contemporary Baḥya ben Asher, who distinguishes between ’ahabah and ḥesheq, explicitly connecting the latter with intellectual conjunction or conjun- ction of thought (debequt hamaḥshabah). See his Kad Haqemaḥ, in Kitve Rabbenu Baḥya, ed. Charles B. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1969), 34–35. Another of Gersonides’ contemporaries, Open Access. © 2018 Yehuda Halper, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110553321-009 The Sex Life of a Metaphysical Sceptic 147 (teḥabqeni), and, of course, kisses (neshiqot). But the characters in the Song of Songs do not go “all the way,” and the erotic desires both in the Song of Songs and in Gerson- ides’ characterization remain unconsummated. In a sense, Gersonides’ Song of Songs commentary resembles Diotima’s account of eros in Plato’s Symposium. Both describe a love of that which the lover does not possess, i.e., for Gersonides, an eros of the soul and the hylic intellect for the active intellect. Moreover, like Diotima’s eros, Gersonides’ ḥesheq is all-consuming, as all of the faculties of the soul subject themselves to it and the entire ḥosheq (“desirer”) is consumed by the desire. This subjugation of the powers of the soul to this final desire is akin to Diotima’s description of the so-called Ladder of Love in the Symposium. According to Diotima, the path to eros of the beautiful begins with the young person’s desire for beautiful bodies, continues with the abstraction of that love to the eros for beautiful souls, and from there to the love of the sciences, and then to the love of beauty itself, i.e., the form of beauty.4 Joseph Kaspi, also says that the primary meaning of the Song of Songs is in uncovering the relations- hip between ḥesheq and cognition of the intelligibles. See his short commentary on Song of Songs in Mikra’ot Gedolot ‘HaKeter’: The Five Scrolls, ed. Menachem Cohen (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2012), p. 28 [Hebrew pagination]. Gersonides also uses the term ḥesheq to refer to desire for higher knowledge, which is a knowledge that is similarly accompanied by pleasure, though it reaches its height only after one’s death, in Wars of the Lord, (Leipzig: Lorck, 1866), 90. See also Seymour Feldman’s translation, vol. 1, (Philadelphia: JPS, 1984), 225. These uses of ḥesheq to refer to erotic love probably derive, at least to some extent, from Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s use of the term to translate the Arabic term for erotic, passionate love, ‘ishq, in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed III 51. On the background of Maimonides’ use of this term, see Steven Harvey, “Avicenna and Maimonides on Prayer and Intellectual Worship,” in Exchange and Transmission across Cultural Boundaries: Philoso- phy, Mysticism and Science in the Mediterranean World, ed. Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2013): 82–105. See also, Steven Harvey, “The Meaning of Terms Designating Love in Judaeo-Arabic Thought and Some Remarks on the Judaeo-Arabic Interpretation of Maimonides,” in Studies in Muslim-Jewish Relations III, ed. Norman Golb. (Reading, UK: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996): 175–196. The term ḥesheq also appears in Shem Tob ibn Falaquera’s translation/summary of Al-Fārābī’s Philosophy of Plato, in Reshit Ḥokhmah, ed. Mortiz David (Berlin: 1902), 74–75. Al-Fārābī’s Arabic term with which Falaquera is translating ḥesheq is ‘ishq (see Alfarabius, De Platonis Philosophia, ed. Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer [London: Warburg Institute, 1943]: 14–15 of the Arabic pages). Al-Fārābī is characterizing Socrates’ discussion in Plato’s Phaedrus and the underlying Greek term is almost certainly ἔρως. A similar use of the term ḥesheq is also attributed to Plato in Judah Al-Ḥarizi, Mussare Hafilosofim, (ed. A. Loewenthal [Frankfurt am Main: Kaufmann, 1895]: 15. There Plato is said to compare the ḥesheq of one soul for another to the ḥesheq of one body for another. This work is a translation of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s ’ādāb al-falāsifah, but unfortunately this passage in Hebrew is among several chapters not found in the Arabic. See Abdurrahman Badawi’s edition of the Arabic text (Kuwait: l’Institut des Manuscrits Arabes, 1985), 61–62, which is missing text corresponding to Chapters 18–20 of the Hebrew edition. Accordingly, we cannot know if the underlying Arabic term is also ‘ishq. 4 See Plato, Symposium, 210a–212b. 148 Yehuda Halper For Gersonides, the text operates on various layers: there is, of course, the text of the Song itself, with its descriptions of erotic desires for bodies. Then, there is the understanding of this as an allegory referring to the soul. Thus he differentiates between the allegory itself (hamashal) and that to which the allegory refers (hanim- shal). The reader who understands that this is an allegory understands that there is a “hidden meaning” (hanistar) and can search for the allegory.5 This allegory concerns the sciences, which culminate in a metaphysical approach to the active intellect.6 The similarities between this progression from the plain text to approaching the active intellect and Diotima’s Ladder of Love in the Symposium are, I think, quite clear. Most significantly, at each stage of this progression we find a new understanding of the object of the ḥesheq. That is to say, eros is present at every stage of the interpretation, though its object and direction change throughout. The process of studying science leads the desirer from the most open kind of desire and the most easily identifiable to the most concealed desire, the desire for the active intellect, which is also the most difficult, if not impossible to grasp. Gersonides’ use of “concealed” (nistar) to refer to what is allegorized suggests that the plain meaning of the text is “revealed” (nigleh). Moreover, Gersonides’ statement that the secrets ought to be kept hidden “from those who are not fit for them”7 implies that the revealed meaning of the text need not be kept hidden from the many. Gersonides is thus distinguished from how most other medieval and rab- binic interpreters of Song of Songs are usually understood. Other interpreters, in 5 One place Gersonides delineates these distinctions is on 66–67 / 13–14: “You must not fail to note that some of the attributes with which the lovers described each other relate both to the allegory (hamashal) and to its intended meaning (hanimshal) […] This was done in order to indicate the hidden meaning (hanistar), so that one would not mistakenly think that the statements in this book should be taken according to their external sense (hanigleh).” 6 See, e.g., 66–68 / 13–15. Menachem Kellner compares the approach to the active intellect through the sciences in the Commentary on Song of Songs with some of Gersonides’ other works in “Gerso- nides on Imitatio Dei and the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge,” Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 275–296.
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