Chapter 4 Platonic and Aristotelian Traditions of Union

The rich vocabulary and models of union that developed in medieval Jewish thought owe much to the absorption of the Arab-Muslim theological and phil- osophical modes of thought that flourished between the 9th and 13th centu- ries, and their synthesis with Neoplatonic and later Neo-Aristotelian structures. As we shall see, one of the most important innovations of medieval Judaism that grew out of this encounter was an articulation of the new spiritual and religious ideal of devequt: a spiritual, mental, and mystical attachment to and even union with God. The history of the various schools of medieval Jewish thought, philosophy and Kabbalah, is deeply indebted to the discernable impact of four major trends in Arab-Muslim thought: the Kalam, Arab Neoplatonism, Sufism and Arab philosophy/Falsafa. In the context of this study, the main contribution of Kalam was the devel- opment of a Jewish discourse of tawhid, the theological analysis of God’s unity and oneness. Chapters introducing the discourse of tawhid (in their analysis of the oneness and unity of the One God as the foundation of Jewish thought) appear in several important treatises, including Saadia Gaon’s (882/892–942) Emunot ve-Deot (Kitab al-Amanat wal-I’tikadat) and Bahya ibn Paquda’s Hovot Ha-Levavot (Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub). For both thinkers, the analysis of the fundamental oneness of God is expressed in light of the discourse of Kalam, each setting a foundation for an entirely different project: for Saadia, the foundation of a Jewish theology in a Kalam key; and for Bahya, a Sufi Jewish spiritual path of illumination and love. In the latter, we find an articulation of the correlation between the discourse of God’s oneness and the love of God that grows out of such tawhid awareness.1 However, the development of the language of mystical union in medieval Jewish thought drew first and most from Arab Neoplatonism. I will first attend to the absorption of Arab Neoplatonism, and lay out models and vocabulary of union in that context. Quite certainly, traces of Arab Neoplatonism are evident in Jewish thought from a very early stage, starting with Isaac Israeli in the 10th century. The Falsafa or Neo-Aristotelian philosophy was absorbed into Judaism

1 See: Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, 66–95.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004328730_005 Platonic and Aristotelian Traditions of Union 61 much later, during the second half of the 12th century.2 Finally, the imprint of Sufi vocabulary on the thriving 13th-century kabbalah (specifically ecstatic Kabbalah) is a controversial matter to be discussed in detail below.3 Both Neoplatonism and Falsafa had decisive influences on the growth of the idea, vocabulary, and ideal of union in medieval Jewish thought. The peripatetic tradition in its medieval versions formulated different theories of human transformation and perfection, all agreeing upon the idea that the core substance of man, intellect or soul, can undergo a transformative procedure eventually integrating and elevating him into the higher and universal meta- physical substances in the metaphysical hierarchy, perhaps even the divine. Often the process of assimilation into parallel metaphysical entities such as the “divine thought” was described with a variety of vocabularies of union. One of the key vocabularies originating in the peripatetic philosophical tradition was the Aristotelian epistemological notion of “knowledge as union”—i.e., knowing as complete identification with an idea. In the peripatetic tradition, “pure thought”, such as “divine unmovable substance” in Aristotle, the “active intellect” in later Aristotelian philosophy, or “Nous” in Neoplatonism, exists as substance outside of man. This epistemic kind of union forms in a non-­ material setting, in which any mind, divine or human, unites with the object it is thinking. Thus, the possibility of the assimilation of different minds and their abil- ity to even unite with one another also opened the possibility for the human mind to connect to and even unite with God’s mind. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle mentions the human’s rare merit to “share” and “participate” in the divine thinking, suggesting that the human mind may assimilate gradually and eventually fully unite with divine thought. In the Aristotelian tradition, divine thought is identified as God; consequently, herein lies a model that can explain philosophically how by thinking of and, in fact, along with God’s mind, i.e. uni- versal and eternal ideas, man can eventually unite with it. Knowledge of truths leads to union with God’s mind, or more so even with God Himself. In this tradition, the philosophical ideal of transformation of the human mind is aimed at reaching or realizing a knowledge that leads to inner unifica- tion with true ideas, which may deepen the self-realization of the human agent and promote a unification of human faculties, and will eventually lead to the unified divine thought in which man may somehow participate. In a famous

2 See the overview by Steven Harvey, “Islamic Philosophy and Jewish Philosophy”, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor. 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 349–369. 3 See chapters 8 and 9.