IBN GABIROL

Ibn Gabirol (in full Solomon ben Yehuda Ibn Gabirol) was an important Neoplatonic philosopher and one of the outstanding figures of the Hebrew school of religious and secular poetry during the Jewish Golden Age inMoorish Spain.

Born in Málaga about 1022, Ibn Gabirol received his higher education in Saragossa, where he joined the learned circle of other Cordoban refugees established there around famed scholars and the influential courtier Yekutiel ibn H.asan. Protected by this patron, whom Ibn Gabirol immortalized in poems of loving praise, the 16-year-old poet became famous for his religious hymns in masterly Hebrew.  

Against all warnings by his patron Yekutiel, Ibn Gabirol concentrated on Neoplatonic philosophy.  In need of a new patron after the execution of Yekutiel in 1039 by those who had murdered his king and taken over power, Ibn Gabirol secured a position as a court poet with Samuel ha-Nagid, who, becoming the leading statesman of Granada, was in need of the poet’s prestige. Ibn Gabirol composed widely resounding poems with a messianic tinge for Samuel and for Jehoseph (Yūsuf), his son and later successor in the vizierate of Granada. All other biographical data about Ibn Gabirol except his place of death, Valencia, must be extrapolated from his writing.

PHILOSOPHY 

Ibn Gabriol’s Fountain of Life, in five treatises, is preserved in toto only in the Latin translation, Fons vitae, with the author’s name appearing as Avicebron or Avencebrol; it was re-identified as Ibn Gabirol’s work in 1846. The work had little influence upon Jewish philosophy other than on León Hebreo (Judah Abrabanel) and Benedict de Spinoza, but it inspired the Kabbalists, the adherents of Jewish esoteric mysticism. Its influence upon Christian Scholasticism was marked, although it was attacked by St. Thomas Aquinas for equating concepts with realities.Grounded in Plotinus and other Neoplatonic writers yet also in Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, Ibn Gabirol developed a system in which he introduced the conception of a divine will, like the Logos (or divine “word”) of Philo. 

It is an essential unity of creativity of and with God, mutually related like sun and sunlight, which mediates actively between the transcendent deity and the cosmos that God created out of nothingness (to be understood as the potentiality for cre-ation). Matter emanates directly from the deity as a prime matter that supports all substances and even the “intelligent” substances, the sphere-moving powers and angels.This concept was accepted by the Franciscan school of Scholastics but rejected by the Dominicans, including St. Thomas, for whom form (and only one, not many) and not matter is the creative principle. 

Since matter, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, “yearns for formation” and, thus, moving toward the nearness of God, causes the rotation of the spheres, the finest matter of the highest spheres is propelled by the strongest “yearning,” which issues from God and returns to him and is active in man.