Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 169 - A Matter of Principles - Albo and Abravanel.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? A Matter of Principles—Albo and Abravanel As every American schoolchild knows, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He was dispatched on his voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, famous as heroes of the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. But heroic isn't really the right word for them if you ask me. In the same year of 1492, they offered the Jews and Muslims remaining in Spain a stark choice—convert to Christianity, leave our realms, or die. Many Jews converted and many left, sometimes choosing the Islamic world as the safest haven. This was a departure from the policy of earlier Christian monarchs. A century earlier, the rulers of the Christian principalities in Spain had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to stop a spasm of violence targeting Jews in the year 1391. The view from the top typically saw Jews as valuable members of the community, serving an especially useful role in economic terms. On the other hand, throughout the medieval period, Jews were often seen as being akin to Muslims. Often they were respected as Abrahamic peoples, much as Muslims designated the Christians and Jews as fellow peoples of the book. But for the same reason, chasing the last Muslims out of Spain seemed to the rulers to go hand in hand with the removal of the Jews. Before this final act of religious cleansing, there had of course been centuries of tension, cooperation, and competition between the three faiths that flourished in Andalusia, frequently spilling across the border into southern France. We have already seen several examples. There was the Kuzari of Judah Halevi, with its favorable comparison of Judaism to Christianity and Islam. There was the shocking event in which Christian authorities were enlisted by Jews to repress rationalist currents among their co-religionists in the so-called Maimonidean controversy. We met the Jewish translator Avndauf, who helped render philosophical works into Latin for a Christian readership, and Gersonides, who lavished his attention on the works of the Muslim commentator Averroes. There were long periods of peace, but also outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence under both Islamic and Christian rule. One particularly remarkable illustration of the fraught tension between Christians and Jews occurred in the early 15th century. It was a debate, or rather a series of debates, convened by one of the anti-popes of Avignon over a nearly two-year period. From February 1413 to November 1414, 69 sessions were held in the Spanish city of Tortosa. At these sessions, Jewish rabbis had the opportunity to defend their religion against a particularly knowledgeable opponent. He was a Christian who had converted from Judaism, taking the rather wonderful new name of Geronimo de Santa Fe. Geronimo knew his Talmud well, so he was able to argue that statements in this rabbinic text proved that the Messiah, still expected by his Jewish contemporaries, had in fact already appeared, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Most of the rabbis who debated with Geronimo eventually capitulated, signing a document abandoning the authority of the Talmud, which suggests that they converted to Christianity. But not all the Jewish scholars were willing to sign. One who did not was Joseph Albo. A native of Aragon in Spain, Albo was a student of Hasdai Crescus, the brilliant critic of Maimonides and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Albo's participation in the debate left a mark on his writings. He composed a now-lost attack on Christianity and a surviving treatise called Sefer HaIkadim, or Book of Principles. This was a contribution to what can fairly be described as the dominant debate within later medieval Jewish philosophy, never mind debates with the Christians—the question of the principles that ground the Jewish law. We already saw that Albo's teacher Crescus was taking up Maimonides' list of principles in the light of the Lord. He complained that in offering a philosophical defense of his principles, Maimonides had unwittingly placed the whole edifice of Judaism on an unsteady foundation. Albo followed his master in criticizing Maimonides, but with his own Book of Principles, he was still pursuing the broadly Maimonidean project of trying to establish the basis on which belief must rest. From a historical point of view, we can see this as a reaction to the challenges that faced the Jewish communities of Spain and southern France in the medieval period. The Muslim Almohads chased Maimonides and many other Jews out of Andalusia, and the situation of Jews later, under Christian rule, was not particularly comfortable either. Constant pressure to convert, either to Islam or to Christianity, was answered with polemical writings against the rival faiths, but also with attempts to show that the Jewish law rests on certain well-defined and well-demonstrated principles. Maimonides was the greatest exponent of this strategy. In pursuing it, he was applying to his religion the lessons of philosophy. Like a demonstrative science, as defined by Aristotle, the Judaism of Maimonides would have a solid foundation in first principles, which play a role like axioms in mathematics. In fact, we might compare the discussion of principles in Maimonides and his heirs to something we saw in late antiquity. The pagan thinker Proclus wrote a work called The Elements of Theology in which he imitated the axiomatic method of Euclid to present Neoplatonism as a demonstrative science. Just as Proclus was responding to the rising tide of Christianity in antiquity, so the competition of the Almohads brand of Islam and the Christianity of the Reconquest led Maimonides, Crescas, Albo, and others to investigate and establish the principles of their own faith. Another benefit of their approach was to lay down exactly what it means to be Jewish. What would Jews give up by converting, and what beliefs must they maintain to avoid heresy? Maimonides' ideas about the principles were highly intellectualist. For him, Judaism was of course about law and practice, but it was also a matter of assenting to a range of doctrines, doctrines that just happened to bear a striking resemblance to the ideas of the philosophers. Hence his controversial claim that Jews must believe in the incorporeality of God. Albo tends to be less rigorous in drawing the line between orthodoxy and heresy. Perhaps because of his experiences in the Tawatossa debate, which had focused on the question of whether Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, Albo does not think that belief in the future appearance of Messiah is a litmus test for membership in the Jewish faith. Jews are supposed to believe this, alright, but denying it does not make you a heretic. Albo gives the same status to belief in bodily resurrection, another flashpoint in criticisms of Maimonides. As long as one accepts some form of reward and punishment after death, one is within the scope of Jewish belief, as far as Albo is concerned. When we imagine someone laying down a religious creed or list of doctrines, we don't usually think of it as a plea for flexibility and tolerance. But as these examples show, the laying down of principles and non-negotiable beliefs can widen the boundaries of orthodoxy just as much as it can tighten them. As a student of Crescus, Albo is particularly dubious that reason can establish the wide range of doctrines promised by Maimonides. Not only does Albo think that someone might imagine God as a body, yet remain within the faith, but he denies that rational proof can establish God's immateriality. Maimonides' philosophical theology centered on three claims—God exists, is one, and is immaterial. Of these, Albo thinks only God's existence could be proven demonstratively. For this purpose, Albo favors a regress argument already found in Aristotle to the effect that there must be some uncaused cause that can first activate potential for change. It's consistent with this proof that the matter out of which the universe is made might be eternal rather than created. This is the view that was adopted by Gersonides. Albo doesn't believe it, but neither does he think that it can be ruled out by rational argument. Happily, these beliefs that Albo recognizes as true but not susceptible to rational demonstration are on his reckoning, not necessary, principles anyway. You absolutely need to believe that God exists if you want to be Jewish, and you also need to believe that God created the universe. But if you find yourself with the false belief that God has a body, or used pre-existing matter in creating, then you'll merely be wrong, not a heretic. Obviously, this means that Albo needs to distinguish between at least two kinds of true belief involved in Judaism. There are the genuine principles, which he calls ikarim, or roots, and then there are the beliefs derived from, or associated with, these principles. There are only three genuine principles—God exists, the Torah is revealed from heaven, and we will be rewarded and punished in the next life. The validity of the Torah itself stands or falls with these so every Jew really has to accept them. Within the many other true beliefs involved in Judaism, there are others whose denial would not involve heretical rejection of the Torah, but which a Jew must endorse if he is to be rewarded in the afterlife. This includes, for instance, belief in the Messiah still to come. Thus Albo disagreed with Maimonides on a number of points, not only about the status of certain specific beliefs within the law, but also regarding the power of reason to establish these beliefs. Yet on one more general point, he was a faithful Maimonidean. Like Maimonides, he conceived of the Jewish law as having the same structure as in Aristotelian science. His slimmer portfolio of principles still performs the function that the principles of Maimonides had played. They are like axioms or first principles in a demonstrative system. In fact, Albo explicitly mentions Aristotle's work on demonstrative science, the posterior analytics, when he is explaining the relationship between his principles and the doctrines derived from those principles. In the coming generations, this conception of the law would be challenged by a figure who might fairly be described as the last significant Jewish thinker of the medieval period, Isaac Abravanel. Abravanel was born in 1437 in the city of Lisbon. So for those of you who have been wondering when this look at philosophy in Andalusia would include someone from Portugal instead of Spain, the moment has arrived, and not a moment too soon, since we're almost done. However, Abravanel's family was Spanish, and in the 1480s he moved to the kingdom of Aragon and Castile, ruled jointly by the aforementioned Ferdinand and Isabella. That feeling of dread you are now experiencing, since you know what is about to happen in 1492, is one that Abravanel apparently lacked. He blithely went to work for the royal couple as a tax official. When the crisis of 1492 came, he lost his position and his second homeland when he chose exile over conversion to Christianity. Eventually he wound up in Venice where he died in 1508. His son, Giuda Abravanel, would become a significant philosopher in his own right. But reflecting the Abravanel family's new Italian home, his ideas seem more at home in the Renaissance rather than the medieval under the sea and tradition we've been following, so we will return to him when we get to Renaissance philosophy. This just goes to show you how blurry are the lines between periods of philosophy. In this case, we're drawing a line between medieval and Renaissance that winds up separating a father from his son. Confirming that the attempt to understand the principles of Judaism was a core issue for thinkers of this period, Abravanel wrote a work entitled Principles of the Faith. This was, however, only one of numerous compositions he produced, among them a commentary on Maimonides's Guide to the Perplexed. Speaking of perplexity, a strange feature of Abravanel's writing is that he seems to be further away from Maimonides's intellectualist approach than Crescas and Albo were, yet he presents himself as defending Maimonides from their criticisms. How can this be? Well, let's start with Abravanel's disagreement with the way his predecessors had pursued their principle project. He narrows down the list of principles even more than Albo had done, getting the number of fundamental doctrines down to the tidy sum of just one—belief in the creation of the world from nothing. He expects even less of rational demonstration than Albo did, stating that not even this single principle can be proven. Then he seems to change his mind and abandons even the core principle of creation, leaving us with a grand total of zero principles. Well, at least it's a round number. This is not because Abravanel thinks that in matters of religious belief anything goes. To the contrary, he is as strict about matters of orthodoxy as Maimonides had been, and thus stricter than Albo. Instead, he is abandoning the whole idea that the law is built on certain foundational beliefs, whether these can be rationally proven or not. Instead, he holds that all the truths given to us in the Torah should be accepted. Like Albo, he explicitly mentions the idea that the law could be structured like a demonstrative science, he just doesn't think the revelation works like that. It all comes from God, it's all true, and no one truth it contains is more fundamental than any other, or, for that matter, more optional. Abravanel insists that Jews are not permitted to disbelieve even the smallest thing in the Torah, and where there is no doubt, there is no need to appeal to grounding principles. Our attitude towards the law should ideally be that of emunah, or faith, by which he means total and unshakeable certainty. This sort of certainty could be induced by, for instance, witnessing a miracle. The whole of the law, not just some favored set of beliefs, merits and demands faith. The believers who have this complete and unflinching commitment, and not those who have convinced themselves of thirteen or three or one particular doctrine, will be those who are rewarded in the next life. That certainly explains why Abravanel would agree with Maimonides's rigorous stand on matters of orthodoxy while disagreeing with him on the matter of principles. The disagreement is of course a sizable one, yet Abravanel speaks out in defense of Maimonides against the criticisms of Crescas and Albo by suggesting that Maimonides had portrayed the laws consisting of principles and derived beliefs for merely pedagogical purposes. Those who need guidance can be started out with a set of basic principles, Maimonides used thirteen, and then brought to accept the rest of the law on that basis. But one shouldn't confuse a useful teaching strategy with an analysis of the nature of the revelation itself. Abravanel finds other points of agreement with Maimonides too. Perhaps the most interesting concerns his response to Crescas who had castigated Maimonides for claiming that God commands us to believe in him. As you'll recall, Crescas argued that this makes no sense because you can't reasonably command someone to believe something. Oh yes you can, says Abravanel. We are under an obligation to believe and may be severely punished if we fail to do so. This doesn't mean that one can just change one's belief at will in response to a threat or command, but one can take steps that might lead to belief. It's interesting to note that Abravanel is here making a suggestion later found in the French philosopher Pascal. When Pascal produces his famous wager argument, that it would be a better bet to believe in God than not, he admits that one cannot just change one's belief in response to such an argument. Instead, one should, for instance, go to church regularly and, in general, live as a Christian, hoping that real belief will come in due course. It's perhaps appropriate that our discussion has wound its way to a French thinker. As you may have noticed, our look at Jewish philosophy in Islamic controlled Spain has overspilled its borders for a good number of episodes now. We've looked at figures who lived in Spain under Christian rule, like Crescas, or who lived outside Spain, most often in southern France, like Gersonides. Most poignantly representative are those who were forced to relocate, living anew the ancient Jewish story of exile. The Almohad regime was so unwelcoming to Jews that Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides fled. The Christians who replaced the Almohads were sometimes more favorable, but sometimes, as our new acquaintance Isaac Abravanel learned, they were not. I hope you are convinced that the story I've been telling is nonetheless a unified one. Medieval Jewish thought is not neatly bounded by political or geographical limits, but it has a recognizable shape, a narrative arc with Maimonides at its apex and the Andalusian culture of convivencia as its cultural setting. Yet there were Jewish thinkers in this period that do not fit into that story because they live far outside the orbit of Andalusian culture. We'll meet two significant examples soon when we turn back to the Eastern Islamic world, namely Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi and Ibn Qamuna. As we will see, they are fully integrated into philosophical developments in the East in the wake of Avicenna. And there were still other Jewish thinkers who responded to other currents within the stream of Islamic intellectual history. Take for instance the development of Karaite Judaism. The Karaites have appeared several times in our narrative as the targets of refutation by rabbinic Jews, from Saadia to Judah Halevi. But they were not content to be targets. Karaite communities in Jerusalem, in Egypt, and even in Christian Byzantium developed their own theology by drawing on ideas from the Moatazolite tradition. This happened from the 10th to the 12th centuries, around the same time that a Rositilian philosophy was blossoming among Jews in Andalusia. Philosophy could flourish among Jews in other places too. For instance in a region we have not discussed at any point so far in our history, Yemen. For the first half of the 15th century, as Joseph Albo was defending Judaism in debate and in writing in the far West, the Jewish community in Yemen enjoyed a benign environment under Zaidi-Shiite rule. From this period we have works by a little known philosopher named Hotar Ben Shalomo, from the Yemenite city of Damar. At first glance, one might see Hotar as akin to a man like Albo, since Hotar also wrote a work responding to Maimonides' 13 principles. But on closer inspection, it turns out that Hotar is reacting not just to Maimonides, but to the peculiar strain of Neoplatonism handed down within Ismaili Shi'ism. He thus shows knowledge of ideas familiar from earlier authors, like the Brethren of Purity and the Ismaili philosopher-missionaries such as al-Qirmani. If you're struggling to remember these names, I don't blame you. I covered them more than 30 episodes ago when I looked at philosophy in the Buyid age. To this already heady mixture of Maimonides and Islamized Platonism, Hotar added allusions to Islamic mystics like al-Halaaj and Jewish mystical texts such as the Book of Creation, a forerunner of the Kabbalah. If you're struggling to remember that, you have less excuse, since I talked about it in the last episode. As a result, it has been proposed that Hotar represents a distinctive eastern strand of medieval Jewish philosophy. Men like Hotar shared the obsession with Maimonides that we see among Spanish and French Jews, and they combine this with a range of other influences owing to the different texts available to them. Here in Yemen, we have a kind of alternate reality of Jewish philosophy, in which Averroes was never born and the Aristotelian cosmology of Maimonides is fused with the cosmic hierarchy of Neoplatonism. This is, in miniature, the story of philosophy in the Islamic world more generally. Like 19th century young men, we've gone west and stayed there for quite a while, but it's just about time we turned our attention back to events in the Islamic heartlands. The third chapter of the story of philosophy in the Islamic world is about to begin—a story that will be dominated not by Maimonides or Averroes, but by Avicenna. Before fulfilling these eastern promises, though, I want to take one last general look at the contribution of medieval Jews in philosophy and science. If there were a high school devoted to that subject, our next interview guest would be its principal. So join me for a conversation with Gad Freudental here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. God bless! God bless!