Note 218 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Even in the schools, however, over and above the influence of the more original teachers, there rises at the close of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth some measure of a new life, introduced into philosophy through the communication of Aristotle to the western world by the Saracens, largely by the mediation of the Jews.218 The latter, in their free life under the earlier Moorish toleration, had developed something in the nature of a school of philosophy, in which the Judaic Platonism set up by Philo of Alexandria in the first century was blended with the Aristotelianism of the Arabs. As early as the eighth and ninth centuries, anti-Talmudic (the Karaïtes) and pro-Talmudic parties professed alike to appeal to reason219; and in the twelfth century the mere production of the Guide of the Perplexed by the celebrated Moses Maimonides (1130–1205)220 tells of a good deal of practical rationalism (of the kind that reduced miracle stories to allegories), of which, however, there is little direct literary result save of a theosophic kind.221 Levi ben Gershom (1286–1344), commonly regarded as the greatest successor of Maimonides, is like him guardedly rationalistic in his commentaries on the Scriptures.222 But the doctrine which makes Aristotle a practical support to rationalism, and which was adopted not only by Averroës but by the Motazilites of Islam—the eternity of matter—was rejected by Maimonides (as by nearly all other Jewish teachers, with the partial exception of Levi ben Gershom),223 on Biblical grounds; though his attempts to rationalize Biblical doctrine and minimize miracles made him odious to the orthodox Jews, some of whom, in France, did not scruple to call in the aid of the Christian inquisition against his partisans.224 The long struggle between the Maimonists and the orthodox is described as ending in the “triumph of peripatetism” or Averroïsm in the synagogue225; but Averroïsm as modified by Maimonides is only a partial accommodation of scripture to common sense. It would appear, in fact, that Jewish thought in the Saracen world retrograded as did that of the Saracens themselves; for we find Maimonides exclaiming over the apparent disbelief in creatio ex nihilo in the “Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great,” believed by him to be ancient, but now known to be a product of the eighth century.226 The pantheistic teaching of Solomon ben Gebirol or Ibn Gebirol, better known as Avicebron,227 who in point of time preceded the Arab Avempace, and who later acquired much Christian authority, was orthodox on the side of the creation dogma even when many Jews were on that head rationalistic.228 The high-water mark, among the Jews, of the critical rationalism of the time, is the perception by Aben or Ibn Ezra (1119–1174) that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses—a discovery which gave Spinoza his cue five hundred years later; but Ibn Ezra, liberioris ingenii vir, as Spinoza pronounced him, had to express himself darkly.229