A History of Mediaeval Jewish PhilosophyHusik, Isaac
ReligionJewish
A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy
Husik, Isaac
Philosophy, Jewish; Philosophy, Medieval
Before leaving the problem of the soul Ibn Daud devotes a word to
showing that metempsychosis is impossible. The soul of man is suited to
the character of his elemental mixture, which constitutes the
individuality of his body. Hence every individual's body has its own
peculiar soul. A living person cannot therefore have in him a soul
which formerly resided in a different body unless the two bodies are
identical in all respects. But in that case it is not transmigration but
the re-appearance of the same person after he has ceased to be. But this
has never yet happened.
Finally Ibn Daud finds it necessary to defend the Bible against those
who criticize the Jews on the ground that there is no mention of the
future world and the existence of the soul after death in the Biblical
writings. All the rewards and punishments spoken of in the Bible, they
say, refer to this world. His answer offers nothing new. Judah Halevi
had already tried to account for this phenomenon, besides insisting that
altogether devoid of allusion to the future world the Bible is not. Ibn
Daud follows in Halevi's footsteps (_cf._ above, p. 170).[236]
Abraham Ibn Daud closes the first, the purely scientific part of his
treatise, by a discussion of the heavenly spheres and their motions. In
accordance with the view of Aristotle, which was shared by the majority
of writers throughout the middle ages, he regards the spheres with their
stars as living beings, and their motions as voluntary, the result of
will and purpose, and not simply "natural," _i. e._, due to an
unconscious force within them called nature. One of his arguments to
prove this is derived from the superiority of the heavenly bodies to our
own. Their size, their brightness and their continued duration are all
evidence of corporeal superiority. And it stands to reason that as the
human body, which is the highest in the sublunar world, has a soul that
is nobler than that of plant or animal, so the heavenly bodies must be
endowed with souls as much superior to the human intellect as their
bodies are to the human body. The Bible alludes to this truth in the
nineteenth Psalm, "The heavens declare the glory of God.... There is no
speech nor language...." The last expression signifies that they praise
God with the intellect. There are other passages in the Bible besides,
and particularly the first chapter of Ezekiel, which make it clear that
the heavenly bodies are living and intelligent beings; not, to be sure,
in the sense of taking nourishment and growing and reproducing their
kind and making use of five senses, but in the sense of performing
voluntary motions and being endowed with intellect.[237]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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