Abstract
Elijah Delmedigo (d. 1493) remained faithful to the medieval Islamic and Jewish rationalist tradition that he saw embodied, above all, in the works of Averroes and Maimonides, even as the imagination of Pico della Mirandola, his most brilliant Italian student, was captured by Neoplatonism and Kabbalah. This rationalist tradition shaped both Delmedigo’s philosophical outlook and his interpretation of Judaism, set out in the philosophical-theological treatise Sefer behinat ha-dat (‘The Examination of Religion’). In the scholarly literature, however, one finds persistently reiterated the view that Delmedigo adopted a ‘double truth’ doctrine, allegedly set forth by Christian Averroists. In the first part of this chapter it is argued that Delmedigo clearly did not endorse such a doctrine. His stance on the relationship between philosophy and religion fundamentally agrees with that of Averroes, according to which ‘the truth does not contradict the truth.’ At the same time, Delmedigo’s position shows considerable originality and is best described as the outcome of a critical dialogue with both Averroes and Maimonides. This also accounts for the passages in his work that allegedly reflect a ‘double truth’ doctrine. The second aim of this chapter is to revisit the question of Delmedigo’s influence on Spinoza. It is highly likely that Spinoza was familiar with Averroes’s ideas in the form in which Delmedigo adopted them and this may help to account for the distinctly Averroistic features of Spinoza’s views on the relationship between philosophy and religion.
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Notes
- 1.
Alfred Ivry, ‘Remnants of Jewish Averroism in the Renaissance’, in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 243–265 (250). For overviews of Delmedigo’s life and works, see David M. Geffen, ‘Insights into the Life and Thought of Elijah Del Medigo Based on His Published and Unpublished Works’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 61–62 (1973–1974), pp. 69–86 and J. J. Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Elijah Delmedigo, Sefer behinat ha-dat, critical edition with introduction and commentary by J. J. Ross (Tel Aviv: Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, 1984) (Hebrew).
- 2.
On Delmedigo and Pico, see Alberto Bartòla, ‘Eliyhau del Medigo e Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: La testimonianza dei codici vaticani’, Rinascimento, 33 (1993), pp. 253–278.
- 3.
This is a simplification. At times Delmedigo seems to distinguish between contemporary pseudo-Kabbalah and a true ancient core; see Kalman Bland, ‘Elijah del Medigo’s Averroist Response to the Kabbalahs of Fifteenth-Century Jewry and Pico della Mirandola’, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 1 (1991), pp. 23–53.
- 4.
See Delmedigo’s unpublished letter to Pico, Ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin 6508, 71a–77b.
- 5.
Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl (Decisive Treatise), ed. George Hourani with corrections by Muhsin Mahdi, Eng. trans. Charles Butterworth (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001), pp. 8–9 (in the edition I use, the pagination of the Arabic text and the English translation are the same). Hebrew trans. and ed. N. Golb in ‘The Hebrew Translation of Averroes’ “Fasl Al-Maqâl”’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 25 (1956), pp. 91–113; 26 (1957), pp. 41–64. As Richard Taylor pointed out, Averroes is likely alluding to Aristotle’s claim in the Prior Analytics that the truth “must in every respect agree with itself” (I, 32; 47a8-9), a claim on which he elaborates in the Middle Commentary on the Prior Analytics and in the Long Commentary on the De Anima. See Taylor, ‘Truth Does Not Contradict Truth’, Averroes and the Unity of Truth, Topoi 19 (2000), pp. 3–16. It is possible that Delmedigo and Spinoza were aware of Averroes’s discussions of the Prior Analytics passage. However, the main Averroistic source for their views on the relationship between philosophy and religion is surely the Faʿl al-maqāl.
- 6.
This part is mostly based on Carlos Fraenkel, ‘Spinoza on Philosophy and Religion: The Averroistic Sources’, in The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation, eds Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti, and Justin Smith (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 58–81.
- 7.
For related controversies in modern scholarship, see Akasoy in this volume.
- 8.
Al-Fārābī, Kitāb taʿʿīl al-saʿāda (‘The Attainment of Happiness’), ed. Ja‛far Āl Yāsīn (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981), p. 185; English trans. Muhsin Mahdi in Al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 44. Al-Fārābī’s most elaborate discussion of religion is the Kitāb al-milla (Book of Religion), ed. Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1968); English trans. Charles Butterworth in The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
- 9.
Al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-ʿurūf = Alfarabi’s Book of Letters: Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1969); English trans. of Book 2 in Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings, ed. Muhammad Khalidi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), secs 142–143.
- 10.
See e.g. Al-Fārābī, Kitāb taʿʿīl al-saʿāda, Ar., p. 185; Eng., p. 45, quoted by Averroes in Commentary on Plato’s Republic, Hebrew trans. Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles, ed. with English trans. Erwin I. J. Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); new English trans. Ralph Lerner as Averroes on Plato’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 30. Cf. Maimonides, Dalālat al-ʿāʾirīn (Guide of the Perplexed), ed. Salomon Munk and Issachar Yoel (Jerusalem: Yunovits, 1931); Moreh ha-Nevukhim, Hebrew trans. Samuel ibn Tibbon, ed. Yehuda Even-Shmuel (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1987); The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963). In particular, see Guide of the Perplexed (I, 8–9), I, pp. 33–35.
- 11.
Shlomo Pines, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, I, pp. cxviii-cxix. To date the most detailed treatment of the Almohad elements in Maimonides’s thought is Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For further references see Akasoy in this volume.
- 12.
See in particular, Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (I, 35), I, pp. 79–81.
- 13.
For a detailed discussion of Maimonides’s peculiar position and its impact on later Jewish philosophy, see Carlos Fraenkel, ‘Legislating Truth: Maimonides, the Almohads, and the Thirteenth-Century Jewish Enlightenment’, in Studies in the History of Culture and Science: A Tribute to Gad Freudenthal 2010, eds Resianne Fontaine, Ruth Glasner, Reimund Leicht and Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 209–231.
- 14.
Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, pp. 9–10. Strictly speaking, the view that the truth of philosophy does not contradict the truth of religion is also compatible with the weaker claim, proposed for instance by Thomas Aquinas, that revelation contains truths that neither contradict philosophy, nor are accessible to it.
- 15.
Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, p. 10.
- 16.
For this argument, see in particular ibid., pp. 8, 19, 24–25; cf. Averroes, Kashf ‛an manāhij al-adilla fī ‛aqā’id al-milla, ed. Maʿmūd Qāsim (Cairo: Maktabat al-anjlū al-miʿriyya, 1964), pp. 132–135; English trans. Ibrahim Najjar, in Faith and Reason in Islam: Averroes’ Exposition of Religious Arguments (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), pp. 16–19.
- 17.
Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, pp. 27–28; for the metaphor of the physician, see also Averroes, Kashf, Ar., p. 181; Eng., p. 67.
- 18.
See Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, pp. 29–32. According to Kashf (Ar., pp. 132–133; Eng., pp. 16–17), one of the main accomplishments of the Faʿ l al-maqāl is to have shown that allegorical interpretation is strictly reserved to philosophers.
- 19.
Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, p. 21.
- 20.
Adolph Hübsch, ‘Elia Delmedigos Bechinat ha-Dath und Ibn Roshd’s Faʿl al-maqāl’, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 31 (1882), pp. 552–563; 32 (1883), pp. 28–48.
- 21.
Julius Guttmann, ‘Elias del Medigos Verhältnis zu Averroes in seinem Bechinat ha-Dat’, in Jewish Studies in Memory of Israel Abrahams, ed. Alexander Kohut (New York: Press of the Jewish Institute of Religion, 1927), pp. 192–208.
- 22.
Ibid., pp. 197–198.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 199–200.
- 24.
See Ivry, ‘Remnants’ and in particular Aryeh L. Motzkin, ‘Elija del Medigo, Averroes and Averroism’, Italia, 6 (1987), pp. 7–20.
- 25.
See Geffen,‘Life and Thought of Elijah Del Medigo’and Ross, ‘Introduction’.
- 26.
Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, pp. 84, 86, 92, 96.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 76; cf. p. 98 on the goal of the Law of Moses.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 29.
On the difference between the Mosaic Law and philosophy with respect to method, see in particular pp. 92–94.
- 30.
Strictly speaking, these are different methods belonging to the same discipline, i.e., logic. On the inclusion of Rhetoric and Poetics into Aristotle’s Organon and its philosophical implications, see Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Delmedigo briefly refers to the different methods of ‘logic’ (ha-limmud ha-kolel) at p. 75.
- 31.
See Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, pp. 76–78.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 93.
- 34.
Ibid., pp. 93–94.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 84. Indeed, Delmedigo’s reverence for Maimonides is such that he makes an exception with respect to the public interpretation of God’s anthropomorphic attributes. Whereas Averroes strictly opposed disclosing God’s incorporeality in public, Delmedigo recognises it as a fundamental principle of the Law of Moses, newly introduced by Maimonides (see p. 86). He even goes so far as to turn the precedent into a general rule: Doctrines previously concealed may be disclosed if the opinions commonly held by non-philosophers permit it (see p. 93). On the concept of gradually disclosing the Mosaic Law’s allegorical content in the Maimonidean tradition, see Fraenkel, ‘Legislating Truth’. But Delmedigo is clearly uncomfortable with this aspect of Maimonides’s project. It runs against the general thrust of his argument, which is even more insistent than Averroes’s on the need to keep philosophy and religion apart.
- 36.
According to Delmedigo, the disclosure of the allegorical interpretation of angels led to conflict and strife between philosophers and kabbalists in the Jewish community (see Behinat ha-dat, pp. 93–94). His account of the conflict is clearly modelled on Averroes’s description of the emergence of factions in Islam as a consequence of the disclosure of allegorical interpretations; see Faʿl al-maqāl, pp. 29–32.
- 37.
Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 96. Note that this passage comes in the context of Delmedigo’s discussion of rabbinic aggadot.
- 38.
See Menachem Kellner, Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Delmedigo is briefly discussed in chapter 9.
- 39.
See Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 85.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 77 (my emphasis).
- 42.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 81–82.
- 45.
See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (II, 25), II, p. 328.
- 46.
See ibid., Guide of the Perplexed (II, 13–25), II, pp. 281–330. For the concept of scientific progress, see in particular ibid. (II, 19), II, pp. 302–312 and (II, 24), II, pp. 322–327. For considerations of probability, see ibid. (II, 23), pp. 321–322.
- 47.
Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 83.
- 48.
Elijah Delmedigo, Annotationes, De primo motore quaestio, De efficientia mundi, in John of Jandun, Quaestiones in libros Physicorum Aristotelis (Venice: Hieronymus de Sanctis, and Johannes Lucilius Santritter, for Petrus Benzon and Petrus Plasiis, 1488), 122a–134b (133a). See Josep Puig Montada, ‘On the Chronology of Elia del Medigo’s Physical Writings’, in Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, eds Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1999), II, pp. 54–56.
- 49.
Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 77.
- 50.
See Hübsch, ‘Elia Delmedigos Bechinat ha-Dath und Ibn Roshd’s Facl al-maqal’, pp. 30–34, referring to Faʿl al-maqāl, p. 18.
- 51.
Guttmann, ‘Elias del Medigos Verhältnis zu Averroes’, pp. 206–207.
- 52.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (II, 25), II, p. 328; Dalālat al-ʿāʾirīn, p. 229.
- 53.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (II, 25), II, p. 329; Dalālat al-ʿāʾirīn, p. 230.
- 54.
See Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, pp. 85–87. The question of why he does not consider creation a fundamental principle is, of course, interesting, but cannot be discussed here.
- 55.
For a discussion of these treatises, see Josep Puig Montada, ‘Elia del Medigo and his Physical Quaestiones’, in Was ist Philosophie im Mittelater?, eds Jan Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), pp. 929–936.
- 56.
Behinat ha-dat, p. 93.
- 57.
See Averroes, Faʿl al-maqāl, pp. 9–10 and 19–20.
- 58.
See Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 93.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
For a comprehensive account of my thesis concerning Spinoza’s conception of the relationship between philosophy and religion, see Carlos Fraenkel, ‘Could Spinoza Have Presented the Ethics as the True Content of the Bible?’, in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, IV, eds Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 1–50.
- 61.
See in particular Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, ed. Fokke Akkerman, with French trans. Jacqueline Lagrée and Pierre-François Moreau, in Oeuvres complètes, under the direction of P.-F. Moreau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999-), III, chapter 7. I quote the Tractatus from this edition. I add references to Carl Gebhardt’s edition, Opera, 4 vols (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1925), according to which I also quote all other writings of Spinoza.
- 62.
See in particular Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Oeuvres, III, chapters 12–15.
- 63.
- 64.
Cf. the title of ch. 15: ‘Nec theologiam rationi, nec rationem theologiae ancillari, ostenditur, et ratio, qua nobis S. Scripturae authoritatem persuademus’.
- 65.
See Fraenkel, ‘Could Spinoza?’.
- 66.
Spinoza, Cogitata metaphysica, in Opera, I, pp. 264–265.
- 67.
Spinoza, Epistolae, in Opera, IV, pp. 92–94.
- 68.
I take 1665 to be the turning point, because in his correspondence with Willem van Blyenbergh in January and February (letters 19, 21, 23, in Opera, IV, pp. 86–95; 126–133; 144–152), Spinoza still firmly upholds the dogmatic position, whereas from his correspondence with Oldenburg in the autumn of the same year we learn that he had started to work on the Tractatus theologico-politicus. See letters 29 and 30, in Opera, IV, pp. 164–166.
- 69.
For a discussion of these passages, see Fraenkel, ‘Could Spinoza?’.
- 70.
Spinoza, ‘Praefatio’ to Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Oeuvres, III. Spinoza elaborates on the method in Tractatus theologico-politicus (ch. 7), in Opera, III.
- 71.
See Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (ch. 15), in Opera, III.
- 72.
In the preface to the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza describes ‘scepticism’ as the ‘one obstacle’ that prevents potential philosophers from philosophising (Oeuvres, III, p. 74; Opera, III, p. 12); cf. Epistola 30, in Opera, IV, p. 166.
- 73.
For a discussion of why Spinoza adopted the dogmatic position in his early writings, why he rejected it in the Tractatus theologico-politicus, and why he continued making use of it even after dismissing it, see again Fraenkel ‘Could Spinoza?’.
- 74.
Spinoza, Epistolae, in Opera, IV, p. 98.
- 75.
See the programmatic passages in Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I, pp. 5–20; (II, 2), II, pp. 252–254.
- 76.
Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Oeuvres, III, p. 316; Opera, III, p. 114.
- 77.
Alfred Ivry, ‘Averroes and the West: The First Encounter/Non-Encounter’, in A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 142–158.
- 78.
See Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1st edn (1697); 4th edn (Amsterdam: Brunel, Wetstein & Smith, 1730), pp. 384–391.
- 79.
For the Hebrew translation, see Golb, ‘The Hebrew Translation’.
- 80.
See Spinoza, Cogitata metaphysica (II, 12), in Opera, I, pp. 275–281, and Delmedigo, Behinat ha-dat, p. 93.
- 81.
Leon Roth, ‘The Abscondita Sapientiae of Joseph del Medigo’, Chronicon Spinozanum, 2 (1922), pp. 54–66.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 58.
- 83.
Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (ch. 14), in Oeuvres, III.
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Fraenkel, C. (2013). Reconsidering the Case of Elijah Delmedigo’s Averroism and Its Impact on Spinoza. In: Akasoy, A., Giglioni, G. (eds) Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_11
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