Andalus and Sefarad by Stroumsa Sarah;

Author:Stroumsa, Sarah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Pseudo-Empedoclean Neoplatonism

The origins of the theory of an Andalusian “school of Pseudo-Empedocles” go back to the nineteenth century, when Salomon Munk and David Kaufmann believed they had found in three late (fourteenth- and fifteenth-century) Hebrew Kabbalistic texts fragments of the Book of Five Substances. This book was first attributed to Empedocles by Shem Tov Ibn Falaqera in his introduction to the Hebrew epitome of Ibn Gabirol’s Source of Life. Falaqera also suggested that in his book, Ibn Gabirol followed “opinions of the ancient philosophers that are similar to those mentioned by Empedocles in the book he composed on the five substances.”56 The theory, which originated with the discovery of these late Jewish texts, received its fuller development by Asín Palacios, who, relying on the information of al-Shahrastānī and al-Shahrazūrī, thought that he detected the Pseudo-Empedoclean tradition in a variety of Arabic Jewish and Muslim texts, continuing all the way to Hebrew Kabbalah and Latin scholasticism.57 The Pseudo-Empedoclean system, as analyzed by Munk, Kaufmann, and Asín Palacios, involved a complex reconstruction from fragments of many different texts. It presented a Neoplatonist doctrine in which the emanation of the pure, spiritual prime element (al-ʿunṣur al-awwal) by the Creator’s will is followed by the emanation of the intellect, the universal soul (al-nafs al-kulliyya), nature (al-ṭabīʿa), and secondary matter. Voluntarist creationism and the existence of a prime element prior to the universal intellect were perceived as distinctive hallmarks that set this doctrine, supposedly typical of the Iberian peninsula, apart from classical Neoplatonism.58 Characteristic (but not exclusive) imagery and vocabulary, such as the imagery of the ladder, the distinction between the kernel or core and the outer shells, and the image of the source (yanbūʿ), were also identified in the cosmogony and soteriology of this doctrine.59

With few exceptions, most specifically a critical article by Samuel Miklós Stern, the existence of Pseudo-Empedocles has been taken for granted for almost a century.60 This near-consensus was reversed in 1997 when Daniel De Smet published his Empedocles Arabus, arguing persuasively that Pseudo-Empedocles did not constitute a distinct philosophical system. There is, hence, no single coherent “Pseudo-Empedoclean system” identifiable in the various texts that have been associated with Pseudo-Empedocles. De Smet distinguishes between the so-called Pseudo-Empedoclean doctrine and what he calls the Arab Empedocles. Both represent for him but two of the many faces of Arabic Neoplatonism. Treating either of them as a separate school is neither correct nor helpful. As a main source for what has evolved into the so-called Pseudo-Empedocles, De Smet, following Ulrich Rudolph, pointed to the Pseudo-Ammonius.61 It is possible that Falaqera had in mind this doxology when he alluded to the ancient philosophers whose system Ibn Gabirol may have been following.

De Smet was not alone in his skepticism. Josef van Ess, for example, has described the Pseudo-Empedocles doctrine as yet another phantom of the scholarship regarding al-Andalus.62 Nevertheless, it seems to me imperative to ensure that, as we chase away the phantom, we do not at the same time disperse the insights that it brought to the fore.

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