The Font of Life (Fons vitae) by Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) (review)

Known to the Latin West variously as Avicebron, Avencebrol, or Avicembron, Solomon Ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021–ca. 1058) was one of the most remarkable Jewish Neoplatonists of the Middle Ages. Although much of his work is no longer extant, two important philosophical works survive: On the Improvement of the Moral Qualities and The Font of Life. Originally written in Arabic as Yanbû ‘ al-Hayâh, the latter survives as a complete work only in the twelfth-century Latin translation of Dominicus Gundissalinus and John of Spain as the Fons vitae, although a thirteenth-century Hebrew translation of the work by Shem-Tov Ibn Falaquera, in abridged form, is also extant. With the recent effort by John A. Laumakis, based on the Latin critical edition of Clemens Baeumker, the English-speaking world finally has a reliable translation of this important work.

Written in dialogue form and comprising five treatises, the Fons vitae contains Ibn Gabirol’s Neoplatonic account of metaphysics and cosmology. One of its more interesting features is the creative role that Gabirol attributes to the divine will rather than the divine intelligence within his emanationist system. This is unusual for a Neoplatonic work and suggests that the created order came into existence voluntarily rather than out of necessity. What role does the divine will play in Gabirol’s account? It is an intermediary between God or the first essence, which is one, and from which it emanates, and the rest of the cosmos, which emanates from it, and whose substances, whether sensible or intelligible, are composed of matter and form. That is, it is intended to fill an ontological gap between the one and the many that comprise Gabirol’s hierarchy of being. Although Gabirol seemed to be of two minds over whether the divine will was the first essence in its capacity as active, or whether it was a hypostasis that was altogether distinct from the first essence, his integration of such a notion within a Neoplatonic framework is unique.

Now the ultimate point of human life is to come to know this first essence, direct cognition of which has become obscured through the soul’s composition with the body, and in which true happiness consists. Such knowledge involves an ascent from the lower to the higher, that is, from knowledge of the sensible world of particular substances, which are reflections of the higher, to a knowledge of universal form and universal matter, the attainment of which will provide access to the domain of universal intelligence. Once this is achieved the soul will be in a position to acquire knowledge of the divine will and ultimately of the first essence: God. Finally reunited with God, the font or source of life, the soul will be said to have overcome death and achieved eternal happiness.

Although Gabirol had little appreciable impact on Jewish thought, several ideas associated with the Fons vitae had considerable influence on the medieval Latin tradition. This is not to imply that Gabirol’s views were greeted with enthusiasm by all Latin authors. For if it is true that the Fons vitae had a pronounced impact on the thought of Gundissalinus and William of Auvergne, it is equally true that theologians such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were critical of Gabirol’s views, and in particular of his notion of spiritual matter and his putative defense of the plurality of substantial forms. Aquinas famously rejected both of these views, although many thinkers in the Franciscan tradition, notably Bonaventure, embraced them. Indeed, for a time, the notion of the plurality of substantial forms was the dominant and indeed orthodox position at Oxford and Paris, Aquinas’s defense the unicity of the substantial form in human beings having been condemned in 1277. To the extent that such views originated with Gabirol, the Fons vitae is crucial background reading.

Although...