Ibn Gabirol

Ibn Gabirol (born c. 1022, Málaga, caliphate of Córdoba—died c. 1058/70, Valencia, kingdom of Valencia) was one of the outstanding figures of the Hebrew school of religious and secular poetry during the Jewish Golden Age in Moorish Spain. He was also an important Neoplatonic philosopher.

Early life and career

Born in Málaga about 1022, Ibn Gabirol received his higher education in Saragossa, where he joined the learned circle of other Cordoban refugees established there around famed scholars and the influential courtier Yekutiel ibn Ḥasan. Protected by this patron, whom Ibn Gabirol immortalized in poems of loving praise, the 16-year-old poet became famous for his religious hymns in masterly Hebrew. The customary language of Andalusian literature had been Arabic, and Hebrew had only recently been revived as a means of expression for Jewish poets. At 16 he could rightly boast of being world famous:

…My song is a crown for kings and mitres on the heads of governors.
My body walks upon the earth, while my spirit ascends to the clouds.
Behold me: at sixteen my heart like that of a man of eighty is wise.

He made, however, the mistake of lampooning Samuel ha-Nagid, a rising Jewish statesman and vizier in the Berber kingdom of Granada, who was also a talented poet, Talmudist, strategist, and model writer of letters. After making poetical amends, Ibn Gabirol seems to have been admitted to the favour of this vizier, whose main court encomiast he subsequently became.

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A Study of Poetry

This happened while the poet was involved (on the Saragossan side) in the disproportionate strife between the grammarians of Saragossa and those of Granada concerning Hebrew linguistics. Being an emancipated Cordoban, he offended the orthodox with heresies such as recommending childlessness, denunciation of the “world,” Neoplatonism, and an almost insane self-aggrandizement (coupled with the use of animal epithets for his opponents). He apparently had to flee from Saragossa; the circumstances leading to his departure are described in his “Song of Strife”:

Sitting among everybody crooked and foolish his [the poet’s] heart only was wise.
The one slakes you with adder’s poison, the other, flattering, tries to confuse your head.
One, setting you a trap in his design will address you: “Please, my lord.”
A people whose fathers I would despise to be dogs for my sheep…

His “Song of Strife” and other poems show that his being a synagogal poet did not protect him against the hatred of his co-religionists in Saragossa, who called him a Greek because of his secular leanings.

Against all warnings by his patron Yekutiel, Ibn Gabirol concentrated on Neoplatonic philosophy, after having composed a non-offensive collection of proverbs in Arabic, Mukhtār al-jawāhir (“Choice of Pearls”), and a more original, though dated, ethical treatise (based on contemporary theories of the human temperaments), also in Arabic, Kitāb iṣlāḥ al-akhlāq (“The Improvement of the Moral Qualities”). The latter contains chapters on pride, meekness, modesty, and impudence, which are linked with the sense of sight; and on love, hate, compassion, and cruelty, linked with hearing and other senses.

In need of a new patron after the execution of Yekutiel in 1039 by those who had murdered his king and taken over power, Ibn Gabirol secured a position as a court poet with Samuel ha-Nagid, who, becoming the leading statesman of Granada, was in need of the poet’s prestige. Ibn Gabirol composed widely resounding poems with a messianic tinge for Samuel and for Jehoseph (Yūsuf), his son and later successor in the vizierate of Granada. All other biographical data about Ibn Gabirol except his place of death, Valencia, must be extrapolated from his poetry.

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Poetry

The Jewish subculture of Moorish Andalusia (southern Spain) was engendered by the cultural “pressure” of the Arab peers. Ibn Gabirol’s dual education, typical for the Jewish intelligentsia in the larger cities, must have encompassed both the entire Hebrew literary heritage—the Bible, Talmud, and other rabbinic writings and, in particular, Hebrew linguistics—and the Arabic, including the Qurʾān, Arabic secular and religious poetry and poetics, and the philosophical, philological, and possibly medical literature.

His poetry, like that of the entire contemporary Hebrew school, is modelled after the Arabic. Metrics, rhyme systems, and most of the highly developed imagery follow the Arabic school, but the biblical language adds a particular tinge. Many of Ibn Gabirol’s poems show the influence of the knightly Arab bard al-Mutanabbī and the pessimistic Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī.

His secular topics included exaggerated, Arab-inspired self-praise, justified by the fame of the child prodigy; love poems (renouncing yet keenly articulate); praise of his noble and learned protectors, together with scathingly satirical reproach of others; dirges (the most moving of which are linked with the execution of the innocent Yekutiel); wine songs (sometimes libertine); spring and rain poems; flower portraits; the agonizingly realistic description of a skin ailment; and a long didactic poem on Hebrew grammar. Ibn Gabirol’s long poetic description of a castle led to the discovery of the origins of the first Alhambra palace, built by the above-mentioned Jehoseph. Of a very rich production, about 200 secular poems and even more religious ones were preserved, though no collection of his poems survived. Many manuscript fragments of the former came to light only recently, preserved in synagogue attics by his co-religionists’ respect for the Hebrew letter. Many of his religious poems were included in Jewish prayer books throughout the world.

His religious poems, in particular the poignant short prayers composed for the individual, presuppose the high degree of literacy typical of Moorish Spain, and they, too, show Arabic incentive. His famed rhymed prose poem “Keter malkhut” (“The Crown of the Kingdom”), a meditation stating the measurements of the spheres of the universe, jolts the reader into the abject feeling of his smallness but, subsequently, builds him up by a proclamation of the divine grace.

The following morning meditation exemplifies his religious poetry:

See me at dawn, my Rock; my Shelter, when my plight
I state before Thy face likewise again at night,
Outpouring anguished thought— that Thou behold’st my heart
and what it contemplates I realise in fright.
Low though the value be of mind’s and lip’s tribute
to Thee (accomplishes aught my spirit with its might?).
Most cherish’st Thou the hymn we sing before Thee. Thus,
while Thou support’st my breath, I praise Thee in Thine height.
Amen.

Philosophy

His Fountain of Life, in five treatises, is preserved in toto only in the Latin translation, Fons vitae, with the author’s name appearing as Avicebron or Avencebrol; it was re-identified as Ibn Gabirol’s work by Salomon Munk in 1846. It had little influence upon Jewish philosophy other than on León Hebreo (Judah Abrabanel) and Benedict de Spinoza, but it inspired the Kabbalists, the adherents of Jewish esoteric mysticism. Its influence upon Christian Scholasticism was marked, although it was attacked by St. Thomas Aquinas for equating concepts with realities. Grounded in Plotinus and other Neoplatonic writers yet also in Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, Ibn Gabirol developed a system in which he introduced the conception of a divine will, like the Logos (or divine “word”) of Philo. It is an essential unity of creativity of and with God, mutually related like sun and sunlight, which mediates actively between the transcendent deity and the cosmos that God created out of nothingness (to be understood as the potentiality for creation). Matter emanates directly from the deity as a prime matter that supports all substances and even the “intelligent” substances, the sphere-moving powers and angels. This concept was accepted by the Franciscan school of Scholastics but rejected by the Dominicans, including St. Thomas, for whom form (and only one, not many) and not matter is the creative principle. Since matter, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, “yearns for formation” and, thus, moving toward the nearness of God, causes the rotation of the spheres, the finest matter of the highest spheres is propelled by the strongest “yearning,” which issues from God and returns to him and is active in man (akin to the last line of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The love which moves the sun and the other stars”).

Yet, the dry treatise does not betray the passionate quest of the Neoplatonist author. A philosophical poem, beginning “That man’s love,” reveals the human intent. Therein, a disciple asks the poet-philosopher what importance the world could have for the deity (to be understood in Aristotelian terms as a deity that only contemplates its own perfection). The poet answers that all of existence is permeated, though to different degrees, by the yearning of matter toward formation, and he declares that this yearning may give God the “glory” that the heavens proclaim, as the Bible teaches.