Abraham Bar Hiyya - As A Moral Philosopher

As A Moral Philosopher

Not only as mathematician and astronomer, but also as moral philosopher, the author of the profoundly religious work, Hegyon ha-Nefesh (Meditation of the Soul) deserves special notice. In this field of philosophy he had also pioneer work to do; for, as is shown by Guttmann (Monatsschrift, 1900, p. 195), in refutation of Kaufmann's assumption that the Hegyon ha-Nefesh was originally written in Arabic (Z. D. M. G. xxx. 364; Die Spuren Al-Baṭlajûsis, p. 28, and Bacher, Die Bibelexegese der Jüdischen Religionsphilosophen des Mittelalters, p. 82), Abraham b. Ḥiyya had to wrestle with the difficulties of a language not yet adapted to philosophic terminology.

Whether composed especially for the Ten Days of Repentance, as Rapoport (ibid.) and Rosin (Ethik des Maimonides, p. 15) think, or not, the object of the work was a practical, rather than a theoretical, one. It was to be a homily in four chapters on repentance based on the Hafṭarot of the Day of Atonement and Shabbat Shuvah. In it, with the fervor of a holy preacher, he exhorts the reader to lead a life of purity and devotion. At the same time he does not hesitate to borrow ideas from non-Jewish philosophers, and he pays homage to the ancient sages of the heathen world who, without knowledge of the Torah, arrived at certain fundamental truths regarding the beginning of things, though in an imperfect way, because both the end and the divine source of wisdom remained hidden to them (Hegyon, pp. 1, 2). In his opinion the non-Jew may attain to as high a degree of godliness as the Jew (Hegyon, p. 8a).