Hasdai Crescas

Works

• c. 1410The Light of the Lord (Or Adonai)

  Aristotelian physics and Maimonides’ intellectualism attacked from within: an actual infinite and a void are possible, and the soul’s end is love of God, not knowledge.

Position

The Light of the Lord was planned as the first, philosophical part of a larger work whose legal part Crescas never wrote; it was meant to replace Maimonides’ framework of faith and law. Its first book examines the propositions of Aristotelian physics with which Maimonides opened the second part of the Guide and on which his proofs of God rest. Against Aristotle Crescas argued that an actual infinite is possible – infinites can even differ in size – that a void can exist, and that place is not the inner boundary of the surrounding body but the extension a body occupies; he also allowed that more than one world could exist. For the existence of God he kept a single argument: whatever is possible in itself needs a cause, so there must be a being necessary in itself, whether the chain of causes is finite or infinite. Against Maimonides and Gersonides he denied that human perfection and immortality consist in knowledge. God’s essence is goodness and love, and the human end is love of God and joy in keeping the commandments, which does not depend on intellectual achievement. On freedom he held that human choice is real but fully determined by causes, and that reward and punishment remain just because they act as causes on the will. Spinoza cites him by name (“Rab Chasdai”) in a letter of 1663 for the argument about infinite causes, and many scholars see his influence in Spinoza’s views of extension, necessity and the love of God. Parts of his critique of Aristotle reached Christian readers through Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola.

Life & context

Hasdai ben Judah Crescas was born around 1340 in Barcelona into a family of merchants and scholars. He studied with Nissim of Gerona, the leading Talmudist of Catalonia, and by 1370 was a judge in the Jewish community of Barcelona, with close ties to the royal court of Aragon. In 1389 he moved to Saragossa as its rabbi, and in 1390 the king and queen named him the highest judge of the Jews of the Crown of Aragon. In the summer of 1391 anti-Jewish riots spread across Castile and Aragon; thousands were killed and many more forced to convert. A son of Crescas was killed in Barcelona, and he described the events in a letter to the Jews of Avignon. He spent his last two decades trying to rebuild the communities and to strengthen those who remained Jewish. Around 1397–98 he wrote a Refutation of the Principles of the Christians in Catalan, preserved only in a Hebrew translation, and he worked for at least fifteen years on The Light of the Lord, which a pupil edited after his death. He died in Saragossa late in 1410 or early in 1411. Joseph Albo was among his pupils.

Further main works

• Letter to the community of Avignon on the riots of 1391
• Refutation of the Principles of the Christians (written in Catalan c. 1397–98; preserved in Hebrew translation)