Ibn Gabirol's Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism

ISBN: 9781107240551 出版年：2013 页码：286 Sarah Pessin Cambridge University Press

Drawing on Arabic passages from Ibn Gabirol’s original Fons Vitae text and highlighting philosophical insights from his Hebrew poetry, Sarah Pessin develops a Theology ofDesire at the heart of IbnGabirol’s eleventh-century cosmo-ontology. She challenges centuries of received scholarship on his work, including his socalled Doctrine of Divine Will. Pessin rejects voluntarist readings of the Fons Vitae as opposing divine emanation. She also emphasizes Pseudo-Empedoclean notions of Divine Desire and Grounding Element alongside Ibn Gabirol’s use of a particularly Neoplatonic method with apophatic (and what she terms “doubly apophatic”) implications. In this way, Pessin reads claims aboutmatter as insights about love, desire, the human relation to goodness, wisdom and God, and the receptive, dependent, and fragile nature of human being. Pessin reenvisions the entire spirit of Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy, moving us from a set of doctrines to a fluid inquiry into the nature of God and human being – and the bond between God and human being in desire.