Solomon ibn Gabirol

A Hebrew poet whose Fountain of Life, in Latin translation, influenced Christian theology more than Jewish. Part of his poetry voices Neoplatonic ideas of emanation and the soul's return.

Muslim al-Andalus proved especially fertile ground for Jewish engagement with the main cultural currents of the time, and ideas about God, creation and prophecy passed easily between authors of different religions. Bahya ibn Paquda, in the latter eleventh century, copied almost verbatim a passage from an Arabic theological text by a Christian author into his Duties of the Heart, and the same text turns up in the Islamic thinker al-Ghazzali. The Fountain of Life (Fons Vitae) by Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1020 to 1057) had more influence on Christian theology, in Latin translation, than the lost original ever had among Jews.1 Two philosophical traditions shaped Jewish philosophy (as they did Muslim and Christian): Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. Neoplatonism, a reading of Plato that arose in late antiquity, sees all existence as the result of an 'emanation' from a pure spiritual first principle; the farther from the source, the more material. The human soul, spiritual in origin, can free itself from the body and return to purity, and some of Gabirol's poetry voices these ideas.2