The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus. Maud Kozodoy

with his preconversion name: Profayt Duran ha-Levi. The third is not signed at all—and that, plus the fact that it does not appear in Meir Crescas’s manuscript collection, suggests either that it was not written to Meir Crescas but to another individual and later collected with the others or that it was written later, after Meir’s manuscript was completed. If this last suggestion is right, it would have been composed while Duran was living as a Christian.

      After surveying Duran’s general facility with philosophical argumentation, I consider a point of possible contact between Duran and Hasdai Crescas on the issue of Jewish dogma, and then turn to Duran’s eclectic incorporation, into his Maimonidean system, of terminology and ideas drawn from Judah Halevi on divine emanation and from Abraham ibn Ezra on astrology.

      PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

      I begin with the one philosophical letter definitely written by Duran to his student Meir Crescas.⁸ In it Duran explains human perfection, and does so in purely philosophical terms. Meir Crescas had asked about a confusing phrase in a book called Sefer ha-Tamar, an Arabic divination text by Abu Aflaḥ of Syracuse, translated into Hebrew in fourteenth-century Provence.⁹ In copying this letter into his manuscript, his pride rather touchingly shining through, Meir notes that it is “the answer of the great sage, my perfect teacher maestre Profayt Duran ha-Levi, to me the writer, the smallest of his students.”¹⁰

      One of a series of aphorisms attributed in the text to Suleiman (King Solomon) had proved obscure: “The hearts inclined to the desire, and the desire to the temperament, and the temperament to the divine will, and the divine will, its solution is aggadah, and the solution of aggadah is emanation and the solution of emanation is perfection and the solution of perfection is hidden.” In his reply, Duran interprets this phrase as a wonderfully concise expression of “the final felicity of man and the purpose of the perfection that is possible for him to attain and the causes that bring him to it and the path to this [end].” He acknowledges the controversy over the details of this perfection among “sages of investigation,” but also notes, rather approvingly, that the phrase encapsulates “what the important philosophers said about it and where the opinions of the great ones agree.”¹¹

      Duran propounds three introductory principles before turning to interpret the words from Sefer ha-Tamar as expressing them. For our purposes it is necessary only to look at the introductory principles. The first is a thoroughly philosophical view of what constitutes human perfection:

      The ultimate perfection of man occurs in the part of the soul by which [man] is particularized and that [part of the soul] is the intellectual faculty and it [occurs] when [the soul] is perfected by the apprehension of those intelligibles that are attainable. [Aristotle] has written about this in one [of the chapters of] the Book of the Qualities [Nicomachean Ethics] and [al-Ghazali] in his preface to The Intentions [Maqāṣid], and most of the philosophers have agreed on this [principle]. Indeed, as for the quality of this perfection, one sect thinks that the hylic intellect turns into the acquired intellect and that the more intelligibles one acquires, the more one’s intellect is perfected. And [another] sect thinks that there is a higher level [than this] and it is [achieved] when this hylic intellect, after its perfection, is unified with the separate [intellect] and conjoins with it [in] a conjunction [by means of] apprehension. And ibn Rushd has written at length about this and upholds this possibility in his treatise called The Possibility of Conjunction,¹² and the true prophets arrived at this level while they yet lived. Maimonides has explained this in his chapter about prophecy, Guide II.37.¹³

      Duran explains human perfection in intellectual terms: the rational faculty apprehends intelligibles while the body lives. And afterward? There are two opinions on the nature of immortality: some, according to Duran, believe that it consists in the sum total of the intelligibles apprehended in life, the Gersonidean view. The more eternal truths one has learned over the course of one’s life, the more blissful (or at least interesting), presumably, immortality will be. Others believe that there is yet a higher level of immortality, namely, that the perfected human intellect becomes conjoined with the agent intellect after death, presumably enjoying all of the intelligibles comprehended in the agent intellect. Duran refers us to the Guide II.37, where Maimonides discusses the intellectual overflow “through which we have intellectual cognition” and its different effects on different men, among them men of science and prophets.¹⁴ Presumably Duran understands Maimonides to hold the second opinion with respect to this conjunction.

      Then Duran turns to the nature of prophecy itself: “Second, the prophesying soul is particularized by three virtues [that differentiate it] from the rest of the human souls: one, knowledge of the future; two, subjugation of the matter of the world; three, and this is the most considerable, knowledge of the secrets of existence. And truth emanates suddenly without intermediate boundaries, and this happens to it because of the conjunction with the separate [intellect]. [Al-Ghazali] already wrote this in The Intentions and The Balance of Inquiries,¹⁵ and [Maimonides] hinted about it in his estimable book.”¹⁶ Just as the human soul is differentiated from that of animals by the intellectual faculty, so too the prophet’s soul is differentiated from the soul of regular humans by three virtues, or abilities. First, the prophet can see the future; second, he can control matter, that is, perform miracles; third, he knows “the secrets of existence.” Duran is evidently alluding to knowledge about the created world that can be attained only by prophecy, as discussed above in Chapter 3. If we follow Duran’s position there, we might include among these “secrets of existence” knowledge of the nature of celestial matter and some partial knowledge of the separate intellects. Prophetic knowledge is therefore of two types: knowledge of sublunar events before they happen and knowledge about the universe that cannot be attained through the unaided use of human reason.

      Finally, Duran turns to the requirements for prophecy:

      Third, this perfection, however it comes to be, will indeed come with perfection of the temperament and its equability and the disposition particular to it, and with choice [free will] and intellection to bring the intellect from potentiality to actuality by the apprehension of the sciences. And with these two causes, [Aristotle] thinks that this [makes] achieving [prophecy] possible. But according to the opinion of the men of Torah, there is a third cause here and it is the divine will. [Maimonides] has explained this in [Guide] II.32. And if what is intended by the “divine will” is what some of the later sages understood, namely, what is written in the Book of Adam Rishon,¹⁷ about which the master hinted (according to their opinion) at the end of [Guide] II.33, then the philosophers acknowledge this reason also.¹⁸

      As Duran describes it here, an individual must first be physically perfect, as measured by the equability of his temperament. That is to say, the humors and qualities in the body should be perfectly balanced. This equable temperament allows the development of a disposition toward intellection. And the perfection of the intellect itself is achieved through the study of the sciences. According to the philosophical view, prophecy is automatically and necessarily attained once all these requirements have been met. As Duran himself notes, this is the view expressed in Guide II.32, where Maimonides describes the philosophical opinion thus: “when in the case of a superior individual who is perfect with respect to his rational and moral qualities, his imaginative faculty is in its most perfect state, and when he has been prepared in the way that you will hear, he will necessarily become a prophet, inasmuch as this is a perfection that belongs to us by nature.”¹⁹

      According to Maimonides, however, this is not the approved Jewish view—that of the “men of Torah.” Instead, these men hold that prophecy can be withheld even from someone who is physically and intellectually prepared, if God so wills it: “It may happen that one who is fit for prophecy and prepared for it should not become a prophet, namely, on account of the divine will.”²⁰ In the final line of the extract above, Duran cites the argument of some later interpreters of the Guide to the effect that when Maimonides speaks of “divine will” in this context, he means secretly to indicate something other than what is usually considered to be the divine will. According