## 1. Life and Works




There exists a large debate in the secondary literature concerning the
place and role of Jews in Renaissance culture. One group envisages a
synthesis between Jewish culture on the one hand, and the ideals of
the Renaissance on the
 other.[2] 
 Jews, according to this interpretation, could quite easily remain
Jewish while still sharing in the values and culture of non-Jewish
society. Another group, however, maintains that such a synthesis is
historically untenable because Jews remained a small, persecuted
minority left to the whims of various local
 governments.[3] 
 These two approaches leave us with radically different conceptions of
Renaissance Jewish philosophers. According to the first approach, a
Jewish intellectual could quite easily partake of the ideals and
categories of Renaissance Humanism and Neoplatonism. According to the
second approach, however, such a synthesis could never occur, and, as
a result, most Renaissance Jewish thinkers were more indebted to the
legacy of Maimonides than the various trajectories of Renaissance
thought. A more productive approach, however, exists between these
two: The Italian Renaissance provided certain elite Jews with new
literary genres, intellectual categories, and educational ideals with
which to mine the depths of their tradition.


### 1.1 Life




Judah Abrabanel was born in Lisbon, Portugal, sometime between 1460
and 1470. He was the firstborn of Don Isaac Abrabanel
(1437-1508), who was an important philosopher in his own right. 
In addition to their intellectual skills, the Abrabanel family played
an important role in international commerce, quickly becoming one of
the most prominent families in Lisbon.




Despite the conservative tendencies in the thought of his father,
Don Isaac insured that his children received educations that included
both Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. Rabbi Joseph ben Abraham ibn
Hayoun, the leading rabbinic figure in Lisbon, was responsible for
teaching religious subjects (e.g., Bible, commentaries, and halakhic
works) to Judah and his brothers. As far as non-Jewish works and
subjects were concerned, Judah, like most elite Jews of the fifteenth
century, would have been instructed in both the medieval Arabo-Judaic
tradition (e.g., Maimonides, Averroes), in addition to humanistic
studies imported from
 Italy.[4]




By profession, Judah was a doctor, one who had a very good
reputation and who served the royal court. In 1483, his father
was implicated in a political conspiracy against Joao II, the Duke of
Braganza, and was forced to flee to Seville, in Spain, with his
family. Shortly after his arrival, undoubtedly on account of his
impressive connections and diplomatic skills, Isaac was summoned to the
court of Ferdinand and Isabella, where he was to become a financial
advisor to the royal family. Despite his favorable relationship
with them, Isaac was unable to influence them to rescind their famous
edict of expulsion--calling on all Jews who refused to convert
to Christianity--to depart from the Iberian
Peninsula.




Judah seems also to have been well connected at the Spanish court and
was one of the physicians who attended the royal family. After the
edict of expulsion had been issued, Ferdinand and Isabella requested
that he remain in Spain. To do this, however, he still would have had
to convert to Christianity. Yet, in order to try and keep Judah in
Spain, a plot was hatched to kidnap his firstborn son, Isaac ben
Judah. Judah, however, discovered the plot and sent his son, along
with his Christian nanny, on to Portugal, where he hoped to meet up
with them. Upon hearing that a relative of Isaac Abrabanel had
re-entered Portugal, Joao II had the young boy seized and forcefully
converted to Christianity. It is uncertain whether or not Judah ever
saw or heard from his son again. In a moving poem, entitled
*Telunah 'al ha-zeman* ("The Travails of
Time"), he writes:



> 
> 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Time with his pointed shafts has hit my heart
> >   
> > 
> >  and split my guts, laid open my entrails,
> >   
> > 
> >  landed me a blow that will not heal
> >   
> > 
> >  knocked me down, left me in lasting pain...
> >   
> > 
> >  He did not stop at whirling me around,
> >   
> > 
> >  exiling me while yet my days were green
> >   
> > 
> >  sending me stumbling, drunk, to roam the world...
> >   
> > 
> >  He scattered everyone I care for northward,
> >   
> > 
> >  eastward, or to the west, so that
> >   
> > 
> >  I have no rest from constant thinking, planning--
> >   
> > 
> >  and never a moment's peace, for all my
> >  plans.[5]
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 




Like many of those Jews who refused to convert, Judah and his
immediate family, including his father, made their way to Naples.
There, Ferdinand II of Aragon, the king of Naples, warmly welcomed the
Abrabanel family, owing to its many contacts in international
trade. In 1495, however, the French took control of Naples, and Judah
was again forced to flee, first to Genoa, then to Barletta, and
subsequently to Venice. It seems that he also traveled around Tuscany,
and there is some debate as to whether or not he actually met the
famous Florentine Humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (it seems
unlikely that he did). In 1501, after the defeat of the French in
Naples, he was invited back to be the personal physician of the
Viceroy of Naples, Fernandez de Cordoba. Among all of these
peregrinations, Judah found the time to write (but not publish) his
*magnum opus*, the *Dialoghi d'amore*. He seems to
have died sometime after 1521. Other than these basic facts, we know
very little of the life of Judah Abrabanel.




Especially enigmatic are the last years of his life, between 1521 when
he was requested to give medical attention to Cardinal San Giorgio
until 1535 when Mariano Lenzi published the *Dialoghi*
posthumously in Rome. There is some evidence that Judah moved to Rome
near the end of his life; some suggest that he fell in with a
Christian group of Neoplatonists. Indeed, the 1541 edition of the work
mentions that Judah converted to Christianity (*dipoi fatto
christiano*). This, however, seems highly unlikely as (1) it is
not mentioned in the first edition, the one on which all subsequent
editions and translations were based, and (2) there is no internal
evidence in the *Dialoghi* to suggest this. In fact, one of the
characters in the work implies the exact opposite, stating that
"all of us believe in the sacred Mosaic law" (*noi
tutti che crediamo la sacre legge
 mosaica*).[6] 
 It seems, then, that either a careless or over-zealous editor
inserted the phrase "*dipoi fatto christiano*" into
a later edition of the *Dialoghi*.


### 1.2 Works




The only major work that we possess of Judah Abrabanel is the
*Dialoghi d'amore*. There is some debate as to when the
work was actually written. Many point to the year 1501-1502 owing to a
phrase in the third book: "According to the Jewish tradition, we
are in the year 5262 from the beginning of creation" (*Siamo,
secondo la verita ebraica, a cinque milia ducento sessanta due
del principio de la
 creazione*).[7] 
 The year 5262 of the Jewish calendar corresponds to 1501-1502 of the
Gregorian calendar. Yet, manuscripts other than that based on the 1535
edition have the date of 5272 (i.e., 1511-1512). This is significant
because many who argue that the *Dialoghi* could not possibly
have been written in Italian point to the fact that Judah would not
have been fluent in Italian. Yet, if we assume the 1511-1512 date to
be correct this would place him in Italy for close to twenty years,
more than enough time to gain proficiency in Italian (especially given
the fact that he would have already known at least one Spanish
vernacular and, as a physician, Latin).




We also know that Judah wrote poetry (see the poem quoted above). In
addition to his biographical poem, he also composed poetic
introductions to three of his father's last works: *Rosh
Amanah, Zevach Pesach*, and *Nachalat Avot.*




Finally, we possess a letter dating to 1566 from one Amatus Lusitanus,
a physician who wrote that he attended to a patient by the name of
Judah "who was the grandson of the great Platonic philosopher,
known as Judah or Leon Abrabanel, who gave to us the most beautiful
dialogues on love." Further in this letter, he mentions that
Judah also composed a work entitled *De Coeli Harmonia*
("On the Harmony of the Spheres") and that, according to
the introduction, he dedicated it to the "divine Pico della
Mirandola." Unfortunately, this work has not survived. If he
dedicated to Pico as the letter indicates, it would most likely have
been composed before the *Dialoghi* and also, based on the
title, it would have been composed in Latin.


### 1.3 *Dialoghi d'amore* and the Question of Language




The central question concerning the language of the
*Dialoghi*'s composition is: How could a Jewish refugee
from Portugal show such facility with Italian, let alone the Tuscan
dialect, since Judah seems to have spent very little time in
 Tuscany?[8] 
 Those who argue
for a Latin original point to the fact that (1) he was a physician and
would have known Latin, and (2) a phrase by Yosef Shlomo Delmedigo
(1591-1655) in his *Mikhtav Ahuz* suggesting that he was going
to translate Judah's work from Latin. Those who argue for a
Hebrew original point to another phrase, this time by Claudio Tolemei
(1492-1556), a non-Jew, which states that Judah composed his treatise
in *sua lingua* ("his own language"). 
Although, as others have pointed out, such a phrase could quite easily
refer to "his own style."




However, given the evidence, an Italian original for the work seems
most likely since (1) all the manuscripts, including Mariano
Lenzi's edition of 1535, are in Italian; (2) it seems that Judah
had lived in Italy for close to twenty years by the time that he wrote
the *Dialoghi* (more than enough time for someone to gain an
intimate knowledge of Italian, especially someone proficient in Latin
and Spanish vernaculars); (3) neither later Jewish authors, e.g.,
Azaria 
 de'Rossi,[9]
 nor non-Jewish authors, e.g., Tullia
 d'Aragona,[10]
had any reason to suspect that it was written in a language other than
Italian; (4) if we assume the later date of 1511-1512, many non-Tuscan
Italian authors of this period called for the adoption of Tuscan as a
literary language, owing primarily to the fact that this was the
language of Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio
 (1313-1375);[11]
 and, (5) as for the
question of the Tuscan dialect of the work, many Italian printers of
the early sixteenth century "Tuscanized" Italian according
to set
 criteria.[12]




Moreover, many Jewish authors in the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-centuries increasingly resorted to Romance vernaculars in
order to attract a Jewish audience (including *conversos* and
ex-*conversos*), which no longer understood Hebrew. In
sixteenth-century Italy, larger trends in rhetoric and the use of
language increasingly led to the creation of the ideal of a pure
Italian language. In this regard, Judah becomes an important
transitional thinker in the encounter between Judaism and the Italian
Renaissance. Whereas his father, Don Isaac, could still adapt
humanistic themes to his Hebrew writings, which were still primarily in
conversation with medieval
 thought,[13]
 increasingly in Judah's generation the only way
to engage in a full-scale examination of the universal tendencies
associated with Humanism was to write in the vernacular.




Finally, the very genre of the *Dialoghi*, that of the
*trattato d'amore* ("treatise on love"), was
the product of the Italian vernacular of the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. When, for example, Judah discusses the
concept of love as a universal or cosmic principle he draws upon, as
will be clearer below, a particular vocabulary and set of concepts that
only make sense when contextualized within this already
 existing
 discourse.[14]


## 2. Faith, Reason, and Myth




Two features that are new in Judah's work and, thus, serve to
differentiate his thought from that of his Jewish and Islamic
predecessors are: (1) his almost complete lack of concern with the
venerable antagonism between faith and reason, and (2) his interest in
elucidating the concomitant intersection between Greek myth and
Judaism.




The tension between faith and reason had been at the heart of
medieval Jewish philosophy. This became especially pronounced in
post-Maimonidean philosophy, which witnessed the radicalization of a
number of principles (e.g., eternality of the universe, denial of
bodily resurrection), and which threatened to undermine traditional
religious belief. This led to a *Kulturkampf* between
those who thought that non-Jewish learning (i.e., philosophy) had a
valid role to play in the Jewish curriculum versus those who claimed
that such "foreign" works led to apostasy. The
reverberations of these conflicts, known collectively as the
"Maimonidean controversies," were severe.




The antagonism between faith and reason is immediately palpable in
the thought of Judah's father, who constantly tried to uphold
traditional Jewish belief against what he considered to be the
onslaught of philosophical radicalism. Yet, in the thought of
Judah this "conflict" between the hitherto venerable
antagonists virtually disappears. The question we have to ask,
then, is why? The most likely reason is to be located in the
notion of *sophia perennis*, which played an important role in
the thought of Florentine humanists. According to this doctrine,
there exists a unity to all knowledge irrespective of its source. 
As a result, the rationalism of philosophy could quite easily be
reconciled with that of revelation because both were regarded as
articulating the same truth. Evidence of this may be seen in
Judah's frequent citation of biblical passages to support
philosophical principles and *vice versa*. Furthermore, because
Judah is primarily unconcerned with the antagonism between faith and
reason, he becomes one of the first Jewish philosophers to ignore
esotericism (viz., that philosophical truths must be kept from
the unenlightened) as a philosophical principle. For him,
traditional esoteric topics, such as metaphysics, now become part and
parcel of the beautiful and dramatic unfolding of God's beauty in
the universe, and such topics are open to all (including women, as the
character of Sophia demonstrates).




Further evidence of Judah's use of the concept of *sophia
perennis* may be witnessed in his orientation towards ancient Greek
myth. The "rediscovery" of ancient Greek and Roman
literature was one of the hallmarks of the Renaissance, and in the
thought of Judah we certainly see this, only now with a distinctly
Jewish "twist." On one level, he wants to show that there
exists a fundamental identity between Greek myth and the teachings of
the Torah. Yet, on a deeper level he wants to argue that the
Greeks ultimately derived their teachings from the ancient Israelites
and subsequently corrupted
 them.[15]
 For instance, Judah argues that Plato studied among
the ancient Israelites in
 Egypt,[16]
 and that Plato's myth of the Androgyne, found
in the *Symposium*, is actually a Greek plagiarism of a Jewish
source:



> 
> 
> 
> Sophia: The story is beautiful and ornate (*la favola e
> bella e ornata*), and it is impossible not to believe that it
> signifies some philosophical beauty (*bella filosofia*), more
> especially since it was composed by Plato himself, in the
> *Symposium*, in the name of Aristophanes. Tell me,
> therefore, Philo what is the allegory?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Philo: The myth was handed down by earlier writers than the
> Greeks--in the sacred writings of Moses, concerning the creation
> of the first human parents, Adam and Eve...it was from [Moses]
> that Plato took his myth, amplifying and polishing it after Greek
> oratory, thus giving a confused account of Hebrew matters (*facendo
> in questo una mescolanza inordinate de le cose
> ebraiche*).[17]
> 
> 
> 




Judah seeks to accomplish at least two things with passages such as
this. First, he claims, polemically, that the Jewish tradition,
especially its mythopoeic tradition, is the source of all subsequent
literary and philosophical streams of western civilization. Secondly
(and this is less evident in the above passage than in other ones), he
tries to wrest Christian-centric interpretations of biblical passages
(e.g., the Garden of Eden and the concept of original sin), including
those offered by thinkers such as Ficino and Pico della
 Mirandola,[18]
 away 
from what he considers to be the original intentionality of the
text. Rather, he claims that the Jewish version or interpretation of
such texts is actually more in keeping with the spirit of the
Renaissance than those offered by Christians. The corollary of this is
that any individual, Jewish or Gentile, should quite easily be able to
accept equally the truths of Judaism and those of
 philosophy.[19]


## 3. Beauty and Love




In the thought of Judah Abrabanel, the concepts of beauty
(*bellezza*) and love (*amore*) become technical terms
through which he examines virtually every traditional philosophical
issue. Frequently, however, his discussion of one of these terms
is predicated on the existence of the other; as a result, beauty and
love are inseparable in the *Dialoghi*, undoubtedly mirroring
Judah's understanding of the way in which these two principles
operate in the universe. The intimate relationship between these
two principles may be witnessed in his definition of beauty as that
"which delights the mind that recognizes it and moves it to
love" (*dilettando l'animo col suo conoscimento, il
muove ad 
 amare*).[20]
 Without Beauty, in other words, the intellect is
unable to desire something outside of itself and, thus, it is
effectively unable to cognize. Judah subsequently argues that the lower
senses (i.e., taste, smell or touch) cannot grasp Beauty; only the
higher senses (e.g., sight and hearing) can--in addition, of
course, to the imagination and the
 intellect.[21] 
 Moreover, since Beauty is
mirrored throughout the universe, physical objects (notes, melodies,
etc.) both participate in and point the way towards this incorporeal
Beauty:




Beauty is only found in the objects of sight (*oggetti del
viso*), such as beautiful forms and shapes and beautiful pictures,
the perfect symmetry of the parts with the whole, well-proportioned
limbs, beautiful colors and clear light, the sun, the moon and the
stars, and the heavens in all their splendor. This grace exists
in objects of sight by reason of their spiritual nature, and it is the
custom to enter through the clear and spiritual eyes, to delight our
soul and move it to a love of such an object; and this is what it is
that we call beauty. It is also found in objects of hearing, such
as beautiful oratory, voices, speech, song music, consonance,
proportion and harmony. For in the spiritual nature of these
things is found grace which moves the soul to delight and to love
through the medium of the spiritual sense of hearing. Thus grace
and beauty are found among beautiful things that are endowed with a
spiritual nature (*sensi 
 spirituali*).[22]




Based on this and other passages, Judah argues that it is primarily
by means of the beauty of created things that the individual is able to
apprehend and move towards incorporeal or spiritual Beauty. Love
is what is ultimately responsible for directing the soul and the
intellect of the individual to increasingly spiritual matters.


## 4. Philosophy of Beauty


### 4.1 The Elevation of Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and the Imagination




We witness the further departure of Judah's thought from that
of his predecessors when we examine his discussion of rhetoric and
aesthetics. Medieval Aristotelians tended to locate rhetoric in
the *trivium* (which also included logic and dialectic), and,
thus, as propaedeutic to "higher" sciences such as
metaphysics. In the Renaissance, however, eloquence was equated
with wisdom, and the good rhetorician had to be proficient in all
branches of human knowledge. This led many Jewish Renaissance
thinkers to examine not only the classical authors (e.g., Cicero and
Quintilian), but also to mine the Bible for its use of language and
style. Whereas Maimonides and other Jewish Aristotelians had been
interested in biblical rhetoric as a means to reproduce imaginative
representations of philosophical truths to those unlearned in
philosophy, Renaissance thinkers held that rhetoric was the art form
*par excellence*, one that enabled the individual to command
respect in public
 life.[23]




Furthermore, following Maimonides (e.g., *Guide* I.2), many
medieval thinkers envisaged beauty as contingent upon consensus and not
a matter of the intellectual faculty. In the Renaissance, by
contrast, beauty was elevated to an ideal that, *inter alia*,
moved the intellect, by means of desire, to either perfect that which
exists below it or to be perfected by that above. This principle
was subsequently shared by philosophers, poets, and visual artists,
and, quite frequently, there existed a fluid line separating these
professions.



This elevation of rhetoric and aesthetics in the Renaissance led to a
subsequent interest in the imagination, a faculty frequently
mistrusted, but often deemed necessary to medieval political
philosophy. Mistrusted because, following Plato's critique, the
imagination had the power to deceive and distort; yet, at the same
time necessary because the imagination was the defining element of
prophecy. (In medieval Aristotelianism, the prophet was regarded as a
perfect philosopher with a perfected imaginative faculty to coin
images for the uneducated masses.) Only now, because Judah was not
particularly concerned with philosophical esotericism, the products of
the imagination, i.e., images, were not to be appreciated on a
pedagogical level alone, but more importantly on an aesthetic
one. Following Ficino, Judah argues that the artist--more
specifically, the artist's imagination--becomes the vessel
through which God 
 speaks.[24]
### 4.2 Cosmology and Metaphysics




Although there exists an intimate connection between sensual and
cosmic beauty it is by means of the latter that Judah frames his
discussion of cosmology, ontology, and psychology. Beauty, to
reiterate, is what inspires love and desire, and thereby connects all
levels of the universe into an interlocking and organic relationship.
The result is that everything, both sensual and intelligible, has the
potential to image and reflect God's beauty.




Judah's cosmology is a case in point. In the
*Dialoghi* he presents two distinct accounts of the origin of
the universe. This issue--viz., was the universe
created or is it eternal--was one of the touchstones in the
debate not only between philosophers and non-philosophers, but also
among philosophers. At stake in these debates was God's
omnipotence and omniscience: If the world was created, then clearly God
is transcendent to the world as both its Creator and Sustainer; if not,
then God's power to act is potentially curtailed by another
principle's eternality. In his discussion of these
matters, Judah adopts two models: one based on Islamicate Neoplatonism
and the other on the Plotinian triad.




According to the first model, Judah argues--citing Ghazali,
Avicenna and Maimonides--that God in His complete simplicity and
"by the love of His infinite beauty produces out of Himself alone
the first intelligence and mover of the first heaven" (*con
l'amore de la sua immense bellezza immediate da se sola la
prima intelligenzia movtrice del primo cielo 
 produce*).[25] 
 The first
intelligence, in turn, contemplates (1) the beauty of its cause to
produce the second intellect, and (2) its own beauty to produce the
first heavenly sphere. This theory of emanation, based on the
love of
 beauty,[26]
 pervades the entire universe (both supra- and sub-lunar). The
Active Intellect, the lowest of the ten heavenly intellects and
associated with the sphere of the moon, becomes the intellect of the
corporeal world. By contemplating its own beauty it produces the
forms found in this world, and in contemplating the beauty of its
cause, it produces human intellects. Following this, Judah offers
a Plotinian account based on a celestial
 triad.[27] 
 He now distinguishes between
three types of beauty that pervade the cosmos. The first is God
*qua* the Source of beauty (*l'attore di
bellezza*), the second is beauty itself (*bellezza*; i.e.,
intelligible beauty), and the third is the physical universe produced
by this idea in the intellect of God (*il participante di
 bellezza*).[28]




Judah subsequently uses the latter model, combined with kabbalistic
embellishment, to interpret the first creation account in Genesis,
where the physical world is now described as the offspring between
God, the male principle, and intelligible beauty, now personified as a
 female.[29]
 Corporeal
beauty, according to this model, becomes the primogeniture of
God's love for His female consort, wisdom. Since this
physical world is intimately connected to God, it cannot be
negated. Rather, this world becomes necessary, and this is a
leitmotiv that runs throughout the work, for humans to make physical
beauty "spiritual in our
 intellect."[30] 
 One must, in other words,
orientate oneself towards sensible beauty in such a manner that one
reverses the ontological chain.


### 4.3 Psychology and Prophecy




The above discussion is directly related to the way in which
Judah's envisages both psychology and prophecy. According
to him, the five external senses divide into (1) those that are
primarily material (*materiali*): touch (*tatto*), taste
(*gusto*), and smell (*odorato*); and (2) those that are
increasingly spiritual (*spirituali*): hearing (*per
l'audito*) and sight (*per 
 l'occhi*).[31] 
 It seems that only
the latter are able to penetrate behind the purely physical so as to
abstract the spiritual from the corporeal. Hearing, intimately
connected to the Renaissance ideal of rhetoric, consists of the ability
to discern "fine speeches, excellent reasoning, beautiful verses,
sweet music, and beautiful and harmonious
 melodies."[32] 
 Sight, ranked just
above the faculty of hearing, owing to the primacy that Judah puts on
vision, deals with "beautiful colors, regular patterns, and light
in all its varied
 splendor."[33] 
 The senses, thus, function hierarchically as a
prolegomenon to any form of higher knowledge, with the imagination
forming the threshold (*mezzo*) between the senses and the
intellect.




Central to the unfolding argument in the *Dialoghi* is the
concept of ocular power (*forza oculare*). In the first
dialogue, Judah describes two modes of apprehending spiritual
matters. The first is through the faculty of sight and the second
through the
 intellect.[34] 
 For the eye, like the intellect, is illumined
by means of light, thereby establishing a relationship between the eye,
the object seen, and the space that separates
 them.[35] 
 Just as the sun supplies light to the eye, the divine intellect
illumines the human intellect during the act of intellection. It is
light, then, that enables us to "comprehend all the beautiful
shining objects of the corporeal
 world."[36]
 Sight becomes the model by which we engage the universe: it is what
makes knowledge possible since it is only through vision of tangible
particulars that we acquire knowledge of intelligibles.




Judah subsequently distinguishes between three types of
vision. The highest type is that of God's visual
apprehension of himself; following this is that associated with the
angelic world, which sees God directly though not on equal terms;
finally, there is human vision, which is the weakest of the three types
and can only visualize the divine
 indirectly.[37] 
 The best 
that most humans can do in this world is to obtain knowledge
of incorporeal essences through corporeal particulars. Judah does
admit, though, that some special individuals are able to unite with
the angelic world, which he describes as the Agent Intellect
(*intelleto agente*). When such unification
(*copulare*) occurs, the individual "sees and desires
divine beauty as in a crystal or a clear mirror, but not
directly" (*vede e desia la bellezza divine come in uno mezzo
cristiallino, o sia chiaro specchio, ma non in se stessa
 immediate*).[38] 
 Judah refers to this act as prophecy. 
Like Maimonides, Judah claims that Moses did not prophesy through the
imagination, but only through the intellect, which he nevertheless
describes in highly visual terms as beholding "the most beautiful
figure of God" (*la bellissima figura di 
 Dio*).[39]




In the third dialogue, Abrabanel further divides the human into a
tripartite structure consisting of the body (*il corpo*), the
soul (*l'anima*), and the intellect
 (*l'intelletto*).[40] 
 The soul, which I have interpreted as the
imaginative faculty because of the properties assigned to
 it,[41]
 is once again the intermediary (*mezzo*) between the body (and
the senses) and the
 intellect.[42]
 Although he does not come right out and define the functioning of the
soul in any detail, he does claim that it is indispensable to the
proper working of the body and the intellect. Moreover, it is
this faculty that is in constant danger of being corrupted by unhealthy
corporeal desire and, most importantly for the present, it is
ultimately responsible for translating the corporeal into the
incorporeal and *vice versa*. This soul, in turn,



> 
> 
> 
> has two faces (*due faccie*) , like those of the moon turned
> towards the sun and the earth respectively, the one being turned
> towards the intellect above it, and the other toward the body
> below. The first face looking towards the intellect is the
> understanding with which the soul reasons of universals and spiritual
> knowledge, extracting the forms and intellectual essences from
> particular and sensible bodies (*estraendo le forme ed essenzie
> intellettuali da li particulari e sensibili corpi*)...the
> second face turned towards the body is sense, which is particular
> knowledge of corporeal things known ... These two faces have
> contrary or opposed notions; and as our soul with its upper face or
> understanding makes the corporeal incorporeal (*l'incorporeo
> al corporeo*), so the lower face, or sensible cognition,
> approaching the objects of sense and mingling with them, draws the
> incorporeal to the
>  corporeal.[43]
> 
> 
> 


## 5. Philosophy of Love


### 5.1 Judah's Recasting of Love as a Philosophical Principle




The traditional philosophical notion of love, going back at least to
the time of Plato, is that love results from the imperfection and
privation of that which loves. One loves, in other words, what
one does not possess (see, e.g., Plato, *Symposium*
 200a-201e).[44] Accordingly,
 that which is imperfect loves that
which is perfect, and, that which is perfect (i.e., God) neither loves
nor desires. Aristotle likewise claimed that that which is less
perfect (e.g., slaves, children, wives and ruled) should have more love
for that which is more perfect (e.g., freeborn, parents, husbands, and
rulers) than *vice versa*. The First Cause, then, is loved
but does not love. This discussion would predominate from Late
Antiquity to the Middle Ages.




Judah's theory of love, by contrast, was intimately connected
to the literary interests of humanism and the aesthetic sensibilities
of Renaissance
 artists.[45] 
 As a consequence, Judah faults previous
thinkers for (1) not ascribing love to God and (2) confining their
discussion of love primarily to that between humans, thereby ignoring
the dynamic role of God in relationships based on this principle. 
Using the name of Plato as a metonym for other philosophers, he is
critical of this approach:



> 
> 
> 
> Plato in his *Symposium* discusses only the kind of love that
> is found in men, which has its final cause in the lover but not in the
> beloved (*terminato ne l'amante ma non ne l'amato*),
> for this kind mainly is called love, since that which ends in the loved
> one is called friendship and benevolence (*che quel che si
> termina ne l'amato si chiama amicizia e
> benivolenzia*). He rightly defines this love as a desire of
> beauty (*desiderio di bellezza*). He says that such love
> is not found in God, because that which desires beauty and
> doesn't have it is not beautiful, and God, who is the highest
> beauty, does not lack beauty nor can he desire it, whence he cannot
> have love, that is, of such a kind (*Tale amore dice che non si
> truova in Dio, pero che quel che desia bellezza non
> l'ha ne e bello, e a Dio, che e sommo
> bello, non gli manca bellezza ne la puo desiare,
> onde non puo avere amore, cioe di tal
>  sorte*).[46]
> 
> 
> 




Judah seeks to provide a corrective to this and, in the process,
offer what he considers to be a more comprehensive theory of
love. In particular, he intertwines love and beauty such that the
lover of beauty seeks to unite with the source of beauty, something
that the lover subsequently seeks to reproduce himself (the lover is
always male, according to Judah because it is responsible for
impregnating the passive and receptive female principle). This
can take the form of God's creation of the universe, the
artist's creation of a work of art, and the philosopher's
composition of a pleasing work of philosophy. In his discussion
of love, Judah also departs from other Renaissance thinkers. Whereas
Ficino had equated human love with sensual love between humans, Judah,
drawing upon Maimonidean precedents, resignifies human love as, on one
level, that which the intellect has for
 God.[47]




Perhaps, Judah's biggest departure from earlier thinkers is
his ascription of love to God. Here, however, his discussion is
not entirely new; rather, he picks up on a number of issues discussed
in the work of Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340-ca. 1410), the important critic
of Aristotelianism and Maimonideanism. For Crescas, breaking from
both the Platonic and Aristotelian positions, love need not be
associated with privation or imperfection:



> 
> 
> 
> Inasmuch as it is known that God, may He be blessed, is the sources
> and fountain of all perfection, and in virtue of his perfection, which
> is His essence, He loves the good, as may be seen from His actions in
> bringing into existence the entire universe, sustaining it perpetually,
> and continuously creating it anew, and all be means of His simple will,
> it must necessarily be that the love of the good is an essential
> property of perfection. It follows from this that the greater
> perfection [of the lover] the greater will be the love and the pleasure
> in the
>  desire.[48]
> 
> 
> 




Love, for Crescas, is tantamount to God's creative
activity. In the third book of the *Dialoghi* Judah picks
up this theme:



> 
> 
> 
> Divine Love (*L'amor divino*) is the inclination
> (*tendenzia*) of God's most beautiful wisdom toward the
> likeness of His own beauty, to wit, the universe created by Him,
> together with its return to union with His supreme wisdom; and His
> pleasure is the perfect union of His image with Himself (*la
> perfetta unione di sua immagine in se stesso*), and of His
> created universe with Himself as
>  Creator.[49]
> 
> 
> 




Judah's subsequent discussion of love, however, departs
significantly from either Crescas or other Renaissance thinkers. 
This is especially the case when it comes to Judah's refusal to
abnegate sensual love. Rather, he celebrates such love as the
gateway to cosmic or spiritual love. Sensual love, for him,
becomes that which orientates the individual towards the Divine. 
Unlike Crescas, however, Judah does not reject the Maimonidean concept
of God as divine intellect. Furthermore, Judah's discussion
finds no homolog in the thought of Crescas or even Maimonides when it
comes to the concept of God's beauty.


### 5.2 "The Circle of Love" (*il circulo degli amari*)




Near the end of the third dialogue, Judah introduces the
"circle of love," *il circulo degli amari*, as
follows:



> 
> 
> 
> The circle of all things (*il circulo di tutte*) begins from
> their first origin, and passing successively through each thing in
> turn, returns to its first origin as to its ultimate end (*ultimo
> fine*), thus containing every degree of being in its circular form
> (*comprendendo tutti li gradi de le cose a modo circulare*), so
> that the point which is the beginning also comes to be the end. 
> This circle has two halves (*due mezzi*), the first from the
> beginning to the point most distant from it, the mid-point, and the
> second from this mid-point to the beginning
>  again.[50]
> 
> 
> 




This circle, in other words, begins with the divine, whose love
creates and sustains the universe: "each degree of being with
paternal love procreates its immediate inferior, imparting its being or
paternal beauty to it, although in a lesser degree as is only
 fitting."[51]
 This emanative framework, the love of that which is more beautiful for
that which is less beautiful, comprises the first half of the
circle. Every thing in the universe exists on a hierarchical
chain of being, from the pure actuality of the divine to the pure
potentiality of prime matter. Just as the superior desires the
perfection of the inferior, the inferior desires to unite with the
superior. The first half of the circle spans from God to utter
chaos, whereas, the second half of this circle works in reverse. 
It is the love of the inferior for the superior, predicated on the
former's privation and subsequent desire to unite with the
superior.


## 6. The End of Human Life




The *telos* of Judah's system occurs when the intellect
is "absorbed in the science of the Divine and of things
abstracted from matter, rejoicing in and becoming enamored of the
highest grace and beauty which is in the creator and artificer of all
things, so that it attains its ultimate
 happiness."[52] 
 Within this
context, Judah employs a well-known and well-used metaphor in his
discussion of the imaginative faculty, that of the mirror
 (*specchio*).[53]
 In the medieval Islamicate philosophical tradition,
following Plotinus, the mirror (Ar. *mir'a*), is
frequently used as an image for the perfected soul, at whose vanguard
resides the
 intellect.[54] 
 Just as the mirror reflects what is placed in
front of it, the soul, in a state of perfection, reflects the higher
principles of the universe. Early on in the *Dialoghi*,
Philo asks Sophia, "Do you not see how the form of man is
impressed on and received by a mirror, not as a complete human being,
but within the limits of the mirror's powers and capabilities,
which reflect the figure only and not the
 essence."[55] 
 Later, in dialogue
three, he argues that it is through our own "intellectual
mirror" that we apprehend the divine:



> 
> 
> 
> It is enough for our intellectual mirror (*specchio
> intellettuale*) to receive and image (*figurare*) the
> infinite divine essence (*l'immensa essenzia divina*)
> according to the capacity of its intellectual nature; though there is a
> measureless gulf fixed between them, so far does its nature fall short
> of that of the object of its
>  understanding.[56]
> 
> 
> 




By corporealizing the spiritual and spiritualizing the
corporeal, the intellect, in tandem with the imagination, enables
individuals to gain knowledge of the divine world. Unlike
Maimonides and other medieval Aristotelians who equated the natural
world with impermanence and evil, Judah argues that this world is the
natural receptacle of heavenly powers: "Hence earth is the proper
and regular consort of heaven, whereof the other elements are but
paramours. For it is upon the earth that heaven begets all on the
greater part of its
 progeny."[57] 
 In an interesting passage, Judah, like
Maimonides before him, compares matter to a
 harlot.[58] 
 Yet, unlike Maimonides, he
reaches a radically different conclusion. For Judah, "it is
this adulterous love that beautifies the lower world with such wondrous
variety of the fair-formed
 things."[59] 
 In keeping with Judah's
claim that "the lower can be found in the
 higher,"[60]
 this world becomes one
gigantic mirror that reflects spiritual beauty, and in which one can
grasp divine
 intelligibles.[61] 
 Just as Philo is enthralled by Sophia's
beauty, the individual, upon contemplating physical objects that are
beautiful, apprehends the divine:



> 
> 
> 
> God has implanted His image and likeness in His creatures through
> the finite beauty imparted to them from His surpassing beauty. 
> And the image of the infinite must be finite, otherwise it would not be
> a copy, but that of which it is the image. The infinite beauty of
> the Creator is depicted and reflected in finite created beauty like a
> beautiful face in a mirror and although the image is not commensurate
> with its divine pattern, nonetheless it will be its copy, portrait, and
> true likeness (*Si depinge e immagina la bellezza infinita del
> creatore ne la bellezza finita creata come una bella figura in uno
> specchio: non pero commisura l'immagine il divino
> immaginato, ma bene gli sara simulacro similitudine e
>  immagine*).[62]
> 
> 
> 




It is ultimately the love of beauty in the soul of the individual,
combined with the cognizance that one lacks it in its entirety, that
moves not only the soul of the individual, but also the entire
cosmos. Virtuous love, which Philo answers in response to
Sophia's fourth question concerning the parents of love, is the
highest form of love and, significantly, one can have this for either
corporeal or spiritual things. Indeed, Philo intimates that such
virtuous love can only emerge from sensible
 phenomena:[63]




When [the soul] perceives a beautiful person whose beauty is in
harmony with itself, it recognizes in and through this beauty, divine
beauty, in the image of which this person is also
 made.[64]




The goal of Judah's system is to ascend through this
hierarchy, that gateway to which is the sensual enjoyment that one
derives from physical objects. Only after this can one appreciate
spiritual beauty, an appreciation of which culminates in basking in the
divine presence. Judah discusses this process in the following
manner:



> 
> 
> 
> We ought principally to love the higher forms of beauty separated
> from formless matter and gross corporeality (*amiamo le grandi
> bellezze separate da la deforme material e brutto corpe*)
> , such as the virtues and the sciences, which are ever beautiful
> and devoid of all ugliness and defect. Here again we may ascend
> through a hierarchy of beauty from the lesser to the greater
> (*ascendiamo per le minori a le maggiori bellezze*) and from the
> pure to the purest leading to the knowledge and love, not only of the
> most beautiful intelligences, souls and motors of the heavenly bodies,
> but also of the highest beauty and of the supremely beautiful, the
> giver of all beauty, life, intelligence and being. We may scale
> this ladder only when we put away earthly garments and material
> affection (*potremo fare quando noi abbandonaremo le vesti corporee
> e le passioni 
>  materiali*)...[65]
> 
> 
> 




Even though the corporeal was, at the outset of this journey,
indispensable; the higher one moves up the hierarchy the less important
the material becomes. As far as the individual is concerned, the
highest felicity resides in the union with God, which the Italian
describes erotically as *felice coppulativa*:



> 
> 
> 
> Because the love of the human soul is twofold, it is directed not
> only towards the beauty of the intellect, but also towards the image of
> that beauty in the body. It happens that at times the love of
> intellectual beauty is so strong that it draws the soul to cast off all
> affection for the body; thus the body and soul in man fall apart, and
> there follows the joyful death in union with the divine (*la morte
> felice 
>  coppulativa*).[66]
> 
> 
> 


## 7. Reception History and Influence




One of the most surprising features concerning the reception history
of the *Dialoghi* is that a work of Jewish philosophy would
subsequently become a European bestseller among non-Jews. In the
years immediately following its Italian publication, the
*Dialoghi* was translated into virtually every European
vernacular. This popularity might be the result of the prominent
role that grace (*grazia*) plays in the *Dialoghi* or the
fact that Judah frequently stresses the interlocking relationship
between the corporeal and the spiritual, something that seems to have
resonated with contemporaneous Christian treatments of the incarnation
in literary
 fiction.[67]




This popularity of the work has led some to posit that Judah
Abrabanel's thought is epigonic, responsible for disseminating
the thought of "great thinkers" such as Marsilio Ficino
(1433-1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) to a wider
audience. This essay's point of departure, however, has
been that the thought of Judah Abrabanel, while dependent upon certain
features of these earlier thinkers, nevertheless makes significant
departures from them in terms of his construction of an overarching
system that revolves around the twin principles of love and beauty




Paradoxically, the initial response of Jews to the *Dialoghi*
was for the most part negative. Some of the earliest criticisms,
especially those of Saul ha-Kohen Ashkenazi, fault Judah with
rationalizing kabbalistic principles. Ashkenazi, in a letter to
Don Isaac Abrabanel, criticizes Judah for his lack of philosophical
esotericism, and for spending too much time on linguistic matters, such
as riddles and eloquence. Such antagonism reflects the broader
context of the Maimonidean controversies, in which philosophers sought
to make philosophy known to a broader Jewish public often by means of
dramatic dialogues or philosophical novels. Those opposed to the
Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm of philosophy often blamed such
treatises for weakening the faith of Jews by diminishing their
commitment to the *halakhah* (law) and, thus, making them more
susceptible to conversion. Despite such initial criticisms,
however, subsequent generations stressed the interrelationship between
Platonism and kabbalah on the one hand, and philosophy and aesthetics
on the other. Notable individuals include Azariah de Rossi (d.
ca. 1578) and Judah Moscato (d. ca. 1594).




The actual influence that the *Dialoghi* would have on
subsequent thinkers is more difficult to judge. Essentially,
Judah adopted certain trajectories of medieval cosmology and
psychology, combined them with Renaissance notions of beauty, and
thereby created a full-blown aesthetics of Judaism. This led him
to conceive of the universe as a living, dynamic structure, in which
all levels share in a symbiotic and organic relationship. Unlike
many of his medieval predecessors, he did not define this world, the
world of form and matter, in terms of privation or its distance from
the divine. On the contrary, he envisages this world as the arena
wherein individuals encounter, through sensual particulars, the beauty
and love of the divine. Abrabanel's emphasis, like
that of many of his Renaissance contemporaries, on aesthetics and the
phenomenal world would eventually become an important dimension of
16th- and 17th -century natural philosophy. We do know, for
example, that Baruch Spinoza had a copy of the *Dialoghi* in his
library.