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who held that man can come to know natural laws through his sensory experience. While God knows these laws a priori, natural laws produce the individual events from which man can then deduce the laws.⁵⁰ And those laws can tell us something about God.

      But what about the laws expressed by the divine governance of the earth by means of the celestial realm? Can they tell us anything about God? Maimonides calls on the reader to consider the enormous size of the universe (“this great and terrifying distance”),⁵¹ arguing that the remoteness of the orb of the fixed stars is indicative of the still greater remoteness of God. If we are at so great a distance from the body of the highest part of the orb of Saturn that “its substance and most of its actions are hidden from us,” how much more can this be said of God, “Who is not a body”?⁵² In his gloss, however, Duran asserts: “Its substance is hidden from us: he means that the substances [essences] of the spheres cannot be apprehended through the senses, only through the intellect. Most of its actions [are hidden from us]: i.e. apprehension of the actions of the heavenly bodies in this lower world, most of them are hidden from us. How much more can this be said of God: He means that [if] apprehension of the actions of the heavenly bodies is hidden from us, all the more so is it proper [to say] that the apprehension of the actions of their agent, which is not a body, and [apprehension] of Him, may He be blessed, are hidden.”⁵³

      Duran allows that while we may not be able to apprehend the orb of Saturn with our material senses, we can apprehend its existence, and some of its actions, with our intellect. I understand him to mean that Saturn is so far away we can barely see it, and its motion is so slow as to be hardly detectable. We certainly cannot “see” its celestial sphere. But its existence can be apprehended with the intellect through observation of the phenomena—in particular, I would suggest, by constructing mathematical models for its motion. As for Saturn’s “actions,” it would appear that Duran is interpreting Maimonides’ words as referring not to the planet’s motions but to its influence on the lower world. What we have here is a causal chain: God “moves” the intellects, the intellects “move” the spheres and their planets, and the planets “move” the terrestrial elements. Maimonides would then be saying (in Duran’s interpretation) that since we do not fully understand the workings of the influences of the planets on this earth, how much less can we understand the workings of their causes, or of the First Cause; but from what we do observe, we can use our intellects to construct arguments about their existence. It is, however, precisely the workings of the influences of the planets on the earth that is the “esoteric” subject of the Account of the Chariot described above.

      To repeat, it appears that, for Duran, the heavens are distant but not unreachable through the exercise of our minds. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 5, Duran believed that the study of the celestial orbs, at least by means of astronomy, was worth much time and effort.

      * * *

      If the commentary on the Guide was written, as it seems, when Duran was relatively quite young, it is possible he was still working out his own philosophical approach. Duran’s exceptional sensitivity not only to issues of doctrine but to infelicities of expression in the Hebrew and clunky and unclear syntax may well suggest that his glosses emerged out of a pedagogical engagement with the text. But whether he was responding to student difficulties or to his own perceptive examination of the textual confusions, or even both, is hard to say. It is striking that in this work he does not refer to Judah Halevi at all, suggesting, as I argued in Chapter 1, that he had not yet encountered the Kuzari, a book that seems to have made a deep impression on his later writing.

      But it also seems Duran had read at least some key parts (if not all) of Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord first. If so, it might explain his conviction that Maimonides believed that the world was created, for Gersonides took a far more positive view toward this issue, arguing against Maimonides that it was not only true, but indeed a provable proposition. To Gersonides, there was one philosophical theory that fit with both philosophy and Judaism, namely, creation out of preexistent matter. This matter, which Duran adduced in his comments on Guide II.24, was without form, neither in motion nor at rest. Similarly, for Gersonides, the universe has no end, even if it had a beginning—perhaps another reason why Duran attempted to read this as Maimonides’ “secret position.” As we saw, Duran’s defense of Ptolemaic astronomy against Maimonides is easily traceable to Gersonides as well, and in general Duran’s apparent epistemological optimism may also have its source there. In this sense, then, the commentary straddles the line between Duran’s own learning experiences and his teaching, reflecting an element of both activities. Thus, as a student might do, Duran picks and chooses from his predecessors, and seems finally to approach Maimonides from a Gersonidean viewpoint.

      Duran, a member of the Iberian Jewish urban elite, and in particular of the philosophically educated medical profession, participated in an intellectual world that was grounded in an assumption of the fundamental validity of rational thought. At the same time, this world was consciously Jewish. By adhering to the Maimonidean synthesis of the Jewish religious tradition with scientific knowledge and the ideal of reason, the two sides could cohere. In a number of different ways, rationalism could be absorbed into Judaism. As we have seen, Duran, for one, seems to have been comfortable with that synthesis, and even with some of its more radical versions.

      CHAPTER 4

      Philosophical Eclecticism

      In the thirteenth century, Aristotelian Jewish philosophy had been at a peak. The translation into Hebrew of, among many other works, ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle and the immensely influential Guide of the Perplexed led to what has been called “the consolidation of Spanish rationalism under the banner of Maimonides.”¹ By the end of the century, Aristotelianism was dominant among the majority of philosophically inclined writers, and in many cases was considered identical with philosophy itself. Kabbalists, too, like Isaac ibn Latif (c. 1210–1280) and Abraham Abulafia (1240–c. 1291), were influenced by Aristotelian ideas.²

      A hundred years later, however—which is to say, by the time Duran was active—new generations of Provençal and Iberian Jewish philosophers had developed more eclectic systems of thought, many of which prominently featured Neoplatonic ideas. In a sign of the general shift away from radical Aristotelianism, both Abraham ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, two earlier thinkers influenced by such ideas, would enjoy something of a vogue in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

      That ibn Ezra’s writings were intensely studied and commented on, including by Duran, was indicative both of deepening interest in astrological theory and of the increasing incorporation of Neoplatonic elements into Aristotelian thought.³ Similarly inspired in great part by ibn Ezra was the radically naturalist Neoplatonism developed by a circle of philosophers in Castile.⁴ Judah Halevi’s writings, themselves strongly influential in Duran’s work, also enjoyed a revival at the turn of the fifteenth century, exemplified in the effort by a group of Provençal commentators on the Kuzari to work out a heavily astrological version of Jewish philosophy.⁵

      In this chapter I trace some of the same philosophical tendencies examined in Duran’s commentary on the Guide as they appear in his early philosophical responsa, a number of which are still extant. Of these epistles, two (which I have termed “On the Hebdomad” and “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar,” respectively) were copied by Meir Crescas into his manuscript collection of Duran’s writings discussed in Chapter 2. In that manuscript Meir reports that “On a Phrase from Sefer ha-Tamar” was a response to a question of his (Meir’s), and that “On the Hebdomad” was a response to a question merely “that was asked of him [Duran].”⁶ A third philosophical letter (which I have called “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation”) can be found copied elsewhere, is usually collected together with the other two, and is also sometimes said to have been written to Meir Crescas.⁷

      None of the three has been dated, though both

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