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explains them as disparate.

      Duran’s description of the path to perfection according to the philosophers is thus consistent with his Maimonideanism, in that he accepts the philosophical understanding of prophecy as Maimonides explains it in the Guide while implicitly (“according to their opinion”) distancing himself from the more radical interpretation of Maimonides as having been secretly in agreement with the Aristotelian view. In passing, we may note with some amusement that Duran is choosing to read an obscure sentence attributed to Solomon in a text of magical practices as a description of a philosophically conventional view of prophecy.

      * * *

      In this letter as in his other philosophical responsa, Duran reveals a broad and detailed familiarity with philosophical arguments as well as a confidence in deploying them. The letter “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation” is another fine example of his approach. In it, he responds to the question “whether, according to our faith, some individual souls have immortality and eternal salvation, and whether a soul that sins a particular sin receives punishment and pain and eternal cutting off.”²¹ The question has two parts: first, whether there is such a thing as eternal salvation, and second, whether there is also eternal damnation. Duran answers as a philosopher, with arguments based on logical premises and scarcely a biblical proof text to be seen until he is at least halfway through. For Duran, the philosophical approach to questions of religious doctrine was no merely rhetorical exercise. It is his home ground, and, by implication, the home ground of his intended audience as well.

      For Duran, the first part of the question hardly merits discussion, for in his opinion it has already been settled by the philosophers as well as by “men of Torah.” In this case, both groups admit eternal salvation. Even Aristotle, according to Duran, believed in the immortality of the soul and, he notes, established it in De anima. The only disagreements among philosophers have concerned not the fact but only the nature of the soul’s immortality. And since immortality and salvation exist, so, too, do their opposites: what Duran calls “cutting off and eternal punishment.”

      This reasoning he bases on an Aristotelian syllogism: given two states opposed to each other, if one exists, so does the other. If there is such a thing as “black” in the world, then there is such a thing as “white.” Therefore, if immortality and eternal salvation exist, eternal cutting off and destruction exist as well. Duran’s first proof text is taken not from the Bible but from al-Ghazali’s (c. 1058–1111) Maqāṣid, which he cites by its translated Hebrew title, Kavvanot ha-Filosofim (“Intentions of the Philosophers”). This work consists of a summary of positions held by the “philosophers,” collected by al-Ghazali originally for the purpose of refuting them. As was common by the fourteenth century, however, Duran appears to assume that al-Ghazali was not a critic but a proponent of these same theories:²² “The sage al-Ghazali [lit. Abuḥamid] acknowledged it also in the Intentions. This is his expression: ‘and a being shall die without reaching the desired object, and desire shall remain and consciousness, and that is the great pain which has no limit to it.’ And the intended [meaning] of this is: that [the great pain] is of infinite duration, for that which is of infinite intensity is impossible.”²³

      Duran parses al-Ghazali carefully, commenting that, in saying that after death one suffers great pain with “no limit to it,” al-Ghazali cannot intend by this something impossible—that is, that the intensity of the pain is infinite. What al-Ghazali must mean instead is that the pain the soul experiences after death is of finite intensity but of infinite duration. Duran’s reading of al-Ghazali’s words here is strikingly similar to Moses Narboni’s in his commentary on the Maqāṣid. According to Narboni, al-Ghazali believed that the pain suffered by a soul after death refers to being denied conjunction with the agent intellect. Narboni, like Duran, specifies that from this we can learn that al-Ghazali believed in postmortem reward and punishment. Narboni also makes the point that al-Ghazali appears to agree here with the rabbis.²⁴

      * * *

      Duran has often been grouped together with Hasdai Crescas and his students Zeraḥyah Halevi and Abraham ben Judah Leon.²⁵ A slightly older contemporary of Duran, Crescas was a highly important figure in late fourteenth-century Catalonia in both philosophical (or antiphilosophical) thought and anti-Christian polemics. Crescas’s single great work of religious philosophy, Or ha-Shem, was written too late for Duran to have read it in its final form before composing his own works. Or ha-Shem was completed in 1412, though an earlier version came out two years earlier,²⁶ whereas Duran’s last known dated work is from 1403. On the issue of how to categorize Jewish doctrine, however, there are distinct similarities between them.

      In the second half of “On Immortality and Eternal Damnation,” Duran addresses the question of whether, if someone disagrees with the argument he has just given about eternal punishment, that person is then himself “cut off and eternally punished.” And in the process Duran sketches out a threefold system categorizing the various types of heresy, following the listing of Jewish dogma in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance:²⁷ “The first is denial of something which depends on divine statute for His existence and His unity and other things—and this is the particular thing by the name of ‘heresy’ [minut] and about this scripture says: ‘And they shall go out and look upon the carcasses of the men who have rebelled against me.’ (Is. 66:24) And it does not say ‘who have rebelled absolutely’—it means that they sinned in what depended on it.”²⁸ The first kind of heretics, according to Duran, consists of those who fall into the category of minut. These minim appear often in the Talmud; in English, the word is often rendered as “sectarians.” According to Duran, they reject matters that are dependent on “His existence and His unity”—that is, doctrines dependent on there being a divinity, that he exists, and that he is One. To reject any one of these doctrines is by implication to reject the existence or unity of God.²⁹

      Duran’s second category: “The second is denial of that which depends on belief in prophecy, in its existence and the [uniqueness] of the prophecy of Moses our Teacher, upon him be peace, and this is the particular thing that goes by the name ‘unbelief’ [apikorsut], a name derived from denier [kofer] after karos in the Greek language, and as Galen wrote in the first chapter of his book, On the Natural Faculties.”³⁰ These, therefore, are doctrines for which, if one rejects one of them, one has rejected the possibility of prophecy (revelation).³¹ Finally, Duran’s third category is “denial of what depends on the law of the Torah, in its being from heaven and that it will not change, and that is the specific thing that goes by the name denial.”³² These are dogmas for which, if one rejects them, one has rejected the word of the Torah itself, its divine source, or its unchangeable nature.³³

      The important thing to note in this list is that Duran phrases the issue by, as it were, working backward. By defining the denial of a doctrine, he is in fact constructing a threefold or, actually, fourfold positive division of Jewish doctrine: fourfold because, by excluding the particular issue of eternal reward and punishment from the three categories of heresy, he implicitly adds a fourth positive category to the list: namely, nonheresy.³⁴

      One significant aspect of this fourfold categorization of Jewish doctrine is that while Duran is very clearly drawing from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, his shaping of this material is almost perfectly echoed in the division of Jewish doctrines found in Hasdai Crescas’s Or ha-Shem. The first division enumerated by Duran consists of those things that depend on the existence and oneness of God. According to Crescas, the first category of doctrines includes roots or first principles without which one cannot imagine revelation of a divine law: that is to say, they are the “first principles of the divine Torah” that depend on “belief in the existence of God.”³⁵ The second category for Duran is made up of those things that depend on prophecy and revelation, again matched in Crescas’s category of, in this case, ideas the acceptance of which makes possible belief in revelation in general. Duran’s third category depends on the actual, unchangeable word of Torah; for Crescas, the third section is made up of true doctrines, namely, doctrines actually taught by the Torah: “true beliefs which

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