LEVI BEN GERSON

Jewish philosopher, physician, and astronomer, known also as Ralbag, Gersonide, and Master Leo of Bagnols (Languedoc); b. Orange, France, 1288; d. 1344. He spent his life alternately in Orange, Perpignan, and Avignon, where the popes were residing. He is the most famous teacher of the philosophical school that followed the spirit initiated by maimonides, as well as the best among the Jewish writers of the fourteenth century. Although he had talent for the theological, natural, medical, astronomical, and speculative sciences, he became outstanding by virtue of his writings about religious philosophy and exegesis.

His first works are The Book on Comparison and The Book of Numbers, but his masterpiece has the title Wars of the Lord, which his detractors called Wars Against the Lord because of some slightly rationalistic tendencies in its author. Gerson's principal philosophical ideas reside particularly in this work. The subjects treated are numerous and diversified: the immortality of the soul, prophecy, God's omniscience, providence, the heavenly bodies, and creation. The book also contains a whole treatise on astronomy, the calculations and observations of which make him a precursor of Kepler.

Despite edifying reflections, Gerson's exegesis has a pronounced rationalistic flavor inasmuch as it does violence to biblical texts and Jewish beliefs in order to adapt them to Aristotelian philosophy. This is quite different from the procedure of St. Thomas Aquinas, who in the preceding century had adapted the same philosophy to Christian dogma. More precisely, Gerson was interested especially in reconciling religion and philosophy by proceeding, not with the hypotheses of Maimonides, but with an impartial and purely critical spirit cleansed of all religious prejudice. He anticipated Spinoza, who also would seek the truth for its own sake and outside of every historical consideration. "Our law," Gerson said, "is not despotic. It does not seek to make us accept error as though it were truth. It seeks especially to lead us to the knowledge of the truth." Going beyond the positions held by the Jewish philosophers who came before him, Gerson was the first to attack the dogma about creation ex nihilo by recognizing the existence of a primary matter that he deemed so formless as to make it equivalent to the "nothing" referred to in the cited dogma.

The success of his exegesis resulted not so much from his philosophical ideas as from the charm of his style and, even more so, from the reflections for moral practice he placed at the end of each chapter in the Bible. These reflections or Toalioth enjoyed great popularity and underwent many editions. Yet Gerson did not have great influence on Judaism, the orthodox members of which at times accused him of heresy. He had more success with Christian scholars, indeed, to the extent that Pope clement vi had him translate from Hebrew into Latin his treatise on astronomy and his study about the instrument he had invented.

See Also: jewish philosophy; science (in the middle ages).

Bibliography: i. husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (New York 1959); Encyclopaedia Judaica: Das Judentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 10 v. (Berlin 1928–34) 7:324–338. g. vajda, Introduction à la pensée juive du moyen âge (Paris 1947). j. caro, Kritische Untersuchungen zu Levi ben Gersons Widerlegung des aristotelischen Zeitbegriffes (Würzburg 1935). e. l. ehrlich, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10 v. (Freiburg 1957–65) 6:995.

[a. brunot]