Medieval alchemy, Kabbalah and Islamic esotericism
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Avicebron · Avencebrol · Shelomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol
A Hebrew poet whose Latin philosophy was read for seven centuries by people who did not know he was Jewish. His Fons Vitae puts a divine Will between God and everything else, which is the hinge the sefirot later turn on.
- Dates
- c. 1021 – c. 1058
- Dating
- approximate dates
- Born
- Málaga
- Died
- Valencia
The life
He wrote liturgical poetry still in the prayer book, and a philosophical work in Arabic that survives complete only in Latin translation.
Place in the tradition
The mediating Will is what a wholly unknowable God needs in order to act at all, and it is the problem every later account of emanation inherits. Kabbalists took the structure; scholastics took the matter-and-form doctrine.
a note on the record
History and later legend
He was known to Latin readers as Avicebron and taken for a Muslim or a Christian until Solomon Munk identified the Fons Vitae as his in 1846 — an attribution lost for about seven hundred years. His death date is given as c. 1058 and also as late as c. 1070.
the written record
Principal works
-
written c. 1045; Latin translation c. 1150
Fons Vitae
Yanbu' al-Hayat / Mekor Hayyim
A dialogue on matter and form in which a divine Will stands between an unknowable God and everything that proceeds from him. Written in Arabic, lost in the original, and preserved complete only in the Latin of Avicebron.