The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey (Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the ... French, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew Edition) [Bilingual ed.] 9782503591438, 2503591434

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Yehuda Halper and Resianne Fontaine. Introduction
Cristina D’Ancona. Happiness without Sense-Perception
Giuseppe Veltri. Happiness in Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic Thought
Mauro Zonta. Philosophical Terms for ‘Happiness’ in Languages of Culture in Medieval Near, Middle, and Far East
Charles E. Butterworth. Alfarabi on Categories of Existence and Politics
Thérèse-Anne Druart. Alfarabi’s Directing Attention to the Way of Happiness or the Way out of the Cave
Y. Tzvi Langermann. Light, Exhilarants, and Healing the Spirit
Hannah Kasher and Ariel Malachi. On the Certainty of Tradition
Dong Xiuyuan. From Tranquillity to Extra Effort
Charles Manekin. Maimonides on Joseph Ibn Jābir’s Ultimate Happiness
Resianne Fontaine. ‘Shun Evil and Do Good’
Yehuda Halper. Happiness, Eros, and the Active Intellect
Frédérique Woerther. ‘…donc le bonheur ne réside pas dans le jeu’
Binyamin Abrahamov. Ibn al‑ʿArabī’s Theology of Prayer
Katja Krause. Meaning Beyond Defining
Ruth Glasner. How to ‘Win the Fulfilment of the Best Life Set by the Gods’
Chaim M. Neria. Courage and Death
Warren Zev Harvey. Hasdai Crescas’s Use of the Term ‘Happiness’
Dov Schwartz. Happiness in Life and after Death in Late Medieval Byzantine Jewish Thought
Yitzhak Y. Melamed. Spinoza and Some of his Medieval Predecessors on the Summum Bonum
John Walbridge. Epilogue – The Pure Young Men
Back Matter

Citation preview

The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought

Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle AgeS Texts and Studies in Interpretation and Influence among Philosophical Thinkers of the Medieval Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew Traditions

General Editor Richard C. Taylor, Marquette University Editorial Board Cristina D’Ancona, Università di Pisa Thérèse-Anne Druart, The Catholic University of America Steven Harvey, Bar-Ilan University Jules Janssens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Josep Puig Montada, Universidad Complutense

Volume 1 Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey

Edited by

Yehuda Halper

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2021, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-2-503-59143-8 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-59144-5 DOI: 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.121549 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2021/0095/25

Table of Contents

Introduction Yehuda Halper and Resianne Fontaine 9 Happiness without Sense-Perception: From Plotinus to the visio beatifica, East and West Cristina D’A ncona 17 Happiness in Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic Thought Giuseppe Veltri 51 Philosophical Terms for ‘Happiness’ in Languages of Culture in Medieval Near, Middle, and Far East Mauro Zonta 69 Alfarabi on Categories of Existence and Politics Charles E. Butterworth 77 Alfarabi’s Directing Attention to the Way of Happiness or the Way out of the Cave Thérèse-Anne Druart 91 Light, Exhilarants, and Healing the Spirit: Some Observations on Avicenna’s al‑Adwiya al‑Qalbiyya (Cardiac Drugs) Y. Tzvi Langermann 105 On the Certainty of Tradition: Maimonides versus Ibn Daud Hannah Kasher and Ariel Malachi 123 From Tranquillity to Extra Effort: Some Notes on the Introduction and Conclusion of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed Dong Xiuyuan 149

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Maimonides on Joseph Ibn Jābir’s Ultimate Happiness Charles Manekin 159 ‘Shun Evil and Do Good’: The Problem of Evil According to Maimonides’ Commentators on Guide, III. 8–12 Resianne Fontaine 177 Happiness, Eros, and the Active Intellect: Understanding Erotic Desire in Averroes’s Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ in light of the Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics Yehuda Halper 195 ‘…donc le bonheur ne réside pas dans le jeu’: Quelques brèves remarques sur le Commentaire moyen d’Averroès à l’Éthique à Nicomaque, X. 6 Frédérique Woerther 215 Ibn al‑ʿArabī’s Theology of Prayer Binyamin Abrahamov 227 Meaning Beyond Defining: Averroes’s Dispositio in Thomas Aquinas’s Account of Heavenly Beatitude Katja Krause 259 How to ‘Win the Fulfilment of the Best Life Set by the Gods’: Questions Addressed to Plato by Gersonides Ruth Glasner 303 Courage and Death: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Joseph ben Shem Ṭob Chaim M. Neria 309 Hasdai Crescas’s Use of the Term ‘Happiness’ Warren Zev Harvey 335

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Happiness in Life and after Death in Late Medieval Byzantine Jewish Thought Dov Schwartz 351 Spinoza and Some of his Medieval Predecessors on the Summum Bonum Yitzhak Y. Melamed 377 Epilogue – The Pure Young Men: Chastity, Euripides, and the Madrasas of Pakistan John Walbridge 393

Bibliography of the Writings of Steven Harvey

407

Index of Names

417

Index of Passages Cited

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Steven (Shmuʾel) Harvey

Yehuda Halper and Resianne Fontaine

Introduction Since every sort of knowledge and decision desires some good, what is […] the highest of all the goods achievable in deeds? As far as its name goes, most people virtually agree; for both the many and the cultivated call it happiness, and they suppose that living well and doing well are the same as being happy. But they disagree about what happiness is, and the many do not give the same answer as the wise. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095a14–221

At the opening of his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle famously takes human happiness (εὐδαιμονία) to be the end of all human actions, and accordingly the end of organized human activity. Thus it is the aim of political science, which organizes human endeavours and arts in pursuit of human happiness. But people do not agree as to what human happiness is. There is a particularly large divide between the wise (οἱ σοφοί) and the many (οἱ πολλοί) on this issue. ‘The many think it is something obvious and evident — for instance, pleasure, wealth, or honor’, while some of the wise ‘used to think that besides these many goods there is some other good that exists in its own right and that causes all these goods to be goods’.2 The various ends are the causes of the various different ways of pursuing happiness and hence a source, for better or for worse, of the diversity of mankind. The medieval Arabic translation of Nicomachean Ethics 1095a14–22 is generally reliable, but translates Aristotle’s πρακτῶν, ‘in deeds’, by ‫األشياء التي تفعل‬, which can mean ‘things that are done’, but can also mean ‘things that are made active’.3 That is, an Arabic reader might not see that Aristotle here limits his concept of the highest good to one achievable in deeds, and instead see the highest good as one

* Acknowledgment: with thanks to the copyeditors of the volume Michal Rubin and Deborah Oosterhouse. 1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Irwin, p. 3 (translation modified). Irwin translates ὀρέγεται at 1095a15 ‘pursues’. This works well in context, but does not convey the sense the same word has at the opening of the Metaphysics, where all people by nature desire to know. ‘Desires’, indeed, is how the Arabic translators saw the word, and it was the Arabic translation that had the greatest impact on the thinkers studied in this volume. See The Arabic Version of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Akasoy and Fidora, trans. by Dunlop, p. 119. Additionally, Irwin translates πρακτῶν ‘in action’, which is too close to ‘in activity’, referring to ἐνέργεια or ἐντελέχεια. Accordingly, we have modified it to ‘in deeds’. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a22–28, trans. by Irwin, p. 3. 3 The Arabic Version of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Akasoy and Fidora, trans. by Dunlop, p. 119. On the translators of the Nicomachean Ethics into Arabic, see Schmidt and Ullmann, Aristoteles in Fes, pp. 15–16. The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey, ed. by Yehuda Halper, PATMA 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 9–16 DOI 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.122261

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achievable in activity. Accordingly, the Arabic reader might seek a highest good beyond the realm of deeds and beyond the direct reach of politics. Thus Averroes, when commenting on those among the wise who see the highest good as one that exists in its own right, says, [Aristotle] said: ‘People thought that here was another Good, different from the many other goods, which exists essentially’ outside of the soul ‘and which is the cause of the other goods’ being goods’. He means that these people see knowledge of this external Good and conjunction with it as happiness, like those who speak about the forms.4 This Good is clearly not attainable directly through politics, family life, or any kind of deeds. Indeed, its pursuit would consist entirely of striving to go beyond the soul, presumably through intellectual contemplation of form. Nevertheless, there is perhaps a role for politics and deeds in securing a situation, political, moral, family, etc., in which such intellectual contemplation is possible. So, in a sense, the pursuit of happiness can involve ethical, economic, and political concerns, even as its main concern is an intellectual pursuit of a transcendent goal. Happiness, then, in the Arabic Aristotelian tradition, and consequently also in the Hebrew tradition, is conceived of differently by different people, but there is some unity to the views of the wise, who see happiness as the attainment of an intellectual Good, often equated with knowing God. The articles in this volume explore a range of thinkers from antiquity through Benedict Spinoza, all but one of whom joined some of Aristotle’s wise people in holding human happiness to be intellectual knowledge of that which is Good in itself, viz. God. These thinkers, from Greek pagan, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian backgrounds, shared similar views of the highest good, and of the intellectual activities to be undertaken in pursuit of that Good. Yet they differed, often greatly, in the role they assigned to deeds and practical activities in the pursuit of this happiness. These differences were not only along religious lines, but also along political and ethical lines. Other differences treated the relationship between the body and intellectual happiness and the various ways in which bodily health and well-being can contribute to intellectual health and true happiness. Even Hasdai Crescas, the only thinker examined here to see intellectual knowledge as neither necessary nor sufficient for human happiness, still looked to the Aristotelian understanding of happiness in order to construct his own view of religious happiness. The first three chapters in the volume provide general background for the entrance of the notion of intellectual happiness into medieval Muslim and Jewish cultures. In the first article, Cristina D’Ancona describes how such philosophical notions of intellectual happiness, or ‘happiness without sense-perception’ are especially prominent in Greek Neoplatonic thought (Plotinus), from which they spread to the works of Muslim philosophers (Miskawayh and al‑Ghazali) and 4 Averroes, Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. by Berman, p. 63: ‫אמר וכבר חשבו אנשים שבכאן טוב אחר נמצא בעצמותו חוץ לנפש זולת אלו הטובות הרבות ושזה הטוב הוא סבה לכל‬ .‫ כמו האומרים בצורות‬,‫ ירצה שאלו רואים כי ידיעת זה הטוב אשר מחוץ וההתדבקות בו הוא ההצלחה‬.‫הטובות שיהיו טובות‬

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to Latin philosophy (Thomas Aquinas). What these thinkers in East and West have in common is that they combined Platonic and Aristotelian notions in their accounts of the ascent of the human soul to the intelligible world and its union with the divine. In the second chapter, Giuseppe Veltri treats ancient Jewish notions of happiness and good fortune. Veltri shows that many of these notions are derived from Greek notions of happiness. This is especially clear for those thinkers who wrote in Greek, but it also emerges from his study of Rabbinic literature. Yet of these thinkers, only Philo of Alexandria has a view of intellectual happiness that is truly similar to the one at the centre of this volume. The third chapter by the late Mauro Zonta provides a terminological introduction to the volume. It studies the equivalents for ‘eudaimonia/happiness’ in Semitic and other languages and points to possible relations between them. Regarding terms for this important concept, we may add that surprisingly the medieval Hebrew word for happiness, haṣlaḥah, is conspicuous by its absence in Klatzkin’s Thesaurus philosophicus. Articles by Charles Butterworth and Thérèse-Anne Druart discuss Alfarabi’s understanding of intellectual happiness through his interpretations of Aristotle and Plato. Butterworth is interested in the political implications of the view that intellectual goods are the highest form of happiness, particularly if the multitude cannot attain these intellectual goods and so cannot be truly happy. Butterworth surveys a range of Alfarabi’s works to describe the intellectual pursuit of happiness and the role of political foundations and statesmanship in that pursuit. The subject of Thérèse-Anne Druart’s article is Alfarabi’s Directing Attention to the Way of Happiness. In her investigation of the purpose of this work (instruction as to how happiness can be attained through study) and its intended audience (the beginning student of philosophy), she brings out the pedagogical intent of the work. She argues that Alfarabi conceives of the proper order of the study of Aristotelian logic as a parallel to Plato’s allegory of the cave: the beginning student who has redressed his moral dispositions exits the cave via the progressive study of the first books of the Organon, and once he has become a philosopher he returns to it in order to instruct those who are still inside by means of the other logical books, in particular, the Rhetoric and the Poetics. Tzvi Langermann deals with material, medical aspects of happiness that emerge in Avicenna’s monograph on Cardiac Drugs. Since light is the key ingredient for joy (faraḥ), Avicenna details the illuminating properties of simples in his medications and recommends the therapeutic use of exhilarating substances, which improve the material constitution of the pneuma, so as to cure sadness and to restore joy to the spirit. The next four articles are concerned with Jewish philosophers and/or with the way they interpret and incorporate theories held by Muslim thinkers. The joint article by Hannah Kasher and Ariel Malachi builds off of Steven Harvey’s observation in his 1992 Jewish Quarterly Review article on the impact of Maimonides’ letter to Samuel Ibn Tibbon that Maimonides holds Alfarabi as the greatest authority on logic and that subsequent Jewish thinkers followed Maimonides in adopting this

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view. They point out that Abraham Ibn Daud, however, differs from Maimonides with regard to the logical status of generally accepted opinions and their use for the verification of revealed truth. The reason for this divergence, they argue, is that Ibn Daud follows Avicennan logic, whereas Maimonides follows Alfarabi. Dong Xiuyuan explores Maimonides’ account of the importance of the body for attaining scientific knowledge. He identifies Avicenna as the source for this view as well as the notion that tranquillity and perfect happiness require suspension of the body so as to allow for the unhindered use of intuition. Ultimate happiness, according to Maimonides, is dependent on dialectical knowledge of physical and metaphysical sciences, and this in turn is dependent on intuition gained by extracting one’s intuition from bodily influence. Such use of intuition to comprehend physics and metaphysics is, according to Dong, the extra effort philosophers need to make in order to become truly happy. Does Maimonides’ intellectualist view of perfection of the intellect and happiness in the two worlds leave hope for a believer who is not an expert philosopher? Discussing Maimonides’ letter to Joseph Ibn Jābir, addressed by Maimonides as ‘my pupil’, Charles Manekin argues that the answer must be in the affirmative. What is critical here is love of God and the possession of true beliefs concerning God’s existence and actions, which the believer has acquired through instruction by ‘men of knowledge’. Maimonides thus underlines the importance of teaching the multitude. Evil and sin hinder the attainment of perfection and felicity, for the multitude and the élite alike. Resianne Fontaine explores how four commentators of Maimonides, Efodi, Asher ben Abraham Crescas, Moshe Narboni, and Shem Ṭob ben Joseph Ibn Shem Ṭob, interpret the account of evil in Guide III.8–12. The latter two commentators, Moshe Narboni and Shem Ṭob ben Joseph Ibn Shem Ṭob, explicitly link these chapters to Maimonides’ interpretation of the Book of Job and his discussion of the end of man. Yehuda Halper examines Averroes’s description of the intellectual erotic desire of human beings for the Active Intellect in light of Averroes’s interpretation of Metaphysics Λ.7. There Aristotle describes the motion of the heavens as akin to that of an erotic desirer, with God serving as the object of the heavenly erotic desire. Halper compares this account to Averroes’s interpretation of erotic desire in his Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There, erotic desire is said to apply only to the love of the lower for the higher and not to refer to love between equals. Human desire for intellectual perfection is also a love of the lower (human beings) for the higher (separate intellects and God), that is, it is an erotic desire for superhuman and divine intellects. Frédérique Woerther analyses Averroes’s comments on Aristotle’s discussion of the difference between amusement and happiness, with particular concern for the question of why the definition of happiness does not apply to amusement, which, after all, like happiness can be pursued as an end in itself (Nicomachean Ethics X. 6). The examination is based on a careful philological comparison of all the available sources: Aristotle’s Greek text, the Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Arabic version of Averroes’s commentary.

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Binyamin Abrahamov describes Ibn al‑ʿArabī’s theory of prayer in line with Neoplatonic notions of God’s influence on the world. Prayer, in Ibn al‑ʿArabī’s view, is an end in itself, and one that connects the devoted with the divine influences on the universe. This kind of prayer, which is not limited to Muslims and can even be performed to some extent by polytheists, is good in itself, and the spiritual freedom attained through it is a kind of happiness. Katja Krause examines Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the beatific vision in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, his Summa contra Gentiles, and his Summa Theologiae. Throughout these works, Aquinas develops the notion of supernatural human happiness as a kind of intellectual conjunction with God (along lines similar to those Averroes identified with some of the wise above). Aquinas’s views are greatly influenced not only by Latin and Greek philosophical and theological concerns, but also by Arabic philosophical literature, particularly Averroes. Yet Aquinas’s various works and their underlying concepts underwent a kind of intellectual development over the course of his life and through his engagement with other churchmen, from an earlier strong Aristotelianism to a later more direct engagement with Latin and Greek theological concerns of the Church. Ruth Glasner’s contribution is a fictional epistle from Levi Gersonides to Plato, assuming that Gersonides had access to Plato’s writings and could read Greek. Gersonides asks Plato about his statement in the Timaeus that human happiness consists in intellectual cognizance of the cosmos and its motions and human harmonization with it. Gersonides further questions whether dialectical discussions can really contribute to this end, whether theoretical mathematics can really be separated from practical mathematics, and whether the movements of the cosmos are truly simple enough to be contemplated and imitated by human beings. Though fictional, these questions highlight the differences in the scientific approaches of Plato and Gersonides. Chaim Neria explores the connection between courage and death, especially martyrdom, in Joseph ben Shem Ṭob’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Bringing biblical and Talmudic examples to bear on his interpretation of Aristotle’s text, Joseph ben Shem Ṭob understands courage in battle to be in contrast with virtue and happiness, for which life is a necessary condition. Nevertheless, under certain circumstances death for the sake of God’s name can lead to eternal life and happiness, albeit not in this world. Joseph ben Shem Ṭob’s argument is influenced by Thomas Aquinas, though it is more explicit about the religious value of martyrdom. Warren Zev Harvey analyses Hasdai Crescas’s uses of the Hebrew term for happiness, haṣlaḥah. Crescas’s use of this term is highly indebted to the uses of the term among medieval Jewish Aristotelians. Yet, Crescas does not understand the term in its Aristotelian sense, according to which true happiness is philosophical. Rather, Crescas sees true happiness in worship and love of God and following the commandments. Dov Schwartz analyses a range of works in late medieval Byzantine Jewish thought, describing their approaches to finding happiness. These thinkers studied and wrote Aristotelian philosophy and saw happiness as asceticism,

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attainment of intelligibles, intellectual conjunction, and immortality. Many of these thinkers were greatly influenced by astrological notions and Kabbalah. Nevertheless, there is a significant tradition that sought to ground views of happiness in the Hebrew Nicomachean Ethics tradition, including in debates with Alfarabi’s rumoured rejection of intellectual conjunction, and in readings of Maimonides’ Guide. Yitzhak Melamed examines Benedict Spinoza’s view of the summum bonum in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. There, Spinoza repeatedly asserts that man’s highest good is knowledge of God. Melamed points out the similarities between this view and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and argues that Spinoza developed this view through readings of medieval Jewish Aristotelian ethical works. Melamed focuses on Maimonides, but also notes similarities to Joseph ben Shem Ṭob’s Kebod Elohim. Spinoza, while generally an anti-Aristotelian, nevertheless follows in the tradition of Aristotelian interpretations of the view of happiness developed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Spinoza thus forms a good conclusion to the series of articles in this volume, since, although he follows Aristotle in many crucial respects, his approach was also the beginning of a significant break with Aristotle that ushered in modernity. In an epilogue, John Walbridge provides a creative comparison of the Athens of Euripides and life in the Madrasas of Pakistan. Walbridge suggests that the two places and their approach to discovering a good life are not as far apart as one might expect. We might even infer that the break with Greek philosophy so characteristic of modern Western philosophy is not necessarily the case for many Islamic countries. Indeed, we might even question whether the departure from Aristotelian views of happiness and its philosophical pursuit in the West is necessarily an improvement. These articles on the pursuit of happiness in medieval Jewish and Islamic thought are all dedicated to Prof. Steven Harvey. The pursuit of happiness, indeed, occupies a central place in the thought of the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish philosophers that have attracted Prof. Harvey’s attention over the years. A quick look at Prof. Harvey’s publications reveals that several of his studies treat subjects that are, in one way or another, related to the question of human happiness. These include bliss, desire, joy, pleasure, (passionate) love, friendship, the best life, the distinction between the multitude and the philosophers, the attainment of truth, virtues of the soul, immortality, and intellectual and moral perfection. Prof. Harvey’s forthcoming article on happiness in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed is the clearest example of this interest, but many other important articles also emphasize the role of happiness. See, for example, his ‘Key Terms in Translations of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed’. The theme of the relation between the contemplative life and a life of action forms the subject of ‘Maimonides in the Sultan’s Palace’. ‘Love’ is the subject of an early encyclopaedia entry, as well as a terminological study, ‘The Meaning of Terms Designating Love in Judaeo-Arabic Thought and Some Remarks on the Judaeo-Arabic Interpretation of Maimonides’. A number of his articles deal with the Nicomachean Ethics and are concerned with its transmission and fortuna in Islamic and Jewish philosophy (‘Are the Medieval Hebrew Translations of Averroes’ Commentaries on Aristotle Still of Value and Worth Editing?’; ‘The Nature and

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Importance of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Ethics and the Extent of its Influence on Medieval Jewish Thought’; ‘The Influence of the Nicomachean Ethics on Medieval Jewish Thought’), whereas the question of the summum bonum in Averroes’s commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics emerges in the article that Prof. Harvey wrote together with Frédérique Woerther, ‘Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Book i of the Nicomachean Ethics’. A Hebrew article examines quotations from Aristotle’s Ethics in Maimonides’ Guide and Ibn Falaquera’s Guide to the Guide. But themes linked with the pursuit of happiness are to be found also in various other publications by Prof. Harvey, such as that on ‘Phrónesis’ in medieval Islamic philosophy (‘Alfarabi, Averroes, and the Medieval Islamic Understanding of Phrónesis’), a terminological and conceptual study, in which we read about political happiness and moral and intellectual virtues. Other examples are his articles on Ibn Falaquera’s rendering of Alfarabi’s and Averroes’s writings where the theme of human happiness figures prominently, for example ‘Falaquera’s Alfarabi: An Example of the Judaization of the Islamic Falâsifah’ and ‘The Quiddity of Philosophy according to Averroes and Falaquera: A Muslim Philosopher and his Jewish Interpreter’. These topics resonate in the articles presented in this volume, sometimes in combination with other themes that have engaged Prof. Harvey’s attention over the years. Like Harvey’s own publications they discuss a wide variety of Greek, Muslim, and Jewish authors, straddling borders between them. The contributors to this volume are all greatly indebted to Prof. Harvey’s careful, precise approach to scholarship, particularly with regard to subjects that move between languages and cultures over hundreds of years. All of us know Prof. Harvey as a dedicated teacher, a careful and insightful mentor, and an encouraging colleague and friend. We have all benefitted from years of intellectual and academic advice and guidance, to say nothing of Prof. Harvey’s characteristic good humour (in both senses of the expression). Moreover, we have all been influenced by Prof. Harvey’s original ideas and questions, which are in many ways definitional for the approaches of future scholarship. This point is demonstrated most clearly by the present volume which strives to treat subjects and questions in keeping with his approach. Indeed, the volume aspires to continue Prof. Harvey’s own pursuit of intellectual happiness in the hope that, when combined, our contributions to the study of happiness, if they do not reach the highest good, will at least make some progress in its pursuit.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aristotle, The Arabic Version of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora, trans. by Douglas Dunlop (Leiden: Brill, 2005) —— , Ethica Nicomachea, ed. by I. Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894; repr. 1962) —— , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Terrence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999) Averroes, Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the Hebrew Version of Samuel ben Judah, ed. by Lawrence V. Berman ( Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999) Secondary Sources Schmidt, Ernst A., and Manfred Ullmann, Aristoteles in Fes: Zum Wert der arabischen Überlieferung der Nikomachischen Ethik für die Kritik des griechischen Textes (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012)

Cristina D’Ancona

Happiness without Sense-Perception From Plotinus to the visio beatifica, East and West Plotinus on Happiness without Sense-Perception In his Apories on the Soul Plotinus discusses at length the status of the individual soul after its return to the intelligible world.1 This is not a place, rather it is a status that fits the soul’s nature better than life with the body does; hence, the soul will no longer need memory,2 which only belongs to the kind of life it lives when it dwells in the sublunar world.3 After its separation, the soul will obviously not experience bodily pleasures and pains;4 this elicits the question whether or not the disembodied soul feels joy or discontent, a question that Plotinus does not address in the Apories on the Soul but elsewhere, and in most cases only incidentally. And indeed, the persistence of the individual soul with its memory and feelings is only a part of the problem raised in Plotinus’s version of Platonism by the status of the disembodied soul: more vital is the question of judgement in the afterlife, an issue that he addresses as part and parcel of his analysis of what the human being is, properly speaking.5





* My sincere thanks go to the referee of this article for their improvements and remarks. Any remaining shortcomings are mine. 1 One of Plotinus’s most expansive writings, the Apories on the Soul falls into three parts in the systematic layout of his works, the Enneads, that trace back to Porphyry’s ekdosis. In his edition, Porphyry subdivided some of the largest treatises by Plotinus into two or three parts, keeping one and the same title for the work as a whole. Thus, in Ennead IV, devoted to the soul, there are the Apories on the Soul I, II, and III that feature as the third, fourth, and fifth treatise. It is well known that Porphyry also provided a chronological table; it is usual to refer to a given treatise by both the systematic and chronological number, hence the label of IV 3[27] for the Apories on the Soul I, and IV 4[28] and IV 5[29] for the second and third part of the same treatise. 2 The treatment of memory runs from Chapter 25 of IV 3[27] to Chapter 12 of IV 4[28]. 3 IV 4[28], 1. 12–16: ‘But if, as we believe, every act of intelligence is timeless, since the realities there are in eternity and not in time, it is impossible that there should be a memory there, not only of the things here below, but of anything at all. But each and every thing is present there; so there is no discursive thought or transition from one to the other’. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, iv, 137. On the change from the discursive mode of knowledge typical of soul to the non-discursive knowledge of the intellect once soul is disembodied, cf. Becker, Plotin und das Problem der geistigen Aneignung, pp. 21–22. 4 IV 4[28], 23. 13–16: ‘But when the soul is alone, even if it is possible for it to direct its attention to the world of sense, it will end with an understanding of the intelligible; what is perceived by sense will escape it, as it has nothing with which to grasp it’. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, iv, 199. 5 The title of the treatise echoes Phaedrus, 246 C 1–6: ‘Thus when it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world; but one that has shed its wings sinks down until it can fasten The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey, ed. by Yehuda Halper, PATMA 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 17–50 DOI 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.122262

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If one commits oneself to the idea that the human being is a rational soul, but also maintains that the soul cannot fail to acknowledge the good and beautiful when faced with it, one has to say what precisely that being is that can fall apart from the good and beautiful, and that in the afterlife is judged for such wrongdoings. In his penultimate treatise, What Is the Living Being, and What Is Man? (I 1[53]),6 Plotinus embarks upon a complex argument in order to show that the soul, taken in itself, is not the proper subject of affections, nor is the body: any feeling, be it pleasant or painful, affects only that subject that results from the union of the soul with the body. Joy and pain, as well as any other feeling and — what is more — the ethical responses to them, affect the ἡμεῖς, namely our selves, that result from the union of our soul with our body. This third thing is different not only from the body and soul as such, but also from the conjunction of the two, which is a mere ens rationis in Plotinus’s eyes. Properly speaking, there is no union of the soul with the body, unless we are ready to yield to Aristotle’s objections against dualism. Indeed, were the soul to be united with the body, this would entail the oddity of a body that already exists independently of and prior to the cause of its rational arrangement. Now, this cause is the soul; hence, taking at its face value the image of a soul that ‘enters’ the body after having fallen outside the place beyond the heavens would entail that the effect, body, antecedes its cause, soul. Such a narrative of the Platonic soul has to be philosophically accounted for, and in so doing Plotinus proves to be keenly aware of the force of Aristotle’s anti-dualistic arguments. He often confronts this issue in his discussions of the body-soul relationship; his solution consists in taking Plato’s dualistic accounts as intended to highlight the causal priority of the soul with respect to the body. The point Plotinus wants to make is that the body simply does not exist before the soul produces it, endowing matter with rational structure and life. What the image of the ‘descent’ of the soul stands for is the creation of the body by a soul that, when the time of its incarnation comes, produces both the physical structure and, in the case of human individuals, the psychic subject: our diachronic and psychological identity. Note that this diachronic and psychological ‘I’ is by no means a temporary ghost in the machine: it is the ethical subject. The rational soul, insofar as it always contemplates Forms, is impassable and sinless; but men are wise or wicked, and Plato speaks of a judgement for both in the afterlife: this implies that our self survives as such once the soul has abandoned its body. No doubt that for Plotinus the afterlife of those who have devoted themselves to philosophy consists, in a purely Platonic vein, in coming back to the intelligible world. The destiny of the other sorts of souls should not concern us here, because one thing is sure, such souls are not happy;7 but if we focus on the afterlife of the on something solid, and settling there it takes to itself an earthly body which seems by reason of the soul’s power to move itself. This composite structure of soul and body is called a living being, and is further termed “mortal”’. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Hackforth, p. 70. 6 Cf. Plotinus, Traité 53, trans. by Aubry; Plotinus, Che cos’è l’essere vivente e che cos’è l’uomo?, trans. by Marzolo. 7 Plotinus’s image of the underworld is shaped by Odyssey XI 601–03; on his use of the image of the shadow of Heracles, cf. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, pp. 102–03.

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wise man, a paradox seems to affect Plotinus’s picture. On the one hand, this soul has no memory of its past identity, neither does it have affections, or psychic life in the usual sense; on the other, we are told quite solemnly and on more than one occasion that this state is the best possible one, and that if and when the soul reaches it, its joy is perfect. ἐνταῦθα καὶ ἀναπαύεται ψυχὴ καὶ κακῶν ἔξω εἰς τὸν τῶν κακῶν καθαρὸν τόπον ἀναδραμοῦσα· καὶ νοεῖ ἐνταῦθα, καὶ ἀπαθὴς ἐνταῦθα. καὶ τὸ ἀληθῶς ζῆν ἐνταῦθα· τὸ γὰρ νῦν καὶ τὸ ἄνευ θεοῦ ἴχνος ζωῆς ἐκείνην μιμούμενον, τὸ δὲ ἐκεῖ ζῆν ἐνέργεια μὲν νοῦ· ἐνέργεια δὲ καὶ γεννᾷ θεοὺς ἐν ἡσύχῳ τῇ πρὸς ἐκεῖνο ἐπαφῇ, γεννᾷ δὲ κάλλος, γεννᾷ δικαιοσύνην, ἀρετὴν γεννᾷ. ταῦτα γὰρ κύει ψυχὴ πληρωθεῖσα θεοῦ, καὶ τοῦτο αὐτῇ ἀρχὴ καὶ τέλος· ἀρχὴ μέν, ὅτι ἐκεῖθεν, τέλος δέ, ὅτι τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἐκεῖ. καὶ ἐκεῖ γενομένη γίγνεται αὐτὴ καὶ ὅπερ ἦν· τὸ γὰρ ἐνταῦθα καὶ ἐν τούτοις ἔκπτωσις καὶ φυγὴ καὶ πτερορρύησις. δηλοῖ δὲ ὅτι τὸ ἄγαθὸν ἐκεῖ καὶ ὁ ἔρως ὁ τῆς ψυχῆς ὁ σύμφυτος, καθὸ καὶ συνέζευκται Ἔρως ταῖς ψυχαῖς καὶ ἐν γραφαῖς καὶ ἐν μῦθοις. (VI 9[9], 9. 14–26) [There the soul takes its rest and is outside evil because it has run up into the place which is clear of evils; and it thinks there, and is not passive, and its true life is there; for our present life, the life without God, is a trace of life imitating that life. But life in that realm is the active actuality of Intellect; and the active actuality generates gods in quiet contact with that God, and generates beauty, and generates righteousness, and generates virtue. It is these the soul conceives when filled with God, and this is the beginning and end; its beginning because it comes from thence, and its end because its good is there. And when it comes to be there it becomes itself and what it was; for what it is here and among the things of this world is a falling away and an exile and a shedding of wings. And the soul’s innate love makes clear that the Good is there, and this is why Eros is coupled with the Psyches in pictures and stories.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, vii, 35–37) Longing and desire for this state is an innate feeling whose attainment is phrased in verses of the Homeric epics that refer, or are made by Plotinus to refer, to Odysseus’s return to his homeland.8 Only there is the soul truly happy; but how can this happiness be accounted for? The philosophical foundations for happiness without sense-perception are laid out in the first treatise that Plotinus wrote when, after having taught Platonism for ten years in his Roman school, he decided to let his teaching spread beyond it.9 This first treatise, On Beauty (I 6[1]), is initially cast in the form of an exegesis of Plato’s account of beauty,10 but it soon turns out to be an outline of Plotinus’s own



8 See below, note 24. 9 Various hypotheses have been advanced apropos Plotinus’s decision (recorded by Porphyry) to begin writing treatises, after a long period when he taught Plato’s philosophy only in the form of meetings of the school. For a synthesis of the scholarship one may see my entry ‘Plotinus’, in particular pp. 888–90. 10 At the beginning of the treatise, Hippias’s enumeration of the various kinds of beauty (Hippias Major,

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philosophy, which includes the ascent to that Good that is even above beauty. In search of the definition of what beauty is, namely a property that applies to a variety of entities as disparate as bodies, songs, ways of life, actions, characters, and sciences, Plotinus first endorses the ‘ladder of Love’ of the Symposium.11 He then argues against the Stoic definition of beauty in terms of good proportion, advancing an anti-emergentist argument that can be mentioned here only more briefly and more roughly than it deserves. Its main point is to undermine the idea that beauty is a property issuing from non-beautiful things.12 Since the theory of beauty as good proportion cannot account for uncompounded beauty (the examples provided are gold,13 lightning in the night, and the stars), this property should be understood as the presence of something that is grasped by the soul as a whole. Now, the condition for the soul to grasp beauty is affinity between them.14 The topic echoes the Symposium,15 but Plotinus goes beyond the relationship established there between beauty, affinity, and generation on the one hand, ugliness, rejection, and infertility on the other (Symposium, 209 B 2–3), and proceeds to his typical reading of Plato’s dialogues one in the light of the other. The doctrine of participation stands in the background of the next step in his attempt at defining what beauty is. He moves from one kind of affinity, that of the soul and beauty, to another kind, that between beautiful things grasped by sense-perception and τὰ ἐκεῖ καλά. This paves the way for him to ask what it is that makes beautiful things to be such, and the answer predictably is that they are beautiful μετοχῇ εἴδους (2. 13), because of their participation in intelligible Forms. Grounded both on the Symposium (τὰ δὲ ἄλλα πάντα καλὰ ἐκείνου μετέχοντα τρόπον τινὰ τοιοῦτον, 211 B 2–3) and Timaeus, 30 C 2 – 31 A 1, this is in Plotinus’s eyes the right account, apt to replace the defective theory of beauty as good proportion. Of the subsequent developments, a point is especially relevant here: the continuity and difference between the beautiful things grasped by sense-perception (τὰ ἐν αἰσθήσει καλά, 3. 34) and those beauties that are of a higher, intelligible nature. True, they are different from each other:

286 E – 295 A) is alluded to, in particular 286 A 3; the main source of the discussion of beauty is Diotima’s speech in Symposium, 210 C 3 – 211 C 3. The expression ἐπιτηδεύματα καλά that repeatedly occurs in the treatise is featured both in Hippias Major, 286 A 3, 286 B 6–7, and in Symposium, 211 C 5. 11 Symposium, 211 C 3, ὥσπερ ἐπαναβασμοῖς χρώμενον. 12 The argument runs as follows: Let us state that beauty issues from the good proportion among things; now, either these are beautiful or not, but if they are beautiful, it is not good proportion that accounts for their beauty, rather it is another cause that has to be searched for; if, on the other hand, they are not beautiful, how on earth is it possible that from non-beautiful things, once arranged in a given way, beauty emerges? 13 Cf. Hippias Major, 289 E 2–7. 14 I 6[1], 2. 8–11: ‘Our explanation of this is that the soul, since it is by nature what it is and is related to the higher kind of reality in the realm of being, when it sees something akin to it or a trace of its kindred reality, is delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and remembers itself and its own possessions’. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 237. 15 Symposium, 206 C 1 – D 2.

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Περὶ δὲ τῶν πρωσωτέρω καλῶν, ἃ οὐκέτι αἴσθησις ὁρᾶν εἴληχε, ψυχὴ δὲ ἄνευ ὀργάνων ὁρᾷ καὶ λέγει, ἀναβαίνοντας δεῖ θεᾶσασθαι καταλιπόντας τὴν αἴσθησιν κάτω περιμένειν. ὥσπερ δὲ ἐπὶ τῶν τῆς αἰσθήσεως καλῶν οὐκ ἦν περὶ αὐτῶν λέγειν τοῖς μήτε ἑωρακόσι μήθ’ ὡς καλῶν ἀντειλημμένοις, οἷον εἴ τινες ἐξ ἀρχῆς τυφλοὶ γεγονότες, τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον οὐδὲ περὶ κάλλους ἐπιτηδευμάτων τοῖς μὴ ἀποδεξαμένοις τὸ τῶν ἐπιτηδευμάτων καὶ ἐπιστημῶν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν τοιούτων κάλλος, οὐδὲ περὶ ἀρετῆς φέγγους τοῖς μηδὲ φαντασθεῖσιν ὡς καλὸν τὸ τῆς δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης πρόσωπον, καὶ οὔτε ἕσπερος οὔτε ἑῷος οὕτω καλά. (I 6[1], 4. 1–13) [But about the beauties beyond, which it is no more the part of sense to see, but the soul sees them and speaks of them without instruments — we must go up to them and contemplate them and leave sense to stay down below. Just as in the case of the beauties of sense it is impossible for those who have not seen them or grasped their beauty — those born blind, for instance — to speak about them, in the same way only those can speak about the beauty of ways of life who have accepted the beauty of ways of life and kinds of knowledge and everything else of the sort; and people cannot speak about the splendour of virtue who have never imagined how fair is the face of justice and moral order ‘neither the evening nor the morning star are as fair’.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 243–45)16 This passage states the difference between the beauties grasped by sense-perception and those of a rational order, like virtues; however, shortly afterwards, Plotinus claims that the πάθος produced in the soul by the spectacle of virtues is exactly the same as that which is produced by the physical beauties of the beloved ones in the souls of their lovers. Now, the continuity of degrees of beauty is already implied in the ‘ladder of Love’ (cf. the ἐπιτηδεύματα καλά of the passage quoted above), but Plotinus embarks upon a detailed description that to some extent goes beyond the Symposium. In fact, he combines this dialogue with the Phaedrus, to the effect of establishing the continuity between the visible and intelligible beauties from the specific viewpoint of the subject whose wings begin to grow, so to speak.17 The point he wishes to make is that invisible beauty produces in the souls of those who meet it the same kind of feeling which is experienced in the case of passionate love. Both feelings are expressed in terms taken from the language of mysteries: ταῦτα γὰρ δεῖ τὰ πάθη γενέσθαι περὶ τὸ ὅ τι ἂν ᾖ καλόν, θάμβος καὶ ἔκπληξιν ἡδεῖαν καὶ πόθον καὶ ἔρωτα καὶ πτόησιν μεθ’ ἡδονῆς. ἔστι δὲ ταῦτα παθεῖν καὶ πάσχουσιν αἱ ψυχαὶ καὶ περὶ τὰ μὴ ὁρώμενα πᾶσαι μέν, ὡς εἰπεῖν, μᾶλλον μέντοι αἱ τούτων ἐρωτικώτεραι, ὥσπερ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν σωμάτων πάντες μὲν ὁρῶσι, κεντοῦνται δ’ οὐκ ἴσα, ἀλλ’ εἰσὶν οἱ μάλιστα, οἳ καὶ λέγονται ἐρᾶν. (I 6[1], 4. 16–22)

16 As mentioned by the editors Henry and Schwyzer, this is a quotation from the Nicomachean Ethics, V. 3. 1129b28–29, where in turn Aristotle quotes from the lost Melanippe of Euripides. 17 Phaedrus, 249 D 5–7: ‘Such an one, as soon as he beholds the beauty of this world, is reminded of true beauty, and his wings begin to grow’ (trans. by Hackforth, p. 92). Cf. Armstrong, ‘The Divine Enhancement of Earthly Beauties’.

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[These experiences must occur whenever there is contact with any sort of beautiful thing, wonder and a shock of delight and longing and passion and happy excitement. One can have these experiences by contact with invisible beauties, and souls do have them, practically all, but particularly those who are more passionately in love with the invisible, just as with bodies all see them, but all are not stung as sharply, but some, who are called lovers, are most of all.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 245) Lack of space forbids altogether a treatment of the reason why Plotinus insists on such a continuity between the feeling produced by visible and invisible beauties,18 but one should at least mention that this fits in with his anti-Gnostic stance.19 The stylistic device Plotinus adopts in his own version of the ‘ladder of Love’ is that of addressing directly those involved in such a feeling. τῶν δὴ καὶ περὶ τὰ ἐν οὐκ αἰσθήσει ἐρωτικῶν ἀναπυνθάνεσθαι δεῖ· τί πάσχετε περὶ τὰ λεγόμενα ἐπιτηδεύματα καλὰ καὶ τρόπους καλοὺς καὶ ἤθη σώφρονα καὶ ὅλως ἔργα ἀρετῆς καὶ διαθέσεις καὶ τὸ τῶν ψυχῶν κάλλος; καὶ ἑαυτοὺς δὲ ἰδόντες τὰ ἔνδον καλοὺς τί πάσχετε; καὶ πῶς ἀναβακχεύεσθε καὶ ἀνακινεῖσθε καὶ ἑαυτοῖς συνεῖναι ποθεῖτε συλλεξάμενοι αὑτοὺς ἀπὸ τῶν σωμάτων; πάσχουσι μὲν γὰρ ταῦτα οἱ ὄντως ἐρωτικοί. τί δέ ἐστι, περὶ ὃ ταῦτα πάσχουσιν; οὐ σχῆμα, οὐ χρῶμα, οὐ μέγεθός τι, ἀλλὰ περὶ ψυχήν, ἀχρώματον μὲν αὐτήν, ἀχρώματον δὲ καὶ τὴν σωφροσύνην ἔχουσαν καὶ τὸ ἄλλο τῶν ἀρετῶν φέγγος. (I 6[1], 5. 1–12) [Then we must ask the lovers of that which is outside sense ‘What do you feel about beautiful ways of life, as we call them, and beautiful habits and well-ordered characters and in general about virtuous activities and dispositions and the beauty of souls? What do you feel when you see your own inward beauty? How are you stirred to wild exultation, and long to be with yourselves, gathering your selves together away from your bodies?’

18 For a similar adaptation of the upward path leading from visible to invisible beauties cf. I 3[20], 2. 1–15, where the ‘ladder of Love’ of the Symposium is combined with the tripartition of men into philosophers, musicians, and lovers of Phaedrus, 248 D 1–4. 19 The continuity between visible and intelligible beauties has much to do with Plotinus’s intention to establish, or re-establish, the correct interpretation of Plato against the Gnostic identification of the visible world with evil, a tenet that he rejects as incompatible with genuine Platonic doctrine. Another anti-Gnostic point Plotinus wants to make is that every soul has an innate capacity to grasp the intelligible objects: ‘Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use’, I 6[1], 8. 26–28, Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 259. The antiGnostic implication of this tenet is clearly stated later on, in the treatise Against the Gnostics, where Plotinus indignantly protests against the Gnostic pretension to be the only few to get the truth, while ordinary men cannot: II 9[33], 9. 27–29 and 46–51: ‘But one ought to try to become as good as possible oneself, but not to think that only oneself can become perfectly good — for if one thinks this one is not perfectly good. […] Then the man of real dignity must ascend in due measure, with an absence of boorish arrogance, going only so far as our nature is able to go, and consider that there is room for the others at God’s side, and not set himself alone next after God; this is like flying in our dreams and will deprive him of becoming a god, even as far as the human soul can’ (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, ii, 259–61).

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For this is what true lovers feel. But what is it which makes you feel like this? Not shape or colour or any size, but soul, without colour itself and possessing a moral order without colour and possessing all the other light of the virtues.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 245) In the first part of the speech addressed to true lovers, when the ἐπιτηδεύματα καλά are mentioned, Plotinus is echoing the Symposium; but then he moves to a kind of reality which is said to be ἀχρώματον, and now it is chiefly the Phaedrus that is alluded to. As a result, the soul’s journey to the intelligible world (Phaedrus) is described along the lines of the effects of ἔρως, whose objects are indeed those of the ‘ladder of Love’ (Symposium). The ἔργα ἀρετῆς raise admiration, and their impact is as strong as that of the physical beauty of the beloved one. Moreover, souls that fall in love with invisible beauties also experience the wish for exclusive concentration on the beloved object, which is the typical feature of passionate love.20 The words πάσχουσι μὲν γὰρ ταῦτα οἱ ὄντως ἐρωτικοί are meant to produce a climax towards the question τί δέ ἐστι, περὶ ὃ ταῦτα πάσχουσιν; the answer points to a beloved object that, like the place beyond the heavens of Phaedrus 247 C 6, is without colour or shape. What happens to the loving soul once faced with beauty, be it of bodies or behaviours, is a twin movement of breaking off with customary perception and longing for lonely concentration: both effects result from the intensity of the πάθος. The invisible beauties listed are taken from the civic virtues of the Symposium that inspire admiration: μέγεθος ψυχῆς, ‘greatness of soul’; ἦθος δίκαιον, ‘a righteous life’; σωφροσύνη καθαρά, ‘a pure morality’; ἀνδρία βλόσυρον ἔχουσα πρόσοπον, ‘courage with its noble look’ (another quotation from the Iliad, referring to Ajax), ‘dignity and modesty advancing in a fearless, calm, and unperturbed disposition’; and above all the θεοειδὴς νοῦς, the ‘godlike intellect’ (Plotinus, Enneads, I 6[1], 5. 13–17, trans. by Armstrong, i, 247). As in the Symposium, the beautiful attitudes of the soul come after the physical beauties in the ascent towards unqualified beauty; as in the Phaedrus, passionate love is the sign, and the beginning, of the return of the soul to the intelligible realm. At this point, only one step is necessary in order to move from Plato’s to Plotinus’s universe: the link between the ascent of the Symposium plus the Phaedrus, on the one hand, and the ‘escape’ of the Theaetetus, on the other. In doing so, Plotinus has first recourse to Homeric epics and states that this ‘escape’ is in reality nothing other than a journey towards the soul’s homeland. This move is inspired by one of the pivots of Plotinus’s Platonism: the argument of affinity taken from the Phaedo. The soul and the intelligible world, with all its beauties ‘without colour or shape’, share in the same nature; this elicits the soul’s return to a status which is not alien to it but, on the contrary, suits its true nature (Republic X, 612 A 4). Hidden as it might be, like that of the sea god Glaucus, the genuine nature of the soul is still there.21 If the soul’s homeland is the intelligible world, this does not imply that 20 Symposium, 211 D 6–8. 21 Cf. the passage quoted above from VI 9[9]: ‘And when it comes to be there it becomes itself and what it was’. Plotinus echoes Plato, Republic, VIII. 547 B 6–7, ἐπὶ τὴν ἀρητὴν καὶ τὴν ἀρχαίαν κατάστασιν.

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the visible world is a rotten place of exile, and Plotinus makes great effort to keep his Platonism distinct from the dualistic narratives of other schools of his times.22 Rather, he thinks that when the soul dwells in the visible world it runs the risk of being confused, and nearly loses the capacity to make a distinction between apparent and true beauty.23 This is the scope of philosophy: in the treatise On Beauty as well as in several other writings chronologically near it, he insists on asking ‘what is the mode of the return’ from the many wanderings of the soul towards its homeland. Here the Iliad is quoted, and the words φεύγωμεν δὴ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα ‘let us fly to our dear country’ are followed by an allusion to the narrative of Circe and Calypso, taken from the Odyssey; elsewhere the Odyssey is coupled with the Phaedo and Republic: the verb ἀφικνεῖσθαι, ‘to reach’, provides the link between Homer and Plato.24 It comes as no surprise that Plotinus presents the return to the intelligible world, prompted by the philosophical teaching that reminds the soul of its true nature,25 as the same thing as the ‘escape’ of Theaetetus 176 A 18, where we are urged to φεύγειν ὡς τάχιστα, and the φυγή is spelt out as the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν.26 The individual soul, notwithstanding its exposure to the risk of losing its lucidity and sinking into irrational desires, has an innate capacity to see beauty, first via 22 See above, note 19. 23 I 6[1], 5. 32–39: ‘Shall we not say that its ugliness came to it as “beauty” brought in from outside, injuring it and making it impure and “mixed with a great deal of evil”, with its life and perceptions no longer pure, but by the admixture of evil living a dim life and diluted with a great deal of death, no longer seeing what a soul ought to see, no longer left in peace in itself because it keeps on being dragged out, and down, and to the dark?’ Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 247–49. 24 In I 6[1], 8. 16–17 the expression φεύγωμεν δὴ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα is taken from Iliad, II. 140, where Agamemnon is speaking, but the rest of Plotinus’s sentence turns into Odysseus’s speech, urging his men not to be caught by Circe or Calypso; in V 9[5], 1. 21–22, Plotinus echoes Odyssey V, 37, ἐκ πολλῆς πλάνης εἰς πατρίδα εὔνομον ἀφικόμενος ἄνθρωπος, and the connection with the verb ἀφικνεῖσθαι (cf. Phaedo, 82 B 10 and Republic, VII. 532 E 2) is made explicit in the immediately subsequent sentence, which echoes the question about the way of the return already raised in On Beauty (compare τίς οὖν ὁ τρόπος; τίς μεχανή, I 6[1], 8. 1; and τίς οὖν οὗτος ὁ τόπος καὶ πῶς ἄν τις εἰς αὐτὸν ἀφίκοιτο, V 9[5], 2. 1–2). The man able to find the way back (ἀφικνεῖσθαι) is the one who is by nature ἐρωτικός and φιλόσοφος. V 9[5], 2. 1–10 counts as a summary of On Beauty. On the Homeric image of Odysseus in both writings, see Pépin, ‘The Platonic and Christian Ulysses’. 25 Compare V 1[10], 1. 22–30: ‘One must therefore speak in two ways to men who are in this state of mind, if one is going to turn them round to what lies in the opposite direction and is primary, and to lead them up to that which is highest, one, and first. What, then, are these two ways? One shows how contemptible are the things now honoured by the soul, and this we shall develop more amply elsewhere, but the other teaches and reminds the soul how high its birth and value are, and this is prior to the other one and when it is clarified will also make the other obvious’ (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, v, 13). Cf. also I 3[20], 1. 1–18, quoted below, note 32, where the same question, τίς οὖν ὁ τρόπος, occurs at lines 10–11. 26 Theaetetus, 176 A 5 – B 2: ‘But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed — for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth. This is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pure, with understanding’ (Plato, Theaetetus, trans. by Levett and Burnyeat, p. 195).

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sense-perception and then within itself. The soul is indeed in a position to start its philosophical journey back to its homeland, and let me briefly mention that this journey is not described in the Enneads as an exercise of meditation under the guidance of a guru, but as a specific teaching of philosophical doctrines, developed around a text, its apories, and the solutions that are provided in most cases by Plato’s dialogues — but this is another story. More germane to the present issue is to remark that the scope of the intellectual effort whose starting point is the intense πάθος for physical beauty is to become as godlike as possible. It is noteworthy that in his account of the state of the individual soul, when it reaches the intelligible realm Plotinus moves from Plato to Aristotle. Πολλάκις ἐγειρόμενος εἰς ἐμαυτὸν ἐκ τοῦ σώματος καὶ γινόμενος τῶν μὲν ἄλλων ἔξω, ἐμαυτοῦ δὲ εἴσω, θαυμαστὸν ἡλίκον ὁρῶν κάλλος, καὶ τῆς κρείττονος μοίρας πιστεύσας τότε μάλιστα εἶναι, ζωήν τε ἀρίστην ἐνεργήσας καὶ τῷ θείῳ εἰς ταὐτὸν γεγενημένος καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ ἱδρυθεὶς εἰς ἐνέργειαν ἐλθὼν ἐκείνην ὑπὲρ πᾶν τὸ ἄλλο νοητὸν ἐμαυτὸν ἱδρύσας, μετὰ ταύτην τὴν ἐν τῷ θείῳ στάσιν εἰς λογισμὸν ἐκ νοῦ καταβὰς ἀπορῶ, πῶς ποτε καὶ νῦν καταβαίνω, καὶ ὅπως ποτέ μοι ἔνδον ἡ ψυχὴ γεγένηται τοῦ σώματος τοῦτο οὖσα, οἷον ἐφάνη καθ’ ἑαυτήν, καίπερ οὖσα ἐν σώματι. (IV 8[6], 1. 1–11) [Often I have woken up out of the body to my self and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, iv, 397) We are told here that for Plotinus the individual soul is apt to share the status of intelligible reality: this account refers to its lifetime in this world, but the same is true for the afterlife of the wise. When this happens, the individual soul experiences the same ἐνέργεια as the divine Intellect. This ἐνέργεια is described as a ζωή, or better, as the highest form of life.27 The echo of Metaphysics XII cannot

27 Metaphysics, xii. 7, 1072 b 14–16: διαγωγὴ δ’ ἐστὶν οἵα ἡ ἀρίστη μικρὸν χρόνον ἡμῖν (οὕτω γὰρ ἀεὶ ἐκεῖνο· ἡμῖν μὲν γὰρ ἀδύνατον), ἐπεὶ καὶ ἡδονὴ ἡ ἐνέργεια τούτου. Metaphysics, xii. 7, 1072 b 26–27: ἡ γὰρ νοῦ ἐνέργεια ζωή, ἐκεῖνος δὲ ἡ ἐνέργεια· ἐνέργεια δὲ ἡ καθ’ αὑτὴν ἐκείνου ζωὴ ἀρίστη καὶ ἀΐδιος. At line 30 Aristotle famously defines God as ζῷον ἀΐδιον ἄριστον. It is a typical Plotinian move to endorse an Aristotelian topic precisely when he wants to criticize Aristotle; this he does also on the issue of happiness. In the treatise On Well-Being (I 4[46]), the Aristotelian definition of εὐδαιμονία is criticized, but at the same time the close connection established by Aristotle between happiness and the ‘life’ of intellect is taken for granted, and rephrased in Platonic terms: ‘We have often said that the perfect life, the true, real life, is in that transcendent intelligible reality, and that other lives are

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be clearer or more deliberate,28 and the reason is evident. Once Aristotle has stated that what the most divine part of man experiences only seldom and for a short time, the divine Intellect possesses as a timeless and eternal ἐνέργεια, it is difficult not to rephrase the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν in such terms. This is what Plotinus does, not only in the passage quoted above, where he speaks of the capability of the human intellect to share in the divine Intellect even when the soul is embodied, but also in the treatise What Is the Living Being , and What Is Man? that I alluded to before, in which the status of the human soul in the afterlife is discussed. This is the very end of that treatise: τὸ δὲ ἐπισκεψάμενον περὶ τούτων ἡμεῖς ἢ ἡ ψυχή; ἢ ἡμεῖς, ἀλλὰ τῇ ψυχῇ. τὸ δὲ τῇ ψυχῇ πῶς; ἆρα τῷ ἔχειν ἐπεσκέψατο; ἢ ᾗ ψυχή. οὐκοῦν κινήσεται; ἢ κίνησιν τὴν τοιαύτην δοτέον αὐτῇ, ἣ μὴ σωμάτων, ἀλλ’ ἐστὶν αὐτῆς ζωή. καὶ ἡ νόησις δὲ ἡμῶν οὕτω, ὅτι καὶ νοερὰ ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ ζωὴ κρείττων ἡ νόησις, καὶ ὅταν ψυχὴ νοῇ, καὶ ὅταν νοῦς ἐνεργῇ εἰς ἡμᾶς· μέρος γὰρ καὶ οὗτος ἡμῶν καὶ πρὸς τοῦτον ἄνιμεν. (I 1[53], 13. 1–9) [What is it that has carried out this investigation? Is it ‘we’ or the soul? It is ‘we’, but by the soul. And what do we mean by ‘by the soul’? Did ‘we’ investigate by having soul? No, but in so far as we are soul. Will soul move then? Yes, we must allow it this sort of movement, which is not a movement of bodies but its own life. And intellectual activity is ours in the sense that the soul is intellectual and intellectual activity is its higher life, both when the soul operates intellectually and when intellect acts upon us. For intellect too is a part of ourselves and to it we ascend.] (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 121) For this reason it is our individual soul, in Plotinus’s account, that goes back to the intelligible world, even if it does not bring with itself the memory or any kind of affection.29 It is ‘we’ who share the διαγωγή of the divine Intellect.30 The latter is a sort of life characterized by being perfectly happy, not because the Aristotelian God experiences joy or satisfaction, but because its self-sufficiency can be phrased by us only in terms of blessed and changeless life, ζωὴ ἀρίστη καὶ ἀΐδιος. The Aristotelian

incomplete, traces of life, not perfect or pure and no more life than the opposite’ (I 4[46], 3. 34–37, Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 181). 28 Obviously, there is also the Phaedrus in the background of this account: compare 248 A 1, καὶ οὗτος μὲν θεῶν βίος. However, Plotinus’s description of the union of the individual soul with the divine Intellect is even more reminiscent of the Aristotelian passage quoted above. It is on purpose that Plotinus adopts the typically Aristotelian terminology of ἐνέργεια and ζωή, in order to show that what the Metaphysics presents as the goal for men is possible only on the grounds of Plato’s account of the soul. 29 In the ascent towards the intelligible world and union with the divine Intellect, the individual soul does not lose its individuality. This is stated in as many words by Plotinus: IV 4[28], 2. 24–32, in particular lines 29–30: ἥνωται οὐκ ἀπολλυμένη, ἀλλ’ ἕν ἐστιν ἄμφω καὶ δύο. 30 IV 8[6], 8. 23. Once again, this passage is reminiscent of Metaphysics, XII. 7, 1072 b 14–15: διαγωγὴ […] ἡ ἀρίστη. Cf. Linguiti, ‘Plotino sulla felicità dell’anima non discesa’.

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pattern of Metaphysics XII is put in the service of a description of the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν.31 As we have just seen, the status of the human intellect, when it shares the way of life of the separate Intellect, is described as a personal experience in the early treatise On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies, and in the passage quoted above from his penultimate treatise, Plotinus claims that the subject of the life that coincides with intellection is ἡμεῖς. Of this individual nature the soul is a part, and not the best one: we are souls, and are intellects too. How it is possible that our intellect is ours, notwithstanding the fact that it shares the status of the intelligible realm, is a complex point to explore in Plotinus’s philosophy. For the present purpose suffice it to say that towards the end of his literary production he claims that our higher life is νόησις, and that we ascend to the separate Intellect that operates on us. The νόησις that our soul performs once in the intelligible realm is characterized by that self-sufficiency and blessed changelessness that, phrased in psychological terms, would correspond to ‘happiness’. It is because of the continuity between the psychological and intellective ἡμεῖς that seeing the intelligible beauty and its principle — the Good beyond beauty — can count as the final step of the ‘ladder of Love’ and the end of the soul’s journey: τέλος τῆς πορείας (Republic, VII 532 E 3).32

31 I 4[46], 4. 1–23: ‘If then man can have the perfect life, the man who has this life is well off. If not, one would have to attribute well-being to the gods, if among them alone this kind of life is to be found. But since we maintain that this well-being is to be found among men we must consider how it is so. What I mean is this; it is obvious from what has been said elsewhere that man has perfect life by having not only sense-life but reasoning and true intelligence. […] Other men, we maintain, who have it [i.e. ‘this perfect kind of life’, lines 12–13] potentially, have it as a part, but the man who is well off, who actually is this and has passed over into identity with it [does not have it but] is it. […] What then is the good for him? He is what he has, his own good. The transcendent Good is cause of the good in him […]. There is evidence for this in the fact that man in this state does not seek for anything else; for what could he seek? Certainly not anything worse, and he has the best with him’ (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 181–83). 32 Plotinus often has recourse to the Platonic expression (ὁδοῦ ἀνάπαυλα […] καὶ τέλος τῆς πορείας): cf. in particular I 3[20], 1. 1–18, which deserves full quotation because of its close connection to the topic dealt with here: ‘What art is there, what method or practice, which will take us up there where we must go? Where that is, that it is to the Good, the First Principle, we can take as agreed and established by many demonstrations; and the demonstrations themselves were a kind of leading up on our way. But what sort of person should the man be who is to be led on this upward path? Surely one who has seen all or, as Plato says, who enters into a human child who is going to be a philosopher, a musician or a lover. The philosopher goes the upward way by nature, the musician and the lover must be led by it. What then is the method of guidance? Is it one and the same for all these, or is there a different one for each? There are two stages of the journey for all, one when they are going up and one when they have arrived above. The first leads from the regions below, the second is for those who are already in the intelligible realm and have gained their footing There, but must still travel till they reach the furthest point of the region; that is the end of the journey, when you reach the intelligible’ (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Armstrong, i, 153).

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Ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, Arabic Philosophy, and Kalām The early exposure of Arabic philosophy to the Plotinian doctrine of happiness without sense-perception lies beyond doubt, because the passage quoted above from On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies is featured in one of the earliest works issued from Graeco-Arabic translations of the ninth century, the so-called Theology of Aristotle.33 This work is a heavily adapted version of parts of Enneads IV–VI concocted within the ‘circle of al‑Kindī’.34 In the pseudo-Theology, Plotinus’s passage ‘Often I have woken up […]’ is cast as a speech of the author of the book, ‘Aristotle’,35 to the effect of having the latter as the key player of the conversion of the soul to itself and subsequent ascent to the intelligible realm: here the soul sees the First Cause face to face.36 This move was destined to have a long-lasting influence both East and West of the Muslim world.37 33 The pseudo-Theology of Aristotle has been edited twice. The editio princeps was provided towards the end of the nineteenth century by Dieterici, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles; then came the edition by the Egyptian scholar Badawī, Aflūṭīn ’inda al‑‘arab. Plotinus apud Arabes. Neither work is a critical edition; the latter is the work of a team funded by the ERC AdG 249431, Greek into Arabic: Philosophical Concepts and Linguistic Bridges: cf. Arnzen and others, Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle. The terminus ante quem for the production of the pseudo-Theology is the year 842, because it begins with the information that ‘Aristotle’s’ Theology has been revised by al‑Kindī for Aḥmad, the son of the caliph al‑Mu‘taṣim, who reigned 833–42. 34 The existence and paramount importance of this group of scientists and translators came to light thanks to Endress, Proclus Arabus; see also Endress, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Literatur’, esp. pp. 428–29, and the comprehensive account by the same scholar, ‘The Circle of al‑Kindī’. See also Endress and Adamson, ‘Abū Yūsuf al‑Kindī’. 35 Chapter I of the pseudo-Theology is comprised of parts of two treatises of Ennead IV (plus some additional material): the end of IV 7[2], which is a normal third-person account, and the beginning of IV 8[6], namely the first-person speech quoted above. In the Arabic version, where the two passages are merged together, the transition from one to another is marked by the subtitle ‘A statement of his (kalām lahu) that is like an allegory of the universal soul’, Dieterici, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles, p. 8. 4; Badawī, Aflūṭīn ’inda al‑‘arab. Plotinus apud Arabes, p. 22. 1; Plotinus, Opera, ed. by Henry and Schwyzer, trans. by Lewis, p. 225. 36 Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle: Dieterici, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles, p. 8. 5–13; Badawī, Aflūṭīn ’inda al‑‘arab. Plotinus apud Arabes, p. 22. 2–9. ‘Often I have been alone with my soul and have doffed my body and laid it aside and became as if I were naked substance without body, so as to be inside myself, outside all other things. Then I do see within myself such beauty and splendor as I do remain marvelling at and astonished, so that I know that I am one of the parts of the sublime, surpassing, lofty, divine world, and possess active life. When I am certain of that, I lift my intellect up from that world into the divine cause and become as if I were placed in it and cleaving to it, so as to be above the entire intelligible world, and seem to be standing in that sublime and divine place. And there I see such light and splendor as tongues cannot describe nor ears comprehend’, Plotinus, Plotiniana Arabica, trans. by Lewis, p. 225 (slightly modified). In the last sentence a Prophetic ḥadīṯ is embedded, in itself derived from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 2. 9, as noticed first by Zimmermann, ‘The Origins of the So-called Theology of Aristotle’, esp. p. 141; in the same vein, see also Bucur and Bucur, ‘The Place of Splendor and Light’. 37 A telling example of the Eastern influence of this passage is the well-known account of al‑Suhrawardī’s ‘dream’: discussion and references to previous scholarship in Arnzen and others, Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle, quoted above, note 33; another telling example, this time of the influence on Western Muslim thought, is Ibn Ṭufayl: ‘Hayy undertook to expel all this from himself, for none of these

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Less easy to detect is the Muslim afterlife of the topic of the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν. One may wonder if there is room in Islamic kalām for an inquiry comparable to that which was conducted by Hubert Merki in the fifties of the past century apropos Christian theology,38 and if not, one is entitled to wonder why;39 but my purpose here is much more modest. I will deal mainly with the philosophical tradition, and Muslim kalām will enter the picture only by way of a limited comparison between the position widely accepted by the falāsifa, on the one hand, and some statements by al‑Ghazali on the other. Furthermore, within the philosophical tradition I will narrow the focus on only one author and one text: Miskawayh, and his Refinement of Character. However, a thumbnail sketch on what a history of this topic in Arabic philosophy might resemble is in order here. The formula ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν was known to the Arab readership from the very beginning of the acquaintance of a Muslim elite interested in the ‘sciences of the Ancients’ with philosophical literature. As has long been recognized, the formula features as the fourth definition of ‘philosophy’ in the Alexandrian introductions to philosophy — chiefly the so-called Prolegomena and the commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge40 — a literary genre that counts as a source of inspiration for the parallel literature in Arabic.41 In his Epistle of the Definitions and Descriptions of Things, al‑Kindī endorses among others also this definition, slightly modified in order to have ‘assimilation’ (tašabbuh) as directed not to God’s essence, but rather to God’s deeds.42 The formula is alluded to also in al‑Kindī’s Discourse

things were conductive to the ecstasy he now sought. […] And sometimes, in the midst of his struggles, all thoughts and memories would vanish — except self-consciousness. Even when immersed in the beatific experience of the Necessarily Existent Truth, his own subjecthood would not disappear. This tormented Hayy, for he knew it was a blot on the purity of the experience, division of his attention as if with some other God. Hayy made a concerted effort to purge his awareness of-the-truth, die to himself. At least it came. From memory and mind all disappeared […]. Drowned in ecstasy, he witnessed “what no eye has seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to conceive”’: Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzān, trans. by Goodman, pp. 148–49. 38 Merki, ὉΜΟΙΩΣΙΣ ΘΕΩΙ. Clemens of Alexandria praises Plato for having assigned to man the goal of that εὐδαιμονία that consists in the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν: cf. the passage of Strom., II. 100. 3 commented upon by Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien, p. 127. 39 As a key to answering this question one may refer to the percipient remark by Daniel Gimaret quoted below, note 42 sub finem. 40 Ammonius, In Porphyrii Isagogen sive V Voces, ed. by Busse, p. 3. 7–9; the same definition is to be found in Elias, Eliae in Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, ed. by Busse, p. 16. 9–18, and in David, Prolegomena et in Porphyrii Isagogen Commentarium, ed. by Busse, p. 34. 16. 41 The close relationship between the definitions of philosophy listed by al‑Kindī and the Neoplatonic introductions to philosophy was noticed by Altmann and Stern, Isaac Israeli, pp. 14–18 and 28–30. This relationship also forms the subject-matter of the detailed study by Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie; for the formula ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν as one of the definitions of philosophy cf. esp. pp. 99–101. 42 Al-Kindī, Risāla fī ḥudūd al‑ašyā’ wa-rusūmihā, ed. by Abū Rīda, i, 172, 10–11 (as for this definition of philosophy, there is no difference between the text as edited by Abū Rīda and as edited in al‑Kindī, Cinq Épîtres, trans. by Gimaret, p. 22. 13–14): ‘They also defined it from the point of view of its action, and said that philosophy is becoming similar to the actions of God, the exalted, to the extent that man is able. [By this] they meant man’s becoming perfect in virtue’, al‑Kindī, The Philosophical Works,

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on the Soul.43 A bit later, both Abū Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā’ al‑Rāzī44 and the Brethren of Purity45 deem the assimilation to God to be the scope of man’s life, and the same is said in a compilation of topics from the Nicomachean Ethics known as Summa Alexandrinorum.46 A fully fledged account of the presence of the formula

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trans. by Adamson and Pormann, p. 305. D. Gimaret first noticed the shift from Plato’s assimilation to God’s nature to the assimilation to God’s deeds in the Arabic rendition; see al‑Kindī, Risāla fī ḥudūd al‑ašyā’ wa-rusūmihā, trans. by Gimaret, p. 58: ‘En ce qui concerne la définition elle-même, on peut penser que le traducteur [i.e. of the Greek list: see above, note 40], ou quelque auteur postérieur, a volontairement modifié le texte original en disant “se rendre semblable aux actes de Dieu”, et non à Dieu lui-même, ce qui, évidemment, pour un Musulman orthodoxe, serait une abominable hérésie’. Abū Yūsuf al‑Kindī, al‑Qawl fī l-nafs al‑muḫtaṣar min kitāb Arisṭū wa-Falāṭun [sic] wa-sā’ir al‑falāsifa, in al‑Kindī, Risāla fī ḥudūd al‑ašyā’ wa-rusūmihā, ed. by Abū Rīda, i, 274. 17–275. 7. ‘But those in whom the power of the intellectual soul is most dominant, and who are most accustomed to thinking, discerning, knowing the true natures of things, and investigating the difficult points of science, are virtuous men, close to being similar to the Creator, praise be to Him. […] Man can arrange his soul through this method, as far as it is in man’s ability, so that he may be wise, just, generous, and good, preferring truth and beauty. Through all this, he attains a kind of power and ability [just] below that of the Creator, praise be to Him. For, as regards its [sc. the soul’s] proximity to it [God’s ability], it obtains only an ability similar to His’ (al‑Kindī, The Philosophical Works, trans. by Adamson and Pormann, p. 114). Kraus, ‘La Conduite du philosophe’, pp. 239. 5–11: ‘Je résume: Le Créateur Très-Haut possède le savoir et n’ignore rien, il est juste et ne commet point d’injustice, il est le Savoir même et la Justice et la Miséricorde, il est notre Créateur et Seigneur et nous sommes ses serviteurs et ses esclaves. Or, étant donné que l’esclave le plus aimé de ses maîtres est celui qui s’attache le plus à leur conduite et suit de près leur façon d’être, il s’ensuit que parmi les serviteurs de Dieu Très-Haut le plus rapproché de lui sera celui qui possède le plus grand savoir et la plus grande justice, et qui dépasse les autres en miséricorde et en clémence. C’est cela que veut dire la sentence de tous les philosophes ‘La philosophie c’est l’imitation de Dieu Très-Haut en tant que cette imitation est possible à l’homme’. Cette phrase résume tout le contenu de la conduite du philosophe’. Gimaret, in al‑Kindī, Cinq Épîtres, trans. by Gimaret, p. 58 refers to Rasā’il i, 399. 13, 427. 17; iii, 41. 7, 143. 17–18, 371. 14–15, 382. 1–2 in Ikhwān al‑Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil, ed. by Bustānī; Altmann and Stern, Isaac Israeli, p. 200, refer to iii, 348, a passage that is worth quoting in full because of its close similarity to the passage quoted at note 43 from al‑Kindī. Altmann and Stern say: ‘The Ikhwān describe the effort to become similar to God in terms of moral and intellectual qualities: “In this sense the learned philosophers say that philosophy is an assimilation to God as far as this is possible to man, i.e., his science must be truthful, his action wise and well balanced, his character noble, his opinion true”’. The text known as Summa Alexandrinorum is an epitome of the Nicomachean Ethics that has come down to us in the Latin version made by Hermannus Alemannus in 1243/44, but whose Arabic original is largely attested to. The Latin text was edited first by Marchesi, L’Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione latina medievale, and then by Fowler, ‘Manuscript Admont 608 and Engelbert of Admont’. The genesis and transmission of this text are an irksome problem, and one which is complicated by that of the possible relationship with another text, the so-called Seventh Maqāla, namely another epitome of the Nicomachean Ethics sandwiched between Books vi and vii in the unique manuscript of the Arabic version of Nicomachean Ethics. Recent scholarship generally concurs that the two texts are related to each other, but there is no scholarly consensus on what kind of relationship, nor on the relationship that both may have with the lost ‘commentary’ by Porphyry on the Nicomachean Ethics. The most recent analysis, and an innovative one, has been provided by Ullmann, Die Nikomachische Ethik des Aristoteles in arabischer Übersetzung, ii, 72–122. The topic of the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν is interspersed with the Aristotelian treatment of virtue: cf. Marchesi, L’Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione latina medievale p. lxiv, Fowler, ‘Manuscript Admont 608 and Engelbert of Admont’, p. 224:

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ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν in Arabic philosophy would include a discussion of the interesting fact that this doctrine is often interwoven with those issued from the two main sources of philosophical ethics in Islam: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and Galen’s De Moribus.47 As such, the formula is not featured in Alfarabi’s Attainment of Happiness, but this work attests the cross-pollination of Aristotle’s criteria for εὐδαιμονία on the one hand, and the Neoplatonic topic of the four degrees of virtue on the other. Needless to say, these degrees are conceived of, in the Platonic school before and after Plotinus, as steps in the ascending path towards the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν.48 The transmission of this topic to the Arabic-speaking world might well have been multifarious, therefore it is difficult to detect in which way Alfarabi became acquainted with it; but what tips the scale in favour of the influence of a Plotinian or post-Plotinian version is the fact that Alfarabi’s idea of ultimate happiness is shaped by the union of the intellect with the intelligible realm — a typical Neoplatonic interpretation of the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, and one that tallies well with Alfarabi’s own interpretation of the conjunction of the human intellect with the separate Agent Intellect. The ‘supreme happiness in the life beyond (al‑sa‘āda al‑quṣwā)’49 alluded to in The Attainment of Happiness is hardly different from the conjunction of the human mind with the separate Intellect of Alfarabi’s Perfect State.50 All this suggests that the falāsifa saw a close relationship between educating the soul to keep the irrational emotions under control, organizing the individual and civic moral life around the Aristotelian principle of the mean between opposite vices, and ascending in Neoplatonic vein from moral virtues to the purification of the inner life of the soul, whose pinnacle is the contemplation of the divine

‘Optimum enim est tamquam a Deo glorioso donorum suis servis, ut per hanc sibi assimilentur: Deo quidem assimilari virtus divina est’; and Marchesi, L’Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione latina medievale, p. lxxxiv, Fowler, ‘Manuscript Admont 608 and Engelbert of Admont’, p. 249: ‘Quoniam ergo perfectus actus intellectus speculativi sit finis vite humane et felicitas et exemplar beatitudinis, patet ex hoc quod per hunc assimilatur homo deo gloriosi et intelligentiis supremis’. 47 Even mentioning the basic literature to support this claim would exceed the limits of this essay; for a recent outline of the influence of the Nicomachean Ethics, with discussion of previous scholarship, cf. Ramón Guerrero, ‘Recepción de la Ética Nicomaquea en el mundo árabe’; the Arabic version of Galen’s De Moribus has been edited by Klein-Franke, ‘The Arabic Version of Galen’s Περὶ ἐθῶν’. 48 Cf. Dillon, ‘Plotinus, Philo and Origen on the Grades of Virtue’. 49 Alfarabi, K. Taḥṣīl al‑ṣa‘āda, pp. 101–47, esp. p. 102. 2–5: ‘The human things through which nations and citizens of cities attain earthly happiness in this life and supreme happiness in the life beyond are of four kinds: theoretical virtues, deliberative virtues, moral virtues, and practical arts’, Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. by Mahdi, p. 13. 50 Alfarabi, On the Perfect State, trans. and ed. by Walzer; repr. ed. by Endress (pagination follows the reprint), pp. 204. 13–206. 3 (Arabic) and 205–07 (English trans.): ‘The presence of the first intelligibles in man is his first perfection, but these intelligibles are supplied to him only in order to be used by him to reach its ultimate perfection, i.e. felicity. Felicity means that the human soul reaches a degree of perfection in (its) existence (fī l-wujūd) where it is in no need of matter for its support, since it becomes one of the incorporeal things and of the immaterial substances and remains in that state continuously for ever. But its rank is beneath the rank of the Active Intellect’.

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nature.51 Nowhere is this more evident than in Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, where the Neoplatonic doctrine of happiness without sense-perception is stated in as many words. In itself a compilation of various sources that can be traced back to the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Galenic traditions,52 the Refinement of Character aims at providing the principles for man to attain a permanent disposition, or character (khuluq, ἦθος), that prompts beautiful deeds. This can be done only if the nature of the soul is known; in turn, knowledge of the nature of the soul falls into four main subsets: one should know what the soul is, how it is, how its perfection is produced, and what is apt to clean it and, on the contrary, what risks to corrupt it.53 Thus, Chapter I of the Refinement of Character is devoted to the principles of ethics;54 Chapter II deals with the means to attain perfection;55 Chapter III addresses the question of the ultimate good;56 Chapter IV discusses justice;57 and the focus of Chapter V is love and its degrees, starting from passionate love and culminating in the ‘divine’ kind. Miskawayh’s description of divine love, and lovers, gives a distinct Neoplatonic ring that did not escape Richard Walzer,58 who was also convinced that the ultimate source of Miskawayh’s ethics was to be found ‘among the Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle’.59 I do not know if I can follow him in

51 It is well known that the theory of the grades of virtue worked out by Plotinus in treatise I 2[19] was summarized by Porphyry in the Sentences, and more precisely in sentence 32 under the form of the fourfold hierarchy of virtues: ‘The civic virtues, based as they are on moderation of the passions, consist in following and going along with the process of reasoning relative to our duty in the field of practical actions […]. The virtues, on the other hand, of the person who is making progress towards the state of contemplation consist in detaching oneself from the things of this realm; hence these are also termed “purifications” […]. In brief, the disposition characteristic of the civic virtues is to be seen as the imposition of measure on the passions, since it has as its aim living a human life in accordance with nature, while the disposition that results from the contemplative virtues is manifested in total detachment from the passions, which has as its aim assimilation to God. […] There is therefore another class of virtues, a third one, after the purificatory and the civic, which are those of the soul as it is exercising intellection. […] The fourth class of virtues is that of the paradigmatic, which are […] actually to be found in the intellect, seeing as they are superior to those of the soul and are the paradigms of these, the virtues of the soul being their likenesses’, Porphyry, Sentences, ed. by Brisson, trans. by Dillon, ii, 809–12. 52 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq; Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, trans. by Zurayk. Another Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq was authored, approximately half a century before Miskawayh, by Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Cf. Endress, The Works of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, pp. 82–85; Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Samir; Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, The Reformation of Morals, trans. by Griffith; Urvoy, Traité d’éthique d’Abū Zakariyyā Yahya ibn ‘Adī. 53 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, p. 1. 6–15, English trans. p. 1. 54 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, pp. 3. 1–30. 10, English trans. pp. 5–26. 55 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, pp. 31. 1–73. 11, English trans. pp. 29–65. 56 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, pp. 75. 1–104. 14, English trans. pp. 69–91. 57 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, pp. 105. 1–134. 10, English trans. pp. 95–119. 58 Walzer, ‘Some Aspects of Miskawayh’s Tahḏīb al‑aḫlāq’, esp. p. 228. 59 Walzer, ‘Some Aspects of Miskawayh’s Tahḏīb al‑aḫlāq’, p. 224. Walzer advances the hypothesis that the ultimate source of Miskawayh was Porphyry: ‘Hence it is tempting to connect Miskawaih’s exegesis of Aristotle’s Ethics, through al‑Fārābī, ultimately with Porphyry. […] It is certainly a

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this claim; be that as it may, the Neoplatonic version of assimilation to the divine surfaces in this passage: ،‫فإذن الجوهر اإللهي الذي في االنسان إذا صفا من كدورته التي حصلت فيه من مالبسة الطبيعة‬ ‫ اشتاق إلى شبهه ورأى بعين عقله الخير‬،‫ولم تجذبه أنواع الشهوات وأصناف محبات الكوامات‬ ‫ فيلتذ‬،‫األول المحض الذي ال تشوبه مادة فأسرع إليه وحينئذ يفيض نور ذلك الخير األول عليه‬ ‫ استعمل الطبيعة البدنية أم لم‬،‫ ويصير إلى معنى االتحاد الذي وصفناه‬،‫به لذة ال تشبهها لذة‬ ‫ ألنه ليس يصفو الصفاء‬،‫ إال أنه يعد مفارقته الطبيعة بالكلية أحق بهذه الرتبة العالية‬،‫يستعملها‬ .‫التام إال بعد الحياة الدنيوية‬ [If, then, the divine essence within man is freed from the turbidity which comes to it from contact with nature, and if it is not lured by the various kinds of desires and pursuits of honors, it will long for its like and will perceive, through the eye of its intelligence, the First Pure Good, which is not contaminated with matter, and will hasten towards it. The light of that First Good will pour upon it, and the pleasure which it will experience thereby will be beyond comparison to any other kind of pleasure. Whether it makes use of the bodily nature or not, it will attain the meaning of union which we have described. However, it will be more worthy of this high rank after freeing itself totally from the bodily nature, because it will not achieve complete purity until it leaves the worldly life.]60 There is a divine substance in man, a jawhar ilāhī that can be disentangled from the accretions of irrational desires and vices. This divine substance is longing for its similar, and contemplation of the separate spiritual Good — the First Principle, al‑khayr al‑awwal al‑maḥḍ61 — is completely within its reach. Put otherwise, moral purification and the life of the intellect are conducive to the union of the human soul with the divine; even if the possibility is left open to attain such a vision when man is alive, perfect happiness is possible only in the afterlife. The specific source of Miskawayh’s claim is in all likelihood impossible to single out, even taking for granted that there is such a source; more important is to notice that this passage attests the survival in the Arabic philosophical tradition of all the constituents of

permissible guess to connect the whole discussion which follows with Porphyry’s exposition of the Nicomachean Ethics of which we know from and through Arabic sources only’ (p. 226). 60 Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Zurayq, p. 139. 10–18, English trans. pp. 126–27. Later on in the same chapter, Miskawayh insists on the ‘divine part of man’ (p. 168. 18 Arabic, p. 150 English trans.) which is intellect, and credits Aristotle with the idea that ‘Complete and pure happiness belongs to God’ (ed. by Zurayq, p. 169. 18, English trans. p. 151) and to the man who ‘imitates his acts to the extent of his capacity’ (ed. by Zurayq, p. 170. 7–8; for this version of the formula, see above, note 42): Cf. also Miskawayh, Tahḏīb al‑aḫlāq, ed. by Zurayq, p. 171. 11–14: ‘Aristotle said: Man’s aspirations should not be human, though he be a man; nor should he be satisfied with the aspirations of the animal which is destined to die, though he himself also may be so destined. He should rather aim with all his capacities to live a divine life’ (English trans., p. 152). 61 It comes as no surprise that Miskawayh has recourse here to the typical terminology of the pseudoTheology and Liber de Causis (whose title in the Arabic tradition runs K. Arisṭūṭālīs fī l-Īḍaḥ al‑khayr al‑maḥḍ).

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Neoplatonic happiness without sense-perception. Even though no literal quotation from the pseudo-Theology can be detected in these lines, Miskawayh’s account is reminiscent of Plotinus’s speech in its Arabic rendition:62 what performs purification and is worthy of ascending to the divine is the rational soul, in itself a substance akin to the reality it strives to contemplate; the joy experienced by the soul once the goal is reached is beyond comparison with respect to any other kind of pleasure. This was surely also Avicenna’s own position, as stated in writings like his Treatise on Love, where intellectual knowledge in its highest form equals the highest form of love and ends in the assimilation to the essence of the Pure Good,63 or in the Persian Mi‘râj Nâma, if one accepts its Avicennian authorship,64 where a vision of God face to face is described,65 or again in the two writings devoted to the so-called ‘Destination, ma‘ād’,66 namely the Kitāb al‑ mabda’ wa-l-ma‘ād67 and the Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād. The latter involves a fully fledged discussion of the afterlife. After having argued at length against bodily resurrection, thus reaching the conclusion that immortality pertains only to the rational soul, Avicenna raises the question of happiness in the afterlife. A distinction is made between happiness

62 See above, note 36. On the influence on Miskawayh of the Neoplatonic Arabic tradition, especially Kindian, cf. Adamson, ‘Miskawayh’s Psychology’; cf. also Marcotte, ‘Ibn Miskawayh’s Tartīb al‑sa‘ādāt (The Order of Happiness)’. 63 Cf. Avicenna, ‘A Treatise on Love’, trans. by Fackenheim, pp. 223–25: ‘The First Cause is identical with the Pure Good […]. The perfection of both human and angelic souls lies in two things: (i) the conception of those intelligible beings to which they have a possible relation, each according to its capacity; this is an effort to become assimilated to the essence of the Absolute Good, and (ii) in the consequent emanation from them of such actions as are in harmony with their nature, and as are just in relation to the latter. […] These imitations occur for no other purpose than to make possible an approximation to the Absolute Good. […] Therefore, the real object of the love of both human and angelic souls is the Pure Good’. 64 The Avicennian authorship of this work has been challenged, but a detailed analysis has allowed Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna, pp. 201–07, to conclude that ‘the evidence supporting the authenticity of the treatise is sufficiently strong that the burden of proof falls upon those who would dispute this claim’ (p. 110). My sincere thanks go to the referee of this article for pointing out that the presence of Avicennian elements in this work is not in itself a proof of genuine authorship, because such elements feature also in post-Avicennian works. 65 ‘[T]hat divine, holy Presence is free of body, substance, and accident, which exist in these worlds. […] I saw the abstract knowledge of its existence to an extent that no living creature can encompass by means of sensation. […] when my knowledge made its way to the gnosis of unity I was no longer engaged in perceiving and preserving particulars. The rational soul achieved so much pleasure from this knowledge that all the faculties of the natural and animal (souls) stopped working. I was so immersed in unity that I was no longer engaged in the world of substances and bodies. […] For the realm of unity entails continual immersion in spiritual pleasure. […] when he perceived the beauty of unity and apprehended the reality of the discourse of the Necessary Existent, and understood that its speech does not consist of pronunciation and sound, he attained pleasure the like of which he ‘had never experienced’, trans. in Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna, pp. 135–37: it is apparent from this passage that ‘Aristotle’s’ account in the Arabic Plotinus quoted above, note 36, is put into the service of the philosophical analysis of the ascent of the Prophet to heaven. 66 For a terminological analysis of ma‘ād, cf. Avicenna, Epistola sulla vita futura, ed. by Lucchetta, pp. xviii–xix, and Michot, La Destinée de l’homme selon Avicenne, p. 9 n. 46. 67 Avicenna, al‑Mabdā’ wa-l-ma‘ād, ed. by Nūrānī.

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that pertains only to the rational soul and happiness in the imaginative faculty (quwwa mutakhayyila), which is created by God with the purpose of rewarding those who have been virtuous during their lifetime, but whose souls are not apt to intellectual contemplation.68 It has been shown by Georges Ch. Anawati that al‑Ghazali reacts precisely against this position. The critique of philosophy as leading to unbelief apropos bodily resurrection, which is raised in the Incoherence of the Philosophers,69 seems in fact to reflect the Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād, in which the afterlife of the pious is described as an imagination, better than the much more nuanced account of the K. al‑Šifā’; the same applies also to al‑Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error.70 In all likelihood, al‑Ghazali’s acquaintance with the afterlife as understood by the falāsifa was not limited to his Avicennian readings. It has been established on firm grounds that he was also acquainted with Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, a text that counts as one of the main sources of his ethical doctrines.71 He may

68 The terminology varies according to the different works in which Avicenna deals with his topic; also takhayyul, the act of imagining, is frequent. As for the rationale behind this doctrine, cf. Michot, La Destinée de l’homme selon Avicenne, pp. 191–94: ‘L’âme du sage s’échappe instantanément vers le monde intelligible et celle de l’homme pieux, qui a suivi l’enseignement des prophètes, a respecté leur Lois, quitte tout aussi rapidement le monde de la génération et de la corruption, la sphère sublunaire. Rejoignant, au moment même de la séparation, l’univers des âmes célestes, elle s’attache à une parcelle infime, à un ‘atome’ de la quintessence stellaire, ce qui assure la survie active de son psychisme. […]. Dans l’au-delà imaginal, les âmes inconscientes découvrent en outre la réalisation de la promesse et de la menace des prophètes, elles vivent tout l’univers eschatologique qu’ils leur ont dépeint […] le Très-Haut leur accorde de se rassasier des divers plaisirs qui leur ont été promis en fondant justement, par le biais des anges, des intellects pratiques et du psychisme inférieur, la réalité ontologique de ce qu’ils imaginent. […] pour Avicenne, on ne peut mesurer correctement ce que sont l’au-delà des simples et la corporéité future si on ne se souvient pas de l’objectif que les prophètes poursuivent fondamentalement en les annonçant: conduire dans le droit chemin une masse aux mœurs à peu près bestiales, une plèbe obsédée par ses passions. L’au-delà est un lieu de plaisir, le corps paradisiaque un instrument de volupté. Leur fonction est de permettre aux âmes inconscientes de vivre la jouissance que les prophètes font miroiter devant leurs yeux quand ils achètent leur agir vertueux’. 69 Anawati, ‘Un cas typique de l’ésotérisme avicennien’. Through a comparison between the doctrine of the afterlife criticized by al‑Ghazali in the Incoherence of the Philosophers and that of Avicenna’s Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād, Anawati reaches the conclusion that ‘On dirait que Ghazali avait devant les yeux le texte même de la Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya quand il a rédigé ce chapitre du Tahāfut’ (p. 289). For the section of the Incoherence of the Philosophers where this doctrine is stigmatized, cf. Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. by Marmura, pp. 208–25. The final pronouncement is that the philosopher’s doctrine on this issue features ‘manifest infidelity (al‑kufr al‑ṣurāḥ) that none of the Islamic sects have believed’ (p. 226. 9–10 Arabic, p. 226 English trans.). 70 Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error, trans. by McCarthy, p. 66: ‘In the three questions first mentioned they [i.e. the philosophers] were opposed to (the belief of) all Muslims, viz. in their affirming 1) that men’s bodies will not be assembled on the Last Day, but only disembodied spirits will be rewarded and punished, and the rewards and punishments will be spiritual, not corporal. They were indeed right in affirming the spiritual rewards and punishments, for these also are certain; but they falsely denied the corporal rewards and punishments and blasphemed the revealed Law in their stated views’. 71 It has been shown by a series of studies initiated by Wilferd Madelung that al‑Ghazali’s ethics owes much to Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, in itself the source of the Book of the Means of the

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well have noticed the passage quoted above, where Miskawayh (at variance with Avicenna) does not even address the question of the relationship between his theory about happiness in the afterlife and the Quranic account of it. There is a work where al‑Ghazali’s debt towards the Refinement of Character is evident, the Scale of the Action (Mīzān al‑‘amal),72 and that elicits some remarks on this issue. A classification of the positions concerning the afterlife is offered that in some sense overlaps with the more famous assessments of the Incoherence of the Philosophers and Deliverance from Error, and in some sense does not. The first position is that of the believers who never thought to challenge the Quranic accounts of the afterlife. They affirm the sensible pleasures (al‑laḏḏāt al‑ḥissiyya, 182. 8), even though they would readily acknowledge that in the afterlife there may well be also other kinds of joy. This position is not evaluated, but it is clear from the general context of the chapter that it is met with full approval by al‑Ghazali, for a reason that will become clear before long. Then another group comes, that of ‘some divine Muslim philosophers’ (ba‘d al‑ilāhiyyīn al‑islāmiyyīn min al‑falāsifa, 182. 18). They maintain that only the rational soul is immortal. The happiness they are looking for is that which concerns the intellect (laḏḏa ‘aqliyya, 182. 20); however, according to them this does not imply complete denial of the sensible pleasures. Even if true happiness is only intellectual, the possibility exists according to them to experience physical pleasure in the imaginative part of the soul: the description of this position matches that of Avicenna’s Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād.73 At variance with the Incoherence of the Philosophers and Deliverance from Error, this position is not condemned, to the extent in which it too (even though not so boldly as the first position does) encourages people to perform in this life the deeds that are mandatory in order to enjoy their reward in the afterlife. Then yet another philosophical school is mentioned: that of those who totally remove physical pleasure from the afterlife, maintaining that joy and pain affect only the soul, not the body, and this even in the present life; a fortiori the disembodied soul will experience a joy which is not comparable with any kind or degree of physical pleasure. After having described this position at some length (183. 14–184. 23), al‑Ghazali advances the possibility that it merges together with that of the Sufis (185. 1–9). One may speculate that this last position has to do with Miskawayh’s account in the Refinement of Character — a text that is surely a source, indirect as it may be, of the Scale of the Action; but in the final analysis this is not vital. What is important to notice here is that the position of those who do not even take into

Perfections of the Revealed Law by al‑Rāġib al‑Iṣfahānī: cf. Madelung, ‘Ar-Rāġib al‑Iṣfahānī und die Ethik al‑Ghazalis’; Daiber, ‘Griechische Ethik in islamischem Gewande’; Janssens, ‘Al-Ghazali’s Mīzān al‑‘Amal’; Mohamed, ‘The Duties of the Teacher’. 72 Al-Ghazali, Mīzān al‑‘amal, ed. by Dunyā; page and line references in the text are to this edition. 73 This school, says al‑Ghazali, maintains that the physical pleasures do not have real, extra-mental existence (‘wujūd min khārij’, 183. 1), but credits them with a sort of reality in imagination (‘‘an ṭariq al‑takhayyul’, 183. 2); compare this with the account of Avicenna’s position as stated in note 68, above. According to al‑Ghazali, this position is not against the religious Law: not only does it not prevent from following its commands, but even encourages to do so (183. 2–13).

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account physical pleasure in their idea of the afterlife is presented as a philosophical doctrine that may have something in common with the mystical way of the Sufis. In any case, this position is not evaluated either. Eventually a fourth position is mentioned, and this is squarely condemned. It resembles that of the ‘materialist’ philosophers (al‑ṭabī‘yyūn) harshly criticized in the Deliverance from Error: both these and the people mentioned in the Scale of the Action deny the very existence of an afterlife.74 However, the position condemned in the Scale of the Action differs in that it is not a proper school. Rather, it is described as a foolish idea held under the pressure of sensuality, and not without the Devil’s influence, by people of any or no allegiance who are looking for a theoretical justification of their libertine behaviour (185. 11–21). A passage follows, in which al‑Ghazali warns against the arguments of those among these wicked people who might try to enrol Aristotle or Plato as examples of a sceptical attitude towards the Quranic afterlife (185. 21–186. 11). It would exceed the limits of the present article to discuss in and by itself the purpose of this chapter of the Scale of the Action, whose focus seems to be more and more on something like Pascal’s pari.75 Life is short, and the one who exchanges its ephemerous pleasures against a terrible eternity of physical pain is a fool, even if such an eternity were only probable; now, it is certain: al‑Ghazali’s point is that of urging the reader to follow the commands of the Law, because religion does not consist in working out theories, but begins and ends in performing deeds that will ensure the pleasures of the afterlife, while a sceptical attitude would irreparably compromise them — hence the evident approval of the first position mentioned above.76 Be that as it may, I must say that it is not entirely clear to me whether or not the doctrine of the philosophers in both versions — that which grants a sort of subjective reality to the Quranic pleasures, and that which refuses them even such an evanescent status — meets his approval in the Scale of the Action, and what kind of consistency one can reach, if any, between the position held here and in the Incoherence of the Philosophers and Deliverance from Error. On a more general note, al‑Ghazali’s appraisal of Muslim Graeco-Arabic philosophy (falsafa) is a complex question we are not compelled to enter, but one thing is clear: he did not fail to realize that the falāsifa identified the highest goal of the human soul with happiness without sense-perception, setting at naught the Quranic afterlife (Incoherence of the Philosophers and Deliverance from Error) or simply ignoring it (Scale of the Action). 74 In the Deliverance from Error they are depicted as acknowledging the existence of a wise Creator, but denying the afterlife: ‘So they adopted the view that the soul dies, never to return. Consequently they denied the afterlife and rejected the Garden and the Fire, the Assembly and the Recall, and the Resurrection and the Reckoning. So in their view there would be no future reward for obedience, and no punishment for disobedience. Therefore they lost all restraint and abandoned themselves to their passions like beasts. There were also godless men, because basic faith is belief in God and the Last Day — and these men denied the Last Day, even though they believed in God and His Attributes’, Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error, trans. by McCarthy, p. 62. 75 Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Sellier, pp. 468–72. 76 For a different appraisal of al‑Ghazali’s attitude towards philosophical ethics (meaning chiefly Miskawayh’s doctrines known via al‑Rāġib al‑Iṣfahānī) and Sufism, cf. Mohamed, ‘The Duties of the Teacher’.

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A Platonic (and Neoplatonic) Background for visio beatifica in the Latin Thirteenth Century Of the prolonged influence of Platonism on the theological elaboration of Paul’s claim ‘videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem’ (i Corinthians 13. 12) from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, only one specific point will be taken into account here: the nature of happiness in the afterlife as stated in Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the visio beatifica.77 Aquinas addresses this issue in various places; among them, the long section of the Summa contra Gentiles devoted to the demonstration that the goal of each and every intellectual substance is intelligere Deum, namely chapters 24–64 of Book iii, has received a masterful treatment by no less a scholar than Étienne Gilson.78 Here I will focus on Q. 3 of Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, on the definition of ultimate happiness (Quid sit beatitudo). It is comprised of eight articles that range from the definition of this status of the human soul to the question whether or not it consists in the vision of divine essence. Aquinas states from the outset that beatitudo, the happiness of the blessed, though obviously created if considered in and by itself (quantum ad ipsam essentiam), is also something uncreated if considered from the viewpoint of its cause, that is God, and of its object, once again God. If one asks how on earth is it possible that something that is assumed to be inherent in the human soul is actualized by that uncreated and supreme happiness that is God, the response one gets is rooted in the Platonic doctrine of participation, embedded in Boethius’s auctoritas quoted by Aquinas. The double status of ultimate happiness as a participated quality and perfect happiness per se (identical with God) is featured in one of the speeches of Philosophy in the De Consolatione Philosophiae, III prosa 10. Aquinas unhesitatingly follows in Boethius’s footsteps even when Philosophy goes so far as to describe shared happiness in terms of deification, namely man’s participation in divine nature. Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, Q. 3 a. 1, resp.: Si ergo beatitudo hominis consideretur quantum as causam vel obiectum, sic est aliquid increatum; si autem consideretur quantum ad ipsam essentiam beatitudinis, sic est aliquid creatum. [Therefore, if man’s beatitude is thought of with respect to its cause or object, then in this sense it is something increated, whereas if it is thought of with respect to the very essence of beatitude, then in this sense it is something created.] 77 On the genesis, history, and problems of this theory, cf. Trottmann, La Vision béatifique, in particular pp. 29–410; Torrell, ‘La Vision de Dieu per essentiam selon saint Thomas d’Aquin’, remarks that the formula ‘visio beatifica’ does not occur as such in Thomas Aquinas, and discusses Thomas’s position against the background of the two theological traditions, Latin (Augustine) and Greek (ps.Dionysius, John Damascene). Also the Dionysian tradition was crucial in this respect. An excellent analysis has been provided by Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God. 78 Gilson, ‘Sur la problématique thomiste de la vision béatifique’.

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Ad primum ergo dicendum quod Deus est beatitudo per essentiam suam […] homines autem sunt beati, sicut ibidem dicit Boetius79 per participationem, sicut et dii per participationem dicuntur. Ipsa autem participatio beatitudinis secundum quam homo dicitur beatus aliquid creatum est. [Reply to objection 1: God is beatitude through his essence […]. By contrast, as Boethius says in the same place, men are blessed through participation, just as they are said to be ‘gods’ through participation. And the participation in beatitude by virtue of which a man is called blessed is itself something created.]80 Article 2 of this question asks whether or not happiness is an operatio, and Aquinas’s argumentation is instructive. The first reason brought forth against the definition of ultimate happiness in terms of operatio is taken from Scripture, more precisely from St Paul.81 The second reason is taken from Boethius,82 and other reasons are put forward as well. The sed contra is based on one and only one auctoritas, Aristotle: ‘Sed contra est quod Philosophus dicit in I Ethic. quod felicitas est operatio secundum virtutem perfectam’, and this is Aquinas’s favoured position. Of this article, what is relevant to the present purpose is not only Aquinas’s general response, but also one of the solutions of the individual points, the fourth. Respondeo dicendum quod, secundum quod beatitudo hominis est aliquid creatum in ipso existens, necesse est dicere quod beatitudo hominis sit operatio. Est enim beatitudo ultima hominis perfectio. Unumquodque autem intantum perfectum est, inquantum est actu: nam potentia sine actu imperfecta est. Oportet ergo beatitudinem in ultimo actu hominis consistere. Manifestum est autem quod operatio est ultimus actus operantis, unde et actus secundus a Philosopho nominatur in II De Anima: nam habens formam potest esse in potentia operans, sicut sciens est in potentia considerans. Et inde est quod in aliis quoque rebus unaquaeque dicitur esse propter suam operationem, ut dicitur in II De Caelo. Necesse est ergo beatitudinem hominis operationem esse. 79 Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, III prosa 10, 23–26, ed. by Bieler: ‘Nam quoniam beatitudinis adeptione fiunt homines beati, beatitudo vero est ipsa divinitas, divinitatis adeptione beatos fieri manifestum est. Sed uti iustitiae adeptione iusti, sapientae sapientes fiunt, ita divinitatem adeptos deos fieri simili ratione necesse est. Omnis igitur beatus deus. Sed natura quidem unus; participatione vero nihil prohibet esse quam plurimos’ (‘For since that men are made blessed by the obtaining of blessedness, and blessedness is nothing else but divinity, it is manifest that men are made blessed by the obtaining of divinity. And as men are made just by the obtaining of justice, and wise by the obtaining of wisdom, so they who obtain divinity must needs in like manner become gods. Wherefore everyone that is blessed is a god, but by nature there is only one God; but there may be many by participation’, Boethius, The Theological Tractates, trans. by Stewart and Rand, pp. 271–73). 80 The English translations of the Summa Theologiae are quoted from the work in progress by Freddoso. 81 ‘Dicit enim Apostolus, ad Romanos 6. 22: Habetis fructum vestrum in sanctificationem, finem vero vitam aeternam. Sed vita non est operatio, sed ipsum esse viventium. Ergo ultimus finis, qui est beatitudo, non est operatio’. 82 Praeterea, ‘Boetius dicit in III De Consolatione. quod beatitudo est status omnium bonorum aggregatione perfectus. Sed status non nominat operationem. Ergo beatitudo non est operatio’.

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[I respond: in the sense in which a man’s beatitude is something created existing within him, one must claim that man’s beatitude is an operation, for beatitude is man’s ultimate perfection. But each thing is perfect to the extent that it is actual, since a potentiality is unperfected in the absence of its [corresponding] actuality. Therefore, beatitude must consist in man’s ultimate actuality. But it is clear that an operation is the ultimate actuality of a thing that operates; this is why the operation is called ‘second actuality’ by the Philosopher in De Anima 2. For it can be the case that what possesses a form is operating [only] in potentiality, in the way that someone who has knowledge might be thinking [only] in potentiality. Hence, in the case of other entities as well, each thing is said to exist for the sake of its operation, as De Caelo 2 says. Therefore, it must be the case that man’s beatitude is an operation.] Ad quartum dicendum quod, cum beatitudo dicat quandam ultimam perfectionem, secundum quod diversae res beatitudinis capaces ad diversos gradus perfectionis pertingere possunt, secundum hoc necesse est quod diversimode beatitudo dicatur. Nam in Deo est beatitudo per essentiam […] In hominibus autem, secundum status praesentis vitae, est ultima perfectio secundum operationem qua homo coniungitur Deo: sed haec operatio nec continua potest esse, et per consequens nec unica est, quia operatio intercisione multiplicatur. Et propter hoc in statu praesentis vitae perfecta beatitudo ab homine haberi non potest. Unde Philosophus in I Ethic., ponens beatitudinem hominis in hac vita, dicit eam imperfectam, post multa concludens: Beatos autem dicimus ut homines. Sed promittitur nobis a Deo beatitudo perfecta, quando erimus sicut angeli in caelo, sicut dicit Matthaeus 22. 30. [Reply to objection 4: Since ‘beatitude’ expresses a certain ultimate perfection, ‘beatitude’ must have different senses because the diverse things capable of beatitude are able to attain diverse grades of perfection. For instance, in God there is beatitude through His essence […]. By contrast, in men who are in the state of the present life, the ultimate perfection is through an operation by which man is joined to God, but this operation cannot be continuous and, as a result, it cannot be a single operation, either, since an operation is multiplied by being divided. For this reason, in the state of the present life a man cannot have perfect beatitude. Hence, in Ethics 1 the Philosopher, in positing beatitude for man in this life, says that it is imperfect, and after much discussion he concludes that ‘we call men blessed, but as men’. However, God has promised us perfect beatitude, when we will be ‘like angels in heaven’, as Matthew 22. 30 says.] Aquinas’s account is modelled after Aristotle’s comparison in Book xii of the Metaphysics between the status of divine Intellect, always immersed in the actuality of intellection of the highest intelligible object, and the intermittent share in such

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a status by man.83 There is nevertheless a remarkable difference between Aquinas’s statement and its Aristotelian model: what in Aristotle was a comparison becomes in Aquinas a causal relationship, and man’s beatitudo is cast as the effect of the cognitive conjunction with God: ‘secundum operationem qua homo coniungitur Deo’. On this basis, continuity is granted between the highest human operatio in this life, that of intellect, and the visio beatifica in the afterlife of blessed souls. Only rare in this life, this intellectual operatio represents the very substance of the afterlife of the blessed, as granted in Matthew’s Gospel. In his explanation of how this is possible, Aquinas argues first that ultimate happiness cannot be the operatio of the will.84 It is in this context that it is argued that physical pleasure has nothing to do with the afterlife. In a. 3, ‘utrum beatitudo sit operatio sensitivae partis aut intellectivae tantum’, Aquinas maintains that essentialiter no sensory power can be involved in it, because ultimate happiness consists ‘in coniunctione […] ad bonum increatum, quod est ultimus finis’.85 Having disposed in this way of the idea that the afterlife is a place of physical pleasure, Aquinas proceeds in a. 4 to address the question whether or not this operatio of the intellect is a cognitive status properly speaking, the alternative possibility being that happiness concerns the will, in itself a faculty of the rational soul: ‘utrum, si beatitudo est intellectivae partis, sit operatio intellectus, an voluntatis’. Once again, his response features an ‘intellectualist’ stance: Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, Q. 3 a. 4, resp.: Dico ergo quod, quantum ad id quod est essentialiter ipsa beatitudo, impossibile est quod consistat in actu voluntatis. Manifestum est enim ex praemissis quod beatitudo est consecutio finis ultimi […]. Sic igitur essentia beatitudinis in actu intellectus consistit.

83 Cf. above, note 27. 84 For the implications of this debated question and for the position of those scholastic doctors, chiefly Bonaventure, who posit that the will is the subject of beatitudo, see Trottmann, La Vision béatifique, pp. 197–208, and pp. 337–65 on Guillaume de la Mare, Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome, and Duns Scotus, the ‘intellectualist’ interpretation (vs. ‘affective’ interpretation) was advocated by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, as detailed by Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God. 85 Aquinas mentions Augustine’s allusion to the ‘overflow’ (refluentia) of the intellectual beatitudo on the body of the blessed after resurrection, and reports the discussion of this point to the treatment of bodily resurrection, something that is done in the Suppl., q. 82. The latter falls into four articles: 1. Whether or not the bodies of the blessed after resurrection are impassable (response: Et ita corpora illa erunt impassibilia); 2. Whether or not this impassibilitas is one and the same for all the blessed (response: as this status expresses the independence from any affection, it does not imply magis et minus, rather it is aequalis in omnibus beatis; as it is considered from the viewpoint of its cause, namely the perfect control of the body on the part of the soul, sic erit in uno maior quam in alio, because the blessed souls enjoy the vision of God at different degrees: indeed, dominium causatur ex hoc quod fruitur Deo immobiliter); 3. Whether or not this status implies that the blessed do not have senseperception at all (response: they perceive, though differently with respect to the sense-perception performed through the corruptible body); 4. Whether or not all the senses will be in actu in the afterlife (though not explicitly stated, Aquinas seems to side with those who grant to the resurrected body all the senses except taste).

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[Thus, I claim that as regards what beatitude is in its essence, it is impossible for it to consist in an act of the will. For it is clear from what was said above [aa. 1–2 and q. 2, a. 7] that beatitude is the attainment of the ultimate end […]. So, then, the essence of beatitude consists in an act of the intellect.] Article 5 of the same question insists that ultimate happiness concerns the intellectus speculativus, by no means the intellectus practicus; but even more important from the viewpoint of the medieval afterlife of the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν is that the object of such an actus intellectus is for Aquinas the very essence of God. Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, Q. 3 a. 8, resp.: Respondeo dicendum quod ultima et perfecta beatitudo non potest esse nisi in visione divinae essentiae. Ad cuius evidentiam duo consideranda sunt. Primo quidem, quod homo non est perfecte beatus quamdiu restat sibi aliquid desiderandum et quaerendum. Secundum est quod uniuscuiusque potentiae perfectio attenditur secundum rationem sui obiecti. Obiectum autem intellectus est quod quid est idest essentia rei, ut dicitur in III De Anima. Unde in tantum procedit perfectio intellectus, in quantum cognoscit essentiam alicuius rei. […] Nec ista inquisitio quiescit, quousque perveniat ad cognoscendum essentiam causae. Si igitur intellectus humanus, cognoscens essentiam alicuius effectus creati, non cognoscat de Deo nisi an est, nondum perfectio eius attingit simpliciter ad causam primam, sed remanet ei adhuc naturale desiderium inquirendi causam. Unde nondum est perfecte beatus. Ad perfectam igitur beatitudinem requiritur quod intellectus pertingat ad ipsam essentiam primae causae. Et sic perfectionem suam habebit per unionem ad Deum sicut ad obiectum, in quo sola beatitudo hominis consistit, ut supra dictum est. [I respond: There cannot be ultimate and perfect beatitude except in seeing God’s essence. To see this clearly, there are two points that must be taken into account: the first is that a man is not perfectly happy as long as something remains to be desired and sought after; the second is that the perfection of any given power is in accord with the nature of its object. Now as De Anima 3 says, an intellect’s object is the ‘what-ness’, i.e., the essence, of a thing. Hence, an intellect’s perfection goes as far as does its cognition of the essence of a thing. […]. And this inquiry is not put to rest until he arrives at the cognition of the essence of the cause. Therefore, if the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows of God only that He exists, then the intellect’s perfection has not yet, absolutely speaking, reached the first cause; instead, there still remains in it a natural desire to make an inquiry into that cause. Hence, that intellect is not perfectly blessed. Therefore, what is required for perfect beatitude is that the intellect should reach the very essence of the first cause. And so it will have its perfection by being united to God as its object, and, as was explained above, this alone is what man’s beatitude consists in.]

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An important difference with the Neoplatonic account of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν lies admittedly in that for Plotinus this status depends upon the very nature of the soul, which is in itself divine, whereas for Aquinas it is bestowed by God. This is clearly stated in the Ia pars of the Summa: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 12, a. 4 resp. Relinquitur ergo quod cognoscere ipsum esse subsistens sit connaturale soli intellectui divino, et quod sit supra facultatem naturalem cuiuslibet intellectus creati, quia nulla creatura est suum esse, sed habet esse participatum. Non igitur potest intellectus creatus Deum per essentiam videre, nisi inquantum Deus per suam gratiam se intellectui creato coniungit ut intelligibile ab ipso. [It follows, then, that to know subsistent esse itself is connatural only to the divine intellect, and that this lies beyond the natural power of every created intellect. For no creature is its own esse; instead, every creature has participated esse. Therefore, no created intellect can see God through His essence except insofar as God, through His grace, conjoins Himself to the created intellect as something that can be understood by it.] This is indeed an important difference, not a detail that can be watered down. Aquinas’s epistemology depends upon the idea that human knowledge is rooted in abstraction from sense-perception and operates through the conversio ad phantasmata. However, visio beatifica is admittedly an exception to this principle,86 and now we are in a position to see why: knowledge always entails grasping the essence of the thing known, and this has as its intermediate step the conversio ad phantasmata when the knowing principle, the rational soul, operates on what it has acquired via sense-perception. On the contrary, when the operatio of the rational soul is directed — better, attracted — towards an object whose essence does not need to be disentangled from something else, but rather coincides, in absolute intellectual clarity, with the object itself, what is grasped cannot be but this very essence, and then the satisfaction of the natural desire to know is perfect. Such is Aquinas’s philosophical interpretation of the Pauline ‘videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem’. This interpretation owes to Plotinus at least as much as it owes to Aristotle: not only does ultimate happiness consist of an intellectual act without sense-perception, but it represents the final step of the soul’s ascent and return to its homeland, where it eventually meets the only reality that can fulfil its natural desire. The doctrinal structure of Aquinas’s treatment of visio beatifica results from combining the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic models. On the one hand, there is the Aristotelian model of a divine διαγωγή consisting in perfect self-sufficiency as the ratio of essential beatitudo, God, and in which the human disembodied soul takes part when it shares a status of impossibility

86 Although not the only one: I take the liberty to address the reader to an article of mine where this question is discussed: ‘Elementi di neoplatonismo nella teoria della conoscenza umana di Tommaso d’Aquino’.

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to desire anything else. This comes from Aristotle. On the other hand, there is the Platonic and Neoplatonic model that makes the disembodied soul become as God-like as possible, and this comes from Plotinus, though indirectly: a good candidate is the speech of Philosophy in the Prosa 10 of Book iii of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae quoted above, where the lady does not hesitate to frame her explanation in the language of deification. That Aquinas frames man’s ultimate happiness also in terms of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν is confirmed by another passage of the Summa Theologiae: I, Q. 12 a. 6 resp., where we are told Facultas autem videndi Deum non competit intellectui creato secundum suam naturam, sed per lumen gloriae, quod intellectum creatum in quadam deiformitate constituit, ut ex superioribus patet. [Now the capacity to see God belongs to a created intellect not by its nature, but rather through the light of glory, which, as is clear from what was said above (a. 5), gives the intellect a certain godlikeness.]87 It is true that this statement lays emphasis on the fact that such a vision does not belong to the human intellect on its own; rather it is produced by an extrinsic cause: the lumen gloriae. As mentioned above, this is the main difference between the Plotinian and Thomistic reception of the Theaetetus. Still, it is worth noting that Aquinas shows no hesitation at all in phrasing the ontological status of blessed souls in terms of deiformitas, as some sort of godlikeness. Even more interesting is the intended audience of this doctrine. That the essence of the afterlife of the blessed is the visio beatifica is also perhaps alluded to on occasion by al‑Ghazali,88 but what is characteristic of Aquinas is that his interpretation of Scripture is entirely shaped by the philosophical doctrines of the Aristotelian and Platonic schools. His interpretation of Paul’s facie ad faciem was part and parcel of a teaching imparted to the Dominican friars of the newly founded studium at Santa Sabina,89 a teaching

87 On the lumen gloriae and the scholastic discussions on this formula, cf. Trottmann, La Vision béatifique, pp. 283–336. 88 Al-Ghazali, Jawāhir al‑Qur’ān, ed. by al‑Qabbānī, p. 30. 7: ‘laḏḏa al‑naẓar ilā Llāh ta‘āla’, ‘the vision rejoices in God Almighty’. 89 On the time of redaction and purpose of the Summa Theologiae, cf. Torrell, Initiation à saint Thomas d’Aquin, pp. 189–99, in particular pp. 192–93: ‘Il faut donc lire ce qu’il va faire à Rome comme une tentative de reprendre la formation des frères sur une base plus large. […] Le contexte que nous avons rappelé permet de mieux comprendre le début de la Somme et son propos. Souvent citées, ces quelques lignes ne sont parfois comprises qu’à demi: “Puisque le docteur de le vérité catholique doit non seulement enseigner les plus avancés, mais aussi instruire les commençants […], notre intention est donc d’exposer ce qui concerne la religion chrétienne selon le mode qui convient pour la formation des débutants”. On s’est souvent interrogé sur les dons intellectuels de ces étudiants à qui était offert un manuel d’une qualité si exceptionnelle. Il est possible que Thomas ait surestimé leurs capacités, mais il pensait moins à la plus ou moins grande difficulté intrinsèque des matières enseignées qu’à leur agencement dans un corps de doctrine qui leur offrirait, non pas une simple suite de questions juxtaposées tant bien que mal, mais bien une synthèse organique qui leur permettrait d’en saisir les liens internes et la cohérence’.

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intended to give them the basic structures of the theology they would have to distil in their sermons or argue for in the universities. In the next generation or so, the topic outlined above spread outside the studia and the universities, and Aquinas’s visio beatifica was ready to serve as one of the overarching structures of Dante’s third cantica in the Commedia.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Alfarabi, Abū Naṣr, Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. and intro. by Muhsin Mahdi (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962) —— , K. Taḥṣīl al‑ṣa‘āda, in Rasā’il al falsafiyya (Hyderabad, 1926) (repr. in al‑Fârâbî, Various Philosophical Treatises, ed. by Fuat Sezgin, Islamic Philosophy, 16 (Frankfurt a.M.: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1999)) —— , On the Perfect State (Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al‑madīnat al‑fāḍilah), trans., intro., and ed. by R. Walzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) (repr. ed. by Gerhard Endress (Chicago: Great Books of the Islamic World, 1995)) Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error: Five Key Texts Including his Spiritual Autobiography, al‑Munqidh min al‑Dalal, trans. and annot. by R. J. McCarthy (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1999) (original edn entitled Freedom and Fulfillment (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980)) —— , The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. and intro. by M. E. Marmura, Islamic Translation Series (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000) —— , Jawāhir al‑Qur’ān, ed. by M. Rašīd Riḍā al‑Qabbānī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al‑’ulūm, 1990) —— , Mīzān al‑‘amal, ed. by S. Dunyā (Cairo: Dār al‑ma‘ārif, 1964) Al-Kindī, Abū Yūsuf, The Philosophical Works of al‑Kindī, trans. by P. Adamson and P. E. Pormann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) —— , Risāla fī ḥudūd al‑ašyā’ wa-rusūmihā, in Rasā’il al‑Kindī al‑falsafiyya, ed. by M. ‘A . Abū Rīda, 2 vols (Cairo: Dār al‑fikr al‑’arabī, 1950–52) —— , Risāla fī ḥudūd al‑ašyā’ wa-rusūmihā, in Cinq Épîtres, trans. by D. Gimaret (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1976) Ammonius, In Porphyrii Isagogen sive V Voces, ed. by Adolf Busse (Berlin: Reimer, 1891) Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, trans. by Alfred J. Freddoso, Avicenna, Epistola sulla vita futura (Risāla al‑Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād), ed. by F. Lucchetta (Padova: Antenore, 1969) —— , al‑Mabdā’ wa-l-ma‘ād, ed. by ‘A . Nūrānī, Wisdom of Persia, 36 (Tehran: Institute of Islamic Studies; McGill University, Tehran Branch, 1984) —— , ‘A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina’, trans. by Emil L. Fackenheim, Mediaeval Studies, 7 (1945), 208–28 Badawī, A., Aflūṭīn ‘inda al‑’arab. Plotinus apud Arabes: Theologia Aristotelis et fragmenta quae supersunt (Cairo: Dār al‑naḥḍa al‑’arabiyya, 1955; repr. 1966) Boethius, Philosophiae Consolatio, ed. by L. Bieler, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 94 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984) —— , The Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (London: Heinemann, 1918) David, Prolegomena et in Porphyrii Isagogen Commentarium, ed. by Adolf Busse (Berlin: Reimer, 1904)

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Dieterici, Friedrich, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles aus arabischen Handschriften zum ersten Mal herausgegeben (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1882; repr. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1965) Elias, Eliae in Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, ed. by Adolf Busse (Berlin: Reimer, 1900) Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān: A Philosophical Tale, trans. and intro. by L. E. Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; repr. with new preface 2009) Ikhwān al‑Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al‑Ṣafāʾ, ed. by B. Bustānī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1957) Miskawayh, Abī ‘Alī Aḥmad ibn, The Refinement of Character, trans. by Constantine K. Zurayk (Beirut: The American University of Beirut, 1968) —— , Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Qusṭanṭīn Zurayq (Beirut: The American University of Beirut, 1966) Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, ed. by Philippe Sellier (Paris: Garnier, 1993) Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952) —— , Theaetetus, trans. by M. J. Levett and Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992) Plotinus, Che cos’è l’essere vivente e che cos’è l’uomo? I. 1. 53, trans. and intro. by C. Marzolo (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2006) —— , Enneads, trans. by A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1984) —— , Opera, ed. by Paul Henry and H. R. Schwyzer, with trans. from the Arabic by G. Lewis, 3 vols (Paris: Brouwer - L’Édition Universelle, 1951–73) —— , Plotin. Traité 53, French trans. by Gwenaëlle Aubry (Paris: Cerf, 2004) Porphyry, Sentences, ed. by L. Brisson, trans. by J. Dillon, 2 vols (Paris: Vrin, 2005) Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, The Reformation of Morals, trans. and intro. by S. H. Griffith (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002) —— , Tahḏīb al‑akhlāq, ed. by Samir Khalil Kussaim (Beirut: Cedrac, 1994) Secondary Sources Adamson, Peter, ‘Miskawayh’s Psychology’, in Classical Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception, ed. by Peter Adamson (Turin: Aragno; London: The Warburg Institute, 2007), pp. 39–54 Altmann, Alexander, and Samuel Miklos Stern, Isaac Israeli: A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century. His Works translated with comments and an outline of his Philosophy (repr. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979) Anawati, Georges C. (Marie-Marcel), ‘Un cas typique de l’ésotérisme avicennien: Sa doctrine de la résurrection des corps’, in Études de philosophie musulmane, ed. by Georges C. (Marie-Marcel) Anawati, Études Musulmanes, 15 (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 263–89 (originally published in the Revue du Caire, 1951) Armstrong, A. Hilary, ‘The Divine Enhancement of Earthly Beauties: The Hellenic and Platonic Tradition’, Eranos Jahrbuch, 53 (1984), 49–81 Arnzen, Rüdiger, ‘Al-Suhrawardī and the Arabic Plotinus’, in Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle: Text, Translation, History, and Doctrine, ed. by Rüdiger Arnzen and others, 3 vols (forthcoming)

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Arnzen, Rüdiger, and others, eds, Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle: Text, Translation, History, and Doctrine, 3 vols (forthcoming) Becker, Otfrid, Plotin und das Problem der geistigen Aneignung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1940) Blankenhorn, Bernhard, The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015) Bucur, Cristina, and Bogdan Gabriel Bucur, ‘The Place of Splendor and Light: Observa­ tions on the paraphrasing of Enn. 4. 8. 1 in the Theology of Aristotle’, Le Muséon, 119 (2006), 271–92 Daiber, Hans, ‘Griechische Ethik in islamischem Gewande: Das Beispiel von Rāġib al‑Iṣfahānī’, in Historia Philosophiae Medii Aevi: Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. by Burkhard Mojsisch and Olaf Pluta (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1991–92), i, 181–92 D’Ancona, Cristina, ‘Elementi di neoplatonismo nella teoria della conoscenza umana di Tommaso d’Aquino (Q. d. De Veritate, 10, 6 e Super Librum de causis, prop. 13[14])’, in La filosofia medievale tra antichità ed età moderna: Saggi in memoria di Francesco Del Punta (1941–2013), ed. by Amos Bertolacci and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2016), pp. 325–62 —— , ‘Plotinus’, in Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. v.2: De Plotina à Rutilius Rufus, ed. by R. Goulet (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2012), pp. 817–1000 Dillon, John M., ‘Plotinus, Philo and Origen on the Grades of Virtue’, in Platonismus und Christentum: Festschrift für Heinrich Dörrie, ed. by Horst-Dieter Blume and Friedhelm Mann (Münster: Aschendorff, 1983), pp. 92–105 (repr. in John M. Dillon, The Golden Chain: Studies in the Development of Platonism and Christianity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990)) Endress, Gerhard, ‘The Circle of al‑Kindī: Early Arabic Translations from the Greek and the Rise of Islamic Philosophy’, in The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism, ed. by Gerhard Endress and Remke Kruk (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1997), pp. 43–76 —— , Proclus Arabus: Zwanzig Abschnitte aus der Institutio Theologica in arabischer Über­ setzung (Wiesbaden: Imprimerie Catholique, 1973) —— , ‘Die wissenschaftliche Literatur’, in Grundriss der Arabischen Philologie, vol. ii: Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Helmut Gätje and Wolfdietrich Fischer (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1987), pp. 400–530 —— , The Works of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī: An Analytical Inventory (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1977) Endress, Gerhard, and Peter Adamson, ‘Abū Yūsuf al‑Kindī’, in Philosophie in der islamischen Welt, vol. i: 8.–10. Jahrhundert, ed. by Ulrich Rudolph and Renate Würsch (Basel: Schwabe, 2012), pp. 92–147 Fowler, George B., ‘Manuscript Admont 608 and Engelbert of Admont (c. 1251–1331). Appendix 14. Summa Alexandrinorum’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 49 (1982), 195–252 Gilson, Étienne, ‘Sur la problématique thomiste de la vision béatifique’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 31 (1964), 67–88 Heath, Peter, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ), with a Translation of the Book of the Prophet Muḥammad’s Ascent to Heaven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)

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Hein, Christel, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: Von der spätantiken Einleitungs­ literatur zur arabischen Enzyklopädie (Frankfurt: Lang, 1985) Janssens, Jules, ‘Al-Ghazali’s Mīzān al‑‘Amal: An Ethical Summa based on Ibn Sīnā and al‑Rāghib al‑Iṣfahānī’, in Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages: Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation in Honour of Hans Daiber, ed. by Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 75 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 123–38 Klein-Franke, Felix, ‘The Arabic Version of Galen’s Περὶ ἐθῶν’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 1 (1979), 125–50 Kraus, Paul, ‘La Conduite du philosophe: Traité d’éthique d’Abū Muḥammad b. Zakariyyā al‑Rāzī’, Orientalia, n.s., 4 (1935), 300–34 (repr. in Paul Kraus, Alchemie, Ketzerei, Apokryphen im frühen Islam, Gesammelte Aufsätze hrsg. u. eingeleitet von R. Brague (Hildesheim: Olms, 1994), pp. 239–51 (text) and 252–53 (trans.)) Lamberton, Robert D., Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) Linguiti, Alessandro, ‘Plotino sulla felicità dell’anima non discesa’, in Antichi e moderni nella filosofia di età imperiale, ed. by Aldo Brancacci (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2002), pp. 213–36 Madelung, Wilferd, ‘Ar-Rāġib al‑Iṣfahānī und die Ethik al‑Ghazalis’, in Islamkundliche Abhandlungen: Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. by Richard Gramlich (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974), pp. 152–63 Marchesi, Concetto, L’Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione latina medievale: Documenti ed appunti (Messina: Trimarchi, 1904) Marcotte, Roxanne D., ‘Ibn Miskawayh’s Tartīb al‑sa‘ādāt (The Order of Happiness)’, in Monotheism & Ethics: Historical and Contemporary Intersections among Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. by Y. Tzvi Langermann, Studies on the Children of Abraham, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 141–61 Merki, Hubert, ὉΜΟΙΩΣΙΣ ΘΕΩΙ: Von der platonischen Angleichung an Gott zur Gottähnlichkeit bei Gregor von Nyssa (Freiburg: Paulusverlag, 1952) Michot, Jean R., La Destinée de l’homme selon Avicenne: Le Retour à Dieu (ma’ād) et l’imagination, Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, 5 (Louvain: Peeters, 1986) Mohamed, Yasien, ‘The Duties of the Teacher: Al-Iṣfahānī’s Dharī‘a as a Source of Inspiration for al‑Ghazali’s Mīzān al‑’Amal’, in Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al‑Ghazālī. Papers Collected on his 900th Anniversary, ed. by Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), i, 186–206 Pépin, Jean, ‘The Platonic and Christian Ulysses’, in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. by Dominic J. O’Meara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 3–18 and 234–39 Ramón Guerrero, Rafael, ‘Recepción de la Ética Nicomaquea en el mundo árabe: La teoría de la virtud en la filosofía islámica’, Studia graeco-arabica, 4 (2014), 315–34 Riedweg, Christoph, Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987) Torrell, Jean-Pierre, Initiation à saint Thomas d’Aquin: Sa personne et son œuvre (Paris: Cerf, 2015) —— , ‘La Vision de Dieu per essentiam selon saint Thomas d’Aquin’, in Recherches thomasiennes: Études revues et augmentées (Paris: Vrin, 2000), pp. 177–97

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Trottmann, Christian, La Vision béatifique: Des disputes scolastiques à sa définition par Benoît XII (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995) Ullmann, Manfred, Die Nikomachische Ethik des Aristoteles in arabischer Übersetzung, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011–12) Urvoy, Marie-Thérèse, Traité d’éthique d’Abū Zakariyyā Yahya ibn ‘Adī, Études chrétiennes arabes (Paris: Cariscript, 1991) Walzer, Richard, ‘Some Aspects of Miskawayh’s Tahḏīb al‑aḫlāq’, in Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida (Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1956), ii, 603–21 (repr. in Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy, Oriental Studies, 1 (Oxford: Cassirer, 1962), pp. 220–35) Zimmermann, Fritz W., ‘The Origins of the So-called Theology of Aristotle’, in PseudoAristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, William Francis Ryan, and Charles B. Schmitt (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986), pp. 110–240

Giuseppe Veltri

Happiness in Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic Thought Our understanding of ‘happiness’ is twofold: 1. the state that one experiences merely accidentally — that is, as a result of a fortunate occurrence that is not dependent on one’s will or desire; 2. the state that one attains intentionally, through the force of will, prowess, and ethical desire and that is experienced as personal self-fulfilment and perfection.1 The Greek word εὐτυχία expresses the first, the Greek word εὐδαιμονία usually the second meaning, although it is nearly impossible to differentiate with greater nuance because the question of the origin and involvement of the human will plays a role.2 I should also mention the third term for a happy state, μακαριότης, which is usually regarded as a synonym for εὐδαιμονία.3 While the first two terms, which express divine and human happiness, play a significant role particularly in Hellenistic philosophy of an Aristotelian and Stoic cast,4 the term μακαριότης, and in general terms from the root μακαρ- were used especially in the Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint, and the New Testament (Matthew 5. 3–12) and thus found their way into the writings of the Church Fathers.5 The term τύχη, which expresses both ‘destiny’ (and often, as well, ‘fortunate coincidence’)6 and its personification

* This article was translated into English by Rebecca Garron (henceforth RG). I thank my friend and colleague Yehuda Halper for some improvements. 1 Cf. Forschner, Über das Glück des Menschen, pp. 1ff. As an example for the customary use, I quote the definition offered by Wahrig, Deutsches Wörterbuch: ‘Günstige Fügung als Schicksal; der daraus erwachsende Erfolg; Gemütszustand innerer Befriedigung und Hochstimmung besonders nach Erfüllung ersehnter Wünsche’. (‘A fortunate coincidence as destiny; the success that arises therefrom; a feeling of inner satisfaction and joy, especially after wishes have been fulfilled’; English translation by RG). 2 For more on the topic of free will, see Dihle, Die Vorstellung vom Willen in der Antike; Brembach, Das Problem des Bösen im Zusammenhang. 3 See Hauck, ‘Makarios’, p. 365. 4 A few texts on the topic have been translated into German; see Nickel, Epiktet, Teles, Musonius, Wege zum Glück. See also Stephens, Stoic Ethics. 5 Another term ὄλβος/ὄλβιος (‘wealth, happiness, and prosperity’) that in Hellenism poetically expresses happiness is hardly used in the Jewish-Hellenistic literature. See, however, Josephus, Bellum 1. 201; 3. 443; Antiquitates 18. 200, 296. There is no mention of any form of the word in Philo. See also Sirach 30. 15 (hapax legomenon in the LXX). 6 See also Preisendanz, ‘Tyche’, p. 1645. The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey, ed. by Yehuda Halper, PATMA 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 51–68 DOI 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.122263

FHG

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(goddess of destiny/fate) should also be seen in this context; in biblical usage, the word gad would correspond most closely.7 In what follows, we shall see that both Jewish-Hellenistic and rabbinic concepts of happiness were largely shaped by Greek philosophical speculation and so dependent on the Greek terminological distinctions underlying philosophical conceptions of happiness. In Greek Aristotelian ethics, the eudamonistic life, viz. the life according to the second view of happiness, is the highest purpose a human can attain. Yet, Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic thinkers tended to place a higher value on external indicators of happiness and good fortune, better expressed by the first view of happiness. Such views of happiness, though partly influenced by Stoic thought, played a crucial part in the development of ascetic and eschatological ethics, ethics which were later also adopted by the Christians. Outside of Jewish-Hellenistic literature, there is no extensive discussion in ancient Judaism about what the Greeks thought happiness meant, for the Greek philosophers assume the individuality of human beings and the autonomy of their judgements.8 In rabbinic Judaism, this aspect — philosophically — was first thematized in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, in Jewish antiquity we already see a tension between subjective happiness and fate; between the goal of human beings as autonomous creatures and the inevitable, to which, in part, even the divine is subject. This issue occurs in Greek philosophy, as well as in Jewish-Hellenistic and rabbinic literature. Indeed, this tension permeates Ecclesiastes, with its pessimistic reflections on happiness. Here, fortune is, on the one hand, the aim of all striving; on the other hand, the inevitable course of life is preordained by the divine or δαίμων.9

Hellenistic Judaism The fact that the Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint, uses neither the term εὐδαιμονία nor εὐτυχία but instead only the terms from the root μακαρ- as a translation of ashre,10 is noteworthy, especially considering that εὐδαιμονία also had 7 Tychē translated in the Septuagint gad (Genesis 30. 11) and meni (Isaiah 65. 11), see also ii Maccabees 7. 37. On gad, see Schunk, ‘gad’, pp. 920–21. On the concept of happiness in the Old Testament, the author explains as follows: ‘Unabhängig von der Vokabel gad liegt der Begriff “Glück” sinngemäß überall dort im AT vor, wo Wohlergehen und Erfolg als Folge des Eingreifens JHWHs erkannt werden. In nachexilischer Zeit wird der Inhalt des Glücks — so wie das Wort ḥayyim immer mehr die Bedeutung “Glück” gewinnt — über das bloße physische Dasein und seine Güter hinaus vor allem in der inneren Befriedigung des Herzens durch ein von der Gottesgemeinschaft bestimmtes Leben gesehen’ (‘Regardless of the term gad, analogous terms for happiness can be found everywhere in the Old Testament where well-being and success is recognized as the result of JHWH’s intervention. In the post-exile era the meaning of happiness — just as the word ḥayyim increasingly comes to mean “happiness” — becomes more than just mere physical existence and one’s goods to mean above all inner satisfaction of the heart from a life led in fellowship with God’; English translation by RG). 8 This is not the place to address the problem as to what extent these terms can be compared to or even seen as equivalent to the ones used by us. In the research, this is a controversial matter that also resonates in the discipline of history. 9 See also Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus, pp. 225f. English: Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism. 10 The term appears especially in wisdom literature: in iv Maccabees 4. 2 and 18. 19; Proverbs 14. 21;

ha p p i n e s s i n j e w i s h - h e l l e n i s t ic and rab b i ni c t ho u ght

a religious meaning. It may be that the translators avoided using these terms because the word compounds ευ-δαιμον and ευ-τυχη combine (polytheistic) elements such as daemon (demi-god) and Tyche (Goddess of Destiny) with the prefix ευ (‘good’, ‘beautiful’). Nonetheless, this absence is not a compelling reason for assuming that the Septuagint purposefully uses the term μακάριος, which it uses to express happiness, in opposition to Greek philosophy. For the Greeks, μακάριος and εὐδαίμων were synonyms.11 We can presume it to have been a preventive measure, although, with regard to the meaning of human happiness, the Septuagint hardly concerns itself with Hellenism. Rather, its translators place much more emphasis on the Old Testament’s teachings about wisdom and piety, in which happiness is a divine gift and a condition for all bliss.12 At iv Maccabees 17. 18 and 18. 19,13 μακάριος even gains an eschatological dimension. It is primarily Philo of Alexandra and, to a lesser extent, Flavius Josephus, who study the Greek concepts of happiness and the anthropology and ethics implied in them. It is striking that both authors show a preference for the terms εὐδαιμονία and εὐτυχία, rather than the synonymous μακαριότης, which appears most frequently in the Septuagint, as noted above. Philo of Alexandria

Philo knew exactly how to distinguish between εὐδαιμονία and εὐτυχία.14 Although we can find in Philo a positive view of εὐτυχία as a gift from God — Philo even wished this for the future of Israel15 — he primarily used it as a negative term that he contrasted with virtue: Some legislators have introduced the system of filling magistracies by lot, to the detriment of their peoples, for the lot shows good luck, not merit.16 Thus, with regard to the Therapeutae, he reiterates: So much then for the Therapeutae, who have taken to their hearts the contemplation of nature and what it has to teach, and have lived in the soul alone,

16. 20; 29. 18; ii Maccabees 7. 4. 11 See Bertram, ‘Makarios’, pp. 367–69. 12 Bertram, ‘Makarios’, p. 368. 13 ‘they now stand beside the divine throne, and live a blessed life’; ‘This is our life, and the happiness (makariotēs according to the codex Alexandrinus) of our days’: English translations: The Translation of the Greek Old Testament Scriptures,, trans. by Brenton. 14 For Philo’s vocabulary, see Leisegang’s index: Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt, ed. by Leisegang, vii, 1–2; for Philo’s oeuvre in Greek, see Leisegang, Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt. All English translations of Philo are from Philo, The Works, ed. by Colson and Whitaker, and by Marcus. 15 De Vita Moysis (Moses), II. VII. 44: ‘For, when the brightness of their shining is accompanied by national prosperity, it will darken the light of the others as the risen sun darkens the stars’ (ευτυχία γάρ τοϋ έθνους οί νόμοι συναναλάμφαντες άμαυρώσουσι τούς άλλους καθάπερ άνατείλας ήλιος τούς αστέρας). 16 De Specialibus Legibus (The Special Laws), IV. XXIX. 151.

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citizens of Heaven and the world, presented to the Father and Maker of all by their faithful sponsor Virtue, who has procured for them God’s friendship and added a gift going hand in hand with it, true excellence of life, a boon better than all good fortune and rising to the very summit of felicity (πάσης άμεινον ευτυχίας, έπ’ αυτήν ακρότητα φθάνον ευδαιμονίας).17 He says of the Essenes: For while they stand almost alone in the whole of mankind in that they have become moneyless and landless by deliberate action rather than by lack of good fortune, they are esteemed exceedingly rich, because they judge frugality with contentment to be, as indeed it is, an abundance of wealth.18 His negative judgment of εὐτυχία is based both on his view that wealth leads to corruption and impiety19 and on his Stoic sources, according to which happiness is inconstant: Now, most men, if they feel a breath of prosperity ever so small upon them (καν αυτό μόνον αύρα βραχεία τίνος ευτυχίας προσπεση), make much ado of puffing and blowing, and boast themselves as bigger than meaner men, and miscall them offscourings and nuisances and cumberers of the earth and other suchlike names, as if they themselves had the permanence of their prosperity securely sealed in their possession, though even the morrow may find them no longer where they are. For nothing is more unstable than Fortune. who moves human affairs up and down on the draughtboard of life (τύχης γάρ άσταθμητότερον ουδέν άνω και κάτω τά ανθρώπεια πεττευούσης), and in a single day pulls down the lofty and exalts the lowly on high.20

17 De Vita Contemplativa (On the Contemplative Life or Suppliants), XI. 90. The italics are mine. 18 Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit (Every Good Man is Free), § 77. 19 Legatio ad Gaium (Embassy to Gaius), XIV. 105: ‘For their beauty to shame when he fixed his greedy eyes and gaping mouth on great estates to work the unjust robberies which were crowned with the slaughter of their owners, whose prosperity was the cause of their miserable end (αἷς ἐπικατεσφάττοντο οἱ δεσπόται τῆς εὐτυχίας ἕνεκα κακοδαιμονοῦντες)’. De congressu eruditionis gratia (The Preliminary Study), XXVIII. 159: ‘They grow sleek and fat, they expand themselves, and the breath of their spirit is lusty and strong, and then to their utter sorrow and misery they win the woeful prizes of impiety, proclaimed and crowned as victors in the contest of godlessness’ (διὰ γὰρ τὴν λείως ῥέουσαν εὐτυχίαν ὑπέλαβον ἑαυτοὺς εἶναι τοὺς ὑπαργύρους καὶ ὑποχρύσους θεούς, νομίσματος κεκιβδηλευμένου τὸν τρόπον, τοῦ ἀληθινοῦ καὶ ὄντως ὄντος ἐκλαθόμενοι). 20 De Vita Moysis, I. VII. 31: ‘For nothing is more unstable than Fortune, who moves human affairs up and down on the draughtboard of life, and in a single day pulls down the lofty and exalts the lowly on high; and though they see and know full that this is always happening, they nevertheless look down on their relations and friends and set at naught the laws under which they were born and bred, and subvert the ancestral customs to which no blame can justly attach, by adopting different modes of life, and, in their contentment with the present, lose all memory of the past’. Philo alludes to Epicurus, Fr. 420. See also De somniis (On Dreams), I. XXIV. 154: ‘For one day, as the poet says, brings one man down from on high, and lifts another up, and nothing relating to man is of a nature to remain as it is, but all such things are liable to changes of every kind’ (ἡ μία γάρ, ὡς ἔφη τις, ἡμέρα τὸν μὲν

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He uses the terms from the root εὐδαιμον- completely differently. For Philo, bliss is the essence of the divine state imparted to man. Accordingly, his theodicy lays the foundation for his ethics. The supreme Happiness, ‘fountain of beauty’, is exclusively (and incomparably) the ownership of God: God alone in the true sense keeps festival. Joy and gladness and rejoicing are His alone; to Him alone it is given to enjoy the peace which has no element of war. He is without grief or fear or share of ill, without faintheartedness or pain or weariness, but full of happiness unmixed. Or rather since His nature is most perfect, He is Himself the summit, end and limit of happiness (μάλλον δέ αυτός άκρα και τέλος καί ορος ευδαιμονίας ό θεός). He partakes of nothing outside Himself to increase His excellence. Nay He Himself has imparted of His own to all particular beings from that fountain of beauty — Himself.21 Only God can be praised as the sole Happy and Blessed Being (thereby equating εὐδαιμονία and μακαριότης): Without toil He made this vast universe long ages ago, and now without toil He holds it in perpetual existence, for to know no weariness is an attribute most fitting to God. But it is not so with mortals. To them Nature has given no good thing to be acquired without toil, that here too God may alone be accounted happy — the one and only blessed being (ΐνα και ταύτη τό μακάριον έν τοις ούσι μόνον ό θεός εύδαιμονίζηται).22 As for human beings, our originally happy life was destroyed by the first humans’ sin: For their conduct well merited wrath, inasmuch as they had passed by the tree of life immortal, the consummation of virtue, from which they could have gathered an existence long and happy. Yet they chose that fleeting and mortal existence which is not an existence but a period of time full of misery.23 The goal of human happiness is, consequently, to re-establish or regain fellowship with God or, as Philo expresses it, to desire God as an overseer and observer.24 At this point, the Alexandrian develops an idea from the Stoics, according to which every human being is granted an ἐπίτροπος (called by Philo ἐπίσκοπος and ἔφορος).25

21 22 23 24

25

καθεῖλεν ὑψόθεν, τὸν δὲ ἦρεν ἄνω, μηδενὸς ἐν ὁμοίῳ πεφυκότος μένειν τῶν παρ´ ἡμῖν, ἀλλὰ παντοίας μεταβαλλόντων τροπάς). De Cherubim (On the Cherubim), XXV. 86. De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini (The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain), VIII. 40. De Opificio Mundi (On the Creation), LV. 156. De Mutatione Nominum (On the Change of Names), XXXIX. 216: ‘And so he adds “before God”, holding that in this lies the crown of happiness — that the mind should be privileged to live under the survey and watchful care of the Supreme Excellence’ (προστίθησιν οὖν ‘ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ ζήτω’ (Gen. 17. 18), τέλος τῆς εὐδαιμονίας τιθέμενος ἐπισκόπου καὶ ἐφόρου τοῦ τῶν ὄντων ἀρίστου τὴν διάνοιαν ἀξιωθῆναι). For Aristotle, there is no goal of happiness, because that is itself the goal. See Forschner, Über das Glück des Menschen, p. 6. See Seneca, Epistula, 41. 2: ‘Non sunt ad caelum elevandae manus nec exorandus aedituus ut nos ad aurem simulacri, quasi magis exaudiri possimus, admittat: prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est’;

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It cannot be ruled out, however, that this is an exegesis of the term ευ-δαιμων: Happy is the person who has ‘a good daemon as a leader’.26 To attain human happiness Philo claims that one has to heed the maxim, ‘Know thyself ’, γνῶθι σεαυτόν.27 Human εὐδαιμονία also consists of good words, resolutions, and deeds (exegesis of Deuteronomy 30. 12–14),28 just as impiety (κακοδαιμονία) does from the opposite of these.29 God himself prepares his people’s path to happiness through revelation, by which he leads us to a virtuous life.30 The harmony of the soul, the cosmos, and the order of the universe leads to absolute happiness.31 Thus, it is no wonder that in this context Philo identifies the constellations as ‘divine, happy beings’.32 Within human beings, on the other hand, there is ‘an inseparable portion of that divine and blessed soul’.33 Thus he implies clearly that God is a house, the incorporeal dwelling-place of incorporeal ideas, that He is the father of all things, for He begat them, and the husband of Wisdom, dropping the seed of happiness for the race of mortals into good and virgin soil.34 Blessing does not depend on the Sophists’ endless, tireless quibbles over words, but from the improvement of the ēthos, the conduct of life, by dispelling vice and ‘allowing in’ virtues.35 This finds expression in De Vita Moysis: The Sabbath day of rest, according to this, should be used for philosophical speculation: And the wisdom must not be that of the systems hatched by the word-catchers and sophists who sell their tenets and arguments like any bit of merchandise in the market, men who forever pit philosophy against philosophy without a blush, Ο earth and sun, but the true philosophy which is woven from three strands — thoughts, words and deeds — united into a single piece for the

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Epictetus, I. 14. 12ff. On the connection between this concept and εὐδαιμονία, see Plato, Timaeus, 90c; Xenocrates, 81. See also Ritter, ‘Glück, “Glückseligkeit”’, p. 680. In rabbinic literature, God is often identified as the Good: see Talmud Bavli Menahot 53b and Bokser, ‘The Thread of Blue’, esp. p. 16, n. 17. De Somniis, I. X. 57: ‘But bring the explorer down from heaven and away from these researchers draw the “Know thyself ”, and then lavish the same careful toil on this too, in order that you may enjoy the happiness proper to man’. Plato, Apologia, 28e ff. See Betz, ‘The Delphic Maxim ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ in Hermetic Interpretation’. See Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, p. 76. De Mutatione Nominum, XL. 237. De Vita Moysis, II. XXXV. 189. Quis divinarum rerum heres sit (Who Is the Heir of Divine Things), XVII. 86: ‘For he wishes to suggest not number merely, but a multitude of other things, such as tend to happiness perfect and complete’. Cf. De Somniis, II. IV. 27. Legum Allegoriae (Allegorical Interpretation), II. IV. 10; see also De Cherubim, XII. 41. Quod deterius potiori insidiari soleat (Worse Is Wont to Attack Better), XXIV. 90: The soul as the seat of blessing is an idea that can already be found in Democritus, VS B 171. De Cherubim, XIV. 49. De Congressu, X. 53.

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attainment and enjoyment of happiness (εἰς ἕν εΐδος ήρμο σμένων πρός κτήσιν και άπόλαυσιν ευδαιμονίας).36 Philo’s Stoic ethics lead him to a dialectical understanding of happiness, as it is formulated in Quod deterius 7 and 60. With regard to the pragmatic life, which, according to Philo, Joseph symbolizes, it is, says Philo, the unifying of three types of goods: the external, the bodily, and the spiritual. It is only the coming together of all three aspects, Philo says further, that forms the true, absolute good, while each individual aspect is only στοιχεία ἀγαθών (Quod deterius potiori insidiari soleat (That the Worse is Wont to Attack the Better), 7: ‘This appears in his treatment of the three kinds of good things, those pertaining to the outside world, to the body, and to the soul’). He continues: He [the lawgiver] points out that neither fire nor earth nor any of the four elements, out of which the universe was formed, is a world, but the coming together and blending of the elements into one; and argues that in precisely the same way happiness is found to be neither a peculiar property of the things of the outside world, nor of the things pertaining to the body, nor of those pertaining to the soul, taken by themselves. The opinion above is without a doubt Aristotle’s,37 who, when counting the three classes of goods also regarded the bodily as necessary for the absolute good.38 Philo counters Aristotle’s ethics with his own, which is typically Stoic: only καλὸς κ’ἀγαθός.39 By this he means the active love of virtue. Within the framework of the allegorizing of the figure of Isaac, Philo writes (Quod deterius, 60): For happiness consists in the exercise and enjoyment of virtue, not in its mere possession. But I could not exercise it, shouldest Thou not send down the seeds from heaven to cause her to be pregnant, and were she not to give birth to Isaac, i.e. happiness in its totality, and I have made up my mind that happiness is the exercise of perfect virtue in a perfect life. A comparison between the common view of ‘happiness’ and his own finds expression in De Praemis 11, where it appears as hope for success versus the attainment of happiness through philosophy: What we have to consider is that most vital form of seed which the Creator sowed in the rich soil of the rational soul. And the first thing thus sown is hope, the fountain head of the lives which we lead. In hope of gain the tradesman arms himself for the manifold forms of money getting. In hope of a successful 36 A similar thought can be found in Seneca, Epistula, 20. 2: ‘facere docet philosophia, non dicere’. Epistula, 16. 3: ‘(philosophia) non in verbis, sed in rebus est’. Cf. Mishnah Abot 1. 17 and Kaminka, ‘Les rapports entre le rabbinisme et la philosophie stoïcienne’, p. 238. 37 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I. 1098b12 and Politics, VII. 1323a24. 38 Aristotle, Politics, I. 1099a31 and VII. 1153b17. 39 See Forschner, Über das Glück des Menschen, p. 42. For Aristotle’s three types of life, see Merlan, Kleine Philosophische Schriften, pp. 279–81.

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voyage the skipper crosses the wide open seas. In hope of glory the ambitious man chooses political life and the charge of public affairs. The hope of prizes and crowns moves the training athlete to endure the contests of the arena. The hope of happiness incites also the devotees of virtue to study wisdom, believing that thus they will be able to discern the nature of all that exists and to act in accordance with nature and so bring to their fullness the best types of life, the contemplative and the practical, which necessarily make their possessor a happy man.40 This is where Philo, in turn, takes a critical look at Aristotle,41 who sees precisely the combination of fleeting and intransient means as the ethical goal. According to Philo, it is philosophy alone that can guide human action. The true τέλος lies beyond philosophy. Philosophy enables human beings to perfect the various concretizations (life directions) of their being. Josephus

The negative connotation of the word εὐτυχία, which Philo stresses, receives a somewhat more nuanced reading from Flavius Josephus.42 Like other ancient historians,43 Josephus also interprets this term as the power of fate, revealed above all in the history of nations or their kings. For him, εὐτυχία is a political term and designates a personal or national triumph,44 for example a career as a statesman, such as the careers of Hyrcanus (Antiquitates, XII. 300) or Herod (Antiquitates, XV. 361). However, this is a purely profane state that may even corrode the relationship to God. The Essene Manaemos (in Hebrew: Menahem) prophesied the following for Herod: Success will distinguish you like no other man; you will enjoy eternal honor, nonetheless you will neglect piety and justice.45 His success, his happiness, was, according to Manaemos, indeed a divine gift; yet it only applied to his external deeds, in his private life he was, on the other hand, unhappy (Antiquitates, XVI. 76–77). For Josephus, εὐτυχία is essentially a positive term. It alone does not suffice, however — and in this, he agrees with Philo — to perfect life, as he stresses with reference to the story of Gaius:

40 Philo, De Praemis et poenis (On Rewards and Punishments), II. XXXIX. 212. 41 Cf. Wolfson, Philo, ii, 166–67. 42 Quotations from Josephus are from Josephus, The Works, trans. by Whiston; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, ed. by Thackeray and Marcus. For Josephus’s vocabulary, see A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus, ed. by Rengstorf. 43 Preisendanz, ‘Eytychia’, pp. 1662–65. 44 Antiquitates, II. 277; Antiquitates, XII. 184–86; Antiquitates, XII. 339; Antiquitates, XV. 255; Antiquitates, XV. 361; Antiquitates, XVI. 64; Antiquitates, XVI. 338; Antiquitates, XVIII. 363. 45 Antiquitates, XV. 376.

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I would like to console all of those who find themselves in unhappy circumstances, and impart a lesson to those who believe that happiness is eternal, although it ends in unhappiness if it is not bound to virtue.46 Human beings are subject to the power of Fortuna/Tyche.47 In using this word, Josephus relies upon contemporary historiography, which stresses both the workings of the Tyche upon the cities, peoples, and their kings and statesmen, and the unpredictability of fate. The historian measures the value of those who lead and of groups/peoples according to their conduct, their ἀρετή, in the face of fate’s vicissitudes.48 The word εὐδαιμονία also appears in Bellum in an exclusively political and economic sense. To this extent, it is a synonym for εὐτυχία. Josephus thus designates the prosperitas, the earlier or the current prosperity of a nation,49 the earlier prosperity of a ruler,50 or the welfare of a city.51 In Liber Antiquitatum, Josephus uses the term in the sense of a nation’s or individual’s present or promised prosperity.52 In contrast to εὐτυχία, εὐδαιμονία is an entirely positive term. It is the meaning of Noah’s blessing (Antiquitates, I. 142). The elements that contribute to human εὐδαιμονία are solely under God’s rule (Antiquitates, I. 155). God had already provided for human happiness at creation. Happiness or prosperity was, before the first sin, the consequence of obedience; συμφορά (‘calamity, disgrace’) is, on the contrary, the consequence of human disobedience. The law is the source/cause of prosperity (Antiquitates, IV. 211).53 The denial of the divine origins of prosperity is blasphemy.54

46 Antiquitates, XIX. 2. 47 See Philo, De Vita Moysis, II. IV. 17, where he distinguishes between military cunning and εὐτυχία. 48 Bibliography and annotations on the term Tyche in Josephus can be found in Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship, pp. 443–34. 49 Bellum, II. 86: Bellum, I. 11; Bellum, II. 372. 50 Bellum, VII. 237; Bellum, I. 68–69; Bellum, I. 400; Bellum, II. 250 (Happiness and wealth were already synonymous in Homer). 51 Bellum, II. 258; Bellum, III. 29; Bellum, IV. 615: the harbour of Alexandria provides everything that Alexandria would have required for its well-being; Bellum, VII. 74: after Vespasian arrived, Rome proceeded to greater prosperitas (see also Bellum, VII. 157). 52 Antiquitates, II. 201, Antiquitates, II. 271, and Antiquitates, IV. 44: Israel’s prosperitas in Egypt; Antiquitates, III. 296: the promise of prosperity as the cause of the revolt against Moses; Antiquitates, VI. 56, VII. 380, VIII. 110, VIII. 126, VIII. 132, XI. 2, XI. 81: the prosperity of the nation of Israel and its inhabitants; Antiquitates, VIII. 171, VIII. 211: Solomon’s well-being; Antiquitates, I. 224: Abraham’s current prosperity; Antiquitates, II. 7–8: Jacob’s prosperity; Antiquitates, II. 10, II. 15, II. 17: Joseph’s dreams of wealth and the realization of his dreams; Antiquitates, II. 21: God’s guarantee for Moses’ welfare; Antiquitates, IV. 27: Moses’ own profit from the accusation of Moses by Korah; Antiquitates, IX. 215: Jeroboam’s prosperity. 53 Cf. Apologia, II. 204 and Antiquitates, VIII. 296 with respect to the cult. 54 See Antiquitates, I. 113: Nimrod claims that prosperity cannot be traced back to God, but to one’s own powers.

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For Josephus, too, μακαριότης and εὐδαιμονία are synonymous.55 When he mentions Solon apud Herodotus I. 32, Josephus reaffirms that, before death, no one should be called μακάριος (i.e. ‘pious’ or ‘happy’).56 Jewish-Hellenistic Discussion

This overview of ideas of happiness in Philo and Josephus has revealed their (obvious) dependency upon Greek thought. Both Philo and Josephus use the technical term, influenced by Greek philosophy, for happiness: εὐδαιμονία, εὐτυχία. While the Alexandrians, however, specifically emphasize the divine origins of happiness in the human soul, by which they mean that happiness is attainable solely through philosophy, this notion can be found nowhere in Josephus. Without a doubt, Philo is influenced by the ideology of the Therapeutae/Essenes. In contrast to the philosopher Philo, the historiographer Josephus stresses the power of τύχη, fate, which men can set against virtue. Josephus’s view of fate allows Josephus to characterize and distinguish between two Jewish groups of the day: the Pharisees and the Essenes. According to Josephus, the Essenes believed in fate as the inevitable force of history. The Pharisees, on the other hand, put greater emphasis on personal will. As far as earthly goods are concerned, Philo reveals at this point a perhaps Stoic distance, while Josephus commits to the biblical emphasis on earthly goods as gifts of God. This is probably directed, above all, against the apocalyptic movements of the era, which sought to shift happiness to the beyond.

Rabbinic Literature The Greek concept of εὐτυχία is most closely related, as already mentioned, to the Hebrew gad or, in its later use, the word mazal, which Rabbinic literature also uses in the sense of fortune,57 namely, to signify the event that is independent of will and ability, unforeseeable and inexplicable.58 In contrast to this is the praise of someone who fulfils the commandments, which is seen as the condition for perfection. In Hebrew, this kind of praise is introduced by the phrase ashere ha-ish (in English, roughly ‘happy the human being’). This is closest to the genuinely Jewish concept of ‘bliss’, because it belongs to the biblical‑wisdom body of thought (most famously in Psalm 1) that we also find, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount of the New

55 Bellum, I. 490. 56 Bellum, V. 461. 57 Rabbinic references are quoted according to the following editions: Talmud Bavli; Talmud Yerushalmi, ed. by Moses; Midrash Debarim Rabbah, ed. by Lieberman; Midrash Echa Rabbati, ed. by Buber; Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, trans. by Freedman and Simon; Midrash Tehillim, ed. by Buber. 58 See the outdated but useful contribution of Hamburger, ‘Glück und Unglück’; see also TiroshSamuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism, for rabbinic Judaism pp. 101–42.

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Testament, especially in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5. 3–12). The concept associated with the terms gad or mazal has, on the other hand, an astrological background.59 Tokens of Happiness

The idea of human happiness is without a doubt related to the question as to whether the will to shape one’s own life even plays a role or whether everything is predetermined. This problem, which in Antiquity revolved primarily around fate’s effect and sphere of influence, also has echoes in rabbinic Judaism. It would provide enough material for a separate essay.60 Here, I want to refer only to that aspect that addresses in particular the topic of happiness: the influence of the stars upon human life. In this, there are also common features between the Stoic ‘popular philosophy’ — as Bergmann has called it61 — and rabbinic literature. It was widely believed in Antiquity that the inevitability of fate could also be attributed to the influence of the stars. Philo of Alexandria, who in his early writings argued rigorously for a monotheistic God, nonetheless demonstrates familiarity with the idea of the ‘power of the constellations’,62 which he calls ‘divine, happy beings’. In this context, he expresses his belief that between human beings and the universe there is a kind of harmony, similar to that between the strings of an instrument — to echo with Plotinus.63 The Philonic idea of the happiness of the stars, or put more accurately, of the constellations of happiness, closely corresponds to the rabbinic expression mazal tov (good fortune) or mazal ra’ (bad fortune). The biblical gad that is also used in the Torah to mean ‘congratulations’ is semantically related.64

59 Cf. also Wächter, ‘Rabbinischer Vorsehungs- und Schicksalsglaube’; Wächter, ‘Astrologie und Schicksalsglaube im rabbinischen Judentum’; but see now Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica. 60 See also the explanations from Urbach, The Sages, pp. 254–85. 61 Bergmann, ‘Die stoische Philosophie und die jüdische Frömmigkeit’. He writes with respect to rabbinic Judaism that the Greek way of thinking and the conceptualization and the ethical definitions of the Stoa remain foreign to Palestinian Judaism. This statement, however, is hardly tenable in the face of speculations on fate. 62 Gundel and Gundel, Astrologumena, pp. 180–83. See Migr. 178: ‘Die Chaldäer scheinen sich mehr als andere Menschen mit Astronomie und Horoskopstellung befaßt zu haben, indem sie das Irdische mit dem Überirdischen und das Himmlische mit dem Erdgeschehen in Verbindung brachten und, wie durch Musik Worte (verbunden werden), einen ganz harmonischen Einklang des Alls aufzeigten durch die gegenseitige Verbindung und Beziehung aller Teile für- und zu- einander, die zwar räumlich getrennt, aber ihrer Verwandtschaft wegen nicht geschieden sind’ (‘The Chaldeans seem more than other people to have studied astronomy and the horoscope in that they bring together the earthly with the supernatural and the heavenly with what happens on earth and, as music (brings together) words, they revealed a completely harmonious universe in which the elements, separated in space but not in their nature, enjoyed a mutual connection for and to one another’; English translation by RG). See Bréhier, ‘La Cosmologie stoïcienne à la fin du paganisme’. 63 ‘The effect of prayer is a fact because a part [of space] is connected by sympathy with [another] part, similarly to a properly tuned string’ (English translation by RG). Plotinus, Enneads, IV. 4. 40, German translation by Luck, Magie und andere Geheimlehren in der Antike, p. 135. 64 See also Ester Rabbah 7. 10; Qohelet Rabbah 7. 1. 15; Qohelet Rabbah 11. 1. 9; Rashi on Sanhedrin 105a; cf. also Krauss, ‘Ägyptische und syrische Götternamen im Talmud’, pp. 351–52.

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The rabbis are divided on the meaning of the stars in human fate. The main bone of contention is whether the stars possess power over Israel. This discussion continued throughout the Middle Ages.65 In the Bible, there are a few contradictory statements on this matter. According to Deuteronomy 4. 19, the stars are only for the nations of the world (‫הַ ּׁשָ מָ יִ ם‬-‫ ּתַ חַ ת ּכָל‬,‫ לְ כֹ ל הָ ַע ִּמים‬,‫ אֹ תָ ם‬,‫) ֲאׁשֶ ר חָ לַק יְ הוָה ֱאֹלהֶ יָך‬ and not (necessarily) for Israel. According to Deuteronomy 17. 3, on the other hand, God denies that he gave the constellations to the idolaters to pray to. The relatively late Midrash Aggada (Wa-Etḥanan on 4. 19) even goes so far as to change the biblical text. According to this, God has only created the stars to provide illumination: Moses told them: ‘You will see sun, and the moon. You should not consider them deities, because God created them to illuminate the hearth as it has been written: that God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven for illumination’ (cf. Deuteronomy 4. 19). A similar anti-astrological tendency is also expressed in the rabbinic exegesis of Genesis 30. 11 in Genesis Rabbah 71. 9, where the Bible uses the term gad: It comes the fortune of the houses, it comes the fortune of the world, he who will cut off | destroy the justification of the star worshippers. The Midrash plays with the words gad and legadded (‘to cut down, to cut off ’). Here, the use of the exclamation gad, which we know from the Talmudim to be an idolatrous act, is clearly being opposed.66 And yet, the belief in the power of the stars in the ancient world is too firmly rooted and — as we would say — ‘scientifically justified’ for some religion or philosophical movement to completely escape it, especially because, according to Lucian’s words, the stars were in no way local deities.67 The Zodiac also played a role in the life of Israel, as the Midrash shows and according to which the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm (Exodus Rabbah 15. 6 (Vilna edn)): you will find that there are twelve signs of the zodiac at the celebration. Just as the heavens cannot exist without [the support of] the twelve signs of the zodiac, nor can the world exist without [the support of] the twelve tribes.68

65 See also Marx, ‘The Correspondence between the Rabbis of Southern France and Maimonides about Astrology’. 66 See also Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 67b: ‘One who says, GD GDY WSNWQ L Sˇ KY WBWSˇ KY. That is forbidden because of the customs of the Amorites. R. Yehuda writes: GD is nothing other than an expression of idolatry, as it were: and (those) who prepare Gad a table (Isaiah 65:11)’. 67 Lucian of Samosata, De Dea Syria, 34; Lucian of Samosata, The Work, trans. by Fowler and Fowler. See also Schroer, In Israel gab es Bilder, p. 258, n. 6. 68 Cf. also Tanhuma B wa-yeshev 8 and Tanhuma B wa-yehi 16 in Midrash Tanhuma, ed. by Buber; Midrash pesiqta de rav Kahana, ed. by Mandelbaum, section 16; Midrash pesiqta rabbati, ed. by Friedmann, section 4.

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Here, a kind of domestication of astrology takes place: the twelve signs of the zodiac are based on the twelve tribes of Israel; at the same time, the harmony between humanity and the cosmos finds expression. The influence of the stars on human beings spans a human lifetime, from birth through any and all of life’s activities. Everything is in the power of the mazalot: ‘Rabba says: Life, children, and food do not depend on human merit but upon the lucky star’.69 The mazal, however, has a limited vision: ‘He does not look at that which is in front of him and at that which is above him but at that which is beneath him. That is like the man who stands backwards on a ladder’.70 The rabbinic passages on happiness and unhappiness resulting from the power of the stars could be endlessly multiplied. Nonetheless, the impression that the rabbis were of the same opinion would be wrong. It is rather the case that the Talmudic texts often have a hint of irony and criticism when evaluating this ‘science’: ‘Rabbi Ashi said: “Dimia and I were born on a Sunday; he became the head of a band of thieves and I became the head of a school. Everything can lead to fortune or misfortune”’ (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 156a–b).71 Happiness from Observing the Torah

Even if the Fatum irrevocably determines human life, at least one aspect of Jewish being remains entirely subject to the will: observing the Torah. Several passages confirm that this, according to the rabbis, is human beings’ true purpose, thus giving them the key to their own ‘happiness’: Whoever learns it is worthy to receive the holy spirit. What is the reason? (This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein): for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success and then you will understand.72 The happy person is one who (through knowledge of the Torah) is in a position to become master over sin. With reference to David, the Midrash affirms: ‘Wellbeing to those who are greater than their sins and whose sins are not greater than they’. The professional study of the Torah surpasses every other activity.

69 Babylonian Talmud Mo‘ed Qatan 28a. 70 Bamidbar Rabbah 12. 9. Thus with a few (also meaningful) variants in Devarim Rabbah 5:12; Devarim Rabbah 1. 12 shofetim (ed. by Lieberman); Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah 3. 1; Pesiqta de-rabbi Kahana 1. 3 (ed. by Mandelbaum); Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Ha-Shanah 2 (58a); Babylonian Talmud Mo‘ed Qatan 28a. 71 Rubenstein, ‘Talmudic Astrology’. 72 Wayyiqra Rabbah 35. 7; see also Midrash Tehillim 1. 15. See the interrelation between the Torah and success in Ekha Rabbah petihta 8. 12.

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Human beings were created solely for onerous labor. If they are not suited to the labor of the Torah, then they [are destined for] the labor of the earth. Wellbeing to him whose labor is the Torah.73 How does he who has chosen to make the Torah his life’s meaning fare in worldly life? The rabbis agree with the classic biblical notion of happiness, namely that health, children, and goods constitute human prosperity and are a sign of God’s goodwill. Accordingly, the rabbis could hardly have complained about dearth, as the Midrash below seems to confirm (Tanhuma ki tissa 29 (162b)): Another interpretation: The blessings of the Lord maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it (Proverbs 10. 22). This is the blessing of Moses, because the Holy One, praise Him, said: Hew thee two tables of stone (Exodus 34. 1) and the Holy One, praise Him, showed him a piece of sapphire in his tent and he cut it. And He said: Hew [tablets], the dust is yours. And he grew [rich] as a king. From this, you learn that anyone who occupies himself with the Torah can live from the Torah and will be rich and successful. So, Moses became rich from his preoccupation with the Torah, from which it seems the conclusion should be drawn that the rabbi’s career is better than any other. In fact, we need to ask ourselves whether this kind of advertising for more faith in God might not just indicate that a preoccupation with the Torah led for many to a life of poverty, making it hard to find young acolytes.74 The quoted texts clearly reveal a major tendency in the rabbinic literature: Judaism is Torah-based, that is, all speculation and interpretation begins and ends with the Torah, which shapes, influences, and circumscribes the world of the rabbis. This is why the preoccupation with the Torah is seen as human beings’ greatest satisfaction. Everything else is subordinate. The preoccupation with the law is a preoccupation for its own sake, thus it does not heed pragmatic concerns.75 In this, it does not distinguish between the coming world and this one. According to Babylonian Talmud Pesaḥim 50a, R. Yosef b. R. Yehoshua once awakened from a coma and told his father that the other world is a perverse world. His father responded: ‘My son, you have seen the true world. We will stand there just as we are standing here. What did you hear them speak there?’ He said: ‘I heard them say: “Hail to the man who came here who has studied”’. The Torah could be compared without further ado to the Philonic understanding of philosophy. For the rabbis, Israel’s happiness is without a doubt adherence to and a preoccupation with the Torah. This Torah piety is not eschatological; it is earthly. God provides his reward already in this world, as emphasized in Midrash Tehillim 1. 17: 73 Genesis Rabbah 13. 74 Cf. Hengel, ‘“Berufung” und “Bekehrung” zur Philosophie’. 75 See Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 17a and Sukkah 49b. See also Stiegman, ‘Rabbinic Anthropology’, pp. 544–45.

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(Blessed is the man who does not dwell in the advice of the godless), […] but who enjoys the Torah of the Lord (Psalm 1. 1–2): Whoever occupies himself with the Torah, the Holy One, praise be, will fulfil his desires. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly […] but his delight is in the law of the LORD (Psalm 1. 1–2): Whoever occupies himself with the Torah, the Holy One, praise be, will fulfil his desires. Here I refer to Midrash Tehillim 1. 11 to illuminate this view: a (‘planted’) is not used here, but rather shatul (‘inserted’). This will teach you that even all tempests, when they come and whip at him, cannot move him from his place. And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper (Psalm 1. 3). Elsewhere it says: This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth ( Joshua 1. 8). If you heed this, thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success, meaning you will be fortunate in this world and have insight into the next. Rabbinic Notions of ‘Happiness’

Rabbinic Judaism reveals, in contrast to Jewish-Hellenistic literature, greater biblical continuity. That bliss is expected from the preoccupation with the Torah also has practical consequences. Preoccupation with the Torah is not enough. One must (in Philo’s terms) have a practical love for ἀρετή. Here, too, the similarity to the Stoics is astonishing. For the Stoics, however, the way, meaning the virtuousness of life, was the goal, happiness. For the rabbis, on the contrary, God rewards the active preoccupation with the Torah in this and in the coming world with happiness. This concept of happiness is, apparently, incompatible with the ideas of the power of the stars mentioned above. How can we explain this aporia? In its totality, rabbinic literature does not represent a philosophic system that we can analyse on the basis of premises and conclusions. It is the product of arduous exegesis by the heads of schools and their students that, moreover, was constantly corrected, as well as corrupted, altered, and adapted by editors and authors as it was passed on. This process followed specific methods that draw on hermeneutics to overcome the limits of time. The old and the new meld together, and the one is explained by the other. The rabbinic literature at our disposal today is thus a complex portrait of the life and ideology of an interpreting people. It is by no means, however — even if at first glance it may seem so — a completely convoluted muddle in which statement arbitrarily follows statement. Methods of investigation must, nonetheless, take into account the peculiarities of literary traditions. Individual traditions, unlike authorial literature, cannot be set against more or less closed systems; rather, they must be interpreted within the context of the real and cultural circumstances of their creation, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic methods of their transmission on the other hand. The rabbis’ ideas of happiness discussed here represent only an initial inventory. I have sketched them only roughly, as a harmonizing comprehensive presentation would not do justice to the literature. We can see a clear contradiction between

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the belief in an inevitable, pre-determined fate on the one hand and the demand for active obedience to the divine commandments, by which happiness (including material happiness) can be attained, on the other hand. The fact that this contradiction seems never to have been resolved in the rabbinic literature can be interpreted — and this should only be understood as a tentative conclusion: the rabbis, in contrast to the Hellenistic authors, were less concerned with an internally directed, subjective happiness.

Works Cited Primary Sources A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus, ed. by K. H. Rengstorf, 4 vols (Brill: Leiden, 1973–83) Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, ed. by H. St. J. Thackeray and Ralph Marcus, Loeb Classical Library, 242, 281, 326, 365, 410, 433, 456, 489, 490 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926–) —— , The Works of Josephus, Complete and Unabridged New Updated Edition, trans. by William Whiston (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987) Lucian of Samosata, The Work of Lucian of Samosata, trans. by Henry W. Fowler and Francis G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) Midrash Echa Rabbati, ed. by Solomon Buber (Vilna: Romm 1899) Midrash pesiqta de rav Kahana, ed. by Jacob Israel Mandelbaum (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1962) Midrash pesiqta rabbati, ed. by Meir Friedmann (Vienna, 1880) Midrash Rabbah ‘al ha-torah we-’al hamesh megillot, 5 vols (Vilna: Romm, 1897) Midrash Debarim Rabbah, ed. by Saul Lieberman ( Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1964) Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, trans. by H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, vols i–ii (London: Soncino Press, 1983) Midrash Tanhuma, ed. by Solomon Buber, 3 vols (Vilna: Romm, 1885) Midrash Tehillim, ed. by Solomon Buber (Vilna, 1891) Midrash zuta ‘al shir ha-shirim, rut ekhah we-qohelet, ed. by Solomon Buber, 2nd edn (Vilna: Romm, 1914/15) Philo, The Works of Philo, vols i–x, ed. by Francis Henry Colson and George Herbert Whitaker, vols xi–xii, ed. by Ralph Marcus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1929–62) Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt, ed. by Johannes Leisegang, 7 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1896–1930; repr. 1962–63) Talmud Bavli (Vilna: Rom, 1908–13) Talmud Yerushalmi, ed. by Margaliot Moses (Schitomir: Schapira, 1860–67) The Translation of the Greek Old Testament Scriptures, Including the Apocrypha, trans. by Lancelot C. L. Brenton (first publ. London: Bagster & Sons, 1851),

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Secondary Sources Bergmann, Judah, ‘Die stoische Philosophie und die jüdische Frömmigkeit’, in Judaica: Festschrift zu Hermann Cohens siebzigstem Geburtstage (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1912), pp. 145–66 (repr. in Essays in Greco-Roman and Related Talmudic Literature, ed. by Henry A. Fischel (New York: Ktav, 1977), pp. 1–22) Bertram, Georg, ‘Makarios’, in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1942; repr. 1966), iv, 367–69 Betz, Hans Dieter, ‘The Delphic Maxim ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ in Hermetic Interpretation’, Harvard Theological Review, 63 (1970), 465–84 Bokser, Ben Zion, ‘The Thread of Blue’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 31 (1963), 1–32 Bréhier, Emile, ‘La Cosmologie stoïcienne à la fin du paganisme’, Revue de religions, 64 (1911), 1–20 Brembach, Alexander, Das Problem des Bösen im Zusammenhang mit dem freien Willen bei Augustin (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2017) Cohen, Boaz, Jewish and Roman Law: A Comparative Study (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1966) Dihle, Albrecht, Die Vorstellung vom Willen in der Antike (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985) Feldman, Louis H., Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937–1980) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984) Forschner, Maximilian, Über das Glück des Menschen: Aristoteles, Epikur, Stoa, Thomas von Aquin, Kant (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993) Gundel, Wilhelm, and Hans Georg Gundel, Astrologumena: Die astrologische Literatur in der Antike und ihre Geschichte, Sudhoffs Archiv, 6 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966) Hamburger, Jacob, ‘Glück und Unglück’, in Real‑Encyclopädie des Judentums (Strelitz: In Commission bei Koehler, 1897–), iii, Supplement IV, pp. 27–33 Hauck, Friedrich, ‘Makarios’, in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1942; repr. 1966), iv, 362–70 Hengel, Martin, ‘“Berufung” und “Bekehrung” zur Philosophie bzw. zur Torah im Griechentum bzw. bei den Rabbinen’, in Nachfolge und Charisma (Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1968), ii.5, 31–38 —— , Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. by John Bowden (London: SCM, 1981) —— , Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zur ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr., 3rd edn, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988) Kaminka, Armand, ‘Les Rapports entre le rabbinisme et la philosophie stoïcienne’, Revue des Études Juives, 82 (1926), 232–52 Krauss, Samuel, ‘Ägyptische und syrische Götternamen im Talmud’, in Semitic Studies in Memory of Rev. Dr Alexander Kohut, ed. by George Alexander Kohut (Berlin: Cavalry, 1897; repr. Jerusalem, 1972), pp. 339–53

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Leicht, Reimund, Astrologumena Judaica: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der astrologischen Literatur der Juden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006) Luck, Georg, Magie und andere Geheimlehren in der Antike (Stuttgart: Kröner 1990) Marx, Alexander, ‘The Correspondence between the Rabbis of Southern France and Maimonides about Astrology’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 3 (1926), 311–58 Merlan, Philip, Kleine Philosophische Schriften, ed. by Franciszka Merlan (Hildesheim: Olms, 1976) Nickel, Rainer, Epiktet, Teles, Musonius, Wege zum Glück (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1987) Preisendanz, Karl, ‘Eytychia’, in Paulys Realencyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Munich: Druckenmuller, 1948), vii.A.2, 1662–65 —— , ‘Tyche’, in Paulys Realencyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Munich: Druckenmuller, 1948; repr. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1979), vii, ad loc Ritter, Joachim, ‘Glück, “Glückseligkeit”’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1974), iii, 679–91 Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., ‘Talmudic Astrology: Bavli Šabbat 156a–b’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 78 (2007), 109–48 Schroer, Silvia, In Israel gab es Bilder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987) Schunk, Klaus-Dietrich, ‘gad’, in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1932; repr. 1973), ad loc Stephens, William O., Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) Stiegman, Emero, ‘Rabbinic Anthropology’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, vol. ii. 19. 2: Religion (Judentum), ed. by Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), pp. 487–579 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and WellBeing (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003) Urbach, Epharim E., The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975) Wächter, Ludwig, ‘Astrologie und Schicksalsglaube im rabbinischen Judentum’, Kairos, 11 (1969), 181–200 —— , ‘Rabbinischer Vorsehungs- und Schicksalsglaube’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Jena, 1958) Wahrig, Gerhard, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Munich: Mosaik Verlag, 1986) Wolfson, Harry A., Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)

Mauro Zonta

Philosophical Terms for ‘Happiness’ in Languages of Culture in Medieval Near, Middle, and Far East To Steve Harvey, a long-time friend, with the highest esteem*

The philosophical meaning of ‘happiness’ is found in various languages of the Near, Middle, and Far East, from c. 500 to c. 1500. The comparison of these terms seems to show mutual interaction and cultural contacts between Greek and such languages as Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, classical Arabic, and Middle Persian. As it has been suggested elsewhere, we may also explore possible direct or indirect contacts between Arabic and languages of the Far East in that period, such as Sanskrit, classical Tibetan, medieval Chinese, and old Mongolian. The Greek term εὐδαιμονία, ‘happiness’ in any sense (spiritual: ‘true, full happiness’, and material: ‘prosperity, good fortune’),1 was first found in fifth-century Greek literature, in Pindar, Herodotus, and Thucydides: it was evidently derived from εὐ-, ‘well’ (as an adverb), and δαίμον, ‘divinity, (good or bad) chance, fortune’, to which the nominal suffix -ία was added, in order to point out the abstract ‘quality’ of the concept. The term was again found in fourth-century Greek philosophical literature, in Plato and in Aristotle.2 However, there is no trace of it in the Greek translations of the Old and New Testaments. In Christian Greek literature, the word is almost unknown: the only possible reference is found in the verb εὐδαιμονάω, literally ‘to be truly happy’.3 The corresponding Latin term should be felicitas. It derived from facundus, fetus,4 in the proper sense of ‘fecundity, fertility’ of the soil, and then acquired a philosophical meaning as ‘status et conditio eius, cui res omnes secundae fluunt, bona fortuna, prosperitas, beatitudo’, in perfect agreement with the Greek εὐδαιμονία.

* Editor’s note: This article was among the very last articles written by Mauro Zonta before his untimely death in August 2017. Prof. Zonta was unable to edit or correct the article for this volume, and we would like to thank Dan Shapira for his help in preparing the article for publication. 1 Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, p. 708b. 2 Plato, Timaeus, 34c, 42b, 69a, 90a; Plato, Leges, I, 628d, 636e; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X. 3 Opusculum de Persica captivitate (a text written in the seventh to eighth centuries, about the conquest of Jerusalem by the Sasanians in 614–28), ed. by Migne, 10. 15; see also Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, p. 562a. 4 Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, vi.1, 426–35. The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey, ed. by Yehuda Halper, PATMA 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 69–75 DOI 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.122264

FHG

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As such, it was first employed by Cicero (first century bce: in Hortensius and other places), then by Pliny the Elder and Quintilian (first century ce).5 Unfortunately, Greek philosophical terms were not uniformly rendered in other languages of culture in the early Middle Ages. For example, the term εὐδαιμονία apparently cannot be found in one of the Christian Greek philosophical works most diffused in the Near East: De natura hominis (Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου) by Nemesius of Emesa (the fourth century). However, there are translations of different Greek philosophical texts where a direct comparison with εὐδαιμονία can be found. For example, in the Classical Armenian version of the Greek text of Plato’s Laws, the term ‘happiness’ is found, in comparison with the Greek adjective εὐδαίμων, ‘happy, lucky’, as barebaxt(owt’iwn), ‘happy(ness)’. In its turn, this term derives from the classical Armenian root bare-, ‘well, good’, and the Armenian noun baxt, ‘chance, fortune’.6 So, it does not seem too far-fetched to guess that the Armenian term was literally influenced by the Greek one, εὐ-δαίμον, literally ‘good chance’; better still, the former is an evident morphological calque of the latter. There is another Classical Armenian term which means ‘happiness’: erʧankowt’iwn, from the adjective erʧankik, ‘happy’;7 but no close relationship can be found to the Greek term. In Old Georgian, the key term for ‘happiness’ is gednieregay, from the adjective gednier, ‘happy’. However, there is also net’ilogay, ‘blessedness, felicity’, from the adjective net’il, ‘happy, blessed’.8 Both adjectives seem to be different from other languages; however, both nouns are evidently derived from the similar adjective, as we found in Classical Armenian erʧankowt’iwn. I suspect that such a linguistic evolution followed a similar path in both languages, Classical Armenian and Old Georgian. Another tentative interpretation of the same term is apparently found in Coptic. Both main Coptic dialects (Sahidic and Bohairic) seem to use naiat or naiet as ‘felicity, beatitude’.9 Apparently, the most important work of Coptic lexicography, by W. E. Crum, ignores this fact. On the contrary, Jaroslav Černý points out nanou- as ‘good’, as found in Crum too,10 but also confirms naiat as ‘beatitude’ and connects with eia, ‘eye’. Perhaps it was ‘influenced’ by the former? In classical Ethiopic, Wolf Leslau pointed out three terms that translate ‘happiness’. The first is bǝṣ‘ān, ‘beatitude, happiness’, from the verb baṣ‘a or baḍ’a, which means ‘value, be blessed’, apparently originally from Ethiopian itself, of

5 Forcellini, Lexicon totius latinitatis, ii, 446a. In Medieval Latin, see Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus, p. 412b, and Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, iii, 427c (where ‘feliciter’ is only the official name of the Roman Emperor). 6 Plato, Tramaxowsnit’iwnk’ jaġags owrinac’ ew Minovs, p. 21, l. 21. See also Calfa, Dictionnaire ArménienFrançais, pp. 143a, 149b. 7 Calfa, Dictionnaire Arménien-Français, p. 262b [= Plato, Tramaxowsnit’iwnk’ jaġags owrinac’ ew Minovs, p. 262b]. 8 Sardshweladse and Fähnrich, Altgeorgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, pp. 99b, 913a–b. 9 Parthey, Vocabularium Coptico-Latinum et Latino-Copticum, p. 106a. 10 Černý, Coptic Etymological Dictionary, pp. 109, 104; see also Crum, A Coptic Dictionary, p. 227a.

P h i lo s o p h i c al Te rms fo r ‘ Happi ne ss’

ecclesiastical use; the second is fǝśśaḥā, ‘joy, happiness’, of evident Arabic origin (see Arabic fasuḥa, ‘be wide’); the third is ḥaśśet, ‘happiness’, from the verb ḥaśaya, ‘make happy’, found in Yemenite dialects and, even earlier, in Akkadian.11 The first term seems to have a Christian ‘identity’, hinting at traces of Christian civilization in Ethiopia around the fourth century and later. In Syriac, the widespread term which means ‘happiness’ is būsāmā, ‘gladness, felicity’, together with similar ones, such as bāsīmūtā, ‘happiness’, both from the verbal term basīm, ‘happy’, and from the root bsem, ‘good smell’: those terms can be found in early Syriac literature.12 There are also other similar words: ṭub gar, ‘fortunate, happy’, or ḥsīm, ‘happy’, from the verb ḥsam, ‘emulate’.13 Is there some linguistic ‘influence’ involved? As a matter of fact, the root b-s-m, albeit with a different meaning (‘to be pleasing, cheerful’), is found in Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic.14 In contrast, the technical terms for ‘happiness’ in medieval Hebrew were numerous. The term sa‘ad, as in classical Arabic, was also found in Talmudic Hebrew (third to eighth centuries), but having a different meaning: ‘support, assist’.15 Also in South Arabic, apparently before the Qur’an, the verbal form s-‘-d had the same meaning as the Hebrew one: ‘favor someone with, grant, support’.16 However, according to other sources this root can be interpreted as ‘acting happy’.17 The above-mentioned fact is evident in classical Arabic.18 The verb sa‘ida is explicitly interpreted as ‘to be happy, in a state of felicity’, even in the Qur’an; later on, in the ninth century, sa‘āda is rendered as ‘happiness’ and translated Greek εὐδαιμονία.19 According to Soheil Afnan, the Arabic term is already found in both Greek-to-Arabic ninth-century translations of the Metaphysics (Usṭāth and Isḥāq Ibn Ḥunayn) as εὐδαιμονία, as well as Alfarabi;20 the term would derive from Pahlavi šāhīt and New Persian šādī. As a matter of fact, Old Persian has šiyāti-, as pointed out by Afnan, as ‘peace, happiness’.21 This is relevant and important for the history of the term. In fact, according to the Dictionary of the Manichaean Texts, in Middle Persian and Parthian (third century bc – third century ad) there were various terms for ‘happiness’, such as hwšnwdy (*hušnūd) in Middle Persian and hwydgyft (*huyadagīft) in Parthian, as well as wštyryšn (*wištīrišn), xw’ryy (*xwārī), and xwnkyyḫ (*xunakīh) in Middle Persian; but the main word for ‘happiness’, in both languages, is š’d- (*šād) in its many forms, as š’dgr (*šādgar), š’dyft (*šādīft), and, most of all, in Middle Persian

11 Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Ge‘ez, pp. 111a, 168b, 247a. 12 Payne-Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, p. 38b. 13 Payne-Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, pp. 60a, 151b. 14 Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, p. 224a–b. 15 Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, p. 1009a–b. 16 Copeland Biella, Dictionary of Old South Arabic, Sabean Dialect, pp. 339–40. 17 Conti Rossini, Chrestomathia arabica meridionalis epigraphica edita et glossario instructa, p. 198b. 18 Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, i, 1360b–1363a. 19 Daiber, Aetius Arabus, p. 583, n. 1584. 20 Afnan, A Philosophical Lexicon in Persian and Arabic, pp. 125a, 135a. 21 Kent, Old Persian, pp. 210b–211a.

71

72

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as š’dyḫ (*šādīh), ‘happiness, serenity’.22 This seems to me a clear proof of the direct ‘Persianization’ of the aforementioned Arabic term. However, there are some hints at a diffusion of the term in a wider area, maybe even to India. It should be noted that medieval Turkish languages developed the interpretation of ‘happiness’ in a totally different way with respect to Indo-European languages. As has been pointed out by Gerard Clauson, Turkish languages had such terms as avın-, ‘to be happy’ in Chaghatai (eleventh century and after); erej (from Sogdian ryz, ‘happiness, bliss’ according to Clauson), in many Turkish languages, as well as qut, ‘good fortune, happiness’ in Turkish and Uyghur (from the eighth century onwards); finally, there is meŋi:lik, ‘happiness’ in Uyghur (eighth century on).23 However, the most common medieval Turkish term seems to be sevin, sevinç, ‘joy, pleasure, love’ in Turkish and Uyghur from the eighth century onwards (see in particular the similar adjective sevençlik, ‘happy’). An evident case of the relationship of the above-mentioned Middle Persian term to a medieval Indo-Aryan language of Central Asia is found in Sogdian. As first pointed out by Badri Gharib, there were many Sogdian terms for ‘happiness’, for example, a loanword of Middle Persian *hušnūd, or such words as *sarδmanet or *širastyā;24 however, the most important term is šātuxyā, ‘happiness’, used by Buddhists, Manicheans, and Christians. Nicholas Sims-Williams and Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst have found, and included in their dictionary of Sogdian Manichean terms, two words which mean ‘happiness, joy, bliss’: š’twxy’ and xwsndy’.25 The former is similar to Pahlavi šādīh, both semiologically and phonetically. As in the case of Tocharian B, an extinct Indo-European language, the relevant dictionary points out two important terms regarding ‘happiness’: yṣwarkaññe, ‘welfare, prosperity, happiness’, and sakw (in Tocharian A, suk), ‘(good) fortune, happiness’.26 The latter is almost identical to Sanskrit sukha-, with the same meaning: in Sanskrit, sukha(ṁ) means ‘easiness, prosperity, pleasure, joy, happiness’.27 As a matter of fact, in the Mahāvyutpatti (The Great Etymology), a multilingual dictionary in Sanskrit and classical Tibetan produced around ad 800 and later completed with medieval Chinese and old Mongolian definitions, there are even three voices for sukha-.28 Moreover, the Sanskrit term is rendered in the same way in classical Tibetan as bde ba, ‘happiness’.29 In medieval Chinese, the first and second terms of the dictionary are only one: lè (in middle Chinese, lαk), ‘joyful, happy, happiness, 22 Durkin-Meisterernst, Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, pp. 194a, 195a, 313a–314a, 347b, 366a, 368b. 23 Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish, pp. 12b, 200a, 594a, 700a, 790a–b. 24 Gharib, Sogdian Dictionary, pp. 82b n. 2079, 177b nn. 4445–46, 361b n. 8952, 380a n. 9405, and, most of all, p. 370b, nn. 9169–70 and 9174. 25 Sims-Williams and Durkin-Meisterernst, Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, pp. 182b, 222b–223a. 26 Adams, A Dictionary of Tocharian B, pp. 512, 664. 27 Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p. 1221a. 28 Sakaki, The Mahāvyutpatti, pp. 148a n. 1914, 173b n. 2347a, 413a n. 6400. 29 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Special Reference to the Prevailing Dialects, pp. 270a–b: bde ba, ‘to be happy, happiness’, which corresponds to sukha; Das, A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms, pp. 668a–669a: bde as ‘happiness’ in Buddhism.

P h i lo s o p h i c al Te rms fo r ‘ Happi ne ss’

pleasure’. For the third term, it is rendered into Chinese as ān-lè, in middle Chinese as Ɂαn-lαk, ‘calm joy, peaceful happiness’.30 The last term corresponds to the old Mongolian translation of the three voices,31 as ĵirγalang or amuγulang, ‘peace’. In another place, however, bēye and similar terms mean ‘joy, happiness’.32 To sum up, it does not seem far-fetched to assume that the term ‘happiness’, as found in Sanskrit sukha and which had earlier been rendered in India and Western China, for example, in Tocharian B, as sakw, due to a consonant change (dental letter instead of palatal one),33 later evolved into sa‘āda in classical Arabic, most probably through Middle Persian šād. In my opinion, there was a pre-Indo-European root *sat- which was connected to the concept of ‘happiness’ that had three different evolutions: (1) the Tocharian sakw-, from which the Sanskrit sukha- developed; (2) the Old Persian šiyāt-, from which the Middle Persian šād- developed; and (3) the South-Arabic s-‘-d, from which the classical Arabic sa‘āda developed. So we may say the character s-, probably the original one, remained in the marginal areas of the Near and Middle East, from Arabia to India, while in the central area (Persia and Central Asia) it was substituted with the letter š-.

30 See Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation, p. 185: lè (75. 11); in early middle Chinese, its pronunciation is lak, ‘joy, joyful’. See also the very recent work by Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, pp. 256b and 578b: lè