contains sense or nonsense.”
“What is it about?”
“Partly it is a commentary on Cicero, hence its name. Partly it is a discourse on love and friendship, and the connections between those and the life of the soul and the exercise of virtue. That much I can understand. But not much more. Then there is the last section, in which the teacher takes this Manlius into the heavens and shows him all eternity. This is the most baffling part. All I know is that anyone who wrote this sort of thing down now might find themselves in grave difficulties. So I don’t know who I can talk to about it.”
“You will have to go and ask Cardinal de Deaux’s Jew,” said Ceccani with a smile. “He might know. And he will hardly denounce you. I will ask Brother de Deaux to give you an introduction. He will not deny me the favor, I think, despite the fact that we loathe each other cordially. Knowledge is neutral territory in our warfare.”
Olivier was half surprised, half excited by the prospect. He had, of course, heard of the cardinal’s Jew, but had never met him; few people had. How he had attached himself to Bertrand de Deaux no one knew, although it was known that even the pope brought him in, on occasion, for some form of advice. When he arrived in Avignon he talked to no one, and those curious who tried to engage him in conversation were met with a quizzical sort of disdain, a polite but utterly distant response that suggested that their good opinion really was not necessary to him in any way. Many, not surprisingly, found this offensive, considering that such a person should be flattered and honored by their willingness to converse with him at all, but their opinions seemed to count for little in his mind.
Olivier had always assumed that this Gersonides was, if not a money changer, then a physician; such being the most notable occupations that Jews followed, and because the law forbidding Christians to use their services was universally ignored. Certainly the curia had need of the former; not to lend money, for its revenues were titanic, but to channel that great river of gold throughout Europe, so that it reached the right people with dispatch. Well- connected Jews were ideal for such purposes and, in return for protection, could be relied on to perform such services honestly and cheaply. Such people, however, were not obvious choices for the elucidation of obscure manuscripts from the evening of Rome.
“Oh, he is not a money man,” said Ceccani with a chuckle. “He is as poor as can be, and has no sense in that direction at all. I have consulted him myself on occasion but have long since stopped giving him gold; he only gives it away before he is a dozen paces outside the door. Asceticism and poverty are noble and holy things, but I confess I do find them annoying in a client.”
“So? What is he?”
“He is a man of learning, my dear Olivier, and his people value this so much that they give him money merely to make himself more learned. You, no doubt, would appreciate this habit of theirs. He is what they call a rabbi, and what we would call a philosopher, as he seems to exercise no priestly functions at all. He lives in Carpentras and rarely leaves his house. Even the pope almost has to beg him to answer his letters. You can take it as an indication of his worth that His Holiness is willing to do so. I will get you a letter of introduction and you must go and see him. He will talk to you if de Deaux insists. Do not expect to like him, however, for he tries hard to make himself disagreeable and generally succeeds very well.”
IT IS HARD to believe that so little is known about one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages that no one is even sure within thirty years when he died, and yet this is the case with Levi ben Gershon, also known as Gersonides and, to those with a cryptic turn of mind, as Ralbag from the Hebrew letters of his name. Officially he died in 1344, as this is the last time his name appears in the archives and in 1352 he is referred to as being already dead. Others, however, dismiss this and point to evidence that suggests he was still alive in 1370. No one, however, has devoted much time to the mystery, as his life is such a blank page that discovering when he died would add little. Apart from the fact that he lived his entire life in Provence, and was known to the curia of Avignon, almost nothing remains of his daily existence.
Instead, there is his work, one of the most extraordinary outpourings of his, or any other, age. Gersonides was a polymath who turned his mind at various stages to astronomy, chemistry, the Talmud, ancient philosophy, medicine, and botany. Only politics, the art of statecraft, did he leave well alone, perhaps a wise decision considering his position. Few people would have thanked him for his thoughts. Instead he turned his particular situation—utterly isolated from the society around him, devoid of any influence but rather vulnerable and subject to any of its whims—into an aspect of the philosophic position that he painstakingly created over so many years. In contrast to his great predecessor Maimonides, he advanced the proposition of the superiority of the contemplative life to the active one, dismissing the notion of an ideal balance between action in this life and preparation for the one that comes after. For one of his most important works was on the existence of the soul, a matter that had also concerned Sophia but which Christian thought rather tended to take for granted as something that needed no demonstration.
He had once—with some considerable reluctance—set out his line of argument to Ceccani, who had struggled to grasp the concepts that the Jew had brought to bear on the problem, and it was because of this conversation that the cardinal, a few years later, dispatched Olivier to see him. It should not be thought that Ceccani had befriended him in any way; both were much too proper for any such connection, and in any case, Gersonides belonged to Cardinal de Deaux. Ceccani would no more have broken the law by breaking bread with Gersonides than Gersonides would have accepted any such invitation. Ceccani, equally, did not hurry to let anyone know of his occasional contact, even though he consulted him on matters such as medicines and astrological forecasts—another area in which the Jew had a more profound knowledge than anyone except, perhaps, a professor in Paris fully in the pay of the king of France and hence somewhat unreliable.
Nor did Ceccani like him much, although he was intrigued by the man’s demeanor, a sense of his own worth that was haughty and unflinching. Other Jews he had met—not that there had been many, and even these had always been purely business meetings—had been well mannered, excessively so. Ceccani knew that it was insubstantial, this persistent politeness, a mask to disguise their nervousness at dealing with one as powerful as he, but did nothing to discourage it or set them at greater ease. With the rabbi there was no such uncertainty.
“Why,” he said to himself after one of their earlier meetings, “I do believe the man feels sorry for me! He talks to me like a backward pupil.” It was a measure of the cardinal’s qualities—one which Gersonides also sensed—that he was faintly amused, rather than outraged, by the realization.
As for Gersonides himself, he found the assorted prelates who badgered him a distraction, not quite an irritant but certainly an honor he was quite ready to do without. He did not wish to be consulted by princes of the church, and took no satisfaction from their attentions. It was a service that might, perhaps, do some good one day. He did not wish to turn away anyone with a genuine desire to know, and both cardinals de Deaux and Ceccani— though no philosophers, and too much men of power to cultivate any true passion—perhaps had some spark within them.
So, every time he was summoned, he sighed wearily, put on his cloak, and made his way to Avignon, a monument to greed and excess he detested. And there he gave answers and opinions as best he could. His reward in 1347, three years after we are told he died but in fact a year that saw him still in rude good health, was a knock on the door and a visit from Olivier de Noyen. It was a fateful meeting for reasons even more important than the explication of an obscure text in the tradition of late Neoplatonism. In Olivier, Gersonides felt the flame burning brightly, the same one that Sophia had felt in Manlius when he, too, had come to her door. Like her, he could not resist. Unlike her, however, he cursed his ill fortune.
The phrase of Manlius that led Olivier to the rabbi was at least a considered one, and one of the greatest importance. Indeed, it was at the summation of nearly eight hundred years of thought on the relationship that must exist between the physical and the metaphysical. “The soul dies when it falls to earth.” More Christian heresies were contained in this statement than in almost anything else in the entire document. It contradicted the idea that the soul is created
More important, it did not accord at all with the ideas that Olivier had learned so far from his readings of Cicero and Aristotle, containing a mystical, magical element entirely absent in their works.
In truth, they were ideas all but dead in the West when Manlius put them on paper, although they survived in
