Infinity, Divine Transcendence and Immanence in Or Hashem

Abstract

Hasdai Crescas (1340-1411) was a philosopher, rabbi and public person, who lived in a very turbulent period for the Iberian and Provençal Jewish communities of the late Middle Ages. Crescas made a vehement critique of the Aristotelian paradigm received from falsafa, which was used by Maimonides to support and prove the existence, unity and incorporeality of God, conceptualized in the Guide of the Perplexed as the necessary being which is absolutely transcendent in relation to contingent beings, that is, to the world. In Or Hashem, Crescas elaborates an alternative concept of the necessary being, in which the two antithetical notions of divine immanence and transcendence are related to the distinction within the necessary being between its simple essence and its infinite attributes. The simple, one, ineffable essence of the necessary being is expressed in infinite attributes in the eternal and constant act of giving in the univocality of being its good and its actuality to the infinite contingent beings. Crescas advocates that the universe, though ontologically contingent, is infinite in its actuality. God is thus conceived as the eternal and constant first cause, entelechy and Place of the World.