IBN GABIROL, SOLOMON (1022 –1058 or 1070), Jewish poet and Neoplatonist philosopher in Moorish Spain.
Ibn Gabirol came of age in Saragossa, a thriving center of Jewish culture and intellectual life. He was orphaned at the age of twelve and suffered from a disfiguring skin disease. He proved to be a prodigy in Hebrew, which had ceased to be a spoken language for more than five hundred years and had only recently been revived for composing new works of literature. By sixteen, Ibn Gabirol had gained international fame for his Hebrew religious poetry (many of his works are still used today in Jewish services). He also wrote in Arabic, and his Hebrew poetry employs elements of Arabic meter, rhyme schemes, and imagery.
While his poetry was widely celebrated and he gained the support of a notable patron, Yekutiel Ibn Ḥasan, Ibn Gabirol frequently clashed with the Jewish intelligentsia of his day and was by all accounts difficult, arrogant, and misanthropic. He wrote scathingly about his enemies, describing his elders in Saragossa as “a people whose fathers I would despise to be dogs for my sheep” while flattering himself with lines like “Behold me: at sixteen my heart like that of a man of eighty is wise.”
When his patron was murdered in 1039, Ibn Gabirol lost his primary ally and was forced to flee Saragossa for Granada, where he secured a position as court poet. Little is known about the rest of his life, and the date of his death varies widely—in one account he was trampled to death by an Arab horseman; in another he was murdered by a jealous rival poet.
As a philosopher Ibn Gabirol wrote treatises in Arabic on morality and metaphysics that were as controversial as his personality, containing as they did few references to Scripture and instead invoking mysticism and Neoplatonism. His most significant philosophical work is Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life), in which he argues that all things, including the soul and intellect, are made of matter, which is a direct manifestation of God. It was translated into Latin a century later and circulated under the name Avicebron, a Latinized version of Ibn Gabirol. Fons Vitae became an influential text for medieval Christian scholars, who believed it to be written either by an Arabic Christian philosopher interpreting St. Augustine or a Muslim reader of Aristotle, and its meaning was hotly contested in Franciscan and Dominican monastic communities. It was not until the thirteenth century that a Hebrew summary of the original work was discovered and the true identity of the author revealed.