The Fountain of Life (Fons Vitae)

A metaphysical dialogue between a master and a disciple by the Jewish poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol, written in Arabic in eleventh-century Spain. The Arabic original is lost; the work survives complete in a twelfth-century Latin translation and in Hebrew extracts made by Shem Tov ibn Falaquera. In five treatises it develops a Neoplatonic account of reality with almost no reference to scripture. Its distinctive thesis is universal hylomorphism: everything other than God, including souls and intelligences, is composed of matter and form, so that a single universal matter and a single universal form underlie both the spiritual and the bodily worlds. Between God and creation stands the divine Will, which joins form to matter. Knowing this structure, the book teaches, is how the soul knows itself and rises toward its source. Latin scholastics read it as the work of 'Avicebron', until Salomon Munk identified the author as Ibn Gabirol in the nineteenth century.

It introduced universal hylomorphism, a doctrine debated by Franciscan and Dominican scholastics, and shows Jewish Neoplatonism at its most purely philosophical.