Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 168 - Chariot of Fire - Kabbalah.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Chariot of Fire, Kabbalah. I think I won't be offending anyone's religious sensibilities if I point out that the Bible contains some passages that are, shall we say, hard to understand. Just last week we saw the deep moral and theological puzzles posed by the book of Job, and in the past we've seen people worrying about physical descriptions of God in the Bible, and even about an episode in which Noah drinks himself into unconsciousness. But for sheer, tantalizing incomprehensibility, it is hard to beat the beginning of the book of Ezekiel. It begins where the book of Job ended, in a storm, with the prophet Ezekiel beholding a cloud full of flame. Within the cloud were four figures with four faces and four wings apiece, the faces those of humans, lions, bulls, and eagles. These beings moved next to the wheels of a great domed chariot bearing a throne, upon which sat a fiery, brilliantly shining figure, the Lord himself. If you're hoping that I am going to explain this vision to you, then I'll have to disappoint you. I don't know what it means, and if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you. The Mishnah and Talmud lay down the following restriction. The laws of incest may not be expounded in the presence of three people, the story of creation in the presence of two, nor the chariot in the presence of one, unless he is a sage. I know that my listeners are very wise, but you might not qualify as sages, and I certainly hope there's more than one of you. Despite this prohibition on teaching, or perhaps in part because of it, a genre of interpretive literature devoted to the chariot, or Merkaba, already developed in late antiquity. These esoteric treatises describe the journey of the mystic to behold God sitting upon his throne. Such texts help to inspire the most famous tradition of writing produced by medieval Jews, Kabbalah. The Hebrew word kabbalah means tradition. It refers to the fact that mystical ideas and interpretations of Scripture were handed down through the generations. Much as the Mishnah bans open teaching concerning the chariot, Kabbalists emphasize the secretive nature of their teaching. The influential German esotericist Eliezer of Worms referred specifically to the chariot when he said that the tradition, or kabbalah, of such interpretations can be transmitted only orally. No wonder then that Eliezer and the Kabbalists made themselves rather hard to understand when they did write down their ideas. We've looked at some strange and difficult texts before in our history of philosophy, like Iamblichus's Defense of Pagan Theurgy and the paradoxical writings of Ibn Adabi. But Kabbalah outdoes them, offering a welter of symbolic images, numerological analysis, and biblical exegesis that is usually more dumbfounding than the passages being interpreted. This stuff makes Iamblichus look like Bertrand Russell. Yet depending on further exegesis by other scholars, I hope that I can convey something of the underlying philosophical content of the Kabbalah and something of its relation to medieval Jewish thought more broadly. That Kabbalah is part of the story of medieval Jewish thought is already a point of controversy. The most celebrated Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, is written in Aramaic and narrates the journey of several rabbis through the Holy Land as they have a series of mystical encounters. In other words, the Zohar presents itself as a work from antiquity. But the great modern scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Skolem, showed that the Zohar must be a medieval text. He carefully analyzed the language used in the text to show that it couldn't reflect ancient usage, and also pointed out that whoever wrote the Zohar was pretty vague on the geography of the Holy Land. So it's now generally accepted that it was produced in the late 13th century. Skolem thought it was the work of a Kabbalist named Moses of Leon, but it may rather be a joint production of the group gathered around him. The enormous size and complexity of the Zohar would already be enough to suggest that it did not emerge from nowhere. Indeed, it is, aptly enough, drawing on a long-standing tradition of mystical literature. Among genuinely antique writings, we have the aforementioned texts devoted to the chariot, and also a work called the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation. Its origins are even more shrouded in uncertainty than those of the Zohar, but it is certainly far older than the medieval texts of Kabbalah proper. Already Saadia Gaon, who, as you'll remember, lived from the 9th to the 10th centuries, wrote a commentary on it. The Book of Creation anticipates some of the key themes of Kabbalistic literature. It refers to 32 paths of wisdom by which God created the universe, a reference to the numbers from 1 to 10 plus the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These numbers and letters are at the core of the Kabbalah. In part because of its late antique sources of inspiration, Kabbalah offers a revival of ideas from antiquity, not only from avowedly Jewish texts, but also from Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. You might remember that Christian authors mocked the rich symbolic language of Gnosticism, for instance when Irenaeus suggested that his Gnostic opponents might as well worship a divinity called pumpkin. The historical connection between Gnosticism and Kabbalah is hard to work out in detail, but seems real enough. In the case of Neoplatonism, things are a bit clearer. Kabbalists built on the philosophical writings of men like Ibn Gabriel, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and especially Maimonides, all of whom transmitted Neoplatonic ideas about the ineffability of God. The Kabbalist Moses of Burgos remarked that he and his associates planted their feet at the spot, reached by the heads of the philosophers. That nicely encapsulates the Kabbalists' attitude towards philosophy. Figures like Maimonides had gone as far as they could with human reason, and even pointed out the inability of reason to grasp God. The Kabbalists could go further by following one of two paths. Following a distinction already made in the medieval period, scholars now speak of contemplative versus ecstatic, or theosophical versus prophetic Kabbalah. The first contemplative kind begins with the earliest significant Kabbalistic text, the Sefer ha-Bahir, or Book of Splendor. It seems to have been produced in southern France in the late 12th century. The Book of Splendor looks back to antique mystical literature, referring, for instance, to Ezekiel's vision of the chariot, but it also anticipates the most central and celebrated teaching of the Kabbalah by enumerating powers within the structure of the divine. These are the so-called seferot, an inadequate translation of which might be numbers. Standardly, Kabbalists recognize ten of them. Though the seferot are associated with the first ten arithmetical numbers and with letters of the Hebrew alphabet, they are most frequently designated by ten names, beginning with keter, hokma, and binah, meaning crown, wisdom, and understanding. There were hints of this in the ancient Book of Creation and here in the Book of Splendor, but it is in the Zohar and other writings produced in the 12th and 13th centuries that the teaching of the seferot fully emerges. Particularly important in developing the theory was a circle of rabbis in Provence gathered around Abraham ben David, known as Rabad, and his son Isaac the Blind. This group has been credited with creating the first fusion between Kabbalistic teachings and Jewish philosophical sources. To see why, we must start at the top, with the idea of God's ineffability. Philosophers like Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides had been willing to admit that God lies beyond our grasp. We can understand him only indirectly by knowing the things he has created or by speaking of him negatively. The Provençal Kabbalists basically agree. They refer to God and himself as ein sof, the infinite, about which we can have no knowledge or speech. But they add a caveat that makes all the difference, namely that God also shows himself in the guise of the seferot. So the seferot play something like the role of divine attributes or of relations between God and the universe. We might loosely compare the contrast between the philosophers and Kabbalists here to that between the two groups of Muslim theologians we looked at, the rigorously negative Mu'atazilites and the more attribute-friendly Asharites. Or to make a comparison with more like-minded Islamic literature, we might think of the seferot as being analogous to the names of God in Ibn Arabi's mysticism. Like the names in Ibn Arabi, the seferot do not just represent God to his creation, they also interrelate and even come into conflict. The dynamic interaction between the seferot is one of the most striking aspects of Kabbalah. We find the Kabbalists evoking the Neoplatonic idea of a cycle of procession and return, all things coming from the first principle and going back to it, but within the divine seferot themselves. The first two seferot look especially Neoplatonic. The first, keter, or crown, shares God's infinity and ineffability. For this reason, there was debate among the Kabbalists about whether the crown could even be associated with a Hebrew letter, as are the other seferot. So we might tentatively compare keter, or crown, to the Neoplatonic one, with the following seferah, wisdom, playing a function much like the Neoplatonists' intellect. It contains the essences of things and also emanates the subsequent seferot, just as Plotinus' intellect is the realm of forms and gives rise to the rest of the Neoplatonic hierarchy. Such analogies may help to reassure us that it is worth including a discussion of Kabbalah in our history of philosophy, but we shouldn't push the analogies too far. The full set of ten seferot is distinctive. The importance of a set of ten powers is emphasized already in the ancient book of creation, which warns the reader, do not say that they are eleven or that they are nine. Also unique to Kabbalah is the welter of symbolic resonances assigned to the seferot. One seferah may stand to another as male to female, with frankly erotic language being used to describe the relationship. The seferot are also associated with the parts of the soul and of the human body, and they are of course matched to the parts of the chariot beheld in the vision of Ezekiel. The vivid and concrete language used in speaking of the seferot and the numerology used by the Kabbalists evoke another sort of ancient Jewish mystical literature which assigned huge numerical values to the size of God's limbs. There's a contrast here to Jewish medieval philosophers, from Sadia to Maimonides, who insisted that the incorporeality of God is absolutely fundamental to a correct understanding of Judaism. The Kabbalists agreed, of course, that God is in himself utterly beyond body or any other created thing. Yet they were more relaxed about the application of corporeal and even sensual language to the divine through the medium of the seferot. Rabad acidly remarked, regarding Maimonides's intolerance of Jews who describe God in bodily terms, This tradition within the tradition that was Kabbalah, the so-called contemplative or theosophical strand developed in Provence but found its way into Spain. This was thanks to Isaac the Blind, whose students brought this seferotic theory to the Catalonian city of Gerona at the beginning of the 13th century. From there, Kabbalistic ideas were taken up by a number of Spanish Jewish scholars, not least among them, Nahmanides, whom we saw trying to keep the peace in our episode on the Maimonides controversy. Given his standing in the Jewish community, Nahmanides's endorsement of Kabbalah gave the tradition a major push. He helped to create the momentum that eventually culminated with the writing of the Zohar towards the end of the 13th century. Northern Spain, which by this point had passed from Muslim into Christian hands, became the new center of Kabbalistic activity on the part of the Jews. The initial circulation of the Zohar occurred there. As we saw, the lead suspect for authorship was Moses from León, a north-central region of Spain, and a significant number of other Kabbalistic authors wrote there from the 13th to the 14th centuries. One is worth picking out in particular, Abraham Abulafia, greatest representative of the second ecstatic, or prophetic, variety of Kabbalah. His life stretched from 1240 to the 1290s, and it was rather eventful, though not quite as eventful as he expected it to be. After experiences he took to be prophetic in nature, Abulafia declared himself to be the Messiah, and he supposedly tried to get an audience with Pope Nicholas III in Rome in order to announce the good news. This should set up a fantastic anecdote, but unfortunately there isn't one, because the Pope died before there could be an encounter between the two, plus Abulafia may have made the whole thing up. Abulafia moved on to Sicily, where he acquired some followers but also provoked sufficient outrage that the locals appealed to Solomon ibn Adret, another expert in Kabbalah who hailed from Barcelona. We met him in a previous episode too, instituting a ban on teaching philosophy to the young. The two Kabbalists disagreed on several points. The touchiest issue was that Abulafia claimed to be the Messiah, whereas ibn Adret claimed that he, you know, wasn't. But also ibn Adret represented the more theoretical brand of Kabbalah as we know it from the Zohar and from Rabad and his circle. Since this, Abulafia proposed a new set of traditional values. When he wasn't provoking popes, Abulafia was trying to provoke a direct vision of God through the use of certain meditation techniques emphasizing a side of Kabbalah that has been compared to the ancient practices of Theurgy defended by Iamblichus. Through such ritualistic practices, the mystic could facilitate a union, or cleaving, together with God. Or if not God, then at least the active intellect, which was associated with one of the divine seferot. Abulafia called the resulting brand of Kabbalah prophetic and explicitly contrasted his approach to the contemplative, more theoretical style of ibn Adret. Rather than just investigating the symbolic relationships among the seferot, Abulafia would do things like repetitively chanting the letters of the tetragrammaton, joining its four consonants to all the Hebrew vowels in sequence. Spiritual practices like head-shaking, weeping, and fixed hand gestures would accompany the chanting. All this was in part inspired by rituals described by the aforementioned Eliezer of Worms. This may sound like an anti-rationalist critique of contemplative Kabbalah. Forget sephirotic theory, let's chant meaningless syllables and shake our heads until God grants us a vision, and then tell the Pope about it. But that would be unfair to Abulafia, who knew his way around philosophy. He wrote no fewer than three works commenting on Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, and who retained elements of theoretical Kabbalah alongside his meditative practices. After all, we just saw that active intellect is seen by Abulafia as the target of mystical union. He also associated the ten seferot with the ten heavenly intellects of the Aristotelian cosmology. So it might be better to think of the practical side of prophetic Kabbalah as a complement or completion of the theory of the seferot. The ritual practices recruit the body into the soul's efforts to reach God. This helps to explain why Abulafia so frequently sounds like a Platonist, just like the other Kabbalists. One of his favorite themes is the opposition between our intellect and our imagination, something Abulafia compares to the relation between a rider and a horse that needs to be controlled with a whip. The same image had been used in the Platonist tradition to represent reason's control over the lower parts of the soul. And like the Platonists, Abulafia sees the lower psychological faculty, which he calls imagination, as a power closely tied to body which needs to be dominated by the intellectual part of the soul. But of course this is Kabbalah, so Abulafia's account of intellectual perfection comes packaged in the images and tropes of the Jewish tradition. Our flight from body towards God is like the flight of Moses and the Jews from Egypt. Abulafia also refers to the Biblical character Enoch who was transformed into the angel Metatron. In just the same way, the right mystical practices will enable us to transform into active intellect. Such details show us that Abulafia, like Kabbalists more generally, shared Maimonides' goal of finding agreement between the Jewish and philosophical traditions. But from a Maimonidean point of view, the Kabbalists are like British drivers from an American point of view, going the wrong direction. In Kabbalah, philosophy is absorbed into a coded and recoded language of scriptural images and esoteric terminology. Maimonides was doing the reverse, offering guidance to those who were perplexed by Biblical language by translating that language into rationalist Aristotelianism. A nice example is the one we began with, Ezekiel's vision of the chariot. Maimonides proposed reading this passage as a metaphysical theory dressed in symbolic robes. A student of Abulafia's rejected this, insisting that the chariot conveys to us the secrets of the emanations among the Seferot. Yet that reference to emanation strikes another Platonist note. And for some observers, the contrast between Maimonides and Kabbalah was not so much about rationalism as opposed to mysticism, it was instead about different approaches to philosophy, Kabbalah's Platonism or Maimonides's Aristotelianism. One partisan of the Aristotelian approach was the 15th century Renaissance thinker Elijah del Medigo. He was struck by the neat fit between Kabbalah and the Platonist texts that were just being made available in his day, thanks to new translations from Greek into Latin. In the Renaissance, Jewish philosophers will continue to take up both the Maimonidean and Kabbalistic sides of this debate. In fact, we may need to take another look at Kabbalah when we get to Renaissance philosophy. It continued to work its magic on Jewish thinkers in that period, and also made its influence felt among so-called Christian Kabbalists. In subsequent centuries Kabbalah will, appropriately enough, appear in numerous manifestations of which the most famous is probably Hasidic Judaism. In fact, Kabbalah is another one of those subjects that could provide material for a whole series of podcasts on its own. For now though, I'm going to stick with the task at hand by taking the story of medieval Jewish philosophy up to the brink of the Renaissance. We'll be looking next at the spread of Jewish thought beyond the borders of Spain and Provence where our focus has been for the last 15 or so episodes. To paraphrase Bob Marley, we know where we're going, we know where we've been. It's another exodus, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you you you you you you