The subject of the next group of entries is Jewish mysticism, permeating the Biblical books of the Prophets and epitomized in the phenomenon of the Kabbalah.
Mysticism can be defined as the belief in the possibility of entering into a communion with God through a set of extra-rational practices. It is, therefore, a much more ambitious endeavor than, say, occultism, which, in my usage, is limited to supernatural and paranormal forces of a far inferior order. Russian mysticism goes to the core of this key distinction with its use of the explicit one-word term Bogoiskatelstvo: Godsearch, or Godseeking. With such unambiguous terminology, there can be no confusion as to the object of the Russian mystical search.
However, mysticism is an awfully confusing and confused term, habitually mixed up with occultism, as the following example illustrates: Webster’s Dictionary presents Kabbalah as “an occult religious philosophy, based on a mystical interpretation of the Scriptures.” This reminds me of a similar situation when the term faith is used interchangeably with the term religion. In that case, I have chosen to separate the two meanings by understanding faith as a personal belief in God, as opposed to religion as a collective belief, or (worded differently, but essentially the same) a person’s adherence to his or her culturally-predetermined, or perhaps consciously chosen, system of public worship.
In a similar fashion, I have chosen to restrict the meaning of the occult as suggested above, and I no longer expect a confusion about these two terms: mysticism and occultism, such as the one displayed by Webster’s Dictionary, which I am not trying to pick on, but using as an important reference, to illustrate the existence of a confusion.
The word mysticism is usually associated with intellectual activities of fiercely independent minds more or less outside the reaches of established authority. Just as in Schopenhauer’s definition, philosophy is for the few and religion is for the many, when mysticism leaves the confines of the elite and becomes food for the masses, it turns into a quasi-religious cult and can no longer be regarded as mysticism proper. Whenever in public possession, it becomes trivialized and vulgarized beyond recognition.
Because of its undisciplined, individualistic nature, mysticism has had a precariously shaky life within the domain of the established Christian Church. Branded as heresy, its doom is sealed by the procedural tools in the Church’s possession. Saint Augustine was at his ingenious best, in formulating the official position of the Church on the tricky issue of religious mysticism in the following passage from his City of God:
“It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its immutability, to pass beyond it, and by a continued soaring of his mind to attain to the unchangeable substance of God (!), and in that height of contemplation to learn from God Himself… But (!!!) since the mind itself, though naturally capable of reason and intelligence, is disabled by besotting and inveterate vices… even from tolerating His unchangeable light,… it has in the first place to be impregnated with faith, and so purified.” (That is, placed under strict Church supervision, and, therefore, utterly deprived of the essential component of mysticism which is individual freedom, thus rendering such pursuit virtually meaningless.) (Quoted from City of God xi:2.)
Under such circumstances, the historical recognition of Saint Francis of Assisi, the great mystic, is rather an exception than the rule, and, not surprisingly, the intensely mystical quality of Francis’ personality is greatly downplayed by his Christian apologists. By the same token, another eminent Christian mystic John Scotus Erigena (not to be ever confused with another John Scotus: Duns, who lived some five centuries later) may have avoided the fate of being burned at the stake, which, however, befell some of his works; but it is a sad historical fact that his brilliant mind was subdued and diminished by the Authority of the Church, and his pitifully small place in history is grotesquely incommensurate with the breathtaking size of his intellectual worth and especially his potential.
Unlike their European counterparts, Russian Christian mystics enjoyed much more religious freedom, this subject to be discussed in detail in the Russian section. Deprived of all civic freedom by the firm autocratic grip of the Tsarist establishment, they channeled their philosophical inquiry into the areas of theology and theosophy, where their challenge to the authority of the Russian Church seldom crossed the line of apostasy, especially considering the fact that the authority of the Russian Church was already severely curtailed by its submission to the Tsar’s Holy Synod.
But as far as the philosophical value of the historical legacy of religious mysticism is concerned, at least in my personal estimation, Jewish mysticism stands in a class of its own, summa cum laude, and now the rest of the present triptych goes to the task of its glorification.
The bottom line here is probably this: Inasmuch as powerful Churches, namely, the Roman Catholic Church, habitually discourage independent mystical inquiries, the lessened power of the Russian Church had created a vacuum, inviting Russian Godseekers to pursue their private communions with God; whereas the complete absence of a centralized Jewish ecclesiastical authority had opened the floodgate for an unrestrained gush of distinctive Jewish mysticism.
Jewish mystics, in accordance with a longstanding Jewish tradition, avoid direct references to God even in epithetical substitutions, which is evidenced by the titles of their writings and by the oblique manner of the references to the Divine, wherever these cannot be helped. The famous vision of God in Ezekiel’s prophesy is known as Merkava, The Chariot, deliberately focusing on a lesser object, rather than on the centerpiece of the Prophet’s vision, which was God Himself. Here is Ezekiel’s peculiarly roundabout, yet audaciously daring, description of the Most High.---
“And above the firmament was the likeness of a throne as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face…” (Ezekiel 1:26-28.)
It is almost incredible how a profound God-fearing and trembling humility (here is a pun on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling) of a great Jewish mystic goes hand-in-hand with his Siegfried-like fearlessness in tackling a subject of matchless dare. Indeed, with all his roundabout talk, Ezekiel leaves no doubt that his vision is of a man on a throne, yet, like Siegfried, he realizes that “Es ist kein Mann!!!,” but the Unknowable God, deigning to appear to him as a man on a throne, in that frightening vision.
Not just Ezekiel, of course, with his Merkava vision, but all the Prophets of the Bible were great mystics, in their own right, by virtue of their claim of having a direct personal communion with God. The Revelation of Jesus Christ to the Apostle John is yet another expression of the classical Jewish mysticism, concluding the Christian Bible. Another fascinating example of this mysticism is the Book of Enoch, which is canonical in the Russian Orthodox Bible, but virtually unknown to the Christians of the Western traditions.
The glorious tradition of Jewish mysticism continues with luxurious excess in post-Biblical times, its most remarkable early expression being the delightfully fraudulent Sefer Yetzira, Book of Creation, attributed to a chain of holders, traced back from Avraham Avinu to Noah to Adam!) by its anonymous authors, whose real names, for that reason, have been deprived of a well-deserved fame, as the original creators of the mystical concept of the Sefirot, representing, quite literally, a backtracking journey into God’s mind, starting with the least incomprehensible emanation, and ending up with the unknowable Ein Sof. The ten Sefirot are now to become the central subject of my next entry, in a journey of my own: from the publishing mystery of Sefer Yetzira to the explicit genius of Isaac Luria.
Mysticism can be defined as the belief in the possibility of entering into a communion with God through a set of extra-rational practices. It is, therefore, a much more ambitious endeavor than, say, occultism, which, in my usage, is limited to supernatural and paranormal forces of a far inferior order. Russian mysticism goes to the core of this key distinction with its use of the explicit one-word term Bogoiskatelstvo: Godsearch, or Godseeking. With such unambiguous terminology, there can be no confusion as to the object of the Russian mystical search.
However, mysticism is an awfully confusing and confused term, habitually mixed up with occultism, as the following example illustrates: Webster’s Dictionary presents Kabbalah as “an occult religious philosophy, based on a mystical interpretation of the Scriptures.” This reminds me of a similar situation when the term faith is used interchangeably with the term religion. In that case, I have chosen to separate the two meanings by understanding faith as a personal belief in God, as opposed to religion as a collective belief, or (worded differently, but essentially the same) a person’s adherence to his or her culturally-predetermined, or perhaps consciously chosen, system of public worship.
In a similar fashion, I have chosen to restrict the meaning of the occult as suggested above, and I no longer expect a confusion about these two terms: mysticism and occultism, such as the one displayed by Webster’s Dictionary, which I am not trying to pick on, but using as an important reference, to illustrate the existence of a confusion.
The word mysticism is usually associated with intellectual activities of fiercely independent minds more or less outside the reaches of established authority. Just as in Schopenhauer’s definition, philosophy is for the few and religion is for the many, when mysticism leaves the confines of the elite and becomes food for the masses, it turns into a quasi-religious cult and can no longer be regarded as mysticism proper. Whenever in public possession, it becomes trivialized and vulgarized beyond recognition.
Because of its undisciplined, individualistic nature, mysticism has had a precariously shaky life within the domain of the established Christian Church. Branded as heresy, its doom is sealed by the procedural tools in the Church’s possession. Saint Augustine was at his ingenious best, in formulating the official position of the Church on the tricky issue of religious mysticism in the following passage from his City of God:
“It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its immutability, to pass beyond it, and by a continued soaring of his mind to attain to the unchangeable substance of God (!), and in that height of contemplation to learn from God Himself… But (!!!) since the mind itself, though naturally capable of reason and intelligence, is disabled by besotting and inveterate vices… even from tolerating His unchangeable light,… it has in the first place to be impregnated with faith, and so purified.” (That is, placed under strict Church supervision, and, therefore, utterly deprived of the essential component of mysticism which is individual freedom, thus rendering such pursuit virtually meaningless.) (Quoted from City of God xi:2.)
Under such circumstances, the historical recognition of Saint Francis of Assisi, the great mystic, is rather an exception than the rule, and, not surprisingly, the intensely mystical quality of Francis’ personality is greatly downplayed by his Christian apologists. By the same token, another eminent Christian mystic John Scotus Erigena (not to be ever confused with another John Scotus: Duns, who lived some five centuries later) may have avoided the fate of being burned at the stake, which, however, befell some of his works; but it is a sad historical fact that his brilliant mind was subdued and diminished by the Authority of the Church, and his pitifully small place in history is grotesquely incommensurate with the breathtaking size of his intellectual worth and especially his potential.
Unlike their European counterparts, Russian Christian mystics enjoyed much more religious freedom, this subject to be discussed in detail in the Russian section. Deprived of all civic freedom by the firm autocratic grip of the Tsarist establishment, they channeled their philosophical inquiry into the areas of theology and theosophy, where their challenge to the authority of the Russian Church seldom crossed the line of apostasy, especially considering the fact that the authority of the Russian Church was already severely curtailed by its submission to the Tsar’s Holy Synod.
But as far as the philosophical value of the historical legacy of religious mysticism is concerned, at least in my personal estimation, Jewish mysticism stands in a class of its own, summa cum laude, and now the rest of the present triptych goes to the task of its glorification.
The bottom line here is probably this: Inasmuch as powerful Churches, namely, the Roman Catholic Church, habitually discourage independent mystical inquiries, the lessened power of the Russian Church had created a vacuum, inviting Russian Godseekers to pursue their private communions with God; whereas the complete absence of a centralized Jewish ecclesiastical authority had opened the floodgate for an unrestrained gush of distinctive Jewish mysticism.
Jewish mystics, in accordance with a longstanding Jewish tradition, avoid direct references to God even in epithetical substitutions, which is evidenced by the titles of their writings and by the oblique manner of the references to the Divine, wherever these cannot be helped. The famous vision of God in Ezekiel’s prophesy is known as Merkava, The Chariot, deliberately focusing on a lesser object, rather than on the centerpiece of the Prophet’s vision, which was God Himself. Here is Ezekiel’s peculiarly roundabout, yet audaciously daring, description of the Most High.---
“And above the firmament was the likeness of a throne as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face…” (Ezekiel 1:26-28.)
It is almost incredible how a profound God-fearing and trembling humility (here is a pun on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling) of a great Jewish mystic goes hand-in-hand with his Siegfried-like fearlessness in tackling a subject of matchless dare. Indeed, with all his roundabout talk, Ezekiel leaves no doubt that his vision is of a man on a throne, yet, like Siegfried, he realizes that “Es ist kein Mann!!!,” but the Unknowable God, deigning to appear to him as a man on a throne, in that frightening vision.
Not just Ezekiel, of course, with his Merkava vision, but all the Prophets of the Bible were great mystics, in their own right, by virtue of their claim of having a direct personal communion with God. The Revelation of Jesus Christ to the Apostle John is yet another expression of the classical Jewish mysticism, concluding the Christian Bible. Another fascinating example of this mysticism is the Book of Enoch, which is canonical in the Russian Orthodox Bible, but virtually unknown to the Christians of the Western traditions.
The glorious tradition of Jewish mysticism continues with luxurious excess in post-Biblical times, its most remarkable early expression being the delightfully fraudulent Sefer Yetzira, Book of Creation, attributed to a chain of holders, traced back from Avraham Avinu to Noah to Adam!) by its anonymous authors, whose real names, for that reason, have been deprived of a well-deserved fame, as the original creators of the mystical concept of the Sefirot, representing, quite literally, a backtracking journey into God’s mind, starting with the least incomprehensible emanation, and ending up with the unknowable Ein Sof. The ten Sefirot are now to become the central subject of my next entry, in a journey of my own: from the publishing mystery of Sefer Yetzira to the explicit genius of Isaac Luria.
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