Abstraction and Representation in Medieval Neo-Platonist Philosophy and Kabbalah

• In Event: Competing Voices and Textual Traditions in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah

Abstract

The role that philosophy played in the rise of the kabbalah in the middle ages has been a pivotal question in the scholarship of Jewish mysticism. On the one hand, the new philosophical abstract conception of God has been accepted, but on the other kabbalah gives a dominant place to visual forms of representation. In order to explore this complex knot between abstraction and representation this study discusses the particularities of kabbalah's conception of emanation and outlines some of its similarities and differences vis-a-vis medieval Neo-Platonism. I will focus on the use of visual imagery to express theological ideas such as emanation. The importance of this study lies in presenting the process of ‘image-writing’ (i.e. icono-graphy) of the divine in medieval theosophical kabbalah from Provence and Gerona. These schools presented a visual theology which uses images to describe what cannot be described, the inner world of God. For theosophical kabbalists, the possibility of a visual esoteric language was understood as a tool to convey theological ideas. The power of visual language lies precisely in its iconographic function in depicting the emanative creation.

Author

• Sandra Valabregue-Perry, Yale University