Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 229-281
Keywords:
Nathan,
;
Sabbathaians
;
Cabala History To 1300
Abstract:
This study explores ritual embodiment and the semioticization of the somatic in thirteenth-century kabbalah and its later repercussions in the nexus between ascesis and the hypernomian limits of the law in the Sabbatian theology of Nathan of Gaza. The connection between nomos and ethos in the worldview promulgated by kabbalists has been duly recognized in scholarly literature, examined most often under the taxonomy of ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot. The rationale of the commandments was greatly enhanced by the widespread assumption concerning the homology between the microanthropos—idealized in the body politic of Israel—and the macroanthropos, a correspondence that does not simply suggest a reciprocal reflection of the upper in the lower and of the lower in the upper, but rather the ontic assumption that the events of the supernal realm are instantiated and brought to fruition in the terrestrial realm. The locus of the ritual gestures is assuredly the carnal being, but the ontological isomorphism between the human and the divine bodies, and the possibility of mutual influence that ensues therefrom, are predicated on the transmutation of the physical into the imaginal. The latter term does not denote a disembodied state or a noetic abstraction; it attests rather to an alternate form of body that is intermediate between the corporeal and the spiritual, a form that is immaterial in its materiality and material in its immateriality.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004460942_014
URL:
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