The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (review)

Over the past decade, a number of scholars have come to question the existence of a clear dichotomy between philosophy and mysticism in late antique and medieval thought. Scholars for generations have argued the allegiances of such enigmatic figures as Avicenna and Ibn Tufayl for the philosophical and mystical camps, usually betraying their own modern concerns as much as they shed light on the subjects of their studies. Scholars have often characterized Jewish Neoplatonists, who invested their energies into literary compositions at least as much as into syllogistic philosophical treatises, as unsystematic and dilettantish thinkers (Ibn Gabirol being an exception).

Aaron Hughes's The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought approaches such issues from a new perspective and presents the first attempt to discuss together three interrelated works: Avicenna's Arabic Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Aware), the closely related Hebrew rewriting by Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ḥay Ben Meqitz (a literal translation of Avicenna's title), and Ibn Tufayl's Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzan. The two Arabic works have been available in English for some time; in an appendix, Hughes offers the first English translation of the Hebrew from Israel Levin's critical edition. Scholars have often relegated the relationship between the two Arabic works to one of name only. Ibn Ezra's work has been discussed within the history of the Hebrew rhymed prose narrative (sometimes called the maqama) and as a translation whose very existence testifies to the Jewish-Islamic symbiosis of medieval al-Andalus, but it has not been considered seriously as a philosophical work that shared common but not identical concerns with its Arabic parent text. Hughes's attempt to discuss these three stylized, literary texts together as serious works that convey perspectives on topics of philosophy—especially the nature of the imagination—is admirable and successful.

Hughes terms all three texts "initiatory tales" in which a protagonist (the narrator in Avicenna's and Ibn Ezra's texts, Ḥayy himself in Ibn Tufayl's) is ushered into a state of knowledge of the Divine. Hughes genetically traces the topos of initiation mediated by a celestial guide to the late antique Neoplatonic tradition. Each story is couched in a meticulously constructed literary language rich in metaphor and intertextual allusion. It is the texts' employment of nondiscursive language, Hughes argues, that pushes the soul to a realm beyond discursive thought, thereby enabling its intimate encounter with the Divine. Hughes is particularly interested in elucidating the paradoxical role of visual images in the journey toward the Divine, for images are low-level derivatives of the otherworldly source from which they hail but are necessary and therefore valued footholds for the upward climb.

Medieval Neoplatonism, as Hughes rightly points out, traversed and synthesized numerous intellectual disciplines including poetry and poetics, exegesis, astrology, and philosophy. Appropriately, Hughes employs an equal number of scholarly techniques in order to explicate the elusive texts under discussion: literary theory, religious studies, aesthetics, and intellectual history. Hughes reads as a scholar of religion as much as one trained in intellectual history. Hence we read of rites of initiation, mythopoesis, and the master-disciple relationship more than one often finds in works dealing with philosophical literature.

The initiatory tale is understood according to the tripartite schema of separation/liminality/aggregation posited by van Gennep and in vogue in many areas of scholarship (including Arabic poetry). The pattern fits most smoothly with Ibn Ezra's text. In Avicenna's text, the aggregation stage is admittedly truncated while in Ibn Tufayl's it is extremely elongated and a partial failure (the model of the passage manqué might be useful here). Seventeenth-century European readers of Ibn Tufayl's text privileged the first part of the text over the others in that it seemed to answer questions about religion as a natural phenomenon and the possibility of knowledge of the Divine through rational speculation (hence the 1671 Latin translation by Edward Pococke...