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123 Following the conversion of Sabbatai Zvi to Islam in 1666, a number of his followers interpreted Lurianic concepts to support an antinomian position: Only the descent of the messiah into evil would exhaust the full potential of evil and lead to its collapse. Scholem wrote, “Once it could be claimed that the Messiah’s apostasy was in no way a transgression, but was rather a fulfillment of the commandment of God . . . the entire question of the continued validity of the Law had reached a critical stage.”1 A central issue was whether the believers should follow Sabbatai in his descent into evil in order to redeem the divine sparks. The “moderate” Sabbateans drew a circle around the concept of “strange holiness”: the apostasy of the messiah was not intended to serve as an example to others, and so long as Israel remained in exile and the exterior world remained unchanged, no commandment of the Torah could be violated. The “radical” Sabbateans believed that all the believers had to convert and descend into the evil realm to conquer evil from within and hasten salvation. The violation of the Torah became its true fulfillment; by outward transgression of the commandments, the spiritual elite were destroying the kelippot (shells or husks) by filling them with holiness. Alongside this idea, another somewhat contradictory notion was presented in support of antinomianism: It was impossible for those whose souls were already in the messianic world to sin. In the world of redemption, which the spiritual elite already inhabited, all is holy and everything is permitted; the Torah of the unredeemed world was cancelled, and its violation expressed a truer Torah that had been concealed in the premessianic world.2 Sabbateans disagreed about the appropriate behavior of the higher world and its Torah, but many radical Sabbateans put the antinomian ideas into practice.3 The secret rituals of one of the subsects of the Sabbateans in Salonika included eating forbidden food, and the transgression of sexual prohibitions was used as an initiation rite. Ceremonial ritual fornication took place mainly during the ritual of the “extinguishing of the lights,” celebrated at the beginning of spring.4 6. the sacredness of sin Antinomianism and Models of Man 02 Part 2.indd 123 9/20/10 10:24 AM 124 c h a p te r 6 Antinomianism in Judaism has been coupled with messianism; with the coming of the messiah or the advent of the messianic era, a “higher” law is understood to nullify the Halacha, and believers may demonstrate this by deliberate transgressions . An earlier case of Jewish messianism was early Christianity, and Paul, its major propagandist to non-Jews, has been called the first Jewish antinomian. Paul’s teaching that the Mosaic law had been abrogated by the “law of the Spirit” in Christ was ambiguous because he did not clarify the nature and boundaries of the new law or the extent to which it retained elements of the old law. This teaching has been interpreted as containing the seed of antinomianism, and a number of antinomian thinkers and movements can be found throughout the history of Christianity.5 Antinomianism is not, however, confined to messianism in the monotheistic faiths. It has also been associated with mysticism and can be found in the nonmonotheistic world religions. An important question here is whether antinomianism is an abnormal religious phenomenon with little or no relationship to prevailing religious, sometimes orthodox , conceptions, or whether it is one possible rational outcome of those prevailing , sometimes orthodox, systems. The answer to this question is an important preliminary to a consideration of the applicability of sociopsychological models. If we counterpose two models derived from the works of Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim, we might ask the following question: Is antinomianism an expression of man’s basic sexual and destructive drives in revolt against the constraints of society, or is it a product of processes of learning and socialization within particular social and religious milieus? Is antinomianism a product of a normally latent but unalterable human nature, or does it demonstrate the phenomenal modifiability of human nature? Antinomian ideas have been associated with dualistic metaphysical systems. Three types can be distinguished. First, radical dualism asserts that two supramundane forces or principles are in complete opposition to each other. Second is a metaphysical system that distinguishes a dualistic plane of existence that is false and relative from a monistic plane that is true and absolute. And the third idea is that an antithesis of...

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