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

2. Reading between the Lines: Text as Encounter with the Divine

2 Reading between the Lines: Text as Encounter with the Divine IN CHAPTER 1, I ARGUED THAT THERE IS A TENDENCY TO REGARD THE INITIATORY tale from one of two competing and ultimately contradictory perspectives . For the sake of convenience, I referred to these as the maximalist and the minimalist positions. The former contends that these tales are sui generis, the apogee of medieval philosophy. The mistake of this position , to reiterate briefly, is to see in these tales something that is impossible to verify by independent means. Those who follow the minimalist position, by contrast, argue that these tales are trivial and not worthy of serious philosophical attention. In this chapter, I want to move beyond these two characterizations by looking at the late antique antecedents of the initiatory tale. I will show that these tales are genetically related to the visionary, non-discursive, and symbolic textual universes of Neoplatonism. The argument of this chapter is that unless we contextualize these tales within this tradition of Neoplatonism, we risk overlooking their contribution to medieval philosophy. What follows is not an introduction to Neoplatonism but an analysis of certain themes and trajectories of this tradition that made their way into medieval Islam and Judaism; these aspects found concrete expression in the genre of the initiatory tale. Unlike those who take the maximalist position, I argue that there is nothing unique about these initiatory tales. Indeed, they share the same literary, textual, and linguistic assumptions that were developed by Plotinus and elaborated upon by his successors. Where they do differ from such earlier texts, however, is in their basic monotheistic frameworks and vocabularies. Both the literary account of a heavenly ascent and the rich use of mythic language provided by the religious narratives of Islam and Judaism offered the individuals who are the subject of this study an ideal framework to connect, and subsequently explore, the counterpoints between philosophy and 26001-02.qxd 10/8/03 16:13 Page 48 READING BETWEEN THE LINES 49 religion. Once we analyze the philosophical underpinnings of Neoplatonic literary criticism, we will see that these tales are in fact philosophically significant. Indeed, they presuppose a certain aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology—and only make sense when understood against this background. In so doing, I draw attention to and focus on the form and style of the Neoplatonic text in general, and the initiatory tale in particular. The literary, mythic, and aesthetic presentation we encounter in this type of writing is inseparable from a specific way of doing philosophy. Within this philosophical worldview, form and style are not incidental. According to Martha Nussbaum, Certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. With respect to certain elements of human life, the terms of the novelist ’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech, or of the abstract theoretical discourse, are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy.1 It is important not to minimize the genre, formal structures, and vocabulary of philosophical treatises that are presented non-discursively. Within the context of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought, these initiatory tales are among the few philosophical texts written in such a manner . This alone should encourage us to pause in order to examine their mode of expression, which is ultimately inseparable from the search for, and ultimate presentation of, truth. In the present context, I examine certain themes and trajectories that were basic to the Neoplatonic worldview in order to show why it was no accident that Avicenna, ibn Ezra, and ibn T .ufayl choose to compose their tales in such a manner. Rather than assuming that the narrative dimension of Neoplatonism— whether ancient or medieval, Islamic or Jewish—is unphilosophic, nonanalytic , or prone to mystical opaqueness, I contend that it challenges the logocentric assumption that philosophical thinking is somehow image-free or that there even exists such a phenomenon as imageless thinking.2 Language is not simply a means of communication, but the vehicle that makes ontology possible since it is ultimately responsible for bringing phenomena to light. This property of disclosure led Heidegger to refer to language as one of the original events of unconcealment.3 I am influenced by his discussion and contend that it is language that reveals the world, in all of its fullness, to the individual. Language is intimately connected to art (especially literature) since both are...