20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Imagination

Intagination Geoffrey H. Hartman T here is no imagination without distrust of imagination. This interdependence is especially obvious when a powerful religion attempts to subsume imaginative activity. The relation between religion and fantasy must be intimate, even complicit, since religion is orbic as well as orphic, wishing to embrace the totality of human life. When we study how a religion seeks to regulate imagination we also perceive the imaginative character of that religion itself. The Hebrew Bible has no word for imagination: Ye~er, more correctly translated as inclination or impulse, is the term used in such famous passages as Genesis 6:6 ("every imagination of the thoughts of [man's] heart is evil from his youth"). A special word is needed only when the relation between the divine and the human sphere has become uncertain. Then imaginative representation supplements , even fills in for, presence; and though the Bible is already a representation , its force consists precisely in making us receive not only stories in which God is a participant but stories that suggest that there was another epoch, when the divine Presence was direct. l That epoch of "open vision" 452 IMAGINATION is over by the time of Samuel, yet prophets continue to stand in a direct relation to the Word of God. Imagination, according to medieval Jewish philosophy, is the faculty that, when perfect, both receives and communicates this much of the divine influence. The imagination had ambivalent status, however. Maimonides, following Aristotle, said that it was limited to sense impressions and their combination . It could not raise itself to truly abstract or immaterial conceptions, that is, to philosophy; it produced, when it tried this, such fictions and phantasms as the corporeality of God. Yet without imagination there is no prophecy . The divine influence, after passing through the active intellect and the reason, was received by an imagination that the higher animals shared with man. The ambivalence surrounding imagination centered on this contrast between its low position in the hierarchy of faculties and its sublime function in prophecy. Prophecy is therefore defined by Maimonides as "the most perfect development" of the imaginative faculty, and includes vision and dream (which the rabbis called "the unripe fruit of prophecy") as its two principal modes. What was to be done with a gift that could go so wrong, yet on which prophecy depends? Maimonides in effect moots the higher function of imagination by legislating prophecy out of existence until the messianic era, yet imagination continued to trouble both philosophy and theology. It might be denounced, but could it be regulated, since it was not (by the philosophers' and theologians ' own account) distinctively human? When prophetic it was so not through the intellect that mankind shared, to a degree, with God; and when ordinary it was something common also to beasts. But for its prophetic potential, imagination would not have been an issue. To clarify the nature of imagination was to resolve a question of authority. Who speaks "for" God in an era of uncertain vision? It has been argued that the very formulation of the mishnaic code by the rabbis involved a daring transfer of authority: The Mishnah became Scripture, not just an exilic elaboration on Scripture.2 Imagination may always involve a question as to who speaks for God, or what authority such representations have. In the Pentateuch the authority of God is declaratively set down in the First and Second Commandments. The most explicit biblical statement on imagination, in fact, is the Second Commandment's prohibition against graven images (Ex. 20:4-5), formulated in the context of religions with animal and astral gods. The prohibition did not suppress all figural representation , however. Bezalel is authorized in Exodus 31:4 (cf. II Chron. 2:6) to "devise skillful works ... in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stone" for the sanctuary in the wilderness.3 Excavations have uncovered IMAGINATION 453 the frescoes of the Dura-Europos synagogue (third century C.E.), unusual for its depictions of even the human form, while the decorative arts flourished in the period of the Second Temple. Yet when such work might induce idol worship (avodah zarah) it was curtailed, and certainly 'after the establishment of Christianity the visual arts did not develop as they did in Christian circles. Jewish craftsmanship was invested in ceremonial objects. If iconicity leads to idolatry, then the encouragement of a pictorial and...