“Seekers of Love: Ecstatic Rapture as Mystical Ideal in Jewish, Christian, and Sufi Mysticism” (original) (raw)

Love constitutes a paradigmatic emotion deployed by mystical writers across the three monotheistic traditions as a counterpoint to ratiocinative discourse transporting the reader into a direct and intimate knowledge of the divinity in contrast to indirect knowledge that logic and scholastic argumentation engender. In my paper, the concept of love will form the main emotional pivot of analysis and will engage related phenomena of jealousy, desire, rapture, physical expressions of attachment (kiss), and poetics or language through which affection becomes articulated. In Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), I will be focusing on Elijah de Vidas’s main work, Reshit Hokhmah (The Beginning ofWisdom) written in Safed in the last decades ofthe sixteenth century. De Vidas’s work belongs to the genre of ethical literature (mussar) within the Jewish esoteric corpus with a clear focus on affecting and refining human character traits in order to cultivate greater love in a person for God as well as for other human beings. The base text that Reshit Hokhmah recurrently cites and comments on is the medieval kabbalistic classic, the Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor) and as such my analysis will draw on the Zohar’s rich symbolic and poetic layers to uncover how emotive states and feelings function in the creation of meaning in Jewish mysticism. Love comprises a fundamental aspect of Christian mystical discourse and the writings of important female mystics, such as the medieval Beguine Hadewijch of Brabant, provide an especially fertile ground for fostering spirituality through embodied emotions. Speaking of the Divine through poetry is depicted by Hadewijch as not only a powerful means of awakening love in the inner person of the speaker but also diffusing this love in the hearts of members of her own community: “You must gladly speak of God. This is a criterion of Minne (Love), that the name of the Beloved is found sweet. Saint Bernard speaks of this: ‘Jesus is honey in the mouth.’ To speak of the Beloved is exceedingly sweet; for it awakens Love immeasurably.” In another poem the intersecting repetition of love and the ambiguous movement between the beloved and the lover creates a sense of union with the Divine through love: O love, were I love, and with love, love you, love, O love, for love, give that love which love may know wholly as love. The Sufi poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi will provide the third pivot for engaging the concept of love and emotions in Islamic mysticism. Rumi uses the image of a hunter and the deer to depict the attraction between the human soul and the divine beloved. The path to the deer begins with the hunter following the footprints of the animal but as he approaches closer the scent of the deer’s musk gland guides him finally to the prey. Reciprocity and mutual attraction is underlined by Rumi as a key principle in his doctrine of mystical love: “[A]s the beggar is in love with bounty and in love with the bountiful giver, so the bounty of the bountiful giver is in love with the beggar.” Through the close examination of mystical sources in Judaism, Christianity and Sufism, my paper will chart new fruitful avenues for investigating the expression, theory, transmission, and practice of emotional states in the pursuit of higher religious ideals espoused by the authors of these texts.