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Transforming the Maimonidean Imagination: Aesthetics in the Renaissance Thought of Judah Abravanel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2005

Aaron W. Hughes
Aaron W. Hughes
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 97 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 461 - 484
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© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Introduction

The life and work of Judah Abravanel (ca. 1460–after 1523) are at such odds with each other that one wonders how such an important and optimistic Renaissance treatise could have been produced by such a tragic figure.1

For requisite biographical material, see Menachem Dorman, “Judah Abravanel: His Life and Work” (in Hebrew), in Sichot עal ha-

Ahavah: Leone Ebreo (Giuda Abrabanel) (ed. and trans. Menachem Dorman; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1983) 13–95; other treatments include B. Zimmels, Leo Hebreus (Breslau: n.p., 1886); S. H. Margulies, “La famiglia Abravanel in Italia,” Rivista israelitica 3 (1906) 97–107, 147–54; Heinz Pflaum, Die Idee der Liebe Leone Ebreo: Zwei Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie in der Renaissance (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1926) 55–85; Carl Gebhardt, Leone Ebreo (Heidelberg: n.p., 1929); and A. R. Milburn, “Leone Ebreo and the Renaissance,” in Isaac Abravanel: Six Lectures (ed. J. B. Trend and H. Loewe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937) 133–57.

Although his life was marked by peregrinations and uncertainties,2

See, for example, the poem “Telunah עal ha-zeman” in Mivhar ha-Shirah ha-עIvrit be-

Italyah (ed. Jefim Hayyim Schirmann; Berlin: Schocken, 1934) 216–22; for an excellent English translation, see Raymond Scheindlin, “Judah Abravanel to His Son,” Judaism 41 (1992) 190–99.

all of which were due to his unwillingness to leave the fold of Judaism, Judah Abravanel's magnum opus, the Dialoghi d'amore, would become a Renaissance bestseller.3

He seems also to have written other philosophical works that, unfortunately, have not survived. For instance, there is evidence that he published a work by the name of De Coeli Harmonia (“The Harmony of the Heavens”). Moreover, the Dialoghi themselves are incomplete: missing are the introduction and what seems to have been a fourth dialogue. David Hariri has argued that parts of this fourth dialogue can be found in Giordano Bruno's Eroici Furori; see his “The Traces of the Missing Fourth Dialogue on Love by Judah Abravanel Known as Leone Ebreo” (in Hebrew), Italia 7 (1988) 93–155.

Originally published in Italian in 1535,4

There is no consensus as to the original language of the Dialoghi. Some contend it was Italian or Latin, some that it was Spanish; others argue that it was Hebrew, chosen to appeal to like-minded Jewish intellectuals. For a summary of the debate, yet one that remains agnostic in its conclusions, see Dorman, Sichot עal ha-

Ahavah, 86–95. For a good analysis of where and how Judah's work fits into the Renaissance genre of the trattati d'amore, see John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno's Eroici furori (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) 67–162.

they were subsequently translated into a number of other European vernaculars.5

For the history of this translation activity, see Menachem Dorman, “The Dialoghi and Their Translation” (in Hebrew), also in his Sichot עal ha-

Ahavah (n. 1, above), 96–182; for an interesting case study of the uses to which the Dialoghi could be put in the construction of national identity, see Doris Sommer, “At Home Abroad: El Inca Shuttles with Hebreo,” Poetics Today 17 (1996) 385–415.

As a result of these translations, Judah Abravanel became known to the West as Leone Ebreo.6

On the popularity of the generic name “Leone Ebreo” in the Renaissance and the confusion surrounding Judah Abravanel, see Dorman, Sichot עal ha-

Ahavah, 13–15.

In any examination of Judah's work, a number of seemingly intractable questions present themselves. How and why, for example, did a work of Jewish philosophy become so popular among a non-Jewish audience?7

For a good articulation of the problem of the status of this work and its place in Jewish thought, see David B. Ruderman, “Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy (ed. Albert Rabil, Jr.; 3 vols.; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) 1:408–12. Other useful studies include Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Culture in Renaissance Italy: A Methodological Survey,” Italia 9 (1990) 63–96; and Arthur M. Lesley, “The Place of the Dialoghi d'Amore in Contemporaneous Jewish Thought,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (ed. David B. Ruderman; New York: New York University Press, 1992) 170–88.

The Dialoghi seem to have resonated deeply among Christian Neoplatonists, yet they were largely ignored by contemporaneous Jews.8

The Dialoghi, however, did make subsequent inroads in Jewish thought. For a thorough discussion, see Isaiah Sonne, “Traces of the Dialoghi d'amore in Hebrew Literature” (in Hebrew), Tarbiz 3 (1934) 287–313. In the modern period, according to Arthur M. Lesley (“Proverbs, Figures, and Riddles: The Dialogues of Love as a Hebrew Humanist Composition,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History [ed. Michael Fishbane; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993] 204), “the Dialogues of Love by Yehuda Abravanel has attracted more attention from historians of Jewish philosophy than its influence on later Jewish thought deserves.” Colette Sirat (A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985] 408), for example, writes that this work “was written in a secular language and represent[s] a book of profane philosophy. This is not a work of Jewish philosophy, but a book of philosophy written by a Jew.” A similar view is held by Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: A History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (trans. David W. Silverman; New York: Schocken, 1973) 295.

This ambiguity, in turn, suggests another set of questions: Did Judah Abravanel frame his treatise in ways that would have been foreign to other Jews? Do the Dialoghi, which stress the love of God, conflict with the medieval Jewish philosophical enterprise that instead emphasized the knowledge of God? Why did one of the first sustained attempts to delineate an aesthetics of Judaism apparently fall on deaf ears?

There are two possible ways to answer these questions: by considering the language in which the Dialoghi were composed, and by considering their philosophical content. Although I have no intention of wading into the philological evidence, so expertly surveyed by Dorman in the introduction to his Hebrew edition, many Jewish authors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increasingly resorted to Romance vernaculars in order to attract a Jewish audience (including conversos and ex-conversos) that no longer understood Hebrew. In sixteenth-century Italy, larger trends in rhetoric and the use of language increasingly led to the creation of the ideal of a pure Italian language. In this regard, Judah was an important transitional thinker in the encounter between Judaism and the Italian Renaissance. Whereas his father, Don Isaac, could still adapt humanistic themes to his Hebrew writings, which were primarily in conversation with medieval thought,9

For general background, see Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds: The Life and Thought of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) 85–90. For a more specific discussion of Don Isaac Abravanel, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Seymour Feldman, Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel, Defender of the Faith (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).

it was increasingly the case in Judah's generation the only way to engage in a full-scale examination of the universal tendencies associated with humanism was to write in the vernacular. As a result, Judah's Dialoghi, if they were in fact originally composed in Italian, would have found without too much difficulty a ready non-Jewish audience.

Philosophically, Judah's aesthetics and his theory of the imagination represent an important shift from the standard medieval Jewish philosophical paradigm. That paradigm, perhaps best articulated in the work of Maimonides (d. 1204), tended to reduce aesthetics to the realm of consensus and imagination to that of untruth. Judah Abravanel, in contradistinction, provides an early and overwhelmingly positive assessment of both aesthetics and the imagination.10

Even though Judah departed from Maimonides when it came to the imagination and aesthetics, his overall program carried on the Maimonidean tradition. For instance, Judah's emphasis on the love of God and its relationship to knowledge of the sciences is, for all intents and purposes, a continuation of Maimonides' thought.

For him, beauty, that which inspires love and desire, connects all levels of the universe in an interlocking and organic relationship, which Judah refers to as the “universal circle” (il circulo di tutto). The result is that everything, both sensual and intelligible, has the potential to image and reflect God's beauty. The imagination is crucial here because it is the faculty responsible for decoding such images and reflections by translating the incorporeal into the corporeal and vice versa.

Since Judah stressed the importance of the imagination and aesthetics, the initial Jewish response to the Dialoghi seems to have been primarily negative, undoubtedly contributing to the treatise's general neglect among Jews. Some of the earliest criticisms, especially those of Saul ha-Kohen Ashkenazi, fault Judah for rationalizing kabbalistic principles. Ashkenazi, in a letter to Don Isaac Abravanel, particularly criticizes Judah for violating the Maimonidean principle of keeping philosophical matters from the masses, and for spending too much time on linguistic matters, such as riddles and eloquence.11

Lesley, “The Place of the Dialoghi d'amore in Contemporaneous Jewish Thought,” 184–85. Despite the initial criticism, however, subsequent generations stressed the interrelationship between Platonism and Kabbalah, on the one hand, and philosophy and aesthetics on the other. Notable exponents of this interrelationship include Judah Moscato and Azariah de Rossi.

Much of this antagonism reflects the broader context of the Maimonidean controversies,12

The classic study of these controversies remains Daniel J. Silver, Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy 1180–1240 (Leiden: Brill, 1965); a convenient selection of primary sources may be found in After Maimonides: An Anthology of Writings by His Critics, Defenders, and Commentators (in Hebrew) (ed. A.S. Halkin; Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 1979); more recently, see the discussion in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003) ch. 6.

in which philosophers sought to make philosophy known to a broader Jewish public often by means of dramatic dialogues or philosophical novels. Those opposed to the Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm of philosophy often blamed such treatises for weakening the faith of Jews by diminishing their commitment to the halakhah and thus making them more susceptible to conversion. Moreover, those committed to the philosophical enterprise criticized such treatises for revealing the secrets of philosophy to those who were intellectually incapable of receiving them. Criticism on both of these fronts only intensified in the aftermath of the traumatic expulsion of 1492.13

As Moshe Idel cautions, however, the tragedy of the Spanish exiles did not deeply affect the dynamics of Jewish culture, especially in Italy. See his “Religion, Thought, and Attitudes: The Impact of the Expulsion on the Jews,” in Spain and the Jews: The Sephardic Experience, 1492 and After (ed. Elie Kedourie; London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) 123–39; and idem, “Encounters Between Spanish and Italian Kabbalists in the Generation of the Expulsion,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World: 1391–1648 (ed. Benjamin R. Gampel; New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 189–222. In support of Idel's claim, it should be remembered that Isaac Abravanel, Judah's father, was extremely knowledgeable when it came to contemporaneous trends in humanistic thought.

It is also important to note that Maimonides came to occupy a particularly ambiguous position in traditional Italian-Jewish thought: philosophers read him philosophically, whereas kabbalists tended to read him mystically. So when I say that Judah “transforms” the Maimonidean imagination, I refer particularly to the “Aristotelian-Maimonidean” imagination of the philosophers.

Although in many ways the thought of Judah Abravanel represents a continuation of medieval Jewish philosophy, a number of features mark his break with that tradition. First, the medieval philosophical tradition tended to place rhetoric among the lower forms of logic, such as those associated with Aristotle's Rhetoric or Poetics, which the medieval tradition regarded as part of Aristotle's Organon14

e.g., Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990) 1–51.

Judah, however, elevates rhetoric to a position among the higher sciences, such as cosmology and epistemology. The beautiful and the pleasing speech of the Torah is no longer a concession that Moses had to make for the masses, it is now part and parcel of the divine fabric. The goal of the philosopher/aesthete/artist is to imitate this to the best of his ability. Second, following the lead of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Judah presents in the Dialoghi one of the first full-blown attempts to catalogue parallels between pagan myth and the biblical tradition, arguing that the former is ultimately a corruption of the latter. Third, the Dialoghi, in stressing the interlocking relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, border on the pantheistic or panentheistic,15

Hubert Dethier, “Love and Intellect in Leone Ebreo: The Joys and Pains of Human Passion,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought (ed. Lenn E. Goodman; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) 353–86.

thereby resonating with contemporaneous Christian treatments of the incarnation in literary fiction.16

Yet this does not adequately account for (1) the fact that neither pantheism nor panentheism were foreign to Judaism, especially kabbalah; and (2) why the Dialoghi became a (non-Jewish) Renaissance bestseller. My assumption for (1) at this stage of research is that the pantheism or panentheism, in combination with the other factors listed in this paragraph, would have originally met with a certain degree of hostility among contemporaneous Jewish philosophers. The Dialoghi, thus, represent an important moment in the changing attitudes towards Jewish identity in the Renaissance. As for (2), Christian audiences were well used to the genre of the Dialoghi, the trattati d'amore, in both the vernacular and in Latin (e.g., Ficino's commentary to Plato's Symposium). For contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous ideas of the incarnation in Christian letters and philosophy, see Guy P. Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante's Incarnational Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) 67–125; Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 29–51; and Alexandre Leupin, Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages (trans. David Laatsch; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 1–24.

What follows, then, is an attempt to show that Judah Abravanel, in stressing the importance of imagination and aesthetics, developed an aesthetics of Judaism that was, in many ways, a radical departure from the mainstream Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm.17

This, however, was certainly not foreign to Judaism. See, inter alia, the important studies of Daniel Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic,” in Ocular Desire (ed. Aharon R. E. Agus and Jan Assmann; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994) 30–48; and Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 13–51.

Judah was a true Renaissance artist who not only attempted to show the ontological correspondence between the celestial and corporeal worlds, but who, in the very composition of his text, put this into praxis by creating a beautiful mimetic representation of the divine.

The Dialogue in Medieval Jewish and Renaissance Philosophy

Before turning to specifics of Judah's narrative, it is important to consider the genre in which he decided to give expression to his philosophical views. Even the form in which Judah offers his argument, I contend, represents a significant departure from the standard exposition employed by medieval Jewish Aristotelians. There thus exists an intimate connection between genre and argument in the Dialoghi. The dialogue is certainly not foreign to Jewish thought. It was a popular genre in the apocalyptic literature of Late Antiquity; moreover, dialectic and dialogue are central to rabbinic texts. In terms of Jewish philosophy, some of the most important non-Aristotelian texts were written as dialogues (e.g., Ibn Gabirol's Meqor Hayyim, Halevi's Kuzari), not to mention such lesser-known works, such as Abraham ibn Ezra's Hay ben Meqitz,18

For an English translation of this work, consult Aaron W. Hughes, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) 189–207.

Isaac Pulcher's עEzer ha-Daעat,19

Isaac Pulcher, עEzer ha-Daעat (ed. Jacob Levinger; Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1984).

and Shem Tov Falquerra's Sefer ha-Mevaqqesh.20

Shem Tov ben Joseph Falaquera, Sefer ha-Mevaqqesh (Amsterdam, 1772). Part one has been translated into English as Sefer Ha-Mebaqqesh: Falaquera's Book of the Seeker (trans. M. Herschel Levine; New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976).

Abravanel certainly knew well the work of Ibn Gabirol and cites him by name in the Dialoghi.21

See, e.g., Dialoghi III, 246 (290).

In addition, the works of Ibn Ezra and Halevi enjoyed new life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which can be attested to by the number of supercommentaries written on Ibn Ezra's biblical commentary,22

Notable commentators from the fourteenth century include Samuel ibn Zarza, Shlomo Franco, and Samuel ibn Motot; important fifteenth-century supercommentators include Profiat Duran and Asher Crescas. For secondary literature, see Georges Vajda, “Recherches sur la synthèse philosophico-kabbalistique de Samuel ibn Motot,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 27 (1960) 29–63; see also Irene Lancaster, Deconstructing the Bible: Abraham ibn Ezra's Introduction to the Torah (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) 22–25.

and the various commentaries on Halevi's Kuzari.23

E.g., Judah Moscato (1530–ca. 1593), Kol Yehuda (Warsaw: n.p., 1880). For requisite secondary literature, see I. Bettan, Studies in Jewish Preaching (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1939) 192–225.

The dialogue seems to have provided a convenient genre to speculating about ideas in ways that differed from the standard Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm. In the dialogue, according to Lesley, “radically incompatible kinds of discourse can be integrated into a single text, to make significant statements about the relations of the individual, God, and the world.”24

Lesley, “Proverbs, Figures, and Riddles,” 204–5. See also the comments in Sergius Kodera, Filone und Sofia in Leone Ebreos Dialoghi d'amore: Platonische Liebesphilosophie der Renaissance und Judentum (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995) 16–22.

This, in turn, has philosophical consequences. For instance, the genre of the dialogue intimates that the goal of the text resides between the comments of the different characters, and it is up to the reader to arrive at a meta-textual meaning by working through that which is communicated textually in the narrative. One must, in other words, become an active participant in the text.25

See Hughes, Texture of the Divine, 48–81.

The philosophical dialogue was, I contend, a form well suited to the expression of a distinctive aesthetics and theory of the imagination.

Aesthetics was intimately connected to the “rhetorical culture” of the Renaissance.26

Here I follow the lead of Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (ed. Charles B. Schmitt, et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 715–45. A useful discussion can also be found in Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (trans. J. J. S. Peake; New York: Harper and Row, 1968). For an excellent discussion of rhetoric in the Jewish context, see Alexander Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica as Reflected in Some Jewish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 63–84.

Renaissance humanists envisaged rhetoric as the vehicle for “providing a comprehensive system both for creating and for evaluating works of literature, by which they meant not just poetry, drama and fiction, but also letters, history and philosophical treatises.”27

Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” 715.

Language was so important to Renaissance humanism because proper linguistic expression was the ideal to which all gentlemen aspired. Rhetoric was at the center of humanist education, which put a premium on elegant expression. Within this context, eloquence was not regarded as the prolegomenon to knowledge, but reflected its telos. The good orator was, thus, someone who was regarded as proficient in all branches of human knowledge. This is the opposite of the medieval period, where rhetoric occupied a very low position on the logical hierarchy. In the Renaissance, however, rhetoric enabled the individual to display his wisdom while persuading others of his position. The perfect orator became synonymous with the perfect man.28

Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica as Reflected in Some Jewish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,” 79. A key figure in the development of the rhetorical sciences among Renaissance Italian Jewry is Judah Messer Leon. For a critical edition of Messer Leon's treatise on rhetoric, see The Book of the Honeycomb's Flow (Sefer Nopheth Suphim) (ed. and trans. Isaac Rabinowitz; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), as well as the discussion by Abraham Melamed, “Rhetoric and Philosophy in Nofet Sufim by R. Judah Messer Leon” (in Hebrew), Italia 1(1978) 7–39.

Many of these themes are also dealt with by the Jewish teacher of Pico della Mirandola, Yohanan Alemanno (1435–1503). Like Judah's Dialoghi, Alemanno's dialogue Hay ha-עolamim,29

Yohanan Alemanno, Hay ha-עolamim (L'immortale): Parte 1, la retorica (ed. Fabrizio Lelli; Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1995).

composed in late-fifteenth-century Florence, was in conversation with the neoplatonic thought of Ficino and Pico. Like Judah, Alemanno was also concerned with the relationship between imagination and intellect, and the role of poetics and rhetoric as disciplines necessary for the attainment of human felicity.

On a philosophical level, this meant that allegory and other types of figurative language were not barriers to philosophical understanding. On the contrary, such language imitated the very fabric of the divine. Without beautiful and poetic language, one was unable to encounter the beautiful and, by extension, God. The text par excellence for this, at least according to the Jewish thinkers, was the Torah. Many of the Renaissance humanists, especially Ficino and Pico, argued that the central vehicles for correct philosophical expression were myth and allegory. Both of these thinkers stressed what Kristeller calls a “poetic theology,” which claimed that philosophical and religious thought could be found in ancient poetry and mythology if read properly.30

For an excellent study of this topic, see Marco Ariani, Imago Fabulosa: Mito e Allegoria nei “Dialoghi d'Amore” di Leone Ebreo (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1984). See also Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) 121–32.

Importantly, the goal of the philosopher was not simply to unpack a myth by translating it into analytical prose, but to demonstrate an understanding of it by composing other myths. In other words, the humanist composed myths about myths and allegories of other allegories. A beautiful narrative tried to embed within itself the beauty to be found in the intelligible world.31

Important in this context is Yohanan Alemanno's Hesheq Shlomoh (“The Desire of Solomon”). In this work, a philosophical and kabbalistic commentary on the Song of Songs, Alemanno reads the biblical narrative in the light of neoplatonic theories of love; see George Vajda, L'Amour de Dieu dans la théologie juive du Moyen Age (Paris: Librarie Philosophique, 1957) 280–85.

In the Renaissance, therefore, the dialogue provided an important medium for engaging in philosophical speculation. Many of the humanist thinkers, using Plato's Symposium as their guide and model, composed dialogues on love and beauty, both celestial and terrestrial.32

Important examples include Il Libro del Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) and Asolani by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). For requisite secondary literature, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Renaissance Platonism,” in his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper, 1961), esp. 60–65; Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love, 67–162; Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 1–9; and Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, 1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985) 1–8.

Particularly popular was the trattato d'amore (“treatise on love”) that was inaugurated as a genre by Ficino's commentary on the Symposium.33

For an English translation, see Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (trans. Sears Jayne; Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985).

This genre would subsequently become popular in the sixteenth century, when it frequently took the form of a dialogue and was often written in the vernacular as opposed to Latin.34

Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love, 69.

Not all of the treatises associated with this genre were philosophical; several were popular treatises that reflected the courtly ideal of love. Many of those who wrote philosophically inspired treatises tended to stress the Platonic notion of love, thereby denigrating its sensual and physical aspects. Gradually the genre became increasingly stereotyped, concerned less with philosophical ideas and more with their expression in a highly stylized and polished prose. Judah Abravanel, however, was responsible for giving this genre one of its most sustained and important examples. Unlike the work of many who came either before or after him, his Dialoghi comprise a probing philosophical treatise, providing a sustained ontological, psychological, and metaphysical discussion of love as a cosmic principle.

Renaissance Conceptions of Imagination and Aesthetics

The idea of beauty as an incorporeal and metaphysical principle was a very common one among Renaissance humanists, such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Both of these thinkers relied on Plotinus who regarded beauty as a cosmic principle that participated in the celestial world.35

On the importance of Plotinus in the thought of Ficino, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (trans. Virginia Conant; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964) 13–29.

For Ficino, physical beauty participates in a celestial prototype and, in the process, it is the former that leads to the contemplation of the latter.36

Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium, 143–44.

Everything in the universe desires to rise up the organic hierarchy. The desire to return to one's source is called love, and what encourages each being to make the return is the beauty in that which is above it.37

E.g., ibid., 51–52.

Imagination is the faculty that allows this to occur. Like Judah Abravanel, as we shall see, Ficino argued that love and enjoyment of beauty can occur only through the higher faculties of the soul (i.e., seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking). The lower senses have no part in the enjoyment of beauty.38

Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, 265.

For Ficino, beauty is not simply part of the corporeal world, it is a cosmic principle that is diffused throughout the entire universe. All beautiful objects in the physical world partake of the idea of beauty, which he subsequently identifies with God. The beauty of physical objects, thus, functions as a path by which the human soul loves and ascends to God, the true end of the soul.

But if Judah Abravanel drank from the stream of Renaissance humanism, he was equally at home in the world of the Kabbalah, where beauty was also regarded as a universal principle pervading the entire cosmos. Increasingly in the fifteenth century, Jewish thinkers began to stress the limitations of human reason and to argue that scientific knowledge was incapable of providing the key that would unlock the secrets of the universe. The knowledge of supra-rational truths became associated with revelation and, increasingly, Jewish thinkers regarded the creative hermeneutics of the Kabbalah as the means by which to apprehend such truths. Indeed, the Italian Kabbalah instituted the desire to interpret certain kabbalistic principles in the light of contemporaneous philosophical categories, something that non-Italian kabbalists were frequently critical of.39

On the dissemination of kabbalistic works in Italy, see Moshe Idel, “Major Currents in Italian Kabbalah between 1560 and 1660,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 345–68; idem, “Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the Kabbalah in the Sixteenth Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983)186–242; idem, “Kabbalah and Ancient Philosophy in R. Isaac and Judah Abravanel,” in The Philosophy of Judah Abravanel: Four Lectures, 73–112; and Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy (trans. J. Chipman; Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1990), esp. 280–98.

Within this context, Beauty, hypostatized as tiferet, in the kabbalistic system of divine emanations, the sefirot, becomes an essential component within the divine pleroma. Tiferet, the sixth of the ten sefirot, occupied the center or heart of the cosmos that emanated directly from God. In Alemmano, tiferet is an important locus on the cosmographical map that leads to the mystical union (devequt) that the adept has with God. According to his Song of Solomon's Ascents (Shir ha-maעalot li-Shlomo), tiferet represents the seventh, and highest, level of the spiritual world, and is associated with

the four-letter, ineffable name of God, with which Moses was joined during the forty years in the desert, and to which he attached those among the Israelites who were prepared for such attachment.40

For Hebrew text and English translation, see Arthur M. Lesley, “The Song of Solomon's Ascents by Yohanan Alemanno: Love and Human Perfection according to a Jewish Colleague of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1976) 218.

The goal of human life for Alemanno, as for the kabbalists generally, was the mystical union with the Godhead. Following his spiritual teacher, Abraham Abulafia, Alemanno equated this unio mystica with prophecy, a central component of which was the imaginative faculty. In his Song of Solomon's Ascents, he argues that humans receive divine guidance in at least seven ways. The sixth type of divine guidance, second only to that of the intellect, is that of the imagination. It occurs when the imagination makes

veracious images taken from subtle, spiritual forms and substances. It then imagines them veraciously, as when a man imitates a living thing upon a wall, or draws it upon a flat surface so that it appears to protrude…. Such imitation [i.e., that of the prophets] resembles that of artists who use the craft of perspective, or the craft of making a symbol resemble the thing it symbolizes, or the activity of the imagination in producing veracious dreams.41

Quoted in Lesley, “The Song of Solomon's Ascents,” 210.

The imagination is thus an artistic faculty. It is what is responsible for true images in much the same way as the artist mimetically produces divine reality. This is a far cry from the Platonic mistrust of the artist as a fashioner of untruth.42

Alemanno, however, does agree with Plato that desire and “divine madness” were important constituents of the prophetic experience; see Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Pre-Modern Judaism, 420.

It is similar, rather, to the thought of Pico, where we witness the shift from the Platonic ideas as existing in the intelligible world to conceptions that are internal to the human mind.43

Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, 6.

The artist, or, the artist's imagination, becomes the vessel through which God speaks.44

See, e.g., Ficino, Theologica Platonica (2 vols.; Paris: Belles Lettres,” 1964–1970) 2:203.

Alemanno subsequently claims that the imagination, because it is able to accurately conceive of the ideas, is able to survive the death of the body.45

Quoted in Lesley, “The Song of Solomon's Ascents,” 211.

This notion of beauty and imagination would find practical expression in the genre of allegory. The philosopher now takes on the role of an artist who creates a beautiful work of art that embodies the beauty engendered in the cosmos. It is in the genre of the trattati d'amore, according to Perry, that we encounter a “constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical speculation.”46

Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 25.

These features all come together in Judah's Dialoghi d'amore, considered to be one of the most important representatives of this genre.

Imagination and Aesthetics in the Dialoghi d'amore

Judah Abravanel develops a novel synergy between aesthetics and imagination that in turn informs his speculations on cosmology, ontology, and psychology. Central to all of these “disciplines” is the concept of beauty as a cosmic principle. In the third dialogue, for instance, Judah presents two distinct accounts of creation, one based on Islamicate neoplatonism and the other on the Plotinian triad. First, citing Ghazali, Avicenna and Maimonides, he argues that God in his complete simplicity and “by the love of His infinite beauty produces out of Himself alone, the first intelligence and mover of the first heaven.”47

Dialoghi III, 282 (333).

The first intelligence, in turn, contemplates the beauty of its cause, thereby producing the second intellect, and its own beauty, thereby producing the first heavenly sphere. This theory of emanation, based on the love of beauty,48

Pines argues that the hidden source of Judah's theory is Avicenna's Risāla fī al-עishq. See his “Medieval Doctrines in Renaissance Garb?: Some Jewish and Arabic Sources of Leone Ebreo's Doctrines,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (n. 39, above), esp. 380–89. Although he makes a strong case, the fact of the matter (as Pines himself admits) is that there exists no firm proof that Judah either knew Arabic or that the Risāla fī al-עishq was ever translated into Latin or Hebrew. Another important and more direct source for Judah, however, could have been Hasdai Crescas's

Or ha-shem.

pervades the entire universe (both supra- and sublunar). The Active Intellect, the lowest of the ten heavenly intellects and associated with the sphere of the moon, becomes the intellect of the corporeal world. By contemplating its own beauty it produces the forms found in this world, and in contemplating the beauty of its cause, it produces human intellects. Following this account of creation, Judah offers a Plotinian account based on a celestial triad.49

Dialoghi III, 349 (416). Seymour Feldman argues, correctly in my opinion, that Judah “has thus reinterpreted both the Timaeus and the Symposium in terms of the Enneads.” See his “1492: A House Divided,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World: 1391–1648 (n. 13, above), esp. 50–52.

He now distinguishes between three types of beauty that pervade the cosmos. The first is God qua the Source of beauty (l'attore di bellezza), the second is beauty itself (bellezza, i.e., intelligible beauty), and the third is the physical universe produced by this idea in the intellect of God (il participante di bellezza).50

Dialoghi III, 349 (416–17). See the comments in Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 23.

Judah subsequently uses the latter model to interpret the first creation account in Genesis, where the physical world is described as the offspring between God, the male principle, and intelligible beauty, now personified as a female.51

Dialoghi III, 355–57 (424–25). See Feldman, “1492: A House Divided,” 52–53.

Corporeal beauty is thus the first offspring of God's love for his female consort, Wisdom. Since this physical world is intimately connected to God, it cannot be negated. Rather, this world becomes necessary—and this is a leitmotif that runs throughout the work—so that humans can make physical beauty “spiritual in our intellect.”52

E.g., Dialoghi III, 329–30 (393): “Sono adunque le bellezze corporee nel nostro intelletto spirituale, e come tali conoscono da lui.”

The faculty that invests the spiritual with, or divests it of, corporeal extension is the imagination. Judah frequently describes this faculty as “the eyes of our soul” (occhi de l'anima nostra razionale),53

Here Abravanel employs terminology similar to that of his medieval precursors, many of whom also refer to the imagination as the “eye of the heart” (e.g., עeyn ha-lev). See Aaron W. Hughes, “Three Worlds of ibn Ezra's Hay ben Meqitz,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11 (2002), esp. 14–23; Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines, esp. 160–87.

because it is able to visualize the beauty that exists in the spiritual world (le bellezze spirituali).54

Dialoghi III, 326 (389).

The imagination becomes the faculty responsible not only for giving the incorporeal three-dimensional extension, but also for recognizing the formal and intelligible beauty that is embedded in material objects.

Crucial here is the notion of mimesis, which, for Judah, exists on every level of the universe. Not only are material objects mimetic representations of celestial beauty; even our rational soul (l'anima nostra razionale) becomes the “image of the world soul” (per essere immagine de l'anima del mondo),55

Ibid.

in which there exists the imprint of all the forms, including that of beauty. The form of beauty, in particular, is realized when the imagination, as the eye of the soul, intuits this form by abstracting it from matter. Once this occurs, the intellect takes over and is subsequently able to apprehend “the highest beauty of the first intellect and the divine ideas” (la somma bellezza del primo intelletto e idee divine).56

Ibid. Compare Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love, 87–91.

Significantly, Judah argues that the individual's encounter with celestial beauty occurs “indirectly through riddles (enigmate).”57

Dialoghi III, 274 (324).

Just as our soul is an image (similimente immagine) of the world soul, so too are corporeal beautiful objects (bellezze corporee) which are apprehended by sight and hearing simulacra and images (simulacri e immagini) of intellectual beauty.58

Ibid., 326 (389).

In modern parlance, philosophy becomes synonymous with hermeneutics, the ability to “decode” the perceived relationship between natural and supernatural realities. Primary to this endeavor is the imagination, which occupies the interface between external and internal processes. Judah's related analysis of rhetoric and oratory, which he puts into practice in the very fabric of his Dialoghi, mirrors this discussion. Both of these Renaissance disciplines provide spiritual form to words, which are synonymous with matter.59

See, e.g., Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (n. 26, above), esp. 715–24; for the Jewish context, see Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica as Reflected in Some Jewish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 63–84.

Since Judah argues that language is ultimately unable to express spiritual matters adequately,60

Dialoghi I, 43 (46).

writing must imitate cosmology. In other words, writing itself becomes an act of creation in which an image fashioned out of beautiful language must not only be beautiful in and of itself (unlike Maimonides), but must also point beyond itself to intelligible beauty.

According to Judah's psychology, the five external senses may be divided into those that are primarily material (materiali): touch (tatto), taste (gusto), and smell (odorato); and those that are increasingly spiritual (spirituali): hearing (per l'audito) and sight (per l'occhi).61

Dialoghi III, 316 (376).

It seems that only the latter are able to penetrate behind the purely physical so as to abstract the spiritual from the corporeal. Hearing, intimately connected to the Renaissance ideal of rhetoric, consists of the ability to discern “fine speeches, excellent reasoning, beautiful verses, sweet music, and beautiful and harmonious melodies.”62

Ibid.

Sight, ranked just above the faculty of hearing, owing to the primacy that Judah puts on vision, deals with “beautiful colors, regular patterns, and light in all its varied splendor.”63

Ibid.

The senses, thus, function hierarchically as a prolegomenon to any form of higher knowledge, with the imagination forming the threshold (mezzo) between the senses and the intellect.

Central to the unfolding argument in the Dialoghi is the concept of ocular power (forza oculare). In the first dialogue, Judah describes two modes of apprehending spiritual matters. The first is through the faculty of sight and the second through the intellect.64

Ibid., 38 (41).

For the eye, like the intellect, is illumined by means of light, thereby establishing a relationship between the eye, the object seen, and the space that separates them.65

Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 17. For medieval precursors, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), esp. ch. 1. For other contemporaneous theories, see Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

Just as the sun supplies light to the eye, the divine intellect illumines the human intellect during the act of intellection. It is light, then, that enables us to “comprehend all the beautiful shining objects of the corporeal world.”66

Dialoghi III, 327 (389): “sua luce … illumina i nostri occhi e li fa comprendere tutte le lucide bellezze corporee.”

Sight becomes the model by which we engage the universe: it is what makes knowledge possible, since it is only by viewing tangible particulars that we acquire knowledge of intelligibles. Moreover, the internal faculty that is responsible for giving bodily extension to the incorporeal is the imagination, frequently described by the medieval Islamicate philosophical tradition, to which Judah is an heir, as the “inner eye” (al-עayn al-batiniyya), although Judah himself does not seem to use an Italian translation of this phrase.

Judah does, however, distinguish between three types of vision. The highest type is that of God's visual apprehension of himself; next is that associated with the angelic world, which sees God directly, though not on equal terms; finally, there is human vision, which is the weakest of the three types and can only visualize the divine indirectly.67

Dialoghi III, 277 (328).

The best that most humans can do in this world is to obtain knowledge of incorporeal essences through corporeal particulars. Judah does admit, though, that some special individuals are able to unite with the angelic world, which he describes as the Agent Intellect (intelleto agente). When such unification (copulare) occurs, the individual “sees and desires divine beauty as in a crystal or a clear mirror, but not directly” (vede e desia la bellezza divine come in uno mezzo cristallino, o sia chiaro specchio, ma non in se stessa immediate).68

Ibid., 275 (325). Judah, unlike Maimonides, hints that this is not a completely natural act; rather, it occurs “through the grace of God” (per grazia di Dio). Significantly, Alemanno argues that the grace of God is also necessary for a human to attain the level of prophecy. See Fabrizio Lelli, “Yohanan Alemanno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la cultura ebraica italiano del XV secolo,” in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494–1994) (ed. G. C. Garfagnini; Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1997) 303–25.

Judah refers to this act as prophecy. Like Maimonides, Judah claims that Moses did not prophesy through the imagination, but only through the intellect, which he nevertheless describes in highly visual terms as beholding “the most beautiful figure of God” (la bellissima figura di Dio).69

Dialoghi III, 276 (326).

Just as corporeal beauty is an image (simulacro) of celestial beauty, so is a human being an image (simulacro) of the universe. In our very existence, therefore, we witness the intersection of the spiritual and the material. In order to apprehend beauty in increasingly elevated stages of spirituality, one must rely on those faculties of the soul that “are most exalted above the body” (elevate dal corpo).70

Ibid., 317 (376).

These spiritual faculties are, in ascending order, imagination (immaginazione), understanding (ragione intelletiva), and intellect (sapienzia umana). The imagination is the faculty that “arranges, distinguishes and ponders the things of the senses, and discerns in many other sources grace and beauty, moving the soul to love and delight.”71

Ibid., 227 (266): “L'immaginazione e fantasia, che compone discerne e pensa le cosa de' sensi, conosce molti altri offizi e casi particulari graziosi e belli, che muoveno l'anima a dilettazione amorosa.”

Thus, the imaginative faculty occupies a position between (mezzo) the external senses and the internal faculties. In occupying the interface between the corporeal and the spiritual, the material and the intelligible, it is able to move between them, translating them into one another.

Although the epitome of Judah's system is the intellect, it is primarily a faculty that deals with forms abstracted from matter. It is the intellect that is “absorbed in the science of the Divine and of things abstracted from matter, rejoicing in and becoming enamored of the highest grace and beauty which is in the creator and artificer of all things, so that it attains its ultimate happiness.”

72

Dialoghi III, 228 (267).

The intellect must ultimately rely on the imagination, however, to supply it with the forms that the imagination has abstracted from matter. Within this context, Judah frequently employs a well-known and well-used metaphor in his discussion of the imaginative faculty, that of the mirror (specchio).73

The application of the metaphor of the mirror to prophecy appears in Jewish sources as early as the rabbinic tradition in, e.g., Lev. Rabba 20, a passage that would subsequently be interpreted by medieval Jewish authors.

In the medieval Islamicate philosophical tradition, following Plotinus, the mirror (Arabic mir

ā), is frequently used as an image for the imaginative faculty.

74

Compare Plotinus, Enneads 1.4.10. For requisite secondary literature, see Annick Charles, “L'imagination, miroir de l'âme selon Proclus,” in Le néoplatonisme (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971) 241–51; and Manfred Ullmann, Das Motiv des Spiegels in der arabischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Göttingen: Vandenhoek Ruprecht, 1992), esp. 62–120.

Just as the mirror reflects what is placed in front of it, the soul, in a state of perfection, reflects the higher principles of the universe. Implicit in this metaphor of the mirror is an ocular or visual model for acquiring knowledge. This knowledge is not something that occurs simply on the intellectual level, but requires vision and images, both of which, in the Western philosophical tradition, are associated with the imaginative faculty.75

See Hughes, Texture of the Divine, ch. 3.

Early on in the Dialoghi, Philo asks Sophia, “Do you not see how the form of man is impressed on and received by a mirror, not as a complete human being, but within the limits of the mirror's powers and capabilities, which reflect the figure only and not the essence?”76

Dialoghi I, 33 (35): “Non vedi tu che s'imprime e comprende la forma de l'uomo nel specchio, non secondo il perfetto essere umano, ma secondo la capacitá e forza de la perfezione del specchio? il quale è solamente figurativo e non essenziale.”

Later, in dialogue three, he argues that it is through our own “intellectual mirror” that we apprehend the divine:

It is enough for our intellectual mirror (specchio intellettuale) to receive and image (figurare) the infinite divine essence (l'immensa essenzia divina) according to the capacity of its intellectual nature; though there is a measureless gulf fixed between them, so far does its nature fall short of that of the object of its understanding.77

Ibid., 254 (300).

The imagination, by corporealizing the spiritual and spiritualizing the corporeal, enables individuals to gain knowledge of the divine world. Unlike Maimonides and other medieval Aristotelians who equated the natural world with impermanence and evil, Judah argues that this world is the natural receptacle of heavenly powers: “Hence earth is the proper and regular consort of heaven, whereof the other elements are but paramours. For it is upon the earth that heaven begets all or the greater part of its progeny.”78

Dialoghi II, 73 (81–82): “Sí che questa è la propria e ordinaria moglie de l corpo celeste; e gli altri elementi son sue concubine. Per ciò che in lei genera il cielo tutta o ver la maggior parte dela sua generazione.”

In an interesting passage, Judah, like Maimonides before him, compares matter to a harlot.79

See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, introduction and 3.8; in the translation of Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), see 13–14 and 430–36, respectively. On the somewhat ambiguous approach of Maimonides to matter, see Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Limits of Reason (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 90–102.

Yet, unlike Maimonides, he reaches a radically different conclusion. For Judah, “it is this adulterous love that beautifies the lower world with such wondrous variety of the fair-formed things.”80

Dialoghi II, 76 (84–85): “Pur con quest'adultero amore s'adorna il mondo inferiore di tanta e cose cosi bellamente formate.”

In keeping with Judah's claim that “the lower can be found in the higher,”81

Ibid., 68 (75). I therefore disagree with Herbert Davidson (“Medieval Jewish Philosophy in the Sixteenth Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century [n. 39, above], 127), who claims that “Leone happens to be interpolating a philosophic discussion into a dialogue on love and consequently feels called upon to pay obeisance to the concepts of love and beauty.”

this world becomes one gigantic mirror that reflects spiritual beauty, and in which one can grasp divine intelligibles.82

On this point, see the important discussion by Abraham Melamed, “The Transformation of the Love-of-the-Noble Motif in Albo, Alemanno, Judah Abravanel, and Moscato” (in Hebrew), in The Philosophy of Leone Ebreo: Four Lectures (ed. Menachem Dorman and Ze

ev Levy; Haifa: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985) 62–66.

Just as Philo is enthralled by Sophia's beauty, the imagination, upon contemplating physical objects that are beautiful, apprehends the divine:

God has implanted His image and likeness (l'immagine e similitudine) in His creatures through the finite beauty (bellezza finita) imparted to them from His surpassing beauty (l'immenso bello). And the image of the infinite must be finite, otherwise it would not be a copy, but that of which it is the image. The infinite beauty of the Creator is depicted and reflected (depinge e immagine) in finite created beauty like a beautiful face in a mirror (come una bella figura in uno specchio); and although the image is not commensurate with its divine pattern, nonetheless it will be its copy, portrait, and true likeness (similacro similitudine e immagine).83

Dialoghi III, 269 (318).

In the third dialogue, Abravanel further divides the human into a tripartite structure consisting of the body (il corpo), the soul (l'anima), and the intellect (l'intelletto).84

This tripartite structure was also extensively used by Pico in his Heptaplus, where the intermediate world, that of the angels, corresponds to the domain of the human imagination. According to Wirszubski (Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, appendix 17), an important source for Pico was probably Bachya ben Asher's Commentary on the Pentateuch.

The soul, which I here interpret as the imaginative faculty because of the properties assigned to it, is once again the intermediary (mezzo) between the body and the intellect.85

Dialoghi III, 331 (394).

Although he does not come right out and define the function of the soul in any detail, he does claim that it is indispensable to the proper working of the body and the intellect. Moreover, it is this faculty that is in constant danger of being corrupted by unhealthy corporeal desire and, most importantly for the present discussion, it is ultimately responsible for translating the corporeal into the incorporeal and vice versa. This soul, in turn,

has two faces, like those of the moon turned towards the sun and the earth respectively, the one being turned towards the intellect above it, and the other toward the body below. The first face looking towards the intellect is the understanding with which the soul reasons of universals and spiritual knowledge, extracting the forms and intellectual essences from particular and sensible bodies … the second face turned towards the body is sense, which is particular knowledge of corporeal things known. … These two faces have contrary or opposed notions; and as our soul with its upper face or understanding makes the corporeal incorporeal, so the lower face, or sensible cognition, approaching the objects of sense and mingling with them, draws the incorporeal to the corporeal.86

Dialoghi III, 331 (394–95).

The imagination now becomes the essential link in Abravanel's psychology, since it is the faculty responsible for translating the corporeal into the incorporeal and the incorporeal into the corporeal. Without the imagination, therefore, the intellect is unable to move between the celestial and the material worlds. Unlike Maimonides, then, Judah Abravanel does not regard the imagination as a hindrance to knowledge; on the contrary, imagination is the faculty that is primarily responsible for apprehending the image of intellectual beauty. The imagination now becomes an important philosophical faculty and not just a prophetic or pedagogical one. For Judah, the imagination ceases to be utilitarian, as it was for Maimonides; it now becomes the faculty that enables the individual to recognize the beauty in both the world and the word.

This positive valorization of the imagination will, in turn, play an essential role in Abravanel's aesthetics. One of the themes woven throughout the Dialoghi is the intimate connection between the sensual and the intelligible. This connection is where we witness the synergy between imagination and aesthetics, in which both become responsible for apprehending the nature of the relationship between the divine and the mundane. Indeed, for Judah, philosophical activity is ultimately the reconciliation of such antitheses.87

Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 3.

This means that, for him, everything physical possesses within itself the seeds for grasping the metaphysical.

In his initial discussion of beauty (la bellezza) in the third dialogue, Abravanel provides, at the outset, the following definition: “beauty is grace, which delights the mind that recognizes it and moves it to love.” 88

Dialoghi III, 226 (264): “La bellezza è grazia, che, dilettando l'animo col suo conoscimento, il muove ad amare.”

Beauty, therefore, becomes inseparable from both love and knowledge. This beauty, not grasped by the lower senses (i.e., taste, smell, or touch), is apprehended only by the higher senses (i.e., sight and hearing), in addition to the imagination and the intellect.89

Dialoghi III, 226 (265).

As a result, it is only by means of the beauty of created things that the individual is able to make the corporeal spiritual. The former is what ultimately allows access to the latter, and the imaginative faculty, as the link, or mezzo, between body and intellect, corporeal and incorporeal reality, facilitates this process.

Aesthetics and imagination, occupying the interface between the corporeal and the incorporeal, are central to a proper understanding of the Dialoghi.90

This paragraph relies on the discussion by Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 22.

The purview of both is beauty, and it is ultimately the love of beauty in the soul of the individual, combined with the cognizance that one lacks it in its entirety, that moves not only the soul of the individual, but also the entire cosmos. Virtuous love is the highest form of love and, significantly, it can be directed toward either corporeal or spiritual things. Indeed, Philo intimates that such virtuous love can only emerge from sensible phenomena:91

See the discussion in Suzanne Damiens, Amour et intellect chez léon L'Hébreu (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1971) 168–73.

When [the soul] perceives a beautiful person whose beauty is in harmony with itself, it recognizes in and through this beauty, divine beauty, in the image of which this person is also made.92

Dialoghi III, 389 (465): “per il quale, quando vede una persona in sé bella di bellezza a se stessa conveniente, conosce in quella e per quella la bellezza divina, però che ancor quella persona è immagine de la divina bellezza.”

The goal of Judah's system is to ascend through this hierarchy, the gateway to which is the sensual enjoyment that one derives from physical objects. Only after this can one appreciate spiritual beauty, an appreciation of which culminates in basking in the divine presence. Judah discusses this process in the following manner:

We ought principally to love the higher forms of beauty separated from formless matter and gross corporeality, such as the virtues and the sciences, which are ever beautiful and devoid of all ugliness and defect. Here again we may ascend through a hierarchy of beauty, from the lesser to the greater and from the pure to the purest leading to the knowledge and love, not only of the most beautiful intelligences, souls and motors of the heavenly bodies, but also of the highest beauty and of the supremely beautiful, the giver of all beauty, life, intelligence and being. We may scale this ladder only when we put away earthly garments and material affection.93

Ibid., 357 (426).

Even though the corporeal was, at the outset of this journey, indispensable, the higher one moves up the hierarchy, the less important the material becomes. Yet—and this will have important repercussions on his theory of aesthetics—Judah does not regard this hierarchy to be one simply of ascent. In this respect, near the end of the third dialogue he introduces the circle of love, il circulo degli amari.94

Dialoghi III, 377 (450). The source of this concept has been the subject of some debate. According to Damiens, Abravanel would have derived this from Ficino by way of the Alexandrian mystics, especially Pseudo-Dionysius. See her Amour et intellect chez Léon l'Hébreu, esp. 162–64. B. Zimmels sees in it a kabbalistic influence. See in particular his Leone Hebreo Neue Studien (Wien: n.p., 1892) 39. Joseph Klausner (“Don Yehudah Abravanel and His Philosophy of Love” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 3 [1933] 94) argues that it comes from Ibn Gabirol. Moshe Idel, however, faults the last two for offering no sources. In contrast, he claims (“The Source of the Circle of Love in the Dialoghi d'amore” [in Hebrew], עIyyun 28 [1978] 156), quite plausibly, that Judah Abravanel's source is al-Batalyawsi, perhaps as mediated by his father's commentary on Genesis or by Yohanan Alemanno.

This circle begins with the divine, whose love creates and sustains the universe: “Each degree of being with paternal love procreates its immediate inferior, imparting its being or paternal beauty to it, although in a lesser degree as is only fitting.”95

Dialoghi III, 378 (451): “che ognuno con caritá paterna causa la produzione del suo succedente inferiore, participandoli il suo essere o bellezza paterna, ben che in minor grado secondo conviene.”

This emanative framework, the love of that which is more beautiful for that which is less beautiful, comprises the first half of the circle. Everything in the universe has its place in a hierarchical chain of being, from the pure actuality of the divine to the pure potentiality of prime matter. Just as the superior desires the perfection of the inferior, the inferior desires to unite with the superior. One side of the circle leads downward from God to utter chaos, while the other side of the circle leads from chaos to God. It is the love of the inferior for the superior, predicated on the former's privation and subsequent desire to unite with the superior. As far as the individual is concerned, the highest felicity resides in the union with God, which the Italian describes erotically as coppulativa (“union” in the sensual, erotic sense):

Because the love of the human soul is twofold, it is directed not only towards the beauty of the intellect, but also towards the image of that beauty in the body. It happens that at times the love of intellectual beauty is so strong that it draws the soul to cast off all affection for the body; thus the body and soul in man fall apart, and there follows the joyful death in union with the divine.96

Ibid., 196 (227).

What is responsible for this union with the divine is the imagination and aesthetics. Although the ultimate union is one that transcends the body, it nonetheless requires the beauty and love that the physical makes possible. Not surprisingly, Judah chooses to describe this summum bonum in highly visual terms: “It is enough that you should understand that our happiness consists in the knowledge and vision of God, in Whom we behold all things most perfectly.”97

Ibid., 43 (46): “Basta che sappi che la nostra felicitá consiste nel conoscimento e visione divina, ne la quale tutte le cosa perfettissimamente si veggono.”

Judah's Transformation of the Maimonidean Imagination

For those familiar with Maimonides' discussion of the imagination, the different treatment this faculty receives at the hands of Judah should be readily apparent. In this final section, however, I would like to show, by way of juxtaposition, how Judah departed from the medieval peripatetic discussion, transforming the imagination from a deceptive and chimerical faculty into the locus where one encounters the divine presence. I begin by presenting the major themes of Maimonides' theory of the imagination and aesthetics.

For medieval Aristotelians, the imagination (al-qūwa al-mutakhayyila) was regarded as one of the lower faculties of the soul, responsible for combining and recombining sensible imprints stored within it.98

E.g., Alfarabi, Mabādi

ārā

ahl al-madīna al-fādila (ed. and trans. Richard Walzer; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 211–28. For Greek precedents, see Fazlur Rahman, Prophecy in Islam: Philosophy and Orthodoxy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 29–91.

Thus, the imagination was regarded as a productive faculty, one that was the inverse of the immediacy and permanence provided by the intellect.99

See Aaron W. Hughes, “Imaging the Divine: Ghazali on Imagination, Dreams, and Dreaming,” JAAR 70 (2002) 33–53, esp. 38–41.

Occupying an ambiguous position between the intellect and the senses, the imagination's main function, which could have either positive or negative repercussions, was to recombine various images that were either not immediately present to the senses or that did not exist in reality. When the imagination was kept in its proper place—that is, subservient to the intellect—it could be of some use, especially when it came to pedagogical issues. For this reason, medieval philosophers often claimed that the imagination was ultimately responsible for the creation of myths, fables, and fictions, all of which were indispensable to the prophet's ability to present abstract truths to those lacking the proper intellectual preparation.100

Among Jewish philosophers, the only prophet who did not fit neatly into this paradigm was Moses, who was able to prophesy without the mediation of the imaginative faculty. On Maimonides' taxonomy of the various levels of prophecy, see Guide 2.45 (trans. Pines, 395–403).

We witness this model in the work of Maimonides, who offers one of the clearest paradigms of the imagination in medieval Jewish philosophy.101

Although I here treat Maimonides' discussion as normative, it is necessary to mention that his paradigm of the imagination represented but one type, the Aristotelian, among several competing paradigms. Other thinkers, most notably those influenced by neoplatonism, tended to emphasize different aspects of the imagination. Such individuals included Ibn Gabirol and Abraham ibn Ezra. See Hughes, The Texture of the Divine, esp. 82–114. Particularly relevant to my argument, however, are Ze

ev Levy's comments stressing that many of the Jewish Platonists and neoplatonists, unlike Jewish Aristotelians, tended to have a bigger impact on non-Jewish thought; see his “On the Concept of Beauty in the Philosophy of Judah Abravanel” (in Hebrew) in The Philosophy of Judah Abravanel: Four Lectures (n. 82, above), 28.

Following the lead of Muslim thinkers such as Alfarabi and Avicenna Maimonides argued that the imagination was primarily a creative faculty responsible for the formation of images no longer present.102

E.g., Maimonides, Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 369–70). See also Alfarabi, Mabādī

ārā

ahl al-madīna al-fādila, 211–28. For requisite secondary literature, see Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Jeffrey Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides: The Imaginative and Rational Faculties,” in Maimonides and Philosophy: Papers Presented at the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, May 1985 (ed. Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel; Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986) 185–201.

Imagination was, thus, often regarded as the antithesis of the intellect, something that got in the way of the intellect's proper functioning. On the whole, Maimonides was quite critical of the imagination. For example, he equates it with the evil impulse, the source of all error: “For every deficiency of reason or character is due to the action of the imagination or consequent upon its action.”103

Guide 2.12 (trans. Pines, 280).

Despite this negative assessment,104

For an analysis of the various paradigms of the imagination that Maimonides seems to work with, see Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 192–97; and Oliver Leaman, “Maimonides, Imagination and the Objectivity of Prophecy,” Religion (1988) 69–80, esp. 72–73.

the imaginative faculty becomes an essential component of prophecy, which Maimonides regarded as the highest human perfection.105

Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 192.

In his main discussion of prophecy in the Guide,106

Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 369).

Maimonides contends that it is the Active Intellect that is the immediate cause of prophecy, which essentially consists of an overflow into the prophet's intellect and then into his imagination.107

For a detailed discussion of this passage and others, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001) 221–89.

The prophet, in order to receive the overflow, has to be perfect in every respect: physically, physiognomically, morally, intellectually, and imaginatively. Since he has no need of the body and is not swayed by corporeal desires, the non-Mosaic prophet's imagination is free to work in the service of the higher faculties.108

For an important and detailed treatment of these higher faculties or internal senses, see the two studies by Harry Austryn Wolfson, “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts,” HTR 28 (1935) 69–133; and “Maimonides on the Internal Senses,” JQR 25 (1934) 441–67.

In such an individual, because the

imaginative faculty[,] which is as perfect as possible, acts and receives from the intellect an overflow corresponding to his speculative perfection, this individual will only apprehend divine and most extraordinary matters, will see only God and his angels, and will only be aware and achieve knowledge of matters that constitute true opinions and general directives for the well-being of men in their relations with one another.109

Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 372). This discussion of the imaginative faculty seems to be missing in his discussion of prophecy in both Hilkhot yesodei ha-torah 7.1 and Introduction to Pereq Heleq.

The imagination is central to non-Mosaic prophecy. It is the faculty that enables the prophet to invent images and similitudes in order to teach intelligibles to the masses, who are unable to attain intellectual perfection on their own.110

See the discussion in Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 193–196; and Howard Kreisel, Maimonides' Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) 63–92.

The imaginative faculty, as it emerges from the Guide, is primarily a political faculty. It is the faculty that differentiates the prophet from the philosopher, because the former, unlike the latter, feels a moral obligation to help perfect those around him.111

Guide 2.37 (trans. Pines, 374–75).

In this regard, it is also a pedagogical faculty, because the prophet employs it to help the intellectually deficient to gain, at the very least, a semblance of the truths that the philosopher can apprehend through the rational faculty.112

This treatment of the imaginative faculty would have much staying power over the coming centuries. Indeed, for Gersonides (1288–1344), the imagination is also the faculty responsible for the prophetic moment. As such, the relationship between the imagination and the intellect is a major concern to him in the Wars of the Lord. Following the lead of Averroes, Gersonides claims that it is the imagination that provides the link between veridical dreams, divination, and prophecy. Like Maimonides before him, Gersonides argues that the imagination, if properly tamed, is the locus of prophetic or prophet-like knowledge; if it succumbs to the desires of the body, however, it is the source of error. For both Maimonides and Gersonides, then, the prophet is someone who must possess a perfect intellect and a perfect imagination. Despite this, however, the imagination is ultimately secondary to the intellectual faculty, the perfection of which is the sine qua non of human felicity.

Since not all humans are capable of the same degree of understanding, different audiences require different presentations. So even though Moses, in his role as the supreme lawgiver, did not rely on the imaginative faculty, he did use his imagination in the communication of the divine message to the masses.113

Alfred Ivry, “Neoplatonic Currents in Maimonides' Thought,” in Perspectives on Maimonides (ed. Joel L. Kraemer; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 135.

According to Tirosh-Rothschild, “the figurative speech of the philosophic Torah was a concession to the intellectual imperfection of the multitude.”114

Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity,” in History of Jewish Philosophy (ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman; London: Routledge, 1997) 523.

Since philosophical concepts were encoded into the very fabric of the Torah, it was the role of the philosopher to decode such concepts. The truth of the text resided not in its literal level, but in its deeper, more profound levels.115

An excellent survey of this motif in Jewish thought may be found in Frank Ephraim Talmage, “Apples of Gold: The Inner Meaning of the Sacred Texts in Medieval Judaism,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible to the Middle Ages (ed. Arthur Green; New York: Crossroad, 1986) 313–35.

The philosopher was responsible for getting at the “real” (i.e., philosophical) message that lay just behind the Torah's surface.

Within this context, beauty occupies a rather circumscribed position. Beauty is essentially a synonym for God, an entity that is completely other and, thus, unknowable.116

For an eloquent account of this relationship, see Kenneth Seeskin, Searching for an Unknowable God: The Legacy of Maimonides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 23–39.

For Maimonides, then, aesthetics is essentially utilitarian.117

Warren Zev Harvey, “Ethics and Meta-Ethics, Aesthetics and Meta-Aesthetics in Maimonides,” in Maimonides and Philosophy (n. 102, above), 135. See also the comments in Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) 105.

Although he acknowledges the existence of physical beauty, it is but superficially linked to the divine world. It calms the soul, but does little when it comes to intellectual activity.118

See, e.g., Shemonah Peraqim, in Ha-qedamot ha-Rambam la-Mishnah (ed. and trans. M. D. Rabinowitz; Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, n.d.) 184–90.

In Guide 1.2, a chapter providing a philosophical reading of Adam's fall, Maimonides now argues that it is the intellect that distinguishes truth from falsehood, yet that which is perceived as beautiful or ugly belongs to the realm of opinion.119

Guide 1.2 (trans. Pines, 24). Within this context, see Pines's n. 6. I here follow Bland (The Artless Jew, 96) and translate al-hasan as “beautiful,” as opposed to Pines's “fine.”

The imagination, here associated with common opinion, gets in the way of intellection. Indeed, Maimonides argues that beauty, generated by the imagination, is what was ultimately responsible for Adam's fall from grace.

Even though Maimonides acknowledges the existence of aesthetics and the imagination, both were ultimately marginalized in favor of the intellect and the act of intellection. The intellect's purview is not this world of impermanence but the world of transcendence that exists above the sphere of the moon. As a result, sensual objects, even beautiful ones, are not to be appreciated in and of themselves, but only insofar as they point beyond themselves to something else. Beauty and imagination are thus subordinated to truth and intellect, respectively; at best, they are regarded as their prolegomena.

As we have seen with Judah, however, aesthetics and imagination take on considerably new significance. First and foremost, both are endowed with overwhelmingly positive, not just utilitarian, functions. Whereas the Maimonidean imagination was primarily a political faculty, in Judah's thought it becomes the locus for apprehending the image of intellectual beauty. Both Judah and Maimonides concur that the imagination is intimately connected to the intellect. They part company, however, on what precisely defines this connection: Maimonides focuses on the prophetic imagination and its ability to devise parables and allegories for the unlearned; Judah is interested in how this faculty translates the corporeal into the spiritual and vice versa. According to Maimonides, the prophetic imagination is concerned solely with harnessing the downward motion of the intellectual overflow, but for Judah the imagination is not solely concerned with such an overflow and, most importantly, moves in both directions. For Maimonides, imagination is central to the political well-being of a people; for Judah, on the contrary, it is essential to understanding, at the most basic levels, what it means to be human.

In like manner, Judah argues that aesthetics can no longer be circumscribed by the consensual; it now becomes an integral part of intuiting the spiritual within the corporeal and vice versa. Judah celebrates beauty by refusing to restrict it to that which is physical; and thus he opens up the concept of beauty in ways that are at odds with medieval Jewish Aristotelianism: beauty now becomes tantamount to God himself. As a corollary of this position, Judah envisages beauty as a cosmic principle that connects everything in the universe into an organic relationship. Physical objects are no longer superficially beautiful; they now become the prime locus of apprehending the divine presence. At a fundamental level, then, imagination and aesthetics are inseparable, since both are responsible for discerning the interconnection between the physical and the metaphysical.

Conclusions

In the Dialoghi, Judah has adopted certain trajectories of medieval cosmology and psychology, combined them with Renaissance notions of beauty, and thereby created a full-blown aesthetics of Judaism.120

Pflaum, Die Idee der Liebe, 52.

He conceives of the cosmos as a living, dynamic structure, in which all levels share in a symbiotic and organic relationship. This world of form and matter is not defined by its privation or distance from the divine; rather, it becomes the arena wherein embodied individuals encounter, visually and imaginatively, the beauty and love of the divine. It is this emphasis on imagination, aesthetics, and the phenomenal world that would eventually become such an important dimension of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy.121

This combination, of course, would receive its most sustained treatment in Spinoza's identification of God with nature (Deus, sive Natura). On the relationship between Judah and Spinoza, see Edmondo Solmi, Benedetto Spinoza e Leone Ebreo: Studio su una Fonte italiana dimenticata dello spinozismo (Modena: G. T. Vincenzi e Nipoti, 1903), esp. 34–53; and Ze

ev Levy, Baruch or Benedict: On Some Jewish Aspects of Spinoza's Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) 22–25.

I have argued that the crucial feature of Judah's system is the imagination. It is the faculty that is ultimately responsible for delineating the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, and subsequently translating them into one another. Whereas Maimonides had confined the imagination—not to mention aesthetics—to the realm of opinion, for Judah, this faculty becomes the primary locus whereby the individual divests the corporeal from the spiritual in order that the intellect can engage in its activity of contemplation. Even though Judah's system culminates in the intellectual love of God, such love is only possible with the aid of both the imagination and aesthetics.

Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge the comments of Professors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Daniel H. Frank, and Oliver N. Leaman on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the very constructive reviews offered by two readers for HTR. When citing Judah Abravanel's Dialoghi d'Amore, I give the page number of the standard Italian edition of Santino Caramella (Bari: Laterza and Figli, 1929) followed by, in parentheses, the corresponding page number in the English translation of F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d'Amore) (London: Soncino Press, 1937). This translation is somewhat outdated, especially in terms of its unwillingness to capture the erotic nature of Judah's Italian. For a more recent critical edition of the Italian text, see Giacinto Manuppella, Dialoghi d'amore (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Investigaçao Cientifica, 1983).