Philo on Immortality

The writings of mystics always seem nonsense to the non-mystical, and apparently nothing will ever explain the one to the other. The chief difficulty is, perhaps, the freedom with which the mystic contradicts himself, and this he does largely for three reasons. First, the mystic despairs of language as an expression of his ideas, and often treats words and figures of speech loosely just because they mean little to him themselves, since he apprehends most completely in silence. Yet sometimes, in the second place, the inconsistency is studied, and the mystic is trying to suggest an a-verbal idea, doing so by a process which may be compared to the “resultant” of stresses in physics: for by two pulls at an angle to each other one may move an object between them in a direction different from either pull. Or, the same figure, one may make a wind blow a sail-boat in a path directly against itself by going off on a sufficient number of mutually correcting tacks. In the same way the mystic often feels that one of the best devices he can use to express himself is to build up verbal inconsistencies. So he declares that he goes to glory through humiliation, loses himself in order to find himself, dies in order to live, and in these statements creates an impression different from the literal meaning of any single word he uses. In art he similarly makes a monogram of cross and crown

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Glory · Humiliation · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Mysticism · Nonsense · Nothing · Object (grammar) · Order (exchange) · Physics · Reflexive pronoun · Theology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Theology and Philosophy of Evil

• Harvard Theological Review

  James Nati•Journal for the Study of Judaism•2015

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