Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 - )
(Professor Wolfson is author of several admirably deep and
thoughtful books. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of kabbalah,
mysticism and the phenomenology of mystical experience)
Today I want to present a passage about the problem of transcending transcendence from Professor Wolfson's brilliant and absolutely outstanding book "A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream. Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination" (Zone Books, New York 2011):
"The transcendence I affirm transcends the idea of transcendence that unfailingly entails recourse to the theopoetic imagination, the figural iconization of the invisible in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery.
I hasten to add that the transcendence I avow should not be interpreted atheistically, as the ineffable abyss one confronts in acknowledging that there is no God outside the cosmos, a stance that is the obverse of the theistic portrayal.
Others have argued that the property of ineffability can equally describe the respective experiences of the atheist and the theist, although the experiences plainly must be differentiated - for the former, the ineffable is linked to the void, for the latter, to the plenitude of being.
In my estimation, there is no need to bifurcate the two; even the locution "beyond the beyond" is inappropriate, since it still implies a boundary - albeit the boundary demarcated as being outside all boundaries - that must be breached.
Transcendence neither is nor is not this boundary, and consequently, the theist's sense of plenitude and the atheist's sense of void need not to be set in opposition. Logically, the transcendent is what is not, but this is only so because it is not what is.
Metaphorically, we may construe it as the plenitudinal vacuum, swarming with the fullness of being's nothingness, the intrinsic reality that intrinsically lacks reality, the ultimate emptiness that is itself empty, even of its own emptiness, and thus the space of nonlocality that resists the reification of nothing as something or of something as nothing."
- Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream. Zone Books 2011, p. 27.
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(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)
