Rational Mysticism

Ideas, growing

Rational Mysticism

No superstition and no magical thinking, and plenty of awe at the Creator of all things.

Reason first. Nothing I believe can conflict with it. The mysticism itself is transrational: reason is the conduit to a more intuitive, interpretive, and poetic way of knowing that goes a little past where reason can safely tread.

I call myself a rational mystic. No superstition and no magical thinking, and plenty of awe at the Creator of all things big and small. For me the two halves aren’t in tension. Rambam is the proof: a legal scholar, a judge, a doctor, and a philosopher, and also a contemplative on the path of prophecy, living a life of self-abnegation, service, and the disciplined cultivation of virtue. In short, Rambam was a Hasid.

Heschel’s God in Search of Man reads to me like modern Jewish sufism in the language of philosophy, and it meets Rambam in unexpected places. The more speculative side of this, how unity becomes multiplicity without God being divided, lives under divine ecology.

Start with

Every post that uses it