Page 3 of 5
The Cabbalistic Return to Perfection
After the emanation, the error, and the imprisonment–after the fall–the question becomes: How does one return to the immaterial anthropos if one is moored to the physical cosmos? The Gnostics responded by claiming that the only way to return to the perfect Adam is by escaping matter through asceticism or death. This is the way of ascent, the rise from time to eternity.
But there is another path to the anthropos, one of descent. The medieval and Renaissance Cabbalists developed this latter mode. Though the Cabbalist was desirous of returning to Eden, he knew that this redemption could be achieved only through intense experiences of matters darkest realms. This embrace of matter to conquer material touches the core of golem-making: freedom is fate.
According to Gershom Scholem, the Cabbalistic myth of Isaac Luria, developed in the middle years of the sixteenth century, was a "response to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, an event which more than any other in Jewish history down to the catastrophe of our time gave urgency to the question: why the exile of the Jews and what is their vocation in the world?"4
Shaken by this 1492 removal, Luria developed a cosmogony more tragic than even that of the Gnostics: the broken cosmos emerges from God himself, so vast and powerful that he must annihilate himself to make space for the world and shatter his products to spread his force. The universe is God in exile. Luria's cosmogony is grounded on the Zohar, a revision of Genesis from thirteenth-century Spain that reaches back to the Gnostic redactions of the second century. 5
The invisible tree of God in mystical Eden is reflected by the tree of Life and the tree of Knowledge in green Eden. Adam Kadmon (Man Projection) finds its double in unlapsed Adam. The letters of the En-Sof (the Cabbalistic version of the hidden God, the Infinite) undertake to model the Book of Nature, perfect before Adam misread it.6
Adam's transgression severed heaven and earth. Before his hubris, the entire cosmos was Eden. Each part enjoyed concord with other parts. All parts harmonized with the whole. The whole concurred with the part. Adam's attempt to rise above his place threw the world into disarray. Blighted trees barely recalled the branches of the pleroma. Adam contracted to a fragment of his spiritual double. His creative words scattered into mere signs. The universe suffered exile from God.7 In Luria, this tragedy is even more intense.8
