Glimmers of the World Soul in Kabbalah

Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.