The Mystical Dynamics of the Holy Spirit in Moses Nahmanides' Writings

Abstract:This essay explores Nahmanides' teachings concerning the holy spirit. It demonstrates that he elevated the holy spirit to the highest possible gradation in the godhead—conceived as the divine essence that flows through the various gradations of the godhead and into the perfected individual, inducing a variety of revelations: subprophetic, prophetic, and eschatological. The holy spirit in Nahmanides' thought is the driving force behind his conceptualization of the godhead, the community of Israel and its leadership, and the individual Jew—throughout their various phases of self-actualization, that is, becoming spirit. He placed the holy spirit along a spectrum of spirituality—the least spiritual stage is that of people who glimpse the future and those men of the holy spirit, while the most spiritual stage is that of the eschatological state of being, in which the spiritual faculties permanently overtake the corporeal faculties. Furthermore, Nahmanides crafted spaces structured by the spirit in the forms of the Jerusalem temple and contemporary rabbinic courts. This essay concludes by drawing attention to the similarities between Nahmanides' conception of the holy spirit and the common conception of the holy spirit in medieval Christianity, thereby analyzing Nahmanides' conception of the holy spirit in its historical and religious context: situated between mystical, philosophical, and polemical tensions.