156 CHAPTER SIX
(hishma).^7 Avicenna also employs meta phorical language of the kind that
is usually described as mystical. Typical of Avicenna is the frequent use
of the notion of love (ishq), which he elaborates in order to describe the
soul’s longing for this plea sure and the happiness that is associated with
it.^8 Paradise, or “the place of (eternal) dwelling,” is, according to Avi-
cenna, the intellectual world, whereas the imaginative world, that of the
senses, is the world of corruption and of the graves.^9 The body and its
pleasures are thus excluded from Avicenna’s paradise.
This interpretation was considered by orthodox Muslims to be simply
heretical. The orthodox reaction is exemplifi ed by Ghazali, whose Inten-
tions of the Phi losophers, in which he summarized the various philo-
sophical positions, was based on Avicenna. In his critique of phi loso-
phers’tahafut,^10 al- Ghazali says: “What... contradicts religion among
the things they say is the denial of bodily resurrection, the denial of cor-
poreal pleasures in paradise and bodily sufferings in hell, and the denial
of the existence of paradise and hell as described in the Quran.”^11 Un-
like their Muslim contemporaries, Jewish medieval phi losophers did not
have to contend with a sacred text offering plastic, corporeal descrip-
tions of the afterlife. In fact, as both Muslim and Christian polemicists
repeatedly reminded their Jewish interlocutors, the Hebrew Bible hardly
discusses the soul’s survival and the hereafter.^12 One could thus expect
the problems that faced Jewish phi losophers to be much simpler than
those facing their Muslim counterparts. Already the Talmud, however,
contains corporeal descriptions of the hereafter: the souls of the righ-
teous are kept under the divine throne, the righ teous sit under canopies
and enjoy the splendor of the divine presence (shekhina).^13 Rabbinic
tradition identifi es paradise (ganeden) as the abode of the righ teous, as
opposed to hell (gehinnom), the abode of the wicked,^14 but the Rabbis
(^7) Isharat,al-namat al- thamin, in M.A.F. Mehren, Traités mystiques d’Abou Ali al- Hosain
b. Abdallah b. Sina ou d’Avicenne (Leiden, 1889– 99), 1.
(^8) See, for instance, his risala fi’l-ishq, in Mehren, Traités mystiques; see also Isharat,al-
namat al- thamin (Mehren, Traités mystiques, 8– 9). On Avicenna’s vision of the hereafter,
see further in Stroumsa, “True Felicity.”
(^9) Fi ithbat al- nubuwat wa- tawil rumuzihim, in Tis rasail fil-hikma wal-ilahiyyat (Istan-
bul, 1298H), 82– 90, on 89; trans. M. E. Marmura, “On the Proof of Prophecies and the
Interpretation of the Prophets’ Symbols and Meta phors,” in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval
Po litical Philosophy, 112– 21, on 120.
(^10) See chap. 2, note 74, above.
(^11) Tahafut al- Falasifa, ed. M. Bouyges (Beirut, 1927), 354.
(^12) See, for example, Saadya,Amanat, 264; Ibn Kammuna,Tanqih al- abhath fil-milal al-
thalath, ed. M. Perlmann (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 40; Avraham ibn Daud,Sefer
Emmunah Ramma (Frankfurt, 1852; reprinted Jerusalem, 1967), 39.
(^13) BT,Baba Batra 75.
(^14) See BT, Hagiga 15a; Baba Batra 15a.