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to Judaism's emphasis on personal relationship with God. Can one have an intense, emotionally stirring relationship with a God who is no longer seen as a “person” in the traditional sense? This question first occurs in the context of what we might call radical transcendence, as found in a number of medieval thinkers. Their God is so elevated —meaning abstract or rarified — that relationship becomes hard to imagine. But the question applies equally, though differently, to a theology of radical immanence, such as I am proposing. Here the question is not the remoteness of God but rather the otherness of God. Can you be in relationship, which somehow implies the interpersonal, with One who is in no way separable from your own deepest self, the innermost Self of all that is? This challenge keeps the medieval theological enterprise — from which I stand quite far in some ways — germane to my own quest.

I have mentioned that Philo of Alexandria was the first postbiblical thinker to develop the idea of God as present within the self or soul. It is no coincidence that Philo was a Hellenistic Jew, writing in Greek and seeking to create a reading of biblical Judaism in a Platonic mode. Plato, you may recall, did not think highly of the old Homeric tales of the gods. He even thought of banning from his ideal republic the poets who wrote of them. God for Plato is already quite abstract, the highest ideal of truth known to the human soul. Philo is both a Platonic philosopher and a mystic. His religion is centered around a contemplative idealism in which the soul fulfills itself by discovering its identity in its divine source. In Neoplatonic thought, influenced by Philo, God is the ultimate source of being, symbolized by light, toward which all souls naturally turn and to which they long to be restored. For the Neoplatonists, who (unlike Philo himself) exercised considerable influence on Judaism throughout the Middle Ages, God is both a philosophical category and the object of deep personal desire, often expressed in the persuasive language of poetry.34

It took nearly a thousand years after Philo's first attempt for Judaism again to be transposed into philosophic terms. When this did happen, beginning in the tenth century, it was largely in the Islamic cultural realm. Jews first came to read the Greek (including the Neoplatonic) philosophers via Arabic translation, and the most important works of Jewish philosophy were composed in Arabic as well. One of the great goals of this philosophical movement was what has been called a “purification” of the Jewish views of God.35 To the sophisticated medieval mind, the sacred stories of the Bible and especially the seemingly exaggerated tales of the rabbis were embarrassingly primitive and grossly anthropomorphic. Surely one could not believe these stories literally; their value had to lie in some other dimension, either in a moral message they contained or in some more obscure truth that could be unpacked only by means of esoteric interpretation. Philosophical Judaism was frequently accompanied by a massive effort at reinterpreting, and often explaining away, the anthropomorphic theology of the received tradition.

The God of the medieval philosophers was transcendent in a way very different from that of the rabbis or the old Merkavah mystics. Those early voyagers through the divine “palaces” transcended this world for the sake of a higher universe characterized by visual and auditory experiences of a most graphic nature. They lived entirely within a fantastic universe shaped by images and myths received from tradition. The apex of their inward journey, one that transported them beyond the physical realm, was an extension of visions articulated by the ancient prophets, texts that had been revered and expanded upon for centuries.

In the philosophical piety of the Middle Ages, the vertical metaphor was still in use. The new hierarchical cosmologies of the Middle Ages may have contained ten spheres rather than seven heavens, but verticality still seems essential to their character. The spheres