| This dissertation is devoted to an investigation of the conflicted attitude toward Christianity demonstrable in the writings of the kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240--ca. 1291). Abulafia's hostility toward Christianity is explicit and emphatic. He partakes of most of the polemical arguments raised against Christians by the fellow Jews of his day. On the other hand, Abulafia's absorption of Christian doctrines is equally clear and central. In fact, Abulafia goes beyond this absorption of doctrine to accord a place of key importance in his own messianic self-conception to the figure of Jesus. The latter Abulafia viewed as the transgressive element within his own inner psyche. Abulafia, in kind with many of the kabbalists of his day, viewed Jesus as the epitome of idolatry, and he discusses the extent to which this inner idolatrous element tempted him. For Abulafia, the threat of such temptations manifested itself in the form of demons. These, by his own testimony, dogged him as he sought to commune with the Active Intellect. We will explore the fashion in which these demons embodied Abulafia's powerful attraction to Christianity. The latter Abulafia characterizes as the forbidden feminine element, while the demons poised against him threatened Abulafia with emasculation. The implications of Abulafia's attitudes toward Christianity lend themselves to psychoanalytic investigation. Abulafia's ambivalent feelings toward Christianity ran to the core of his psyche, providing the subtext for his mystical doctrine and sense of his own messianic mission and demonstrating the role of the forbidden other in the construction of self. Abulafia, in his mystical thought and practice, seeks to subsume Christian influences within a synthetic whole. By such means he intended to overcome the self-other dichotomy, with redemptive consequences. |
