Ein Sof

Ein Sof, "without end", is the kabbalistic name for God as God is in himself, prior to all revelation, attribute and relation. The term emerges among the Provencal and Geronese kabbalists of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the circle of Isaac the Blind, and becomes standard in the Zohar.

Its whole purpose is to establish a distinction. On one side is the hidden Godhead, of which nothing whatever may be predicated: not will, not thought, not goodness, and in the sharper formulations not even existence in any sense in which the word is otherwise used. On the other side are the ten sefirot, the emanated attributes through which God becomes knowable, acts in the world, and is addressed in prayer. On this reading, everything scripture says of God is said of the sefirot; Ein Sof is the subject of no biblical sentence, and the negative theology is pressed further here than in most of the philosophical tradition.

That distinction generated the central problem of kabbalistic theology: what the sefirot are in relation to Ein Sof. If they are the divine essence itself, divine unity is preserved but God appears to have real internal multiplicity. If they are vessels or instruments distinct from the essence, simplicity is preserved but something has been placed between God and the world. Both positions had learned defenders, and the argument continued for centuries. Critics pressed the obvious charge: the fifteenth-century writer Isaac ben Sheshet transmits the barb that Christians believe in three and the kabbalists in ten. Kabbalists answered that the sefirot are not beings alongside God but the one God's self-articulation, related to Ein Sof as a flame to its colours, an analogy the Zohar itself supplies.

Ein Sof's insistence that nothing whatever can be predicated of God did not appear from nowhere; it stands in a long tradition of negative, or apophatic, theology that the kabbalists inherited and then pushed in a distinctive direction.

Maimonides, writing a century or so before Ein Sof became standard kabbalistic vocabulary, argued in the Guide of the Perplexed that every positive attribute predicated of God, wise, powerful, existent, is either a statement about God's actions in the world or a denial of the corresponding defect, so that to say God is "living" really means only that God is not to be classed among the dead or the inanimate. Maimonides drew heavily on the Islamic philosophical tradition, particularly on Al-Farabi and Avicenna, which had itself inherited the negative theology of late antique Neoplatonism, chiefly the idea, traceable to Plotinus, of a supreme One beyond being, beyond thought and beyond every category, from which all multiplicity proceeds by emanation.

The kabbalists took over the destination, an ultimately unknowable divine reality, but rejected the philosophers' account of how anything follows from it. Where Maimonides treated the philosophical inquiry into the divine attributes as the highest exercise of created reason, and Neoplatonism described emanation as an impersonal, necessary overflow, Kabbalah retained the strict apophaticism concerning Ein Sof while insisting that the process by which the sefirot emerge is nonetheless personal and addressed by scripture and prayer, one reason some kabbalists were suspicious of philosophy even while borrowing its vocabulary.