Rewriting the Book of Nature
Kabbalah and the Metaphors of Contemporary Life Sciences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v2i4.419Keywords:
religion, nature, kabbalah, magic, science, geneticsAbstract
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems as if biology, genetics, and the ‘life sciences’ are in normative control of cultural discourses regarding nature, the body, and the cosmos. This article addresses religious and esoteric semantics that underlie modern biology. The ‘deciphering’ of the human genetic ‘code’—a metaphor introduced to the ‘life sciences’ by Erwin Schrödinger in 1944—rests on Pythagorean and kabbalistic notions about letters and numbers as the building blocks of the cosmos. The progress of ‘genetic engineering’ and related techniques puts the human being into the position of universal creator of life. The philosophical interest in natura naturans returns in modern science in an unambiguously religious and metaphysical way. Looking at the kabbalistic tradition and its ‘ontologization’ of language and letters reveals the genealogy of conceptual frameworks that are still operative today.
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Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2003. ‘Philosophy and Kabbalah: 1200–1600’, in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press): 218-57.
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Vanderjagt, Arjo, and Klaas van Berkel (eds.). 2005. The Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Leuven: Peeters).
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Armstrong, David M. 1978. Nominalism and Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Asimov, Isaac. 1962. The Genetic Code: The Story of DNA—The Chain of Life (London: John Murray).
Black, Robert. 2001. Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Blumenberg, Hans. 1986. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp).
Bono, James. 1995. The Word of God and the Languages of Man (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
Brandt, Christina. 2004. Metapher und Experiment: Von der Virusforschung zum genetischen Code (Göttingen: Wallstein).
Collins, Francis S. 2006. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press).
Coudert, Allison P. 1999a. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden and Boston: Brill).
Coudert, Allison P. (ed.). 1999b. The Language of Adam / Die Sprache Adams (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).
Coudert, Allison P., and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (eds.). 2004. Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford: Blackwell).
Farmer, Stephen A. 1998. Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486). The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies).
Geyer, Hermann. 2001. Verborgene Weisheit: Johann Anrdts ‘Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum’ als Programm einer spiritualistisch-hermetischen Theologie (2 vols.; Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter).
Giller, Pinchas. 2001. Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Goodman, Martin, and Sarah Goodman (ed. and trans.). 1983. Johann Reuchlin: De Arte Cabalistica—On the Art of the Kabbalah (Introduction by G. Lloyd Jones; Norwalk: Abaris Books).
Grafton, Anthony. 1991. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press).
———. 2001. Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press).
Grözinger, Karl E. 1993. ‘Reuchlin und die Kabbala’, in Herzig and Schoeps 1993: 175-87.
Hayman, A. Peter (ed. and trans.). 2004. Sefer Yesira (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).
Herzig, Arno, and Julius H. Schoeps, in collaboration with Saskia Rohde (eds.). 1993. Reuchlin und die Juden (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke).
Howell, Kenneth J. 2002. God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press).
Hughes, Aaron W. 2004. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Idel, Moshe. 1981. ‘The Concept of the Torah in Heikhalot Literature and Its Metamorphoses in Kabbalah’, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 1: 23-84 (Hebrew).
———. 1990. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Tradition on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 2002. Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
Irvine, Martin. 1994. The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Kilcher, Andreas B. 1998. Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als ästhetisches Paradigma: die Konstruktion einer ästhetischen Kabbala seit der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler).
Kilcher, Andreas B. (ed. with the collaboration of Philipp Theisohn). 2006. Die Kabbala Denudata: Text und Kontext. Akten der 15. Tagung der Christian Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft (Bern: Peter Lang).
Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian Freiherr. 1677. Kabbala Denudata (2 vols.; Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtentaler; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1999).
Matt, Daniel C. (ed.). 2004–2007. The Zohar Pritzker Edition (4 vols.; trans. and commentary Daniel C. Matt; Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Morlok, Elke. 2006. ‘Text und Textur bei Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla und in der Kabbala Denudata. Die Rekonstruktion der Struktur der Gottesnamen aus Sha’are Ora in der Lexikographie der Kabbala Denudata’, Morgen-Glantz: Zeitschrift der Christian Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft 16: 161-79.
Newman, William R. 2004. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).
Ohly, Friedrich. 1995. ‘Die Welt als Text in der “Gemma Magica” des Ps.-Abraham von Franckenberg’, in idem, Ausgewählte und neue Schriften zur Literaturgeschichte und zur Bedeutungsforschung (ed. Uwe Ruberg and Dietmar Peil; Stuttgart and Leipzig: S. Hirzel): 713-25.
Peuckert, Will-Erich, and August Faust (eds.). 1955–61. Jacob Böhme: Sämtliche Schriften (11 vols.; Stuttgart: Frommmanns Verlag).
Roling, Bernd. 2002. ‘The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a Christological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin’, in Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra (eds.), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Leuven: Peeters 2002): 231-66.
Rummel, Erika. 1995. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. 2003. ‘Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der Christlichen Kabbala’, in idem (ed.), Christliche Kabbalah (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke): 9-48.
Schrödinger, Erwin. 1944. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Based on Lectures delivered under the auspices of the Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Slaughter, Mary M. 1982. Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).
Stillman, Robert E. 1995. The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses).
Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2003. ‘Philosophy and Kabbalah: 1200–1600’, in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press): 218-57.
Urbach, Ephraim E. 1979. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes Press).
van Berkel, Klaas, and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds.). 2006. The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Leuven: Peeters).
Vanderjagt, Arjo, and Klaas van Berkel (eds.). 2005. The Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Leuven: Peeters).
van Helmont, Francis Mercury. 2007 [1667]. The Alphabet of Nature (trans. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse; Leiden and Boston: Brill).
von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2005. Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London: Equinox).
Wasserstrom, Steven M. 1993. ‘Sefer Yes
Published
2009-03-17
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Stuckrad, K. von. (2009). Rewriting the Book of Nature: Kabbalah and the Metaphors of Contemporary Life Sciences. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2(4), 419-442. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v2i4.419
