Prophecy Between Poetics and Politics from Al-Farabi to Leo Strauss

Abstract

Judaeo-Arabic prophetology, as developed in the wake of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, was highly attentive to the kind of representational modes produced by divine revelation and their political use—but also their political precarity. By drawing on another corpus, less often discussed in this context, the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, this study proposes to undertake a close analysis of how the medieval thinkers in question (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides) understood the poetics of prophecy to function. What emerges is an account of how the political theo-logic of poetics and rhetoric—as developed with respect to terms such as imitation, imagination and visualization—came to play a central role in the theory of prophecy, and how that theory of prophecy in turn gave rise to an understanding of what Leo Strauss once termed the ‘literary character’ of these philosophers' ‘art of writing’.

So I swear by what you see and by what you do not see, truly [the Quran] is the speech of a noble messenger and not the speech of a poet (wa mā huwwa bi-qawli shā'irin). How little you believe! Sūrah 69, al-Ḥāqqah [The Inevitable Truth/Reality] vv. 38–41

Marginalia

Epochs gifted with particularly virulent imaginations tend to conceal their most original impulses and creative innovations by presenting themselves as little more than a post scriptum to traditions past. For the medieval Arabic-language Aristotelians, the epitome or abridgement—jawāmi', mukhtaṣar—and the commentary—sharḥ, tafsīr, talkhīs—were the primary forms in which classical Greek thought was not only preserved but elaborated in a process that resembles a revolution as much as a commitment to textual fidelity.¹ Among the more productive alterations within the process of cultural transfer that was rife throughout the late antique period was the Arabic canonization of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics as parts of the Organon, that is, the logical portion of the Aristotelian corpus.² Firmly establishing what was, among the Alexandrian commentators, a supposition, this logicizing operation drew rhetoric and poetry into the domain of the syllogism.³

In their work elucidating the logic of the poetic and rhetorical crafts, the Judaeo-Arabic commentators (of whom I focus in this essay on Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides) placed these arts within a well-elaborated framework of phantastical poetics that abutted their transformative commentaries on the De anima and the Parva naturalia, as these all contained developed doctrines of the powers of phantasia, that is, the imaginative faculty.⁴ At the centre of this commentary tradition lay the question: ‘what are the logical, ethical and political implications—logical and thus ethical and political implications—of the kinds of sensible representation that are produced by poetry and rhetoric?’ ‘We say’, writes Averroes in his Commentary on Plato's 'Republic',

that there are two ways by which the virtues in general are brought about in the souls of political humans. One of them is to establish the opinions in their souls through rhetorical and poetical arguments. This is limited to theoretical science presented to the multitude of humans ... .⁵

This quote would catch the attention of the man who, among all twentieth-century scholars, perhaps most closely imitated the expository practices of the commentators he studied:⁶ Leo Strauss, whose notes—recently published in 2022—on this treatise of Averroes's describe the political application of poetics and rhetoric raised in this passage as nothing less than ‘the issue’:

What is the issue? There are two ways in which the vulgar (≠ the elite) can acquire speculative opinions, opinions about matters of speculation, i.e., about the first principle of the whole and the end (25, 24): 1. rhetorical and poetic speeches and, 2. compulsion.⁷

Strauss—and here his oeuvre, however contentious, was unique, even exemplary—had homed in on what he rightly perceived as a unique contribution of the Arabic commentators: a fully developed doctrine of the relation between politics, poetics, and theology, which intersected in a theory of imaginative representation.⁸ And, as those familiar with Strauss's work know well, he persistently called to his readers' attention the political account of phantasia that was developed in the theories of prophecy beginning with Al-Farabi and continuing through to Maimonides. But the mention of compulsion by Averroes, and Strauss in turn, should give pause. At stake is a philosophical account in which phantasia and mimesis are implicated in matters of force: poetics and rhetoric here impel consent. While the falāsifa make clear that the true way of knowledge consists of logical reasoning, they radically limit who is capable of the proper theoretical exercise of intellect and to what extent. The breach between burhān (demonstrative proof) and its opposites—tamthīl (figurative representation), muḥākāh (imitation), and so on—(the distinction which is at work in the passage of Averroes cited above) forms the central antinomy of this study.

The thinkers here in question develop a politicized account of mimesis, phantasia and figurative language at the crossroads between, on the one hand, their theories of poetics and rhetoric (the subject of Section II) and, on the other, their theory of prophecy (the subject of Section III), both of which derive from the Arabic reception of the Aristotelian corpus and ultimately give rise to a theory of representation—an art of writing but also of reading—that is developed in Strauss's work (the subject of Section IV). Present throughout this study and the works it considers are a set of concerns about visualization, understood both literally—'what may be made perceptible to the faculty of sight?'—and figuratively—'what ought to or must remain concealed?'

The Politics of Poetics

In elaborating a theory of imaginative representation—as well as its political and ethical uses—the Arabic commentators took as their point of departure developments that had already begun in the world of late antiquity, most notably, the ‘the widespread collocation of the terms phantasia, enargeia and mimesis in ancient literary criticism’.⁹ The insinuation of mimesis into the account of the imaginative faculty established imitation as a central power of phantasia, while the inclusion of enargeia (‘vividnesss’ or ‘representing something as if before one's eyes’) in this triad lent particular weight to questions about visualization and visibility,¹⁰ as can be seen in Pseudo-Longinus's Περì Ὕψους (On the Sublime), where this terminological convergence is clearly articulated:

Weight, grandeur, and urgency in writing are very largely produced, dear young friend, by the use of ‘visualizations’ (αἱ φαντασίαι). That at least is what I call them; others call them ‘image productions’ (εἰδωλοποιΐας). ... [T]he word has now come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience (πάθους βλέπειν δοκῇς καὶ ὑπ᾿ ὄψιν τιθῇς τοῖς ἀκούουσιν). (15.1–2)¹¹

So, too, do we find these three terms discussed together in Proclus's Commentary on the 'Republic':

Indeed the representation (μίμησις) of these men moves our imagination (τὴν φαντασίαν ἡμῶν) ... . We seem to be actually present at the events on account of the vivid presentation of the things imitated, generated in us by the representation (τῶν πραγμάτων διὰ τὴν ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως ἐναργῆ φαντασίαν τῶν μεμιμημένων).¹²

Both mimesis and phantasia would be received, translated, and explicated in the Arabic commentaries. And while enargeia was neither translated into Arabic nor became the object of a theoretical account,¹³ the intensification of the association of phantasia with enargeia in the late antique period, particularly among the Neoplatonists,¹⁴ would emerge from the assimilation of the theory of phantasia in De anima to the account of enargeia in the Poetics and Rhetoric, the very triad of texts that would play the central role in the Arabic commentaries here in question.¹⁵ In turn, the pronounced attention devoted to how phantasia makes something appear before one's eyes and renders something visible was to persist in the Arabic world, where it would form the centre of an inquiry into the possible use and political precarity of vivid representations.¹⁶

In the Arabic context, the term takhyīl came to cover much the same semantic field as the Greek phantasia/mimesis/enargeia triad.¹⁷ It is the unique word used to express how representation induces an effect in the imaginative faculty. In the context of the Aristotelian commentaries, ‘Vorstellungsevokation’—'the (psychic) evocation of a representation' (as suggested by Heinrichs)—remains the scholarly consensus for a translation.¹⁸ Formed from the second verbal root, the verb could be said to evoke the noun form of the word, that is, khayāl, which means most broadly ‘image’. Words from the root kh-y-l, of which we will see many, cover the field encompassing ‘imagination’, ‘representation’, and ‘the evocation of images’.

The Arabic commentaries on the Poetics and Rhetoric revolved around three key terms: the previously mentioned takhyīl, as well as muḥākāh (=μίμησις, imitation) and tashbīh (figurative language). Put generally, the falāsifā develop an account of how figurative language makes possible the imitation of entities both physical and conceptual and, through this imitation, generates imaginative effects. Visualization and the sensible representation of the conceptual are central to this process, as seen in Averroes's gloss on the claim in the Poetics that one should have 'the material as much as possible in the mind’s eye (μάλιστα πρὸ ὀμμάτων)’ and that, in doing so, one sees things ‘most vividly, as if one was present at the events (ἐναργέστατα ὁρῶν ὥσπερ παρ᾿ αὐτοῖς γιγνόμενος)’ (1455a22–5):

He [i.e., Aristotle] said: the poetical narrative becomes excellent and attains utmost perfection/completion [al-tamām] when in describing the thing or the incident taking place the poet attains a level such that the listeners see it as though it were sense-perceptible and visible without its contrary occurring too them from this description.¹⁹

And this is indeed a gloss: this is an excellent example of the process of adaptation and renovation that the original undergoes in its transfer. For the idea that presenting something before the eyes is centrally concerned with the sensible (visible) presentation of the conceptual is central to the conception of what takhyīl is,²⁰ and was already crucial for Aristotle's own claim about the importance of the representation of an action. Thus, the Arabic commentators stay true to the original sense of Aristotle's text by way of, not despite, developing it farther afield.

One can see how this process of representation is tied to affective reactions in the work of the man known in the Arabic world as al-mu'allim al-thānī, ‘the second teacher’ after Aristotle: Al-Farabi. Writing in his Kitāb al-Shi‘r (The Book of Poetry), a treatise that was not only one of the earliest but also one of the most definitive for the formation of Arabic philosophical poetics, he writes:

For evocation is [to poetry] what knowledge is to demonstration, opinion is to dialectic and persuasion to oratory. Indeed, one's actions often follow one's imaginings (takhayyulāt). That is to say that one may imagine (yatakhayyalu) a certain thing about a matter and so do the act one would do were the existence of that thing in that matter to be confirmed by the senses or by evidence, even when it happens that what has been evoked in one's mind is not, in actuality, as it has been evoked.²¹

Al-Farabi states explicitly that the imaginative evocation generated by poetry issues in an action that follows from the images or imaginings generated, even if what transpires in the imagination and what transpires in actuality are constitutively at odds. The effectivity of this process has much to do with visualization; he continues:

just as what one sees with one's own eyes can cause one to imagine (yukhayyilu ilayhi) a certain matter in a certain thing, when that very same thing is described in words, then those words can cause him to imagine in that thing the very same thing that he would have imagined had he seen the thing with his own eyes. ... therefore the intended purpose of [imaginatively] evocative utterances (al-aqāwīl al-mukhayyilah) is to prompt the listener into acting out the thing about which a certain matter has been evoked to him—be it an act of seeking out or escaping from, or striving for or being averse to, or any other action positive or negative—whether he assents to that [action] that has been evoked in him or not and whether the matter is, in reality, as he has been made to imagine it or not.²²

We see not only Al-Farabi's manifold and intricate exposition of the entire phantastical process of poetic speech but also how closely the visualization engendered by imaginative representation is tied to an ethico-political register. For the imagination may be manipulated in such a fashion that an individual is either drawn towards or repelled from a given object. To understand how this process works, one must understand the logical poetics and rhetoric upon which the work of the Arabic Aristotelians depends.²³

The Arabic commentators reasoned that if the Rhetoric and Poetics belong to the Organon, then there must be a corresponding syllogism operative within poetic texts. Enter the poetic syllogism,²⁴ one of the most consistently fascinating aspects of Arabic philosophical poetics. According to the commentators, the figurative language of which poetry consists must have a logical structure. Let us look, for instance, at Avicenna's favourite example (which is all the more memorable on account of the manner in which he pairs careful logical reasoning with grotesque imagery): honey is vomited bile.²⁵ The logic runs as follows:

Honey is yellow. (Major premise)

Everything yellow is vomited bile. (Minor premise)

Therefore, honey is vomited bile.²⁶

Writing in his Jawāmi' Kitāb al-Shi'r [Short Commentary on the Poetics], Averroes raises alarm about the possible consequences—but also the possible uses—of a logical operation such as this one, by commenting on a famous line of encomiastic poetry by Abū-Tammām:

huwwa al-bahru min ayyi al-nawāhī ataytahu

[He is the sea from whatever direction you come to him.]

The syllogism in the mind of the poet can be formalized as follows:

This ruler gives boundlessly.

Everyone that gives boundlessly is a sea.

Therefore, the ruler is a sea.

Commenting on this line, he writes:

Now it is evident that this art does not take the representations of something as though they were the thing itself. But many people might err about that and thus take the representations of something as though they were the thing itself ... . For the most part these representations cause error concerning the things which can be conceived of [tutaṣawwar] only by their representations or which can be conceived of only with difficulty ... Aristotle came to the opinion that this art was highly useful, because by means of it the souls of the multitude [al-jumhūr] could be moved to believe in [i'tiqād] or not believe in a certain thing and towards doing or abandoning a certain thing ... .Thus, the art of poetics is that which enables a man to devise an imaginative representation of each particular thing in the most complete manner possible for it.²⁷

In this passage, which is certainly not sui generis among treatises of this type, Averroes notes that the potential error and, correspondingly, the ‘highly useful’ nature of this art results from a process of imaginative representation that issues in a kind of belief.²⁸ Within the corpus under consideration here, conception, belief, and representation were organized within a logical framework that centred on two terms: taṣawwur (conception) and taṣdīq (assent). This dyad underpins both the rhetorical and poetical arts insofar as they are logical.²⁹ The masses are influenced to act in accordance with the ‘conception’ of reality that has been instilled in them through these figurative and rhetorical uses of language because they ‘assent’ to the conclusion drawn by comparison. The metonymy here 1) serves to express the ruler's generosity (a non-sensible attribute) in a concrete image and 2) has a logic even though the conclusion is false (that is, even though the ruler is not actually a sea). There is a corresponding syllogism that takes place in the mind of the audience members, which can be distinguished from the one offered above ‘because it leads the listener to the conclusion that the thing in question has certain properties and should be aspired to or avoided’.³⁰ It runs as follows:

The ruler is a sea.

Every sea gives freely and liberally.

Therefore, the ruler gives freely and liberally.

The populace gathered around to listen to this encomiastic poetry are able to conceive of this non-sensible attribute (taṣawwur of his generosity), they imaginatively envision the greatness of his generosity through the wonder of the metaphor (takhyīl) and thus they assent to the notion that the ruler is a benign, liberal sovereign (taṣdīq). The three concepts operate closely together.

There are minor differences in how this process functions between rhetoric and poetics but elucidating them is neither my intention here nor entirely feasible. For in trying to discern clear distinctions between them, one runs up against what Black calls ‘a major inconsistency in the Arabic philosophical tradition's development of the logical interpretation of poetics’:³¹ that there is no logically grounded manner by which one could perfectly divide the two fields. What can, however, be stated without a doubt is that a proper understanding of the logical process underpinning these two arts in tandem is the sine qua non of understanding the ethico-political field of their application. As Black puts it elegantly and emphatically:

The acknowledgement of the political utility of rhetorical and poetical modes of argument by the Islamic tradition is a direct consequence of that tradition's logical and epistemological analyses of the kinds of knowledge that these arguments' forms are capable of engendering.³²

The remarkable claim that the Arab philosophers make apropos of poetics is that following Aristotle's distinctions between the degree of veracity of each type of syllogism, the poetic syllogism is logical though entirely false.³³ The poetical art offers an instance of a non-apophantic mode of predication whose statements are not judged on the dichotomy of true-or-false but rather on the efficacy of the imaginative result and subsequent production of consensus. The criterion of evaluation shifts from a ‘truth/falsehood binary [that] depends on extrinsic values’ to a ‘rational/make-believe binary [that] depends on the intrinsic logic of an image’.³⁴ The takhyīl which poetry effects takes place in the no-man's land between psychology and logic, assent and knowledge, and in this gap lie the possibilities of an ethico-political appropriation and application of poetry.³⁵ In al-Jurjānī’s Asrār al-Balāghah [The Secrets of Eloquence], Averroes's fear, cited above, that in a vivid representation the mass may take a figure of the thing for the thing itself is given a precise terminological account and, again, connected directly to vivid representation:

Here is another kind of make-believe (takhyīl), one that harks back to what went before on the feigned forgetting of the comparison (tanāsā al-tashbīh) and turning one's mind away from imagining it. ... Poets borrow some human attribute that is perceptible through the senses as a metaphor for attributes that are abstract. Then it is as if they find that very attribute and perceive it in reality, with their eyes (ka'annahum qad wajadū tilk al-ṣifah bi-'ayyniha), and as if the metaphor and the analogy have altogether slipped from their minds. ... Obviously, the intention is to induce the hearers to be amazed at seeing what they have never seen before and what is contrary to custom ... .³⁶

Through the elision of the trope's rhetorical nature, comparison gives way to reification in a process that Gruendler terms ‘naturalization’.³⁷ The ‘natural’ or the ‘real’ can thus be produced in a process of forgery that operates in the imaginative faculty. ‘Because of the corruption of their sense perception and of their imagination, those who have sick bodies imagine what is sweet to be bitter and what is bitter to be sweet’, runs an aphorism of Al-Farabi's before immediately switching to the register of virtue ethics: ‘They form a concept of the suitable as being unsuitable and a concept of the unsuitable as being suitable’.³⁸ One can immediately see how this may be exploited. Schoeler puts it nicely when he writes that ‘[t]he rational process of syllogistic reasoning in the listener's mind that is set in motion by figurative language therefore immediately turns into a psychological process that results in an action or a reaction’.³⁹ The sentiment is fitting in a context that paid such careful attention to what Aristotle meant in the Poetics by the representation of action and the ethico-political stakes thereof.

This bind between the knowledge and the action resultant from poetic language is clearly articulated at the start of Al-Farabi's Taḥṣīl al-Sa‘ādah [The Attainment of Happiness],⁴⁰ where he notes that the logical faculty separates between the thing itself and its image or similitude.⁴¹ Instruction mediates the difference; this difference in turn mediates between mass and elite, who are granted differential access to knowledge:⁴² ‘[t]he vulgar ought to comprehend merely the similitude of these [ultimate and incorporeal] principles, which should be established in their souls by persuasive arguments’.⁴³

In his Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs [The Philosophy of Aristotle],⁴⁴ one discovers Al-Farabi's own position by a sort of interlinear reading, paying close attention to the manner in which he provides his ‘objective’ account of Aristotle's philosophy:

Therefore he [that is, Aristotle] gave an account of the art [that is, rhetoric] that enables man to persuade the multitude regarding a) all theoretical things and b) those practical things in which it is customary to confine oneself to using persuasive arguments based on particular examples ... . Then afterwards he gave an account of the art [that is, poetics] that enables man to project images of the things that became evident in the certain demonstrations in the theoretical arts, to imitate them by means of their similitudes, and to project images of, and imitate, all the other particular things in which it is customary to employ images and imitation through speech. ... He called the faculty resulting from these arts the logical faculty.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Poetics should be surprised to discover the essence of the text described in this manner and rightly so, for what we are given is Al-Farabi's understanding of what the poetical art is, articulated through the authority of Aristotle and mediated through third-person locutions—‘he gave an account’, ‘he called’—which place these claims in the Stagirite's mouth.⁴⁵ The association of the masses with the imaginative faculty was consistent throughout the work of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes.⁴⁶ All of them made clear that image-evoking representations—mukhayyalāt—effected in the minds of the public issue in a certain kind of knowledge and action.

The Poetics of Prophecy

Put summarily: from the moment when the Aristotelian corpus began to be commented upon by its Arabic interpreters, the rhetorical and poetical arts were both logicized and given a (further) political articulation. The exposition of the dual aims of rhetorical and poetical discourse—that is, the representation of higher truths through imitation and the determination of individual action through imaginative effects—reaches its apex in Al-Farabi's theory of religion through at times shocking means and with at times renegade conclusions.⁴⁷ Continuing his account of the imagination's use in instruction, he notes:

Now when one acquires knowledge of the beings ['ilm al-mawjūdāt] or receives instructions in them, if he perceives their ideas themselves with his intellect, and his assent to them is by means of certain demonstration [al-barāhīn al-yaqīnah], then the science that comprises these cognitions is philosophy. But if they are known by imagining them through similitudes [mithālāt] that imitate them, and assent to what is imagined of them is caused by persuasive methods, then the ancients call what comprises these cognitions religion. ... Therefore, according to the ancients, religion [millah] is an imitation of philosophy [muḥākiyyah li-l-falsafah].⁴⁸

It does not require the mind of a Strauss but only a Straussian vigilance before deflections to realize that Al-Farabi is practising proper social distancing by placing his claim in the mouth of the ancients (who knew no such thing as religion in the sense in which he describes). One can say along with Strauss that ‘Fârâbî avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator, or of the historian, in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters’,⁴⁹ as he wrote in an essay that would later be reworked into the introduction of his epochal Persecution and the Art of Writing.⁵⁰ The thesis that the relation between religion and philosophy is an imitative one and thus ultimately a matter of mimesis brings the Poetics decisively within the politico-theological fold and unites takhyīl's two aims—the cognitive and the ethical—within the purview of revealed religion.⁵¹

What is in essence described by Al-Farabi is the structure of prophetic revelation. Islamic prophetology offers a theory of imaginative representation which is intimately linked with the one found in the commentaries on the Poetics and Rhetoric and which explains how exactly intelligible truths are represented in religious texts or, in other words, how religion is an imitation of philosophy.⁵² Al-Farabi will undertake an innovation absent from the work of his precursors (notably Al-Kindi), whereby he associates prophetic revelation via phantasia with a process of imitation (muḥākāh/mimesis).⁵³ His theory of prophecy emerges against the backdrop of several ancient sources, notably: 1) the account of the internal senses (al-ḥawāss al-bāṭinah) derived from Aristotle's De anima and Alexander of Aphrodisias's commentary (that is, the location of the psychic faculties in the ventricles of the brain),⁵⁴ 2) the account of phantasia as expounded into a theory of takhyīl, 3) Neoplatonic emanationism,⁵⁵ and 4) of particular importance, the Arabic version (an adaptation more than a translation) of the Parva naturalia. The prophet, who possesses an intellect of divine quality, receives the emanation which ‘spills over’ from the Active Intellect to the faculty of imagination.⁵⁶ The imaginative faculty in turn imitates the intelligibles through images, which are then projected onto the common sense [=κοινὴ αἴσθησις = al-ḥiss al-mushtarak], where they appear to the senses, notably the faculty of vision. The association of visualization and prophecy⁵⁷ both precedes Al-Farabi—as in Kindi's claim that the prophet ‘sees [the sensible form of the concept of his thoughts] alone as if it were in front of his eyes, there being no difference between the two [that is, seeing with one's own eyes and with one's mind]’⁵⁸—and continues through to Maimonides,⁵⁹ who, citing Al-Farabi's definition of prophecy nearly verbatim, adds that:

it is a perfection that comes in a dream or in a vision [mar'eh]. The word mar'eh [vision] derives from the verb ra'oh [to see]. This signifies that the imaginative faculty [al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah] achieves so great a perfection of action that it sees the thing as if it were outside [ka'annahu min khārij].⁶⁰

Within the account of prophecy developed in relation to imagination's power of imitation,⁶¹ there develops what in essence ought to be termed a poetics of prophetic revelation. Indeed, Avicenna had classified poetry [shi'r] as one of the things that may be received from the celestial flux during visions,⁶² while the Arabic version of the De divinitatione per somnum provided a fully developed account of how the Active Intellect ‘dresses up’ the intelligibles with spiritual forms that then appear as corporeal words and pictures to the sensus communis during visions.⁶³ The intelligibles thus appear to be images of corporeal objects put before the eyes of the prophet, whose text then recreates that imaginative process in reverse, so to speak, permitting its readers/listeners knowledge of the intelligibles.⁶⁴ This twofold process of representation and reception has a perfect analogue in discussions of the poetic syllogism, in which there is one kind of syllogism that takes place in the mind of the poet and one that takes place in the mind of the reader/listener.⁶⁵ These two types of syllogisms would thus correspond to the two parts of prophetic activity.⁶⁶ This process in toto is best summarized by Gutas: ‘the imagination may also help the theoretical intellect during its contact with the active intellect. In both cases the imagination converts this knowledge into audible and visible images, but when the contents of the knowledge are the divine message of revelation, this is conveyed to people as a recited holy text ...’.⁶⁷

The falāsifa's account of the poetics of prophecy develops through a series of lexical transpositions between the domain of poetics and rhetoric and that of prophecy, the most notable being Al-Farabi's previously mentioned use of mimesis. Consider, for instance, Avicenna's reference to prophecy as a mushāhadah ḥaqqah ('true vision'),⁶⁸ which ought to be supplemented by al-Jurjānī's poetic account of mushāhadah, in which he describes how poetic language renders visible either something obscure or something that is not sense-perceptible.⁶⁹ There is not only a particular kind of knowledge that emerges from poetic language, al-Jurjānī notes, but the vivid representation of the opaque through mushāhadah results in a more deep affection of the soul, an affection, which possesses both epistemological and ethical force.⁷⁰ The vision granted the prophet—mushāhadah in Avicenna's sense—would thus find its complement in the visualization produced by the poetic language of the holy text—mushāhadah in al-Jurjānī's sense.

Precisely how this process of visualization functions in prophecy may be seen in the extension of takhyīl into the sphere of tafsīr, that is, Quranic exegesis, an extension, which, one ought to add, comes closest to the use of takhyīl in philosophical poetics.⁷¹ It was the great jurist and Mu'tazalite theologian al-Zamakhsharī who demonstrated the manner in which takhyīl makes possible corporeal representations of abstract, ineffable notions. He uses one of the famous quandaries of Quranic interpretation: how to interpret the references, in Sūrat al-Zumar 39/67, to God's body?

They have not shown Allah His proper reverence—when on the Day of Judgement the whole earth will be in His Fist [wa-l-arḍu jamī'an qabḍatuhu], and the heavens will be rolled up in His Right Hand [wa-l-samawātu maṭwīyātun bi-yamīnihi]. Glorified and Exalted is He above what they associate with Him!

‘The intentions of this utterance’, he writes, ‘if you take it as it is in its entirety and totality, is the depiction (taṣwīr) of His majesty and putting before our eyes the essence of His majesticness and nothing else, without taking the “handful” or the “right hand” into the realm of the literal or that of the figurative’.⁷² Al-Zamakhshari appeals to takhyīl as the principle that grounds his interpretation, for where there is takhyīl there is a reduction of ‘some abstract notion such as God's omnipotence to a hypothetically posited corporeal image which is intended to make the abstract notion tangible’,⁷³ and thus one cannot accuse the holy text of an anthropomorphism of the divine. In sum, to make one of the modalities of God's Being such as his majesty apprehensible to the great mass of people, the prophetic revelation of the Qur'ān employs an imagistic language that results in an imaginative effect, as Al-Farabi describes perfectly in his Political Regime:

Most people have no ability, either by innate character or by custom, to understand and form a concept of those things. For those people, an image ought to be made, by means of things that represent them, of how the principles, their rankings, the active intellect, and the first ruler come about. ... [R]eligion is a sketch of these things or of their images in the soul.⁷⁴

In the setup to this passage, Al-Farabi describes how theoretical truths (the principles of the existents) are expressed in images and he chooses the analogy of a human whose image can be found in a statue, or in a mirror, or twice-removed, as when one sees the image of a statue reflected in a mirror. Al-Farabi makes use of the exact same analogy, using almost identical wording, in his Kitāb al-Shi‘r [The Book of Poetry] where he is discussing mimesis and figurative language.⁷⁵ But whereas the referent in Kitāb al-Shi‘r is poetry, here (in the passage above) it is religion. We see yet again (this time intertextually) the mutual articulation of the poetic and the theological.⁷⁶

That takhyīl provides a logical account of the seeming heresy of representing the immaterial God through sensibilia would not have been lost on Maimonides, whose Guide takes up the problem of anthropomorphism as its central theme. His work reveals a more than passing acquaintance with the poetics of prophecy developed by the falāsifa, interest in which would persist in Judaeo-Arabic letters, such as in the Kitāb al-muḥāḍarah wa-l-mudhākarah⁷⁷ of Maimonides's predecessor Moses Ibn Ezra. Drawing upon both the Arabic version of the Parva naturalia and the commentaries on the Rhetoric and Poetics, Ibn Ezra assimilates the logic of rhetoric and poetics to that of prophecy:

The art of oratory [khiṭābah] is called rhetorica in Greek ... . According to the philosopher Aristotle it is speech that persuades ... . Its excellence increases or decreases depending on the speaker’s poetic elegance [faṣāḥah] and rhetorical eloquence [balāghah] ... . And orations are found in our sacred prophetic books ... . The art of poetry [shi'r] is called poetica in Greek ... . The term for poet [shā‘ir] in our language [that is, Hebrew] is navi [=prophet —PM].⁷⁸

Divergences notwithstanding, Maimonides will in many respects continue in Ibn Ezra's wake as he offers an account of prophecy that relies on the transposition of poetic and prophetic categories, much like Al-Farabi's account of muḥākāh (mimesis), though in this case words from the trilateral m–th–l are at stake. The dependence upon literary categories is even more pronounced in Maimonides's case because he possesses a more developed theory of parable and allegory than the Islamic authors.

Maimonides's discussion of parables centres on the imaginative modes of representation that the prophets employ as a means of conveying divine truth. Persistently throughout the Guide, he avails himself of the word meshalim (s. mashal) to refer to biblical parables (though the word itself can generally refer to ‘imitations’), which, in the main of his text (that is, not in biblical quotations), he will refer to with the Arabic amthāl/amthila (s. mathal; similes, metaphors, symbols).⁷⁹ Between Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew, Maimonides's mathal/mashal bears two further resonances. First, in Averroes's Epitome of the Parva naturalia, to which the Judaeo-Arabic accounts of prophecy (both Ibn Ezra's and Maimonides's) are indebted, tamthīl denotes the poetic process by which the imaginative faculty executes the work of representation during visions:

... the powers of thought and memory are inactive during sleep and ... the faculty that is active during sleep is the imagination [al-mutakhayyilah]. For this power is in perpetual movement, and its activity consists of concept formation [al-taṣawwur] and representation [al-tamthīl] and proceeding from image to image.⁸⁰

The result of tamthīl, the process by which the imaginative faculty represents, is thus amthāl/meshalim ('representations', 'parables', 'symbols', etc.).⁸¹ What is more—and here we find the second resonance—the full account of how this process of figuration functions is actually provided in Arabic literary criticism, not least in the Aristotelian commentaries here in question, in which tamthīl forms a mainstay of poetics and rhetoric.⁸² It is for this reason that Maimonides claims that since the majority of the prophetic books utilize amthāl, it is necessary for the philosopher to know something about the workings of figurative language.⁸³ In the following quotation from Al-Farabi, for instance, it is clear that tamthīl bears both poetic and prophetic connotations (the passage comes in the course of a discussion of prophecy):

Now these [theoretical truths] can be known in two ways, either by being impressed on their souls as they really are or by being impressed on them through affinity and symbolic representation [bi-l-munāsabah wa-l-tamthīl]. In that case symbols [mithālāt] arise in man's minds, which reproduce them by imitation [tuhākīha].⁸⁴

His comment here, which arises in the context of a discussion of the relation between religion and politics, concurs seamlessly with Averroes's claim in his Short Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ that

[w]ith [poetical speeches], one strives for an imaginary representation [takhyīl] or exemplification [tamthīl] of something in speech so as to move the soul to flee from the thing, or to long for it, or simply to wonder because of the delightfulness which issues from the imaginary representation.⁸⁵

Put sweepingly: the prophetic dreamwork is structured like figurative language. Given that prophecy is ‘political and ultimately metaphysical’,⁸⁶ its representation of intelligiblia during prophetic visions was to take on a marked philosophical significance. But the comprehensibility of these broader philosophical repercussions depends upon an exposition of the poetics of prophecy, for its politics indeed derive from its literary nature.

The Politics of Prophecy

Prophecy becomes a—perhaps the—nodal point at which the ancient philosophical corpus and revealed religion enter most significantly into dialogue. Al-Farabi's theory of prophecy is de facto a political theory⁸⁷: ‘the idea of Imam [read: Prophet —PM],⁸⁸ Philosopher, and Legislator is a single idea ... these [theoretical] things are philosophy when they are in the soul of the legislator. They are religion when they are in the soul of the multitude’.⁸⁹ This idea comes up repeatedly in Al-Farabi's work.⁹⁰ To say that ‘Imam, Philosopher and Legislator’ are a single idea is not to say that they are evaluated equally, but the ranking of philosophy vs. prophecy is of less central concern for my purposes here than is the fact that the division of the sciences in Al-Farabi's oeuvre (as in Avicenna's after him) culminates in the political science that serves to conduct men and women's lives. And it was from the purview of this political science that prophecy had to be studied.⁹¹

The division of sciences is far from a mechanical exercise. Indeed, it constitutes one of those particularly premodern paratextual operations, like the gloss or epitome, which, while appearing to be but a middling genre of importance for (political) philosophy, in fact bears marked esoteric significance, as Strauss well recognized. The defining role that Islamic philosophy came to play for Strauss in the course of the 1930s was precipitated by his encounter with precisely such a parageneric text of Avicenna's, his ‘On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences’,⁹² in which Strauss discovered that Avicenna had classified and summarized Plato's Laws as the text in which prophecy and divine law are treated.⁹³

Precisely what, if anything, of Plato's Laws was actually known first-hand has been a topic of intense debate, including in the very pages of this journal.⁹⁴ But the Arabic philosophers are remarkably consistent in considering Plato's Laws a dialogue in which Plato addresses the political precarity of representational modes, particularly the kind found in prophecy. We have seen that the logical account of poetics and rhetoric was related to the psychological account of prophecy insofar as both emerged out of the Arabic philosophical framework in which imagination, imitation, and visualization were treated in tandem. Thus far, my analysis has been concerned with the sensible representation of the intelligibles; however, this formed but one of two representational strategies, the second of which—the concealment of intelligible truths—we must now explore in greater depth.

The Arabic philosophers' account of visualization and concealment explicitly develops the Platonic interplay between logos and muthos, burhān and hikāyah. Exemplary in this respect is Avicenna's ‘Risāla fī ithbāt al-nubuwwāt’ ('Epistle on the Proof of Prophecies')—a text of which Strauss was explicitly aware⁹⁵—in which Avicenna explains the essence of prophecy:

The message (al-risālah), therefore, is that part of the emanation termed ‘revelation’ (waḥy) which has been received and couched in whatever mode of expression is deemed best for furthering man's good in both the eternal and the corruptible worlds as regards knowledge and political governance, respectively.⁹⁶

Avicenna then goes on to respond to his interlocutor's question about interpreting symbols, specifically the symbols or images in which revelation is couched. This leads him to make quite a remarkable statement:

We will now take up the interpretation of the symbols [al-marāmīz] you asked me about. It has been said that a condition the prophet must adhere to is that his words should be symbols and his expressions hints. Or, as Plato states in the Laws: whoever does not understand the apostles' symbols [rumūz al-rusul] will not attain the Divine Kingdom [al-malakūt al-ilāhī]. Moreover, the foremost Greek philosophers and prophets made use in their books of symbols and signs [marāmīz wa-ishārāt] in which they hid their secret doctrine ... . Moreover, how could the prophet Muhammad (may God's prayers and peace be on him) bring knowledge to the uncouth nomad, not to say to the whole human race considering that he was sent a messenger to all? Political guidance, on the other hand, comes easily to prophets; also the imposition of obligations on people.⁹⁷

Of course, no such passage exists in Plato's Laws, a dialogue, which was, as mentioned, unlikely to have been known in the Arabic world. But Avicenna's claim is in line with a particular conception of the Laws that reaches back, I would argue, to Al-Farabi's Jawāmi' Kitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭūn (Summary of Plato's Laws), in which he states:

Our purpose in making this introduction is this: the wise Plato did not permit himself to present and uncover all kinds of knowledge to all people. Therefore he followed the path of using symbols, riddles, obscurity, and difficulty [al-ramz wa-l-ilghāz wa-l-t'amīyyah wa-l-taṣ'īb] lest knowledge fall into the hands of those not deserving of it and be deformed or into the hands of someone who is not cognizant of its worth or uses it improperly. In this he was correct. ... [T]he one who reads or hears his discussion presumes it is symbolic and that he intends a meaning different from what he has openly declared. This notion is one of the secrets of his books. Moreover, no one can grasp what he declares openly and what he states. This is how his discussion proceeds in the Laws.⁹⁸

Al-Farabi and Avicenna announce a representational strategy that is, so to speak, the photographic negative of that of prophecy: whereas prophetic revelation gives the truths of theoretical knowledge a corporeal and thus readily perceptible garb, philosophy retreats from exoteric doctrine into a language that may be interpreted correctly only by the initiates of theoria.⁹⁹ This distinction does not contradict the fact that philosophical truth and revealed truth are one but rather defines each as symmetrically analogous, but opposite, operations.¹⁰⁰ Maimonides represents the continuation of this tradition¹⁰¹ as can be seen in his admonition in the Guide:

Do not think that only the divine science should be withheld from the multitude. This holds good also for the greater part of natural science. ... This is not only the case with regard to people adhering to Law, but also with regard to the philosophers and learned men of the various communities in ancient times. For they concealed what they said about the first principles and presented it in riddles. Thus Plato and his predecessors designated Matter as the female and Form as the male.¹⁰²

What all three thinkers formulate in the passages just quoted is in essence the distinction between what Strauss termed esotericism and exotericism.¹⁰³ But the element of Strauss's contribution that I would like to highlight here consists of his understanding how the political–prophetic distinction of esotericism vs. exotericism was part of the same conceptual system as the theory of phantasia/takhyīl, which the medievals had inherited from the ancients:

Pour guider l'homme vers le bien-être de l'âme, la loi divine a donc indiqué les plus importantes de ces opinions, mais seulement d'une manière qui ne dépasse pas l'entendement du vulgaire. C'est pourquoi il était nécessaire que les prophètes disposassent de la perfection suprême de la faculté imaginative: l'imagination rend possible la représentation métaphorique, exotérique, des vérités dont le sens propre, ésotérique, doit être caché au vulgaire.¹⁰⁴

Placing this imaginative poetics at the core of an inquiry into these philosophers' account of prophecy enriches—and, indeed, forms a necessary complement to—what Strauss once called the ‘literary character’ of these thinkers' ‘art of writing’.¹⁰⁵ The concept of a ‘literary character’ in these writings (a concept that Strauss would develop in an essay that marked a turning point in his own thinking on Islamic and Jewish prophecy) already alerts us to the philosophical import of the poetics in question here.¹⁰⁶ The literary strategies studied and employed by these philosophers were far from univocal: they could serve to make something visible for a wide audience, keep something hidden for a small elite, or, as was most often the case, offer a multi-faceted poetic construct that permitted access to truth in different forms and at different levels depending on the sense that a given reader could interpret based on his/her degree of theoretical training (or lack thereof).

This is perhaps nowhere more clearly seen than in the philosophical study and practice of allegorical representation (i.e. the amthāl/meshalim previously considered in relation to the poetics of prophecy). Thus, for instance, while Avicenna establishes a dichotomy between prophet and philosopher (in other words, between visualization and concealment), his visionary recitals (that is, his philosophical allegories) lie somewhere in between: they instantiate the imaginative poetics elaborated in his philosophical work, but their sense varies dramatically based upon the reader, whether one of the literal-minded common readers or an initiate who knows how to read the concealed secret doctrines. This multi-faceted literary approach derived explicitly from the politics of poetics, rhetoric and prophecy that Avicenna derived from the Aristotelian corpus.¹⁰⁷

Both this theory and practice of the allegorical art of writing would persist in the Judaeo-Arabic milieu from which Maimonides's work emerged. Ibn Ezra's Kitāb al-muḥāḍara offers one of the most prominent examples of a treatise that is explicitly indebted to the work of the Islamic Aristotelians and that develops their poetics and rhetoric into an account of esoteric writing related to the mashal, which, he notes, like the ḥiddah (a riddle or enigma), has ‘a hidden interpretation [ta'wīl bāṭin] other than that which is apparent’. ‘We use these parables [tilk al-amthāl] for the people [li-l-nās]’, notes Ibn Ezra, ‘but only the learned [al-'ālimūn] comprehend them’.¹⁰⁸ Scholarship has only recently begun to give a comprehensive account—and herein lies one of the points of departure for this study—that Maimonides's account of prophecy and of the literary structure of divine revelation (like that of the falāsifa) developed in relation to the commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics.¹⁰⁹ The philosophical terminology developed in the theories of takhyīl reappear in the Guide as part of the lexicon of which Maimonides avails himself in order to give a logical account of how allegorical representation actually functions. He explains, for instance, at Guide I.33 that parables lead those with unperfected minds towards the assent (taṣdīq) of ‘the existence of the objects of these opinions and representations [of tradition] but not toward grasping their essence as it truly is’.¹¹⁰ Such claims—of which there are many—proceed from an understanding of how the imaginative faculty functions, as Maimonides says explicitly: ‘Undoubtedly it has become clear and manifest that the greater part of the prophecies of the prophets proceeds by means of parables (amthāl); for that is the action of the instrument for this, I mean the imagination (al-mutakhayyilah)’.¹¹¹

It followed from Maimonides's account of the poetics of revelation that he would have to write in this style as well and thus, as Strauss notes:

Maimonides will also have imitated, in some manner or other, the way of the prophets, that is, the twofold method of representation of the Torah, by concealing what ought to be concealed while offering parables for those unable to directly comprehend intelligible truth.¹¹²

But this ‘twofold method’, as Strauss well recognized, could never simply retreat into a simple or simplistic doctrine of the dichotomy of esoteric vs. exoteric modes of writing, for this too-neat opposition is complicated by Maimonides's recognition, underscored by Strauss, that ‘[t]he authors of the Bible chose, in order to reveal the truth by not revealing it, and not to reveal it by revealing it, the use of words of certain kinds and of parables and enigmas’.¹¹³ In other words, the poles of visualization and concealment do not align with the poles of exoteric and esoteric writing.

The consequences of this recognition are immense. It has been the hope here that by recovering the imbrication of takhyīl at the heart of the politics of prophecy,

the Arabic Aristotelians' commentaries on the Organon have taken on a novel urgency. We now see that they did not simply expound the relation between imaginative discourse and prophecy but politicized the distinction between vivid and concealed language. For if knowledge of the intelligibles offers a philosophical truth too politically potent to be expressed in its unembellished form, then it must only be conveyed in symbolic form, which means, in turn, that the very imaginative process used to represent something vividly before people's eyes and thus render it comprehensible is at the same time a process of concealment.¹¹⁴When the question of what mimesis can or does make visible is properly situated at the core of political prophecy, the possible extensions of the discussion farther afield are manifold,¹¹⁵ for, yet again, imitation is revealed to be a category of the utmost politico-theological relevance, even to a perilous degree—a problem, of which any careful student of Plato will already have been aware.

If we follow the trajectory of the theory of prophecy that Strauss sketches,¹¹⁶ it has its origins in a politico-philosophical problematic that emerges out of Plato's Laws, is first developed among the Islamic falāsifa (who are confronted with both Platonic political philosophy and divine revelation) and reaches its definitive summation in Maimonides's Guide. As Strauss would later say explicitly, in order to understand Maimonides he read the falāsifa and only after reading the falāsifa could he properly read Plato.¹¹⁷ Thus, the legibility of a particular philosophical problem was indissoluble from the dynamic of culture transfer by which that problem was transmitted:¹¹⁸ what happens to classical Greek philosophy in its translation to the world of revealed religion?¹¹⁹ What are the genres and subgenres within which that transfer takes place? How are the literary forms of that transfer implicated in the objects themselves of philosophical inquiry?¹²⁰ And what kind of reading is required to engage with Platonic political philosophy if (as Strauss claims) certain questions and answers first become visible post facto, that is, retroactively from the medieval period looking ‘back’?¹²¹

Any possible answers depend on a thoroughgoing account of the manner in which takhyīl is implicated at the core of that agon between poetry and philosophy, which already with Plato was said to be ancient (Republic, 607b). The Arabic introduction of prophecy into that age-old quarrel at once prolongs and displaces that dialectic, whose afterlife extends from its origins in the ancient world through its prophetic reformulations in the medieval period and into our modern era under the grip, as it is, of the ‘theologico-political predicament’ that radiates out from—or rather, up to—Weimar Germany and beyond.¹²²