¶ … mystical movement in the medieval and early modern period and examine how Christians, Muslims and Jews explored ways to draw closer to God. We will discuss how Christian mysticism, Islamic philosophy and Hasidism expressed this impulse in several ways. All of them depend upon transcendence to obtain perfect knowledge of the divine.
In the "Mystical Theology of St. Denis," Denis tells Timothy that divine grace allows a person to transcend the human body and its limited physical senses. This transcendence and ascension is due to God's grace. By going past the body and its senses, we are able to purify ourselves. For the Christian mystic, doing this allows them to know the first cause which is God. God then is the ultimate reality. Those who have not experienced this can not accomplish a true knowledge of God since they are not coming up on issues with the same dedication that those who transcended have.
Similarly, Hasidism as elaborated by the Baal Shem Tov promotes devekut to God by internalizing mystical knowledge about God which is gotten by contemplating the meaning of the eyn sof (the ineffable name). In this way, the can transcend the limits of the body and pass into a higher realm of higher worlds. In Hasidism, even the non-educated and unlettered could become conscious of God on a higher level. This knowledge in applied to the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Kaballah and leads to daat, the ultimate knowledge of God and the elevation of the soul. The Hasidic approach differed from traditional mysticism and Jewish asceticism in that it emphasized joy and optimism. This came about through the intercession of the rebbe who mediates between his followers and the divine as an intercessor.
In the case of Al-Farabi, although he represented philosophical logic, he was under major influence by Sufi mysticism which transcended purely physical knowledge. Sufism is simply an umbrella term for the ascetic and the mystical movements within Islam. Further, Sufism is supposed to have incorporated separate elements of Christian gnosticism, monasticism and Indian mysticism. Two central Sufi concepts are the complete and total reliance upon God. There is also dhikr, that is, the perpetual remembrance of God. The middle ground for al-Farabi is the boundary between philosophical reality and this mysticism that a thinking person could achieve.
