The Metaphysical Structure of the Divine and the World in Cordovero’s Kabbalah

This paper explores the philosophical dimension of Jewish esotericism through Moses Cordovero’s attempt to construct a rational system of metaphysics in sixteenth-century Safed. Cordovero’s project, both systematic and speculative, positions the Pardes Rimonim (1567) as a bridge between theology, philosophy, and esotericism within the Jewish intellectual tradition. Cordovero (1522–1570) sought to rationalize esoteric discourse and organize it into a coherent metaphysical framework within the early modern Jewish intellectual tradition. In the Pardes Rimonim, he synthesizes earlier kabbalistic traditions—from the Zohar to the Sefer Yetsirah—into a conceptual system articulating divine unity, the emanation of the sefirot, and the ontological structure of reality (Scholem, 1960; Idel, 1988). Far from ecstatic mysticism, his thought represents a form of philosophical esotericism, aiming at a rational understanding of the divine through the interplay of language, causality, and being (Wolfson, 1994).Cordovero’s rationalization of the esoteric resonates with the medieval synthesis of faith and reason (Maimonides), while his metaphysical vision echoes Neoplatonic and Avicennian models (Plotinus; Avicenna). At the same time, his notion of divine emanation and ontological mediation anticipates certain intuitions in contemporary philosophy—from Spinoza’s monism to Levinas’s ethics of transcendence and Deleuze’s philosophy of process.From a hermeneutical standpoint, Cordovero’s Kabbalah may be read as a philosophy of meaning, where the world functions as a text to be deciphered, each sefira mediating between transcendence and immanence (Ricoeur, 1965; Gadamer, 1976). Through this vision, Cordovero offers a model for rethinking the relation between the symbolic and the rational, and thereby contributes to the contemporary philosophy of religion.Ultimately, this study argues that Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim reveals Jewish esotericism as a distinctive form of speculative rationality, capable of engaging in a genuine dialogue with current philosophical thought and enriching the broader history of metaphysics.