«Лучшее в поэзии – ложь»: Песнь песней в еврейской философско-теологической мысли Средневековья в свете подхода арабских аристотеликов к поэтике

Abstract

This article deals with the question of how the Jewish Aristotelians, followers of Maimonides, combined the exclusive status of the Song of Songs with the no­tion of the falsity of poetry. According to Aristotle’s Arabic commentators, poet­ics is part of the logical organon. The poetic syllogisms are based on deliberately false premises and rules of inference, and thus poetic discourse is the lowest in the hierarchy of the logical corpus. At the same time, the following Talmudic maxim is known: “If all Scripture is holy, then the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies”. Thus, Jewish theologians, having assimilated the Arab Aristotelian approach to poetics, were faced with a difficult task: how to explain the supreme status of the Song of Songs in the biblical canon if this book is written in the lan­guage of lies? In the works of medieval Jewish theologians we do not find a clearly formulated solution to this problem, which may be due to the fact that the Song of Songs was often associated with an undisclosed esoteric theme. This article will describe the range of views of medieval Jewish thinkers on the role of poetic speech in the Song of Songs and provide an overview of researchers’ attempts to formulate a solution to the above problem. An analysis of a number of texts by medieval Jewish commentators will offer a response not found in the research literature to the question of combining the high status of the Song of Songs with the deliberate falsity of poetic discourse. According to our reading of Moshe Ibn-Tibbon’s commentary on the Song of Songs, the false language of poetry helps to avoid the illusion of comprehension where positively formulated knowledge is impossible.