On the Nature and Origin of the Doctrine of Emanation among the Kabbalists

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also everything is raised up again through him, from the lowest to the highest original Latin: "ab imis ad summa".

The so-called four worlds In Kabbalah, these are the hierarchical levels of existence: Atziluth (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), and Assiyah (Action), the ten Sephiroth The ten attributes or emanations through which the Infinite reveals itself in each world, the dual primal force—Father and Mother In the Sephirotic tree, these represent the qualities of Hokhmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Understanding)—the five roots of the souls, and so on, are all merely names and mental concepts. Through these, the revelations or manifestations of the light-, spirit-, and life-force of the Most High are designated according to all types, levels, and gradations.

One must therefore not be surprised if, according to the principle of the Kabbalists: "What is in one world is in all," the same names and images are used by them sometimes in a higher and sometimes in a lower sense, and the same characteristics appear across all levels and gradations. According to their principles and their entire method of thinking, they find a thousand distinctions where our metaphysics The philosophical study of the nature of reality, being, and the world, whose principles are of a completely different kind, no longer knows how to distinguish anything.

Consequently, according to this system, God is Everything, and yet Nothing of all that has a name This refers to the concept of Ayin (Nothingness), signifying that God is so far beyond human language and definition that He is "no-thing" that we can name.

He is Everything—not as if He himself, according to His essence, could be divided or stretched out in length and breadth (which the Kabbalists absolutely reject and speak against most emphatically); rather, He is Everything because nothing exists,