Mirror of His Beauty : Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbala (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World)

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Antiseptic
Review: I can't say that I disliked this book. It provides a compendium and a tabulation of a wealth of material regarding the history of the Divine Feminine in the Christian and Jewish traditions, starting with the wisdom literature in the bible and going through the later Middle Ages. Along the way it reviews the thoughts of Philo and the Kabbalah in this area, and provides some data on the phenomenon of Mariology in Western Medieval Christianity.

On the whole, though, I found the book to be long on data and short on insight. One gets the feeling that Professor Schafer fears to offend his Jewish and Christian readers by pursuing the possibility that they actually may have had an effect on each other's religious thought.

Also, despite the subtitle of this book, there is virtually nothing about the Islamic contribution to this phenomenon, an omission that I suspect may be crucial. The figure of the Divine Feminine is very important in much Islamic mystical literature from the Middle Ages, and not least of all in Spain, where it would have had considerable influence certainly on Jewish circles, and very likely on Christian ones as well.

In short, if you're looking for a thumbnail sketch of the Feminine Images of God in pre-modern western thought, this book is fine, but you will not walk away with any in-depth understanding of the subject.