The Journal of Religious

r eHistory
uchlin
Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2001

and ancient wisdom

115

CHRISTOPHER S. CELENZA

The Search for Ancient Wisdom in

Early Modern Europe: Reuchlin and
the Late Ancient Esoteric Paradigm

This article offers a contextualized interpretation of the De arte cabalistica, a treatise written in 1517 by Johannes Reuchlin, the German political gure, humanist,
Hebraist, and Pythagorean Kabbalist. The study begins by establishing a context
for reading the treatise and sketches a late ancient mentality, termed the postPlotinian moment, of which a number of Renaissance thinkers, Reuchlin included,
partook. Next the piece moves to Christian Kabbalism and Reuchlins place within
that movement. Finally, there is a vefold analysis of the De arte cabalistica
framed around the issues of allegoresis, soteriology, the efcacy of language, the
gulf between humanity and divinity, and information transfer.

O quanta est haec altitudo, quanta profunditas, quae sola de apprehenditur

[Oh how great is the height, how great the depth, of that which is understood by
faith alone]. So wrote Johannes Reuchlin in March 1517, in the De arte cabalistica, a treatise dedicated humbly to Pope Leo X.1 He had been suffering at the
hands of slanderers, and hoped, he wrote in the treatises afterword, that Leo
1. On Reuchlin see L. Geiger, Johann Reuchlin, sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Duncker
and Humblot, 1871; repr. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1964); L. Geiger, ed., Johann Reuchlins
Briefwechsel, Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 126 (Tbingen: Litterarischer
Verein, 1875; repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1962); Johannes Reuchlin, Briefwechsel, band I, 1477
1505, Unter Mitwirkung von Stefan Rhein, bearbeitet von Matthias DallAsta und Gerald Drner
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999); M. Brod, Johannes Reuchlin und sein
Kampf (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965); the studies in M. Krebs, ed., Johannes Reuchlin, 1455
1522: Festgabe seiner Vaterstadt Pforzheim (Pforzheim: Im Selbstverlag der Stadt, 1955); and S.
Rhein, Johannes Reuchlin (1455 1522). Ein deutscher uomo universale, in P. Gerhard Schmidt,
Humanismus im Deutschen Sdwesten: Biographische Profile (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1993),
5975. For Reuchlin and his ties to Renaissance occultism, see C. Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte
Tradition der Renaissance, Pforzheimer Reuchlinschriften, 6 (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1998).
The De arte cabalistica (hereafter cited as DAC ) was printed in 1517 in Hagenau; the standard
modern version is a reprint contained in Johannes Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico (1494). De arte
cabalistica (1517) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964); for this study I have
used the reprint in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah / De arte cabalistica, tr. Martin
and Sarah Goodman, with introductions by M. Idel and G. Lloyd Jones (Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993). The quotation is from Oiii recto. Throughout, the translations are my own, though I have used and beneted from those of Martin and Sarah Goodman.
For a general bibliographical study of Reuchlins works, see J. Benzing, Bibliographie der
Dr Christopher S. Celenza is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, East
Lansing, U.S.A.

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would remember him well and understand that Reuchlin was the rst to translate Greek into German, and the rst to open up the mysteries of Hebrew to the
Latins. In the De arte cabalistica, Reuchlin makes a particular set of syncretistic
manoeuvres, which leads him to equate the Kabbalah with Pythagoreanism,
a comparison which had been rst suggested by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
(with whom Reuchlin had come into contact in 1490) in his Heptaplus.2
In this paper I would like to offer a contextualized examination of Reuchlins
De arte cabalistica. My main contention will be that Reuchlin, in writing this
work, was tapping into a set of late ancient, esoteric post-Plotinian concerns
resurrected in the Renaissance, which go beyond texts and citation and have
to do as much with mentalities and approaches to ritual as they do with more
traditional historico-philosophical questions. The Christian Kabbalah, which
I shall discuss below, meshed especially well with these concerns and provided a new dimension for thinkers such as Reuchlin to esh out the possibilities inherent in the intrinsically exible, yet fundamentally recognizable
form of discourse to which the late ancient mentality gave rise. In what
follows I shall sketch the fundamentals of this late ancient approach and its
manifestation in late fteenth-century Florence. Thereafter, I turn to Christian
Kabbalism and Reuchlins place within the movement. Finally, I shall frame
my discussion of Reuchlins De arte cabalistica around ve separate concerns which reect this approach, to be enumerated below.
It is important to emphasize that this study presents no new specic information on Reuchlin. Rather, the intention is to read him in a new way. In his
recent major work, Thinking with Demons, Stuart Clark directly confronts
problems raised by philosophers of language.3 In studying the thought of an
intellectual, are we tapping into anything real? Or are we studying the
words alone, divorced from any possible signicance other than that which we
impose on them? He goes beyond this traditional problem of philosophical
realism (whose long shadow looms over debates surrounding critical theory
and its applicability to historical writing) by suggesting that the task for the
intellectual historian is to recreate internal coherences and systems of meaning in the intellectual life of the past. In this way, Clark transcends the
problems regarding the correspondence theory of truth that sometimes plague

Schriften Johannes Reuchlin im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Bad Bocklet: W. Krieg, 1955); see
there, 2830, for the printing history of the De arte cabalistica. I would like to thank Salvatore
Camporeale and this journals readers for their very helpful criticisms and suggestions.
2. C. Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandolas Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989); L. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 67. For Picos Hebrew sources see the
contributions of Fabrizio Lelli et al. in Pico, Poliziano e lUmanesimo di fine Quattrocento, ed.
P. Viti (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 159 223. On Reuchlin and Pico, see W. Beierwaltes, Reuchlin
und Pico della Mirandola, Tijdschrift voor filosofie 66 (1994): 31336; Zika, Reuchlin und die
okkulte Tradition, 1726. Jacques Lefvre dEtaples also saw a fundamental similarity between
Pythagorean number theory and the practice of Kabbalah, which he expressed in his never-printed
De magia naturali. See B. P. Copenhaver, Lefvre dEtaples, Symphorien Champier, and the
Secret Names of God, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 189 211.
3. S. Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).

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intellectual history, showing well how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

intellectuals who thought and wrote about witchcraft literally thought with
demons, that is, how and why they actually incorporated them into their world
view. Along the same metatheoretical lines, I intend here to offer a recreation
of an internally consistent mentality reected in post-Plotinian Platonism that
was resurrected, modied, and internalized by a number of European thinkers
from the end of the fteenth century onward.
The Post-Plotinian Moment: Late Ancient Platonism and the
Florentine Renaissance
Plotinus (ad 204 270) had deprecated the value of religious ritual in conjunction with the philosophical life, though he did not deny that it could be efcacious for non-philosophers who were trying to liberate themselves from the
material world.4 Partially, this was because he saw matter as anti-substantial
and evil; since many aspects of religious ritual, especially theurgic ritual,
involved using material things, he viewed these rituals as on a lesser plane
than pure contemplation. It was by contemplation alone that true philosophers
could free their souls from the corporeal matter in which they were imprisoned
and, ultimately, engage in henosis, the process of union with the One: We
must y from here and separate ourselves from what has been added to us,
and not be a composite, an ensouled body.5 Partially, too, Plotinus attitudes
toward ritual were shaped by his view of the place of the human soul. Unlike
Platonists before and, importantly, after him, Plotinus suggested that the
human soul, in its descent from the realm of the divine, had not descended
entire. Instead it had left a part of itself with the divine: And, if one ought to
dare to express ones own view more clearly, contradicting the opinion of
others, even our soul does not altogether come down, but there is always
something of it in the intelligible.6 For Plotinus, when we engage in henosis,
we are completing ourselves: we are far from the One ontologically, but not
so far as other Platonists thought. More than a spark of the divine was in us;
there was instead a literally essential similarity.
Plotinus student, biographer, and editor Porphyry (ad 232309) occasionally vacillated in his opinion regarding the efcacy of religious ritual; but, for
4. For further argumentation and bibliography on this problem see: C. S. Celenza, Pythagoras
in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 667711;
C. S. Celenza, Temi neopitagorici nel pensiero di Marsilio Ficino, in Actes du XLIIe Colloque
International dEtudes Humanistes Marsile Ficin 1499 1999, ed. S. Toussaint, Cahiers de
lHumanisme, Les Belles Lettres, forthcoming (Paris, 2001); C. S. Celenza, Lantiquit tardive
et le Platonisme Florentin, in Philosophie et Philologie au Quattrocento, ed. F. Marioni Zini,
forthcoming (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001); C. S. Celenza, Late Antiquity
and Florentine Platonism, in Marsilio Ficino: His Sources, His Circle, His Legacy, ed. M. J. B.
Allen and V. R. Rees, forthcoming (Leiden, Cologne, New York: Brill, 2001) and for certain
historiographical points, C. S. Celenza, Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels, forthcoming, Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001).
5. Enn. 2.3.9 (echoing Plato, Tht. 176a8b1 and Phd. 67c6):  


/  . &1 2    
3
.
6. Enn. 4.8.8:      ! #    ,
& ' & ( (  ),  * &# , , ..

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journal of religious history

reasons largely similar to those of Plotinus, he too thought it was something

to be used by non-philosophers. The real change in the course of later Platonism
came with Iamblichus (ad 242/5 326), Porphyrys student and then opponent, who consciously merged philosophy and religious ritual, and saw them
as interdependent. In Proclus commentary to Platos Timaeus, in a passage
which preserves an opinion of Iamblichus, we read: we dare to react against
those Platonists who contend that our soul is of the same weight as the gods
and has the same essence as the divine souls and who say that it becomes the
Intellect itself and the Intelligible and the One itself when it has abandoned
everything and has been united with it.7 Plotinus opinion concerning the place
of the human soul and its ontological distance from the One, in other words,
was regarded as arrogant.
Along with this came a different view of the material world. This is not
to say that Iamblichus views matter (hyle) considered as a philosophical
category as a good thing, for one would be hard pressed to nd a Platonist
who did. But he did view the created world with more optimism. On the one
hand, he assigned to humankind an ontological place essentially distinct from
divinity. On the other, he, like all later Platonists, believed that the ultimate
goal of life was to return to the One. Given these two positions, the only
solution was to assign an important place in his world view to religious ritual,
which often used physical material means as aids. The material things had
been placed there for a reason; far from shunning them, the wise philosopher
will learn to appreciate and use them efcaciously. Hence theurgy, or the
efcacious performance of ineffable acts beyond all human [noetic] understanding.8 In the later history of Platonism, Iamblichus was routinely, as
opposed to exceptionally, referred to as theios, divine; and an often repeated
ancient epithet comparing him and Porphyry is revealing: The Syrian
[Iamblichus] was inspired by the gods, the Phoenician [Porphyry] highly
learned.9 Iamblichus changed the Plotinus-determined direction of Platonism
in such a way that the philosopher as a gure became understood as a person whose purview embraced efcacious religious ritual; this sort of ritual was
no longer seen as beneath the philosophers concern. It was with Iamblichus
that the much-vaunted Hermetic tradition, with its strong focus on human
agency, was rst linked in a lasting manner to the Platonic tradition.10
To jump without transition to the late fteenth century in Florence would
be unreasonable, since there were many medieval thinkers deeply committed
to this sort of approach to ritual and the world, where the human operator can
7. Proclus, In Tim, III.231, 510, cited and translated in C. G. Steel, The Changing Self: A Study
on the Soul in Later Neoplatonism: Iamblichus, Damascius, and Priscianus (Brussels: Paleis der
Academien, 1978), 28.
8. Iamb., De myst., 2.11.96 (ed. des Places, 1989): . 24
 56 ' . On Iamblichus and theurgy see G. Shaw, Theurgy: Rituals of Unication in the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Traditio 41 (1985): 128, and G. Fowden, The
Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Ancient Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986; reissued with new preface, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
9. Steel, 12.
10. See Fowden.

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119

have an effect on the world around him and even on his mobility up the
ontological scale.11 Yet it was in the late fteenth century that the greater part
of the later Platonic works alluded to became available in the West, and it was
Marsilio Ficino (14331499) who made them accessible.12 When historians
of philosophy have approached Ficino, I suggest elsewhere, they have sought
overmuch the Plotinian in his thought, since, for a long time, historians of
ancient philosophy have considered Plotinus the rationalistic exception in a
world of late ancient Platonic ritualistic decadence. When historians of esoterism have approached Ficino, they have tended to exclude Ficinos vast writings
on traditional philosophical topics. However, if Ficinos entire oeuvre and his
style of life are taken into account, he is more similar to the late ancient model
holy man represented by gures like Iamblichus and later Proclus; and it is
unsurprising that in certain fundamental ways Ficinos thought mirrors that
of these post-Plotinian philosophers.
One of the most basic manifestations of this post-Plotinian tendency is the
manner in which Ficinos thought includes efcacious rituals such as the
theurgic use of natural materials, exorcisms, etc. in the general ambience of
a richly scholarly Platonism: At the same time we do not say that our spirit
is prepared for the celestials only through qualities of things known to the
senses, but also and much more through certain properties engrafted in things
from the heavens and hidden from our senses, and hence only with difculty
known to our reason.13 The things are endowed with power to be used and
manipulated by the sagacious human operator; and the power, it seems, must
be granted to minds which use it legitimately, as medicine and agriculture are
justly granted, and all the more so as that activity which joins heavenly things
to earthly is more perfect.14 Although Ficino is constantly on guard against
appearing heterodox, there is a widening ideological space for discussions of
human efcacy, where the operator has recourse to occult powers, provided
the right ritual means are used to access them. It is a fundamentally nonPlotinian moment, and one of great importance in understanding early modern European intellectual culture, for it was shared by quite a large number of
gures on the intellectual landscape.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was certainly one of those, and, as mentioned
above, he had suggested early on that there was a fundamental similarity shared
by the Kabbalah and Pythagoreanism, such that both, practised correctly, had
the power to unlock hidden powers inherent in things material, verbal, and
symbolic. The fascination of many thinkers, Pico included, for what has
come to be termed Christian Kabbalism meshes well with the particular web
of concerns which the post-Plotinian moment wove in Renaissance Europe,
and it is to a discussion of Christian Kabbalism that I now turn.
11. See R. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
12. For bibliography on Ficino see P. O. Kristeller, Marsilio Ficino and his Work After Five
Hundred Years, Quaderni di Rinascimento, 7 (Florence, 1987) and T. Katinis, Bibliograa
Ficiniana, Accademia 2 (2000). The following points are developed much more fully in my
studies mentioned above, at n. 3.
13. Marsilio Ficino, De triplici vita, 3.12: 298 301.
14. Ibid., Apologia, ad fin.

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Christian Kabbalism, Pico della Mirandola, and the Career of

Johann Reuchlin
The Kabbalah the term literally means tradition is a Hebrew technique of understanding which reects two concerns: rst, a theosophical
understanding of God combined with a symbolic view of reality and the
theurgical conception of religious life, and second, the way to attain a
mystical experience of God through the invocation of divine names.15 While
the Kabbalah owes some of its characteristic themes, especially its theurgic
ones, to late ancient Talmudic and Midrashic literature, the textual artefacts
which the Renaissance would possess, especially the Zohar, originated with
the Castilian Kabbalists of the second half of the thirteenth century.16
Christian Kabbalah received a classic denition from Gershom Scholem;
he wrote that it was the interpretation of Kabbalistic texts in the service of
Christianity (or, to be more precise, Catholicism); or the use of Kabbalistic
concepts and methodology in support of Christian dogma.17 Joseph Dan
widens the denition, and suggests that certain Christian Kabbalists also
believed that the study of non-biblical Hebrew religious texts had an impact
on Christianity itself, and offer[ed] a deeper, more profound understanding
of Christianity.18 In other words, Christian Kabbalists assumed two things
fundamentally: rst, that Christianity represented the truth; second, that
anything, including non-biblical Hebrew religious wisdom, could be put to
nding, unveiling, and explicating the truth; indeed, it was all, in its own
way, part of the truth.19 This widened denition of Christian Kabbalah seems
appropriate, since it acknowledges the relative malleability of orthodoxy in
pre-Tridentine Europe.

15. M. Idel, Qabbalah, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade et al., 16 vols. (New
York and London: Macmillan, 1995) 12: 11724, at 117. For recent literature on the Kabbalah
see the studies in L. Fine, ed., Essential Papers on Kabbalah (New York: New York University
Press, 1995); and M. Hallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, tr. R. Bar-Ilan and O. WiskindElper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
16. Idel, 11821. For a study of the Zohar along with translated excerpts, see I. Tishby, The
Wisdom of the Zohar, tr. D. Goldstein, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); for a full
English translation see The Zohar, tr. H. Sperling, M. Simon, and P. Levertoff, 5 vols. (London:
Soncino, 1931 4). It should be noted that for Renaissance Christian thinkers it was important to
dissociate the Kabbalah from the Talmud, since the latter had been stigmatized as a blasphemous
source, intended to combat Christianity and, in the eyes of some, as demanding that Jews use the
blood of Christian children in their rituals. See J. Dan, The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and
its Historical Signicance, in The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and their Christian Interpreters, ed. J. Dan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5595, at 64;
and the ne study of R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) esp. 111 62.
17. G. Scholem, The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah, in Dan, 1751, at 17; the essay
is a translation of Scholems Zur Geschichte der Anfnge der Christlichen Kabbala, in Essays
Presented to Leo Baeck on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday (London: East and West
Library, 1954), 158 93. In general on Christian Kabbalism see the studies in J. Dan, J. L. Blau,
The Christian Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); and F. Secret, Les kabbalistes chrtiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Dunod,
1964), esp. 44 72 on Reuchlin.
18. J. Dan, The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and its Historical Signicance, in Dan, ed.,
The Christian Kabbalah, 55 95, at 56; see also 62 on the relationship between Kabbalah and
mysticism.
19. Dan, 60.

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In the Florentine Renaissance milieu, Giovanni Pico was the most important Christian Kabbalist, and was himself inuenced by the translations of
Kabbalistic literature by his teacher in Kabbalistic matters, Flavius Mithridates,
a convert to Christianity.20 Pico had gone so far as to suggest that any successful magical art had to be allied to Kabbalah in some fashion, and that no
names could have any magical power if they were not Hebrew or closely
derived from Hebrew: claims that put him at the centre of a lively polemic.21
In Picos 900 theses, which he had proposed to debate in 1486, 119 are
explicitly Kabbalistic.22 As is well known, Picos disputation never happened,
as a number of his conclusions were condemned by Innocent VIII.23 With
respect to the late ancient, pagan Platonic environment and its adaptability to
Christian Kabbalism, Pico, in his 900 theses, seems to imply (though he does
not explicitly propose) a continuity and overlap between the later Platonic
henads (literally, unities) as elaborated by Proclus, and the ten sefirot, so
important in the Kabbalistic tradition.24 Both the henads and the sefirot were
manifestations in some interpretations, emanations of divinity. Proclus
used the henads to create a complex ontological system, an ancillary exegetical

20. See C. Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandolas Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, with S. A.
Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Picos 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 167 (Tempe,
Ariz., 1998), 3445. See also M. Idel, The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the
Kabbalah in the Renaissance, in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. B. D. Cooperman,
Harvard Judaica Texts and Studies, 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 186
242; and G. Massetani, La filosofia cabbalistica di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Empoli:
Traversari, 1897). In general on Jewish thought and the Italian Renaissance see D. Ruderman,
The Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought, in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms,
and Legacy, ed. A. Rabil, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 1: 382
433; and the recent review essay of A. M. Lesley, Jews at the Time of the Renaissance,
Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 845 56.
21. Cf. Pico, Conclusions, ed. Farmer, in Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 9>22 (p. 500): Nulla
nomina ut signicativa, et inquantum nomina sunt singula et per se sumpta, in magico opere
virtutem habere possunt, nisi sint hebraica, vel inde proxima derivata. For polemic against Pico
see Pedro Garsias, Determinationes magistrales contra conclusiones Joannis Pici (Rome, 1489)
= L. Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum, 2 vols. in 4 (Stuttgart, 18261838) no. 7492; cf. Zika,
Reuchlins De verbo mirifico, 107.
22. For the text see Farmer, 210 553; for the Kabbalistic conclusions see 28.147 and 11>1
72. See Farmers introductory monograph for further literature.
23. For the juridical examination of Picos theses and the manner in which the disputatio
was suspended, see A. Biondi, La doppia inchiesta sulle Conclusiones e le traversie romane di
Pico nel 1487, in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel
cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (14941994), ed. G. C. Garfagnini, Studi Pichiani, 5,
2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 1: 197212; for Picos Kabbalistic conclusions and the manner
in which he saw a fundamental similarity between Kabbalistic reasoning and the Pythagorean
tetractys, see B. P. Copenhaver, Locculto in Pico. Il Mem chiuso e le fauci spalancate da
Azazel: La magia cabalistica di Giovanni Pico, in the same volume, at 213 36.
24. On the henads, see Proclus, Platonic Theology, ed. and trans. H. D. Saffrey and L. G.
Westerink, bks. 1 and 2 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967); Elements of Theology, ed. and trans.
E. R. Dodds, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), props. 113 65; and the commentary In Platonis Parmenidem, ed. V. Cousin (Paris, 1864), 104365; there is an English translation of the latter in Proclus, Commentary on Platos Parmenides, trans. J. M. Dillon and G. R.
Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also the discussion of the henads in
L. Siorvanes, Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996), 16775. On the sefirot, see below, n. 27. Farmer, 70 1, and 85 9, interpreting
Picos theses 10>9 and 10>10, suggests that Pico saw this similarity and intended to bring it out
into open debate at his planned disputation in Rome.

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goal of which was to nd correspondences in the Platonic corpus.25 By them

he intended to represent the emanations of the divine both in the proper,
immaterial realm of the divine and in the created world. Moreover, just as
the One is the cause and goal of the universe . . . so the ones [the henads]
are the One multiplied.26 In order to reach the divine, human beings, in
Proclus view, had to use and access the unities immanent in the created
world.
In the medieval Hebrew tradition, the sefirot represent a way to reconcile a
God who, on the one hand, is removed, deep within himself, and ineffable
(called Eiyn Sof endlessness) with a God who chooses to reveal himself
and is in fact immanent in the created world. Each sefirah represents a manifestation of this revelation, and it is by studying the sefirot that human beings
can come to know Gods immanent aspects and even to activate divinity.27
The comparison between the neo-Platonic henads along with their theurgic
possibilities and the sefirot is suggestive, and it is not unlikely that Pico saw,
as Farmer has suggested, a fundamental similarity there. It is Reuchlin, however, who explicitly focuses on the sefirot and merges them suggestively with
what was for him the Pythagorean tradition (and what is for us, of course, the
neo-Pythagorean, later Platonic tradition). Zika has pointed out that Reuchlins
works, especially the De verbo mirifico, are best seen within the context of
contemporary debate,28 a debate which, in its own way, shows the relative
openness which was possible in the late fteenth and early sixteenth centuries. One might suggest, then, that in the De arte cabalistica Reuchlin is
advancing the debate on the efcacy of symbolic language and the manner in
which one can, using symbolic language, have an effect on the sensible world.
In this respect he differentiates himself sharply from many sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century thinkers, who believed instead following a venerable
Aristotelian line of argument that words were arbitrarily designated signs of
things that possessed meaning only by human convention.29 Instead, Reuchlin
was creating and operating within a language system whose raison dtre was
to transcend by ritual the closed nature of language and the boundary between
words and things.
Reuchlin drew great inspiration from Picos belief in the validity of the
Kabbalah, and from the general syncretic milieu in late Quattrocento Florence,
as he later testied a number of times.30 But his beliefs and his practices are
his own and are not only simple imports from Florentine culture; this notion
25. There are basically two sorts of henads in Proclus, those (Siorvanes, 168) that are independent and complete in themselves, and [those] that belong to their participants. Cf. Proclus,
Elements of Theology, proposition 64.
26. Siorvanes, 1901.
27. Cf. Hallamish, 121 66; Tishby, 1: 269 307 for an introduction to the Sefirot and 309 70
for texts.
28. Zika, Reuchlins De verbo mirifico, passim; C. Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte Tradition,
23 62, esp. 2730.
29. See Clark, 28193; B. Vickers, Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. B. Vickers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 95163.
30. Secret, Les kabbalistes, 44.

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123

necessitates a brief examination of his background.31 Reuchlin lived from

1455 to 1522, and studied at Freiburg, Paris, Basel, Orleans, and Poitiers. He
made, by his own report, two trips to Italy where he became acquainted with
Florentine thinkers, in 1482 and then in 1490, in the service of Count Eberhard
of Wrtemburg. He is well-known for the Reuchlin affair, when, in 1510,
he was asked by a Cologne commission to write a recommendation concerning the entreaties of the converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn, who advocated
the conscation of Hebrew books in the city. In his Gutachten his recommendation Reuchlin refused to endorse the notion that all Hebrew books
should be conscated.32 In 1511 he wrote a treatise, the Augenspiegel, in which
he defended his earlier opinion. Thereafter, his own work, the Augenspiegel,
came under investigation. In 1512 the theology faculty of the University of
Cologne condemned his work and in 1514 the work was condemned by a
University of Paris commission of theologians. Controversy arose, and in the
aftermath the famous work, the Letters of Obscure Men [Epistolae obscurorum
virorum] was written, in which a number of well-known humanists, among
them Crotus Rubeanus and Ulrich von Hutten, skewered Reuchlins scholastic critics.33 A series of polemical writings ensued, and, at the behest of the
Master of Heretical Depravity, the Brabant Dominican Jacobus Hoogstraeten
(who would later critique Luthers De libertate christiana), a papal investigation was undertaken.34 The original papal investigation ended in a mandatum
de supersedendo, that is, an ofcial postponement, in 1516, despite the fact
that the majority of investigators had decided in Reuchlins favour. Thus the
De arte cabalistica, written in 1517, was clearly the work of a true believer in

31. The following account of Reuchlins career relies on the sources cited above in n. 1. For
the differences between the Kabbalism of Pico and that of Reuchlin, see H.-M. Kirn, Das Bild
vom Juden im Deutschland des frhen 16. Jahrhunderts, dargestellt an den Schriften Johannes
Pfefferkorns, Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism, 3 (Tbingen: Mohr,
1989), 156 72, cited in H. A. Oberman, Discovery of Hebrew and Discrimination Against the
Jews: The Veritas Hebraica as Double-Edged Sword in Renaissance and Reformation, in
Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, ed. A. C.
Fix and S. C. Karant-Nunn, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 18 (Kirksville, Mo: Sixteenth
Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 1934, at 24 n.14.
32. On this episode see Geiger, 203 454; Hsia, 11924; J. H. Overeld, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 24797, an
expanded version of J. H. Overeld, A New Look at the Reuchlin Affair, Studies in Medieval
and Renaissance History 8 (1971): 165207; C. Zika, Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and
Occult Philosophy, The Journal of Religious History 9 (1977): 223 46; H. Peterse, Jacobus
Hoogstraeten gegen Johannes Reuchlin, Verffentlichungen des Instituts fr Europische
Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung abendlndische Religionsgeschichte, 165 (Mainz: Zabern, 1995);
and Johannes Reuchlin, Schriften zum Bcherstreit, 1. Teil Reuchlins Schriften, ed. W.-W. Ehlers,
L. Mundt, H.-G. Roloff, and P. Schfer, in Johannes Reuchlin, Smtliche Werke, 4 (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstadt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1999). For the complexity of Reuchlins attitudes toward the
Jews, especially in the period preceding the Reuchlinhandel, see H. Oberman, Three SixteenthCentury Attitudes to Judaism: Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Luther, in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth
Century, ed. B. D. Cooperman, Harvard Judaica Texts and Studies, 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 326 64.
33. For recent literature on this problem, with new discoveries, see W. Ludwig, Literatur und
Geschichte Ortwin Gratius, die Dunkelmnnerbriefe und Das Testament des Philipp
Melanchthon von Walter Jens, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 34 (1999): 125 67.
34. Hoogstraetens critique of Luther: H. A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 45.

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the power of Christian Kabbalism to transform religion. Instead of receding

into bland apologetics (which would have been the safer course), Reuchlin
deliberately set out to write a potentially controversial treatise unifying various strands of wisdom. Dedicated to Pope Leo X, the work was intended not
only to explain Reuchlins views on the compatibility of Christian practice
with Pythagorean Kabbalism, but also to serve as a pice justificative in
the eyes of the pope, and, one supposes, in the eyes of the Fifth Lateran
council, one of whose many charges was to come to some sort of judgment
regarding Reuchlin.35 Finally, in 1521 Reuchlins Augenspiegel, with the burgeoning Protestant Reformation as background, was condemned by the pope.
Reuchlin was sentenced to silence on the matter and had to bear the costs
of the trial.
Reuchlin was only involuntarily a polemicist and was at heart a litterateur
and religious thinker.36 In his earlier years he had been part of the lively
Heidelberg circle of German humanists, which included Jacob Wimpheling,
Conrad Celtis, and others.37 He wrote a number of works, including a satirical
treatise on relics (the Sergius) and a Terentian comedy (the Proscaenica
gymnasmata, also known as the Henno).38 He was also a sophisticated scholar
of Greek: he Latinized a text of the Christian bishop Proclus of Cyzicus in
1488 and, later, defended the traditional, iotacized pronunciation of Greek
against Erasmuss restored version.39 He himself believed that his greatest
contribution was his introduction to the modern West of an accurate knowledge of Hebrew, in his De rudimentis hebraicis of 1506. About it he wrote:
No one before me was able to bring together the rules of the Hebrew language
in a book. . . . I am the rst. I have raised aloft a monument more lasting than
bronze.40
35. See N. Minnich, Prophecy and the Fifth Lateran Council (15121517), in Prophetic
Rome in the High Renaissance Period, ed. M. Reeves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
6387, at 812; and Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte Tradition, 639 on the importance of the
DACs preface in determining Reuchlins intentions.
36. Cf. Overeld,15963.
37. On German humanism see L. Spitz, The Course of German Humanism, in Itinerarium
Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations,
ed. H. A. Oberman and T. A. Brady (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 371 436; N. L. Brann, Humanism in
Germany, in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, 2: 12355; and the relevant studies in W. Ludwig,
Litterae Neolatinae : Schriften zur neulateinischen Literatur (Munich: W. Fink, 1989).
38. On which see H. Holstein, Johann Reuchlins Komdien: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des
lateinischen Schuldramas (Halle, 1888; rept. Leipzig, 1973); G. Ehrstein, Scaenica Faceta: The
Choral Odes of Johannes Reuchlins Scaenica Progymnasmata (1497), in Acta Conventus
Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed.
R. Schnur et al. (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1998), 235 41.
39. For the Proclus translation, which was done in 1488 for the prior of the Carthusian order in
Basel, Jakob Louber, but was not printed until 1529, see Johann Reuchlins Briefwechsel, ed.
Geiger, #14 and #15 (pp.14 20), and Benzing, 31. On Proclus of Cyzicus, the archbishop of
Constantinople, + 446 ad (not to be confused with Proclus the head of the Athenian Academy),
see P.-Th. Camelot, Proklos, Erzbischof von Konstantinopel, in Lexikon fr Theologie und
Kirche, 8 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1963), 768. The Erasmus controversy: R. Weiss, Learning and
Education in Western Europe from 1470 1520, in The New Cambridge Modern History, ed. G.
R. Potter, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 95126, at 11920 and H. A. Stoll,
Erasmisches und Reuchlinisches Griechisch? in Renaissance und Humanismus in Mittel- und
Osteuropa, ed. J. Irmscher, 1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962), 8997.
40. Cited and translated in Spitz, 63.

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The De Arte Cabalistica: A Five-Fold Consideration

Reuchlins interest in Hebrew was conditioned by the post-Plotinian mentality mentioned above, which was adaptable to various social circumstances. In
his 1494 dialogue, On the Wonder Working Word [De verbo mirifico], he
outlined a number of important features of an ideology of efcacious language,
as he took active part in the debate, mentioned above, occasioned by Picos
900 conclusions. The work was written after Alexander VIs bull exculpating
Pico and would seem to be a response to Garsiass attack on Pico published
in 1489. In it, Reuchlin suggested that words have real ritually efcacious
power: Words are not just means to mystical union, rather, the verbum
mirificum is also the instrument, to quote Charles Zika, by which man
performs external miraculous activities in the world.41 The wonder-working
word itself, the verbum mirificum of the works title, is revealed in the dialogues third and nal book: It is the pentagrammaton, the ineffable name
IHSUH, or the name of Jesus. Toward the end of true human self-knowledge
and union with divinity, understanding the pentagrammaton is the nal step,
adding the revelation of Christ to the promise of the Old Testament. The
pentagrammaton, Reuchlin writes, is none other than the name of the Lord,
the Tetragrammaton, but for the assumption of one letter s; which with the
deity of the rst syllable soaks, immerses, and steeps the second syllable, that
is, the human nature which has been imbibed by the poured-out oil.42 In
other words, as early as 1494 Reuchlin saw a way to introduce themes from
the Hebrew and prisca theologia traditions (i.e., the Hebrew name of god
IHUH, four letters and the fourfold Pythagorean tetractys), Christianize
them by adding a fth component, and add to the mix an understanding of the
efcacy of symbolic language.
His thoughts were developed more fully in his 1517 treatise De arte
cabalistica; in the interim between the De verbo mirifico and this treatise he
had learned Hebrew and studied the Kabbalah in greater depth, making much
more precise his understanding of the nature and function of the sefirot. In the
De arte cabalistica we can see the ve features of the late ancient mentality
to which I alluded above. They are: rst, a certain approach to allegoresis;
second, a specic set of soteriological concerns; third, a connection of texts
with praxis and ritual efcacy; fourth, a recognition of the radical disjunction
between the human and the divine; and fth, a characteristic set of problems
related to the issue of information transfer.
The dialogue is among three interlocutors, Marranus, Philolaus, and Simon.43
Marranus, a Moslem, and Philolaus, a Pythagorean, meet by chance at an inn
41. C. Zika, Reuchlins De verbo mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 10538, at 106 7.
42. De verbo mirifico, G5 recto: est ipsum nomen suum ihsuh, quod non est aliud a nomine
domine Tetragrammato, nisi unius literae assumptione, quae secundam syllabam deitate primae
syllabae perfundat, mergat, et intingat, id est humanam naturam oleo effuso imbibitam, unde et
nomen oleum id esse supra ostendemus. Cited and translated in Zika, Reuchlins De verbo
mirifico, 132.
43. For an in-depth explication of the text of the DAC, see Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte
Tradition, 63125.

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in Frankfurt, where they have both come to visit Simon, the learned Jewish
expositor of the Kabbalah. On the rst day, Simon tells them the basics of the
Kabbalah. On the second, because it is the Jewish sabbath, he is absent and
Philolaus takes the oor, speaking of Pythagoreanism; on the third, Marranus
and Philolaus return to Simon, who goes into greater depths and reveals
certain Kabbalistic secrets. The interlocutors rarely disagree, and when they
intervene in one anothers speeches, it is almost always to support the main
interlocutors opinion; thus we can see all three interlocutors as expressing
facets of Reuchlins opinions.
The rst feature of the late ancient mentality is a certain kind of allegoresis
applied to texts which is linked in its turn to the second feature, soteriology.
The approach involved reading texts in such a way as to protect a given gure,
concern, or set of concerns.44 For Ficino, for example, Plato was the gure he
felt most inclined to protect.45 Thus, when he came to difcult parts of the
Platonic oeuvre, the myth of Er in the Republic, say, which suggested metempsychosis, Ficino placed the blame elsewhere, and shifted it away from Plato,
averring that Pythagoras was behind this wrongheaded position in the Platonic
corpus.46 For Reuchlin, however, Pythagoras is the important gure.47 In the
De arte cabalistica, he gives a number of selective and suggestive readings of
Pythagoras, toward the end of providing an orthodox and true Pythagoreanism,
in harmony with Christianity and related to the traditions of the Kabbalah.
Reuchlin, for example, is very concerned to protect Pythagoras from the
charge of transmigration of souls. So he nds a way counter to all ancient,
late ancient, medieval, and Renaissance knowledge of the Pythagorean tradition
to argue that Pythagoras did not, in fact, believe in transmigration. There
is a rumour around, the interlocutor Philolaus suggests in book 2 spurred
on by ancient detractors and invidi carptores who either inserted things Pythagoras never would have said or thought into his books or else twisted what
he said for the worse that Pythagoras believed that the human soul could
inform the bodies of beasts.48 As the real backbone of his response, Reuchlin
offers the sort of argument familiar enough to early modernity: the argument
from integrity. How could such a great man have written such nonsense? How

44. Cf. J. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1: 23 4.
45. Hankins, 1: 265359.
46. Hankins, Plato; and Celenza, Pythagoras in the Renaissance.
47. Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte Tradition, 144 54.
48. DAC, Giii rectoverso: Rumorem autem de illo passim divulgant hanc eius fuisse opinionem
quod anima humana quorundam post mortem corpora brutorum informet, quod viris ratione
utentibus incredibile videri debet, de tam excellenti philosophiae autore et abundantissimo
scientiarum fonte unde ad nos emanavit divinarum et humanarum rerum cognitio. Quin potius ea
suspicio trananimationis ex hominibus Pythagoricorum mysteriorum partim ignaris, partim ob
invidiam perosis orta est. Non enim caruit aemulorum livore praestantissima eius viri virtus,
innocentissima vita, egregia doctrina, celebris fama, utque t, nihil non pollutum reliquerunt
invidi carptores, Timon, Xenophanes, Cratinus, Aristophon, Hermippus, et alii quorum non
exigua multitudo est, qui de Pythagora suis in libris mendacia plurima scripserunt, ac ea prodiderunt
quae nusquam ab illo vel dicta vel scripta fuere, aut eiuscemodi si qua dixisset, tantum in
peiorem ea sensum perverterunt, ut facile crederetur talis ac tantus vir inconsyderate docendo
aberrasse, de rerum principiis, de numeris, de faba non gustanda, de abstinendo ab animatorum
esu, de inferis, deque metempsychosi et transitu animarum, de quo nunc tractamus.

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127

could someone who had so carefully distinguished the forms of things the
exemplaria from their transitory outward appearances the species
have thought that the human essence, which is the same as its form, would
have anything in common with a beast?49 What Pythagoras meant was that
only those living things whose reason shows that they can distinguish differences in things are the divine genus, the genus that does not suffer change.50
As to Pythagoras claim that in a former life he had been Euphorbus, the
Trojan, this was metaphorical, and referred to the fact that Pythagoras liked
and helped athletes and was himself strong. Just as when a strong man is
referred to as another Hercules, or as Numenius referred to Plato as Moses
speaking Attic Greek, the similarities are not to be understood as substantial
ones, rather of character and ability. To make this argument, Philolaus goes
far, and suggests that beyond all this, Pythagoras was not even the rst Greek
to argue for the immortality of the soul. Long before, Homer had spoken of
the souls of the dead engaging in conversation and prophesying.51
He goes on to say that Pythagoras, when speaking of transmigration, was
actually speaking, not about souls, but about matter, and was referring to the
fact that matter always has a desire to take on new forms.52 The interlocutor
Marranus intervenes and discusses examples from the Judeo-Christian tradition
where dead bodies were revivied, using scriptural examples, like Jesus and
Lazarus, Paul and Eutychus, etc. In other words, to bring Pythagoras into line,
Reuchlin completely reinterprets all of the traditional positions about Pythagoras. That Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, and that he
was the rst to argue for the immortality of the soul would not have served
Reuchlins overall aims to bring Pythagoras into the orbit of Hebreo-Christian
truth as he saw it; thus Reuchlin, with the philologically sophisticated freedom
of the Renaissance allegorist, nds arguments to fashion a suitable Pythagoras.
As it had had for certain later Platonists, especially Iamblichus, the Pythagorean tradition and even the gure of Pythagoras himself have a soteriological
resonance for Reuchlin.53 Not, of course, in a universal sense: no soteriological
analogies are made between the gure of Pythagoras and Christ. But Reuchlin
does inform us, again through Philolaus, that Pythagoras was someone whose
very word had been trusted like the oracle of the gods.54 In addition, the
enterprise of neopythagorean philosophizing, for Reuchlin combined with
Kabbalistic teaching, is viewed as something that can contribute to individual
49. DAC, Giii verso: Qui enim exemplaria et species rerum ita distinxit, ut mutuo transmutari
confundive nequant, quo nam modo humanam essentiam, quae sua est forma, comunicaret bruto?
50. DAC, Giiii recto: Voluit igitur Pythagoras animantia sola quorum sacra natura, id est ratio,
demonstrat singula, divinum esse genus, scilicet a deo propagatum, ut aureis edidit carminibus, cuius
species nec mutetur nec convertatur, sic generum in singulorum formas esse permanentes, licet
in eadem sua forma dissimiles.
51. DAC, Giiii rectoGvi recto.
52. This Stoicizing position regarding matter would be much beloved by Giordano Bruno, later
in the sixteenth century. Cf. C. S. Celenza, Giordano Bruno, the Presocratic Tradition, and the
Late Ancient Heritage, Accademia 2 (2000).
53. For Iamblichus and the soteriological element in Pythagoreanism, see D. OMeara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
54. DAC, Giii recto: tam praecipuum virum, cuius dictamini ceu oraculo deorum creditum est.

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salvation. It was Pythagoras, Philolaus argues in response to a gentle challenge from Marranus, who recognized the centrality of humankind in the
salvic process. Philolaus had earlier spoken of gures like Hercules, who
saved people from various ills. Marranus challenge was that gures such as
Hercules do not have much to do with eternal salvation. In response, Philolaus
says that the saviour should not be considered one who preserves and restores
the things of the world cities, animals, etc. but rather he who saves this
smaller world, the world of humankind.55 As Pythagoras had recognized in
his Carmen aureum, Philolaus goes on, humankind suffers by its own choice
and does not see or hear the good that is so close to them. For Reuchlins
interlocutors, Pythagoras is not a universal saviour, of course, but he is a
critical element in the soteriological equation, an oracular gure who was an
important part of the unveiling of the truth by which humankind would be
guided, saved, and, ultimately, divinized.
Moreover, the writer who employs this style of thought and exposition
often himself takes on a kind of oracular status.56 The soteriological resonances
of the material expounded afford the expositor the ability to create a vatic
persona. As Renaissance esoterists moved closer, sociologically speaking, to
the traditional gure of the wandering prophet and became intellectuals forced
to create spaces for themselves by merging learning with prophecy, the rhetorical posture of the revealer became increasingly important. It reected a
tension which was then probably two millennia old between two naturally
conicting missions, a tension which becomes visible whenever a guardian of
secret knowledge chooses to publish. On the one hand, the true esoterists
goal must be to keep restricted knowledge within a closely guarded circle of
initiates. On the other hand, to create a social space for himself and protect
himself from incursions of hostile orthodoxies, the esoterist, who is usually
removed from efcacious political power, must be able to develop some sort
of relationship with authorities. That relationship might manifest itself in
the capacity of occasional adviser (as in the case of Ficino and the Medici);
court astrologer (one thinks, later, of Tycho Brahe); wandering professor (as
in the case, again later, of Giordano Bruno); or, as in the case of Reuchlin vis
vis Leo X, the De arte cabalisticas dedicatee, faithful Christian who is trying to bring a greater depth to Christianity by incorporating elements from
non-Christian traditions.57 Ultimately, the most common way to develop a
55. DAC, Gi versoGii verso; cf. Gii verso: Assentiorque Salvatorem de quo tam magnice
ac tam perpetuo sacra vaticinantur eloquia, eum fore oportere, qui non tam huius grandis mundi,
non regionum et urbium, non inmorum elementorum et syderum, non lignorum et lapidum, non
plantarum et arborum, non piscium, non volucrum, non pecorum, quae omnia naturam ducem et
suae conditionis instinctum inerranter et probe sequuntur, et ad costitutum sibi nem manent
quod sunt, quam istius minoris mundi servator et restaurator sit, hoc est hominis, qui ab aequitatis
sibi tradita norma et rectae rationis sententia saepe decidens generositatem suam coacervatione
vitiorum in stagna profunda malorum et sempiternae corruptionis barathrum voluntarie praecipitat,
unde revocare gradum propriis viribus et sua ope nequeat.
56. See Fowden; and Celenza, Pythagoras in the Renaissance.
57. For Tychos social environment see John R. Christianson, On Tychos Island: Tycho Brahe
and his Assistants, 15701601 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Bruno and
his search for social place see Saverio Ricci, Giordano Bruno nellEuropa del Cinquecento
(Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000), 17.

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relationship with power is to promise results from new knowledge which the
revealer unveils. This in turn is connected to the third feature I would like
to examine, the connection of texts with praxis and the respect for ritual
efcacy.
In the theurgic tradition and this is true for late ancient Platonists, for
later medieval Kabbalists, and for certain Renaissance esoterists it is important that the things discussed work, that they have efcacious power.58 The
practice of the Kabbalah merged especially well with this tradition. Through
their use of symbols, Reuchlin argues, Kabbalists propel the mind toward
divinity as efcaciously as possible: Individual words, individual mysteries,
syllables, diacritic and punctuation marks, are full of secret meaning.59
The Kabbalah is the means by which we arrive at the highest level of understanding, even if, he adds, it is impossible that our soul arrive as high as the
Messiah without an incomprehensible ash of understanding (nisi quodam
incomprehensibili intuitu quasi via momentanei raptus).60 Beyond just the
ecstatic individual wonder-working, Reuchlin points out (through Simon the
Kabbalist in book 1) that through his power, the Kabbalist becomes the friend
of angels; thus he effects marvellous things (res admirandas), which the
crowd calls miracles.61 In fact, after Adams sin and Gods consequent anger,
God sent an angel down to Adam, to teach him how to repair the ruins. By the
divine will of greatest God, Simon avers, again in book 1, the angel showed
Adam the way of atonement and engaged with Adam in divine conversation,
which was to be understood by allegory, in a Kabbalistic way. Nothing, not
even the punctuation, was without signicance.62
At a certain point in the De arte cabalistica, Simon the Kabbalist instructs the other two interlocutors in the manner in which one arrives at the
seventy-two sacred names. Reuchlin has Simon come up with these names
by using a time-honoured Jewish technique to combine and recombine the
Hebrew letters of Exodus 14:1922, each of which has seventy-two letters
58. For the wide acceptance in later medieval society of the efcacy of magical practice, see
R. Kieckhefer, The Specic Rationality of Medieval Magic, The American Historical Review 99
(1994): 81336. Stressing Reuchlins focus on accessing the wonder-working word ritualistically
is J. J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern
Science and Medicine, 1: Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995),
1248. Cf. also the classic statement regarding the mass as the foundation for late medieval
belief in the efcacy of magic in the Renaissance in D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic
from Ficino to Campanella, Studies of the Warburg Institute, 22 (London: The Warburg Institute, 1958), 36.
59. See DAC, Diii verso: Igitur altiore loco et digniore gradu habendi sunt cabalistae illam
legis expositionem sequentes, quae per quaedam symbola mentis elevationem ad superos et
ad rem divinam quam maxime propellit, hanc appellant graeci vestri anagogicam insitutionem
quae non modo philosophia sit sed et sophia ipsa, hoc est sapientia. Unde merito sapientes
denominantur. And for the quotation, Eii recto: Hic est solus verae contemplationis campus,
cuius singula verba, singula sunt sacramenta, et singuli sermones, syllabae, apices, punctaque
eius plena sunt arcanis sensibus, non tantum nobis autoribus, verum etiam christianis attestantibus.
60. DAC, Eii recto.
61. DAC, Eiii verso: Unde oritur intima Cabalistae cum angelis amicitia, per quam aliquando
nomina divina rite cognoscens res admirandas concit, quae vulgus miracula nominat.
62. Ibid., Cii recto: Hic [angelus] autem summi dei nutu expiationis ei viam ostendit, et
divinum sermonem per allegoriam recipiendum, more cabalistico exposuit, cuius non modo
verbum ullum sed ne litera quantumcumque minuta et exilis ac ne apex quidem frustra ponitur.

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in Hebrew.63 Before uttering the names, Simon suggests that they should be
pronounced, as invocations of angels, only by men who are dedicated and
devoted to god with fear and trembling, in short, by initiates.64 Immediately
thereafter Simon reveals the seventy-two names, then goes on to say to his
two listeners: Gentlemen, you now have to hand not only words with which
you can mutter secret conversation from the deepest part of your heart; now
you can compound the words you have articulated and invoke any angel you
please by his symbolic name. Although they are each masters of their own
individual realms, still, there is nothing they possess which is not shared. For
even though they live in the supercelestial world, nonetheless they do care for
these lower [subcelestial] things.65 The human operator, using divinely placed
things in a ritualistically correct manner, effects marvels, calls down angels
into service. The inner meaning of the words and their components can be
plumbed and used by the divinely illuminated interpreter. Words: It is a
respect for their power that the Kabbalist and the Pythagorean share. But it is
only a certain, specically anti-syllogistic use of words that is valuable, a use
which respects the bonds between the sensible and the supra-sensible which are
contained, secretly, in various parts of the created world, an essential segment
of which, Reuchlin would argue, is language.
For Reuchlin, the Pythagorean tradition and the Kabbalistic tradition
balance each other out. In the case of the Pythagoreans, Reuchlin sees the
symbola of Pythagoras as particularly important. These were gnomic sayings
attributed to Pythagoras since antiquity; Reuchlin exploits them for their
ethical dimensions, primarily, but sees in their combination of enigmatic
words also a great allusive power, one reective of Pythagoreanism in general, whose origin lay in ancient Jewish and Egyptian thought.66 In the case of
the Kabbalah, the letters and words are not only the signs of things, but are
also the very stuff of the things.67 Combining them in the right ritual manner
allowed the human operator to bring their efcacy to the fore.68
63. On this technique see J. Dan, The Name of God, the Name of the Rose and the Concept
of Language in Jewish Mysticism, Medieval Encounters 2 (1996): 228 48 and Dan, The
Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin, 76 9. Pico had alluded to it in his conclusions; see ed. Farmer,
11>56; and Copenhaver, Locculto in Pico, 2249.
64. DAC Kiiii verso: per invocationes angelorum ab hominibus deo deditis, devotisque cum
timore ac tremore sic enuncianda.
65. DAC: Praesto iam sunt ad manum, viri optimi, cum quibus non modo ab imi pectoris
penetralibus clandestina colloquia mussare, verumetiam expressas quoque voces miscere et
quemlibet symbolico suo nomine invocare queatis; quanquam singularum regionum praesides,
tamen nihil non comunicatum habentes. Tametsi enim in mundo supercoelesti habitant, at ista
nihilominus inferiora curant.
66. DAC, Iiii versoK recto. See esp. ibid., Iv recto: Hoc unum volui nescius ne esses et
oblivioni haud committeres omnem ferme Pythagoricam philosophiam esse notis verborum et
tegumentis rerum plenam, eumque tradendi morem, ut ante dixi, ab Hebraeis creditur et Aegyptiis
ipse ad Graecos primus transtulisse. On the Pythagorean symbola in the Renaissance see the
introduction of Ari Wesseling in Angelo Poliziano, Lamia: Praelectio in priora Aristotelis
analytica, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 38, ed. A. Wesseling (Leiden: Brill,
1986) and my forthcoming book, Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum
Nesianum, Studies in the History of Christian Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
67. DAC, Kii verso: Philolaus suggests that Cabalam aliud nihil esse nisi (ut Pythagorice
loquar) symbolicam theologiam, in qua non modo literae ac nomina sunt rerum signa, verum res
etiam rerum [emphasis added].
68. Reuchlins view is a variety of the sort of vis verborum as elaborated by Walker, 80 1.

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This concern for ritual efcacy was connected in Reuchlins eyes to the
larger goal of religious reform. He, and others who shared this mentality,
found themselves bestriding a dangerous and widening fault line in early
modern European intellectual life. They became sources of controversy,
even as they expanded the limits of acceptable religious discourse. Parenthetically, this is one of the reasons, as Charles Zika points out, that Erasmus
distanced himself from Reuchlin after 1517: He saw Reuchlins attachment to
practical Kabbalah as a precarious Judaizing tendency toward ceremonialism.69
Reuchlins concern for human efcacy is connected in turn to the fourth feature: the radical disjunction between the human and the divine.
In Reuchlins view, the bitterest factor militating against the understanding
of the divine through faith is syllogistic logic; he stresses over and over that
our powers are insufcient, and cites late ancient neoplatonizing Aristotelian
commentators like Themistius and Philoponus to prove it.70 Theology, he had
earlier noted, gives a firmior ac validior notitia, and must be kept far from
syllogistic murmurings.71 Toward the end of the De arte cabalistica, Simon
the Jewish Kabbalist avers that we are so damned by our feeble understanding of divine matters that we judge things that are not apparent in the same
way as we judge things that do not exist.72 O altitudo. O profunditas. O
nostra inrmitas. [Oh, the height, oh, the depth. Oh, our weakness.]73 This
discussion of the radical distinction between the human and the divine serves
as a backdrop and as preparation for a discussion of one of the essential parts
of Kabbalah: the secret science of the power of letters, which would so fascinate a non-Kabbalistic contemporary, Johannes Trithemius.74 Simon arrives
at a point where a certain combination of names and letters discussed Kabbalistically means: Pater deus, lius deus, spiritus sanctus deus, tres in uno et unus
in tribus. And here is the quotation with which I began: O quanta est haec
altitudo, quanta profunditas, quae sola de apprehenditur.75 The immense gap
between the human and divine is bridged by the interpreter who experiences
the profunditas which, guided by his faith, transcends the infirmitas which is
the human beings natural condition.
This human weakness, this infirmitas, is related to the fth feature of the
esoteric mentality: a certain type of information transfer in an environment
of religious crisis. With human capacity alone it would be impossible to master all that is necessary to liberate the soul. Was it not said to Abraham,
Reuchlin writes, Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you can,
but he could not, even though in his day, according to Maimonides, he was a
69. Zika, Reuchlin and Erasmus.
70. DAC, Evi versoFi recto.
71. DAC, Bv recto.
72. DAC, Mii verso: quia nos tam tenui erga res divinas ingenii paupertate mulctati de iis quae
non apparent haud secus atque de iis quae non sunt iudicamus.
73. DAC, Mv verso.
74. On whose Steganographia and other magical works see N. L. Brann, Trithemius and
Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
75. DAC, Oiii recto.

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journal of religious history

celebrated astrologer.76 In other words, to know the heavens, human contemplative capacity alone is not enough; one needs to make use of the adiumenta
which the divine had placed in nature. But how to choose among these aids?
How to choose, especially when the aids are not material, as they might be in
standard theurgic practice (stones, signed plants, etc.), but are verbal,
literary, textual? The question becomes one of canon formation, a question
which we see in many guises and in many forms in the Renaissance. Which
are the right texts to read? In what order? Which to exclude?
While the esoteric mentality serves often as a means of inclusion when
creating small intellectual communities (i.e., insiders who are initiated, outsiders who are the uninitiated), the tradition also serves as a means of exclusion with respect to information transfer. When there are so many sources out
there to choose from, how do we choose what not to read, what to exclude?
Here insider status helps greatly, for it affords a truly natural certainty as to
what to exclude. Reuchlin offers the example of a cow, which knows with an
inner certitude which blades of grass to eat, which to pass over. So too does
the initiated Pythagorean Kabbalist have an inner certainty.77 At the end of
book 2, the Pythagorean book, the interlocutors recognize the critical importance of the type of information transfer under discussion. The interlocutor
Marranus sums up, saying that it seems that Pythagoreans and Kabbalists
agree, since both want to bring mens minds to perfect blessedness. To do so,
they both engage in information transfer by means of symbols, signs, adages and
proverbs, numbers and gures, letters, syllables, and words.78 As the boundaries of knowledge were being burst open by printing, by careful, ever more
intense philological scholarship, by debates and by an increasingly rigid seeming religious atmosphere, manifested paradoxically in a burgeoning plurality of
orthodoxies whose outer limits no one was sure of coded, veiled wisdom
was appealing, as a short cut, as a means to combine learning and inspired
wisdom, an epistemological bypass to knowing the truth.
These ve features, which Reuchlin shares with many other esoterists,
serve to highlight also some of the things that distinguish him. His specic
concentration on Pythagoreanism, for example, gave him the widest kind of
hermeneutic latitude. While veiled wisdom was a commonplace in the
Platonic tradition, the Pythagorean tradition, in the eyes of some interpreters,
76. DAC, Biiii verso: Nonne Abrahae dictum fuit, Suspice coelum et numera stellas si potes,
nec potuit ipse, quanquam suo tempore, secundum Rambam, insignis astrologus erat?
77. DAC, Kiii recto: Cernitis bovem depascere oridum aliquod et viride pratum, non quidem
totum, sed deliberata electione nunc hanc ingerere [cod. inquirere] herbam, nunc illam, subitoque
aliam quidem facile relinquere, aliam autem prorsus obmittere, donec ad consentaneum et vescum
sibi alimentum perveniat quo consistat et requiescat. Hoc modo Cabalistae post campos scientiarum
latissimos et prata contemplationum omni amoenitate ornata multas et varias qualitercunque
olentes herbas degustant, ut demum toto gramine perlustrato illud divinum Moly reperiant, cuius
quanquam radix nigrescit, tamen os, Homeri opinione, albus enitet lacti similis, quo invento
cunctas repulisse miserias videntur, appetitus sui nem in hoc mundo consecuti foelicem. Virtus
vero Moly est, opera difcilia radix, os animorum tranquillitas.
78. DAC, Ki, recto: Nam quid aliud intendit vel Cabalaeus vel Pythagoras, nisi animos hominum
in deos referre, hoc est ad perfectam beatitudinem promovere? Quae autem alia via quam similis
utriusque tradendi modus et ambobus aequa exercitatio per symbola et notas adagia et paroemias,
per numeros et guras, per literas, syllabas, et verba.

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took this aspect one step further. Pythagoras deliberately communicated in

riddles, with concealed meanings that the interpreter, here Reuchlin, had,
using inner certainty, to reveal. Reuchlin is interesting in this respect precisely because he represents a kind of fusion between two mentalities often
seen as contradictory.
On the one hand, his oeuvre in general and the De arte cabalistica in
particular offer philological criticism and argumentation with which Valla or
Poliziano would have been comfortable. Reuchlin protests a number of times
that Latin interpreters have wrongly understood the meaning of Hebrew biblical
texts, and his knowledge was undergirded by sound, careful scholarship. But
this sort of precise philology is often linked with a proto-modern historical
and critical sense associated with the rise of Quellenforschung. And here we
see that Reuchlin is far from that latter, nineteenth-century paradigm of critical reading. The symbolic Pythagorean tradition which Reuchlin associated
with the Kabbalah called specically for interpretation. It was a hermeneutics
without an even possible critical foundation, a philology whose base text
could never, by design, be determined. When later interpreters ancient,
late ancient, medieval, and early modern approached the above-mentioned
Pythagorean symbola, for example, they believed they had necessarily to
interpret them in order to unveil their hidden meaning. Recent scholarship
has shown fairly convincingly that in the original Pythagorean communities
the sayings were never imbued with the kind of deeper meaning that later
interpreters often assumed, and functioned instead as ritual markers, as precepts
which, under the guidance of a vatic gure, the insiders were simply to obey,
not to understand in an apodeictic sense.79 Yet for Reuchlin, surrendering to
this sort of riddle-ridden, enigmatic discourse and joining it to the Kabbalah
allowed him to combine the skills of a philologist with the soul of an esoterist.
His case shows us better than any that philology, despite its often positivistic,
scientic aspect, is as undergirded by ideology as are almost all intellectual
discourses.

79. Especially important here is W. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism,
trans. E. Minar, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).