Pico was the first Christian to treat knowledge of Kabbalah as valuable.
Flavius Mithridates, his most prolific Jewish informant, translated (and
mistranslated) thousands of pages of Kabbalah into Latin for him. Large
portions of the Oration, drawing on these texts, are also informed by Kabbalah
in ways that no contemporary Christian could have detected—least of all a
Christian who lacked the clues provided by the Conclusions. The esoteric
intention of Pico’s thought, proclaimed emphatically in the Oration, is the
feature that most distances it from the whole project of post-Cartesian
philosophy in the West and also from earlier philosophies outside the Platonic
tradition. Wishing not just to mystify but also to provoke, Pico succeeded and
paid the price of the Church’s censure.
Theology, spirituality and philosophy—all in the broadest sense—are the
main topics of Pico’s Kabbalah, which shows (or hints) how God reveals himself
in the Sefirot, the divine names and the words of scripture. In the 72
Kabbalist theses at the end of the Conclusions, this revelation becomes
Christology and Trinitarian theology. From a Kabbalist point of view, the
Sefirot and the divine names are actors in dramas of theology, cosmology,
anthropology and angelology whose major themes are exile, death, atonement and
redemption, stories that Pico transposes onto the Christian Trinity, with Jesus
Christ, the Messiah, as the saving hero.
Accordingly, leading points of spiritual practice in the Conclusions are
prayer, prophecy and ascent to mystical union with God, which is also the main
topic of the Oration, where Pico makes positive use of magic and theurgy as
steps toward the ascent. The Conclusions, which confirm this endorsement of
magic, also show in greater detail than the Oration why Pico links magic with
Kabbalah. He sees it as a spiritual technique which, like the higher theurgy of
the Neoplatonic philosophers, locates and opens routes to God which ordinarily
are unknown to humans. The practice of Kabbalah starts with theory because
these hidden channels of divinity must be disclosed and interpreted before they
can be used: spirituality follows hermeneutics.
Technical details of hermeneutics are the most obscure material in the
Conclusions, especially Pico’s speculations about Hebrew words and letters.
Language is the gateway to wisdom, the elements of language are letters and
numbers, and these signs proliferate in secret codes. Pico’s genius and
ambition, which the Church would see as impudence, attracted him to this
provocative theology of the hidden word, whose enigmas and ambiguities
encouraged his fascination with the esoteric. The larger Kabbalist project of
the Conclusions, and hence of the Kabbalah in the Oration, is Christological
and Trinitarian. The smaller exhibitions of Kabbalah that Pico uses to support
his grand theory focus on particular Biblical texts, which are also illuminated
by the Gentile wisdom of the ancient theologians.
Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and other ancient
theologians are among the authorities from whom Pico derives his 900 theses,
but so are Aquinas, Albertus and other scholastics, Averroes, Avicenna and
other Muslims as well as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus and the Greek
commentators. The Conclusions are, among other things, an egregious
advertisement of Pico’s learning in a catalog of philosophical propositions
which are often challenging to orthodoxy and sometimes paradoxical—a word that
Pico himself used to describe some of his propositions, whose ancestors were the
quodlibetal theses debated in medieval universities. He ascribed only the last
group of about 500 to himself, attaching the first set of roughly 400 to
ancient and medieval authorities, among whom were the Kabbalists—by far the
least familiar to Pico’s contemporaries.
In the Heptaplus of 1489 we can still hear the Kabbalist voice of the
Conclusions, but mainly because Pico’s earlier works since the Commento of
1485–6 have prepared us to listen for it. Although all these texts discuss
Kabbalah more openly than the Heptaplus, they seem to have made little
impression on Pico’s contemporaries. Roberto Salviati, a well informed
Florentine who knew Pico well, called the Heptaplus “the first fruits of his
studies” when he arranged to have it printed. That Salviati thought the
Commento, Conclusions and Apology negligible or embarrassing is more likely
than that he did not know those works. Simple ignorance is likelier in the case
of the Oration, which Pico’s nephew would later describe as having been kept
out of circulation by his uncle. For readers whom Kabbalah might alienate, the
Heptaplus was not much of a threat because Pico had sanitized it.
………………………………………………………………
Although Genesis was not as attractive to Christian interpreters as Job
or the Psalms, explicating the creation narrative of Gen. 1:1–26 had been a
task of hermeneutics since the great hexameral commentaries of Basil of
Caesarea and Ambrose. Like all of the Bible, the creation story was thought to
have three layers of meaning beyond its literal or ‘historical’ sense:
allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The standard view was that “history
talks about events, allegory about how one thing is understood from another,
tropology discusses morals, … and anagogy is the spiritual meaning … that leads
to higher things.” The Heptaplus proposes and practices a new kind of allegory,
a method derived from the structure of creation itself and directed toward a
new type of anagogy or ascent to supreme bliss (felicitas) in the Godhead.
Pico provides the key to his system only in the last part of the
Heptaplus, which seems to be an appendix tacked on to the work—just another
display of the author’s virtuoso skill in Hebrew. But to learned Jews of the
day, whether they were Kabbalist or not, Pico’s analysis of the Hebrew letters
of the first word of Genesis (Bereshit, “In the beginning”) would have seemed
crude and simple-minded. Only from a Christian perspective was there anything
exotic in it, and its main effect on Christians would have been to dazzle them
with art.
This seemingly extraneous ending is actually a grand and arcane finale.
It hints at a secret that no Christian of Pico’s day could have grasped: that
Moses himself, the author of the creation story, had passed through 49 Gates of
Understanding—7 × 7—on his way to the fiftieth, the supreme and final Gate to
union with God. The 49 preliminary Gates are all the compartments of creation,
which in turn demonstrate Pico’s new allegorical method by exemplifying it: the
universe of existence is also the universe of understanding that shows the path
to mystical union.
Although Pico does not explain the Gates in the 900 Conclusions, he does
mention them in a way that gave later scholars, like Johann Reuchlin, the clues
that they needed to find such enigmas in Kabbalist texts and then decipher
them. The short version of the story is that Wisdom, the second Sefirah builds the palace of Intelligence and carves
50 Gates into it, 7 revealed in each of the 7 lower Sefirot and another one
unrevealed. The 50 Gates, also called the Jubilee, correspond to the 50-year
festival ordained in Leviticus but also to a millenarian Great Jubilee of
50,000 years, when the 7 sabbatical cycles or weeks of 7,000 years come to an
end. After the lower Sefirot collapse into S3 in a final millennium, the cycle
starts again, having been completed in that last generation of a thousand
years—in the Sabbath of the Shekinah (S10). This Sabbath, the seventh day of
rest after the six days of creation, is Pico’s ultimate allegory of mystical
union, the secret encoded not only in the letters of Bereshit but also in the
sevenfold structure of the Heptaplus itself.
But who knew or could have known? In 1489, when the Heptaplus was
published, its only informed readership was the handful of learned Jews in
Italy who could also read Latin—the very people who had taught Pico himself
enough Kabbalah to fill his Conclusions with it. In the Heptaplus, however,
even where its structure and content obviously depend on Kabbalah, Pico
suppresses what the Jews had taught him, until the final exposition of Bereshit
that could only have baffled Christian readers if it did not offend them. As in
his earlier works, Pico intends to mystify because he believes that the highest
and most sacred wisdom must not be divulged in plain language. He wants God’s
secrets to be understood only by an élite clever enough to unravel the
allegories that conceal them. The surprising thing, in the Western tradition of
philosophy, is that Pico thinks of this project as philosophical.
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