Italian and German Kabbala

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 9 of 13

Italian and German Kabbala
Pico and Johannes Reuchlin
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 28, 1986

Transcript:

I hope to be able to get to Reuchlin tonight. If I'm unable to get to Reuchlin I will work Reuchlin in with Paracelsus. But Pico is so important and, in going over the material, there are several aspects to it which need to be emphasized and cannot be let out. I'm going to start tonight, coming right in, Pico has three documents which have been translated into English, fairly frequently, The Oration on the Dignity of Man being the most famous and the most reproduced, but the one that I wish to begin with tonight is On Being and the One.

Pico did not live very long – he only lived 31 years – and towards the end of his life he began to contemplate writing a very large work called The Concord Between Plato and Aristotle. The reason for this is that in the Neoplatonic tradition there was a confusion in the early Middle Ages over authorship of certain treatises, and Plato and Aristotle's doctrines were entangled in Neoplatonic thought and were carried all the way through the scholastic centuries, kept tightly knit within the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, and as we'll see in just– a shortly it is the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite that most entranced Pico towards what turned out to be the end of his life. He was– because of dying at age 31, unable to write the large work. But he wrote a precis of this work, about 20 pages or so, and he dedicated it to another philosopher, a friend of his who also had a short life, only lived 40 years, whose name is known in Italian Renaissance studies as Poliziano – his real name was Angelo Ambrogini. Ambrogini was about nine years the senior to Pico and born about the same time as Reuchlin around 1455, Pico about 1463.

On Being and the One, in having it dedicated to Angelo Poliziano, and they had shared quarters in an estate of Lorenzo de Medici. So they were quite close to each other. They ate their meals together. It was very much like the Brucheon in ancient Alexandria where everyone was cordially present with each other during the course of many months and sometimes many years. So, in the Proem to this precis he writes,

“You told me some days ago what Lorenzo de Medici discussed with you concerning being and the one. Supported by the reasons of the Platonists, he disputed against Aristotle, on whose Ethics you are giving a public commentary this year. Lorenzo is a man of such powerful and multiform mind that he seems to be suited to everything. What I especially admire in him is his always speaking or meditating on some literary matter, even though he is always really occupied with [running] the republic. And since those who think that Aristotle disagrees with Plato…” you asked me how they might be reconciled.

And so he is writing this – and there are ten chapters, short chapters, some of them being half a page, some of them being about three pages – in this manuscript, On Being and the One. One of the reasons for the ten forms is that this conforms, as we'll see, to the ten Sephiroth in his Kabbalistic and Pythagorean structure. By this time, by the age of 30, Pico's mind was definitely structured as they would have said in the Renaissance in an architectonic. That is to say he no longer thought in terms of a doctrine but that the paths of his thinking described a structure. For Pico, he did not believe in doctrines, but he recognized that the flow of thought itself is a pattern and that one should stand back as it were from doctrinaire positions in order to fully experience what actually is the pattern of the mind and that when any people have done this anywhere in the world what they have discovered to be the primordial structure agrees and is concurrent everywhere through history. In this way people will say that there is a universal philosophy, not a pastiche doctrine which all then share expressing it in various ways, not a collaboration of perspectives, but that the flow of thought itself is the– is the pattern which reoccurs. And that this flow of thought discloses itself, not so much in the line of argument, but in the concourse of the history of ideas. That the history that we live the meaningfulness of the history that we live is the largest form of the structure and that we discover that what happens within ourselves, within our mental patterning as it were, also plays out amplified in history what we would regard as history. But peculiar to this – and Pico is about the first to ever really entertain this idea – peculiar to this then, is that man can no longer under the convincing experience of this flowing pattern of his mind can no longer conceive of himself as a part of the pattern. He is not an element in the structure, nor is he the center of that structure. He is in fact distinguished by a peculiar kind of spiritual freedom which allows him to experience any part of the pattern at his will, or the whole of the pattern by stepping outside of it completely. And it is in this capacity of being free from having to be a part having to be a cog in the machine that man proves his divinity. For this is an aspect of man which is divine. For in this way, God is able to occur outside of the entire realm of being, and this is what he is going to be writing about now to Poliziano. This would have been roughly 1490, around there, in Florence.

“Chapter One; which [deals with] the reasons of the Platonists, by which they maintain that the one is superior to being.” It is different and it is superior. Pico writes,

“Aristotle says in many places that the one and being, and likewise then the true and the good, correspond to each other and are the same [then] in extent.” That is, the idea of the true and the idea of the good are congruent. The idea of the one and the idea of being are congruent. Wherever one would conceive of those ideas having a shape of meaning either would be able to effectively take that place in that ideational structure. Pico is going to combat this.

“We shall treat,” he writes, “of the true and the good later. The Academy [the Florentine Academy] – The Academy opposes this, and thinks that the one is prior to being. When they say prior, they mean that the one is more simple and more universal. For this reason they also say that God, whose is the highest simplicity, is one, but not that he is being.”

One is therefore more primordial in its aim in its unitas – I have to use the word that Ficino would use quite distinctly. That being can be recognized that the whole of being is able to be cognized but that the one is unable to be cognized and essentially is unknowable in its unity. That thus God is a eventually unknowable, but that we can only discover this by finding the limits of the known, and that man has the power of mind to find the limits of the known because he can see– can only conceive by training of the entirety of being and realize that he has not thereby corralled God. He has not made a form which then contains God. But therefore, God is unknowable in his mystic grandeur.

So he writes to Poliziano, 1490, “They say that the prime matter of all things, rough and unformed, is within the limits of the one, but they maintain that it is outside the limits of being. They then add that that which is opposed to the one is not the same as that which is opposed to being.” And here Pico now is going to talk logic. He's going to shift to scholastic perspectives and he's going to talk about logic; that what is opposite logically to the one is different from what is logic– logically opposite to being. What is logically opposite to being, he will say, is nothing. But what is logically opposite to the one, is multiplicity, and that multiplicity is quite distinct from nothing, but that there is a relation between multiplicity and nothing that needs to be inspected by man, and that only man with training can do this. And it is this consequent action then that Pico is quite concerned with.

What is the depth of his concern? It is that on this level of inspection man can no longer be content with the content of thought, but must shift his emphasis to the structure of thought, and thus the interest in Pythagorean matters; thus the interest in Kabbalah, because the Kabbalah talks about structure; Pythagorean theory is about number. And thus these afford man the chance to slip outside of the duplicity which is always there in the world and always there in his mind, except when man refines himself.

And so he writes, in Chapter Two, that the place in Plato, where Plato talks about the one and being, as distinct as he has ever talked about anywhere in the dialogues, is the dialogue called the Parmenides which is one of the most difficult of all the Platonic dialogues – extremely difficult. And there is a part in the Sophist also Pico alludes to, but it's just a small quotation. Whereas, the entirety of the dialogue, the Parmenides – and we have a tape on this done about four years ago, on the mystical doctrine of the Parmenides of Plato.

Pico, in writing to Poliziano, then says here, “...it is asked where Plato spoke of being and the one, and which shows that his words agree more with the view of those who say that the one and being are equal, than those who wish the one to be superior…” And so he's going to show that in the Parmenides, if one reads the content of the Parmenides, it seems that the dialogue reaches the conclusion that one, the one, and being – with a capital B – are equal. That is that they are not so much tautological but they are displaceable by each other in the use of the mind's operations. But Pico will show that if you look at the dialogue form of the Parmenides, where eight pairs of opposition are brought into play, that the form of the Parmenides is Pythagorean, and that the content is Aristotelian, eventually. But that the form of the Parmenides is what he is urging Poliziano to pay attention to.

Then he writes here, “So much then for Plato. Consequently, according to him, not-one and nothing are equals, indeed, they are the same. [and] One and something are equals. After this, Plato proves further that not-being cannot be called one, and he concludes: …” – and he quotes then from the Parmenides – “...‘being is not a characteristic of not-being.’” That is that not, not-being itself does not occur with the quality of being or beingness as we would wish to use here. Then Pico draws this moral: “[Plato speaks then] of the one that he previously said was equal to what is something. It appears, then, that Plato held it as certain that the one was being. But let this be so, let us grant that Plato affirmed something which he certainly nowhere [really] affirmed. [But let us grant it then;] let us examine in what sense Plato could have spoken truly, first laying down the foundations of the Aristotelian position in this way.”

And then he goes on to set Plato aside for a moment, set Plato's content of the Parmenides aside. And this is a very important issue, for what Pico is settling here is one of the most sophisticated of all focuses of thought. And the way in which Pico settled it will influence the 16th century more powerfully than any other single idea. This is the– This is the seminal idea that will hold until probably to the middle of the 17th century until Newton and Leibniz really.

He writes, “This term being, about which it is argued whether it be equal to the one, can be taken in two modes. The first is that when we say being, we understand all that which is outside nothing. Aristotle employed the term in this way when he made being equal to the one. He did not adopt this way of speaking without a reason. As it is truly said, we ought to think as the few, and speak as the many. We think and believe for ourselves, we speak for others, that is, for the multitude, and therefore we speak so that we may be understood. The masses and the common people understand being in the following way. Being is all that to which existence is not lacking, and which can truly be called nothing. But we find that even those who are considered to be wisest among the very people who think the opposite have used the term being in this way. Parmenides [who was a] Pythagorean, when he said that that which is, is one, meant God, if we believe Simplicius and many others who wish to defend Parmenides…”

The great statement by Parmenides, pre-socratically, before Plato's time, which was the great conundrum of the classical age of Pericles. Parmenides challenged once uttered the conundrum. He said, “What is is, and what isn't isn't,” and that these are total incommensurate as far as the mind of man, are concerned that there's no way to bridge that. And Pico is alluding that to that here. He's saying that the structure of the dialogue Parmenides shows in the dialogue form that the mind of man is incapable of bridging these two incommensurate. But that just because the mind of man is incapable of bridging them does not mean that it does not occur in reality and that man has to plumb beneath his mind to another sensibility, if you will – to use an 18th century term – in order to stand that the mind is at loggerheads over this precise issue, because it is designed that way. It has been made that way. It has been, in fact, created that way. And that only the mind which is changed by revelation is able to extract itself from this created structure which always ultimately ends in this loggerhead. And God is unknowable in those terms. That only in a revelation– a revelation does the structure of man's experience step outside of what his mind can conceive and he is a spiritual being then knows more profoundly than his mind can understand and that in this mode man is in a redemptive stance rather than a created stance and in his redemptive stance he is able to understand what the mind could not conceive of but understands it in his – if we can use the term ‘spiritual wholeness’ – this is what he is writing about.

And in this essay, On Being and the One, after he has wrestled with this mightily with Poliziano, he then discloses the source of his understanding. Who is it? Who has made this clear to Pico? Pico, without writing here, because Poliziano knows darn well who did this – it was Ficino. It was Ficino, in his translations, and Ficino had translated and made available the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. And he had done this because he had realized that the whole movement had gone from the Corpus Hermeticum, to the Platonic dialogues, to the works of Plotinus, to Dionysius the Areopagite, and that this was the phase-form structure of the wisdom tradition of antiquity.

So we find Pico writing to Poliziano in the middle of his work On Being and the One, and he writes in this way, “Therefore we have not yet reached God. For until we also understand and comprehend what we say about God, we are said to remain in light, and what we say and feel about God is an inferior as the capacity of our intellect is inferior to his infinite divinity. Let us rise to the fourth step and enter into the light of ignorance, and, blinded by the darkness of divine splendor let us cry out with the Prophet, ‘I have become weak in thy courts, O Lord,’ finally saying only this about God, that he is unintelligibly and ineffably above everything most perfect which we can either speak or conceive of him. Then we place God most eminently even above unity, goodness, truth, and existence, which we [can] conceive. Dionysius the Areopagite saw this. After all that he wrote in the Symbolic Theology, in the Theological Institutions, in On the Divine Names, and in On Mystical Theology, he finally at the end of that work spoke as he could about God in a very holy way, as if he were already in the cloud. After some other things on the subject, he cried out: ‘[God] is not truth, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, nor one, nor unity, nor deity, nor goodness, nor spirit, so far as we can know him, nor does he have the name father or son nor any of the other things which are known to us or anyone else in the world, nor is he any other of the things which are not nor any of the things which are, nor do the things which are know the divinity as it is, nor does it know the things which are as they are, nor is there any speaking of it, nor name nor science nor darkness nor light, nor error, nor truth, neither is there any affirmation or negation [possible].’ ”

And Pico then says, “That divine man said this. Let us [then] sum up what we have said. We shall see that we learn in the first step that God is [not in any way material] not a body. [And those then that assert that] God is the soul of the heavens or [the soul] of the universe, as the Egyptians thought,” – are– are misunderstanding profoundly that, in fact, we must agree then with Dionysius, that silence is the only way in which the experience of the divine can be uncomprehended. That is not what we can comprehend but what we realize that we cannot ever comprehend, and that that occurs in a– in a silentio.

And, “this is the solution” then, and that, “the books of Dionysius entitled On Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names. In these books we must be careful not to underestimate what he wrote, since it is sublime. Nor, when we judge all that we understand to be little, should we invent for ourselves any dreams [or any] inextricable fictions.” This is the way that Pico is writing about 1490, towards the close of his life.

Now it's interesting– It's interesting for us because at this time, as we pointed out last week, there was a tremendous rush in Florence to bring to the conclusion all of the developments of the age. In fact, from the beginnings in the 1450s on through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, through those tremendous generations at least two generations of individuals in Florence had been this tremendous opening up, pulling out every stopper. And the main driving gear of this was the translating genius of Ficino who himself did not pause to consider all of the manifold implications of what he was revealing by translating. He was tremendously aware as a– as a happy-go-lucky priest; he was tremendously aware as an educator; as a translator as a– as a favorite of the Medici family; as the center of an international correspondent group. He was tremendously aware in that way, but he did not ever sit down and think through the implications of the accumulated wisdom which the ancient world had come to, piecemeal, slugged it out decade by decade, over about five or six hundred years was revealed in Florence within one or two generations, and it was too much too soon.

By the early 1490s there was a tremendous strain in the city of Florence, in the psychic propensity of the Florentines to become archetypally possessed, and in fact they went through a horrifying experience in the early 1490s. It centered around Lorenzo de Medici, and Lorenzo who had become quite ill early in 1492, had decided to barricade himself at the Villa Careggi with Ficino. He was not receiving any visitors except the inner circle. The inner circle included, incidentally at this time the young teenage Michelangelo. Lorenzo had adopted Michelangelo as a son for himself when Michelangelo was fifteen. His own family had cast him out. And so there was Lorenzo and Ficino; there was Pico and the adolescent Michelangelo; there was Poliziano; there was Botticelli, and a few other individuals who were around him. And this was a very small coterie of individuals. But nothing medically could be done for Lorenzo. He perished of internal malady. I'm not sure just what it was, but it was like a blood infection which was just uncurable. And as a matter of fact they– the physician at the time, a Jewish physician from Rome, tried a blood transfusion to take the blood from Lorenzo and put it into a donor and take the donor's blood. A young boy and put it in his. But they did not have the techniques to keep the blood transfusion airtight. And air got into the blood of the boy and he died. At any rate by April of 1492 it was apparent that Lorenzo de Medici was going to die. And as he was going to die enacted in his consciousness in miniature was what happened to Florence as– as a whole. Lorenzo began having nightmares. He began vomiting up images and amplifying them to himself until he felt that his life was totally sinful, that he had done things which would damn him forever. And he searched around to find some way to have himself extricated from this. None of the conversations with Ficino or Pico did any good. They were– They were still able to cheer him up, but he didn't need cheering up. He had an existential problem.

And so priest after priest was brought in. But Lorenzo was tremendous in his intellect and could see through them. They were void. So finally Lorenzo called for the one monk priest who had increasingly been abrasive to Lorenzo, the man named Savonarola. And Savonarola had been preaching from the pulpit, preaching hellfire and damnation, that the Medicis were responsible for corrupting the soul of the Florentines. And it was this very person that Lorenzo called to the Villa Careggi. It was like Daniel walking into the lion's den. And Savonarola, bracing himself, was a practiced Dominican monk, well capable of handling himself, came into seeing the dying Lorenzo and realized that he had the power of the city of Florence within his grasp. Not his grasp to have, but his grasp to– to convert. And he made three demands on the dying Lorenzo: that he forfeit monies that he had made off shady deals; that he forfeit many positions of authority which he had dealt out to friends; but the third one was that he reinstate the liberty of the Florentine people by taking the Medici family out of Florence forever. And this was unpalatable and Lorenzo turned his head on Savonarola, and Savonarola walked out of the Villa Careggi, but as he walked out the eyes of Florence were no longer on Lorenzo but on Savonarola, and Savonarola began having visions.

The complement, as we can see today psychologically, they were the complement to the visions that Lorenzo had. Lorenzo's nightmares were not personal. They were collective in nature and Savonarola had the complement of those collective nightmares. In fact, he saw an angel of the Lord holding a sword up and then turned the sword over onto the city of Florence. And the phrase that was engraved there, in Latin on that sword, is translated “the sword of dominion comes with swiftness and settles into the earth.” This vision powered Savonarola to begin speaking in Lent and these Lenten sermons in 1492 were in April. Lorenzo then died in April 8th; Easter was on April 22nd. And in between these two dates every day Savonarola went to the great cathedral in Florence to the Duomo and lectured on the same thing day after day and the crowds grew until finally the great cathedral could not hold the population that was coming out. People would go early in the morning and they would sit trembling in the cathedral waiting all day until Savonarola would come late in the afternoon to bring these sermons which got heavier and heavier and his visions became more and more profound until finally the day before Lent was over the whole cathedral was packed.

Here's how the historian Villari records it: “The Duomo was scarcely large enough to contain the vast crowd which had been waiting since the early morning in a state of great excitement, tension, and expectation. At last the preacher mounted the pulpit and on looking round upon his hearers and noting the extraordinary agitation prevailing among them paused, and then looking out cried out in a loud terrible voice in Latin, ‘isago arducam agwa supertram’ that (‘behold I see a wave of water over the earth.’ ” The earth is going to be suffered with a deluge again. And his sermon was that the deluge was a deluge of blood that the whole Florentine population were now doomed by a tidal wave of blood that was coming in on them, because of having challenged the universe by having built a Tower of Babel intellectually too high. Villari said that his voice resounded through the church with the strength of a thunderclap. Pico della Mirandola said that he felt a cold shiver run through him. This is one of his letters and that his hair stood on end and Savonarola also declared that he himself was no less moved than his hearers. They're all caught up in this. And so at this point in late April of 1492, Pico gave up on the development of the way in which thought could finally build a structure of apprehending the divine. And it was at this point that he wrote Being and the One that I started the lecture with tonight. That man in all seriousness has to recognize that his intellectual structure at its final purpose discloses that it is inadequate to understand the divine and must step aside that that is the purpose of intelligence to know when is enough. And this of course is profoundly different from the beginnings of the Renaissance in the 1450s and 1460s.

Well let's take just a little break and then we'll come back and we'll see some more where this goes.

When we were talking about John Colet and Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, we alluded to the wonderful translation that Colet made of Dionysius the Areopagite from Latin into English. So Ficino did the translations into Latin from the Greek, from the very difficult Greek, and Colet did it into English. Colet of course doing this around the end of the 1490s – 1497, 1498. In the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite in Colet's translation we note that Colet has, besides the translation, commentary. Introductions and commentary. And he writes in here:

“Moses and Truth received from God upon Mount Sinai not only the law which he left to them that came after to be written down in five books. But also the hidden and true explanation and interpretation of those five books, its spiritual meaning when unfolded. This God commanded him not to commit to writing in any way but to disclose and entrust it in that first instance to Joshua son of Nun only, who should in turn communicate it to chief priests that were likely to maintain it as secret and strict and religiously sealed.”

This is the doctrine then which is passed on and becomes in the eyes of Colet the central secret and lineage – the hermetic thread that runs throughout history. Then Colet, in order to explain how Dionysius the Areopagite comes to understand this, and how the Kabbalah comes to express this, copies down without giving any ascription to it, a whole page from Pico– Pico's book, The Apology, and it's word for word – it's verbatim.

Now we don't have Pico's Apology in English, so we'll read Colet and we'll see what he says about Kabbalah, about the secret tradition which is not written down. At first it's understood as a secret tradition that the content is not written down, but it changes so that the understanding is that it's not the content that isn't written down but that it is the structure of it which does not allow for it to be written of in the ordinary way. That it's there hidden in the text. It's there hidden in the letters. It's not an allegorical meaning of some permutation of the content but it's an arcane structure which is hidden, which the content-oriented mind will never understand and never get to that only by the discipline of the esoteric tradition can the mind be reschooled to learn this?

And he writes, but as Colet– this is– this is the Dean of Saint Paul's, in London, 1497. “But as for those more hidden mysteries and such as lay concealed beneath the rugged bark of the words of the law, of the Torah, and its rude covering of these words were those secrets of God on high. If they had been disclosed to the foolish multitude by the men of old time, what else, I ask would it have been then to give that which is holy to the dogs to cast pearls before swine.” As if ordinary men were swine and dogs. Perhaps ordinary men are swine and dogs, we don't know. “Wherefore, those ancients divulged not the profound contemplation of the most secret things in the law and the hidden depth of its more recondite truth, but only to wise men unknown to the multitude and only in a spoken wisdom.”

The key here– The key here is that this is a profound contemplation. It is not just a casual word for Colet, for Pico, for Ficino. They were freshly understanding that this was what Plotinus was talking about. That contemplation is a redemptive act of man's spirit not a creative act of man's mind but that it comes after a revelatio after a profound transformation. Where what the mind does is makes a frame of reference through which the spirit can move, but the mind is no longer concerned with the content, but only with making formal structures which are exact in their patterning so that the spirit may flow through it. These eventually, these shapes of meaning, will be the images, the symbolic images, and it's through the symbolic images that man's spirit flows. Not to any words that he could disclose to himself but to the actual experience. You can see how close this is to the, for instance, the Byzantine experience of the mystical theology of icons. That they are not there as images for the mind but that they are thresholds and portals for the spirit to pass through the other way. That meaning being brought to your mind but your spirit going to the divine. That this action is contemplation and that we in our secular misunderstanding think of contemplation as sitting quietly. And it's not that at all. That it's the action of the spirit moving back to the divine through the symbolic thresholds, and that if the mind has done its work well, it has arranged all these symbolic thresholds in an order, in a sequence, which allows for the spirit to move quickly through and not be confounded. That the true hierarchies that keep man back are not any demons anywhere, or any astrological influences anywhere, but the unordered architectonic structure of the mind itself and that that when that is ordered, not to establish a doctrine of any kind regardless of what it is, but to order the architecture of the mind so that the redemptive move of contemplation can swiftly move back through those corridors to freedom, to the divine.

That discipline which teaches us how to order is the Kabbalah, says Cohen. And he writes here, “These are the books of the Kabbalah and of reception.” Kabbalah meaning a received tradition the– the secret tradition of reception; being received. What is being received? Man's contemplative response to the divine is received. “These are the books of the Kabbalah and of the reception which are kept with such religious care by the Jews that none but those who are of forty years of age may even begin to touch them.”

That it was these books then that were translated for Pope Sixtus the Fourth. Some seventy books of the Kabbalah were translated into Latin for Sixtus the Fourth by the aid of some learned man. Sixtus died in 1484 and it was a Jewish scholar who helped make those translations. His name was Flavius Mithridates. Flavius Mithridates. Sixtus incidentally was a terrible individual. He was one of the great nepotist of the papal authorities; all of his relatives end up– ended up with gold and high offices. One of his nephews burst into the cathedral in Florence and tried to murder Lorenzo, did murder his brother Giuliano. Sixtus was a terrible individual. His mistress was the famous courtesan Vannozza, whose mother had been his mistress before. One of his daughters was very famous in history. His name was Rodrigo Borgia and his daughter's name was Lucretia. And he had an affair with her. So Sixtus was not a very powerful individual and towards the end of his life, fearing for his soul, built the Sistine Chapel. They probably don't tell you these things on the tours. But it was this same sickness in his desperateness – notice that at the end of their life they become terribly desperate – that he had the Kabbalah translated into Latin.

It was from these translations in Latin that Pico was able to scan the entirety. He did not know enough Hebrew to read the Kabbalah. You cannot read the Zohar very easily even if you can read Hebrew. But he could read Latin. Pico's library was enormous. He spent seven years going all over Europe. He spent his entire princely patrimony on his library. But 95% of the library was in Latin. There were only a couple of books in Hebrew, a couple of books in Arabic, a number of them in Greek, but almost all of them were in Latin. So it was these translations that Pico read, but he didn't live long enough to put it together. He died in 1494. He died just a few years after Lorenzo, about two years after Lorenzo died. But as he was dying a friend of his named John Reuchlin – Johannes Reuchlin – was publishing in the very year in Basel in what today is Switzerland, The Mirific Word, the wonder-working word, a Kabbalistic interpretation of Jesus. The name. And this would become one of the really great books of the age because Reuchlin was a tremendous scholar. Whereas Pico was somewhat of a dilettante, Reuchlin was a tremendous linguist who understood the Hebrew language better than the rabbis of the time. Was– Was tremendously interested in learning the language well enough that one could think freely in it, so that one could discipline the mind freely enough in it so that one could contemplate in it, could send the spirit back through it, this is different.

Later on, individuals who did not know this, who did not have the Neoplatonic key to this, who forgot that there's a spiritual element in this, would try to learn the angelic hierarchies as if it were a content as if it were a– a sacred formula. One of these would be John Dee, who in the 1580s would go off to Bohemia for Queen Elizabeth on a secret mission to try and contact an angel through the angelic hierarchy and didn't understand it at all that this was a spiritual discipline, that through contemplation one moves effortlessly without any words at all. Those who understood this in England at the time, practice it rather than– than writing anything. What did they practice? They practiced shaping language so that it became spiritual. Who were those individuals? People like Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare. They made the English language capable of spiritual movement without having an intellectual doctrinaire structure to lard it up. So that when we read their works, their works sing to us in form not in any kind of theological content. And so someone who is naive says well these are not philosophers, these are poets. And the other poets who are spiritual say, that's right they are. They sure are. That's what we're doing. That's what it's all about.

So here is John Colet, Dean of Saint Paul's, the teacher of Thomas More, the friend of Erasmus, the– the priest for Henry the Eighth, copying a page from Pico's Apology which had been written just a few years before. The term Kabbalah is, in Latin, Receptio because that teaching was received as of hereditary right by one from another, not by means of any written memorials, but by an orderly succession of communications, a tradition, a tradition. But that after the Jews were restored from the Babylonian captivity through Cyrus and after the rebuilding of their temple under Zerubbabel turned their mind to the restitution of the law of the Torah. And Ezra the ruler the high priest of the church after revising the Book of Moses – he is speaking of Genesis here – after revising the Book of Moses plainly perceived that the custom instituted by their forefathers of transmitting the teaching from hand to hand could not be preserved. That through all of the exiles through the massacres through flight captivities that the Israelite race would not be able to keep the secrets of the heavenly doctrine vouchsafed to them, they would perish except for the discovery that they could put it into the text in a hidden way. And that this came to pass and that this was the formation of it.

From this successive reception then, the transfer– the transferal of the spiritual law, communicated then through man secretly this knowledge came afterwards thus to be put into writing and that those books openly contain the secret things and the mysteries which are veiled in the literal law. These secret things as origin perceived are called by Saint Paul the Oracles of God, giving life to the law, without which the life giving spirit that law is dead. The– the Torah by itself literally is– is dead. There's no life in it. Notice now they're thinking in the same way that the Old Testament is like this, the Torah is like this. And that after a revelation, after a revelatio of– of Christ, the New Testament then is a contemplative work is a double mystery. Not only has its Kabbalah, not only is there a Christian Kabbalah, but that it moves in this spiritual contemplative way back through the world of form in a negative – what we would call a negative theology, avia negativa.

So that the Christian Kabbalah is very very arcane, very esoteric and is in fact the– the primordial achievement of the– of the capacity of man. And so it runs in this kind of a sequence that there was at one time a revelation to Moses. There was a revelation carried out in its form and time to Plato. There was the development from Hermes Trismegistus of this tradition that all of these confluences came together in the time of Jesus and were brought together into one. All those traditions were brought together into a oneness, which was then established so that only those individuals who are able to contemplate freely, who were not baffled by their mind, would be able to attain to that oneness. And thus, after fifteen hundred years, the state of civilization was that everything was completely corrupt, and thus the– the appearance of someone like Savonarola signaled the end of the epoch, the end of the age.

What comes after that age? What comes after that age is that only those individuals who are able to live by the Holy Spirit were going to be able to understand what's going on. And so this becomes the– the high wisdom watermark as we enter the 16th century, as the Hermetic tradition leaves from the 1400s and enters the 1500s. Notice now that all this time there are some individuals who have been fortunate enough to be brought in on the tail end of this. One of them is Michelangelo, who at 1500 was twenty-five years old, had seen it all at twenty-five already, and would live to be almost ninety. And in Michelangelo's art is where you find the best expression of it. Leonardo da Vinci is around and understanding all of this. There are a few individuals who are just starting to come up. Paracelsus is seven years old in 1500. And Paracelcus is going to be the first new man. He's going to be the first individual who is conscientiously made, tutored by this esoteric tradition to usher in a whole new set of circumstances for mankind. We're going to make a new man and he's not going to be a superman in the sense of being masterful at doctrine but he's going to be a superman in the sense that he's going to be able, by his power of contemplation, come back to the divine. And that– that he will understand all of the forms of nature and of the mind. He will be, not only a doctor in the sense of– of knowing how to treat man or the diseases and the basis of nature, but on the basis of transformed nature. His will be an iatrochemical medicine. It will be a medicine of man who is able to rearrange, by the power of his mind, so that he doesn't just become healthy again so that he is able to walk through his health back to the divine. And this will be his purpose and he– and the Hermetic tradition will be relentless for the next five hundred years in establishing that this is how it will be and that it will be in Pico's word “a science.” It will be a science. It will be a knowledge that man will have and he will understand what it is and how to do it.

Let's end with the end of Pico's oration On the Dignity of Man. Man then is going to have fantastic new capabilities and that these capabilities are given him now at this time so that he may be free. How is he going to be free? He's going to be able to rearrange whatever needs to be arranged; transform whatever needs to be formed, so that he may walk back through by art, by the art of transformation walk back through nature to the one to spiritual freedom. He writes here in the oration On the Dignity of Man, right at the end:

“But, as was the practice of the ancient theologians, even so did Orpheus protect the mysteries of his dogmas with the coverings of fables and conceal them with a poetic veil. So that whoever should read his hymns would suppose there was nothing beneath them but idle tales and perfectly unadulterated trifles. I have wished to say this so that it might be known what a task it was for me how difficult it was to draw out the hidden meaning of the secrets of philosophy from the intentional tangles of riddles and from the obscurity of fables, especially since I have been aided in a matter so serious so abstruse and so little known by no toil no application on the part of other interpreters. And yet like dogs they have barked that I have made a kind of heap of inconsequential nothings for a vain display of mere quantity as if these were not all questions in the highest degree disputed and controversial, in which the main schools are at sword's points and as if I had not contributed many things utterly unknown and untried to these very men who are now tearing at my reputation and who consider that they are the leaders in philosophy. No, I am so far from this fault that I have taken great pains to reduce my argument to as few chapters as I could. If I had myself, after the wont of others, few chapters as I could I would wish to divide it into parts and then cut it into pieces undoubtedly it would have grown into a countless number but I hold my peace about all the rest. Who is there that does not know that a single proposition of the nine hundred, the one that treats of reconciling the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, that I could have developed six hundred more theses just out of this? But I know of things which many are ignorant and now, in order that this, most Reverend fathers that I am writing to may no longer stand in the way of your desire, you most excellent doctors of learning whom I perceive to be prepared and girded up in the expectation of dispute with me not without great delight may we now join battle as to the sound of trumpets of war.”

That's what they call the Renaissance. And of course the Pope appointed a committee to investigate this guy. And they did and found him guilty of heresy. He waited until the next pope came in Alexander the Sixth and he got a dispensation for a price. It was the Renaissance.

We'll see some more next week.