Christian Kabbalah

13 CHRISTIAN KABBALAH P e t e r J. Fo r s h a w G ershom Scholem argues that the primary motivation for Christian kabbalists was a form of missionary activity: “Christian Kabbalah can be defined as the interpretation of kabbalistic texts in the interests of Christianity (or, to be more precise, Catholicism); or the use of kabbalistic concepts and methodology in support of Christian dogma.”1 As evidence, he points to the Christological speculations of Jewish converts, such as the Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith) of Raymund Martini (1220–1285), works that contributed to the growth of an incipient Christian Kabbalah.2 1 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the Dawn of Christian Kabbalah Although the Majorcan mystic Ramon Lull (1225–1315) is sometimes credited with being the first Christian to show an acquaintance with Kabbalah in his De auditu Kabbalistico, the work actually shows little familiarity with the Jewish tradition. Christian speculation about the Kabbalah first took root in the Florentine Renaissance. While Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was busy translating and writing commentaries on the works of Plato, Plotinus, and Hermes Trismegistus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) began studying kabbalistic works. This was all part of Pico’s project of creating his syncretic philosophia nova, his synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought with esoteric doctrines gleaned from prisci theologi such as Zoroaster, 1 2 Gershom Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” in The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books & Their Christian Interpreters, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1997), 17–51, here 17. Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” 18. See also Moshe Idel’s “Introduction to the Bison Book Edition,” in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), v–xxix; Idel, Kabbalah in Italy 1280–1510: A Survey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 227–235. 143 Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 144 Peter J. Forshaw Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pythagoras. Pico is the first author raised as a Christian who is known to have read an impressive amount of genuine Jewish Kabbalah. He marks a watershed in the history of Hebrew studies in Europe.3 The fruit of Pico’s studies can best be found in his famous nine hundred Conclusiones Philosophicæ Cabalisticæ et Theologicæ (1486). It was here that Pico first introduced the Kabbalah into the mainstream of Renaissance thought by means of forty-seven “Cabalistic Conclusions” according to “the secret teaching of the wise Hebrew Cabalists” and seventy-two “Cabalistic conclusions according to my own opinion,” with further kabbalistic references in other groups of “Conclusions,” including those on magic, Mercury Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and the Orphic hymns.4 Pico’s two major kabbalistic influences were the Spanish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240–ca. 1291) and the Italian rabbi Menahem Recanati (1250–1310). These men represent two quite different types of Kabbalah, the one ecstatic, the other theosophical-theurgical. Recanati is mainly concerned with the ten sefirot as divine emanations and engages in a symbolic exegesis of Scripture as the way to unravel their mysteries. On the other hand, Abulafia, the father of prophetic Kabbalah, tends to downplay the importance of the sefirot and concentrates on the names (shemot) of God and their permutations as a spiritual discipline by which man can attain union with the divine.5 Though neither detailed nor systematic in his discussion, for example, of the sefirot, paths of wisdom, and gates of understanding, Pico nevertheless shows an awareness of these teachings and understands their relation to kabbalistic theories of creation and revelation. Pico’s alleged primary motivation for studying the Kabbalah is evangelizing against heretics and Jews. In the Apologia he composed in 1487 – following the condemnation of thirteen of his theses as heretical – he avows that his motive is “to do battle for the faith against the relentless slanders of the 3 4 5 On Pico and Kabbalah, see François Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Dunod, 1964), Cap. III; Klaus Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of Christian Kabbala,” in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl Erich Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 195–207; Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), passim. On Pico as creator of the “first true Christian Cabala,” see Bernard McGinn, “Cabalists and Christians: Reflections on Cabala in Medieval and Renaissance Thought,” in Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 11–34. Steven A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), 343, 421, 489, 497–503, 507, 511. On Abulafia and Recanati, see Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, passim. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 145 Hebrews.”6 As his second set of “Cabalistic Conclusions” explains, his intention is one of “providing powerful confirmation of the Christian religion from the very principles of the Hebrew Sages,” so that the Jews can be refuted by their own kabbalistic books.7 He proposes to use the Kabbalah’s own hermeneutical techniques to prove, for instance, the supremacy of the name of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity.8 The significance of Pico’s Kabbalah should not, however, be restricted simply to Christian polemic and apologetics. Chaim Wirszubski argues that the “Cabalistic Conclusions” “outgrew their original purpose” and that Pico viewed Kabbalah from an entirely new standpoint, being “the first Christian who considered cabbala to be simultaneously a witness for Christianity and an ally of natural magic.”9 Pico’s interest goes far beyond the simple confirmation of Christianity when in his “Magical Conclusions” he famously asserts that the divinity of Christ is best demonstrated by the science of magic and Kabbalah.10 Joseph Dan believes that with this thesis, Pico is less concerned with promoting traditional Catholicism than with implying that Christianity should discover a new meaning, one outlined in his nine hundred theses.11 The extreme nature of the claims Pico makes, such as that “no magical operation can be of any efficacy unless it has annexed to it a work of Cabala,” created a widespread interest in this Jewish tradition.12 Pico’s alliance between Kabbalah, magic, and theology produced a significant development in Christian Kabbalah: From then on, a Christian kabbalist could be a theologian or a magus or both. 2 Johann Reuchlin’s Influential Formulations on the Word and the Art During the time Pico was active in Florence, he was visited by the German scholar Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), universally regarded as one of the key 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Brian P. Copenhaver, “The Secret of Pico’s Oration: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy,” in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 56–81, here 75. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 29, 32. Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 523. Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 151, 185. Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 497. Joseph Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and Its Historical Significance,” in Dan, The Christian Kabbalah, 55–95, here 57. Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 499. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 146 Peter J. Forshaw figures of European scholarship and intellectual life at the turn of the sixteenth century. Reuchlin wrote two of the most influential books of Christian Kabbalah, the De Verbo Mirifico (On the Wonder-Working Word, 1494) and De Arte Cabalistica (On the Kabbalistic Art, 1517).13 One of the main attractions of Kabbalah for him was the multiplicity of divine names in Hebrew. In his “Conclusions,” Pico had briefly referred to the name of Jesus in a kabbalistic context; in De Verbo Mirifico, Reuchlin launched into a full-blown declaration of how the Jewish four-letter name the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, had been superseded by the five-letter Christian Pentagrammaton, the name “above all others,” YHSVH. Reuchlin’s first kabbalistic work was significant for its ideas about language and the contribution it made to the Renaissance debate on the occult powers and properties of words and names. It contained extraordinary examples of marvelous deeds achieved through the wonder-working word, from feeding the hungry and curing the sick to exorcizing demons and reviving the dead.14 By the time he published De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin was the leading Christian Hebraist of his age and had become involved in the controversy with the Cologne Dominicans over the Talmud, sometimes referred to as the “Battle of the Books.” Reuchlin wrote his second kabbalistic work “as a form of special pleading for the protection of Hebrew books against burning because of their ‘Christian’ content.” This was a particularly courageous stance to take and a radical departure from the standard theological antagonism toward the Talmud.15 An important aspect of the new concept of language found in kabbalistic sources was a set of exegetical techniques having no counterpart in the Christian interpretation of Scripture. In De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin provides examples of the Jewish techniques of gematria (or arithmetic), 13 14 15 On Reuchlin, see Karl E. Grözinger, “Reuchlin und die Kabbala,” in Reuchlin und die Juden, ed. Arno Herzig and Julius H. Schoeps (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1993), 175– 187; Bernd Roling, “The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a Christological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin,” in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 213–266; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Einleitung: Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala,” in Christliche Kabbala, ed. Schmidt-Biggemann (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2003), 9–48. Charles Zika, “Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), 104–138. Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 50; Joseph Dan, “Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 991; Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of Christian Kabbala,” 197. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 147 Notariacon (manipulation of letters), and Themura (commutation of letters), all for the sake of proving the supremacy of the Christian religion. Somewhat incongruously, Reuchlin’s Jewish representative, Simon ben Eleazar, promotes Christian Trinitarian doctrine with his explanation of how the twelve-letter name Ab Ben Veruach Hakadosh (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) flows from the Jewish Tetragrammaton YHVH.16 So informative was Reuchlin’s exposition that from his time, no writer who touched on Christian Kabbalah with any thoroughness did so without using him as a source. 3 Other Significant Sources for Early Christian Kabbalah One of the central figures in sixteenth-century Christian Kabbalah is undoubtedly the Venetian scholar Francesco Giorgio (ca. 1460–1540),17 author of two large volumes on Kabbalah that were widely read: De Harmonia mundi totius cantica tria (Three Canticles on the Harmony of the Whole World, 1525) and the Problemata (1536). In both books, the Kabbalah was central to the themes developed, and the Zohar, for the first time, was used extensively in a work of Christian origin. Elaborating on the works of Pico and Reuchlin, in De Harmonia mundi Giorgio presents the major ideas of Renaissance kabbalists. In the process, he takes the Christianization of Kabbalah far beyond that found in Pico’s theses. One of Giorgio’s disciples, Arcangelo da Borgonuovo (d. 1571), borrowing extensively from the works of his teacher and Reuchlin, published a Dechiaratione sopra il nome di Giesu (Declaration on the Name of Jesus, 1557), essentially an expansion of the final chapters in Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico. This was later followed by a commentary on Pico’s kabbalistic theses, Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata (More select and obscure dogmas of the Cabalists, 1569).18 The German Jewish convert Paulus Ricius (1470–1541) likewise discovered in Kabbalah the mysteries of the Trinity, the eternal generation of the Son of God, redemption through the passion and blood of the Messiah, and his resurrection. Rici was widely read in Hebrew sources, and with the zeal of a convert he published a series of short tracts under the title Sal Fœderis (Salt 16 17 18 Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala, 57–59. Giulio Busi, “Francesco Zorzi: A Methodical Dreamer,” in Dan, The Christian Kabbalah, 97–125; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; reprinted 2001), 33–44. Chaim Wirszubski, “Francesco Giorgio’s Commentary on Giovanni Pico’s Kabbalistic Theses,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), 145–156. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 148 Peter J. Forshaw of Covenant) in 1507, intended to defend Christianity against the calumnies of the Jews. In 1514, Rici became physician to Emperor Maximilian I, for whom in 1519 he prepared a new Latin translation of the Talmud, with commentary. In 1516, he published what was to become an influential translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light (1516), containing the first depiction of the Tree of Life outside a Jewish text. The most famous of his kabbalistic works is the four-part religio-philosophical synthesis of kabbalistic and Christian sources, De Cœlesti Agricultura (On Celestial Agriculture, 1541). Book Four consists of an introduction to the Kabbalah in a series of fifty theorems, as well as a translation of main passages from Gikatilla’s Gates of Light. Ironically, despite his Jewish origins and obvious erudition, and despite the orthodox, non-magical nature of Rici’s Kabbalah, he was accused by a priest of not propounding true Kabbalah “because he presented this doctrine in another light than that of Pico.”19 The individual responsible, however, for providing the most enduring image of early modern Christian Kabbalah is the German theologian Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), in his encyclopedia of esoteric thought, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533). This work was to became one of the most widely consulted sources for Kabbalah in the Christian world – despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Agrippa only shows knowledge of the works of Christian kabbalists such as Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, and Giorgio, rather than direct engagement with Hebrew or Aramaic sources. Agrippa presents a similar intermingling of Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and kabbalistic ideas to Reuchlin, iterating the same claims to Hebrew being the “original language” and the significance of its twenty-two letters as the foundation of the world. Scholem observes that the place of honor in De Occulta philosophia is accorded to practical Kabbalah and arithmology, for it is a rich source of information on the occult and kabbalistic significance of numbers; at the same time, we should not neglect the importance of Kabbalah for Agrippa’s notion of a sacralized magic.20 19 20 Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens, 89. On Ricius, see also François Secret, “Notes sur Paolo Ricci et la Kabbale chrétienne en Italie,” Rinascimento 11 (1960), 169–192; Crofton Black, “From Kabbalah to Psychology: The Allegorizing Isagoge of Paulus Ricius, 1509–1541,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2:2 (2007), 136–173. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridian Books, 1978), 198; Zika, “Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate,” 138. See also Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 149–159. On Christian Kabbalah’s relations with occult philosophy, see Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens, ch. 11. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 149 4 A Cabalchemical Hybrid: Experimental Fusions of Kabbalah and Alchemy During the course of the sixteenth century, a pronounced trend emerged toward the permeation of Christian Kabbalah with alchemical symbolism.21 This convergence of alchemy and Kabbalah was perhaps to be expected as both arts were concerned with knowledge of creation. Both arts, too, advocated a secret transmission of knowledge from master to pupil, with initiations, ordinations, and revelations from God and his angels. To a certain extent, the kabbalists’ reduction of language to its elemental letters corresponded to the alchemists’ reduction of matter to its primal state; the permutation of letters and words corresponding to the circulation and combination of elements and substances. The first known combination of alchemy and Kabbalah can be found in the works of the Venetian priest Giovanni Agostino Panteo (d. 1535), who develops a hybrid “Kabbalah of Metals” in two works: the Ars transmutationis metallicae (Art of metallic transmutation, 1519) and Voarchadumia contra alchimiam (Voarchadumia against alchemy, 1530).22 In the most kabbalistic-sounding chapter of the Voarchadumia, concerned with the “Mixture at the roots of the Unity of the 72 Voarchadumic elements,” Panteo numerically analyzes a small collection of words connected with alchemical substances. We learn that the mysterious substance Risoo is called Thélima in Greek, and in Hebrew Reçón, both terms appearing in Panteo’s list of synonyms for gold. Both words translate literally as “Will,” but the alchemico-kabbalistic significance lies in the realization that the Hebrew Reçón shares the same letters as Eretz, one of the Hebrew words for “earth.”23 In this opaque way, Panteo attempts a kabbalistic elucidation of the secrets of the powers of alchemical substances and processes. He makes no direct reference to Jewish texts, but he does mention Pico and provides three magical alphabets derived from Hebrew, one of which subsequently appears in Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia. Another is the Enochian alphabet, well known to those familiar with John Dee’s communications with spirits. 21 22 23 Gershom Scholem, Alchemy and Kabbalah (Dallas: Spring Publications, 2006); Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 152–169. On Pantheus, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Vol. 5, 537–40; Hilda Norrgrén, “Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee’s Reading of Pantheus’s Voarchadumia,” Ambix 52:3 (2005), 217–245. Nicolas Séd, “L’or enfermé et la poussière d’or selon Moïse ben Shémtobh de Léon (c. 1240–1305),” Chrysopoeia, Tome III, fasc. 2 1989, 121–134, at 131. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 150 Peter J. Forshaw The French Paracelsian David De Planis-Campy (1589–ca. 1644) identified Dee, the Elizabethan magus, as one “most versed in Chymical Cabala.” This is doubtless because of the composite alchemical symbol “mathematically, magically, cabbalistically, and anagogically” elucidated by Dee in his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564).24 Dee is familiar with the kabbalistic exegetical techniques of “the Tziruph (or Themura) of the Hebrews” and speaks of the “cabbalistic expansion of the quaternary,” thereby introducing a Reuchlinian reference to the Pythagorean tetraktys. It is evident, however, that he is less convinced of the importance of Hebrew than Pico or Reuchlin. Dee also shows a marked tendency to forge his own Kabbalah of Greek and Roman letters and geometrical, astrological, and alchemical symbols to discover the secrets of God and creation. Despite being classed by Méric Casaubon as “a Cabalistical man, to his ears,” Dee gives the distinct impression that he is not particularly interested in kabbalistic textual interpretation. In the Monas, he pointedly makes a distinction between a “Kabbalah of the Real” and a “Kabbalah of the Word,” the former relating to the Book of Nature, the latter to the Book of Scripture. Dee turns from an exclusively “literal” kabbalistic reading of printed books to one connected with natural magic and deciphering the hieroglyphs or signatures of the created world.25 5 The Sigillum Dei in Heinrich Khunrath’s “Christian-Cabalist” Amphitheatre So far our story of Christian Kabbalah has primarily been one of Catholic exponents.26 However, it is a Lutheran acquaintance of Dee, the German theosopher and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who appears to be the first person to publish a work explicitly describing itself as “Christian Cabalist”: The Christian-Cabalist, Divinely Magical and Physico-Chymical Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595 and 1609).27 Familiar with Agrippa’s 24 25 26 27 Peter J. Forshaw, “The Early Alchemical Reception of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica,” Ambix 52:3 (2005), 247–269, at 263. Philip Beitchman, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 242–243. On Dee’s switches from Protestantism to Catholicism and back, plus possible contacts with Familism, see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129, 149. On Khunrath, see Peter J. Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom in the Occult Works of Heinrich Khunrath,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 107– 129. Khunrath’s usage is antedated in manuscript, however, by Jean Thénaud (d. 1542) whose La Saincte et trescrestienne cabale dates from around 1521. See Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala, 89–97; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter, 185 n.1. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 151 De Occulta Philosophia, it is likely that Khunrath deepened his knowledge of Christian Kabbalah through a compendium published while he was studying medicine in Basel: the Artis Cabalisticæ: hoc est, Reconditae Theologiae et Philosophiae, Scriptorum, Tomus I (Volume 1 of the Cabalistic Art, that is, of the Writers of Recondite Theology and Philosophy, 1587) of Johannes Pistorius of Nidda (1546–1608). This collection has been called the “Bible of Christian Cabala,” containing as it does works by Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, Arcangelo da Borgonuovo, Leone Ebreo, and a Latin translation of the Sefer Yetzirah.28 Khunrath’s knowledge of the Kabbalah most clearly reveals itself in the Amphitheatre’s engraving of Christ, the Sigillum Dei (Seal of God) or Sigillum Emet (Seal of Truth). As Raphael Patai remarks, one “has the impression of seeing a complex Jewish emblem written in Hebrew,” a central figure (of Christ cruciform) from which radiate eight concentric rings, five in Hebrew letters, forming “a veritable brief anthology of important quotations and names of Jewish religious significance.”29 It includes the Ein Sof, ten sefirot, ten Names of God and ten angelic orders, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew text of the Decalogue. The debt Khunrath owes to Reuchlin is nowhere more evident than at the heart of the engraving where five large tongues of flame appear, each bearing one letter of the wonder-working word YHSVH. It appears that we are now quite far from Christian Kabbalah as primarily missionary activity aimed at converting the Jews. For Khunrath, kabbalistic reception of divine revelation is to be used for the recognition of the divine Father and Son and the understanding of what he calls the “Three Books” of Nature, Man, and Scripture, as represented in the best-known engraving from his Amphitheatre, the “Oratory-Laboratory.” Khunrath’s claims of being “ineffably rapt in God” and inspired by “Sophia Enthusiastica” include a new dimension of personal revelation (through dreams and angels) to his kabbalistic experience in the Oratory. In the Laboratory, one of the products of Khunrath’s emphasis on the necessary conjunction of Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy is the “Divine” Philosophers’ Stone, with its “Physico-Magical, Hyperphysico-magical, Theosophical and Kabbalistic” uses.30 28 29 30 Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiennes, 280. Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, 156. Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom,” 115, 128; Dan, “Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance,” 639. See Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,” p. 62, on the opposition between Kabbalah and mysticism: “the first emphasizes tradition and marginalizes individual experience, whereas the latter includes the notion of an original discovery of a truth by an individual.” Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 152 Peter J. Forshaw 6 Zoharic and Lurianic Influences: Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata Interest in Kabbalah and alchemy reappears in the seventeenth century’s most prominent anthology of Jewish and Christian kabbalist texts. With the conviction that the Kabbalah was an original secret revelation that contained all the spiritual evolution of humanity from the creation of the world, and that the Jewish and Christian religions were identical from the point of view of their esoteric core, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1689) decided to publish a Latin translation of the most significant parts of the Zohar, along with other kabbalistic treatises and commentaries to assist the reader’s understanding. This resulted in the publication, in 1677, of the first volume of the Kabbala denudata, seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque Theologica (The Kabbala Unveiled or the transcendental, metaphysical and theological doctrine of the Hebrews), dedicated “to the Hebrew-, Chymistry-, and Wisdom-loving reader.” Whereas previously the most influential Hebrew sources had been the works of medieval authors such as Recanati, Gikatilla, and Abulafia, the Kabbalah Unveiled espouses the works of a new form of Kabbalah with a stress on redemption and the millennium, promoting what Scholem calls the “true theologia mystica of Judaism.”31 In keeping with the interests of earlier Christian kabbalists such as Reuchlin and Agrippa, this volume includes a “Key to the Divine Names of the Kabbalah” and an edition of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light. New, however, are works of the Safed mystic Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and other Lurianic kabbalist works, including a detailed explanation of the Tree of Life and a summary of an unusual Jewish alchemical treatise, the Esch Mezareph (The Refiner’s Fire), giving correspondences between the sefirot, planets, and metals, plus several speculative kabbalistic works by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687). A second volume of the Kabbalah Unveiled, the Liber Sohar restitutus (The Book of Splendour restored, 1684), emphasizes Knorr’s missionary intent, beginning with a systematic résumé of the Zohar’s doctrines, to which is added a Christian interpretation. The same technique is used in another text included in the volume, the Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae . . . ad conversionem Judaeorum (Outline of Christian Kabbala . . . for the conversion of the Jews), a dialogue between a “Kabbalist” and a “Christian Philosopher,” in which 31 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 284. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 153 they explain their respective religious doctrines, showing the concordance between the two traditions. Inspired by the Lurianic Kabbalah with its “optimistic, vitalist philosophy of perfectionism and universal salvation,” Rosenroth and his collaborator in the publishing enterprise, Frans Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699), rejected many of the conventional Christian views of the fall, salvation, and the Trinity, as well as the particularly Protestant focus on divine justice, predestination, man’s helplessness, and the concept of an eternal hell. They tended to minimize or allegorize Christ’s role in the redemptive process, preferring instead the Lurianic vision of a universe restored to its original perfection through human effort.32 This second volume also contains work that would later be of great interest to occult societies such as the Golden Dawn, in particular, a section entitled Pneumatica cabbalistica, introducing kabbalistic ideas about spirits, angels and demons, the soul, and the various states and transformations included in the kabbalistic theory of metempsychosis. Also included were Latin translations of Lurianic works, including chapters on angelology, demonology, and the magical creative power of language, describing how pious men can create angels and spirits through prayers. The Kabbala denudata was superior to anything that had previously been published on the Kabbalah in a language other than Hebrew, providing a non-Jewish readership with authentic texts that were to be the principal source for Western literature on Kabbalah until the end of the nineteenth century.33 7 Christian Kabbalah on the Threshold of Modernity: Oetinger and Molitor Moving to the eighteenth century, the best known representative of Christian Kabbalah is undoubtedly the Lutheran pastor Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782), who sought a philosophia sacra as a substitute for the systems of profane philosophy developed by thinkers such as Descartes and Hobbes. He found this in various guises, including the philosophy of Leibniz, the Neoplatonically kabbalistic works of Henry More, the writings of Paracelsus and other alchemists, the theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the works 32 33 Allison P. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), 345. See especially ch. 6: “Christian Knorr von Rosenroth and the Kabbalah Denudata”; eadem, “The Kabbala Denudata: Converting Jews or Seducing Christians,” in Pokin and Weiner, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews, 73–96. Scholem, Kabbalah, 416. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 154 Peter J. Forshaw of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), and in the Jewish Kabbalah. Oetinger was especially drawn to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with the Etz Hayim (Tree of Life) of Luria’s main disciple Hayim Vital (1543–1620), a major source for his Öffentliches Denckmahl der Lehrtafel einer weyland württembergischen Princeßin Antonia (Public Monument of the Didactic Painting of a Former Württemberg Princess Antonia, 1763).34 This was his description and analysis of an emblematic triptych commissioned for the Church of the Holy Trinity at Bad Teinach in the Black Forest by Princess Antonia of Württemberg (1613–1679), one of the daughters of the alchemist and occultist Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg. In his commentary on Princess Antonia’s Lehrtafel, Oetinger sets forth a system of Christian Kabbalah based on his reading of the Zohar, containing separate chapters comparing the philosophies of Newton, Boehme, and Swedenborg with that of Kabbalah. For our final representative of Christian Kabbalah, we are back with a Catholic scholar, in the figure of the German philosopher Franz Josef Molitor (1779–1860). Like Rosenroth and Oetinger before him, Molitor collaborated with Jewish scholars and developed his kabbalistic program over decades of research into primary Jewish sources. His four-volume Philosophie der Geschichte, oder über die Tradition (Philosophy of History, or On Tradition, 1827–1853) was the nineteenth century’s most erudite and profound consideration of the Kabbalah’s significance for Christians, earning Scholem’s praise as “the crowning and final achievement of the Christian Kabbalah.”35 8 Conclusion What has become clear is that Scholem’s negative image of a Christian Kabbalah primarily engaged in evangelical activity against the Jews requires some modification. While it is justified on the surface by the overt declarations of Pico and Reuchlin (no doubt balancing on a knife edge, ever aware 34 35 Miklós Vassányi, Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 128ff; Eva Johann Schauer, “Friedrich Christoph Oetinger und die kabbalistische Lehrtafel der württembergischen Prinzessin Antonia in Teinach,” in Mathesis, Naturphilosophie und Arkanwissenschaft im Umkreis Friedrich Christoph Oetingers (1702–1782) ed. Sabine Holtz, Gerhard Betsch, and Eberhard Zwink (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 165–182. On Oetinger, see also Ernst Benz, Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of Theology, trans. Kenneth W. Wesche (St. Paul, MN: Grailstone Press, 2004). Scholem, Kabbalah, 200–201; Arthur Verlsuis, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1994), 76. On Molitor, see also Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph Molitor und die jüdische Tradition: Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der Geschichte” (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 155 of the Inquisition), it misrepresents some of the Christian Kabbalists discussed here, who each had his own motives, ranging from novel biblical interpretation, greater awareness of the prehistory of Christianity, Church reform and the revitalization of religion, to insights into the theories of alchemy and the practices of magic.36 Here Dan’s more irenic reading should be considered, with the suggestion that even the early Christian kabbalist works included a different, additional message: that non-biblical Jewish sources also held great relevance for their Christian readers, not only as a way of strengthening and upholding their faith, but as a way of discovering a deeper, more profound understanding of the nature of their own religion. True, the aim of conversion often lurked in the background, but with it also the hope of reinvigorating the Christian religion, together with the possibility of personal transformation and spiritual transfiguration. There is surely some historical irony in the fact that it was the Christian kabbalists who were the first to publish and promulgate Jewish esoteric material. With its implication of tolerance and even respect toward the tradition of another religion, their belief in the relevance of Jewish Kabbalah for its Christian counterpart is “very nearly unique in the history of the three scriptural religions.”37 36 37 Cf. Yvonne Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 82. Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,” 55–56, 68. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016