Way Oxford Thenaud
Country Teaching Seraphim 1 Aleph Aleph א 1 Prudence
Life House Cherubim 2 Beth Beth כ
Peace Retribution Thrones 3 Gimel Gimel ג Retribution
Wisdom Door, entry Powers 4 Daleth Daleth ך
Seeing Foyer Principalities 5 He He ה
Hearing Hooked needle Dominations 6 Waw Vau ו
Smell Arms Virtues 7 Zayin Sdain ז
Speaking Fright Archangels 8 Het Cheth ח Infusion Lead astray Angels 9 Tet Theth ת
Sleep, Bed Praise Primum mobile 10 Yod Jod י 2 Riches Palm of hand Firmament 20 Kaph Caph כ
Negotiation Doctrine Saturn 30 Lamed Lameth ל
Waters Water Jupiter 40 Mem Men מ
Way Oxford Thenaud
Spirit Apposition Sun 60 Samek Samach ם
Laughter Eye Venus 70 Ayin Ayin ע
Seed Mouth Mercury 80 Pe Phe פ
Suspicion Ribs Moon 90 Sade Zadik צ
Sleep Circuit Elements 100 Kop Kuph ק 3
Grace Poverty Elements 200 Res Res ך
Fire Teeth Elements 300 Sin Schin ש + Ԃ
Power Signs Elements 400 Taw Thaph ו + Ԃ all mixed 500 Kaph Caph ך
or 600 Mem Men ם
elementally 700 Nun Num ן composed 800 Pe Phe ף things 900 Sade Zadik ץ The Father by the Son and in the Son Who is the Principal, End and Beginning of all things created the Head, the Fire and the Foundation of the Great Man by good alliance.
The head, seat of reason and of animal powers, signifies the angelic world; fire is the celestial world; the foundation represents the elemental world; and the alliance embodies the union of the other three. The devout recitation of the 150 Psalms has a sure effect on events: for example, Domine in virtute tua laetabitur rex ("In thy strength the king rejoices, O Lord" [Ps. 20/21:11) brings about prosperity and victory in peace, and so on. Thenaud
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teaches us that there are three parts of Kabbalah: number (consulto), weight (sententia), and measure. Others name two parts, Sephiroth (numbers) and Shemoth (names) -- speculative and practical, respectively. Still others give five parts: rectitude, combination, permutation,
equipollence, and numeration (foil. lxxiro-lxxiiiivo).
Following rectitude, one reads the first letters of, say, a page to find a sentence revelatory of hidden truth. In combination, one combines various letters so as to use them to replace one another: for example, A for B, B for A; C for D, D for C; etc. Or one combines syllables. Permutation results from the changing around of all the letters of a sentence, without adding or subtracting any, to give another complete sentence: "Françoys par la grace de Dieu roy de France" ("Francis by the Grace of God King of France") contains "l'Eage d'or d'icy a C. roys durera en France." Equipollence is a kind of abbreviated notation or shorthand. Numeration is based on numerical equivalences of letters, so that words have equality of number and meaning through mathematical operations. All these methods produce the greatest spiritual truths when applied to Holy Scriptures, especially in Hebrew, but similarly to a lesser degree in Latin or Greek (foll. lxxiiiivolxxviro).
Thenaud's Hebrew guide cautions him that because of his pupil's limited knowledge of Hebrew, he must avoid profaning the mysteries of the Names of God, and he will instruct him only in a general way. Then, after a brief statement about the three ineffable Names of God revealed by the angel Gabriel or Metatron, he teaches the essence of the kabbalistic doctrine of emanation. Of the three names, the first, Himself (Hu), reveals the simple unity of the divine nature; the second, Essence (Ehieh; Greek On; Latin Ens), divine transcendence; and the third, Fire (Esh;
Greek Pir; Latin Ignis), reminds of the illuminatory aspects of God, who transforms us by his Spirit into divine sons of light. The ten emanations of the celestial angelic world, from the Ensoph, Infinity, are ten spheres: Kether, infinite power and crown of the reign of everlasting felicity; Hochman, wisdom, God the Son; Binath, prudence, intelligence, God the Holy Spirit; Hesed, misericordia; Geburatb, justice, severity; Tiphereth, glory, beauty; Nerad, triumph, magnanimity; Hod, confession, praise; Malkuth, king, superillustrious deity; Pahad, furious, fear.
4
While revealing to us mortals the splendor of the divine, to the degree we are capable of perceiving it, these names also warn us of the need for purification before we approach so awesome a study (foll. lxxvirolxxxiivo).
Ritual purificatory bathing, changing of garments, and four days of fasting serve as preparation for our pilgrim prior to his being instructed on the fifth day into the meaning of the unspeakable Tetragrammaton. Those
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four sacred characters manifest themselves universally in tetrads: the four worlds all have
tetradic structures. In the angelic, four princes direct the angelic hosts according to the will of the Eternal Monarch. In the celestial, four triple signs are present with four qualities that cause the four seasons. In the elemental world, the four elements reflect the tetradic nature as well as the four aspects of the microcosm, that is, flesh, spirit, shadow, and soul. Finally, after a long enumeration of other universal reflections of the unutterable Tetragrammaton, our Hebrew explains the name of God יהוה (Yahweh): Yod, 10, is the beginning of all things and the end of all numbers, for unity contains the first tetrad. He, 5, contains the 2 of creatures and the 3 of the divine nature, otherness and unity, multiplicity and simplicity. Waw, 6, perfection, signifies the celestial and elemental worlds joined together and united, perfected and accomplished by God (foil. lxxxiivo-lxxxviro). There follows a discussion of the various names of God and those of the
seventy-two angels (foil. lxxxvi-lxxxixvo) and of the ancient practice of kabbalists of purifying
themselves by fasting and ceremonious rites during thirty-seven days for the reception of the Spirit who ravished their spirits into mystical ecstasy (foll. lxxxx-lxxxxivvo).
In the fifth treatise, Thenaud demonstrates clearly the prejudices of his Christian unilateral faith, for Dame Simplicité suddenly separates him from his Hebrew guide and the Holy of Holies of the Temple, saving him from such unenlightened superstition, to lead him to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The walls are lined with the books of the early fathers, so numerous as to outnumber the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Rome, written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Aramaic; but of all of them the Roman fathers Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great represent the four fountains of all knowledge. Their works put to shame the teachings of the great philosophers and men of letters of antiquity, for their doctrine founds itself on the essential teaching of the cross, illustrated thus:
The simple faith of the Christian Kabbalah does not need transmutation, equipollence, or any of the other operations to teach its doctrines, which are recorded in the divine book seen by Saint John on Patmos (foll. lxxxxvrolxxxxviivo). By Grace, the pilgrim is led on to the holiest of
mountains, Calvary, where he has visions of the divine Names subsequently explained by Dame Simplicité in the Chapel of Saint Helen. The three worlds of angelic, celestial, and elemental dimensions are explained now in terms of a series of quadratures that recall the carmina quadrata of Rabanus Maurus. In a short sixth treatise dealing with cosmology, Thenaud brings to an end
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his volume, having run the course of his understanding of Hebrew Kabbalah, only to return to the dogma of Roman theology. Jewish mysticism is at best a preparation for the revelation of Christian faith for which one does not need practical kabbalistic manipulations but uniquely divine grace (foll. lxxxviiiro-cxvivo).
Now it is clear from this analytical summary what use a professional Christian theologian could make of the Kabbalah. He viewed it much as the early fathers had viewed the Old Testament, as a prefiguration in which law precedes grace, penitence precedes salvation, and so on. Thenaud follows the lead of early humanists such as Pico della Mirandola and Reuchlin, on whose works he draws most heavily. But, as the eminent scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem has shown, it is rather the Jews converted to Christianity during and prior to the fifteenth century who have set the stage, 5 for they interpret kabbalistic texts as prefiguring or containing explicitly doctrines of
the Trinity, as seen in the example of the three different letters of the Tetragrammaton. Yod, waw, and he designate respectively "the Father and the existence of a 'principle without beginning' in God, Son as a principle of the beginning, Holy-Spirit as a spiritual breath emitted by the first two principles." 6 Their tradition, on the one hand,, made it easier for converted Jews to accept the
teaching of Christianity by finding essential doctrines already revealed in Jewish mystical thought, and, on the other, permitted conservative nonkabbalistic Jews to condemn Kabbalah as non-Jewish. Converted Jews served as teachers for such humanists as Pico, whose instructor Dattilo 7 may serve as the literary type of guide we see in Thenaud.
There is another important concept we must bring again to mind in order to understand better such a use of Kabbalah -- namely, the tradition of the prisca theologia. 8 In an early form the idea
is that the philosopher-god Hermes Trismegistus instructs Asclepius, who transmits the knowledge of "Logos" to Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, the Platonists of the Academy, the Neoplatonists, the Alexandrian Platonists, the medieval Platonists, on down to the Platonists of the Renaissance (Ficino, Pico, etc.). Let us now complicate things by adding in Moses. Does he instruct or is he instructed by Hermes? Clearly the whole notion fits better into Christian linear time if it is Moses who transmits (at least partially) the revealed tradition (received from Enoch, from Noah, from Adam, from Adonai Elohim) 9 to Hermes. The terms "eclectic" and
"syncretistic" are frequently used to explain such a notion of prisca theologia, but they betray a nineteenth- or twentieth-century perspective. For the Renaissance these various schools of philosophy were not disparate but rather unified expressions of essentially the same divinely revealed and inspired truth. Thenaud reflects such
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humanist tendencies, but he also demonstrates, as we have seen, those prejudices that led ultimately to overt hostility toward Kabbalah. Consequently, his work, which we have set forth to introduce Renaissance Kabbalah, is perhaps more representative even than those of his betterknown predecessors.
It would be presumptuous to pretend to give here a summary of kabbalistic doctrines or of the history of Kabbalah. Earlier studies in these volumes give the origin of the Kabbalah, and Gershom Scholem has written much on this topic. 10 For the Renaissance, the history has been
written by Joseph Blau and François Secret and completed more recently by the studies of the Cahiers de l'Hermetisme (see n. 5 and n. 9) among others. To acquaint the reader who seeks here an initiation into and to remind the reader already knowledgeable of the Kabbalah, we shall
rather now elaborate briefly on Thenaud's sources, while referring the reader to more complete texts and studies.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ( 1463-1494), often cited as the first Renaissance kabbalist, was perhaps, more correctly stated, the first nonJewish Christian kabbalist. 11 It is undoubtedly he
who, in his oration On the Dignity of Man, intended as an introduction to his nine hundred theses, establishes from the outset the idea of the concordance 12 of Christianity, Jewish
Kabbalah, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism, magic, Zoroastrianism, etc., within a framework of prisca theologia:
For this reason I have not been content to add to the tenets held in common many teachings taken from the ancient theology of Hermes Trismegistus, many from the doctrines of the Chaldeans and of Pythagoras, and many from the occult mysteries of the Hebrews. I have proposed also as subjects for discussion several theses in natural philosophy and in divinity, discovered and studied by me. I have proposed, first of all, a harmony between Plato and Aristotle. . . . (245)
Second, Pico establishes the belief, following perhaps the convert Flavius Mithridate, whom he met in Paris and whose translations he probably used, 13 that "the ancient mysteries of the
Hebrews [serve as] . . . the confirmation of the inviolable Catholic faith" (249). This is a most important point, because it sets the stage for subsequent humanistic investigation. But Pico himself states the case admirably:
When I purchased these [kabbalistic] books at no small cost to myself, when I had read them through with the greatest diligence and with unwearying toll, I saw in them (as God is my witness) not so much the Mosaic as the Christian religion. There is the mystery of the Trinity, there the Incarnation of the Word, there the divinity of the Messiah; there I have read about original sin, its expiation through Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of
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the devils, the orders of the angels, purgatory, and the punishments of hell, the same things we read daily in Paul and Dionysius, in Jerome and Augustine. But in those parts which concern philosophy you really seem to hear Pythagoras and Plato, whose principles are so closely related to the Christian faith that our Augustine gives immeasurable thanks to God that the books of the Platonists have come into his hands. (252)
Similarly, his definition of Kabbalah as revealed tradition passed on from generation to generation, from God to Moses, and on down the line, serves as the standard for several generations of Renaissance kabbalists. 14 Pico teaches, probably from the Sepher Yetsirah or
Book of Creation, the doctrine of the En-Soph and the Sephiroth, or emanations, as numerationes, enumerations. And, more specifically, dealing with the Sephira Shekhinah, representing God living in the world, and with the corporeal world, he places humanity at the center of the world. Through his free will, and because of his divinely given ability to raise himself up or down the hierarchy of being, the Human, Man (Adam), can become like unto Adam Kadmon, celestial Man (Christ). 15 He deals with the kabbalistic mysteries of the Names
of God 16and of the thirty-two paths of wisdom by which God brought about creation. We have
already seen this idea in Thenaud, where the thirty-two paths consist of the ten Sephiroth and the twenty-two characters of the alphabet.
Another of Thenaud's sources, Johannes Reuchlin ( 1455-1522), drew on the work of Pico, which he developed more discursively. In fact, the better known of his two works on the
Kabbalah, De arte cabalistica ( 1517), appears in the Opera omnia of Pico. 17 His earlier text, De
verbo mirifico ( 1494), presents a dialogue among three speakers, Sidonius, an "Epicurean" philosopher; Baruch, a Hebrew thinker; and Capnion (Reuchlin), a Christian, each of whom dominates respectively one of the three days and three books of the work. Now there is
obviously a progression from the wisdom of antiquity to that of the Old Testament, in talmudic and kabbalistic perspectives, and to that of Christianity. Similarly the wisdom of antiquity is largely geographical, mathematical, and cosmological (elemental); that of Baruch concerned with the world of emanations from the divine Names, with the paths of creation, with kabbalistic knowledge (celestial); while Capnion concerns himself with ultimate spiritual truths dependent on the pronounceable name of Christ (angelic). It may be indeed true, as Blau points out, that Reuchlin's knowledge of Kabbalah at this stage of his study is limited and contains error; but let us remember that Reuchlin writes from the perspective of prisca theologia. He is not interested in pure Kabbalah in historic isolation, but in Kabbalah as only one manifestation of spiritual truth whose most absolute expression is revealed in Christ. If, as Blau also
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suggests, his Kabbalah is more Pythagorean than kabbalistic, does it not result from Reuchlin's seeing Moses and Pythagoras as exponents of the same wisdom? Among the concepts he sets forth here, let us call attention to the following: (1) Reuchlin gives the names of the Sephiroth in part in incorrect order. 18 (2) Hebrew is the oldest of languages, the language used by God for
creation, for dialogue with humanity and among human beings and angels; it is the oldest written language, and Moses is the first author ( De verbo 2.42-43). (3) The mysteries of all creation are expressed in the Tetragrammaton, from which all creation has emanated by divine will (60-72), as is manifest in a long listing of things characterized by the Tetrad. (4) As Capnion explains on the third day, Logos is the wonder-working Word, the name of the Son, Yhsvh, the
Pentagrammaton coexisting with God's other name, YHVH, of the time of the law. Yhsvh contains the determinant of the Son, shin, the determining element of Esh, fire (73-103), one of the main signs of the age of Grace and Spirit.
The De arte cabalistica, as Secret points out, elaborates on the De verbo, but it is not a mere repetition in form or content. 19 Obviously Reuchlin profited much from his study of Hebrew in the years intervening and established himself as one of Europe's leading Hebraists. 20 Also a three-part work, the De arte presents a dialogue among Simeon, who speaks in books 1 and 3 about Kabbalah; Philolaus, a Pythagorean whose "philosophy" determines book 2 in the absence of Simeon, who must observe the Sabbath; and the Muhammadan Marranus, who actively participates on all three days. According to Simeon, "Cabala is an alchemy
transforming external perceptions into internal, then into images, opinion, reason, intuition, spirit, and, finally, light. Such a deification is symbolised by the place of the microcosm Tiferet, the great Adam, in the middle of the tree of the Sephiroth. . . . This deification is not obtained without a work of moral and intellectual asceticism." 21Mathematics and metaphysics do not suffice; maturity in the contemplative way alone, a gift of God, leads us to deification [θεοσις] ( Kabbale27-44; De arte115-23). Book 3 clarifies the doctrine of the thirty-two paths of wisdom, that of the number 10 whose radius 5 (the spherical number) when multiplied by 10 (the number of the universe) gives 50, the number of the gates and of the jubilee; and when we add to the gates the number of letters, we arrive at 72, the number of the Names of angels and of God. In this work, Reuchlin distinguishes between practical Kabbalah and spiritual Kabbalah, and he
implies, like Pico before him but more pointedly, that the names of angels can be used in kabbalistic magic ( Kabbale203-314; De arte210-71). 22
Another of Thenaud's contemporaries, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim ( 1486- 1535), whom he undoubtedly met in the troubled years
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when the latter served as astrologer to Louise de Savoie, was popularly recognized as Rabelais's necromancer-sorcerer Herr Trippa ( Tiers Livre, chap. 25). He developed even more fully the supposed magical aspects of Kabbalah. 23 In book 1 (elemental world) Agrippa concerns himself
with the nature and virtues of things, of the planets and their sympathies and influences, of the passions of the soul, and of humanity, human nature, and the relationship of human beings as microcosm to macrocosm. In book 2 (intellectual world), Agrippa deals with numbers, so he naturally enumerates at "ten" the ten Names of God and of the Sephiroth (2.13.194-95); at "twelve" the Hebraic Names of God of twelve letters and of the orders of angels and tribes, etc. (14.196-99). He discusses Notariacon, values of letters with their mystical meanings (19.209-11) and the related sciences of cosmology and astrology. Book 3 (celestial world) presents religion in its relation to magic and the dependence of the magus on God for his knowledge (chaps. 1-9). In the remaining chapters he talks about the Names of God, angels, and demons, revealing a
summary knowledge of kabbalistic teachings, both theoretical or spiritual and practical, which he