Christian kabbalah: from Pico to Reuchlin and Agrippa

Among the nine hundred theses that the young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola proposed in Rome in 1486, ready to debate them before the learned of all Europe, there was one that sounded like a provocation: no science, he argued, makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah. With these words Christian kabbalah was officially born, the attempt to read the Jewish mystical tradition as a hidden confirmation of the truths of Christianity.

Pico and his Jewish teachers

Kabbalah, a Hebrew term meaning “tradition” or “reception”, had developed in Provence and Spain between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its most important text, the Zohar, circulated from the end of the thirteenth century. Pico approached it thanks to Jewish and convert collaborators, in particular Flavius Mithridates, who translated numerous kabbalistic texts into Latin for him. Pico's kabbalistic theses, seventy-two according to his own opinion and a further forty-seven drawn from the Jewish masters, summarise its main ideas.

Pope Innocent VIII suspended the disputation and a commission of theologians judged several theses suspect. In 1487 the pontiff condemned them all, and Pico, who had replied with an Apologia, was forced to take refuge in France, where he was briefly detained. His insights, however, had already opened a path that many humanists would follow in the following decades.

Reuchlin and the battle of the books

The German jurist Johann Reuchlin was the first great Christian Hebraist of the Renaissance. In 1494 he published De verbo mirifico, in which he argued that the name of Jesus could be read as the divine tetragrammaton with the addition of the letter shin, a symbol of the incarnation. In 1517 he dedicated to Pope Leo X De arte cabalistica, a true summa of Christian kabbalah in dialogue form.

In the same years Reuchlin found himself at the centre of a famous controversy with the convert Johannes Pfefferkorn, who called for the confiscation and destruction of Jewish books. Reuchlin defended their preservation with legal arguments, and the affair, which lasted almost a decade, divided the German humanists and anticipated some themes of the religious debate of the Reformation.

Agrippa, Giorgi and Postel

Cornelius Agrippa read Reuchlin's works passionately and in 1509, at Dole, gave public lectures on De verbo mirifico, which earned him the hostility of a Franciscan preacher. The third book of De occulta philosophia is largely indebted to kabbalah: in it we find the ten sefirot, the divine names, the combinations of Hebrew letters and the tradition of the seventy-two names of God derived from three verses of Exodus.

Other authors developed Christian kabbalah in different directions. The Venetian Franciscan Francesco Giorgi published De harmonia mundi in 1525, fusing kabbalah, Platonism and musical theory. The Frenchman Guillaume Postel translated the Sefer Yetzirah into Latin, published in Paris in 1552, and parts of the Zohar that remained largely in manuscript.

Christian kabbalah was an ambivalent phenomenon. It arose partly from missionary aims, since it sought to show that the Hebrew texts themselves contained Christian truths, but it also produced a genuine interest in the Hebrew language, grammar and literature. Without it, it would be difficult to understand the structure of Agrippa's thought and of much of European esotericism in the following centuries.