Johannes Reuchlin and De verbo mirifico: the Wonder-Working Word

Johannes Reuchlin, born in Pforzheim in 1455, was a jurist in the service of the dukes of Württemberg and one of the greatest German humanists. He knew Latin and Greek, but his true passion became Hebrew, which he studied with Jewish teachers at a time when few Christians could read it. In 1490, during a journey to Italy, he met Pico della Mirandola in Florence, and from that meeting he drew the impulse to bring Christian Kabbalah to Germany.

A Dialogue in Three Voices

The fruit of this interest was De verbo mirifico, “The Wonder-Working Word”, printed in Basel in 1494. It is a dialogue in three books between three characters: Sidonius, an Epicurean philosopher, Baruchias, a Jewish sage, and Capnion, who represents the author himself. The name Capnion is a humanist pun: in Greek kapnion means “little smoke”, just as Reuchlin in German recalls the word Rauch, smoke.

The three discuss the power of words and sacred names. Sidonius brings the viewpoint of the pagan philosophers, Baruchias explains the Jewish tradition on the name of God, and Capnion seeks the Christian synthesis. The aim is to show that true wonder-working power belongs not to the formulas of magicians but to the divine names revealed in Scripture.

From Tetragrammaton to Pentagrammaton

The heart of the work concerns the Tetragrammaton, the name of God in four Hebrew letters, which Jewish tradition regarded as ineffable. Reuchlin proposes that in the Christian era this name was completed by adding a fifth letter, shin, placed at its centre. The result is a pentagrammaton that he reads as the Hebrew name of Jesus.

For Reuchlin this construction proved that Christian revelation was already contained, in hidden form, in the letters of the Hebrew Bible. The argument enjoyed great success among Christian Kabbalists and also appears in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, whose author knew and admired the German jurist's works. Modern scholars recognise in it a Christian theological construction, foreign to the way Jewish tradition understood the divine name.

The Kabbalistic Art and the Battle for Hebrew Books

In 1506 Reuchlin published the Rudimenta hebraica, a grammar and lexicon that opened the study of Hebrew to many Christian readers. In 1517 came De arte cabalistica, dedicated to Pope Leo X, a new dialogue between a Jew, a Pythagorean and a Muslim, richer and more systematic than the first. Here Kabbalah is presented as a symbolic philosophy akin to that of Pythagoras.

In the same years Reuchlin found himself at the centre of a long controversy. The convert Johannes Pfefferkorn demanded the confiscation and destruction of Hebrew books, and Reuchlin, consulted as an expert, opposed him. Pamphlets, trials and a case involving universities and the Roman curia followed; in 1520 Rome condemned his tract Augenspiegel. Humanists defended him, notably with the famous satire of the Letters of Obscure Men.

Reuchlin died in 1522, after teaching Greek and Hebrew at the universities of Ingolstadt and Tübingen. His work gave Christian Kabbalah firmer philological foundations than Pico's and made it a European field of study, which Agrippa, Giorgi and Postel would explore in the following decades. More than anyone else, he established the idea that the study of original languages was the key to ancient wisdom.