by Umberto Eco
Furthermore, in the rhymed Catalan version of his Logica Algazelis, Llull declares: “De la logica parlam tot breu—car a parlar avem de deu” (“Of logic we will speak briefly—because we have to speak of God”). The Ars is not a revelatory mechanism capable of designing cosmological structures as yet unknown: it discovers nothing; it supports probable arguments on the basis of ideas already known (or assumed to be known).
10.4. Pico’s Revolutio Alphabetaria
We have one more knot to untie, a knot that lies at the junction between medieval Llullism and Renaissance and Baroque Llullism (and beyond)—it regards the supposed Llullism of Pico della Mirandola. Whether or not Pico was influenced by Kabbalistic texts is no longer an issue. At most, the discussion is still moot as to exactly what texts friends like Flavius Mithridates and others introduced him to. Idel (1988a: 205) reminds us that, for Yohanan Alemanno, friend and inspirer of Pico, “the symbolic cargo of language was becoming transformed into almost mathematical type of command. Thus, Kabbalistic symbolism was transformed (or retransformed) into a magical incantatory language.” Hence, Pico could affirm that no word can have any virtue in magical operations if it is not Hebrew or coming from Hebrew: “nulla nomina ut significativa, et in quantum nomina sunt, singula et per se sumpta, in Magico opere virtutem habere possunt, nisi sint Hebraica, vel inde proxima derivata” (“No name, insofar as it is endowed with meaning and insofar as it is a name, taken singly in and of itself, can produce a magical effect, unless it is Hebrew or closely derived from Hebrew”) (Conclusiones cabalisticae 22).15
What is the source, however, of the conviction, which we find in a number of authors, that Pico’s Kabbalism owed a debt to Llull (whose Ars brevis and Ars generalis ultima Pico was certainly familiar with; see Garin 1937: 110)? To give but one example, the most curious document regarding this association is probably the book by Jean-Marie de Vernon (Histoire véritable du bienheureux Raymond Lulle, Paris, 1668: 347–348), which, attributing to Llull no fewer than 4,000 works declares that 2,225 of them were in the library of Pico!
The answer is simple, at least in the first instance. The responsibility must be ascribed to a few lines—anything but perspicuous—in Pico’s Apologia, where, speaking of the Kabbalistic tradition, Pico draws a parallel that, to quote Wirszubski (1989: 259), is “the first of its kind in modern letters”:
Duas scientias hoc etiam nomine honorificarunt. Unam quae dicitur חכמת הצרדך [hokmat haseruf], id est ars combinandi, et est modus quidam procedendi in scientijs et est simile quid sicut apud nostros dicitur ars Raymundi, licet forte diverso modo procedant. Aliam quae est de virtutibus rerum superiorum que sunt supra lunam et est pars magiae naturalis supremae. Utraque istarum apud Hebraeos etiam dicitur Cabalam propter rationem iam dictam, et de utraque istarum etiam aliquando fecimus mentionem in conclusionibus nostris. Illa enim est ars combinandi quam ego in conclusionibus meis voco alphabetariam revolutionem. Et ista quae est de virtutibus rerum superiorum quae uno modo potest capi ut pars magiae naturalis. (They also honored two sciences with this name. One is called חכמת הצרדך [hokmat haseruf], that is the combinatory art, and it is a certain way of proceeding in the sciences, similar to what we call the ars Raymundi, even though on occasion they may proceed in a different manner. The other which has to do with the powers of the higher things that are above the moon is part of the supreme natural magic. Both these two sciences are called Kabbalah among the Hebrews for the reason previously mentioned. And we have spoken of both some time ago in our Conclusiones. The first in fact is the combinatory art that I refer to in my Conclusiones as the revolutio alphabetaria. And the second is the one that has to do with the powers of higher things, which can be thought of as a part of natural magic) (Apologia, 5, 28, my emphasis).
Let us consider this fundamental moment in the Apologia. The trouble is that, in drawing this parallel between the ars combinandi and the ars Raymundi, Pico is more interested in the differences than in the similarities. In the passage cited, Pico makes a distinction between a Kabbalah of names and a theosophical Kabbalah. Now the first part of the Kabbalah, or the first way of understanding the Kabbalah, is the ars combinandi, which Pico has already (in the Conclusiones cabalisticae) dubbed the revolutio alphabetaria. Observe that, in the Abulafian tradition, the word revolutio stands for combination in general (Wirszubski 1989: 137), but the term certainly implies a rotatory connotation, which calls to mind the Kabbalistic or Llullian wheels (or, as we will see, steganographic wheels, à la Johannes Trithemius). In any case, the term could be also used metaphorically, as a more or less visual image of the combinatory swirling typical of the Kabbalistic technique of the anagram or Temurah. Frances Yates, while recognizing that Pico’s ars combinandi is derived from the combinatory practices of Abulafia, decides to deal only with the second type of Kabbalah—something she has of course every right to do—dismissing the first by saying that Pico considers it to be somehow similar to the art of Raimon Llull (Yates 1964: 113).
However that may be, a combination of letters cannot help recalling the techniques of Llull, and this is why Pico says that the two practices are similar. Whereupon, however, he points out that the similarity is only apparent: “licet forte diverso modo procedant” (“even though by chance/perhaps they may proceed in a different manner”). The ambiguous adverbial expression forte (“perhaps” or “by chance”) is a teaser. If Pico had wished to allude to a substantial difference, he would have had his good reasons: as we have seen, the letters in Llull’s combinatory system refer to theological entities, to divine Dignities, and they therefore refer to a system of combinations which, though it appears to occur at the alphabetical level, in fact subsists in the realm of contents. The Abulafian Kabbalistic system, on the other hand, is exercised on the substance of the expression, on letters of the Torah, or on those elements of the form of the expression that are the letters of the alphabet.
Still, this explanation could easily be confuted on the basis of the Kabbalistic belief that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning, at least a numerological meaning. So the Kabbalah too, though it may seem to be combining and permutating alphabetical elements, is really permutating and combining concepts. Apart, then, from their different theological backgrounds, ars Raymundi and ars combinandi are not substantialiter different from each other. They are so forte, “by chance,” or with regard to their outcomes, or the way they are used.
It is our conviction that Pico had understood that what distinguished Kabbalistic thought from that of Llull was that the reality that the Kabbalistic mystic must discover is not yet known and can reveal itself only through the spelling out of the letters in their whirlwind permutations. Consequently, though it may be only in a mystical sense (in which the combinations serve only as a motor of the imagination), the Kabbalah pretends to be a true ars inveniendi, in which what is to be found is a truth as yet unknown. The combinatory system of Llull, on the other hand, is (as we saw) a rhetorical tool, through which the already known may be demonstrated—what the ironclad system of the forest of the various trees has already fixed once and for all, and that no combination can ever subvert.16
That Pico had understood perfectly, with his aside, this point, is also confirmed by his Conclusiones cabalisticae:
Nullae sunt litterae in tota lege, quae in formis, coniunctionibus, separationibus, tortuositate, directione, defectu, superabundantia, minoritate, maioritate, coronatione, clausura, apertura, & ordine, decem numerationum secreta non manifestent. (There are no letters in the whole Law which in their forms, conjunctions, separations, crookedness, straightness, defect, excess, smallness, largeness, crowning, closure, openness and order, do not reveal the secrets of the ten numerations.) (Farmer 1998: 359)
Furthermore, if we bear in mind that these numerationes are the Sephirot, we can appreciate the revelatory power with which he endows his ars combinandi. What results this whirling dervish of an art leads him to, well beyond all philological common sense, but evincing without que
stion a combinatorial energy that knows no limits, we may gather from the famous passage in the Heptaplus dedicated to the Bereishit.
Here for the first time we encounter what will turn out to be a distinguishing feature not only of Kabbalism but of the whole later hermetic tradition: given a discourse that already in and of itself dares to enunciate unfathomable mysteries, it is assumed to allude even further, to mysteries still higher and more occult. For Pico, in the Second Proem, the Mosaic account of the creation of the world alludes, in every one of its parts, and according to seven different levels of reading, to the creation of the world of the angels, of the celestial world and the sublunar world, as well as to man as microcosm: “Thus indeed this book of Moses, if any such, is a book marked with seven seals and full of all wisdom and all mysteries” (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 81). In the sixth chapter of the Third Exposition (“On the Angelic and Invisible World”), for instance, the creation of the fish, birds, and earthbound animals is seen as a revelation of the creation of the angelic cohorts. If there are unfathomable and unfathomed mysteries to discover, nothing must be taken as known. The combinations must be venturesome and, at least as far as intentions go, innocent and open-minded. Here is the famous passage, typically Kabbalistic in tone, in which Pico launches into the most uninhibited permutational and anagrammatical operations:
Applying the rules of the ancients to the first phrase of the work, which is read Beresit by the Hebrews and “In the beginning” by us, I wanted to see whether I too could bring to light something worth knowing. Beyond my hope and expectation I found what I myself did not believe as I found it, and what others will not believe easily: the whole plan of the creation of the world and of all things in it disclosed and explained in that one phrase.… Among the Hebrews, this phrase is written thus: בראשיח, berescith. From this, if we join the third letter to the first, comes the word אב, ab. If we add the second to the doubled first, we get בבד, bebar. If we read all except the first, we get ראשית, resith. If we connect the fourth to the first and last, we get שבת, sciabat. If we take the first three in the order in which they come, we get כרא, bara. If, leaving out the first, we take the next three, we get ראש, rosc. If, leaving out the first and second, we take the two following, we get אש, es. If, leaving out the first three, we join the fourth to the last, we get שת, seth. Again, if we join the second to the first, we get רב, rab. If after the third we set the fifth and fourth, we get איש, hisc. If we join the first two to the last two, we get ברית, berith. If we add the last to the first, we get the twelfth and last word, which is תב, thob, the thau being changed into the letter thet, which is very common in Hebrew.
Let us see first what these words mean in Latin, then what mysteries of all nature they reveal to those not ignorant of philosophy. Ab means “the father”; bebar “in the son” and “through the son” (for the prefix beth means both); resit, “the beginning”; sabath, “the rest and end”; bara, “created”; rosc, “head”; es, “fire”; seth, “foundation”; rab, “of the great”; hisc, “of the man”; berit, “with a pact”; thob, “with good.” If we fit the whole passage together following this order, it will read like this: “The father, in the Son and through the Son, the beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation of the great man with a good pact.” This whole passage results from taking apart and putting together that first word. (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 171–172)
Pico’s ars combinandi has nothing in common with the ars Raymundi. Ramon Llull used his art to demonstrate credible things; Pico uses his to discover things incredible and unheard-of. Nevertheless, the various misapprehensions that will later arise probably derive from the fact that it is precisely Pico’s example that will free Llullism from its original fetters.
It is certainly not a question of seeing in Pico’s uncoupling of the Kabbalistic Ars combinandi from the Ars Raymundi, and in the dizzying permutational exercises that Pico encourages, the detonator that liberated in the coming centuries Llull’s Ars from its early limitations, taking it (as we will see), beyond theology and beyond rhetoric, to nourish the formal speculations of modern logic and the random brainstorming that characterizes so much of contemporary heuristics.
What is certain is that with Pico is affirmed, in harmony with his defense of the dignity and rights of man, the invitation to dare, to invenire or discover, even if it was more in keeping with the tendentious suggestions of Flavius Mithridates than with those of factorial calculus. What was needed at this point was for someone to suggest that, if we are going to continue to talk about being, the being chosen must be a being as yet unmade, rather than a being that already exists. And it was Pico who (perhaps without intending to) steered modern thought in this direction. Which is, when you get down to it, another way of saying that “man, for Pico, is divine insofar as he creates; because he creates himself and his world; not because he is born God, but because he makes himself God. Throughout the entire universe, operatio sequitur esse. … For Pico, in man, and in man alone, esse sequitur operari” (Garin 1937: 95).
This is the sense in which, to use Pico’s own words, the ars combinandi and the ars Raymundi “diverso modo procedunt.” In this sense we may cancel the ambiguous expression forte (“by chance, perhaps, accidentally”), possibly inserted out of prudence, possibly because Pico’s intuition was still in its first vague glimmerings. Once the adverb has been eliminated, in that brief aside, we pass from the idea of man as subject to the laws of the cosmos to that of a man who constructs and reconstructs without fear of the vertigo of the possible, fully accepting its risk.
10.5. Llullism after Pico
With the advent of the Renaissance the unlimited combinatory system will tend to express a content that is equally unlimited, and hence ungraspable and inexpressible.
In the 1598 edition of Llull’s combinatorial writings, a work entitled De auditu kabbalistico appears under his name. Thorndike (1929, V: 325) already pointed out that the De auditu first appeared in Venice in 1518 as a little work by Ramon Llull, “opusculum Raimundicum,” and that it was consequently a work composed in the late fifteenth century. He hypothesized that the work might be attributed to Pietro Mainardi, an attribution later confirmed by Zambelli (1965). It is remarkable, however, that this opuscule of Mainardi’s should be dated “in the last years of the fifteenth century, in other words, immediately following the drafting of Pico’s theses and his Apologia” (Zambelli 1995[1965]: 62–63), and that this minor forgery was produced under his influence, however indirect (see Scholem 1979: 40–41). The brief treatise gives two etymological Arabic roots for the word “Kabbalah”: Abba stands for father while ala means God. It is difficult not to be reminded of similar exercises on Pico’s part.
This confirms that by this time Llull had been officially enrolled among the Kabbalists, as Tommaso Garzoni di Bagnacavallo will confirm in his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni (Venice, Somasco, 1585):
The science of Ramon, known to very few, could also be called, though with an inappropriate word, Kabbala. And from it is derived that common rumor among all the scholars, indeed among all persons, that the Kabbala teaches everything … and to this effect there is in print a little book attributed to him (although this is the way that lies are composed beyond the Alps) entitled De Auditu Cabalistico, which is nothing more when you get down to it than a very brief summary of the Arte magna, which was definitely abbreviated by him in that other work, which he calls Arte breve.17
Among the later examples from “beyond the Alps,” we may cite Pierre Morestel, who published in France in 1621, with the title Artis kabbalisticae, sive sapientiae divinae academia, a modest anthology of the De auditu18 (with an official imprimatur no less, since the author proposed to demonstrate exclusively, as Llull himself did, Christian truths), with nothing Kabbalistic about it, apart from the title, the initial identification of Ars and Kabbalah, and the repetition of the etymology found in the De auditu.
Figure 10.
7
An additional stimulus to Neo-Llullism came from ongoing research into coded writings or steganographies. Steganography developed as a ciphering device for political and military purposes, and the greatest steganographer of modern times, Trithemius (1462–1516) uses ciphering wheels that work in a similar way to Llull’s moving concentric circles. To what extent Trithemius was influenced by Llull is unimportant for our purposes, because the influence would in any case have been purely graphic. The wheels are not used by Trithemius to produce arguments, simply to encode and decode. The letters of the alphabet are inscribed on the circles and the rotation of the inner circles decided whether the A of the outer circle was to be encoded as B, C, or Z (the opposite was true for decoding; see Figure 10.7).
But, although Trithemius does not mention Llull, he is mentioned by later steganographers. Vigenère’s Traité des chiffres19 explicitly takes up Llullian ideas at various points and relates them to the factorial calculus of the Sefer Yetzirah.