In scriptural religions a book means not only a reservoir of information but also the idea of a certain order that stems from the divine realm. Or, to put it in Blanchot’s terms, “The book is in essence theological.”1 In the following I shall attempt to describe the relationship between two types of order, expressed by different understandings of the term “book,” which developed in the Jewish elite during the Middle Ages and culminated in Renaissance Florence in the immediate circle of Marsilio Ficino.
The Renaissance may be described as the period when the relationship between the book of God and the book of nature started to shift in a new direction. The earlier stages of the confrontation between the two had been decided in favor of the book of God, as the very resort to the metaphor of the book demonstrates. In the encounter between the Jewish sacred scriptures and the concepts of order shaped by Greek philosophical modes of thought, it seems that the former prevailed. This diagnosis is but another formulation of Harry A. Wolfson’s theory of the history of Western religious philosophy from Philo to Spinoza, which assumes that philosophy has been a maidservant, ancilla.2 But with the dramatic infusion of Greek speculative material in Western culture, a move to which Marsilio Ficino contributed so much, another type of balance started to become visible, one in which the book of nature became more dominant than the book of the law. The beginnings of modern science have been traced to the emergence of an occult philosophy, which Frances A. Yates described as follows: “This philosophy, or outlook, was compounded of hermeticism as revived by Marsilio Ficino, to which Pico della Mirandola added a Christianized version of Jewish Cabala. These two trends, associated together, form what I call ‘the occult philosophy,’ which was the title which Henry Cornelius Agrippa gave to his highly influential handbook on the subject.”3 This is but another version of a synthetic binarian approach opened by Wolfson, which now leads to secondary types of speculative corpora: no longer the classical Greek philosophies and the Jewish sacred scriptures but two forms of occultism: the hermetic and the Kabbalistic, both later bodies of writings.4 If medieval religious thought, according to Wolfson, was the result of different amalgams between the older speculative corpora, Renaissance occult philosophy, which Yates says was destined to undermine medieval scholastic thought, stems from later layers of thought.
Although by and large I accept the two grand historiosophies of these two great scholars, the picture both in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance is much more complex. Hermetic elements were also available in the Middle Ages, as has been asserted by Charles Trinkaus5 insofar as the Latin Middle Ages are concerned, and, as I have attempted to show, in medieval Jewish sources hermetic themes were even more evident.6 So as not to repeat findings I have presented elsewhere, I shall restrict the following discussion to the point that the trope of the book can serve as a good example of the complexity of medieval sources and of their impact on the entourage of two thinkers who flourished in the lifetime and the immediate vicinity of Marsilio Ficino in Florence: the famous Pico della Mirandola and his less renowned though extraordinarily gifted teacher, Rabbi Yohanan Alemanno. My claim will be that in Jewish sources, since the middle of the twelfth century, astrological understandings of religion slowly grew. I shall adduce several examples of this growth, culminating in some expressions offered by Alemanno as being reminiscent of the late-fifteenth-century formulation of the relationship between liber legis and liber dei as found in Pico. My point is that the entrance of astrology had a dramatic impact on the ways of conceptualizing religion no less than philosophy and contributed, at least in some cases, to the emergence of antinomian approaches.
In the Bible the existence of a supernal book, or books, where the fate of individuals is inscribed is assumed. This is the case in Exodus 32:32, in Psalms 69:29 and 18217:16, and Daniel 7:10. The basic assumption is that being inscribed in a celestial book or some other book will determine the fate of an individual.7 Such a vision reverberated in the Talmud, as we learn from BT, Rosh ha-Shanah, fol. 16b. I shall refer to these views as mythical books, which remained an integral part of Jewish culture in subsequent generations, although they were interpreted in various ways.
The image of the book was relatively widespread in the Middle Ages, as we learn from the very erudite treatment of Ernst R. Curtius.8 As Curtius pointed out, there are few sources in the Greco-Roman literature that informed the medieval resort to book imaginary. Despite Curtius’ encyclopedic knowledge of the topic, it seems that he left aside an issue that is important for understanding the development of medieval and Renaissance imageries of the book. This may have something to do with his orientation toward Latin culture.
One of the main contributors to the impact of astrology in the understanding of Judaism in the Middle Ages is R. Abraham ibn Ezra, who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century. Ibn Ezra was well aware of a great many classical astronomical and astrological books composed in Arabic, and he himself wrote some shorter though influential treatises on these topics. Moreover, he was acquainted with some hermetic books.9 What is of particular consequence here is the far-reaching effort to correlate astronomy, astrology, and astromagic with some topics found in Jewish tradition, especially the Bible. Ibn Ezra’s most significant achievement is an influential commentary on substantial parts of the Bible, where he alluded to the correspondence between biblical topics and astrological or astromagical concepts. Judaism thereby emerged as a more cosmic religion than it was in its rabbinic versions.10
So, for example, Ibn Ezra comments on Exodus 32:32, where Moses says to God: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Ibn Ezra writes: “I have already commented in [the commentary on] Daniel,11 ‘And the books were opened,’ that all the decrees concerning the species and the individuals are found in the constellations of heaven.”12 When interpreting Psalms 69:29, where the term “the book of life” is mentioned, he writes: “I have already commented in ‘my book’13 that the book of life is heaven and all the future decrees are written there since the day of their creation.” Thus, a more “scientific” understanding of the mythical books has been offered, one that integrates the archaic understanding of supernal books and the astronomical realm, which is understood to contain all the events in the sublunar world and thus the fate of all men.
On the other hand, in the commentary on Exodus 6:3, ibn Ezra avers that he discloses a secret:
God created three worlds … and the mundane world receives power from the intermediary world,14 each individual in accordance with the supernal constellation.15 And because the intellectual soul is more exalted than the intermediary world, if she will be wise and will know the deeds of God—those done without any intermediary and those done by means of an intermediary—and [if] she will leave the desires of the world, and [if] she will isolate herself, in order to cleave to the exalted God. And if there is the constellation of the stars during pregnancy a bad time destined to come on a certain day, God who is cleaving to him will change the course of the causes in order to save him from evil … and this is the secret of the entire Torah … this is why Moses was able to change the course of the mundane world and perform miracles and wonders.16
I am especially interested in the statement regarding the “secret of the entire Torah.” It contends that in order to decode the secret of the Torah one has to resort to astrological themes,17 and indeed this is what happened in the large corpus of super commentaries on ibn Ezra’s commentary.18 Astrology, and to a certain extent magic, therefore already play an exegetical role in some important instances in ibn Ezra’s commentaries, although it is hardly a comprehensive approach to all the topics in the Bible.
In the next important commentary on the Pentateuch, written by Nahmanides a century after ibn Ezra, the latter’s view on Exodus 32:32 is adduced in order to criticize it, just as Nahmanides criticizes R. Shlomo Yitzhaqi’s (Rashi’s) assumption that the book of God is none other than the Torah.19 Though a Kabbalist, Nahmanides does not offer a Kabbalistic interpretation of the nature of the book. However, another important commentator, who can be described as a follower of Nahmanides’ main follower, the late-thirteenth-century R. Bahya ben Asher ibn Hallewah, active in Barcelona, wrote on the same verse:
According to the path of the intellect: “out of Thy book”—he called the constellation of the stars the book of the Holy One,20 blessed be He, because just as the book is the inscription and design of the letters concerning the sciences, so in the constellation of stars there is an inscription21 and the designs of powers concerning the topics of man, and the number of his life in this world, as mentioned and inscribed there, as is the case of the thing inscribed and written in a book. And this is also the case in the verse “Thou hast seen the embryo22 and on Thy book all is written”23 … “that Thou hast written”—the meaning is “that Thou hast innovated” because the creature is a witness for its creator as the written is a witness for the writer. And Moses intended to say that since He, blessed be He, innovated these powers, He has the power to obliterate them.24
This is quite an extensive parallel between the celestial world and the structure of a book found in Jewish sources before the end of the thirteenth century. Despite Nahmanides’ rejection of ibn Ezra, the Barcelonese Kabbalist accepted his view on the celestial book.
Being a Kabbalist, however, R. Bahya offers, immediately after the astrological interpretation, a theosophical one that relates the book to divine powers. Following an earlier Kabbalistic tradition, he contends that according to “the path of Kabbalah, [the meaning of] ‘out of Thy book’ is, from the sefirot, which means as if he said from the supernal extremities,25 which are the six [lower] sefirot, because they are the beginning of everything done and they are called ‘the work of heaven and earth’ … the meaning of the saying of the sages of truth26 is that the three books which are opened, one of the perfect righteous, one of the extreme wicked, and one of the mediocrities, are the [sefirot] Hesed [mercy], Din [judgment], and Rahamim [grace].”27 In the vein of the Geronese Kabbalist, R. Bahya identifies the book with three supernal books where the deeds of all men are written and which should be understood as symbols for the three sefirot Hesed, Din, and Rahamim.
There can be no doubt that the path of Kabbalah is a higher way of interpretation than the astrological path. Both interpret the meaning of the book, but whereas the astrologers decode the Bible as pointing to the celestial bodies, the Kabbalists contend that it should be read as pointing to supernal attributes that are part of the divine structure, the sefirot. The three books, or sefirot, play a role that shares the nature of the mythical books in the Bible but also come closer to a more orderly structure, as dictated by the nature and dynamics of the sefirotic system. This system is not, however, as rigid as the astrological one.
The Barcelonese commentator does not make any attempt to establish a specific correspondence between the two exegetical systems, and I assume that he did not even intend to offer one. Kabbalah and astrology are, for the late-thirteenth-century Kabbalist, two distinct understandings of the Torah.
The conjugation of the astrological with the Kabbalistic reading of the books is found in two passages written in the second part of the fifteenth century in Florence by R. Yohanan Alemanno, one of the Jewish companions of Pico della Mirandola.28 In one of his more interesting treatises Alemanno follows, in a more extreme manner, the avenue opened by ibn Ezra:
Anyone who knows the science of the stars and constellations that emanate upon the creatures on earth may interpret the entire Torah according to the signs and rules of astrology. This is true of the masters of theoretical as well as practical astrology. Any man, either good or evil, who knows the work of the pure and impure angels who are superior to the stars may draw their fragrance upon our heads, for he has given a Kabbalistic interpretation to the entire Torah. This matter includes the masters of both the speculative and the practical sciences of the sefirot.29
The Torah may be read in two different ways, one astrological, the other Kabbalistic. Each has a speculative and a practical part.30 It seems that through the practical interpretation of the Torah one “may draw their fragrance upon our heads.” Unlike ibn Ezra, who exhibited a much more restrained attitude and did not embrace a comprehensive astrological interpretation of the Torah, Alemanno contends that such an interpretation is possible. In both the astrological and the Kabbalistic interpretations, the drawing down of the divine powers is related to the reading of the Torah. Unlike in R. Bahya, who did not offer a unified approach for the two levels of interpretation, in Alemanno such a unified vision is obvious: the Torah deals with the secret of the descent of supernal powers upon man. Alemanno, like some later Kabbalists, accentuated the astromagical aspects of the Torah. Although hierarchically different, astrology and Kabbalah coincide insofar as the type of activity involved in both cases: astrology, in fact astromagic, and Kabbalah, according to its practical implication, draw down powers upon the practitioner, who is portrayed as referring to the Torah, in fact as interpreting it in a magical manner. This passage, which deals explicitly with interpretation of the Torah, contends that the same structure informs the two lores, despite the fact that they activate different realms of reality. As in the case of R. Bahya ben Asher, Kabbalah is conceived of as higher than astrology, but with Alemanno the two lores are regarded as isomorphic from the point of view of their basic way of activity. In other words, we may describe Alemanno’s understanding of Kabbalah as influenced by astromagic, for the center of gravity of this understanding of Kabbalah is the causing of the supernal powers to descend upon the mundane world.
The analogous structure of magic and a Kabbalistic reading of the Torah described in Ms. Paris BN 849 has an interesting partial parallel in Alemanno’s Collectanaea:
The astrologer studies every one of the creatures in relation to one of the seven planets. In the same manner, the Kabbalist studies every word of the Torah, as stated before in connection with the commandments of the Torah. That is, he studies the sefirah to which it is related. The astrologer studies the movements and governance of the stars. In the same way the Kabbalist knows what will happen to people in the future by reference to the influence and efflux of the sefirot. This is in accordance with the activities and movements of those who perform the commandments and divine service. This method is superior to that of the astrologer.31
Although the untitled treatise was composed toward the end of the fifteenth century, the last passage was set down at a very early date, perhaps before 1478 or even before 1470, but the proofs I have for this cannot be included here. This determination is significant in view of the similarity between Alemanno’s statement and one of Pico’s theses, as we shall see in the next section. The problematic relation of Kabbalah to astrology was discussed in Italy before Alemanno. In the opinion of R. Isaac Dieulosal, the systems of Kabbalah and astrology are compatible.32
For Alemanno, as he expressed himself early in his literary career, the astrologer’s domain has nothing to do with the Torah, which is the patrimony of the Kabbalistic magical interpretation. Thus, we may assume that although later in his untitled treatise he offered a more harmonistic approach, earlier he did distinguish between the “books” addressed by the astrologer and the Kabbalist.
Thus a Kabbalistic study of the Torah is no longer seen as inspired by a preoccupation with the hidden processes of divinity, as is the case with many of the Spanish Kabbalists. According to the Italian author, the Kabbalist has become a “superastrologer” who utilizes his knowledge to foresee and perhaps also to foretell the future. Interestingly, already in this earlier text of Alemanno, the affinity, though certainly not the identity, between the astrological decoding and the Kabbalistic study of the Torah has been explicated rather clearly. This understanding of the two ways of envisaging “books” is not identical to the much more common terms liber scripturae and liber naturae.33
Late-fifteenth-century Florence, the cradle of the activity of two main intellectuals, Ficino and Pico, has also been the place where Alemanno lived for several years. He was in contact with Pico, teaching him an important philosophical-mystical treatise, Hayy bin Yoqtan.34 Alemanno was acquainted with a broad range of medieval books, most prominently astromagical writings, which he considered the apex of an ideal curriculum he composed.35 Thus, before the end of the 1480s, a thinker in Florence could have access to a variety of forms of thought previously not well known or even inaccessible to a Western intellectual.36
In addition to Alemanno, Pico was in close contact with a scholar who may be described as the closest parallel to Ficino during the Florentine Renaissance: Flavius Mithridates. He translated many Kabbalistic writings from Hebrew into Latin, in some cases inserting, as Chaim Wirszubski has demonstrated, observations that gave either a Christian or a magical flavor to the Kabbalistic text.37
The first person who could take advantage of this unique access to Jewish Kabbalah and Judeo-Arabic texts, and who was instrumental in encouraging Mithridates’ translations, was the young count of Mirandola, Giovanni Pico. On good terms with both Ficino and Mithridates, he enjoyed their literary output but contributed his own views based on a variety of syntheses between ideas found in these two corpora.
While all the modern scholars dealing with the Florentine Renaissance had access to the entire opus of both Ficino and Pico, Pico’s Kabbalistic sources remained in the dark. Frances Yates, who assigned a paramount importance to Pico’s synthesis for a great variety of later developments in what she called the European “occult philosophy,” composed all her books before the full exposition of Wirszubski’s findings was made available to a Western scholar and had only a vague idea about what actually was before the eyes of the young count.
If my above analysis of Alemanno’s view of the relation between Kabbalah and astrology is correct, then his understanding of practical Kabbalah is similar to Pico’s. Both consider the practical Kabbalah to include the use of divine names.38 Here, however, given our concern with the concept of the book, I would like to direct attention to the last of Pico’s Theses, which deal with modes of reading two books. The young Pico claims that “as true Astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, so the Kabbalah teaches us to read in the book of law” (sicut vera Astrologia docet nos legere in libro Dei, ita Cabbala docet nos legere in libro legis).39 There have been a few attempts to address the content of this thesis and its sources seriously. According to Henri de Lubac, Pico is conjugating two views found already in Bonaventure,40 but obviously Kabbalah is never mentioned by the mid-thirteenth-century Christian mystic. And although Wirszubski refers to this thesis, he does not trace its precise sources.41 Let me attempt to engage the problems hinted at in the short thesis.
Pico’s statement about astrology’s relation to the book of God and the Kabbalah’s relation to the book of the law seems analogous to Alemanno’s view. The practical side of astrology can be identified with magia naturalis, for it teaches the way to receive the influx of higher powers. Kabbalah is a higher form of magic because its speculative formation is, as Pico emphasized here, superior to that of astrology. Such a comparison between the writings of the two Renaissance authors who were in contact suggests what seems to be a very close similarity. If we assume that Alemanno’s stand was known to the young Pico, we may offer a more specific interpretation of Pico’s thesis, which refers to the purpose of reading. In the count’s thesis it is not very clear what the ultimate gain is from such a reading. A better understanding of the celestial world and the Bible? Or are those understandings instrumental for an additional purpose? With the later Alemanno, in his Untitled Treatise, following ibn Ezra and R. Bahya, the answer is clear: the two readings of the Bible serve a quite practical purpose: to know the future. It is difficult to say whether this is the case with Pico. If the answer is yes, then in his understanding astrology differs from astronomy, and we should ask what the astrology is that is not identical to the vera Astrologia. If the answer is no, then true astrology should be understood as a more “scientific” approach, devoid of the practical implications. If this is the case, at least insofar as the topic under consideration is concerned, Pico is less “hermetic” than Alemanno.
I assume that it is possible to enhance the probability of a Jewish impact on Pico’s understanding of the two books by an analysis of an important detail: Pico describes the book read by the astrologer as libro Dei. This is the closest Latin parallel to the Hebrew expression sifro shel ha-qadosh barukh hu’ used by R. Bahya ben Asher in the text adduced above. The Kabbalist explicates the biblical expression sifrekha, “Thy book,” in the third person. Also in his passage, this “book of God” stands not for the Bible but for the celestial world, just as in the case of Pico. Moreover, it is quite plausible that an additional topic related to the book and found in R. Bahya ben Asher had an impact on Pico, thus allowing a much greater probability of a Jewish source for Pico’s thesis. As Wirszubski pointed out, the four ways of interpretation as adopted by R. Bahya alone had been mentioned explicitly by Pico.42 Moreover, there is good reason to assume that another important topic of Pico might also have been influenced by R. Bahya.43
Let me return to Pico’s thesis from another point of view. Pico, like Bahya, does not associate astrology and Kabbalah as operating according to the same principle, but sees them as two different modes of interpreting the Bible. Insofar as this thesis is concerned, Kabbalah is not by definition magical but merely exegetical. From this perspective Bahya and Pico are closer to each other than either of them is to Alemanno, who offered a conceptual, not only an exegetical, nexus between the two. Their texts use the same term, “book of God,” one that is not found in Alemanno.
Assuming, as seems quite plausible, that Alemanno was influenced by Bahya’s juxtaposition of Kabbalah and astrology, and that so was Pico, the most plausible assumption would be that Alemanno was instrumental in teaching Pico about Bahya’s interpretations of the concepts related to “book.” The young Alemanno, however, under the impact of additional sources, adopted a harmonistic attitude toward the two lores, which means the understanding of Kabbalah as an astro-magic lore. This type of understanding is also found in Pico.44 If this were indeed the development that informed the Renaissance authors, we would see medieval sources and conceptualizations of knowledge as having had a deep impact. The contention that the book of law is higher than that of nature is certainly more medieval than Renaissance. Also, the ascent of the importance of magic among the Jewish elites in the Middle Ages is certainly not new.45 This is especially obvious in Barcelona, where R. Bahya ben Asher studied and apparently also composed his commentary.46 The description of the relationship between Kabbalah and astromagic, which Yates attributed to Pico as if emerging from his combination between Ficino’s hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah, should therefore be substantially qualified. The concept of occult philosophy during the sixteenth century is indeed very much indebted to Pico. He developed, however, a pattern of understanding Kabbalah in its relationship to astrology, in fact more to astro-magic, that started its career much earlier in the Middle Ages, when the theosophical version of Kabbalah was conjugated to the astrological understanding of the Bible in Barcelona. This combination attracted the attention of Alemanno, and I assume that he, and to a certain extent also Mithridates, was instrumental in teaching or convincing Pico of the existence of two modes of reading: one appropriated for the Bible, the other for the celestial world or even perhaps nature.47 Pico, like his medieval source, attributes to the inspection of the sacred book a status higher than the book of nature. Thus, Pico’s treatment of the relationship between the two books represents nothing that is substantially novel in comparison to the attempts to offer a hierarchy of knowledge, a general approach that still awaits further interpretation, which integrated the astromagical within a greater scheme that puts Kabbalah on its peak.
It is therefore necessary to qualify Yates’s description of the emergence of the occult philosophy as related to a twofold development, in which Ficino provided the hermetic material and Pico the Christian Kabbalah. In addition to the specific finding related to Pico’s thesis on the two books from a perusal of Alemanno’s manuscript treatises, it is obvious that a substantial quantity of astromagical material stemming from a variety of Arabic and Jewish treatises existed in Florence and influenced Alemanno, and could also have contributed to the process that generated the occult philosophy. By introducing astromagic of ultimately hermetic origins in Florence, Ficino was certainly not alone, nor was he the single or perhaps even the most important source for Pico’s view on this topic.