Abstract
Renaissance Neoplatonism was marked by a preoccupation with restoring ancient wisdom as a foundation for present and future knowledge. Although its adherents often had divergent and idiosyncratic agendas, there was a consistent emphasis on developing a Christian world view grounded in knowledge of the harmony of God’s creation.1 The Renaissance Neoplatonic synthesis of Christianity and ancient philosophy was significantly reinforced by the discovery of the Kabbalah, the Jewish esoteric tradition. The Kabbalah taught a descending order of creation from the perfection of God to the imperfect material world. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are also numbers, were the basic units of creation. The notions of creation by descent and numerical harmonies indicated similarities between the Kabbalah and the ideas of Pythagoras and of Plato. The correspondences were believed to demonstrate that both traditions shared a common origin, i.e., divine revelation to Adam, Abraham, or Moses. Renaissance Christians, like Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, and Franciscus Georgius, looked to the Jewish mystical tradition in their attempts to rediscover the wisdom behind the Hebrew scriptures. They also viewed the Kabbalah as the sacred original from which the pagan philosophers derived their knowledge.2
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Notes
The development of Renaissance Neoplatonism (Neopythagoreanism) is the subject of numerous works. Frances Yates provides an excellent overview of the leitmotifs of the philosophy in Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1964). From this study, she focused on narrower areas in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1972), and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1979). In all three works, John Dee is mentioned prominently as is Robert Fludd. Yates’s use of the term “Hermetic” to describe an aspect of Renaissance Neoplatonism was criticized in Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). Charles B. Schmitt, however, produced a more general criticism of the emphasis placed on Neoplatonism by modern Renaissance scholars. He makes a strong case for the vitality of Aristotelianism in the period in John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1983). Specific studies of the Neoplatonic belief in an esoteric tradition, dating from the patriarchs and rediscovered in the Renaissance, are presented by Danton B. Sailor, “Moses and Atomism, ” Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 3-16, and D. P. Walker, “The Prisca Theologia in France, ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954): 204-259. The idea that Moses taught Hebrew wisdom to the Greeks was extremely important in linking the Kabbalah with Neoplatonism. The idea became a commonplace found in sources as divergent as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Incertitudine et Vanitate scientiarum et artium (Cologne, 1530) and Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661).
Pico della Mirandola’s interest in Hebrew was occasioned by his belief that all wisdom was revealed to Moses, a doctrine know as the prisca theologica. Pico believed that the study of the Jewish esoteric tradition would not only reveal wisdom but also prove to Jews the truth of Christianity. This doctrine was articulated by Johannes Reuchlin and the Franciscans Franciscus Georgius and Archangelus of Borgo Nuova, among others, who adopted the Kabbalistic view that Kabbalah was part of the oral tradition given to Moses. Impressed with the apparent parallels between Kabbalah and Pythagoreanism, Georgius also suggested that there was a correspondence between the Kabbalistic system and Aristotelianism. Reuchlin has one of the characters in his dialogue, De Arte cabalistica, express the opinion that not only Pythagoreanism but all philosophy was rooted in Hebrew sources. (De Arte cabalistica [Hagenau, 1516] has been issued in facsimile as On the Art of the Kabbalah, with a translation by Martin and Sarah Goodman [New York: Abaris Books, 1983], and reissued with an introduction by Moshe Idel [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993]. The original introduction by G. Lloyd Jones confuses John Dee with Robert Fludd as the author of the Moysiacal Philosophy [pp. 130 and 131], while the Idel introduction does much to identify the sources of Reuchlin’s Kabbalism.)
Among the best works dealing with Christian Hebraists and the Kabbalah are Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); François Secret, Les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris, Dunod, 1964); Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1983); and the above-cited works of Frances Yates.
John Dee’s translation from Boethius’s De Arithmetica in the “Mathematicall Praeface” to The Elements of Geometrie of Euclide, trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), p. 3. The “Praeface” has been reprinted with an introduction by Allen G. Debus as John Dee, The Mathematicall Praeface (New York: Science History Publications, 1975); all references to Dee’s “Praeface” hereafter may be found in this reprint. Boethius was, of course, but one of a number of Neopythagorean thinkers. Robin Waterfield has translated an anonymous but important late classical Neopythagorean work, The Theology of Arithmetic (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1988), which discusses the underlying mathematical nature of the cosmos.
The Sepher Yezirah is probably the earliest extant Kabbalistic work. Its position in Jewish Kabbalah is discussed by Gershom Sholem in Kabbalah (New York: Keter, 1974) and by Joseph Dan in Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986). There are several modern translations: Knut Stenrig (London: Wm. Rider and Sons, Ltd, 1923); Irving Friedman (New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1977); and Harris Lenowitz in Origins, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (New York: Anchor Books, 1976), pp. 7-78. Guillaume Postel translated Yezirah into Latin as Abrahami patriarchae Liber Jezirah, sive Formationis mundi (Paris, 1552). (For biographical studies of Postel, see W. J. Bouwsma, Concordia mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957], and Marion L. Kunz, Guilluame Postel, Prophet of the Restitution of All Things: His Life and Thought [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981].) Yezirah exists in two Hebrew versions, one long and one short. Both describe the same basic alphabetic formation. Awareness of Yezirah seems to have increased in the seventeenth century. It is quoted often by Athanasius Kircher in Obiliscus pamphilius (Rome, 1650). In that work, Kircher also reproduced and interpreted Dee’s monad: pp. 364-379.
Hebrew:
John Dee had the largest private library in England; see Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1972), pp. 40-61. The catalogue of Dee’s books has been analyzed and published in Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson, John Dee’s Library Catalogue (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990). The library contained not only Neoplatonic and general scientific works, but also histories and a large number of Hebrew books. G. Lloyd George in his The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1983), Appendix 2, has listed Dee’s Hebrew library.
Two translations of Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564) have been made into English: J. W. Hamilton Jones (London: Watkins, 1947); and the acknowledged best translation, C. H. Josten, “A Translation of John Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564), with an Introduction and Annotations, ” Ambix 12 (1964): 84-221. A discussion of the Kabbalistic elements of the Monas is found in Michael T. Walton, “John Dee’s Monas hierogfyphica: Geometrical Cabala, ” Ambix 23 (1976): 116-123.
Josten, “Dee’s Monas, ” p. 123.
The monad appeared on the title page of the IIPOΠAIΔEYMATA AΦOPIΣTIKA Propaedeumata aphoristica (London, 1558; reprinted London, 1568). In this work, dedicated to Gerard Mercator, the monad is called the “insignia” of the “inferior astronomy, ” that is, alchemy. The text, however, deals primarily with mathematics and astronomy. See Debus, John Dee, p. 6, and Josten, “Dee’s Monas,” p. 86.
Just what the Cabbalae was is difficult to determine. It seems to have been a collection of Kabbalastic materials gleaned through Dee’s studies of Latin and Hebrew books. Dee’s knowledge of Hebrew is uncertain. He possessed several grammars and basic study texts, and in the Monas he uses some technical grammar and cryptic terms. Voarchadumico, voarch beth adumoth, and edom seem to refer to the person illuminated by primordial light who can see in the red stone carbuncle the two “red things, ” the reigns of fire and water. See Josten, “Dee’s Monas,” pp. 126 and 137. Dee was acquainted with Reuchlin’s De Arte cabalistica and the Kabbalah in Agrippa’s De occulta Philosophia. He owned two copies of the Agrippa and noted it and Reuchlin’s work in the margin of British Library, Sloane MS 3188 fol. 12v. See French, John Dee, p. 52 and 53. Dee met Guilluame Postel in France prior to Postel’s publication of his translation of Yezirah and the publication of the Monas, and may have benefited from the Hebraist’s knowledge. N. H. Clulee discusses Dee’s connnection to Postel in John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science anad Religion (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 88 and 209. He ties the two together in a search for the universal language.
Josten, “Dee’s Monas,” pp. 132-133. Dee pointed out in the Monas that alphabets are derived from the sureq or dot and the yod or line of the Hebrew alphabet. The point and the line are also the source of geometrical figures. See ibid., p. 127.
Ibid., pp. 128-129.
Ibid., pp. 132-133. The term tzyruph is an unusual Kabbalistic term. The usual term is temunah. Reuchlin uses temunah, but also tzyruph. See De Arte cabalistica, lib. 3, cap. 16. Given the popularity of De Arte, it is probably the source of Dee’s use of tzyruph.
Ibid., pp. 134-135.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid., p. 164.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 129. As the reference to the monad in the Propaedeumata as the insignia of the lesser astronomy indicates, the monad was not only an astronomical messenger, but also an alchemical messenger. The alchemical applications of the monad are touched on by Josten. N. H. Clulee has also illuminated this aspect of Dee’s philosophy in “John Dee’s Mathematics and the Grading of Compound Qualities, ” Ambix 18 (1971): 178-211.
Josten, “Dee’s Monas,” p. 133. French discusses Dee’s religious views and his desire to unite Christians and Jews in John Dee, p. 135.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. [John French] (London, 1651), book 2: 170.
Ibid., book 1: 161. Agrippa discussed the techniques of Kabbalistic exegesis in book 2. Agrippa’s and Dee’s ideas were remarkably similar to those of the author of The Theology of Arithmetic (note 4, above). The Theology discusses the monad, the dyad, the triad, etc., and their meanings.
Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, book 1: 161. The paraphrasing is apparent when compared to the Hebrew phrase and English translation cited in note 5, above.
Ibid., book 1: 161. Frances Yates discusses Agrippa at length in her Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, pp. 37-60. For a more complete study of Agrippa, see Charles Nauret, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1965).
See note 5.
Dee, “Praeface, ” 1 recto. Dee owned a set of Pico’s works. French, John Dee, p. 51.
De Arte cabalistica, lib. 2, cap. 43. Cusanus was a major popularizer of the Platonic idea that mathematics was intermediate between God and the creation. Dee also cited Cusanus: “Praeface, ” Aiii verso. Clulee discusses Cusanus and Dee in John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 153-154. In an unpublished paper on the numerical game rithmomati-cia, Anne E. Moyer illustrates the widespread acceptance of Neoplatonic mathematical ideas: “Mathematics, Philosophy, and Learned Leisure: The Philosopher’s Game in Sixteenth-Century Europe.”
Dee, “Praeface, ” ciiij recto. The importance of Neoplatonic mathematics to art in the sixteenth century is discussed by Charles Carmen in an unpublished paper, “Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man: A Renaissance Microcosm.” Professor Carmen argues that the two positions occupied by Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man depart from Vitruvius, but are true to the geometrical harmonies which put man between the greater and the lesser worlds. Dürer’s work on perspective, Underweysung der Messung mit Zirkel und Richtscheyt (Nuremberg, 1525), as well as Alberti’s Delia Pittura (1436; first printed Basel, 1540), emphasize art as a replication of nature and society.
Johannes Kepler, letter to Duke Frederick of Württemberg, February 17, 1596, in Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. v. Dyck and Max Caspar (Munich: C. H. Beckische Verlag, 1938-), 13: 218, translation ours. The original German reads: “Demnach der Allmechtig verschinen Sommer nach langwürringer ungesparter mühe und vleiss mir ein Hauptinventum in der Astronomia geoffenbaret: Wie solliches ich in ein besondern Tractätl aussgefuhrt, und allberaitt Zupublicirn in willens.” Agrippa discussed the celestial powers and the regular solids in Occult Philosophy, book 2: 253-254.
Kepler reprinted the Mysterium, originally published in Tübingen in 1596, twenty-five years later, Frankfurt in 1621, with commentary. This edition has been translated into English by A. M. Duncan in Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum (New York: Abaris, 1981).
The poem exists in two version, one appended to Kepler’s letter to Duke Frederick concerning his revelation (see note 27) and one in the Mysterium. The translation of the Mysterium text is by Duncan (see note 28). Both versions look to Copernicus as the restorer and improver of Pythagorean knowledge. The variations in the Latin text are interesting. The letter version reads: Quid mundus, quae causa Deo, ratioque creandi. Unde Deo numeri; quae tantae regula moti; Quod faciat sex circuitus; quo quaelibet orbe Intervalla cadant; cur tanto Jupiter et Mars Orbibus haud primis interstinguantur hiatu; Hic te Pythagoras docet omnia quinque figuris. Scillicet exemplo docuit, nos posse renasci. Bis mille erratis dum fit Copernicus annis, Hoc, meliar mundi specalator, nominis. At tu Frogibus inventis, quibus est e glande voluptas, Cum grege porcorum poseas ex lintre subulcos. The poem is the same in the Mysterium, except for the last two lines, which are replaced by “Glandibus inventas noli postponere fruges.” Kepler’s printed version thus does not associate his readers with swine. We translate the letter version thus: What is this Universe, its creation’s need? How from God did its being proceed? Whence by Deity was it counted? What great pattern laid, before its construction mounted? How came the planets circuits six? In which orb does the rhythm of their intervals mix? Though not among the first, why are Jupiter and Mars Divided by an expanse more suitable for stars? All this does Pythagoras teach with five figures pure of form. And shows by example that we can be reborn. Two thousand years you wandered until Copernicus came, A better cosmic student, a man renowned of name. Now you, by his fruitful invention, know pleasure sublime Yet still you feed the herdsmen from the same trough as the swine. The poem is especially interesting in that it evinces Kepler’s adherence to the Neoplatonic idea of Pythagoras, or Pythagoreanism, reborn. See Blau, Christian Interpretation, pp. 41-64, for a discussion of “Pythagoras Redivivus.”
Johannes Kepler, Astronomia nova (Heidelberg, 1609). The liveliest discussion of Kepler and his discoveries is found in Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Macmillan Co., 1959). The classic and most complete biography of Kepler is Max Caspar, Johannes Kepler (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1948), trans, ed. C. Doris Hellman (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959).
Johannes Kepler, Harmonices mundi (Frankfurt, 1619), translated into German by Max Caspar, Johannes Kepler, Welt Harmonik (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1967).
J. V. Field in Kepler’s Geometrical Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) discusses book 2, Kepler’s search for geometrical harmony, in great detail. Field stresses Kepler’s Platonism and its divergence from that of Neoplatonists like Robert Fludd. See especially pp. 171-190.
Westman, Hermeticism, p. 67.
Johannes Kepler, letter to Joachim Tanckius, May 12, 1608, Gesammelte Werke, 16: 158, translation and emphasis ours. The letter was written in response to some speculative harmonies suggested by Reinhard. After attacking speculative harmonies, Kepler declared, “I believe geometrical proportions were the pattern of the Creator which introduced like ideas into the world.” Hanc ego geometicam proportionem puto Ideam fuisse Creatori ad introducendam generationem similis ex simili: He then went on to say that he also played games, like those of Reinhard, but unlike Reinhard, he knew them to be games. He then commented on symbols and natural philosophy: Ludo Quippe et ego Symbolis, et opusculum institui, Cabalam Geometricam, quae est de Ideis rerum Naturalium in Geometria: sed ita ludo, ut me ludere no obliuiscar. Nihil enim probatur symbolis, nihil abstrusi eruitur in Naturali philosophia, per Symbolas geometricas, tantum ante nota accomodantur: nisi certis rationibus euincatur, non tantum esse Symbolica sed esse descriptos connexionis rei utruisque modos et causes
Kepler, Harmonices, in Gesammelte Werke, 6: 223, translated by Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 262.
Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmici (Oppenheim, 1617). Robert Fludd is one of the most important figures in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century debate over the subject matter and methodology of natural philosophy. Allen G. Debus has ably and exhaustively explored Fludd’s role in natural philosophy in numerous articles and monographs. Perhaps his most succinct study is “The Chemical Debates of the Seventeenth Century: The Reaction to Robert Fludd and John Baptiste van Helmont,” in Reason,Experiment, and Mysticism, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 19-47. An excellent summary of Fludd’s philosophy has been published by Jocelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1979). William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renais sance (London: Routledge, 1988), reworks the traditional materials and adds some insights from social history.
Kepler, Harmonices, in Gesammelte Werke, 6: 374. The passage reads, “Illud quidem familiare est Chymicis, Hermeticis, Paracelsistis; hoc proprium habent Mathematici.”
Ibid., translation ours. The passage reads, “Videas etiam, ipsum plurimum delectari rerum aenigmatibus tenebrosis, cum ego res ipsas obscuritate involutas in lucem intellectus proferre nitar.” Caspar comments on the passage in Johannes Kepler (English trans.), p. 292, as does Westman, Hermeticism, pp. 59-67, and Field, Cosmology, pp. 179-190.
Kepler discusses Moses’ Egyptian knowledge in De Stella nova, in Gesammelte Werke, 1: 173 (originally published in Prague, 1606). He identifies the Timaeus as a commentary on Genesis in Harmonices mundi, in Gesammelte Werke, 6: 221. Kepler clearly expresses the idea that Pythagoras and Plato were part of a tradition begun by the Hebrews and seen in its purity in Genesis. See also his Astronomiae Pars optica, in Gesammelte Werke, 2: 198-199. Kepler’s use of the word Kaballah to describe the harmonies is best seen in light of the prisca tradition. Kabbalah commonly referred to mystical knowledge revealed at Sinai. John French, in his translation of Sendivogius’s New Light of Alchemy (London, 1650), pp. 315-316, defined Kabbalah as “a most secret science, which is said to be delivered by Divine Inspiration, together with the Law of Moses.”
Westman in Hermeticism expresses this crucial difference between Kepler and other Neoplatonists as the “important recognition, never appreciated by Hermetic natural philosophers, that a theory of physical causes is insufficient without the primacy of empirically and geometrically controlled statements about nature” (pp. 67-68).
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Walton, M.T., Walton, P.J. (1997). The Geometrical Kabbalahs of John Dee and Johannes Kepler: The Hebrew Tradition and the Mathematical Study of Nature. In: Theerman, P.H., Parshall, K.H. (eds) Experiencing Nature. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5810-7_2
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