Pico della Mirandola and Christian Kabbalah: Renaissance Synthesis of Jewish and Christian Mysticism

became so famous at the time was that of combining the doctrines and methods of the Jewish tradition, namely the Kabbalah, with Christianity. Pico della Mirandola, thanks to the collaboration of a Hebrew translator, Flavio Mitridate, had managed to gather an entire Kabbalistic Library and thus form an idea of a movement that until that moment had remained internal to a restricted circle of Jews. Now, to be clear, it's not that Pico della Mirandola was the first Christian to take interest in Kabbalah; already Ramon Llull had been interested in the subject, as had Cusanus, who was a learned cultivator of the matter. But Pico della Mirandola gathered around himself a small circle of Jews, including Flavio Mitridate (William of Sicily converted to Christianity), Elijah del Medigo and a certain Avrham with whom he was accustomed to discuss passionately¹. By maintaining these relationships with these learned Jews, he had the opportunity to form an idea of Kabbalistic doctrines and had the chance to spread them, thus becoming the first Christian to treat Kabbalah openly and completely. It's important here to underline that Pico's shift toward Kabbalah was united with the study of Hermeticism, Pythagoreanism and Plato; in the absence of Plato's Timaeus, at least according to Ficino's account², Christians would have lost every attempt in eristic challenges against the Jews. However, the shift operated by Pico from Platonism and Hermeticism to Kabbalah proved most convincing for many Renaissance intellectuals for various reasons: first because Christianity shared with Judaism the Old Testament as a sacred book; second because as Pico demonstrated in his Theses or Conclusions, Christianity was not only not in contrast with Kabbalah, but agreed so well with it as to be its logical consequence, so much so that - Pico said in one of the conclusions - no Kabbalist could deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, simply based on the name; third because Kabbalah possessed all those mystical techniques and realizing practices capable of achieving that spiritual transmutation which in official Catholicism, as in Platonism and Pythagoreanism, were found in an unclear and poorly delineated way. So through Kabbalah and the reinsertion of the Hebrew Tradition seemed to be able to provide Christianity with that momentum and those techniques of the much-longed-for reform that the religious and spiritual world awaited. ¹The Jewish Enigma of the Renaissance by Giulio Busi and Wiszubuski Pico della Mirandola's encounter with Jewish Mysticism ²Giulio Busi, The enigma of Judaism in the Renaissance III Understanding the importance of the revolution hinted at by Pico were primarily a series of German scholars and ascetics such as Reuchlin and Abbot Tritemio. Among the first communities to welcome the Kabbalistic revolution launched by Pico was indeed the Rhenish Society for Science, which was a scientific literary society founded by Conrad Celtis whose founding members included Jacob Wimpfeling, Johannes Reuchlin and Giovanni Tritemio. The contribution of these latter was certainly the most decisive in promoting and spreading Christian Kabbalah in Renaissance Europe. The two are particularly important because besides being friends and helping each other respectively in their studies (it seems that Reuchlin, who had learned Hebrew from Flavio Mitridate, had helped Tritemio perfect its use, while the latter seems to have helped Reuchlin in the study of Greek), they represent in a certain way two distinct modes of understanding and applying Kabbalah, given that the first can be traced back to a type of more meditative Kabbalah called prophetic - referring mainly to the writings and meditations of Abulafia - the other instead refers to a practical Kabbalah of a more magical character that could have its substrate in the initiatory Kabbalistic tradition of Eleazar of Worms, but certainly with notable Arabic contaminations currently unknown. These two distinct approaches have always coexisted in the same Kabbalah which in the Megillat Setarim, an anonymous text attributed to Maimonides, is divided into three main species: «Rabbinic Kabbalah» (speculative): serves to understand rationally and with the intellect divine realities and mysteries and can be associated in some way with a Kabbalah similar in purpose to scholastic philosophy «Prophetic Kabbalah»: whose purpose is to tune the human mind to the divine mind and produce interior ecstatic raptures that carry the spirit away from the body. The purpose of these techniques therefore is to extract man from the world in a certain way so as to make him understand realities that transcend created intellect. «Practical Kabbalah»: magical or theurgical whose purpose is to realize the divine in the body; if in the previous one man is separated from the lower compound to be able to unite with God, in this other type of Kabbalah man realizes in himself and in the world these divine mysteries by virtue of the power of symbols and correspondences with the idea of making the Divine descend into the body itself, sanctifying and sublimating it³. The division however is not sharp and compartmentalized, it is a distinction provided by rabbis for orientation Reuchlin and the Doctrine of the Word The first development of Christian Kabbalah we will see relates to Reuchlin's doctrine, a learned German philosopher who made numerous trips to Italy and had the opportunity to come into contact with the Florentine Academy and personally know Pico della Mirandola. Reuchlin saw in the theology of the word of Hebrew Kabbalah and in the writings and prophetic techniques mainly of Abulafia, a more effective way for the soul's ascension to the divine. ³that then in practice this invoked descent translates in reality into a raising of the ascetic to heaven is another matter cf. Dionysius the Areopagite, the Angelic Hierarchies. IV Reuchlin realizes indeed that the Hebrew alphabet precisely for its sacredness and for how it was conceived and used in kabbalah is ideal for helping consciousness relate to realities of a spiritual character. Let's try to understand why and what are the cardinal points of Kabbalistic doctrine: The Name, not only tells us something about the essence of who bears it, but contains - at least in part - the