De Magia naturali, On Natural Magic,
by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples:
Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and
prisca theologia
© 2006 by
Kathryn LaFevers Evans
CSUSM Thesis Advisor, Professor Oliver Berghof
______________________________
Committee Member Professor Peter Arnade
______________________________
July 2006
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THESIS ABSTRACT
The life of Catholic reformer Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, 1455-
1536, spanned the threshold between Medieval and Renaissance eras.
Like other humanists, Lefèvre synthesized philosophical, theological
and scientific theories and practices — of such is his unpublished
treatise De Magia naturali, On Natural Magic. I elucidate Lefèvre’s
focus on universal mystical metaphors of divine union, in order to
offer a simpler view into the evolution of his writings. Engaging
historic-intellectual background in critical analysis of Book II, I
address the conflicting political, religious, and academic opinions
of natural magic, demonstrating that current Academia is poised to
expand the historical, “theoretical” treatment of natural magic to
engage it as a phenomenological, “practical” human experience.
In De Magia naturali Book II, Lefèvre decloaks mythology,
philosophy, astrology, literature and religion to a scientific
theory, practice and experience of number as Idea. He reveals how
the limit of metaphorical imagery is duality, the binary Coincidence
of Opposites, symbolized by the number 2. The magic in Lefèvre’s
number mysticism is human experience of numerical ascension from man
to God, achieved through the number 3, the love-nexus re-uniting 2
into One, duality into unity. Renaissance humanists conceived of
this prisca theologia, pristine or ancient theology, as embodied in
the Christian Trinity through the Spirit of Christ. Current Academia
is responsible to teach this wisdom tradition from a multicultural,
interdisciplinary worldview, as I posit the humanists intended.
Number Mysticism; Numerical Ascension; Christian Kabbalah;
Renaissance Humanism; Theology; Mythology; Literary Theory.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank my teachers: Charles, Celeste & Austin; my parents;
Thesis Committee, Professors Oliver Berghof & Peter Arnade; and
Medieval Curator Consuelo Dutschke, of Columbia Rare Book &
Manuscript Library — all of whom have taught me that a childlike
heart is the best place to learn.
My family’s endurance of the thesis process has been stellar,
particularly that of my husband without whom this endeavor would not
have been undertaken. Dr. Berghof, of UC Irvine and of CSU San
Marcos Literature & Writing Studies Department, has been an
inspiration whose depth can only be measured in Silence. Scholar Dr.
Arnade of CSUSM History Department has listened with patient
enthusiasm. Dr. Dutschke has been an exemplary academic colleague.
Appreciation to Professor Jason van Boom, Ph.D. student at Graduate
Theological Union, for Latin consultation as the thesis process
ended when I most needed scholarly camaraderie.
I honor the LTWR Faculty, Staff and fellow grad students for
caring like a family. Lastly, I thank the Book of Nature, expressed
in the literary disciplines through something sacred: Words.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Historical Context and Humanism 5
2. Justification through Christ the Spirit 19
3. Ascension, Intellect and Love 24
II. TRADITION OF MASTERS & LEGACY IN LANGUAGE
1. Italian Background and Contemporary Foreground 34
2. History and Summary of De Magia naturali 47
3. Snapshot in Time of the Tradition 57
III. METHODOLOGY & BOOK II ON CHRISTIAN KABBALAH
1. Stigma of the Non-Christian 59
2. Book II on Kabbalah 65
3. Network of Christian Kabbalists 80
IV. EQUALITY & UNITY OF THE BINARY
1. Primal Metaphors & Myth 114
2. Experience & History, Metaphorical & Literal 133
3. Poets, Philosophers, & Mythological Beings 144
V. PRIMARY SOURCES & CONCLUDING REMARKS 154
VI. WORKS CITED & WORKS CONSULTED 168
Original thesis hardcopy available at CSU San Marcos,
and at GTU Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.
Online digital edition forthcoming through CSUSM.
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I. INTRODUCTION
1. Historical Context and Humanism
Renaissance Catholic reformer Jean Jacques Lefèvre, known as
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, was born around 1455 of humble parentage
in the small fishing village of Étaples in the Northeastern province
of Picardy, France.1 His lifetime, 1455-1536, spanned the threshold
between the European Medieval and Renaissance eras. After the
Valois-Hapsburg Wars resumed in the early 1520’s, many homes in the
Northeast of France were burned, as well as churches and the records
in them. Consequently, little is known of his youth, although it may
be conjectured that as a young boy he was singled-out by local
clergy as exemplary in intellectual potential, and as was customary,
Lefèvre was later sent to the University of Paris.
Living at the threshold between Medieval and Renaissance
world-views, in essence between pagan and modern worlds, Lefèvre and
other humanists synthesized many philosophical, theological and
scientific theories and practices. Exemplary among Lefèvre’s
teachings is his unpublished treatise De Magia naturali, On Natural
Magic.2 Providing historical and intellectual backgrounds, and
engaging in critical analysis of Book II as informed by numerous
texts, this thesis addresses the conflicting political, religious,
and academic opinions of natural magic in Lefèvre’s time and in our
1 Historical dates and facts on Lefèvre d’Étaples not otherwise cited are from Scott R. Clark’s Chronology of the Medieval and Reformation Church, referenced in Works
Cited. 2Olomouc, Universitni Knihovna, ms M I 119, ff. 174-342; Book II begins on f. 198;
all further references are cited per Evans transcription-translation work-in-progress
pagination, eg. Book II begins with page 50, cited “Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198”.
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own. The goals are to demonstrate: that Lefèvre never did abandon
natural magic, the practical half of philosophy; and that current
Academia is ready to expand the historical, “theoretical” treatment
of natural magic to engage it as an experiential, “practical” human
universal.
In the title of De Magia naturali Book II Chapter 10, Lefèvre
employs the umbrella term, “Prisce velate Theologie” or “Ancient
veils of Theology” (Evans II:80, f. 213). Throughout Book II,
Lefèvre unveils or decloaks mythology, philosophy, astrology,
literature and religion to reveal a scientific theory, practice and
experience of number as Idea. He reveals how the limit of the
metaphorical imagery in disciplines is duality, the binary
Coincidence of Opposites, symbolized by the number 2. The magic in
Lefèvre’s number mysticism is based on human experience of numerical
ascension from man to God inherited through a tradition of masters
and achieved through the number 3 – identified in Chapter 1 as
Venusian love-nexus – reuniting exilic binary into the One, duality
into unity (Evans II:51, f. 199v).
Renaissance humanists conceived of this prisca theologia,
pristine or ancient theology, as embodied in the Christian Trinity
through the Spirit of Christ. Theirs was a mystical vision of
universal Holy Spirit beyond dualistic boundaries. Current Academia
has the tools to study and teach this tradition, demonstrated in the
topic of Lefèvre’s Book II, which he calls “Pythagorean philosophy”,
and which he equates to “Cabala” and prophetic teachings (Evans Ch.
1 II:50, f. 198; Ch. 14 II:89-90, f. 217-218v). As such, Book II can
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be categorized as Christian Kabbalah, a springboard for this and
future study of the text.
The primal architectural metaphor in Christian Kabbalah or
prisca theologia is the exilic Fall from One to 2. Exile is
expressed mythically as lover below exiled from Beloved above,
allegorically in the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the
Garden of Eden, and metaphorically in Jesus’ birth as the Son of
God. The final Christian salvation from exile is expressed
sacrificially through Jesus’ crucifixion when he becomes Christ, the
Spirit that unites God and man, completing ascension to the Trinity.
Likewise, magic resolves exile anagogically in number mysticism
through the mysteries of relationship between above and below,
between superior and inferior numbers. Lefèvre equates that final
Christian sacrifice into salvation with the thoughts of pre-
Christian philosophers, the words of pre-Christian myths passed down
through the oral tradition by the poets of Classical Antiquity, and
the actions of pre-Christian magicians or magi: identical in both
Negative and Positive theology; identical in both theoretical and
practical philosophy – delivering Christianity onto the same Ground
of Silence as pagan magic.
In “The Revival of Lullism at Paris, 1499-1516,” Joseph M.
Victor reminds us that, always a devotee of Christ, always a lover
of Catholicism, Lefèvre cherished the teachings of the Spanish
mystic Raymond Lull, who described the universe as a ladder of
beings — stones, plants, animals, man, angels, God — a giant
collection of symbols that led to the divine (Victor online). For
the metaphorical scaffolding of Book II itself, Lefèvre employs the
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descending and ascending chains of the numerical, celestial and
angelic spheres, on which man ascends to the divine. The Coincidence
of Opposites is the tension that drives Book II of the treatise On
Natural Magic, and this before Lefèvre had read the Church-
sanctioned Nicholas of Cusa. Augustin Renaudet, in Préréforme et
Humanisme à Paris: Pendant les Premières Guerres d’Italie (1494-
1517), dates Lefèvre’s studies of Cusa during the first decade and a
half of the sixteenth century (661). Therefore rather than Cusa,
Lefèvre cites many-another proponent of number mysticism, each of
whom either expounds or metaphorically embodies a common theory of
genesis through a Coincidence of Opposites, and a common practice of
ascension to unity through a Trinitarian relationship intrinsic in
the binary itself.
Reproduced below, with permission from San Diego State
University Special Collections Library, are several pages of the
1230 CE Sphaera of Johannes de Sacro Bosco, published in 1527 with a
prefatory epistle and commentary by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. These
images illustrate the prevalent Ptolemaic world-view of the era,
while portraying its precariousness through the personified
discourse between science and myth.
In these anthropocentric, geocentric depictions, the celestial
spheres are under the purview of both the astronomer Ptolemy and
Urania, the muse of astronomy and astrology. She foretells the
future from the position of the stars, and is associated with
universal love and the Holy Spirit (“Urania” Wikipedia). This male-
female binary of Ptolemy and Urania embodies the architectural
principle of Coincidence of Opposites – Earth below, celestial above
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– yet is paradoxically indefinite as to which gender holds the
superior position.
The planets Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn orbit Earth on spheres ascending to the eighth sphere of the
Constellations and unmoving stars, then beyond. This unmoving ground
is termed “Aplanes” in Book II Chapter 7, and this celestial ground
that exists beyond is also termed “the Ground of Silence” in Chapter
14 (Evans II:68, f. 207; II:90, f. 218v). Depicted in the first
illustration under the image of the world is the higher soul resting
upon this celestial Ground.
These celestial, planetary spheres become the personified
binaries or Coincidence of Opposites in Lefèvre’s Book II, out of
whom, through the Trinitarian relationship between them, the chains
for ascension to divine union are woven. The treatise is thus
mythopoetic, and should be studied primarily as a sacred text. The
fact that Lefèvre published Sphaera in 1527, writing a prefatory
epistle and commentary on it at that time, supports my argument that
Lefèvre never did abandon the world-view and teachings of the 1493
De Magia naturali. Modern scholars have repeatedly asserted that he
did. I posit that the key, the cipher for interpreting not only this
treatise, but also the entirety of Lefèvre’s teachings, is found in
Book II’s prisca theologia of Coincidence of Opposites and the
Trinity.
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Renaissance humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples lived at a time
of creative expression in Europe. In 1441, Thomas à Kempis published
Imitatio Christi, The Imitation of Christ, exemplifying the devotio
moderna. In 1450, Pope Nicholas V founded the Vatican Libary.
Leonardo Da Vinci was born in 1452. In 1453, the Hundred Years’ War
ended. Constantinople fell to the Turks, leading to an increasing
westward migration of Greek-speaking intellectuals some of whom
brought manuscripts with them. Around 1454, the first printing press
operated at Mainz. Born also around 1455 was the German humanist
Johannes Reuchlin. Italian humanist Count Giovanni Pico Della
Mirandola (Pico) was born in 1463, and Michelangelo was born in
1475. War between France and the Hapsburgs broke out in 1477. In
1478 Lorenzo de Medici rose to ruler of Florence: Lorenzo the
Magnificent, patron of the arts and of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic
Academy.
William A. Christian Jr. explains, in Local Religion in
Sixteenth-Century Spain, that the practice of Christianity
transformed in part during the sixteenth century from one of
personal vows made to the saints and Mary to one of personal
devotion directed to Christ — a movement known as devotio moderna,
modern devotion. A central ingredient in both modes of practice was
the fact that this was personal religion, direct contact with the
divine, accomplished without clerical intervention. Lay devotion
spread on ordinary feet — person to person, belonging to the people
and imbedded in the landscape. Devotes of the divine experienced
visions, rapture and ecstasy. At times when human intervention
seemed necessary to a successful outcome of prayer, traveling
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magicians competed directly with priests for the power to intercede
with God on behalf of their fellow laymen. Priests accused magicians
of forming pacts with the devil. The Spanish Inquisition acted
against this modern practice of Christian devotion among Catholics —
peasants, magicians and clergy alike — as well as against conversos,
Jewish converts to Christianity (19-20, 29-32, 55, 90).
Despite the creative expression for which the Renaissance is
known, throughout Europe during this volatile time between Medieval
and Renaissance eras freedom of thought, speech and action was
curtailed among the educated as well as among the population at
large. According to Henry Kamen in The Spanish Inquisition: A
Historical Revision, from the 1480’s on, book burnings by the
Spanish Inquisition were common (308). Relative to the chronology of
Lefèvre d’Étaples, he attended the University of Paris (la
Sorbonne), receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1480.
During the 1490’s, burning of the conversos themselves peaked.
Mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila focused on the interior religion
of union with God, but many were denounced as heretics. Village
religion, the freedom to practice traditions, folklore, and beliefs
in a landscape shared by all faiths, no longer belonged to the
people. Convivencia in Spain — where Christian, Jewish and Muslim
faiths coexisted and intermingled — was officially eradicated in
attempts to control avenues of access to God and to promote
political solidarity (Kamen 308). Political oppression of interior
religion, whether of layman or intellectual, crossed all borders of
the contiguous European countries and citystates.
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According to Eugene F. Rice Jr. in “The De Magia Naturali of
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples,” Lefèvre’s whereabouts between 1480 and
1490 is unknown (20). Returning to Paris in 1490 the Renaissance
humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples became a professor of philosophy
at the Collège du Cardinale Lemoine, a residential college of the
University of Paris. Rice, in “Humanism in France,” reports that he
treasured Thomas à Kempis’ point in Imitatio Christi, on which
humanists and mystics agree, that it is more important to love the
Trinity than to argue fine points in the relationship of the Persons
(Rabil 2: 113).
The clash between politicized or state religion and interior
religion is one based in man-made law rather than in natural law.
The Trinitarian ritual of the Eucharist, where the Holy Spirit
unites Father and Son in the body of Christ, draws grace downwards
to the congregation. Inverted salus, inverted salvation, happens
when the beneficence of grace through sacrificial blood is replaced
with politically driven persecution. Mystic-minded thinkers such as
Lefèvre performed a Trinitarian ascesis — exercise or discipline —
for ascending upwards to God. The mystical, practical exercises
grounded Father and Son in love, eliciting in humankind an ethical
choice of moral freedom.
The Renaissance humanist anthropocentric vision of man as the
intermediary circuit joining heaven and earth, and through which
Spirit is drawn, was not only to be taken theoretically, but also to
be exercised practically. In using what some would consider an
abstract mathematical concept, a triangle representing the number 3,
humanists described the practical relationship of the Trinity, with
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man as the conduit of love, and love as the basis of creation. As
John Bossy explains in Christianity in the West: 1400-1700, Christ
the man was central. In Bossy’s way of describing the Trinity,
Spirit becomes flesh (73, 101).
Werner L. Gundersheimer writes in French Humanism: 1470-1600
that French humanists studied questions specific to cognition,
ethics and faith, attempting to reorganize university education and
studies. Occamist criticism narrowed by modern philosophers into the
study of formal logic constricted the study of past intellectuals
and theology, prompting humanist research into the thought of past
histories and the pursuit of mysticism among all classes of society
(65-9).
“Humanism” as used in this thesis, comprises Aristotelianism,
Neoplatonism, and also Christian Kabbalah. Renaissance humanism is,
most basically, the study of human culture, particularly man’s
intellectual activities. Humanism revived and imitated literary and
educational ideals of ancient Greek and Latin thought through a
cultural and educational program (Pico, Wallis Introduction xii-
xiii).
Paul O. Kristeller’s essay “Renaissance Humanism and Classical
Antiquity” provides more detailed descriptions of Renaissance
humanism. Activities humanists engaged in included the collecting of
ancient texts and the discovery of important unknown manuscripts,
the practice and development of textual criticism and commentary,
editing for dissemination via the newly-invented printing press, the
imitation of ancient authors in new writings, and transformation of
the vernacular after the Latin model. Humanist Greek studies were
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facilitated through Byzantine scholars who moved to the West,
teaching their language and literature. The study of Greek became
established in universities. The Greek New Testament and the Hebrew
Old Testament impacted theological scholarship, resulting in
vernacular versions of the Bible such as Lefèvre’s [Louvain and]
Antwerp edition[s] (Rabil 1: 5-28; parenthetical note mine).
Lefèvre is best known as early translator of the Bible into
French, yet also wrote many commentaries on ecclesiastical works,
editing and publishing numerous scientific works as well. He is
lauded among European and American Catholics, Protestants and
scholars, each from their own perspective on his work as it pertains
to their area of expertise.
In his essay “Humanism in France” Eugene F. Rice summarizes
that, like their Italian contemporaries, Lefèvre and other French
humanists restored Aristotle’s philosophy, and emphasized Plato,
late antique Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism, as well as Hermetic
writings (attributed to Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus), and Kabbalah
(Rabil 2: 109-10). While on his Italian journey of 1491-2, discussed
below in Chapter II Section 1, in Rome Lefèvre sought out Ermolao
Barbaro, who acquainted him with Christian Aristotelianism, the path
to further synthesis of knowledge (Gundersheimer 70).
According to Kristeller, humanist patristic scholarship
provided a Christian philosophy and eloquence, as well as a
Christian vision of antiquity and a pristine theology that
reconciled pagan religious thought with Christian. Humanists
searched for manuscripts in monastic and cathedral libraries, and
scrutinized the legends entwined with biographies. The union of
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wisdom and piety with eloquence was the humanist religious program,
justifying the studia humanitatis. Humanists developed the idea of
the dignity of man: man as the link between macrocosm and microcosm,
with moral freedom to turn toward the good (Rabil 1: 5-28).
Kristeller’s essay “Humanism and Moral Philosophy” begins with the
clarification that moral philosophy “was considered part of the
studia humanitatis and was therefore closely associated with the
humanist movement” (Rabil 3: 271).
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2. Justification through Christ the Spirit
Despite political censorship, interior religion flourished
during what Frank L. Borchardt calls the enchanted years surrounding
1500. Direct contact between French, German and Italian
intellectuals fostered the distillation of techniques for mystical
union with God into a plausibly Christian format. He explains in
“The Magus as Renaissance Man” that through appropriation of the
Negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius (called via negativa and
considered a passive receiving), Positive theology techniques handed
down through pagan magi (considered an active taking), were rendered
acceptable to Christians as grace from God: flesh was stitched to
Spirit; magic was transformed into Christian mysticism. Furthermore,
the culmination of mystical techniques through negation leading to
transcendence was called “faith,” enabling numerical ascension on
threads of love to miracle (Borchardt online).
During the Reformation, the sixteenth-century Trinity of the
Father, the Word, and the Spirit also inspired several heretical
sects who elaborated indirectly upon the doctrine of a radical
Saxon, Thomas Muentzer. A theologian of the Holy Ghost or Spirit,
Muentzer framed his message in the language of unity. He believed in
the Oneness of Spirit, that 2-ness was the opposite of Oneness, and
that holiness entailed the swallowing of the parts by the whole.
This radical German Christianity of the 1520’s and 30’s was perhaps
seed for that in England of the 1640’s and 50’s (Bossy 91, 107,
110). Like Lefèvre in this regard, the doctrine of Coincidence of
Opposites was prevalent among these practitioners of Spirit also.
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Justification by faith, and the notion of absolute brotherhood
indemic in Medieval Christianity, had already been embraced with the
1470’s Restitution of primitive Christianity. God the Father, and
son as Word, has been said to collapse inevitably into a
confrontation with the issue of Spirit. Various tributaries of
“brethren” or the “Brotherhood” propounding peace and love (or
otherwise) through the Holy Spirit found refuge in Bohemia and
Moravia. Bossy captures the propensity of Spirit to threaten
organized Christianity as “a kind of spirit of permanent revolution”
(104-8). His elaboration that freeing Spirit meant that scriptural
words were outer coverings of an inner meaning to be discerned is
what Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali ultimately addresses. Spirit being
the seed, vehicle and goal of this treatise, De Magia naturali is
thus understood as a product of the times. Perhaps not
coincidentally, the single extant complete manuscript copy ended up
in Czechoslovakia.
In 1505, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius expressed
in a letter that the basis of occult knowledge rests in the mystery
of the Trinity. His technique for ascension to the Trinity was by
faith, through the study of number leading to understanding of the 3
and the One. Trithemius was not the first to record these themes,
for they circulated among the intellectuals of the time (Borchardt
online). Philip Edgcumbe Hughes in Lefèvre: Pioneer of
Ecclesiastical Renewal in France comments that many learned
Christiformity, becoming Christlike through faith, through the
writings of Nicholas of Cusa, a German mystic born in 1400 (31-2).
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Cusa’s mysticism of Positive theology becomes a central theme of
Lefèvre’s spirituality (44-7).
Lawrence H. Bond, in his essay “Nicholas of Cusa and the
Reconstruction of Theology: the Centrality of Christology in the
Coincidence of Opposites,” though not mentioning number mysticism
directly, explains the mechanics of it via the doctrine of
reconciliation: between the dialectic, between and encompassing
object and subject, is the paradox of Christ’s person; the
epistemological basis of all theology is Christology, which provides
the only true knowledge of God. The terms “Christology” or
“Christocentric view of the universe” describe Cusan metaphysics.
Cusa clarifies the only valid dialectic and the epistemological
given as that of Coincidence of Opposites.3 Cusa stipulates that a
reform of epistemology must precede the reconstruction of
methodology (81-4).
This observation supports my argument that Lefèvre’s marrying
of his methodology to this epistemology, the embodying of this
Trinitarian epistemology within his methodology, is Lefèvre’s legacy
to the Academy that has been overlooked. In other words, a marrying
of the practical experiential with the theoretical historical is the
next reconstruction needed in Academia. Bond stipulates that this
technique (the mechanics of Christology) is “descriptive rather than
logical, declarative rather than academic” (94).
3 Capitalized throughout to accentuate its fundamental importance to the thesis.
22
Cusa holds that God cannot be the object of knowledge since he
operates as subject on our Intellect.4 He concludes that the object
of knowledge must necessarily be ignorance (83).
That type of ignorance can be called duality. Cusa therefore
unifies the Father-son/subject-object/unity-duality binary into one
Trinitarian whole, which is only subjectively experiential through
Christ or Spirit. Bond clarifies this in Cusa’s means of knowing God
through negation — also called Negative theology — explaining
knowing as reconciliation received in faith through Christ as nexus
of both Infinite and finite, knowledge and ignorance. Coincidence is
the theologian’s method (85, 87). The subject’s Intellect is the
culmination, Lefèvre concurs, of the theologian’s method and where
this faith and intuition occur. In this regard, Bond reiterates the
problem of confusing logical and linguistic distinctions (84, 87).
This I call simply an issue of semantics, the issue that silenced
Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali for 500 years: the Church’s refusal to
recognize the reconciliation of magic with mysticism in Intellect as
knowledge of faith in Christ’s Spirit by a sacrifice into grace.
Relative to mysticism versus magic, Bossy pinpoints that it is
never the wholly other that is the object of persecution, but
specifically that which is most alike. What fueled the wrath against
neighbor in the later Middle Ages was the doctrine of the limited
good, where there was only so much to go around, therefore some must
be evil and undeserving. Magic – witchcraft – like the sexual act,
was deemed intrinsically shameful and evil, an offense against
holiness (36-7). The semantic interpretation generally accepted, and
4 Imagination, Reason, and Intellect capitalized throughout to accentuate that these were named the ascending methodology Lefèvre employed in teaching.
23
that of the Church, was the historical literal sense, whereas
Lefèvre’s methodology unified Opposites through the paradoxical
language of metaphor, disclosing anagogical or mystical-Spiritual
meaning.
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3. Ascension, Intellect and Love
Throughout the Renaissance the interrelatedness of the three
major intellectual traditions — Aristotelianism, humanism, and
Neoplatonism — typified the synthesizing nature of its culture.
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’ epistemology and methodology – a
hierarchical, philosophical theology in ascending order of
Imagination, Reason, and Intellect – mirrored these three traditions
and will serve to explain their interpretations here.
For an academic program of studies, Kent Emery Jr. reports in
“Mysticism and the Coincidence of Opposites in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century France” that Lefèvre recommended beginning with
Aristotle’s natural philosophy and physics, as they engage the
Imaginative mode and require many words; proceeding to Scripture and
the Fathers, as the humanists did, since those engage the rational
mode of Reason through modest sermon; and culminating in the
Neoplatonist Intellectual mode with the study of Pythagoras, who
teaches in Silence (Emery online).
Lefèvre, whose De Magia naturali concerns itself with knitting
together the heavenly and the earthly, surmounted the potentially
heretical claiming of man’s power to achieve union with God through
numerical ascension by equating his final vehicle — Intellect — with
faith. Intellect was perceived by Lefèvre as the faculty of
intuition and vision. Through Intellection, faith corrected Reason
(Rice, “Lefèvre d’Étaples and the Medieval Christian Mystics” 101-
2).
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At one extreme, Aristotle represented the life of studies, in
that through contemplating the world the student ascends to
knowledge of heavenly things. At the other extreme, Pythagoras
represented the death of studies, in that he fulfilled their goal of
leading the student to the Silence beyond the binary of life and
death, beyond the Coincidence of Opposites. Between the paradox of
the Infinity of God and the nothingness of man lay the fertile
ground of receiving in mystical Silence — divine essence, the will
of God, pure love (Emery online).
This circumscribed the relationships within the Trinity: the
All of the Father, the nothing of man the Son, ascending as Christ
Incarnate through the love of the Father for the Son – the Holy
Spirit. The goal of prisca theologia and of mystica theologia,
(mystical theology) — that of union with God in divine love — is at
the heart of personal religion. Via the ascending continuum in the
human mind of Imagination, Reason, and Intellect, Lefèvre applied
Aristotelianism, humanism, and Neoplatonism in order to guide his
students to wisdom. His epistemology was reflected in his teaching
methodology, which demonstrates my point that Academia might engage
the experiential, practical modes along with the theoretical.
Like Pythagoras, Gundersheimer tells us that Lefèvre traveled
widely from the time of his adolescence in search of “the honey of
the Fathers.” He collected manuscripts from numerous monasteries and
convents, written by visionary monks and nuns expounding on their
experiences of God. Hildegard of Bingen, Hilary, and Nemesius of
Emesa were among those he resurrected and published. The latter had
developed the themes of the dignity of man, of man as the link
26
between macrocosm and microcosm, and of freedom of the will in De
natura hominis (a Greek work of late fourth century). According to
Gundersheimer, the politically safe haven of the Christian Fathers
and mystics justified humanist affinity with pagan philosophers,
whom the indisputable Fathers themselves brought forward. An example
Gundersheimer provides is that, in 1512 Lefèvre published the
Epistles of St. Paul, considered by some the first Protestant book.
In the teachings of the Fathers, Lefèvre found pietas et doctrina,
piety and doctrine, the religious and moral insight required to
raise man’s mind to God. The Fathers inspired Lefèvre and his
followers to reform theological teaching through a humanist cultural
program grounded in the simplicity of love (70, 84, 166-7, 176,
179).
In Rice’s Introduction to The Prefatory Epistles, Lefèvre’s
Commentary on the Catholic Epistles is quoted:
“The true Christian does not love only Christians of his
own kind but will love also Indians, Ethiopians, Asians
and Africans, and those who live in islands beyond the
sea and in lands which for so many centuries have been
unknown until discovered in our own day.” (XXIII)
Rice pinpoints the key to Lefèvre’s doctrine of justification,
which leads to salvation for all, as the reconciliation of Aristotle
and Paul in an ideal pietas, piety or compassion (XXII). This key of
ideal pietas I posit is embodied in the humility of sacrifice to the
middle term – the number 3 as love-nexus between lover and Beloved –
in the prisca theologia of his 1493 De Magia naturali Book II. This
treatise, as the fulcrum between Lefèvre’s textbook, Introduction to
27
Aristotle’s Metaphysics written in 1490, and his publications
subsequent to the De Magia, is thus also the nexus marrying pagan
and Christian teachings. I posit that specifically Book II on
Pythagorean philosophy or Christian Kabbalah holds the key for
interpreting not only this treatise, but also the entirety of
Lefèvre’s teachings.
Teaching at the Collège du Cardinale Lemoine until 1508,
Lefèvre brought the discipline of mathematics back into University
studies. Rice, in “Humanism in France,” calls mathematics the
pinnacle of his teachings, as a path to understanding scriptural
mysteries (Rabil 2: 110, 113). Lefèvre expressed mythological
archetypes through writings on Images such as numbers, geometric
shapes, and divine names, in a mythopoetic style that has declined
in Academia with secularization.
The publications in 1509 and 1513 of Quincuplex Psalterium or
Fivefold Psalter, and publication in 1512 of Paul’s Epistles with
commentary, marked Lefèvre as a heretic. Lefèvre concluded that the
Scriptures told of justification by faith alone, near to the time
when Luther identified that doctrine. Erasmus, another famed
academic, was a companion of Lefèvre’s in Paris, althouth their
paths parted (Reformation Histories).
Rice’s compilation of The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques
Lefèvre d’Étaples and Related Texts, I feel, is an invaluable source
of clues concerning censure for heresy. I note them here in support
of my position that, contrary to what previous scholars have
asserted, Lefèvre never did renounce the magic philosophies of his
earlier writings. Epistle 26 from Guillaume de la Mare’s Sylvae,
28
singing the praises of illustrious gentlemen, is a poem published in
1513 honoring Lefèvre. I interpret it as revealing specifically that
the unpublished De Magia naturali was nevertheless known and
publicly praised among his contemporaries. I conjecture that the
author published the poem in 1513 in response to Lefèvre’s recent
censure. Concurrently, Guillaume de la Mare also dismissed the
verity of his Sylvas in a letter to the Bishop, calling them
juvenile. In denouncing the rationality of his own work, I conclude
that the author is simply acting out of self-preservation (85-6).
In Epistle 38 to Jacobo Ramirez de Guzman, 1503/4, Lefèvre
includes Pico della Mirandola alongside the martyrs, in that their
teachings were misunderstood. Not long after the De Magia was
written, Pico died suspiciously of a sudden illness (Lynn Thorndike,
A History of Magic and Experimental Science: Vol’s III and IV,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 4: 520). Lefèvre seems to be
asking the reader again to judge for himself whether or not pagan
teachings can be reconciled with Christian teachings. In the letter
he uses as example of paganism serpents, pythons and insane rituals
(117-20). Yet contradictorily, close to that time Lefèvre was
preparing to write the Kabbalistic Quincuplex Psalterium in which he
has much to say about dragons, serpents and all of the abyss. In the
commentary to Psalm 148 he claims that the subterranean meaning of
dragons sent forth from the cave is the Spirit between heaven and
earth (230-32). Therefore in the 1509 Quincuplex Psalterium, Lefèvre
was still propounding the doctrine of Christ as Spirit uniting
heaven and earth, still marrying pagan and Christian teachings in
Christian Kabbalah.
29
Coincidental clues, regarding responses to censorship, in
Prefatory Epistles from the date of 1512 are that: Lefèvre’s alleged
opinion of natural magic turns from positive to negative; he
denounces his property in Étaples; and on pages 287-90 Rice tells of
an anonymous supplementary biography appearing in 1512 and published
through Trithemius, cataloging and praising Lefèvre’s works.
Rice’s Introduction to his edition of Lefèvre’s Prefatory
Epistles also provides a thorough yet succinct summary of Lefèvre’s
life and works. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to recap
everything of import in Lefèvre’s life, but I wish to include a very
relevant paragraph of Rice’s that is so succinct there is no room
for paraphrase:
Between 1508 and 1520 Lefèvre continued his
scholarly work at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des Prés,
under the patronage of the abbot, Guillaume Briçonnet,
bishop of Lodève and subsequently of Meaux. In the
spring of 1521 Briçonnet called him to Meaux to help him
put into effect a comprehensive program of diocesan
reform. On May 1, 1523 he made him his vicar-general in
spiritualibus. Lefèvre’s chief contribution was a French
translation of the New Testament and Psalms. The
fortuitous coincidence of this experiment in reform with
the first penetration of Lutheranism in France focused
the attention of the faculty of theology on his
exegetical works. In 1523 a committee of theologians
detected eleven errors in his commentary on the Gospels.
When the Parlement of Paris summoned him to appear
30
before it on suspicion of heresy, he fled to Strasbourg
in the late summer of 1525. Recalled by Francis I in
1526 and appointed librarian of the royal collection,
then at Blois, and tutor of the king’s children, Lefèvre
finished translating the Bible under royal protection
and published it in a single volume at Antwerp in 1530.
He passed his last years in tranquil retirement at the
court of Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre (XIII-
XIV).
In the prefatory epistle to Introduction to Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, Lefèvre praises Aristotle for the same wisdom he
cherishes in Book II: geometric reckoning, mathematical computation,
are the mirror and measure of justice (Lefèvre). The Spiritual
reckoning to justice that is justification, then, Lefèvre decloaks
through number mysticism. In De Magia naturali Book II Chapter 2,
Lefèvre names the Jove-Venus ternary of love as the virtue or vigor
that couples with the quaternary to compute the 12 signs of the
zodiac and the 12 judges who are the form of justice through whom
all are counted saved (Evans II:52-55, ff. 199-201v).
Also in the prefatory epistle to Introduction to Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, Lefèvre cites the tradition of masters that he equally
lauds in De Magia naturali, as an unbroken chain from Egyptian
priests and Chaldean magi to the philosophers Plato and Aristotle,
conveying wisdom concordant with Christian theology (Lefèvre). The
Jove-Venus ternary of love, the Trinitarian prisca theologia through
Coincidence of Opposites, is the marriage nexus between pagan and
31
Christian to which Lefèvre always returns, the key to all of his
writings.
Convinced that divine wisdom was best taught through the
simple words of the medieval mystics to whom God had spoken
directly, Lefèvre revived French study of the Spanish mystic Raymond
Lull (Victor online). This revival of Lullism in Paris propagated
the Christian mystic’s metaphor of lover and Beloved as expression
of man’s relationship with God — the continuity of Lefèvre’s
essential focus on the Coincidence of Opposites as path to divine
union.
In 1491 he read Lull’s Contemplations. Lull brought Lefèvre
beyond Occamism, which cleared his way to the doctrine of divine
love (Gundersheimer 70). As mentioned above, Lull described the
universe as a ladder of beings — stones, plants, animals, man,
angels, God — a giant collection of symbols that led to the divine
(Victor online). At a monastery in Padua, Lefèvre copied a
manuscript of Lull’s Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Hughes 12).
Lull’s words relating nature and man to God that Lefèvre
copied are exemplified in a quote from that book: “The birds hymned
the dawn, and the Lover, who is the dawn, awakened. And the birds
ended their song, and the Lover died in the dawn for his Beloved”
(Peers 41). In this love poem to God, the principle of Coincidence
of Opposites central to my thesis is dramatized in birth-death
imagery, as if enacting the genesis of creation and the sacrificial
act of re-union with, or return to, the divine.
Teachings of the Christian Mystics, edited by Andrew Harvey,
supplies these words from one of St. Paul’s Epistles that Lefèvre
32
published exemplifying aequalitas, equality: “So we, being many, are
one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (27).
Gregory of Nyssa was another whose words he published, and which we
can read in the above collection: “Do not be surprised that we
should speak of the Godhead as being at the same time both unified
and differentiated. Using riddles, as it were, we envisage a strange
and paradoxical diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity” (49).
Words of Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth century Syrian monk whom Lefèvre
praised, speak of divine Silence: “Trinity!!...Lead us up beyond
unknowing and light, up to the farthest highest peak of mystic
Scripture, where the mysteries of God’s word lie simple, absolute
and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence”
(50). Thus, many of the pagan themes expounded in the Florentine
Platonic Academy Lefèvre also received through Church Fathers such
as these.
Lefèvre also copied some of Hildegard von Bingen’s writings.
Matthew Fox explains, in Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, that
an Illumination titled, “Egg of the Universe” in Scivias, depicts
one of her visions of unity: “By this supreme instrument in the
figure of an egg, and which is the universe, invisible and eternal
things are manifested. [. . .] Oh Holy Spirit, you are the mighty
way in which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and
under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with
relatedness” (48-9). Hildegard describes “The Cosmic Wheel” with
Christ in the center and spokes resembling the hexagram Star of
David, another vision depicted in an Illumination about unity in De
33
operatione Dei: “[. . .] Love appearing in a human form, the Love of
our heavenly Father” (54-5).
Hildegard praises the devotees who aided her in writing out
and depicting her visions: “[. . .] and he faithfully heard and
loved all the words of these visions without tiring, since they were
sweeter than honey and honeycomb; and so through the grace of God,
and with the help of these venerable men, the writing of this book
was finished” (Flanagan 88). In copying some of Hildegard’s work,
Lefèvre was a vital link for transmitting wisdom through the
humanist tradition of masters.
Guy Bedouelle reiterates in Lefèvre d’Étaples et
l’Intelligence des Écritures that in the latter part of his life,
Lefèvre’s only goal was to convey the sweetness of Scripture to the
humble to nourish them (16). After reading Reuchlin’s works on
Kabbalah, he treated explicitly in the 1509 Quincuplex Psalterium
the Kabbalistic theme of number mysticism associated with sacred
names, dear to him in De Magia naturali Book II (37). Lefèvre
remarked of Psalm LXXII: “Jeshua nomen benedictum regis nostri et
salvatoris omnium, et Deo incarnato ineffabile factum effabile”
(86). “The blessed name of Jesus our king and savior of all, and the
name of God incarnated, makes the ineffable effable.”
34
II. TRADITION OF MASTERS & LEGACY IN LANGUAGE
1. Italian Background and Contemporary Foreground
As for Christian Brotherhood and convivencia, in 1492 the
Inquisition expelled Jews from Spain, and Christopher Columbus
discovered the New World (Kamen 20; Clark). By 1493, Pope Alexander
VI had divided the New World between Spain and Portugal, and by
1494, King Charles VIII of France went to war against Italy
(Renaudet 150). During the Italian Wars, under Emperor Charles V
Spanish troops intervened in Italy against the French (Kamen 308).
It was just before the wars began – around 1493 – that Lefèvre,
inspired by Ficino and Pico of the Florentine Academy, wrote his
treatise De Magia naturali, On Natural Magic (Renaudet 150).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Augustin Renaudet,
Honorary Professor of Le Collège de France, wrote his definitive
history of pre-Reform humanism at Paris. It is from Préréforme et
Humanisme à Paris: Pendant les Premières Guerres d’Italie (1494-
1517) that I translate and paraphrase the story of Lefèvre’s Italian
journey, which functions here as background history for De Magia
naturali.
In 1491, Lefèvre read the two first books of Lull’s
Contemplations, which provided the inspiration to travel to Italy.
Many other University Parisians, such as Robert Gaguin, Charles
Fernand and Jean Cordier, had already crossed the mountains before
him. Distancing himself from scholasticism, Lefèvre intended to
visit the schools of philosophy to initiate himself into the
35
methodology of the Italian professors, particularly the
Aristoteltian rationalism of Barbaro and the Platonic mysticism of
Pico (134-136).
Lefèvre left France in the cold winter of 1491-2, accompanied
by Guillaume Gontier as secretary and copyist. He traversed the
mountainous Region Piémont in northwestern Italy and the Alps of
Lombardie. Perhaps bypassing Venice, Lefèvre arrived in Florence
where Marsilio Ficino and the Florentine humanists restored Plato’s
philosophy. Following the Neoplatonic model, Ficino founded a
religious metaphysics on the idea of a ladder of beings, emmanations
of God – the supreme unity and intelligence – descending by degrees
to multiple, insensible matter. From the middle of this cosmic
hierarchy, the rational soul of man can ascend to God by the way of
a dialectic of love. Thus, Ficino revived the spirit of the Gnostics
(136-139). Through a tradition of masters then, reaching from the
Gnostics to Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, to the Florentine
humanists, Lefèvre inherited the dialectic of love. I assert that
this dialectic of love is the Coincidence of Opposites and
Trinitarian prisca theologia of which Lefèvre writes in De Magia
naturali Book II.
Lefèvre recognized in Ficino then, his own vision of
intellectual and mystical synthesis. Pico at this time was
publishing On Being and the One, preliminary thoughts of a synthesis
between the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato (Bedouelle 15). Hugh
Ross Williamson writes in Lorenzo the Magnificent that Ficino and
Pico of the Florentine Platonic Academy fused Christian, Greek,
Hebrew, Orphic and Kabbalistic teachings in their quest for unity
36
based on their theory of vestiges of the Trinity. A triad of the
Graces, for instance — Beauty, Chastity, Desire — were perceived as
a giving in emanatio (emanation), a receiving in raptio or conversio
(rapture or conversion), and a drawing up in returning, remeatio
(return). Revealing the Neoplatonic triad through this embodiment of
the dialectic, the Graces are then changed through the experience of
Venus’ initiation of the Primavera to – Beauty, Love, Desire (142,
145). Venus here represents the One.
This reflects the Coincidence of Opposites described herein –
the All of God (Beauty) opposite the nothing of man (Desire or
Longing) – with Divine Love, or Holy Spirit as the third or middle
element completing the Trinity. As in Botticelli’s Primavera,
painted for Lorenzo, Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II Chapter 1
portrays Mercury as longing and Venus as love-nexus between the Moon
and Mercury (Evans II:50-51, f. 198-199v). Pagan becomes Christian
Kabbalah fully in Chapters 14-17, where Lefèvre asserts that the
numbers to the mystery of the magi and the numbers to the mystery of
the prophets are the same. These chapters explain that the letter
“s” sounded in the middle of the Tetragrammaton, or the number “300”
counted in the middle of the numbers ascribed to the Tetragrammaton,
completes the name Jesus through which mediating love-nexus,
enjoined by Spirit, man is redeemed (Evans II:89-97, ff. 217-221).
Williamson quotes Ficino: “’the Trinity was regarded by the
Pythagorean philosophers as the measure of all things, the reason
being, I surmise, that God governs things by threes and that the
things themselves also are determined by threes,’” and “’The Trinity
has left its mark on every part of Divine Creation’” (142, 145).
37
These are the lines of inquiry Renaissance humanists followed
that led them to the belief in what Emery points out as a prisca
theologia. Specifically through Kabbalah and the Judaic mystical
tradition they traced religious truth and philosophical wisdom to
their source in God’s communications with Adam and Moses. Egyptian
priests and Chaldean magi were supposed to have passed on divine
mysteries to the philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato and
Aristotle (Emery online).
Again paraphrasing Renaudet, erudite syncretism pleased the
poetic intelligence of Marsilio Ficino. Under the protection of
Lorenzo de Medici, this doctrine embellished the elegant and noble
life that the Florentine humanists led. Ficino’s country home next
to the Caregio, facing the royal villa built by Cosimo de Medici,
was where the members of the Platonic Academy that he founded met.
Inscriptions of moral and religious character ornamented the walls
of the grand salon where Ficino worked and presided over the
reunions. One remarked with pleasure the resemblances between his
character and that of Plato. As before in the gardens of the
Platonic Academy, at Careggi one supported moral, metaphysical or
literary controversies; sometimes a banquet gathered familiars with
master. With dinner over, the master would discourse on an obscure
theory of the Platonic system (140-1).
Renaudet surmises that in Florence Lefèvre could thus hear
Ficino expounding on his doctrines; he could assist at some of the
Academy’s meetings, get to know these professors, savants, priests
and doctors who met at Careggi. Perhaps Lefèvre heard Cristoforo
Landino, the teacher who had tried to demonstrate that Vergil, in
38
recounting the voyages of the Aeneid, described a man who fought
against vices and arrived finally at the contemplation of God. For
three years already, under the guidance of Pico della Mirandola,
Lefèvre had studied the philosophers. Concluding his studies in 1491
at Pico’s Studio, these lessons, inspired by a method in contrast to
the scholastics, provided Lefèvre with elegant and precise models of
teaching (141).
Lefèvre best loved Pico’s thinking and character among the
Florentine savants, who, despite his 1480’s imprisonment at Vicennes
and the censures of the Inquisition, continued his efforts to
reconcile antique philosophy with Christian dogma and modern
doctrines. Pico recognized the accepted three worlds – intelligence,
celestial bodies, and matter – yet with man free to model himself
after any of the diverse elements of his nature. Like Ficino though,
for Pico philosophic speculation was founded on divine love (142-3).
Simplified here then is the Lullian ladder of beings, which spans
architecturally the Coincidence of Opposites embodied as divine
Intellect or intelligence and man as Fallen matter, with celestial
or divine love the intermediating ground: a dialectic of love.
Renaudet reports that not only did Pico frequent the Platonic
Academy, he also often went to the convent of San Marco where Jerome
Savonarola preached. Pico’s patron Lorenzo de Medici feared this
friar though, who alluded to his rulership as corrupt tyranny. In
April 1492, Lefèvre may not have yet left Tuscany when Lorenzo the
Magnificent fell ill and died, amid dark premonitions of those
closest to him (142-4).
39
In Rome Lefèvre at last met Ermolao Barbaro where he
questioned him on the art of explaining Aristotle. An erudite more
than a thinker, Barbaro revealed the riches of Aristotelianism, and
gave Lefèvre a copy of the anti-Platonic Dialectic that had been
copied by Georges de Trébizonde. Renaudet unfortunately provides no
information as to Lefèvre’s return journey itself, though he does
continue that, back at Paris, Lefèvre taught an interpretation of
Aristotle that harmonized with the thinking of Ficino and Pico. He
taught that in all of Aristotle’s philosophy of sensible nature
there existed secret correspondences with divine things, opening the
way to hidden knowledge of the sub-sensory intelligible world, and
without which this philosophy lacks life. For Lefèvre and his
Florentine associates, a rational theory of the world was incomplete
without the soul (145-9).
At this point in Préréforme et Humanisme à Paris, Renaudet
perhaps exposes his own bias against magic in discussing censorship
of Lefèvre’s time and his treatise on magic: “superstitions of the
ancients, combined with those of the Arabs formed a system at once
theoretical and practical where astrology supplemented magic” (149).
After little more than a 150-word summary of Lefèvre’s De Magia
naturali, Renaudet concludes that he probably cast aside the science
of horoscopes, and that he probably didn’t believe in astrology
(151, 153). Like Ficino though, he did admit planetary influences,
and like Pico, Reuchlin and the Kabbalists he did admit the
marvelous properties of numbers (151).
As foreground for De Magia naturali, I provide viewpoints on
Kabbalah from more recent sources, such as Janet Berenson-Perkins’
40
Kabbalah Decoder. Sacred numerology called gematria, a specific
aspect of Jewish Kabbalah developed between the seventh and eleventh
centuries CE, I consider in this thesis as interpreted by
Renaissance Neoplatonists, and as transformed by them into an aspect
of Christian Kabbalah (94).
As they practiced it, Kabbalah intertwined with Christianity
in the mystical technique of numerical ascension. The Kabbalistic
Tree of Life, 10 sefirot or cosmic tree, depicts genesis descending
or emanating, and man returning to God in ascension, within an
anthropomorphic Image symbolizing the Coincidence of Opposites and
the Trinitarian prisca theologia. As an interior religion, the
natural magic of Christian Kabbalah is embedded in the human body.
Viewed from above as if looking down onto the crown of the head,
that sefirotic Image is seen as a hexagram, a central topic of
sacred geometry and sacred numerology. Formed of 2 interlocking
triangles, one descending from above, one ascending from below, the
hexagram is a geometric Image of man’s union with the divine.
Again, the primal myth embedded in the human body and depicted
anthropomorphically in the cosmic tree or 10 sefirot is exilic,
where lover below must ascend via divine love or Holy Spirit to
reunite with Beloved above. In the system Pico endorsed, man has the
free will to ascend to Plato’s the Good. Trinitarian Spirit, the
dialectic of love, is the key Christian Kabbalists chose to use.
Pythagoras originated Grecian numerology, believing that the
universe was expressible in numbers. Fascination with sacred
geometry goes hand in hand with sacred numerology and sacred names.
Illustrating how the prisca theologia intercepted by humanists is
41
brought forward in time through an unbroken chain of masters, Jacob
Boehme, a seventeenth-century German Christian Kabbalist, made the
theoretical descriptions of his predecessors more accessible through
diagrams (Berenson-Perkins 12, 94).
Boehme described his visionary experience: “I saw the Being of
all Beings, the Ground and the Abyss, also the birth of the Holy
Trinity, the origin and the first state of the world and of all
creatures” (Law 8). Boehme’s first figure, the equilateral triangle,
symbolizes the “Trinity Unmanifest”, “Nothing and All”, “Alpha and
Omega”, “the Eternal Beginning and the Eternal End”, “Mysterium
Magnum” — “the Great Mystery.” The culmination to Boehme’s Clavis or
The Key is depicted in the Judaic hexagram Star of David as Image of
final union of the 2 triangles into One (Boehme 56-7, 52-3, 80-1).
To demonstrate further that there is a perennial unbroken
chain of teachers of prisca theologia, I mention Leonora Leet’s 1999
publication, The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah: Recovering the Key
to Hebraic Sacred Science. Leets writes, “But associating the four
days of creation needed to manifest the hexagram form with the four
cosmic worlds of the Kabbalah leading to the manifestation of the
physical world will call for a radical reinterpretation of the
biblical account” (228). The first chapter of Lefèvre’s Book II
concurs regarding the quaternary being the foundation for the rest
of manifest creation (Evans II:50, f. 198). Leets draws the
beautiful geometric forms depicting genesis. The story unfolds again
with a precise and comprehensive scholarly astuteness.
Pertaining to literature in particular, Georges Dumézil,
structuralist, philologist and historian of religions, wrote a
42
magnum opus, great work, during the early 1900’s. Mythe et Épopée or
Myth and Epic brought the knowledge forward into our time of an
Indo-European civilization, based on the intimate relationship
between languages spoken from India to England. This linguistic
hypothesis is supported by a body of mythological-religious stories
common to all Indo-European peoples. More fascinating still is his
extrapolation that these peoples shared a common perception of the
world through a common mode of thought, that of thinking in 3 terms
(Dumézil, Grisward Introduction). This is an essential thesis point,
since I extrapolate that all humans think in 3’s, hilighting the
importance of the Renaissance humanists’ Trinitarian prisca
theologia as a key for decloaking metaphorical imagery in mythology.
Georges Dumézil’s Archaic Roman Religion is an encyclopedic
resource for use in studying both Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali and
his subsequent Quincuplex Psalterium. The difficulty of translating
the De Magia naturali is revealed in Dumézil’s descriptions of the
correlations between the Indo-Iranian and Italo-Celtic languages. He
quotes Joseph Vendryes:
“What is striking is that a rather large number of words
appear in this list of concepts which are connected with
religion, and especially with the liturgy or worship,
with sacrifice. Reviewing these words, adding certain
others to them, and grouping the whole by categories,
one does not merely establish one of the most ancient
elements of Italo-Celtic vocabulary; one also
establishes the existence of common religious traditions
43
in the languages of India and Iran and in the two
Western languages.” (1: Trans. Philip Krapp 80)
This reiterates the importance of engaging current
mythological studies through an experiential key such as prisca
theologia, along with teaching the historical multicultural roots of
Christianity.
Dumézil gives specific examples of identical words and their
connotations, one example being “I believe” and its substantive
“faith” which cover the whole field of relations between gods and
men (1: 81). Huston Smith’s semantic interpretation of faith as
beliefs in the mind is a linguistically correct one (“Finding Wisdom
in the Western Tradition”). Despite semantics one must attempt
translation of De Magia naturali; and perhaps having little
experience in the beaten path of Vergilian translation, for
instance, is an advantage to the translator striving for
multicultural ownership of Lefèvre’s treatise on prisca theologia.
Editor of Dante, Cristoforo Landino recorded some of the
Platonic Academy’s sessions, including those when Vergil was
discussed as a philosopher whose allegorical teachings were in
harmony with Plato’s. It was pondered in what way the meaning
beneath the surface of the text became obvious (Williamson 135).
Another commonality between Archaic Roman Religion and De
Magia naturali, in this instance provided by Dumézil, is that
abstractions were elevated to personifications as paired divinities:
ritual theological couples, where the female expressed one essential
mode of action of the male. “The elevation of abstractions,
desirable qualities, or powerful forces, virtutes and utilitates
44
(Cic. Leg. 2.28), to the rank of divinities was a game of language
and thought in which all the ancient Indo-European societies
indulged” (1: 49; 2: 397). This supports my translation of “vires”
as “vigors” rather than “virtues,” since the active connotation of
the word vigor perhaps better captures the original meaning of the
female-male essential mode of action (Evans Ch. 4 II:59, f. 203v);
Ch. 7 II:67, f. 207v). The process that Dumézil describes in
“abstractions as a game of language and thought,” is what I suggest
bringing more deeply into Academia through the study of religion as
mythology, decloaking it within Literature’s treatment of sacred
texts.
Mircea Eliade, in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
speaks to Huston Smith’s, and Plato’s, point about student
experience being the goal of teaching:
At this point we wish to emphasize the following
fact: Although the shamanic experience proper could be
evaluated as a mystical experience by virtue of the
cosmological concept of the three communicating zones,
this cosmological concept does not belong exclusively to
the ideology of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism,
nor, in fact, of any other shamanism. It is a
universally disseminated idea connected with the belief
in the possibility of direct communication with the sky.
On the macrocosmic plane this communication is figured
by the Axis (Tree, Mountain, Pillar, etc.); on the
microscopic plane it is figured by the central pillar of
the house or the upper opening on the tent — which means
45
that every human habitation is projected to the “Center
of the World,” or that every altar, tent or house makes
possible a break-through in plane and hence ascent to
the sky. [. . .] The shamans did not create the
cosmology, the mythology, and the theology of their
respective tribes; they only interiorized it,
“experienced” it, and used it as the itinerary for their
ecstatic journeys. (274-6)
R. Labat asserts, In “Chapter 2. Mesopotamia,” that the magic
and divination of Sumero-Akkadian thought [assimilated into
Renaissance Neoplatonism as wisdom of the Chaldean priests] was not
the expression of a primitive mentality. Well-developed
intellectually, Mesopotamian magic was not synonymous with primitive
black magic. Incantations were based on elements common to most
forms of magic, such as “the constraining force of knots, [. . .]
attraction or repulsion by specifics, the purifying action of water,
the dissolving power of fire, [and] the power of occult forces”
(Taton ed., Ancient and Medieval Science 69-70).
Lefèvre understood this same natural magic as a prisca
theologia in harmony with Christianity, its technique of numerical
ascension being synonymous with the journey of the Christian mystic:
[. . .] and its goal is the same: a brief and rapturous
moment of contemplation in which the mind sees God face
to face. [. . .] those who properly understand how the
inferior world is coupled in love to the heavenly, will
recognize that the fundamental link between them, the
nexus from which flows all the harmony in the universe,
46
is Jesus Christ. And they will recognize that magic is
ultimately reducible to the Christian sacrament whereby
man puts on Christ and emerges reformed and repaired by
love — amore divino reformatus atque recuperatus. (Rice,
“The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples” 27-
8)
Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali thus reveals a Renaissance
humanist who reached beyond political and intellectual boundaries
through writings expressive of the humanly universal mystical
experience of union with God in divine love.
47
2. History and Summary of De Magia naturali
In the long wake of Pope Innocent VIII’s Papal Bull of 1484
against sorcerers, Lefèvre chose not to publish his treatise On
Natural Magic, possibly specifically in light of the debate against
astrology during the Spring of 1493 in Lyon (Bedouelle 36-7). Simon
de Phares, condemned, appealed to the Parlement of Paris who
transferred proceedings to the Sorbonne. The Doctors condemned those
often called mathematicians, Chaldeans or astrologers, declaring
mortal punishment for any Christian concurring with them. The
Faculty seized, condemned and burned forty volumes of de Phares
(Renaudet 152-3). De Phares himself was imprisoned in Lyon, then in
Paris (Bedouelle 37).
Pico’s sudden death at 31 may also have deterred Lefèvre from
publishing his treatise. Lynn Thorndike in, A History of Magic and
Experimental Science: Vol’s III and IV, Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries, evokes our suspicion over the means of Pico’s death,
through the words of Sidonius: “’And another whose name I suppress
was more miserably captured and mulcted of his fame.’ [. . .] Peril
of life and death is about all that one gets from the pursuit of
magic” (4: 520). In the funeral sermon, Savonarola regretted that
Pico had not renounced the world in time, “declaring his conviction
that Pico’s early death was an unexpectedly severe punishment from
God because he had delayed to put this purpose into effect” (Hughes
33).
What is remarkable is that, despite Lefèvre’s notoriety, this
one treatise has been read by perhaps only a handful of modern
48
scholars. There is an alleged edition, or at least Book II, studied
philologically at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) of the
Sorbonne. I believe it is yet unpublished. Possibly due to America’s
current political reputation I received no response from their
librarian regarding the edition. Likewise, I received no response to
repeated correspondences with libraries and individual scholars in
the Czech Republic, where the only extant copy of the complete
manuscript is held. There is an alleged copy in some form held by a
German databank “Alcuin,” although access is restricted and it
appears from the superscript markings that the databank merely lists
De Magia naturali but does not hold a copy of it.
Guy Bedouelle has noted that what is implicit in De Magia
naturali is made explicit in Lefèvre’s Quincuplex Psalterium, a
facsimile edition of which has been published. Yet the availability
of this more in-depth study on natural magic within the context of
Biblical Psalms does not explain the persisting disinterest in the
shorter treatise, which contains the seed of Lefèvre’s inspiration.
Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali has been left virtually untouched
primarily because of its physical obscurity. There is sparse
reference to it in the critical work available on Lefèvre, with
Columbia’s Kristeller, Rice and Penham, and Europe’s Mandosio, Brach
and Pierozzi, and myself, being perhaps the only modern scholars to
have read the treatise. The single extant manuscript in six books of
De Magia naturali is held by the Czech Republic’s Knihovna
Univerziti. The University of Columbia graciously gave me permission
to work on that manuscript in the form of a microfilm copy housed
there through the generosity of Professor Paul O. Kristeller. The
49
Olomouc manuscript was not catalogued until after the middle of the
twentieth century, when Kristeller happened upon it in the course of
cataloguing Medieval/Renaissance Latin manuscripts throughout
European libraries. Kristeller had anticipated a critical edition by
Penham, though, as I confirmed through Penham’s son, the elder
passed away before engaging in the project.
The Vatican Library holds a 1568 manuscript copy of the first
four books of De Magia naturali in the Queen Christina collection,
and the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels holds a fragment of the
treatise. Looking at the first few pages of all three manuscripts,
one is drawn to the conclusion that they appear to have come from
the same prime manuscript. I have therefore decided to work from the
complete 1538 Olomouc manuscript, itself perhaps the extant prime.
Undoubtedly the most important specific research find came
during my final recheck of resources on Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali.
WorldCat had of course always listed the Longinus compilation, which
includes a De magia naturali for instance. No new works by that name
came up under these standard searches when I re-checked. For years,
nothing whatsoever came up on a Google search for De Magia naturali,
however in re-checking Google before preparing the final thesis, I
was pleasantly surprised. Apparently due to the popularity of the
music group Melek-Tha, Google had learned that the search for their
dark ambient music CD De Magia Naturali Daemonica was frequent.
In learning to display the title of their CD, Google
inadvertantly picked up a class that was offered at EPHE, École
Pratique des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne. That 2002-3 philology
class was taught by Jean-Marc Mandosio, who allegedly collaborated
50
with Jean-Pierre Brach on an edition and commentary of Jacques
Lefèvre d’Étaples’ De Magia naturali. I was enthusiastic to contact
their librarian regarding accessibility of the alleged French
edition. My first attempt at correspondence got no reply, but I plan
to continue this pursuit. There was another seminar taught by
Mandosio in 2004-5 on Book II, which verifies the correctness of my
decision to begin work on the De Magia with that key book.
Google then also picked up an article by Pierozzi and
Mandosio, in the revue Chrysopœia entitled, “L’interprétation
alchimique de deux travaux d’Hercule dans le De Magia naturali de
Lefèvre d’Étaples,” which I was able to get through interlibrary
loan. Although other sources such as Rice’s essay include
information on the De Magia, I will translate and paraphrase this
article’s account on pages 191-263 of Chrysopœia Volume V:
The complete manuscript MI 119 of the university library in
Olomouc, Czech Republic, dated 1538, is entitled Jacobi Fabri
Stapulensis Magici naturalis liber primus ad clarissimum virum
Germanum Ganaium regium senatore. Pierozzi chose the Olomouc
manuscript for this essay’s study since it is the only complete copy
in six books, and (aside from the Belgian fragment) is the oldest.
The manuscript in the Vatican Library, 1115 Reginense, seems
to have been copied around 1568-9 in Crackow by the Hungarian
humanist Andreas Dudith, also with his annotations. Rice had pointed
out that Dudith made his copy from an original undoubtedly brought
to Crackow by Jon Schilling, who frequented the Parisian milieu of
Ganay and Lefèvre d’Étaples between 1504 and 1512.
51
Latin manuscript 10875 of the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique
holds a fragment written in Gothic cursive, probably between 1496-
1501.
A fourth fragment I had not previously heard of, Latin
manuscript 7454 of la Bibliothèque nationale de France, is an
anonymous calligraphy copy on paper of Book I.
Lefèvre dedicated many books to his patron Germain de Ganay up
until 1503, for all magic, natural or demonic, was condemned
outright in 1504. This is an important event to bear in mind
regarding the epistles I mention in support of my postulation that
Lefèvre never did abandon magic. Pierozzi, like Rice, dates the
writing of De Magia naturali between Fall of 1492 and Fall of 1495,
since Book III Chapter 18 mentions Roland, the firstborn of Charles
VIII and Anne of Bretagne who was short-lived. Pierozzi in this
essay dates the De Magia at 1494, rather than Renaudet’s 1493 which
I’ve followed.
The first chapter of Book I presents a definition of magic,
wherein the magi practice a discipline of natural philosophy that
utilizes the secret effects of nature. Lefèvre adopts Pico’s formula
of magic operations as the marriage of the world. The key to
exploring and manipulating nature is the sympathetic relationship
between the active celestial and the passive terrestrial. A sexual
analogy is employed, with superior world as masculine, and inferior
world as receptive feminine.
For Lefèvre, the foundation of all magical operations is the
sympathetic relationship that exploits the friendship or opposition
between living beings. His magic includes occult artifices such as
52
ligatures and incantations. The terms I find in Book II or use
regarding it that correlate with these terms of Pierozzi’s are:
exercises, Coincidence of Opposites, binding chains, and the poets’
songs. As I have done, Pierozzi notes the influence of Ficino and
Pico throughout Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali.
In Book I, Lefèvre examines in detail the various
correspondences between the signs of the zodiac, the four elements
and the four humors. He uses the Chaldean Image of the celestial
seen as a Great Animal, with the zodiacal body parts influencing
terrestrial bodies; the celestial agent, the terrestrial patient.
Lefèvre claims that if the friendships between things were
known, even miracles would cease to astound. He posits that natural
magic is an operational wisdom that exploits the principle
scientific knowledge attained in astrology, medicine and alchemy.
This I term Lefèvre’s decloaking of disciplines. He enjoins those
who want to learn in depth, to read not only Latin authors, but also
Chaldean and Indian authors.
Pierozzi notes the element of dialogue in Book II, as I have,
considering the mystical significance of numbers and referring
continually to teachings of the Pythagoreans, Chaldeans and
Kabbalists. While writing the De Magia, Lefèvre discovered the work
of Odo of Morimond, twelfth century specialist in number mysticism.
Subsequently, Lefèvre formulated the correlations between
mathematics, music and astrology with the same arguments as those in
Book II. Again I offer to term this Lefèvre’s decloaking of
disciplines.
53
Pierozzi and Mandosio’s translation on pages 200-1, of the
paragraph on the Pythagorean Silence that I have also found as a key
passage in Chapter 14, is more of a paraphrase than my own
translation which strives to capture the poetic idiom that itself
embodies the mystical teachings it imparts. As a result of the
translation choices or understanding, Pierozzi and Mandosio have a
slightly different interpretation than myself of Lefèvre’s intended
meaning, emphasizing the distinction Lefèvre makes between sacred
numerology and sacred names, whereas I emphasize his correlation of
them and the point of the passage, which is negation or sacrifice
onto the Ground of Silence (Evans II:90, f. 218v). This highlights
the importance of multiple published editions to provide a breadth
of possible interpretations and a depth of understanding for future
scholars studying the De Magia naturali.
Pierozzi does however concur that modern Kabbalah becomes an
essential key for mystical exegesis of Scriptures. Although, the
authors perhaps overlook the essence of the link between De Magia
naturali and Quincuplex Psalterium, since Lefèvre does employ in the
latter for instance, Scriptural exegesis that includes the sacred
Hebrew alphabet alongside sacred numerology — a complete system of
gematria. This I find clear proof of in Quincuplex Psalterium pages
170-203, Psalm 118 (119). Lefèvre divides this long Psalm into 22
Spiritual Meditations, each ascribed a letter of the Hebrew
alphabet, its name, what it signifies (quality), and its number.
Pierozzi singles out another passage wherein Abraham is said
to have been granted the potency to engender his descendents through
the number of his name, which is the quinary or 5. I had also
54
written on the importance in Book II of the 5th element, the
quintessential Spirit that elicits God’s grace into the world.
The text that could be considered the source of Lefèvre’s
Kabbalistic Book II Pierozzi, acknowledging Copenhaver, cites as
Pico’s Conclusiones, wherein is the same type of Kabbalistic
exegesis of the Old Testament and the Trinity. Lefèvre and Pico see
in Kabbalah a method of exegesis suited to confirm Christian
theology as in accord with the truths of ancient theologians.
In Book III, Lefèvre returns to more classic astrological
theory, reviewing the constellations while recalling specific
mythological characters associated with them. The Triangle, for
example, by analogy to the Trinity stimulates scientific and
artistic capacities in human beings. He examines the properties of
the planets that dominate each constellation and the influences that
they exert on the vegetal and animal world. Lefèvre’s decloaking of
mythology according to what I would call a mystical-metaphorical
interpretation, Pierozzi designates as an alchemical-metaphorical
interpretation. These ideas concur, confirming my assertion that De
Magia naturali is a useful treatise for convincing scholars to
decloak mythology mystically, Spiritually – anagogically.
Pierozzi’s summary also points to Books III & IV specifically
as fertile ground for critical analysis of mythology in terms of
mysticism, Spirit. In Book IV, Greco-Roman mythological divinities
are aligned with the 12 signs of the zodiac according to named
temples or houses. Pierozzi and Mandosio chose to write this
alchemical-metaphorical essay on Lefèvre’s two chapters (one from
each of Books III & IV) treating the exploits of Hercules. The
55
authors find Book III Chapter 6 and Book IV Chapter 18, of
alchemical and astrological motifs, interlaced with allegorical and
symbolic Images. Beyond the scope of this thesis, I will only
comment further that their essay addresses such charged Images (to
Christianity and Judaism) as the golden apples in the Garden of the
Hesperides and the dragon, the serpent. Hercules is symbolic of the
operations [exercises] the alchemist [Magus/Maga] employs in his/her
alchemical [mystical-magical] practice. The serpent-spirit is like a
flame that burns eternally.
The bulk of the collaborative article is Mandosio’s
translation and commentary on those two chapters, which at the time
of writing in the mid-1990’s were the ony two chapters he had read
of the treatise. Mandosio concludes that Lefèvre is the forgotten
precurser to the birth of a veritable alchemical mythological
tradition found in Augurelli’s 1515 Chrysopœia, and in Bracesco’s
1542 Il Legno della vita and 1544 L’Esposizione di Geber filosofo.
He surmises, as I did, that Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali was known
through a confidential distribution. These sources and observations
strongly support my thesis. Mandosio notes numerous other Primary
Sources than what I’ve compiled below that Lefèvre may have had
occasion to read before writing this treatise. I include Mandosio’s
mention of Manilius’ Astronomica, Pico’s Conclusiones and Ficino’s
De Amore in the listing below.
Concluding my translation and paraphrase of Pierozzi and
Mandosio’s essay, “L’interprétation alchimique de deux travaux
d’Hercule dans le De Magia naturali de Lefèvre d’Étaples” on pages
191-263 of Chrysopœia Volume V:
56
Book V is a series of tables on the passage of diverse
celestial figures through each sign of the zodiac. Book VI presents
tables of the degrees in the function of which the constellations,
through the diverse signs of the zodiac, produce extraordinary
effects on the life of the whole universe. Lefèvre concludes his
treatise with an examination of the reciprocal rapport of attraction
and repulsion, which the celestial figures embody in their diverse
aspects.
The above summation sentence of Pierozzi and Mandosio confirms
my assessment of the central key in De Magia naturali as the
Coincidence of Opposites.
57
3. Snapshot in Time of the Tradition
Lefèvre’s life and work has only recently come to the
attention of U.S. scholars who focus on mysticism, tracing the
tradition of masters through Medieval and Renaissance eras and
suggesting their influence on subsequent theologians and
philosophers. In the 1980’s article by Kent Emery, Jr., he asserts
that Lefèvre’s teachings contributed to the evolution of l’ecole
abstraite, the abstract school, an indigenous French school of
Spirituality the influence of which, Emery claims, reached to the
philosophy of Hegel.
In the absence of a published critical edition of De Magia
naturali, Emery is missing the puzzle piece that places Lefèvre’s
awareness of and commitment to the principle of Coincidence of
Opposites and ascension not only with his 1491 studies of Lull, but
also directly from Pico’s teachings at that time on Christian
Kabbalah. Lacking that information, Emery places Lefèvre’s
contribution to this tradition after his turn-of-the-century studies
of Cusa. As mentioned above, Renaudet dates Lefèvre’s studies of
Nicholas of Cusa during the first decade and a half of the sixteenth
century (661). Thus because of De Magia naturali’s physical
obscurity, Lefèvre has not been counted among the Christian
Kabbalists of his day. My work on the treatise sheds light on
Lefèvre’s role in propagating the prisca theologia in abstract form.
Gershom Scholem in Kabbalah suggests further research to
substantiate that, along with heirarchical metaphors, philosophical
speculation on sacred Names came through the Christian Platonic
58
tradition via the De Divisione Naturae of John Scotus Erigena (48).
This comment directly ties in Lefèvre’s writings, since he followed
the tradition of masters that included Raymond Lull and Erigena.
Importantly, Emery emphasizes that Lefèvre reinforced teachings,
aside from those of Lull and Cusanus, of mystic Church Fathers such
as St. Bonaventure and the Victorines, which were then later
legitimized by Lefèvre’s students Josse Clichtove and Charles de
Bovelles, then by the Capuchin Benet of Canfield, then Laurent de
Paris who expressed prisca theologia as the Palace of Divine Love,
then by the Capuchin Joseph du Tremblay (Emery online).
This clearly direct inheritance, which Emery traces over just
a few hundred years, inclines one to accept the legitimacy of the
Renaissance humanists’ claim to have rediscovered an ancient prisca
theologia through an unbroken chain of teachers. This thesis further
substantiates that the tradition of masters is unbroken even up to
today’s Academy. To illustrate the impact Renaissance humanists had
on future thought, I again cite Emery’s article in Journal of the
History of Ideas, “modern historians recognize an indigenous French
school of spirituality, which one authority calls ‘l’école
abstraite.’” Of the founder Benet of Canfield, and his contemporary
Laurent de Paris, Emery says, “For both, the principle of the
coincidence of opposites is central” (Emery online).
59
III. METHODOLOGY & BOOK II ON CHRISTIAN KABBALAH
1. Stigma of the Non-Christian
It seems that modern theologians and scholars before Emery’s
time would categorize De Magia naturali, even sight unseen, as an
erroneous early work that he outgrew and regretted. This seems to be
due to the persistence of the stigma associated with natural magic,
and, more importantly, due to the persistent misunderstanding of
Lefèvre’s interpretation of it. Lefèvre’s public repudiation of
natural magic seems to me to be rather simply in compliance with
religious censorship, expressed to avoid persecution as a heretic.
Paul J. W. Miller’s Introduction to the translation of Pico’s
On the Dignity of Man, a book that includes On Being and the One and
Heptaplus is somewhat biased, yet otherwise provides a good summary
of Pico’s humanist epistemology and methodology. Miller negates what
I posit as Lefèvre’s, and Pico’s, decloaking of religions to a
universal prisca theologia in such comments as, “Pico treats the
qabbalah with more respect than it perhaps deserves.” Although,
Miller is justified in concluding that the humanists’ methodology
was to utilize tools from other sources in a Christian Biblical
exegesis (Pico xi). That was a goal of Renaissance Academia, though
our current goal in the Academy should include critical analysis
from outside the confines of Christianity, since mysticism and
shamanism are universally human.
What Miller presents as the humanists’ misinformation, “A
sacred religious truth was presented by these thinkers in
60
allegorical form, hidden under mythological fables” (ix), I posit as
truth in the sense that human myths can be interpreted in mystical
terms according to how all humans think and perceive. Lefèvre
believed so, including in De Magia naturali many examples of his
mystical-metaphorical reading of mythology, astrological or
otherwise. Treatment above of Pierozzi and Mandosio’s essay on a
chapter in each of Books III & IV addresses Lefèvre’s
interpretations of Hercules and the serpent. Through number
mysticism in Book II, besides the planetary Greek and Roman gods and
goddesses, Lefèvre decloaks such mythological characters as Phoebus,
Minos, Cacus and Rhadamanthys, Cÿbele, Narcissus, Phillide and
Flora, and Daedalus — some of whom will be addressed herein. I point
out vehemently that Lefèvre’s anagogical decloaking of mythology
according to mystical-Spiritual metaphors is an essential and timely
key for current literary theory.
Miller’s Introduction demonstrates just how Pico [and thus
Lefèvre] reconciled St. Thomas’ distinction between God and
creatures, and Aristotle’s God with Plato’s Good, in that the
humanists equated the highest principle of each with God as
existence or being itself, juxtaposed to its opposite in creatures
who merely participate in existence or being (xxi-iii). Philosophies
and theologies were thus decloaked into the binary Coincidence of
Opposites, sometimes simplified as the All of God and the nothing of
man.
Following Aristotle’s injunction that man can actualize
virtues through habituation, Pico asserted man’s moral freedom
[which Lefèvre then taught as freedom to moral choice] (xv). Like
61
Pythagoras and Plato, they propounded an active participation on the
part of their students for the ethical choice between good and evil
(xvi). The Images or Forms and Names employed in this tradition as
it passed from teacher to student were intended for use in practical
exercises, or Positive theologies. The Christian challenge was to
demonstrate how these were reconciled with the Negative theology of
receiving grace through Christ.
One of Pico’s fundamental theses is that his universal concord
between philosophies and religions “is embodied in the collaboration
of man’s free moral choice with a return to God which we do not
make, but receive” (xvii). Herein is Lefèvre’s severing, or
receiving through sacrifice, of Pythagorean number mysticism at the
point where it becomes the One who alone descends on the Ground of
Silence.
Voluntque Cabalam litterariam in numerorum secretam
philosophiam Magicumque traducere. Hinc pendet secreta
Pythagore philosophia. Hinc arcana numerorum singula in
solo silentio discenda.
And they will the written Cabala to conduct them across
into the secret philosophy and magic of numbers. From
here Pythagorean philosophy hangs secreted. From here
the mystery of numbers descends alone on the desert
silence. (Evans Ch. 14 II:90, f. 218v)
Both Pico and Lefèvre thus equate magic with Christian
mysticism. Retelling their propagation of this prisca theologia of
aequalitas, equality, is the fulcrum on which this thesis is
balanced. That scholars belonging to a particular religious
62
tradition such as Catholicism or Judaism retell the ancient,
pristine theology as slanted toward their own religion is what I
protest. I posit that these Renaissance humanists were not Christian
Fundamentalists, but instead practiced their open-minded humanist
creed of the study of human culture, particularly that of man’s
intellectual activities. Miller concurs, in that he finds
The permanent interest and value of Pico’s view of
nature comes from his seeing the physical order as a
translation of philosophical and religious truth. In
this way, physics, philosophy, and Scripture literally
say the same things in different languages. (xii)
It is the humanists’ exegesis of religion along with the
decloaking of these disciplines into a metaphorical language of
Images that leads me to insist that their prisca theologia be
studied under the broad discipline of Literature as the mythology of
sacred texts. Mythology embodies archetypal human Ideas through
Images just as prisca theologia does. More importantly, prisca
theologia is a language of Images that can inform our study of
mythology in a way intended by the Renaissance humanists. Lefèvre in
Book II, for instance, interprets both Ovid and Vergil in terms of
his “Pythagorean philosophy” or number mysticism (Evans Ch. 2 II:53,
f. 200v; Ch. 3 II:57, f. 202v; Ch. 4 II:60, f. 203).
I suggest that Lefèvre’s conviction to ground the subjective,
abstract mystical experiences not only in metaphor, but also in
objective action, is the step that caused many scholars to overlook
a key to his thinking. Unlike the mystic poets cloistered in
monasteries and convents, Lefèvre lived in the secular working
63
world. His ardor, which found him traveling often, served the
humanist purpose of recovering and publishing the writings of pagan
and Christian mystics whose mode of expression was poetic.
Lefèvre further grounded subjective, metaphorical abstractions
in the world through his rigorous teaching at the Collège du
Cardinale of the University of Paris. The teachings embodied his
epistemological convictions: Lefèvre began teaching his students
with Imagination through study of Aristotle’s many words, proceeding
to Reason through study of Scripture and the Church Fathers, and
ascending to Silence in Intellect through study of authors such as
Pythagoras or Nicolas of Cusa. Grounded in the world of publishing
and teaching, he was diligently engaged in climbing up the Spiritual
ladder with his students through words that were perpetually
inclined towards Silence.
Revealing through two choice words of subjective abstraction
acceptable in his day exactly what was the highest rung of this
concrete ladder to the divine, Lèfevre equated Intellect with
intuition and faith. An important lesson of this teaching technique
is that for Lèfevre and other abstract thinkers such as Pythagoras,
Cusa and the Kabbalists, abstract symbolism itself was a technique
they could utilize to ascend to union with God, whereas those with
other modes of thinking needed to hear abstractions expressed
through metaphor to access their meaning. Lèfevre correlated the
metaphors of Scripture, the metaphors within writings of the Church
Fathers and pagan poets, with abstractions of Pythagoras such as
those which Reuchlin later summarizes in On the Art of the Kabbalah:
64
De Arte Cabalistica: “This is Pythagoras in a nutshell. Two is the
first number; one is the basis of number” (155).
Of the Church Fathers, Lefèvre also valued Cusa’s teaching of
this coincidentia oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites.
Lefèvre’s keen intent on sharing these intuitions, this faith, with
his Catholic students and the Christian public at large, with the
seeming ease of leaving behind their prior Kabbalistic, magic,
Pythagorean and Chaldean garments, I posit has been misinterpreted
as an evolution beyond erroneous teachings.
Quite the opposite may be more accurate: that the seed for
much of Lefèvre’s later writings lies hidden in De Magia naturali —
hidden because of its physical obscurity and not because its
metaphors lack clarity. The treatise is neither greater nor lesser
than his later writings, but may be more succinct regarding his
vision of man’s relationship with God, which is the reason I am
endeavoring a complete transcription alongside all of his other
works, and adding the uncommon dimension of translation into
English, to be followed or accompanied by a critical edition of the
treatise. Relative to that project, I will engage Quincuplex
Psalterium as Christian Kabbalah. Quincuplex Psalterium is both a
resource for my work on De Magia naturali and a subsequently written
support to my postulations.
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2. Book II on Kabbalah
Akin to Pico della Mirandola’s principle of universal accord,
Book II of the De Magia is a typical humanist synthesis of
metaphorical systems of expression: that of Neoplatonism and
Ficino’s macrocosm of the planets within the microcosm of man; of
angelology; of Pythagorean philosophy and numerical ascension; of
Pico’s Christian Kabbalah and genesis; and of the poets’
anthropomorphic male-female metaphors for union in divine love.
The primal exilic metaphor of the Fall from One to 2 that
forms the scaffolding of Book II, and which is the Coincidence of
Opposites, always followed by an ascension in return, leads one to
agree with Lefèvre’s categorizing of Book II as Pythagorean
philosophy or Christian Kabbalah. That is substantiated in the
Kabbalah’s system of the 10 sefirot depicting emanation of divine
attributes down from Keter, the Crown or God, into creation. The
Kabbalist’s technique then effects ascension from Malkhut, Kingdom
or Presence, back upwards towards Keter, and beyond to the En Sof,
Infinity or unfathomable depth. The En Sof then, equates with the
Ground of Silence in Book II, the “severed beyond” that numerical
ascension sacrifices one into.
De Magia naturali Book II follows this formula of numerical
ascension: through contemplation of the Coincidence of Opposites
expressed metaphorically as anthropomorphic relationship of the 2
into union with the One, man can apprehend the Trinity, which
precedes the multiplicity of genesis. The unchanging constant in
Lefèvre’s writings may be simply this consistent and systematic
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intent on ascent to the divine, with numerical ascension essentially
the only magic and mysticism of which he writes.
As Rice has noted regarding De Magia naturali Book II, he
cherishes in particular numerical ascension, following the tradition
of masters of number mysticism, which includes Pythagoras, the magi
and the Kabbalists (“The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre
d’Étaples” 26-7). I posit that Lefèvre’s metaphysical thinking in
abstract mathematical symbols requires a metaphorical-mythological
clothing akin to that used by mystic poets, and that his synthesis
of multicultural metaphors has a logic that is simpler and perhaps
more profound than one might think at first glance.
Lefèvre divides natural philosophy into two divisions:
philosophy, the theoretical science; and natural magic, the
practical science. This magic works through attractions and
repulsions that knit together heavenly and earthly things (Rice,
“The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples” 21-2).
Drawing upon the authority of contemporary religious and
scholarly writers, I hope to elucidate Lefèvre’s focus on
multicultural mystical symbolism of divine union in order to offer a
simpler, less contradictory, view into the evolution of his
writings. This particular treatise is the fulcrum point between
Lefèvre’s early work on Aristotle and his subsequent confinement to
Christian themes, the fulcrum between pagan and Christian. Lefèvre’s
epistemology and methodology never changed, but the cloth he dressed
them in and his sources of authority did, because of political
pressure in the guise of religion.
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Lefèvre, though, did find that Christian teachings clearly
expressed his own religious experiences and convictions. This
arranged marriage to Christianity did, after all, prove to be a
marriage of love. For example, in De Magia naturali, Lefèvre relates
that God delights in the number 3, and associates the triangle with
the Trinity: “From the triangle all things come; it is the
beginning, middle and end. [. . .] It inspires love of justice and
equity, for the equilateral triangle is the figure of aequalitas”
(Rice, “The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples” 24).
Lefèvre’s Ideal of the triangle as expressing Trinity, aequalitas,
is thus also a metaphor for the freedom to moral choice, an ideal of
perfection that Lefèvre strove for even within the imperfections of
his working world. Through sacred geometry and number mysticism
then, Lefèvre married Christianity to Kabbalah.
Lefèvre, in Book II, honors the ancient tradition of masters
from whom he inherited the principle of Coincidence of Opposites and
number mysticism in general. Rice summarizes that, in Book II,
Lefèvre refers to number mysticism as Pythagorean philosophy. He had
inherited Ficino’s teaching of the propagation of mathematical
philosophy by Hermes Trismegistus, Zalmoxis, Zoroaster, Pythagoras,
the Egyptian magi, Plato and the Kabbalists — numerical ascension
being the most ancient teaching of the magi. In the language of
Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism, Lefèvre wrote that numbers and
figures best express the love and harmony linking creation to the
divine paradigm. He wrote on emanation from the One, and of the
mental technique of using arithmetical-geometrical symbolism to
ascend golden chains to a vision of the One and of the Trinity. The
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correspondences Lefèvre draws reflect the harmony of natural magic,
which he now understood as a prisca theologia of Christianity (“The
De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples” 26-7, n.28). These
observations support my arguments that Academia ought to engage
humanity’s esoteric, phenomenological tradition that crosses
historical and cultural boundaries. As importantly, Rice himself
here provides support for my assertion that Lefèvre, although active
in the working world, was indeed a mystic.
D.P. Walker explains, in Spiritual and Demonic Magic from
Ficino to Campanella, that natural magic was the term used for
describing numerical correspondence between positions of heavenly
bodies and musical intervals, belonging to a cosmological theory
that the whole universe is constructed on musical proportions (81).
Yet Rice’s assessment of the astrology and magic of which
Lefèvre and other Renaissance humanists wrote is ultimately a
negative one:
The assumption of a sympathetic relationship
between things heavenly and earthly, the one agent, the
other patient, was for Lefèvre — as it had been for his
ancient and medieval predecessors — the guiding
principle of natural magic. The basic analogy is sexual.
The celestial bodies are masculine; the world is
feminine, passively receptive to heavenly influence. The
mundus inferior is as straitly linked to the superior
mundus as Juno, the female principle, is joined to
Jupiter, the male. Between the two worlds the attentive
magician discerns a dense and subtle network of
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correspondences and “secret” effects, simple in
principle, enormously complex in detail.
The secret effects Lefèvre attributed to the
constellations will sufficiently illustrate the
anecdotal absurdity of his method. [. . .]
The shape of a constellation also determines the
character of its influence. Lefèvre found in Deloton,
the Triangle, an especially congenial subject for a
fanciful essay packed with historical exempla,
quotations from the poets, and Christian analogies. [. .
.] A detailed system of correspondences between parts of
the body and signs of the zodiac relates the inferius
animal, the human body, to the magnum animal, the sky.
[. . .] Around this fundamental correspondence, Lefèvre
embroidered — with a perfectly conventional and
stereotyped ingenuity — a host of others, connecting
with the planets and signs of the zodiac the four
elements, the four humors, and the secret properties of
plants and animals, colors, stones and drugs. (24-5)
In a twist that I can’t help but see as intelligently
intentional, Rice concludes his 10-page synopsis of Lefèvre’s 350-
page treatise with a hint as to where Lefèvre really stood with
magic. He begins the concluding paragraph explaining how Lefèvre’s
opinion of magic was a high one, then Rice explains how on the other
hand Lefèvre later published “the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitiones
Petri apostoli, a work whose most frequently quoted and illustrated
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episodes were Peter’s disputes with Simon Magus” (28). Rice shows us
the paradox of contradiction that Lefèvre presents publicly:
[. . .] he publicly repudiated his earlier views and
attacked even natural magic as a dangerous delusion.
After pointing out that the Recognitiones Petri contains
“apostolic doctrine,” Lefèvre emphasized what he took to
be the chief profit to be got from it: we should all
especially admire this book “because it attacks every
sort of vanity. To begin with, it refutes the deceptions
of magic, so that no one may henceforth find refuge from
his own errors under the cover of magic of any sort; I
say of any sort, because no magic is good magic. It is
nonsense to believe that any magic is natural or good,
for natural magic is a wicked deception practiced by men
who seek to hide their crimes under a respectable name.”
The shift is typical of his intellectual development,
and parallels his growing disenchantment with Hermes
Trismegistus, Pythagoras and the Platonici, a shift the
easier to make because virtually all the ideas he had
come to disapprove of when they were called “magical”
seemed to him as admirable as ever when he found them in
the Dionysian corpus, the Fathers of the church, Ramon
Lull or Cusanus. (28-9)
Rice thus inadvertently supports my argument that Lefèvre
never did abandon the Christian Kabbalists’ Trinitarian natural
magic. I feel that in these closing remarks Rice may have actually
meant to elicit that very inquiry, since the paradox in Lefèvre’s
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positions really is too obvious to ignore. An example is found in
the 1510 title to a Trinitarian work by Richard of St. Victor that
apparently Lefèvre had published by Henricus Stephanus in 1510. The
descriptive title of the commentary to the work reads thus, followed
by my translation:
Metaphysica(m) & humani sensus transcendentem apicem sed
rationali modo complectens intelligentiam, quod opus ad
dei trini honorem et piarum mentium exercitationem.
Foeliciter prodeat in lucem.
Metaphysics and the transcendent apex of human
sensation, but embracing the intellect by means of
reason, which work to the threefold god I’m honoring, is
the exercise of pious minds. [The Trinity] Felicitously
appearing in the light. (Richard, title)
Miller’s summary of Pico’s overarching philosophy expresses
the premise on which Lefèvre’s natural magic worked, and the premise
about creation I adopt in this thesis:
For one thing, Pico had a philosophic view of the world,
including man, according to which each part of the world
is wholly present in every other part. It follows that a
truth about any one part immediately reverberates
through the whole, and discloses truth about every other
part. (x)
Miller points out that the key to Pico’s Scriptural exegesis
is revealed in Heptaplus, Septiform Narration of the Six Days of
Creation, Pico’s principle being to identify within Biblical
doctrines truths of science and philosophy (xi). This observation
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reveals that humanists interpreted creation through the number
mysticism of Genesis. A sixfold genesis is exactly where Lefèvre
begins De Magia naturali Book II. Chapter 1 delineates the flow from
unity – the first and absolute principle from which all other
principles form — of the binary – the principle of alterity and the
number of power (Evans II:50, f. 198). In this juxtaposition of
unity and binary — One and 2 — Lefèvre portrays the Coincidence of
Opposites as the relationship from which the sixfold genesis of
creation ensues.
Lefèvre continues building the scaffolding on which number
mysticism rests, stating that after the binary is the ternary number
longing, the unborn nearest to nature itself (Evans Ch. 1 II:50, f.
198). This means that, still within the unmanifest nature of God,
Spirit is nearest of the 3 to manifest nature. The ternary thus
embodies the resultant middle element formed between the Coincidence
of Opposites of Father and Son, and is itself the Trinitarian
longing, breath or Spirit for reunification of the exiled binary
with unity. The Holy Spirit of Christ is thus shown to be the
binding love-nexus that moves the parts into reunification with the
whole.
After the ternary, the quaternary number connection is
vaporized and perfected (Evans Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198). The quaternary,
like vapor, is thus a perfect unmanifest foundation, which supports
manifest creation. The quinary number of action extends out from
that womb, accompanied by the senary to the end of creation (Evans
Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198). The given end or completion of creation, later
designated as the septenary rest, would thus be Kabbalah’s Malkhut
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or Kingdom (Evans Ch. 16 II:94, f. 220v). By beginning with a
septiform narration of the six days of creation, Lefèvre thus
reveals in the first chapter of Book II, that the natural magic of
number mysticism is identical to Biblical Scripture.
Of great interest for future study of Book II as Kabbalah is
that Lefèvre first depicts a septiform creation, just as the Image
of the 10 sefirot is sometimes depicted as the truncated version of
the cosmic tree, the version comprised of only 7 spheres. They are
sometimes correlated with the Hindu Chakra system, as well as with
the Ptolemaic system of 7 planets. Before the treatise concludes
however, Lefèvre discusses all 10 numbers. In Pearl Epstein’s
analysis of Kabbalah as detailed below, she concurs with my
interpretation of the cosmic tree as anthropomorphic, representing
man’s nervous system joining Heaven and Earth, and the ascension of
man’s Spirit through the internal spheres back up to God (Kabbalah:
The Way of the Jewish Mystic 69-72).
I assert that a fundamental purpose of Lefèvre’s Book II would
have been to discern the process of genesis through number
mysticism, natural magic, which would lead in return up ultimately
to the Trinity within unity. Miller reminds us that, “This
Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy at all, but a cultural and
educational program” (xiii). Lefèvre would have intended On Natural
Magic Book II, at least in part, as a number mysticism or numerical
ascension exercise manual for students. The reason humanists placed
such an emphasis on the practical half of philosophy is that they
believed in God’s continual accessibility to humans through our very
body. Theirs was an anthropomorphic religion that conceived of
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divine union as a reality literally within each human. Miller
explains thus:
The natural world, in this sort of interpretation,
is a physical embodiment or model of philosophic and
religious truth, not a mere symbol or metaphor of a
supernatural order: nature actually embodies God’s
goodness and wisdom. The parallel between one part of
nature and another, between man and nature, or between
man and God, is not a poetic fiction but a real
isomorphism or identity of structure. (xii)
In Pico’s “First Proem” to Heptaplus, he mentions another work
in progress on the Psalms of David, wherein he interprets them
according to the secrets of nature found within Genesis (67).
Perhaps Lefèvre intended his Quincuplex Psalterium as a continuation
of Pico’s work in extrapolating Genesis in the Psalms, since it
expounds extrinsically through commentary what is intrinsic in De
Magia naturali. I chose Book II as the topic of this thesis for the
reason that it contains the key of genesis for interpreting the
other five books, and most likely his larger work Quincuplex
Psalterium as well. It will be a substantial future scholarly
undertaking alone to compare Pico’s Heptaplus with Lefèvre’s Book
II.
Regarding the continuum from theoretical philosophy to
practical philosophy, Pico held that the cross and Christ’s blood
signify that the approach to God is open for man through ascension
in imitatio Christi. Lefèvre felt the need to unify action and
contemplation, describing Christ in his native tongue of Middle
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French as, “nostre pensee, nostre parler, nostre vie...nostre tout”
(Renaudet 603; Bedouelle 223). “Our thought, our speech, our
life...our all,” echoing Zoroaster the Chaldean’s famous quote,
“Good thoughts, good words, good deeds” (Greenlees, Title Page).
Lefèvre thus taught the practice of philosophy together with the
theory of philosophy.
Rice asserts that Lefèvre, in the Olomouc manuscript of De
Magia naturali, makes the earliest recorded reference in France to
the Kabbalah (Rice, “The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre
d’Étaples” 27). I would amend that claim to read, “the earliest
recorded Christian reference in France to the Kabbalah by that
name.” I feel it is important to clarify the source and history of
Kabbalah in order to obtain a clear understanding of Lefèvre’s
contribution to the tradition known as Christian Kabbalah.
Scholem provides us with a detailed account of Kabbalah’s
evolution. He argues against the view of adoption by pre-Kabbalists
of the Iranian theory of two principles, yet he refers to Kabbalah’s
indebtedness to Sufi mysticism of Islam, and comments that some of
its similes are Babylonian. Also, the Kabbalistic link between
gematria — sacred numerology — and angelology was either formulated
in Babylonia, or within the Italian Jewish tradition (Kabbalah 26,
32, 35). In Book II Chapter 10 Lefèvre delights in this correlation,
which he fully develops through commentary in his Quincuplex
Psalterium, Fivefold Psalter.
Scholem defines Kabbalah as the historical interpenetration of
Jewish Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. The doctrine of the Sefirot with
its 10 spheres is likely from the Pythagorean School or from Gnostic
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doctrine. Scholem concludes that the main part of Sefer Yezirah was
written between the third and sixth centuries by a Palestinian Jew
(27, 45). Gnosis is defined as, “Intuitive apprehension of spiritual
truths, an esoteric form of knowledge sought by the Gnostics”
(“Gnosis”). Again, Lefèvre’s methodology, and highest rung of his
philosophical theology – Intuition – corresponds with Kabbalistic
wisdom.
These were early stages of Kabbalah’s evolution, for:
Contemporaneous with the growth of hasidut in France and
Germany, the first historical stages of the Kabbalah
emerged in southern France [. . .]. Sefer ha-Bahir,
ostensibly an ancient Midrash, appeared in Provence some
time between 1150 and 1200 but no earlier; it was
apparently edited there from a number of treatises which
came from Germany or directly from the East. An analysis
of the work leaves no doubt that it was not originally
written in Provence [. . .]. Cast in the form of
interpretations of scriptural verses, particularly
passages of mythological character, the Bahir transforms
the Merkabah tradition into a Gnostic tradition
concerning the powers of God that lie within the Divine
Glory (Kavod), whose activity at the creation is alluded
to through symbolic interpretation of the Bible and the
aggadha. Remnants of a clearly Gnostic terminology and
symbolism are preserved, albeit through a Jewish
redaction, which connects the symbols with motifs
already well known from the aggadah. This is especially
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so with regard to anything that impinges on keneset
Yisrael, which is identified with the Shekhinah, with
the Kavod, and with the bat (“daughter”), who comprises
all paths of wisdom. There are indications in the
writings of Eleazar of Worms that he too knew this
terminology, precisely in connection with the symbolism
of the Shekhinah. The theory of the Sefirot was not
finally formulated in the Sefer ha-Bahir, and many of
the book’s statements were not understood, even by the
early kabbalists of Western Europe. The teaching of the
Bahir is introduced as ma’aseh merkabah, the term
“Kabbalah” not yet being used. (42-3)
I plan to further research Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’ De Magia
naturali Book II with reference to the Bahir, in order to compare
Venus with Shekhinah and the bat, and to compare the Ideas that
number mysticism represent in terms of the powers of God within the
Kavod. Following Lefèvre’s extrapolation of what is taught
intrinsically in De Magia naturali into his extrinsic interpretation
of those teachings as Scripture in Quincuplex Psalterium, it will be
of great interest to compare that book also with the Bahir’s
“interpretations of scriptural verses, particularly passages of
mythological character” and passages on the Kavod “whose activity at
the creation is alluded to through symbolic interpretation of the
Bible.”
The Sefer ha-Bahir stresses “the mysticism of the lights of
the intellect,” its spirit reflected in later Neoplatonic literature
as the “’Book of the Five Substances of Pseudo-Empedocles’ (from the
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school of Ibn Masarra in Spain)” (48). Notice again that “the lights
of the intellect” as highest mysticism correlates with Lefèvre’s
Intellect as final vehicle. Empedocles is named by Lefèvre in Book
II as regards his version of Coincidence of Opposites and the
quinary (Evans Ch. 4 II:59-60, f. 203). Scholem continues with a
listing of metaphors from several texts — and expressive of our
humanists’ syncretistic blending of traditions — that reveal the
“supernal essences” from “the highest hidden mystery” or “the
primeval darkness”:
[. . .] primeval wisdom, wonderful light, the hashmal,
the mist (arafel), the throne of light, the wheel (ofan)
of greatness, the cherub, the wheel of the Chariot, the
surrounding ether, the curtain, the throne of glory, the
place of souls, and the outer place of holiness. (48)
Scholem’s book Kabbalah is an encyclopedic and excellent
reference tool for further research into Lefèvre’s Book II. His
chapter on “Practical Kabbalah” points out the at times vehement
opposition to the magical operations of practical magic. Scholem
reports that, for the most part, the boundary between physical magic
and purely inward magic was easily crossed in either direction. Yet,
he singles out Pico as one whose usage of the term “practical
Kabbalah” was ambiguous and contradictory, a semantic issue (182-3).
Scholem concludes this on the issue of semantic pejoratives: “From
the fifteenth century on, the semantic division into ‘speculative’
and ‘practical’ Kabbalah became prevalent, though it was not
necessarily meant to be prejudicial to the latter” (183).
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The importance, to scholars like Lefèvre at the turn of the
sixteenth century, of mathematically generated images as forms
expressing Ideas was captured in allegorical representations such as
Rabelais’ Pantagruel, first published in 1532 (Gargantua and
Pantagruel Chronology). In the Glossary to Oeuvres Complètes, the
stereotype of good evangelical theologian immortalized in Rabelais’
character Hippothadée, is said to allude to either Lefèvre d’Étaples
or to St. Jude Thadée (998). The anti-heretical stereotype Lefèvre
was stamped with was, I assert, due to his intentionally exaggerated
denouncements of heretical teachings — a practical means of evading
censure. During the turn of the sixteenth century, it would have
been far safer to suffer trial by satire than to be brought to trial
by the Inquisition for openly expounding Jewish mysticism.
After the turn of the sixteenth century, in a climate volatile
with anti-semitism, Reuchlin courageously published De arte
Cabalistica, in which he wrote: “This is Pythagoras in a nutshell.
Two is the first number; one is the basis of number” (155). A
contemporary of Rabelais and Lefèvre, Johannes Reuchlin was brought
before the Inquisition in 1513 for propounding Judaism. Lefèvre
spoke out on his behalf during the ensuing disputes over the ruling
of heresy. By 1520, both Inquisition and the Sorbonne academics had
condemned Reuchlin’s teachings as heretical (Hughes 102-3). Yet by
then Reuchlin had already won the support of other humanistic
scholars, and had dedicated a pivotal book to Pope Leo X, a Medici
who had favored Reuchlin’s cause. De arte Cabalistica was published
in 1517, at the same time as Lefèvre’s Introductorium astronomicum
discussed herein.
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3. Network of Christian Kabbalists
Beginning with the tradition of masters that Lefèvre claims in
De Magia naturali: Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie reminds us, in The
Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, that Pythagoras traveled widely
at an early age to gather the wisdom of the ancients — to Egypt and
possibly as far as Persia to study the teachings of Zoroaster and
the Chaldeans. Pythagoras learned that the monad/unity/One is a
divine principle underlying number, but in itself is not a number at
all. Dyad/2, represents the possibility of duality/Logos — the
relation of one thing to another – while the triad/3 achieves that
relation in actuality. This is the archaic paradigm of cosmogenesis,
the pattern of creation resulting in the world. The long tradition
of masters passing down the concepts we are considering here
continues to proceed from Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle, St.
Augustine, to the Neoplatonists and Neopythagoreans (20-2, 33-43).
Before the turn of the sixteenth century in Italy, Marsilio
Ficino’s Florentine Platonic Academy became a renowned institution,
a mecca for the era’s intellectuals. Platonic philosophy united this
informal gathering of scholars, some of whom traveled far to
occasionally join in this intimate learning experience (Brucker,
Renaissance Florence 228-9). As related above via Renaudet, in the
winter of 1491-2 Lefèvre made the arduous journey to Florence
seeking out Pico and Ficino.
Central at the Florentine Academy was Plato’s teaching that
philosophy itself was a mystical initiation, a union of man and God.
Ficino’s efforts to reconcile Platonism with Christianity pivoted on
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his Catholic conviction that God became man, that the Incarnate
Christ was God’s masterpiece, created for man to imitate in order to
achieve that union with God. Through such juxtapositions of
Platonism and Christianity, Ficino popularized “the idea of
comparative religion, from which all reconciliatory arguments must
start” (Williamson 133-4).
R. Yohanan Alemanno, one of Pico’s Jewish companions, conveyed
a unified vision of Torah and Kabbalistic lore, ascribing to both
the secret of the descent of supernal powers upon man, contending
that the same structure informs the two lores (Idel, Absorbing
Perfections 487). Lefèvre also married the literal with the
mystical, and as with Pico and Ficino, philosophic speculation was
always grounded in divine love (Renaudet 183).
In the “First Proem” of The Heptaplus: on the Sevenfold
Narration of the Six Days of Genesis, Pico writes that Pythagoras
became a master of Silence, that Plato concealed the teachings in
mathematical images that reveal Jesus Christ as the image of the
substance of God. In the “Second Proem” Pico describes, what Eliade
later calls the pre-eminent shamanic experience of ascension, in
terms of the crucifixion, which opened the way for men to approach
God Himself. The early Fathers spoke allegorically of hidden
alliances and affinities of all nature, inspired by the
Spirit/Creator. In closing, Pico reminds us that Moses called the
world “the great man,” a world created through the law of peace and
friendship, a world at one with its Maker, the good itself (67-9,
77, 173-4).
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Pico’s master Ficino, in Theologia Platonica de Immortalitate
Animorum, Platonic Theology of the Immortality of the Soul,
explained that St. Augustine chose Plato as his model, as closest to
Christian truth. Ficino also chose to portray Plato in accord with
Christian truth, marrying philosophy with sacred religion: theology.
Ficino cited Hermes Trismegistus in this treatise. He understood
Zoroaster to reveal that all is within the body of God, since God
wills himself, enacts himself, as creation. Ficino’s interpretation
of Plato’s teachings on free will of the thinking soul, leaving its
judgment free, is echoed in our understanding of Lefèvre’s teaching
of freedom to moral choice (Ficino 11, 23,185, 209-11).
Pico wrote essays on comparative religion, paralleling
Pimander, the alleged Egyptian genesis attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus, with the Hebrew-Christian Genesis as received by
Moses. Giordano Bruno, like other visionary mystics before him and
others after, depicted aspects of cosmogenesis in geometric
diagrams, involving triangles and the Star of David (Yates 85, 306-
24). Lefèvre as well, in an attempt to visualize intuitions of
Nicolas of Cusa, drew an extended Star of David diagram (Bedouelle
64). In 1494, Lefèvre published an edition of what Bedouelle calls
“the treasured” Pimandre (64). All of these wisdom traditions are
beginning to be studied extensively in Academia as Esotericism.
Although writings such as Pimander have proven to be of much
later dates than previously thought, I question the assumption that
therefore these multicultural teachings were never connected after
all. As a counter to the skepticism about Pythagoras having traveled
to Persia to learn much wisdom passed on from the Chaldeans, I would
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direct attention to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In
Collections and Treasures it holds a Cuneiform stone tablet in Old
Babylonian script, a unique artifact in that it confirms:
[. . .] that the inhabitants of Mesopotamia employed in
their calculations Pythagorean number theory, as much as
thirteen hundred years before Pythagoras lived. [. . .]
From this tablet we learn that Greek mathematics,
particularly astronomy, was indebted to the Babylonian
science which preceded it (Columbia).
Perhaps the most important general realization from my studies
on resources relevant to Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali is that it can
be categorized, in terms of comparative religion, as Christian
Kabbalah. I have resisted the easy notion of such categorization in
my thesis title in order to emphasize instead the three more
universal components the De Magia Book II is structured around:
Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and prisca theologia. One
must choose terms from some particular perspective though, so it
could be argued that these particular terms originate from within
the Christian tradition. I contend that the Ideas are humanly
universal and that the terms were meant to lead us beyond the
Christian and Judaic boundaries.
My purpose in including neither the word “Christian,” nor the
Judaic term “Kabbalah” in the title, was to de-emphasize the
politico-religious polemic the terms elicit in some contemporary
readers, whether scholar or not. Instead, this thesis claims the
Ground of Silence with no politico-religious boundaries in order to
raise continually my own sights on equality as well as that of the
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reader, and also to hi-light the best of Renaissance humanist
intentions and the Ideal they strove for.
The terms Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and prisca
theologia named in sequence, correspond with the numbers 2, 3, and
One. After the condition of duality exists, it is evident that there
is a third element joining them in the holistic perception of the
Three in One. These three terms in the thesis title express a
unified transcendent Idea: a continuum where there is no separation
between God, Spirit, and man; a continuum where there are no
religious boundaries.
Religious metaphors and Images are useful when they instruct
about transcendent Ideas, but confusing when they are misconstrued
to confine to political boundaries. Yet, Ideas most often do need to
be expressed through metaphor and Image in order to convey meaning,
and those metaphors and Images do become misconstrued. For instance,
the terms Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and prisca
theologia – as a unified Idea – could be Imag-ined as a Pillar, a
phalus, a Mountain, an umbilicus, or the body of Jesus Christ
uniting God and man. This statement will become clearer in the
treatment of Moshe Idel’s book Ascensions on High in Jewish
Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders below. However, the metaphorical
Images used above to communicate the same Idea may be interpreted or
construed differently by every reader.
This reality of human communication is played upon differently
by different authors, as noted below in the writings of scholars on
Christian Kabbalah. Each author has a somewhat different angle on
the Ideas at stake, and each succeeds to a greater or lesser degree
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at convincing the reader of the legitimacy of their angle. All I can
do, as an equal of scholar and reader alike, is to present my own
arguments in the best possible light. This is akin to what the
Renaissance humanists have done in such treatises as Lefèvre’s De
Magia naturali and Pico’s Conclusiones. Each accentuates or draws
attention to certain facets of natural magic, Christianity,
Kabbalah, Platonism or Pythagoreanism for instance, through
metaphors and Images that lend credibility to their arguments. These
metaphors and Images are expressed in words for the most part,
sometimes with graphic depictions added. We must ultimately admit
that our individual interpretations of these words and drawings,
even of numbers, are speculative. Communication is a speculative
venture. I feel however, that the one point that transports these
written communications out of the field of speculative politico-
religious contentions is the fact that they were, and are, based on
humanly universal Intuitive experiences.
Although my research into the two recent books that follow
came at the end of my thesis research, this chapter is provided as a
central confirmation to the reader that the teachings of the
tradition of masters I touch upon could, during some European
historical eras, be categorized as Christian Kabbalah, and as a
confirmation that these teachings were in fact studied by a network
of scholars who could be called Christian Kabbalists – European
Renaissance humanists, scientists, philosophers, German pietists,
and Jewish conversos alike. My hope however, is that it will
support, as the other chapters have, the thesis argument that
Academia ought to engage such texts as humanly universal
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experiential phenomenon rather than solely as historical religious
artifacts.
That is essentially the same argument offered in the
concluding chapters of Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of
Theology, written by the scholar Ernst Benz in 1958, and translated
into English by Kenneth W. Wesche in 2004. It is an introductory
work on the history and teachings of Christian Kabbalah, the author
concluding thus about Oetinger in particular, and about the
Christian Kabbalists in general:
What he brings to expression in his joining of the
classical doctrine of the Trinity with the doctrine of
the Sefirot is a speculative attempt to penetrate into
the inner movement of life in the Godhead, and to
comprehend the processes in the universe and in
salvation history, the presence of God in the world, in
nature, in humanity, and the various forms of the
personal encounter between God and man from out of the
inner movement of life in the Godhead itself. Also, the
Christian Trinity doctrine is but the intellectual
reflection, the insufficient attempt of human
expression, [of] a genuinely intuitive encounter with
the divine Transcendence on the ground of its various
forms of self-manifestation returning back to man.
[. . .] It would be a mistake to require dogmatic
correctness of such an attempt. It is much more the
expression of an experience of the Transcendent that
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formed a genuine community. We ourselves are not afraid
to call it mystical, so long as this word is not weighed
down by a multitude of misunderstandings and prejudices,
and we can say with certainty that it was an experience
of the Transcendent in which the greatest pious men of
the Jews and Christians experienced themselves as one.
That appreciation of this commonality is on the
rise again today confirms to me the conclusion in
Leopold Ziegler’s Conversation of the Masters, the most
recent work of the great revivalist of Schelling’s
theology in our time. His Conversations of the Masters
on Universal Man, at the climax of its presentation,
joins the theogonic and eschatological aspects of the
Image of the Universal Man, and in so doing comes upon
the Hasidic Image of the Messiah. There Leopold Ziegler
writes apropos his meditation on Hasidism concerning the
Jewish capacity for Spirit: “There is a capacity for
Spirit, moreover, which at the very least encompasses
the Christian revelation as far as is possible, and
includes rather than excludes it in itself. I repeat: at
the very least, as far as possible. Accordingly, I place
all my hopes on that day of reconciliation, when Judaism
and Christianity commonly acknowledge their guilt in
their divisions and both affirm their common root in the
symbol of the Return or Restoration.” (79-82)
I point out that the Return specifically is under the purview
of mythology. These speculative attempts at communication then –
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even within the Biblical communications of God with Moses, and back
further before the Bible to sacred texts of other cultures – all
might be studied as the mythology of religions within sacred texts,
in order to know of humanity’s deepest commonalities. The
anthropomorphic Image of the Return of the Messiah – whether one
calls it Jesus Christ, the Pillar, the Pentagrammaton, or the number
326 – embodies the Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and prisca
theologia, and expresses an intuitive experience of transcendent
Being or unity.
Ernst Benz begins Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of
Theology with an Introduction setting the stage for the relevancy of
his book to “our modern ears” (7). His observations reflect our
contemporary dilemma of politicized religion – fundamentalism –
polarizing the Global Village:
The rejection of mysticism in contemporary Protestant
theology follows from a particular understanding of
God’s utter transcendence and of the absolute break that
prevails in the relationship between God and man [. . .]
we must nevertheless reckon with this attitude as a
widespread prejudice. Such a hostile attitude, however,
has not always held the field. In particular, the great
surge of mysticism within the theology and theosophy of
German pietism led not only to a renaissance in the
study of the Kabbalah within Protestant theology, but
also to a positive evaluation of the religious content
of the Kabbalah in its own right. (7-8)
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Benz hi-lights in the Introduction some of the masters he
treats in what I have called the tradition of masters. He includes:
(beginning with but not sequentially thereafter) the Swabian
humanist and Hebraist Reuchlin, followed by a Swabian intellectual
tradition and the prelate Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, head of the
Christian theosophy of early Pietism; the Protestant mysticism of
Jacob Boehme and his school, which spread throughout England and the
Netherlands, particularly Holland and especially in Amsterdam;
theological circles influenced by Boehme included natural scientists
such as Isaac Newton, Robert Fludd and Francis Mercurius von
Helmont; then outside the Christian religion from the beginning of
the Enlightenment as theosophy and anthroposophy. He studies
Oetinger in particular for the simple reason that he names his
authorities (9). We will see the historical differences of opinion
that lack of clearly cited sources leads to in my treatment of the
symposium edited by Joseph Dan. We will also see how this tradition
is differently defined and confined by different scholars,
supporting my postulation that it could instead be defined with no
politico-religious barriers whatsoever, as I feel the humanists
attempted.
In Chapter I, Benz dives into an account of the beginnings of
Christian Kabbalah. He defines “Christian Kabbalism” as: “the
interpretation of Kabbalistic themes in the context of the Christian
faith, or an interpretation of Christian doctrines utilizing
Kabbalistic methods and concepts” (11). From his bibliographic notes
we learn that members of this tradition named by Hamberger include
also: the Buxtorfs, Rittangel, Hottinger, Athansius Kircher,
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Vitringa, Knorr von Rosenroth, H. More, Buddeus [Guillaume Budé,
student of Lefèvre], Kleuker, Schelling, Franz von Baader, Friedrich
von Meyer, Joseph Franz Molitor and Adolph Koester (84).
For the beginnings though, Benz cites Gershom Scholem who
asserts that although Pico della Mirandola is generally thought of
as the progenitor of Christian Kabbalah, in actuality the conversos
or Jewish converts formulated it. Abraham Abulafia is the earliest
“witness” for this avenue of conversion that Scholem has found,
although he points out that the first convert to refer explicitly to
Kabbalah is Abner von Burgos, also called Alfonso von Valladolid.
Scholem also points to Samuel ben Nissim Abul Fradsch who also went
by the names Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and Flavius Mithridates, as
the convert who taught Pico Hebrew and Chaldean. Raymond Lull
praised Christian Kabbalah, and Pico veritably equated it with the
Magia or magic in their mutual proof of the divinity of Christ (12-
13).
Benz mentions the objecting reactions of Jewish and Christian
orthodoxy alike. Notwithstanding, Christian Kabbalah continued in
its fundamental departures on the Trinity and the Incarnation, where
they linked the Trinity with the sefirot, which are defined as “the
outflowings or emanations of the Godhead” (15). Benz states that
Pico also came into contact with the “forgeries of the Kabbalistic
pseudepigrapha” through such authors as Paulus de Heredia and Pedro
de la Caballeria, the latter of which falsely quotes the Zohar with
an equivalent of the Trisagion from Isaish 6.3 (15). As Joseph Dan
also includes this instance via Scholem’s chapter “The Beginnings of
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the Christian Kabbalah,” I find it appropriate here to comment on
that Biblical verse:
In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord seated
on a throne, high and exalted, and the skirt of his robe
filled the temple. About him were attendant seraphim,
and each had six wings; one pair covered his face and
one pair his feet, and one pair was spread in flight.
They were calling ceaselessly to one another,
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts:
The whole earth is full of his glory.
(The New English Bible with the Apocrypha 816)
My interpretation is that each seraph is a clear embodiment or
Image of the unified experience of the Trinity in the One. The 2
pairs of wings covering the head and feet symbolize Coincidence of
Opposites; the 3rd middle pair of wings in flight symbolizes
completion of the Trinity in the Holy Spirit; and the fact that this
Trinity is envisioned as One Being is symbolized in the body of the
seraph that constantly announces God’s unified presence in creation.
Lefèvre begins De Magia naturali Book II by stating that the subject
of Pythagorean philosophy is unity, the generatrix of every number
(Evans Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198). In Chapter 2 Lefèvre then praises the
Venusian nexus as embodying the ternary, of which Vergil sings in
order to bind and draw tight the three in an amatory (love) chain
(Evans II:52, f. 199). Vergil’s injunction is for the poets to weave
the mountain of amaryllis or the chain of Venus out of the threefold
colors of amaryllis (Evans II:53, f. 200v). I interpret this amatory
chain or Venusian love-nexus as equivalent to not only the Image of
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the Mountain or Pillar, but also to that of the Trinity unified in
the crucifix.
Lefèvre continues the explanation declaring that the ternary
of the magus (magician) is the number of Venus, and that the
Charities and Graces are themselves the ternary number of Venus, who
Pindarus asserts live next to Apollo’s throne and who Jove
perpetually extols. At this point Lefèvre then positions himself
squarely in the Pythagorean tradition, in whose school women were
welcomed as equals, by regarding Venus – as third from the lowest
earth and Image of inferior female – and Jupiter – as third from the
highest earth or eighth globe and Image of superior male – as
equals: “just as the inferior lover always occurs reversing to the
superior, nor at any time ought to be degenerated to fallen” (Evans
II:53, f. 200v). In terms of Isaiah’s Image of the seraphim, the
head and feet, though opposite, are continuously, bodily connected
through the Holy Spirit as a ternary, Trisagion or Trinity, Holy on
all Three counts.
Lefèvre states that the mutual chain of benevolence,
beneficence, and concord is perfected through this nexus of love
between Jupiter and Venus. The number three, which Venus and Jupiter
computed from the Monad, the fountain and beginning of things, is
efficacious and made for love (Evans II:53-54, f. 200). Later we
will see how Lefèvre equates the name of Jesus Christ with the
middle, restorative element of divine love.
Regarding Pico as the accepted founder of Christian Kabbalah,
Benz points out that the tradition made a deep impression only when
Pico championed it, raising it to “a central theme of the Christian
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philosophy of the Renaissance.” Through Pico, Reuchlin took up
Christian Kabbalah. His writings recognized the Jewish Kabbalah as
an “ur-revelation brought to mankind even before the birth of
Christ, imparting insight into the sublime mysteries of the divine
Being” (16). Published in 1494 [the year after Lefèvre wrote his De
Magia], Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico or The Wonderworking Word
states that:
God and man are joined by the ‘wondrous Word’ [. . .]
even from Moses’ Tetragrammaton there is a progressive
development to the most wonderful of all Names: Jesus,
through whom the inexpressible Name of God is first made
expressible. To this name of Jesus, in whom man and God
are united, belongs all glory. This Name works wonders
and redemption. (Benz 16-17)
Lefèvre culminates Chapters 14-16 with a Kabbalistic
discussion of the numbers of the Tetragrammaton YHVH [Yehouah],
totaling 26. His conclusion through number mysticism equates with
Reuchlin’s conclusion that when the Name becomes that of Jesus
[Yehoshuah] it works wonders. As Lefèvre describes it, the
Tetragrammaton becomes this Name when the quinary or fifth number-
letter [the “s”], which is 300, is born in the middle of the four,
declaring the miraculous sign operating above all celestial and
earthly virtues and powers, the conciliator of God and man. Thus the
effable is born from the ineffable, making the invisible visible,
and converting God into audible, visible Word (Evans II:89-95, ff.
217-220). This Name above all Names and in whom all will genuflect,
whether celestial, earthly, or infernal, is that most powerful,
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blessed and holy Name in whom the Spirit is enjoined. It is the Name
therefore that works and makes all miracles or wonders. When these
sacramental numbers of the magi, the prophets and David are
collected in one sum to the number 326, the intelligible world is
born from the paternal mind (Evans Ch. 16 93-94, f. 219-220v).
Lefèvre includes in Chapter 16 a diagram of the Cross with
the letter “s” – signifying Jesus Christ or the number 300 – on each
extremity of the Cross (Evans II:93, f. 219). Benz reports that
Reuchlin too, ends his 1517 De Arte Kabbalistica “in a glorification
of the Name of Jesus and of the Cross, which are explained using the
above mentioned Kabbalistic technique of letter interpretation”
(18). Like Lefèvre, Reuchlin posits that the Kabbalah was
transmitted in an unbroken tradition, and maintains that it may also
be the source of Hellenistic philosophy, Pythagorean philosophy in
particular, which itself came from Egyptian, Jewish and Persian
wisdom. Reuchlin also talks about the angels and the heavenly
spheres (17-18). It is clear from these exact parallels between the
Christian Kabbalistic writings of Reuchlin and Lefèvre’s treatise
that De Magia naturali can be categorized as Christian Kabbalah.
Benz devotes Chapters II through IX to F.C. Oetinger of the
early eighteenth century. Naming Leone Ebreo of the fifteenth
century, Benz relates that he linked the Kabbalistic tradition with
Platonism and Neoplatonism in Dialoghi d’Amore or Dialogues of Love.
Centuries later, Oetinger corresponded with Spencer’s Collegia
pietatis in Frankfurt, a circle which studied Kabbalah. Knorr von
Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Unveiled is cited as of particular interest to
this circle, and in it they found the doctrine of the Trinity and
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Christology, the version of which included the Shekinah as Wisdom,
the first of God’s creatures (20-21).
Oetinger was initiated into “the teaching of the greatest
Kabbalist of German Jewry, Isaac Luria” (42). He counted Boehme,
Swedenborg and Luria as “principal witnesses of spiritual knowledge”
(43). Historically, through Oetinger’s directly linking Boehme and
Luria, German Pietism is connected with Hasidism. Ez Chaim or Tree
of Life, was the most important work on Luria, written by one of his
students Hajim Vital. That book is an explanation received from
above by Luria of the obscure Zohar, the author of which is Simeon
son of Jochai. Oetinger related that Luria was visited nightly by
Moses and Elijah, “as on Mt. Tabor, and they would speak with him of
the resurrection of the fallen house of David that was drawing near”
(44-45, 51). Oetinger equated Jesus Christ with “the Lord of the
Spirit” from II Cor 3.17-18 (46).
As I have noted the date in the Introduction, Benz also
remarks that the year 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain,
marks a turning point in Kabbalistic history. He clarifies this as
the transition from an Old Kabbalah of esoteric teachings limited
within a small group of scholars. The New Kabbalah replaced those
traditional messianic teachings with “speculation on the ur-origin
of the world, on Creation’s spiritual Image in God, and on the
divine Ur-Image of Man in God [. . .] and of the way of meditation
in ‘vision’ participating in that Ur-Oneness and returning to it”
(49-50). Again, it is clear that Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali fits
the scholarly category of Christian Kabbalah. The more universally
human terms of my title – Coincidence of Opposites, the Trinity, and
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prisca theologia – again encompass that speculation on genesis or
origin, the Image of Spirit, and the Ur-Image of Man in God uniting
all three and returning them to Oneness.
Summarizing Oetinger’s sequence of the 10 sefirot, as God the
unfathomable Depth, the “En Sof” or “Ungrund,” “thrusts itself out
of itself”:
1. Keter (Crown)
2. Hochmah (Wisdom)
3. Binah (Understanding)
4. Gedulah or Chesed (Love or Mercy)
5. Gevurah or Din (Judgment or Power)
6. Tipereth (Compassion)
7. Netsah (Endurance-victory or Eternity)
8. Hod (Splendor)
9. Yesod (Foundation)
10. Malkhut (Kingdom) (Benz 67-73)
Benz points out that the correlation of the doctrine of the
Trinity to that of the 10 sefirot belongs to the oldest tradition of
Christian Kabbalah, and cites Reuchlin as the first to do this in
the Swabian tradition (74). Lefèvre, then, should be counted as the
first in the French Christian Kabbalistic tradition to correlate the
Trinity with the 10 sefirot. In Book II Chapter 11, he relates that
Christian Theology [the doctrine of the Trinity] is by no means all
power alone itself, though the highest infinite born from the monad.
[The Trinity] from the monad, indeed having stirred, leads all. It
is the supra-rational, -intelligible and -intellectible, all within
themselves as the permanency of majesty within the Infinity of
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light. The sensing, reasoning, intellecting portions of the
intellectible were responding alternately in analagous proportions
(Evans II:85-86, f. 215-216v). In this not only can we see Lefèvre’s
methodological continuum of Imagination, Reason, and Intellect, but
we can also see how he proportions that directly to his Trinitarian
epistemology.
In Chapter 12, Lefèvre discusses the contribution of these
three superior numbers within the divine numbers, concluding that
the denary number (10) arises out of the primordial triune. And as
through which denary the magus Pythagoras descended. This denary-
monaden principle is lover returning to Beloved, namely the unity of
all powers, and the unity of all causes, the love of all causes.
Therefore Monad and monad will be one and the same, in which is made
as one and the same principle: power and love (Evans II:86-87, f.
216).
Continuing in this vein, Chapter 13 qualifies the Monaden as
empty [En Sof or abyss], while the binary signifies the intelligible
world, and the ternary as the Idea of the most divine longing that
coincides with the love-nexus. Emptiness returning to Idea coincides
with power, and the beginning coincides with the end. The empty
Monaden is also Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, the beginning of
all and the newest: namely the Monad and the senary. But yoke the
beginning and the end with the septenary and they fill full rest.
The Paternal Monad is power and love returning to unity, equality
and nexus. From the Monad therefore through equality, and from
equality are made all things. Name as the binary the exemplar of
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water as it contains all: it is Idea. Monad, Idea, and Love
returning: these three are One (Evans II:87-89, ff. 216-217).
Similarly, Oetinger states that the Messiah is the Alpha and
Omega “in union and communion with the 10 sefirot in his union with
mankind, just as the eternal God is the Alpha and Omega outside of
humanity” (Benz 75). Of the first three sefirot, the Crown is the
First Person of the Godhead, Wisdom is the Second Person, the Son,
Logos or Word, and Understanding is the Third Person, the Holy
Spirit. These inseparably united three are the Threeness of Persons
in the Divine Being. After naming the first three sefirot as the
Trinity, Benz interprets the other seven as spirits and spirit-
fountains of God. Noting that the doctrine of the sefirot is
connected to that of emanations from Neoplatonism, he concludes that
these are “not Persons in the sense of the classical doctrine of the
Trinity,” and that thus there are difficulties in comparing the two
doctrines (75-6). Oetinger insisted the Doctrine of the Three
Persons not be imposed on Jews, but suggested to use instead the
words “outflowings or mirrored-splendor or sefiroth” (Benz 77). Benz
explains the doctrines as joined, where one term replaces another,
which I interpret as meaning that they are meant as equally valid
interpretations. He comments then that Oetinger [being a Christian]
of course uses the term Person (77). This is admitedly a problem
with comparative religion, though as I noted, one must choose terms
of communication. Bear in mind that Lefèvre himself chose the term
“Pythagorean philosophy” for the subject of Book II.
Like Lefèvre, Benz emphasizes that for Oetinger the divine
Triad is “an uncreated thousand-fold myriad” (77). Relative to that,
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he cites Koppel Hecht’s insightful definition of Spirit: “’The
outflowing from Wisdom through the Spirit towards creation and the
return to God, the Eternal One, is the Spirit’” (76-7).
Benz treats extensively the Kabbalistic Master Tablet of
Princess Antonia, a mural in the Church of the Trinity in Deinach
(Bad Teinach) that graphically depicts a Kabbalistic system that
encompasses the 10 sefirot via Biblical history set in a palace and
garden inhabited by anthropomorphic, angelic, and animal Images. The
two princesses living in Wurtemberg between 1613 and 1679, Antonia
and her sister Anna Johanna who studied the sciences, are proof that
educated Christian women were allowed to study Kabbalah alongside
the Bible. Through Kabbalah, Antonia saw the sefirot within the
crucified Jesus: two radiances in the head united in the third; two
radiances in the breast and shoulders united in the third; two
radiances in the hip and stomach united in the third; and all were
united in the final 10th sefirot. She experienced these as uniting
the mystery of God and Christ, as well as the Old and New Testaments
(57-9, 96-7). In short, the Threefoldness along with the Seven
Spirits of God “are depicted on two columns as ten persons” (61-2).
A century later, Oetinger was perhaps one of the few Christian
scholars who could interpret the Tablet. Benz points out that “no
one has troubled himself to study this rare monument until most
recently” (59). Impressions were made in 1663 of illustrations of
the Master Tablet, but were never published (64).
The 2 columns experienced by Antonia represent the Coincidence
of Opposites. Her three sets of 3 are depicted in Lefèvre’s Book II
as the elemental mind, the second mind and the Supernal mind (Evans
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Ch. 7 II:69-71, ff. 208v-209v). Like Antonia, Lefèvre offers us
angels as anthropomorphic Images, deities whose guardianship of the
Ideas facilitate our learning the ascent by Saturnian chains to the
Saturnian mind (Evans Ch. 4 II:57, f. 202v). In my larger work-in-
progress, I will correlate Princess Antonia’s Master Tablet with
Lefèvre’s system of correspondences between angels, celestial
spheres and numbers, as depicted and described in Chapter 10 (Evans
II:80-85, ff. 213-215).
The mural’s secrecy due to its physical obscurity, and not
because it’s Images lack clarity, mirrors that of Lefèvre’s
treatise. Esotericism such as that in Lefèvre’s treatise has been
understood since the dawn of mankind. Yet until recent years, few
scholars have been interested in challenging the boundaries of
Academia in this regard again.
In hi-lighting some of the Master Tablet’s graphic teachings
that Oetinger wrote on, Benz mentions first what Pico claimed in his
Conclusiones: “’no science proves the Divinity of Christ as well as
the Kabbalah and Magia’” (62). From the beginnings of this tradition
then, magic was associated with Kabbalah, as in Lefèvre’s treatise.
Benz sums up further that Kabbalistic philosophy was “raised as a
criterion for all philosophy and theology of the time,” comparing
these (among others) against it: Newtonian Philosophy; Lord
Professor Plouquet’s System; Detlev Cluver’s system; the philosophy
of Baglivius and that of Frederick the Great (63). Kabbalistic
philosophy as this “criterion” equates with the Renaissance
humanists’ denoting it as a prisca theologia.
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Oetinger’s sermon delivered on the Feast of the Three Wise
Men, wherein he counts Nicodemus (Jn 3:1-5) as a master of Kabbalah
who knew the mystery of the Trinity and the Seven Spirits within the
sefirot, bears particular import regarding categorizing De Magia
naturali Book II as Christian Kabbalah. Oetinger preached the
doctrine that Kabbalah was ur-revelation of the Way of Salvation,
which was known since the beginning of the world. He equates
Nicodemus’ vision of God with that in the Zohar, noting that early
Kabbalists also spoke of the Trinity as the Triad or the higher
Synetrium. He counted all of those who knew of this Trinity –
heathens, Jews, and Christians alike – as illumined by communion
with God (55-7). Thus Oetinger echoes Lefèvre’s injunction to “’love
also Indians, Ethiopians, Asians and Africans, and those who live in
islands beyond the sea’” and that “Even pagans and men who live
today in unknown regions of the earth, if they love God and respect
their parents and fellows according to their natural instinct
(naturalis instinctus) and the law of nature (which is
indistinguishable from the Decalogue), will be saved” (Rice,
Prefatory Epistles XXII-III).
Moreover, to categorize Nicodemus as a Kabbalist as we have
seen in Benz’s book, then also to categorize Lefèvre as a Kabbalist
through analysis of Book II in this treatise, is to categorize
Lefèvre as a Nicodemite. This definitively informs the question,
posed by Thierry Wanegffellen at the 1992 conference, Jacques
Lefèvre d’Étaples: Actes du Colloque d’Étaples, as to whether or not
he was a nicodémite (“Lefèvre nicodémite? Qu’est-ce que le
nicodémisme?” 155-80).
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As posed at the conference, the accusation of heresy that the
label nicodémite signified in Lefèvre’s time was centered around the
controversy of a Catholic’s bodily union of God and man through
Christ in the Eucharist, as it related to the spiritual union that
is Justification by Faith. Wanegffellen includes quotes from
Lefèvre’s teachings to his students. He concludes the paper with a
quote in which Lefèvre teaches that the virtue and efficacy He
offers us in this sacrament, can and must be better cognized and
felt through experience than can be expressed through speaking.
Lefèvre then instructs his student to meditate that there can be
none worthy to receive Him. Wanegffelen simplifies this instruction
to the “non sum dignus” or “I am not worthy” (179-80). Although both
of these Ideas signify a receiving in negation, a Negative theology
– a sacrifice – I feel that Lefèvre’s inclusion of all people in the
meditation is the key to understanding him as a nicodémite.
Lefèvre’s Justification by Faith was for all of humankind, Catholic
or not.
Benz’s Christian Kabbalah also supports my suggestion that the
reason Lefèvre has not been understood in the manner which I present
in this thesis is that scholars have not only taken his cross-talk
at face value, they have thought of him primarily as a man of action
in the material world – teaching, writing, editing, publishing. In
the essay, “Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the Medieval Christian
Mystics,” Rice claims that, “Lefèvre was not himself a mystic. He
recorded no visions for us; his mind apparently never deserted his
flesh in ecstasy” (102). Yet Rice follows that with, “He repeatedly
cited the mystics’ silence as the exemplar of the highest form of
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contemplation” (102). I contend that Lefèvre actively practiced this
mystical Silence, the highest experience that can only be described
in riddles or negations. This is where scholars have missed the fact
that Lefèvre was a practicing mystic, which was itself the reason he
strove to bring practical philosophy – natural magic – into
university studies via his threefold ascending technique of
Imagination, Reason and Intellect.
Rice continues to puzzle over the contradiction that Lefèvre
presented over the course of time:
The relation of his own thought to the mystical
tradition, however, was never a simple one, and it
changed a good deal with time. The following curious
passage, from a letter of 1501, illustrates the
difficulty: “ [. . .] Aristotle is the life of learning;
Pythagoras the death of learning, which is superior to
life. It rightly follows that Pythagoras taught by
keeping silent, Aristotle by talking, but silence is act
and speech privation. [. . .] in Aristotle there is very
little silence and many voices; but silence speaks and
utterance says nothing and the best words are simple
silence.” (102-3)
This passage is not “curious” at all, but rather speaks
volumes in its riddles about Lefèvre’s inner commitment to mystical
Silence. He was established on the Ground of Silence, and no
bantering of words was to diminish or shake that faith. A double-
entendre is that Lefèvre’s silence on magic, Kabbalah and
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Pythagorean philosophy in his later years was itself the best proof
of their validity.
Rice supports his position that Lefèvre’s philosophy evolved
away from natural magic, stating:
One thing at least is clear. Lefèvre would not have
written the passage this way ten years later. [. . .]
“Nothing is more vain and empty than those who call
themselves Pythagoreans . . . read Irenaeus and you will
find that the Pythagoreans were the most vicious
opponents of the Christian religion.” And to a visiting
Italian about 1511 he emphasized that he was not an
Aristotelian (and still less a Platonist) but was a
Christian only. (103)
The passage in Christian Kabbalah that clearly supports my
argument is this:
In considering these ideas, one must constantly remember
that we are not dealing with abstract speculations or
logical concepts, but with an effort to give expression
to religious intuitions and experiences. The creators of
the Kabbalah were not abstract thinkers; they were
mystics, men of prayer, and in large part ascetics who
spent their time in prayerful meditation and
contemplation on the mysteries of God. (Benz 65)
Benz elaborates that the feeling of piety for God as a sacred
and sublime transcendence, an intuitive experience, was practiced in
the knowledge that God and the earthly world were intimately linked.
God’s Being was experienced in the longing for self-manifestation,
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and then in man’s return to God: a theogonic process with no
separations (65-7). In this description of Christian Kabbalah then,
we recognize the Pillar, the One Image that includes all Three.
Lefèvre also delineates the Pillar whose parts are inseparable from
the whole in Book II, when he speaks of the knots, nexus, and chain
in both Jove and Venus as celestial Concords: in the singular, the
magician that draws every thing and every effect together (Evans Ch.
4 II:57-58, f. 202). In describing the ternary Venus as passionate
longing, Lefèvre later ascribes that love-nexus to Jesus Christ in
the number 300, and celebrates this reforming love, concluding that
Venus is namely that by which is being chained and drawn tight the
body, sometimes as if by Venus’ laughter (Evans Ch. 5 II:62-3, f.
204-205v; Ch. 17 II:95, f. 220).
Oetinger, in comparing Newton’s doctrine with that of
Kabbalah, echoes Lull’s ladder of beings cited above in the
Introduction, claiming that it can be easily implied:
“[. . .] from all flowers, herbs, stones, animals, that
an all-universal unified Spirit of nature goes out to
the sanctuary of heaven, filling up the space of heaven
(Ps. 150.1) and itself in seven powers and thereafter
through combinations, conternationes (placing of three
things together), conquaternationes (placing of four
things together) in endless corporeal and specific
mixtures.” (70)
Lefèvre describes the same perception, wherein the ternary
unites upon and is coupled to the quaternary. Multiplied together
they compute the 12 judges in the end of ages who put forth sacred
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and immovable utterances, and through which divine virtues all are
counted saved and into their end are called back (Evans Ch. 2 II:54-
55, f. 200-201v). Book II, in fact, culminates with a table
depicting four unities or worlds, comprised of four groups of 7,
each divided into 3 and 4. This table encompasses the Christian
Kabbalist’s central interest in both the theogonic process and the
unified continuum: that of genesis of creation, reformation and
recuperation of man, and the end of time or death of creation; and
that of the first unity as the superintelligible, the second unity
as the intelligible, the third unity as the intellectual world, the
fourth unity as the sensible or corruptible (Evans Ch. 18 II:97-98,
f. 221-222v).
Lefèvre, in the 19th or ultimate chapter on Syrian Arithmetic,
offers to his patron Germain de Ganay that, with the obscure they
speak of mysteries; contemplative people (who having been severed
are worthy) convey much fruit. He then displays a table in 10’s,
offering the salutation to Germain of a future disputation on how
Syrian numbers might compute the end (Evans II:99, f. 222). Again,
Lefèvre’s partiality to contemplatives or mystics who sever
themselves in a sacrifice, a negation in meditation, a Negative
theology, bears witness to my thesis arguments.
The 1997 publication by Harvard College Library of the
symposium proceeds, The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books &
Their Interpreters, edited by Joseph Dan, is another contemporary
resource for research on De Magia naturali as well as an indication
that acceptance of Esotericism within Academia has begun. Indeed,
the University of Pennsylvania’s groundbreaking first volume of the
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scholarly journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft has just this summer
been published.
The proceeds of the symposium on The Christian Kabbalah
includes papers on these contributors to the tradition of masters:
Francesco Zorzi; Leibniz, Locke, and Newton; Jacob Frank; and
Johannes Reuchlin. I will comment in brief on Joseph Dan’s treatment
of the latter, along with his Introduction, and then on Gershom
Scholem’s chapter on “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,”
which Dan has included before the symposium proceeds (Contents
page). I also mention here the inclusion of Paul Ricci in this
tradition of masters.
Joseph Dan connects the beginning of Christian Kabbalah in
the last two decades of the fifteenth century to the Platonic-
Hermetic-magical Florentine enterprise of Ficino and Pico. Of those
not previously noted herein, Dan mentions the occult work of
Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, noting that Christian Kabbalah also
significantly influenced John Dee, Francis Bacon, Robert Fludd,
Michael Maier, Guillaume Postel, Francis Mercurius van Helmont,
Giordano Bruno, and possibly the Masonic movement. Dan names Frances
Yates, P. O. Kristeller, F. Secret, and Chaim Wirszubski as
important contributors to the study of Christian Kabbalah
(“Introduction” 13-15).
Importantly though, Dan asserts that “a great deal remains to
be done concerning particular writers and works and concerning the
nature of the phenomenon as a whole and its place in comtemporary
European culture” (15). Here then are the needs and issues that this
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thesis and my transcription-translation work-in-progress on De Magia
naturali address.
Scholem, in “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” points
out that the thesis of Pico and others regarding Christian Kabbalah
was a mere variation of that proposed by Raymundus Martini in the
thirteenth century in Pugio fidei, regarding the Talmudists. This
work, which served as Catholic propaganda for the purpose of
conversions, occurred in Catalonia, the location and period when
Kabbalists led by Nachmanides began to consolidate Kabbalistic
literature (17-18). This observation hi-lights my point that the
common phenomenon being studied here is indeed a prisca theologia
that transcends the boundaries of religions.
In his customarily thorough mode, Scholem next relates the
difficulties in pinpointing exactly who and by what names the
progenitors of Christian Kabbalah were, citing the work of Eugenio
Anagnine and Joseph Blau as resources on the development of
Christian Kabbalah. He then notes that Pico was the first Latin
scholar to refer directly to the Kabbalah in explicita mentio,
though concluding he was preceded by implicita mentio of Paulus de
Heredia (18-21). Scholem cites the fourteenth century Abner of
Burgos as the first converted Jew to make specific reference to the
Kabbalah. Alfonso focused on the concepts of the shekinah and the
measure of the body of God (26). Of great interest for future
research I feel, regarding the female or Daughter as the perfected
physical manifestation of God, is the observation that Metatron has
been equated to both the Son and to the shekinah (27-8). As Lefèvre
has said, she ought not to be degenerated to fallen.
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Scholem again cites Pico’s Jewish associates as those who
provided Pico with his sources, in particular, “the former Sicilian
Jew Samuel ben Nissim Abu’l-Faradj of Agrigento (Flavius
Mithridates) (21-2). Pico was the first Christian of non-Jewish
origin to follow this thought process (24). Scholem pinpoints the
earliest documented conversion via Kabbalistic methods of exegesis
as Abraham Abulafia of the thirteenth century (25).
From the same century Scholem cites Arnaldo de Villanova as
the first, before Pico, to ascribe the doctrine of the Trinity to
the Tetragrammaton [YHVH]: Y = Father; W [V] = Son; H = Holy Spirit
(25). A key point here is that my interpretation places the H of
Holy Spirit between Y and V, and not as the final H. The reason is
the architecture of the Coincidence of Opposites, where the 1 and 2
are united by the middle element 3. The resultant ineffable
theological structure is Y/1 – H/3 – VH/2. Lefèvre and the Christian
Kabbalists then constructed the effable Pentagrammaton YHSVH, with
the middle HS signifying Jesus Christ’s physical incarnation as
bringing down the Holy Spirit and uniting Father and Son in the
Messiah. I will need to research Scholem’s source on Pico’s
Trinitarian interpretation, which names V as the Holy Spirit.
Scholem does confirm that Pico dealt with sefirotic symbolism in
general (34-5).
Importantly informing this thesis, Scholem provides the dates
of Pico’s time in Paris as between July 1485 and March 1486 (23).
This fact explains that Lefèvre may have been studying with Pico in
Paris during part of the uncharted time between 1480 and 1490. As
mentioned previously herein, Lefèvre merely concluded his studies
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with Pico during his own trip to Italy. Scholem reiterates that
Pico’s theory that “Kabbalah and magic were the most convincing
proof of the divinity of Christ” was astounding and scandalous at
the time (17, 24).
Scholem also reiterates that Pico inherited Christian
misinterpretations and falsifications, including teachings of John
and Paul, and naming Pedro de la Caballeria’s interpretation of the
Trisagion from Isaiah 6:3 (28-30). Though founded in historical
fact, these strongly expressed opinions support my suggestion that
scholars not place impenetrable boundaries on their respective
religions, as the Ideas and experiences are humanly universal.
An author for further research is David Messer Leon who was
inspired by Ficino’s circle, and whose Magen David treats the
relationship between Plato and Kabbalah. Of note regarding the
scarcity of references to Pico’s work [and to Lefèvre’s] on
Christian Kabbalah is Scholem’s mention of a Jew burned as a martyr
in 1490. He states as evidence of the interchanges between Jews and
Pico the fact that “while the Italian Platonists were turning to
Kabbalah, Jewish scholars in Italy were simultaneously turning to a
Platonic interpretation of the Kabbalah’s basic principles” (39). In
the final analysis, exchanges between religions that can be called
comparative religion cross boundaries in all directions equally.
Dan’s obervation [regarding Lefèvre’s era of humanists], in
“The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,” corroborates this possibility
of open-minded comparative religion:
The Christian Kabbalist rejects, knowingly or
unknowingly, the concept that Christianity is right
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exactly in as much as Judaism is wrong [. . .]. As
stated above, I have not been able to find a credible,
sustained parallel to this attitude in earlier or later
points of contact between Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. (57)
The historical prevalence of closed-mindedness regarding
comparative religion in Academia that this observation implies, one
hopes will end through acceptance of a phenomenological approach to
the ideas and experiences religions convey.
Noting several points of divergence between Pico’s version of
“Christian” and that of the era’s other Christians, Dan concludes
that “the main difference can be presented in one word which
expresses almost everything: Pythagoras” (58). Dan quotes Reuchlin’s
1517 letter to Pope Leo X declaring his innocence of heresy:
“Marsilio (Ficino) has prepared Plato for Italy, Lefèvre d’Étaples
has restored Aristotle for the French, and I, Reuchlin, shall
complete this group, and explain to the Germans the Pythagoras [. .
.]” (59). Dan follows the letter with a clear synopsis of Reuchlin’s
history of Christianity, Judaism and Pythagoreanism:
The “Italian philosophy of the Christian religion” was
recorded first in the works of the Jewish kabbalah. It
was then absorbed by Pythagoras and his disciples. Their
writings have been dispersed, and can be reconstructed
now only by assembling the fragments of the Greek school
and combining them with the remaining volumes of the
Jewish kabbalah. Together, they represent the lost
philosophy of Christianity, and this is the essence of
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Reuchlin’s enterprise. There is no boundary separating
Pythagoras from the kabbalah, and there is no boundary
separating both of them from the philosophy of the
Christian religion. (60)
This is the direction in which Academia needs to go. Aside
from that however, neither Reuchlin nor Dan mentions Lefèvre as a
Christian Kabbalist. Nor do they mention the De Magia naturali as a
treatise that contains a book on Christian Kabbalah that may be the
key to all of Lefèvre’s teachings and writings. My thesis makes
those contributions to the research on Lefèvre, on Renaissance
humanists as Christian Kabbalists, tying both to the humanly
universal prisca theologia.
Dan points out that Reuchlin’s letter to the Medici pope was
naive in that he was obviously unaware of how marginal his concept
of Christianity was. He concludes that, although Reuchlin’s was a
sincere Christian orientation, this Christianity in the phrase
“Christian Kabbalah” denotes a highly unusual meaning shared by few
“before, after or during the period in which this cultural
phenomenon flourished” (61). This assertion I take exception to on
the grounds that the beliefs of the populace at large were perhaps
sparsely recorded in what we now call Academia, and also the fact
that this interpretation of Christianity is one of Jesus Christ as
both Spirit and flesh, which I observe as not uncommon at all. Dan’s
point does, however, confirm the appropriateness of my attempt at
explaining this prisca theologia by using terms that are not
religion-specific: hence the terms I chose for the thesis title. It
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is at this juncture that Dan treats the problem of communication,
which I mentioned in regards to choosing terms (65-67).
Dan brings attention to the fact that the Kabbalistic texts
studied by Jews and Christians differ, another reason to bear in
mind the intended meaning of the term Kabbalah (62-3). The Kabbalah
inherited from the Zohar includes three core features: the idea from
the book of Bahir that the sefirotic realm included a feminine power
termed the shekinah, the pleroma of the 10 sefirot, which now
included the second parallel set of sefirot creating a dualistic
concept of existence (65). Whereas Dan asserts that “Christian
kabbalists, consciously and unconsciously, rejected or marginalized
the symbols which were central to the Zohar and most other
kabbalistic works” (65), my thesis describes how all three criteria
are met in Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II.
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IV. EQUALITY & UNITY OF THE BINARY
1. Primal Metaphors & Myth
Relative to the Medieval-Renaissance threshold which Lefèvre’s
De Magia naturali bridges, examples follow of a few avenues through
which current scholars are engaging the pagan-Christian dialogue.
Flint’s The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe tells of the
“rehabilitation” of pagan magic to Christian miracle. Regarding
pagan sacred places becoming Christianized, Flint reports “an
abundance, almost an embarassment, of evidence”:
Where non-Christian shrines were destroyed, they were
wherever possible replaced by Christian ones: oratories,
churches, and monasteries, erected upon the selfsame
spot and made up sometimes of the very same materials
(those, at least, which had managed to survive the first
fine fury of destruction). (254)
Kieckhefer’s Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the
Fifteenth Century provides translations of magical rites, along with
commentary. In a chapter on “The Magic of Circles and Spheres”, he
writes:
[. . .] in medieval thought, the stars and planets
emitted powers that affected life on earth and could be
put to use by a magician for good or for ill. The
possibility of such astral magic was not merely a belief
of the magicians themselves; philosophers and
theologians, indeed educated people generally, accepted
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the premise that the heavenly bodies influenced affairs
here below. (176)
In Book II Chapter 3, Lefèvre details planetary effects on the
earthly resulting from similars’ affinity to similars through the
benignity or archetypes who embody the Coincidence of Opposites:
And Jupiter and also Venus, celestial love-nexus of
benevolence, sound in unison the approach reciprocally
nearest to benignity, as of all magical accordances,
through their path, benignity is sanctioned. And in
truth not only the celestial to the celestial accord,
but also the celestial to the earthly. [. . .] The
influence consequently of the eighth circle, and also of
the Moon, earth feels the greatest. (Evans Ch. 3 II:56-
57, f. 201-202v)
Flint translates an incantation for bringing concord between
humans through archetypes who embody the Coincidence of Opposites:
“O Lord God, almighty creator of [all] things,
visible and invisible, establish gentle concord between
[_________ and _______], such as you established between
Adam and Eve, and between Jacob and Rachel, and between
Michael and Gabriel [. . .], and such concord as you
established between the angel whose medium is fire and
the one whose medium is snow, so that the snow does not
extinguish the fire, nor does the fire consume the snow,
and so you likewise turn envy into concord. [. . .]”
(179)
Thomas Moore, in The Planets Within: The Astrological
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Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, elucidates Ficino’s notion of Spirit
as an intermediary, unifying body, soul and Spirit in solar
consciousness through the Image of divine marriage:
“Heaven, the bridegroom of earth, does not touch her, as
is commonly thought, nor does he embrace her; he regards
(illuminates) her by the mere rays of his stars which
are, as it were, his eyes; and in regarding her he
fructifies her and so begets life.” (132)
This sexualized, though decidedly mystical, Coincidence of
Opposites in ritual theological couples Lefèvre adopts as a primary
metaphorical scaffolding for De Magia naturali, describing it as
“the mitigation of re-creation,” and justifying its use with “such
that minds more easily understand” (Evans Ch. 7 II:67, f. 207v).
Christianity’s pagan roots in Mesopotamia, as was elucidated
by Dumézil, Jean Bottéro explains through Religion in Ancient
Mesopotamia. God, Marduk, is revered “in all his bodily components,
external and internal, including all bodily fluids, the hair, the
lower jaw, the spinal column, the hair on the chest, the blood,
tears, earwax, sperm, and so on, to compare them all, following a
logic about which we no longer have any idea, to precious elements
in nature or in culture:”
1 His top-knot is tamarisk;
His whiskers are a frond;
His ankle bones are an apple.
His penis is a snake.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11 His heart is a kettle-drum;
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His skull is silver;
His sperm is gold. (66)
In Lefèvre’s Chapter 5, he speaks of “the vigor of Jove” as
“the seminal fluid of all things” (Evans Ch. 5 II:62, f. 204). The
fact that metaphors intimate to human anatomy as embodying God have
been prevalent in various religious traditions supports my argument
that sacred texts ought to be studied primarily as mythology within
the discipline of Literature, in order to cross the thresholds of
specific religions easily on the vehicle of metaphor.
Bottéro links Mesopotamian cosmology with Biblical cosmology,
in one instance where 2 opposing terms represent the antithetical
couple, “On High,” or “Heaven,” and “Below” or the “Earth [and
Hell]”. The “Epic of Creation reveals how Marduk, after having
felled Tiamat, the primitive universal mother, built the framework
of the universe out of her remains:
He split her in two, like a fish for drying,
Half of her he set up and made as a cover, heaven.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Spreading [half of] her as a cover, he established the
earth.
[After] he had completed his task inside Tiamat,
[He spre]ad his net, let all (within) escape,
He formed (?) the . . . [] of heaven and netherworld,
Tightening their bond []. . . .
[. . .]And since their matter was the “sea water” from
the body of the primordial mother goddess, that mass,
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emptied from within, floated in a certain sense in an
abyss of infinite water, a cosmic ocean (79).
This description parallels Lefèvre’s quotation from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses when “All was sea,” and his intuitions about the
Pythagorean plane or Ground of Silence (Evans Ch. 4 II:59-60, f.
203). Lefèvre further reiterates the pervasive quality of Venus as
sung by the poets and magi: “the entire Venus and the passionate
longing of Venus are born in the sea” (Evans Ch. 5 II:62, f. 204).
Moshe Idel, in Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, shows
instances of the shekhinah as the universal soul, the supernal Image
both on high and below, female thus embodying both conduit from the
last sefirah below, called “ocean”, and goal above, the first
sefirah (177-8).
In the translation and pictorial form of the World Egg that
Bottéro has provided on pages 78-9, the One primordial Mother
Goddess is sacrificed in order to create the 2 of duality: heaven
and earth, bound together (we are left to assume since the word is
missing) by some kind of World Pillar or Mountain. This sacrifice is
a sacred one, where the primordial Mother’s “death” is the negation
that creates life.
Negation through sacrifice, death of the primordial Mother, is
depicted also in the primal exilic myth of the Fall from the Garden
of Eden. The Fall is that illusory Self-reflection of the monad,
that severing in 2 as lover and Beloved; and the story of ascension
to the One, myth’s eternal return to unity of that Coincidence of
Opposites. Idel concurs:
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The Garden and the Eden, which stand respectively for
the last and the first sefirah, symbolize the entire
sefirotic realm. In other words, Gan Eden is the symbol
of the whole divine pleroma. [. . .] The repair of the
divine pleroma is the quintessence of the religious
obligation of the righteous [. . .]. (208)
The Fall can also be Imagined then, as a metaphor for the
World Egg, the Egg of the Universe, where the ellipsoid shape formed
by the relationship of above and below has 2 centers. As described
in Spirit and the Mind, the egg-shaped Shiva Lingam:
The sphere, a symbol of unity, has one centerpoint — but
the lingam, ellipsoid in shape, has two centers,
emerging and merging back into, the one. Here is the
symbol of the two (duality) coming out of and returning
into the one — the one being the source, the sustenance
— the basis of the two. (Sandweiss 140)
Moshe Idel’s Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars,
Lines, Ladders thus is another of the encyclopedic resources
essential to future study of Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali, which
concerns itself with ascension via the Homeric catena aurea, golden
chains. The chains in Book II are themselves the World Pillar or
Mountain, both path and unity.
In support of my argument that Academia might include
experiential ascesis, exercise, Idel in his Introduction points out
that Eliade had shifted our attention to the modes of achieving
religious experiences, the techniques, in such books as Yoga and
Shamanism:
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These works represent a major methodological
breakthrough in the study of the history of religion by
shifting the center of interest from theoretical views
and beliefs to modes of achieving religious experiences.
The importance of technique is also evident in Ioan P.
Culianu’s Eros and Magic, in which the magical
techniques are emphasized as central to Giordano Bruno’s
world view. (6)
Idel points out that Scholem’s prevailing theory of Kabbalah
as theological interpretation misses the experiential nature of this
mystical lore (17). The impact of the Christian emphasis on theology
and faith has imbalanced the perception of Jewish mysticism away
from its technical, ritualistic and linguistic facets (19).
Idel proposes unifying our understanding of the contending
ideologies of mysticism and magic:
Ascending on high and bringing down some form of
esoteric knowledge, either in the form of magical names,
of remedies or of a magical reading of the Torah, can be
understood as a model that I propose calling mystical-
magical. The first action — the ascent on high —
represents the mystical phase of the model, as it allows
the religious perfectus contact with the divine or
celestial entities. His bringing down of the secret
lore, which in many cases has magical qualities,
represents the magical aspect of this model. (31)
Ascent has practical implications, for when the righteous soul
ascends to the source it can know the future. In ascensio mentis,
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human Intellect as his real Image is man’s vehicle of ascent to the
divine Intellect (40-2). Our Coincidence of Opposites, in terms of
human and divine, Idel correlates with the biblical verse, “’Make
thee two trumpets of silver, of a whole piece shall thou make them’”
(46). According to his explanatory definition, the same metaphorical
Image infers Lefèvre’s male-female Coincidence of Opposites: “The
Hebrew word for trumpets — Hatzotzerot — is interpreted as Hatzi-
Tzurah — namely ‘half of the form,’ which together, since they are
two halves, create a perfect form” (46). Through the metaphor of
virgin bride and bridegroom, Idel explains that as Israel ascends to
the Holy One by degrees, experiencing always a new union, the
pleasure in the process is more important than attainment of the
goals. He ties all of the metaphorical “as if” scenarios to
Neoplatonism. While in Neoaristotelian language, Imagination ascends
beyond itself to the supernal source, actualizing Intellect, “until
he merits that the spirit rest upon him” (50-3).
Relating Medieval astrology’s celestial bodies to the 10
sefirot, Idel cites Cordovero’s descriptions of the nature of
Kabbalistic prayer [wherein, I point out, both pairs of opposites —
God-man and male-female — are working together]:
“Behold, this man is worshiping the Holy One, blessed be
He and his Shekhinah, as a son and as a servant standing
before his master, by means of a perfect worship, out of
love, without deriving any benefit or reward because of
that worship . . . because the wise man by the quality
of his [mystical] intention when he intends during his
prayer, his soul will be elevated by his [spiritual]
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arousal from one degree to another, from one entity to
another until she arrives and is welcome and comes in
the presence of the Creator, and cleaves to her source,
to the source of life; and then a great influx will be
emanated upon her from there, and he will become a
vessel [keli] and a place and foundation for [that]
influx, and from him it [the influx] will be distributed
to all the world as it is written in the Zohar [. . .].”
(47-8)
This description supports Lefèvre’s claim that the numbers to
the mystery of the magi and the numbers to the mystery of the
prophets are the same, that this “ancient veil of theology” is in
concordance with Christian theology, and that Judaic Kabbalah is not
unworthy (Evans Ch. 10 II:80, f. 213; Ch. 14 II:89, f. 217). Idel
explains further that this ascent in the supernal world is part of
the mystical-magical model. Most importantly, is that it is not a
rare experience, but is practiced daily by the Kabbalist. The
ascendent Kabbalist triggers the descent of the influx and serves as
pipeline for its transmission into the world (48).
In relation to Lefèvre’s attribution of the number 3 to
techniques of the magi, Idel mentions Tzevi’s description of the
Messiah’s ascent to the “mother” as referring to the 3rd sefirah,
meaning that Tzevi experienced the “secret of the Divinity” through
ascension to the 3rd sefirah. Idel suggests that the 3
rd sefirah
itself, “the nest of the bird, the mystical place of the Messiah” is
itself the secret of divinity (49). Thus Lefèvre’s interpretation of
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Christ the Messiah as the mystical Holy Spirit, 3rd in the Trinity,
is a prisca theologia that embraces both Christianity and Judaism.
Through the ontologically creative human Imagination, its
thought products, such as the divine name YHVH, ascend to the
highest firmament (Idel 54). Thus, Moses was transformed into a
universal being by means of the Tetragrammaton (44). Lefèvre
positions the numbers 10-5-6-5, which equate with the Tetragrammaton
Y-H-V-H, vertically descending. In this schema, the practitioner
descends on the Ground of Silence rather than ascending (Evans Ch.
14 II:90, f. 218v). This reinforces the appropriateness of Idel’s
mystical-magical model, in that neither the mystical nor the
magical, Spirit ascending or descending, is meant as subordinate or
fallen since it is all One. He continues in this vein citing an
unnamed late fifteenth century Kabbalistic book from Spain, speaking
about Elijah’s angelization through ascension and his descent to the
world in corpore et in spiritu, in body and in spirit, through
divine names (55). Ascent via divine names through the hierarchy of
angels in Lefèvre’s Quincuplex Psalterium will be an important point
of scholarly comparison regarding these topics as presented in
Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders.
Importantly, Idel points out the paradox of what I term as the
Coincidence of Opposites, in that the literary body in particular of
Kabbalistic writings, portrays a more concrete ascent-descent
scenario, while also portraying a “continuum among the divine, the
angelic and the human. The ascent is a motion taking place between
planes of existence that are not separated by ontic gaps but that
are different forms or manifestations of a Protean and more
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comprehensive being” (56). Although the primal myth is exilic — one
of duality — it is from within this unified perspective that
Lefèvre’s works should be studied; it is in this unified vision that
Idel concludes his book.
In his Concluding Remarks of the final chapter, Idel
simplifies the mythologized variations of the World Pillar, or axis
mundi, by severing it into 3 parts: the divine realm above; the
human below; and the path or technique between that unites them
through its usage by the righteous (205). In this simplified model —
unity as One center of the ellipsoid, duality as the 2nd center of
the ellipsoid, and the 3rd element the path between them of return to
the One — all are collapsed into the Pillar alone. In this symbolic
representation of a cosmic continuum where duality, the Coincidence
of Opposites, becomes unified as One, resolving exile, Idel finds
unity among religions, citing Hindu, Manichaean, Christian, Islam,
Shiite, and Sufi metaphors (205-6). The Pillar can be conceived as a
unified metaphor representing both phallus and umbilicus, equalizing
male and female in their common source.
Although a work on Christian Kabbalah, Lefèvre’s De Magia
naturali is an important treatise to compare with Idel’s list of
only two Jewish literary sources on ascent through the planetary
system. The “widespread ascent of the soul through the seven planets
found in Hellenistic and early Christian sources” is rare in Jewish
texts even through the premodern era (56). Notice the emphasis on
the fact that these works are studied as literature.
Despite the impact of astrology and of hermetic sources
on various Jewish literatures, discussions of the ascent
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through the planetary system are few and explicitly
literary; in fact, I am aware of only two examples.
Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, the influential twelfth-century
thinker, produced a literary composition entitled Hay
ben Mequiz under the influence of Avicenna. Another
composition was authored by Rabbi Abraham Yagel, a
Kabbalist in the second half of the sixteenth century,
that is entitled Gei Hizzayon, which follows Italian
models. (56)
Idel concludes through lack of evidence, that in Medieval
mystical literature of Muslims, Christians and Jews, ascent lost its
centrality. Citing Dante’s Divine Comedy, he makes the distinction
between literary and experiential treatments of ascension, the
latter of which he categorizes as mystical literature (56-7). This
distinction may be contradictory to his mystical-magical model, in
that it denies Imagination the ontological creativity he has
ascribed to it. I contend that through the Words and Images
themselves, literature elicits experience.
Another instance of Idel’s distinction between physical and
cosmic worlds (as reflected in his distinction between literature
and mystical literature) is in his treatment of the Pillar in the
Book of Bahir. As mentioned above, the Bahir — a late twelfth/early
thirteenth century Kabbalistic work from Provence — will be an
important primary source in studying De Magia naturali.
Idel distinguishes between the sexual and the cosmic
connotations of the Pillar, severing human and divine righteousness.
Again this runs contradictory to his mystical-magical model,
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particularly as he explains the Pillar in the final Concluding
Remarks as a unified whole even though it has distinguishable parts
(205-6). The cosmic tree, the path itself, the Pillar from earth to
heaven is referred to as the Great Aion, identical to the foundation
and also to the righteous themselves (80-1). Yet in this Idel is not
willing to collapse the models into a unified continuum,
particularly as regards the distinction between the sexual and the
cosmic connotations of the Pillar (80-3).
As in Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali, the Bahir tells of the
descent of semen, portraying the seventh divine power as the spinal
column, and the eighth divine power as the membrum virile (Evans Ch.
5 II:62, f. 204; Idel 82). Lefèvre’s quoting of Vergil’s “chill
snake” burst open through incantations tells of the creative power
of Words and Images, uniting sexual and cosmic connotations in the
metaphor of the snake, as it equates human sexual and spinal
energies with the Cosmic Pillar (Evans Ch. 2 II:53, f. 200v). This
demonstrates Literature’s power to unite duality, and disciplines,
through metaphor.
One value in bringing De Magia naturali out of obscurity is
that it clearly shows the Medieval Neoplatonic metaphorical approach
to Kabbalistic theosophy through architectural, sexual and
geometrical Imagery. Common Images are the circle and center;
emergence from point through line, plane and space; and the chain of
being (Idel 167). The resurfacing of Lefèvre’s treatise points to
the cause for the scarcity of this type of Imagery as oppression by
the Church. Such literary works synthesizing religions had to be
shared in secret. Idel reports that “Medieval thinkers adopted
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belief systems that envisioned the divine reality as spiritual, and
images are scant and cautious in their works.” Here again though,
Idel makes an unfortunate distinction between Images as metaphors
and Images that convey something fundamental to understanding (167).
Throughout Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, Idel
grapples with the problem of whether ascensions are of the physical
body, in corpore, or of some spiritual form. He recalls the ascent
of Moses as interpreted by the Besht, when Moses remained in
ascendence for 40 days yet his body remained below “thrown down like
a stone” (152). Idel likens the function of the tzaddiq in Hasidism
to that of the primal shaman, in that the shaman plays a dual role
of sacred and social, and through ritual mediation with the sacred
heals society as a collective patient. Presenting examples
throughout the book of the paradox that is duality, Idel also
directly challenges Academia to recognize the connection between the
realms of sacred and social (Spirit and body) in future studies of
the shamans and magicians (154).
Describing the continuous historical interaction of religions,
one of Idels’s examples is the adoption by Muslims of cosmology as
shaped in pagan Neoplatonism. Citing an Ismailiyah epistle, he
highlights the Neoplatonic universal or cosmic soul, which mediates
between Intellectual and corporeal worlds. After emergence of the
cosmic Intellect, “the universal soul emanates nature [. . .].
Particular human souls are simply parts of the universal soul,
extensions that are one with the cosmic soul. As such, human souls
may return to their supernal source” (168). The universal soul
serves as intermediary emanation between universal Intellect and
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corporeal world, having particular relevance in worldly events. The
epistle explains that with the genesis of the universal soul it
penetrates from the highest to the lowest, and reaching that nadir
reverses direction toward the all-encompassing sphere in an ascent,
arousing, or resurrecting as it enters its angelic forms. The
universal soul is thus the Spirit of the world (168-9). Lefèvre
graphically depicts this zippering together effect of higher to
lower correspondences in Chapter 10, where angels are correlated
with planets and numbers (Evans Ch. 10 II:81, f. 213).
The Neoplatonic concept of the cosmic soul was also adapted by
Jewish Kabbalists into the “mundane Jerusalem” (human soul, center
of the lower world) and the “supernal Jerusalem” (cosmic soul,
center of the spiritual world) (Idel 176). Lefèvre delineates the
inferior terrestrial numbers of the body and the Superior celestial
numbers of the soul, forming the first binary relationship: “the
first [number] is therefore the binary.” This binary, which embodies
the primal exilic metaphor of the Fall, he unites metaphorically by
means of “the mountain of the binary” (synonymous with the axis
mundi or Pillar). Also transcribed as “the binary (second) mind,”
this first binary contains within it all other numbers (Evans Ch. 7
II:68-9, f. 207-208v).
These definitions and descriptions illustrate the highly
Neoplatonic framework of Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II, as
exemplified in Chapter 4 where the knots, nexus and chains are let
down from heaven to the lowest with guardian angels positioned to
assist in the ascent (Evans II:57, f. 202v). Idel’s mystical-magical
model is thus embodied in Book II as an elliptical continuum with a
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heavenly center and an earthly center, but an ellipsoid that
perpetually weaves itself along “the knots, nexus and chains,” or
Idel’s “the ladder of the ascensions,” out of the spherically
centered love-nexus (Evans Ch. 4 II:57, f. 202v; Idel 170).
Each number in Book II, whether of body or soul, is also
called a soul, each ascending to a planetary mind in accordance with
its qualities, so that the souls of Saturn are of the Saturnian
mind. There are also strati of soul-numbers grouped into
hierarchical minds, beginning with the elemental mind, rising to the
second mind, and then to the supernal mind (Evans Ch. 6, ff. 205-
207v; Ch. 7, ff. 207v-211v).
Idel’s book studies the correspondences between the 10
sefirot, spheres or divine attributes, and the many metaphorical
depictions of ascension he addresses. Using this resource, Lefèvre’s
planetary spheres, minds, and their angelic correspondences in Book
II should also be thoroughly analyzed in terms of Kabbalah’s 10
sefirot.
The Neoaristotelian notion of agent intellect above the
universal soul that Idel demonstrates via an excerpt from an
eleventh-century Neoplatonic Muslim treatise, the Book of the
Imaginary Circles (Ascensions on High 170), Lefèvre adopts in the
overarching metaphor of superior male agent acting upon inferior
female patient. I assert however, that he uses this sexual or
gender-specific metaphor interchangeably.
Lefèvre discloses in Chapters 16 and 17 the Christian
Sacrament as the number 300, the recuperative mediating number for
humans. In gematria, the number 300 is emblematic of the Hebrew
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letter “s” or “shin,” mother or Spirit. Hughes gives a supporting
interpretation of “shin” as a convergence of man and fire (21). This
reinforces the clarity in Plato’s metaphorical injunction to “leap
like a living flame”. In Chapters 14-16 Lefèvre explains how, in
Kabbalah, letters are translated into numbers, in this case the
ineffable name of God: the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton YHVH
(Yehovah) translates into the divine numbers 10, 5, 6, 5. By adding
this fifth Sacramental number in the center of the other four
numbers, Kabbalah translates YHShVH (Yehoshua, Jesus) into 10, 5,
300, 6, 5, totaling 326. Through the active female quintessence of
Spirit, the passive male ineffable becomes effable, the invisible
becomes visible, the Name of God becomes pronounceable as Jesus.
Power to enjoin the universal soul or Spirit Lefèvre ultimately
ascribes to the name Jesus, depicting this in a cross with the
letter “s” inscribed at each of the extremities (Evans Ch. 14 II:89-
90, f. 217-218v; Ch. 15 II:90-92, ff. 218-219v; Ch. 16 II:92-93, f.
219).
Hence magic, Kabbalah, number mysticism, is a prisca theologia
useful to understanding Christian theology. Christ is both
quintessence and the magic ternary uniting the binary Coincidence of
Opposites — God and man — in the Trinity. In pagan terms within Book
II, through love Jupiter and Venus compute this ternary from the
monade, which is itself an all-embracing unity comprised of the four
elemental celestial numbers sounding in unison. (Evans Ch. 7 II:72,
f. 209) Thus, God, celestial realms, and man are envisioned as a
continuum.
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Idel’s book provides the exact link as to where in the
Kabbalist tradition of masters Lefèvre should be placed, albeit
within the offshoot of Christian Kabbalah. Idel identifies the
Renaissance author especially fond of the Book of the Imaginary
Circles as Rabbi Yohanan ben Isaac Alemanno who was active for many
years in Florence, and whose famous student was Count Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola. From Pico, then, Lefèvre received this tributary of
Jewish Kabbalah. To illustrate the importance of this cross-
fertilization between religions, consider Pico and Lefèvre’s
enthusiasm in correlating also the Judaic sefirot with the Christian
sphaera, Imagination’s planetary spheres. Idel points out though
that while the author al-Batalyawsi considers the ladder connecting
the circle earth to that of agent Intellect to be the universal
soul, Pico sees it as nature (Ascensions on High 181-4). Here again
is my point about Lefèvre’s group of Christian Kabbalists conceiving
of nature, or body, as intimately connected to soul at every level,
a unified vision of God and creation, where all is sacred and
nothing is profane.
My point that Academia might more thoroughly and meaningfully
address sacred texts through a phenomenological exegesis is
corroborated by Idel, who also highlights my argument that the
experiential dimension should be illuminated. In the Concluding
Remarks of his last chapter, he enjoins Academia to transcend the
historical approach:
Pinpointing the basic phenomena that emerge from a
certain literature and describing their reverberations
might be considered their inner history. Here we are
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adopting a specific type of phenomenological approach,
which assumes that a model that appears in Jewish
mysticism may articulate its main conceptual structure,
and in our case, this mystical-magical model transcends
the boundaries of various types of Jewish mystical
literature. From a more general viewpoint, the survival
of shamanic imagery and perhaps also experiences in the
remnants of shamanic religions, in Yoga and in
eighteenth-century Hasidism invites new reflections on
the history of religion in general. [. . .] [These]
demonstrate that archaic imagery and presumably
experiences have not been extinguished even in the
regions and religions that Mircea Eliade believes were
conquered by the “historical” penchant in religion.
(208-9).
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2. Experience & History, Metaphorical & Literal
The history versus experience polarity is however, within the
Christian timeframe, as old as Christianity itself according to
Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. Around 150 CE, both
Masters Justin and Valentinus were teaching in Rome. Valentinus
taught the mysteries of gnosis, or immediate experience; Justin
taught moral action and philosophic discourse. Pagels goes so far as
to say that the majority of Jews and Christians then, and ever
since, interpret Scriptures as Justin did: in particular they
interpret the Genesis story as history with a moral, Adam and Eve as
historical persons whose Original Sin taught them a moral lesson
(62-3).
In the same era, Tertullian of Carthage labelled all women co-
conspirators of Eve:
“You are the devil’s gateway. . . .you are she who
persuaded him whom the devil did not dare attack. . . .
Do you not know that every one of you is an Eve? The
sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the
guilt, of necessity, lives on too.” (63)
Lefèvre, on the other hand, true to the Gnostic inheritance
through Kabbalah, espoused a model of aequalitas between ritual
theological couples. His extrapolation of the Fall and the Adam-Eve
binary into other personifications of the Coincidence of Opposites,
and indeed into pure number, didn’t expunge Lefèvre of the heresy
associated with a metaphorical, allegorical reading of Genesis.
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Maintaining perspectives of duality seems to be a constant in
Judaism and Christianity, where, as Pagels points out, a devotee’s
relationship with God is described as “I and Thou”. A Hindu or a
Gnostic, on the other hand, could say “I am Thou”, would claim “that
the divine being is hidden deep within human nature, as well as
outside it” (65). This unified continuum of being was the vision of
Jewish and Christian mystics alike, including Pico and Lefèvre. What
is overlooked of the mystics and their mystical techniques is their
practical impact on nature and society.
Lefèvre understood the riddle of Adam and Eve, of duality, in
Gnostic terms, and expressed that exegesis in the most abstract
terms possible — that of number mysticism: numerical ascension was
fueled by the Coincidence of Opposites personified in ritual
theological couples such as Jupiter and Venus, the key element being
the love-nexus between them, the ascension to unity in marriage.
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent brings controversial religious
issues down to earth. Pagan religion in the Roman Empire held that
the elemental forces of nature were divine forces. During the same
era as Justin, Tertullian and Valentinus, pagan philosopher-emperor
Marcus Aurelius stood for the belief that “gods embodied elemental
forces at work in the universe,” identifying himself with those
powers which he called “providence, necessity, and nature” (40). The
sun’s energy was personified in Apollo, thunder and lightening in
Jupiter, and internal passion in Venus. Pagels explains, though,
that no intelligent pagan worshipped the actual Image of gods or
rulers, but rather used Image as “an accessible focus for reverring
the cosmic forces they represented” (41).
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Thus, pagan religion as an exercise, a practice, is reflected
in Lefèvre’s use of the gods’ Images to transcend their own duality
to a vision of the One, of God. The Images were, and are, metaphors
that serve as vehicles for ascension to experience of divine wisdom.
Pagels cites the Gnostic text Reality of the Rulers, which
tells of Adam recognizing in Eve not merely a marriage partner but a
spiritual power:
“And when he saw her, he said, ‘It is you who have given
me life: you shall be called Mother of the Living [Eve];
for it is she who is my Mother. It is she who is the
Physician, and the Woman, and She Who Has Given Birth.’”
(66)
The Reality of the Rulers tells it that when God warned Adam
to disregard her voice he lost contact with the female Spiritual
principle, who then appeared as instructor in the form of a Snake.
The Snake instructor said that it was out of jealousy that God
forbade Adam to eat from the tree “’of recognizing evil and good [.
. .]. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like
gods, recognizing evil and good’” (67). The “Reality of the Rulers,”
the “Riddle of the Rulers of the Land,” then is simply the duality
that humans are immersed in. This is the same decloaking of creation
to its basic component of “2 is the first number” that Lefèvre leads
us to in De Magia naturali Book II. The “sinful” duality of good and
evil that a fundamentalist view leads to, Lefèvre unifies through
love, Christ’s Spirit, in a vision of blessedness in the One and the
Trinity.
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In the Epilogue, Pagels discloses her realization that, “using
historical means to explore the origins of Christianity most often
does not solve religious questions. [. . .] Finally, I came to see
that more important, to me, [. . .] is the recognition of a
spiritual dimension in human experience” (153-4).
Pearl Epstein’s scholarly yet accessible book, Kabbalah: The
Way of the Jewish Mystic, is an encyclopedic reference for study of
Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II, but along with being one of
historical reference, this book is essential as an experiential
reference. Epstein gracefully rends the shroud of mystery that
traditionally has kept mystical practices secret, providing
descriptions of the many ways in which Kabbalah has been practiced
over the millenium.
While focusing on Kabbalah as Jewish tradition, Epstein
demonstrates that the 10 sefirot or spheres — the cosmic tree of
life — is anthropomorphic: a schematic of the human nervous system.
Collapsing all of the techniques she has described, the Kabbalist’s
tree of spheres, utilized since the Middle Ages, is a breathing and
concentration chart that mirrors the Taoist “diagram of the
ultimateless” (69-72). Epstein thus breaks the spell of religious
ownership, freeing this wisdom tradition to any human in much the
same way that Lefèvre does in Book II through the prisca theologia
of number mysticism.
As noted throughout Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic,
the metaphorical Imagery is interchangeable, so that there is no
separation between divine attributes, their hidden Names, words,
their colors and so on, indeed there is no separation between nature
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and the divine, between man and God (57). This then supports my
argument that literature, through its attention to Words as symbols,
as metaphors for Ideas, already embodies the practical exercise
necessary to unify studies in wisdom. In much the same way that
Epstein suggests taking the Kabbalist’s tree of spheres “out of its
mysterious wrappings and stripped of its religious overtones,” my
suggestion is only to broaden Literature’s domain in public
education to include the study of religion as the mythology of
sacred texts (71).
Epstein describes the Kabbalist’s journey of lover to Beloved
in ways that resonate with Lefèvre’s unification of duality through
ascending chains via the technique of prisca theologia:
Even at this exhalted level, the lover approaches his
goal in stages; the interdependence of the entire chain
of worlds along the cosmic tree allows him to work with
Love as he had with Awe, in the knowledge that God, His
idea, and His word are One. Therefore, in the
corresponding microcosm of his own mind, the mystic’s
thoughts, speech, and action may also be united as one.
Emptied of his ego, he too is free to create new worlds
with each breath — and to destroy them with each
expiration. (34)
The mystical technique of numerical ascension as Lefèvre
describes it, wherein the worthy practitioner by the Jovial chains
ascends to the Jovian mind, is rightly called a prisca theologia
(Evans Ch. 4 II:58, f. 202). As Pagels has noted, Jupiter is a
personified force of nature, the pagan god of thunder and lightning.
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In Epstein’s comparison between Kabbalah and Tao, she cites
Professor Chang:
“When the practitioner constantly sends the genuine idea
to the nervous system, it moves on unceasingly; a
tremendous change in the electrical charges is effected
and the current flow is greatly increased. As the
operation in the serious practitioner goes on month
after month, and year after year, the emergence of
‘lightning and thunder’ within his nervous system will
be the natural outcome . . . Here symbolic language is
used to describe a physical phenomenon.” (71)
Of particular interest is that this phenomenon, which
Lefèvre’s practitioners of Pythagorean philosophy or Kabbalah
experience as a unification into One of the 2 or duality, a unity
between the Coincidence of Opposites, neurologists now characterize
as “’depolarization of the electric charges in the network of the
nervous system’” (71). For this reason, natural magic is called the
practical half of philosophy, because it creates results in the
natural world through an active practice. Without further scrutiny
of the mechanics of natural magic, it would be categorized as
Positive theology since it is active. Its magic happens, however,
always through a Negative theology, a sacrifice of individual ego on
the Ground of Silence.
Brian P. Copenhaver, who wrote the Introduction to the 2000
edition of Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic, shares my own
opinion of the oft-cited Lynn Thorndike:
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Thorndike’s polemical chapters on Ficino, Pico and other
figures studied by Walker are hostile to the concept of
a renaissance in European history and contemptuous of
that period’s most eminent thinkers. Walker’s approach
is, on the one hand, fairer to the renaissance, but on
the other hand, startlingly innovative in taking magic
seriously as a feature of European high culture.
Walker’s book itself would have been informed by his study of
Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali, as his most extensive coverage of
Lefèvre is inclusion in Chapter 5 as one who condemned magic. The
chapter culminates: “But then, Lefèvre himself, in about 1492, had
written a long treatise on astrological magic, which he never
published; he was perhaps being harsh on his own errors” (170). Just
prior to this closing comment, Walker cites with bewilderment
Lefèvre’s condemnation of Ficino’s Hermetica, since he venerated
Ficino as a father (169-70). My point that Lefèvre made these public
denouncements only in order to avoid persecution resolves these
contradictions about Lefèvre’s position on magic. More subtly
though, this particular condemnation is against magicians who draw
Spirit into Images such as statues. Lefèvre perhaps enjoyed the
double-entendre set up by the Spirit-body polarity in that he would
have condemned confining Spirit in stone Images, yet would have
celebrated freeing the boundaries of Image through infusion of
Spirit. This relates directly to the age-old controversy of duality
versus unity, mentioned above through Pagel’s commentary as “I and
Thou” versus “I am Thou”.
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Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella is
otherwise a thorough synopsis of the personages and ideas at play
regarding magic in Lefèvre’s era. To summarize Ficino’s definition
of “spiritus,” it is “the instrument by which they [the priests of
the Muses] can measure and grasp the whole world,” and it is the
link between body and soul (3-4). Walker reveals himself as a
dualist when he categorizes Ficino’s “spiritus” as a physical
phenomenon, distinguishing it from the truly “spiritual” “in the
Christian (modern) sense” (4, 26). Walker’s chapter on the “General
Theory of Natural Magic” is a succinct and essential overview. Magia
Naturalis embodies a real overlapping of art, science, practical
psychology and religion. The vis imaginativa is the fundamental
force; the medium of transmission is the cosmic and human Spirit,
vehicle of the Imagination; the effects are on either animate or
inanimate beings. In Ficinian, Neoplatonic magic, “The main magical
importance of occult qualities is in the resultant planetary
groupings of objects, which can then be used by the other forces,”
i.e., one can make a picture Solarian by representing Solarian
Images, in turn causing the Imagination to become more Solarian.
Words as a force of the Imagination are often used in creating the
objects to reinforce their astrological power; this rests on the
theory of language that there is a real connection between Words and
what they denote: a poem could therefore be both art and incantation
(75-84).
Without the benefit of Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II,
Walker concludes that what he calls, the “Vis Musices B (Proportion
and Number (harmony of the spheres; sympathetic magic) remained, as
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far as I know, purely theoretical” (77, 81). In contrast, Lefèvre
categorizes number mysticism, Pythagorean philosophy as practical,
and in Chapter 7 describes effects based on musical proportions as
practical, not just theoretical (Evans II:73-75, ff. 210-211v).
Without Lefèvre’s De Magia naturali Book II, Walker stops short of
making that connection:
It is a theory that proposes the production of effects
by means of the mathematical or numerical correspondence
between the movements, distances or positions of the
heavenly bodies and the porportions of consonant
intervals in music. That this correspondence could be
physically operative was explained by the analogy of the
sympathetic vibration of strings. This theory is part of
a wider cosmological theory, which supposes that the
whole universe is constructed on these musical
proportions, and which provides the most usual
theoretical basis for sympathetic magic. (81)
Walker discusses the possibility of heresy in each of the
magical combinations he describes. Ficinian subjective magic can
overlap with psychology, which at that time was part of religion,
therefore is that which makes natural magic an obvious threat to
religion. Walker summarizes this chapter in a manner that reveals
the scholarly openmindedness with which he studied magic:
The overlap of magic and religion produced then this
dilemma: either a miraculous but plainly magical
religion, or a purely psychological religion without a
god. [. . .] The historical importance of these
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connexions between magic and religion is, I think, that
they led people to ask questions about religious
practices and experiences which would not otherwise have
occurred to them; and, by approaching religious problems
through magic, which was at least partially identical
with, or exactly analogous to religion [. . .] they were
able sometimes to suggest answers which, whether true or
not, were new and fruitful. (84)
The confluence of the seemingly disparate traditions of
theoretical Negative theologies and practical Positive theologies is
where I suggest much fruit could be harvested in Academia: through
engaging not only the historical literal modes, but also the
metaphorical-Spiritual, experiential modes of critical analysis and
teaching: the anagogical and phenomenological. When Academia
empowers judgmental dialogue against this worldview, the result is a
polarizing bias that is itself “contagious,” as is Hughes’
unfortunate case of mimicking the established authority:
Pico’s enthusiasm for the cabala as a secret repository
of Christian truth proved to be highly contagious, and
many other scholars absorbed themselves in the studies
he had initiated. The claims he made had at least one
good and positive effect, namely, the reflorescence of
interest in the Hebrew language. (21)
Alternatively, translator Michael J. B. Allen and editor James
Hankins of Platonic Theology present Ficino’s Platonism as key to
understanding European art, thought, culture and spirituality of the
following 250 years. Through mystical mathematics and “an ancient
143
pagan mythological philosophy” God gifted the gentile poets and
sages with a Trinitarian gift of wisdom (viii).
144
3. Poets, Philosophers, & Mythological Beings
In De Magia naturali, for this mystical mathematics and pagan
mythological philosophy, Lefèvre applauds the ancients in recalling
names of poets who sang of the Coincidence of Opposites, with Spirit
as the 3rd element unifying the mythic, ritual theological pairs; and
in recalling the names of philosophers who also taught that genesis
was through the Coincidence of Opposites creating Trinity. The
following chart names a few of the persons and personifications
whose wisdom Lefèvre praises in Book II:
Philosophers
Pythagoras for his formula of 2 as the first number, One as
the basis of number (throughout Book II on Pythagorean
philosophy).
The tradition of masters who have learned to ascend from below
to above, for passing on the techniques: Mercury, Zalmoxis,
Zoroaster, Plato, and the magi (Evans Ch. 4 II:58, f. 202).
Empedocles and Heraclitus for the philosophy of unbinding
through friendship, e.g., “lying near the flexible power
reciprocally in addition to friendship, the mates of the world
beget disorder and annihilation [. . .] Empedocles and
Heraclitus of Ephesus were predicting also of unbinding
through friendship, but of the fatal and boiling fires now of
the superior, now of the inferior I unite as if to couple”
(Evans Ch. 4 II:59-60, f. 203).
145
Empedocles for his assertion of real numbers as those saved by
concordant discord, i.e., the tangible by-product of the
continual genesis of number through sacrifice of one to the
next (Evans Ch. 4 II:61, f. 204v); for his forces of Love and
Strife inherent in Lefèvre’s attraction and repulsion, eg., in
order “to percieve, by trials in man and the world, there is
no other way” (Evans Ch. 4 II:59, f. 203v), duality is the
necessary “evil” for a perceptible creation; the cosmic cycle
where all matter contracts and expands repeatedly without
beginning or end (“Empedocles” thebigview).
Heraclitus for his theory of flux and fire, “unity of
opposites” where “all things are flowing” and burning of the
eternal fire, reality merely a succession of transitory
states” (“Heraclitus” thebigview); inherent in Book II, eg.,
“[. . .] ‘the worlds of the collective fires and vigors are
yoked; conducting the world fire they labor [. . .] [the]
worlds were disuniting and consuming all power, longing and
also nexus, as if collected altogether into one flame [. . .]
and they are being collected by the sea.’ And after that it is
of true sameness, supposing that the world is ever [always]
disuniting, which plane Pythagoras was perceiving,” returning
us to the desert silence (Evans Ch. 4 II:59, f. 203v).
Poets & Mythological Beings
Vergilian magic and that of the magus (magician) is of the
Venusian ternary nexus created by coupling and, “employed in
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songs, by which they labor to be bound and drawn tight in an
amatory chain” (Evans Ch. 2 II:52-53, f. 199-200v).
Orpheus and Pindarus sing of the ternary embodied in the
Charities or Graces, Beauty, Joy, and Charm (Evans Ch. 2
II:53, f. 200v); the Charities equate with the Venusian
amatory chain: “they hinder, and as if drawn tight, they lend
stronger chains” (Evans Ch. 4 II:60, f. 203).
Cloen (Evans Ch. 4 II:60, f. 203) St. Broccan Cloen who wrote
of St. Brigid (CatholicEncyclopedia) is numbered among the
last of the poets to sing in the meter or measure that Lefèvre
“counts”.
Pyramus and Thisbe are forbidden lover and Beloved who through
an illusion kill themselves out of love (Mythology Guide).
They are interpreted by Lefèvre as metaphorical of the
sacrifice to Spirit that occurs between lover and Beloved, in
this case they are inferred to be numbers as they are created
through sacrifices one to the next, the sacrifice fueling the
dimensional building of creation: “hence with Pyramus they are
taking away life, number above measure growing up [. . .]
[they] celebrate by sacrifices due proportion and also
salvation in things” (Evans Ch. 4 II:60-61, f. 204).
Phillide and Flora as the couple with whom the poets count the
collection of life (Evans Ch. 4 II:60, f. 203).
Man and the numbers of love the poets use to grow proportion
(Evans Ch. 4 II:60, f. 203). Proportion, then, is
anthropomorphic; perception of creation is anthropormorphic.
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Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells of the Deucalion flood (paralleling
Noah’s Flood and the Sumerian Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh),
when the waters were gathered and the first binary ritual
theological couple Deucalion and Pyrrha (akin to Adam and Eve)
were created out of that void, the Ground of Silence, One:
“’Then the sea and earth were wearing no separation. All was
sea’” (Evans Ch. 4 II:58, f. 202; “Deucalion” Wikipedia).
Vulcan and Vesta are personifications of the paired fires of
Sun and Mars (Evans Ch. 3 II:56, f. 201).
Other Personifications
Phaëthon is “the Sun’s son,” son of Phoebus Apollo (Helios or
Prometheus) and Eos who Lefèvre cites simply as “Sun,” and
“mother” (Evans Ch. 4 II:59-60, f. 203). Phaënon and Phaëthon
(“shining”) are said to be the planets Saturn and Jupiter
(Room 241-2).
Planet Number Element Quality
(varies)
Aplanes 2 8 earth celestial ground
Saturn 3 7 water intimate longing
Jupiter/Jove 4 6 air nexus of justice & harmony
(e.g., “the celestial horse”)
Mars 5 5 fire nexus of action
Sun 5 4 fire nexus of action
Venus/Juno 4 3 air nexus of love
Mercury 3 2 water sensory longing
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Moon 2 1 earth corporeal power
Earth corporeal ground
As Ficino denotes them in Platonic Theology, Zoroaster’s
immovable movers that Aristotle had called “minds,” the Hebrews and
subsequent philosophers called “angels” and “messengers;” just so
Lefèvre correlates the hierarchy of angels with planetary spheres,
which he also designates as “minds” (Ficino 73; Evans Ch. 8 II:75-
77, Ch. 9 II:77-78, Ch. 10 II:80-81). Lefèvre’s equation of
intuition with Intellect reflects Ficino’s model wherein he defers
to Zoroaster who had said that the intelligible lies outside the
mind, and asserts that above angel and mind is truth (Ficino 83).
Above mind then, Intellect intuits truth or the intelligible.
Ficino agrees with Parmenides the Pythagorean, who claimed
that God is Being, One and motionless, but elaborates that God
“moves and preserves everything and does all things in all” (133).
This exemplifies the architectural scaffolding on which Platonic
Theology rests: the Coincidence of Opposites. This architecture is
the foundation of Lefèvre’s number mysticism in Book II, where it is
embodied: in pure number as 2; in the concept of agent Intellect
above acting on passive body below; as celestial spheres interacting
2 at a time joined by the nexus between; of God and man, with Christ
as the love-nexus uniting the 2. Ficino describes the dynamics of
such action between 2 thus: “For action arises in natural bodies
when opposition arises between contraries. Such opposition is born
in the genus of qualities” (23). The qualities of the celestial or
planetary spheres in Book II, such as fire or water, along with that
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of their nexus, determine the resultant effects on man. The
existence of 2 implies a 3rd element, the relationship between them,
creating the Trinitarian gift of wisdom and understanding.
Coincidence of Opposites is described in Book II in various
ways: “inconsonant concord,” “concordant discord,” “concord
advancing throws salvation into disorder” (Evans Ch.’s 4 & 5 II:61,
f. 204v). Of great importance to this thesis, is that genesis, and
numerical ascension, proceed via these binary couplings through
their sacrifices: they “celebrate by sacrifices due proportion and
also salvation in things” (Evans Ch. 4 II:61, f. 204v). In other
words, their coming into being in due proportion they achieve or
celebrate through sacrifice, and the salvation in things is achieved
or celebrated through sacrifice. The Spirit, the love-nexus between
the 2, is the negation beyond their union that each of the 2 is
sacrificed into. The Positive theology embodied within the qualities
of the 2 is always sacrificed to the relationship between in a
Negative theology. These are the basic architectural elements in
Lefèvre’s Book II: the relationship of 2 is unified in the One,
within which the grace of the Trinity is received. Christ was
celebrated as the uniting Spirit received through faith and
intuition. Nevertheless, the Church chose to condemn natural magic.
Lefèvre’s ontological premises dramatized in Book II are
inherited from his Florentine patriarch Ficino, whose second edition
of Platonic Theology was published in 1491 at the time of Lefèvre’s
journey to Italy, and two years before writing his treatise De Magia
naturali. Ficino further elaborates on the process of genesis and
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re-creation via teachings from Zoroaster the Chaldean and Plotinus,
founder of Neoplatonism:
Being, therefore, wherever it may be, depends on
God. Zoroaster touched on this mystically: “Everything
is born from a single fire.” The lower bodies of the
world make the passage from not-being into being and
cross over from being into not-being. Higher bodies
change from one being into another, or from one mode of
being into another. So all these bodies are by nature
equally inclined to being and to not-being. [. . .]
Plotinus has explained this more or less as follows: God
is act, not of another, not for another, but of Himself
and for Himself. [. . .] God is act, unsleeping and
perpetual, from Himself, in Himself, and wholly with
regard to Himself. [. . .] The whole thrust of the
divine act is centered on itself. [. . .] But willing
and doing — indeed even being — are utterly identical.
(xi, 135, 185)
Plotinus’ above description of God as, “in Himself, and wholly
with regard to Himself. [. . .] centered on itself,” is the theology
Lefèvre uses to decloak the myth of Narcissus in Chapter 8:
If indeed the body which is the soul’s shadow, that
which follows for the sake of the neglected soul,
similars go forth to those things as her own image in
the water, the shadow of herself having then been
contemplated, the forms are held with longing, so as not
to be torn apart from her they will ever and consuming
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seeing, which ingenuously of Narcissus, son of the river
god Cephissus, Orpheus kept singing. (Evans II:75-76, f.
211)
Lefèvre thus interprets the myth of Narcissus as a metaphor
for the One soul manifesting as Her own female-male binary, with the
Trinitarian relationship of longing simultaneously created to bind
them in an eternal Self-reflective gaze. The stereotypical male-
female active-passive position is therefore reversed, with female as
active and male as passive. They are a ritual theological couple of
aequalitas, since both are part of the One. Lefèvre reiterates this
in Chapter 2 (Evans II:53, f. 200v) and also Chapter 7 (Evans II:67,
f. 207v).
Ficino characterizes body or corporeal nature as receptive or
passive, and incorporeal nature as active, stipulating that quality,
since it is incorporeal has the power to act upon the corporeal
(217). It is in this vein of natural magic that Lefèvre in Book II
ascribes the qualities of the celestial spheres (themselves
Imaginary or incorporeal) with the power to influence corporeal
nature. That natural magic is fueled by an active, Positive theology
is tied to Ficino’s premise that since man’s nature is that of a
thinking soul, God grants him free judgment, free will, through
which the soul judges the options and chooses between them (211).
Following Pythagorean thought, Ficino finds the soul of each
zodiacal constellation in the brightest star of each, their heart.
The single soul of the world contains these 12 principal souls, and
each of those 12 heart-souls contains many souls within it.
Following the archetypal mythic mandate of the eternal return,
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Ficino explains how humans are drawn back to the One itself, the
universal Apollo, through the 12 principle souls:
Since every large plurality has to be reduced to a small
number, and the small number to a few unities and the
few unities to one unity, the numberless host of souls
dwelling in any one of the world’s spheres has to be led
back to the few most important souls. (267-8)
This multilayered hierarchy Lefèvre employs through
mathematical geometry in Book II, the subject of which he calls
Pythagorean philosophy. Facilitating genesis, Jupiter and Venus
compute the 3 from the monad fountain; the 4 is next generated from
this Trinitarian love-nexus due to the monad longing for power.
Besides the monad, the other origin of things is 4, the fourth
region held by 3, so that their coupling computes 12. The soul’s
return to its origin is accomplished through active free will
choices of fruitful loving actions, through which souls return to
the 12 and beyond “into their end” (Evans Ch. 2 II:54-55, f. 200-
201v). This process is reflected in the Positive theology, the
active scenario, of natural magic. This is where Zoroaster’s
injunction for “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds” leads
Lefèvre, who must invoke the Pythagorean sacrifice into Silence in
order to absolve magic of its Positive theology, in order to receive
God’s grace through the Negative theology of Intellect, intuition
and faith.
Ficino elaborates that Pythagoras called the One the universal
Apollo “a-pollôn, meaning ‘cut off from the many’” (271).
153
In a Negative theology then, Lefèvre claims that Pythagorean
philosophy, Kabbalah, natural magic, sacrifices itself, severs
itself beyond One and descends on the Ground of Silence (Evans Ch.
14 II:90, f. 218v). The treatise did not find sanctuary in this
sacrifice to grace however, for as Walker astutely points out, it is
the very fact that subjective, natural magic culminates in a
Negative theology that was a threat to the Church since it implied
“deism,” belief in God on the basis of Reason without revelation
(83). Thus Walker’s book delineates why the prisca theologia, God’s
Trinitarian gift to the magi (who explained creation via the
relationship of its 3 chief rulers), was not accepted by the Church
as the inheritance of Christianity, but instead the grace bestowed
by the Trinity was claimed as unique to Christianity: Ficino equates
the Trinitarian god of the magi with the Christian Trinitarian God,
“From God alone comes the prime unity in the world of the parts and
of the whole” (289); Walker sums up the Church’s response as “the
Christian revelation is unique and exclusive, and there is no room
for any other religion” (82).
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V. PRIMARY SOURCES & CONCLUDING REMARKS
A comprehensive Suggested Reading list, which I have not
compiled to date, would include Secondary Sources that are not
already listed in my Works Cited and Consulted pages. More
importantly perhaps is this listing of Primary Sources for
supportive and comparative research into Lefèvre’s De Magia
naturali:
Lefèvre d’Étaples, Elementa musicalia, Arithmetica et musica
(use the 2nd edition titled In hoc opere contente, authors
Boethius and Nemorarius, which includes “Pythagoras’ Game” or
“Rithmimacia”), Astronomicum, Philosophiae naturalis
paraphrases and Quincuplex Psalterium, L’s edition of Richard
of St. Victor’s Egregii patris et clari theologi Ricardi, and
L’s edition of Ficino’s Hermetica
Marsilio Ficino, De Amore, Theologia platonica de
immortalitate animorum (in translation as Platonic Theology
listed in the Works Cited), and De triplici Vita which
includes De vita coelitùs comparanda
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones magicae, Oration,
and On the Dignity of Man, a translation listed in the Works
Cited that includes On Being and the One and Heptaplus
Guillaume Budé, De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum; a
study of a little known treatise of Guillaume Budé, followed
by a translation into English, By Daniel F. Penham
Nicolas of Cusa, Opera omnia
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Dionysiaca
Sefer ha-Bahir (available in translation)
Josse Clichtove, De Mystica numerorum significatione
Johannes Reuchlin, De Verbo mirifico and De arte Cabalistica
the works of Odo of Morimond on number mysticism
Manilius, Astronomica
Giordano Bruno, Opere magiche, Italian tranlslation by Michele
Ciliberto
Longinus, ed., Trinum magicum
Thomas von Bungay, De magia naturali liber
Giovanni Battista della Porta, La magie naturelle divisée en
quatre livres
Francisco Torreblanca Villalpando, Daemonologia; sive, De
magia naturali, daemonica, licita, & illicita . . .
Pavao Skaliş, De magia naturali, a satirical piece
Agrippa, De occulta philosophia
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Vergil, Eclogues, Aeneid, Georgicon
Pliny, Natural History
156
Further critical analysis of De Magia naturali Book II will
serve as support to and summation of my thesis arguments. In Chapter
7, Lefèvre explains how he employs the primary binary metaphors of
the Fall and human intercourse, “the mitigation of re-creation”, [.
. .] “such that minds more easily understand” (Evans Ch. 7 II:67, f.
207v). They are just that: metaphors, with neither of the Fallen
meant as sinful in “this unskillful subordinate description” (Evans
Ch. 7 II:67, 207v). Lefèvre makes this point clear in Chapter 2, at
the beginning of Book II; in this example emphasized here again,
Jove is beneath Venus extolling her:
[. . .] (for it is Venus most of all subject to Phoebus)
and who Jove perpetually extols; just as the inferior
lover always occurs reversing to the superior, nor at
any time should be degenerated to fallen. (Evans II:53,
f. 200v)
The ritual theological couple, the Coincidence of Opposites,
therefore prefigures and circumscribes the Trinitarian aequalitas,
equality, which will be discussed shortly.
It must be reiterated now that the Coincidence of Opposites =
the binary = 2; ternary = 3; quaternary = 4; quinary = 5, and so on.
Notice also below how Lefèvre describes the 5th element — the
quinary, the quintessential Spirit — as the number who from within
the quaternary is cast and unites with its own Image in the first
manifestation of creation. The prerequisite for that happening is
exemplified in theses images of 2 as the first number: superior
celestial numbers and inferior terrestrial numbers; soul and body;
157
the second mind and the elemental mind; “the first is therefore the
binary” (Evans Ch. 7 II:69-70, f. 208).
The first manifestation of creation happens between the
quinary of the second mind and the quinary chain cast out of the
quaternary within the elemental mind: “The elemental mind, namely of
which are the binary, ternary, quaternary and also quinary, and if
planting all with the inferior elements of the soul you were
uniting, is filled full, of which first the quinary is united, [. .
.]” (Evans Ch. 7 II:69-70, f. 208). “Fire in truth quinary vigor”:
the inferior quinary eagerly and powerfully longs for unification,
leaping like a living flame to meet the superior quinary power, the
singular vigor lifting. Depicted numerically therein is the Image of
Jesus sacrificed like a flame of human blood on the cross, Jesus
becoming Christ, body ascending to Spirit (Evans Ch. 5 II:61, f.
204v).
Genesis then proceeds, “[. . .] second the senary, third the
septenary, fourth the octonary desirous and powerful. But in the
second mind, the benevolence of union and of grace is freeing with
benefaction” (Evans Ch. 7 II:70, f. 208). Spirit then, freed by
union and grace into the beneficent Eucharist, the body of Christ.
An example of the number mysticism tables that Lefèvre provides in
Book II follows (Evans Ch. 7 II:72, f. 209):
159
II:72
Simplices numeri caelestes
superiores, hoc pacto
colliguntur:
2 Aplanes
3 Saturnus
4 Jupiter
5 Mars
Compositi caelestes numeri
superiores:
5 Aplanes Saturnus
6 Aplanes Jupiter
7 Aplanes Mars
8 Saturnus Mars
9 Aplanes Saturnus Jupiter
9 Jupiter Mars
10 Aplanes Saturnus Mars
11 Aplanes Jupiter Mars
12 Saturnus Jupiter Mars
Monas mundi duodenarium
illuminans:
14 Aplanes Saturnus
Jupiter Mars
II:72
The Simple superior celestial
numbers, collected into this
treatise:
2 Aplanes
3 Saturn
4 Jupiter
5 Mars
The united superior celestial
numbers:
5 Aplanes Saturn
6 Aplanes Jupiter
7 Aplanes Mars
8 Saturn Mars
9 Aplanes Saturn Jupiter
9 Jupiter Mars
10 Aplanes Saturn Mars
11 Aplanes Jupiter Mars
12 Saturn Jupiter Mars
The Monad of the world,
illuminating the duodenary:
14 Aplanes Saturn
Jupiter Mars
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In De Magia naturali Book II Chapter 1, Lefèvre describes the
subject of Pythagorean philosophy as: “unitatem,” unity, which is
“in the magi’s thought the generatrix of every number, and the first
and absolute principle from which all other principles form” (Evans
Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198).
Lefèvre describes the principles embodied in the form of
numbers flowing sequentially out of unity, like vapor congealing to
form a more and more manifest fluid: “Nearest whom flows the binary,
the principle of alterity and the number of power, after whom the
ternary number longing, the unborn nearest to nature itself, after
whom the quaternary number connection, and already of the matter
vaporized and perfected” (Evans Ch. 1 II:50, f. 198).
Then, after ascribing active qualities to the planetary
spheres, Lefèvre explains how they continue congealing the flow of
genesis from One: “In like manner the Moon flows number into the
body, and number power, [. . .] Mercury flows longing into the
sensory, Venus flows love-nexus into the corporeal, Sun flows love-
nexus into the vital life which flows from the heart into the body”
(Evans Ch. 1 II:51, f. 199v).
By the end of only Chapter 2, Lefèvre has decloaked within
pagan Imagery the nature of the Trinity, and just which god is
transporting what quality through fluid sacred space and enchanted
time, clear to the end of time, to that mathematical point where all
of the Virtues converge, returning the souls who had flowed forth in
the genesis of creation, through song ascending back to their source
in the fountain waters. Such was the fluid intermingling of
religions and academic disciplines at the turn of the sixteenth
162
century. I posit that it was not just from the humanist habit of
reading ancient poets such as Vergil, but also from his habit of
ascesis, mental discipline or exercise, that Lefèvre was fluent at
Imagining the meaning of ancient mythological traditions.
In his travels between France and Italy, before writing De
Magia naturali, Lefèvre would have traversed ground where Christian
shrines were built on top of pagan temples. Cÿbele is the Phrygian
goddess Mother Earth; Ops is the Roman equivalent of the Greek
goddess Rhea whose name may have derived from “to flow”: both
associated with the natural riches of earth (Room 106, 222). In
Chapter 1, Lefèvre juxtaposes the celestial earth Ops and Rhea above
with the Earth of humans, Cÿbele, below (Evans Ch. 1 II:52, f. 199).
Since Cÿbele held a somewhat prominent place in the artistic
expressions during the reign of Francis I, Lefèvre would have had
good reason to create his own artistic Imagery of her. It is
reasonable to conjecture that, at home in Paris he may have thought
of “The statue of Cÿbele by the Tribolo, executed for Francis I.,
and placed, not against a wall, but in the middle of Queen Claude’s
chamber at Fontainebleau, [. . .] behind it an attribute [. . .]
which was the symbol of generativeness” (“Cÿbele”). This non-
numerical, personified instance of the binary is an example of how
Lefèvre saw the same Coincidence of Opposites as that in the number
2, here clothed in a metaphor of myth.
Lefèvre saw our human mind as a reflection of the divine mind.
His words from Introductorium astronomicum show us that perception,
which can be summarized in my words: “as above, so below” or “object
and subject are unified in the Coincidence of Opposites,” the stance
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from which he wrote De Magia naturali. By permission of San Diego
State University Special Collections Library, the first pages of
Lefèvre’s Introductorium astronomicum of 1517 CE are reproduced
here.
Copernicus, sharing Lefèvre’s lifespan, had begun to overturn
this Imagery with a heliocentric, physical model of the solar
system. Since the anthropocentric, geocentric, view of the universe
had already been challenged by the developing science of astronomy,
Lefèvre apparently felt the need to make clear that these earlier
Images of the universe are an interior vision within the mind. He
asserts in the prefatory epistle to Introductorium astronomicum that
this “is the wisest, optimum working of the true heavens, and of the
true movement of the divine mind: our minds always emulate that of
the parent (with which the ignorant lips of many disagree). Our mind
is a simulation, a vestige, through which we can comprehend the
workings of the divine mind, and how the heavens are created. This
is therefore mental astronomy through which one touches the heavens.
It’s the mind’s eye in which the ethereal orbs and orbits are
represented without confusion” (Lefèvre).
Then at the end, Lèfevre seems to contradict himself by
condemning the Chaldeans and Egyptians whom he had in earlier works
lauded for those very perceptions. What has been interpreted
literally by other scholars as a renouncement of astrology and
magic, I interpret as merely a pandering to the Church in order to
avoid persecution. Like De Magia naturali, Lèfevre dedicates
Introductorium astronomicum to Germain de Ganay.
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Summing up then, Lefèvre continues from Chapter 1, explaining
salvation or redemption in taking us just through Chapter 2 of Book
II, when all “whom love action will have led forth to that place of
divine virtues” have ascended to the One, “all are counted saved,
into their end are called back” (Evans Ch. 2 II:55, 201v).
Within Chapter 2 the prisca theologia of the sacred Venusian
ternary, the amatory chain of the Trinity, is praised. I interpret
that Lefèvre equates the “plains” in Vergilian magic to the
Pythagorean “plane,” or the Ground of Silence from which creation
arises. The chill, torpid snake is split in 2, then we are able to
perceive creation from within the binary, as the Trinitarian “tree,”
“vine,” “chain” or “snake” (Evans Ch. 2 II:53, f. 200v; Ch. 4 II:60,
f. 203).
This Trinitarian number 3, “Venus and Jupiter computed from
the monad, the fountain of things.” Trinity, the love nexus, couples
with the quaternary, who after the monad, is the other “origin who
made things.” This multiplying of 3 with 4 makes the zodiac of 12
(Evans Ch. 2 II:54-55, f. 200-201v).
Then, in Chapter 3, Lefèvre delineates how the opposing forces
of attraction and repulsion chain creation together through the
elements and qualities (Evans II:56-57, f. 201-202v). Chapter 4
reveals how deities, angels, are positioned along the chain from
heaven, to assist in our ascent to Idea, and beyond “into the seed
of life”: grace, the Eucharist (Evans II:57-8, f. 202).
Where does this Infinity of couplings begin and end, this
Infinity of descending grace and ascensions on high, and who is the
observer, the witness of their coming and going?
167
In Chapter 5 genesis begins with the binary and is completed
within that self-reflective binary. Through Coincidence of
Opposites, Spirit is perpetually manifested as body: “The sensible
world, nearest image of the celestial world, by the concordant
discord of their own numbers the nexus perseveres perpetually in its
own motion.” I add that from an anthropomorphic viewpoint, we as
body are duality, we as Spirit are the unification of duality and
One in the Trinity: We are the only observer of genesis. Aside from
human ascension into Spirit, humility leads us to remember who we
the recipients of grace also are: “all things earthly whatsoever are
cast of the mortal binaries, the most enduring, and into earth of
the binary itself at last reverting” (Evans II:62-63, f. 204-205v).
And genesis begins again through the ritual theological couple
Jove and Venus. Venus herself is a personification of and a metaphor
for the Pythagorean “plane” or Ovid’s “all was sea”: “the entire
Venus and the passionate longing of Venus are born in the sea.”
Jove, “the seminal fluid of all things,” emulates air. The poets
continuously sing of their virtuous lovemaking, World without end:
“Venus indeed is that by which is being chained and drawn the body,
sometimes as if by Venus’ laughter” (Evans II:62-63, f. 204-205v).
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