Furthermore, in the rhymed Catalan version of his Logica Algazelis, Llull declares: “De la logica parlam tot breu—car a parlar avem de deu” (“Of logic we will speak briefly—because we have to speak of God”). The Ars is not a revelatory mechanism capable of designing cosmological structures as yet unknown: it discovers nothing; it supports probable arguments on the basis of ideas already known (or assumed to be known).
10.4. Pico’s Revolutio Alphabetaria
We have one more knot to untie, a knot that lies at the junction between medieval Llullism and Renaissance and Baroque Llullism (and beyond)—it regards the supposed Llullism of Pico della Mirandola. Whether or not Pico was influenced by Kabbalistic texts is no longer an issue. At most, the discussion is still moot as to exactly what texts friends like Flavius Mithridates and others introduced him to. Idel (1988a: 205) reminds us that, for Yohanan Alemanno, friend and inspirer of Pico, “the symbolic cargo of language was becoming transformed into almost mathematical type of command. Thus, Kabbalistic symbolism was transformed (or retransformed) into a magical incantatory language.” Hence, Pico could affirm that no word can have any virtue in magical operations if it is not Hebrew or coming from Hebrew: “nulla nomina ut significativa, et in quantum nomina sunt, singula et per se sumpta, in Magico opere virtutem habere possunt, nisi sint Hebraica, vel inde proxima derivata” (“No name, insofar as it is endowed with meaning and insofar as it is a name, taken singly in and of itself, can produce a magical effect, unless it is Hebrew or closely derived from Hebrew”) (Conclusiones cabalisticae 22).15
What is the source, however, of the conviction, which we find in a number of authors, that Pico’s Kabbalism owed a debt to Llull (whose Ars brevis and Ars generalis ultima Pico was certainly familiar with; see Garin 1937: 110)? To give but one example, the most curious document regarding this association is probably the book by Jean-Marie de Vernon (Histoire véritable du bienheureux Raymond Lulle, Paris, 1668: 347–348), which, attributing to Llull no fewer than 4,000 works declares that 2,225 of them were in the library of Pico!
The answer is simple, at least in the first instance. The responsibility must be ascribed to a few lines—anything but perspicuous—in Pico’s Apologia, where, speaking of the Kabbalistic tradition, Pico draws a parallel that, to quote Wirszubski (1989: 259), is “the first of its kind in modern letters”:
Duas scientias hoc etiam nomine honorificarunt. Unam quae dicitur חכמת הצרדך [hokmat haseruf], id est ars combinandi, et est modus quidam procedendi in scientijs et est simile quid sicut apud nostros dicitur ars Raymundi, licet forte diverso modo procedant. Aliam quae est de virtutibus rerum superiorum que sunt supra lunam et est pars magiae naturalis supremae. Utraque istarum apud Hebraeos etiam dicitur Cabalam propter rationem iam dictam, et de utraque istarum etiam aliquando fecimus mentionem in conclusionibus nostris. Illa enim est ars combinandi quam ego in conclusionibus meis voco alphabetariam revolutionem. Et ista quae est de virtutibus rerum superiorum quae uno modo potest capi ut pars magiae naturalis. (They also honored two sciences with this name. One is called חכמת הצרדך [hokmat haseruf], that is the combinatory art, and it is a certain way of proceeding in the sciences, similar to what we call the ars Raymundi, even though on occasion they may proceed in a different manner. The other which has to do with the powers of the higher things that are above the moon is part of the supreme natural magic. Both these two sciences are called Kabbalah among the Hebrews for the reason previously mentioned. And we have spoken of both some time ago in our Conclusiones. The first in fact is the combinatory art that I refer to in my Conclusiones as the revolutio alphabetaria. And the second is the one that has to do with the powers of higher things, which can be thought of as a part of natural magic) (Apologia, 5, 28, my emphasis).
Let us consider this fundamental moment in the Apologia. The trouble is that, in drawing this parallel between the ars combinandi and the ars Raymundi, Pico is more interested in the differences than in the similarities. In the passage cited, Pico makes a distinction between a Kabbalah of names and a theosophical Kabbalah. Now the first part of the Kabbalah, or the first way of understanding the Kabbalah, is the ars combinandi, which Pico has already (in the Conclusiones cabalisticae) dubbed the revolutio alphabetaria. Observe that, in the Abulafian tradition, the word revolutio stands for combination in general (Wirszubski 1989: 137), but the term certainly implies a rotatory connotation, which calls to mind the Kabbalistic or Llullian wheels (or, as we will see, steganographic wheels, à la Johannes Trithemius). In any case, the term could be also used metaphorically, as a more or less visual image of the combinatory swirling typical of the Kabbalistic technique of the anagram or Temurah. Frances Yates, while recognizing that Pico’s ars combinandi is derived from the combinatory practices of Abulafia, decides to deal only with the second type of Kabbalah—something she has of course every right to do—dismissing the first by saying that Pico considers it to be somehow similar to the art of Raimon Llull (Yates 1964: 113).
However that may be, a combination of letters cannot help recalling the techniques of Llull, and this is why Pico says that the two practices are similar. Whereupon, however, he points out that the similarity is only apparent: “licet forte diverso modo procedant” (“even though by chance/perhaps they may proceed in a different manner”). The ambiguous adverbial expression forte (“perhaps” or “by chance”) is a teaser. If Pico had wished to allude to a substantial difference, he would have had his good reasons: as we have seen, the letters in Llull’s combinatory system refer to theological entities, to divine Dignities, and they therefore refer to a system of combinations which, though it appears to occur at the alphabetical level, in fact subsists in the realm of contents. The Abulafian Kabbalistic system, on the other hand, is exercised on the substance of the expression, on letters of the Torah, or on those elements of the form of the expression that are the letters of the alphabet.
Still, this explanation could easily be confuted on the basis of the Kabbalistic belief that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning, at least a numerological meaning. So the Kabbalah too, though it may seem to be combining and permutating alphabetical elements, is really permutating and combining concepts. Apart, then, from their different theological backgrounds, ars Raymundi and ars combinandi are not substantialiter different from each other. They are so forte, “by chance,” or with regard to their outcomes, or the way they are used.
It is our conviction that Pico had understood that what distinguished Kabbalistic thought from that of Llull was that the reality that the Kabbalistic mystic must discover is not yet known and can reveal itself only through the spelling out of the letters in their whirlwind permutations. Consequently, though it may be only in a mystical sense (in which the combinations serve only as a motor of the imagination), the Kabbalah pretends to be a true ars inveniendi, in which what is to be found is a truth as yet unknown. The combinatory system of Llull, on the other hand, is (as we saw) a rhetorical tool, through which the already known may be demonstrated—what the ironclad system of the forest of the various trees has already fixed once and for all, and that no combination can ever subvert.16
That Pico had understood perfectly, with his aside, this point, is also confirmed by his Conclusiones cabalisticae:
Nullae sunt litterae in tota lege, quae in formis, coniunctionibus, separationibus, tortuositate, directione, defectu, superabundantia, minoritate, maioritate, coronatione, clausura, apertura, & ordine, decem numerationum secreta non manifestent. (There are no letters in the whole Law which in their forms, conjunctions, separations, crookedness, straightness, defect, excess, smallness, largeness, crowning, closure, openness and order, do not reveal the secrets of the ten numerations.) (Farmer 1998: 359)
Furthermore, if we bear in mind that these numerationes are the Sephirot, we can appreciate the revelatory power with which he endows his ars combinandi. What results this whirling dervish of an art leads him to, well beyond all philological common sense, but evincing without question a combinatorial energy that knows no limits, we may gather from the famous passage in the Heptaplus dedicated to the Bereishit.
Here for the first time we encounter what will turn out to be a distinguishing feature not only of Kabbalism but of the whole later hermetic tradition: given a discourse that already in and of itself dares to enunciate unfathomable mysteries, it is assumed to allude even further, to mysteries still higher and more occult. For Pico, in the Second Proem, the Mosaic account of the creation of the world alludes, in every one of its parts, and according to seven different levels of reading, to the creation of the world of the angels, of the celestial world and the sublunar world, as well as to man as microcosm: “Thus indeed this book of Moses, if any such, is a book marked with seven seals and full of all wisdom and all mysteries” (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 81). In the sixth chapter of the Third Exposition (“On the Angelic and Invisible World”), for instance, the creation of the fish, birds, and earthbound animals is seen as a revelation of the creation of the angelic cohorts. If there are unfathomable
