Lefevre d; Etaples, Symphorien Champier, and the secret names of God

Author(s): Brian P. Copenhaver Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 40 (1977), pp. 189-211 Published by: The Warburg Institute Stable URL: http://www jstor.org/stable/750995 Accessed: 14/03/2011 05:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://wwwjstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=warburg. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@ jstor.org. The Warburg Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. http://www jstor.org

LEFEVRE D’ETAPLES, SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER, AND THE SECRET NAMES OF GOD Fx understanding how the revival of occultism of the late Quattrocento rested on previous accomplishments of Christian scholarship and anticipated later movements of religious reformation, Lefévre d'Etaples's De magia naturali (1492-94) is an important source. But his six books on natural magic were never printed, and survive today only in three manuscripts: one a fragment, one partially illegible, and another only recently discovered.! Full appreciation of Lefèvre’s treatise awaits labours of editing and interpretation which will make De magia naturali widely accessible to students of Renaissance thought. Here my intention is simply to shed light on the significance and depth of the work by FE elenina development of one Cabalist theme— the secret names of God—in the final chapters of book two of De magia naturali. The argument of these chapters is terse and deliberately obscure, so I beg the reader’s indulgence in opening this essay with a description of mysteries which I hope eventually to make less dark than the mysteries themselves. Lefèvre titled his second book De Pithagorica philosophia quae ad Magiam introducit, and devoted its first thirteen chapters to astrological and theological implications of numerology. In chapter fourteen this investigation of the power and meaning of numbers leads to a new topic, the ‘mysterious Cabala’ through which ‘the more secret Hebrews’ claim to be able to ‘call up the secrets of all wisdom and work all miracles—even more than the magicians.’ This Hebrew magic depends on certain divine numbers, for ‘just as . . . words which do not form the divine names are empty, inefficacious, and powerless, so those numbers not drawn from the divine numbers are . . . nella! for the secret work of magic.” On this mystical combination of words and numbers depends ‘the secret philosophy of Pythagoras,’ who learned the magic of numbers from the arcana of the Syrians and Egyptians. Lefèvre seems to have The following abbreviations are used in the Prefactory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Related Texts, New York 1972, p. 20; Rice, footnotes: MPL and MPG = Migne, Patrologia Latina ‘The De Magia Naturali of Jacques Lefèvre and Patrologia Graeca respectively. A-NCL = Ante-Nicene Christian Library. CCSL = Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. d'Etaples, in Philosophy and Humanism : Renais- CSEL 29; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York 1934, iv, pp. 336; Augustin Renaudet, Préréforme et = Corpus Scriptorum sance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney, Leiden 1976, pp. 19- Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 1The fragment is in Brussels, MS lat. 10875; Vaticana, Regin. lat. 1115 has books i to iv, chapter Vedeckä Knihovna, books. isme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d'Italie, 2nd ed. rev., Paris 1953, pp. 150-53. 19; Olomouc, Stätni 119/1 I should also thank Prof. Rice È having has all six I am grateful to Professor Eugene Rice for enabling me to see fols. 198-222 of the Olomouc manuscript, which was discovered by Professor Kristeller. I have seen the whole Vatican MS but circumstances have limited me to book two in the Olomouc copy, which I have followed below in most cases. On De magia naturali, see: Rice, The first brought the Cabala material in De magia naturali to my attention; and Profs. D. P. Walker, Frances Yates and Raphael Loewe for encouraging and criticizing my essay, most of which was written when I was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, 2 Olomouc M 119/1, fols. 198-217.

thought that Cabala was originally concerned with letters and that it became magical only after Cabala litteraria was associated with numbers. Some of these numbers appear in chapter fourteen: the series 10, 5, 6, 5 through which ‘all miracles are worked’, and the number 26 which ‘completes the Tetraa " The significance of the series 10, 5, 6, 5 is the subject of chapter een, which shows how the presence or absence of these numbers either increased or diminished the power of the biblical heroes Joshua, Abraham and Sarah.* Chapter sixteen begins with the display of a new series, 10, 5, 300, [61 5, alongside 10, 5, 6, 5. Lefèvre claims universal wonderworking power or 300, the new number in the series; he sees in it the mystery of the Word made flesh and the derivation of the ‘name of the mediator from the name of the mind of the father’, the name which commands spirits, drives out disease, raises the dead, the name about which the magicians, the pop and David have sung.5 In chapter seventeen Lefèvre reveals that e as been talking about 3 Ibid., fol. 217: ‘Nec iniuria profecto magi contendunt, nam contendunt 10 secretiores 2 Hebrei ex divinorum nominum elementis [eJum qui arcanam eorum Cabalam proet omnia miracula supra magos operari, At vicenarius senarius Tetragrammaton implet per coniunctiones aut compositiones; omnia operari miracula et credunt et hactenus crediderunt, quatuorque his implent numeris: ro Quod Pythagoras ad Egiptios 5 peregrinus vicinosque Syros, 6 studio cognoscendi flagrans 5 profectus cognoscens, numeros ex corum arcanis elicuit per quos suo more omnia cognosci contendit. Voluntque Cabalam litterariam in numerorum secretam philosophiam magic[a]mque traducere. Hinc pendet secreta Pythagorae philosophia. Hinc arcana numerorum singula in solo silentio discenda. Et Re verba vana putas nullaque probari virtutis efficacia quae divinum nomen non formant, ita qui numeri, qui ex divinis non eliciuntur numeris, ad secretam magiae operationem inefficaces esse probantur.* The phrase vicenarius senarius, which I translate above as ‘26’, actually means ‘belonging to the number 26’, a reference to the relationships between numbers and letters upon which Gematria 5 300 * funde da posse omnis sapientiae secreta elicere 10 [6] 5 quibus si inter[venerit] trecentenarius medius in hoe potissimo quinario . . . cui omnis iam potestas in celo et in terra concessa est. Nascitur ex ineffabili effabilis et invisibili in terris visibilis Deus conversatur, nomen audibile, ile verbum. In quo quinario imo qui super omnem quinarium virtutemue atque potestatem exaltat omnis beneictio seritur. Et ex hoc sacratissimo quinario mediatoris nomen ex paternae mentis nomine deductum cognoscitur, nomen quod est super omne nomen, et in quo omne genum flectitur, celestium, terrestrium, et infernorum, in quo ineffabile benedictum paternum nomen residet, suaque [trans]fusa illic est virtus. Nomen ergo sanctum, benedictum, potentissimum in quo spirit[us] impera[n]tur, morbi effugantur, mortui suscitantur, omnia operantur fiuntque miracula; cui [ ? ] omnia, estque idem nomen inquam eius de quo magi prophetaeque omnes cecinerunt, de quo et David in hymnis et nomini sancto eius psallendo For the fourth term of the new series, both (see below, the Olomouc and Vatican MSS have 5, but p. 192) is based; I have used this simplified it is clear that this ought to be 6 from context and from later computations in the same chapter: ‘Et si sacramentales numeri in una summa colligantur, evadunt ad numerum ecc? xxvi, qui ex xxvi collecto Te ati translation throughout. 4 Ibid., fols. 217%-18; the entitled ‘Additio et ablatio numerorum efficax et mirifica.” chapter is divinorum 5 Ibid., fols. 218Y-20; the chapter is entitled ‘Sacramentum’ and begins: ‘Inter divinos numeros benedicti numero, ter quaterna multiplicatione, hoc est duodenaria [nun]tiali numero addito quaternario denario, surgit.” aucto

the greatest mystery (sacramentum maximum) . . . in whose movement toward the light our age is to be believed more ges pas enoughin devotion to a religion now almost elicited from these letters and from the sanctuaries of sacred numbers . . ., especially if [one] + goes on to understand the mystery of goo. For 300 de the middle letter of ‘Jesus’, man’s ne are one and the same thing, mean one and the same thing. . Lefèvre closes this cha NET in the expectation of a reformation to be wrought ty goo, ‘the number of redemption and renewal.’® In chapter eighteen he how the union of the numbers 300 and 400 indicates the victory of immortalityover mortalityin man: *. . . the sting of 400 passes away and death--Thau is absorbed in life-[Sin. 3 “This obscure reference to the sign (Heb. ®, Taw means ‘sign’) which marked the foreheads of the good men in Ezekiel ixà is illuminated by a marginal gloss, but the reader gets no help with the mysteries of ‘Syrian counting’ expressedin the last chapter of book two.” e e eS penetrate the darkest The ‘number Sine a appropriate in such sacred discourse and that men of undi talking” ends the second book: VINI VII va VI V HI III HT LXX LX L XXXX XXX XX “Ibid., fols. 220-21: ‘Sacramentum hoc corrupt things. He em XS the fourth inquam o Germane maximum est, et eius ad number, or quaternary, in each series; and Lucem intentione nostra tempestas credenda est beatior, siin religionis pietate iam ferme ex ipsis elementis et sacrorum numerorum aditis eruta ferventior perseverat. Tum sit goes on to say: Germanus beatior, et maxime quid si intelligere pergit trecentenarii mysterium. Nam trecentenarius Jhes[u] hominis mediatoris medium elementum unum idemque sunt, unum idemque portendunt. Sum . Mors per quod quadringentenarium designatur, ‚quo fit si quadringentenarius trecentenario iu ut mortali immortale uletur et dissolvat S[in]. Hinc timent demones omnes, quo in fronte sunt signati mediatoris electi, quod AB Brie ee pag bee percupidus. Comperi stimulus ae mor[s]que thau rei enim ut diligentissima rquisitione huius perit hominem recuperatum in arcanis; [por]tendit in vita S[in] est absorb designatque I have read ‘Sin’, where both the Olomouc and the Vatican manuscripts have sus ‘Trecentenarius ergo redemptionis recuperationisque numerus quod qua[m]primum tanta protinus me because this Hebrew letter makes sense of ear, Agata qe soca a omnis, summus atque optimus rerum status extn gnu aut gras, et de hoc con the subito occupavit mentis laetitia, ut tantae below, vix capax ipsae fuerim.. . . Salus parta est she CRU lia propheta < Den 26 names the Hebrew, ee I have the conventions in Fira * Ibid., fol. 221; chapter begins with a London 19 i # table of ‘four unities’, X to 7, 1010 ‘a 222; the chapter is titled: "Numer secundum” Ma A these 2 the polini of the per precedentia et pleraque mysteria the Olomouc reads * 1973; pp. XV-xxviii. 100 to 700, and 1 to 7 us that intelligible, the the intelligible, the intellectual Bands re and the text reads: ‘Sed world, and all insensible, perishable and obscura haec inquam sunt o Germane nisi

Even in the few chapters under study here, De magia naturali more riddles than I have space or wit to answer. The solutions I can offer will take us re Journey through the histories ofbiblical exegesis and occultist 8 ret best beginning is with chapters fourteen and fifteen, in which it becomes clear that Lefèvre understood Cabala as a way of manipulating the tion. numerical values of Hebrew letters, especially those in sacred names, in order to work wonders of learning and magic. The word ‘Cabala’ occurs only twice in chapter fourteen and not at all in the remaining chapters of book two; the content of these chapters, however, is cl related to the ‘associations and ents’ of numbers and letters which Lefévre took to be the basis of Ca and which were, in fact, the chief business of the kind of Cabala called Gematria. Chapters fourteen and fifteen begin to lay bare the wonders latent in the ineffable name of God, M7, spelled (without points) yöd hè wäw hé, for which another word, ‘ädönäy, 37%, is substituted when reading the Bible aloud. The Gematria in Lefévre’s chapters is the normal one which igns to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet their standard numerical values.? Yöd has the value ten, hé five, and wäw six, so that letters whose numerical values total twenty-six ‘complete the tetragrammaton’: ydd-10-+-hé-5+ waw-6-+hé-5=26. To reveal the power of the tetragrammaton’s letters, Lefévre points out that neither Joshua’s mili exploits nor Isaac’s birth in the old age of Abraham and Sarah would have possible without the aid of these numbers and letters. In Abraham’s case he mentions ona hé-5), in Joshua’s denarius and senarius (yöd-ıo and wäw-6), and in ’s uae (yôd-10). Lefèvre makes no direct reference to the names of these heroes, but context together with the mention of Additio et ablatio in the title of chapter fifteen should have been enough to send his readers to the stories told in Genesis xvii and Numbers xiii. The Genesis narrative of Isaac’s miraculous birth and God’s covenant with Abraham mentions two nam symbolic of these events. God commanded ‘abram, 9778, meaning High Father, to call himself ‘abraham, 99728, meaning Father of a Multitude; this entailed the addition of a hé-5 to “alep-1, bét-2, r&$-200, mém-40, thus transforming the total value of the letters in the patriarch’s name from 243 to 248.19 God also ordered that Abraham’s wife be called Sarah, "Y, hii numeri aliquo ex fonte scaturiant. Obscura inquit et arcanorum ubi ea amplius quam par est reteguntur maiestasque ° On the different varieties of Gematria, see Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Library of Jewish Knowledge, Jerusalem 1974, pp. 337- minuitur, etiam omnino tecta, viris contem- yes this book le a collection: of Scholens’s D i secretis digni sunt) multum portant ia Judaica articles on Cabala sfiora, di euler gates pre and is i for students of the subject. rte ad magna assurgunt et ex humilibus ad 19Olomouc M 119/1, fol. 218: ‘Abraardua. Proinde si Syriorum numerandi fons hamum senem, facile crediderunt magi, quicquam conducere valet, illuc age vela prolis generationisque mansisse impotentem, hucque uitur QUE demitte, numerus VI et figuratus modo qui finem dicendi fecit: OVER NE UV ERE III II I LXXXX LXXX LXX LX L XXX XX X) XXXX nisi quinarii benefitio fuisset adiutus. In quo numero, sibi divinitus elargito, vidit mentis ideam, tota mente iubilans. quo numero facta est Abrahae benedictionis gentium repromissio, in quo benedicuntur omnes gentes’ ; cf. Gen. xvii: 1-6.

meaning Princess in the absolute sense, instead of Saray, “Y, meaning My Princess. Tradition explains that God had divided the yód-10 in Saray into two hé-5's; one of these He gave to her husband, the other He left to her. This reduced the total value of Sarah’s name by hé-5 but kept the sum of the names of man and wife unchanged, so preserving some arcane parity." In Numbers xiii: 16 *. . . Moses called the son of Nun Joshua, not Hoshea,' and so set him apart from the other young warriors sent out to explore the land of Canaan. This foreshadowing of Joshua’s greatness can be explained on the same principle as Abraham’s and Sarah’s name-changes: the addition of sacred letters from the tetragrammaton gives power to the person whose name is changed. Höse’a, 77, became Yehösu’a, 999, by the prefixing of a yöd-ıo and—as Lefèvre mistakenly thought—the insertion of a waw-6 between “áyin and Sin. This transformation—‘denario auctus pariter et senario —could prepare Joshua to vanquish kings, command the sun, cross rivers with feet unwet, and bring down the walls of Jericho.*? Read in the context of Midrashic and Talmudic commentary, these para in Genesis and Numbers become rich not only in Cabalist significance ut also in astrological meaning, a valuable insight for the author of De magia naturali, were he somehow privy to these rabbinical traditions. Both the Babylonian Talmud and the Midrash Rabbah explain that Abraham had concluded from observation of his planet, Jupiter, that he was doomed to infertility. When he complained of his fate to the Holy One, the divine response was to lift him *. . . high above the vault of the sky and . . . [to say] to him, “From that very planet which showed you that you are not destin to have any et will prove to you that you will have progeny.” ’ ‘Abram and Sarai cannot beget,’ said the Lord, ‘but Abraham and Sarah can beget.’ God also ordered Abraham to ‘go forth from . . . thy planet [gazing,] for Israel is free from planetary influence.’!3 The Lord had ‘crowned’ Abraham with a hé and made him ‘Father of a Multitude’, but his crowning was at the expense of the yöd removed from Sarah’s name.!? Afraid for the integrity of the Torah, M /bid., ‘Sed per ablationem denarii a Sara Abraham uxore, magi Machumetheorum infecundam longe et prorsus divinitate exortem abhorrerent fugerentque, docerentque non esse fecundam. In Sara enim eius lumen extinctum est quo luceat divinum imputatum es[se], quo rite ad Deum assurgat, plenitudo diminuta est, quo vacua inanisque cadat’; H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds. Midrash Rabbah: Gen. (Lech Lecha) 47.1-2, London 1939, i, 399-400, n. 1; cf. Gen. xvii: 15-21. 12 Olomouc M 119/1, fol. 218: ‘Ut amplius ammireris numerorum portenta, additio plerumque miracula operatur et ablatio mysterium suum retinet. Dux Hebreorum Josue nunquam tot reges edomuisset, nunquam amnem siccis pedibus transegisset, neque eo duce, sine illa Arietis aut machinae concussione, Hierichontis moenia coruissent, neque sol in suo orbe fixus stetisset, nisi denario auctus pariter et senario fuisset. Haec tamen universa per 10, 5, 6, 5 paterna mente volente sunt operata’ ; Midrash Rabbah, loc. cit., n. 3; cf. Num, xiii: 1-16; Josh. iii: 14-17; vi: 1-21; x: 12-15; xi: 1-24 Joshua's name can be written DWI, but in Num. xiii: 16, where the nam takes place, the Masoretes specified Prim. 13 Midrash Rabbah: Gen. (Lech Lecha) 44.10, 12; Exod. ( Tetzaven) 38.6-8; Num. (Bemidbar) 2.12; Eccles. 5.6.1 [Freedman and Simon, i, 367-8; iii, 454; v, 42, n. 1; vili, 134]; i. Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Shabbath 156%; Nedarim 32%, London 1936-38, 14 Midrash Rabbah: Gen. (Lech Lecha) 39.11;

the yod . . . soared aloft before God and protested: ‘Sovereign of the Universe. Because I am the smallest of all letters,Thou hast withdrawn me from the name ofthat righteous woman!’ Said the Holy One . . .: ‘Hitherto thou wast in a woman’s name and the last of its letters; now I will set thee in a man’s name and at the beginning of its letters,’ as it says, And Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun Joshua . . . R. Mana said: Formerly she was a princess [Sarai] to her own people only, whereas now she is a princess [Sarah] to all mankind. Another version of the yüd’s indignation has it springing from Solomon’s breach of commandments laid down in Dao xvii: 16-17, a sin which the verb form yarbeh to the form rabah, entailing the loss of a yöd. “Who knows?’ asked the yöd, “Today he has abolished one letter, tomorrow . . . another until the whole Torah will be nullified?” God replied : “Solomon and a thousand like him will pass away, but the smallest tittle will not be erased from thee.’ Whence do we know that he did erase it from the Torah and put it back again? Because it says: As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah,... Where did He put it back again? And Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun Fehoshua. . . . Both stories end with Joshua’s name-change, which helps restore the balance upset by previous displacements of the yöd. According to one rabbinical comment, yöd was the appropriate letter to add to Hoshea’s name because its value was 10 and ‘, . . Joshua received the reward which would have gone to the ten spies . . . who failed in their reconnaissance of the Promised a The concern of these midrashim for the inviolability of words and names in the Torah points toward the Cabalist principles that the Torah and God's mystical name are identical and that the speech of God in the Torah is infinite in its meaning. The Sha’arei Orah of Joseph Gikatilla, a Spanish Cabalist of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, E it this way: “The entire Torah is like a... commentary on the [ineffable] name of God.’!® It is no surprise that the earliest Christians came to comparable conclusions about the powers of names and their ch . Reflections of New Testament accounts of the name-changes of Peter and Paul, along with the primitive Christian conviction that the name of Christ was t against demons, appear in the works of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, ostom, and other early exegetes.17 46.7-8; 47.1-2; Leo. (Metzora) 19.12; S. of S. he broke the commandment, He shall not (yarbeh) etc., Deut. xvii: 16; by 5-11.4 [Freedman and Simon, Ke321, 393% multiply removing the yod the word reads rabah, he 399-400; iv, 239; ix, 242]; a kind of as an ical method. 15 Ibid., Gen. (Lech Lecha) 47.1-2; Exod. Va’era) 6.1; Lev. (Metzora) 19.2; Num. Lecha) 16.9; S. of S. 6.11.3 [Freedman and Simon, i, iv, 2 eek ; iii, 103-4, n. 4; Que EE a did multiply’. the words: Deut, xvii: 16 begins with 7 ; the note thus fect but not for the removal the aga. 16 Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 171. 17 Justin Aii, 238, Dial. Tr. eo: 113, a 10 pstein, pp. 732-3]. the Midrash explains, somewhat find, that Solomon *. . . was ically I because 1,2 A-NCL, ü, 76- : Ñ pre cite 00 etat cf Ue comes Bom 4.13 [MPL 2: sde: in ian ; 2 Apol. Adv. Mar. De mut. nom. 1.6, 2.2-4 51: 123-30}; Origen Con. Cels. 1.25 [

DANS ae TRES OF COD of names. He noted that the taken with the namesof God, Abraham,Isaac, Jacob, and other biblical heroes retained their power only if preserved in their Hebrew form. His claim that such names ‘possess . united with the name of God’ sounds like an anticipation of but Origen was thinking not of an exchange of letters but of a combination of these holy names in prayer: ‘God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.’ Origen knew that one of God’s ten names was the tetr: aton. He saw Joshua, whom he knew from the Septuagint as Jesus Nave, as a type of Jesus; andin his Homilies on Genesis he commented on Abraham’s and Sarah’s name. In Contra Celsum he warned that the names of Abraham and other patriarchs were so potent that they could be misused even by those ‘. . . who work with incantations and magical arts.’!® From Evagrius, a late fourth-century thi later condemned as an Origenist, we have a fragment titled El; + III which adds an important new dimension to the early Christian interest in divine names. ‘The unutterable name assigned to the Lord is written with four letters,’ Evagrius explains: ioth, he", waw, and heth 1; in the middle of them, after the first two, the letter called sen by the Hebrewsis inserted and this means ‘teeth’, so that pened arl e ne un one living’ e four letters are interpreted: waw ‘in it’, and heth ‘the one living’.5 aa teeth in, he zoth ‘beginning’, he ‘this’ Evagrius’s Spell of a medial Sin between yöd hé and wäw hät leads one to the word MT, approximately the Hebrew spelling of the name ‘Jesus’ which was to hechas an object of reverence and a source of fascination for Lefévre and other Christian students of Cabala. But there was no edition of Evagrius's fragment until the seventeenth century; and it was St, Jerome who, in his Hebraicae tiones in libro Geneseos and other works, provided the main channel for the transmission of this S: patristic material to Christians of the medieval West. He knew that 's name had lost a yöd, that a he had been added to hers and Abraham’s, and that Hebrew scholars claimed that the hé had come from the tetraunioni he also explained the semantic differences between Abram/ braham and Sarai-Sarah.% In Ep. 25 ad Marcellam Jerome included that 18 Con. Cels. 1,21, 2. 439 5.455 In Gen, esse Comm. in x2obpevov atv, 6 ton dBévrec, de elvan tov elpydv : 145 Comm, vay névre ypappérov oUrog” dpyh ulm, ¿sóvres dv in Joan. 4.26; ame Rom. praef.; cbr 6 Cav. dpunvederu rk récoapa orotyetx, rd 100 Sel. in Num. ad 19: 17;Sel. in Ps. ad. 2; Sel. in doh, wa Buk Tod % y airy, mul 312 700 oben de abe 341-2, 526-7, 611-13; 12: 52, 76-77, mistook for n. Exch. 8; Hom. 4 in Ezech. 7; in Num. Hom. zal dud 00 70 6 Küv. The word ITIITI isa Greek 14; Hom. in lib. Jesu Nave 1 [MPG 11; 338 approximation of mr, whose final n Evagrius 1, Ha 322, 397-400, 539; 13: 421, 702; 14: * de Lagarde, Onomastica sacra, Gottingen 1887, pp. 229-30: Tè ¿nl +05 xupiov rarrópevoy dvexpdivatov bvopx Suk rrocépov redperas croryelon, Buk tod 160, Bd +00 4 n, dà +00 0048 xal Bud tod 40 7]. Toby pécov rapevredès i sà mpGra Bio mup' "Eßpaloıs aryeïov 2° Heb, ce ge ble 2d; Matthias Thiel, ee Gestalt Hebräischkenninisse des frithen Mittelalters, Bir de Su Medieval i 197: 224-5, 407-8; is Secret, Les Kablalınes chris de la Renaissance, Paris

list of the ten names of God—among them ‘the ninth, tetragrammum, which . .. is ineffable, . . . and is spelled with these letters: iod, he, vau, he’—which was best known in the early Middle Ages.? A more striking contribution to the exegesis of sacred names was his treatment of Joshua as a type of Christ in his tractates on the Psalms. His comment on Psalm Ixxvi explains that the Jews saw the Promised Land, but could not enter. . . . But under Jesus our commander (Jesu duce) we his sons have come to the Jordan and entered the Promised Land. ... Jesus himself, then, our commander, holds the sword, goes before us always . . . conquers the enemy, and for seven days we have gone about Jericho, this world, that is. . . . He [ Joshua] commanded the sun to stand still, and it did, and he was a great forerunner ofJesus. ... He killed the five kings in the cave. ... He is the son of Nun, whom we call Nave, and he was called Osee . . . or Saviour.?? Jerome opened this exegesis to future Cabalist interpretation in Tractatus de Psalmo X, which he introduced with some speculations on the power of the number ten ‘. . . which is both beginning and end, in which all calculation is repeated. ... And to mention something more curious,’ he added, ‘the name ofJesus, the Saviour, and the ineffable name written ioth, he, vau, he, by the Hebrews begin with this [letter, yöd-10].’?? Thus Jerome had not only linked the names of Abraham, Sarah and Joshua with the powers of the tetragrammaton but had also gone the extra steps of associating the names of Joshua, Jesus and Yahweh and of treating the latter two in a numerological context. In Ep. 30 ad Paulam Jerome prepared the Hebrew alphabet itself for numerological analysis by dividing its twenty-two letters into seven connexiones and supplying an interpretation for each connexio. The seventh connexio is qôp, res, sin, täw, . . . and in that seventh number there is also a mystical meaning, ‘the calling of the head, the signs of the teeth.” Spoken sound is produced through the teeth and through these signs one arrives at the head of all things, who is Christ. I ask you, what could be more sacred than this mystery? (Quid hoc sacratius sacramento?)** % Ep. 25 [CSEL 54: 218-20]; Thiel, Hebräischkenntnisse, pp. 69, 74-75, 221. 22 Tract, Ps. LXXVI 21 [CCSL 78: 63]: ‘Iudaei uiderunt terram repromissionis, et intrare non potuerunt, ,.. Nos filii sub Iesu duce venimus ad Iordanem, et intrauimus in terram repromissionis. . . . Tunc ipse Iesus dux noster gladium tenet, et semper nos praecedit, et pugnat pro nobis, et uincit aduersarios, et septem diebus circumimus Hiericho, hoc est, istum mundum. ... Ille imperauit soli ut staret, et stetit, et istius typo ille magnus erat: ille imperabat, sed Dominus efficiebat. Ille uictor extitit: ille, quod frequenter dixi, in spelunca quinque reges interfecit . . . ille est filius Nun, quod nos legimus Naue: ille est qui dicebatur Osee . . . hoc est saluator’; Lib. int. heb. nom. ad. I Reg. 1 [CCSL 72: 104]; Thiel, Hebräischkenntnisse, PP; 3 337: 3 Tract. Ps. X [CCSL 78: 355]: ‘Nunc ad decimi psalmi ordinem reuertamur: qui numerus et finis est et principium, in quo omnis supputatio reuoluitur. . . . Et ut aliquid curiosius inferam, ab hoc Iesu, id sit ir incipit nomen, et illud ineffabile quattuor litterarum apud Hebraeos exinde habet exordium, quod scribitur per ioth he uau he .. .’; Thiel, Hebráischkenntnisse, p. 328. 3 Ep. 30 [CSEL 54: 246-8]: ‘7 coph vocatio Septima conexio est, quae res capitis et extrema, quo et in ipso sen dentium quoqueseptenarionumero tau signa sit mysticus intellectus, ‘vocatio capitis dentium signa,’ per dentes articulata vox promitur et his signis ad caput omnium, qui Christus est, pervenitur. Oro te, quid hoc sacratius sacramento?’

Like Evagrius, Jerome had noted that the Hebrew word (TY Sin) for the letter Y Sin means ‘tooth’, and on this etymology he built an association between ®—which appears in Jesus’s name—and the mystery of Christ, the Word, as vox articulata. Now the numerical value of Y is 300, the magical number of chapters sixteen to eighteen of De magia naturali. Lefèvre's sacramentum maximum has its roots, then, in the mystery of Jerome’s seventh connexio ; but before we can move closer to the core of this holy enigma there are more byways to travel. If it is safe to be guided by Walafrid Strabo’s Glossa ordinaria, Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla and the biblical commentaries of the Victorines, then it seems that later medieval exegesis (at least through Nicholas’s time) had little to add to Jerome’s handling of the sacred names.?° However, as early as the twelfth century Christian biblical scholars had begun to take notice of an important new source of literal, halachic and aggadic exegesis in the works of Rashi (1040-1105), or Rabbi Shelomo Izhaki of Troyes. Nicholas of Lyra came to be called ‘Rashi’s ape’ for using him so often; and many other Christian scholars, most notably the Victorines, seem to have taken advantage of the abundant manuscript circulation of his writing. Rashi appeared in print in Hebrew for the first time in 1475.28 His Commentary on the Pentateuch deserves our attention because Christian scholars who had access to it could have learned of the midrashim which recounted Abraham’s liberation from astrology, Isaac’s conception after Abraham’s and Sarah’s name-changes, the complaint of the yöd and the consequent association of Joshua’s namechange with Sarah’s.?” Another line of interpretation which bears mention appears in the succession of anti-semitic tracts which followed on the works of Petrus Alfonsi (6. 1062, Moses Sefardi) and Raymond Martini (1220-85). This literature, much of it composed by men who were conversos or Dominicans or both, was particularly sensitive on two points of doctrine: the Trinity and the truth of Christ’s claim to be the Messiah. Thus there is a great deal of searching in these polemics for important words which exhibit threenesses— like ‘Yahweh’, which has three different consonants—and for similarities between names like Yahweh and Jesus. One finds reflections of these speculations in the works ofJoachim of Flora, Arnaldus of Villanova and Nicholas of Cusa as well.2® What did Lefévre know of these various exegetical traditions when he wrote De magia naturali? The Cabalist chapters of that work are silent on his sources; but more than a dozen years later, when he was working on his Quincuplex Psalterium, Lefèvre briefly rewakened his interest in God’s secret names. The Psalter, published in 1509, falls into two parts: the first prints the 25 Glossa ord. ad. Gen. xvii: 5-7, 15-16 [MPL 113: 123-4]; Post. ad. Gen. xvii: 5-7, 15-16, Num. xiii: 16; Hugo of St. Victor Adnot. eluc. in Pent. ad. Gen. 15, 17; Alleg. in Vet. Test. 4.1 [MPL 175: 51, 671]; Peter 150-1; Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars, Pittsburgh 1963, pp. xii, 10-11, 103-4. 27 R. Salamonis Jarchi commentarius in Pentateuchum Mosis, Latine versus . . . a Joh. Friderico Comestor Hist. schol. lib. Gen. 50; Lib. Num. 17; Lib. Jos. praef., 1 [MPL 198: 1098, 1227, 1259-1261]. Breithaupto, Gotha 1710, pp. 94, 118, 131, 186, 1120, 1507-8. 28 Secret, Kabbalistes, pp. 8-17; Bernard Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn., Oxford 1952, pp. Suter, ‘Martini, Raymond,’ En. Jud., 1066; ‘Petrus Alfonsi’, ibid., xiii, 347.

three versions of Jerome’s Psalter (Romanus, Gallicanus, and Hebraicus) together with Lefévre’s commentary; the second contains the version of the old Latin Psalter which Augustine used for his Ennarationes in Psalmos; and the Vulgate Psalter corrected against Jerome’s Hebraicus. As part of an introduction to the second part of his Psalter, Lefèvre prepared a full folio of analysis of the divine names in order to explain why he had used them to gloss the second part.?® God's names, he explains, are full of ‘mysteries useful to our religion and worth knowing’. He notes that the Psalmist used more of the names than Jerome had listed in his letter ad Marcellam, and after he confesses his inability to penetrate all their mysteries he calls on Petrus Alfonsi (Rabbi Moses) to reveal the trinitarian secrets hidden in the tetragrammaton's three consonants.% ‘Since this name is ineffable,’ he adds, they apply to it, as if it were pronounceable, the breathings (spiritus) seva Ei a cames which . . . are the breathings of the name Iesua, ‘the healer’ (salutaris), that is, or of Ihesuha, our Saviour’s proper name, as some would have it. . . . So what do these breathings mean, but that Messiah, Word, and Spirit are part of the great and arcane name of God? . .- But here you ask whether or not the name ‘Iesus’, which the prophet uses so much in the Psalms to glorify Christ as ‘healer’ and ‘saviour’, has a breathing or not. No, it has not, but it corresponds to the word which the Greeks write sous, or Iesus, without any breathing; this name does not conceal the tetragrammaton, and yet, as I have said, it does conceal the breathings of that great name. But following the old usage of the Latins, I rather Seguente give a breathing (aspiro) to that proper name, [Jesus], and then I understand that it conceals the whole tetra; aton, as can be understood more fully from the book De verbo mirifico, as I have often said elsewhere in the notes. The Jews, however, would take our Saviour’s name, Iesus, as without breathing and spelled Ioth, Sin, Vau, Ain; they would reject the other—Ioth, He, Sin, Vau, He—as fictitious and too nicely worked up by us. Either way, it is an august and venerable name.®! 29 Quincuplex Psalterium: gallicum, romanum, hebraicum, vetus, conciliatum, Paris (H. Estienne) 1509, fol. 231; Rice, Epistles, pp. 198-201; Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Ecriture, Paris 1959-64, iv, 411-27. 30 Psalt. fol. 231: ‘Et ad conciliatum nomina dei quibus propheta per spiritum sanctum in hac tota psalmodia laudat deum annexui tum quod frequenter aliquorum in annotationibus meminimus tum quod non parva mysteria et tam nostrae religioni utilia quam celebrat deum: El, Elohim, Elohe, Eloha, Sebaoth, Elion, Adonai, Iah, mm, Sadai, Sur, Abir. ... Sed quaeres quae mysteria haec continent? Maiora profecto quam nostrae potestatis sit enucleare. Nitemur tamen pauca edisserere de magno nomine dei mm quod Rabbi Moses +» dicit trinum esse et unum . . .;’ Petri Alphonsi ex iudaeo Christiani dialogi lectu dignissimi . . ., Cologne (loan. Gymnicus) 1536, pp. 176-8. 32 Psalterium, fol. 231: *. . . cum hoc nomen scitu digna continere viderentur. Et nomina sit ineffabile, illi quasi effabile hos spiritus dei ad Marcellam scribens sacer Hieronymus supponunt, seva ‘;’ et cames ‘+’ quae . . . decem enumerat . . . et his omnibus in psalmis utitur propheta, eo excepto quod sunt spiritus nominis Iesua, id est salutaris, sive ihesuha, proprii nominis salvatoris nostri ut nonnulli volunt. . . . Quid igitur spiritus illi designare videntur, nisi Messiah, verbum, sexto loco . . .; verum in psalmis utitur insu propheta his pro nominibus dei, Eloha, Sur, Abir. Erunt igitur duodecim nomina quibus egregius movente spiritu sancto psaltes in divina sua hymnographia et spiritum esse magni et arcani nominis dei. ... Sed hic quaeres nomen IESUS quo in psalmis tantopere Christum ut salutarem

Earlier, in commenting on Psalm lxxi in the first part of the Psalter, Lefèvre had provided some other material on divine names and had referred to Paulus Hebraeus or Pablo de Santa Maria (c. 1350-1435), author of a polemic Scrutinium fidei as well as of Additiones ad postillam magistri Nicolai de Lyra, the source of Lefévre’s citation. 82 _ In November 1509 Beatus Rhenanus wrote to his old teacher, Johann Reuchlin, to tell him that he had just received a gift from Lefèvre, a copy of the Psalter, just published in the preceding August. In his letter Beatus included some lines from Lefèvre’s comment on Psalm Ixxi which paid honour to that ‘. . . most tasteful and unarguably most learned of the Suevi, Ioannes Capnion, . . . [who] called his book De verbo mirifico after that blessed and wondrous divine name.’®® Lefévre’s commentary set forth the relationship et salvatorem propheta celebrat aspiratum in the verb YIN, ‘to save’, and the noun ne sit an secus? Minime est aspiratum, verum vocabulo gracci absque ulla Sens scribunt ncovo[ 1], nm, ‘salvation’. The similarity of these forms to 2%, Joshua's name, explains id est Iesus, et hoc ehin se non claudit his being linked with the Saviour, but it also respondet tetragrammaton, etsi ut qi dictum est magni illius nominis spiritus claudit. Verum proprium illud nomen iuxta vetustam latinorum consuetudinem frequentius aspiro, et tunc nomen intelligo quod totum in se claudit tetragrammaton, ut ex libro de verbo mirifico amplius intelligi potest utque saepe alias in annotationibus dictum est. Iesus tamen ut non est aspiratum reciperent Iudaei nomen raises first half questions about Lefèvre's use in the of the Psalter of the forms IHESU and IHSUH, from the Hebrew MP, which lacked the ‘Ayin of the salvation-words but contained, as Lefèvre pointed out, the ineffable tetragrammaton with a Sin in the middle to make it pronounceable. For these points and other echoes of Nicholas of Cusa and esse salvatoris nostri cuius clementa sunt Toth, Sin, Vau, Ain; alterum autem Ioth, Reuchlin, see ibid., fols. 5, 7, 17, 32, 35, 37% et a nobis curiose commentatum, Et sive hoc Tbid., fol, vO J. Kaplan, ‘Pablo de Santa Maria’, En. Jud., xiii, 3; Secret Kabbalistes, pp. 14-15; Additiones ad postillam magistri Nicolai a a biblia, editae a He, Sin, Vau, He repudiarent quasi fictitium sive aliud, nomen augustum est et vene- FT “iei "his | is somewhat orthographic Greek hat confusing in tha entities into co! his at rough breathing, the Hebrew reverendo patre domino Venice spirit consonant hé, and the Hebrew vowel 55", 58, 76, 80, 95, 97, 107, 113, 125, 139%, 143", 147%, 155°, 1677-8, 2667-7. guttural points. Paulo de Sancta Maria ., (F. Renner von Heilbron) 1483, ad. Ps. lexi: 17, sig. kvi. # Beatus to Reuchlin, 10 Nov. 1509, in Adalbert Horawitz and Karl der, He also has in mind the theological meaning of spiritus. The ‘breathings’ he mentions, Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus, Leipzig 1886, the vowel points qámes and Sewa, were the p. 25: ‘Qui de te in quincuplici Psalterio ones the Masoretes applied to the Tetra- (quod ad Hebraici et Graeci exemplaris archetypam veritatem fidelissime recognitum grammaton to indicate that it was to be pronounced ‘idonay’; the word for ‘salvation’, also appear in MP, Lefèvre’s statement that the Psalmist uses the name “IESUS” can be understood by referring to the margins of the second part of nuperrime muneri misit) ita honorificam mentionem facit, ut libeat eius hic verba recensere, ... “lllud idem scripsit Mirandula et de eodem librum edidit elegantissimus et sine controversia inter Suevos doctissimus the Psalter where he glosses the appearances Toannes Capnion, cuius paulo ante meminiof the word ‘Christus’ with ‘Messiah’ and mus, quem quidem libellum ab illo divino et those of ‘Salutaris’ with ‘Tesua’. Both yptoréc and 0"? mean ‘anointed one,’ and the Hebrew spelling of Jesus's name as YW? contains the root consonants which appear benedicto et mirando nomine de verbo mirifico nuncupavit.” Hactenus Faber. Quin aliis in locis Reuchlinianorum rudimentorum Ir enim nominat) sacpe meminit’; cf. , Psalterium, fol. 109".

between the name of Jesus, which could be rendered IHESVHE and Yahweh or IHEVHE; Lefèvre attributed this information to Nicholas of Cusa (whom Beatus did not mention in his letter) and added that Reuchlin and Pico della Mirandola (whom Beatus did mention) had written about the matter as well. We recall that when Lefèvre raised the question of divine names more fully at the beginning of the second section of the Psalter, he cited De verbo mirifico again. Augustin Renaudet knew of the references to Reuchlin’s book in the Psalter and also recognized the Cabala material in De magia naturali. Perhaps it was because he believed that De verbo mirifico was published in 1496 that he did not think to associate the two works.** A more likely date for De verbo mirifico is 1494, some time after 21 April.% In the text of his Préréforme Renaudet writes that Lefèvre *. . . composed . . . [De magia naturali] in the early months of 1493 . . .,' but the relevant footnote places the composition of the manuscript between 10 October 1492 and 16 December 1494. Renaudet's evidence for these dates is a reference of Lefévre’s to the Dauphin, CharlesOrland, who actually died in December 1495.% In either case, Lefèvre could have had time to see De verbo sah in print before he finished De magia naturali. Reuchlin’s book was published in Basle, a printing centre whose books were readily available in Paris; the publisher was Johann Amerbach, who had particularly good connections with Parisian scholars through Johannes Heynlin, Amerbach’s teacher as well as Reuchlin’s. From after mid-century until 1479, Heynlin had spent most of his time in Paris, where he obtained his doctorate in theology, became rector of the university and helped found the Sorbonne press. After 1479 he lived mostly in Basle; and until his death in 1496 he advised Amerbach on his pos work. These and other connections between Paris and Basle could have brought Lefèvre news of Reuchlin’s work on the divine names even if De verbo mirifico was published too late to have influenced De magia naturali.8? This evidence of printers, places and dates of publication is, of course, circumstantial, as is Lefèvre’s mention of Reuchlin, Pico and Nicholas of Cusa in a book published a decade-and-a-half after his work on De magia naturali. A look at the speculations of these thinkers on the names of God, however, supports the possibility of their having influenced De magia naturali. Given his deep interest in mathematics, Nicholas of Cusa could not go unaware of the en number mysticism which Lefèvre associated with Cabala.?® Nor could a preacher of his range and power avoid the drama of Abraham and his family, another key topic in Lefèvre’s chapters. In the 34 Renaudet, Préréforme, pp. 150-1, nn. 3- 45 pp. 640-1, n: 3. Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico (n.p., n.d.), sig. a‘, a letter dated ‘Spirae xi kal. Maias M.ccce.xciiii’; Josef Benzing, 37 Peter G. Bietenholz, Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century; The Basie Humanists and = Bibliographie der Schriften Johannes Reuchlins in 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Bibliotheca Bibliographica, Band xviii, Vienna 1955, p. 5+ 36 Renaudet, Préréforme, p. 150, nn. 4-5; Rice, Epistles, p. 20; Rice, ‘De magia’, p. 20, n. 7; Dict. de biog. fran., vii, 1959, col. 533. Printers in their Contacts with Francophone Culture, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance 112, Geneva 1971, pp. 167-9, 175 ; Renaudet, Préréforme, pp. 640-1. 38 Haec accurata recognitio trium voluminum operum Clariss. P. Nicolai Cusae Card. ex officina Ascensiana recenter emissa est, ed. Lefèvre, Paris (Badius) 1514, i, fols. v, Ixxxv, xcviii, clxvii.

Psalter Lefèvre cites Cusanus’s Sermons, where Abraham’s faith in the covenant is described as a kind of vision (in language not unlike Lefèvre’s in chapter fifteen of De magia naturali) and in his Cribratio Alchoran Cusanus retells Abraham’s story at great length, mentioning the transformation of his name.3* But the most likely source of Nicholas’s influence on Lefèvre’s treatment of Cabala is his lengthy analysis of the tetragrammaton in his Sermons. Cusanus regards the divine name as a maximum mysterium and gives details on its Hebrew spelling and on the analogy of ‘Yahweh’ and ‘Jesus’. His sermon Dies sanctificatus envisions a light-filled cosmic hierarchy, populated by angels whose names signify God as light and crowned at its apex by a deus lux whose name one cannot speak because it encloses every vowel-sound within itself. . .. It is, then, the form of words, whence comes the form without which a word cannot be vocalized, for there is no word without a vowel. And so it is the Word of God, that Word through which and in which every word is. But in Hebrew the name IHESUS is IESUA and is the Word of God with the letter ‘s’, which is called ‘sin’. And ‘sin’ means ‘utterance’ (elocutio), the Word of God spoken, so to speak, and so IESUA or IESUS is the spoken Word of God.* Cusanus also teaches that the understanding of certain divine names has been passed on to us ‘. . . through ersons of vigorous intellect more illustrious than the rest in the sanctity of the light of revelation. Other names are from 3°Ibid., ii, fol. lxxxiii: ‘Abraham vidit quando fide non haesitavit, in semine suo esse Christum promissum. . . . Christus uti fuisset Isaac voluntate patris Abraham, ita voluntate patris sui, fuit immolatus et gavisus est * cf. above, n. 10. 40 Ibid., fois. lii-lv: llige mysterium quomodo angeli non habent nisi nomina quae sonant terminum lucis, scilicet Michael quasi fortitudo dei, Raphael quasi medicina lei; hoc est ubi relucet in termino fortitudinis lumen illud aut in termino salutis secundum interpretationem nominum illorum, Et non reperiuntur nomina esse intellectualium sprtuum nisi quidam terminationes lucis vinae, secundum regionem intellectualem, Sic etiam de aliis in sua regione, quemadmodum in mathematicis ex terminatione nn figura nomen sortitur, trigona, na, ona, quia tot angulis Habemus igitur quomodo in lumine gratiae, seu lumine revelato, seu in luce stellae si diligenter ambulaverimus et quaesiverimus, poterimus ad aliquem locum perduci ubi est rex Judaeorum. ... Sed ducit nos lumen ad THESUM.... Et hoc est nomen supra omne nomen coelestium terrestrium, et en neque est aliud nomen in quo est salus.. Qui igitur sitit apprehendere sapientiam uti Magi et illam diligenter inquirit, ducitur lumine gratiae ad IHESUM ut ad mediatorem natura perveniat, a sine quaerentis quo incapax esset quaesitae gloriae. Nomennan dicitur ineffabile forte quia non est nisi unitas omnis vocis. . . . Ineffabileigitur est hoc nomen quod omnem vocalitatemin se complicat.. .. Estigitur forma verborum, unde est forma sine qua non potest verbum vocale fieri; sine enim an itur. Sicut etiam aurum varie terminavocali, non sit verbum. tum in figuris varie nominatur calix, vel nominatur; nam candelabrum, vel et in quo omne verbum. IHESUS autem vocatur hebraice IESUA et est verbum dei anulus, vel crather, vel quippiam similium. Sic etiam divinum lumen licet sit unum, ex termino tamen vario nominatur varie. Ille autem qui scit quod candelabrum illud est ex auro, nominat candelabrum aureum. . . . cum ‘s’ litera quae dicitur sin, et interpretatur sin elocutio, quasi verbum dei elocutum. Est 4 Unde est verbum dei, scilicet verbum per quod omne verbum igitur ue elocutum.. seu IESUS verbum

Chaldaeans, Greeks, Egyptians, . . ” and so Christians have something to learn in these matters from p seers like Hermes Trismegistus, the Erythraean Sibyl, and the Magi.* These allusions to ancient theologians seem friendly, but in a sermon on the Magi Cusanus (citing Chrysostom) attacked the sort of verbal and demonic magic which was to frighten some Christian humanists away from Cabala. ‘It must not be believed that there is wi power in these words,’ he warned, ‘which God has not put there, [and] . .. the mixing of sacred words with anything false is also to be shunned. . . .”4 This note of caution in the Sermons means that of the three fifteenth-century Christian sources which Lefévre mentions in his Psalter, Cusanus is the most apt to have tempered Lefevre’s willingness to meddle with the powers of divine names. Pico’s treatment of sacred names and mystic numbers is bolder and in general closer to the language of De magia naturali. Most of the relevant passages occur among the conclusiones which Pico had planned to defend publicly in Rome in 1486. In them the daring and erudite young Count of Mirandola first combined two of the more important traditions which were to colour the late fifteenth-century renaissance of occultism: Christian Cabala and the Hermetic tradition. But Pico’s thought seemed audacious to his church, and so a papal commision condemned several of the nine hundred theses.** Fourteen of these notorious conclusiones were written ‘according to the mathematics of oras,’ the topic of Lefévre’s second book, and in his seventy-two theses from the Cabalists ‘according to his own opinion’ Pico also associated Pythagorean numerology directly with Cabala. In the same place, he claimed that Cabala was the key to understanding the universal and marvellous power of Christ’s name, that the ineffable tetragrammaton contained the promise of the second and third persons of the Trinity, and that the medial Sin in ‘Jesus’ concealed the mystery of God become man. In another set of Cabalist theses he pointed out that Abraham could not have begotten Isaac without the addition of ‘littera He’ to his name, and in the Oration on the Dignity of Man he tells us that Joshua received the Cabala from Moses.** Any of this fundamental material on Christian Cabala could have supplied Lefévre with the inspiration for the final chapters of book two; further resemblances of detail support the conclusion that De magia naturali does, in fact, depend on Pico’s pioneering work in Cabala. The term paterna mens 41 Ibid,, fols. xi¥—xiii, li: ‘Et sic scimus ex traditione sacrarum literarum revelationes aliquas circa nomen dei ut de nomine tetragrammato et aliis divinis nominibus, Et non quam Deus non dedit. ... Cavendum etiam ne sacris verbis aliqua vana sint comest nisi unum nomen supra regionem intellectualem, scilicet IEHOVA. ... Alia Mirandola and Magic’, LT Opera e il pensiero di sunt nomina divina sed de regione intellectuali, quorum aliqua sunt nobis explicata per vigorosos intellectus qui sanctitate luminis revelationis prae caeteris claruerunt. Alia sunt nomina sapientium, Chaldaeorum, Graccorum, Aegyptiorum, Paganorum, nationum, linguarum. . . .’ 42 Jbid., fols. xxixY-xxx: ‘Nec credendum est verbis illis aliquam virtutem inesse 4 Frances Yates, ‘Giovanni Pico della Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’ umanesimo: Convegno internazionale (Mirandola: 15-18 Settembre 1963), Florence 1965, i, pp. 162, 174, 188, 190-4; cf. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London 1964, pp. 84-116. “4 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gian Francesco Pico, Opera omnia (1557-1573) (rpt. Hildesheim 1969), i, pp. 1-2, 79, 83, 105, 108-9, 328-0.

appears frequently in Lefévre’s chapters and is associated with the tetrammaton: Pico calls it a Zoroastrian idea and finds an analogue for it in Cabala. There are also important parallels between the astrological terms which Lefèvre uses in chapter sixteen and the language of Pico’s Orphic and Cabalist conclusions.1* And Pico's notion that ‘. . . the songs of David are wonderfully suited to the work of Cabala, just as the songs of Orpheus are to the work of truly licit and natural magic’ may well have prompted Lefevre to read the Psalms in Cabalist terms, a project he hints at in chapter sixteen of De magia naturali and again in his Psalterium.*° But nothing Lefèvre said was as bold as Pico’s confident assertion that ‘there is no science which gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and Cabala.” On the contrary, in chapter fourteen he warns that the arcana are ‘to be learned only in silence’ and the orean reticence which encloses the remaining chapters of book two is dense indeed.4? To understand what lay behind the Pythagorean silence which Lefévre enjoined in chapter fourteen, we can turn to the De verbo mirifico of Johann Reuchlin, whom his contemporaries called ‘Pythagoras reborn.’ Like Pico, Reuchlin was more willing to proclaim than to honour the Pythagorean injunction to silence. He closed his book with the command to ‘be silent, conceal, hide, cover, be quiet, say nothing,’ and yet he openly claimed that Pythagoras sought some of his Eastern wisdom among the Hebrews and that his tetractys was an analogue of the tetragrammaton.*® He also announced that God had opened the secret of His name to men as a source of occult power (virtus occulta) and that many wonders, including prophecy, could be wrought by one who knew the powers of divine words (virtutes verborum divinorum) #* The numerical values of the sacred letters yöd, hé and wäw, he made the subject of a long section of De verbo mirifico, a section which included an account of Isaac’s begetting as a result of the addition of hé to Abraham’s name.*% Lefèvre could have used any of this material, but the most striking similarity between his work and Reuchlin’s comes in the third book of De 45 Ibid., pp. 107-8; in chapter sixteen (fols. 21920), mentions the following series while talking about the significance of Orphei 14: magis certificet de divinitate Christi quam 2 3 re Lucina Pallas Ceres Dionisius Rhea Saturnus Oceanus Jupiter Hyperion 2 Apla[n]es Luna Saturnus Jupiter Mars 3 4 Mercurius Venus Sol Except that the sum of the numbers in both series is 14, I am unsure of Lefévre’s meaning. The terminology in Pico’s eighteenth and twentieth Orphic conclusions is similar. 46 Ibid., p. 106: ‘Sicut hymni David operi Cabalae mirabiliter deserviunt, ita hymni vere licitae et naturalis 4? Ibid., p. 105: ‘Nulla est scientia quae nos Magia et Cabala’; cf. above, n. 3. 48 Reuchlin, De verbo mir,, sigs. ab, c3, 05; c8, eg”, e4Y-e6, g8: Sile, cela, occulta, tege, tace, This corresponds to an earlier list (fol. 207) of ‘simple inferior and superior celestial numbers’: operi Magiae'; cf. above, n. 5. mussa; Secret, Kabbalistes, p. 51; Charles Zika, ‘Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century’, this Journal, XXXIX, 1976, pp. 112, 116, 120, 129, 134; Lewis W. Spitz, ‘Reuchlin’s Philosophy: Pythagoras and Cabala for Christ’, Archiv fiir Reformationsgeschichte, xl, 1956, pp. 6-13; L. Geiger, Johann Reuchlin . . ., Leipzig 1871, pp. 187-9. 49 Reuchlin, De verbo mir., sigs. b4, d2, e, £7, f8v; Zika, ‘Reuchlin’, pp. 111, 115, 118119, 127. $0 Reuchlin, De verbo mir., sigs. e4Y-e6; see sig. e6 for Abraham's name-change.

verbo mirifico in a long, culminating section on the name of Jesus, ‘the wonderworking Word.’ Here Reuchlin recounts the exploits of Joshua in language much like Lefévre’s, calls him a ‘type of Christ’, and points out the close relationship between his name and those of Jesus and Yahweh. Citing Jerome’s description of his seventh connexio, Reuchlin argues that a ‘sin’ had to be added to the tetragrammaton to make it capable of pronunciation, and that this addition produced the name ‘ihsuh’, which Greek scholars connect with ‘healing’ and ‘health-giving’ (medendo et sanando), but Hebrews with ‘saving’, *. . . so that they regard ıhsuh as the same as saviour’. Like Lefèvre, Reuchlin saw a sign of the incarnation of the Logos in the derivation of the pronounceable ‘Jesus’ from the ineffable ‘Yahweh’. ‘If you are amazed’, he tells his partners in the dialogue, let me add just this—that what had been unspeakable for so long a time... was now made speakable. And if you are stil astounded, I wil add this— when Word descended into flesh, then letters changed into sound. See how openly and truly I spread the whole arcanum before you.*! Tradition remembered many heroes called ‘Jesus’ or ‘saviour’, but Reuchlin points out that some variation in the spelling of these names always pre their being identical with the name of Jesus. Some sly oly men were given the honour of having letters from the tetragrammaton added to their names. Abraham was given an ‘h’ and Hosea an ‘i’, the latter a gift from Moses which fortified Joshua before he set out to explore in Canaan. Powerful as Joshua’s name was, it was only a shadow of the wondrous name of Jesus and spelled differently since *. . . its last breathing was changed into another guttural and “sin” was transposed behind “vau”.’ If Lefèvre knew 51 Ibid., sigs. gY-g3; ‘Nomen summum et exuperantissimum . . . quod est super omne nomen, quod nominatur in caelo et in terra etiam in futuro saeculo. Nomen miraculosum et mirificum. Nomen sono vocis enunciabile non ultra ineffabile, non Tetragrammaton sed pentagrammaton. Nec est ulla virtus in caelo et in terra quae nomini ihsuh resistere audeat. Nec est ullum aliud nomen quod sanctius et religiosius constat, cuius litterae deus, cuius syllabae spiritus, cuius dictio deus et homo est. Quid attoniti obstupescitis? . . . Si miramini, vel hoc addam: quod prius tanto tempore immo tot saeculis fuit ineffabile, iuncta nunc una non sonante sed consonante littera, i factum est. Est si adhuc admiramini, adhuc addam : quando verbum descendit in carnem, tunc litterae transierunt in vocem. Videte quam aperte vobis et quam fideliter totum pando arcanum. ... Sunt autem quatuor solace, IHVH, quibus Tetragrammaton ineflabile constat et quae divinam naturam propriissime commonstrant. . .. Quae cum dici humana et voce et facultate nequeant, opportune quidem decebat incarnandum deum praeter eas alium cum carne assumere characterem, quo inenunciabilis sonus ac tunc invisibilis dei inenarrabilis nota inter humanos nunc posset dentes stridere aliquando et sic effabiliter vocari, quatenus ante invocabile modo sentiatur vocabile. Apellant vero eam hebraci consonantem Sin, quod dentes Hieronymus presbyter interpretatur ad Paulam Urbicam sic scribens. Septima connexio [etc., see above, n. 24]. . . . Si nomen ineflabile Tetragrammaton oporteat fieri effabile, necessario vocabitur per consonantem quae appellatur Sin, ut fiat ihsuh, qui erit supra te, caput tuum, et dominus tuus. ... Hoc enim nomen a medendo et sanando derivant graecorum autores. Hebraeorum vero grammatici a salvando, ut idem esse ihsuh putent quod salvator.’ This interpretation of Reuchlin’s also depends upon Ambrose’s notion that Sin meant ‘super vulnus’, an idea that leads him to associate Sin with Jesus, who heals the wounds of the soul; see Expositio Psalmi CXVHI 21.1-5 [CSEL 52: 474-6]; Thiel, Hebräischkenntnisse, pp. 87-93.

and fully understood this text of Reuchlin’s, he should not have made the mistake of inserting a wäw as well as a yöd in Joshua’s name. On the other hand, Reuchlin’s language is not crystal clear (especially to one as unfamiliar with Hebrew as Lefévre must have been in the early 1490s) and the form of the text of Numbers which Reuchlin cites—‘vocavitque Hosee filium Nun Ihosue’—seems to support Lefévre’s error: the difference between ‘Hosee’ and ‘Thosue’ seems to be ‘i’ (yöd) and ‘u’ (waw).5? In any case, I believe that Lefévre intended his analysis of Joshua’s name in chapter fifteen as a quiet allusion to a Cabalist derivation of Jesus’s name from Yahweh’s, a derivation he makes more explicit in chapter sixteen. The impulse to single out Joshua could have come from Reuchlin or Jerome or both, but neither of these sources explains Lefévre’s having mentioned Joshua's name-change along with Sarah’s and Abraham's.%% Given the prominence of these characters in the Pentateuch, it may be that no explanation is called for, but one recalls that Rashi's Commentary had publicized the midrashic tale of the indignant yéd and the consequent association of Sarah’s name-change with Joshua's. Only a Hebrew text of Rashi was in print in Lefévre’s lifetime, but his influence among Christian scholars was nevertheless great. Can anything else be said about the possibility of Lefévre’s having known Rashi’s commentary? If we ask this question in the context of Lefèvre’s interest in the occultist tradition in the early 1490s, at least one interesting possibility presents itself. We know, to begin with, that Lefévre travelled in the winter and spring of 1491-92 to Italy and to Pico’s and Ficino’s Florence (as Reuchlin had in 1482 and 1490).5* A letter of 1493 to Jean de Ganay, brother of the Germain de Ganay to whom De magıa naturali is dedicated, testifies that shortly after his Italian voyage Lefévre was thinking about Pythagoras, the prisca theologia, the mysteries of number, and the applications of numerology to sacras litteras.* During the next year, while working on De 52 Reuchlin, De verbo mir., sigs. g3"-24: ‘Fuere . . . plures salvatores Jesu vocati sed aliis litteris et aliis syllabis. . . . Sed quisquis aliqua sanctitate praeditus existimabatur, is aliquam ex iis sanctis characteribus litteram nomini suo nancisci vehementer optavit, ut Abram ‘h. Dixit enim ei deus: Non ultra vocabitur nomen tuum Abram sed appellaberis Abrham. Et Hosee adeptus est ‘T. Cum enim Moyses ad explorandum terram Chanaan viros mittere deliberasset, praefecit eis Hosee filium Nun de tribu Ephraim cui, ut foret salubriori fortitudine, mutato nomine addidit ‘I’, litteram nominis ineffabilis primam vocavitque Hosee filium Nun Ihosue, quod nostri etaim transtulerunt Ihesu. . . . Tantam vim de se praebet illud nomen, ut ad eius quandoque vel effigiem vel umbram solam et admiranda et magnalia fiant. Legitur enim Iosue, qui et translaticio more Iesus filius Nave dicitur, quoniam solum Christi typum et quandam umbratilem in nomine figuram gerebat, transiisse Tordanem, hostium regna subvertisse, victori populo terram divisisse, Soli et Lunae imperasse, Deum eius voci obedivisse. Cui ad integritatem veri nominis ihsuh tantum hoc deerat, quod extrema eius aspiratio in aliam gutturalem versa, et Sin post Vau transposita est, ne creatura nomen creatoris integrum ferret, putaturque id sibi cognomento sumpsisse, qui prius Hosee vocaretur, ut tam potentis nominis assidua recordatione res memoratu dignas gereret.’ 53 Justin 2: discusses all three namein one place (Dial. Tr. 113 [A-NCL 240-1]), but since his text was the int he talks about the addition of an alpha to Abraham’s name and of a rho to Sarah's name. 5 Renaudet, Préréforme, pp. 136-45, 640641; Geiger, Reuchlin, pp. 9-12 55 Lefèvre to Jean de Ganay, [Paris 1493], in Rice, Epistles, p. 18: ‘Et arithmetica contemplatio rite cognita facilem praebet musicarum modulationum intelligentiam

magia naturali, Lefévre also prepared an edition of Ficino’s translation of Mercurii Trismegisti liber de potestate et sapientia Dei; and the work Ficino had begun on Dionysius the Areopagite’s De nominibus divinis could have stimulated Lefèvre to explore the mysteries of divine names.*% But Lefèvre was teaching as well as writing in 1494, and one of his students around this time was Leonard Pomar, a Spaniard and a new Christian. Could Pomar have helped Lefèvre’s study of Cabala and of Jewish scholars like Rashi? Beyond the bare fact of their being together as student and teacher, the only evidence is a letter from Lefévre to Pomar which served as a preface to Charles de Bouelles’s In artem oppositorum introductio, published in 1501. The letter dwells heavily on the Pythagorean silence which was on Lefévre’s mind as he composed his Cabala chapters and which remained there, no doubt, as he chose not to have De magia naturali published.5? We know today of only one complete manuscript of De magia naturali and this may indicate that the work was not widely disseminated in its own time. Perhaps it was the cause célébre of Simon de Phares, a physician whose astrological researches got him into trouble with both the Lyonnais and Parisian authorities in the early 1490s, which convinced Lefèvre to treat his occultist learning with discretion.5* Or perhaps events turned Lefevre’s attention to the prosecutions for witchcraft and sorcery in southern France which seemed to be making the possession of occult wisdom a perilous attainment at best :5° a woman was burned at the stake as a result of witch-trials in the Vivarais in astronomicarumque subtilitatum ingressus; et prisca theologia numeris olim, ut quibusdam ad divina gradibus, tota innitebatur. Quamvis et nunc in sacris litteris sua retineant mysteria numeri. Tolle igitur numeros numerorumque disciplinam, leges imperficis, iustitia caeca relinquitur, nulla modulationum reperietur regula, nullus caelestium contemplationum aditus, sacrarum litterarum delitebunt mysteria, immo et universa philosophia quae pariter humanorum divinorumque cognitio describitur. . . . Pythagoras enim sine numerorum praesidio nihil posse sciri contendebat. . . .’ 56 Besides his commentary on Dionysius (Marsilti Ficint . . . opera . . ., 1576 [rpt. Turin 1959], ii, 1024-1128), see his De. in Philebum 1.12 (ibid., 1217-18), titled ‘Esse vivam in nominibus virtutem, praesertim divinis,’ which mentions the power of the tetragrammaton but gives no clear account of its Hebrew spelling. Describing the faith of Abraham and Sarah in his commentary on the Pauline epistles, Ficino also mentions Pythagoras, whose father he thought was Hebrew and who ‘carried over much of the Mosaic Law into his philosophy’ (ibid., i, 30, 466-8; ii, 1217-18); Secret, Kabbalistes, p. 77. 5? Lefèvre to Pomar, Paris (c. Dec. 24) 1501, in Rice, Epistles, pp. 95-96: ‘. . . in rationali [philosophia] valuit Aristoteles, in intellectuali forte Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, et Pythagoras. . . . Aristoteles studiorum vita est, Pythagoras autem studiorum mors, vita superior; hinc rite docuit hic tacendo, ille vero loquendo, sed silentium actus est et vox privatio. Et ut tibi et multis hac in parte prosim, in Paulo et Dionysio multum silentium, deinde in Cusa et Victorini éuoovolw, in Aristotele autem silentii perparum, vocum multum; nam silentium dicit et tace[n]t voces, siquidem voces dicere[n]t, simpliciter taceret ; ita aperte tecum loquor’; ibid., pp. 78-79, 94; Secret, ‘Glanes pour servir à l’histoire des juifs en France à la Renaissance,’ Revue des études juives, n.s. cxv, 1956, pp. 96-107. 58 Renaudet, Préréforme, pp. 1 52-3. 59 Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess . . ., Munich and Leipzig 1912, pp. 308-9, 358-9, 413-15, 420-4, 428, 440; Hansen, llen ntersuchungen zur Geschichte der Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn 1901, pp. 99-104, 118-22, 124-30, 133-45, 149-84, 188-95, 227-31, 241, 408-15, 445-516; J. B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca 1972, pp. 126-7, 181-7, 202, 216-20, 248; cf. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, London 1975, PP. 126-46.

1490: in the same year the Flagellum maleficorum of Pierre Mamoris was first printed in Lyons, and a decree of Charles VIII ordered the arrest of all “enchanters, diviners, invokers of evil spirits’; the Council of Langres of 1491 forbade all resort to ‘sortilegia et maleficia’ and directed priests to make this prohibition known in their parishes; in the summer of 1493 the Cri du Prevöt de Paris promised the fall weight of the King’s wrath to all ‘charmeurs, devineurs, invocateurs de mauvais et dampnes esprits, nigromancieurs et autres tres-mauvaises et tres-pernicieuses personnes usans de mauvais arts, sciences et sectes prohibees.*9% It was about this time that Pico composed his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, a work which has convinced some readers that Pico had repented of his earlier enthusiasm for the magical arts. Perhaps Lefevre heard rumours that some such change of heart had come u ico. enano the external motives, we can see perfectly good reasons in the work itself for Lefèvre’s keeping De magia naturali from public view. To imply in a work with such a title, that the Christian might And help toward salvation in traditions which were not only magical but Jewish as well, was a rous enterprise.®? Granted, Pico and others had already said as much, but what they said was novel and quickly became unorthodox. Like most of his countrymen, Lefevre seems to have sensed these dangers; he erected defences against them in the elusive language of his chapters on Cabala.®* Though he had the courage to associate the name of Jesus with the number 300, he actually mentioned the =~ name only once and then much more guardedly than either Reuchlin or Pico or even Cusanus.°® His treatment of two other sets of sacred numbers—the pair 300-400 and the ‘Syrian’ numbers 1 to 9 and 10 to go—is even more enigmatic. Lefévre’s argument in chapter eighteen, that the union of Sin and taw symbolizes a victory of life over death for mankind, assumes a reader who knows first that the Hebrew word taw (the name of the letter P taw) means ‘sign’ or ‘mark’ or ‘cross’ ; second that Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel said that in ancient Hebrew writing taw was shaped like the cross with which Christians marked their foreheads; third that the numerical values of sin and täw are 300 and 400; and fourth that Sin symbolizes Christ the lifegiver.95 #0 Hansen, Quellen, pp. 208-12; H. C. Lea, Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, New York 1957, i, pp. 298-9; iii, pp. 1286-7. #1 There been some disagreement on the question of Pico’s consistency in these matters: Yates, ‘Pico’, pp. 190-203; Paolo Rossi, ‘Considerazioni sul declino dell’ astrologia agli inizi dell’eta moderna’, in L’Opera . . . di Giovanni Pico, pp. 317-18, 322- 330; Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Vita et Dottrina, Florence 1937, pp. 167-8, 181-5; Hans Baron, ‘Willensfreiit und Astrologie bei Marsilio Ficino und Pico della Mirandola’, Aultur- und Universalgeschichte . . ., Leipzig and Berlin 1927, pp. 155-7; Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance, Princeton 1970, pp. 212-15. 2 See above, n. 53 On the caution of the French who were interested in occultism, see: D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, London 1972, Ha 63-131; Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, Studies of the Warburg Institute, 22, London 1958, pp. 119-26, 167-70. 81 See above, n. 6. #5 See above, n. 7; Jerome, Comm. in Hez. 3, ad. 9: 4-6! [CCSL 75: 106-7]: ‘Et ut ad nostra veniamus, antiquis Hebraeorum litteris, quibus usque hodie utuntur Samaratani, extrema ‘tau’ littera crucis habet similitudinem, quae christianorum frontibus

This last should have been clear from Lefèvre’s earlier statements, but the other three pieces of information were also necessary to the conclusion that the addition of 300 to 400 signifies Christ’s victory over death on the cross. For a reader unfamiliar with Hebrew orthography, Gematria and patristic interpretations of the Hebrew alphabet, chances of comprehending Lefévre’s remarks were small. Smaller still in the case of the ‘Syrian’ numbers.®® A curious reader might ask himself why the two rows of Roman numerals (from 1 to 9 and from 10 to 90) were written from right to left, as they would be written in Hebrew. He might also recall that Reuchlin and earlier writers had identified the Hebrews with the Syrians in describing the origins of language, and so conclude that Lefévre was really talking about Hebrew numbers.” Then, remembering the attention paid to relationships between numbers and letters in the final chapters of book two, he would go to his lexicon and learn that the series 1... 9, 10... 90 (eighteen numbers in all) corresponds precisely to the numerical values of the first eighteen Hebrew letters. What then? If one looks for the four remaining sh ue which Lefévre did not write—the ultimate reticence —one finds qóp-100, rés-200, sin-300, täw-400. Their sum, 1000, seems an excellent number to finish a book on numerology, and they have a deeper meaning: they are Jerome’s seventh connexio and so express once again the mystery of the spoken name of God,98 I hope that this reading of Lefévre’s Syrian numbers is not as fanciful as the exertions of my curious reader. I think it evident, in any event, that the closing chapters of book two of De magia naturali are an exercise in Christian Cabala and that their presence alone is sufficient explanation for Lefévre’s failure to publish. I also believe that there is a good case for the influence of Jerome, Cusanus, Reuchlin, Pico and perhaps Rashi and Ficino on Lefèvre’s Cabalist chapters. These points seem particularly worth making because they revise the conclusion of François Secret, author of the most important book on Christian Cabala, that Symphorien Champier’s Ars parva Galeni (1516) contained the first description of Cabala in Renaissance France.*%% pingitur, et frequenti manus inscriptione signatur’. On the last page of De verbo mir. (sig. g8), Reuchlin also mentions the taw in Ezekiel as a sign of the cross. 56 Sce above, n. 8. 67 Reuchlin, De verbo mir., sig. c6Y: ‘Syriae vero nobilissimus est ager damascenus Persis vicinus unde Judaeorum gens prima Trogo et Justino et item pluribus historicis non contemnendis attestantibus originem duxit. Ergo Judaei qui et Syri et Assyrii fuerunt multo vetustiora linguae suae monumenta hoc modo autoribus possiderent credamus etiam quam si externis Acgyptü’; cf. Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 10.5.2 [MPG 21: 787-8]. #8 See above, pp. 196-7. #9 Secret, Kabbalistes, pp. 151-3 credits Champier's Ars parva Galeni with “la première présentation de la kabbale par un Français’; the honour of ‘la premitre mention de la kabbale’ by a Frenchman goes to the De judaeorum ritibus (1508) of François Tissard. Though he seems to have been unaware of Champier’s letter in De triplici disciplina (see below), Secret does call attention to Renaudet’s claim that Lefèvre had dealt with Cabala in De magia naturali. He notes the appearance of Lefévre’s protege, Josse Clichetove, in De magia naturali and seems to conclude that it was number mysticism, one of Clichetove’s principal interests, which Renaudet saw and mistakenly identified as Cabala. For the history of Cabala, Secret says, Renaudet’s allusion to Lefèvre’s work is ‘une fausse piste’. Thorndike (History, iv, P- 515), on the other hand, also found Cabala ”s treatise, and so does Rice (‘De magia’, p. 27, n. 28). As Secret says, Clichetove's De mystica numerorum significatione

In fact Champier himself had written about Cabala eight years earlier in one of three letters prefatory to the section of his De triplict disciplina (1509) titled Theologiae Trimegisticae . . . de secretis et mystertis Egyptiorum particulae XII.7° Champier’s letter, which opens with praises of Lefévre’s researches in theology, philosophy and the Hermetica, is largely an attempt to explain away two habits about which he always felt half-guilty: his continuing interest in Hermetic wisdom, an interest which to some strait-laced Catholics might seem dangerously unorthodox, and his close dependence on other scholars who had written on the Hermetic tradition—notably Lefévre and Lodovico Lazarelli.71 There may be, he confesses, many elements in the Hermetic literature which run contrary to Christian piety, but these are late corruptions added by Greeks and Romans, especially the infamous Apuleius. To illustrate the history of the Hermetica’s corruption, Champier recalls the similar fate of Cabala. Originally a useful technique of scriptural exegesis, Cabala eventually fell prey to men unscrupulous enough to misuse its powers in sinful acts of theurgy and magic. Neither Cabala nor the Hermetic literature is, in itself, to be condemned entirely; but the Christian scholar must always be ready to recognize in these bodies of antique wisdom the impious perversions of more recent writers. ‘Among the Egyptians,’ Champier writes, there were mysteries as there was Cabala among the Hebrews. In Latin this means ‘reception’, and through it in ancient times, according to the Hebrews and our authorities, the meaning of sacred letters handed down from Moses and received in succession was understood. And it happened that the Jews came to abuse the name of Cabala and transferred it even to illicit and profane matters, only they were learned secretly and privately. And thus beyond that more secret understanding of divine letters stoped called Cabala by the ancients, beyond the art of transforming letters, and beyond that study which deals with the virtues of superior things, which later men somehow understood by the name of Cabala, these younger men, pretending that they had the secret names of God with which they would coerce demons and work wonders, also ascribed to Cabala a thousand insanities picked up from the Jews. This they called Cabala and mendaciously asserted that by its power Christ had done his miracles.?? opusculum, Paris (H. Estienne) 1513, dedicated like Lefévre’s work to Germain de Ganay, does not deal with Cabala, but it does bring up Joshua’s destruction ofJericho in a chapter (fols. gY-ı1) titled ‘Spiritualis quinari: et senarii designatio.” 70 Simphoriani Cl de triplici disciplina . . ., Lyons (Claude Davost for Simon Vincent) 1509, sigs, hh-hhii; Cabala is also mentioned on sig. hhv. 1 On Champier’s attitude toward occultism, see above, n. 63; Cesare Vasoli, “Temi e fonti della tradizione Ermetica in uno scritto di Symphorien Champier’, Umanesimo e esoterismo, ed. Enrico Castelli, Archivio di Filosofia, Padua 1960, pp. 235-89. The same subject is treated in my own Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France, now in the press (Mouton: The Hague). 12 Champier, De triplici disciplina, sig. hh": ‘Nam apud Egyptios mysteria erant quemadmodum apud Hebreos Cabala. Quod latine receptio atque per eam antiquitus, apud Hebreos et nostros, sensus sacrarum litterarum a Mose traditus et successione receptus intelligeretur. Factum est ut nomine Cabalae Iudei postmodum abuterentur illudque transferant ad res etiam illicitas et prophanas, modo clam et secreto - ciperentur. Quare praeter sensum fam divinorum eloquiorum secretiorem

Champier’s wish to distinguish between a good Cabala and a bad reflects Pico’s Apologia of 1487, his imprudent response to the condemnation of some of his theses. When Champier sees Cabala as somehow comparable to the tradition of ancient Hermetic philosophy, not only is he influenced by the general drift of the Apologia but also he actually reproduces some of Pico’s phrases and sentences. 7? Lefévre’s account of Cabala in De magia naturali can be called evasive and cautious, but it is not hostile, as is Champier’s in De triplict disciplina. The difference between the two may indicate that by 1509 the case against the use of occultist techniques by Christians had become firmer in the minds of French humanists than it was in the early 1490s. Champier’s picture of Cabala is much the blacker. Lefévre’s analysis of Cabala supports the arguments of magicians, while for Champier the attempt to do magic was clearly an abuse of Cabala and a turn to ‘illicit and profane matters’. This hypothesis of a French humanism grown less receptive to the temptations of magic is supported in Lefévre’s case by a letter of 1504 in which he flatly asserted that ‘. , . there is no good magic, and it is a fiction that any magic is natural or at all good’.74 Against this we must set not only Champier’s continuing interest in the occultist tradition but also Lefévre’s own Psalter. If Lefévre’s Pythagorean silence had hardened into an absolute rejection of magic, then why should he have brought up the mystery of Jesus’s name, complete with references to Pico and Reuchlin, in the Psalter? Why should the issue of Cabala have come up at all in this book? The second question is the easier. Lefévre’s work on the text of the Psalms naturally brought him so close to the Hebrew tongue that he could not help remembering what he had learned of Cabala years earlier. The old need for silence, certainly, had not left his mind as he added to his Psalter the long note on God’s names. “There are many mysteries which escape me,’ he admitted, ‘and where they do not they must none the less go unheard for brevity’s sake.’75 And yet Lefèvre found enough space in his Psalter for things left unsaid about the names of God in De magia naturali, room enough for speculation on a theme which became a favourite of Christian Cabalists. On the whole, it looks as if the spiritual atmosphere had come to seem chillier to imaginative souls like Lefévre but that magical experiments like the new Christian Cabala still had the power to fascinate. And finally there is the fact of context to consider: a psalter was a safer place than a tract on magic for allusions to the Cabalist understanding of God’s secret names. A later work of Champier’s, Pronosticon libri tres (1518), also contains a section, actually a full chapter, on Cabala. In the Pronosticon it is evident that proprie Cabala nuncupatus est a veteribus et praeter artem revolutionis litterarum atque illam disciplinam quae de virtutibus rerum superiorum disserit, quae quomodo posteriores Cabalae nomine censuerunt, fecisse.’ 73 Pico, Opera, i, pp. 180-1. 74 Lefèvre toJacobo Ramirez de Guzman, Paris, 10 Feb. 1504, in Rice, Epistles, pp. 117118: ‘... nam profecto nulla bona [magia] acceptas iuniores rettulere, fingentes habere secreta dei nomina quibus demones illigarent et mirabilia operarentur. Atque hanc Cabalam nuncuparunt et Christum illius ope mendaciter affirmarunt miracula ullamve bonam... .’ 75 Psalterium, fol. 231: ‘Multa alia sunt mysteria quae me fugiunt, et ubi non fugerent brevitatis causa nichilominus reticenda.’ mille quoque Hebreorum insanias Cabalae est, et entum est ullam esse e

Champier had continued to read about Cabala, most notably in the Jn cabalistarum seu allegorizantium eruditionem isagogae (1515) of Paolo Ricci, but there is nothing in the work to indicate that his views on Cabala had changed substantially. As in De cà ee disciplina, he finds something worthwhile in an iginal, hermeneutic Cabala while insisting that the more recent uses of Cabala are magical and blasphemous and hence sinful.” There is an ambivalence here which matches Champier’sgr indecisive approach to occultism, and yet his discussions of Ca are clearly more anxious than Lefèvre’s taciturn remarks. Champier has come a longer way than Lefèvre from Pico’s bold proclamation of the primacy of magic and Cabala. It is Champier's consistent admiration for Lefévre’s work which inclines me to see the dro between his letter in De triplici disciplina and Lefevre’s position in De magia naturali as evidence that the early sixteenth-century climate of opinion was becoming less free and spacious than that of the late fifteenth century. Champier followed Lefèvre, even copied him, on so many issues that his departing from him on this one makes one want to know the reasons for the departure.?? In this case, of course, the chance to follow may not have been present simply because Lefèvre kept his chapters out of print, but then this choice itself may be even weighter evidence for the same conclusion. Champier’s statements are in themselves nothing more than the forgotten traces of a minor humanist, but they may be part of the more important story of the mounting perils which lay in the path of religious innovators in the later Renaissance. t such innovation seemed possible or necessary or both is evident from Pico’s theses, from Ficino's Theo sa fia and De triplici vita, and from Lefévre’s De magia naturali and Psalter (which deserve further study). But both Pico andFicino felt compelled to compose apologies in defence of their experiments with the new occultism. Perhaps Lefevre ‘was wisest of the three in not allowing his treatise on magic to come to light at all. Recalling their decisions and revisions, Champier, the admirer and imitator of these three humanist heroes, could only see the question of the place of Cabalist and Hermetist innovations in Christianity heming more closed and at the same time more vexed, Western Washington State College 76 Pronosticon libri tres . . ., Lyons (Vincent de Portonariis) 1518, fol. ii; Paolo cabalistarum seu allegorizantium Ricci, In erudilionem 150-3; Joseph isagogae, Augsburg 1515, fol. 5; from a letter New York 1944, to Erasmus from Champier printed Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance, p . 18, 67-76. 77 Renaudet, Brächforme, PP. 374, n. 6; in pp- 669-71; the epistolary introductions to gv‘-gvi, seen ampier’s books are a good guide to his relations with Lefèvre; see also Rice, Epistles, Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica by the autumn Pp. 59 55 74, 97, 136, 166-9, 174-6, 183, of 1517. See Secret, ‘Notes surles hébraisants ens”, Revue des études juives, iii, 1964, pp. 187-9, Duellum epistolare; Lyons 1519, sigs. Secret notes that Champier had 263, 266, 322-4, 400.