8
Postel and the Significance of Renaissance Cabalism

This essay was my first publication after I received my doctorate and was teaching at the University of Illinois. It was an effort to place the subject of my dissertation in a larger context; I tried to explain why Christian thinkers of the Renaissance were attracted to a singularly esoteric expression of Judaism. The essay was published in the Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), 218–232, and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher .

One of the most extraordinary and yet obscure currents in the intellectual history of the Renaissance was the interest of Christian thinkers in the Jewish cabala. This concern extended from Pico's attempt to absorb cabala into a Christian synthesis of universal knowledge at the end of the fifteenth century well into the seventeenth, and included writers and scholars from every major European country. Yet, in spite of the wide distribution of cabalistic interest in both time and space, the problem of explaining the movement, in the sense of relating it to the general concerns of its historical setting, has not been very satisfactorily dealt with.

There have been two contrasting reasons for this failure. One has been the difficulty of determining the nature of cabala itself. The task is by no means yet complete, but much has now been accomplished, notably through the work of Gershom Scholem.^[1] It is now possible to affirm enough about cabala to attempt some explanation of its attraction for the mind of the later Renaissance.

The word cabala , which literally means tradition , designates an esoteric school of religious thought within Judaism, characterized by both a certain doctrinal emphasis and a particular system of exegesis. Its origins

are still obscure, but it evidently emerged out of the eclectic intellectual atmosphere of the diaspora, and it thus represents a synthesis of influences variously drawn from Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and even Zoroastrian sources, the whole fused with an essential structure of orthodox Judaism.^[2] This fact provides a part of the explanation for Christian interest in cabala. It introduced many of the conceptions of hellenistic thought, attractive but previously suspect, under the respectable auspices of sacred tradition.

The heterogeneous elements of cabala began to assume more or less systematic and written form in the Middle Ages, especially among the Jews of Spain and southern France. The fullest development of cabalistic doctrine, although it can hardly be described as a systematic statement, is contained in the Zohar , or Book of Splendor , which was probably written by Moses of Leon, a Castilian Jew who wrote in the second half of the thirteenth century. In the history of Jewish thought, the Zohar , and the tradition of Jewish mystical speculation which it represents, seem to express the effort of religious minds to correct the overintellectualism of the philosophers such as Moses Maimonides.^[3] This fact also has considerable relevance for the explanation of Christian Renaissance cabalism. Within Judaism cabala represented very much the same sort of reaction against the alleged irrelevancies of formal philosophy that humanism, mysticism, and some aspects of Protestantism represented in the history of Christian thought.

Cabalistic teaching is of several sorts, among which it is convenient to distinguish the following. First, cabala includes doctrines concerned with the relation between God and the creation which are chiefly based on Neoplatonic and Gnostic schemes of emanation. The Zohar posits between God and the universe ten intermediaries, the sephiroth, which solve the perennial problem of explaining the immanent activity of a transcendent God. Second, it includes messianic and apocalyptic doctrines of a more specifically Jewish character. Finally, it includes techniques of scriptural exegesis which have the general aim of discovering profound spiritual significance in even the most apparently local and trivial passages of the Scriptures.^[4] The excesses associated with these techniques, which rely heavily on computing and manipulating arithmetically the numerical equivalents of Hebrew letters and words, have received undue attention.^[5] All aspects of cabalistic teaching attracted and were utilized by Renaissance cabalists.

But there has been, in addition to the obscurity of cabala, a second reason for the inadequate historical treatment of Renaissance cabalism. It has been approached too exclusively in terms of its permanent impres-

sion on European thought, and, measured by this standard, it has been dismissed as an inconsequential "fad" in contrast with the truly "significant" activities of the scientists.^[6] But historical significance involves more than contribution to the future, and it may be suggested that even a passing fad can be sometimes made to yield valuable evidence of the character of an age. In fact, the fads of the Renaissance raise important questions. Why was the intellectual of the Renaissance liable to fads (granted that he was)? What, again, is the significance of the sorts of fads which attracted him? And, to return to our immediate concern, what were the needs which cabalism satisfied for him? The purpose of the present paper is to consider the last question from the standpoint of a French cabalist of the sixteenth century, Guillaume Postel.

Postel is of unusual interest for helping to answer the question.^[7] Part of the reason lies in the fact (which has been insufficiently recognized) that his knowledge of cabala was probably more extensive and systematic than that of any other cabalist of his time. To mention only the best known among Renaissance cabalists, Pico, some two generations earlier, had relied mainly on a mediocre commentary on the Zohar for his knowledge, and Reuchlin's sources were chiefly pre-Zoharic.^[8] But Postel was thoroughly acquainted with all the major documents of cabala, in addition to possessing a wide reputation as a student of Hebrew and of the Near East in general.

Postel first learned Hebrew as a student in Paris after about 1525, but the first traces of cabalistic influence on his thought appeared only after a sojourn in Rome between 1544 and 1547. During this time he became acquainted with two German Hebraists, Andreas Masius (Andreas van Maes) and Johann von Widmanstadt, and it is probable that he also frequented the Jewish colony in Rome. His first cabalistic writings are works written during or immediately after this period,^[9] which thus marks the beginning of his career as a Christian cabalist of the Renaissance. Among his major achievements in this role were two translations of important cabalistic sources. He first produced a Latin version of a considerable portion of the Zohar ,^[10] and not long after he published a Latin translation of the important Sepher Yezirah , or Book of Formation .^[11] He was also familiar with a third important cabalistic writing, the SepherBahir .^[12] A large proportion of his writing after 1548 contains cabalistic elements,^[13] and includes works which demonstrate a knowledge of all three of the major aspects of cabalistic teaching.

A second reason for Postel's special usefulness as a representative of Renaissance cabalism lies in his active participation in numerous important movements of his time, both academic and practical.^[14] He was

a distinguished scholar with an international reputation in philology, and at various times he held chairs among the Royal Readers in what was to become the Collège de France and in the University of Vienna. A philosopher of sorts, he concerned himself with the stock problems of his day. He travelled extensively in the Near East and wrote vernacular best-sellers on the Ottoman Empire. He concerned himself with ecclesiastical reform and religious unity during the struggles of the Reformation, acting as a kind of lobbyist for conciliation at the Council of Trent. He was also a crusade propagandist, a missionary enthusiast, and an erstwhile member of the Society of Jesus. Finally, he was a very personal sort of mystic with a considerable circle of friends and correspondents both inside and outside the Catholic fold; eventually his private speculations brought about his imprisonment for several years in a papal prison at Rome. The wide range of Postel's interests and activities makes it possible to see through him a number of highly interesting relationships between cabalism and other concerns of the sixteenth century.

Finally, Postel is useful for our purposes because his life, and with it his bibliography, were long. He lived to the age of seventy-one; before his death in 1581 he had managed to publish some sixty works, several of considerable length.^[15] In addition he produced numerous personal letters and a huge quantity of manuscript works. These writings cover almost every subject of interest to the learned mind of his day, and in addition a considerable range of subjects intended to interest a nonacademic audience. In fact, as a publicist (and no other word comes close to summarizing the activities of his life) he deliberately wrote for several audiences. The number of his works, their variety, and the diversity of the readers at whom he aimed all help, again, in establishing the connections between cabalism and other interests of the time.

In what follows, therefore, I should like to survey the uses to which Postel put cabala, with the broad purpose of attempting to determine why one leading Christian intellectual of the Renaissance was attracted to such unlikely material. I have suggested above two general explanations. One is that cabala, as of Jewish origin, provided a sanction for hellenistic conceptions previously regarded with distrust. The other is that, as the reaction of religious against philosophizing Judaism, cabala reinforced an important aspect of Renaissance thought. Through Postel we can make our explanations more specific.

Cabala was valuable to Postel, in the first place, because it helped him to make sense of the universe. His problem was the typical one of desiring to reintegrate various aspects of thought and experience which had been

dissociated and compartmentalized not only by the prevailing philosophical schools, but also by the metaphysical skepticism of the humanists. On the one hand, he felt the universe to be a vast system of correspondences in which the general is everywhere mirrored in the particular, every object has cosmic implications, and all created things exist in dynamic relationship to each other and to an ultimate reality. It was God's "first intention," he wrote, "to unify all things."^[16] Accordingly, as his writings indicate, he considered the comprehension and description of this integrated universe a primary aim of human thought. His assumptions about the organization of the universe made him receptive to "that divine Plato, god of philosophers,"^[17] as one might expect, and to astrology.^[18]

On the other hand, Postel could not simply dismiss that growing sense of the gulf between God and the world which was the most profound expression of Renaissance pessimism. He followed Nicholas of Cusa in beginning his thought with the absolute antithesis between God and the world. God, he says, is eternal, infinite, unmoving, and immutable; the created world is in every respect the direct opposite. Hence Postel insisted on the necessity for mediation, without which it would be, he felt, impossible for man and the universe to enter into relationship with God, "for there is no passing from one extreme to the other without mediation."^[19] Without mediation the universe, for Postel, must lack both unity and meaning.

He found his principle of mediation, and hence the unity and meaning of the universe, in cabala. Out of cabalistic materials he was able to construct a total and unified description of the universe which corresponded to his assumptions about its nature, and at the same time which did not deny the absolute transcendence of God. Two aspects of cabalistic doctrine provided him with the integrated world-picture which he craved.

The first of these was the cabalistic view of language. This was, of course, primarily applicable to Hebrew, which Postel esteemed as the true clavis scientiae and the via veritatis perdita .^[20] Its active recovery by all mankind, he believed, is the only path both to a proper understanding of the universe as the systematic whole which God created, and to the restoration of direct communication with God. Here, it may be observed, is a hint concerning one impulse behind the development of Hebrew studies in the Renaissance.

But the cabalistic attitude toward language is also applicable in a secondary sense to all other languages, since, as Postel stresses, they are in every case merely historical corruptions of "the holy language."^[21] The

point is that, for the cabalist, language is far more than an arbitrary instrument of communication between men. It is a general unifying principle, capable of comprehending all particular things. It originated in the words taught by God to Adam and hence possesses an absolute relation to what it designates; it represents the self-expression of God and reflects his creativity.^[22] This view of language provides Postel both with a rationale for his plodding philological labors and, more obscurely, with a basis for a philosophical realism with which to oppose the schools.^[23]

Postel goes considerably farther with the hierarchy of the sephiroth as mediators between God and the universe. He employs them in the first place to unite the creation to God as the transmitters of motion and life. God, he wrote, the unmoved mover, moves the world not directly, since this would require motion, but by means of emanated powers "proceeding from himself and inseparable from his person." And he identified these promptly as the mediators of cabala: they are "named by the Hebrew prophets the powers of the first ten divine names or angels."^[24] Postel also uses the sephiroth, as we shall see in a moment, to unite all things to each other. This was a task for which they were well adapted. The hierarchy of the ten sephiroth is identifiable with, and mystically related to, the intellectual, sensible, and material worlds (to use the conventional distinction employed by Postel himself), the intellectual, moral, and physical attributes of man, sexual differences, colors, the decade, and the letters of the alphabet.^[25]

The standard practice among Christian cabalists was to identify the Trinity with the first three of the sephiroth;^[26] but Postel, who intended more than the reconciliation of religious systems, preferred to work out a system of his own. He arbitrarily selected and combined elements from a number of the original sephiroth to compose a trinity which has only the vaguest relation to that of Christianity.^[27] While Postel was not one to overlook anything in the sephirotic system that would serve his own purposes, he found its sexual dualisms most useful for tying the universe together. In an effort to combine the terminology, and above all the implications, of as many intellectual systems as possible, he described his own mediators as the animus mundi , or masculine principle of the universe, the anima mundi , or feminine and maternal principle, and the first-born child of their marriage. These three mediators serve, for Postel, a wide variety of functions. They are somehow involved in every aspect of the activity of the universe, whose health depends on their proper relationship.

They have, in the first place, metaphysical significance: the animus

mundi is the first means by which the unmoved mover imparts existence and motion to the world: thus, as with the mediator of Nicholas of Cusa, he unites the opposites of finite and infinite.^[28] The maternal principle is specifically the mediator between God and the material world, and makes possible local action.^[29] They also have epistemological significance and thus serve an educative function in which the parents are joined by their son as forms of intellect:

Three separate persons are necessary, under the heading of active or formal INTELLECT, passive or material INTELLECT, and made or created INTELLECT: a general father, who is the root of authority; a mother who is the general basis of reason; and a third, the son, to teach both authority and reason. The task of these three persons joined in one is the illumination of the world by means of the light of the knowledge of God; so that just as these same general categories are joined to God, all individual and particular members of the human race may be united to God, so that men may know as they are known.^[30]

Then, in a strange combination of philosophy and myth, Postel goes on to identify them with the terms of the syllogism, in which he conceives the conclusion as the offspring resulting from the union of the paternal wisdom of authority (the major premise) and the maternal wisdom of reason (the minor premise).^[31] And he declares: "The final intention of God is that through these three universal mediators the law of reason inscribed on the minds of all by intellect or the light of first principles may be manifested and preserved so that man may be truly a rational animal, the image and likeness of God."^[32] Postel means that there is, actually, no essential conflict between revelation (the expression of authoritative wisdom) and the natural reason of man, and that, through the activity of his three mediators, this fact must become clear to the human race.

Postel had for some time been attracted by the conception of religious truth as a set of demonstrable propositions on which all men, as rational beings, can agree. This interest had led to the charge by his Protestant enemies that he was the founder of "a sect of those who through mockery of God call themselves Deists."^[33] He was in fact close to the Florentine Neoplatonic tradition, although bringing to it a fresh zeal which apparently frightened certain of his evangelical contemporaries; but the Protestant charge had its point. His long De orbis terrae concordia , which he always regarded as the most important of his writings, had been intended above all to teach Christian doctrine by "philosophical reasons,"

as the title page (verso) states. He more than once had attempted to list points of agreement among world religions on the basis of their acceptability to natural reason.^[34] in the passages we have just examined he is discovering in cabala a means of justifying this general enterprise.

Another application of Postel's cabalism served to bring out the religious value of natural reason. For he identifies the feminine principle, the anima mundi , not only with reason but also with spiritual insights in this world, in order to explain or to justify a kind of religious feminism.^[35] His doctrine here is an adaptation of cabalistic teaching concerning the Shekinah, last of the mediating sephiroth and the most immediately active in the sphere of human experience.^[36] Postel identifies the feminine spirit of the universe with the Holy Spirit, whose presence alone insures the sanctity of the Church^[37] (and we may recall that he wrote at a time when this matter was by no means academic). But he also believed that the feminine principle, with its special concern for both reason and holiness, is best represented in this life (as one might suppose it should be) by real women: he particularly mentions St. Catherine of Siena on the one hand, and the bluestocking daughters of the late Thomas More and of his own old friend Guillaume Budé on the other.^[38] Femininity was not, for Postel, merely a metaphysical convenience, but a vital fact of positive spiritual value in this world.

Postel's mediators thus do not merely govern the great abstractions which stand above experience; they also intervene in even the most concrete facts of daily life. They give meaning to such different relationships as those of higher and lower, form and matter, heaven and earth, sun and moon, grace and nature, church and state, and even the Old World and the New.^[39] They are the fundamental psychological realities; every individual is composed of both animus and anima, of masculine and feminine elements.^[40] And in something that approaches a theory of myth, Postel discerns in the masculine and feminine principles of the universe the prototypes of all sexually differentiated pagan gods: they are Father Time and Mother Nature and all their numerous offspring.^[41] So they give unity and coherence to the universe.

In fact, the most puzzling aspect of Postel's thought was his effort to bring his cosmic mediating principles down to earth in material incarnations. His identification of the first mediator, the animus mundi , with the incarnate Word^[42] is perhaps inevitable enough. But (perhaps partly in the interests of balance and symmetry) Postel insisted also on the actual incarnation of the feminine principle and her first-born son. He believed he had found the former in a pious woman of Venice whom he called his Mother Joan and the New Eve ; she impressed him in part

because, in spite of her lack of education and her ignorance of Hebrew, she had been able to expound to him the deepest mysteries of the Zohar .^[43] In her, he wrote, he had seen "things so miraculous and great that they exceed all past miracles, save those of the new Adam, Jesus, my father and her spouse." Her destiny it was now to accomplish the regeneration of the world:

It is completely certain that, from the substance of her spirit, it has been decreed and determined in heaven that all men who through the corruption of the old Eve have ever been corrupted, killed and turned against God, being rather damned than born, will be completely restored, like me . . . for it is necessary that the new Adam and the new Eve, two in one spiritual flesh, should be, Jesus the mental father, and Joan the spiritual mother of all.^[44]

The first-born son of the mystical union between the New Adam and the New Eve was none other than Postel himself, whose duty in the world was thus to spread abroad the New Gospel, as the heir to both authority and reason.^[45] He had, as he wrote, a divine commission to restore mankind to a proper recognition of "the divine right of reason."^[46] This puzzling personal twist in his thought has been interpreted both as the evidence of a sick mind and as a rather unorthodox device to win an audience.^[47] However this may be, it reveals Postel as a religious revolutionary who has found in cabala, among other things, the inspiration, or at least the justification, for a new sect.

It is not difficult to find fault with Postel's system on intellectual grounds and to dismiss it as fantasy. It is neither rigorously nor systematically worked out. Nevertheless, it satisfied Postel. It satisfied him because it corresponded to his preconceptions about the universe, and particularly because it not only described the basic structure of the world but also bound together in a living relationship the vital forces of the universe. Its peculiar character is partly explained by the fact that Postel's requirements were imaginative and vital as well as intellectual.

But this system, which depended so largely on cabala, also satisfied Postel because it was bound up with other concerns in which his cabalism played a role. Cabala was useful to him not only because it made a special kind of sense out of the universe, but also because it suggested to him a course of action at a crucial point in the history of European civilization. Postel was extraordinarily aware of the general circumstances of the sixteenth-century world, in which there were emerging new and challenging international, intercultural and interreligious relationships.

He was profoundly concerned with the problem of Christian action in a world in which Protestantism had destroyed the old internal unity of belief and Islam was continuing to expand steadily in the Old World, while, on the other hand, Christianity seemed to be making rapid progress in the New. The peoples of Europe were more than ever before brought into touch with alien peoples and alien beliefs. Postel provides a striking example of awareness of the fact that the European mind was compelled to adapt itself to "new horizons."

The fundamental problem, as Postel viewed it, was world ideological conflict; and in the critical pass to which his world seemed to have come, cabala appeared to him the only solution. It alone could harmonize the wide diversities in fundamental belief among all human groups; it alone could resolve the opposition between the Greek heritage and the Hebraic, between reason and authority, nature and grace. We have already observed how Postel's version of cabala solved the problem in theory, but it did more. By making truth communicable, cabala made it applicable to the solution of human problems.

Above all Postel hoped to use his rationalization of Christianity in behalf of a great missionary program. The conversion of the unbeliever, particularly in the Near East, was the fundamental motive of his scholarly pursuits. It had led him into the Society of Jesus during its early years. It had been chiefly responsible for his interest in the rational demonstration of Christian doctrine. Like Pico before him, he believed that cabala would be of the greatest value as a missionary tool; its primary documents, he thought, demonstrated irresistibly the truth of the basic Christian dogmas. The Book of Formation , he asserted, because it supremely reconciles reason and authority, will be of the greatest service in the conversion of the world.^[48] He insisted also that the whole of the Christian Gospel is implicit in and therefore deducible from the Zohar . By the light of its doctrines, he wrote, compared with which all other teachings in the world are as darkness, even the obstinacy of the Jews will finally be overcome.^[49] The real point here was, of course, that since the Jews would be the last and most difficult converts, the use of cabala by Christian missionaries insured the winning of the whole world.^[50]

The missionary task struck Postel as of particular urgency, and in his sense of crisis we may discern another major reason for his attraction to cabala. He was certain that the world stood on the brink of momentous developments. This certainty in him was in part the product of despair: he felt the world to be "in greater darkness than it has ever been since Christ came to send workmen into the vineyard,"^[51] and at times everything about him seemed to attest to the general disintegration of Chris-

tian society and Christian values. He was particularly alarmed over the decay of the church and of civil society, and he spent a considerable amount of his energy in denouncing it to contemporaries.^[52] He was further disturbed over the steady shrinking of Christendom before a militant Islam on the east, while at the same time Protestantism revealed the presence of the enemy within the gates.^[53] But through apocalypticism, Postel's pessimism was transmuted into optimism, and in decay itself he found the anticipations of rebirth; this appeared to him the lesson and law of history.^[54] Meanwhile the contemporary scene provided him with positive evidence which at once made him hopeful and strengthened his sense of crisis. He was, for example, as profoundly aware of the significance of the discoveries of America and the Orient for the expansion of Christian European influence over the world as any modern historian. Recent progress in learning—Postel had in mind the revival of letters, and especially the development of Hebrew studies—was further evidence to him of great changes immediately impending. And he found even in artillery and the printing press, new weapons of material and intellectual power in Christian hands, additional proof that the world was about to make a fresh start.^[55]

Cabala stimulated his apocalypticism, provided him with prophetic techniques, and furnished him with a description of the characteristics of the last age. His first calculations placed the dawn of the new age in 1556; so in 1553 he wrote to Schwenckfeld, exhorting him to be of good courage, since the day of the Lord was at hand.^[56] When nothing momentous occurred in that year (Postel was then a prisoner in Rome), he postponed the date.^[57] His conception of the millennium itself was largely taken from cabalistic messianism. He envisaged it as a return to the earthly paradise of Genesis, in which man is to be finally delivered from bondage to Satan and restored to his original innocence; hence it is the restitutio omnium , in which mankind will be united in a common speech (Hebrew), a common government, and a common religion based on cabala in which what had hitherto been the possession of a few initiates will become the common property of all mankind.^[58] It is not, Postel stresses, to be confused with eternal salvation. It is, in fact, the Judaic messianic age superimposed onto Christianity. Postel's apocalypticism, of course, is nothing new, and the Renaissance awareness of innovation has by this time been sufficiently established. What is significant here is their combination, and in this combination cabala played a fundamental role.

It is obviously impossible to generalize about Christian cabalism in any but the most tentative fashion on the basis of a single individual,

and in certain respects Postel was probably eccentric rather than typical. Nevertheless his case may be used as the basis for a few provisional conclusions about the historical significance of Renaissance cabalism. What is most important, perhaps, is the evidence here that cabalism is to be understood in the context of contemporary needs and preoccupations. The cabalists were interested in studying cabala, not out of idle curiosity or an interest in "pure scholarship," but in order to use it in their more general experience with the intellectual and practical world. It is clear enough that Postel's uses of cabala were primarily dictated not by the nature of cabala itself but by the requirements of the sixteenth-century scene as he understood it.

Some of the uses to which cabala was put were relatively conscious and explicit; others were perhaps less so. The cabalists were hopeful about the possibilities of cabala as a missionary tool; and here we may discern a preoccupation about European relations with the non-European world. They proposed to use cabala to solve intellectual problems which available intellectual traditions evidently seemed to them inadequate to settle. In this respect cabala is a chapter in the effort of the European mind to adapt itself to new data and new ideas; an error, perhaps, in the process of trial and error, but one which illuminates the problems of adaptation and the nature of the process itself. On the whole (in spite of Postel's erratic qualities), cabalism would seem, perhaps even more than humanism, to have been a conservative adaptation. It aimed at absorbing new materials into a scheme dominated by the assumptions and purposes of the past: the systematic unity of all things, the expansion of Christianity, the apocalyptic end of history. But more than this, Christian interest in cabala served to express the general restlessness of an age of striking innovation. Through it we can find some clue to the causes and character of that restlessness. And in at least one case cabala contributed to the idea of the Renaissance itself.