From the Tree to the Labyrinth (72 page)

For medieval Christian exegesis the hidden meanings are to be detected through a work of interpretation (to identify a surplus of content), but
without altering the expression,
that is to say, the material arrangement of the text, but, on the contrary, making a supreme effort to establish the exact reading (at least according to the questionable philological principles of the day). For some Kabbalistic currents, however, reading anatomizes, so to speak, the very substance of the expression, by means of three fundamental techniques: Notarikon, Gematria, and Temurah.

Notarikon is the acrostic technique, Gematria is made possible by the fact that in Hebrew numbers are represented by letters of the alphabet, so that each word can be associated with a numerical value derived from the sum of the numbers represented by the individual letters—the idea is to find analogies among words with a different meaning that nevertheless have the same numerical value. But the possible similarities between Llull’s procedures and those of the Kabbalists concern Temurah, the art of the permutation of letters, and therefore an anagrammatical technique.

In a language in which the vowels can be interpolated, the anagram has greater permutational possibilities than in other tongues. Moses Cordovero, for instance, wonders why in Deuteronomy we find the prohibition against wearing garments woven out of a mixture of linen and wool. His conclusion is that in the original version the same letters were combined to form another expression which warned Adam not to substitute his original garment of light with a garment of snakeskin, which represents the power of the demon.

In Abulafia we encounter pages in which the Tetragrammaton YHWH, thanks to the vocalization of its four letters and their arrangement in every conceivable order, produces four tables each consisting of fifty combinations. Eleazar of Worms vocalizes every letter of the Tetragrammaton with two vowels, using six vowels, and the number of combinations increases (cf. Idel 1988b: 22–23).

The Kabbalist can take advantage of the infinite resources of the Temurah because it is not only a reading technique, but the very process by which God created the world (as was already stated in the passage from the
Sefer Yetzirah
quoted above).

The Kabbalah suggests, then, that there may be a finite alphabet that produces a dizzying number of combinations, and the one who took the art of combination to its utmost limit is precisely Abulafia (thirteenth century) with his Kabbalah of names.

As we saw in
Chapter 7
, the Kabbalah of names, or ecstatic Kabbalah, is practiced by reciting the divine names hidden in the text of the Torah, playing upon the various combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, altering, separating, and recombining the surface of the text, down to the individual letters of the alphabet.

For the ecstatic Kabala, language is a universe unto itself, and the structure of language reflects the structure of reality. Therefore, conversely to what happens in the Western philosophical tradition and in Arab and Jewish philosophy, in the Kabbalah language does not represent the world in the sense that a significant expression represents an extralinguistic reality. If God created the world through the emission of sounds and letters of the alphabet, these semiotic elements are not representations of something preexistent, but the forms on which the elements that compose the world are modeled.

A linguistic form that produces the world, and a series of symbols that can be infinitely combined, without the interference of any limiting rule: these are the two points on which the Kabbalistic tradition substantially differs from Llull’s
Ars
. As Platzeck (1964: 1:328) remarks: “Llull’s combinatory system, as a pure combination of concepts, is wholly inspired by the rigid spirit of Western logic, while the kabbalistic combinatory system is a philological game.”

If Llull’s ideas did not come from the Hebrew Kabbalah, where did he get them from?

An admiring reader of the Catalan mystic, Leibniz (in his 1666
Dissertatio de arte combinatoria
) asked himself why Llull had stopped at such a limited number of elements. Given that the virtues are traditionally seven (four cardinal virtues and three theological), why did Llull, who increases them to nine, not go further? If, among the Absolute Principles, Truth and Wisdom are included, why not Beauty and Number?

In point of fact, in various of his works, Llull had proposed at one time ten, at another twelve, and at yet another twenty principles, finally settling on nine. Scholars have inferred—given that his Absolute Principles are nine, plus a tenth (labeled with an A) that is left out of the combinatory pool, because it represents divine Unity and Perfection—that he was influenced by the ten Sephirot of the Kabbalah (cf. Millás Vallicrosa 1958). But we have already seen that this analogy will not get us far. Platzeck (1953: 583) observes that a comparable list of Dignities could be found in the Koran, while, in his
Compendium artis demonstrativae
(“De fine hujus libri”), Llull claims to have borrowed the terms of the
Ars
from the Arabs.

Still, we are not obliged to recognize at all costs extra-Christian influences, because the list of divine Dignities could have been handed down to him from a long and venerable Classical, Patristic, and Scholastic tradition. From the
Divine Names
of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to the thought of mature Scholasticism, we find an idea, Aristotelian in origin, which runs through the entire reflective tradition of the Christian world, the idea of the transcendental properties of being: there are certain characteristics common to all being and found supereminently in the divine being, such as the One, the Good, the True (some include the Beautiful), and all of these properties are mutually converted into one another, in the sense that everything that is true is good and vice versa, and so on and so forth.

Furthermore, all the experts concur in identifying in Llull two basic sources of inspiration.

(i). One has its origin in Augustine Platonism, for which there exists a world of divine ideas which we know by internal enlightenment and innate disposition. In chapter 7 of his
De Trinitate,
Augustine affirms that God is called great, good, wise, blessed, and true, and His very greatness is His wisdom, while His goodness, which is greatness and wisdom, is truth, and to be blessed and wise means nothing more than to be true and good, and so on. These are pretty much Llull’s Dignities, which, as was the case in Augustine, cannot but be known a priori, since they are imprinted by God himself on our souls. If Llull had not been convinced of this innatism he would not have thought it possible to dialogue with the infidels on the basis of the fundamental notions common to all mankind.

Platzeck (1953, 1954) has reconstructed a series of sources that Llull could have drawn upon in formulating his own list of divine Dignities, from Boethius to Richard of Saint Victor, from John of Salisbury to Arabic logicians like Algazel (on whom Llull wrote a commentary), not to mention Euclid, filtered through Boethius, who speaks of a number of principles that ought to be well known in and of themselves (
dignitas
would in that case be a translation of
axioma
): “The fact that the three religious communities present in the Mediterranean basin—Christian, Arab, and Hebrew—averred that these dignities or perfections were absolute in God authorized Llull to posit them, in imitation of Euclid’s, as prior axioms or
dignitates
or
conceptiones animi communes
” (Platzeck 1953: 609).

(ii). The other source is the idea, Neo-Platonic in origin, of the Great Chain of Being (cf. Lovejoy 1936). Primitive Neo-Platonism, taken up in the Middle Ages in more or less tempered form, taught that the universe, entirely divine in nature, is the emanation of an unknowable and ineffable One, through a series of degrees of being, or hypostases, produced by necessity down to the lowest matter. Beings are thus arranged at progressively increasing distances from the divine One, and participate to an ever-decreasing extent in a divine nature that becomes degraded little by little to the point of disappearing altogether on the lower rungs of the ladder (or chain) of beings. From this state of affairs two principles follow, one cosmological, the other ethical-mystical. In the first place, if every step on the ladder of being is a phase of the same divine emanation, there exist relations of similarity, kinship, analogy between a lower state and the higher states—and from this root are derived all the theories of cosmic similarity and sympathy. In the second place, if the emanational ladder, on the one hand, represents a descent from the inconceivable perfection of the One to the lower degrees of matter, on the other, knowledge, salvation, and mystic union (strongly identified with each other in the Neo-Platonist view) imply an ascent, a return to the higher planes of the Great Chain of Being.

This tempered medieval Neo-Platonism will endeavor to reduce as much as possible the identity between the divine nature and the various states of creation, and, with Thomas Aquinas, will finally see the chain in terms of participation (which implies, not a necessary emanation of the divinity, but a free act by which God confers existence on his own creatures; and the stages of the chain are related to each other, not by an inevitable inner likeness, but by analogy. Nevertheless, this image of the Great Chain of Being is always in some way present in medieval thought, even when we cannot trace a direct relationship to Neo-Platonism. We have only to recall that every medieval thinker had meditated upon a text of the third or fourth century, the commentary to the Ciceronian
Somnium Scipionis
by Macrobius, whose Platonic and Neo-Platonic inspiration is obvious. Macrobius places at the top of the ladder of being the Good, the first cause of all things, then the Nous or Intelligence, born of God himself, which contains the Ideas as archetypes of all things. The Nous, contemplating itself and knowing itself, produces a World-Soul, which is diffused—preserving its unity—throughout the multiplicity of the created universe. Not a number, but the origin and matrix of all numbers, the Soul generates the numbered plurality of beings, from the celestial spheres down to the sublunar bodies: “Mind emanates from the Supreme God and Soul from Mind, and Mind, indeed, forms and suffuses all below with life, and since this is the one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in continuous succession, degenerating step by step in their downward course, the close observer will find that it creates all the following things and fills them with life, and since this unique light illuminates everything and is reflected in everything, and just as a single countenance may be reflected in various consecutive mirrors, all things follow each other in a continuous succession, degenerating bit by bit down to the end of the series—so that the attentive observer may seize an interconnection of the parts, from God on High down to the last dregs of things, bound to each other without any interruption” (Macrobius 1952).

There is a passage in Llull’s
Rhetorica
(ed. 1598: 199) that is practically a literal echo of Macrobius and confirms this basic principle of likeness among the various levels of being, as a result of which what was predicated in the definition of the original Dignities is realized in each being: “things receive from their likeness with the Divine Principle their conceptually defined places that at the same time correspond to their level of being” (Platzeck 1953: 601).

Through a thorough comparison not only of their texts but also of the illustrations that appear in various manuscripts of the two authors, Yates (1960) believed she could identify an unmediated source in the thought of John Scotus Eriugena. It is significant that for Eriugena the Divine Names or attributes are seen as primordial causes, eternal forms on the basis of which the world is configured, and from them there proceeds a primary matter,
hyle
or
chaos,
which we reencounter in the thought of Llull, author of a
Liber Chaos
or Book of Chaos). Along these lines, Yates (1960: 104 et seq.) identifies the first idea of the
Ars
in a passage from Eriugena’s
De divisione naturae,
in which fifteen primordial causes are mentioned (Goodness, Essence, Life, Reason, Intelligence, Wisdom, Virtue, Beatitude, Truth, Eternity, Greatness, Love, Peace, Unity, Perfection), but Eriugena adds that the number of causes is infinite and that they can therefore be arranged, for purposes of contemplation, in a series of arbitrary successions (the term Eriugena uses is
convolvere,
to cause them to rotate, so to speak, and Yates moreover reminds us that Eriugena, like other authors of his time, used the method of concentric circles to define the divine attributes and their combinations—though for contemplative and not inventive purposes). Obviously, the analogy with Kabbalistic procedures does not escape Yates, though she does not attempt to explain it in terms of direct dependence: “We should ask, not so much whether Llull was influenced by the Kabbalah, but whether Kabbalism and Llullism, with its Scotist basis, are not phenomena of a similar type, the one arising in the Jewish, and the other in the Christian tradition, which both appear in Spain at about the same time, and which might, so to speak, have encouraged one another by engendering similar atmospheres, or perhaps by actively permeating one another” (1960: 112; Llull and Bruno. Collected Essays 1982, p. 112).

Maybe Yates allowed herself to be bedazzled by similarities that seem less surprising when we recall that many analogous themes are to be found in other medieval Neo-Platonic texts (of the School of Chartres, for example). But precisely because of this it is undeniable that there are present in Llull’s texts ideas that Eriugena bequeathed to subsequent thinkers. Moreover, in the ninth century, Eriugena had contributed to the diffusion of the treatise by Pseudo-Dionysius
On the Divine Names,
one of the most important sources of medieval Neo-Platonic thought, at least in its tempered medieval form.