I haven’t had much blogging time as I’m struggling to finish two papers for the end of term. One is on Martin Luther and in my reading, I stumbled upon an interesting digression about the Kabbala. We’ve all been hearing more about Kabbala lately. It’s all the rage in Hollywood. And its chief pop proponent is that intellectual giant and spiritual icon, Madonna.
But just what is Kabbala?
The standard answer: it is a form of Jewish mysticism based upon ancient Hebrew texts. One can achieve a direct relationship with the divine through the invocation of specific words and scriptures. I can’t say what these words and scriptures might be. That’s precisely the point. They are secret. They belong only to those initiated in the ways of Kabbala, the elect, as it were.
My take: Kabbala is about exclusion. It is about who is in and who is out. It is about power—about conferring power on the few to the detriment of the many. As such, it is unacceptable on any terms. No matter how spiritual, if its practical effect is to denigrate others, then it has no legitimate place in this world (or any other for that matter). No wonder it’s so popular in Hollywood.
Here is an interesting passage from a book by Richard Marius. He introduces Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), the great uncle of Philipp Melanchthon, one of Luther’s closest friends and colleagues at the university in Wittenberg. Luther could see that the shit was going to hit the wall, and so wrote to this grand old man of letters seeking support. This was the closest Luther ever came to getting down on his knees and kissing someone’s ass. Here is what Marius offers by way of introduction:
“Reuchlin was old and tired in 1519. He had been at the center of one of the great controversies that swept across academic Germany before Luther’s notoriety. Like many interested in classical studies, he visited Italy on several occasions and early in his life came under the influence of the great Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. Like all Platonists, Ficino believed that the physical universe was an inferior reflection of the more enduring reality lying behind what we see and hear, touch, taste, and feel. Reuchlin’s profound interest in scholarship carried him to the study of Hebrew, and in 1506 he published a Hebrew grammar. It seemed natural to those preoccupied with classical philology that Christians should study the original language in which most of the Bible had been written, and interest in Hebrew had been growing in Christian circles for a couple of centuries.
“Much more daring was Reuchlin’s interest in the Jewish Kabbala. The Kabbala is a body of texts and teaching and a way of religious life. It is usually called “mystical” because its various documents propound the idea that God is to be found by contemplation rather than by dialectical thinking. But it goes further.
“In the Christian mystical tradition, to know God is to be brought into an intimate and heartfelt union with the divine. In the Kabbala, the mystical consciousness leads on to secret or esoteric knowledge about God. In general Kabbalists affirmed that in his essence God was beyond thought, beyond human power to make positive statements about him; however, it was possible to know some of the relations God had with creation. In this area the speculations of Kabbalists were bold and as nonsensical as astrology. The knowledge was to be kept secret among a closed group of initiates; thus in some of its manifestations the Kabbala resembled a kind of Masonic religious order with secret symbols and gestures, signifying cosmic obscurity and portentous vagueness.
“Many of these symbols, assumed to be almost magical, were Hebrew words and various other combinations of the Hebrew alphabet. These symbols supposedly opened direct avenues into the divine. It was supposed that the Kabbala had been passed down by an esoteric oral tradition alongside the sacred texts so meticulously copied by Jewish scribes. In this respect the Kabbala somewhat resembled the idea of an oral tradition in the Catholic Church, and it offered similar benefits: troublesome written texts could be reconciled, difficulties removed, and continuing revelation offered of truths not found in the original sacred writings. Above all, the Kabbala allowed an emotional religious life more satisfying to some than the literal understanding of the Jewish Law. Kabbalists believed their understanding of the Torah was more profound and more direct than that of scribes who pondered the words without seeking mystic enlightenment.
“Reuchlin was among those Christian scholars who thought that the Kabbala offered a better understanding ob both Christian and Jewish scriptures—all leading to further proof that Jesus was the person the Catholic Church and the Christian tradition claimed him to be. Reuchlin was disciple of Pico della Mirandola, who took on himself to reconcile the great religions of the world, supposing that they all fundamentally agreed and that Christianity embraced them all. Should he succeed, he thought that honest Jews would come to Christ, and honest Christians would have their own faith confirmed. Pico used the Kabbala in that process.
“Erudite men like pico and Reuchlin felt the need for yet more confirmation of Christian doctrine. Reuchlin put great stress on the resemblance between the Jewish Tetragrammaton, JHWH, and the frequent abbreviation of the name Jesus, JHS. At this distance he and other Kabbalists look like prospectors in search of an underlying code that would demonstrate the certainty of things in doubt, the relation of apparently disparate phenomena, a vision of impeccable order where confusion had seemed to reign, a bit like the quest of Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. As in all religious seeking, the excitement of Kabbala lay in the imminent revelation of truths, not in their actual discovery.
“Reuchlin came under fierce attack in 1510 from a converted Jew named Johann Pfefferkorn of Cologne. Like many converts Pfefferkorn became a zealot and turned vehemently on his former faith. He wanted to destroy all Hebrew books in Germany. Reuchlin opposed this projected wanton destruction, and Pfefferkorn accused him of heresy. The subsequent controversy became a fierce battle of books and pamphlets resolved only when Pope Leo X imposed silence on both sides. In most treatments of the Reformation, the Reuchlin affair is made to seem part of the ferment that produced Luther. But although Luther took Reuchlin’s side in Wittenberg, he was a mere spectator, more opposed to Reuchlin’s enemies than a fan of Reuchlin’s ideas. Luther had little interest in the Kabbala, for as he contemplated the mystery of God, he asked not for esoteric knowledge to draw back the veil but rather for faith to accept the mystery and go on living without falling victim to the curse of vain curiosity.”
Source: Marius, Richard. Martin Luther, The Christian Between God and Death. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. pp. 168-170.
Just an afterthought: isn’t interesting that the Italian scholar, Pico della Mirandola, sought to bring Jews around to Christianity, a potentially anti-semitic stance. I wonder about the contemporary Italian “scholar” and her aims …