From the Tree to the Labyrinth (75 page)

,
thob
, the
thau
being changed into the letter
thet
, which is very common in Hebrew.

Let us see first what these words mean in Latin, then what mysteries of all nature they reveal to those not ignorant of philosophy.
Ab
means “the father”;
bebar
“in the son” and “through the son” (for the prefix
beth
means both); resit, “the beginning”;
sabath
, “the rest and end”;
bara
, “created”;
rosc
, “head”;
es
, “fire”;
seth
, “foundation”;
rab
, “of the great”;
hisc
, “of the man”;
berit
, “with a pact”;
thob
, “with good.” If we fit the whole passage together following this order, it will read like this: “The father, in the Son and through the Son, the beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation of the great man with a good pact.” This whole passage results from taking apart and putting together that first word. (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 171–172)

Pico’s
ars combinandi
has nothing in common with the
ars Raymundi.
Ramon Llull used his art to demonstrate credible things; Pico uses his to discover things incredible and unheard-of. Nevertheless, the various misapprehensions that will later arise probably derive from the fact that it is precisely Pico’s example that will free Llullism from its original fetters.

It is certainly not a question of seeing in Pico’s uncoupling of the Kabbalistic
Ars combinandi
from the
Ars Raymundi,
and in the dizzying permutational exercises that Pico encourages, the detonator that liberated in the coming centuries Llull’s
Ars
from its early limitations, taking it (as we will see), beyond theology and beyond rhetoric, to nourish the formal speculations of modern logic and the random brainstorming that characterizes so much of contemporary heuristics.

What is certain is that with Pico is affirmed, in harmony with his defense of the dignity and rights of man, the invitation to dare, to
invenire
or discover, even if it was more in keeping with the tendentious suggestions of Flavius Mithridates than with those of factorial calculus. What was needed at this point was for someone to suggest that, if we are going to continue to talk about being, the being chosen must be a being as yet unmade, rather than a being that already exists. And it was Pico who (perhaps without intending to) steered modern thought in this direction. Which is, when you get down to it, another way of saying that “man, for Pico, is divine insofar as he creates; because he creates himself and his world; not because he is born God, but because he makes himself God. Throughout the entire universe,
operatio sequitur esse.
… For Pico, in man, and in man alone,
esse sequitur operari
” (Garin 1937: 95).

This is the sense in which, to use Pico’s own words, the
ars combinandi
and the
ars Raymundi
“diverso modo procedunt.” In this sense we may cancel the ambiguous expression
forte
(“by chance, perhaps, accidentally”), possibly inserted out of prudence, possibly because Pico’s intuition was still in its first vague glimmerings. Once the adverb has been eliminated, in that brief aside, we pass from the idea of man as subject to the laws of the cosmos to that of a man who constructs and reconstructs without fear of the vertigo of the possible, fully accepting its risk.

With the advent of the Renaissance the unlimited combinatory system will tend to express a content that is equally unlimited, and hence ungraspable and inexpressible.

In the 1598 edition of Llull’s combinatorial writings, a work entitled
De auditu kabbalistico
appears under his name. Thorndike (1929, V: 325) already pointed out that the
De auditu
first appeared in Venice in 1518 as a little work by Ramon Llull, “opusculum Raimundicum,” and that it was consequently a work composed in the late fifteenth century. He hypothesized that the work might be attributed to Pietro Mainardi, an attribution later confirmed by Zambelli (1965). It is remarkable, however, that this opuscule of Mainardi’s should be dated “in the last years of the fifteenth century, in other words, immediately following the drafting of Pico’s theses and his
Apologia
” (Zambelli 1995[1965]: 62–63), and that this minor forgery was produced under his influence, however indirect (see Scholem 1979: 40–41). The brief treatise gives two etymological Arabic roots for the word “Kabbalah”:
Abba
stands for father while
ala
means God. It is difficult not to be reminded of similar exercises on Pico’s part.

This confirms that by this time Llull had been officially enrolled among the Kabbalists, as Tommaso Garzoni di Bagnacavallo will confirm in his
Piazza universale di tutte le professioni
(Venice, Somasco, 1585):

The science of Ramon, known to very few, could also be called, though with an inappropriate word, Kabbala. And from it is derived that common rumor among all the scholars, indeed among all persons, that the Kabbala teaches everything … and to this effect there is in print a little book attributed to him (although this is the way that lies are composed beyond the Alps) entitled
De Auditu Cabalistico,
which is nothing more when you get down to it than a very brief summary of the
Arte magna,
which was definitely abbreviated by him in that other work, which he calls
Arte breve.
¹⁷

Among the later examples from “beyond the Alps,” we may cite Pierre Morestel, who published in France in 1621, with the title
Artis kabbalisticae, sive sapientiae divinae academia,
a modest anthology of the
De auditu
¹⁸
(with an official imprimatur no less, since the author proposed to demonstrate exclusively, as Llull himself did, Christian truths), with nothing Kabbalistic about it, apart from the title, the initial identification of
Ars
and Kabbalah, and the repetition of the etymology found in the
De auditu.

Figure 10.7

An additional stimulus to Neo-Llullism came from ongoing research into coded writings or steganographies. Steganography developed as a ciphering device for political and military purposes, and the greatest steganographer of modern times, Trithemius (1462–1516) uses ciphering wheels that work in a similar way to Llull’s moving concentric circles. To what extent Trithemius was influenced by Llull is unimportant for our purposes, because the influence would in any case have been purely graphic. The wheels are not used by Trithemius to produce arguments, simply to encode and decode. The letters of the alphabet are inscribed on the circles and the rotation of the inner circles decided whether the A of the outer circle was to be encoded as B, C, or Z (the opposite was true for decoding; see
Figure 10.7
).

But, although Trithemius does not mention Llull, he is mentioned by later steganographers. Vigenère’s
Traité des chiffres
¹⁹
explicitly takes up Llullian ideas at various points and relates them to the factorial calculus of the
Sefer Yetzirah.

There is a reason why steganographies act as propagators of a Llullism that goes beyond Llull. The steganographer is not interested in the content (and therefore in the truth) of the combinations he produces. The elementary system requires only that elements of the steganographic expression (combinations of letters or other symbols) may be freely correlated (in ever different ways, so that their encoding is unpredictable) to elements of the expression to be encoded. They are merely symbols that take the place of other symbols. The steganographer, then, is encouraged to attempt more complex combinations, of a purely formal nature, in which all that matters is a syntax of the expression that is ever more vertiginous, and every combination is an unconstrained variable.

Thus, we have Gustavus Selenus,
²⁰
in his 1624
Cryptometrices et Cryptographiae,
going so far as to construct a wheel of twenty-five concentric circles combining twenty-five series of twenty-four doublets each. And, before you know it, he presents us with a series of tables that record circa 30,000 doublets. The possible combinations become astronomical (see
Figure 10.8
).

If we are going to have combinations, why stop at 1,680 propositions, as Llull did? Formally, we can say everything.

It is with Agrippa that the possibility is first glimpsed of borrowing from both the Kabbalah and from Llullism the simple technique of combining the letters, and of using that technique to construct an encyclopedia that was not an image of the finite medieval cosmos but of a cosmos that was open and expanding, or of different possible worlds.

His
In artem brevis R. Llulli
(which appears along with the other works of Llull in the Strasburg edition of 1598) appears at first sight to be a fairly faithful summary of the principles of the
Ars,
but we are immediately struck by the fact that, in the tables that are supposed to illustrate Llull’s fourth figure, the number of combinations becomes far greater, since repetitions are not avoided.

As Vasoli (1958: 161) remarks,

Agrippa uses this alphabet and these illustrations only as the basis for a series of far more complex operations obtained through the systematic combination and progressive expansion of Llull’s typical figures and, above all, through the practically infinite expansion of the
elementa.
In this way the subjects are multiplied, defining them within their species or tracing them back to their genera, placing them in relation with terms that are similar, different, contrary, anterior or posterior, or again, referring them to their causes, effects, actions, passions, relations, etc. All of which, naturally, makes feasible a practically infinite use of the
Ars.

The Carreras y Artau brothers (1939: 220–221) observe that in this way Agrippa’s art is inferior to Llull’s because it is not based on a theology. But, at least from our point of view and from that of the future development of combinatory systems, this constitutes a strong point rather than a weakness. With Agrippa, Llullism is liberated from theology.

Figure 10.8

Rather, if we must speak of a limit, it is clear that, for Agrippa too, the point is not to lay the foundations for a logic of discovery, but instead for a wide-ranging rhetoric, at most to complicate the list of disciplines configured by his encyclopedia, but always in such a way as to provide—as is the case with a mnemonic technique—notions that can be manipulated by the proficient orator.

Llull was timid with respect to the form of the content. Agrippa broadens the possibilities of the form of the expression in an attempt to articulate vaster structures of content, but he does not go all the way. If he had applied the combinatory system to the description of the inexhaustible network of cosmic relations outlined in the
De occulta philosophia
he would have taken a decisive step forward. He did not.

Bruno, on the other hand, will try to make his version of Llull’s
Ars
tell everything and more. Given an infinite universe whose circumference (as Nicholas of Cusa already asserted) was nowhere and its center everywhere, from whatever point the observer contemplates it in its infinity and substantial unity, the variety of forms to be discovered and spoken of is no longer limited. The ruling idea of the infinity of worlds is compounded with the idea that each entity in the world can serve at the same time as a Platonic shadow of other ideal aspects of the universe, as sign, reference, image, emblem, hieroglyphic, seal. By way of contrast too, naturally, because the image of something can also lead us back to unity through its opposite.

The images of his combinatory system, which Bruno finds in the repertory of the hermetic tradition, or even constructs for himself from his fevered phantasy, are not merely intended, as was the case with previous mnemonic techniques, for remembering, but also for envisaging and discovering the essence of things and their relationships.