Are Hermes and the Kabbalah Irrelevent?

Karen Silvia De Leon Jones University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

The figure of the Renaissance magus looms large at Yeshiva College. Indeed, the very slogan of the school channels the spirit of Egyptian pneumatic magic. Beckoning us to "bring wisdom to life," the new motto conjures an image of a magician, his figure ensconced in dark robes, Picatrix in hand, standing over the moribund YU student and imparting him with the ancient Gnostic wisdom of the Hermetica. Just as the ancient Egyptians brought the celestial powers into their idols, we take the lifeless Modern Orthodox youth and fill them with celestial knowledge!

Scorn is heaped on the pedant by Giordano Bruno. The pedant represents the opposite of the magus. With his emphasis on philology or his willingness to analyze primary texts (like Copernicus), the pedants of the world challenged Bruno, whom Yates calls "the lunatic the lover and the poet." Indeed, the Oxford doctors who so opposed Bruno find piercing arrows of invective hurled at them. While they ponder the true epicycles, Bruno hears the song of the Universe.

Of course, the Isaac Casaubon controversy, in which Casaubon used early philological methods to disprove the authenticity of the Hermetica as received Egyptian wisdom, brought this situation to a head. At least Bruno had the authoritative Hermetica on his side. When Casaubon proved that the Hermetica was a Gnostic text, and not a text that antedated Moses (who cribbed, in the old account, liberally from Hermes Trismegistus!), the later Magi, like Robert Fludd, had to persist in their art in the face of vastly superior critical scholarship.

In the post-Modern Orthodox world, when expositors like Rabbi Shagar can quote Heidegger and Rav Nachman in the same sentence, when Madonna reigns as the queen of a Kabalistic empire, and when philological approaches to Talmud have been exposed as the most soulless readings of all, perhaps we need to return to the inspired lunatic frenzy of a Giordano Bruno. In an age of religious sectarianism, when the gap between Lakewood and Yeshiva is farther than the gaps between Judaism and Christianity used to be in some places, it might pay to look at this great harmonizer.

While our sages tell us that "scribal jealousies increase wisdom," Bruno vehemently dissents from this position. Scribal jealousies for him, as we have seen, constitute an Oxford pedantry that could only hinder the coming celestial reform. Yet, based on the amazing work of Dame Frances Yates, Karen Silvia de Leon Jones chose to write a book based entirely on the scribal jealousies and the Oxford pedantry that the Renaissance magus so decried.

Yates contends numerous times in her book that, though Bruno dabbles in Kabbalah, following in the illustrious footsteps of Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, his is a strictly Hermetic program. Leon Jones disagrees vehemently. She claims that Bruno is a Kabbalist, and that his Kabbalistic dialogues reflect this.

This argument could now go one of two ways. In the first scenario, Leon Jones could show us not only how Bruno was a Kabbalist, but also how his general program of religious harmonizing worked. Thus, she could tell us how Bruno's "hermetic reform" would've united Catholic countries with Protestant ones. She could explain the place of the Jews, and Jewish wisdom, in this great harmonization. She could explain Bruno's complex messianic politics, and his hopes that various Kings or Queens might usher in an age of religious syncretism in Christianity based on the pre-Mosaic wisdom of Hermes. Leon Jones could even make all of this relevant by pointing to Bruno's Baroque context, with its inquisitions and its Reformation, and by talking about the religious fragmentation of the time and contrasting it with our own, increasingly splintered religious context.

Leon Jones could have done all of these things. Instead, she chose to point to very limited examples that lend no resonance and no context to the amazing figure of Bruno. The first proof Leon Jones gives of the fact that Bruno is a Kabbalist is the recurring motif of the ass in Bruno's celestial reform. This motif, she brilliantly shows, is a Jewish one. Balaam rode an ass and the ass is an important Jewish symbol. Thusly, she concludes that Kabbalah was the consistent hermeneutic thread in all of Bruno's works, and that he did not just steal his Kabalah from Pico and Agrippa.

I am not dismissing Leon Jones as bad scholarship. Indeed, I agree with her conclusions on the nature of Bruno's Kabbalah. The deficiencies in Yate's knowledge of Kabbalah only buttress the idea that there is much more Kabbalah in Bruno, for those who know how to look. Moreover, Yates relied heavily on the outdated ideas of Scholem, who thought of all of Kabbalah as Gnostic, something contemporary researchers like Idel have discredited. As much as I agree with Leon Jones on a purely scholarly level, any book or article can be made relevant, and this book fails the test of relevance. Indeed, beyond the scholarly banter, the book contains about one page of background on Bruno (where we are told that he has an Internet fan club and that there are people in France who want to put a statue of him up in Paris, in imitation of the monument to Bruno in Rome's Campo del Fiore) and very little about the general context of Christian hebraicism and religious harmonization that Bruno wishes to implement. This is noting, if not a betrayal of Bruno to the vile pedantry of the 21st Century academy. Instead of just lining up sefirot with astrological signs as she does, Leon Jones would've done well to work on parallel tracks with Yates, and to write a whole history of the Hermetic/Kabbalistic synthesis, as Yates writes her history of the Hermetic tradition. With such a picture, we might have at least an inkling of the path to our own celestial reform and our own new synthesis.