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Liber XX · Kabbalah

Liber XX · Kabbalah · Chapter II: Christian & Hermetic Qabalah

Francesco Giorgi's De harmonia mundi: Kabbalah and Cosmic Harmony

Francesco Giorgi's De harmonia mundi (1525): how a Venetian friar joined Kabbalah, Plato and Pythagorean number into a theory of cosmic and musical harmony.

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De harmonia mundi totius ("On the Harmony of the Whole World"), printed in Venice in 1525, is the major work of the Franciscan friar Francesco Giorgi (also spelled Zorzi, 1466–1540). In a vast Latin book arranged like a piece of music, Giorgi united the Christian Kabbalah of Pico and Reuchlin with the number theory of Pythagoras, the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus, the Hermetic writings and scholastic theology, arguing that God made the universe according to musical proportions and that Christ restores the harmony broken by sin. The book was widely read in the sixteenth century, later censored, and became a key source for the occult philosophy of Elizabethan England.

Francesco Giorgi: A Venetian Franciscan and Hebraist§

Giorgi was born in Venice in 1466 into the Zorzi family, one of the patrician houses of the Republic, and entered the Franciscan Observants, the stricter branch of the order. He spent much of his life at the convent of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, rose to positions of responsibility in his order, and was known as a preacher, theologian and reformer. Venice, with its printing houses, its Jewish community and its trade with the eastern Mediterranean, was an ideal place for a Christian scholar to acquire Hebrew books and teachers, and Giorgi built a considerable Hebrew learning.

He belonged to the second generation of Christian Cabalists. He knew the theses of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, described in Pico della Mirandola: The 900 Theses, and Johannes Reuchlin's De arte cabalistica, as well as Marsilio Ficino's translations of Plato, Plotinus and the Hermetic writings. Unlike Reuchlin, he was a friar rather than a lawyer, and his work is more openly a Christian theology of creation in which Kabbalah serves as one witness among many to the harmony of God's work.

The Structure of De harmonia mundi: Three Canticles and Eight Tones§

De harmonia mundi was printed in Venice in 1525 by Bernardino de Vitali. Its form expresses its message. The work is divided into three cantica, or songs, and each canticle is divided into eight toni, or tones, which are in turn divided into chapters. The eightfold division imitates the octave, the musical interval in which a scale returns to its starting note, and the whole book is presented as a hymn in which the universe sings the praise of its Creator.

Broadly, the first canticle treats God and the creation of the world according to number, weight and measure, and describes the harmony that binds the heavens, the elements and the human being. The second deals with Christ, the incarnate Word, as the restorer of a harmony disturbed by the Fall. The third concerns the soul's return to God and its final glorification. The argument moves between scripture, Plato, Pythagorean and Neoplatonic writers, Hermes Trismegistus, the Church Fathers, scholastic theologians and Jewish sources, with an encyclopaedic range that made the book a compendium of Renaissance learning.

Number, Music and the Platonic Cosmos§

The foundation of Giorgi's cosmology is Plato's Timaeus, in which the divine craftsman forms the world soul according to the ratios of the musical scale. Pythagorean tradition held that the simplest ratios of whole numbers produce the consonances: 2:1 the octave, 3:2 the fifth, 4:3 the fourth. Giorgi extended this into a total vision. The universe is a single instrument, a monochord stretched from the highest heaven to the earth, and every level of being, from angels to minerals, is tuned to every other. The background to these ideas is described in Pythagoras and Pythagorean Number Mysticism.

For Giorgi, harmony was not a metaphor. Because the same proportions run through all things, the human being, the microcosm, contains in small the whole order of the macrocosm. The body's proportions, the soul's faculties and the moral virtues correspond to musical intervals, and a well-ordered life is a life in tune with the cosmos. This idea of correspondence, common to much Renaissance thought, links Giorgi to the wider tradition of sacred geometry and to the magical cosmos described in Occult Philosophy: Ficino, Pico, Agrippa and the Magical Cosmos.

Christian Kabbalah in De harmonia mundi§

Kabbalah gave Giorgi a further layer of correspondences. He identified the ten sefirot, the emanated attributes of God in Jewish Kabbalah (see The Ten Sefirot and the Tree of Life), with the Christian understanding of divine attributes and linked them with the nine orders of angels described by Pseudo-Dionysius and with the heavenly spheres. In this scheme, the angelic hierarchies, the sefirot and the planets form parallel ladders through which divine influence descends and the soul ascends. Frances Yates regarded this coordination of Kabbalistic, Dionysian and astral hierarchies as the core of Giorgi's system; for the angelic background see Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Mysticism.

Like Pico and Reuchlin, Giorgi read Hebrew names and letters as testimony to the Trinity and the Incarnation, and he treated the secret tradition of the Jews as a part of the ancient wisdom given by God and preserved among the nations. He was more cautious than Pico about magic and did not present his book as a manual of operations. His emphasis lay on contemplation and on the spiritual reform of the Christian, whose soul could be brought into harmony with the cosmos and with God through Christ.

Giorgi returned to scriptural Kabbalah in a second large work, In Scripturam Sacram Problemata (1536), a series of questions on difficult passages of the Bible, many answered with Kabbalistic interpretations.

Harmony in Stone: San Francesco della Vigna§

Giorgi's ideas left a mark on Venetian architecture. In 1534 the Doge Andrea Gritti laid the foundation stone of the new church of San Francesco della Vigna, designed by Jacopo Sansovino, and in 1535 Giorgi was asked for his opinion on the design. His memorandum, preserved and discussed by the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower, proposed that the church's dimensions be governed by the musical ratios of Plato's Timaeus: a nave nine paces wide and twenty-seven long, in the triple proportion, with chapels and choir in related consonant ratios. The memorandum was submitted for comment to the painter Titian, the architect Sebastiano Serlio and the humanist Fortunio Spira. The church was built, and Andrea Palladio later added its façade.

Wittkower used Giorgi's memorandum as a central document for the Renaissance belief that buildings should reproduce the harmonic proportions of the universe. It shows that Giorgi's cosmic harmony was meant to be applied: the same numbers that tuned the heavens were to order the spaces where the liturgy was sung.

Censorship, Henry VIII and Influence in England§

Giorgi's reputation reached England during his lifetime. Around 1529–1530, when Henry VIII sought the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the king's agents in Venice consulted Giorgi, who supplied arguments from scripture and Hebrew learning in support of Henry's case. His books were later read with interest in England, where John Dee owned De harmonia mundi.

In the Catholic world, the climate changed after the Council of Trent. Giorgi's writings came under the scrutiny of the Index of Prohibited Books, and De harmonia mundi was permitted only with expurgations, so that many surviving copies have censored passages. A French translation by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, L'Harmonie du monde, appeared in Paris in 1578. In the seventeenth century the Minim friar Marin Mersenne attacked Giorgi together with Robert Fludd, whose great monochord images continue Giorgi's vision of the world as a tuned instrument.

Frances Yates's The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) placed Giorgi at the centre of a Christian Cabalist tradition that, she argued, shaped Dee, Edmund Spenser and other Elizabethan writers. Specialists have since qualified some of her claims, but Giorgi remains one of the clearest examples of how Kabbalah, Pythagorean harmony and Platonic cosmology were fused into a Christian philosophy of the universe; the wider movement is surveyed in Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Francesco Giorgi?§

Francesco Giorgi, or Zorzi (1466–1540), was a Venetian Franciscan friar, theologian and Christian Cabalist. He is known for De harmonia mundi (1525), his Problemata on scripture (1536) and his memorandum on the proportions of the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice.

What is De harmonia mundi about?§

It argues that God created the universe according to musical and numerical harmony and that Christ restores this harmony in fallen humanity. It combines Plato's Timaeus, Pythagorean number theory, Hermetic writings and Christian Kabbalah into one system of correspondences.

Why is De harmonia mundi divided into canticles and tones?§

The structure imitates music. Each of its three canticles has eight tones, echoing the octave, so that the book itself becomes an image of the harmonious universe it describes.

Was De harmonia mundi banned?§

It was not banned outright, but after the Council of Trent it was subject to the Index of Prohibited Books, which required certain passages to be expurgated. Many surviving copies show the censored text.

Sources and further reading§