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Liber XX · Kabbalah

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

Johannes Reuchlin and De verbo mirifico: The Wonder-Working Word

Johannes Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico (1494): the Pentagrammaton YHSVH, the birth of German Christian Kabbalah and Reuchlin's defence of Jewish books.

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De verbo mirifico ("On the Wonder-Working Word"), published at Basel in 1494, was the first book by the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) and the first systematic work of Christian Kabbalah north of the Alps. In it Reuchlin argued that the unpronounceable four-letter name of God, YHVH, became speakable and saving when the Hebrew letter shin was placed in its centre, forming YHSVH, which he read as the name of Jesus. Reuchlin went on to write the first Christian Hebrew grammar and to defend Jewish books against destruction in one of the great controversies before the Reformation.

Reuchlin's Life: A Humanist Lawyer Learns Hebrew§

Johannes Reuchlin was born in Pforzheim, in the margraviate of Baden, on 29 January 1455. He studied at Freiburg, Paris and Basel, where he learned Greek, and took his law degrees at Orléans and Poitiers. From 1482 he served Count (later Duke) Eberhard of Württemberg as a legal adviser and diplomat, and his missions took him several times to Italy. In Florence in 1482 and again in 1490 he met the circle of Marsilio Ficino; on the second visit he met Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose Kabbalistic theses had been condemned three years earlier (see Pico della Mirandola: The 900 Theses). Humanists liked to render his name in Greek as Capnion, "little smoke", from the German Rauch.

Reuchlin learned Hebrew seriously in his late thirties, first from Jacob ben Jehiel Loans, the Jewish physician of Emperor Frederick III, whom he met at the imperial court at Linz in 1492, and later in Rome from the Jewish scholar Obadiah Sforno. In 1506 he published the Rudimenta hebraica, a grammar and dictionary that made the study of Hebrew possible for Christian scholars without a Jewish teacher. Hebrew, for Reuchlin, was the oldest and holiest language, the one in which God had spoken and through which the hidden structure of creation could be read.

De verbo mirifico: The Dialogue and Its Speakers§

De verbo mirifico was printed by Johann Amerbach in Basel in 1494. It is a dialogue in three books, set in Pforzheim, among three speakers: Sidonius, a philosopher of the Epicurean school who has wandered through all the pagan systems without finding certainty; Baruchias, a learned Jew; and Capnion, Reuchlin's own persona, a Christian. Each represents a stage in the history of wisdom, and the dialogue moves from the uncertainty of philosophy toward the certainty of revealed names.

The first book asks whether any knowledge can be secure and concludes that true wisdom must come from revelation, preserved by the oldest nations in sacred words. The second book surveys the divine names: the Greek and Latin names of the gods, and above all the Hebrew names of God, which Reuchlin treats as more than labels. Like the ancient Pythagoreans and the Neoplatonists, he believed that certain names, rightly understood, share in the power of what they name. Baruchias explains the Jewish teaching on the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name YHVH that was not pronounced, and on other biblical names of God such as Ehyeh and Adonai, the names discussed in the Seven Names of God. Jewish tradition also knew longer, secret names, such as the name of seventy-two letters described in the 72 Names of God, and the whole subject of names was for Reuchlin the gateway to Kabbalah.

The third book, in Capnion's voice, gives the Christian answer. Throughout, Reuchlin aims at concord rather than refutation: the pagan, the Jew and the Christian agree that the divine name is the bond between God and the world, and differ only on which name now carries its full power.

From Tetragrammaton to Pentagrammaton: The Name YHSVH§

The heart of the book is a reading of sacred history as a sequence of names. In the age of nature, Reuchlin argues, God was known to the patriarchs by the three-letter name Shaddai; in the age of the law, to Moses, by the four letters YHVH, which could be written but not spoken; and in the age of grace by a five-letter name that unites the divine and the human. That name is formed by placing the letter shin (ש) in the middle of the Tetragrammaton: YHSVH, which Reuchlin read as Yehoshua or Yeshua, the Hebrew name of Jesus. Later writers called it the Pentagrammaton.

Several reasons supported the choice of shin. It is the letter of the word for fire and was associated with the Holy Spirit; its three strokes suggested the Trinity; and inserted into the silent name, it made the name pronounceable, as the Word made flesh made the hidden God visible. The ineffable name of the Old Testament thus became, in Reuchlin's argument, the spoken and wonder-working name at which, in the words of Philippians 2:10 (KJV), "every knee should bow". The miracles worked in the name of Jesus in the Gospels and Acts were, for him, the proof of that power.

The argument is a Christian reworking of Jewish ideas about the divine name and of the letter speculation described in Gematria. Reuchlin's Jewish learning in 1494 was still limited; he relied on Pico, on Latin sources and on his first Hebrew lessons, and the book contains more Neoplatonic philosophy than Kabbalah proper. He took up the subject again, with far greater command of Kabbalistic literature, in De arte cabalistica of 1517.

The Battle over Jewish Books: Pfefferkorn and the Augenspiegel§

Reuchlin's name is linked as much with a legal battle as with Kabbalah. In 1509 Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert supported by the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained a mandate from Emperor Maximilian I to confiscate Jewish books. When the emperor asked several universities and scholars for opinions, Reuchlin, alone among them, advised against general confiscation in 1510. He argued that only books plainly insulting to Christianity should be removed, that the Talmud, Kabbalistic works and commentaries were valuable for scholarship and for Christians themselves, and that Jews were fellow citizens of the Empire whose property was protected by law. His opinion survives and has been translated into English as Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn All Jewish Books.

Pfefferkorn attacked him in a pamphlet, the Handspiegel (1511), and Reuchlin replied with the Augenspiegel ("Eye-Glass") the same year. The Cologne inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten opened proceedings against him for favouring the Jews. A church court at Speyer acquitted Reuchlin in 1514, but the case was appealed to Rome, where it dragged on for years. Humanists across Europe took his side; his opponents were mocked in the anonymous Letters of Obscure Men (1515–1517), satirical letters in barbarous Latin written chiefly by Crotus Rubeanus and Ulrich von Hutten. In 1520, as the Luther affair altered the climate, Pope Leo X finally condemned the Augenspiegel and ordered Reuchlin to pay the costs.

Reuchlin was not a defender of Judaism as a religion. He shared the conventional Christian view that Jews should be brought to Christianity, but he insisted that this should happen by argument and learning rather than by force or the burning of books. His stand made him a symbol of free scholarship for later generations.

Later Life and Legacy: From Christian Cabala to the Golden Dawn§

In his last years Reuchlin taught Greek and Hebrew at Ingolstadt and Tübingen. He was the great-uncle of the reformer Philip Melanchthon, but he remained in the Catholic Church and kept his distance from Luther. He died in Stuttgart on 30 June 1522.

De verbo mirifico was reprinted in the sixteenth century, often with De arte cabalistica, and its Pentagrammaton became a fixture of Christian occult philosophy. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa used it in Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and from there it passed into the magical literature of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn the name, usually transliterated Yeheshuah, was placed on the pentagram, with the shin at the uppermost point representing spirit above the four elements. That use is a modern occult adaptation; for Reuchlin the name was a doctrine about Christ, not a ritual formula. The wider history of the tradition he helped to found is traced in Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah.

Frequently asked questions§

What does De verbo mirifico mean?§

It means "On the Wonder-Working Word". The title refers to the divine name, which Reuchlin believed carried real power, and specifically to the name of Jesus written in Hebrew letters.

What is the Pentagrammaton?§

It is the five-letter name YHSVH, formed by inserting the Hebrew letter shin into the Tetragrammaton YHVH. Reuchlin read it as the Hebrew name of Jesus; later occultists, especially the Golden Dawn, adopted it as a magical name of spirit.

Did Reuchlin protect Jewish books?§

Yes. In 1510 he was the only expert consulted by Emperor Maximilian I to oppose the general confiscation and burning of Jewish books, a position that led to a decade-long trial and his condemnation in Rome in 1520.

Was Reuchlin a Protestant?§

No. Although his grand-nephew Philip Melanchthon became a leading reformer and Reuchlin's cause was linked by contemporaries with Luther's, Reuchlin remained a Catholic until his death in 1522.

Sources and further reading§