For medieval Christian exegesis the hidden meanings are to be detected through a work of interpretation (to identify a surplus of content), but without altering the expression, that is to say, the material arrangement of the text, but, on the contrary, making a supreme effort to establish the exact reading (at least according to the questionable philological principles of the day). For some Kabbalistic currents, however, reading anatomizes, so to speak, the very substance of the expression, by means of three fundamental techniques: Notarikon, Gematria, and Temurah.
Notarikon is the acrostic technique, Gematria is made possible by the fact that in Hebrew numbers are represented by letters of the alphabet, so that each word can be associated with a numerical value derived from the sum of the numbers represented by the individual letters—the idea is to find analogies among words with a different meaning that nevertheless have the same numerical value. But the possible similarities between Llull’s procedures and those of the Kabbalists concern Temurah, the art of the permutation of letters, and therefore an anagrammatical technique.
In a language in which the vowels can be interpolated, the anagram has greater permutational possibilities than in other tongues. Moses Cordovero, for instance, wonders why in Deuteronomy we find the prohibition against wearing garments woven out of a mixture of linen and wool. His conclusion is that in the original version the same letters were combined to form another expression which warned Adam not to substitute his original garment of light with a garment of snakeskin, which represents the power of the demon.
In Abulafia we encounter pages in which the Tetragrammaton YHWH, thanks to the vocalization of its four letters and their arrangement in every conceivable order, produces four tables each consisting of fifty combinations. Eleazar of Worms vocalizes every letter of the Tetragrammaton with two vowels, using six vowels, and the number of combinations increases (cf. Idel 1988b: 22–23).
The Kabbalist can take advantage of the infinite resources of the Temurah because it is not only a reading technique, but the very process by which God created the world (as was already stated in the passage from the Sefer Yetzirah quoted above).
The Kabbalah suggests, then, that there may be a finite alphabet that produces a dizzying number of combinations, and the one who took the art of combination to its utmost limit is precisely Abulafia (thirteenth century) with his Kabbalah of names.
As we saw in Chapter 7, the Kabbalah of names, or ecstatic Kabbalah, is practiced by reciting the divine names hidden in the text of the Torah, playing upon the various combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, altering, separating, and recombining the surface of the text, down to the individual letters of the alphabet.
For the ecstatic Kabala, language is a universe unto itself, and the structure of language reflects the structure of reality. Therefore, conversely to what happens in the Western philosophical tradition and in Arab and Jewish philosophy, in the Kabbalah language does not represent the world in the sense that a significant expression represents an extralinguistic reality. If God created the world through the emission of sounds and letters of the alphabet, these semiotic elements are not representations of something preexistent, but the forms on which the elements that compose the world are modeled.
A linguistic form that produces the world, and a series of symbols that can be infinitely combined, without the interference of any limiting rule: these are the two points on which the Kabbalistic tradition substantially differs from Llull’s Ars. As Platzeck (1964: 1:328) remarks: “Llull’s combinatory system, as a pure combination of concepts, is wholly inspired by the rigid spirit of Western logic, while the kabbalistic combinatory system is a philological game.”
10.3. Llull’s Trees and the Great Chain of Being
If Llull’s ideas did not come from the Hebrew Kabbalah, where did he get them from?
An admiring reader of the Catalan mystic, Leibniz (in his 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria) asked himself why Llull had stopped at such a limited number of elements. Given that the virtues are traditionally seven (four cardinal virtues and three theological), why did Llull, who increases them to nine, not go further? If, among the Absolute Principles, Truth and Wisdom are included, why not Beauty and Number?
In point of fact, in various of his works, Llull had proposed at one time ten, at another twelve, and at yet another twenty principles, finally settling on nine. Scholars have inferred—given that his Absolute Principles are nine, plus a tenth (labeled with an A) that is left out of the combinatory pool, because it represents divine Unity and Perfection—that he was influenced by the ten Sephirot of the Kabbalah (cf. Millás Vallicrosa 1958). But we have already seen that this analogy will not get us far. Platzeck (1953: 583) observes that a comparable list of Dignities could be found in the Koran, while, in his Compendium artis demonstrativae (“De fine hujus libri”), Llull claims to have borrowed the terms of the Ars from the Arabs.
Still, we are not obliged to recognize at all costs extra-Christian influences, because the list of divine Dignities could have been handed down to him from a long and venerable Classical, Patristic, and Scholastic tradition. From the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to the thought of mature Scholasticism, we find an idea, Aristotelian in origin, which runs through the entire reflective tradition of the Christian world, the idea of the transcendental properties of being: there are certain characteristics common to all being and found supereminently in the divine being, such as the One, the Good, the True (some include the Beautiful), and all of these properties are mutually converted into one another, in the sense that everything that is true is good and vice versa, and so on and so forth.
Furthermore, all the experts concur in identifying in Llull two basic sources of inspiration.
(i). One has its origin in Augustine Platonism, for which there exists a world of divine ideas which we know by internal enlightenment and innate disposition. In chapter 7 of his De Trinitate, Augustine affirms that God is called great, good, wise, blessed, and true, and His very greatness is His wisdom, while His goodness, which is greatness and wisdom, is truth, and to be blessed and wise means nothing more than to be true and good, and so on. These are pretty much Llull’s Dignities, which, as was the case in Augustine, cannot but be known a priori, since they are imprinted by God himself on our souls. If Llull had not been convinced of this innatism he would not have thought it possible to dialogue with the infidels on the basis of the fundamental notions common to all mankind.
Platzeck (1953, 1954) has reconstructed a series of sources that Llull could have drawn upon in formulating his own list of divine Dignities, from Boethius to Richard of Saint Victor, from John of Salisbury to Arabic logicians like Algazel (on whom Llull wrote a commentary), not to mention Euclid, filtered through Boethius, who speaks of a number of principles that ought to be well known in and of themselves (dignitas would in that case be a translation of axioma): “The fact that the three religious communities present in the Mediterranean basin—Christian, Arab, and Hebrew—averred that these dignities or perfections were absolute in God authorized Llull to posit them, in imitation of Euclid’s, as prior axioms or dignitates or conceptiones animi communes” (Platzeck 1953: 609).