Still, this explanation could easily be confuted on the basis of the Kabbalistic belief that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning, at least a numerological meaning. So the Kabbalah too, though it may seem to be combining and permutating alphabetical elements, is really permutating and combining concepts. Apart, then, from their different theological backgrounds, ars Raymundi and ars combinandi are not substantialiter different from each other. They are so forte, “by chance,” or with regard to their outcomes, or the way they are used.
It is our conviction that Pico had understood that what distinguished Kabbalistic thought from that of Llull was that the reality that the Kabbalistic mystic must discover is not yet known and can reveal itself only through the spelling out of the letters in their whirlwind permutations. Consequently, though it may be only in a mystical sense (in which the combinations serve only as a motor of the imagination), the Kabbalah pretends to be a true ars inveniendi, in which what is to be found is a truth as yet unknown. The combinatory system of Llull, on the other hand, is (as we saw) a rhetorical tool, through which the already known may be demonstrated—what the ironclad system of the forest of the various trees has already fixed once and for all, and that no combination can ever subvert.16
That Pico had understood perfectly, with his aside, this point, is also confirmed by his Conclusiones cabalisticae:
Nullae sunt litterae in tota lege, quae in formis, coniunctionibus, separationibus, tortuositate, directione, defectu, superabundantia, minoritate, maioritate, coronatione, clausura, apertura, & ordine, decem numerationum secreta non manifestent. (There are no letters in the whole Law which in their forms, conjunctions, separations, crookedness, straightness, defect, excess, smallness, largeness, crowning, closure, openness and order, do not reveal the secrets of the ten numerations.) (Farmer 1998: 359)
Furthermore, if we bear in mind that these numerationes are the Sephirot, we can appreciate the revelatory power with which he endows his ars combinandi. What results this whirling dervish of an art leads him to, well beyond all philological common sense, but evincing without question a combinatorial energy that knows no limits, we may gather from the famous passage in the Heptaplus dedicated to the Bereishit.
Here for the first time we encounter what will turn out to be a distinguishing feature not only of Kabbalism but of the whole later hermetic tradition: given a discourse that already in and of itself dares to enunciate unfathomable mysteries, it is assumed to allude even further, to mysteries still higher and more occult. For Pico, in the Second Proem, the Mosaic account of the creation of the world alludes, in every one of its parts, and according to seven different levels of reading, to the creation of the world of the angels, of the celestial world and the sublunar world, as well as to man as microcosm: “Thus indeed this book of Moses, if any such, is a book marked with seven seals and full of all wisdom and all mysteries” (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 81). In the sixth chapter of the Third Exposition (“On the Angelic and Invisible World”), for instance, the creation of the fish, birds, and earthbound animals is seen as a revelation of the creation of the angelic cohorts. If there are unfathomable and unfathomed mysteries to discover, nothing must be taken as known. The combinations must be venturesome and, at least as far as intentions go, innocent and open-minded. Here is the famous passage, typically Kabbalistic in tone, in which Pico launches into the most uninhibited permutational and anagrammatical operations:
Applying the rules of the ancients to the first phrase of the work, which is read Beresit by the Hebrews and “In the beginning” by us, I wanted to see whether I too could bring to light something worth knowing. Beyond my hope and expectation I found what I myself did not believe as I found it, and what others will not believe easily: the whole plan of the creation of the world and of all things in it disclosed and explained in that one phrase.… Among the Hebrews, this phrase is written thus: בראשיח, berescith. From this, if we join the third letter to the first, comes the word אב, ab. If we add the second to the doubled first, we get בבד, bebar. If we read all except the first, we get ראשית, resith. If we connect the fourth to the first and last, we get שבת, sciabat. If we take the first three in the order in which they come, we get כרא, bara. If, leaving out the first, we take the next three, we get ראש, rosc. If, leaving out the first and second, we take the two following, we get אש, es. If, leaving out the first three, we join the fourth to the last, we get שת, seth. Again, if we join the second to the first, we get רב, rab. If after the third we set the fifth and fourth, we get איש, hisc. If we join the first two to the last two, we get ברית, berith. If we add the last to the first, we get the twelfth and last word, which is תב, 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).