This is the sense in which, to use Pico’s own words, the ars combinandi and the ars Raymundi “diverso modo procedunt.” In this sense we may cancel the ambiguous expression forte (“by chance, perhaps, accidentally”), possibly inserted out of prudence, possibly because Pico’s intuition was still in its first vague glimmerings. Once the adverb has been eliminated, in that brief aside, we pass from the idea of man as subject to the laws of the cosmos to that of a man who constructs and reconstructs without fear of the vertigo of the possible, fully accepting its risk.
10.5. Llullism after Pico
With the advent of the Renaissance the unlimited combinatory system will tend to express a content that is equally unlimited, and hence ungraspable and inexpressible.
In the 1598 edition of Llull’s combinatorial writings, a work entitled De auditu kabbalistico appears under his name. Thorndike (1929, V: 325) already pointed out that the De auditu first appeared in Venice in 1518 as a little work by Ramon Llull, “opusculum Raimundicum,” and that it was consequently a work composed in the late fifteenth century. He hypothesized that the work might be attributed to Pietro Mainardi, an attribution later confirmed by Zambelli (1965). It is remarkable, however, that this opuscule of Mainardi’s should be dated “in the last years of the fifteenth century, in other words, immediately following the drafting of Pico’s theses and his Apologia” (Zambelli 1995[1965]: 62–63), and that this minor forgery was produced under his influence, however indirect (see Scholem 1979: 40–41). The brief treatise gives two etymological Arabic roots for the word “Kabbalah”: Abba stands for father while ala means God. It is difficult not to be reminded of similar exercises on Pico’s part.
This confirms that by this time Llull had been officially enrolled among the Kabbalists, as Tommaso Garzoni di Bagnacavallo will confirm in his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni (Venice, Somasco, 1585):
The science of Ramon, known to very few, could also be called, though with an inappropriate word, Kabbala. And from it is derived that common rumor among all the scholars, indeed among all persons, that the Kabbala teaches everything … and to this effect there is in print a little book attributed to him (although this is the way that lies are composed beyond the Alps) entitled De Auditu Cabalistico, which is nothing more when you get down to it than a very brief summary of the Arte magna, which was definitely abbreviated by him in that other work, which he calls Arte breve.17
Among the later examples from “beyond the Alps,” we may cite Pierre Morestel, who published in France in 1621, with the title Artis kabbalisticae, sive sapientiae divinae academia, a modest anthology of the De auditu18 (with an official imprimatur no less, since the author proposed to demonstrate exclusively, as Llull himself did, Christian truths), with nothing Kabbalistic about it, apart from the title, the initial identification of Ars and Kabbalah, and the repetition of the etymology found in the De auditu.
Figure 10.7
An additional stimulus to Neo-Llullism came from ongoing research into coded writings or steganographies. Steganography developed as a ciphering device for political and military purposes, and the greatest steganographer of modern times, Trithemius (1462–1516) uses ciphering wheels that work in a similar way to Llull’s moving concentric circles. To what extent Trithemius was influenced by Llull is unimportant for our purposes, because the influence would in any case have been purely graphic. The wheels are not used by Trithemius to produce arguments, simply to encode and decode. The letters of the alphabet are inscribed on the circles and the rotation of the inner circles decided whether the A of the outer circle was to be encoded as B, C, or Z (the opposite was true for decoding; see Figure 10.7).
But, although Trithemius does not mention Llull, he is mentioned by later steganographers. Vigenère’s Traité des chiffres19 explicitly takes up Llullian ideas at various points and relates them to the factorial calculus of the Sefer Yetzirah.
There is a reason why steganographies act as propagators of a Llullism that goes beyond Llull. The steganographer is not interested in the content (and therefore in the truth) of the combinations he produces. The elementary system requires only that elements of the steganographic expression (combinations of letters or other symbols) may be freely correlated (in ever different ways, so that their encoding is unpredictable) to elements of the expression to be encoded. They are merely symbols that take the place of other symbols. The steganographer, then, is encouraged to attempt more complex combinations, of a purely formal nature, in which all that matters is a syntax of the expression that is ever more vertiginous, and every combination is an unconstrained variable.
Thus, we have Gustavus Selenus,20 in his 1624 Cryptometrices et Cryptographiae, going so far as to construct a wheel of twenty-five concentric circles combining twenty-five series of twenty-four doublets each. And, before you know it, he presents us with a series of tables that record circa 30,000 doublets. The possible combinations become astronomical (see Figure 10.8).
If we are going to have combinations, why stop at 1,680 propositions, as Llull did? Formally, we can say everything.
It is with Agrippa that the possibility is first glimpsed of borrowing from both the Kabbalah and from Llullism the simple technique of combining the letters, and of using that technique to construct an encyclopedia that was not an image of the finite medieval cosmos but of a cosmos that was open and expanding, or of different possible worlds.
His In artem brevis R. Llulli (which appears along with the other works of Llull in the Strasburg edition of 1598) appears at first sight to be a fairly faithful summary of the principles of the Ars, but we are immediately struck by the fact that, in the tables that are supposed to illustrate Llull’s fourth figure, the number of combinations becomes far greater, since repetitions are not avoided.
As Vasoli (1958: 161) remarks,
Agrippa uses this alphabet and these illustrations only as the basis for a series of far more complex operations obtained through the systematic combination and progressive expansion of Llull’s typical figures and, above all, through the practically infinite expansion of the elementa. In this way the subjects are multiplied, defining them within their species or tracing them back to their genera, placing them in relation with terms that are similar, different, contrary, anterior or posterior, or again, referring them to their causes, effects, actions, passions, relations, etc. All of which, naturally, makes feasible a practically infinite use of the Ars.
The Carreras y Artau brothers (1939: 220–221) observe that in this way Agrippa’s art is inferior to Llull’s because it is not based on a theology. But, at least from our point of view and from that of the future development of combinatory systems, this constitutes a strong point rather than a weakness. With Agrippa, Llullism is liberated from theology.