As Chaim Wirszubski remarks in his classic study [Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter. – GF], Pico set out to prove the Christian truth by means of Jewish kabbalah, but “as thesis after thesis yields up its secrets, a remarkable thing emerges: Pico’s [kabbalistic theses] evidently outgrew their original purpose.” The same can be said about Christian kabbalah as a whole. In the attempt to apply midrashic techniques such as gematria, temurah and notarikon, which had formerly been restricted to Jewish circles, within a broader symbolic framework based upon new concepts such as the ten sefirot and the many divine names, unheard-of new possibilities seemed to open up for scriptural exegesis and metaphysical speculation. Not only did the biblical text reveal hidden levels of meaning never suspected before, but the correspondences that could be established with pagan mythology and philosophy seemed simply stupefying. It began to look as if all domains of knowledge were linked together by a web of secret, hidden, invisible connections, and Pico seemed to have discovered the hermeneutical key that could make them visible.
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In other words: “ancient wisdom” equaled “hidden wisdom.” It may well be argued that the notions of secrecy and concealment are inherent in the very structure of the Renaissance narrative of ancient wisdom, for the simple reason that, in one way or another, its Christian adherents always needed to make the argument that beneath the surface crust of pagan religion there lay a hidden core of Christian truth.
Pico’s fascination with secrecy and concealment, however, went far beyond anything found in Ficino, and would become crucial for the subsequent development of the discourse on ancient wisdom. Pico seems to have enjoyed obscurity for its own sake, and reveled in the pleasure of mystifying his audience: for example, writing to a friend about his first essay in the philosophy of myths, he boasts that it is “filled with many mysteries from the secret philosophy of the ancients,” and written in such exotic language that it would be “intelligible only to a few.” In all his main writings, he kept emphasizing secrecy as a fundamental dimension of the ancient wisdom, while cultivating a deliberate practice of speaking in riddles so that his words might be “published and yet not published” (editos esse et non editos). Although it could easily be defended with reference to Pythagoreanism and other traditions of Greek antiquity, the concept of ancient wisdom as “hidden wisdom” was raised to a new level of prominence due to Pico’s introduction of kabbalah; and the resulting combination was made even more potent by the addition of yet another ingredient pioneered by Pico, that of the symbolism of numbers. The dialectics of concealment and revelation are central to Jewish kabbalah, and were obviously highlighted even more because of Pico’s emphasis on its status as the secret revelation to Moses […].
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The complex linguistic and scriptural hermeneutics of Jewish and Christian kabbalah have been discussed at great length elsewhere. For our purposes, it is important mainly to emphasize that in the wake of Pico and Reuchlin, not only did kabbalah become an integral part of the Renaissance discourse of ancient wisdom, but this innovation resulted in a very strong emphasis on “esotericism” in the specific sense of a concern with hidden or concealed secrets and the possibility of discovering or revealing them. As has been argued, such concerns were already implied by the very concept that Christian truths lay concealed under the surface of ancient pagan myths and philosophies, but could be uncovered by means of allegorical or symbolical exegesis. This potential now came to full development under the influence of a tradition, the Jewish kabbalah, which had always been esoteric to its very core. It lies entirely in the line of this development that – to give only one famous example – when Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published his great compendium of ancient wisdom in 1533, he called it De occulta philosophia: on hidden philosophy. His well-known dedicatory letter to Johannes Trithemius confirms that he saw his work as an attempt to revive the science of the Magi and other sages of antiquity, and its third and final book was dominated by kabbalah. One might say, then, that this summa perfectly encapsulates all the main developments I have been tracing so far: the ancient wisdom of the pagan sages (seen as including magic and the other so-called “occult sciences”), the kabbalah received by Moses, and the notion of a hidden philosophy grounded in Christian truth.
The increasing emphasis on secrecy and concealment within the ancient wisdom discourse of the Renaissance resulted largely from a confluence of traditional sources and authorities. The main factors mentioned so far have been the basic notion (implicit in the patristic perspective) of Christianity as the hidden core of ancient paganism; the understanding of the prisci theologi as prisci poetae hiding the truth under the guise of mythological fable; the frequent allusions in “Platonic Orientalist” authors to the need for secrecy, oral transmission from master to disciple, and initiations into mysteries reserved for the few; concepts of symbolism and allegory as alternatives to aristotelian logic and discursive language; the dialectics of concealment and revelation central to Jewish kabbalah; the very nature of the new exegetical techniques as tools for revealing hidden dimensions of the sacred texts; not to mention a personal taste for mystery-mongering in authors such as Pico. To all these factors must be added the very simple but basic one of caution: being perceived as an apologist of paganism, Judaism, or the magical arts could be dangerous. Because of its very nature, one will rarely find references to this factor in official printed sources, but it does turn up in private correspondence.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 63-7
“published and yet not published” – рифмуется съ hidden transcripts Джеймса Скотта и изслѣдованіемъ макіавеллизма и arcana imperii Питера Дональдсона.