Was the Western Church “Kabbalistic” from Ancient Times?
In the discourse of comparative religion and historical studies, that is to say the standard academic view of people like Gersholm Scholem, a movement designated by the word “Kabbalah” itself doesn’t go back much further than the 12th century, that is to say the presumed date of the Bahir, and then only as a preocupation of Rabbinical Judaism. Christian Kabbalah is pictured as only a late and imitative phenomena starting in the 15th (Pico della Mirandola) or even 16th (Reuchelin) centuries. However this begs the question of what we mean by “kabbalah” since as Scholem himself pointed out it was just a repackaging of a perrenial stream of “mysticism” one which not only antedated the European middle ages, but included Christians as well as Jews. For Scholem the Christians in question are members of small Gnostic sects such as the Marcosians, a rather libidinous group which flourished around the second century in Gaul. The consensus seems to be that even the proto-tradtions which existed before being designated “kabbalah” were either an exclusively Jewish affair or at most one shared by highly deviant forms of Christianity. Rarely is it suggested that there could be anything “kabbalistic” about orthodox Christian theology during the patristic age.
Of course this would be so if we allow Kabbalah to be defined as, to take one of Scholem’s titles, “Jewish Mysticism” or more inclusively, but improbably, “Any Western spirituality in which mysticism shades imperceptably into magic.” No orthodox Christian theology, either Eastern or Western, could define itself in such terms. But if one were to define kabbalah as, say “Any hermenutic basing itself on a mystical interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures”…which strikes me as a more cogent starting point, then the possibility of a kabbalistic patrology seems much more plausable.
J.N.D Kelly on Jerome:World-Class Genius or World-Class Jerk?
If we are searching for a kabbalist among the church fathers then the obvious place to start looking is in the life and works of Jerome, provided, that is, we accept the last of the above definitions of Kabbalah. Jerome was the first church father to reintroduce the study of the Hebrew scriptures as the basis of Christian Biblical studies. This “hebraic turn” which largely effected the West via Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (which used the Jewish Tanach as the basis for its Old Testement) is not entirely non-controversial. Although the consesus view, at least in the West, is that Hebrew would naturally be the ur-source of the scriptures, there is also a feeling, among Eastern Christians and their sympathizers, that the Septuagint (LXX) is not only a more coherent text from the Christian point of view, but as a redaction from the Hellenistic 3rd century BC, may in fact represent a deeper strata of textual matter than any Tanach which Jerome could have had access to by the turn of the fourth/fifth centuries AD.
Apart from the matter of not having the cognitive or linguistic tools to broach this rather dangerously divisive issue, I think there is something to be said for leaving the whole matter moot, and relocating the difference between the LXX and the Tanach/Vulgate at the level of methodological preferences. Moreover long as one has some tolerance for anachronistic labeling (and lets face it, all thinking about the past would grind to a halt if one did not) I propose that there is nothing at all absurd about calling any alegorical reading of the Tanach or a Tanach based text for Christian hermenutic purposes “Christian Kabbalah” while alegorical readings based on the LXX may be catagorized as extra- or non-kabbalistic.
If one accepts the above premise, then the first Christian Kabbalist was not Pico della Mirandola, or any other Renaissance or medeval dabbler, but non other than St. Jerome himself! Well then, so what? Everyone knows that he was the man who gave the West its first “standard” Bible, but apart from that, who was this guy? As a matter of fact I happen to be readingJerome His Life Writings and Controversies
by J.N.D. Kelly. Kelly himself is a sound scholar and talented writer but his irritation with Jerome’s flawed personality shows through, turning the book into a kind of anti-hagiography. Jerome did have a nasty streak in him, one which tended to progress as he got older, and Kelley spares us none of the details. Secularist readers (I’m not apprised as to what Kelly’s own religious views are) will of course put this down to supposed Christian “resentment” in combination with the frustrations of celibacy. However a close attention to Kelly’s narrative shows that a more plausible explanation is the stress attendant on membership in the late Roman political-ecclesiastical class.
For all of that, and admitting that Kelly’s work in its time (the ’70s) was a needed correction to previous encomiums, I found that the biographer’s prejudices extended to more than taking the Jerome cult down a peg or two. He puts down without comment the remarkable fact that Jerome’s advanced diciples (at least Paula, a woman who was a kind of celebate partner to him) chanted the Psalms in Hebrew. To me this is a remarkable observation. We commonly think of translators as standing between the original and the people who are to be the recievers (there’s that word again!) of the translation-object. But here we have Jerome dishing out the “real stuff” to Paula and who knows who else!
Not only is the virgin Paula chanting in Hebrew, but Jerome sees fit to enlighten her, while explicating the accrostic psalms such as Ps. 118/9, on the letter-meanings of the Hebrew alphabet…for example that Beit is “house” and that Gimmel is “fullness” and so on. In any other context this would be recognized as the Literal Kabbalah, but Kelly passes it by with a sneer at Jerome’s “self-delusion.” Of course it seems to be self delusion because the whole thing seems pointless, except possibly as a mnemonic, as long as one is wedded to the opinion that there is nothing contained in the Bible but a narrative of historical events. Confusingly, this fundamentalist anti-mystical hermenutic is also called “literal” in the sense of a plain meaning, whereas literal, when used as an adjective in Literal Kabbalah, means a hidden layer of (letter) meaning underneath what modern linguists would call the morphological level, i.e., words and parts of words which bear meaning in ordinary discourse.
So what Jerome was teaching Paula was Kabbalah, just as you or I speak prose even if we dont call what we are doing “speaking prose.” Whether Paula quite understood what Jerome was trying to communicate is another question, for elsewhere Kelly indicates that Paula was more interested in the history contained in the Bible than any alegorical or hidden meanings. Kelly also doesn’t go particularly deep into what motivated Jerome to translate the Tanach into Latin in the first place. We presume that we know the answer already, so the question is not even worth raising. For example we presume to know that any Hebrew text would be original compared to any Greek text which would be derivative. As I have have already indicated there are doubts about this. At any rate it is safe to say that Jerome felt he was getting closer to the original sources with Hebrew. Another and related motivation would be making an end run around the Eastern church’s “patent” on scripture, and giving the Latin West a “more original” Old Testment than the LXX.
That much any historian could figure out, but Jerome, with his great thirst for deeper and deeper levels of meaning, certainly had additional motivations in approaching the Hebrew text. From his teaching of the acrostics to Paula it is evident that he was familiar with the idea of concealed meanings at the letter level, and perhaps even the matrx like ways in which letters could be recombined to yeild alternate readings on the discursive level, something which would have been impossible with a Greek text like the LXX.
Wordsmith scholars like J.N.D. Kelly, however good they may be at their own arts, are unlikely to pick up on the significance of this hidden dimension. They use narrative accounts of historical concretes and project them back to some psychological or material factor to explain causes and effects. Thus Jerome’s translation of the Tanach into Latin must, on a priori grounds since we presume the Literal Kabbalah to be nonesense, have been based on scholarly ambition, sectarianism, or subtle “resentment” rather than genuine curiosity. However I suggest that, however encrusted by worldly barnacles, the element of curiosity was salient.
Curiosity, Licit and Illicit
However, even admiting the hypothesis that there is a kabbalistic strain in mainstream Western Christianity going back at least to the time of St. Jerome, the question of whether Kabbalah can be embraced as part of the legitimate deposit of faith remains uncertain. We must recall that Pico della Mirandola’s theses were rejected by the see of Rome, and that Mirandola himself submitted to this judgement, later distancing himself from kabbalah and becoming a diciple of the Dominican monk Savanarola. Many things separate the fourth century of Jerome from the fifteenth century of Mirandola, the popularization of the word kabbalah to discribe the various arts under discussion being only one of them. For one thing Jews and Christians had had ten more centuries to become estranged and develop doctrine in diametrically different directions. So when Pico della Mirandola presented this more intensely Jewish kabbalah to the public, and further mixed it up with the resurgent paganism and magic of the Renaissance, it was clear that its chances of replacing Thomism as the official philosophy of the Western Church were slim indeed. A second round of this battle was play out within Protestantism. However Protestanism having already adopted the philosemetic attitude of Jerome and playing its hebrew cards against Catholicism, drew the line at the “joker’s wild” gambit of invoking the Kabbalah. Within Lutheranism the Christian Kabbalists, under the new moniker of “Rosicrucians” lost out, first to Lutheran scholastics and latter to modernists. Even such a dedicated Christian Hebraist as Issac Newton loathed the Kabbalah as a manifestation of Jewish backsliding into magic and paganism.
But this accusation of “illicit curiosity” leveled against the Kabbalah during the Renaissance was, I am maintaining, already aimed against nothing more than a second, and second-best attempt, to adopt the full implications of Hebrew allegory in the West. The first time around, under the auspices of Jerome, it had already been tacitly adopted in a much purer form. That it was not called “kabbalah” did not keep it from informing peoples expectations of mystical exegesis, even during those centuries when Western Christians had ceased to use Hebrew as a scholarly language. However this doesn’t mean that it was entirely non-controversial, and that some Western usages didn’t appear strangely Jewish to Eastern Christians.
Was even this early Christian “kabbalism” which came in with Jerome entirely licit? The history of Protestantism, or rather of extremist Protestant sects, suggests that it was not entirely without dangers. There has always been the danger of a highly Hebraized Christianity retroverting to Ebionism, or some such doctrine which sees Jesus as a very good man in the service of the Almighty. Since Ebionism has been in disarray for some time, that too provides little hope of a resting place, and one might go further and embrace the doctrine of the Talmud, that Jesus was actually a bad man and a heretic.
Be that as it may, none of this came to pass with Jerome. Indeed his studies of the Hebrew scriptures drove him further and deeper into an orthodox outlook. He consistently maintained that at many points the Trinitarian and Messianic implications of scripture were actually clearer in the Hebrew text than the LXX. A cantankerous crumudgeon he may have been, but his reputation has remained solid among Christian thinkers of every confessional stripe. True if we were to say that he was the first Christian to receive the batton of the Kabbalah from the teachers of the Jews, people may cavil that this represents development in doctrine and not, as Jude (i.e. “the Jew”) wrote “the faith recieved once and for all” from the apostolic generation.
And might not someone demonstrate that the apostles themselves were Kabbalists? Indeed someone might, but not me, at least not now, for even these few random observations on Jerome have taxed my wits. But do give it a thought.
Pico Ultraorientalis 