Egidio da Viterbo

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Egidio da Viterbo — Giles of Viterbo, born Egidio Antonini in 1469, dead in Rome on 12 November 1532 — was an Italian Augustinian friar who rose to lead his order, wear the red hat of a cardinal, and stand among the most learned churchmen of the high Renaissance. The offices he held were considerable; the use he made of them is what holds the eye. He carried Hebrew Kabbalah across the threshold of Catholic theology and treated it not as a danger to be disarmed but as a witness to be called — a buried Mosaic confirmation of the faith the Church already taught.

The Augustinian and the cardinal

He entered the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine young and climbed it on the strength of his preaching and his learning. In 1507 his brethren elected him Prior General, the head of the whole Augustinian order, an office he held until 1518; in that decade he reformed houses, traveled the provinces, and pressed the friars toward a stricter observance. His tenure overlapped with the early career of a German Augustinian, Martin Luther, who came to Rome in 1510–11 on his order’s business while Egidio governed it — a crossing of paths between the two men whose reading of the Church would diverge so completely. Leo X created him cardinal in 1517. He served afterward as papal legate to Spain in 1518–1519 and as bishop of Viterbo, his birthplace, the small Lazio city north of Rome whose name he carried for life.

His reputation as an orator was made before the whole of Latin Christendom on 3 May 1512, when he delivered the opening address to the Fifth Lateran Council in Rome. The council had been summoned to answer a rival, schismatic assembly at Pisa and to take up the reform of a Church many felt had drifted; Egidio’s oration set its programmatic note. Its most quoted sentence held that it is right for men to be transformed by sacred things, not sacred things by men — homines per sacra immutari fas est, non sacra per homines. The reform he called for was not the abolition of the old but the recovery of it: a return to an ancient wisdom from which the present age had fallen away. That single formula, turning the axis of reform inward toward conversion of the man rather than outward toward alteration of the rite, became one of the more durable phrases of the pre-Reformation Curia, and it states in a line the conviction that governs everything else he wrote — that the truth is older than its keepers and that the work of the learned is to uncover it, not to invent it.

The Florentine inheritance

The roots of his learning lay in Florence, in the Platonic revival that Marsilio Ficino had built under Medici patronage. From Ficino came the architecture: a single ancient theology descending through the ages, and a Platonism read as the philosophical idiom of revealed truth rather than its rival. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola came the decisive addition. Pico, in the Kabbalist theses of his 1486 Conclusiones, had made the startling claim that the secret doctrine of the Hebrew sages — read correctly — certified the divinity of Christ more powerfully than any other science, and that the Jewish Kabbalah was therefore not an alien mysticism but a hidden Christian witness preserved among the rabbis. Pico assembled this material through the Latin translations of Flavius Mithridates, the converted Sicilian Jew who rendered tens of thousands of folio pages of Hebrew and Aramaic into a Latin already quietly slanted toward the Christological readings Pico wanted.

Egidio took the inheritance and went further than Pico had gone. Pico had worked through intermediaries and died at thirty-one, in 1494, before he could master the languages himself; Egidio learned them. He read Hebrew and Aramaic, not perfectly but seriously, and he did the thing his Florentine forebears had left undone — he closed the gap between the Christian scholar and the Jewish text by bringing a living Jewish master into his own house. Where Pico had proposed the synthesis as a program of theses, Egidio practiced it as a discipline of decades.

Elijah Levita in the cardinal’s house

That master was Elijah Levita — Eliyahu ben Asher ha-Levi, the Ashkenazi grammarian and Masoretic scholar, one of the foremost Hebraists of his age. From about 1514 Levita lived in Egidio’s Roman household for some thirteen years, teaching the cardinal Hebrew, Aramaic, and the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and receiving in return shelter, salary, and access to a great library. The arrangement is one of the most striking facts of early sixteenth-century learning: a serving cardinal of the Roman Church and an unconverted Jewish scholar living under one roof in a sustained scholarly partnership, each teaching and learning from the other. Levita never converted. He kept his faith through the whole of the relationship and after it, and his own works — the grammar called the Sefer ha-Bahur, the Massoreth ha-Massoreth on the transmission of the biblical text, the lexicon Tishbi — belong to the history of Jewish scholarship, not to its Christian appropriation. What Egidio gained was a direct line into the rabbinic and Masoretic tradition unmediated by the convert-translators on whom Pico had depended. The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered the household, destroyed much of Egidio’s library, and sent Levita to Venice; the partnership did not survive the catastrophe, but its years had already done their work.

That collaboration sits inside a larger pattern. Egidio’s whole project ran on Jewish mediators — Mithridates’s translations behind Pico, Levita’s instruction behind Egidio himself, the manuscripts copied and explicated by Jewish hands. The Hebrew Kabbalah he received was a real and learned tradition, the theosophical and ecstatic Kabbalah of the medieval Castilian and Geronese schools and of the prophetic line, transmitted through teachers who held it as their own. What Egidio did with it — turning its doctrine of the divine names, its sefirot, its letter-mysticism toward the confirmation of Christian dogma — was a use its originators had not intended. Whether that use honored the tradition by taking it with full seriousness, or absorbed it by reading a Christian conclusion back into a Jewish premise, was contested in his own time and is contested still; it is not a question this account settles, and the reading need not be supersessionist to be recognized as appropriation.

The works

Egidio’s published output was small in proportion to his learning; the bulk of his thought survives in manuscript and has been edited only in part. Two works carry the Kabbalistic core.

The first is the Scechina, a Latin treatise composed at Viterbo around 1530, in the years after the Sack drove him from Rome, and presented to the Emperor Charles V at the Bologna coronation diet in February of that year. Its subject is the Shekhinah — the indwelling divine presence of rabbinic and Kabbalistic tradition, the immanent face of God dwelling among creation. Egidio reads the Shekhinah as a cosmic and Christological feminine principle and identifies it at once with Mary, with the Church, and with the immanent presence of the Christian Logos. The treatise is cast partly as an address to the Shekhinah herself, a dialogue in five books that braids Kabbalistic doctrine together with an apocalyptic, ecclesial expectation: the recovery of the ancient wisdom is bound up with the renewal of the Church under a universal Christian monarch, the hidden meaning of the Hebrew names becoming a key to the destiny of Christendom. The work circulated only in manuscript in his lifetime and was never printed until the twentieth century.

The second is the Libellus de litteris Hebraicis, a shorter treatise of about 1517 on the mystical and prophetic significance of the Hebrew alphabet. Here the governing idea stands clearest: that the letters of Hebrew are not arbitrary signs but the very elements of creation, the characters in which the world was written before it was made — a conviction the Jewish Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, had carried for centuries, that the thirty-two paths of wisdom run through the letters and the numbers and that God formed the world by their combination. To read the Hebrew letters rightly, on Egidio’s view, was to read the cipher of the cosmos, and Christian theology completed rather than contradicted what that cipher said.

Around these stood other works in the same vein: the Historia viginti saeculorum, a universal history in twenty ages fusing Kabbalistic number with the eschatology of Joachim of Fiore, drafted in the 1510s; sermons, letters, and the Sermo de Sanctissimo Sacramento of 1525, among the few things printed while he lived. His learning ranged across Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic; his manuscript collection was among the richest in private hands in Rome before the Sack consumed much of it.

The single stream

Behind all of it lay one conviction, the load-bearing idea of the whole enterprise: that a single sacred wisdom had descended through the ages, surfacing in different tongues and traditions but speaking everywhere the same truth. This was the prisca theologia, the ancient theology, the great organizing myth of Renaissance Neoplatonism as Ficino had framed it — a chain of inspired sages running from the depths of antiquity to the Church. On this view the wisdom that Moses received on Sinai, the philosophy that Plato taught in Athens, and the doctrine of the writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus were not competing revelations but channels of one stream, all of them converging on Christ. The chronology that made this credible placed Hermes as a near contemporary of Moses — a dating that would stand until the philologist Isaac Casaubon dismantled it in 1614, long after Egidio’s death — so that the agreement of Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek wisdom could be read as historical convergence rather than as a scholar’s projection.

Within that frame the Kabbalah was one channel among the others, and a privileged one: the secret oral law given with the written law at Sinai, the Hebrew limb of the ancient theology. The Hebrew language itself became a cipher in which creation was written, its letters and names the structuring grammar of the world. The operations the Jewish tradition used to read beneath the surface of scripture — taking words as the sum of their letters’ numbers, expanding letters into words, permuting the alphabet to uncover hidden equivalences, the arts of gematria and the rest — became in Christian hands instruments for finding the Gospel concealed in the Law. The classic move of the whole school, descending from Pico through Johann Reuchlin, was the reading of the unpronounceable divine name: the Tetragrammaton made utterable, and the Name made flesh, by the insertion of a single letter, so that the name of Jesus appeared as the secret completion the holy Name had always intended. Egidio inherited this whole apparatus and set it within his own apocalyptic Mariology and his vision of a renewed Church.

He stands, accordingly, among the central figures of Christian Kabbalah — the founding generation that ran from Pico through Reuchlin and on, by way of Cornelius Agrippa and Guillaume Postel, into the later esoteric tradition of Europe. Where the broader Kabbalah and its early theosophical development belonged to the Jewish world that produced them, Egidio’s was the project of receiving that inheritance into the Church and reading it as a confirmation of Christianity — the same wisdom, he held, that the Hermetic writings and the Platonic dialogues carried under other names.

Sources and editions

Egidio’s own Latin writings, by an author dead in 1532, are in the public domain without restriction; the difficulty is access. His two Kabbalistic works survive chiefly in manuscripts at the Médiathèque of Cambrai (MSS 250 and 254, the latter taken to be the autograph), which have not been digitized, and the standard text remains the critical edition of François Secret, Egidio da Viterbo, Scechina e Libellus de litteris hebraicis (Rome: Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, 1959), in copyright until the middle of the present century. The fundamental study of his career is John W. O’Malley’s Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 1968), which sets the reform thought and the Lateran oration in their context. For the wider movement, the indispensable reconstruction of how Christianizing readings entered the Latin Kabbalah at its source is Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); for Kabbalah in the Italian setting Egidio inhabited, Moshe Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); and for the long arc of the Christian appropriation, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann’s edited Christliche Kabbala (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003). The frame of the single ancient wisdom is treated in D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (London: Duckworth, 1972).

The texts of the tradition Egidio worked within survive in the digital archives that hold their early editions. The systematizing Latin exposition that gave the school its grammar, Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabalistica of 1517 — on the sefirot, the divine names, gematria, and the kinship of Pythagorean number with Hebrew letter — can be read in the Bavarian State Library’s scan of the Hagenau first edition at digitale-sammlungen.de, and the foundational Conclusiones of Pico that launched the whole project is digitized by the Vatican Library at digi.vatlib.it. The primary texts of the Hebrew and Hermetic traditions he set in one stream can be read in the library: the Book of Formation on the creative power of the Hebrew letters (Sepher Yetzirah, in Westcott’s 1911 English), the Zohar in partial translation, and the Hermetic writings he set beside Moses, the Divine Pymander in John Everard’s 1650 rendering.

What remains, beneath the offices and the controversies, is the figure himself: a prince of the Church equally at home in the Hebrew of the rabbis and the Greek of the Platonists, certain that all of it, rightly understood, spoke with one voice.

→ In the library: Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott, 1911) — the Book of Formation on the creative power of the Hebrew letters · The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, 1914) — partial English of the book Egidio read in Mithridates's and his own circle's Latin · The Divine Pymander of Hermes (Everard, 1650) — the Hermetic writings he set in the same stream as Moses

→ Related: Christian Kabbalah · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Marsilio Ficino · Prisca Theologia · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Flavius Mithridates · Johann Reuchlin · Hermes Trismegistus · Kabbalah · Hebrew Gematria Kabbalah · Early Kabbalah · Plato · Guillaume Postel · Cornelius Agrippa · Christianity · Corpus Hermeticum