writings of the Neo-Platonists into Latin and so made them current for
the readers of the sixteenth century, gave a profoundly mystical
colouring to the revived classical philosophy and identified it with
pure and unadulterated Christianity.[1] His contemporary, Pico of
Mirandola (1463-94), joined the teachings of the Cabala with his
Neo-Platonized Christianity and so produced a new blend. Johann
Reuchlin (1455-1522), great German classical and Hebrew scholar, brave
opponent of obscurantism, forerunner of the Reformation, introduced the
Neo-Platonic and Cabalistic blend of ideas into German thought.

The Cabala, it may be said briefly, in the primary meaning of the word,
is the doctrine received by oral tradition as an important supplement
to the written Jewish Scriptures, but the Cabala as we know it is an
esoteric system which was formed under the influence of many streams of
ancient thought-systems, and which came into vogue about the thirteenth
century, though its devout adherents claimed that it had been orally
transmitted through the intervening ages from Adam in Paradise.
According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called
_En-Soph_, the Infinite, is in essence {135} incomprehensible and
immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the
En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or
imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the infinitely
perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world
of matter or created a realm of existence marked with evil as this
lower realm of ours is. Instead of supposing a creative act,
therefore, the Cabala supposes a series of emanations, or overflows of
divine splendour, arranged in three groups of threes, called
_Sephiroth_, which reveal all that is revealable in God, and by means
of which invisible and visible worlds come into being. These
_Sephiroth_, or orders of emanation, are _thoughts_ of the Wisdom of
God become objectively and permanently real, just because He thought
them; and though He is vastly, inexhaustibly more than they, yet He is
actually immanent in them and the ground of their being. They are (1)
the intelligible world, or world of creative ideas; (2) the world of
spiritual forms, such as the hierarchies of angels, souls, and the
entire universe of immaterial beings, the world of astral substance or
of creative soul-matter; and (3) the natural world, in which the divin