The silence is deafening. Is the silence accidental? Opening the door to Giovanni Pico’s diabolism inevitably leads to Johannes Reuchlin and his enabler, Pope Leo X. From there, the investigator encounters the network of occultists occupying the Church of Rome at all levels, from 1525 to 1965, and into the present era. Yet this has been “missed.” How does one miss the elephant in the room? The two leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, who were disciples of the most admired Catholic, Neoplatonic-Hermetic Kabbalist of the fifteenth century, exercised a decisive influence on Vatican II, perhaps more than any other Catholic other than Pope Paul VI.
Yet “traditional and conservative Catholics” are united in almost always listing as the principal ideological godfathers of modernism and Vatican II, the philosophes of the eighteenth century Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Denis Diderot, David Hume, “Voltaire” (François-Marie Arouet)—seemingly everyone except the Church of Rome’s most guilty spiritual and theological progenitors of the Second Vatican Council: Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin, Alexander VI, Leo X, Clement VII, Paul III, Giles of Viterbo, Ludovico Lazzarelli, Francesco Giorgio, Sixtus of Siena, Johannes Trithemius, Francesco Patrizi, Agostino Steuco, Giovanni Nesi, Foix de Candale, Lefevre d’Etaples and hundreds more.
One gasps at the extent to which the guilty parties of an entire epoch in the history of the occult Church have vanished, and are missing from virtually every page of the voluminous output of the “conservative” and “traditional” Catholic oeuvre (innumerable newsletters, pamphlets, journals, bulletins, magazines, books, blogs and websites).
The neglect is appalling, and the question arises, as it always does when there is a gaping memory hole in a highly controversial historical subject: is this erasure the result of rank ineptitude and willful blindness, or a deliberate conspiracy?
De Lubac’s fascinating, book-length encomium for Pico, Pic de la Mirandole: études et discussions (Paris, 1974) is a major statement, yet it has not been translated into English. William G. Craven writes concerning Pic de la Mirandole: “It is a series of essays by the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac…A prefatory note refers to a personal interest in Pico extending over half a century. The great merit of the book is that it makes the point, with a wealth of learning, that Pico’s language, figures of speech and ideas were thoroughly traditional…” 14
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: traditional Catholic. This is the bad joke that “Saint” John-Paul’s august Cardinal de Lubac peddled to the theological overlords of the Church of Rome. It was indeed Pico’s “tradition” that informed the theology of Vatican II. In a sense, it is in fact a theology with a tradition, having a patrimony in the Church of Rome of more than five centuries, which is one reason why the adjective “traditional Catholic” is such a source of confusion and misdirection useful to the Cryptocracy.
From Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac’s Pic de la Mirandole (Part I, “Liberty” Ch. 3, “Limits of the Thesis,” p. 77-78): 15
“There is no denying that the serious warning of the year before and the situation that resulted from it helped the young intellectual to become more mature and wiser. But from granting this to presenting the Heptaplus 16 as a minor work, lacking originality, marred by the intention that gave rise to it and not representing the real Pico, would be going too far. The new work is, on the contrary, the fruit of an intense, personal labor in the highest degree. 17
“…In 1488, at Florence, Pico made the acquaintance of another learned Jew, Jochanan Alemanno, as intelligent as he was erudite, as much poet as philosopher, of a great elevation of soul, and soon the two men became quite intimate. Jochanan completed Pico’s Hebraic culture; he guided him in the knowledge of the Talmud and of the Kabbalah. If he moderated certain aspects of his youthful ardor, he confirmed several of his first intuitions.
When he was writing the Conclusiones and the Oratio, Pico had waxed too enthusiastic over what he believed was the prophetic content of the books of the Kabbalah; Jochanan made him better understand its method, with its possible applications in the philosophico-religious domain. 18 But his Kabbalistic fever did not abate (it never completely left).19
In the Heptaplus he makes no effort to dissimulate it. On the contrary, in it he proclaims that his method of interpreting the Book of Genesis, based on Kabbalah, is something quite new: “hoc novum illud et intactum adhuc quod nos afferre temptavimus.” He provides as an appendix to the work (as a crown, Sixtus of Siena will say20), the most cabalistic page, one could almost say the only one, of his entire work: it is an explication of the first word of the Bible, ‘In principio’ (beresit), based on the divers combinations possible of the Hebraic letters that compose it.
He declares himself amazed by all the discoveries he made, far beyond his expectation and his hope. 21
We can see from the preceding passage by Cardinal De Lubac how normative is the Catholic application of Kabbalah for comprehending the Scriptures. He continues:
“Indeed, as M. Eugenio Garin correctly writes, if the Heptaplus testifies to Pico’s greater maturity, it certainly does not represent a sort of humiliated retreat in comparison to his earlier positions; it is, on the contrary, ‘the work which best expresses his Kabbalistic phase, and the one in which his vision of reality is the most organically composed, in its order, in the correspondence of its various planes, in its link with man, the ideal center of creation.” 22
In the preceding, De Lubac notes that Giovanni Pico was not intimidated by the displeasure of Pope Innocent VIII in reaction to his thesis. Pico knew he had “protection” and there would be no need for any “humiliated retreat.” De Lubac esteems Pico’s Kabbalistic peregrination (this is from de Lubac’s chapter five, “Pagan Prophecy”):
“As all had for centuries, [Pico] believes in the high antiquity of ‘Mercury’ (Hermes Trismegistus) and his writings, the Greek text of which had been recently brought to Florence and which Marsilius Ficinus had translated into Latin under the title of Pimander (1471) at the behest of Cosmo de Medici. Tommaso Benci had just procured a Tuscan version of it (which would not be published until later); Lorenzo de Medici sang its praises in verse, which Gelli set out in dialogues. 23 This Mercury, he thinks, was both ‘a very great philosopher, a very great priest, and a very great king; it is thus (M. Ficinus just explained in his preface) that one commented on his last name of Trismegistus, the thrice great.’ 24He wonders at seeing him ‘in accord with Moses,’ and ‘approaching his thought.’25 Concerning the faith of Christian antiquity, 26 Pico equally upholds the authenticity of the ‘Chaldean Oracles,’ of which he will not delay in discovering a much more recent origin; but for the moment, their discovery enthused him so much that he set himself immediately the task of mastering their language. 27
By a more consequential allusion, in the fervor of his initiation, he believes that he has found ‘the golden thread’28 that will enable him to unify everything: it is the question of the Kabbalah, this ‘divine science,’ already mentioned, defined, and praised in the Commento.29 Does it not come from Moses by way of the men he had chosen at the Lord’s behest and who used it to hold in Israel the place that the cardinals hold today in our Church? 30
“(Pico) persuades himself that he can justify thinking so because of a recent, august example: Had not Sixtus IV, the immediate predecessor of the reigning pontiff, ‘personally seen to it with enthusiasm that these books (of the Kabbalah) were translated into Latin for the use of our faith?’ Already, ‘at the time of his death, three of them had been translated.’ 31 It has been supposed that the story was wholly fabricated by (Flavius) Mithridates, who boasted of having preached a set speech on the Passion mingled with Arabic and Hebrew names before the pontiff for two hours straight with great success.32 Perhaps the story has a foundation in the fact that several Roman theologians, encouraged by Sixtus IV, had interested themselves in the Kabbalah with an apologetic intention that preceded that of Pico.” 33
In his Oration on the D
ignity of Man, Pico published the fact that Pope Sixtus IV had, “for the common good of those of our faith,” the rabbinic books of the Kabbalah published in Latin. De Lubac refers to the controversy that arose when Sixtus IV’s enthusiasm for the Kabbalah began to become known to Catholic Conservatives in the hierarchy. To answer the pope’s orthodox critics, the Vatican floated the rumor that the Judeo-Catholic Kabbalist Flavius Mithridates, preacher to the pope’s own household, concocted the story about the pontiff issuing the Kabbalah in Latin. De Lubac writes that it was “supposed that the story was wholly fabricated by Mithridates.”
Supposed by whom? Few historians of the era believe the rumor to be credible. De Lubac then covers all the bases when he writes, “Perhaps the story has a foundation in the fact that several Roman theologians, encouraged by Sixtus IV, had interested themselves in the Kabbalah”—for “apologetic intentions.”
Here is that slippery indeterminancy which is the very marrow of the arcane command ideology of the Church of Rome. We encounter it consistently throughout the history of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance papacy. These weasel methods permitted the popes to evade the consequences of their revolutionary actions. Leo X’s Bull, Inter multiplices of May 4, 1515, appears as though it is rebuking usury when in fact it is extending, with qualifications, feints, sideshows and distraction, an escape clause for usury in the form of the good cause of helping the poor. “Sin for a good cause” the pope’s argument could be called, if indeed it could be nailed down. A similar pattern of plausible denial and permissible dissimulation occurred in Pope Benedict XIV’s Vix Pervenit of November 1, 1745, which has been often quoted to us as the definitive rebuff to all who dare to assert that the Church gradually made the mortal sin of taking a profit on loans into no sin at all. In fact, after reams of impressive-sounding antiusury blabber, Benedict provided a loophole for usury. 34
The hot button question during the 2014 and 2015 synods that led to the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (March 19, 2016), was whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Communion. Pope Francis addressed the point only in a footnote (no. 351) in the document. The footnote seemed to perhaps constitute a “yes” answer to the question, but not in a way that explicitly altered Church law or teaching. This ambiguity allowed local bishops to interpret the signals from the pope’s Amoris Laetitia differently, with some promulgating a stringent interpretation and others a more lenient one, yielding the historical indeterminancy and potential for plausible denial which we observe in papal documents from the Renaissance onward.
Almost all of the Babylonian Talmud at one time or another can be valid and authoritative in Judaism, depending on the circumstances of the time. In Erubin 13b, we observe that the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai differed. These schools are depicted as disputing for three years over whose ruling constituted the halacha. In this case, even though it was subsequently determined that the halacha was according to Hillel, it is written that both Shammai and Hillel represent the words of God. 35
Since both schools of rabbinic thought represent the word of God according to the belief of Orthodox Judaism, both represent the Torah sheBeal peh, (the Oral “Torah” which rabbinic Judaism claims Moses gave to the ancient Pharisees embodied by Chazal, the collective Pharisaic and Talmudic “sages” who concocted the halacha). Viewed within the perspective of the rabbinic hermeneutic—which is so often denied in public—the exchanges between competing rabbinic views within the Talmud are 1. the basis of rabbinic law (halacha); and 2. have authority and validity even when in certain historical periods another view predominates.
This too is the method and outlook employed by the papal Cryptocracy. Their “god” is the zeitgeist. The Renaissance “happened” partly because the timing was right. There is an argument that can be made that it could not have happened in the Middle Ages. How that timing is determined and why it is a ruling principle, is difficult to explain without entering into a disquisition on one of the more recondite secrets of the occult: the confirmation by what could be described as the “god of power,” of any behavior that is successfully conducted—on the basis that it was successful. While the expression, “might is right” does not alone account for what is also at work here (ritual manipulation in time and place to achieve success), the epigram “nothing succeeds like success” gives a hint of the wind that powers these sails. There is no morality or ethics to the process. Yet it has been the engine of the Church of Rome’s dominion for many centuries.
Another arcane doctrine of the Church of Rome is situation ethics, the long history of which is seldom detected in all respects or analyzed comprehensively by Rome’s true believers. A true believer will sometimes detect one significant instance of situation ethics, as for example, the situation ethics entailed by the syncretist Assisi prayer meetings of Pope St. John Paul II and his successors, or in the marriage controversy of Amoris Laetitia.
But Conservatives who detect some modern instances almost always frame the situation ethic they are denouncing as a radical “aberration” and “departure” from what has otherwise been (“prior to Pope Francis,” or “antecedent to John Paul II,” or “before to Vatican II”), the supposedly unchangeable Roman Catholic Church.
This is a lamentable spectacle to witness in folks who are otherwise often people of integrity, possessed of a selfless dedication to the Faith. But in consideration of the actual documentary record, which has seen the Church of Rome discard immemorial Scriptural dogma on Jews and Judaism, and profit on loans of money, for centuries, their ignorance (or willful blindness) ensures the defeat of their Cause. As we have noted in another chapter, the prelates who are the heirs of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic Renaissance command ideology, privately laugh in contempt at the schmucks who appeal to them for “faithful adherence to the unchanging Church,” based on a naive and cockamamie misapprehension of the history of the Church of Rome.
We left De Lubac at the point in which he cited the apologetic uses of the Kabbalah. This too was Pico’s line, as De Lubac quotes him:
“I find in these books,’ the latter said, ‘God is my witness, the religion, not so much of Moses but of Christ. I see in it the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Word, the divinity of the Messiah; original sin, its expiation by Christ, the fall of the bad angels, the angelic choirs, purgatory, the pains of hell, I read there the same things that we read every day in Paul and Denys, in Jerome and Augustine.” 36
Pico the acclaimed scholarly prodigy, by the waving of the wand of spiritual transposition, sees Christ in the Kabbalah. What exotic substance was he smoking when he saw this hallucination? De Lubac would not agree with our irreverent dismissal of Pico’s papist Kabbalism, however. For him, Pico is the paradigm of a truly pious, Roman Catholic intellectual:
“It is thus to a vast enterprise of spiritual transposition or, as Salutati said, to a ‘pious interpretation’ that Pico intends to devote himself. And if he proceeds in the company of so many strangers summoned from everywhere, it is always in order to come (back), as Manetti had already done, to ‘our Fathers,’ to those whom Manetti called ‘our Catholic doctors,’ as to ‘the only port of salvation.’ 37 In the works of both writers, these expressions above all designate, not those whom we call today the Fathers of the Church, but their Fathers as well as ours, the sacred authors of both Testaments: ‘the patriarch Jacob’; Moses; the Apostle Paul, and his interpreter Denys.” 38
De Lubac hopes that we will believe that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s theology is thoroughly Biblical and orthodox. It seems that the litany of our Fathers in Faith consists of Moses, Jacob, St. Paul and—“Denys”?
As we have noted previously, the strange texts of the hoaxer known by nearly a half-dozen names (Pseudo-Dionysius, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Denis, Denys and Dionigi), are falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Christian who is mentioned in the Book of Acts (17:34), as having been converted by St. Paul. Denys lived some five hundred years after Paul. As rece
ntly as the nineteenth century, scholars such as John Parker continued to believe in the first century provenance of the Denys writings. We do not know the identity of “Denys.” The actual author was a hoaxer: he did his best to make his 525 A.D. writing appear to be authentic apostolic documents from the first century A.D. (through manipulation of manuscript titles and headings, such as the address of a “letter” supposedly intended for “the monk Gaius;” and another addressed to John, the inspired author of the Book of Revelation “on the isle of Patmos” (Letter 10).
De Lubac regurgitates Pico’s detritus about Kabbalah being a support for Catholic truth:
“Finally, if our exegete (Pico) consults the secret books of Judaism, it is not at all in order to ‘reinterpret Christianity thanks to the Cabala.’ 39 It is to wrest from the Synagogue, as from the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Chaldeans, the part of the truths that they unjustly hold, and to give it to the Christians, the only ‘legitimate Israelites.’ 40 It is to force it despite itself to bear witness to the mysteries of Christ and his Church.41In short, it is always, following in the footsteps of an Origen and a Hilary, ‘with a view to confirm the sacrosanct Catholic faith.” 42
In the preceding statement we see De Lubac adopt the tough-sounding rhetoric against the Jews that the endlessly duplicitous occult Renaissance Judaizers would employ whenever it was absolutely necessary to do so for the sake of the rescue of their campaign of rehabilitation of the Talmud or Kabbalah.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 57
