The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century

Book excerpt: If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars. So wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his epitaph for Francis Mercury van Helmont. With his friend Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont edited the Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), the largest collection of Lurianic Kabbalistic texts available to Christians up to that time. Because the subject matter of this work appears so difficult and arcane, it has never been appreciated as a significant text for understanding the emergence of modern thought. However, one can find in it the basis for the faith in science, the belief in progress, and the pluralism characteristic of later western thought. The Lurianic Kabbalah thus deserves a place it has never received in histories of western scientific and cultural developments.