[180] Op. Lat. i. 3. 169.
[181] Cf. Her. Fur., Lag. 636. If not by Iamblichus, this work issued certainly from his school, to which Julian the Apostate belonged.
[182] E.g. Op. Lat. i. 1. 376.
[183] Ibid.
[184] Op. cit.
[185] Op. Lat. i. 2. 409.
[186] Lag. 532.
[187] i.e. creative or original.
[188] Spaccio, Lag. 533. Bruno was probably acquainted with the De arte cabbalistica (1517) of Reuchlin the Platonist, and with Pico of Mirandula’s Cabalistarum selectiora obscurioraque dogmata. Of the Cabala itself the first part (Creation) was published in Hebrew at Mantua 1562, a translation into Latin at Basle 1587: the second part, The Book of Splendour, Hebrew, 1560, a translation, not, as it seems, until the following century. It is unlikely that Bruno read Hebrew, although he makes use of Hebrew letters among his symbols. But there were many writings on the Cabala from which he could have derived his idea of their teaching—e.g. Agrippa’s Occulta Philosophia, to which he was indebted for much of the De Monade. The Cabala (i.e. “traditional teaching”) is a collection of dogmas made about the ninth and thirteenth centuries; it was certainly influenced by Neoplatonism, and contained the interpretation of creation as emanation in graduated series of beings from the one supreme Being, of the Logos or Divine Word as intermediary between the Supreme and the lower beings (viz, the material world and all sensible objects): the elements of the Logos are the Sephiroth, the ten numbers of Pythagoras, corresponding to the chief virtues or qualities; next to these are the ideas or forms, then the world-souls, and last of all material things.
[189] Causa, Lag. 231.