induce the experience (Scholem, 1946: 139, 203). The Zohar was written to
combat the rationalism of educated Jews; its watchword is “back to the
Torah,” interpreted as a secret code; meditative ecstasy for the elect is broad-
ened into a theosophy for the Jewish masses (see Figure 9.5).
In the context of increasing ghettoization and persecution of the Jews,
mysticism shifted from personal experience toward political and sometimes
apocalyptic prophecy. In this respect Jewish mysticism was closer to Islamic
mystical orders, which frequently took on a political motivation, whereas the
greater organizational strength of the Christian Church kept its mysticism
centered on private devotions, watchfully guarded against heretical implica-
tions. After 1400, as the strength of the papacy eroded and then was openly
challenged by the Reformation, Christian mystics too became increasingly
politicized. The Kabbalism which had become widespread among ordinary
Jews was now used as a cultural resource by cosmopolitan Christian intellec-
tuals in mobilizing their projects for a new political-religious order.
Intellectuals as Courtiers: The Humanists
The prominence of mysticism in the later Middle Ages was one of several
directions of intellectual dispersion. There also appeared a new brand of
intellectuals. Some were laymen rather than clergy, or remained in the ambiva-
lent standing of the minor grades without consecration as priests. They wrote
in the vernacular tongues and in a Latin which they took from the manu-
scripts of Roman times, and which they held superior to the “barbarisms” of
the university scholastics. These “Humanists” had a different cultural capital
and a different organizational base; they were court nobility or administra-
tors, in the service of the secular rulers. In Italy, as the papacy disintegrated
into a minor feudal power, its patronage style came to match that of the
local aristocrats. In the 1400s there were humanist cardinals and even popes
taking part in a common round of status display with this non-scholastic
culture. Courtiers had existed before, but they had never been able to compete
with the university teachers and the church theologians as the center of intel-
lectual life.
From now on scholastic and humanist styles were typically rooted in
different careers. Thomists, Scotists, and nominalists continued to be university
professors, especially in the old strongholds of theology and in the universities
which emulated them in Germany and Spain. The Italian universities had
previously stood apart from the theological philosophy of the scholastics; now
they became home to two other factions of professors: the Averroists (e.g., Paul
of Venice, Vernias, Achillini, and Nifo at Padua and Bologna; see 264 in Figure
9.6 and 306, 307, 326 in Figure 9.7) and the Aristoteleans (Pomponazzi, Bar-
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^497