This is the third and final essay in a 3-part series: Part I: Acknowledging the Crisis and Breaking the Spell and Part II: Behold, The Kingdom of God is Within You.
My overall argument thus far has been that the West is entrenched in a ‘meaning crisis’ and that the institutional Church is in an ‘authority crisis’ which has altogether moved it into what I’ve called its ‘post-authority epoch.’ Consequently, the only institution that I believe can adequately respond to the meaning crisis is in no condition to do so. I’ve suggested that this double crisis also represents two sides of the same problem: the slow bewitchment of the Western mind by the spell of the Enlightenment.
Having lost a sense of the supernatural, and theologically justified this by decades of conflating the natural and the supernatural, the Church has lost a sense of its very purpose. What is now left is power, and a craving for power within a petty and dying bureaucracy. The Church’s government has long run on the fumes of its previously held authority, but the engine is now choking and the whole institution is rapidly grinding to a halt. In a feeble attempt to hold onto the last vestiges of authority, the Church’s government has resorted to the habitual exercise of arbitrary power, which, ironically, is further accelerating the erosion of clerical authority.
The Church must, it seems to me, recover its true personality—for a corporate Person she is—as the gift of God to all nations for the transformation of the human heart from stone to flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). The precondition for such a recovery, I have proposed, is that of breaking the spell of modernity, that the scales may fall from our eyes and we can again behold the participatory, vertical vision of creation as the emanated communication of the Godhead. The Hermetic tradition may provide us with the ancient vernacular to understand this communication, so that we might receive—in imitation of the Virgin—the divine Logos within, to undergo the interior transfiguration for expelling the darkness that has clouded the West.
We are in a post-Christian condition, and whilst post-Christian man is not the same animal as pre-Christian man, it is nonetheless true that we have entered a new form of paganism, with the dual characteristics of paganism prevailing as the dominant facets of our shared life: idolatry and slavery to appetite. These two characteristics always go together. We exist for a shared purpose, and once that shared purpose becomes eclipsed, we incrementally shut ourselves up to pursue individual private ends, which become increasingly associated with the personal gratification of appetite. Thus, the religious impulse that directs us to the attainment of our shared purpose gets transferred onto commodities and sensual satisfactions, and these become the idols of post-religious religiosity, which ultimately serve the idol of the isolated self—that final post-religious illusion. What’s unique about the ‘progressive-liberal’ settlement that is the proper polity of the new paganism is that it celebrates this process of enslavement by commodification and titillation as the highest civilisational achievement.
Just as astrologers and magicians of old were directed to the Incarnate Word in the cave to offer Him all in man’s nature that required supernatural transformation: man’s religious impulse (represented by frankincense), his temporal needs (represented by gold), and his death which was to become new life (represented by myrrh), so too post-Christian man must approach the cave of the Church, that he may wander in the desert no more. The Hermetic path possibly presents us with a way for modern man to approach this hallowed cave—where the Truth presently remains veiled and obscured by the black magic of the Enlightenment. And this Hermetic path turns out to be a very ancient path indeed, much treasured by the Church at various times down the ages …
Whether Hermeticism and Neoplatonism have the exact same genealogy is a question for historians. In any case, they have ever been inextricably bound together. Neoplatonism provides the ontological superstructure within which a theocentric worldview makes sense, and Hermeticism provides practices and disciplines to habituate this theocentric vision. This superstructure is that on which the Church Fathers, the medieval schoolmen, and the Christian humanists of the Renaissance built their civilisational project. Many great thinkers of those epochs posited notions that have since become bizarre to us because we’ve lost the framework within which they lived.
Typically, Christians are uneasy at any mention of Hermeticism or esotericism. This is understandable, for such terms have come to mean anything that is not modern mainstream Christian spirituality. In this way, ‘Hermeticism’ is rather like the term ‘alternative medicine,’ which doesn’t tell you what it is but what it’s not, namely not modern mainstream medicine. Thus, ‘alternative medicine’ can mean anything from eating cooked elderberries to support one’s immune system, to Reiki. Likewise, depending on what one is reading, ‘Hermetic’ or ‘esoteric’ could mean anything from “concentration without effort” (a practice similar to those recommended in Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence) to the sex magic of Aleister Crowley.
What I mean by ‘Hermetic’ is a set of practices and disciplines of mind, will, and imagination, that habituate in the practitioner a vision of the world that acknowledges it as God’s Icon. This, I claim, was the shared vision of pre-modernity, and more generally the shared metaphysical vernacular of all broadly religious ontologies. And it is the vision we likely have to recover if we’re to break the spell that established modern man, who is a disintegrated, centaurial creature due to his acceptance of the rationalist paradigm and his retreat from grace.
To indicate how disenchanted our world has become, one can imagine the reaction of his co-religionists to a Catholic saying, “Because I take the Christian conception of the world seriously, I’ve decided to become a crystal healer.” But that’s New Ageism! would be the expected reply. And yet, the Common Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, argues that the presence of precious metals can prevent depression and sapphires can stop bleeding. (He also held that humans possess innate psychic powers, powers that he believed would always lead to evil if not united to the actions of saints, angels, or Divine Persons (see ST I, 117, 3 ad 2).) Hildegard von Bingen dedicated Book Four of her Physica to the use of crystals, gems, and stones to heal a myriad of ailments, and she included guidance on how to ‘recharge’ one’s healing stones in the morning sun or the glow of a full moon. Now, I’m not saying that St. Thomas or St. Hildegard were necessarily correct in these views, but the fact that these teachings are so far beyond what’s acceptable among modern Catholics indicates how far from Christianity’s pre-modern worldview we’ve strayed. This is especially interesting in the case of St. Hildegard, given that she declared that no part of her teaching on healing was learned by experience (though she claimed it was confirmed by experience), but received by direct private revelation from God—a claim that was known when she was made a Doctor of the Church in 2012. These are not peripheral authorities in the Church.
Others want to claim that Hermeticism is a species of Gnosticism. Gnosis for the Hermeticist, however, means something very different to the ‘gnosis’ of the Gnostics. Whereas the Gnostics believed in hidden knowledge that was undisclosed to those who weren’t spiritually pure or enlightened enough, the gnosis of the Hermeticist is not hidden knowledge but deeper knowledge of that which is known to all who are free from the spells—the “egregores,” to use Tomberg’s phrase—of physicalism, materialism, rationalism, and other such ancient superstitions that have re-emerged to create modernity. That the Hermeticist pursues deeper knowledge of what’s known, rather than secret knowledge of what’s hidden, is explicitly declared at the beginning of Tomberg’s Meditations. Moreover, Gnosticism has invariably led to a disdain for the material world and thus a contempt for the body, supported by an anthropological dualism which divided man into a spiritual substance in a fleshly cage. Hermeticism, however, seeks the opposite, namely the retrieval of the world as divine communication and the reintegration of the human person as a single substance of embodied spirit.
When St. Albert the Great, Doctor of the Church, translated a principal Hermetic text called the Emerald Tablet into Latin for his students at the University of Paris, he did so because he believed they had something to learn from it. The first principle of the Tablet establishes the precondition for the Hermetic vision, namely the vertical, participatory, Neoplatonic conception of creation:
True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true. That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation.
According to the Tablet, the realm we inhabit is a reflection of that which is transcendent, and this acknowledgement has always been understood by Hermeticists as the prerequisite for ‘sacred magic’ (“to accomplish miracles,” as the Tablet puts it), which is their term for that species of blessing that heals by mediation what is spiritually corrupted. Creation, the Tablet tells us, unfolds out of God’s contemplation of His own Mystery, and we fulfil the “adaptation” of that creation by rationally and lovingly participating in the eternal act of divine contemplation—known to Christians as the communion of love in the Triune Godhead. The Tablet was translated by St. Albert, it seems, because he wanted his students to deepen their knowledge of things known.
In his remarkable essay entitled “Hermetic Imagination,” Charles Coulombe presents some of Hermeticism’s pedigree in the Church Universal:
The meeting of Hermeticism (the belief that the visible world is an analogy of the invisible, summed up in the phrase “as above, so below”) and Neoplatonism (with its insistence that the Platonic Archetypes were the realities, of which earthly expressions were mere shadows) with Christianity produced several waves of educated folk who shared this magical concept of the world. First came such Neoplatonic Church Fathers as St. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine. Then came the Ultra-Realist scholastics such as John Scotus Eriugena, Pope Sylvester II, William of Auvergne, Roger Bacon, Bl. Raymond Lully, St. Bonaventure, and St. Albertus Magnus, many of whom looked to Alchemy, Astrology, and the Qabalah as a means of interpreting the revelation implicit in creation—a revelation supplementary, but inferior to, Holy Writ. Lastly, the Classical Humanists such as Reuchlin, Pico della Mirandola, Cardinal Bessarion and Aeneas Piccolomini were similarly inclined. The Reformation put an end to most such developments.
Among the list of names that Coulombe provides, Fathers, Doctors, Saints, and Blesseds are counted as having adopted the Hermetic path. And as he notes, the age of revolution, which the Reformation inaugurated, began the process of eclipsing the world understood as God’s Icon—a process which would eventually give us modern man, who stumbles in the dark whilst calling himself ‘Enlightened.’ In the same essay we learn that the Baron de Sarachaga, a relation of St. Teresa of Avila, for forty years headed the Hermetic Institut des Fastes, approved by Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII. “Pierre Dujois, a learned Hermeticist,” Coulombe tells us, “wrote of this school in 1912: ‘There exists in Paray-le-Monial [the centre of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus] a mysterious Cabalic centre, sincerely Catholic it seems, and where the bizarre orthodoxy is nevertheless accepted and even encouraged by the Church.’”
Why has Hermetic Neoplatonism enjoyed such a rich pedigree in the Church? The answer may be in the fact that it possesses the double advantage of overcoming the problem of ‘ascent’ in classical Platonism, by presenting a conception of the world as disclosing by emanation the Eternal Mystery here and now in the concrete complexus of experience, and providing mystical practices by which to spiritually unite oneself—or better, allow oneself to be united—with this Mystery. Classical Platonic ascent holds that the reality is not to be found in this world, which is deemed a deceptive shadow of the perennial ‘forms’ that constitute true reality. According to this view, this non-empirical but nevertheless intelligible realm can only be accessed by those who, using reason alone, undertake the intellectual journey required to ascend towards it.
This is an account of truth that simply cannot accommodate the Biblical view of history, which sees the truth unfolding in the temporal events of peoples and nations, nor can it accommodate the central Mystery of the Incarnation, which is God’s direct spoken Word embodied in the Nazarene—a person living at a particular time in a particular place. But Hermetic Neoplatonism construes ‘ascent’ as acknowledgment of—and spiritual harmony with—the temporal world as the communication of the Godhead. And whilst creation is not the reality in an absolute sense, which is God alone, creation truly conveys Him as my speech truly conveys me. That the world is fallen and wounded by sin doesn’t undermine the Neoplatonic view of creation as divine communication, but only accentuates the need for the healing and elevating power of grace for creation’s fulfilment.
In fact, it is very likely that what the Church currently needs is something like the Franciscan movement of the 13th century. Franciscanism was, in essence, a grassroots recovery of the Patristic Neoplatonism that saw creation as God’s Icon, which linked this enchanted vision to a practical call to embody the mystery of the Incarnation in the most radical, lived expression of the Gospel. St. Francis and his followers soon had many lay folk, entire families even, joining them, eventually forming the Third Order. Franciscanism transformed medieval Christendom, and yet the movement looked very similar to many heretical sects of the time. Had you seen an early Franciscan, you likely would have struggled to tell him apart from a Waldensian, a Bogomil, or an Albigensian. They lived in a very similar manner to these heretical groups, and shared similar aspirations. The Franciscans were distinguished, however, by their unswerving loyalty to Christian orthodoxy and the institutional structures of the Church. This, though, was a loyalty that they maintained while simultaneously enlarging the parameters of what was then deemed orthodoxy.
We are today dealing with a proliferation of heretical movements, and it may be that our response must be an expansion of the parameters of orthodoxy whilst remaining steadfastly loyal to the ancient Faith and the Church—despite its current condition. Stratford Caldecott, in his essay on the New Age, writes that modern man has been fundamentally de-traditioned. Indeed, we may be the first people like this: a people inducted into no tradition except a tradition of repudiation of tradition. Inasmuch as we are religious, we stand in judgement over religious tradition, selecting from it what we please in a spirit of post-modern self-authorship. This ultimately leads to nihilism for the single reason that meaning is always something before which one must humble oneself, and over which one cannot stand in judgement without it vanishing. Caldecott doesn’t hesitate to highlight the Hermetic writings of Valentin Tomberg as offering a path through this novel territory:
The Christian community can expect a generation of converts to come from outside the tradition, from a radically post-modern, new age, and neo-pagan milieu. An influential example would be the Russian anthroposophist Valentin Tomberg, who died in 1973 after converting to Catholicism and writing anonymously a massive work entitled Meditations on the Tarot intended to reintegrate the lost wisdom of the Hermetic tradition with the orthodox Christianity of St. Teresa, St. Francis, and St. Bonaventure … Despite its considerable flaws, it can stand as a harbinger, perhaps, of 0ther attempts to retrieve and purify the legacy of the esoteric movements.
Note that Caldecott does not say that Tomberg sought to integrate, but reintegrate, the Hermetic tradition with orthodox Christianity; the implication being that Hermeticism is a spiritual path that once had its home in the Church, but it has been sundered. Caldecott suggests that, notwithstanding its faults, Tomberg’s Meditations may be at the genesis of a wider project—a necessary project—of retrieving and purifying in the light of the Gospel the practices and disciplines of Hermeticism.
Countless Christians have been inspired by Tomberg’s writings. Pope John Paul II was photographed with both volumes of the Meditations on his desk. The philosopher and defender of Catholic traditionalism Robert Spaemann wrote a foreword for the work, a fact which in my view stands very much in its favour. Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote an afterword for it, which stands less in its favour. Many have come into the Church from without by way of Tomberg’s writings. An important case is that of Roger Buck. Buck was once a central figure at the neo-pagan Findhorn Community and a renowned New Age leader, giving spiritual guidance and running New Age retreats across the world. But his ongoing study of Tomberg’s Hermeticism gradually led him to the Church. He’s now a respected Catholic author, having written such remarkable works as The Gentle Traditionalist and Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed. As Buck has written, “It was only through my repeated reading of Tomberg’s deconstruction of paganism that I could free myself from the New Age.”
Tomberg deconstructs paganism precisely because he is engaged in recovering the nature-supernature distinction that is the cornerstone of Christianity, which many 20th century theologisers strove to undermine. If the bipartite imperative before us, for the Church to breathe once more, is that of re-enchanting the cosmos and recovering the nature-supernature distinction, as I’ve throughout these essays suggested, then Tomberg is our ally. The hope is that, as the wisdom of the Hermetic way is unveiled, so too will the spell of modernity be broken, and the following realisation about which Tomberg writes so beautifully will be undergone by many more people:
The way of Hermeticism, solitary and intimate as it is, comprises authentic experiences from which it follows that the Roman Catholic Church is, in fact, a depository of Christian spiritual truth, and the more one advances on the way of free research for this truth, the more one approaches the Church. Sooner or later one inevitably experiences that spiritual reality corresponds—with an astonishing exactitude—to what the Church teaches: that there are guardian Angels; that there are saints who participate actively in our lives; that the Blessed Virgin is real … that the sacraments are effective, and that there are seven of them—and not two, or three, or even eight; that the three sacred vows—of obedience, chastity, and poverty—constitute in fact the very essence of all authentic spirituality; that prayer is a powerful means of charity, for beyond as well as here below; that the ecclesiastical hierarchy reflects the celestial hierarchical order; that the Holy See and the papacy represent a mystery of divine magic; that hell, purgatory, and heaven are realities; that, lastly, the Master himself—although he loves everyone, Christians of all confession as well as all non-Christians—abides with his Church, since he is always present there, since he visits the faithful there and instructs his disciples there.
Let us come, then, to the question in this three-part essay’s title: Can Hermetic Magic Rescue the Church? I must conclude with a qualified no. Hermeticism cannot rescue the Church. The Church has a Saviour, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. He alone can rescue the Church, and so He will, for the Church must continue until the conclusion of the world. Christ walks this earth today, however, in His members. The baptised are other christs, and they are called evermore so to become by sacramental—principally, Eucharistic—transformation. Whilst they remain under the spell of Enlightened man, that warlock who has conjured modernity, and before whom the Church’s hierarchy presently quakes, the Church’s members will continue to stagger and their mission will increasingly ebb. Tomberg claimed that the time had come for the Church to engage once more with the Hermetic way, to discern what could be embraced within the broad sphere of Christian spirituality and what couldn’t be accommodated. Such an engagement may now be a pressing necessity.
Again, I declare that Christ alone can rescue His Church, but we have ousted Him in a diabolic effort to divorce Bride from Bridegroom. We have lost the primacy of the supernatural: however much the Lord may seek to rescue His Church from its current trajectory of self-destruction, He finds a Church whose members largely don’t believe they need rescuing. They are under a spell, and that spell must be broken. Perhaps the sacred magic of Hermes Trismegistus is what’s needed to banish the black magic of Enlightened man. And thereby, we may begin to retrieve meaning, and in turn start the Church’s process of humbling itself before the true King of the Universe.
When one enters the Cathedral of Siena, the first thing one sees is a huge 15th century floor mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus welcoming one onto the path of theocentric wonder, by which one may learn the wisdom to humble oneself before He who resides in the sanctuary at the other end of the building. Perhaps having so humbled itself, the Church’s government may recover some of its lost authority. There’s no chance of that, though, until the hierarchy is freed from the bewitchment of modernity, to take up its mission once more of sanctifying the faithful and making disciples of all nations, rather than yielding to the unbaptised world—which is the principality of Satan, and its incessant enemy.
