I presented in Part I some of the ways in which the Church has entered what I call its post-authority epoch. As Christians have accepted that they must treat the Church’s authoritative offices with evermore suspicion, they’ve asked themselves—tacitly or otherwise—what it means to “follow the Lamb wherever He goes” in an institution that is largely repudiating His mission (Apocalypse 14:4). In response, many have intensified their personal devotional lives and focused on cultivating the habits of intimacy with God. As this progressively becomes the only option, Christians—I have suggested—will likely need to be more open to a broader spiritual tradition which has been at home in the Church sometimes less and sometimes more, depending on the era.
In the early 1460s, Marsilio Ficino, one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance, was working on the newly rediscovered Platonic dialogues (brought to the West during the Council of Florence, which incidentally achieved the reunification of Catholics and Orthodox for half a century) and he was beginning to write his comprehensive commentary of these dialogues under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Then, unexpectedly, he was given a Greek copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus—the central mystery text of esoteric transformation. Ficino immediately stopped his work to focus all his efforts on translating it into Latin. What Ficino soon realised was that out of the Hermetic traditions, along with those of Platonism and Neoplatonism, emerged a metaphysical language expressive of the vertical vision of the cosmos common to all religious traditions. From this Ficino derived a notion, later developed by his brilliant student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: the prisca theologia—the ancient theology that underpins all natural religion, which is illumined and transfigured by the renewing power of grace that belongs to supernatural religion.
The vertical vision of reality that lies at the heart of the prisca theologia, which has all but vanished from the purview of the Western mind due to the spells—curses, in fact—of rationalism and materialism, also constitutes the fundamental ontological structure on which Thomas Aquinas erected his theology two centuries before Ficino began his work. (Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that Aquinas’s teacher, the Doctor of the Church, Albert the Great, was a dedicated Hermeticist and astrologer.)
For Aquinas, the universe is made up of individuals, and yet those individuals possess a universality by their logical participation in species classes and genera. So, each individual being has an essence which it shares with other beings. Such things share essences because they participate in a logical likeness (species and genus) in the divine mind, and they exist as individuals because they participate in a likeness of an idea of them as individuals in the divine mind. Put simply: I exist because God thinks of me. But I also exist because God, having created an essence of me from the exemplar idea of me in His mind, has held that created essence together with an ‘act of existence’ in a single substance (that I call myself). In sum: I exist because God thinks of me and wills that I exist.
The take home lesson of this metaphysical digression is that, for Aquinas, everything that exists reflects God inasmuch as it reflects an idea in His mind, and also everything reflects God by having existence, thereby reflecting He who is existence. This is Aquinas’s theory of the dual-exemplarism of creation. The universe, then, for Aquinas, is one great Icon of God. When an iconographer dies, however, that doesn’t entail the destruction of the icon; but according to Aquinas were God to stop thinking of the universe for one instant, the whole thing would vanish. Thus, the relation of creation to the Creator is perhaps more like the relation of song to singer. J.R.R. Tolkien, in fact, captured this notion in his “Ainulindalë” creation account in The Silmarillion: angelic co-creators produce a music of essences taught to them by the Creator, to which the Creator grants existence, and out of the celestial chorus the material cosmos unfolds.
The Neoplatonic ontology of Aquinas was generally neglected by the Catholic seminary manualists of the last few centuries, bewitched as so many were with the assumptions of rationalism. For natural theology, they preferred to focus on the famous Five Ways, to which Aquinas devoted one article of the Summa Theologica, and largely ignored the deeper ontology that undergirded the other 2,668 articles of that work. Thankfully, due to the efforts of the so-called ‘existential Thomist’ school—with figures such as Cornelio Fabro, Louis-Bertrand Geiger, and W. Norris Clarke, and more recent scholars like John F. Wippel and Gregory T. Doolan—a felicitous recovery of this ontology is taking place.
Fabro himself noted that a century or so before the hex of rationalism ensorcelled the Western mind, Ficino—as a proto-existential Thomist—had been tracing this Neoplatonic ontology in the writings of Aquinas:
One philosopher who was decidedly on his way to seeing in Thomas the metaphysical tension… grounded in the notion of participation, was Marsilio Ficino, the prince of Humanism of the Quattrocento. In his major work, the Theologica Platonica, he acknowledges the principal theses of Thomistic metaphysics and, while recalling the notion of participation, he fights against the triumphant Averroism with the same arguments used by St. Thomas, whom he calls “the bright light of Christian theology.” Had his voice been heard, many useless disputes within the orders would have been avoided.
I want to suggest that the Church is now stuck in a rut, and consequently is unable to respond both to its own crisis of authority and to the overshadowing of meaning in the West. We waste time on “useless disputes,” to pick up Fabro’s words, rather than breaking out of the paradigm that has entrenched us in this double crisis in the first place. In the High Renaissance, when the writing of the scientific revolution was on the wall, about to burst onto the European scene to banish all metaphysical insight and conceptually level the cosmos in one great sweep, Ficino was drawing out from the Church’s most orthodox sources an account of creation as both celestial music and sacred icon of the Godhead. Perhaps Ficino was able to see the need for this because besides being a Christian humanist and a holy priest, Ficino was a Hermetic magician.
The Hermeticist and Catholic convert Valentin Tomberg explicitly framed the role of Hermeticism in the modern age as the rejection of rationalism, and the privileging of the concrete over all reductionist, isolated concepts detached from reality. In Meditations on the Tarot, which was published posthumously and anonymously in 1980, Tomberg wrote:
The Hermetic-philosophical sense (or initiate sense) is that of concrete spiritual realities. The Hermeticist explains facts not by laws obtained by abstraction nor, much less still, by principles obtained by active abstraction, but rather by proceeding from abstract facts to more concrete beings in order to arrive at that which is the most concrete, that alone in existence which is absolute concrete, i.e., God. Because for the initiate sense God is that which is most real, and therefore most concrete. In fact, amongst all that exists, God is that alone which is absolutely real and concrete, whilst created beings are only relatively real and concrete; and what we designate as ‘concrete fact’ is in reality only an abstraction from divine reality.
This, in a nutshell, is the ‘deeper worldview’ of Christian hermeticism. This is the vision that allows one to see spiritual realities not as speculative concepts that may or may not have some causal relation to one’s life, but really see them as concrete realities. Having made its own the ontology that accommodates the revelation of God, the Hermetic mind, according to Tomberg, moves from the doctrines known as stated propositions to an existential encounter with the realities those doctrines convey, ultimately to the encounter with God Himself, present everywhere. All, then, is seen in the light of God’s existence as the absolute reality on which everything rests, and everything is seen as relative to that secure and unchanging reality.
The Enlightenment, by its fragmentation of the mind into adversative parts that were once in harmony with one another under the old realism of the Western intelligence, bled out meaning from the world and thus made any encounter with God—of whom the world had hitherto been understood as a created communication—considerably difficult, if not impossible. Enlightenment Rationalism reduced reason to the possession of abstract principles that were judged to be more real than the chaotic concrete realities from which such principles became progressively unanchored. Of course, such a truncated conception of reason couldn’t account for a vast range of human experience. In turn, Enlightenment Romanticism sprung up in an attempt to rescue what had been cut by rationalism from the human horizon. But having accepted the premises of rationalism—namely that reality ‘out there’ is reducible to the mere measurable and quantifiable—the Romantics located the realm of meaning, belonging, affectivity, and intimacy, in enclosed impulses of the mind rather than seeing them as responses to the way the world actually is. Hence, the Romantic movement was typically accompanied by a solipsistic melancholy that stood in contrast to the naïve optimism of rationalism’s confidence. By the time this process of dismantling the once integrated Western mind was complete, it was held that if God did exist, he was probably a neurochemical in the prefrontal cortex.
If the faithful are to uncover a path out of the dual crisis of authority and meaning to which I referred above, which are themselves downstream from the initial Enlightenment spell, the faithful will have to double-down on the devotional life. That will require a full recovery of the theocentrism that is antithetical to the ‘Enlightened,’ abstractionist, materialist paradigm of modernity. This cultivation of, as it were, a pre-modern conception of the world, is one I’ve pursued for years. When I wander with my whippet in the fields, woods, or along the canals near my home in Bedfordshire, I behold the disclosing of the Godhead in time: the ongoing creative will of the Father, rendered intelligible through the Eternal Logos, animated and renewed by the Spirit. I’m not embarrassed to say that I’m often stirred to fall onto my knees and praise Him (behaviour that nearby farmers find alarming).
The urgent necessity before us is that of re-enchanting the cosmos in which we find ourselves (as the topmost part), and doing so not by superimposing meaning onto it as if it were otherwise nothing but purposeless blobs in a vacuum. We must break the spell of the Enlightened man, who can only superficially be a Christian, and recover the vision of the cosmos as God’s Icon by which God conveys Himself here and now. In short, I suggest, the venture of slowly salvaging our crumbling civilisation will start with the death of the Enlightened man and the rebirth of the Hermetic man. Indeed, the Hermetic vision may be exactly what’s needed to break out of the modern paradigm. And if that’s correct, then no sooner should the Hermetic vision be attained than it must be united to the Gospel proclamation and the sacramental power of the Church, otherwise it will rapidly degenerate into something indistinguishable from New Ageism, further plunging the West into the frustration of mere natural religion. Consider the following passage by the theologian and writer Stratford Caldecott:
The New Age can… be understood as a reaction, or set of reactions, to the atomic individualism of post-Enlightenment modernity, and to the social fragmentation and alienation associated with this. In its negative aspect, it presents a picture of the self desperately battering against the bars of its own cage, trying to find a way out, but constrained by one or other unexamined assumption of modernity. It seeks to submit to an authority, but will no longer look in the one place where genuine authority is to be found. It seeks love, but it cannot bring itself to make a commitment. It seeks to respect and venerate nature, but at the same time it wants to escape the constraints of nature. It wants to become immortal, but at the same time to evolve into something different from itself. It wants to know everything, but not by becoming humble enough to learn. It wants to be free, but not by having to make a decision.
Every one of these aspirations of New Ageism marks a wholesome rejection of, as Caldecott puts it, “the atomic individualism of post-Enlightenment modernity.” Each of these aspirations represents a deep and sincere pursuit of the truth, accompanied by an error that can only find its corrective in the Christian life. Were the Church to resume its mission of preaching the Gospel, cutting through the coldness of the Enlightened heart of modern man, freeing him, and inducting him into the mystical life that is the Church’s gift, that ancient institution may begin to claw back some of its lost authority, too.
At present, what we’re witnessing in the secular West is the frustration of natural religion, unfulfilled by supernatural religion, haemorrhaging within the physicalist paradigm of modernity. The spirit of modern Western man is like a faulty pressure cooker that’s going to explode, and every attempt to fix the problem pushes him further into the false and malignant solutions of individualism, statism, transhumanism, and all the deceitful promises of the technological age that drive an ever-greater wedge between our condition and any reconciliation with God’s creation—and ultimately any meeting with Him.
Only by recovering a love for its own tradition as a gift providentially bestowed down the centuries, will the Church respond to the dual crisis of loss of meaning and loss of authority. As I say, it is possible that, to break the spell, the Church will have to turn once again to the Hermetic vision: “Hermeticism,” Tomberg tells us, “insofar as it is a living tradition—for more than thirty centuries—owes its life to the commandment ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ … Hermeticism lives and survives from century to century thanks to its essential faithfulness to the divine commandments ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’” The Church is thwarted in bestowing its gift upon mankind because, in its ongoing repudiation of its own tradition, it is currently preoccupied in killing its father and mother.
Eastern Orthodox Christians—who still largely fulfil the fourth commandment by loving tradition—are, in this regard, at a certain advantage. Latin Christians have long emphasised ‘assent,’ and hence the possession of ideas, over existential transformation through right worship (an emphasis that has only swelled due to the unexamined acceptance of the rationalist paradigm). It is unsurprising, then, that serious Catholicism is more likely to be found online—where ideas are offered and bought up—than in the local church. And those Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church, as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—are now being actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leader have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct.
This enthronement of Enlightened man has sucked life out of the Church-polity, and thus the community of the baptised has become jaded and weary. With this, the role of the Blessed Virgin, which is to offer human nature to the Eternal Logos for supernatural transformation, has become eclipsed. As Tomberg puts it:
The Virgin is not only the source of creative élan, but also of spiritual longevity. This is why the West, in turning away more and more from the Virgin, is growing old, i.e., it is distancing itself from the rejuvenating source of longevity. Each revolution which has taken place in the West—that of the Reformation, the French revolution, the scientific revolution, the delirium of nationalism, the communist revolution—has advanced the process of aging in the West, because each signified a further distancing from the principle of the Virgin.
The Blessed Virgin brings spiritual regeneration to nature by welcoming the Logos into the inner chamber. Inasmuch as the Virgin is permitted to take up her role of co-creative mediatrix, the West, which is her child, may unite within itself a sacral humanity with the Eternal Logos in a single, integrated, personal civilisation—as she once did with her Fiat to the Archangel. The cycle of revolution and repudiation, from which the West will never escape under Enlightened man, is rapidly aging the West, and it will continue to do so until the West obeys the fourth commandment and re-inducts itself into its tradition. This revolutionary cycle has now fully entered the inner life of the Church, for which reason the only hope of the West, namely the Church’s apostolic mission, has retreated into the shadows.
But what is this phenomenon called the West? It is the transfiguration by sanctifying grace of Hellenic wisdom, Roman imperialism and law, and the tradition of nations. Inasmuch as Christendom ever existed, it was merely the exoteric manifestation of this esoteric transformation. The principality of Satan and the City of Flesh are found in no particular place beyond the heart of man, and inasmuch as the world resembles the diabolic realm, it is merely reflecting the condition of man’s heart. Likewise, the Kingdom of God and the City of God can be found nowhere but in the heart of man. In which dominion we live depends upon interior conversion: it depends upon which paradigm we opt for. When the Hermetic Joseph de Maistre called Enlightened man “satanical,” this was not mere rhetoric or even metaphor; he was speaking at the deepest, most literal and univocal level.
“Behold, The Kingdom of God is Within You,” says the Lord (Luke 17:21). It is necessary that the spell of modernity be broken that the scales may fall, and this Kingdom be seen with the eyes of the spirit. This, I suggest, may be the new role of Hermeticism: to overcome the black magic of modernity with the sacred magic of the prisca theologia, that the unchaining of the Church may begin and its supernatural gifts be delivered once more. But can the Hermetic way really be reconciled to the Church, or will it always be in tension with orthodoxy? This will be the topic of Part III.
