The Catholic Problem with "Magic"
(A response to Morello)
by John Lamont
x
 |
| Saul and the Witch of Endor (Victoria and Albert Museum) |
Sebastian Morello has written a rather characteristic response to the criticism I made of him in an article in Rorate Caeli. Some observations about his response may cast light on the important issues involved in the debate over his views.
The average reader may desire some justification for the claim that the issues in question are important ones. Why should Catholics care about the Neoplatonists, a philosophical school that existed between the 3rd and 6th centuries A.D., or about theurgy and Hermeticism (whatever those things are)? What does it matter if I am right about them and Morello is wrong, or vice versa?
Firstly, the stakes in this debate are high. Morello's view is that Neoplatonism is the philosophy of the Fathers of the Church and indeed of the Church herself. Neoplatonism is also the philosophical partner and underpinning of theurgy and Hermeticism, which Morello accurately calls practical Neoplatonism. Morello claims that this partnership of theoretical Neoplatonism with theurgy and hermeticism is valuable if not essential for Catholics, because it recalls Catholics to a essential element of their tradition and makes possible and requires the rejection of Enlightenment modernity. He asserts that a number of thinkers – Wolfgang Smith, Valentin Tomberg, Jean Borella – hold legitimate positions that are compatible with Catholicism and contain valuable insights. I claim that Morello's assertion of the truth of Neoplatonism is contrary to the Catholic faith, because Neoplatonism contradicts Catholicism; that his description of Christian liturgy as baptised theurgy is blasphemous and sacrilegious; that his recommendation of Hermeticism as found in the Corpus Hermeticum is a recommendation of superstitious practices that are of demonic origin and that violate the First Commandment, and that the 'Catholic thinkers' that he recommends are syncretists who attack and reject the First Commandment.
Secondly, Morello has opportunities, and has had some success, in promoting his ideas. He is a philosophy professor at St. Mary's, Twickenham, a historically Catholic university (albeit 'an inclusive London university where students are celebrated for who they are'). He is a contributor and editorial board member of the European Conservative magazine. He has been published by respectable Catholic presses, and he is vigorously defended by some well-known figures in the Catholic traditionalist world. His connections with the traditionalist world provide an excellent opportunity for its enemies to attack and discredit traditionalism. Morello is also part of a wider movement that extends much further than Catholic circles, as the authors that he cites indicate. The paganism and superstition promoted by these authors are a perennial element in human history and a perennial danger to Christianity. These are always worth combatting; and we can learn something valuable about the central Christian truths that these falsehoods oppose in the course of combatting them. For all these reasons, an answer to his response is worth making. This raises the question of the form this answer should take. To determine the right form, we must look at Morello's response.
Morello's response
Morello's approach to my criticism is to assert that I have completely misunderstood his positions, and that my discussion of Neoplatonism and Catholic tradition shows ignorance of the subject matter and of scholarship on this subject matter. He begins by addressing my failures more in sorrow than in anger:
Lamont has often shown himself to be a thoughtful writer ... One can imagine my disappointment, then, when I read Lamont’s paper and found that, whilst it contained some interesting history of classical philosophy and its relationship with Christian intellectual culture, insofar as it claimed to respond to my writings, it comprised a sequence of attacks on straw men. Fellow academics in both theology and philosophy who are familiar with my writings and who kindly read Lamont’s piece at my request were all equally surprised at the “misrepresentation” of my thought and the “tendentious character” of Lamont’s arguments. It is frustrating to observe an otherwise thoughtful person so manifestly miss the mark.
As he proceeds, his patience with me lessens:
Lamont is apparently unaware that there is now a vast amount of scholarship on the role of Plotinian and Neoplatonic participation-emanation metaphysics in Christian philosophy and theology. I would encourage him to study the works of Cornelio Fabro, Louis-Bertrand Geiger, John F. Wippel, W. Norris Clarke, and Gregory T. Doolan among others, all of whom I’ve written about—another fact of which Lamont appears uninformed.
He no longer minces his words, as the catalogue of my errors grows longer:
In dismissing my work, Lamont judges it expedient to link my thought to that of René Guénon, whom he associates with “magic and the occult”. It is obvious that Lamont knows little if anything about Guénon. The analysis of Enlightenment and modernity which Guénon offered from the perspective of classical realist metaphysics, centred on the correlative principles of act and potency, is among the most devastating available. The not uncritical utilising of Guénonian thought by Catholic writers such as Jean Borella, Wolfgang Smith, Stratford Caldecott, Jean Hani, Robert Bolton and others is yet another current of 20th and 21st century Catholic scholarship of which Lamont seems totally unaware.
Finally, I am consigned to the outer darkness along with the rest of his detractors: 'From what is a long essay, I have abstracted the few attempts to address what’s actually in my writing. ... Lamont successfully joins a small chorus of people who attack straw men whom they think are me.'
I am of course at a disadvantage in comparison to Morello when it comes to understanding his writings, since I am not able to know what he had in his mind when he wrote. I can only go by the public meaning of the English he uses. If we judge his work by this public meaning, it is easy to see that my essay addressed his positions.
The essay criticized Neoplatonic metaphysics and his claims about this metaphysics. Morello makes the following claims about Neoplatonism:
Neoplatonism—which had its origins in a philosophical school that competed with the Church for supremacy in the Greco-Roman world—provided to the Church the metaphysical structure it required to comprehend the view of creation it had received in narrative form through the Holy Scriptures. ... The mystico-philosophy of Neoplatonism and the revelation of the Christian religion were synthesised in the early Church and together became the foundations of theology, both Latin and Greek, in the Patristic age. ... whilst Neoplatonism largely competed against Christianity in the Church’s early centuries, the latter soon baptised the fundamental insights of Neoplatonism, making its metaphysics the vital framework within which Patristic theology developed.
In addition to defending what he calls 'Christian Neoplatonism', Morello defends what he calls 'practical Neoplatonism, namely theurgy', as espoused in the writings of the Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus. Here and elsewhere, he appeals to a number of writers as authorities for his assessment of theurgy as something valuable and positive. He writes in response to another critic:
One of the major advantages of appealing to both the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions is that they are, in general, deeply anti-Gnostic, going back to Plotinus’s attack on the Gnostics in 2:9 of The Enneads and continuing all the way to Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot (see pages 5-6 of that book). Rather than a Gnostic view of the world as an Ahrimanic prison from which we must seek escape—a view of creation which the Enlightenment reintroduced through the backdoor via Cartesian anthropology and Baconian cosmology—I try to present a different view of the world, one as the first book of divine revelation, alongside Holy Writ, as the Fathers saw it. It is precisely such a view, in their highly erudite attack on the prejudices and assumptions of modernity, that I trace in many thinkers termed ‘perennialist’. Perennialism is a diverse school of thought that holds that common themes recur across religions and philosophies, illuminating certain universal truths about the nature of the world, human nature, and morality. It has hence been deeply bound up with presenting an anti-Enlightenment worldview amid a post-Enlightenment culture. The dialogue between the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition and the works of the perennialists has been fruitful, with such figures as Bernard Kelly, Jean Borella, Wolfgang Smith, and Stratford Caldecott among others all more or less connected with it. ... It is very obvious that those calling out in shrill tones against such a fruitful area of Catholic thought are doing so from near-total, if not indeed total, ignorance. https://onepeterfive.com/to-achieve-clarity-to-avoid-scandal-some-statements-on-christian-re-enchantment/ ... Thinkers such as Wolfgang Smith, Jean Hani, Jean Borella, Valentin Tomberg, and Stratford Caldecott, and Eastern Christian thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov and Vladimir Solovyov, have been for me guiding lights, though I wholly acknowledge that their works are not without their imperfections. https://www.traditionsanity.com/p/snuffing-the-pyre-a-reply-to-michael#footnote-3-165417836
In my essay, I argued that Neoplatonic metaphysics was not adopted by the Church as the metaphysical structure she needed to comprehend the view of creation given in the Scriptures, that Neoplatonic metaphysics is incompatible with Christianity, and that theurgy and Hermeticism are superstitious practices of demonic origin that are forbidden by the First Commandment. The entire content of the essay directly engages with the texts from Morello cited above.
Morello frames his criticism of my ignorance of the subject matter in terms of what I seem to him to be doing; apparently unaware of this, seemingly unaware of that. Why do I seem to him to be doing these things? Well, it seems to me that it seems to him that I am ignorant because I disagree with his positions. Morello is no doubt sincere in explaining disagreement with his views by my ignorance of the subject. He finds such ignorance in all his critics, not just myself; an indication of a deeply held conviction on his part. But the inference from disagreement to ignorance is not a conclusive argument. Other explanations might exist for the rejection of his views. It is therefore not sufficient for Morello to simply accuse his critics of ignorance. He must establish that their criticism is based on ignorance. In the case of Fabro, Geiger, Wippel, Clarke et al., Morello needs to identify some fact found in their works that demolishes a criticism I make. He does not do this. (I will in passing take Morello's claim that I am ignorant of the work of W. Norris Clarke as an occasion to memorialize Fr. Clarke, a very fine gentleman whose presiding over the meetings of the International St. Thomas Society at the American Philosophical Association conferences I greatly enjoyed on the occasions when I was able to attend.)
Morello's accusations of ignorance are fallacious in logic, but an effective debating technique. An honest reply that addressed my criticisms would make specific claims that are open to counterargument. Few people have much knowledge of the scholarship on St. Thomas and Neoplatonism, so his claims of superior expertise can only be disproved by a comprehensive scholarly analysis of the subject, which will be detailed and hard to follow for those new to the subject. To the uninitiated, the very fact of giving a long and detailed response is suspect; if I am in the right, why can this not be easily demonstrated? The blanket accusation of ignorance is thus hard to counter effectively.
This debating technique gives a clue to Morello as a thinker. His views have no intellectual weight in themselves. But although he is not a serious scholar, he is a serious man. He knows what he is doing and is good at it. If he restricted himself to clearly expressing his core positions, which flatly contradict the Catholic faith, then he would not get an audience among Catholics. He would simply be another enthusiast for esotericism. But his assertions about Neoplatonism, the Enlightenment, and the evils of modern society serve as a smokescreen for his esotericism, which can be advanced under its cover. His lack of scholarship is actually helpful here. If his account of Neoplatonism was clear and accurate, it would not be serviceable as a smokescreen. By ranging over a wide variety of topics that are little known to non-specialists, making vague important-sounding pronouncements about them, avoiding reference to specific details where he could be caught out, changing the subject when challenged, responding to criticisms that no-one has made rather than the actual objections raised to his views, and making ad hominem attacks on his critics (which go as far as threats of litigation – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDqRqnLNag), Morello manages to make a good impression on the ill-informed, muddle the issue when his views are criticised, and gain acceptance as a legitimate Catholic voice holding positions that are at least permissible for Catholics if not always correct.
Getting a heterodox view accepted as permissible, as opposed to getting it accepted as actually true, is a very important tactic for subverting the faith – it is the stock in trade of modernists. Most people do not think they are doing anything important by accepting a view as a permissible one for a Catholic to hold. Since accepting something as permissible leaves the option of rejecting it as false, such acceptance is not seen as objectionable – rather the opposite: denying the permissibility of holding an opinion tends to be considered suspect, a crushing of freedom of speech, an exercise in left-wing cancellation and slamming the Overton window shut, etc..
This attitude, while reasonable under some circumstances, is not permissible in matters of faith. That is because faith does not require mere refusal to deny its teachings, but firm, total and unquestioning belief in them. Newman states this:
What is faith? it is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God. ... You will say indeed, that we accept a number of things which we cannot prove or see, on the word of others; certainly, but then we accept what they say only as the word of man; and we have not commonly that absolute and unreserved confidence in them, which nothing can shake. We know that man is open to mistake, and we are always glad to find some confirmation of what he says, from other quarters, in any important matter; or we receive his information with negligence and unconcern, as something of little consequence, as a matter of opinion; or, if we act upon it, it is as a matter of prudence, thinking it best and safest to do so. We take his word for what it is worth, and we use it either according to our necessity, or its probability. We keep the decision in our own hands, and reserve to ourselves the right of reopening the question whenever we please. This is very different from Divine faith; he who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. ('Faith and Private Judgment', https://newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse10.html).
Here we find the key to Morello's strategy. Many Catholics have given some credit to his ideas, without realizing that these ideas are contrary to the faith. This is not so blameable on their part; his statements are contorted and wrapped in mystery, and they deal with phenomena such as theurgy, Hermeticism, and Neoplatonism that most Catholics have never heard of. These Catholics are materially but not formally guilty of sin against the faith when they treat his ideas as possibly true. But then when someone comes along and points out that the ideas they are entertaining are contrary to the faith, their amour propre is wounded. So Morello gains a cheerleading squad that ignores the arguments against him or rejects these arguments in the face of the evidence, and that attacks his critics and works to discredit them.
The important thing is not whether Morello personally engages in occultist activities, perhaps using his whippet Pico as a familiar. That is his concern, and I am quite willing to accept any assurances he may offer that he does not engage in such activities. What matters is that he tries to convince Catholics that false and evil practices and philosophies – the Neoplatonism and theurgy of Iamblichus, the Hermeticism of the Corpus Hermeticum, the religious syncretism of Wolfgang Smith and Jean Borella – are valuable and compatible with the Catholic faith. Even if the Catholics that he persuades do not go on to engage in occultist activity, the very fact of their accepting Morello's 'Christian Hermeticism' as true or as a position that can be reasonably entertained is objectively a mortal sin against the Catholic faith.
To counter this threat, a brief refutation of Morello's position is insufficient, even if such a refutation were to be a logically sufficient one. His smokescreens need to be removed, and the realities they cover need to be displayed. This means giving a detailed account of Hermeticism, theurgy, the positions of St. Thomas and Dionysius the Areopagite on Neoplatonism, and the rejection of magic by the scientific revolution. Such an account is not exactly light reading. It does however provide essential information for the debate between Morello and his critics. Up to this point, neither Morello nor his critics have properly described what theurgy and Hermeticism actually are. When such a description has been given, the debate will be settled. More importantly, this description will show that Christianity has been the main force in establishing a scientific rather than a magical conception of the world.
Christian Neoplatonism? St. Thomas and Dionysius the Areopagite
Morello argues that I am wrong in claiming that Neoplatonic metaphysics was not adopted by the Church, and is incompatible with Christianity. He states:
Lamont claims that I am seeking to transpose Neoplatonism wholesale into the conceptual framework of Christianity. In fact, what I argue is that Neoplatonic metaphysics has already been purified, elevated, and in turn assumed into Christian intellectual culture, but on account of the success of Enlightenment rationalism we are unable adequately to engage with this aspect of our own intellectual heritage. ... I reject—explicitly so in my writings—the deterministic and quasi-pantheistic tendencies of classical Neoplatonism, and Plotinus’s own negative view of matter (as I reject aspects of Aristotle or any other classical philosopher which are incompatible with orthodox Christian doctrine). I do, however, endorse a baptised form of Neoplatonic participation-emanation metaphysics.
Here, Lamont will begin to claim—as he does in his essay—that ‘divine emanation’ is incompatible with Christianity. ... I accept that an un-Christian, deterministic form of emanation metaphysics is anathema to Christians. But a Christianised emanation metaphysics which sees creation’s relation to the Creator not as an artifact that discloses nothing of the divine nature and divine mind, but rather as an outflowing of God’s own inner life, which in turn reflects Him as the primordial ‘book’ of revelation, is not only compatible with Christianity but is the account of the Creator-creation relation that is indigenous to Christianity. The former view—that of creation as an arbitrary artifact—leads to deism, the latter view to a doxological theism. That is why, when Aquinas deals with the Creator-creation relation, he repeatedly uses the very word that Lamont condemns, namely ‘emanation’ (Summa Theologiae I, 45, 1).
Lamont concedes that Dionysius the Areopagite—the authority, as it happens, who is cited more than any other by Aquinas—incorporated Neoplatonic metaphysics into his theology. But then, bizarrely, Lamont fails to tell us whether it was wrong—or, to use Lamont’s words, advocating apostasy—for Dionysius to have done this. Lamont only observes that Dionysius altered the meaning of some terms and developed the concepts of Neoplatonism. Readers are left wondering, however, whether it was wrong in Lamont’s view for Dionysius to have done this. If it was not wrong, then presumably I too am permitted to join this tradition; if it was wrong, then surely Dionysius must be condemned by Lamont along with those who followed him, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.
This contains two arguments against my assertion that Neoplatonist metaphysics is incompatible with Christianity: i) I supposedly accept that Dionysius the Areopagite, the 5th century theologian of great authority, accepted Neoplatonist metaphysics, but Dionysius is perfectly orthodox and is followed by St. Thomas and Albert the Great; ii) St. Thomas himself accepted the Neoplatonist concept of emanation to describe creation.
In the essay that Morello criticizes, I pointed out that Dionysius rejects Neoplatonic metaphysics. I will try to spell out the argument made in the essay so as to eliminate as far as possible any misunderstanding.
- Dionysius the Areopagite is closer to the Neoplatonists than any other of the Fathers of the Church.
- Since Dionysius is closer to the Neoplatonists than any other of the Fathers, then if he rejects Neoplatonism then none of the Fathers accept Neoplatonism.
- Dionysius the Areopagite rejects Neoplatonism.
- Therefore, none of the Fathers accept Neoplatonism.
The details of Dionysius the Areopagite's rejection of Neoplatonism are given in my essay, including a passage from Dionysius in which he rejects the Neoplatonic structure of reality. He rejects all the ways in which Neoplatonic emanation is incompatible with Christianity; production of entities through emanation by more than one level of reality rather than solely by God, consequent absence of the Christian understanding of creation in Neoplatonism, the necessary character of emanation, the eternal character of emanation, the absence of any understanding or willing of emanation (or of anything else) by the One, and the explanation of emanation by the nature of the One rather than by its knowledge, will or choice. Morello states that he rejects the necessary character of Neoplatonic emanation in his supposedly 'baptized' Christian conception of Neoplatonic emanation, but he does not address the other ways in which this emanation cannot be reconciled with Christianity.
What is actually to be found in Dionysius and the other Fathers of the Church is not Christian Neoplatonism, but Christian Platonism. Plato, unlike Aristotle, did not present a single organised description of reality in his works. Plato's dialogues teem with theses, arguments, dilemmas, and uncertainties. We can be confident that Plato himself accepted some of these theses, at least for some parts of his career – as for example the existence of Platonic Forms – but he also provides some of the strongest objections to his own views. The richness and variety of his work goes beyond any single philosophical picture. This variety was extremely fruitful for philosophy, and justifies A. N. Whitehead's description of subsequent Western philosophy as 'footnotes to Plato'. The Neoplatonists were one school that emerged from Plato's thought. The Christian Platonists, who include the most important of the later Fathers of the Church, were another school. We have seen some of the characteristic features of Christian Platonism in St. Augustine in my earlier essay. The Christian Platonists borrowed ideas and themes from the Neoplatonists, but put them to different uses and often changed their meaning. What is found in Dionysius the Areopagite, as in St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and Boethius, is not Neoplatonism but Christian Platonism – a school of thought whose origins predate Neoplatonism, which originated with Plotinus in the 3rd century. It is a school that is fundamentally at odds with Neoplatonism in ways that I enumerated in my essay. St. Thomas's alleged 'Neoplatonism' is not Neoplatonic; it is Christian Platonism.
This can be seen by examining St. Thomas's position on Neoplatonic emanation. Morello argues for St. Thomas's acceptance of a Neoplatonic conception of emanation by pointing out that St. Thomas uses the word 'emanatio' to describe God's act of creation. This argument need not detain us. In fact, St. Thomas comprehensively rejects the Neoplatonic understanding of emanation. He argues that God does not create out of necessity or by his nature, but by his will and intelligence (Summa contra gentiles book II, ch. 23; cf. De potentia q. 3 a. 15), and that it is false that God must have always been causing the universe, so that it has no beginning in time (De potentia q. 3 a. 17). He rejects the Neoplatonic thesis of the eternal existence of souls and other spiritual substances: 'it is contrary to Christian teaching that spiritual substances should be said to derive their origin from the highest deity in such a way that they should have been from eternity—as the Platonists and the Peripatetics held.' (De substantiis separatis ch. 18.) He rejects the Neoplatonist idea that there is more than one hypostasis from which reality emanates – 'we do not assert that the Father and the Son differ in substance, which was the error of Origen and Arius, who in this followed the Platonists' (Summa theologiae 1a q. 32. a. 1 ad 1). He rejects the Neoplatonic position that every level of being in brought into being by the level immediately above it, and causes only the level of being immediately below it;
Certain people have strayed from the truth concerning their mode of being by taking away from spiritual substances an origin in a first and highest author. ... Others held that these substances had indeed a cause of being but they did not proceed immediately from the highest and first principle, but the lower ones among them derived their being from the higher ones according to a certain orderly succession. (De substantiis separatis ch. 9). ... other thinkers, considering these and similar points, assert that all things do indeed derive the origin of their being from the first and highest principle of things whom we call God, yet they do not do so immediately but in a certain order. Since the first principle of things is absolutely one and simple, they thought that only that which is one proceeded from him. And although this effect be more simple and more one than all the other lesser things, it falls short of the simplicity of the first principle, insofar as it is not its own being but is a substance having being. This substance they call the first intelligence, from which they say that it is possible for a plurality of beings to proceed. For, according as the first intelligence is turned to the understanding of its simple and first principle, they say that the second intelligence proceeds from it. Then, according as it understands itself in terms of the intellectuality in it, it produces the soul of the first sphere; but according as it understands itself in terms of that which is potential within it, the first body proceeds from it. And thus, according to a certain order down to the lowest bodies, they determine the procession of things from the first principle. This is the position of Avicenna, which seems to be presupposed in the Book of Causes.
But it is immediately evident that this position is open to criticism. For the good of the universe is stronger than the good of any particular nature. Since the nature of the good and of the end is the same, if anyone withdraws the perfection of the effect from the intention of the agent, he destroys the nature of the good in the particular effects of nature or art. For this reason, Aristotle criticized the opinion of the ancient naturalists, who posited that the forms of the things that are generated by nature and other natural goods are not intended by nature but come about from the necessity of matter. All the more unbefitting is it therefore that the good of the universe proceed not from the intention of the universal agent but by a certain necessity in the order of things. Moreover, if the good of the universe (which consists in the distinction and order of its parts) does come from the intention of the first and universal agent, then it is necessary that the very distinction and order of the parts of the universe preexist in the intellect of the first principle. And because things proceed from him as from a principle with an intellect, which acts in accordance with conceived forms, we may not posit that from the first principle—even though it is simple in its essence—there proceeds only one effect; and that it is from another being, according to the mode of its composition and power, there proceeds a multitude, and so on. This would mean that such a distinction and order in things proceeded from a certain necessity in things and not from the intention of the first agent. (De substantiis separatis ch. 10).
This is all aimed directly at the Neoplatonist position, which he encountered in Avicenna and in the Book of Causes, a work he correctly identified as being an edited and partly altered revision of a work by the Neoplatonist Proclus. He cites Dionysius as an authority in opposing Neoplatonism:
In the fourth chapter of On the Divine Names, [the Blessed Dionysius] says that because of the rays of divine goodness, all intelligible and intellectual substances and powers and operations were established. Because of these rays, they are and live and have an inexhaustible life. Furthermore, he expressly states that all spiritual substances and not only the highest were immediately produced, in the fifth chapter of On the Divine Names: ... he gives us to understand that all the orders of spiritual substances are established by divine disposition and not from the fact that one of them is caused by another. ...
Likewise, it is repugnant to Christian teaching that spiritual substances should have goodness, being, and life, and other such attributes that pertain to their perfection, from different principles. For in the canonical Scriptures, it is attributed to the one and the same God that he is the very essence of goodness. ... And Dionysius most expressly teaches this truth in the fifth chapter of On the Divine Names, when he says that sacred doctrine does not say that to be good is one thing and to be a being is another and that life or wisdom is something else, nor that there are many causes and lesser productive deities of whom some extended to some things and others to others. In this statement he removes the opinion of the Platonists who posited that the very essence of goodness was the highest God, under whom there was another god who is being itself and so forth, with the rest as has been said above [in ch. 11]. (De substantiis separatis ch. 18).
It is thus not the case that St. Thomas baptized the Neoplatonic conception of emanation; this would have been impossible, because it is incompatible with Christianity in all of its aspects. He deliberately rejected it in its entirety.
Morello says that his Christianised emanation metaphysics 'sees creation’s relation to the Creator not as an artifact that discloses nothing of the divine nature and divine mind, but rather as an outflowing of God’s own inner life, which in turn reflects Him as the primordial ‘book’ of revelation', and is 'not only compatible with Christianity but is the account of the Creator-creation relation that is indigenous to Christianity. The former view—that of creation as an arbitrary artifact—leads to deism, the latter view to a doxological theism.' He asserts:
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 universe, then, for Aquinas, is one great Icon of God. ...
In the High Renaissance, ... [Marsilio] 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. ... 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.
Morello mentions both participation and emanation, which are different things. The notion of participation is important in St. Thomas's metaphysics. It refers to the connection between a thing and a higher attibute that characterizes that thing, but that the thing does not exemplify. A man exemplifies the attribute of humanity, because human nature is literally and completely present in him. A man participates in goodness and being by being good and existing, but cannot fully possess goodness itself and being itself in the way that he fully possesses human nature. St. Thomas's understanding of participation is not that of the Neoplatonists, who think that lower entities participate in one way in the One, and in another way in the distinct Ideas of the Intellect, the second hypostasis after the One.
Morello gives both participation and emanation as a basis for the idea of creation as 'God's Icon', which in turn is supposed to be the position of Hermeticism and of all religions. It is hard to address Morello's position, which is expressed in vague and metaphorical terms. It seems to be a garbled and undigested version of ideas put forward by John F. Wippel, W. Norris Clarke and Cornelio Fabro, ideas which were not always clearly formulated by their originators. These ideas are then used in a rather opaque manner to argue for the value of Hermeticism. Morello describes these scholars as belonging to the ‘existential Thomist’ school, but in fact this term refers to Étienne Gilson and his associates, who insisted on the act of existence as central to St. Thomas's metaphysics and vehemently argued for the incompatibility of St. Thomas and Plotinus. Morello's misuse of this term does not give one great confidence in his grasp of Thomistic scholarship. This is in contrast to his discussions of esotericism, which make up most of his speaking and writing and are well informed. One gets the impression that esotericism is his main interest, and that St. Thomas is brought in to support it.
Morello presents a false dichotomy when he claims that creation’s relation to the Creator is either an artifact that discloses nothing of the divine nature and divine mind, or an outflowing of God’s own inner life, which in turn reflects Him as the primordial ‘book’ of revelation. It would be impossible for creation to disclose nothing at all about God, because any creation and any action necessarily says something about the cause that produces them – if only that they exist, and that they have the power to produce such effects. But creation, as necessarily finite, always falls infinitely short of revealing the divine nature, and it is not an outflowing of God's inner life. It proves that the Creator is infinite, because only an infinite being can create ex nihilo, but does not indicate what His infinite nature is. The divine ideas of the things that are created are not separate ideas of their essences, as is the case in Neoplatonism, but God's own idea of Himself in which all actual and possible reality is virtually contained. The description of creation as 'God's Icon' is at best misleading. An icon is an image of a thing for which homage to the image passes on to the thing portrayed. Creation is not the kind of image of God that can serve as an icon of Him, and honouring creation with the honour due to God is idolatry. God's inner nature is revealed not in creation but in the Christian revelation, and the outflowing of God's inner life is not creation, but the gift of sanctifying grace through Christ and the consequent participation of Christians in the life of the Holy Trinity.
Morello claims that Albert the Great accepted Neoplatonism. The reader may well be surfeited with detailed discussions of medieval philosophy at this point. I will only point out that Albert, like St. Thomas and following Dionysius the Areopagite, rejected the essential features of Neoplatonic metaphysics, and developed his own complex and not easily intelligible metaphysical synthesis (on this see e.g. A Companion to Albert the Great, esp. pp. 694-721). He was not a Hermeticist of any kind.
One may wonder why Morello insists in the face of the evidence on the value of Neoplatonism and the Neoplatonic character of Catholic tradition. The reason is that later Neoplatonism, the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and his successors, is necessary as a basis and justification for his enthusiasm for theurgy and Hermeticism. Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, was a polytheist, but held that human ascent to the One could only be achieved through ascetic and moral purification and intense concentration on philosophical reflection. This Plotinian programme for spiritual ascent, like the Platonic programme that inspired it, was self-consciously limited to a tiny number of intellectually favoured individuals. This was no good as a basis for a broad religious movement, as it left most of the human race incapable of substantial spiritual progress. Iamblichus broadened the appeal of Neoplatonism by denying that philosophy and asceticism on its own could lead to spiritual progress, and asserting that the road to spiritual progress was through obtaining the assistance of the gods beneath the One through participation in ritual acts. Morello rejects Plotinus's position on this matter, and adheres to the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. This is the correct approach for a Hermeticist, because Iamblichus both promotes theurgy and provides an metaphysical and religious underpinning for it. We have seen in my earlier essay that the polytheism, the anthropology, and the basic metaphysical structure of Neoplatonism are incompatible with Christianity. We must now consider the allied phenomena of theurgy and Hermeticism.
Theurgy and Hermeticism
Theurgy and Hermeticism are little known outside scholarly and esotericist circles, so an account of them that unfortunately must be given in some detail is needed to see what Morello is talking about in praising them. Theurgy consists in ritual actions that are supposed to bring their practitioners spiritual enlightenment from the gods. The surviving examples of theurgy are largely found in the Hermetic texts and in commentaries and remarks on the Chaldaean Oracles. The Chaldean Oracles were a collection of oracles of pagan gods in Greek hexameters that were purported to have been delivered by the gods to one Julian the Chaldean and/or his son Julian the Theurgist in the second century A.D.. They do not survive as a whole, but enough fragments and commentaries on them exist to provide a good idea of their contents and message.
The Hermetic texts are a collection of religious, astrological, and magical documents composed roughly between the 3rd century B.C. and the second century A.D., whose sole common attribute is their allegedly having been revealed by the god Hermes/Thoth; Thoth being the rough Egyptian equivalent of the Greek god Hermes. They are in Greek except for the Asclepius, a document that was translated into Latin and whose Greek original is lost. The Asclepius provided St. Augustine with his knowledge of Hermeticism. There does not seem to be a simple relation of dependence between any of these documents; they all emerged from a common cultural and religious background, which is their main source.
The Neoplatonists of antiquity made little reference to the Hermetic texts, and presented the Chaldean Oracles as the source of theurgical knowledge. The Renaissance Neoplatonists whom Morello admires made more use of the Corpus Hermeticum.
Despite their overlaps, the differences between the theurgy of the Chaldean Oracles and the contents of the Hermetic texts mean that the two phenomena require individual consideration
Theurgy
Morello describes theurgy as follows:
... what of practical Neoplatonism, namely theurgy? In the writings of Iamblichus, theurgy is sharply distinguished from ‘goetia’, which is sorcery or black magic. Theurgy, as Iamblichus describes it, is the calling down into a hallowed place of benevolent spirits (translated as ‘angels’ and ‘archangels’ by Thomas Taylor in his 1821 edition of Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries of the Egyptians), that these spirits might operate as mediators between the practitioners and the One, increasing union between those practitioners and their Creator. ... I suggest, then, that what we observe in ancient theurgy is an elevated form of practical natural religion, and thus offers us a way to consider what is baptised, assumed, and superseded by supernatural religion. This in turn gives us a way of thinking about liturgy, by considering that from which liturgy arises, namely the assumption by supernature of what’s redeemable in nature, in this case our natural religiosity. Given the widespread liturgical confusion in our own time, such approaches are not without their usefulness.
Like all aspects of natural religion, theurgy remains under the dominion of the devil until it is baptised, and hence ceases to be natural religion. ... So, to answer Lamont’s query regarding why I do not directly respond to St Augustine’s criticisms of theurgy: because such criticisms align with my own critical engagement with theurgy. If Lamont wishes to attack what I write about theurgy, he would do well to attack what I actually write about theurgy.
Morello endorses Iamblichus's distinction between theurgy and black magic:
The Western world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and that they can be placed on people, animals, plants, fungi, and inanimate objects. And the Western world has always held that such curses can be banished by special words, special objects, and special concentration, which in that order it has been content to call ‘blessings,’ ‘sacramentals,’ and ‘prayer.’ In short, even the most orthodox in the West have always believed in what the Hermeticist calls the opposing forces of ‘goetia,’ or black magic, and ‘theurgy,’ or sacred magic—though they generally would not put it in such terms. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/incarnation-and-egregore-two-principles-in-opposition/
Morello omits any detailed description of what theurgy actually involves. Such a description is provided by Ruth Majercik in her translation and commentary on the surviving fragments of the Chaldean Oracles:
Christian sacramentalism, after all, is based on a theistic view which assumes an essential difference between Creator and creation. Thus, any sacramental act performed here below must ultimately depend for its effect on an irruption of the Divine into an otherwise natural order. In contrast, theurgy is based on an emanationist view which posits a "sympathetic" link between all aspects of the cosmos; the emphasis here is on sameness, not difference. Thus theurgy, unlike Christian sacramentalism, depends not on any inbreaking of the Divine but, rather, on a recognition of the Divine's presence in even the basest matter. (In this regard, see, e.g., Proclus, El. Th., props. 144 and 145.) ...
The term "conjunction" ... refers to the "communication" or "contact" (but not "union") of the theurgist (or magician) with a particular god or spirit. ... The principal means of effecting this contact was through the use of various invocations: the adept "called upon" the god by uttering his divine names, which amounted to a lengthy recitation of unintelligible vowel and consonant sounds. Such nomina barbara ... or voces mysticae ... are found throughout the magical papyri as well as in certain Gnostic and Hermetic texts and are a staple of late Antique magical practice. Although a cursory glance at these lists of sounds reveals what appears to be a random selection of so much vocal gibberish, closer scrutiny shows that there are definite patterns not only to the arrangements of the vowels and consonants, but also in terms of numerical equations, all of which had potent magical properties. By rhythmically chanting these sounds (which equalled the "hidden" or divine name of the god), the adept was able to effect the proper conjunction with the god. ... Psellus ... relates a Chaldean "covenant" involving the burying and digging up of certain purified "hylic" substances (e.g., spices, plants, stones) as a means of conjoining with the corresponding spirit of the plant or stone. The chief effect of this particular conjunction was to form a "compact" with the invoked spirit so that he would function as a ministering agent during the soul's ascent (and thus help ward off demonic attack). ... Another rite involved the actual "conjuring up" of a specific deity who would then prophesy to the theurgist. This process of conjuration could seemingly proceed in one of two ways: either by animating the god's statue or by a ritual of "binding" and "loosing." According to Psellus, ... this involved the placing of certain stones, herbs, even small animals ... within the cavity of a statue to establish a "sympathetic" relation with the god. Iamblichus (De myst., V.23) makes a similar statement... . A comparable rite is described in fragment 224 [of the Chaldean Oracles]... where Hecate gives instructions on how to fashion her "image;" ... in conjunction with a prayer (missing from the text but probably composed, in part, from nomina barbara ...).
F. 224: That even (the gods) themselves have advised how their statues ought to be made and from what kind of material, will be clear from the statements of Hecate to this effect:
"But execute my statue, purifying it as I shall instruct you. Make a form from wild rue and decorate it with small animals, such as lizards which live about the house. Rub a mixture of myrrh, gum, and frankincense with these animals, and out in the clear air under the waxing moon, complete this (statue) yourself while offering the following prayer."
The operative principle behind all these procedures is that of sympatheia, a notion which assumes a direct correspondence between a given deity and his or her symbolic representative in the animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds. Thus, by properly fashioning and consecrating the god's "material image" (and then placing it in the god's statue), he or she could be persuaded to appear (generally in the form of light) and answer the questions put to him by the theurgist. ... Again, it is a matter of a common magical practice appropriated by the theurgists for their own ends. The technique itself involved the "binding" of a god in a human medium (again, via the utterance of voces mysticae) and then "loosing" him (via similar formulae) when the rite was completed. ... what is important to stress here is that it was not the theurgist, but the god invoked, who had ultimate control over the rite. Although (as Lewy notes) the Chaldeans freely used the current vocabulary of conjuration .. they did not then claim to have power over the gods, as the gods themselves had communicated the very spells which would bind them. ... Prior to the rite, the officiants – or "caller" and "receiver" – ... underwent preliminary purifications of some kind (probably via fire and water). The actual presence of the god was manifest in various ways. Iamblichus, for example (see De myst., 111.5), describes several types of divine possession, each of which could be verified by certain physical reactions; e.g., levitation, bodily and facial movements, complete immobility, changes in voice, insensitivity to fire, etc. In addition, luminous apparitions often appeared, sometimes seen entering or leaving the medium's body. ... In fr. 146, for example, the deity invoked (probably Hecate) is said to appear in a variety ofluminous shapes; e.g., as a "fiery child," "sumptuous light," "dazzling horse," even a "formless fire" (from which the goddess communicated with the theurgist; cf. fr. 148). Proclus, on the other hand (following Iamblichus), distinguishes between autoptic visions (or those seen by the medium or receiver) and epoptic visions (or those viewed only by the caller) ... Dodds has likened these luminous visions to the "ectoplasm" of modern seances, and suggests that theurgic mediumship, in general, is not unlike that of present-day "spiritualism" ...
Magical Instruments and Objects
As Psellus describes it, this "magic wheel" (or lynx) was a golden sphere embedded with a sapphire and swung around by means of a leather strap. On the surface of the wheel magical characters were engraved. By swinging this wheel, the theurgist would imitate the motion of the heavenly spheres and thus "sympathetically" attract the celestial Iynges (which would then function as "messengers" between the theurgist and the gods). In addition, the swinging of this wheel could evidently be used for more profane ends. Marinus (Vita Procli 28; cf. fr. 208) tells us that Proclus, by using "certain lynxes" caused rain to fall in Attica, thus ending a serious drought. ... Brass instruments of some type (as well as birds) may also have been used in the Chaldean rites (see fr. 210 and notes), probably as an apotropaic means of warding off evil demons. ... Other apotropaic devices included the wearing of magical amulets, the offering of sacred stones (e.g., the mnizouris stone of fr. 149), as well as animal sacrifices. 81 None of this, of course, is original. Like all the rites discussed above, the use of instruments and objects was common magical fare. But in a theurgic context, these various practices take on salvific significance; the end result was not mere manipulation, but the very salvation of the soul. (Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text and Translation, pp. 24-30.)
Proclus described the Neoplatonic metaphysical theory that was supposed to explain why theurgy and magic works;
Prop. 145. For if the procession of existents extends as far as do the orders of gods (prop. l44), the distinctive character of the divine powers, radiating downwards, is found in every kind, since each thing obtains from its own immediate cause the distinctive character in virtue of which that cause received its being. I intend that if, for example, there be a purifying deity, then purgation is to be found in souls, in animals, in vegetables, and in minerals; so also if there be a protective deity, and the same if there be one charged with the conversion or the perfection or the vitalizing of things existent. ... The same account applies to the other characters. For all things, are dependent from the gods, some being irradiated by one god, some by another, and the series extend downwards to the last orders of being. (Proclus, Elements of Theology, tr. E. R. Dodds).
This account uses the Neoplatonic stepwise notion of production of reality by emanation. Each level of reality is produced by an emanation of existence from the level of reality immediately above it. The existence of the level being produced reflects the character of the existence of the level that does the producing. Hence, a purifying god will produce purifying things that reflect the god's own purifying nature, and that derive their purifying character from the god that produces them. This contrasts with the Christian notion, according to which all being is produced directly by God. Since God's being is infinite, the other beings He creates reflect his own being by existing themselves, but there is no specific character of existence that His creation must have, since the possible range of this creation by infinite being is unlimited.
The enthusiast for Neoplatonism Fr. Jean Trouillard asserted that theurgy works like the sacraments, producing its effects ex opere operato, that is, not from the power of the theurgist but from the power of the theurgical rites themselves (Troulliard, L'un et l'âme selon Proclos, p. 175). This misunderstands how the sacraments work and how theurgy is supposed to work.
Theurgy allegedly produces its effects through the nature of the things used in it. These things, whether, names, plants, actions, etc., are supposed to have natural meanings that belong to them intrinsically and are not conferred on them by convention. It is because of this natural meaning and the necessary connection between the meaning and the gods invoked by these meanings that theurgical rites produce their effects. The activity of the theurgist is confined to uttering these words and performing these rites, which will then produce their effects by their natural power. Iamblichus describes this process:
... it is not pure thought that unites theurgists to the gods. Indeed what, then, would hinder
those who are theoretical philosophers from enjoying a theurgic union with the gods? But the situation is not so: it is the accomplishment of acts not to be divulged and beyond all conception, and the power of the unutterable symbols, understood solely by the gods, which establishes theurgic union. Hence, we do not bring about these things by intellection alone; for thus their efficacy would be intellectual, and dependent upon us. But neither assumption is true. For even when we are not engaged in intellection, the symbols themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable power of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognises the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought. For it is not in the nature of things containing to be aroused by those contained in them, nor of things perfect by things imperfect, nor even of wholes by parts. Hence it is not even chiefly through our intellection that divine causes are called into actuality; but it is necessary for these and all the best conditions of the soul and our ritual purity to pre-exist as auxiliary causes; but the things which properly arouse the divine will are the actual divine symbols. (De mysteriis II.11, Clarke, Dillon, Herschbell eds. and trs. p. 115).
St. Augustine rejected the idea that things have a natural meaning, and used this rejection to argue against the efficacy of magic and theurgy. He correctly held that the meaning of words and their components – which are essential to theurgy – is determined not by nature, but by convention; 'to take an illustration, the same figure of the letter X, which is made in the shape of a cross, means one thing among the Greeks and another among the Latins, not by nature, but by agreement and pre-arrangement as to its signification.' He maintained that the meaning of the symbols involved in divination and other magical activities is based on the deceits of the demons, who trick men into ascribing a meaning to these symbols and believing that these meanings have some intrinsic power. 'For it was not because they had meaning that they were attended to, but it was by attending to and marking them that they came to have meaning. And so they are made different for different people, according to their several notions and prejudices. For those spirits which are bent upon deceiving, take care to provide for each person the same sort of omens as they see his own conjectures and preconceptions have already entangled him in.' (De doctrina christiana, ch. 24).
St. Thomas developed this position of St. Augustine's. The question of whether words have a natural or a conventional meaning was raised by Plato in his Cratylus. Aristotle in his De interpretatione 16a20–29 had accepted the conventional character of linguistic signs, and St. Thomas followed him on this. He argued that the utterance of conventional signs by humans has no power in itself to produce results, and hence that any such utterance can only seek to produce results by acting on some intellectual being that perceives the signs and is moved to action by their meaning. Magic uses signs and seeks to produce some result that does not arise from human powers or the natural power of things; it uses conventional signs, it is not addressed to humans, and natural entities without intellect cannot be moved by conventional signs. The only intellectual beings capable of being so moved are God and the demons. But the action of God cannot be the goal of magical signs, because these signs are not addressed to God in humble prayer, and they seek selfish or evil results in many cases. Since these signs are not addressed to God, they can only be addressed to demons. There is thus an explicit or implicit compact made with the demons in every form of magic.
... the forms of artificial bodies result from the conception of the craftsman; and since they are nothing else but composition, order and shape, as stated in Phys. i, 5, they cannot have a natural active force. Consequently, no force accrues to them from the influence of heavenly bodies, in so far as they are artificial, but only in respect of their natural matter. Hence it is false, what Porphyry held, according to Augustine (De Civ. Dei x, 11), that "by herbs, stones, animals, certain particular sounds, words, shapes and devices, or again by certain movements of the stars observed in the course of the heavens it is possible for men to fashion on earth forces capable of carrying into effect the various dispositions of the stars," as though the results of the magic arts were to be ascribed to the power of the heavenly bodies. In fact as Augustine adds (De Civ. Dei x, 11), "all these things are to be ascribed to the demons, who delude the souls that are subject to them." Wherefore those images called astronomical also derive their efficacy from the actions of the demons: a sign of this is that it is requisite to inscribe certain characters on them which do not conduce to any effect naturally, since shape is not a principle of natural action. Yet astronomical images differ from necromantic images in this, that the latter include certain explicit invocations and trickery, wherefore they come under the head of explicit agreements made with the demons: whereas in the other images there are tacit agreements by means of tokens in certain shapes or characters. (2a2ae q. 96 a. 2 ad 2; see also Summa contra gentiles book 3 ch. 106).
But these signs have no power to compel the demons to action. The belief that they have such power is a result of demonic deception, which God sometimes permits to be convincing as a punishment for magical practices. St. Thomas concludes that magic is a powerless deceit.
When St. Thomas speaks of 'occult qualities', he simply means qualities of bodies that are not directly observable by us and that we do not know how to explain, as e.g. magnetic attraction. He held that all such qualities are explainable either by the natures of the things in question or by demonic action. There is no third kind of magical property conferring powers that do not result from demonic activity or the natural bodily attributes of a thing. Hence he says, 'In things done for the purpose of producing some bodily effect we must consider whether they seem able to produce that effect naturally: for if so it will not be unlawful to do so, since it is lawful to employ natural causes in order to produce their proper effects. But, if they seem unable to produce those effects naturally, it follows that they are employed for the purpose of producing those effects, not as causes but only as signs, so that they come under the head of compact by tokens entered into with the demons.' (2a2ae q. 96 a. 2 co.) In the case of the evil eye, which St. Thomas (like everyone else of his time) believed to exist, he explained the harm caused to the victim by physical causation (1a q. 117 a. 3 ad 2).
The Christian sacraments, unlike theurgy, depend on the conventional character of symbols. What makes the sacraments produce their results is a) the convention that determines their meaning, and b) the identity of the speaker. Some of the conventions in question are simply the human conventions that determine the meaning of statements in a human language. Thus, the operation of the sacrament of confession can occur in the proper circumstances through the utterance of the English sentence 'I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit', but it cannot occur through the utterance of the English sentence 'I absorb your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit'. The difference here lies in the meaning given to English words by English speakers. Other conventions for the sacraments are established by God, such as the necessity of water for the matter of baptism. These conventions determine what the words and actions of the sacraments are asserting and symbolizing. The identity of the speaker in the sacraments is always God. The actions and utterances of human speakers also form part of the sacraments, but the primary speaker, who uses the human actions and utterances as instruments, is God. It is God's utterance that produces the effect of the sacrament. The human and divine conventions that determine that the sacraments have the meaning that they do are established purely by human and divine choice. If these choices had been different, the signs needed to confect the sacraments would be different.
The comparison between theurgy and the sacraments made by Morello and Fr. Trouillard is thus mistaken. Although the gods are supposed to provide spiritual illumination in theurgy, the speaker and actor in the theurgical rites is the theurgist, not the god in question. The speaker whose words produce the effects of the sacraments is the Trinitarian God. The conventional nature of the sacramental signs means that it is the identity of the speaker that produces the effects of the sacraments, not, as in theurgy, the intrinsic powers of the signs themselves. The effects of the sacraments can only be produced by the Triune God, because the sacraments produce sanctifying grace that is a participation in the life of the Holy Trinity and can only be caused by the direct action of the one supreme God. The spiritual illumination supposedly provided in theurgy is not provided by the supreme principle of Neoplatonism, but by lesser gods. The providers of spiritual illumination, the illumination provided, and the means of producing the illumination – the innate power of theurgical instruments, resulting from their production and consequent connection to the gods – all depend on the Neoplatonic conception of step-wise polytheistic emanation, a conception that is incompatible with and totally alien to Christianity.
Finally, of course, the sacraments are real actions of God that really produce effects, whereas theurgy is a powerless superstition that is based on a primitive, pagan, and irrational conception of the world. The sacraments actually do produce their effects ex opere operato; theurgy produces nothing except the spiritual ruin of its practitioners.
The hypothesis of a historical influence of theurgy on Christian ritual is baseless. Theurgy could only be practiced by initiates into pagan ritual. Initiation, initiates, and the rituals they practiced were held in horror and contempt by Christians as demonic phenomena condemned by the Scriptures. The theurgists in turn execrated Christians as atheists and sought to eradicate Christianity if they could. Their practice of performing ceremonies to install gods into statues was specifically intended to provide an answer to the Jewish and Christian condemnations of the irrationality of worshipping inanimate idols.
Hermeticism
The various Hermetic texts, while containing theurgical materials, are not limited to theurgy; they provide a broad picture of the religious, cosmological and magical beliefs of later antiquity. This broad picture motivated the work of the Dominican André-Jean Festugière O.P., whose study of Hermeticism and its sources – unfortunately not translated into English – is one of the great works of 20th-century scholarship. Rather than use the facts described by Fr. Festugière as if they were discovered by my own erudition, it is better to cite passages from his works that give an overall picture of Hermeticism.
Fr. Festugière observes:
Hermetic literature is made up of two very different sorts of writings: 1. A series of texts – the most ancient ones, since some of them may date from as far back as the 3rd century B.C. - that are concerned with astrology, alchemy, magic, and the occult sciences generally: this is what I was term for brevity's sake popular hermeticism. ... 2. A series of texts composed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., which are concerned with what I will call learned hermeticism. [Festugière, L'hermétisme, p. 3].
.... By 'occult sciences' I mean the study of occult properties, of hidden powers, that establish relations of sympathy and antipathy between beings of the three kingdoms (animal, vegetable, and mineral). These relations are the 'secrets of nature', as they will be termed during the Middle Ages. He who knows these secrets is evidently the master of nature; he can produce marvels, and thus appears as a being endowed with supernatural powers, a thaumaturge, a great magician. This conception of the learned man (of a Dr. Faustus), which differs so greatly from the Aristotelian conception of a man endowed with knowledge, was developed around the beginning of the 2nd century B.C., under the influence of [the alchemist] Bolos of Mendes. It rules all the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman literature of marvels and wonders (mirabilia) that played such an important role in the Roman Empire. In particular, it inspired the Natural History of Pliny, and a work celebrated during the Middle Ages, the Physiologus. We cannot exaggerate the extent of the influence of this conception. Hermeticism has a place in its literature through a bizarre work ... entitled the Cyranides. [Festugière, L'hermétisme, p. 5].
On learned hermeticism, Fr. Festugière remarks:
On the most essential truths of religion, those concerned with God, the world, and the human soul, the Corpus Hermeticum presents two incompatible positions that lead to completely opposed attitudes. According to one of these doctrines, the world is penetrated by divinity, and is thus beautiful and good; by the contemplation of the world, one attains God (C.H. V, VIIL IX). According to the other doctrine, the world is essentially evil; it is not the work of God, or at least not the work of the First and Ultimate God, since this First God holds himself infinitely above all matter, and is concealed in the mystery of his being: one can therefore only attain God by fleeing this world, and one must behave here below like a stranger (C.H. I, IV, VI, VII, XIII). [Festugière, L'hermétisme, p. 10].
Fr. Festugière observes that the philosophical and theological content of the Corpus Hermeticum is shallow, inconsistent, and devoid of philosophical merit. He holds that the absence of serious philosophical argumentation is deliberate. The Corpus Hermeticum rejects philosophical reasoning as a source of wisdom, and presents supposed divine revelation as the path to higher knowledge. The period during which the Corpus Hermeticum was composed saw great achievements in science, mathematics, and medicine. No trace of these achievements is to be found in its text, in conformity with the anti-intellectualism that inspired it.
He describes the Hermetic conception of the universe:
The philosophical doctrine is that of the unity of the Cosmos and of the interdependence of all the parts of this vast whole. Since the Cosmos of the ancient world was composed of a series of concentric spheres with the Earth at their centre, this doctrine of unity supposes an incessant interplay of actions and reactions between the Earth and the heavenly spheres, and between the various heavenly spheres themselves. Or rather, to say the same thing in somewhat different terms, since the sublunary world and the heavens above the moon are composed by the four elements of water, earth, air, and fire – or the five elements, if one adds the ether – the doctrine of the unity of the Cosmos presupposes continual causal interactions between these elements. Hence, the sin, the planets and the constellations – all the heavenly bodies that are made up of a fire that burns continually and is never consumed – are nourished from vapours that issue from the sublunary world. These heavenly bodies in turn continually act upon the sublunary world by the energies that they project, either upon the sublunary world as a whole, upon parts of it, or even upon specific individuals in that world. From the Hellenistic age until the Renaissance, this doctrine of the unity of the cosmos and of the sympathy that connects all its members was accepted as a dogma. The majority of philosophical schools (with the exception of some Aristotelians and the atomists) accept it, and it is accepted by the average cultivaged person who does not adhere to any school. Not only is it the indispensable foundation of the pseudo-sciences of magic – popular or learned astrology, astrological medicine, alchemy, of gnosis penetrated by magic, of theurgy and every form of divination; not only does it have an accepted place in philosophy properly speaking; but even a purely literary documents like the panegyric in honour of kings inserted at the end of the Corpus Hermeticum uses it as a metaphor, thus indicating how it has become a commonplace of the most banal rhetoric. ... (Festugière, La révélation d'Hermès Trismegiste, vol I: Astrologie et sciences occultes, pp. 90-91).
(Footnote 1 pp. 90-91: ... It is important to carefully distinguish between 1) the simple postulation of phenomena of 'sympathy' and 'antipathy' as manifested here below between the three kinds of entities, and 2) the explanation of these phenomena by a systematic doctrine that connects these phenomena with the heavenly bodies and makes them dependent on the heavenly bodies, in seeking the ultimate explanation for these reciprocal actions in the effluvia or emanations from the heavenly bodies that penetrate everything on Earth. ... Astrology provided the theory of effluvia, establishing a correspondence between the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy in the sublunary world and the 'loves' and 'hatreds' that unite or divide the denizens of the heavens. Neoplatonism (especially after Plotinus: Iamblicus, Proclus) gave this system of explanation its definitive form by the theory of 'chains', that it may not have invented (Hermeticism? cf. C.H. XVI, Asclepius), but that it at least fixed in the form that it would preserve among the Arabs, the Latin world of the Middle Ages, and the occultists of the Renaissance.)
How are the affinities between things to be known? Since these affinities come from the heavens, and since ... reason was no longer trusted, and men wished only to trust in a god or a inspired prophet, knowledge of them had to be sought in a divine revelation (p. 360).
These ideas were nowhere more manifest than in the famous comparison of the Cosmos to a man and of man to a micro-world ('microcosm') ... There is no more famous image in antiquity, among Christians as among pagans, and it continued to be used in the Middle Ages. In astrology, it was no longer an image; the limbs or members of the world were spoken of as literally existing, and a literal relationship was postulated between a given part of the heavens and a given part of the human body ... (p. 92)
... If the doctrine of sympathy had limited itself to recognizing relations of dependence between all parts of the universe, and if these links had been understood as purely physical or mechanical, this doctrine would have been not only reasonable; it would have anticipated a genuine truth, that truth that the law of universal gravitational attraction now puts forward under another metaphor. And the doctrine would also have reached, well ahead of its time, a important modern discovery; that in one form or another our body and even our mind are continually being affected by cosmic rays. But, due to a survival of the most primitive forms of thought, astrology spoiled everything as soon as it translated into psychological terms that which should be understood in terms of physics. It did not leave behind the realm of mythology, but created a mythology even more fantastic and absurd than that of the traditional legends. Forgetting that Anaxagoras, a Presocratic philosopher, had already understood the planets and stars simply as bodies moved by mechanical forces, the vulgar conception of primitive times was preserved, according to which the heavenly bodies were persons. They were living, conscious beings endowed with free will, a sex, a character, spontaneous actions and humours. It was thus inevitable that they should also have a history, and that the relations between them and between earthly things should take the form of relations between human beings. ... (p. 95). .. Since experience showed that astrological theories were false, astrologers were led to continually invent new theories. From thence the extreme complication of astrological theories and methods. (p. 97-98).
The Hermetic texts contain explicitly anti-Christian material. They claim that heathen idols are inhabited by gods, rather than being the lifeless images that Christians claim them to be:
“Are you talking about statues, Trismegistus?” “Statues, Asclepius, yes. See how little trust you have! I mean statues ensouled and conscious, filled with spirit and doing great deeds; statues that foreknow the future and predict it by lots, by prophecy, by dreams and by many other means; statues that make people ill and cure them, bringing them pain and pleasure as each deserves.” (Asclepius 24, in Hermetica, tr, Brian Copenhaver.)
Under the guise of prophecy, the Corpus Hermeticum laments the success of Christianity, but predicts its eventual demise through a general return to polytheism and idolatry:
And yet, since it befits the wise to know all things in advance, of this you must not remain ignorant: a time will come when it will appear that the Egyptians paid respect to divinity with faithful mind and painstaking reverence – to no purpose. All their holy worship will be disappointed and perish without effect, for divinity will return from earth to heaven, and Egypt will be abandoned. The land that was the seat of reverence will be widowed by the powers and left destitute of their presence. When foreigners occupy the land and territory, not only will reverence fall into neglect but, even harder, a prohibition under penalty prescribed by law (so-called) will be enacted against reverence, fidelity and divine worship. Then this most holy land, seat of shrines and temples, will be filled completely with tombs and corpses. O Egypt, Egypt, of your reverent deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children! ... A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter 〈un〉belief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or to worship. This all – a good thing that never had nor has nor will have its better – will be endangered. People will find it oppressive and scorn it. They will not cherish this entire world, a work of god beyond compare, a glorious construction, a bounty composed of images in multiform variety, a mechanism for god’s will ungrudgingly supporting his work, making a unity of everything that can be honored, praised and finally loved by those who see it, a multiform accumulation taken as a single thing. ... The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise; the lunatic will be thought brave, and the scoundrel will be taken for a decent person. ... They will establish new laws, new justice. Nothing holy, nothing reverent nor worthy of heaven or heavenly beings will be heard of or believed in the mind. How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! ... Such will be the old age of the world: irreverence, disorder, disregard for everything good. When all this comes to pass, Asclepius, then the master and father, the god whose power is primary, governor of the first god, will look on this conduct and these wilful crimes, and in an act of will – which is god’s benevolence – he will take his stand against the vices and the perversion in everything, righting wrongs, washing away malice in a flood or consuming it in fire or ending it by spreading pestilential disease everywhere. Then he will restore the world to its beauty of old so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder, and with constant benedictions and proclamations of praise the people of that time will honor the god who makes and restores so great a work. (Asclepius 25-6, in Hermetica, tr, Brian Copenhaver.)
St. Augustine comments on this passage, crediting the fiction that it was a prophecy rather than a retrospective lament disguised as prophecy:
It appears that [Hermes Trismegistus] ... is predicting the present time when the Christian religion has overthrown all these deceitful images with an irresistible finality corresponding to its truth and holiness, so that the grace of the true Saviour may set man free from these man-made gods, and subject him to God, man's creator. ... He was one of those of whom the Apostle is speaking when he says: 'Though they have some acquaintance with God they have not glorified him as God, nor have they given him thanks: but they have dwindled into futility in their thinking and their stupid heart is shrouded in darkness. In claiming to be wise they have become fools: and they have excahnged the glory of the incorruptible God for images representing corruptible man.' [Romans 1:21 ff.] ... Certainly Trismegistus had much to say in this strain about the one true God, the creator of the world – much that corresponds to the teaching of the truth. And yet in some way because of that 'darkening of the heart' he sank low enough to which men to be subject to gods who, on his own showing, are the creations of men, and to bewail the prospect of their extirpation at some future time, as if there were any unhappier situation than that of a man under the domination of his own inventions. ... Hermes of Egypt grieved because he knew the time was coming when all those futile delusions and those pernicious blasphemies would be done away with .., it was the spirits who informed this Egyptian about the coming of the time for their destruction, those spirits who cried out in terror to the Lord, when he was present in the flesh, 'Why have you come to destroy us before the time?' [Matt. 8:29]. (St. Augustine, City of God, H. Bettenson tr., book VIII, ch. 23).
Theurgy, Hermeticism, and Christianity
This account of theurgy and Hermeticism enables us to determine the relations that exist between theurgy and Hermeticism on the one hand, and Christianity on the other. We can begin with Morello's claim that 'what we observe in ancient theurgy is an elevated form of practical natural religion, and thus offers us a way to consider what is baptised, assumed, and superseded by supernatural religion.'
St. Thomas discusses the natural virtue of religion in Summa theologiae 2a2ae q. 81, under the heading of the virtue of justice, one of the four cardinal virtues that belong to human nature as such. He holds that 'Religion is neither a theological nor an intellectual, but a moral virtue, since it is a part of justice' (2a2ae q. 81 a.5 ad 3). He teaches that the natural virtue of religion is directed solely towards the one God. Following St. Augustine in the City of God, he believes that there have always been worshippers of the true God, worshippers who make up the city of God of which St. Augustine speaks; and they have since the Fall been surrounded by the citizens of the other city, those who reject the true God. Natural religion is not under the dominion of the devil. It is not sufficient for salvation because it is a natural and not a supernatural virtue, but it is in itself good, and exercises of natural religion by non-Christians are naturally virtuous acts.
St. Thomas states that idolatry is a sin against the natural virtue of religion: 'It belongs to superstition to exceed the due mode of divine worship, and this is done chiefly when divine worship is given to whom it should not be given. Now it should be given to the most high uncreated God alone, as stated above (Q. 81, A. 1) when we were treating of religion. Therefore it is superstition to give worship to any creature whatsoever.' (2a2ae q. 91 a. 1 co). He specifically identifies Hermeticism and theurgy as a form of idolatry:
Now just as this divine worship was given to sensible creatures by means of sensible signs, such as sacrifices, games, and the like, so too was it given to a creature represented by some sensible form or shape, which is called an idol. Yet divine worship was given to idols in various ways. For some, by means of a nefarious art, constructed images which produced certain effects by the power of the demons: wherefore they deemed that the images themselves contained something God-like, and consequently that divine worship was due to them. This was the opinion of Hermes Trismegistus, as Augustine states (De Civ. Dei viii, 23): while others gave divine worship not to the images, but to the creatures represented thereby.
Theurgy is thus not a form of natural religion. It is directed at the gods of the Gentiles, who are devils. Its content is designed to worship devils rather than the one God, and is shaped by those same devils so as to be most effective in drawing their worshippers towards evil and away from God. This is plainly stated by St. Augustine in a passage I cited in my original article, and will repeat here:
... people attempt to make some sort of a distinction between practitioners of illicit arts, who are to be condemned, classing these as ‘sorcerers’ (the popular name for this kind of thing is ‘black magic’) and others whom they are prepared to regard as praiseworthy, attributing to them the practice of ‘theurgy’. In fact, both types are engaged in the fraudulent rites of demons, wrongly called angels. ... What a wonderful art is this 'theurgy'! What a marvellous way of purifying the soul, where foul envy has more success in demanding than pure benevolence has in obtaining a result! The whole thing is in fact an imposture of malignant spirits. We must beware of it; we must abhor it; we must listen to the teaching of salvation. (City of God, book X ch. 9).
The people attempting a distinction between good and bad magic to whom St. Augustine refers include Morello and the Renaissance Platonists he admires. Theurgy cannot be baptized or assumed into Christianity, and it does not give us a way of thinking about liturgy, because it is intrinsically demonic, false and evil. The meaning of symbolic and ritual acts depends on their subject matter – what they represent and express. Because the subject matter and goal of demonic ceremonies is utterly different from and incompatible with Christian liturgy, the two can have nothing in common, except to the extent that the demonic ceremonies seek to blaspheme and parody the Christian ones. We cannot learn about Christian worship by looking at pagan theurgical rites. They are simply garbage that should be suppressed and disregarded – a point of view hammered home at length in the Old Testament.
It is useful to recall the teaching of the New Testament on this subject:
Romans 1:16. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; 21 for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen. 26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.
These passages describe what theurgy gets you, as St. Augustine states in the passage cited above. Natural religion as St. Thomas understands it is referred to in verses 19 to 21 above, and idolatry is characterized as the rejection of natural religion. Worship of idols is described by the New Testament as a slavery to demons from which Christ frees the Christian: 'Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more?' (Galatians 4:8-9). It is important to remember that theurgy existed at the same time as Christianity, and that theurgists reverenced and prayed to exactly the same gods – Mercury, Venus, Thoth, etc. – that Christians identified by name as devils. These condemnations from St. Paul refer directly to the gods of the theurgical rites that Morello praises.
This evaluation of theurgy applies to the theurgical materials in the Corpus Hermeticum. There is more to be said about Christianity and ancient Hermeticism as a whole. As Fr. Festugière points out, the Corpus Hermeticum gives a fairly complete picture the religious outlook and practices of educated and semi-educated pagans in the Roman Empire – with one exception; all the considerable scientific, mathematical and philosophical achievements of ancient culture are rigorously excluded from it. It presents an entirely superstitious and irrational view of the world. As such, it deliberately rejects human reason as well as Christianity. Hermeticism is precisely that paganism against which the early Church fought, and that it attempted with considerable success to rescue the Roman world from. To suggest that it has some value, or that Catholics can benefit from it in any way, is monstrous and absurd.
Morello and the scientific revolution of the 17th century
Morello's proposal to resort to Hermeticism to exorcise the curse of the Enlightenment is puzzling. Hermeticism was enthusiastically adopted by the Rosicrucians and important elements of Freemasonry. Hermetic ideas and symbols play an important role in Masonic thought and ritual. There is plenty of Hermeticism present in Enlightenment movements and currents of ideas. Hermeticism cannot be a cure for the Enlightenment, since it is a part of it.
The explanation for Morello's embrace of Hermeticism as a cure for the Enlightenment is that it is not really the Enlightenment that he objects to. The term 'Enlightenment' can refer to the broad movement of thought in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries that rejected scholasticism and emphasised the power and value of human reason; or it can refer to the thinkers of this period – English deists, David Hume, French philosophes such as Voltaire, Diderot and d'Alembert, and German philosophers and liberal Protestant thinkers such as Kant, Hermann Reimarus, and Johann Semmler – who denied the existence of divine revelation and manifestations of the supernatural in the world, and attacked the claim that Christianity is a divinely revealed message.
It is senseless to condemn the Enlightenment in the former, broader sense as anti-Christian. Many of the figures of this broader Enlightenment were Christians who made contributions to Christian thought that remain of value to this day. These include Joseph Butler, George Campbell, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Reid, the unfairly maligned William Paley, and Richard Whately.
It is correct to see the anti-Christian Enlightenment figures as the main source of contemporary unbelief and opposition to Christianity. But their anti-Christian ideology does not correspond to the one that is opposed by Morello. Their championing of reason consisted in upholding a negative thesis; the claim that Christian divine revelation and the supernatural do not exist, and that natural unaided human reason, not Christianity, is both the sole source of knowledge and the sole and sufficient engine of human progress and improvement. They did not have a positive, agreed account of human reason and metaphysics. The Enlightenment produced a number of different philosophies – such as those of Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, Kant – which disagreed on fundamentals. Many of these philosophies were idealistic, not materialistic or mechanistic. And Morello does not argue against their denial of the existence of the Christian revelation. What concerns him is the denial of what he considers to be the revelation of God in creation – that is, of the relations of sympathy with and influence over the divine that Hermeticism postulates in things.
Morello's real opponent is not the Enlightenment, but the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, that denied the existence of these sympathetic properties and rejected all magic as unscientific superstition. This is the target of his attacks on a 'dead and mechanical universe', 'materialist reductionism and nihilism', 'Cartesian anthropology and Baconian cosmology', 'reducing reason to the possession of abstract principles that were judged to be more real than the chaotic concrete realities', holding that 'reality ‘out there’ is reducible to the mere measurable and quantifiable', and 'modernity’s dead, mechanistic universe'. It is the basis of his claim that 'modernity, I have come to see, is ultimately a conjuring of black magic by which the mind is hexed with abstractionism, rationalism, scientism, mechanisation'.
Of course, because of the known anti-Christian character of the Enlightenment, a condemnation of the Enlightenment sounds better in Christian ears than a condemnation of the scientific revolution. But Morello makes it clear that he does condemn the scientific revolution:
The seventeenth-century scientific revolution was launched on the claim that a new method had emerged that would not itself entertain so-called “occult qualities.” ... Thus, causes, essences, and finalities, were at best all treated as belonging to considerations beyond what could be known strictly speaking, and at worst dismissed as hocus pocus. Thereafter, predicable qualities of objects were divided into primary and secondary qualities depending on whether they were deemed to inhere in those concrete things in the world or instead in the mode of our perception, with qualities like scent and colour judged to be secondary, certainly by Shaftesbury, Locke, and their followers. Soon, however, the perfectly rational claim was made that non-extramental qualities were not really qualities at all but epistemic projections, and thus illusions. The only realities were those unobservable, scentless, colourless atomic foundational realities that could be tested by experimentation and known by mathematical formulae, and hence all ordinary qualities posited from our everyday observations of the world were judged illusory.
This condemnation of the scientific revolution fits in with his endorsement of Renaissance Platonism and Hermeticism.
Marsilio Ficino, one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance ... was given a Greek copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus—the central mystery text of esoteric transformation. ... 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. ...
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.
Morello is historically correct in seeing Renaissance Platonism and the scientific revolution as competing and incompatible understandings of reality. To judge his thesis, we need to determine which of these competing understandings was correct; the magic and Kabbalah of Pico della Mirandola, or the scientific picture of the world developed by scientists like Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
Renaissance magic
The Renaissance enthusiasm for antiquity was not limited to its art and to ancient Greek and Ciceronian Latin. It extended to a revival of Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Corpus Hermeticum. The history of the scientific revolution is often told in a over-simplified way, in which the Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages was found to be inadequate in the seventeenth century and replaced by the superior theories and methods of Gaileo and Newton. The reality is more complex. In his work on Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), the Franciscan Minim who played an important role in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, Fr. Robert Lenoble observes:
The remarkable historians ... who have studied the origins of modern thought have often, we believe, been the victims of an error of interpretation. They separate into two camps those who, on the one hand, are faithful to the scholastic tradition and the traditional faith – those, let us say for the sake of simplicity, who believe in miracles and the supernatural – and those who, on the other hand, reject these notions, and see in nature the sole source of science and morals. The latter are considered the ancestors of Descartes and the founders of modern thought. It is necessary to look more closely at this period ... The opposition between Cartesianism and Scholasticism immediately discloses itself to be an over-simplification. (Fr. Robert Lenoble, Mersenne, ou la naissance du mécanisme, pp. 4-5; the translation is my own).
In fact, there were three competing understandings of the world during the Renaissance and the 17th century. One was scholastic Aristotelianism. As Fr. Lenoble points out, medieval scholasticism was compatible with a scientific understanding of the world, and indeed incorporated such an understanding in its best practitioners. Aristotle's basic metaphysical picture understood the behaviour of physical objects to be determined by their natures, with their natures being manifested by their powers to cause physical change in other things. This was an understanding of reality that was compatible with science. Medieval scholars revived Greek science and mathematics and developed them further. Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253), Bishop of Lincoln and scientific pioneer, held that natural causation should be understood mathematically. It is a mistake to think of Aristotelian physics as unscientific because it happens to be false. The opposite is the case; it is precisely because Aristotle's views made predictions that could be falsified – as with Galileo's showing that heavy objects do not fall faster than lighter ones, contrary to Aristotle's assertion, by dropping balls of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa – that these views count as scientific.
The second position was the modern science that was developed in the seventeenth century. It required assertions about the world to be expressible mathematically and testable by experiment. It replaced Aristotelian physics and the old Hellenistic astronomy and cosmology by superior theories. It produced a vast expansion in our understanding of the physical world, helped by fundamental developments in mathematics such as the development of calculus and statistics. It is the basis of the modern scientific enterprise that continues to this day. We should note that the scholasticism opposed by the architects of the scientific revolution was the baroque scholasticism of the 16th and 17th century, most notably the positions of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), which differed in significant respects from the positions of Aristotle and St. Thomas.
The third position was an important movement in the Renaissance that took form in the fifteenth century. It rejected medieval scholasticism in favour of what it considered to be the wisdom of antiquity, but it did not seek to return to the Greek scientific tradition. Instead, it adopted a different cosmology and understanding of nature that it found in antiquity – the cosmology that underlies the Corpus Hermeticum and magical practices generally, described above by Fr. Festugière. It kept some of the basic Aristotelian understanding of the world, but rejected its scientific side. In its place, it put magic and/or astrology. This was the position of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance figures that Morello admires and follows. Pico della Mirandola asserted in his 900 Propositions that 'Magic is the practical part of natural science' and 'magic is the noblest part of natural science.'
These two figures require some introduction. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was a Florentine cleric who was a member of the Platonic Academy set up by Cosimo de’ Medici. He translated the Corpus Hermeticum and the works of Plato, Plotinus, and other Neoplatonists into Latin. He claimed that Hermes Trismegistus and Plato both held theological views originally derived from Moses – the prisca theologia to which Morello refers. Ficino claimed that Plato, Plotinus and the other Neoplatonists, and the Corpus Hermeticum were all compatible with Christianity. He believed in a 'natural magic' that made use of the occult powers of things, and that was both innocent and powerful. He held the belief in a World Soul found in the Hermetic literature, and made use of it in his magic theorizing. He held that there was a primitive theology found in Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Plato and Aglaophemus that agrees with and confirms Christian teaching; needless to say this idea is complete nonsense. It is unclear how far he stuck to Christian doctrine rather than accepting the anti-Christian elements in Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. He set forth his views on magic in his De vita coelitus comparanda (1489). Stephen P. Marrone describes Ficino's theory of magic:
As he recounted it, the world contained both an intellect and a body, and it was a living soul, the anima mundi, that drew these two together, made possible communication between them and thus explained all action in the universe. This soul contained the seminal reasons, thus serving as an intermediary between God and his creation in the coming to be of all worldly things. Once creation had occurred, however, the soul continued to exert its influence on worldly objects, but this time by means of its own intermediary, spirit. Spirit could be thought of as the quintessence, a fifth essence of material type, and thus a “most tenuous” of bodily substances. Or it could be conceived of as the heavens themselves, the place where the quintessence resided. In any event, the world spirit (“spiritus mundi”) was what connected us to the rest of the universe, even to the stars and the higher intellectual beings, which Ficino called “daemones.” Insofar as it flowed into our own spirit, it made possible the transference of whatever benefits we could expect from above. (Marrone, A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, pp. 198-99).
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was a nobleman and protégé of Ficino. He followed Ficino in believing in a primitive theology common to all the sages of the past, but although he acknowledged Hermes Trismegistus as an authority he identified the Kabbalah, a superstition of Jewish origin that was partly inspired by Gnosticism, as the main source of knowledge (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/). His principal works were 900 Propositions on a number of philosophical, theological, magical and kabbalistic themes, an Apology for these propositions, an oration to introduce the propositions that was given the title of Oration on the Dignity of Man by others, and the Heptaplus, a kabbalistic commentary on the book of Genesis. The Inquisition condemned 6 of his 900 propositions as suspect and 7 of them as heretical; when Pico responded defiantly to this condemnation, Pope Innocent VIII condemned all 900 propositions in a fit of disgust. His personal and political connections enabled him to evade any serious punishment for his views. Towards the end of his life he became a disciple of Savonarola, but we are concerned with the views he expressed in his writings – the ones that Morello endorses – rather than his outlook at the end of his life.
The distinguished medievalist Frances Yates identified the Corpus Hermeticum as the source of the views of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Morello seems to be following her in this. However, Yates seems to have somewhat exaggerated the role of Hermeticism in the Renaissance in general and in the thought of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in particular. It was certainly known to them, but it was not the sole source of their ideas. Rather, they drew on the general magical conception of the world that inspired the Corpus Hermeticum, and that could be found not just in the Corpus Hermeticum but also in many other sources, including Iamblichus, Proclus, and Arab and Jewish writers who described and endorsed magic. For Pico della Mirandola, the Kabbalah rather than the Corpus Hermeticum was the principal source of knowledge about the world: 'Whoever profoundly and radically grasps the order of the Hebrew language, and knows how to preserve that order proportionally in the sciences, will possess the rule and pattern of perfectly discovering everything knowable ... the moderns, who dispute mathematically concerning natural things, destroy the foundations of natural philosophy.' (900 Propositions). In conformity with magical theory, he asserted that the meaning of the Hebrew language is not conventional but innate to it, which permits it to have intrinsic power. The prisca theologica, the ancient wisdom common to all the great sages, was the Kabbalah, in a somewhat Christianized version adapted from the original rabbinical sources
Ficino and Pico della Mirandola held a number of philosophical and theological positions that we are not concerned with. Our subject is their belief in magic, which Morello defends. Fr. Lenoble describes the basic outlook underlying magic and Kabbalah in his work on Mersenne, since Mersenne was a pioneer of mechanism and used mechanism precisely to oppose anti-Christian magical and superstitious practices – with Pico della Mirandola as a target. As with Fr. Festugière, it is better to cite Fr. Lenoble's important work – also untranslated into English – rather than repeat its contents in my own paraphrase. His discussion is invaluable for our purposes.
The characteristic of the world that Mersenne entered was the absence of scientific method. (p. 83). ... How can we be astonished about this, since magic thought then reigned as an almost absolute mistress? 'For the men of the 16th and 17th century', said Koyré, 'everything is natural and nothing is impossible, because everything is understood in magical terms and Nature herself is just the product of magic, with God as the supreme magician'. In the absence of positive science, the need for explanation, which is a essential component of the human spirit, gives voice to all the themes of an animist understanding of reality, an understanding that is natural to children and to primitive societies. We must thus accustom ourselves to a violent contrast; the best way of understanding the scientific thought of the society in which Mersenne spent at least his first few years, a society that is so close to us by its poetry and literature, would be to re-read the important works of Piaget on the child's understanding of the world, or the works of Lévy-Bruhl on the mentality of primitives. This form of understanding reigns over the great mass of the people, and it diverts or leads astray the efforts of more than one talented mind. (p. 85) ... It is normal for the mass of the populace to believe in ghosts, sorcerors, werewolves. They still believe in them in some country areas; and in cities, fakirs and psychics rake in the money every year. However, in Mersonne's time witchcraft is a 'normal' fact, in the sense that sociologists give to this term: it is taken for granted by institutions and even by scholars. ... Every year, the courts judge hundreds of witchcraft cases. The testimony in these cases is examined with care and properly checked; are they not concerned with extremely grave accusations that lead to interrogation under torture and the death penalty? ... In 1564, at Poitiers, three warlocks and one witch were burned alive, after attending an assembly of sorcerors three times a year near a cross set up at a crossroads ... (p. 86) .
What was there behind all this? It is not sufficient to invoke popular credulity, since it is not the beliefs of the common people alone that are in question. Such a widespread belief must have some sort of factual explanation, and it is not (p. 88) difficult to discover at least one that is of great interest to historians of ideas. Magic was first, at a time when science did not exist, a means of explaining a mass of phenomena that were not understood. ... why be surprised that at the end of the Renaissance, where the field of knowledge was so limited, all the events that stood out from the general shadow of ignorance, from the threatening all-surrounding mystery, were immediately seized upon by magic, which clothed them in the easiest available explanation, that of animism? ... (p. 89).
... There were only two forms of thought that put a brake upon this mania for believing in the marvellous. One rejected en bloc every unlikely account, as with Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac. But this outlook was tainted with scepticism, and, despite certain protestations made purely for form's sake, seemed to dispense with the miraculous. Mersenne refused to place Apollonius of Tyana and Christ on the same level. The other form of thought was religion herself, which rejected false miracles all the more energetically because of her belief in true ones. It is to defend religion that Mersenne first attacked magicians. He wished to denounce their frauds, knowing that scoundrels fabricated apparitions for the sake of profit. ... Some theologians claimed that it is legitimate to fabricate miracles for the purpose of converting unbelievers. Mersenne paid them the respect of discussing their miserable arguments, before dismissing them with disgust. Respect for the faith requires rejections of lies and impostures. But it is also necessary to uncover such lies, as much with magicians as with overzealous theologians. Here the priest Mersenne provided an idea of the greatest importance to the scientist Mersenne, that the latter (p. 95) would fully exploit; only well-founded scientific knowledge will permit us to define what constitutes a natural phenomenon, and in consequence what deserves to be called supernatural. This idea will lead Mersenne to mechanism. ... Mersenne denied to Satan the power to beget men, and to kill and resuscitate them. This denied at the outset the existence of the most dangerous practices of magic, and also of the metaphysics that could be inferred from the existence of such practices. This metaphysics was the Manichaean dualism that gives to evil, the despicable, and the absurd, the same degree of power as that possessed by God. ... Mersenne finds this metaphysics in the Kabbalah.
... The Kabbalah is of Jewish origin, but in reality it belongs to an animist form of thought that is found in all eras, whose structure was correctly analysed by Mersenne himself. Animism supposed that things are signs and have powers. The Kabbalah attributes the same properties to the symbols that enable us to think about things and to categorize them. Speculation about symbols – words, numbers, the points of the compass – goes back to the prehistoric origins of language, numbering, and the descriptions of direction. It is social in essence, with communication being identified with reason and with the all-powerful character of the social group. However, since it is attached to the written word rather than to speech, it is reserved to those capable of reading. In a society where this skill is rare, it had therefore to be an esoteric art. Long confined to Talmudists, during the Renaissance (p. 96) the Kabbalah invaded the entire learned world. Among the Kabbalists attacked by Mersenne – Pico della Mirandola, Giorgio, Kunrath, Fludd – it derives from three sources. First, Hellenism. Mersenne perceptively identifies it as originating in Pythagoras and Plato. We know in what different senses the celebrated formula 'Nature is number' can be understood. If it holds the distant origin of a mathematical physics, in more primitive forms of thought it can also legitimize speculations on the powers of numbers in themselves. The metaphysics of Pythagoras, and Plato's mythology in the Timaeus and his questions – never resolved – about the the identification of knowledge of things and knowledge of language, both encouraged this second approach. The Kabbalah profited from them. Mersenne praised the idea of a mathematical physics, and vigorously denounced the danger of belief in the power of numbers.
It was in Judaism that the Kabbalah was furthest developed. (p. 97) ... The sacred text became an immense allegory; the names, the very letters, the four points of the compass have a meaning and a power. God exercises his own power through them; and conversely, we can through them acquire something of the divine power. The Kabbalah is connected to magic through angelology and demonology; the spirits obey words, and in fact are words, so that their action makes the power of the grammatical features of language less implausible. Through the importance of the materials chosen by God for the divine worship in the Temple of Jerusalem – acacia wood, gold, silver, precious stones – the Kabbalah gets its connection to alchemy. Such is the knowledge of the 'ancient' and 'secret' theologians that Mersenne found confronting him. ... (p. 98). The Kabbalah used Christianity as well. This was the work of the 'new theologians', the 'wise ones' of whom Pico della Mirandola was the head and Fludd, Giorgio, Kunrath and the others the cumbersome disciples. They could claim the indulgence that the Church has always extended to the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures ... within limits. But such allegory cannot serve as a pretext for fantastical or heterodox developments. These limits were quickly transgressed by the Christian Kabbalists. The Christian exterior served only as a covering for the original Kabbalist positions. (p. 98) ...
A metaphysics is found, willingly or not, in the Kabbalah; it is the old doctrine of the hierarchy of Forms and of creation in a series. The mystical veneration for the supreme reality, the One of the Platonists, the ineffable God of Jewish tradition, led to the dismissal of that supreme being into the unknowable, and to the search for those intermediate beings by which the ultimate reality acts upon us, and by which we may ascend to it. St. John's doctrine of the Word, the teachings on the action of the Holy Spirit, were soon interpreted in this sense. The danger of such a dogmatic deviation appeared at the beginning of Christianity; it is why, for example, the Epistles to the Colossians and to the Hebrews insistently affirm the primacy and transcendence of Christ with respect to the angels. (p. 100). Nevertheless, Gnosticism, the meeting-place for all the doctrines of emanation, appeared almost immediately after Christianity. The metaphysics of the Kabbalah is that of Gnosticism. Human destiny is defined by the struggle of light and darkness. Darkness is matter, and also the demons. Light is hidden from the average mortal, but it can be attained by knowing the words that reveal it, or that set the good spirits in motion. The Light created the world, and acts through hypostates that are a jumble of the Jewish Shekinah, the Word and the Holy Spirit of Christianity, the Platonic numbers, the angels and the stars of all the religious traditions. Astrology is thus integrated into the Kabbalah, and since the stars act upon sublunary bodies, we discover by a new route the alchemy that we have already encountered. ... Science is what it is possible for it to be in such a system. Physical causality is identified with verbal analogy. Among the Jews, as among the Romans, the Chaldeans, and the Greeks, numbers are designated by letters. There is thus an 'affinity' between certain letters and certain numbers. If, in adding the numbers signified by the letters of one name, one finds the same number as one does when adding the numbers signified by the letters of another name, there is the same affinity between these two names, and, in consequence, between the two objects that these names designate. This provides the key for a vast programme of investigation of nature! But above all, to define the relations between things, the Kabbalah takes from the most primitive forms of thought a doctrine that we find at the heart of all introductions to occultism; the doctrine of the parallel between the universe or the macrocosm, and the human microcosm. To the stars, the angels, the winds, the plants, the metals, etc., correspond the parts of the human body, and the powers, virtues and faculties of the human soul. Knowledge becomes an immense psychological symbolism; by this means, anthropology, the medicine of the body and of the soul, morality, are all integrated into this picturesque metaphysics. The Kabbalah is all-sufficing, and its games are the path of wisdom as well as of science. (p. 101).
This predominance of the sign is what characterises the Kabbalah in comparison with other forms of animism. More complex, less instinctive than simple magic, it is at the same time more pretentious and more naive than that magic. It does in the end develop a new idea; to the demons of sorcery, it adds a sort of intellectual equivalent – numbers and words! But in summary, it is still a matter of accounting for sensible appearances; magic makes spirits out of them, the Kabbalah makes them into words. Its procedures are thus entirely concerned with manipulating signs; in order to know, it suffices to designate each letter by a number, to suppose, as prompted by your meditations, that letter or number are equivalent to an angel, a metal, one of the rivers of the terrestrial paradise, one of the four points of the compass, a plant, an animal, a verse of the Bible – and to change the letters around, replace them by others that have the same numerical value, to add, to multiply, to divide the numbers, and then to see what new thing you learn thereby. (p. 101) ... The Kabbalah is a crossword puzzle club believing itself to be the Academy of Sciences. (p. 102).
... The judgment of reason on the Kabbalah is that it simply affirms, and proves nothing. Mersenne, carrying this line of criticism to its limits, engaged in some kabbalistic calculations in order to demonstrate by experiment that they yield nothing good ... But these games are not innocent. First, they make us imagine that we are thinking when we are only amusing ourselves. ... These dreams are worse than ignorance, since they prevent us from accurately observing nature. ... Furthermore, the Kabbalists deceive us on the nature of language. ... Mersenne discussed this question at length ... it was from the new science, from mechanism, that he took the decisive response that ruins the prestige of onomancy [using names to predict the future]; a word is simply a flatus vocis, a disturbance of the air, a purely conventional sign ... Only real science can deliver us from false science. And only real science, as well, permits us to save morality. For, and it is the supreme danger of the Kabbalah, in the universal correspondence that it posits between names, stars, elements, and men, human destiny is only a component of the history of the cosmos. (p. 108). ... In the simple contests where angels and demons oppose each other like light and darkness, Mersenne rightly finds the signs of Manichaean dualism. (p. 109).
The exposition of the cosmology behind magic and Hermeticism that is given here may permit us to better understand Morello's 'vertical vision of reality that lies at the heart of the prisca theologia', his 'sophianic vision of creation as theophany', his 'Christianised emanation metaphysics which sees creation’s relation to the Creator not as an artifact that discloses nothing of the divine nature and divine mind, but rather as an outflowing of God’s own inner life, which in turn reflects Him as the primordial ‘book’ of revelation.' Morello accepts the magical view of the world held by the Corpus Hermeticum, and he seems to identify the sympathies and antipathies that are postulated by magic with the idea that creation participates in the divine nature. These magical properties are a form that participation in the divine nature takes in creation. In his view, the participation metaphysics of St. Thomas that was emphasized by a number of 20th century Thomists yields the metaphysical picture of Iamblichus, so that participation consists in Iamblichus's position that things have a lesser form of the nature of the divine being that brought them into being, and as a result can serve to put us in touch with that divine being. This is a original idea, if not an intellectually coherent one.
Renaissance magic vs. science
Morello holds up the positions of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola as the needed antidotes to the poison of modernity. He also associates Cartesian dualism with the scientific revolution and the mechanism that is associated with it, as part and parcel of the poison of modernity for which the Renaissance magicians provide an antidote. Cartesian dualism was proposed by Descartes, a pioneer of the scientific revolution. It is nonetheless distinct from this revolution, and should be considered on its own rather than being lumped together with scientific developments.
Morello describes Cartesian dualism accurately enough:
... the Cartesian severing of the human mind from material being ... Descartes' idea that 'I am...in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind' ... all reality may be split into two categories, the terms of art for which are the res extensa and the res cogitans. That is to say, the world is composed of two kinds of existence, the interior realm of meaning and purpose, bound up with “the self,” and the exterior realm of atomic formations, best understood by recourse to mechanistic metaphors.
The trouble with presenting Ficino and Pico della Mirandola as offering the cure for Cartesian dualism is that they, like all Platonists, agreed with Descartes in identifying the human person with an immaterial mind of a purely intellectual nature, a 'thing that thinks', that uses the body as a dispensable vehicle. So they cannot be proposed as an alternative to it.
There is however a component of Cartesian dualism that comes under Morello's criticism of the scientific revolution. It is not the view of the human person as an immaterial intellectual substance, but the conception of the essence of material things as consisting in extension. This conception in itself is a very general one that can be accommodated to the metaphysics of St. Thomas and Aristotle. As Descartes explained it, however, it did agree with some form of the mechanism proposed in the seventeenth century.
Morello objects to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the mechanism involved in it on these grounds:
The seventeenth-century scientific revolution was launched on the claim that a new method had emerged that would not itself entertain so-called “occult qualities.” ... Thus, causes, essences, and finalities, were at best all treated as belonging to considerations beyond what could be known strictly speaking, and at worst dismissed as hocus pocus. Thereafter, predicable qualities of objects were divided into primary and secondary qualities depending on whether they were deemed to inhere in those concrete things in the world or instead in the mode of our perception, with qualities like scent and colour judged to be secondary ... Soon, however, the perfectly rational claim was made that non-extramental qualities were not really qualities at all but epistemic projections, and thus illusions. The only realities were those unobservable, scentless, colourless atomic foundational realities that could be tested by experimentation and known by mathematical formulae, and hence all ordinary qualities posited from our everyday observations of the world were judged illusory.
Many of these objections are baseless. The scientific revolution did not reject causes. Limiting finalities to the intentions of conscious agents was not its own innovation – the idea that purposes in themselves exist only in minds was proposed by Avicenna, and has been the usual view since the late Middle Ages. Nor were finalities in nature rejected by it. Robert Boyle, discussing the claim that there are 'designs and passions proper to living and perhaps peculiar to intelligent beings' existing 'in nature and bodies inanimate', said 'that there be some things which seem to be of this sort (as arguments drawn from final causes in divers particulars that concern animals), which, in a sound sense, I not only admit but maintain.'
As for the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, this distinction is founded on the verified fact that experiences of secondary qualities such as colour and sounds are produced by physical properties of shape that give rise to light and vibrations of the air that have specific frequencies. Plato advanced a form of the primary/secondary quality distinction in the Timaeus, where he said that perceptible properties all arise from the fundamental physical properties (shapes) of atoms. Most scientists and philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rejected the view that secondary qualities were illusory epistemic projections rather than real properties of external things (cf. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualities-prim-sec/#QualReduMechAffeBodiDepeThem). No-one asserted that all the ordinary qualities posited from our everyday observations of the world are illusory. Secondary qualities were (plausibly) seen as powers to produce sensations in observers, but such powers were considered real properties of the things that have them. Robert Boyle, one of the main authors of the mechanical philosophy, stated:
I do not deny but that bodies may be said in a very favourable sense to have those qualities we call sensible, though there were no animals in the world. For a body in that case may differ from those bodies which now are quite devoid of quality, in its having such a disposition of its constituent corpuscles that, in case it were duly applied to the sensory of an animal, it would produce such a sensible quality which a body of another texture would not: as, though if there were no animals there would be no such thing as pain, yet a pin may, upon the account of its figure, be fitted to cause pain, in case it were moved against a man’s finger ... And so we say that a lute is in tune, whether it be actually played upon or no, if the strings be all so duly stretched as that it would appear to be in tune if it were played upon. (Robert Boyle, 'The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy', in Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, pp. 33-34).
One of Morello's statements about the scientific revolution is however correct. It rejected 'occult qualities'; that is, qualities that were not directly observable, and that could not be shown to exist by experimental verification – which include precisely those qualities of sympathy, antipathy and so on that were postulated by magic. This is the quarrel between Morello and the scientific revolution. That revolution abolished magic by denying the existence of the properties that magic is based on. Morello accurately describes this as the 'disenchantment' of the world. There are four main ways in which the scientific revolution led to the demise of belief in magic among intellectually respectable people, although Morello mentions only one of them.
The first was the insistence upon the application of proper verification and experimental criteria to beliefs about the world. If some property or thing whose existence was not evident to the senses was to be accepted as real, its existence had to be demonstrable by observations and experiments that satisfied scientific criteria such as verifying and controlling the causes and factors involved in its observation, being replicable by any observer, and assigning precise quantitative values to the indications of the existence of the thing. Magic and magical properties were found to fail these tests. Renaissance thinkers and scientists like Francis Bacon were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that magic was real, but they demanded that it could be reliably and objectively shown to work. When this proved impossible, they rejected it as a fraud.
The second, very important factor was the dissolution by the astronomical advances of the 17th century of the old Greek astronomy and cosmology. We have seen how the theory of magic was based on the idea that the stars and planets are attached to spheres rotating around the earth, affected the sublunary world through their influences, and could be influenced by the earthly things connected to them by sympathy and antipathy. The astronomical and physical discoveries of Kepler, Galileo and Newton showed that this idea was totally false, and that magic was based on a primitive cosmology utterly unconnected to reality.
The third factor was the great progress achieved by the science of the 17th century in understanding the world. In a passage cited above, Fr. Lenoble drew attention to the importance of the predominant ignorance of the causes of things, and the lack of any reliable means of understanding or predicting them, in promoting belief in magic. Over the course of the 17th century, scientific advances in astronomy, physics, and medicine vastly enlarged the range of human knowledge. This diminished the sphere in which magical explanations could operate, and made science seem a better bet for understanding the world than magic. The success of science only increased over time, which confirmed its status as the right source for understanding of the world.
The fourth factor, which is the one that Morello addresses, is the 'mechanical hypothesis' adopted during the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Robert Boyle, one of its main advocates, described it as holding that 'there is one catholic or universal matter common to all bodies, by which I mean a substance extended, divisible, and impenetrable', and that 'almost all sorts of qualities ... may be produced mechanically — I mean by such corporeal agents as do not appear either to work otherwise than by virtue of the motion, size, figure, and contrivance, of their own parts (which attributes I call the mechanical affections of matter, because to them men willingly refer the various operations of mechanical engines).' (Boyle, Selected Papers, pp. 17-18, 20). Morello denounces this belief that 'the world is composed of two kinds of existence, the interior realm of meaning and purpose, bound up with “the self,” and the exterior realm of atomic formations, best understood by recourse to mechanistic metaphors' as a belief in a 'dead, mechanistic universe '.
This criticism mistakes the meaning of the mechanical hypothesis. It is not a free-standing metaphysical account of the world that is supposed to be true independently of scientific findings. It is a working hypothesis proposed as a basis for scientific investigation, as Boyle's presentation of it makes clear. It is presented as a theory to be accepted insofar as it produces scientific results. It did in fact produce such results for sound waves, heat, and atmospheric pressure; and in the spheres where it was successful, it has been (more or less) preserved. But it is not an essential part of the conception of the world of the science of the 17th century. It was just an approach to scientific research that was already surpassed in the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, the culminating achievement of the scientific revolution. Gravitational attraction is at the centre of Newtonian physics, and it is action at a distance that cannot be described in terms of the mechanical hypothesis. The later science of electromagnetism and chemical bonds is not susceptible to mechanical explanation in Boyle's terms either.
Modern science does not portray the world as dead and mechanical. It simply presents the universe as it in fact is, as far as we are capable of determining. Morello asserts that the 'disenchantment' produced by science did not just reject magic powers, but also proposed a picture of the world that was devoid of meaning and beauty, a 'dead and mechanical universe'. This involves an equivocation on the term 'disenchantment'. All that science does is show that there is no enchantment in the world in the literal sense – that is, there are no efficacious magical powers, spells, curses, etc. It does not disenchant the world in the sense of emptying it of beauty and wonder. The opposite is the case. The reality of the world as science describes it is the true natural reality of the world, which is the creation of God. This is far more wonderful and beautiful than the magical view of it, a view that is a compound of human imagination and demonic suggestion.
Morello on belief in magic
How far does Morello himself believe in the existence and efficacy of magic? He endorses as correct the views of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who believed in magic. He states:
The Western world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and that they can be placed on people, animals, plants, fungi, and inanimate objects. ... my whole life is marked by an attempt to cultivate a premodern mind ... Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. ... sorcery and witchcraft are very real, and an inordinately rationalistic type of Christianity has neither the conceptual framework for addressing the presence of such practices nor the means for effectively counteracting the evils that such diabolical activities entail.
The term 'Christianity' is a vague one in this context. There are many different kinds of Christians with many different views. It would be true to say that 'some Christians have never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist'; but this is not an interesting claim. Other Christians have denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist. The question is who is right, and whether it is permissible for Christians to accept that such things exist.
We have to begin this discussion with two distinctions. One distinction is between uttering a curse or spell, and causing the harm described in the curse or evil spell by uttering the curse or spell. Everyone has heard people curse others; there is no debate about that. The question is whether or not curses can in any circumstances cause the harm that they call down upon the person being cursed. The other distinction is between whether and how far demons are able to cause harm to human beings on the one hand, and whether or not a curse or evil spell uttered by a human can reliably lead to a demon's causing the harm described in the curse or spell on the other. It is the latter possibility that we are concerned with.
The only way in which curses can cause their intended effect is through the actions of the demons (cf. St. Thomas, Summa contra gentiles, book 3 ch. 105). Morello seems to accept this. The question is whether or not this happens. The starting point for the discussion of this question is the fact that the demons have been judged and punished by God. They are not free to exercise their natural powers as they please. St. Thomas describes what God permits them to do:
Now the order of Divine providence so disposes, that it procures the welfare of the inferior orders through the superior. But man's welfare is disposed by Divine providence in two ways: first of all, directly, when a man is brought unto good and withheld from evil; and this is fittingly done through the good angels. In another way, indirectly, as when anyone assailed is exercised by fighting against opposition. It was fitting for this procuring of man's welfare to be brought about through the wicked spirits, lest they should cease to be of service in the natural order. (1a q. 64 a. 4 co.) ... The wicked angels assail men in two ways. Firstly by instigating them to sin; and thus they are not sent by God to assail us, but are sometimes permitted to do so according to God's just judgments. But sometimes their assault is a punishment to man: and thus they are sent by God; as the lying spirit was sent to punish Achab, King of Israel, as is related in 3 Kgs. 22:20. (1a q. 114 a. 1 ad 1).
The demons can affect the imagination and senses of men (1a q. 111 a. 3 co., 1a q. 111 a. 4 co.), and physical assaults by the demons upon men may be permitted by God in some circumstances, as in the cases of Job and St. Anthony.
Given these facts about the power of the demons, what needs to be determined is whether a curse can compel a demon to carry it out; whether a curse can reliably motivate a demon to carry it out; and whether God permits demons to reliably carry out curses. Humans cannot compel demons to do anything. The demons interact with human beings solely in order to cause them harm, and above all to cause their damnation. They will have a motivation to carry out curses if it advances these goals. One can think of reasons why they might carry out curses in order to bring souls to hell – perhaps to impress men with their power and thereby command their obedience – but we do not know enough to say that these motivations will reliably be present whenever someone utters a curse. The only reasons for which God might permit demons to carry out curses are when the harm inflicted by the curse promotes the salvation of the person being cursed, or constitutes a just punishment upon the person being cursed.
However, there is no reliable connection between someone's uttering a curse, and the person being cursed benefiting spiritually from the curse or being justly punished by the curse. Generally neither of these things would happen if a curse was realized. Moreover, if curses reliably brought about their results, that would influence men to believe in the power and lies of the devils, and motivate them to serve the devils and practice sorcery, both of which are destructive to souls to the highest degree. So God will not reliably permit the demons to execute curses, even if these demons are inclined to do so. It is more probable that He will never permit them to do so. And even if it is absurdly supposed that He would do so, it would not mean that curses actually work. For the idea behind a curse is that the curse causes the evil it invokes, and is an exercise of the power to cause harm by cursing on the part of the person uttering the curse. This does not happen if the demons bring about the evil of the curse as a result of divine permission. It is God, and not the sorceror, who exercises His power here. This is reflected in the Scriptures. All efficacious curses in the Scriptures are ones that are pronounced by God upon sinners in punishment for their sin. The act of uttering a curse is condemned in the Scriptures, but there is no mention and hence no condemnation of humans' causing harm to someone by cursing them. The causing of harm by curses is never mentioned as a sin to be rejected. This is remarkable, in the light of the widespread belief in the power of curses during Scriptural times. It would be an irresponsible omission on the part of God to fail to mention such sins, if they were possible.
Finally, if curses worked it would be possible to show that this is the case. It would be possible to identify a sorceror and show that most of the time, when he curses someone, the curse is executed. This does not happen. We can acknowledge that in societies where belief in curses and evil spells is deeply rooted and strongly held, the belief that one has been cursed can lead to illness and even death. This occurs in some African societies. But the causal factor here is the belief, not the curse; and the cure for such ills is the rejection of belief in efficacious curses.
Efficacious curses and evil spells do not exist, and belief in them is backwards superstition. This truth was held (at least outwardly) by the Enlightenment, although, as we have seen, it was first proposed and established by Christian thinkers in the seventeenth century. Its success was a great advance in civilization, and the part of the Enlightenment in spreading it should be given due credit. It put an end to the practice of witch trials and executions for witchcraft, which had brought about the judicial torture and murder of tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Its acceptance had an enormous liberatory effect. Societies where a belief in witchcraft and maleficient spells is generally accepted are hagridden by fear and hatred, as anyone who (like myself) has lived in such a society can testify. The practice of looking for and accepting irrational explanations for ill (or good) fortune that prevails in such societies hampers or destroys reasonable attempts to solve problems and improve the human lot. The considerable improvement in the material conditions of Europe during and after the Enlightenment is probably due in part to the Enlightenment attack on magic and superstition. In religious terms, belief in the power of demons to harm through curses is a falsehood that acceptance of the faith liberates us from. As Fr. Lenoble points out, it is a form of Manicheanism that makes the demons real opponents and competitors to God, rather than miscreants that He uses solely for the implementing of His providential purposes. Morello's endorsement of the efficacy of curses is dark and reprehensible.
Morello's supporting cast
Morello appeals to a number of 20th-century thinkers in defence of his positions, most notably to René Guénon, Wolfgang Smith, and Jean Borella. Do these thinkers give any reasons for taking Morello to be correct?
René Guénon
Morello remarks, 'Lamont judges it expedient to link my thought to that of René Guénon, whom he associates with “magic and the occult”'. I have discussed Guénon briefly in another article on occultist thought https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/russian-philosopher-aleksandr-dugin-defender-of-traditional-values-or-dangerous-occultist/. Morello does not actually deny that Guénon was involved with 'magic and the occult' – he simply implies that I have manifested my ignorance of Guénon by describing him as an occultist. In fact Guénon joined at different times the Martinist Order, more than one Masonic obedience, joined the Gnostic Church, founded the Gnostic review La Gnose, was the editor of the occultist journal Le Voile d’Isis, and was initiated into the Shadhilite branch of a Sufi order of Islam. He believed in an esoteric wisdom common to all religions that originated in Hyperborea, but criticized Catholicism for having lost its esoteric content. Guénon was the founder of the esotericist school known as Traditionalism (not to be confused with Catholic traditionalism). He criticized scientific thought for being disconnected from his metaphysics, which was a mixture of Hindu and Gnostic thought. This criticism was the work of a crank (see Guénon's Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps for details).
Wolfgang Smith
Wolfgang Smith was a professor of mathematics who opposed evolution and proposed his own form of geocentrism. His attempts at solving the paradoxes of quantum mechanics have not met with the approbation of other scientists. (Morello currently holds the Wolfgang Smith Chair in Philosophy at St. Mary's University, Twickenham.) Smith published extensively in the esoteric Traditionalist journal Sophia. Here is a characteristic sample of his work:
I report on a discovery by the German phenomenologist Oskar Marcel Hinze, which I regard as epochal. What stands at issue is a hitherto unsurmised isomorphism between macro- and microcosm, based on the Gestalt aspects of planetary astronomy and the cakra anatomy of man, as described in Kashmiri Tantrism. Given that each of the six principal cakras is associated with a symbolic padma or "lotus" as well as with corresponding letters of the Devanagari alphabet (the number of which equals the number of "lotus petals"), and that each cakra is traditionally associated with a planet, Hinze set out to ascertain whether the "petal numbers" are manifested somehow in the phenomenology of the corresponding planetary orbits. He discovered not only that this is in fact the case, but that even the divisions of the corresponding Sanskrit letters into long and short vowels, sibilants, gutturals, palatals and cerebrals is faithfully reproduced on a planetary scale. We catch here a glimpse of traditional science in its unsurmised immensity (Wolfgang Smith, Science and Myth: What We Are Never Told, p. 5).
The reader may make of this what he wills.
Smith's first religious enthusiasm was for Hinduism, which he encountered in India. In his work Vedanta in the light of Christian wisdom, he puts forward an esoteric version of Christianity that assimilates the true meaning of Christianity with Hindu Vedanta. It can be summarized as follows.
Smith states that the serenity achieved by Vedic meditation is patently supernatural (p.10). Its goal is freedom from the condition of being human; we know that this goal is achievable, because the physical body of those who achieve it sometimes survives although the human being no longer exists (p. 12 ). Christianity offers immortality rather than extinction, but this does not contradict the Vedic position (pp. 16-17). Vedic ethics are in essence identical to those of Christianity (p. 24).
Christian theology censures the essence of the Vedic option, because it states that the cosmos has being, in consequence of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and Vedanta asserts that the cosmos is illusion and does not exist. However, this Christian theological position is due to the fact that theology has to address mankind at large. There is a 'common sense' ontology based on the ordinary notion of 'things', and the public at large is more or less restricted to that level of comprehension (p. 26). Thus, it is necessary to speak to them as if the universe exists. The conception of creation ex nihilo belongs to an exoteric, 'catechetical' level of Christianity that is directed at the level of comprehension of the ordinary public. 'The problem resides in the theological notion of creatio ex nihilo inasmuch as it attributes a being to the cosmos which, in fine finali, it does not possess. No one, however, need be surprised that an ontology comprehensible, say, to a high school student should prove not to be the last word!' (p. 27).
The problem is solved by the existence of an esoteric Christian teaching passed on orally rather than in writing. In Confessions VII, 11, St. Augustine states in addressing God; 'I beheld these others beneath thee, and saw that they neither are, nor altogether are not. An existence they have, because they are from thee; and yet no existence, because they are not what thou art. For only that really is, which remains unchangeably.' This 'categorically undercuts the fundamentalist creatio ex nihilo by reducing created entities to a manifestation of something they are not, and thus implicates [sic] an “ontology of misrepresentation” reminiscent, at least, of the Hindu māyā. On this absolutely fundamental issue St. Augustine appears to be in basic agreement with the sages of India.' (p. 29).
Meister Eckhart's views were perhaps rightly condemned by the Inquisition as thorns of error, because they are esoteric and as such not comprehensible to many (p. 30). Eckhart's esoteric teaching states that one and the same divine command produced the emanation of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the creation of the world. The Son and the Holy Spirit, and creation, are not different things. The seeming reality of creation comes only from its being seen or conceived. 'In Christian metaphysics no less than in the Vedic, the last word turns out to be “nonduality” or advaita.' (p. 34). 'Our present or “normal” mode of seeing is fundamentally flawed: the fact is that we perceive as entities things that have no being of their own, things which actually reduce to a mere Eckhartian modicum. The “purity of heart” Christ enjoins upon us to cultivate must therefore entail the elimination of these modicums, a purification which in the end brings us face to face with God the Father through God the Son ...' The union with Christ is what differentiates Christian yoga from the Vedic. They agree on 'the fact that our “human self” does not survive'. (p. 35).
Smith's religious position is thus one of apostasy from Christianity, replacing Christian teaching with Hinduism. Christianity holds that this world is not an illusion and has real existence. The statements on God and existence by St. Augustine that Smith cites do not express an esoteric quasi-Hindu position; they refer to St. Augustine's view that God's nature 'cannot lose any attribute it possesses, that there is no difference between what it is and what it has' (City of God, book XI ch. 10)', a view that he attributed to the Platonists: 'They saw also that in every mutable being the form that determines its being, its mode of being and its nature, can come only from him who truly is, because he exists immutably. ... For him existence is not something different from life, as if he could exist without living; nor is life something different from intelligence, as in the case of angels – all these alike could come into being only through him who simply is.' (City of God, book VIII ch. 6.) This does not deny that created things have being. Smith's distinction between esoteric and exoteric Christianity permitted him to profess traditional Christian formulas and take part in Christian practice, while attributing a completely different meaning to these formulas and practices. In this he followed Guénon, who lived as a Muslim while believing his esoteric Hindu/Gnostic philosophy.
Jean Borella
Jean Borella was a much more serious figure than Wolfgang Smith. He was a scholar of substance, and made criticisms of Vatican II and the current state of the Church that are acute, penetrating, and important. The principal difficulty with his views is his postulation – admittedly put forward as conjectural – of a truly divine element in non-Christian religions ('un élément central proprement divin dans les religions non chrétiennes') that makes them (to different degrees) works of the holy Spirit ('des floraisons du Saint-Esprit'). He argues for this on the grounds that God's goodness is incompatible with His leaving millions of human beings under the unavoidable illusion of the truth of false religions; that we can see wisdom and holiness in the lives of adherents of these non-Christian religions; and that the great religions like Buddhism and Islam are too substantial and long-lasting to be the product of human effort, and we cannot consider them to be purely and simply the work of the devil, so there must be divine input into their formation. https://jeanborella.blogspot.com/search/label/Intelligence spirituelle et surnaturel
In considering this position, we should first distinguish between thinking that adherents of non-Christian religions (which do not include Judaism before the time of Christ) can be saved, and thinking that such non-Christians can be or are saved through the instrumentality of their false religions. The former statement is a defensible one that has been held by theologians of authority, and for the purposes of our discussion we will accept it as true. It does not entail the latter statement.
Borella's arguments for his claim are weak ones. There is nothing impossible about God permitting millions of people to believe false religions that are not of divine origin, if that is what they choose to do. Human adherence to sin is determined and widespread, is in fact an inevitable result of original sin in the absence of the grace of Christ, and it can and has produced adherence to false religions and false philosophies among millions. We should keep in mind that adherents of false religions often do not know much about what these religions teach, do not take them seriously, and do not even give them much thought. This is a factor that can help divine grace to reach them. We can acknowledge the existence of a degree of wisdom and holiness in adherents of false religions, while pointing out that this can be explained by natural virtue and extraordinary graces. The power and longevity of many false religions cannot be considered an argument for their divine origin. Chinese civilization, to take one example, is a human creation that has had similar power and longevity. Borella's objection to the claim that non-Christian religions are 'purely and simply' the work of the devil attacks a straw man. Evidently there are human elements in every non-Christian religion as well as demonic ones, and they can incorporate elements of a primitive revelation, truths about God that are known through human reason, or parts of Christian revelation that are borrowed without acknowledgement. The Christian teaching is that the gods worshipped by the pagans are demons, not that every element of non-Christian religions is of demonic origin.
Borella is clearly wrong about the salvific power of non-Christian religions. For one thing, the salvific element in Christianity includes faith in Jesus Christ. This is one of the clearest and most frequently repeated teachings of the New Testament. Hence, if a religion does not include that faith, it cannot be salvific and is not of divine origin. An adherent of such a religion may be saved through some form of implicit faith in Christ, but implicit faith in Christ is not conveyed by non-Christian religions.
For another thing, non-Christian religions are false. They are all false at least by omission, through presenting themselves as means of salvation or as the right way to live while making no mention of Christ. But they also include positive falsehoods, as with Islam's deliberate denial of Christianity. It is absurd to say that a religion that teaches falsehood can be a means of salvation or be willed by God.
The thinkers that Morello presents as his inspirations and as supporting his positions are, as can be seen, an eclectic collection. Their sole common feature seems to be the view that religions outside of Christianity can have some value and salvific power. This common position agrees with Morello's advocacy of Neoplatonism, theurgy, and Hermeticism. Because these thinkers are themselves in error, however, they do not make Morello's views more defensible.
Conclusion
Theurgy and Hermeticism are worth combatting, but they are a niche interest that will not grip the attention of many Catholics. The case that has been made against them here does have an interesting and important wider lesson. This case has shown that the main opponent of magic has been the Catholic Church. In the ancient world, the Church comprehensively denounced the practice of magic as gravely sinful. With St. Thomas, we see the same denunciation, with a greater insistence on the futility of its practice. The revival of Greek science by the Church in the Middle Ages, together with the steady progress of technology initiated by the effective abolition of slavery in medieval society, produced both a theoretical alternative to the magical understanding of the world and a powerful practical competitor for magical attempts to control nature. The scientific revolution of the 17th century, largely the work of Catholics, enormously increased the attraction of science in comparison with magic in ways that we have seen. With Mersenne in the 17th century we see science being put to use by Catholics to show the fraudulence as well as the sinfulness of magic.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, Western societies have rejected Christianity in ways that we all know about. One unexpected consequence of this rejection has been a rehabilitation of magic and irrationality. This is not limited to an increase in occult practices. Academics would no longer be permitted to write about belief in magic as primitive and irrational, in the way that Fr. Lenoble did. The left-wing ideology that controls universities rejects the ideas that science is a superior form of rationality, and that magic is irrational superstition, as oppressive and bigoted. This explicit ideological position is more or less limited to the humanities and the social sciences, but the rejection of science exists outside these fields. The practice of scientific rationality is being undermined and rejected in the sciences themselves, influenced by economic and political motivations. This is apparent in the reproducibility crisis in scientific research, where published scientific papers give findings that other scientists are unable to replicate in a large proportion of cases. The covid epidemic provided evidence of collapses of scientific rationality that readers can provide for themselves. (The scientist John Ioannidis, who drew attention to this reproducibility crisis, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/ ended up suffering severely for pointing out scientific failures in the response to covid.)
Morello's position is thus up-to-date and in tune with the times. The historical movement in which he is participating suggests that as Christianity was essential for the overcoming and rejection of belief in magic, so its abandonment in Western culture will lead to the abandonment of general acceptance of scientific rationality, together with a complete rehabilitation of belief in magic and the occult. This development will be the final refutation of the Enlightenment's claim that Christianity can and must be replaced by science. It will however be an uncomfortable victory in debate for Christians, who will have to live with the civilizational collapse that it involves.
