Giordano Bruno & Hermetic Trad

Frances A. Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317973782
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1999. This is volume II which includes the English translation of Giordano Bruno's selected works of the Hermetic Tradition, from 1964.

Chapter IX

AGAINST MAGIC
(1) THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS
(2) THE HUMANIST TRADITION

(1) THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS

Though Pico gained the approval of Pope Alexander VI, the new magic did not go unchallenged by either Catholic or Protestant opinion in later years. On the contrary, there is a growing outcry of alarm, mounting in intensity throughout the sixteenth century, against the increase in magical practices. The Magi themselves always claim to be pious and good, both in act and in intention; they are doing only natural magic, not demonic magic; or if aiming at summoning higher spiritual powers, these are angels, not demons, Even Agrippa, the arch-magician, who seems to be calling on both demons and angels, crowns his work with religious magic and religious pretensions. But many people were asking when is an angel not an angel but a demon, and demanding that a check should be put on the whole movement, the religious aspects of which only made it the more dangerous, A valuable analysis of theological objections to Renaissance magic has been made by D. P. Walker, and there is also much relevant material in Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science. My aim here is only to give a very brief impression of anti-magical opinion, based on these works.

Pico's nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico, strongly disapproved of Ficino's talismans, and also of his uncle's magic, though he thinks, or pretends to think, that his distinguished relative had abjured all magic in his Adversus Astrologiam.¹ G. F. Pico's attack on magic and astrology shows how strongly both were bound up with the prisca theologia, which he regards as pagan idolatry. He also mentions Picatrix as a “most vain book”,² He does not attack Ficino by name, but strongly reprobates the Orphic incantations which Ficino had used (and Pico had recommended as natural magic), and the remarks directed against a “certain man” who has written about astrological images must be meant for Ficino.³

The arguments of Pico's nephew were impressive, and many of them were repeated in 1583 by Johann Wier, a Protestant, who also regards the prisca theologia as wicked pagan superstition and as the source of magic.⁴ “The visits of the Greek sages to Egypt resulted in their learning, not the Mosaic tradition of true theology, but bad Egyptian magic.”⁵ As a Protestant, Wier wants religion to be entirely free from magic, and a large part of his work is directed against Catholic practices which he regards as superstitious.⁶ Erastus is another Protestant writer who strongly condemns magic, and in particular Ficino's magic, which he identifies with Egyptian abominations and with the Platonists. “Would you think this man a priest of God,” he cries, “as he wished to appear, and not rather the patron and high priest of Egyptian mysteries?”⁷ And he accuses Ficino of being addicted to “loathsome and clearly diabolical fables”,⁸ probably an allusion to the magic of the Asclepius. Erastus, too, wants to have religion entirely cleared of magic.⁹

The Catholic views on magic were given authoritative pronouncement by Martin Del Rio, a Jesuit, in a weighty book published in 1599–1600.¹ Del Rio would allow some forms of natural magic and is not altogether unsympathetic to Ficino, but he firmly condemns his use of talismans. He denies that the Hebrew language has any special power. Thus both Ficino's Magia and Pico's practical Cabala would be rejected; Pope Alexander VI's views were not endorsed by the Counter Reformation. As to Agrippa, Del Rio regards him as an absolutely blackmagician, the worst of his kind. The Catholic writer defends Catholic practices from the charge of magic, as Garcia had done long ago when attacking Pico.

There were thus always strong bodies of theological opinion, both Catholic and Protestant, against the Renaissance magic throughout the period in which it flourished.

(2) THE HUMANIST TRADITION

I must first of all define what I mean by “the humanist tradition”. I mean the recovery of the Latin texts, of the literature of Roman civilisation in the Renaissance, and the attitude to life and letters which arose out of that recovery. Though it had many antecedents in the Middle Ages, the chief initiator of this movement, so far as the Italian Renaissance is concerned, was Petrarch. The recovery of the Latin texts, the excitement about the new revelation of classical antiquity which they brought, belongs to the fourteenth century and continues into the fifteenth century. It was very well advanced and had reached a stage of sophistication before the next great experience of the Renaissance—the recovery of the Greek texts and their ensuing new philosophical revelation in the fifteenth century. It cannot, I think, be sufficiently emphasised that these two Renaissance experiences are of an entirely different order, using different sources in a different way, and making their appeal to different sides of the human mind. Let us draw up some comparisons.

There is, for example, the comparison with which we began the first chapter of this book. The Latin humanist's chronology is correct. He knows the correct date of the civilisation to which he wants to return, the golden age of Latin rhetoric as represented by Cicero, the proficiency in literary and historical studies which a Ciceronian speech represents, its exquisite Latin style, the dignified way of life in a well-organised society, which is its framework. This world really did exist at the date at which the Latin humanist thinks it existed. He is not transposing its date to some misty antiquity just before or just after the Flood, with a bogus chronology such as that by which the prisca theologia is given a false emphasis in the other tradition, and distorts the approach to Greek philosophy. This historical realism of the Latin humanist gives also a realism to his textual scholarship. Petrarch already has a feeling for the dating and genuineness of texts¹ which his successors rapidly carried to high standards of philological expertise. Lorenzo Valla was able to prove that the Ad Herennium, used throughout the Middle Ages as a text on rhetoric by “Tullius”, was not really by Cicero.² Compare this with the unfailing gullibility with which Ficino swallows as prisca theologia texts which are really Hellenistic in date.

Then, the two traditions appeal to entirely different interests. The humanist's bent is in the direction of literature³ and history; he sets an immense value on rhetoric and good literary style. The bent of the other tradition is towards philosophy, theology, and also science (at the stage of magic). The difference reflects the contrast between the Roman and the Greek mind. Again, in the Latin humanist tradition, the dignity of man has quite another meaning from that which it has in the other tradition. For Poggio Bracciolini, the recovery of dignity consists in casting off bad mediaeval Latin and dreary mediaeval and monastic ways of life, and the attempt to emulate in his person and surroundings the social pre-eminence, the sophisticated grandeur, of a noble Roman.¹ For Pico, the dignity of man consists in man's relation to God, but more than that, in Man as Magus with the divine creative power.

Again, the attitude to the Middle Ages is different in the two traditions. It is for the Latin humanist that the Middle Ages are “barbarous”, using bad Latin and having lost the true sense of Romanitas. It is the humanist's mission to restore good Latin, which he thinks will in itself help to restore a universal Romanitas, and so to lead the world out of the ages of barbarism and into a new golden age of classical culture.² For the follower of the other tradition, the golden chain of pia philosophia, running from the prisca theologia to the present, threads its way through the Middle Ages and he finds some of his most revered Platonists in the ages of barbarism. Scholastic philosophy (for the other school the acme of barbarism) is for him an important source of pia philosophia, to be collated with his Neoplatonic and other sources. Ficino makes much use of Thomas Aquinas in his presentation of his Christian synthesis; and a large proportion of Pico's nine hundred theses are devoted to mediaeval philosophy. In his famous and oft-quoted letter to Ermolao Barbaro, Pico defended himself from the charge of having lost time over barbarous authors which he might have used for polite scholarship:

We have lived illustrious, friend Ermolao, and to posterity shall live, not in the schools of the grammarians and teaching-places of young minds, but in the company of the philosophers, conclaves of sages, where the questions of debate are not concerning the mother of Andromache or the sons of Niobe and such light trifles, but of things human and divine.¹

Pico, p. 352. The English translation is taken from a quotation in J. A. Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, 1897, II, pp. 241–2.

Pico is reproaching his humanist friend for remaining on the childish level of the trivium, with his grammatical and linguistic studies and cultivation of purely literary ornament, whereas he himself is concerned with the loftier studies of the quadrivium. Pico's letter marks very clearly the fundamental difference in aim between the two traditions, which Giordano Bruno will express more violently in his outcries against what he calls “grammarian pedants” who fail to understand the higher activities of a Magus. Here we may indulge in the curious reflection that if the Magi had devoted more time to puerile grammatical studies and made themselves into good philological scholars they might have seen through the prisci theologi, and so never have become Magi.

Above all, it is in their relation to religion that the difference between the two traditions is most profound. The humanist, if he is a pious Christian like Petrarch, uses his humanist studies for moral improvement, studying the great men of antiquity as examples of virtue from which the Christian may derive profit. If he i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• I. Hennes Trismegistus
• II. Fidno's Pimander and the Asclepius
• III. Hermes Trismegistus and Magic
• IV. Ficino's Natural Magic
• V. Pico della Mirandola and Cabalist Magic
• VI. Pseudo-Dionysius and the Theology of a Christian Magus
• VII. Cornelius Agrippa's Survey of Renaissance Magic
• VIII. Renaissance Magic and Science
• IX. Against Magic: (1) Theological Objections; (2) The Humanist Tradition
• X. Religious Hermetism in the Sixteenth Century
• XI. Giordano Bruno: First Visit to Paris
• XII. Giordano Bruno in England: The Hermetic Reform
• XIII. Giordano Bruno in England: The Hermetic Philosophy
• XIV. Giordano Bruno and the Cabala
• XV. Giordano Bruno: Heroic Enthusiast and Elizabethan
• XVI. Giordano Bruno: Second Visit to Paris
• XVII. Giordano Bruno in Germany
• XVIII. Giordano Bruno: Last Published Work
• XIX. Giordano Bruno: Return to Italy
• XX. Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella
• XXI. After Hermes Trismegistus was Dated
• XXII. Hermes Trismegistus and the Fludd Controversies
• Index