The Theology of the Hermetica and Its Influence on Giordano Bruno
By
Kile Jones
© Kile Jones
2007-04-15.
Storiestold1@yahoo.com
www.kilejones.com
With thanks to
Christopher Lehrich, Professor of Religion,
Science and the Occult, Boston University.
“Your reasoning is
irrefutable, Trismegistus”
The pagan intellectual tradition comprised in the
Hermetica is one of immense importance for the study of classical
philosophy and theology. Not only does the Hermetica give
insight into the social environment of the early C.E. centuries of
Alexandria, but it specifically sheds light on the various philosophical
and religious schools of the day, such as, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism,
Orphism, and Pythagoreanism. The Hermetica, properly understood,
is a 2nd and 3rd century C.E. compilation of
pseudopigraphal dialogues between Hermes Trismegistus and his various
listeners on theology proper, the nature of the cosmos, and the nature
of the soul.
Trismegistus (thrice-blessed), so the legend goes, was a pre-Mosaic,
Egyptian priest who aided in the construction of the pyramids, and who, up
until the critical textual methods of the late Renaissance thinkers, was
considered genuine. Only through the eventual usage of modern historiographical methods have scholars of the Hermetic movement agreed
that the Hermetica was most likely composed by numerous authors
over various times, much like Homer’s Iliad.
As was
just mentioned, the Hermetica is of vast importance for
understanding the pagan intellectual movement of the two centuries after the advent of Christ. This paper is going to cover the
various historical and philosophical movements which aid in our
understanding of the theology of the Hermetica and its influence on
Giordano Bruno’s thought. If we are to understand the various medieval
movements in Christendom, the continuation of the hermetic movement, or
the introduction of alchemy, magic, and the occult into Renaissance
Europe, specifically culminating in Bruno’s thought, we must first
understand their roots, which are seen clearly in the Hermetica.
Historical
Introduction
The Hermetica was written during a time of
significant historical milestones which must be taken into consideration
in order to understand the thought contained in it. Alexander had,
through his various conquests, brought Greek learning into Egypt,
ushering in the famous Hellenistic age. His general Ptolemy became his
successor, ruling and forming the Egypt once ruled by the Pharaohs,
turning the ancient land into a modern-day Athens. His Hellenization of
Egypt left many Egyptians looking back upon their golden age, when Egypt
had prospered and contributed the great religious and cultural
distinctives we now look back at in wonder. The Demotic Chronicle, for
instance, contains anti-Greek sentiments while looking forward to an
Egyptian ruler; one fragment notes: “They say ‘A man of Herakleopolis is
the one who will rule after the foreigners and the Greeks. Take joy, oh
High Priest of Harsaphes!’”
The Herods, a few
centuries later, developed the Jewish state within the Roman province of
southern Israel. Constructing a Jewish vassal-state within the Roman
Empire was not an easy task. Oftentimes, the Herods were at odds with
the Romans and their bureaucratic
political structure. They likewise faced troubles
from their own countrymen who saw them as Roman tyrants. This was
understandable, given that the first Herod, Herod the Great, ordered the death of every Jewish male under the age of two in fear that the
Messiah was amongst them.
The Herods, along with the Jewish state, ended with the Great Revolt and
the eventual destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 73 C. E.
Prior to, during, and
subsequently after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity emerged as
a strong historical movement with its own view of politics, social
ethics, and spirituality. The Hellenized form of Christianity is what
was around in the Alexandria of the Hermetica; the neo-Platonic
theology proper of Origen, the philosophical logos of Clement, and the
science of Didymus. These strands of thinking permeated the
intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria and reveal the climate in which
the Hermetica was composed. Therefore as we understand the text
of the Hermetica we must keep in mind these various intellectual
circles and the possibility of their influence in the formation of this
highly intellectualized neo-Platonic paganism.
The Hermetica
As was mentioned
before, the Hermetica is a compilation of neo-Platonic dialogues
between Hermes Trisgemestus and various listeners, better understood as
initiates. Hermes spends most of his time on the nature of God, the
character of the human soul and mind, and
the intellectual ascendance that must be achieved
in order for proper knowledge to come about. Early on in the
Hermetica we see what the prize is for the correct worshippers of
God: “They rise up to the father in order and surrender themselves to
the powers, and having become powers, they enter into god. This is the
final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.”
This process of theosis (humans becoming god) is not simple in any sense
of the term; on the contrary, it involves deep contemplation, spiritual
direction from a learned sage, and magical incantations, to name only a
few methods. The Renaissance magicians would add to the various steps
of achieving theosis, natural science. Yet it was this idea which
pushed scholars like Bruno to contemplate the implications of
speculative philosophy, astrology, and magic. The goal was that if
one could properly understand the order of the cosmos and align oneself
with the divine essence within the cosmos, one could ascend to some form
of godhood.
Panentheism
One common theological strand within the
Hermetica is the common notion of panentheism (i.e. the world inside
of God). The cosmos, according to Hermes, is located inside of God;
God is not identical with the world (pantheism), and not transcendent to
the world (theism), but the world is part of God. There are numerous
instances of this theology: Hermes tells Asclepius that “all things that
exist are in god” and that “nature has been established in the divine.”
Similarly, like God, the cosmos is eternal: “If the cosmos is a second
god and an immortal living thing, it is impossible for any part of this
immortal living thing to die.”
Since the world is inside of God, it is eternal and alive; according to
Hermes there is a vitality and life-force throughout the cosmos that
should be embraced and entered into. These various forces that swirl
through the material cosmos are occult forces, and through connecting
with them one could look beyond the deception of the physical world and
realize the divine unity of all things.
The Limitation of the
Material
Even though the
material world is thought of as part of God, there is nevertheless a
hindering aspect of the material. In good old fashion neo-Platonic and
gnostic thought, the cosmos is bifurcated into two realms; the
immaterial realm consists of mind, reason, intellect, good, spirit,
angels, demons, and God, while the material realm consists of ignorance,
confusion, brutality, evil, and fleshly passions. In the Hermetica
this point is made quite clear when Hermes tells Asclepius that
Only the name of the good exists among
mankind--never the fact. It cannot exist here. Material body, squeezed
on all sides by vice, sufferings, pains, longings, angry feelings,
delusions and mindless opinions, has no room for the good.
Not far after this passage, Hermes describes the
physical body as “the garment of ignorance, the foundation of vice, the
bonds of corruption, the dark cage, the living death.”
Clearly the authors of the Hermetica had a dualism of mind over
matter which contributed to their overall theology of God and his
magical working in the world. What this anti-material theology meant
was that one had to rise above the ignorant thinking of the material
world and ascend into true intellectual gnosis, which could only be
achieved through the various methods described earlier.
Knowledge as Power
and Salvation
Since the world is both part of God and materially
confining, the cure of such an epistemic confinement is knowledge:
knowledge of the world, humankind, magic, leading to knowledge of the
mind of God. Hermes, in his famous ‘sacred discourse’, describes what
humankind was created for: they were created to “contemplate heaven…the
works of god and the working of nature…to know divine power.”
This mystical and intellectual contemplation was at the same time the
acquiring of knowledge about the universe and God. There was, in Hermes's
mind, a book of knowledge written in nature which, when understood,
yielded immeasurable knowledge--knowledge which in turn imparted power
to secrets, magic, and divination. The idea that knowledge of the world
and its workings yielded power over the mind and nature led many in the
Renaissance to scientific inquiry and investigation. One of the most
prominent scholars, and the one to which we will now turn, is Giordano
Bruno.
Bruno’s Life and
Influences
Giordano Bruno
was born in Nola, Italy in 1548, son to a soldier in the Italian army.
Early in his life Bruno became fascinated with philosophy, theology, and
the art of memory, for which, at the young age of fifteen, he committed
himself to the Dominican Order. After ordination as a Catholic priest,
Bruno fled Italy when word of the Inquisition came and eventually abandoned
the Dominican Order to become, at least for a short time, a Calvinist.
Shortly after this, Bruno moved to Paris in order to avoid what he felt
was the religious fanaticism of both Catholics and Protestants. In
Paris, Bruno lectured on philosophy and theology and became well-known
for his outstanding memory (to which some attributed magical
powers). During this time, Bruno formulated his various beliefs on the
infinity of universes, the magical powers in nature, and the immanent
ontology of God. In Venice, while waiting for a position as professor,
Bruno taught in-house lectures to the Mocenigo family, who, eventually
finding him distasteful, turned Bruno over to the Inquisition for
heresy. Upon being transferred to Rome, Bruno was found guilty of
heresy against the Church, for which he was burned at the stake on
February 17, 1600.
Bruno’s Overarching
Goal
Giordano Bruno thought of himself as the new
embodiment of the ancient Egyptian sages who followed the line of
Hermes. Bruno felt that he was the prototype of the new triumphant man,
who, with Copernican astronomy in one hand, and hermetic knowledge in
the other, dove into the hidden knowledge of the universe. Bruno, who
by our standards might be considered egotistical, spoke of himself as
the one who has “given eyes to blind moles, and illuminated those who
could not see their own image…he has loosened the mute tongues…he has
strengthened the crippled limbs.”
Bruno felt that he had arrived at the knowledge of the universe which
elevates humanity into divinity; Frances Yates, one of the foremost
scholars on Bruno, describes his self-discovery:
Thus it is as man
the great miracle, knowing himself to be of divine origin, that Bruno
soars into the infinite to grasp and draw into himself the newly
revealed reflection of infinite divinity in a vastly expanding universe.
Thus the overarching
goal of Bruno was that humankind would, by understanding the nature and
workings of the universe, realize its own divinity and rise above the
restricting medieval rankings of God first, humanity second, and the
cosmos third. This agenda clearly harkens back to Hermes' proclaiming
that the greatest knowledge is to “be made god.” How Bruno attempts to
achieve this goal of illuminating humanity is by reminding it of God
and its relationship to Him.
Bruno’s Theology
Proper
To Bruno, God is
not some transcendent entity who is distinct and separate from the
world. Bruno, in his famed Cause, Principle, and Unity, assumes
the role of Teofilo, who, through dialogue with his companions, imparts
to them the proper way of thinking about God’s relationship to the
world; while discussing God, Bruno, through the character of Teofilo,
equates God with the ‘universal intellect’ and ‘world soul’:
The universal
intellect is the innermost, most real and most proper faculty or
potential part of the world soul. It is that one and the same thing
that fills everything, illuminates the universe and directs nature to
produce her various species suitably.
Similarly, Bruno describes God as the “intrinsic
principle” of the cosmos which causes its movement.
Clearly this theology resounds with the teachings of the Hermetica
that “all things that exist are in god.” Bruno believed that the cosmos
was infinite, yet united as one, which led to the identity of God and
the world. Antonio Calcagno, speaking on Bruno’s metaphysics, has this
to say:
Bruno’s logic of
cause and effect is interesting in that he makes the relationship
between God and the creation one of identity. God and the universe are
both infinite. Ultimately, because of this relationship of identity,
one can see why Bruno had to admit that God is all things and all things
are God.
What Calcagno
correctly realizes is that Bruno, due to his cosmology, had to associate
God and the world as ontologically identical. How this ties into
Bruno’s Renaissance idealism is that if God and the world are identical,
and we as humans are part of the world, then logically we are part of
God, and thus divine. Yet we do not always recognize our true nature,
which is where Bruno’s anthropology comes in.
Bruno’s Anthropology
Even though humanity and divinity are identical,
there still remains an overall epistemological lack on the part of
humanity. Bruno saw this as due, at least in part, to the negative
teachings of the medieval scholastics who put an insurmountable chasm
between God (infinity) and humanity (finitude). There was a sort of
Dark Age when the wisdom of the Egyptians, the neo-Platonists, and the Hermetics, was lost in time; yet it was with the ushering in of the Age
of Science and the radical advances in astronomy that the golden age
would be brought back, and Bruno was its spokesman. To Bruno, humans
were to become super-humans through their ability to scientifically
extract the meaning from the book of nature. Bruno was very fond of
Copernicus, even to the point of attributing to his messianic
descriptions; for instance, Bruno refers to Copernicus as having a
“divinely-ordained appearance” which was to “precede the full sunrise of
the ancient and true philosophy after its age long burial in the dark
caverns of blind and envious ignorance.”
Bruno thought of Copernicus as a John the Baptist character who would
usher in the great day of awakening, when humanity became God by
utilizing its full scientific and magical power. Blossom Feinstein
compares Bruno’s anthropology to “Alberti, Goethe, Wordsworth,
Nietzsche, G. M. Hopkins, [and] D. H. Lawrence” because it emphasizes “the
connectedness of God and man.”
This ‘connectedness’ is where Bruno and other Renaissance magicians
parted ways with orthodox Christianity by identifying God with the
cosmos and the cosmos with humanity, and thus humanity with God.
Bruno’s View of
Knowledge
It is clear upon
analyzing the thought of Bruno that he derives some of his theology and
anthropology from the Hermetica. His views on knowledge could be
said to do the same thing. For Bruno, knowledge is not some distant
objective data to which we must mentally assent; rather, it is that
which, when understood correctly, yields incredible amounts of power and
progress. Humanity was not to be simply an epistemic on-looker, but to
engage with the cosmos by diving into its rich and buried treasures,
looking for profit. Bruno thus finds himself as the ideal Renaissance
man, who views the world as alive and open to discovery, humanity as the
agent which must lay hold of cosmological knowledge, and God as that
connecting force which binds us to nature and to Himself. Here is where
Bruno engages with the Hermetic telos: humanity was to “contemplate
heaven…the works of god and the working of nature…to know divine power;”
if any maxim could be put forth which best describes Bruno’s program,
it would be this.
Criticism of Bruno
Although Bruno
could easily be lumped together with some of the most ingenious minds of
the Renaissance, it should likewise be said that there are sharp
criticisms of Bruno’s worldview. These criticisms are modern in origin
and reveal the great amount of changes which have taken place in
the last centuries. One criticism, which applies to the whole of
hermetic philosophy, is the assumption of anything metaphysical. With
the establishment of modern scientific method, the spiritual, or
anything not empirically observable, cannot be counted as justified,
scientific knowledge. This is not to say that one cannot hold these
views or provide for them rational arguments, but it is to say that what
is by nature beyond the scope of observable data cannot be proven in
the same way that other facts of experience are proven. Here is
where the modern philosophy of science would part ways with the spiritually-minded Renaissance scientists. Bruno, for instance, although he
contributed greatly to the study of memory, astronomy, and the philosophy of
science, cannot be considered a ‘scientist’ in the modern sense of the
term. Bruno’s hermeticism, occultism, magic, theology, idealism, and
various other philosophical speculations, instantly place him in a
peripheral academic category; whether this is warranted or not is another
paper altogether.
Contributions of
Bruno
As much as Bruno
might be considered an oddity to our modernized conception of an
academic, nonetheless, his great achievements towards freedom of speech,
astronomy, and the philosophy of science were of enormous impact and helped
shift the history of science as we know it. If we are to commend Bruno
for anything, we must commend him for his belief in the freedom of
speech. H. James Birx has noted that “Bruno's iconoclastic ideas and
unorthodox perspectives remain a symbol of creative thought and free
inquiry”,
and even up to the
present time Bruno is considered one of the great champions of
freedom of speech. Not only did Bruno hold unorthodox views at the risk
of Catholic inquisition, but what is most striking is that he expressed them. Bruno could not tolerate the epistemological choke-hold that
Catholicism had put on people; he likewise could
not stand the Aristotelian and scholastic intellectual aristocracy that
was not open to new discovery and which shunned all forms of perceived
dissent.
This distaste for Catholic fundamentalism became a tradition of its own,
with men like Hume and Voltaire as its champions.
Not only did Bruno contribute to the
eventual downfall of dogmatism with the arrival of free thought and
toleration, but he also supplied the necessary impetus for the philosophy of
science to take flight. What Bruno is mainly noted for in philosophy is
his theory of infinite universes. “The whole of Bruno’s philosophy”,
Dorothea Singer goes as far as to say, “is based on his view of an infinite
universe with an infinity of worlds”;
this may seem like an overtly strong reduction, but upon reading his
works one finds this theory to be of central significance. What Bruno
gave the philosophy of science was a daring cosmology that reinterpreted
Copernican theory, adding onto it Lucretius’s arguments and Nicholas of Cusa’s metaphysics, which produced a new and dazzling system
altogether. Even if one disagrees with Bruno’s theories altogether,
even still, that person must appreciate the pioneering work of Bruno
which eventually opened up new avenues of thought and slowly decayed the
iron wall of scholasticism.
Lastly, one of the great
contributions, and the one on which this paper mainly focuses, is
Bruno’s influence on hermeticism. With the revival of hermeticism and
occult philosophy, specifically by Henry Agrippa’s voluminous writings
and Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Hermetica, Bruno
was able to synthesize, formulate, and promote what may be considered a
highly hermetic worldview.
Bruno’s insistence that humanity must rise to divinity, that God and the
cosmos are ontologically connected, and that knowledge of one’s nature
and the world produces psychic salvation, leave Bruno categorized as the
epitome of a Hermetic Renaissance thinker. Bruno, as this epitome, was
able to synthesize ancient Hermetic philosophy, neo-Platonism, occult,
and Renaissance science into an all encompassing hybrid worldview which
proceeded to influence his intellectual progeny.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it
has been shown how the theology of the Hermetica influenced
Giordano Bruno; yet, there is another part to this story. The question
now remains as towards the Hermetica and Bruno’s influence in
contemporary Hermetic philosophies. What can be noted here is the great
weight that the Hermetica and Bruno’s works have had on
intellectual history from the Renaissance to the contemporary
philosophical landscape. They continue the long tradition which urges
humanity towards progress, both spiritual and scientific, with the hope
that someday discovery will take us to the place we ultimately desire.
The erection of Bruno’s memorial statue in the same location where he
was executed by the Inquisition reminds us of more than his place in
Renaissance history; it speaks of his continuing influence up to the
present.
