The Renaissance Love Philosophy and Magic
It’s autumn, the leaves are yellowing and I am back. I’m happy to say that my MA dissertation in Western Esotericism is off and I will be starting my PhD in Western Esotericism. Yup, I can’t get enough of it.
In case you’re wondering (and even if you are not), my thesis was called “The Impact of Jan Baptista Van Helmont’s Theory of Love, Desire and Universal Sympathy on his ‘Christian Philosophy’”. I hope it sounds heavy enough. I will try to write an article on Van Helmont some time soon; he was a physician and an alchemist in the tradition of Paracelsus who lived at the beginning of the 17th century.
For now, I would like to write a bit on the Renaissance love philosophy and its relationship with magic. The story begins with the first Renaissance philosopher, Marsilio Ficino (end of the 15th century). Today he is remembered mainly as the translator of Plato’s treatises from Greek into Latin. History has not been very kind to him, even as he was in many ways the reason the Renaissance ever existed. Ficino re-introduced Plato, the Neoplatonists and Hermetic thinking in the discourse of his contemporary age and hence ignited a revolution of consequences.
I will not go into the depths of Ficinian philosophy now except in so far as he was the creator of a pervasive love philosophy in his era. Of course, if you asked Ficino, he would never recognize that he created it (back then originality was not well regarded). Perhaps he really didn’t. He simply tried to restore the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages, whose chief representatives were Francesco Petrarch, Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti. He also looked farther back to Plato himself for inspiration.
Ficino extended the realm of love to the entire Universe. He believed that love was pervasive, expressed in the natural desire for propagation of species and in the ‘sympathy’ between things. By comparison to our worldview, he believed that attraction did not happen only amongst the members of the same species. Not even only between living things. For instance, gold ‘sympathizes’ with the Sun because of its shininess and yellowish tinge. The sunflowers also ‘sympathize’ with the Sun.
How can this be? Ficino, and other magical thinkers of his age, responded: by means of the unity of the Universe. For them, God is inside, not outside nature; He ensures the divinity of all things. This is not to say that God is nature, like Spinoza thought; Renaissance thinkers affirmed that God is simultaneously in and outside nature. The paradox was solved by differentiating between God the Creator and God the World Soul. This World Soul unified nature and gave it a coherence that lay behind the apparent individuality of things. More than this: it gave it life. These philosophers did not draw sharp distinctions between insects and stones, for instance; they are all alive, just to different extents. Today, we think that we know the difference between a living and a non-living thing; everyone ‘knows’ that a stone is not alive, but a chicken is. Yet things get blurry when it comes to such things as viruses. Scientists are not decided yet whether they are alive or not. What is life? No one can really say. As for the Renaissance, they simplified the problem by affirming: all is alive. They were fond of talking about the Universe being a great animal, meaning by this that it was unified and alive.
This all sounds like clever speculation, but it had very practical applications as well. Not just in magic as we now see it, but in medicine, alchemy (there was no such thing as chemistry then), astrology and other types of practical philosophy. For instance, Paracelsus created a very powerful form of medicine by using the Renaissance speculation.
It must be understood that the World Soul was more than a ‘philosophical’ concept: it was real; it sat somewhere between the physical and spiritual realm. It facilitated the obscure connection between the gold and the Sun, for instance, or between very distant objects. Many believed that magnetism, for instance, was an example of this ‘occult’ communication: the loadstone (magnet) was directing itself towards the North Pole by the means of the World Soul.
Magnetism was an example of magic. To the Renaissance magic did not mean the conscious manipulation of things by a human being, but simply the natural action whereby like attracted like without concern for distance. The loadstone followed magically the North Pole. The sunflowers were also magically acting when they were orienting themselves after the Sun every day.
Yet, of course, there was a conscious magic – that of human beings. The Renaissance thinkers extolled the peculiarity of the human being as a conscious manipulator of nature. He alone of all things could do that, and that was because he was God’s special creature. Hence man was a great magician. He was able to see the connection between things, and their tendency of attracting each other. He could intervene in nature by manipulating things for his purpose.
Here, of course, morality came in to play. For the Inquisition, things were simple: all magic was evil; magic was witchcraft and interference in God’s design. Renaissance thinkers begged to differ; they did not deny the existence of witchcraft, but maintained that the question of good and evil pertained to each individual. Take for instance Helmont; he wrote a treatise in which he explained that witches were evil not because magic itself was evil, but because they used it to evil purposes. The real magicians only employed magic for good purposes. We now talk about ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic. The Renaissance magus thought himself as a white magician. For instance, Ficino wrote a treatise on how to magically purify ourselves: his answer was usually talismans, incense, and music. Music was one of the most potent magical instruments.
Of course, the discourse of the Renaissance thinkers was doomed to fail. It is too complex a matter to explain here why, and scholars are not even sure of the reasons (will they ever be?). Suffice it to say that the early modern period was a very warlike period, and I don’t mean by this physical war; the real battles were carried out in the realm of ideas. Like in most wars, the ones left standing were the ones who wrote history in their own image. Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus became half or full blown villains; Ficino was silenced; Giordano Bruno the magus became a hero for science.
If you want to go deeper into these things I recommend:
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Cornelius, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 3 (London: Chthonios, 1987). Classical Renaissance magic compendium.
Culianu, Ioan P. (1987). Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Excellent study of many of the themes I mentioned.
Debus, Allen G., The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 2nd edition (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002). Good discussion of Paracelsus and his followers, if bent on the scientific side.
Ficino, Marsilio. (1985). Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. by Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications). The book that started it all…
Waddell, Mark A. (2003). ‘The Perversion of Nature: Johannes Baptista Van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the Magnetic Cure of Wounds’, Canadian Journal Of History, 38, 179-197. A good example of how complex the magical debate really was…
Walker, D.P. (2000). Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania. Good and classical scholarship on Renaissance magic, now in its nth edition.
Yates, Frances. (1964). Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago. Acclaimed study that presented Bruno as a Renaissance thinker and magician, and reintroduced Hermes Trismegistus in scholarly studies.
Tags: agrippa, Alchemy, ficino, giordano bruno, helmont, inquisition, love, magic, magnetism, neoplatonism, Paracelsus, renaissance, witchcraft, world soul
