One tradition among historians of science and philosophy holds that in the early-modern period the unraveling of Christianity from pagan philosophy, two forces that had been entangled since the Christ event, established a theory of nature that created the conditions for modern science. This argument implies that science did not make Christianity obsolete, as the popular secularization model has it, but rather that science is the triumph of Christianity. The revival of Greek thinking during the Renaissance triggered a powerful countervailing theological reaction within western Christendom that sought to exorcise from religion and philosophy patterns of thought deemed in error, or even demonic, culminating in the Reformation.
Michael Beresford Foster (1903–1959), Oxford tutor of A.J. Ayer, is among the most known for this view. The reason Greeks had no science, Foster argued, is because their philosophical traditions assumed an uncreated world. Unlike the Christian and Jewish God, who created nature ex nihilo, Plato’s Demiurge assembled the world out of a preexisting and eternal cosmos. God is analogous to a worker who makes things for a purpose—a chair for sitting, a pen for writing—and it is this purpose, or telos, that makes the object intelligible to the human mind. For the Greeks, natural objects were defined through reason alone, which can apprehend the true essence of things simply by contemplating the form given to them by their artificer. Matter, on the other hand, was irrelevant to knowing for the Greeks. It contributes nothing positive to an object’s being, obviating the need for science, based as it is on knowing through the empirical investigation of matter. The pagan theory of God presupposed here meant that God was not independent of the world and therefore has no omnipotent power over it. Nature in Greek thought, which tends toward panentheism, depends on God for its activity but never for its existence.
The God of Christianity is of another order. He is radically separated from Creation, which He creates out of whole cloth by establishing the conditions of possibility for all things. But through this arbitrary act of divine will, known in Christian theology as voluntarism, the purpose of the things He creates ex nihilo (and therefore the means by which humans can know them) is known only to God and remains forever obscure to His creatures. The Christian God who created the world from nothing is like an artist who paints on a whim. We do not know the purpose of the things in the world and—unlike with an artist who might, if she chose to, tell us her reasons—we cannot interview the Creator.
The Greek mode of thought is therefore incompatible with Christian cosmology in that it assumes one can know the mind of God through the things He made. For Christians, as for scientists, knowing is the humble endeavor of forever grasping at our mysterious reality. Only God really knows, and the best we can do is rise a little from our fallen state to know slightly more than nothing. Ecclesiastes 1:13 captures the idea: “I set my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind!”
Despite this deep divide between pagan and Christian modes of thought, the latter in its early centuries used the former to explain itself to the Greek-speaking—and one might say Greek-seeing—culture of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. While the early Christians opposed pagan religious practice, casting it as demon worship, orthodoxy (belief) was shaped around a bricolage of pagan ideas. Tertullian, with a convert’s zeal, famously struck a rare note of objection to the incorporation of Greek philosophy into Christian theology: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church, heretics with Christians?” But the Church Fathers, by and large, built a theological edifice that drew on the intellectual tools of the surrounding pagan culture. The Neoplatonists, or, rather, late Platonists, so beloved of Augustine, were a particularly rich seam to mine. From Plato’s successors Christianity inherited the ideas of kenosis, God self-emptying into His Creation; divination, the process of humans, in their fragmented particularity, partaking in the divine whole; and, famously, John of Patmos’s Christ as logos, the intelligible order of the universe.
Esotericism in Western Culture is a thoughtful account of how moderns tried to unravel Christianity from “esotericism,” a term that almost, if the thorny category of Aristotelian Scholasticism is put aside, maps onto the category of “pagan.” This unraveling, where it succeeded, particularly in the Protestant West, set the stage for modern science. Hanegraaff, chair of the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, here presents something of a landmark for this young field—successor to the more phenomenological tradition of scholarship represented by Eranos, a group of intellectuals formed in the 1930s who met annually in Switzerland and published widely, and particularly of its shining lights: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), a scholar of Jewish Kabbalah, Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a mystical interpreter of Iranian religion and close interlocutor of the Shah, and Romanian religious scholar Mircea Eliade (1907–1986).
Hanegraaff’s book is essentially a history of the myth of esotericism or, borrowing Jan Assmann’s term for his reconstruction of the memory of Moses in Moses the Egyptian, a “mnemohistory” of this mysterious appellation that gathers together diverse modes of thought and practice, including Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, occult correspondences, Paracelsianism, astrology, and “Gnostic” traditions.
Hanegraaff writes that in ancient culture, knowledge was vouchsafed by an ur-divinator of an undefined, or one might say timeless, past. Egypt’s Hermes Trismegistus, Greece’s Pythagoras or Orpheus, Iran’s Zoroaster, and even occasionally the Druids underwrote the development of knowledge. Some early Christians conformed to this thinking by arguing that, historically, Greek philosophy derived ultimately from the subtle machinations of the Christian God. This lens of theologia perennis, with a Christianity preceding Christ (just like Islam for Muslims would be seen to precede Mohammed) chimed well with Trinitarian theology. Christ was not only before the Incarnation but Creation itself; He had been guiding humans since He was heard by Adam and Eve walking in the garden. Saint Augustine wrote in Retractations (I.12.3): “the very thing which is now called the Christian religion was with the ancients and it was with the human race from its beginning to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh.” More specifically, Saint Paul had told the Athenians (Acts 17.23) “the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you.” With its back covered, both historically and theologically, Christianity—a radically new religion with the radically new cosmology of the created world—could incorporate the Greeks as if they were its own.
Esoteric, etymologically derived from something hidden within, is a term that dates back to the second century, used to describe hidden knowledge—for example, in Biblical contexts it refers to the knowledge God imparted to Adam’s third son, Seth, or the secret Kabbalah passed onto Moses on Mount Sinai along with the Torah. But Hanegraaff shows how “esotericism,” a modern coinage, was a very successful means to retroactively recategorize centuries of legitimate knowledge as illegitimate. He recounts the efforts of philosophers, scientists, and theologians involved in this historical tidying up, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which has distorted our understanding of philosophy, science, and religion. This rejection of normative knowledge was neither swift nor linear. It was driven by religious and philosophical discourse that responded to different imperatives during different periods and which in retrospect shaped the identity formation of the West by pruning from it deviant modes of “esoteric” thinking.
Hanegraaff is fascinating in his detailing of the apologia and polemics between Humanist Christians such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Francesco Patrizi, who were very comfortable with a pagan Christianity and who borrowed the theologia perennis framework of the Church Fathers, and conservative Christians such as Giovanni Battista Crispo, Jacob Thomasius, and Daniel Colberg, who in the name of Christ sought to eradicate pagan influences entirely. Humanist Hellenophiles such as Pico (1463–1494) claimed that Greek wisdom derived from Moses and the secret wisdom outside of the Torah revealed to Moses in the form of the Kabbalah (which even mentions Jesus!) was undigested by the Jewish tradition.
More broadly, at a time of apocalyptic religious ferment in a fifteenth-century Europe hurtling toward the Reformation, for many Christian thinkers it would simply not do to tolerate what Hanegraaff terms “Platonic Orientalism,” ancient traditions that emphasized Egyptian or Persian touchstones. Colberg described the “‘sects’ of Platonic-Hermetic Christianity” as “a filthy breed of vermin that had all come crawling from the ‘Platonic egg.’” Giovanni Battista Crispo (1470–1501), in an attack against the Church Fathers, wrote that after having won the battle against satanic pagans, they made the error of not killing them outright but instead taking many of them as hostages, with whom they developed a case of reverse Stockholm syndrome. This theological polemic was the mood music to the attempt to silence Christian humanism—sometimes at the stake.
Hanegraaff’s examination of Jacob Thomasius (1622–1684), a tutor to Leibniz, is particularly illuminating. Thomasius struck a decisive blow to pagan thought by using the eternity of the world, so central to its metaphysics, as a wedge issue to separate folly from true thought. “Where history is concerned,” wrote Thomasius in De stoica mundi exustione (1676), explaining his method, “I cannot go against my principles by trying to persuade others that what I see to be Ethiopians are actually swans.” Thomasius would go on to influence figures such as his son Christian Thomasius, who republished his father’s work and is thought of as the origin of the German Enlightenment, and figures like Johann Jakob Brucker, whose work shaped Diderot’s Encyclopédie, often ridiculing esotericism.
There is something of the academic manifesto about Esotericism in Western Culture. Hanegraaff argues that by restoring esotericism as a legitimate object of scholarship, we can escape the impoverished mainstream of the history of ideas, which often supports the myth of a linear progression toward secularized, positivist science. This historical occlusion also served political purposes, as Hanegraaff illustrates with a metaphor borrowed from Jung: “Even today, [esotericism] remains their principal discursive Other, like a dark canvas that allows [the victors of modernity] to paint their own messages in shining colors of light and truth.”
Hanegraaff’s work parallels Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 book, The Whig Interpretation of History, in resisting retroactive oversimplification of historical narratives to emphasize a narrative of progress, only focusing on the history of science and religion. The narrative reveals how the pious intentions of Christians backfired, secularizing Christianity itself. “You simply could not build a consistent theological system on the Bible or the words of Jesus alone—sooner or later, in one way or another, you always needed the help of Greek philosophy,” Hanegraaff writes. In their zeal for purifying thought of pagan influence, Europe’s early-modern defenders of Christ’s creation of the world were “busy cutting the branch on which they themselves were sitting, undermining those very doctrines that they wanted to defend.” And so the Christian Renaissance ultimately undermined the Church and provided ammunition for Protestant reformers.