Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Wissenschaft, Renaissance; Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno; Thomas More -> Utopia

Kurzinhalt: why the pursuit of God in nature should also entail a veritable explosion of magical and mystical practices; It was no accident that the writing of Utopias coincided ...

Textausschnitt: 80b The connection between this inspiration and the proliferation of empirical investigations and speculations has long been understood as the moving force behind the scientific revolution. What has been less clearly understood is why the pursuit of God in nature should also entail a veritable explosion of magical and mystical practices. Renaissance science presents this extraordinary picture of an expanding interest in natural magic as perhaps its deepest inspiration. Marsilio Ficino and the Neoplatonic Academy of Florence were firmly insistent on the difference between their concern and the traditionally and properly excoriated interest in dark or Satanic magic. They sought only to make contact with the sympathetic bonds of harmony that unite all the layers of the cosmos. Far from appealing to Satan, their goal was to enter more fully into the web of occult influences by which God governs all things. In this way, they could regain more direct contact with the divine will and enter more fully into man's role of co-governor of the material world. The divinely willed plan to restore and perfect all things could proceed more effectively once man became a fully self-conscious partner in the work. Man was to become a magus again, rediscovering the original divine powers of transformation that he had enjoyed before the fall. The means was to penetrate to the inner sympathetic relationships that would allow man to ascend and descend through the order of the cosmos. Talismans, incantations, music, foods, memory systems, gammatria, alchemical operations, and manipulations of all kinds were employed ceaselessly to render the connections transparent. When successful, man would emerge as the perfected microcosmos who could proceed with the reordering of the larger cosmos in the same direction. It was no accident that the writing of Utopias coincided with this eruption of unlimited expectations. The term was coined by Thomas More in his Utopia (1517), literally "no place," which was written some time after his visit to the Neoplatonic circle in Florence. From then on, the writing of Utopias became a prolific genre under the impetus of the same inspiration. It was now permissible to indulge the dream of perfection, for the access to it had been glimpsed in the Hermetic-Alchemical-Kaballistic figuration of the divinized man. Behind the grandiose schemes for universal reformation stood the supremely self-confident magus. The reordering of his soul in line with the cosmological pattern of divine influences had provided him with a ladder up to the heights of divinity itself. Under God, man had been restored to his original miraculous condition of knowing and moving through all things. It was even possible for him to contemplate the supreme test of his creative powers in the Kabbalistic operations for creating a homunculus, a little man.1 The note of rivalry between man and God was barely contained, and its realization occasionally spilled over into consciousness. Indeed, the schemes for cosmic transformation underwent such megalomaniacal elaboration that reason was in danger of being eclipsed entirely. (Fs)