Welcome to
this, the tail end of the conference.
Soon we shall
return, each to the real world, or the various unreal worlds of academics
where the body of our ideas are, hopefully, both tenable and tenurable. All
of our ideas are inscribed within a body of practice which mandates (which
is to say embodies) publication, conferences, dissertations, and other modes
of discourse which allow the graduate student to secure a place within the
body of scholarship and the body of scholars.
Yet I intend to
tell a tale, and to present that story as a body of evidence. Twenty years
before Columbus
set off on his journey, a new world was discovered, and revealed to Europe.
No mere land mass, this New World was the Body of Man, revealed as the World
itself, the world in miniature, as Man himself was a small God. This
revelation came through a peculiar body of Greek texts, themselves claiming
to be translations from an Egyptian sage/man/god: Hermes the Thrice
Greatest. This revelation came through the translation of this "Corpus
Hermeticum" from Greek into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth
century and his efforts at establishing an Academy in Florence which would
renovate the World, both the little and the big.
A rather impressive
text. What then was this Corpus Hermeticum? Here I am confounded by the same
problem which it is my intention in this paper to claim confronted Ficino.
The ambiguity of the Corpus Hermeticum lies not in some particular
interpretation, but rather it is incumbent upon any interpretation of these
strange texts, even to their description, and especially to an explanation
of their origins. I hope to make this clearer further on. For now, perhaps,
I should start as the Corpus Hermeticum begins itself, that is: "Once upon a
time."
Once upon a time,
in the ancient land of Egypt the God Thoth, or Tehuti was worshipped. Tehuti
was a moon-god, the patron of science and literature, of wisdom and
inventions, the spokesman of the gods and the keeper of their records. If
the Egyptian pantheon were an English department, Tehuti would be the
Fullbright scholar who returns with an endowed chair. He isn't the Head of
the department, but he's always snapping up the best students. Egyptian
theologians claimed that Thoth was the demiurge who created the universe
with the sound of his voice. Thoth invented arithmetic, surveying, geometry,
astronomy, soothsaying, magic, metallurgy, music, and writing. He was an
inventive chap.
Once upon a little
later time, say the fifth century b.c.e., the Greeks discovered the
Egyptians and began mapping the Hellenic pantheon onto the Theban. Their
homegrown Greek god of messages and messengers, Hermes, was equated with
Thoth. One of the Egyptian titles of respect for Tehuti was aa-aa or
twice-great. The Greeks seem to have done one better by talking about a
mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, or Hermes the Thrice-great.
Now our once upon a
time falls into history, so that nothing is very clear. Some Greek writers
claimed that Hermes Trimesgistos was a human. Some held him to be a sage.
Others a god. And others some combination of all three. Galen knew of the
writings of "Hermes the Egyptian". Athenagoras in the second century A.D.
knows of Hermes Trismegistus whose family is linked with the gods. And both
Clement of
Alexandria
and Iamblicus gave thumbnail sketches of the books of Hermes Trismegistus.
Magic, astronomy, alchemy, cosmology and theosophy seemed to have been his
especial topics. Iamblicus informs us, or mis-informs us, that Hermes wrote
his works in Egyptian, in hieroglyphics (after all he did invent them) then
they were translated into Greek. Also, Iamblicus claims, many other books
were being circulated under the name of Hermes which were not written by
him. No such Greek works survived through to Christian Europe. By the
fourteenth century Greek was operationally an unknown language, even to the
educated monk or scholar. A single work, which claims to be a sort of
seminar session between Hermes and the god of healing, Asclepius, did get
translated into Latin some time in late antiquity and survived in an
eleventh century codex.
There our tale
would end. Except that its plot was thickened, as are so many human stories,
by war. The Turks were threatening to conquer Constantinople, seat of the
Eastern Roman Empire and center of Orthodox Greek Christianity. Negotiations
were held in 1439 in Florence between representatives of the Metropolitan
and the Pope, an attempt to smooth over theological differences between the
two Catholic and Universal versions of the Christian faith, so that
political aid might follow. Among the Greek priests and scholars sent to
negotiate with the Italians was one Gemisthus Pletho. Pletho knew his
Aristotle as the Europeans did not, he knew the original Greek. Pletho also
knew Plato's works, none of which save the Timaeus were in common use in
Latin translation. Pletho was winning theological arguments using an
erudition the Europeans lacked. Lacked but were soon to win for themselves.
Just as the Soviet launch of Sputnik galvanized America's effort in
aerospace, so this embarrassing show of Greeks with Greek scholarship
hastened the study of Greek language, literature and philosophy in Europe.
One of the members
in the audience in 1439 who heard Pletho and saw that Greek could be a
strategic advantage for Florence was Cosimo Medici. It took Cosimo a couple
of decades but he found the perfect young scholar to learn this new Greek
and translate the works of Plato and the neoPlatonists. That scholar was
Marsilio Ficino. Cosimo set Ficino up in a villa in Careggi and supplied him
with greek manuscripts. In the 1460's in the midst of translating Plato,
Ficino was told by Medici himself to stop work and begin immediately
translating a newly acquired manuscript, a collection of little booklets or
tractates, attributed to some sage or man or god mentioned by Clement and
Iamblicus. In short, Ficino set about translating the Corpus Hermeticum.
Ficino knew his
ancient authors, so he "knew" that Hermes Trimegistus was more ancient than
any of them. By the ancients' own testimony these lectures and revelations
of Hermes were an original fountain of wisdom from which Moses and Plato
were separate, though related, streams of thought.
And what Ficino
found in these tractates was that the body, the cosmos, the human being, and
God, were intimately related, were magically connected. The cosmos was a
body, and the human was a little version of the cosmic. Ficino would later
write in his Commentary on the Symposium "The parts of this world, members
of one living being, all originating from the same maker, are joined
together in the communion of one nature. Therefore, just as our brain,
lungs, heart, liver and other organs act on one another, assist each other
to some extent, and suffer together when any one of them suffers, in just
this way the organs of this enormous living being, all the bodies of the
world joined together in like manner, borrow and lend each other's natures."
And through what agency is this borrowing accomplished?...through love.
"Because" as Ficino says, "all the power of magic consists in love."
But this coherent,
ordered, beautifully symmetrical system of interrelationships was not so
much found in the reading as created by that reading. In a very real sense,
the Renaissance version of this Hermetical philosophy which became one of
the sources for the 17th and 18th century's political and scientific
revolutions, this orderly philosophy of the cosmic body and cosmic eros was
the result of Ficino's misreading across the corpus hermeticum.
Ficino's manuscript
consisted of fourteen tractates. Who put these little booklets together into
a single collection, and when this might have been done are questions to
which neither Ficino nor we now have answers. There were other manuscript
traditions, however, than Ficino's, which contained four more tractates
appended at the end. One of these additional tractates which Ficino did not
have at his disposal, could have warned him of the dangers of reading and
translations. This little book is written as a letter from Asclepius to King
Ammon and says in part: "For my teacher Hermes used to say...that those who
read my writings with the right mind will think them to be quite simply and
clearly written, but those who hold the opposite principles to start with
will say that the style is obscure, and conceals the meaning. And it will be
thought still more obscure in time to come, when the Greeks think fit to
translate these writings from our tongue into theirs. Translations will
greatly distort the sense of the writings, and cause much obscurity.
Expressed in our native tongue, the teaching conveys its meaning clearly, by
the very quality of its sound, and when the Egyptian words are spoken, the
force of the things signified works in them... [But] the speech of the
Greeks, my King, is devoid of power to convince, and the Greek philosophy is
nothing but a noise of talk. But our speech is not mere talk; it is an
utterance replete with workings."
In this utterly
unstructuralist theory of language the sign is the very working, the ergos,
or organ of the signified. And the process of reading is a magical act which
makes manifest, not the writing, but the principles held in the mind which
reads. It is not, as with Harold Bloom, that every reading is necessarily a
misreading, but rather that reading is a magical act of evocation in which
the presence of the text as speech, its embodiment in sound, summons forth
the spirit, the foreheld thought of the reader who is thus a magus
transforming thought to action through the body of a text.
Then what did the
fourteen tractates which Ficino possessed actually say about man, the body,
the cosmos and God? The answer varies with each tractate. Let me read
excerpts of a few and determine what sort of influence seems to be at work
in that passage.
The first tractate
is titled Poimandres. This book relates a vision where once upon a time
while the speaker was pondering on first principles he fell into a strange
sleep and was addressed by a Being of vast and boundless magnitude,
Poimandres. Poimandres shows the speaker the creation of the world out of
the four elements. Being merely elemental, the stuff of the world is vastly
inferior to God. But "Mind, the Father of All, he who is Life and Light,
gave birth to Man, a Being like to Himself. And He took delight in Man, as
being His own offspring; for Man was very goodly to look on, bearing the
likeness of his Father. With good reason then did God take delight in Man;
for it was God's own form that God took delight in. And God delivered over
to Man all things that had been made." Here we certainly seem to be dealing
with a writer who is familiar with the Genesis account of man's creation.
But this account is made more problematic. Poimandres continues "And Nature,
seeing the beauty of the form of God, smiled with insatiate love of Man,
showing the reflection of that most beautiful form in the water, a form like
to his own, in earth and water, loved it, and willed to dwell there. And the
deed followed close on the design; and he took up his abode in matter devoid
of reason. And Nature, when she had got him with whom she was in love,
wrapped him in her clasp, and they were mingled in one; for they were in
love with one another. [14]"
Man's body is
forced upon him by a feminine Nature who has a wild crush on the Masculine
idea of man. This sort of relationship bears close resemblance to Gnostic
myths current in the second century C.E.
Obviously, the
cosmos as related by Poimandres is a nasty, grasping Lady who drags
everything she touches, literally, into the mud. So the Cosmos is not such a
great thing, eh? Yet the very next tractate contains this exchange between
Hermes and Asclepius.
"Herm. And the
Kosmos is a body, is it not?
Ascl. Yes.
Herm. Now this
Kosmos is great; there is no body greater than the Kosmos."
This cosmic body is
not mere dross, for bound up with it is a spiritual principle: "That which
is within the body, and which moves the soulless thing, is not a body; and
that is what moves both the body of him who carries a thing and the body of
the thing carried; for a soulless thing cannot of itself move anything. Thus
it is that you see the soul distressed by the weight of its burden, when it
bears two bodies at once."
So the body is not
mere mass, but rather it is matter which is moved by soul. This soul is
essential and of a piece with all created bodies. This concept will be found
later by another reader of the Hermetica, Isaac Newton, and will be the seed
of Newton's concept of mass/force as Betti Jo Dobbs has shown us.
So only looking at
the first two tractates, a great deal of smoothing over is necessary if the
Hermetica are to present a coherent philosophy, or even point of view. But
there are twelve other books, each as varied. In one we read: "And God is
the Good, and nothing but the Good. Call nothing else good then, nothing but
God." And the influence here of Gospel of John seems palpable. Yet elsewhere
in the same booklet we have: "And the other name of God is 'Father'. He is
called the Father, because he is the maker of begetter of all things; for it
is the part of a father to beget. And for this reason the begetting of
children is held by those who think aright to be the most weighty concern in
human life, and the most pius of deeds. That a man should depart from life
and leave no child is a great misfortune, and a great sin; it is a thing
accursed in the sight of the Sun. Such a one is punished by the daemons
after death; and the punishment is this, that the soul of the man who has no
child is condemned to enter a body that is neither that of a man nor that of
a woman. Therefore, Asclepius, never be glad on behalf of any man that he is
childless, but pity his misfortune, knowing what manner of punishment awaits
him. This certainly neither Christian nor Gnostic, both tending towards the
encratic and ascetic. An Egyptian hold over? or a late Hellenic theory of
homosexuality?
Nor are the
Hermetica democratic in their perceptions, the fourth tractate tells us "But
man has this advantage over all other living beings, that he possesses
speech and mind {ton logon kai ton noun} Now speech, my son, God imparted to
all men; but mind he did not impart to all." Everyone yammers, this seems to
say, even the Greeks. But only the few have the knowledge of true mind. So
we would think these writers had little use for the common man or for the
mere body, that material sludge of Nature who is after all only a sort of
lusting Sadie Hawkins of souls. Yet the fifth tractate speaks of the body as
movingly as the Book of Job. "Think, my son, how man is fashioned in the
womb; investigate with care the skill shown in that work, and find out what
craftsman it is that makes this fair and godlike image. Who is it that has
traced the circle of the eyes, that has pierced the orifices of the nostrils
and the ears, and made the opening of the mouth? Who is it that has
stretched the sinews out and tied them fast, and dug out the channels of the
veins? Who is it that has made the bones hard, and covered the flesh with
skin? Who is it that has separated the fingers, and shaped the broad surface
of the soles of the feet? Who is it that has bored the ducts? Who is it that
has shaped the heart into a cone, and joined the sinews to it, that has made
the liver broad, and the spleen long, and hollowed out the cavities of the
lungs, and made the belly capacious? Who is it that has so fashioned the
most honorable parts that all may see them, and concealed the parts that are
unseemly? See how many crafts have been employed on one material, and how
many works of art are enclosed in one compass! All are beautiful, all true
to measure, yet all are diverse one from the other." And it doesn't seem far
fetched to imagine acquaintance with Job for this writer.
For the most part,
though, the philosophy presented in the majority of the tractates is good
old fashioned Middle Platonism. "The Good, Asclepius, must be a thing that
is devoid of all movement and all becoming, and has a motionless activity
that is centered in itself; a thing that lacks nothing, and is not assailed
by passions...." these sorts of Platonic quotations could be given for
hours.
What then attracted
Ficino? Where did he the find evidence for the wisdom he assumed lay in
these texts? There are some passages worthy of a sage/god/man. This one in
particular presents a idealized humanism not to be matched, not in Pico's
own De hominus dignitate, nor in Hamlet's magnificent "What a piece of work
is man.."
The following
speech was written, not in the Renaissance, but in that misty antiquity
which spawned Renaissance humanism:
"If then you do not
make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known to
like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grow to a like
expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all
time, and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you
too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are
able to grasp al things in your thought, to know every craft and every
science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make
yourself higher than all heights, and lower than all depths; bring together
in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity;
think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think
that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are
young,m that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world
beyond the grave;' grasp in your thought all this art once, all times and
places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can
apprehend God. ...[20b] For it is the height of evil not to know God; but to
be capable of knowing God, and to wish and hope to know him, is the road
which leads straight to the Good; and it is an easy road to travel.
Everywhere God will come to meet you, everywhere he will appear to you, at
places and times at which you look not for it,, in your waking hours and in
your sleep, when you are journeying by water and by land, in the night-time
and in the day-time, when you are speaking and when you are silent; for
there is nothing which is not God...Nothing is invisible, not even an
incorporeal thing; mind is seen in its thinking, and God in his working."
[22]
I apologize for so
extensively quoting the text I'm supposed to be talking about. I offer only
two defenses. First, as long drawn as the preceding quotations were, the
Hermetica themselves are much longer and far more complex in their apparent
borrowings and syncretism than even this florilegium could make evident. And
secondly, when I get started talking about gnosticism and Hermeticism I tend
to forget that the Corpus Hermeticum and the Nag Hammadi texts really aren't
as widely read as Shakespeare, or even Tennyson.
So now that we at
least we have a basic idea of what these texts contain, let's examine
Ficino's concept of the magical body. Besides his Commentary to the
Symposium, Ficino included much of his magical theory in the Three Book on
Life, and it is especially in the third of these that we see him explaining
the idea of a cosmic body where signals are sent, something like our own
nervous impulses, through astral influence. Each of our bodies, just as the
bodies of gems and plants and animals, replicates, mirror in some way that
cosmic body, so the influence of the stars influences us. Also, since Christ
is the image of man and the person of God, we are in our bodies reflections
of godhood itself.
But that concept
itself, the body, has not been exhausted even after this two day conference.
Our own contemporary notion of what a body is is still for the most part
inscribed within a structuralist paradigm, a sort of structuralism which
Foucaultian, Derridean or Irrigaric theories might consider dated, if not in
fact outdated (wherein "my body" is defined as the sum total of all that is
not "my body", or my body ends where some other body begins). Or else we
locate our bodies through a pure and privative capitalist critique (in this
case "my body" is all that I own, my body is property and that property is
mine). That these are not merely academic questions, of where bodies end or
where proprietary rights begin, is obvious from the current deadly abortion
question.
But for the
Hermetic revolution to make sense to us here, now; for the notion of world
as body, we must locate the boundaries between world and body in a wholly
unmodern fashion. In the modern epoch, say since Descartes, between self and
world there is a originary division inscribed, the primal slash is
envisioned as being situated between my "self" and my "world". Yet other
times had other bodies, and that slash was placed differently so that, in
fact, the world was a body, and the body was a world.
It might help, at
this point, to examine the origins of these words I am tossing about as
"body" and "world". For it is the Greek "soma" which reflects the equally
Greek "kosmos". And we find that the move towards translation, the move,
first, from Greek to Latin so that "kosmos" becomes "mundus"; and then this
present translation of "mundus" to world blurs essential origins. As the
Corpus Hermeticum warned us, translation has brought confusion and apparent
senselessness. Let us then examine these words in a proper, modern,
scholarly way. Let us examine their etymologies.
The Greek soma
meant at first, or as early as Homer, "mere" body, the physical stuff, as
opposed to demas, the living body. Later "soma" designated both the living
and the dead body, with the distinction that the living "soma" was imbued
with "psyche" or the animating vital spirit. And this word "soma" can be
traced back to an earlier Proto-Indo European root which developed related
words in Greek meaning "swelling", "thumb", "tumor" and "tumulus". This is
an unexpectedly troublesome etymology. How is the body like the thumb or the
burial tumulus? The image this etymology suggests is of a thumby, tumorous,
tumulous-bound swelling about the soul. The body is considered a swelling.
We might examine this derivation of "body" as swelling from a male point of
view, as a metonomy for that urgent singular swollen member around which the
body pivots and manifests as mere supplement to thrust. Or, on the other
hand, from the feminine perspective the body can be seen as the swelling
within the womb, the tumescence beneath the mystery of her pregnant belly,
the body as a vital tumor in the hidden uterus.
The bodily metaphor
makes assumptions of a certain anal retentive neediness for surroundings.
The swelling which is the body finds its end in the swelling that is the
grave. The grave is seen as a marker, a sign of the body buried beneath it.
The tomb is literally in Greek a "seme", a sign; so that even semantics
finds its origin in the somatic. And I would return to my first toilet joke
and remind us that the Latin mundus in a phrase such as mundus mulieribus
meant the toilet of the women, their decorations, their ornamentation, much
as we could imagine some supermarket magazine called Ladies' World, replete
with ads and articles about perfumes, shampoos and feminine hygeine
products. Originally the Latin mundus had the primary meaning of cleansing
methods or primping, so that Cicero tells us if he had guest coming over he
would make sure his furniture was munda. This word for tidiness or a women's
toilet became "world" only through a borrowing of the Greek word 'kosmos",
order, which could mean "putting oneself in order", "arranging one's face"
powdering one's nose" "making one's toilet" along with more general, ideal,
and Greek notions of order in the "big picture" kosmos. Because the Latin
word fit one of the meanings of the Greek word it took on all of the other
meanings too, in a sort of etymological act of imperialism which we call a
calque.
The idea of kosmos,
then, as order or ornament is at least as old as the Pythagoreans. For them
kosmos generated out of number hence possesses harmony and beauty, and is
the opposite of chaos. Perhaps ultimately the word "kosmos" must be derived
from the Proto-Indo European *kens "to proclaim", so that the idea of order
is found etymologically to be not a given, but a product of discourse. So
that voice or breath, the "anima" or "psyche" as the very stuff of discourse
constitues the "kosmos", while the body, the "soma", is the swelling stuff
that surrounds the voice, and acts as both sign and tomb of that indwelling
breath.
The argument from
etymology which is transparent to us as modern scholars (so that in fact our
scholarship can de defined as the set of practices which we use whose use is
transparent to us) is a move towards the originary which is also of
necessity imaginary. (all moves towards the originary must be imaginary: the
Eden of Christian historiography locates a first spot by inventing it, the
primal protoplast of evolutionary theory cannot be found but it is that
datum supplied by the theory which founds the theory itself, the Big Bang of
cosmology is not derived from data, the Oedipal complex of Freudian
ego-formation).
The origin we find
through our scholarship is a product of that scholarship. The transparency
of this imaginary origin is surety of our scholarship; that is, we all
understand the methods of scholarship, we can look through them
transparently as through a window onto the world, and these methods are the
givens, what is understood by the practicing community of scholars as the
condition of their scholarship, so that we do not ask "meaningless
questions" or "stupid questions" -- that is, those questions which reveal an
ignorance of method, and also those which reveal a perception of the
non-transparency of that method. The perceptive question of the New
Historicist is the stupid question of the New Critic.
The etymological
move towards PIE roots is one such gesture towards the originary and the
imaginary. These roots, these origins, are "found" by looking through the
words, "past" and "behind" them to an origin which our etymologies perceive
by supplying.
Ficino's move with
the Hermetical texts is identical, or at least congruent. He is also making
a move toward the originary which is imaginary. Ficino sees through the
Hermetical text to a originary point in some authoring, and authorizing,
Hermes Trismegistos who precedes the texts, from which the text derives,
rather than seeing Hermes himself derived from the texts, an author who
arises after the fact of his work.
Ficino's
renaissance scholarly attitude is distinct from our modern scholarly
attitude in that he sees the Hermetica as originary rather than derived, as
authored rather than anthologized, and as teaching and revealing a new order
rather than repeating a received world of thought. Since the texts reveal
relationships with or knowledge of Babylonian astrology, Egyptian magic,
Platonic cosmology, Christian theology, Pythagorean number theory,
Gnosticism, and Cabalism this originary move fixes the diversity of opinion
in a first source, a prisca theologica in which all of its diversity is
resolved into a primary unity, that is, truth, a truth which can be
recaptured for Fifteenth century Europe and late Medieval Christianity,
making room for Plato, and Humanism (along with a rediscovered and
re-rationalized occultism) in the Ark of Mother Church.
The Hermetica
provided the possibility that Christianity might be freshened (as we say of
cows) by pagan wisdom which does not contradict either Moses (hence the
Church) or Pythagoras (hence Plato and the Western philosophical tradition),
since both sprang from the originary fount of Hermes Trismegistos.
This mushy, messy
mystical world/body view is the body of my speech. If it were a science
fiction story this would be the tale of the irresistible force of ideas
working upon all too movable bodies or "When Worlds Collude", of how mundus
met kosmos after years of separation. How the world as decorative get up of
its maker collided with world as grand, discursive ordering, and of how
there was hell to pay for it, taken out in bodies, quite corporeally tied to
stakes and burned.
Ficino's reading
elides authorship, so that in fact the entire collection of disparate
tractates was called by the name of the first libellus, Poimandres. It would
be as though the whole New Testament were to be called the Book of Matthew,
so that the Acts of the Apostles were called the fifth chapter of the book
of Matthew. Just as he elides difference in the text, Ficino eludes
diversity in his audience. Florence in the fifteenth century had become much
more elite, more controlled by the Medici. Similarly, Ficino holds his
symposia -- an essentially elitist movement of knowledge with those few
scholars who have learned Greek, some who learned Hebrew, and members of the
powerful political families of Florence.
These few men would
act as the leaven to raise the loafing level of discourse in Europe. As Van
Pelt has described for us, the image of the sacred Temple, itself, which
before this time was conceived to have an entrance but no exit, now develops
an exit, apparently thorugh the influence of these Hermetical texts. The
adept, after he attains wisdom does not remain in the
Temple,
or ascend to the heavens, he returns to help mankind. The renaissance
Hermeticists become involved in the Reformation.
The end is near,
the time is apocalyptic, but as it keeps not coming the urge to perfect the
world for Christ's return becomes a reform movement, as in Rosicrucianism, a
renovatio through the 17th century on into the end of the 18th century.
Those who are gaining power through the occult, those who are discovering
their magical bodies are turning around to help the world.
The philosophical
texts which were ascribed to the ancient Egyptian demigod/sage Hermes
Trismegistus provided
Europe with a new and invigorating philosophical
tradition when these texts were first translated by Ficino in 1471. But the
body of the Hermetical texts was problematized from that very first
translation through Ficino's ascription of all 14 tractates to a single
author, "Poimandres".
Throughout the
Renaissance these writings were "marked" in the Derridean sense to form a
spurious unity which elided the differences between the Neo-Platonic,
Gnostic, Greek magico-philosophical, and Christian elements. Each of these
strands of tradition has its unique view of the body, both as the human
corpus and (through metalepsis) as the cosmic body. The Renaissance
developed traditions of the "mesocosmos" mediating between these two bodies
in the form of churches, villas and public buildings which were seen in the
sixteenth century "Hermetic" architectural tradition as talismanic temples,
replicating in brick and mortar the very form of the body of the cosmos.
And truth can be
recaptured for early modern Europe, making room for Plato, and Humanism. And
Christianity might be freshened (as we say of cows) by a pagan wisdom which
does not contradict the Church. Yet within this very celebration of the
humanist conception of cosmic unity and human potential there is inscribed
the ineradicable mark of the anti-cosmic, the gnostic, which finds its
provenance within the very body of these texts of liberation. The Church, of
course, did not put up with this.
Ficino's
translation is a tale of how mundus met kosmos after centuries of
separation. It was a translation which would incite new insights in
thousands, including Newton, Copernicus, and Gallileo. In this translation
the world as object of its creator collided with world as grand, discursive
ordering, and there was hell to pay for it, taken out in bodies, quite
corporeally tied to stakes and burned.
As early modern
scientists and philosphers would find out, a corporate Church could still
hold bodies, both human and heavenly, in thrall; they could crisp Giordano
Bruno at the stake and force Gallileo to let the moons of Jupiter return,
Aquinistic, back to their orthodox non-exisitence.
The humanistic
tradition which did eventually win out against such cannonical destruction
of bodies, grounded itself, in part, on these Hermetical texts and was
similarly "marked" with the contradictions implicit among the various
tractates, which manefested in a spurious, invented, and essential unity of
the "body". Within the very celebration of the humanist conception of cosmic
unity and human potential there is inscribed, then, the ineradicable mark of
the anti-cosmic, the gnostic, which finds its provenance within the very
body of these texts of liberation.
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