Hermeticism

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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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