Dutch and English Hermetic Neoplatonist

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Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 8 of 13

Dutch and English Hermetic Neoplatonist
John Colet, Thomas More, and Erasmus
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 21, 1986

Transcript:

We come tonight to the most difficult juncture in the Hermetic tradition. The English have always been a problem– and the English have never accepted the Hermetic tradition in any traditional way, they always insist on having it their way. They turned the pie to face them and they start from the point and work back towards the crust. Everybody else in Europe just eats it as the wedge is served to you regardless. So it's easy to trace the Hermetic tradition in Germany, or in Italy, even France if one wished to, but in England it's almost impossible because immediately upon arrival it translates. And the reason that it translates right away is that there is a hermetic tradition which is underground in England all the time. And the earliest comprehensive person that I can find who is responsible for this English attitude was Chaucer – Geoffrey Chaucer – who we do not think of as a hermetic magus at all. But who had the most profound understanding of alchemy and of man and of the great tradition in his time.

Chaucer is born about 1340 and from Chaucer there are a number of English hermeticists like George Ripley or Thomas Norton and others who write very capably, but who in their lives are such exemplary Christians, clerics really, that by the time the Florentine hermeticists are influencing England, the English work it in and they translate everything that's Hermetic into Christian terms, Christian humanist terms. This will produce a problem at the close of the 16th century in England. Because of this subterfuge the English mind will lose track of itself temporarily around the year 1600. And because of this quirk in the English mind we have the prodigious consciousness of Shakespeare who struggles with the two basic elements, which are forced into recognition forced into consciousness – one of them is human character. Are we who we think we are? Who could we be other than what we are temporarily? What roles could we have? And if we're capable of many roles, what drama are we in, and who is writing this drama?

And the issue of madness will come up in Shakespeare again and again. And all the great tragedies of Shakespeare will be around this whole question of– of madness. What is– what is madness? What is consciousness that has gone outside of its lines, outside of the shapes, by which it is recognizable? And does not consciousness belong in human beings in human characters? But once upon a time there were hierarchies, there were metaphysical hierarchies by which one could project out onto these hierarchies all of this complex order. But in the English mind in the 16th century, increasingly, there was nowhere to project it. There was only the personality ever more complex of the individual who had to find room within himself. And finally there were too many people at home in the single individual. And in Elizabethan drama you find the explosion of consciousness trying to deal with this– All the world's a stage and it is so for the English.

The Hermetic tradition, when it is refurbished by Marsilio Ficino in Florence in the 1460s and 1470s, is fairly coherent because it's within the confines of a single man's acquaintance. It's not that Ficino himself understands everything, although he's the one who is making the translations which everybody then uses, but he knew everyone personally. So there's a godfather to the tradition. There's someone you can ask. There's someone you can write to and find some response, some clarification. And when Ficino dies in 1499 the Hermetic tradition loses this grandfather figure. And that first generation of Hermeticists who– who were responsible to Ficino try to carry on but they do not have Ficino's interest in man universally. They have their own interests and the Hermetic tradition splits into three really. It splits into an Italian section, into a German section, and into an English section.

And tonight we're going to look at, in particular, the English Hermeticists who were not usually thought of as hermeticists. In the Italian tradition, which we're not going to get to in this series but into the one coming up in January, that tradition culminates in Giordano Bruno, and Bruno is a mastermind but he will be burned at the stake in the year 1600 and it will signal to the Italian Hermetic tradition that this is a dead end, there is no longer any way to go. And so the German and English hermeticists after 1600 will increasingly try to find some way to come together and the issue by which they come together is an anti-pope, an anti-papal combine. And so that the fama of the Rosicrucians in 1614 we'll talk about the Pope being an anti-Christ. We'll talk about a new age that's going to dawn and it'll be German and English hermeticists combined together who will seek to do that. And the 17th century will have an eerie flavor to it of English and German mentalities. But the English mentality will constantly want to translate everything into the person. Whereas, the German mentality wants to translate everything into a historical movement, a zeitgeist which has a progression. And so the English will try to accommodate the Germans and say, that's right, there is a historical movement, but it objectifies in people. And the Germans will say, that's right, there are people but they have to fit together into a group. We must be a group, we must be organized. And finally the English reply will be, we're having a hard enough time organizing ourselves. There are so many people in us individually we have to take time out to find out how many are at home. And so you will find individuals later on in the 17th century, like John Milton, who is absolutely convinced that he's heavily populated, and was, and wrote that way.

So we find tonight it's very difficult to move from Ficino to John Colet. It's fairly well established now by 20th century scholarship that they never physically met. No one knew for sure, but it's fairly well established now. The volume that does this I think comprehensively is this one by Sears Jayne, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino, published in 1961. I think the original edition here was Oxford University Press, 1963. So about 20 years ago. But they corresponded. And in particular Colet was interested in learning the last stage at which Ficino had reached so that he could take the last stage, the last phase, and translate that into English terms. And that's where the problem comes in, in trying to trace the Hermetic tradition to England because Ficino had done champion labor. He had translated the Corpus Hermeticum in the 1460s so that by the late 1490s he had almost 40 years experience. He was no longer talking about the Hermetic documents, because he had made all the translations of Plato and he had shown conclusively that the platonic dialogues formed a pattern, and that this pattern was a theology – that all of the dialogues taken together were a massive spider web of a doctrine, a theological doctrine for the transformation of man, for the metanoia of man, but that the platonic theology was so complex it was such an intellectual system that it was very difficult to teach this to individuals, so that as time went on from Plato, the Platonic Academy more and more tried to find shortcuts excerpting, abstracting, out of the platonic corpus trying to find just those few items that could be taught. And that the master of this selecting process was actually Aristotle who gave up the dialogue form. He did write dialogues but they were never kept in antiquity because his abstracts, his philosophical prose writings, were the effective line of argument. So instead of the platonic dialectic, which leads you then to have to master the whole web of circumstance, with Aristotle you could develop lines of thought. You could develop logics of subjects and these would be shortcuts. But Ficino had found that this Aristotelian shortcut had produced a crisis of consciousness in antiquity, and that that crisis of consciousness was answered by Christianity. The appearance of Christianity, not so much in the first century AD, but by the second and third century AD without a question. Christianity responded to this by reinstating the transformative pattern all over again as the whole question of the wholeness of an individual. The mind can be trained by abstractions by lines of argument but the human being cannot be fulfilled by that kind of mentality no matter how sharp or how clever He has to live his being. And that. That was the point. So that by the third century AD the platonic tradition in its hermetic mode had culminated in the great genius of Plotinus.

And so Ficino, who had translated the Hermetic Doctrines (the Corpus Hermeticum) – 13 books in the 1460s and had worked in the 1470s on Plato then in the 1480s worked on Plotinus. And in 1492 he published his monumental translation of Plotinus. And for the first time in European history and Western history Plotinus was available in a language that could be read fairly simply. Plotinus's Greek is notoriously difficult. In fact from 1492 back to the last Plutonians who understood what Plotinus was talking about holistically as we would say around 500 AD for that thousand years there were only one or two individuals who understood Plotinus and they stood out like as one history of philosophy professor said they they stand out like razor thin needles pinnacles of excellence and the flat plane of mediocrity. One of them was responsible for the Carolingian Renaissance John Scotus Eriugena single-handedly and is an object lesson that one man makes a difference. One human being makes a difference. But when Ficino had translated Plotinus by 1492, into Latin, everyone realized then that the Hermetic tradition with its platonic theology intact had come to a transformative node in Plotinus, and that Plotinus’s Enneads were the long sought for short form of the platonic theology, because instead of speaking to them to the mind to train the mind in terms of its mentality it spoke to the spiritual essence of the mind so that the mind would not pay any attention to the world so much, except in a symbolic way, and would integrate it in an interior spiritual essential, quintessential, aspect. So that Plotinus was the key to the short form of human transformation. And that this had been recognized in the fourth century AD and that the great growth of Christianity as an esoteric religion came in the fourth century AD, because in the fourth century AD for the first time you find individuals who understand Christianity in terms of Neoplotinian Hermetic transformation. One of the cumulative figures of that is Augustine– Saint Augustine, or Saint Jerome.

These were the powerful individuals who were not esoteric so much, but they are Transformers. They're the ones who say this is how it works and then turn it out for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to be able to live by and tell them. If you want to know we can teach you but you don't really have to know because all you have to do is to do it because the transforming metanoia has been put into Hermetic forms known as sacraments and the application of sacramental Christianity will transform you. Baptism, final unction, marriage, all of these sacraments, the Eucharist, they work, they really work, and they work for you on your spiritual essence. Whether or not you understand it intellectually is a whole nother issue. But they do work and they're effective for you.

Thus the church becomes the repository in the fourth century AD for the whole tradition so that the last great hermetic teacher, the last great Hermetic Magus of the classical world – we don't know his name, he's known in history as Dionysius the Areopagite. He writes a series of terse short books which are the quintessence of transformative Hermeticism in terms of the whole matrix of the platonic theology refined down to Plotinus and applied to Christianity. And his three treatises that are very powerful came out around 500 AD. One concerns divine names, how to call the powers by their names. And if you do this in this order they will be evoked to you because you have the power of Christ working in you to call these out and to help coordinate your powers Dionysius the Areopagite wrote the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the way in which the shape of the sacramental church is effective, hermetically. And then he wrote the celestial hierarchy showing that this is why the universal cosmos responds to the ecclesiastical hierarchy; that these two hierarchies meet together and that horizon where they meet together that's where spiritual man has his abode and that's the realm of the kingdom. And Christ is the Magus in that realm. But you have to work up to that, through the ecclesia so that those helpers who help you work up through the ecclesia are the priests, through applying the sacraments, so that one is saved by being brought transformatively up through the worldly levels to that kingdom to that horizon. And from then on one can one knows how this works up to this point the celestial hierarchy works the very same way and you can go from there on your own.

So that in 1492, when Ficino translates Plotinus, he immediately starts working on translating Dionysius the Areopagite. And right at the end of his life the last thing that he does is he presents his translation of Dionysius. And that's where John Colet comes in. And Colet contacts Ficino and he says what's the latest? And Ficino says, Dionysius the Areopagite has got it together. And John Colet says that's the man I want to read. And so Colet, then, in contacting Ficino writes a whole series of commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite and they lay on a dusty shelf in manuscript unprinted in London from 1500 to about 1869 when someone finally put an edition out and then it went out of print right away and a hundred years later somebody reissued it in a scholarly reprint and it's never reached more than maybe a couple thousand people in five hundred years. Which is why no one understands how the Hermetic tradition gets to England and how it gets there in the way in which it did.

But when you look at Colet's understanding of Dionysius the Areopagite he's interested in seeing just how Dionysius was interested in seeing how the Hermetic principles are masterfully handled by Jesus. Jesus the magician but not so much Jesus the magician a la Morton Smith in our time, but Jesus the magician in being able to work with the demonic elements which have got to be there in the celestial hierarchy, because not only are there angels, angelic orders in the celestial hierarchy, but there are demonic powers also in that celestial hierarchy. And that what causes man a problem in terms of the church is that the church helps him up to that level but shelters him from dealing with evil in himself and when he's turned loose he doesn't know how to handle the demonic powers and they eat him alive.

And so the church has done a disservice. They're like a parent who's sheltered the children too much and they don't know how to live in the world when they're grown up. And so this crisis of consciousness comes to a head in the early sixteenth century. It comes to a head in terms of intellectual struggle. But a hundred years later in the seventeenth century it comes to a head in terms of witchcraft trials and things like that. It comes in a popular vomiting stage. And one of the results is that Europe suffers the Thirty Years War which was devastating. And religious wars go on and on and on. And the seventeenth century is like a horrific catalog of religious wars and they're all Christian sects against Christian sects, all of them. They're not against Moslems or against Buddhists. It's Christian sects against Christian sects.

But the roots of all this go back and we can understand from around 1490 to about 1520, in those thirty years, the focus, the roots of all this are there. In fact when we look at Florentine, the Florentine experience, we can see that within two years of the publication of Plotinus by Ficino – which is revolutionizing the consciousness of the leading thinkers of that time. They're taken to a tremendous distance from the general population. They've been getting more and more out on the limb. And finally with Plotinus they almost completely transcend what the man on the street would be able to understand. And from this imbalance a religious dictator comes in and takes over the city of Florence – his name was Savonarola. And he's screaming from the pulpit. He's saying it's those damned Medicis that have done this to us. And the people of Florence drive the Medicis out of town, dispossessed them. We don't want to have anything to do with them. And finally the power of Savonarola grows and grows and by 1494 the Pope in Rome is trying to hush him up but he will not hush. They do everything, they try to merge his church jurisdiction with another church jurisdiction and say you're no longer in charge. But so and so is. He keeps on preaching. And finally the situation gets into a metaphysical bind where Savonarola is caught in a condemnatory position, which he cannot extract himself and the church quickly sends down inquisitors. They quickly try Savonarola, they hang him, and then they burn him publicly in Florence in 1498 May.

What is going on, someone asks looking from the outside. We have the most incredible humanist tradition for thirty years in a fabulous city patronized by the Medicis and the works of art are the wonder of the world. Ever since then all of a sudden these people and all these values are rejected and thrown out and called the work of the devil. Because this psychic polarity is in such imbalance the people watching that, conscientiously, were not in Italy but were in Germany. People like Trithemius, especially, were seeing we've got to be careful. And people like Colet in England saying that's right we've understood this for a long time. You can't just go out and be the magus on the street. It's all got to be truly esoteric. It's got to be disguised. It's got to be just metaphorical as far as everyone else is concerned. But that because we understand how this is done it'll really work. Even though it seems metaphorical to everybody else.

So, in England, Colet sets up for himself a school. He became the dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, the largest cathedral in London. And he was an extraordinarily wealthy individual. He inherited what would be the equivalent of millions of dollars, and he turned all of this money into trust funds. And he set up an educational institution for boys in London. There were a hundred and fifty-three scholarships made in perpetuity that there would always be a room for a hundred and fifty-three boys to be taught absolutely free at Saint Paul's and anybody could come in, and if they could manage to learn and stay, then they could be trained. You didn't have to be an intellectual giant to start, but– But there was this basis of bringing a population in and training them. And the basis of their training was the Greek language, that they would learn the Greek, so that they could read for themselves the documents, the history.

We've– we have translations but we want you to read it in the original because we don't want to– we don't want to talk about it except in Greek so that the people on the street will be saying well you're learning classics. That's nice. You're learning Hermes and Plato and Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite but you're doing it in– in Greek and– and your intellectuals and we're glad that– that you're doing it but don't bother us. And eventually Colet, in connection with Reuchlin, we'll see that, in fact, just like you learn Greek you have to learn Hebrew. And finally it'll be three classical languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. And the school there will be trilingual. And what starts out in 1507 or 1509 when it started, becomes the norm for English education by the end of the 16th century. You find a lot of people in England in the late 1500s who read and speak Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. A whole population of people.

There are– there are certain individuals who have four daughters and three sons and the whole family can– can converse in all these languages and it becomes an everyday thing. In fact Colet's school is still operating in England. It's moved to Hammersmith. In fact, before D-Day, Eisenhower gave the last briefing to the Allied generals in Colet’s school in the auditorium. So it's still there and there are still a hundred and fifty-three scholarships in perpetuity. So some of these things stay.

But what Colet represents is the translation of the Hermetic tradition into ostensibly Christian clericism but that the Christian cleric becomes a man of conscience, of discriminating conscience, who increasingly has to decide for himself whether he's going to participate in the church or not. That the English conscience becomes the– the transforming altar; becomes the crucible, becomes the crater. Colet, in fact, is the individual that Agrippa is sent to when Trithemius tries to educate Agrippa and Agrippa wants to go off on the magic all the time he sends him to England. And Colet tries his best. But the number one student of Colet is not Agrippa but is Sir Thomas More, and Sir Thomas More is a real enigma. He is not the simple figure that we think of. In fact, he will become the archetype for the individual conscience in England needing to mature his own consciousness, irregardless of the consequences. And of course he will be beheaded by Henry the Eighth who loved him who made him Chancellor of England who didn't want to kill him but More forced him to realize that what is transformative in life is how you live – not what you think. It's not your beliefs but it's how you live those beliefs. And that he was willing to die for his. Are you willing to kill me for yours? Well then you will have to do it.

But in his early life, Sir Thomas More, when he's a young man when he's around thirty he has a tremendous difficulty with himself, has a crisis, religious crisis. He goes to Colet and he asks him what he can do. And Colet says I want you to read The Life of Pico della Mirandola who is a perfect example of the flashy individual who doesn't make it. And so Sir Thomas More, as a formative young man, reads this and Colet is trying to educate him to see that you have to– you have to live the life in continuity and in that way you apply the refining fire to yourself. Whereas, if you try to make events happen, you try to make yourself change, you translate the efficacy of the hermetic process to a mentality. And so ideas mature but you do not. And you find yourself with ideas that are so well developed that they come to dominate you, they become obsessive and that this is what we have to watch out for.

And later on, having learned that lesson well, thirty years later More is trying to teach Henry the Eighth that he has an obsessive idea of the power of a king. And if the king continues in his obsession he will kill off the best of his people and that he is the first example of this. And this will be the prototype that Shakespeare will use in a lot of his history. Shakespeare's kings are always dealing with this problem, of might and power and people. In fact, one of Thomas More's early dramas – he wrote dramas – was Richard the Third. And Thomas More's Richard the Third is very interesting to read vis a vis Shakespeare's Richard the Third.

If you remember last week one of the genius developments of Trithemius was to devise the beginnings of an arcane alphabet. That language was the problem because human intelligence formed itself on language bases. That it was the structure of language which turns out to be true. It's the structure of language that is the skeleton for the habituating capacity in man's mind. We are able to learn and remember and retain and think, but we do all of these functions in terms of a language matrix. And if we're thinking in French it's different from thinking in English. If we're thinking in Greek it's different. It isn't just geographical absurdities that make differences in people, but it's the language forms. And so Trithemius was interested in devising a universal language that everyone could understand.

And at the beginning of More's Utopia – here's the Penguin Classics – here's The Utopian Alphabet that Thomas More designed. And he says in here, in translation, word for word:

“Utopus me General from not island made island.
Alone I of-lands all without philosophy
State philosophical I-have-formed for-mortals.
Willingly I-impart my-things, not not-willingly I-accept better-ones.”

An esoteric little quatrain saying that there is a utopia, there is this– this kingdom, which man can reach through the development of reason and experience so that the guide now is not so much a priest through the church with sacraments, but the individual through his intelligence is able to guide himself into those realms. And the Colet-More line of the Hermetic tradition develops especially the idea of the self-taught man. He is able to handle himself; to be a tutor to himself and go and find out what information he needs or what experiences he needs and apply them to himself and so develop himself, make himself. This will become a very powerful line in the Hermetic tradition when it comes to the United States. And the Utopia is set not in Europe but in America, 1516, it's set in America. And so More, in a prophetic way, is saying it can't happen here. But that doesn't mean that this new human capacity to be self teachers for ourselves can't find a land somewhere in the New World. The new world, like the New Testament. Like the New Testament where Jesus is effective and not the Old Testament God so much.

In the New World the individual man is going to be effective and not so much the church tradition. So that this will mature itself. And of course when you can understand the Hermetic tradition in this way the great Hermetic master who perfects this will be Benjamin Franklin the man who realizes that there is no upper limit to what a man can self-develop himself. Where is the limit? There is no limit. And this will become a particularly interesting quintessential American trait. It comes down to the phrase of, “can do”. We’ll find some way to do it. I will find some way to do it. It's a peculiar trait.

It starts here about five hundred years ago in this struggle with Colet and More, with the Hermetic tradition of trying to find a way that they can live it, they can understand it in England, a very peculiar thing. It is not quite the same in the German tradition or in the Italian tradition or in any other tradition. This is why the United States has such a peculiar history. From, say, around 1760 to about 1820 American history is very peculiar because the experiment there is not so much with the government, the form of the government, but with trying to just free up people to find out what they can do. And all of this, believe it or not, is a development of the Hermetic tradition that starts here at this time.

Now in More's reading of The Life of Pico della Mirandola, he finds that Pico's personal dilemma was the turning point in his career, that for instance, in many of the historical facts of Pico's life – such as the intricacies of his personal geometry the precise details of his learning and background and so forth – More is not interested in that kind of the makeup of a man. He's not interested in the standard European derivation of the man. His concern with Pico, as is quoted here, “cunning and virtue.” Pico's cunning and virtue with the qualities of his mind and with the qualities of his character. The relationship between mind as an essence and character as a core. This is what concerns More. This is the alchemy of– of the person.

And so More realizes from his teacher Colet that he really he can't get the answers from Colet that he's hoping for. We have a letter here– I have a letter someplace that– in one of these books that More writes to call it and it's almost desperate. He's almost begging him to save him from himself. Tell me what I have to do. And Colet always then is turning it back to him and saying you have to develop yourself. That's what you have to do. And so More, in his life, devises a very peculiar individualistic way of comporting to himself. He has to throw himself out into the world in order to see what he's going to do. He becomes like a scientist for the person, for his own person. And so More, who was going to become a priest and might have even become a monk, becomes a married man, has a large family, gets involved with a very powerful king, becomes Lord Chancellor of England. But in all this he is never more than acting out roles. Never. And the equanimity, the fabled equanimity of More's personality is the personality projected out. But inside is all of the turmoil in the scientific distilling. How may my character and my mind, the core of my life and the essential quality of my mind, come into that magical interplay where they can transform. Because the object is to become an eternal spirit and not stay a man in any role whatsoever. And this of course makes him almost invisible and the European complement of– of Saint Thomas More, he was canonized – the European complement to him is Erasmus who is likewise always thought of as the most boring drab equanimous person and who was just as volatile as More and just as hermetic and striving in his own way. And after the break we'll take a little look at him.

The Hermetic Christian formula is how to transform this into its complement which is to have the personality harmonized and have the mind thereby able to vertically ascend. But that's too esoteric.

In Thomas More's Utopia he writes, but the protagonist here that, “ ‘I didn't guess too far wrong,’ I remarked. ‘The moment I saw him, I thought he must be a sailor.’ ‘In that case you made a big mistake,’ he replied. ‘I mean he's not a sailor of the Palinurus type. He's really more like Ulysses or even Plato. You see, our friend Raphael – for that's his name Raphael Nonsenso – is quite a scholar. He knows a fair amount of Latin and a tremendous lot of Greek. He's concentrated mainly on Greek because he's mainly interested in that philosophy, and he found that there’s nothing important on that subject written in Latin, apart from some bits of Seneca and Cicero.’ ”

Can you see how esoteric this is without– without seeming to be? He's talking hermetically across the board but with such felicity that if you didn't know that you wouldn't pick it up. Watch.

“ ‘He wanted to see the world, so he left his brothers to manage his property in Portugal – that's where he comes from – and joined up with Amerigo Vespucci. You know those Four Voyages of his that everyone is reading about? Well, Raphael was his constant companion during the last three, except that he didn't come back with him from the final voyage. Instead, he practically– practically forced Amerigo to let him be one of the twenty-four men who were left behind in that fort. So he stayed out there, to indulge his taste for travel, [because that's] all he ever really cared about’.” Internal travel. “ ‘He didn't mind where he eventually died, for he had two favorite quotations,” – here they are – “ ‘The unburied dead are covered by the sky’ and ‘You can get to heaven from anywhere’ ” – that's hermetic humor, you have to hand it to him.

There's still hope right? Well the Lord Chancellor has got to be a diplomat right? Yeah.

Colet is the teacher of More, he's the one that– that matures him. What is the alchemical process? The alchemical process is that you have to dissolve before you can coagulate. You have to dissolve the old before you can precipitate the new. Here's Colet in one of his lectures on the account of the creation and he's talking here on the composition of Christ's mystical body and in that– in the relationship of whatever that is to the church. And he's talking in here about generation and corruption. And he says that, “the corruption, or change of form, always has to precede generation.” It always has to be this corruption of the form and it has to be carried then to a certain point to where a new form can be precipitated out of it. Now he's going to talk about then– how, like in matter, there is nothing permanent. All stability is from the– the determining form. But the quintessential determining form will be the mystical body of Christ because the mystical Body of Christ is not so much dissolved matter, but dissolves forms, which dissolve matter. It's quintessential, so that you don't have to follow any kind of alchemical formula dealing with transformation of material. That that's actually kid stuff but that the real grown up version is to deal with on the archetypal level, from the spirit, where you're not transforming matter by the form principle but you're transmuting form by the spiritual principle.

And Colet says this is very powerful then. He says, “from this standpoint, then that Christianity in the New Testament is an extraordinary amplification of the powers of man which were only hinted at in the Old Testament.” And he goes on to talk, somewhere along this line, that in fact the Old Testament was really just a beginning ground, a test ground. And that out of this then, comes this whole new application and so Colet then says that, in the– “in the tradition there was a time when contemplation, Plotinic contemplation, Plotinian contemplation, was effective and was the necessary ground.” But that now, thousand years later, what's effective is action, personal action. It's what a man does with his life that is the proving ground, the testing ground, and not his contemplation that that was all right to start off with to get him used to the fact that he has these faculties he has these capacities but now that he's mature and he's grown, now he can practice them.

So this shift is very powerful. This is an enormous shift. This is– this is like pivoting with power because the whole emphasis then on experience goes from internal experience settling into its own horizon of equanimity to internal experience being generated to be applied in a life for what you do. And out of this is going to come a whole new orientation of what it means to be human. And it's like we have, today, in our comportment, we have the idea that we have the right to live our life – we have that right – and that the living of our life is everything to us. It's all important to us and that it comes as very strange to think that we could just contemplate our life and that that should be satisfactory. We no longer have that bias, although for four thousand years in the West that was the bias that the quiet contemplation of life was more important. But here we see at this time around 1500 is the beginning of this change.

And of course one of the great figures in this change is Martin Luther. Luther's criticism of the church for coddling people by doctrine, that even though the doctrine is sound – qua doctrine – even though that might be so it cripples the people so that they cannot be in charge of their own development. So that a– a community of individuals can only come together on the basis of doctrine on the basis of a church structure. And what thereafter is for human beings, new human beings, to be able to come together on terms of their capacities, their faculties. And this– this change of consciousness is so profound that it doesn't take hold right away in Italy or Germany or even in England. There are individuals in England and there are societies in Germany, but the place where it really takes hold is in Spain. The idea of a bunch of adventurous individuals who can step outside of history and do what they want to do. And of course the archetype for that is Cortez and his men, who just simply step off the European continent and then a decade or so develop a tremendous archetype of action in the New World.

And this later on– we've lectured on this a couple of years ago and we went through the whole development of this and how the mind of Cervantes then becomes, in Shakespeare's time, the mind of Cervantes understands this– this transformative. So that action versus contemplation when you have action then what's important to you is your ethical comportment. And so metaphysics transposes into ethics in the English mind about this time and becomes concerned with the same things.

Here is a quotation from Sears Jayne, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino, from the Oxford publication about 20 years ago. “One of the ways of assuring right choices is to cut down on the number of choices for Colet as for the– as for Dionysius the Areopagite evil is associated with multiplicity. He stresses this issue in a long comment which begins with a quotation from Saint Paul…” – this is from Romans – “ ‘Do not remember evil things if you wish to retain the good. Avoid multiplicity, confusion, and tumult. Seek simplicity, tranquility, and peace. Have few thoughts, and share them with few people – that is, better thoughts with better people. Avoid the crowded way. Follow the bypass. Seek not the broad way but the straight way. The way which few know and few go. Then you will find what few find and enjoy what few enjoy.’ ”

So in seeking simplicity as in avoiding the flesh it is a moral issue which is at stake. The key to salvation is moral then ethical. “On the three stages of the soul search…” – the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive, the purification, the discovery, and the union. “The first or the moral stage, this purification is the one to which Colet then urges man's primary attention.” Don't worry about the other stages. Don't worry about the other phases. The intricacies of this phase are enough and the intricacies are impossible as long as they're amplified so one has to pare them down in simplicity. And so the learning of principle here is a way of simplifying life, not so much of learning by rote, a doctrine.

So the understanding in Colet, in Moore, and later on in the English Hermetic tradition of laws is not so much laws to be obeyed but laws to be applied. So that later on when this develops say like in the mind of Isaac Newton he understands the laws of gravity or the laws of physics is something which you can apply that you don't have to just obey because you understand what they are but you can make them work for you. And when you put that together with the powerful notion of a secret language like mathematics you not only know the laws of gravitation or thermodynamics but you have a mathematics which can express them and you can make them work. You can make steam engines. And so these tremendous hermetic ideas, extraordinarily powerful, have all their seeds here. And they had their seeds since classical times but they were never put into a form where individual human beings could get to them in terms of themselves and bring them together in terms of their own person and then go out and find like-minded individuals and form working groups to make this happen. And that changes the face of world history is when all of that starts to work together and all of that– all of that is a part of the Hermetic tradition.

The Hermetic tradition is not fortune telling and it's not all this other piddly stuff. It is the real effective way of changing the forms of things, and then changing the forms of forms if you have to. Why? So that man can realize that his spirit is free. He is not constrained by what he temporarily is in his condition, he will be what he will be.

So this development on the continent is paralleled by the development of the personality of Erasmus. And Erasmus, extremely difficult individual, like Thomas More. Almost everyone assumes that they understand Erasmus and that he's boring, and he's important and he's boring. We are glad he was around. We don't want to hear about it. This is very unfortunate because he gives us the continental personality whereby we can see how the Hermetic tradition translates itself into – what we would call today, the not so much the humanist, not the humanist, he had his arguments with the humanists too as one would expect when you understand it – the individual who is arcane enough to be able to live the life that he wants and can make that life happen for himself. That is a very arcane time. You have to be able to psychologically, just psychologically be free from all of the support structures. Erasmus is one of the first individuals in continental Europe who can live, fully, outside of a doctrinaire position. He doesn't have, eventually towards the end of his life, any doctrinaire position whatsoever. He is totally emancipated free from having to have any kind of a belief system. He can choose what he wants to have in his mind and have that. He can choose to do with it whatever he wants to do. An extraordinary individual. So much so that when Albrecht Dürer was doing the last portrait that he did of Erasmus, and he portrayed Erasmus writing with his books and– and a writing desk somewhat like this lectern and later on illustrating one of Erasmus’s books, Praise of Folly, Hendrik van Loon – a great illustrator – the last page just put the background of Dürer’s etching without Erasmus being there and labeled it the Arsenal of Tolerance, that the– that the freed position of the suspended mind in a free character is indeed the hermetic horizon of transformation. Because there, whatever we would wish to come out will come out. It is the matrix of the all. And if we wish to have a human being capable of having an interstellar civilization instead of farming, you can, whatever you wish to do.

Erasmus, in his personality, recounts in a famous letter, a letter to the papal secretary at the time he was trying to get the Pope to forgive him a certain technical indiscretion on his record. The indiscretion was that he had been forced to become a monk and he didn't like this. He was young. And so he was trying to explain in this letter to Grunnius, the papal secretary, about monks and so forth. And so he writes in here of himself, “‘Where will you turn,’ they said. ‘You will never be able to come into the presence of good men. You will be execrated by the monks and hated by the common people.’ Now the youth had a mind which felt dishonor keenly and feared death less than disgrace. On the other hand, he was urged on by his guardians and friends some of whom had lessened his property by theft. In a word, they conquered by villainy. The boy with abhorrence in his soul and reluctance in his words was compelled to put his head into the halter just as captives in war stretched forth their hands to the victor to be bound or as men overcome by protracted torments or wont they do not what they wish but what their conqueror wishes.” But he calls himself Florentius, “constrained his mind as best he could. But as for his body no one is able to constrain it to suit himself. In the meantime he did what imprisoned captives are wont to do. He solaced himself with his studies as far as this was allowed for it had to be done secretly, though it was allowable to get drunk openly.”

So in this condition what appealed to Erasmus? Very interesting. He considered himself a slave. A slave to the monkish system. And so his reading tended more and more in classics to discover those elements in classical studies which were affined to his position. He discovered in the Stoic Epictetus an interesting little manuscript - it's only about twenty-five pages in translation. Its original title was the Enchiridion, the Enchiridion, or manual – The Enchiridion of Epictetus. It begins like this:

“Of things, some are in our power and others are not. In our power we have opinion, we have desire, and we have aversion. We can control these. The things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance; but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, and in the power of others. Remember, then, that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered; you will lament; you will be disturbed; you will blame both gods and men. But if you think that only that which is your own is to be your own and if you think that which is another's as it really is, belongs to another no man will ever compel you; no man ever hinder you; you will never blame any man; you will accuse no man; you will do nothing involuntarily; no man can harm you; you will have no enemy; you will suffer no real harm.” So Epictetus tells us, pay attention to what you can do, which are your own, and anything that's outside of your power, let that go.

So Erasmus, when he gets freed, he writes his own Enchiridion. And we have a translation here. Now notice in Erasmus’s Enchiridion what he is writing in here. He begins,

In Life One Must Be on Guard
“In the first place, you should continually bear in mind that mortal life is nothing but a kind of perpetual warfare – as Job testifies, a soldier both widely experienced and consistently invincible – and very much deceived are the general run of men, whose minds [are captivated by the world] with alluring pleasures, who take unseasonable furloughs as if the fighting were already over and [that] they were not living in a most hazardous peace. It [was] strange to see how confidently they live, how soddenly they sleep – now on the one side, now on the other – while being assaulted without letup by ironshod hordes ambushed by so many stratagems, beset by so many snares! Just look about you: the vilest demons sleeplessly watch for your ruin, and they are equipped with a thousand tricks and devices for doing us harm. From aloft they strive to wound our souls with fiery and deadly missiles, steeped in venom and every bit as unerring as the dart of a Hercules.”

And for this reason then human life is constantly stirred up. So we have to be on guard; we have to be vigilant and zealous. And in this kind of warfare we have a general, which is ourselves, but we have to have a strategy for victory. And whatever is in your power you can't do anything about, but what is in your power you can handle, just like Epictetus. But the difference now between Epictetus and Erasmus is that the figure of Christ comes in hermetically to show that there is a way of handling, not the individuals who are causing you problems, but the causes in the individuals which are causing you problems. What are those causes in those individuals? It's those demonic interferences that are coming down and influencing them. So it's a really comprehensive strategy, it’s not so much arguing with someone to try and prove your point to them, but to evoke out of them a recognition that they're bound up in this warfare. They're not just causing you problems but they are participating in a problem situation. That's how we would talk today.

So in the Erasmian Enchiridion there are thirty-nine sections. Only the center part of it though is effective. There are twenty-two phases of effective action – twenty-two. That's Erasmus's major Arcana – the effective phases. But in part five as he's leading up to this “Concerning the Inner and Outer man,” the inner and the outer man. This is five hundred years ago.

“Man, then, is a being of a most unusual sort composed of two or three vastly unlike parts: he has a soul that is somewhat divine and he has a body that is like a dumb brute. In physical terms, obviously, we do not excel any animal in every respect…” and so on, but that the peculiar aspect is not that there are two.

But that these two natures are totally dissimilar to each other. That that is interesting that they should be totally dissimilar and be brought together. That tells us something about ourselves. And he says, “it's like two wolves holding each other by the ears and if they let go they will attack each other. So you can live neither with nor without yourself. As a result we are inwardly torn by an involved kind of dissension as elements are simultaneously one with and at odds to each other. The war of the elements like in alchemy, the reconciliation of opposites. And it's now coming in. Where is it coming in? It's– it’s coming into terms of body and soul and where do they occur together? They occur together in the life of the person. It is the life of the person that is the crucible by which they are brought together, by which they are reconciled. And without a shape to that life then there would be no chance to reconcile them whatsoever.

So it's somebody who's addressing himself just to bodily things (gymnastics, tai chi, exercise) and thinks that that's going to cure anything is deluding themselves. Or if someone is only trying to tutor their soul by believing church doctrine as vigorously as they can is equally ineffective. Neither of those get to the issue which is to bring those two together so that it's only shaping the life that really is the crucible the place where this can come to be. But in shaping the life it's very difficult because this is a dynamic process – it's ongoing. So that reason man's intelligence has to learn them to pattern his life.

This is why the– the twenty-two stages, then, of developments concern itself with this. The first rule is faith; the second rule is action; and the third rule is to despise illusions. Now it's interesting because in John Colet, in his computation of the basic form of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he divides the religious procedure into triads and he says that God as the father was always concerned with faith but that God as the son was concerned with hope and God as the Holy Ghost was concerned with charity. That in fact this was linked up to the angelic hierarchy so that in the hierarchies there were triads, three triads, of angelic powers corresponding to the three triads of ecclesiastical development in that man's archetypal structure is based upon these triads. In Dionysius the Areopagite according to John Colet the highest triad in the celestial hierarchy were three horizons of angelic powers that concerned themselves with the Holy Spirit. In the middle there were three angelic levels of powers that concerned themselves with Christ, and at the first level there were three that concerned themselves with God the Father. And that the lowest of the nine levels concerned itself with the beginning of the beginning. And the next one was the middle of the beginning and the third was the end of the beginning. It's very esoteric language. This is talking theological structure without any doctrine whatsoever. This is Pythagorean talking. This is archetypal talking of ordering, but ordering according to forms of forms rather than ordering content in terms of form. So you have the beginning of beginning. You have a middle of beginning and the end of beginning a beginning of the middle a middle of the middle and an end of the middle. And it sounds peculiar at first. Beginning of the end. The middle of the end. The end of the end. So that these hierarchies, these celestial hierarchies, then lead in the development of personality like in Erasmus here in his Enchiridion is a personal friend of Colet and of more.

We have some letters from them here. We're not going to be able to get to tonight. The way to begin is with ignorance, your own ignorance. Recognizing it. And the way to transform that ignorance is through faith. Faith transforms ignorance but it only goes so far. And then you have to go to the next phase. And the next phase is action. And Erasmus says this is where Jesus comes in, shows us how to do it, how to do it, but takes us only to a certain point to where then we have to do it ourselves. And this is the Holy Ghost. This is the upper reaches of the transformation where we make an end of it where what is of concern to us is not so much faith or hope but what is called charity. Charitas, charity, has an odd connotation for us today. The– the Mahayana paramita that corresponds to that is dana which is usually translated as giving, or we might say, colloquially, generosity. But the– the– the charitas in there, the Greek understanding of charities there is that what one has charity towards is to all giving all of oneself to all but in proportion so that whatever is there that is you has been given away methodically and the only thing remaining is what you can't give away. And that presence is your spiritual core. And when you can't give anything more away what still is there in his conscious that's divine. And that core then– that core, automatically, has as its complement, you have already gotten there that horizon of mind which is free in the cosmos which is not tainted by any kind of falsity or corruption. And that spiritual condition then is the freedom of the personal conscience. And this is what the personality of Erasmus and More and Colet were all about.

We have here a letter which I'll read just a little bit to you. This is to John Colet, to his friend Colet. Greetings Erasmus. Writing from Cambridge, England 29th of October 1511. “Something came into my mind which I know will make you laugh… in the presence of several– several Masters of Arts I was putting forward a view on the assistant teacher, when one of them, a man of some repute, smiled and said ‘who could bear to spend his life in that school among boys when we could live anywhere in any way he liked?’ I answered mildly, that it seemed to me a very honorable task to train young people in manners and literature that in fact Christ himself did not despise the young. That no age had a better right to help and that from no quarter was a richer return to be expected. Seeing that young people were the harvest field and the raw material of the nation. I added that all truly religious people felt that they could not better serve God in any other duty than the bringing of children through. He wrinkled his nose and said with a scornful gesture, ‘if any man wishes to serve Christ altogether let him go into a monastery or a religious order.’ I answered that true religion consisted in the office of Charity.” He's writing this to Colet who is understanding what he's saying. “Charity consists in our doing, our best to enlighten our neighbors especially the children. This last the man rejected as an ignorant remark. Look he said we forsaken everything in this is our perfection. That man has not forsaken everything said I who when he could help by his very labor refuses to undertake a duty because he regards it as too humble. And with that to prevent a quarrel arising I let the man go. Well there you have the dialog and you see what's going on. Once again. Farewell.”

This generation of Erasmus and More and Colet who were transposing the Hermetic tradition into this most effective of all levels not dealing with the alchemy of metals, but dealing with the transformation of the individual; and not dealing with the transformation of the individual in terms of some doctrine however esoteric, but in terms of the actual lived life, the experience of that person as they live it. It was this combination that was to prove tremendously effective. But the application of those discoveries of any individual in that way needed to have some link to the world, some link to history, in order to apply this. And what they needed was a language by which to express what they had found out about themselves to each other.

And next week with Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin we’ll see the developments of the esoteric language, the beginnings of Kabbalah, of Christian Kabbalah, and we'll see that these were the Pythagorean hermetic beginnings of finding out that esoteric universal language. And it would come into place just when the maturation of individuals, able to find themselves outside of any kind of a theological structure. And when there were enough individuals the language was ready and the two great elements will come together and we're going to see that not in this lecture series but in one that will follow it.

So we'll see Pico and Reuchlin next week. Thanks.