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Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge and Western Culture (Wouter J. Hanegraaff )

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.2.1.0092

2161-2196

Christopher McIntosh,

Over the past half century or so esotericism has gradually succeeded in establishing itself as a recognized field of academic study, thanks to the work of a number of dedicated scholars, including the author of the present work, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, who is Professor of the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Whereas previously the subject of esotericism was generally shunned and derided in academe, it now has its own university departments, its learned societies, and its conferences. Commensurately, there is an increasing output of excellent scholarly publications in the field.Now is therefore a good moment to look at the field of esotericism itself and its place in the academy and in Western intellectual and cultural history. This is what Wouter Hanegraaff has undertaken in this outstanding book. He brings to the task an unusually wide knowledge of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history. He argues his case with great clarity and incisiveness and writes in an eloquent and engaging manner.The main questions that Hanegraaff sets out to answer are: What is esotericism? How can we locate it within the history of Western thought? Why was it marginalized for so long? And what is its significance in the academic world of today? The book is underpinned by a fascinating and insightful argument, which I will try to summarize.Hanegraaff begins the story in the Renaissance, with the appearance of a powerful grand narrative, that of "ancient wisdom," which was propounded by Italian humanists such as Marsilio Ficino. This narrative became linked with the tradition known as Christian apologeticism, dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era and involving the notion that the roots of Christianity could be traced back to Moses via an ancient religious lineage that also encompassed the pagan philosophers, who were seen as having anticipated Christianity. This apologetic discourse, having merged with that of ancient wisdom, became a highly important factor in Roman Catholic thought and remained so until it was challenged, mainly from within the Protestant camp, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.The story of anti-apologeticism, as Hanegraaff writes, begins with the Leipzig philosopher and theologian Jacob Thomasius (1622–1684). His goal was to "purify" Christianity, which he saw as being contaminated by pagan error. Pagan philosophy and biblical truth were for Thomasius two entirely different animals: blurring the distinction between them resulted in bad history as well as doctrinal confusion. What was it that made these pagan philosophers so alien to biblical revelation? "Historically," Hanegraaff writes, "Thomasius traced all of them to their origin in the dualistic doctrine of Zoroaster and the Persian Magi, which in turn had been inspired by the devil: it was from this barbarian source that philosophy had reached Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers" (104–5). This dualism was based on what Thomasius saw as the "original fallacy," namely, paganism's rejection of the creatio ex nihilo in favor of the eternity of the world. This amounted to a deification of the creation at the expense of its Creator.Thomasius laid the foundation for "the landmark book that gave birth to the study of Western esotericism as a specific domain of research: Ehregott Daniel Colberg's Platonisch-Hermetisches Christentum of 1690–1691" (107). Colberg, Professor of Philosophy at Greifswald, was motivated by an intense hostility toward the heterodox religious currents of his age such as Paracelsianism, Weigelianism, Rosicrucianism, and Christian theosophy in the tradition of Jakob Böhme. How ironic that, in meticulously cataloguing these beliefs and tracing their historical antecedents, Colberg unwittingly became a pioneering figure in the study of Western esotericism.Colberg's work was carried further by the historian and Protestant pastor Jacob Brucker, who compiled a vast history of philosophy, published in German from 1731 to 1736 and later in Latin, in which he attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff. Brucker's position, like that of Colberg, was essentially that there are three kinds of knowledge: first, the Christian revelation; second, rational philosophy and science, which are valid as far as they go but should not be confused with religion; and third, the chaff, that is to say, erroneous and irrational knowledge, which Brucker saw as a continuation of pagan religion.To Brucker, these erroneous traditions "were the negative counterpart of both reason and faith and therefore could not claim to remain a legitimate part of the history of either…. From then on, they began to vanish from the textbooks of history of philosophy and church history, where they still have the status of mere footnotes" (147). Brucker's work was of seminal importance as it was plundered by, among others, Diderot for his encyclopedia. For Diderot and those of the Enlightenment who thought like him, the esoteric traditions belonged in a pigeonhole labeled "rejected knowledge."At the same time, these traditions continued to have their adherents and to live a parallel existence in, for example, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Hanegraaff describes how they received a boost during the Romantic period, when those who were tired of the "disenchanted" world of the Enlightenment became fascinated by magic, divination, clairvoyance, mesmerism, somnambulism, and the occult in general, turning eagerly to works such as like Montfaucon de Villars's esoteric novel Le Comte de Gabalis and later, during the nineteenth-century occult revival, to the writings of occultists like Eliphas Lévi.Coming to the modern period, Hanegraaff says, "Modernization is … the key to understanding the emergence of Western esotericism … as a concept or category in the study of Western culture. Understood in terms of disenchantment, the core of modern post-Enlightenment society and its appointed representatives (such as, notably, academics) requires and presupposes a negative counter-category consisting of currents, practices and ideas that refuse to accept the disappearance of incalculable mystery from the world" (254). Thus Western esotericism becomes "the Other of science and rationality," functioning as "a dark canvas of presumed backwardness" (254). Given the predominance of this modernist paradigm in academe, it is not surprising that esotericism was for so long excluded.By the early twentieth century, however, "the Other" was beginning to re-assert itself and to claim serious attention. The path was blazed by amateur scholars such as Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), an immensely prolific author on such topics as alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and the Holy Grail. Equally path-blazing were the Eranos meetings, held at Ascona in Switzerland from 1933 and comprising a galaxy of prominent names in many branches of the humanities and sciences. Among the most famous were the psychologists Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Neumann, and James Hillman, the anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the Judaic scholars Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, the Islamicists Henri Corbin and Annemarie Schimmel, the writer on Zen Buddhism D. T. Suzuki, the biologist Adolf Portmann, and many more. Eranos was the creation of a wealthy Dutch woman, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, whose original intention was to start an esoteric summer school with an early New Age perspective, but who was then persuaded to turn Eranos into a serious academic forum with a series of scholarly yearbooks. A rich American couple, Paul and Mary Mellon, donated lavishly to Eranos and financed the publication of selected Eranos yearbooks in English in the prestigious Bollingen Series.One of the participants at the postwar Eranos conferences was a young French scholar named Antoine Faivre, who later became one of the doyens of esoteric scholarship and in 1979 was appointed to the chair for the History of Esoteric and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe at the École Pratique des Hautes Études within the Sorbonne, the first chair of its kind in the world. In addition to his books on Hermeticism, German Naturphilosophie, and Christian theosophy, Faivre has become famous for his definition of esotericism as a "form of thought" involving four essential characteristics: the notion of correspondences, the belief in living nature, the importance attached to the imagination and mediation, and the idea of transmutation. In addition he posited two nonessential characteristics: the notion of transmitted knowledge and an emphasis on concordance. While this definition has sometimes been questioned, there is no doubt that it has proved an immensely valuable working tool for students of esotericism. Hanegraaff rightly devotes an entire section of a chapter to Antoine Faivre and his work.Another key figure is Frances Yates (1899–1981), who for many years held a post at the Warburg Institute in London with its remarkable collection of esoteric books, itself an important part of this story. I can remember how exciting it was in the 1960s when Yates was producing books like Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Art of Memory. Here was a scholar of major standing who was forcing the academic world to look seriously a domain that it would rather have ignored. While critical of some of aspects of Yates's work, Hanegraaff acknowledges her important role.And so the story continues down to the present time, in which the study of esotericism is flourishing and growing. In his conclusion Hanegraaff writes, "The study of Western esotericism should be firmly grounded, first and foremost, in a straightforward historiographical agenda: that of exploring the many blank spaces on our mental maps and filling them in with color and detail, so that they become integral parts of the wider landscape that we already knew or thought we knew" (378).This book should be required reading for anyone studying Western esotericism. Apart from the service it does to this domain of study, it provides a fascinating window on the history of Western thought.