Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie

the judgment to come, the resurrection of the world, the glory of the blessed, and the torments of the damned.”
    The dialogues attributed to Hermes are a conglomeration of mystical philosophy and poetic religiosity. But along the lines of the actual works of Plato and the Neoplatonists, they asserted that matter, the physical world, the body, was a kind of unreality. Reality, truth itself, was in the immaterial essence of things, and existed as an emanation or divine force from God. On one hand, each physical thing or phenomenon was a limited, more or less vulgar incarnation of an unlimited, pure idea. On the other hand, this immaterial truth was in all things; all matter had the immaterial energy of God within it. And though human beings lived in physical bodies, they were at least partly divine, because they had immaterial intellect. As stated by the nonexistent Hermes, this godly intellect allowed man to move through the material world “as though he were himself a god,” tapping into the subtle energies that continually streamed down from above, and engaging with the invisible interconnections among stars, plants, stones, and animals.
    Ficino became very involved with this
magia naturalis
, or natural magic—especially in the use of talismans to draw down astral power and in the use of music as incantation. Sometime later, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of Ficino’s fellow scholars, wrote his
Oration
on the Dignity of Man
. “If rational,” he wrote, man “will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.” The oration is often referred to as a manifesto of worldly Renaissance humanism, a document that helped put the focus on human capacity rather than the spiritual afterlife. But it was written to introduce Pico’s nine hundred theses, largely a compendium of mysticism and magic by which he believed it was possible to grasp “everything knowable.”
    Pico gave short shrift to Aristotle, but embraced the philosophy of the Platonists, the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the oracular poetry of the Chaldeans, the Hymns of Orpheus, the astral magic of Hermes Trismegistus, and, most especially, the Kabbalah of the Hebrews. Kabbalah was compatible with Christianity, too. One of Pico’s sections was titled “[Seventy-two] Cabalistic Conclusions According to My Own Opinion, Strongly Confirming the Christian Religion Using the Hebrew Wisemen’s Own Principles.”
    For Pico, magic was “the practical part of natural science,” and also the “noblest part.” It was within this context that learned people began to consider all manner of magical and mystical texts. The authority that this fake Hermes lent to Plato helped put a general premium on the immaterial: invisible bonds, unseen correspondences within the natural world. These things were “occult,” but not in the modern sense;
occult
originally meant just “hidden,” “concealed,” or “secret.”
    And so a century later it was possible to be an Aristotelian, Catholic, Hermetic, and generally mystical mathematician who believed that it just might be your calling to achieve a universal understanding of things, to uncover or to
dis
cover hidden truths. After all, Hermes instructed you to “believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”
    Notwithstanding the Vatican’s censure of various kinds of magic and strict adherence to Aristotle in natural philosophy, the Jesuits contemplated these ideas as well—though as one Jesuit philosopher wrote, “Scarcely any mortal or certainly very few indeed, and those men of the keenest mind who have employed diligent observation for a long time, can attain to such natural magic.”
    Young Kircher believed he might be one of these very few.

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