Divine Fury (14 page)

Such legends helped to perpetuate an image of the dark magus as a kind of anti-saint, a sorcerer who trafficked with the demons, whereas the true saint lived in fellowship with the angels, drawing on their knowledge and power. The line between the two was theologically clear, and in hindsight easy to determine: saints were canonized as saints precisely because they resisted the demons and drew angelic favor. But in the chaos of spiritual combat, the line was far less distinct, blurred by the simple fact that even the best-intentioned might fall prey to a demon’s deceptions. To consciously summon an angel, then, was always to risk idolatry and incantation, mistaking an angel of iniquity—a demon—for an angel of the good.

It was largely for this reason that the cult of angels generated such consternation in the early church. Already in the first century, Saint Paul saw the need to warn the inhabitants of the city of Colossae in Asia Minor of the dangers of “false humility and the worship of angels” (Col. 2:18), and authorities reiterated his warning in the centuries to come. The regional Council of Laodicea in 380 judged that “it is not right for Christians . . . to invoke angels,” pronouncing “anathema” on such “secret idolatry.” And a late fifth-century council forbade the practice of “calling on angels for protection against illnesses or evil spirits,” concluding that the “angels are themselves demons.” Whatever they were, they were not easily exorcised, and in the end the church was forced to settle on an uneasy compromise. Belief in angels was dogma, but their worship could be dangerous. Let the angels appear to the chosen and come to the aid of the saints. But to summon them directly risked imperiling one’s soul by conjuring a demon instead.
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Such strictures were given force by well-publicized condemnations like that of the French priest Adalbert in the mid-eighth century, who
boasted of receiving holy relics, a letter from Jesus, and revelations from the angels, with whom he claimed to be in regular contact. But condemnations of the sort could no more stifle the yearning to ascend to angelic heights than the doctrine of original sin could eradicate the desire to be like Christ. The angels existed, did they not? They were higher than man, closer to God, and could come to the aid of the exalted, imparting wisdom and divulging truths. Why one should refrain from seeking their assistance in the purest of faith was never entirely clear. And so, alongside the more orthodox channels of transcendence, at the margins and in the shadows, Christians sought furtively to draw on the power of angels to raise themselves to God. Those who did so by consciously cultivating “demonic magic”—magic involving the medium of an angel or a demon—were always a tiny minority. But a great many more pursued the esoteric secrets of “natural magic.” The distinction, always subtle, turned on the means of transmission: whereas demonic magic involved soliciting an immaterial force to perform actions in the material world, natural magic was held to be the result of matter acting on matter in a hidden or occult way. It was widely believed, for example, that the planets could exert an influence on human beings and animals, just as certain minerals or medicinal herbs could be manipulated to induce bodily cures. By this reasoning, all therapeutic medicine was a type of natural magic. And so, though it was clear that the church condemned magic of the demonic kind, it took a more indulgent view toward the natural variety. The Gospel of Matthew, after all, spoke of the glorious wise men from the East, good magi guided by a star, whose knowledge of the heavens helped lead them to Christ (Matt. 2). The tale provided a scriptural basis in support of a tradition of good magic, and that tradition was defended further by Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages, who drew elaborate distinctions between magic evil and good, helping to carve out a place in which various forms of hermetic wisdom might flourish: the study of medicine, alchemy, astrology, and the practice of the occult.
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Such practices generated considerable interest in the Middle Ages, but it was in the Renaissance that they came into their own. Countless works of ancient magic and the occult were recovered alongside the many Greek and Roman classics that were “reborn” in the age. Works of alchemy and astrology competed for space on early-modern shelves alongside dense ruminations on Kabbalah, Arab treatises on divination, and the scattered writings attributed to the mythical Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus. The latter, in particular, with his talk of shape-shifting and the ability to animate statues, made orthodox minds uneasy, but in truth, the line between natural and demonic magic was
always thin. And though few of the Renaissance’s magi ever engaged in outright demonolatry, they did show a worrying tendency to talk of spirits, crowding their cosmos with legions of beings who might heed their call.

That tendency long predated the Renaissance. Christians sought from late antiquity forward to complete the Great Chain of Being that connected the lowliest creatures to God. The effort to integrate Platonist and Neo-Platonist cosmological accounts, in particular, with their elaborate descriptions of the angels and
daimones
that animated the universe, encouraged speculation, and in the wake of the Neo-Platonist revival of the twelfth century commentators grew increasingly bold in imagining
genii
at every level of the cosmos. Some spoke, in a turn of phrase that would have shocked the earliest Christians, of “good demons” (
bonos daemones
) who staffed the celestial hierarchy along with the choirs of the angels and the saints. Others invoked
genii
of various classes and kinds, and still others wrote of the tutelary
genius
in a way that was more than a synonym for the guardian angel. Finally, poetic and literary accounts described the figure of Genius as an artist (
artifex
) and priest who presided over reproduction and gave form and shape to all beings—the scribe of the universe, sketching their outlines on a magical parchment. The account of the Genius in the latter case was allegorical. But the speculation about the place of
genii
in the universe was not.
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Thus the Renaissance magi of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries confronted a cosmos teeming with spiritual beings. And with all those beings bumping about, it was hardly surprising that some should have slipped inside the pathways of their purportedly natural magic. The German Benedictine Johannes Trithemius is a notorious case. Although he repeatedly denied any involvement with demonic magic, his treatises read today like manuals for conjuring. Trithemius classified the various ranks of spirits of the holy hierarchy and detailed the means to call upon angels through the recitation of chants composed in a secret, angelic tongue. He astonished with his claims to have uncovered techniques enabling magi to perform incredible feats of learning, such as mastering the entire Latin language in two hours. And when a private letter of 1499 boasting similar skills was intercepted and made public in Germany and France, Trithemius was forced to deny publicly that he was able to forecast the future and raise the dead. Even more astounding were the pretensions of Trithemius’s acolyte Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who asserted in his
magnum opus, De occulta philosophia libri tres
(
The Three Books of Occult Philosophy
), the existence of not just one good
genius
, but three, the so-called
triplex homini daemon bonus
watching over men. Composed of a
daemon
like Socrates’s, sent by God to shepherd the rational soul, this “three-fold keeper” also included a “genius of nativity” controlled by the “circuits of the stars” and a “daemon of profession” dictating our natural aptitudes and strengths. It was the complex interaction of the three that formed individual character and produced the highest qualities in the highest men, a point that Agrippa sought to illustrate by reference to the varied gifts of the holy prophets and the saints, noting that Abraham excelled in justice, Jacob in strength, Solomon in knowledge, Peter in faith, John in charity, and Thomas in prudence. The magus who could learn to control his demons, speaking their language and interpreting their signs, might similarly rise to great heights. Throughout his work Agrippa gave detailed instructions as to how this might be accomplished.
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Neither Trithemius nor Agrippa was ever formally censured, and in their own estimation they acted in the fullness of faith. Yet the collective impact of the rumors of the inquiries of these men and of other magi across Europe was to stir up fears of a threat to orthodoxy, and arguably with good reason. For the speculations of the magi challenged the central Christian belief that there were limits to what could be known of the divine world without divine favor. Rarely do the magi speak of grace. Their presumption, rather, is that one can plumb the secrets of the universe and even rise to supernatural power (performing miracles) through a mastery of knowledge applied in such a way as to command the angels and manipulate the divine. But this presumption carried the attendant threat of ecclesiastical displeasure, and for this reason, virtually all of the leading magi of Europe came, in the end, to repudiate magic, bowing like Agrippa to the authority of their superiors. In an age when charges of witchcraft or traffic with the demons could lead to imprisonment or death, as the celebrated persecutions of the hermetic scholars Giordano Bruno and John Dee later in the sixteenth century made clear, magic was dangerous.
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Yet the impact of the magi was by no means short-lived. In the long run, they left behind powerful images and myths focusing on the hazards of the quest for superhuman knowledge and wonder-making power. Providing the basis for such literary archetypes as Shakespeare’s Prospero, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the figure of Faust, the magi called attention to the tenuous space that lay between the demons and the angels, reaffirming what the saints in their struggles and Christ in the wilderness knew: that the line separating those who would be more than men from those who would be less was perilously thin. The dark magus and the luminous saint were brothers of sorts, a lesson in chiaroscuro
that harkened back to a founding temptation.
Eritis sicut dii
, the serpent says in Jerome’s translation (Gen. 3:5): Eat from the tree of knowledge, and “you will be like God [or the gods].” The attempt to go beyond ourselves was fraught with peril, and yet there could be no higher calling than to seek to imitate God. This was a primordial and perennial conflict that would replay itself in modern times. For if the saints and the sorcerers were descendants of those in the grips of the
daimones
, they are ancestors, too, of the modern genius and his evil double and twin.

The influence of the magi was no less profound in the nearer term. For although overt efforts to draw the powers of the
genii
and
daimones
may have waned in the suspicious climate induced by the Reformation and its Catholic response, those beings nonetheless turned up in the writings of humanists throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some, like the physician and man of letters Girolamo Cardano, dwelled at length on the ministration of his own personal
genius
, noting that “guardian spirits have clearly been operative” throughout history, and citing the cases of Socrates, Plotinus, Caesar, and Brutus as proof. The temptation to master the guiding force of our nature endured, but there were other ways besides sorcery to divine it, as the magi themselves well knew. “The ancient philosophers teach us to know the nature of the Genius of every man,” Agrippa remarked. Yet their instructions for making inquiries, through the use of astrology and other means, were generally so vague, so conflicted, and so difficult to understand that Agrippa reasoned we could “far more easily inquire into the nature of our Genius from ourselves,” examining those habits and instincts that heaven and nature instilled in each of us from birth. Agrippa’s injunction to “Know thy Good Genius” became, in effect, the Socratic command to “Know thyself.” Others agreed, stressing that by seeking self-knowledge and turning within we might dispense with the services of the angels and the demons altogether and be raised aloft by the motive power of the mind. In their recovery of the ancient past, the Renaissance magi stirred up not only the classical
genius
, but the classical tradition of the great-souled man, whose divine fury and superior
ingenium
would come to constitute the genius within.
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M
ARSILIO
F
ICINO WAS
a prime mover in this process. He, too, was a magus, and also a priest, and in the fullest sense of that overused phrase, a Renaissance man. A fifteenth-century Florentine humanist and theoretician of music, a physician, philosopher, and student of the soul, Ficino worked at the behest of his patron, Cosimo de Medici, to translate the whole of Plato’s recovered writings into Latin, along with
a host of Neo-Platonic authors and many other ancient texts, including the scattered writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. A man of deep faith, Ficino also harbored a lifelong interest in the occult.

Ficino’s interests generated suspicion at the time (and controversy to this day) as to whether the magic he practiced was truly natural. But his more important legacy where matters of genius are concerned has less to do with the angels and demons that flutter through his work than with what he did to render their services obsolete. His initial guide in this respect was Plato. For, almost single-handedly, Ficino restored Plato’s doctrine of the
furor divinus
to European awareness, translating and writing formal commentaries on the
Symposium
and the
Phaedrus
and producing a massive synthesis of Platonic and Christian thought, the
Platonic Theology
(1474). In so doing, he drew out a line of inquiry implicit in Plato himself. Substituting the beautiful soul for the angels as the agent of ascent to God, Ficino ventured that our true
genius
was the glorious mind, caught up in the rapture of divine embrace.