PART ONE - Galileo, Descartes, and Giordano Bruno - Technical and Magical Dominion Over Nature
Part One (1/5)
It was also given the power to give breath
to the image of the beast so that the image
could even speak and cause all who refused
to worship the image of the beast to be killed.
(Rev 13:15)
The Origins and Development of Magic
The word 'Mago,' according to the etymological Pianigiani dictionary (here is the address of the web version of the Etymological Vocabulary of the Italian Language by Ottorino Pianigiani: www.etimo.it (Ed.)), derives from the ancient Persian 'magu,' from which 'magnus,' meaning great. It is connected with Sanskrit 'maha,' also meaning great, and 'mahati,' meaning to magnify, honor, and sacrifice. The sacrifice involves the idea of the power of sacrifice, giving rise to the German 'Macht,' the English 'might,' and the idea of killing the victim, leading to the Spanish 'matar,' and the Italian 'ammazzare' or 'mattanza,' from which comes the Latin 'mactare,' meaning to sacrifice, and the Italian.
Herodotus uses the term 'magos' to designate the Median and Persian priests dedicated to astrology, divination, and dream interpretation. From the study of the stars, they received guidance for human conduct, as the stars were considered divine beings. The Magi who came to Bethlehem to visit the infant Jesus were nothing but these individuals, so it would be better to call them 'magicians' rather than 'Magi.' What is surprising in this touching episode of the Gospel is how Christ, from this early stage, manages to attract even idolaters and magicians to himself.
However, magic has ancient origins, which are the subject of the history of religions. Primitive man has a concept of divinity as a force that dominates him and from which he wants to obtain favors: hence the concept of sacrifice and religion. At the same time, man has the ambition to be able to control divinity, compelling it to do what he wants. This is the moment of magic and superstition. Since the most remote antiquity, within us, the moment of humility that generates divine worship and religion alternates with the moment of pride that generates magic and superstition."
As Bergson, quoted by Maritain [1], states:
"Bergson has shown very well that the primordial element found at the origin and the core of magic is the relationship of causality. 'Man immediately recognized that the limit of his normal influence on the external world was quickly reached. But he was not resigned to not going further. He continued the movement, and since the movement, by itself, did not achieve the desired effect, nature had to take it upon itself ... Things will then be more or less obedient and powerful; they will have a force that lends itself to the desires of man and of which man can take possession ... The operations of magic begin that act that man cannot bring to completion. They make gesture that will not produce the desired effect but will achieve it if man knows how to force the complacency of things. Magic is therefore innate in man, being nothing but the externalization of a desire that fills the heart.'
The magical practices of primitive populations are regulated by the execution of traditional ancestral ritual actions, the competence of the magician, shaman, or sorcerer, based on the recitation of fixed formulas or incantations, accompanied by the display of special figures, the casting of specific signals, the performance of apotropaic or evocative gestures, chants, hymns, dances, and conventional symbolic gestures, or with the preparation of special chemical or organic concoctions, believed to arouse the forces of benevolent or malevolent spirits.
Magic is a false and illusory solution given to the problem of the power of the spirit over matter and the body. Its aim to create harmony is correct. Its perception of the primacy of the spirit over the body is also correct. However, the power it gives to the spirit is excessive, and its dematerialized and idealistic conception of matter, resembling that of Berkeley (esse est percipi), is deceptive. This conception should ensure this mastery of the spirit.
Instead, in practice, fortunes are reversed. The humiliated matter takes revenge. The magician, who practically materializes the spirit, finds in his hands a result that is entirely disappointing but entirely logical: confusing matter with spirit can only lead to the confusion of spirit with matter. Thus, in the end, there is no dominion of the spirit over the body, but the flesh dominates the materialized spirit.
The true union of the spirit with the body occurs in Christianity, thanks to the Incarnation of the Word. Here, the distinction between spirit and body and the superiority of the former over the latter is respected, and, in fact, the elevation of corporeality to the level of divine life in what Saint Paul calls the 'spiritual body' (1 Corinthians 15:45)[2].
"Magic, on the other hand, does not entail subjection to God and His laws regarding nature and humanity. As the Bible clearly explains, magic is associated with idolatry. In India, it has pantheistic foundations, as man is not seen as a creature in a personal relationship with God, distinct as a spirit from the materiality of nature. Man can dominate nature by obeying the laws that the creator God has placed in nature itself, but - in that worldview - man, nature, and God are conceived as a Unity-Whole, matter-spirit, where everything acts on everything, and everything suffers from everything. The operation of the magician, therefore, is not that of an agent with finite power, distinct from God and nature; it is the very act of the God-nature-man on himself and the parts of himself.
The Origins of Magic
The first authoritative accounts in the West of magical practices are provided by Sacred Scripture itself with the narrative of Moses confronting the magicians of Egypt (Exodus 8:13). Moses demonstrates possessing a power superior to theirs because he shares in the same divine power. This episode shows the resemblance between magical power and thaumaturgic power.
Scripture clearly distinguishes various forms of human, angelic, and divine active and efficient causality: creation, thaumaturgy, transformation, transubstantiation, generation, technique, poetry [3], and work. It clearly distinguishes all these activities from magic and superstitious activities such as idol worship, divination, necromancy, theurgy, astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and astral cult. The Bible extensively speaks of the former, praising and exalting them, while condemning and strictly prohibiting the latter (Exodus 2:17; Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 18:10).
Magic presupposes the pride and arrogance of wanting to operate on nature and humans - perhaps even on God Himself! -, with a power equal to the divine. It involves the production of miraculous works and false miracles to distance people from God, to make them independent of Him, claiming to be self-sufficient, but making themselves servants of Satan, the inspirer and master of magical arts.
Magic, therefore, deceives the magician by making him believe he possesses a knowledge - gnosis - equal to the divine and thus emancipating him from the duty to obey the moral law and the laws set by God in nature, but wanting to arbitrarily legislate for human nature and the physical world, authorizes any manipulation, alteration, and disruption of the natural order, both physical and human, with immense damage to man and nature.
As we know, the Jewish culture that gave us the Bible also gave us the Kabbalah[4]. Just as the Bible clearly and uncompromisingly warns us against magic, explaining its idolatrous purpose, gnostic pride, violence against nature and man, the delirium of omnipotence, illusory efficacy, harm to man, offense to God, and demonic influence, so the Kabbalah, with vain sophisms, tickling our mania for greatness, mixes biblical sayings with the revelation of false mysteries, with the promise of superhuman powers [5], with sentences and recipes coming directly from those Egyptian magical practices that Moses had successfully debunked in their arrogant vanity.
A renewed interest in magic occurred, as is well known, with the Florentine Humanism of the 15th century, when Marsilio Ficino sought to valorize the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of magical writings then attributed to a legendary Hermes Trismegistus, hence the term "Hermeticism" attributed to these esoteric doctrines[6].
It was assumed that these writings contained the teachings of the magicians of ancient Egypt. Scholars later determined that they were Neoplatonic doctrines from the 3rd century, which also inspired the theurgy of Proclus and Iamblichus. Thus, Neoplatonic doctrines where human will, participating in the divine, enhances the spirit beyond itself by increasing its power over matter, to the extent of being able to shape it according to the intuition of ideas.
In the same Florentine environment, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola lived and worked. He, having raised the question of the dignity of man, investigated from all available sources that Florence, under Lorenzo the Magnificent, was abundantly supplied with.
With his prodigiously gifted mind, he synthesized a rather eclectic and inconsistent, yet brilliant and exciting frame, from which he derived, as exposed in his famous "De Dignitate Hominis," the idea of man as a creature to whom God has not assigned a specific, fixed, immutable, delimited, and unsurpassable nature but has given the ability to determine, shape, modify, increase, and perfect itself arbitrarily indefinitely, beyond the starting point created by God.
Therefore, man's task is not so much to enact powers determined by the limited forces established by God as essential and specific to nature, but rather to have the power and the faculty to establish the forms, modes, boundaries, and degrees of his activity of free self-determination and self-realization of his nature.
Within this vision, Pico advocates the value of what he calls "natural magic" or "white magic," which would be beneficial magic resulting from merely human forces, as Pico has defined them. Now, to judge the legality of magic, it is not enough to consider the purpose for which it operates, one must also evaluate the method by which it operates.
Now, Pico undoubtedly detested that magical operation that relies on the assistance of Satan, the principle of the so-called "black magic," as it cannot bring any good to man. However, he did not disdain the so-called natural magic under the pretext that it is beneficial. That's right, but Pico overlooked the fact that the method he intended to use, namely the idea of being able to freely determine the boundaries of his human nature, is contrary to God's true plan for man. Therefore, starting on the wrong foot, his natural magic could only result in vain ambition or deception.
Pope Alexander VI imprudently expressed a private approval of Pico's idea, but his successor, Leo X, had the Holy Office pronounce a contrary sentence. Pico complied, became a friend of Savonarola, and at his death, he wanted his body to be dressed in the Dominican habit. However, Pico's ideas continued to exert an influence, especially on (Giordano) Bruno, who distanced them even further from the truth by incorporating them into his pantheistic system. In this system, man is no longer a simple creature before God, as Pico still admitted, but is the point of connection between the world that becomes God and God who becomes the world.
Here, man is presented as essentially endowed with a divine power at his disposal, capable of increasing and strengthening his power to the point of being able to operate on nature, giving life to machinery and natural substances.
In the 17th century, with Campanella and Leibniz, who seems to have been in contact with the Rosicrucian Brotherhood [7], the belief of Neoplatonic and therefore idealistic origin spread in certain esoteric circles. According to this belief, all physical nature is animated by at least a sensitive soul.
This conviction will also be present in Bruno. While in Spinoza, matter is reduced Cartesianly to extension, so the only motions of bodies are local and mechanical - and free will plays no part -, in the Neoplatonic cosmology of Campanella and Leibniz, all physical substances are living and sentient substances. Moreover, for Leibniz, they are true sleeping and unconscious spirits, which, when awakened, become the souls of plants and animals, and with further consciousness, become intelligent and willing subjects, namely the human souls of man. Through further awareness, they become angelic spirits, unified around the supreme absolute and infinite monad, and by its work, the One of the many, which is God.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, May 10, 2023
source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/2023/05/galileo-cartesio-e-giordano-bruno.html
END OF PART ONE (1/5)
[1] The magical sign and the nocturnal regime of the spirit, in "Quattro saggi sullo spirito nella condizione di Incarnazione" (Four Essays on the Spirit in the Condition of Incarnation), Morcelliana, Brescia 1978, p.69. In this essay, Maritain also cites Lucien Lévy-Brühl, who thoroughly studied the magical practices of primitive populations in Australia, highlighting how magic takes place under the sign of myth and the prevalence of imagination over reason. However, the fundamental principle of magic is the pride of a man who claims to operate as God, so even Hegelian idealism, organized on the plane of concept and logic, ultimately does not differ much from the ambitions of Australian aborigines.
[2] This instance of spiritualization of the body and incorporation of the spirit is also found in Iranian Shiite mysticism: see Henry Corbin, "Corpo spirituale e terra celeste. Dall’Iran mazdeo all’Iran sciita" (Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdaean Iran to Shiite Iran), Adelphi Edizioni, Milan 1986.
[3] Maritain warns against the risk of confusing poetry with magic in the book he wrote with Raissa, "Situation de la poésie" (The Situation of Poetry), Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1964.
[4] For an overview of the magical practices of Kabbalah, see Julio Meinvielle, "Influsso dello gnosticismo ebraico in ambiente cristiano" (Influence of Jewish Gnosticism in the Christian Environment), edited by Don Ennio Innocenti, Edizioni della Sacra Fraternitas Aurigarum in Urbe, Rome 1988.
[5] "Transhumanism" is already here.
[6] Cf. Frances Yates, "Giordano Bruno e la cultura europea del Rinascimento" (Giordano Bruno and the European Renaissance Culture), with an introduction by Eugenio Garin, Edizioni Laterza, Bari 1995; "Giordano Bruno e la tradizione ermetica" (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition), Edizioni Laterza, Bari 1992.
[7] See note 11.