When and where he lived—or whether he ever existed on this planet at all—we do not know. He is sometimes identified with the Greek Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth, the biblical Enoch, and the Muslim Idris. But he is best known as Hermes Trismegistus, “Thrice-Greatest Hermes.” A legendary divine being, part god, part man, whose life has been dated to remote antiquity, Hermes Trismegistus is revered as the father of alchemy, the occult sciences, and the Western esoteric tradition itself. He’s most famous for appearing in a collection of texts that bear his name: the Corpus Hermeticum, or “Hermetic body” of writings.
The Corpus Hermeticum caused an enormous stir when it came to Western Europe in the fifteenth century, along with other treasures of Greek literature. A monk named Leonardo da Pistoia found a copy of this text in Macedonia and presented it to Cosimo de’ Medici, the great Florentine patron of the arts. At the time (around 1460), the humanist Marsilio Ficino was translating the dialogues of Plato into Latin for an eager public. Cosimo asked him to interrupt his work on Plato and translate the Corpus Hermeticum first.1
Cosimo’s request was no mere whim. Scholars in that era believed that these texts went back to the remotest antiquity and contained the summit of ancient wisdom. The cathedral at Siena, Italy, has an inlay dating from 1488 that shows this legendary sage and calls him Hermes Trismegistus, contempo-raneus Moysi, “Hermes Trismegistus, the contemporary of Moses.” This reflects the accepted belief of the time, which reckoned Hermes Trismegistus to be the Egyptian sage par excellence. Some believed that Moses, who the Bible said was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), had gained his knowledge from him. Ficino said at one point that Hermes Trismegistus was the first link of the aurea catena, the “Golden Chain” of adepts that included the mythical Greek poet Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato. Ficino’s translation of these texts into Latin, published in 1471, gave birth to the occult philosophy of the Renaissance (which I discuss in chapter 6).
The truth about these texts turned out to be more prosaic. In 1614, the classicist Isaac Casaubon proved that the Corpus Hermeticum didn’t go back to the time of Moses (who, according to tradition, lived around 1300 B.C..) but was much later. Casaubon dated them to the late first century A.D., although scholars today believe they were written from the first through the third centuries A.D.2 Casaubon reached his conclusions chiefly on linguistic grounds: the Greek of these texts is nothing like the Greek of 1300 B.C. It would be as if someone had claimed the book you are reading now had been written in 800 A.D. Anyone at all familiar with the English of that era could take one look at it and know it was not.
The Mind of Authority
Casaubon brought upon the Corpus Hermeticum a decline in prestige from which it’s never entirely recovered. Since his time, the Hermetic writings have been relegated to second-class status by academic scholars, who often describe them as containing a confused mixture of Greek philosophy (especially Platonism) with Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Gnostic elements. They are regarded as holding some interest for the study of late classical religion but little else.
In recent years, however, scholarly opinion has begun to see some truth in the claim of Egyptian origins for these texts. To explore this argument, consider the title of the first and longest treatise in this collection: the Poimandres. The origin of this word is obscure. Many scholars have tried to connect it to the Greek poimen, or “shepherd,” but this hasn’t always satisfied even those who have proposed it. Some scholars have set forth another possibility.
The Poimandres begins with a mystical experience. The first-person narrator tells of a time when “my thinking soared high and my bodily senses were restrained.” He encounters “an enormous being completely unbounded in size,” who introduces himself by saying, “I am Poimandres, mind of authority.”
It is this expression—“mind of authority”—that evokes an Egyptian background, because it’s probably a translation of the Egyptian p-eime-n-re, which actually means “mind of authority.”3 Thus Poimandres is a grecized version of p-eime-n-re, with the literal meaning put alongside it. And the word translated as “authority” is Re, which is also the name of the Egyptian sun god.
The texts have other Egyptian echoes as well. A number of them are addressed to “Tat.” This name evokes Thoth, or Tehouti, the Egyptian god of communication and learning corresponding to the Greek Hermes. But the most haunting mention of Egypt comes in a text called the Asclepius:
O Egypt, Egypt, of your reverent deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children! Only words cut in stone will survive to tell your faithful works, and the Scythian or Indian or some such neighbor barbarian will dwell in Egypt. For divinity goes back to heaven, and all the people will die, deserted, as Egypt will be widowed and deserted by god and human.4
This passage sheds an intriguing light on the purpose of these texts. Written in late antiquity, when the religion of Egypt was in advanced decay, they may be an attempt to capture the essence of its spiritual knowledge and pass it on to another civilization. The Greek language and Greek philosophic terms suggest that the Egyptian sages realized that their esoteric knowledge could only live by taking on a new guise and a new manner of speaking. The Corpus Hermeticum may have been part of an effort to do just that.
Some claim the Hermetic treatises contain traces of Jewish influence; although they are right, the echo is a faint one. Here’s one example: “Mind, the father of all, who is life and light, gave birth to a man like himself whom he loved as his own child. The man was most fair: he had the father’s image.”5 This has some affinity with the famous verse in Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27). The God of Genesis is both male and female—another point of similarity with the Poimandres, which goes on to say: “He [man] is androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father.”6
But these details are an exception. The cosmogony of the Poimandres is not like that of the Hebrew Bible, at least not in any literal sense.7 According to the Poimandres, God the Father begins creating the universe by engendering a second god: a “craftsman” very much like the Gnostic demiurge or the creator in Plato’s Timaeus. This “craftsman” then produces “seven governors: they encompass the world in circles, and their government is called fate…. The craftsman-mind, together with the word, encompassing the circles and whirling them about with a rush, turned his craftworks about.” Out of this whirling arise the physical elements and “living things without reason”—the animals.
At this point God the Father creates man in his own image. The Father loves the son because he sees his own image in him. The son wants to create as well, but as he descends into the realm of lower nature to do this, he sees his own image and falls in love with it. This impulse brings about cosmic disaster. Like Narcissus, “when the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it: wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers.” Through this passionate romance with his own reflection, man falls into the realm of material nature and becomes subject to the “seven governors”—the seven planets that govern fate and destiny.
It’s clear how much this myth resembles those of the Gnostics. In both cases we have a notion of two Gods, one benign but remote, the other evil or at any rate ambiguous; a descent into the realm of matter that becomes an imprisonment; and spiritual powers that bar the way between humanity and liberation. But the two visions also differ in some key respects. To begin with, the Hermetic hierarchy of seven “governors” forms a clearer and more elegant system than the cumbersome Gnostic networks of archons. And the Hermetic vision is not negative or paranoid, but genuinely tragic. Man falls in love with his own image as reflected in Nature, and Nature in turn falls in love with him—but by this love man is shackled to the physical world with its restrictions and sufferings. “Unlike any other living being on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus, although man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it.”8
To become free from this enmeshment, man must retrace his steps through the seven spheres of the “governors.” At each stage he sheds one of the noxious traits imparted to him by these planetary rulers:
Then the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone [the moon] surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second [Mercury], evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third [Venus] the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth [the sun] the ruler’s arrogance, now freed from excess; at the fifth [Mars] unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth [Jupiter] the evils that come from wealth, now inactive; at the seventh zone [Saturn] the deceit that lies in ambush. And then, stripped of the effects of the cosmic framework, the human enters the region of the ogdoad; he has his own proper power, and along with the blessed, he hymns the father.9
As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Character is fate.” Esoteric philosophy teaches that the planets create our fate as much by shaping our natures as by dictating future events. The only way to liberate ourselves from these planetary “governors” is to rise through these spheres, stripping ourselves of their associated vices—rendering them “inactive,” as the Poimandres puts it—through spiritual practice. This may be what it means to have “seven devils” cast out of you, as Mary Magdalene did.
The Lost Egyptian Religion
Although the myth in the Poimandres is strange and exotic, in some ways it’s also quite familiar. There is a divine father who begets a son whom he loves; the son comes down into a world of matter where he is ensnared, and he must do battle with inimical cosmic forces in order to be freed. These details suggest that the Poimandres and the other Hermetic texts form a bridge between the religion of ancient Egypt on the one hand and Gnosticism and esoteric Christianity on the other.
Admittedly, this theory has its problems. The biggest one is that the teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum bear only a dim resemblance to the religion known to Egyptologists—a religion of meticulous embalming of corpses; of gods that are half-human, half-beast; of rites performed to ensure that the Nile flooded regularly each year. Archaeological evidence spanning over three thousand years suggests that it was these teachings, and not the Hermetic doctrines, that underlay Egypt’s “reverent deeds.”
Was there really an Egyptian esoteric doctrine, otherwise unknown, that we see presented in the Corpus Hermeticum? One piece of evidence suggests there was. The Hermetic texts speak of reincarnation (sometimes known as metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls). The Asclepius says that “those who live faithfully under god” will ascend to become divine beings, but “for the unfaithful it goes differently: return to heaven is denied them, and a vile migration unworthy of a holy soul puts them in other bodies.” Another Hermetic treatise tells us that a person who dies childless “is sentenced to a body that has neither a man’s nature nor a woman’s—a thing accursed under the sun.”10 Both these passages point toward reincarnation.
Now it’s generally accepted that the ancient Egyptian religion did not teach reincarnation, and there is little if any archaeological evidence that it did. But the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., says, “The Egyptians were the first to teach that the human soul is immortal, and at the death of the body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth; and after passing through all creatures of land, sea, and air (which cycle it completes in three thousand years) it enters once more into a human body at birth.”11 This idea is very much like what we have seen in the Hermetic texts above.
Herodotus’s testimony is sometimes dismissed out of hand, but could he have known of a secret Egyptian tradition that left no archaeological traces? The evidence grows more intriguing in that Herodotus goes on to say, “Some of the Greeks, early and late, have used this doctrine as if it were their own; I know their names, but do not here record them.”
Herodotus probably means Pythagoras, the Greek sage of the fifth century B.C. who is best known for the Pythagorean theorem in geometry. This theorem was previously known in Egypt. In fact it’s likely that Pythagoras learned it there and then brought it back to Greece along with other teachings, some of which were rather strange. One of the oddest details about Pythagoras is that he forbade his followers to eat beans. This is so peculiar that the theories concocted to explain it range from the flimsy to the hilarious, but the simplest explanation again appears in Herodotus: “The Egyptians sow no beans in their country; if any grow, they will not eat them either raw or cooked; the priests cannot endure even to see them, considering beans an unclean kind of pulse.”12 If indeed Pythagoras studied in Egypt, he might have picked up this food taboo, much as an American today who studies spirituality in India or Japan may become a vegetarian. Among the ideas that Pythagoras passed on to his Greek followers appears to have been the doctrine of reincarnation, which, as Herodotus implies, Pythagoras taught as if it were his own. (Reincarnation also appears in Plato, who bears many marks of Pythagoras’s influence.)
We can see the doctrine of reincarnation in the Hermetic texts, but where do we find it in Christianity? Although most Christians assume that the teaching is totally foreign to their religion, the truth is a bit more complex. The third-century Church Father Origen, whom I discuss in detail later in this chapter, expounded views very much like those of the Hermetic texts. He wrote: “So long as a soul continues to abide in the good it has no experience of union with a body. [——] But by some inclination toward evil these souls lose their wings and come into bodies, first of men; then through their association with the irrational passions, after the allotted span of human life they are changed into beasts.” Eventually “even the gracious gift of sensation is withdrawn” and the soul comes to inhabit a plant. From this point it begins its ascent again.13
Astonishingly enough, the doctrine of reincarnation has never been explicitly repudiated by the church, although many Christian theologians have dismissed or derided it. Today it is often claimed that the doctrine was rejected either by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. or by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, but as a matter of fact neither of these dealt with the topic; instead they were concerned with the nature of Christ. One source of this misconception is Shirley MacLaine, the actress and New Age author, who introduced these ideas in her highly popular books, adding further to the confusion by mixing up the two councils.14
Reincarnation sits ambiguously on the edge of the Christian tradition. Valentin Tomberg (1900–73), a Baltic German convert to Roman Catholicism whose Meditations on the Tarot, published anonymously, remains one of the great modern classics of esoteric Christianity, observes, “The Church was hostile to the doctrine of reincarnation, although the fact of repeated incarnations was known—and could not remain unknown—to a large number of people faithful to the Church with authentic spiritual experience.”15 Tomberg’s views are intricate and differ in some key respects from those of Origen and the Hermetic writings, but his comments serve as a reminder that to this day Christian esotericists often accept the possibility of reincarnation even though conventional Christianity does not.
In any case, the ancient sources suggest that something like the following happened: There was in Egypt an esoteric doctrine that spoke of reincarnation, the immortality of the soul, and the descent of the soul into matter as a form of bondage. This doctrine was not written down but was taught orally, and this is perhaps how Pythagoras learned it. He brought these ideas to Greece in the sixth century B.C., just in time to feed and inspire the discipline of philosophy that was just being born. Pythagoras’s ideas went on to influence Plato (remember that Ficino specifically mentions both Pythagoras and Plato as part of the aurea catena, or Golden Chain). The following centuries would see these ideas recirculate from the Greeks back to the Egyptians to form a kind of esoteric common currency in the world of the eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt they would come into a final flowering in the Hermetic teachings, which in turn poured their wisdom into Christianity, particularly in its esoteric and Gnostic forms.
The Inoculation of Christianity
How, then, did these ideas actually influence Christianity? Partly through Gnosticism, whose affinity with the Hermetic teachings should be fairly obvious by now. But these ideas made their way into orthodox Christianity as well, chiefly thanks to two great fathers of the church who repudiated Gnosticism but embraced gnosis—along with many esoteric doctrines.
The first of these figures was Clement of Alexandria. As with most of the Church Fathers of that era, we know only skeletal details of his life.16 He was born around 150 A.D., possibly in Athens, though he spent most of his life in Alexandria. Allusions in his written works indicate that he could have been an initiate of the pagan mystery religions, about which he seems unusually well informed. He sought spiritual knowledge from a number of sources, and makes reference to six “blessed and memorable men” whom he does not name but who, he says, spoke in “plain and living words.” The last of these, who was “first in power,” is usually identified as Pantaenus, head of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Clement became a Christian and eventually succeeded Pantaenus as head of the school. He apparently left Alexandria in 202 A.D. during the persecution by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. Our last glimpse of him comes from 211, when he appears as bearer of a letter from Alexander, afterward bishop of Jerusalem, to the church of Antioch. Clement’s death is generally placed around 215 A.D.
Clement is the author of a number of surviving works, including The Instructor, a guide to daily life for Christians; Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?—a short treatise reassuring wealthy converts that Christ’s criticisms of the rich did not mean they would have to give up their fortunes; and the compendious Stromateis (or Stromata, meaning “Patchworks” or “Miscellanies”), which deals in great detail with the relation of gnosis to Christian faith.
One of the most curious recent discoveries in New Testament studies is a previously unknown fragment of a letter ascribed to Clement. The scholar Morton Smith discovered it in 1958 at Mar Saba, an Eastern Orthodox monastery near Jerusalem. In this letter, Clement says the Evangelist Mark, after writing the familiar version of his Gospel in Rome, wrote a “more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected.” This “more spiritual Gospel,” which Clement said was preserved in the church at Alexandria up to his own time, is otherwise unknown to us. It differed from the familiar version of Mark’s Gospel, containing additional stories of Jesus’s acts as well as “certain sayings of which…the interpretation would…lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by seven [veils].” (The seven veils may have the same meaning as the “seven devils” and the “seven governors” that I’ve already discussed.) Clement’s letter quotes some lines of this Gospel, including a story of the raising of a young man from the dead, rather like Lazarus. After raising him from the dead, “Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”17 Smith analyzed this letter and found that stylistically it resembles Clement’s other writings enough to make a strong case for its authenticity.
Most intriguing, perhaps, Clement says that the “hierophantic teaching of the Lord” was not revealed in the familiar versions of the Gospel; it was reserved for initiates. Clement adds that the doctrines of the libertine Gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians sprang from a misinterpretation of Mark’s secret text.
I don’t have the space here to explore all the issues raised by this intriguing fragment. But remember that in chapter 1, I pointed out the almost universally accepted fact that the original ending of Mark, which deals with the aftermath of the Resurrection, was lost. Furthermore, scholars have long been struck by the extreme abruptness of Mark’s Gospel in its transitions from one story or scene to the next. These facts may indicate that the actual situation was the opposite of what Clement claims: perhaps Mark initially wrote a text that included many secret teachings but was later edited—by Mark himself or by someone else—for general consumption. This at any rate would explain both the omissions and the Gospel’s abruptness.
Whatever conclusions we may want to draw from this fragmentary letter, Clement’s better-known writings reveal a man of tremendous learning and irenic temperament. While he heaped contempt upon the more superstitious elements of Greek religion—its orgiastic rites and the misbehavior of its gods—he admired Greek philosophy and tried to integrate it into the emerging Christian orthodoxy. His writings are full of citations, not only from the Bible and well-known pagan authors such as Homer and Plato, but from numerous others whose fragments only survive because Clement quoted them at one point or another. And although he has sharp words for the Gnostics, he grants a place to gnosis in his theological system and argues that it is compatible with—indeed the essence of—Christian faith.
Clement’s thought is like that of the classical Gnostic schools in many ways. He frequently stresses the need to conceal the true meaning of Christian doctrine in symbols and allegories. He describes three tiers of humanity, the “heathen,” the “believer,” and the gnostic, who roughly correspond to the Gnostic division of humanity into the carnal, the psychic, and pneumatic. Most of all, Clement is lavish with praise for the true (that is, the orthodox Christian) gnostic—“the one who knows God.” The gnostic is an imitator of God, patient and self-restrained, indifferent to pain and poverty, and willing to offer up his life in martyrdom if it is called for. Above all, the gnostic is a man of faith. “The gnostic is…fixed by faith.” Moreover, “faith is something superior to knowledge.”18
Like the other Church Fathers, Clement repudiates the “false gnosis,” which, he claims, has brought true gnosis into disrepute. Theologically, the greatest sticking point was the Gnostics’ refusal to identify the God of the Old Testament with the loving Father described by Jesus. But Clement also condemns their sexual mores (which, from his point of view, are either too lax or too strict, depending on the sect in question); their contempt for the body; and their repudiation of certain scriptures, such as the Epistles to Timothy.19 (Actually, modern scholars agree with the Gnostics that these letters were falsely attributed to Paul.)
Yet underneath it all there seems to lie a deeper tension, a far more fundamental cause of division than any mere matters of doctrine or practice. I have alluded to it already in saying that for Clement, faith is above knowledge. This is the essential point at which orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism diverge. For Clement, as for practically all orthodox Christians, faith is the prerequisite: believe first and then you will know. For the Gnostic, faith is secondary; it is only a stopgap until you have knowledge—the direct experiential knowledge that is the essence of gnosis.
This no doubt accounts for the much-reviled arrogance of the Gnostics. They were not willing to put faith before knowledge; for them, either you knew or you didn’t, and faith was only a way station, possibly a detour. To ordinary believers, such an attitude must have seemed extremely condescending. It also explains much about the Gnostic schools and their fate. Since the Gnostics trusted ultimately only in their own experience, each one saw the cosmos in slightly different terms; no two Gnostic teachers taught exactly the same doctrine. For much the same reason, an organized hierarchy was not only unnecessary but more or less impossible. Because they were unwilling to place their trust in ecclesiastical powers or theological party lines, they could not establish any institutions to compete with the emerging Catholic Church. So in the end they vanished.
Despite his affinities with the Gnostics, Clement ultimately chose the route of faith. Or was Clement playing a double game, making such assertions in his public writings but speaking quite differently among initiates? After all, he sometimes hints that what you should say in public may be the opposite of what you should say in private. We’re not likely ever to find out. In any case, he was never repudiated by the hierarchy. He was canonized, and from his own time to the present, he has always remained among the most esteemed of the Church Fathers, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy.
The Repudiation of Origen
Origen, another great Church Father from Alexandria, did not enjoy the same good fortune. In fact Origen has the peculiar distinction of being perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher to be disowned after his own time. There are a large number—including Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, and Jacob Boehme—who were regarded with suspicion or hostility while they were alive, only to be rehabilitated after their deaths. But there are few who, like Origen, who were regarded as orthodox in their own time and disowned later. For this reason it’s sometimes hard to discern exactly what Origen taught: not only have many of his works vanished, but some of them survive only in Latin versions by translators who watered down his meaning in order to make him more acceptable in their own day.20
Origen was born around 185 A.D. and was raised in Alexandria—the epicenter, as we have seen, of Gnostic currents.21 He was raised in a Christian family. His father gave him a superb education, teaching him not only the Christian scriptures but the pagan classics as well, making Origen the most formidably learned of all the Church Fathers. His father died in the persecution under Septimius Severus in 202 (the same one that caused Clement to flee Alexandria), leaving Origen, the eldest son, with the duty of providing for a large family. Fortunately, a wealthy Christian woman became his patron, enabling him to finish his education so that he could work as a grammateus, a professor of Greek literature. In his youth Origen also studied under Ammonius Saccas, a Platonist who also taught the celebrated Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. Most scholars assume he studied under Clement, who was in Alexandria during Origen’s youth, although the latter never mentions Clement by name in his surviving works.
From an early age, Origen showed not only remarkable intellectual gifts but a fiery passion for his faith. He took Christ’s remark about “eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Matt. 19:12) too literally and castrated himself in an attempt to follow it—an act he later regretted.
As Origen matured as a teacher, he encountered a formidable opponent—Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria. Origen began teaching at a time when bishops were expanding their already considerable powers. Because Origen did not allow a mere bishop who was very likely inferior to himself in learning and intelligence to dictate what he taught, his position in Alexandria became more and more untenable, and he went to Rome around 215. He returned to Alexandria, where he was condemned by the church in 231 (we do not know why, although apparently it was not over doctrinal issues). Around 234 he settled in Caesarea on the coast of Palestine, where he would stay for the rest of his life.
In 249, the emperor Decius inaugurated the most intense and systematic persecution of the Christians up to that time, requiring everyone in the empire (except Jews) to worship the pagan gods and to have papers certifying they had done so. Origen was arrested, cast into prison, and tortured. Decius’s reign was short, and Origen was released after the emperor’s death in 251. But his health was broken from his ordeals, and he died a year or so later.
Both in his lifetime and afterward, Origen won renown for extraordinary learning and phenomenal output. One ancient source numbered his works at six thousand, though the Church Father Jerome argues for the more cautious figure of two thousand. This is not as preposterous as it may sound, since it probably includes letters and sermons; moreover, a “book” in antiquity was the amount of material that could fit on a single scroll—considerably less than a modern printed book. Even by the most conservative estimates, Origen was a prolific author. His works include commentaries on numerous books of the Bible; On First Principles, the most significant of his surviving theological treatises; Contra Celsum (Against Celsus), a reply to a now-lost polemic against Christianity; and the compendious Hexapla, a parallel text of six different versions of the Bible in Hebrew and Greek.
Like Clement, Origen was not a Gnostic, and also like Clement, he treated many Gnostic teachings with contempt. One of the most interesting of these has to do with the nature of the Old Testament God. As we’ve seen, the Gnostics made a sharp distinction between the true, good God and the inferior demiurge; they often equated the latter with the deity portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures. Origen did not agree with these ideas. Why?
At one point in Contra Celsum, Origen turns to a claim made by the pagan philosopher Celsus that each nation has its own governing spirit, a kind of middle-level administrator in the cosmic hierarchy.22 This, according to Celsus, is why customs and mores—even the very notion of what is pious and holy—vary from nation to nation. The Jews are no exception; they too have their own governing “angel.”
This idea resonates with the Gnostic idea, suggested by Gal. 3:19, that the law “was ordained by angels in the hands of a mediator,” but Origen rejects it. He says it is ridiculous, because it collapses the truth of what is actually holy and pious into a meaningless relativism: “If, then, religion, and piety, and righteousness belong to those things which are so only by comparison, so that the same act may be both pious and impious, according to different relations and different laws, see whether it will not follow that temperance also is a thing of comparison, and courage as well, and prudence, and the other virtues, than which nothing could be more absurd!”23
Origen justifies his views with an esoteric explanation of the Tower of Babel. He says this story speaks of a time when all nations spoke one “divine language”: that is, they all worshipped the same God in the same way. But when they desired “to gather together material things, and to join to heaven what had no natural affinity for it,” they fell away from true worship. They were punished by having their “language” confounded. That is, each nation was handed over “to angels of character more or less severe, and of a nature more or less stern, until they had paid the penalty of their daring deeds; and they were conducted by those angels, who imprinted on each his native language, to the different parts of the earth according to their deserts.”24 The one exception was “the portion of the Lord, and His people who were called Jacob, and Israel the cord of His inheritance; and these alone were governed by a ruler who did not receive those who were placed under him for the purpose of punishment”—that is, by God himself (5.31).
Essentially Origen is saying that while all the other nations are governed by some subordinate angel, the nation of Israel is not; they were “the portion of the Lord.” They were the ancestors of the Christian religion, which also worships the one true God. Thus the God of the Old Testament is, as orthodox Christianity insists, the one true God.
What’s especially fascinating about Origen’s views is that they are exactly the same as those of the Jewish Kabbalah, which equates the one true God with the divine name YHVH, or Yahweh. The thirteenth-century Kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla explains, “The ministers [i.e., angels] of these other nations…cannot touch the name YHVH…. The Name YHVH…is only for Israel.”25 Even more strikingly, Gikatilla goes on to explain his views with an allegorical exposition of the Tower of Babel story that is much like Origen’s. It’s unlikely that Gikatilla knew of Origen’s works or would have used them in his own interpretation of scripture. Rather, the similarity of these ideas in authors of such different periods and orientations suggests that it was part of the esoteric tradition that was carried on in both Judaism and Christianity. Later still, the idea would reenter Christian tradition through the Kabbalah itself. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a Christian Kabbalist of the fifteenth century (whom we look at in chapter 6), would write, “No king of the earth is punished on earth unless his heavenly militia is humiliated first.”26 This statement, written in the cryptic language of the Kabbalists, probably means that the fates of nations are dictated by those of their governing spirits.
Despite his universally admitted learning and piety, Origen’s reputation suffered over succeeding generations. In the late fourth century, a Church Father named Epiphanius of Salamis attacked him as the source of the Arian heresy (explained below). In 553, almost three hundred years exactly after Origen’s death, he was anathematized—that is, officially condemned—by the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, and the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered his works destroyed. This effectively put an end to Origen’s authority in Orthodox Christianity, although Justinian’s ruling had less weight in the Western than in the Eastern church, and Origen continued to be respected in the Western church into medieval times. The 1913 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia emphasizes that “he does not deserve to be ranked among the promoters of heresy.27
Why was Origen anathematized? His teaching of reincarnation no doubt gave rise to suspicion, although it was never specifically rejected by the church. The main cause of his condemnation lay in his alleged inspiration of the Arian heresy in the fourth century. The Arian heresy—if it in fact deserves that name—was the doctrine espoused by the fourth-century theologian Arius that Jesus Christ, being the Son of God, was the first of God’s creations and as such was not equal to the Father. Because the relation of the Father and the Son had been only vaguely spelled out up to that point, this controversy split the church apart.
It can be hard for a modern reader to grasp the intensity and viciousness of these ancient theological disputes. Yet they occupied the attention of a population that extended far beyond bishops and priests. Among his other talents, Arius knew how to write catchy songs, and it discomfited orthodox churchmen to hear tunes expounding his heresies sung by men in the street. As the Roman Empire became officially Christian (a process that took place over the fourth century) and the emperors began to involve themselves with the church hierarchy, these issues also became matters of high state.
In fact it was Constantine, the first Christian emperor, who brought the Arian controversy to a head by convening the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The council ruled that the Father and Son were both fully divine, formulated the doctrine of the Trinity now held by much of Christendom, and condemned Arius.
Origen didn’t actually teach Arianism, but he did hold an emanationist view of the relation between the Father and the Son. This is sometimes called “subordination of the divine Persons.” According to Origen, the Father “eternally generates” the Son, even though the Son was not created in time: “Would someone be so bold as to say that the Son began to exist after having not existed previously?” Origen asks. “When did…the Word who knows the Father not exist?”28 Nonetheless, to later theologians, Origen’s emanationism sounded enough like Arius’s teaching that it was condemned by association.
This “subordination of the divine Persons” isn’t the only reason Origen fell out of favor. Another teaching of his that later generations would condemn was what has since come to be called “universalism”—the doctrine that all souls can be saved (at least potentially), even those in hell. He cites such verses as 1 Cor. 15:28: “When all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Origen comments: “Just as when the Son is said to be subjected to the Father, the perfect restoration of the entire creation is announced, so when his enemies are said to be subjected to the Son of God, we are to understand this to involve the salvation of those subjected and the restoration of those that had been lost”—that is, damned.29
Universal salvation arises out of Origen’s view of divine chastisement, which has more to do with correction than with punishment or retribution: “And so it happens that some in the first, others in the second, and others even in the last times, through their endurance of greater and more severe punishments of long duration, extending, if I may say so, over many ages, are by these very stern methods of correction renewed and restored.”30 For Origen, even the devil can be redeemed.
For churchmen more comfortable with the idea of “the lake of fire and brimstone” where the wicked “shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:10), Origen’s benign view of the Last Judgment was not to be tolerated. This, too, would count against him.
The final stroke against him had to do with his interpretation of scripture. Of all the Church Fathers, Origen was the least attached to the idea that the Bible is literally true in all respects. Perhaps his early experience with self-mutilation made him chary of taking even Christ’s words totally at face value. At any rate, his compendious commentaries on the Bible were largely efforts to draw out its allegorical and symbolic meaning. Origen did not invent this approach—it can be traced back to Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who lived around the same time as Christ—but Origen applied it more fully than any other theologian has before or since.
Origen held that scripture had three levels of meaning, corresponding to the body, soul, and spirit—the three-part division of the human entity according to the esoteric doctrine. He even denied that scripture was always true at the literal level:
Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,” and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life: and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to “walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.31
At this point it might be useful to step back and see what the condemnation of Origen means for us now. The relation of the Father and the Son is rather far removed from modern concerns; few even among theologians would be willing to come to blows over such issues. But when we come to Origen’s notions of universal salvation and his allegorical interpretation of scripture, we can see how, if there had been more room for them in later theology, they might have forestalled many of the sharpest assaults on Christianity today. At present, two of the greatest sticking points with Christian teachings have to do with issues Origen directly addressed. In the first place, there’s the incredible viciousness and injustice of infinite torment in hell for what, after all, are finite offenses on earth. By granting the possibility that everyone may be saved in the end, Origen blunts the harshness of an endless divine wrath. In the second place, Origen’s allegorism frees us from taking the Bible literally. Without such an interpretation, we must either, like fundamentalists, insist that it’s all to be taken at face value no matter how absurd this seems or, like modernists, admit that while the Bible was meant to be literally true, it’s really nothing more than a collection of old fables dressed up as fact. Had the church not turned away from Origen in the sixth century, he might have been able to help it with its critics today.
The Exteriorization of Christianity
Yet the church did turn away from Origen. Appreciating his brilliance, the Catholic Church in particular has been careful not to denounce him fully, but to all intents he has been left on the sidelines. More broadly, in the first five hundred years of its life, the church, both Catholic and Orthodox (they would not split completely until 1054), worked hard to push out esoteric or Gnostic viewpoints. Such approaches were, it is true, never totally discarded. They’ve always been found in isolated sectors of the mainstream churches, and the monastic tradition, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy, has often provided some haven for them. But over the centuries they have become increasingly marginalized. By the twentieth century, the impulse toward gnosis was all but forgotten in organized religion.
All this leads one to ask how this transformation of Christianity happened, and why. Most scholars view this question in light of the long power struggle among competing sects in the early centuries of Christian history. The triumph of Christianity itself is usually regarded as the result of imperial pressure. As Edward Gibbon writes in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after the conversion of Constantine “every motive of authority and fashion, of interest and reason, now militated on the side of Christianity.” Furthermore, this triumphant Christian church regarded itself not as subject to the state but as superior to it. To quote Gibbon again, “The emperor might be saluted as the father of his people, but he owed a filial duty and reverence to the fathers of the Church.”32 This newfound temporal power enabled the church to enforce its doctrinal decrees with the full might of the state.
This view makes sense in light of the struggles for power and control that dominate the pages of secular history. But one is led to wonder, can spiritual history be explained totally in terms of secular events? Those with a religious orientation have frequently said it cannot. Orthodox theologians, for example, have sometimes portrayed the history of church doctrine as a progressive series of triumphs of the Holy Spirit over the devil and his minions, the heretics. Conventional history dismisses explanations of this kind, if only because they lend themselves poorly to such key historiographical concerns as documentation and evidence. Nonetheless, taken with some caution, such perspectives can prove refreshing and enlightening, particularly if they are comparatively free from dogmatic prejudice.
One such perspective comes from René Guénon (1886–1951). Although he’s little known in the English-speaking world, Guénon was one of the most influential esoteric philosophers of the last century; his disciples include such figures as the well-known Islamic scholar S. H. Nasr and Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions. A difficult and rebarbative thinker who despised modernity, Guénon nevertheless has a great deal to say about esotericism in world religions.
In an essay called “Christianisme et initiation” (“Christianity and Initiation”), Guénon says that at the outset Christianity was in many ways an esoteric teaching, but that it more or less consciously divested itself of these elements in order to make itself more popular. This was not merely a marketing ploy. The Greco-Roman religion was in an advanced state of decay, and something was needed to take its place. Had Christianity not made this sacrifice, as it were, Western civilization would have been destroyed entirely. Guénon writes:
If we consider the state of the Western world—that is, the collection of nations included under the Roman Empire—at the time in question, we can easily recognize that, if Christianity had not “descended” into the exoteric domain, this world as a whole would have been entirely deprived of any tradition, since those that had existed up to that point, especially the Greco-Roman tradition that had naturally become predominant, had come to a state of extreme degeneracy that indicated that their cycle of existence was at an end. This “descent,” we must once again insist, was in no way an accident or a deviation. On the contrary, one should consider it as having a veritably “providential” character, since it kept the West in that age from falling into a state comparable to the one in which it finds itself now.33
Here we have a situation somewhat like that of the Egyptian religion, whose death was foreseen in the Hermetic texts. In this case, however, Greco-Roman religion—whose degeneracy was frequently lamented by the pagans themselves—did not even have enough living matter to be transmuted into another form. It was simply supplanted by a tradition that was still young and vibrant. Guénon adds that this “descent” was in all probability complete by the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.
Throughout his works, Guénon argues that there are two aspects of any authentic spiritual tradition: the “inner,” or esoteric, and the “outer,” or exoteric. Most religions have some fairly well-defined esoteric teaching at their core. Judaism has the Kabbalah; Islam has Sufism; Guénon even claims that in China, Taoism is not, strictly speaking, a different religion from Confucianism but its “inner” aspect. However this may be, when we come to Christianity, we don’t find any obvious esoteric center. According to Guénon, this is because in those early centuries, Christianity took its “inner” rites and rituals, such as baptism and the Eucharist, and turned them into external religious forms.
This “descent” into externality has left the Christian tradition with a hole at the center. Christianity has never entirely lost its esoteric connection: that would be its demise, since esotericism is the living pith of a religion. But the inner aspect of the tradition has mostly been denied, ignored, or downplayed. As the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast said in a 1992 interview, “The best way of hiding something is to put it out in the open, where nobody who looks for hidden things will find it. So the hidden teaching is right out front, but you have to have eyes to see. What does that mean in our context, having eyes to see? It means that you will get at it by committing yourself.”34 And yet there are many who seem to have committed themselves and have still come away wanting. Commitment, like faith, may not be enough on its own.
These considerations say a great deal about why Western civilization developed as it did. Christianity came more and more to deny its own interior, especially after the Middle Ages, when it gave primacy to reason over spiritual insight. The civilization that is its daughter has followed its example. The West is the civilization of the exterior par excellence. Our science, politics, economics, philosophy are all based on externalities, on what Guénon called “the reign of quantity.” By reducing our thoughts and feelings to electrochemical reactions, modern neurology and biochemistry have even exteriorized our inmost depths.
I am not decrying these developments or holding out the image of some long-past age to draw forth nostalgia. In all likelihood the situation had to develop as it did; could it have done otherwise, it no doubt would have; and as Guénon suggests, it may even have been providential, at least at the start. In the end, whether this exteriorization, led at first by Christianity itself and then by the sciences that shunted it aside, will prove of benefit or of harm to the human race—even at the dawn of the twenty-first century it is too early to tell.