CHAPTER

11

The Pagan Renaissance1

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Christianization of Europe was complete.² Gothic cathedrals and churches radiated their influence over every community, great and small. Mendicant orders like the Franciscans not only preached the Gospel but lived it out, sharing the poverty of their humblest listeners. The universities were flourishing, with an idealized curriculum of the Seven Liberal Arts,³ crowned by Theology. The cults of saints and their relics, with pilgrimages to their shrines, provided endless variety and interest, and a feeling for the spirits of place. A growing devotion to the Virgin Mary offered a feminine focus for love and prayer that was otherwise wanting in monotheism. Heretics, dissenters, and revanchist pagans were mercilessly suppressed. Few people in Europe could have had any doubt about the existence of heaven, purgatory, and hell, and of what it took to end up in each.

In the ancient past, comparable systems of belief and social control have lasted for thousands of years, as witness the civilizations of China, Egypt, Peru, and the Europe of the megalith builders. In all known instances, the hierarchy was headed by a sacred king, served by the members of an elite administrative order. These possessed scientific and cosmological knowledge that they incorporated in stone monuments and no doubt in other, more ephemeral forms. The life of the masses was structured by religious rituals and obligations, shading off insensibly to secular law and order.4

Some people think that the Middle Ages were like that, achieving an equilibrium between the church’s spiritual authority and the temporal power that belonged, in theory, to the Holy Roman Emperor. But this seems to me a romantic dream. Unlike the ancient theocracies, the edifice was scarcely in place when cracks began to appear in its fabric. Of course there are individuals who can be blamed for the self-destruction of the ideal Christian civilization.⁵ But in retrospect it seems to be impossible to realize eternal values in an age which some call by the Hindu term Kali Yuga or, after the Greek cyclical scheme, the Age of Iron.⁶ Nothing seems to last for very long.

The fourteenth century began its sorry tale of decadence with the brutal dissolution of the Order of Knights Templar, and ended it with two rival popes. Soon would come the final schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches,⁷ then the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the so-called Enlightenment, and the dismal, soulless state known as modernity.⁸ But that story is not our concern. We are trying to trace the influence of those who have always had at heart the spiritual state of our civilization, and we will not find them on one side or the other of these squabbles.

Images, symbols, myths, and archetypes are what truly stamps a culture, rather than theology and faith in things unseen. In the Middle Ages, these coincided; in the Renaissance, they drew apart, as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a change of revolutionary dimensions in the European imagination. The Christian images did not vanish, but they were joined by a rival body of images, reborn from Greco-Roman antiquity, with which they lived in grudging compromise.

Once in late medieval Siena, a Roman statue of Venus was unearthed. This was in 1345, at a time when the nude was never used gratuitously in art, but only when realism demanded it, as in depictions of Adam and Eve. The newly found example of the classical canon of beauty was mounted on a pedestal in the piazza and admired by the populace. But the two years that followed were full of catastrophe for the city. Fearing that their idolatry had offended God and the Virgin, the pious Sienese took down their Venus, smashed her into little pieces, and buried the remains.9 This instructive tale illustrates the ambiguous nature of images from the pagan world: they were tremendously attractive, but they carried a whiff of sulfur about them. There was a strong theological tradition that the pagan gods were none other than the fallen demons of Satan’s band, who had amused themselves before the coming of Christ by devising false religions for the snaring of mankind.

In the following century the danger was forgotten. Adulation of antiquity was rampant, and the Greco-Roman models were eagerly emulated by sculptors, painters, architects, poets, playwrights, and philosophers. These artists did not cease to turn out works on sacred subjects, as anyone knows who has wearied at the endless Virgins and Children in Italian art museums. But a growing fashion in secular life, starting with the decorative arts and spreading to sculpture and architecture, favored classical subjects. Soon these became the norm, going hand in hand with the education in Latin and Greek favored by the humanists. The homes of the aristocracy were soon adorned with the iconography of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, with pagan gods and goddesses, and, not insignificantly, with nude figures.

Imagine the difference between spending the impressionable years of childhood looking at church iconography and Books of Hours, and growing up among walls painted with the loves of Jupiter and the Labors of Hercules! It did not matter that the classical myths were well known to be pure fiction, and their divinities regarded at best as allegorical: the images were powerful and memorable. One reason is that for the first time in many centuries, eroticism had become an acceptable subject for the visual arts. It would remain so right through the prudish nineteenth century, when classical subjects served as the pretext for artists to continue undisturbed with their favorite exercise of depicting sensuous, nude bodies.

Although the Christian and the pagan imaginations cohabited in artists’ ateliers, destined respectively for sacred and secular use, their incompatibility must have been felt by the users. Mostly battened down in the unconscious mind, it erupted in religious zeal, bigotry, and conflict, as though one’s true beliefs had to be protected at all costs. And indeed, Christian values were under fire, for few (least of all the Renaissance popes and cardinals) would willingly choose the ascetic, self-denying ethos of the Gospels over the colorful, heroic virtues of Hercules, Aeneas, and the historical Romans.

So much for the exoteric effects of the new gods. In the esoteric field, they had an equally revolutionary effect. Chapter 1 mentioned Georgios Gemistos Plethon, the envoy from Mistra to the Council of Florence in 1438–39, and his notion of an Ancient Theology taught by a chain of pre-Christian initiates. Among Plethon’s gifts to the Florentines was the singing of Orphic hymns to the classical divinities.¹⁰ Plethon thereby planted the seed which Marsilio Ficino, translator of the works of Plato, Plotinus, and Hermes Trismegistus, cultivated, with spectacular effect on the European magical tradition.¹¹

Ficino’s magic¹² was grafted on to an existing tradition of medieval magic, which in turn had derived from Arabic sources such as the notorious manual of spirit evocation called Picatrix.¹³ The fundamental idea was the doctrine of correspondences, which teaches that everything in the universe corresponds to other things on higher or lower levels of being. Thus, for example, the human body corresponds to the Zodiac, whose twelve constellations rule its twelve principal members or organs. The seven planets have their correspondences in the mineral realm as seven metals, while in the vegetable realm they rule various herbs, and so forth. The principle of natural magic is that manipulating something on one level attracts influences from the corresponding thing on another level. So, in a simple example, to wear a golden ring attracts the lordly qualities of the Sun, while a copper bracelet draws the friendly influences of Venus.¹⁴

The Arabic sources also spoke of magic worked through conscious agents, either angels or demons, whose ranks are arranged according to the laws of correspondence and who can be commanded by the proper rituals.15 But the dangers of trafficking with demons (who might even impersonate angels) made this a risky activity for Christians and Moslems alike.

The influx of ancient Greek philosophical and wisdom literature greatly expanded these horizons. To Ficino, who was anything but a naïve dabbler, the Hermetic treatises and the writings of Plotinus clarified many things that had been obscure, such as the mechanism by which natural magic works. Once again, the key was the imagination. The imaginative energy was what opened the connection between one level and another, and the more strongly it acted, the most certain were the results. The fuel by which it worked was Eros (love or desire), and the substance on which it imprinted itself was the spiritus, or subtle spirit that interpenetrates the material universe.

Based on these principles, Ficino developed a kind of planetary magic in which the magus would surround himself with colors, scents, substances, and music of the kind corresponding to the planet whose influences he wished to attract. These would both draw the influences through their own correspondences and aid him in the intense concentration of his will and imagination. It was a moot point among Renaissance magicians whether the planet was conceived as a purely natural object or as an ensouled being—presumably an angel.

The argument could be raised of why, if one’s desire is licit, one shouldn’t simply pray to God or the saints for it. To perform a magical operation instead seems, to conservative believers, to insult the efficacy of prayer and God’s wisdom in granting or refusing it. The magician may retort that magic is simply an operation in the natural world, working with specialized knowledge of God’s creation and hence no more impious than agriculture. After all, farmers don’t follow Christ’s injunction to “take no thought for the morrow” (Matt. 6:34), but rely on their knowledge of Nature’s laws and act accordingly. Even if the magic involves a spirit or an angel, is this any worse than the commonplace prayer to a saint?

As in the case of the medieval synthesis, the new, pagan imagination of the Renaissance worked on two levels, exoteric and esoteric. In the public domain there were the new palaces and gardens, paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, prints, and books, which were the antithesis of the Gothic cathedrals and of Medieval Christian art. No one could evade the influence of the new imaginal environment, and few would want to, for it opened the senses to the Eros of earthly beauty. All unknowingly, Europeans were becoming Platonists: for while mainstream Christianity spurned natural beauty and erotic attraction, Plato’s philosophy embraced them, as the first sprouting of the wings on which the soul would eventually rise to the knowledge of intellectual beauty.16

In the more esoteric circles of the highly educated humanists, it was equally impossible to evade the seduction of classical philosophy and the challenge it posed to the Christian view of the world. As we have seen in chapter 1, Plethon’s lineage of pagan sages opened up a vision of the distant past in which all God’s peoples were endowed with a wisdom appropriate to their time and place. The newly discovered texts of Hermes, Zoroaster, Plato, etc., set a thorny problem to those obliged to reconcile them with the Christian revelation.

The inhabitants of old European cities still live their lives among the evidence of this split imagination: the Gothic cathedral and churches on the one hand, the Renaissance palaces on the other, with their contrary iconographies. It is a rich, even overrich combination, mixing two worldviews that, for all the well-meaning efforts of synthesis, remain an unsolved conundrum in the history of consciousness. Moses and Homer; Caesar and Christ: whether we like them or not, these are the twin roots of our spiritual heritage.