The Church as Machine

It has been two and a half years since I posted the following essay, but I still think it makes some good points. While I have expanded quite a bit on what I think the answer is, I think I conceive of the problem in similar terms: a mechanistic and technocratic drive in man that infiltrates even religious thinking itself.

Originally posted here

Recently, I finished reading Pierre Hadot’s newest book, The Veil of Isis, which is a thought-provoking reflection on the concept of Nature from Heraclitus to the present. More specifically, Hadot uses the fragment of Heraclitus, “nature likes to hide itself”, to trace how man has approached the world around him from ancient Greece to the present day. As a paradigm, he uses the two mythological figures of Prometheus and Orpheus to analyze how poets, philosophers, and scientists have either viewed nature as a mystery to be revered or a specimen to be dissected. The book thus centers on the dichotomy that emerges between veiling and unveiling, personified in pagan iconography of the veil of the goddess Isis/Artemis/Diana.

The immeasurable space in the spirit

The end of the Robert Wilson / Philip Glass “opera”, Einstein on the Beach

Man is an earthly star enveloped in a cloud, but a star is a heavenly man….

Therefore leaving behind the narrow confines of this shadow, return to yourself; for thus you will return to spaciousness. Remember that there is an immeasurable space in the spirit, but in the body one could say infinite constriction. This indeed you can see from the fact that numbers, which are akin to the nature of spirit, increase without limit but do not diminish; whereas there is a limit to the expression of the physical, to its contraction there is no limit.

-Marsilio Ficino, found in Meditations on the Soul

More on the microcosm

Assuredly, man is a small world in such a way that he is also a part of the large world. Now, a whole shines forth in all its parts, since a part is a part of a whole. Just as the whole man shines forth in the hand, which is proportioned to the whole, but, nevertheless, the whole perfection of man shines forth in a more perfect manner in the head: so the universe shines forth in each of its parts, for all things have their respective relation and proportion to the universe, but, nevertheless, the universe shines forth more greatly in that part which is called man than in any other part. Therefore, because the perfection of the totality of the universe shines forth more greatly in and through man, man is a perfect, but small, world and is part of the large world. Hence, a man has particularly, specially, and distinctly the things which the universe has universally. And because there can be only one universe but there can be a plurality of particular and distinct things, many particular and distinct men bear an image of, and a specific resemblance to, the one perfect universe. Thus, the stable oneness of the universe is unfolded quite perfectly in such a variegated plurality of small transient worlds that succeed one another.

-Nicholas of Cusa, De Ludo Globi

Pico della Mirandola video

The Hercules of Hades is able to speak of his bravery. But he esteems it a small thing now that he has passed to a region more sacred and has arrived in the intelligible realm; he is now endowed with a strength more than Herculean for those battles which are the battles of the sages.

-Plotinus, The Enneads

Virtus in astra tendit, in mortem timor
Praesens ab astris, mater, Alcides cano.
Poenas cruentus iam tibi Eurytheus dabit:
Curru superbum vecta trancendes caput.
Me iam decet subire coelestem plagam:
Inferna vici rursus Alcides loca.

-Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus

On Sight

But, that there is some light, though small, in the eyes and brain, many animals which see at night can attest. Their eyes glow in the dark. And also, if anyone has pressed the corner of his eye in some certain way with his finger and twisted it, he seems to see a certain luminous circle inside himself. And it is said that the deified Augustus had eyes so bright and shining that when he stared at someone very hard, he forced him to lower his eyes, as if before the glow of the sun. Tiberius also is said to have had very large eyes which (this would be amazing) saw at night and in the dark, but only for a short time, and when they first opened from sleep; then they grew dim again.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

In Mexico, it is said that people who give small children the evil eye (el mal de ojo) have la vista muy fuerte (a strong sense of sight). It is even said that a person can kill someone if his sense of sight is strong enough. This is almost always completely involuntary. Spanish speakers can see the short documentary, El Mal Visto, regarding this phenomenon. One wonders if such beliefs are remnants of the esoteric sciences of the Renaissance and earlier.

From the Magical Conclusions

Voices and words have efficacy in a magical work, because in that work in which nature first exercises magic, the voice is God’s.

Every voice has power in magic insofar as it is shaped by the voice of God.

Voices that mean nothing are more poweful in magic than voices that mean something. And one who is profound can understand the reason for this conclusion from the preceding conclusion.

-Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, from the 900 Theses

Enchanted Protestantism – II

Robert Fludd’s Anti-Papist Quest for the Philosopher’s Stone

Petra autem erat Christus

As I have written previously, to say that Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” took place along strictly confessional lines is erroneous. While Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the long run left more room for ancient visions of the world to persist, in its more official sphere, it was just as scrupulous and rationalistic as its Reformed counterpart. Within the last fifty years, what we have seen in the Catholic Church, at least in the developed world, is the consumation of the Council of Trent, not its negation. Theological principle becomes the only fountain of Catholic praxis, whether that principle be feminism, liberation theology, postmodern liberalism, or the official “party line” of the Vatican. Catholicism has been dissected and rationalized; no longer are practices encouraged that are “off the grid” of some institutionalized ideology. While these spontaneous practices still emerge in the survival of atavistic attitudes and in such phenomena as the charismatic movement, the Catholic mainstream has long ago tried to re-form itself along the lines of theological perfection and correctness. It is not the religion of saints and sinners, but of technocrats and specialists; it is not a faith in spirits and demons, but in committees and political action.

Protestantism in many ways went that route a long time ago, but at the beginning of it all, and at the margins of the Protestant world until recently, the blurring of the line between the sacred and the profane, of nature and supernature, was very much present even in this seemingly iconoclastic religion. I have written already of the persistence of such attitudes amidst the popular classes, so now it is time to speak of the religion of the elites at the time that the Reformation was still getting off the ground. In many ways, it would seem that, just as in Catholicism, “folk Protestantism” often received its inspiration from the religion of the elites that had been discarded in the name of “theological purity”. In the case of Reformation England, the “enchantment of the world” was not seen as something contrary to the reformation of Christianity, but rather intrinsic to it.

Kronos

Saturn is the supreme intellect among the angels by whose rays souls in addition to the angels are illumined and inflamed and are raised continually with all their might to the intellectual life. Whenever souls are converted to this life, they are said to be under Saturn’s rule in that they live by the understanding. Consequently, in this life they are said to be regenerated by their own will because they choose to be reformed for the better. Again, they are said to grow young again daily (that is, if days can be numbered then) and to blossom more and more. Hence the words of the Apostle Paul, “The inward man is renewed day by day.” Finally, fruits are said to be supplied men in abundance, produced unbidden and in a perpetual spring, and this is because there- not by way of their senses and laborious discipline but by way of inner light- men enjoy to the highest degree the tranquility of life and pleasure, along with the wonderful spectacles of truth itself.

-Marsilio Ficino

On Nature

Were one to ask Nature why it produces, it might- if willing- thus reply: “You should never have put the question. Silently, as I am silent and little given to talk, you should have tried to understand. Understand what? That what comes to be is the object of my silent contemplation- its natural object. I am myself born of contemplation; mine is a contemplative nature. The contemplative in me produces the object contemplated much as geometricians draw their figures while contemplating….. Within me I preserve traces and principles of my source and of the principles that brought me into being. They too were born of contemplation and without action on their own part gave me birth. But they are greater than I: they contemplated themselves and thus I was born.”