Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times.

Williams, Michael A.

Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times. Edited by Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff. SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. x + 402 pp. $24.95 paper.

The eighteen essays in this collection originated from lectures at Amsterdam Summer University in 1994. The stated objective for the volume is to highlight the importance of the third "current" or component of Western culture, characterized by resistance to the dominance of the presumed twin pillars of the European cultural tradition: rational inquiry from ancient Greek philosophy to modern science, and biblical faith (vii, 372-73).

The volume therefore encompasses a broad chronological frame, covering topics from the Nag Hammadi codices and the Corpus Hermeticum to New Age religion, and touches on a rich variety of figures and sources. The editors use the "Gnosis" and "Hermeticism" of the title in distinction from the narrower categories of "Gnosticism" and "Hermetism." "Hermetism" they reserved for the ancient Corpus Hermeticum itself and literature directly inspired by it down through the ages. In his opening essay on "Gnosticism and Hermetism in Antiquity," van den Broek similarly limits the definition of "Gnosticism," though in phenomenological terms, to systems with an absolutely negative view of the visible world and its creator, and the notion of a divine spark enclosed within the material bodies of humans due to a precosmic tragedy, from which the spark escapes again to be restored to the divine through gnosis. "Hermeticism" and "Gnosis," on the other hand, are used here for much broader arrays of evolving traditions that ultimately are synonymous with "Western esotericism," or the third component of Western culture (vii, 373).

The collection works rather well as an introductory survey of such a theme, and many of the individual chapters constitute discussions both economical and engaging. For example, Jean-Pierre Mahe's two excellent contributions, on "Gnostic and Hermetic Ethics" and on the Nag Hammadi Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead, provide good samples of his provocative argument for greater attention to the place of ethics and ritual in the Hermetic tradition. Van den Broek's chapter on the Cathars contends that the "Gnostic framework" of Catharism was combined with features that were not Gnostic at all, such as an emphasis on sacrament rather than gnosis as indispensable for salvation. Antoine Faivre's chapter on "Renaissance Hermeticism and the Concept of Western Esotericism" is well placed as a kind of conceptual hinge, providing transition from the late antique-medieval articles to the chapters on esotericism since the Reformation. Faivre includes a brief reprise of his influential definition of Western esotericism as consisting of four key elements: belief that the universe is a network of correspondences; that nature is a living organism; that imagination gives access to various levels of reality and functions through mediations such as rituals or symbols; and that humans and nature at large can undergo transmutation of being. Cees Leijenhorst outlines teachings of the sixteenth-century Croatian-Venetian philosopher Francesco Patrizi, who was more radical than Marsilio Ficino in ascribing a deep understanding, not mere foreshadowing, of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity to the prisci theologi of Hermetic-Platonic philosophy. An empathetic analysis of the alchemical symbolism of the hieros gamos, amply illustrated with fascinating plates, is presented by Karen-Claire Voss. Roland Edighoffer contributes a chapter on the role of Hermetic tradition in early Rosicrucianism and the evolution of German Lutheranism. Surveying Christian theosophic tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for example, Jakob Bohme, John Pordage, Jane Leade, Johann Georg Gichtel, Gottfried Arnold), Arthur Versluis stresses that such figures are unacknowledged antecedents of the religious pluralism and ecumenism of the twentieth century, and observes that notions of Protestantism as excessively masculine and antimystical are countered by "several centuries of literature founded in Judeo-Christian Sophianic spirituality" (232). Jos van Meurs offers a beautiful essay on the influence of Hermetic and Gnostic motifs on William Blake (including plates of some of Blake's illuminations). Hanegraaff contributes two careful chapters, on the relation of Western esoteric tradition to Romanticism and to New Age movements. In both instances he stresses how comparisons of these later phenomena with earlier Western esotericisms must involve more than a simplistic assertion of continuity, but rather an attention to historical developments and reinterpretations that result in important differences. This is paralleled by Faivre's comment that reflection on common elements in Western esoteric currents "should be only a preliminary step toward studying their genesis, development, transformations, displacements, migrations ... as well as their historical and cultural (including scientific and ideological) contexts" (121). Similar caution is observed in many of the essays, and the volume as a whole strikes an admirable balance between the suggestion of continuities and a respect for historical particularity.

Homage to historical particularity assumes that each historical case has been well understood, and here there can always be room for improvement. This is probably always true of more ancient material, where the sources are limited and the reconstruction of social history more difficult. In the volume's concluding essay, Hanegraaff remarks on the irony that New Age adherents have thus far shown so much interest in ancient "Gnosticism," seemingly ignoring the latter's "strong dualistic tendencies" (374), rather than in Hermetic tradition and especially its more "holistic" manifestations since the Renaissance. Hanegraaff credits this largely to the publicity attracted in recent decades by the Nag Hammadi codices, and this may be partly correct. But there is also a question about how adequately labels such as "strongly dualistic" characterize many of these ancient sources themselves, which are turning out to be far less easy to pigeonhole on such points than much of conventional scholarship used to assume. A volume such as Gnosis and Hermeticism, where the essays on later movements tend to take for granted and discuss important differences among individual thinkers in, say, Renaissance Hermeticist, or theosophical, or Rosicrucian movements, might have been an occasion to highlight similar complexities among the more ancient sources, rather than to rely so completely on "Gnosticism" as a lump foil for later historical diversity and reinterpretation.

On the whole, this is a provocative and valuable survey of some fascinating and fertile variety in Western esotericism. This, along with the general crispness of style in most chapters, can make this book a very useful inclusion in the assigned reading for several sorts of courses.

Michael A. Williams University of Washington Seattle, Wash.