Realist Revolution: "How the Occult Transformed Philosophy & Spirituality"

"The Great Chain of Being"

A recent video about a “Realist revolution” by Dr. Justin Sledge of Esoterica drew my attention. “How the Occult Transformed Philosophy & Spirituality”, in the West, we could add. One could argue that similar developments on smaller local scales may have taken place in the East, although the Platonic corpus had never disappeared from the East, nor the “ancient theology”, nor the Kabbalah, see below. I will only transcribe an edited form of the parts of Dr. Sledge’s video that I found most relevant for this blog. I am thinking in particular of the power transition in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka, via Buddhist “scholasticism” to Yogācāra, Tantra to Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. From “Nominalism” to “Metaphysical Realism”, and from a realm of becoming to a realm of being, with a Great chain of being, a chain of Light.

“Following centuries where Platonic Forms and Ideas were taken to be eternally real, the middle ages saw a dramatic shift. And, by the mid-14th century, metaphysical categories were taken to be mere words, names - hence, Nominalism. However, this philosophical triumph of Nominalism would be short lived. In the mid-15th century, discoveries and translations of ancient texts would give rise to a Realist Revolution led by Platonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah. This episode explores how this Realism brought on occult philosophy transformed western philosophy and spirituality.

Perhaps all Western philosophical problems emerged, the positions of Plato and Aristotle, in this case, in what we call the problem of the universals, language and logic, especially categorical logics. [ ] To what degree the language that I use to perform that categorization has any metaphysical impact on either the particular or the universal. Plato famously answered that, at least some universals are, in fact, metaphysically real. Those of course, are the forms, the ideas of Platonic philosophy.

These forms were witnessed by our pre-carnate souls largely forgotten when we got incarnated, and they're remembered as we come to learn new things. Thus, you actually don't learn geometry, but your soul remembers it as you study it in this life. Mathematical entities, and especially conceptual entities like goodness, justice and beauty exist as general categories in a perfect eternal realm of being. We live in the realm of becoming in which human beings interact through the organ, as it were, of their souls, for Plato. The soul is an organ of perception. Specifically the perception of the forms. Aristotle thought that the platonic forms, the universal categories are simply conventional names for sets of things. These two positions set the typologies of how to deal with the problem of universals down to this day.

Plato's position is that some abstract objects have their own independent existence, and those categories are in fact real entities just as real as you and I. Perhaps even more real than you and I. This position is known as realism, and those entities are variably said to exist in their own realm, in the mind of God, or in what we might call “moderate realism”, as found in folks like Don Scotus, where they actually exist as sort of concepts within the human mind, but they're still in there and they're still real.

On the other hand Nominalism is a position that universal categories or abstract objects like numbers exist in name only. From the Latin nomen. Categories, universals and mathematical objects were simply conventions of language and logic (t. tha snyed bden pa), by which we communicate ideas or perform mathematical and logical functions. Both Aristotle and Plato were more or less conventionalists when it came to the philosophy of language, which is just to say that they held that language was basically of no intrinsic, metaphysical bearing on either the particulars or the universals. Plato does sometimes seem to suggest that the language has its origins in natural science, which means they're not totally arbitrary in the way.

By the early European Middle Ages, it was Platonism that appeared to be the front-runner for philosophical dominance: Saint Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and John Scotus Eriugena, not to be confused with the later Duns Scotus. We're all much more in the camp of Plato. And therefore, something of the Realist camp, typically thinking that the forms were literally thoughts and the perfect ideas of God's mind.

Further language itself is considered to be a kind of divine gift. Linking human beings, with God being part of that whole, we're created in the Divine image. However, that Platonic bend was not the last. Attacks, starting with Abelard, and the translation projects of Aristotle from Arabic, especially as those translations were shaded as we might say with the commentaries of Averroes. The 12th and 13th century saw a dramatic shift to Nominalism, and while there were many moderate Realist holdouts, scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and Dun Scotus did hold on to a moderate form of Realism. Again with those categories existing really, but as mental objects primarily.

William of Ockham would lead a full frontal assault on the last vestiges of Realism with Nominalism or Terminism, flowering. After the mid 14th century Platonic Realism had basically been crushed. Occult practice would have gone on through that period ignoring the scholastic debates. Occult practitioners were concerned with experimental results, and not with metaphysical arguments. Dozens of magical manuals proliferated through the Latin West during this period. An intellectually rich occult philosophy can’t flourish under Nominalism, but three factors would boost it.

Firstly, the rediscovery and publication at the very heart of Metaphysical Realism, the works of Plato and his intellectual and spiritual inheritors, including Plotinus, Porphyrus, Iamblichus etc. Through the mid-15th century Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) would translate the Platonic corpus along with the works of Neoplatonists. The recent invention of the printing press would help spread these. Metaphysical Realism was back on the agenda.

Secondly, and indirectly thanks to Marsilio Ficino again, was the arrival of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was believed to be the recovery of profoundly primeval wisdom. The pervasive belief was that ancient wisdom was nearer to the Divine source of all knowledge and was therefore more pure and more true. The Corpus Hermeticum was thought to be the teachings of the ancient Egyptian Sage Hermes, Trismegistus, Hermes, the Thrice great, sometimes heralded as the teacher of Moses himself. The Prisca theologia ("ancient theology") proved decisive over and against scholastic philosophy. Because insofar as this ancient wisdom was simply nearer to the Divine truth. It could simply undermine the entire scholastic corpus, without any argument, because it was more ancient and pure.

Hermetic ideas such as the semi-divine nature of the human being, the macro-microcosm relation and an overall warming to theurgical and magical practices would also begin to transform European spiritual and intellectual life.

Abracadabra, I create as I speak (photo Dr. Justin Sledge)

Thirdly, Metaphysical Realism would get an unlikely boost from Kabbalah, that primarily developed in the 13th century in Spain and in France though inheriting important texts from late Antiquity Kabbalah. The indigenous Jewish Realism of the Kabbalah’s came about through Divine speech. The Hebrew language was no mere convention, it was a sacred language. The Torah had God speaking creation into being in texts like the Sefer Yetzirah, expounded upon and systematized into both a cosmogonic theory but also a magical practice. Thought and language are bound up with Divine activity in the mind of Kabbalah such that the human mind is said to commune with the Divine Mind through super-rational prophetic intercourse performed at some level in Hebrew and through Hebrew. For the first few centuries the development the Kabbalah was a highly esoteric literature and practice known only to a very tiny group of rabbinical elites. But at exactly this time period in the mid 15th century when Platonism and Hermeticism were also reemerging, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) would spearhead the introduction of Kabbalah into the wider European intellectual and spiritual landscape. He did this by employing several converted Jews. Pico would orchestrate translations of several key Kabbalistic texts arguing that the Kabbalah too contained primeval truths, necessary to restore the "proper dignity" to the human being (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486)  so much so that magic and Kabbalah were the best proofs of the truth of Christianity, over and against the dominant scholastic Paradigm and the scholastic philosophy. In fact Pico argued that through magic and Kabbalah was it possible for humans to become truly exalted, transforming themselves into something virtually angelic in character.

"The works of Christ could not be done either by the way of magic or by the way of the Kabbalah .

The miracles of Christ, not by reason of the thing done, but by reason of the manner of doing them, are the most certain proof of his divinity.

There is no science that certifies us more about the divinity of Christ: magic and Kabbalah."

Pico's argument (photo Dr. Justin Sledge)

In a sense, by the start of the 15th century some form of Nominalism was the dominant answer to the problem of universals, with a largely conventionalist theory of language. Then within the span of just about a generation, the Platonic Corpus including neoplatonism, the Prisca theologia in the form of the Corpus Hermeticum and the rise of Kabbalah in the form of Christian Kabbalah had united into what would become the foundations of modern Western esotericism, and a absolute spear against Nominalism which was triumphant only decades earlier. Nominalism was now facing a profound intellectual existential crisis and the effects were immediate. Ficino's magical practice adopted a Great chain of being model rather than the one in which the sublunar world was fundamentally distinct from the world of the celestial realm thus linking the human being with the Divine in a way that was almost blasphemous in the world of scholastic thinking which embraced a hardcore Aristotelian world. The Great chain of being broke that world.”

I recommend to watch the whole video, because Dr. Sledge makes some interesting connections with modern times. "Creating through speech" (Abracadabra) has the wind in the sails again... with Golems (chatbots) all over the place