By the late 16th century, the Catholic Church had finally begun to lose its grip over the mind of Western Europe, resulting in an intoxicating, exhilarating liberation. There was finally freedom again to probe into the lost ancient knowledge of the past. Pico de la Mirandola, a young Italian aristocrat, is most famous for having written, in 1486 at the age of 23, his now-classic “Oration on the Dignity of Man” which quickly became a foundation of Renaissance humanism. Pico takes a strongly neo-Platonic view, presenting a perspective far from established Catholic doctrines.
Pope Alexander VI and his powerful sponsor Lorenzo de Medici were both very interested in what Pico had to say. Along with Plato, Pico’s most important source for his Oration was the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus which, on the instructions of Lorenzo, had just been translated from Greek into Latin and was believed to be a ground-breaking re-discovery of the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt. Upon its first translation in the 1480s, it was seen as an unprecedented treasure-trove of wisdom from thousands of years before. The Hermetica and Pico’s “Oration” contributed greatly to the re-emergence of Platonic and Egyptian philosophy as central currents within the emerging Renaissance view of the true potentialities of human beings.
Pico describes all of “this house, this world we can see” as “a very superb temple of divinity.” Within this emanation of an underlying unity, human beings, he asserts, can be “all that they choose to be”, all that “they will.” From our own center, he maintains, we can even become “one in spirit with God.” In Pico’s view, we can go beyond believing we are mere animals and become aware of ourselves instead as “divinity clothed in human flesh.” Human beings, Pico maintained, could, at last, become free to discover who and what we truly are.
Pope Alexander VI had a strong interest in the sacred sciences, hermetic magic, and kabbalah. He actively embraced arcane and mystical directions right the heart of the Church. This re-orientation within the Vatican itself resurfaced even more strongly 150 years later during the time of Pope Alexander VII who developed a close relationship with two of the most important artistic figures of the Late Renaissance, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Athanasius Kircher.
Kircher was a renowned Egyptologist who had been brought to Rome to decipher hieroglyphics at the Collegio Romano. Pope Alexander and Kircher viewed Egypt as the “true and original repository of magic and sacred science and where the secrets of immortality were known.” They adhered to the admonition of the Hermetica that “Unless you make yourself one with God, you cannot understand God.”
Their associate Bernini translated this focus into such still outstanding Baroque achievements as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, the epic colonnaded Saint Peter’s Square in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the designs for Rome’s Trevi Fountain. An Egyptian obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphics rose atop the Fountain of the Four Rivers and another especially massive obelisk, hauled back from Egypt with great effort, became the focal point of Saint Peter’s Square.
In England, questioning and overthrowing the existing order during the 17th century was even more dramatic. The years of the English Civil War, culminating in the execution of Charles I in 1649 saw a similar questioning of much that had come before. The “Diggers” called for confiscated lands of the crown, church, and royalists to be turned over to the poor. Large accumulations of private property, and especially possession of vast inherited properties, were denounced as “anti-Christian. A radical wing of the Puritan movement sought, surprisingly, freedom from many kinds of personal restraints, including sexual freedom.
If all human beings, the reasoning ran, had the ability to be at one with God and the spirit of Jesus, then all actions taken in such a state of communion could be viewed as expressing an innate inner divinity, rather than as sins. A considerable number of these 17th-century radicals also possessed strong interests in alchemy, mysticism, and Hermeticism, believing these ancient “sacred sciences” could help reveal how to reconstruct the world in accord with divine laws.
In 1661, nineteen-year-old Isaac Newton arrived as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. His undergraduate notebooks already show a fascination with why the physical universe worked as it did and a search for sources that would expand his insight. In 1669, at the astonishing age of only 27, Newton was named Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He had, however, already begun to shift his greatest interest toward alchemy, determined to delve into the metaphysical realm where matter and spirit, from the perspective of alchemists, interacted together.
For Newton, the wisdom embodied in alchemy seemed to derive from the most ancient times. Eventually, he would own one of the most extensive collections of alchemical texts in Europe. Newton became an early member of the semi-underground “Invisible College” that evolved into the Royal Society. Members of the Invisible College were involved with the esoteric brotherhoods of the early Rosicrucians and Freemasons as well. The occult and arcane were a Renaissance obsession.
The true Invisible College, its original members believed, was the “network of nameless adepts who kept alive the alchemical flame.” The sacred science embodied in alchemy, Newton believed, could also be found within the teachings of kabbalah. Newton concluded that “the most ancient civilizations were also the most knowledgeable, the most pure, the most advanced.” According to Jewish tradition, Solomon himself was a practitioner, and master, of “divine technology.” Architect Christopher Wren was just as enthusiastic as Newton about the “extraordinary mathematical magic they both saw at work in the geometry of Solomon’s Temple.”
Wren’s towering Saint Paul’s Cathedral rose over a London re-emerging from its Great Fire. With its massive, elegant geometries and classical embellishments, Saint Paul’s feels more like a deist temple than a Christian church. A soaring dome embodying the heavens soared strikingly high above the epicenter, as at, concurrently, in the new, even more epic, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well.
Simultaneously, Newton continued to pursue alchemical experiments in the well-equipped laboratory he had created in his rooms at Trinity College. After years of experimentation, Newton recorded in his notebooks that he had achieved refining and generation of the legendary “Philosopher’s Stone” and with its aid transmuted a quantity of lead into gold. He described a tiny “tree” of golden leaves sprouting like a shoot from the potent “quintessence” he had laboriously refined, a result that may have startled even Newton. The final chapter of Newton’s life found him digging into the works of Pythagoras, striving for an understanding of Pythagoras’ integration of musical harmonies with the larger order of the movement of the planets and operation of the universe.
The explorers of the Invisible College understood that aspects of the knowledge they were re-accessing stretched far back in time and that these ancient wisdom streams have been passed on through cultures that have existed all over the world. They came to see themselves as heirs of the “underground river” of far-reaching wisdom frequently barred and banned from the world above. They perceived that they dwelt, in reality, within a boundless divinity, an “invisible cathedral” that encompassed the entire earth and the heavens beyond.
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Copyright 2022 Will Gold.