Before moving on to the anti-apologetic reaction, it is important to provide a brief evaluation of what the preceding discussion contributes to the leading problematics of this book as a whole. I have been arguing that the ancient wisdom narrative of the Renaissance, grounded in Platonic Orientalism and patristic apologetics, created the conceptual foundation of the initial “referential corpus” of Western esotericism. This means that Western esotericism is ultimately grounded in a historiographical concept, rather than in a common philosophical or religious worldview, a specific approach to knowledge, or a “form of thought.” However, because the Renaissance narrative of ancient wisdom was itself derived from Platonic Orientalism, the philosophical worldviews and salvational epistemologies basic to that late antique phenomenon certainly became central to it. This is why concepts of correspondences, living nature, imagination/mediations (all typical of the late antique philosophies that flourished in the Platonic Orientalist context) and perhaps even transmutation (linked more specifically to the somewhat later development of an “alchemical” paradigm […]) are indeed pervasive throughout the corpus, as has been famously emphasized by Antoine Faivre. For the same reason, concepts of “higher knowledge” or gnosis, whose centrality to the late antique currents in question is well known, were likewise bound to become highly important within the Renaissance narrative of ancient wisdom and its later developments. And finally, we have seen that the closely related concern with secrecy and concealment has strong roots in the Platonic Orientalist matrix as well, but was given a new degree of prominence due to Pico’s introduction of kabbalah and its novel exegetical techniques.
That the initial referential corpus of Western esotericism was grounded in a historiographical concept of “ancient wisdom” has far-reaching implications, as will be seen throughout the rest of this book. As I emphasized at the very beginning of this chapter, the discourse developed at a time when historical consciousness as we understand it was still in its infancy, and the enthusiasts of ancient wisdom were arguing on the basis not of critical historiography, but of unquestionable theological and metaphysical assumptions. As a result, what emerged from their studies of ancient wisdom was not a history of human opinions and their development through time, but a history of truth. […S]uch a project is by its very nature ambiguous and, indeed, self-defeating. It is easy to conceive of a “history of error” describing the many ways in which human beings have lapsed from true religion into a variety of erroneous doctrines and heresies; but by definition, and in sharp contrast, absolute metaphysical or divine truth cannot possibly change and develop through time while still remaining absolute. In other words: the ancient wisdom narrative of the Renaissance was grounded in what must now be seen as an inherently a-historical approach to historical questions. In the period of the Renaissance this was not a conscious choice – it is only with hindsight that we now see the Italian humanists as early pioneers of the history of human thought; but we will see that since the eighteenth century, it made the narrative of ancient wisdom highly attractive for authors with deliberate anti-historical agendas, including not a few influential academics.
We have concentrated on how the discourse of ancient wisdom developed during roughly a century, between the Councils of Ferrara/Florence and of Trent. It was during the later sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, with the development of critical philological methods, that the truth of history began to catch up, slowly but surely, with the history of truth. The story of how this happened has often been told, most famously by Frances A. Yates in her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which emphasizes very strongly how the entire edifice of “the Hermetic Tradition” had rested upon the erroneous dating of ancient texts and therefore had to collapse as a result of source criticism. Yates believed that it was Isaac Casaubon who exploded the myth of Hermes Trismegistus by demonstrating, in 1614, that the Corpus Hermeticum had not been written in very ancient times but as recently as the first centuries of the Christian era. Today we know that Casaubon’s work was, rather, the culmination of a process of historical criticism that had begun already in the 1560s. Eventually, critical philology proved lethal to the intellectual legitimacy not only of “the Hermetic Tradition,” but of all varieties of the ancient wisdom narrative: not only the hermetic writings were robbed of their ancient origins and turned out to be from the first centuries ce, but so were the Chaldaean Oracles and the Orphic Hymns. Furthermore, as the history of philosophy developed into a critical discipline, scholars began to differentiate between Plato’s own philosophical ideas and those developed by the various later, middle- and neoplatonic currents, including the idea of an “esoteric Plato” whose doctrines were derived from ancient oriental sources.
Frances Yates was right in emphasizing that philological criticism destroyed the very foundation of the ancient wisdom narrative and rendered it intellectually untenable. However, historians of religion know that, no matter how definitive and irrefutable such scholarly arguments may be, they are seldom sufficient to destroy religious conviction. […] For the argument developed in this book, this has two consequences. One is that we should not be surprised by the fact that the ancient wisdom narrative survived the era of Casaubon and remains alive and well even up to the present day. It managed to do so, not primarily because adherents found ways of refuting the philological argument (although some did, at least to their own satisfaction), but for the reasons suggested by Evans-Pritchard: the “sentiments and values” associated with a given system of thought are usually given preference over rational considerations, and people tend to favor arguments that support their beliefs. A second consequence is that the philological “destruction” of the ancient wisdom narrative should itself be understood within a wider context as well: it did not stand on its own, but was part of a much wider and more complicated series of religious narratives, which had the common feature that their basic “sentiments and values” demanded a sharp rejection of “paganism” and a criticism of its historical liaison with Christianity.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 74-6
“it was Isaac Casaubon who exploded the myth of Hermes Trismegistus” – любопытно, какъ это соотносится съ такимъ оккультурнымъ и конспирологическиъ явленіемъ, какъ “альтернативныя хронологіи”.