Epilogue: Towards the Renaissance

Summary

The Renaissance brought new ideas and imaginings concerned with the medieval supernatural, but in many ways these extend and develop, rather than reject, earlier perspectives. The sixteenth century, like the thirteenth, was marked by renewed interest in learned magic and the occult sciences, an interest rooted in the development of humanist ideas and the growth of natural science. The new Greek learning brought much greater access to Plato and neo-Platonic works, to the corpus of Hermetic writings, translated into Latin by Ficino and widely circulated, and to the Jewish Cabbala, used particularly by Pico. Familiarity with these and with Paracelsian theory produced works such as Cornelius Agrippa's popular treatise on occult philosophy (1533), and the treatises of, for instance, Giordano Bruno and John Dee. There was a wide range of attitudes and spectrum of beliefs, but at the heart of such occult philosophy, as John Mebane has argued, was ‘the ideal of self perfection’: that ‘through grace God created humanity in His own image, but it remains for individuals to realize, through free creative acts, the potential which God has given them’. Renaissance philosophy, fuelled particularly by the newly discovered Enneads of Plotinus, returned to the neo-Platonic ideals of the late classical period. The idea of a supernatural that incorporated all manner of spirits of the air, good and evil, was reinforced by neo-Platonic philosophy, and developed by Renaissance writers. The ancient arguments of the theurgists and the idea of epiphanic encounter took on renewed force: through the study of magic, humanity could gain access to the divine mind, and man might be restored to his prelapsarian state. The neo-Platonic philosophy of the Renaissance emphasised the manifestation of the divine in the created world – in the forms of natural objects, but also in the self and in art. Magic, if it was pursued as an enactment of the divine will, could aid in regeneration. Thus notions of the cosmos as an organic unity, held together by natural correspondences that might be harnessed to beneficial purposes, were developed in the concept of active, highly intellectual, natural magic that might positively reshape identity and destiny.