Oracles of the Cosmos

BETWEEN PANTHEISM AND SECULARISM

The divide between science and religion is traced back to the early modern period.

In the first part, the popular talk of oracles of reason is traced back to the ancient oracles published in the 15th century, and it is shown how this led to the emergence of a “natural” theology that does without revelation, so that eventually reference to a divine creator seems superfluous. In the second part, using the concept of the cosmos, it is shown that mathematics, especially geometry, has been part of the theological interpretation of Creation since the Middle Ages. From this developed the concept of transcendence as rooted in human thought. Therefore, cosmos, creation, and humanity, which are mutually exclusive, form a unity of complementary elements.

ORACLES OF THE COSMOS

Paul Richard Blum is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore, USA) and currently researcher at Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic).

His publications cover mainly Renaissance philosophy, including most recently the edition of Gasparo Contarini’s book on the immortality of the soul.

PAUL RICHARD BLUM

ORACLES OF THE COSMOS

ORACLES OF THE COSMOS BETWEEN PANTHEISM AND SECULARISM PAUL RICHARD BLUM

ISBN: 978-3-7965-4546-7

Paul Richard Blum

Oracles of the Cosmos Between Pantheism and Secularism

Schwabe Verlag

This book is a result of research funded by the Czech Science Foundation as the project GA Č R 21-17059S “Pantheism and Panpsychism in the Renaissance and the Emergence of Secularism”.

Publication of this book was supported by Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, and Cosmos & Creation.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Schwabe Verlag, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel, Schweiz This work is protected by copyright. No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or translated, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover illustration: William Blake: Newton (1795) Cover design: icona basel gmbH, Basel Cover: Kathrin Strohschnieder, STROH Design, Oldenburg Graphic design: icona basel gmbh, Basel Typesetting: 3w+p, Rimpar Print: CPI books GmbH, Leck Printed in Germany ISBN Print 978-3-7965-4546-7 ISBN eBook (PDF) 978-3-7965-4547-4 DOI 10.24894/978-3-7965-4547-4 The ebook has identical page numbers to the print edition (first printing) and supports full-text search.

Furthermore, the table of contents is linked to the headings. rights@schwabe.ch www.schwabe.ch

Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I. From Pantheism to Secularism

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Oracles of Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Chaldean Oracles: Stanley and Plethon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Platonism and Christianity since Marsilio Ficino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Natural Theology without God? From Sabundus to Comenius, from Cardano to Bacon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Non-overlapping magisteria? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Summary of Part I: How to balance the Authority of God with the Intelligibility of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 II. Religion and Science – Mutual Support? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Carl Sagan’s Cosmos vs. Humboldt’s Kosmos: Admiration and Order . . . . . . 49 God and Geometry: William Blake’s Newton

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Geometry in Raffaello’s School of Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 God and Geometry: The Bible moralisée

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Human Endeavor and Divine Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Nicholas of Cusa and Roger Boscovich: Through Reflection to Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Modern Conceptual Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Cosmos, Creator, and Human Understanding: Non-overlapping and Complementary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees, tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these homuncular men, who walk upon the ground with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

Preface

The present book is an extended version of two presentations delivered at the annual Cosmos & Creation conference at Loyola University Maryland in June 2021. This conference series was founded by Jesuits Thomas King and James Salmon in 1982. “The founders’ original intention was to bring scientists together to share their experiences as scientists working in God’s world.”1 As Father Salmon used to explain, the title of the series was intended as a response to Carl Sagan’s book and film Cosmos, so I found it appropriate to take a look at and comment on it in part two of this book. Unlike most previous speakers, I will argue primarily from a historical perspective, when I present the relationship between science and religion. I will work with history, and in this case, I will commence by moving back in history to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages and then chronologically move the discussion forward to the present. This method is rooted in the structure of history: the state of affairs at one time goes back to its origin, and in order to make that plausible, one has to recount the development from the past into the present. Every tenet can be interpreted as an answer to a question raised in the past.2 This also holds true for my topic in this book, which is secularism and pantheism and how this pair of patterns shapes the understanding of science.

Since I will move through various epochs and disciplines, the use of my terminology has to be flexible. Religion, science, secularism, pantheism, etc. will not have one clearly delineated meaning and will converge with related ideas and synonyms. By secularism I mean any approach that denies the need for religion or reference to a divine realm; therefore, it is also covered by concepts like materialism or scientism (which claim science can explain everything), and naturalism (which claims nature is all we need to know). As with most terms that end in ‘-ism’, these words do not only describe a certain state of affairs (in this case, the 1 See website https://www.loyola.edu/join-us/cosmos-creation/about/mission. Accessed June 6, 2021. I am especially grateful to Father Salmon for introducing me to the conference series and for appointing me as co-director (2008–2019). – The text of this book has been improved thanks to advice from Andrew Olesh, Jr., and Phillip Arvanitis.

2 Paul Richard Blum, “How to Think with the Head of Another? The Historical Dimension of Philosophical Problems,” Intellectual History Review 26, no. 1 (2016): 153–61; an extended version of this: Paul Richard Blum, “Antworten und Fragen. Die Historizität philosophischen Denkens,” in Braucht die Philosophie ihre Geschichte? Does Philosophy Need its History?, ed.

Ivana Skuhala Karasman and Petar Šegedin (Zagreb: Institute of Philosophy, 2019), 9–32.

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Preface

focus on the secular, material, scientific, or natural); they indicate an effort to keep other influences or perspectives, specifically the theological and religious, outside the preferred activity (in this case: science). Religion, on the other hand, is not limited to organized church-like structures and dogmas nor to sentiments like worship or non-rational experience; religion that stands in conversation with scientists and philosophers takes on the role of theology, meaning the discourse about the relation between the absolute and the world of investigation. All these terms have had evolving meanings over history. As an example, I may cite a recent study on naturalism. Thomas J. Spiegel defines naturalism as follows: “Ontological thesis: The only things that fundamentally exist are the entities countenanced by the theories of natural sciences. Methodological thesis: Philosophy should cede authority to natural science whenever warranted. The remaining philosophical problems ought to be solved emulating natural-scientific methodology.”3 This may be fitting in the 21st century. However, from a historical point of view, the ontological meaning takes for granted that scientific theories have priority over the research field of the sciences, whereas the sources to be discussed in the present study were still struggling with the question regarding the priority of theory over objects. The methodological thesis claims headship of science over philosophy, whereas in early modernity, and still today, naturalism opposes the impact of theology and religion in science, rather than that of philosophy. Finally, I also use the term ‘pantheism’ quite loosely, as I am not ready to produce a comprehensive theory of pantheism. In the present context, ‘pantheism’ describes any attitude in which God and nature, Creation and Creator are deemed to be identical, co-extensive, or mutually replaceable. Panentheism and panpsychism are versions of the same pattern. The difference may be described as follows: While pantheism tends towards the identity of God and the world, panentheism tries to keep a metaphysical difference alive, and panpsychism focuses on the immateriality of the divine that, nevertheless, permeates reality.4 So, I ask the audience to bear with me when I switch back and forth between terms and concepts. Having a conversation about distinct disciplines, and across history, invites flexibility for the sake of finding common ground and differences whenever they matter.

Palacký University Olomouc, January 2022

3 Thomas J. Spiegel, Naturalism, Quietism, and the Threat to Philosophy (Basel: Schwabe, 2021), 15.

4 Cf. Catherine Keller, “The Body of Panentheism,” in Panentheism across the World’s Traditions, ed. Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63– 82.

I. From Pantheism to Secularism

Let me start with Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra: To look away from himself the creator wished – so he created the world. …A new pride my ego taught me, I teach it to mankind: no longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head that creates meaning for the earth!5

These are some of the prophetic utterances in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The section is a sermon to the “Hinterweltler” – those who dwell in the backworld or backwoods and believe in a true world ‘behind’ the one where they live.

It is Nietzsche’s Platonism upside-down that places the ideal within the real. The sermon encapsulates two important features of modern secularism. First, if there is a creator, he must be alien to himself in his creation. Thus, even if there is a divine creator, his creation is not at all divine. Second, there is the ‘issue’ of pride.

Humans would bury their heads in the sand if they cared about the divine; therefore, humans should identify with the world and make sense of it by themselves.

The quotation above is one of the manifestos of the 19th century that proclaim the end of the search for transcendent truth and the right and burden of humanity to remain with itself and its own resources. I chose this one because of the main character Zarathustra, whom we will meet when we discuss the beginning of modern secularization.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), part 1, 21–22; Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 4, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (München: dtv, 1999), chap. “Von den Hinterweltlern”, 35, 36–37: “Wegsehn wollte der Schöpfer von sich, — da schuf er die Welt. … Einen neuen Stolz lehrte mich mein Ich, den lehre ich die Menschen: nicht mehr den Kopf in den Sand der himmlischen Dinge zu stecken, sondern frei ihn zu tragen, einen ErdenKopf, der der Erde Sinn schafft!” – Here, I used the translation as cited; wherever there is no citation of a translation, the translation is mine.

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I. From Pantheism to Secularism

Oracles of Reason During the 18th and 19th centuries, a few publications came out that proclaimed to advocate “oracles of reason.” In 1841 in London, Charles Southwell (1814–1860) published a periodical by the title The Oracle of Reason: or, Philosophy Vindicated.6 Its existence and fate belongs to the politics of religion in England, but it is of interest to us because it sets reason against revelation under the heading of oracle.

A Sober and humble distinction, says Lord Bacon, must be made betwixt the oracles of Sense and Faith; unless mankind had rather choose absurd religions, with fictitious and romantic philosophies. Now, as by an Oracle of Faith is meant, something delivered by supernatural wisdom, or above nature: this paper will not pretend to teach such unteachable things, it laying no claim to supernatural wisdom; so by “ORACLE of Sense, or REASON,” is meant something delivered by natural wisdom; that busies itself with the comprehensible.7

To justify the term ‘oracle of sense’ Southwell invokes Francis Bacon in the very first sentence. So we certainly should come back to Bacon. Southwell’s periodical was a programmatic call for atheism, and therefore it is somewhat ironic that it felt obliged to usurp and redefine ‘oracle’ (usually understood as a sacred pronouncement of the gods) in a strictly naturalist sense. We will see why.

In 1784 Ethan Allen (1738–1789) published his book Reason the Only Oracle of Man. The running title was “Oracles of Reason.” It was expressly designed as a “Natural Theology” – a concept we will meet again in this study – suggesting that all that needs and can be known about God derives from our knowledge of nature. […] therefore so certain as God is, we cannot comprehend his essence, eternity or manner of existence. This should always be premised, when we assay to reason on the being, perfection, eternity and infinity of God, or his creation and providence. As far as we un-

Charles Southwell, The Oracle of Reason: Or, Philosophy Vindicated, vol. 1 (London: Thomas Paterson, 1842). This is a reprint as one book of the issues 1841–42. On the Southwell case cf. George Jacob Holyoake, The Spirit of Bonner in the Disciples of Jesus, or, The Cruelty and Intolerance of Christianity Displayed in the Prosecution, for Blasphemy, of Charles Southwell, Editor of the Oracles of Reason : A Lecture (London: Cleave and Hetherington, 1842); Charles Southwell, “The Trial of Charles Southwell, (Editor of ‘The Oracle of Reason’) for Blasphemy: Before Sir Charles Wetherall, Recorder of the City of Bristol, January the 14th, 1842,” http://jstor.org/stable/10.2307/60208481. Accessed 21 April 2021 – I may mention at this point that of the authors treated in this section Southwell, Allen, and Stanley do not feature in Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), which explores modern secularism. Blount is mentioned occasionally.

7 Southwell, The Oracle of Reason, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 1.

6

Oracles of Reason

derstand nature, we are become acquainted with the character of God; for the knowledge of nature is the revelation of God.8

Legend has it that the press where the Oracle was printed was hit by a lightning so that most of the production burned and that pious people believed this must have been divine intervention.9 Allen was certainly known as a Colonel of the American Revolutionary War, yet he “did something that real Americans don’t customarily do. He wrote a book.” It is actually dubitable that Allen was the author or the sole author – there is suspicion that he may have appropriated the manuscript from his senior friend, the physician Thomas Young (1732–1777).10 As radical as it purported to be, it is worth noting that the book rehashes arguments for the existence of God from the contingency of the world that are quite traditional. It connects these arguments unsurprisingly with elements of negative theology (if God is the first origin of things, He in Himself remains unknowable) and then concludes that man is left to his own devices: reason and everything that is in concordance with reason – evidently a version of deism, as it was pervasive in early modern English culture. A polemic against the book by Josiah Sherman compared Allen with the Prodigal Son feeding on husks like swine. Another tract defended Christianity as the true “oracle.” The term ‘oracle’ was quite popular at that time: In the early 18th century in London, an Athenian Society published a series with mundane and religious questions under the name of Athenian Oracle. There were also several newspapers that bear the term ‘oracle’ in their titles. The astronomer Samuel Stearns published his scientific and laytheologian observations in a book in 1791 by the title The American Oracle.11 Yet again we may ask: why do they all invoke the term ‘oracle’? – it must ring a bell.

8 Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, or A Compenduous [sic] System of Natural Religion. (Bennington, Vermont: Haswell & Russell., 1784), 30.

9 George Pomeroy Anderson, “Who Wrote ‘Ethan Allen’s Bible’?,” The New England Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1937): 685–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/359932, 696.

10 Anderson; cf. Pauline Maier, “Reason and Revolution: The Radicalism of Dr. Thomas Young,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 229–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/2712351, 236.

More details on the origin and circumstances of Allen’s book in Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York: Norton, 2014), quotation p. 11. Stewart locates Allen’s “Bible” in the context of dominant deism among the founders of the United States, evident in the formula, in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, “Nature’s God” that implies an immanent deity. This history, however, is outside the topic of this study.

11 The polemics: Josiah Sherman, Oracles of Reason, as Formed by the Deists, Are Husks for Deistical and Heathen Swine: But the Truths of the Gospel Are Bread for God’s Children.: A Concise, but Plain Answer, to Gen. Allen’s Oracles of Reason: Shewing the Unreasonableness of Them, and the Principles of the Deists, Arians, Socinians and Universalists, and the Excellency of the Holy Bible ; as Containing a Most Refined System of Morality ; and the Wisest, Easiest and Best Method for the Salvation Sinners That Can Be Devised or Desired.: The Great Doctrines of

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About a hundred years earlier, in 1693, Charles Blount (1654–1693) published a collection of polemical essays defending various unorthodox ideas under the title The Oracles of Reason.12 The preface opens with the assurance: “Nature, or that Sacred and Supream [sic] CAUSE of all Things, which we term God, has furnished his Creatures with Guides […].”13 In the case of humans, that guide or “Director in this Maze and Lottery of Things” is “Reason, and its sovereign Rule and Touchstone to examin [sic] them by […].”14 One of the sections contributed

by Blount himself is “Of Natural Religion as opposed to Divine Revelation,” in which he offers the definition: “Natural Religion is the Belief we have of an eternal intellectual Being, and of the Duty which we owe him, manifested to us by our Reason, without Revelation or positive Law.”15 In his “Summary Account of the Deists Religion” Blount insists on the impossibility of worshiping God via images, sacrifices and external rites, and also via mediators (which excludes any kind of church). Then the only way of worshiping God is “by inviolable adherence in our lives to all the things φυσει δικαιά [naturally right], by an imitation of God in all his imitable Perfections, especially his goodness, and believing magnificently of it.”16 We see that the major thrust of the pamphlets is directed at Substitution, Vicarious Sufferings, and Atonement, Are Here Explained. (Litchfield [Conn.]: Collier., 1787); and the defense: [Anonymous], Divine Oracles the True Antidote against Deism, and False Christianity; or, The Clear Light of Revelation Constrasted to the Darkness of a Boasted Age of Reason (Providence (R.I.): Wheeler for D. Brewer, 1797). Newspapers were, among others, Portmouth Oracle (according to WorldCat 1803–1821) and Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, or American Oracle of Liberty (according to WorldCat 1778–1781). Samuel Stearns, The American Oracle. Comprehending an Account of Recent Discoveries in the Arts and Sciences. With a Variety of Religious, Political, Physical, and Philosophical Subjects, Necessary to Be Known in All Families, for the Promotion of Their Present Felicity and Future Happiness (London: Lackington, 1791), an almost identical edition the same year New York.

12 Charles Blount, C[harles] Gildon, and others, The Oracles of Reason … in Several Letters to Mr. Hobbs and Other Persons of Eminent Quality and Learning (London,: [s.n.], 1693). It appears there are different prints with the same bibliographical identity; the one at Early English Books Online, ProQuest document ID2240896122, is better legible than ProQuest document ID2240904990 and has in the sentence quoted below correctly δικαιά instead of δικαιή. Οn Blount see J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142–48 and passim; J. A. Redwood, “Charles Blount (1654–93), Deism, and English Free Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 3 (1974): 490–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/2708796; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 362–64. In these, little is said about the notion of oracles. A thorough interpretation with contemporary context in Ugo Bonante, Charles Blount: Libertinismo e deismo nel Seicento inglese (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1972).

13 Blount, Gildon, and others, The Oracles of Reason, fol. A2r.

14 Blount, Gildon, and others, fol. A3r.

15 Blount, Gildon, and others, 197.

16 Blount, Gildon, and others, 88–89.

Oracles of Reason

moral and social obligations and well-being rather than physical nature while invoking naturality in approaching God. But considering the call for imitating God with human means, which implies some sort of negative theology (the one that eventually renounces divine authority), the author seems to encourage reliance on what is traditionally considered to be the most divine in humans, namely reason. Already in his earlier pamphlet Great is Diana of the Ephesians, Blount reduced revelation to reason: “Reason teaches that there is but one only supreme God […]. Reason teaches that the Law of God, viz. that Law which is absolutely necessary to our future happiness, ought to be generally made known to all men […].”17 Blount also quotes from the ancient Pythagorean Ocellus Lucanus who advocated the eternity of the non-created world and thus stood in competition with Moses, because Ocellus was supposed to antedate Moses and the Bible.18 The intellectual movement to which the authors cited and discussed so far belong is mostly referred to as ‘libertinism’ or – more recently – as ‘Radical Enlightenment.’19 The movement consists of various strains and inter-European dependencies, none of which are the topic of this essay. Our interest focuses on the development of the secularist understanding of knowledge and science as is crystallized around the keyword ‘oracle.’ Rebranding ‘oracles’ from authoritative revelation towards affirmative reduction to human reason that operates within rationalist and empiricist science, while leaving religion to morality at best, that was the impulse of the texts discussed above. The entire exercise would probably be best described as protuberances of the contentions in English religious policies, which evidently provoked a great number of dissenters who frequently insisted upon reason and rational discourse, not so much against particular dogmas, and in favor of independent research, but against the irrationality that appears to have clouded the religious attitude of the English society. This is also evident in a response to Blount. Josiah King objected to Blount’s endorsement of deism with a quotation from Pliny, who said: “It is to be believed that the World is God, eternal, immense, having neither beginning, nor end.” Concluding, he quotes Saint Augustine confessing: “Not thou, O Lord, but a vain phantasm, and my error was then my God.”20 This reference to Augustine is revealing insofar as 17 Charles Blount, Great is Diana of the Ephesians: or, The Original of Idolatry, Together with the Politick Institution of the Gentiles Sacrifices. (London: [s.n.], 1680), 24.

18 Blount, Gildon, and others, The Oracles of Reason, 212–20. Cf. Bonante, Charles Blount, 72–73, Ocellus 19–21.

19 Israel, Radical Enlightenment.

20 Josiah King, Mr. Blount’s Oracles of Reason Examined and Answered in Nine Sections in Which His Many Heterodox Opinions Are Refuted, the Holy Scriptures and Revealed Religion Are Asserted against Deism & Atheism (Exeter, England, 1698), 74 and 75–76, http://www. proquest.com/eebo/docview/2248496244/citation/8AA56524930946E4PQ/2. Accessed January 28, 2022. A unique usage of the term oracle is in the title of a sermon of 1646; the text is a Christian exhortation and makes no further reference to oracles: John Gore, The Oracle of God

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Augustine was the forefather of all theology that approached the transcendent truth by way of introspection. Indeed, all the defenders of rationality could make the same claim, namely that they are willing to acknowledge the divine realm, as long as they are permitted to trust their own judgment.

We need not make clear definitions of natural theology, deism, and atheism in this context because we must state that the main theme at that time was, indeed, to tease out to what extent invoking rationality served to suppress spirituality and the validity of any notion of God in human affairs. Deism came to mean the gesture to relegate God to the area of the inaccessible, and hence also irrelevant, while natural theology claimed to form concepts of God independent of scripture and authority. And it appears that the usage of the language of ‘oracles’ indicates this very transition.

Chaldean Oracles: Stanley and Plethon In the following, I suggest that the immediate source of all this interest in oracles and the motivation to use oracles as a brand name for non-Christian thought was a book on the history of philosophy that Thomas Stanley started to publish in 1655. It was the first of its kind.21 Within the discipline of philosophy this was a landmark because now, after humanism, Neoplatonism, Bacon, and Descartes, philosophers turned to the history of their discipline in order to advance in thinking.

History (which by expounding actions past teacheth to regulate the future, and furnishes us with wisdom at the cost of other mens experience) is not unlike Painting: their scope is the same; […] he who rests satisfied with the general relation of affairs […] loseth it[s] greatest benefit; since what is most particular, by its nearer affinity with us, hath greatest influence on us.22

A Sermon Appointed for the Crosse, and Preached in the Cathedrall Church of St. Paul, in London, on the 20. Day of December, Being the Sunday before Christmasse, Anno Dom. 1635. By Iohn Gore Rector of Wenden-Lofts in Essex. (London: Greeke and Greene, 1646).

21 Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy. Containing those on whom the Attribute of Wise was conferred (London: Moseley and Dring, 1655), vol. 4 1662. The development of this work in print is complicated. I am using a PDF with various title pages, paginations and dates.

On the content and printing see Luciano Malusa in Giovanni Santinello, Philip Weller, and Constance Blackwell, eds., Models of the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1: From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the “Historia Philosophica” (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 172–203; and Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra: Zoroaster und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 1998), vol. 1, 388, vol. 2, 604–612.

22 Stanley, The History of Philosophy vol. 1, fol. a1.

Chaldean Oracles: Stanley and Plethon

Thus, Stanley set an eclectic agenda that relies on history as a repository of valuable models, whereby not the great lines (as we can read them in modern handbooks) but the details of persons and ideas promise relatability to the later reader. This was a major step away from an unhistorical concept of truth. The medieval intellectuals ‘picked and chose’ from the past, mainly for the sake of the argument to be construed. Any possible argument and evidence lay on the same plane of logical coherence. Therefore, a theologian like Thomas Aquinas was not shy to employ the Neoplatonic negative theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite together with Aristotelian metaphysics (which could be read as a rebuttal of Platonism) in order to construe his philosophical theology. Typical was the production of documents that corroborated political facts retroactively, such as the document that legalized the political power of the Roman Pontiff in Italy. It was the so-called Donation of Constantine, written centuries after the alleged fact. Before Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla could prove it to be a forgery, the mindset had to change.23 For humanists, truth was based on history so that apparent evidence faded if not consistent with events over time. A convenient example of the non-historical approach of pre-modern knowledge is Isidore of Seville’s etymology of the word ‘oracle’: “Oracles are so called because from there responses are given, and oracles are from the ‘mouth’ (os, gen. oris).”24 While Isidore made huge progress in tying things to the meaning of words, there is not the slightest perspective on the development of any thought over the epochs.

(And, accordingly, it did not occur to the medieval scholar that even languages change over time.) With Stanley, the debate over philosophical concepts includes the origins and changes over time of philosophical thinking. On the one hand, that gave legitimacy to eclectic argumentation insofar as a philosopher was able to refer to turning points in the history of the debate that were worth considering, reversing, or repeating. On the other hand, reference to the history of a philosophic thought could serve as proof for its consistency and allow further derivation for the continuation of the debate. Philosophy, thus, shed its dogmatic appearance and – inspired by the humanists’ discovery of human interaction where reality takes place – philosophy became dialogical and discursive. This is evidenced by some of the key works of early modern philosophy that were presented as orations: Valla’s refutation of the Donation of Constantine, Giovanni 23 Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. Glen W. Bowersock, vol. 24, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Paul Richard Blum, Nicholas of Cusa on Peace, Religion, and Wisdom in Renaissance Context (Regensburg: Roderer, 2018), 14–21.

24 Isidore of Seville, “Etymologiarvm Sive Originvm Libri Xx,” accessed July 4, 2021, https:// www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore.html, XV, iv 3: “Oracula dicta eo quod inde responsa redduntur; et oracula ab ore.”; Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 308. For this reason, in ecclesiastical law oraculum has the meaning of an authorization by voice only.

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I. From Pantheism to Secularism

Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, and the manifesto of modern rationalism: René Descartes’ Discourse on Method. In addition, the personal philosophical letter as a humanist means of promoting new ideas, beginning with Francesco Petrarca, made philosophy communicative. These authors have in common that they prefer the rhetorical over the strictly logical method. As Luciano Malusa has analyzed, Thomas Stanley is greatly indebted to the humanist agenda of historicizing philosophy, including revitalizing ancient wisdom for the purpose of philosophical progress.25 For that reason, he thought it compelling to include even obscure sects and movements as they might have contributed to human thought.

The fourth volume of Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1662) deals with Chaldean philosophy. He explains in detail the obscure history of the people and the wise men of the Chaldeans from somewhere in the Orient.26 It is essential that – like Ocellus Lucanus – the Chaldeans and their wisdom antedate all Greek wisdom and likely the Bible. The remains of their wisdom are known as oracles.

Stanley remarks that this wisdom is referred to as ‘oracles’ not metaphorically but because the Chaldeans did have an Oracle, comparable to that of Delphi, but he also admits that the pronouncements are “so Broken and Obscure, that they may at first sight seem rather Ridiculous than Weighty.”27 And yet, the obscurity of origin and meaning was part of the appeal of such wisdom. While Stanley represents the beginning of historic perspectives on philosophy – which allowed and required taking stock of apparently obscure and remote sources of wisdom – this was also the epoch of the birth of critical historical research when the reliability and genuineness of sources were scrutinized. Indeed, French philologist and historian of Scripture Pierre Daniel Huet published in 1679, that is, shortly after Stanley, a voluminous study on the Bible, in which he endeavored to tell facts from fables around ancient theology. Huet brushed the Chaldean Oracles aside in a few words: “If you only move your nose close, you will smell the fraud.”28 Historicizing often has two faces: the one looking back into the past for qualities that deserve a renaissance, the other looking forward by way of demystifying fraud that could taint clear evaluation of genuine authorities. Of these oracles discussed in Stanley’s book, there is no identifiable corpus of aphorisms or teachings, but there existed three collections in Greek, which Stanley discussed in philological detail. He published them, together with his English translations, and Luciano Malusa in Santinello, Weller, and Blackwell, Models of the History of Philosophy.

Vol. 1, 172–74.

26 Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra, vol. 2, 604–612.

27 Stanley, The History of Philosophy vol. 4, 4 and 5.

28 Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio evangelica, Editio quarta [first 1679] (Bassani, Venetiis: Remondini, 1782), vol. 1, 87b: “… si nares admoveris, fraus subolebit.” He expressly mentions Psellus and Plethon, Stanley’s sources.

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Chaldean Oracles: Stanley and Plethon

presented them in chronological order from the most recent to the earliest. The most recent and textually most reliable is a collection published by Francesco Patrizi as an appendix to his own Nova de universis philosophia, 1593. Then follow in Stanley’s publication the collections of Plethon and Psellus, being most helpful thanks to their commentaries.

Patrizi, so much needs to be said, was a fervent anti-Aristotelian, and his new philosophy, inspired by Neoplatonism, propagated an all-encompassing philosophy, in which body and soul, universe and concrete nature were coordinated.29 The main sections of his book had Greek titles that started with pan, that is, ‘all’: Panaugia, Panarchia, Pampsychia, Pancosmia, – aiming at getting hold of the universal principles that are not only concepts but realities. With him, ‘theories of everything’ under the heading ‘pan’ became worth pursuing, such as pantheism and panpsychism. This could well have had some appeal to the rationalists of the 18th century.

The third and earliest source reprinted in Stanley’s volume 4 is the Byzantine scholar from the 11th century Michael Psellos, the most reliable source of Chaldean thought even until today. In between is the collection of Oracles with commentaries by Georgius Gemistos Plethon,30 and this is the most interesting character in our story.

Georgius Gemistos (ca. 1360–1454) came to Ferrara and Florence in 1438 as a member of the Byzantine delegation that attended the Council of FerraraFlorence. This council was a continuation of that of Basel, which among other things confronted heterodoxy in England and Bohemia, as well as questions of church authority. The sequel had the purpose to reunite the Byzantine and the Roman Churches in order to strengthen the resistance of the Greek territories against the pressure of the Turks. The delegation from Constantinople must have been impressive. One of the sources compared it with the advent of the Three Magi in Bethlehem.

I wonder why you don’t consider coming to see this great event at Ferrara where the Emperor and the Patriarch of the Greeks are with over one hundred and thirty princes and prelates. … Here are Armenians, Trebizondians [from the Black Sea], Wallachians [Romanians], Russians, and Georgians … It was really the Spirit of God who so congregated and guided the Three Magi from various parts of the world. In their princes lingers

Francesco Patrizi, Nova de universis philosophia: in qua Aristotelica methodo, non per motum, sed per lucem & lumina, ad primam causam ascenditur … (Ferrariae: Mammarellus, 1591), the Oracles have a separate numbering of pages and quires; on Patrizi see Tomáš Nejeschleba and Paul Richard Blum, eds., Francesco Patrizi: Philosopher of the Renaissance (Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2014), http://www.renesancni-texty.upol.cz/soubory/ publikace/Francesco_Patrizi_Conference_Proceedings.pdf. Accessed January 28, 2022.

30 Stanley, The History of Philosophy, vol. 4, 37–46.

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