Enlightenment and Esotericism
from HEGEL AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION from Glenn Alexander Magee (2001)
“The Enlightenment quest for universal knowledge and power over nature led to a revival of mysticism and occultism, for these had always promised to deliver just those boons…”
CS Lewis, in hid famous tract THE ABOLITION OF MAN, also notes the kinship between the Enlightenment sage at the altar of science and the Esoteric mage in the alchemists’ cave.
“The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.”
My comment: Fashionable Atheism dismiss religion itself as failed empiricism, as the “God of the Gaps”, as an abortive pre-scientific model confined to issues where scientific models have not yet entered and triumphed.
Rational atheists, that is, those who have some sound reason to disbelieve in God, always eventually reason their way back to God, because their reasons for disbelief evaporate upon unemotional close inspection.
Fashionable atheists, that is, those who make a pose and publish show of atheism, are votaries of an esoteric religion, Wokeness, Cultural Marxism, Marxism, Hegelianism, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Freemasonry. They are rebels against reality and apostates from the Christ, from Christendom, from the True Church.
If I may be blunt, fashionable atheists are Protestants who decided to protest against all Church authority and teachings, not just the teachings on divorce and salvation. They are saved by Reason Alone instead of Faith Alone, and instead of Sola Scriptura, they have Sola Natura — nature is their only gospel.
Fashionable Atheists are magicians after the manner of John Dee and Paracelsus and Nicolas Flamel. They think reason is their Philosopher’s Stone, and that historical dialectic or evolution is their purifying fire which will burn the world phoenix-like and restore it to primal utopia.
The sign of Simon the Magician is to attribute godlike qualities to man, and to talk in esoteric jabberwocky. The moment someone says “heteronormativity” or “material dialectic” you are hearing the theological terminology of esotericism.
But for these sick, self-deluded superstitious magicians to call themselves rational or scientific is sad irony. More ironic is to call us superstitious or irrational we who worship the Logos, which is the Word of God.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
