Key Points:

• The Medici of Florence financed a revival of pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture that touched off the Italian Renaissance.

• During the Renaissance, the Greco-Roman idea of a transformative journey evolved into the magical conception of Alchemy.

• The Medici reflected the idea of the Alchemical Journey with a physical hedge maze, which can still be visited today.

The Medici of Florence

The Italian Renaissance was not a random flowering of artistic talent. It was systematically created by a family of wealthy bankers in the city of Florence, Italy. They used their vast wealth to rescue promising artists from a lifetime of toil in the fields, freeing them up to devote all their time to honing their skills. Renowned Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Botticelli were bankrolled by the Medici clan.

The Medici couldn’t have known that their patronage would have a momentous impact on the course of human history. They were concerned with reviving the pre-Christian culture of classical Greece and Rome. Then, as now, evidence of Greco-Roman grandeur could be seen in the old ruins half-buried in the Italian countryside.

In addition to financing great artwork, the Medici also sought lost Greco-Roman literature. The last emperors of Rome had been Christians who bolstered waning political power by destroying intellectual competition to the Roman Catholic Church. Whether intentionally destroyed or lost in the chaos, most pagan literature was lost to the West during the Fall of Rome, including the works of the Greek philosopher Plato.

But by the 15th century, the intellectual monopoly enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church for a millennium was beginning to crack. While agents of the Medici scoured the Mediterranean basin for lost scraps of Greek literature, the artists they patronized surpassed the quality and workmanship of the masters of Antiquity.

The Medici obsession with classical Greece and Rome was a major catalyst that caused the Italian Renaissance to blossom. That’s why, when the Medici designed a hedge maze for their Boboli Gardens, they chose authentic Roman statues of the grain goddess Demeter to mark both the start and the finish.

Alchemy

Magic is the notion that we are not mere observers of reality, but also creators of it. When we sleep, our brains simultaneously create and experience environments that seem every bit as real to us as our waking lives do. The magical view is that real life is like a dreamscape, where the act of observation is also an act of creation.

Some of the oldest suspicions about reality come from the ancient Greek Mystery Schools, where psychedelic drugs were once consumed. The most famous of these Mystery Schools was Eleusis, where, for a thousand years, the grain goddess Demeter was worshipped by initiates drinking a mysterious beer-like substance.

Recent archaeobotanical evidence suggests that psychoactive ergot was in the beer used in the rites of Demeter. Psychedelic substances perturb reality, like a stone dropped into a still pond perturbs the reflection on its surface. That’s why initiates into these Mystery Schools often came away with the impression that reality is a mutable product of the mind. They called this insight “being saved.”

Among the saved was the Greek philosopher Plato, who was an initiate into multiple Mystery Schools. It’s no coincidence that he wrote about reality as if it were an illusion, likening it to shadows on the wall of his famous allegorical cave. Plato’s pairing of an imperfect, observable universe with a perfect, hidden realm became immensely popular in the centuries after his death. During the late Roman Empire, his dualism informed the Christian conception of heaven.

The idea of an archetypal voyage is woven deeply into Greco-Roman culture. The epic poem The Odyssey is a story about an epic journey. The myth of the motherly grain goddess Demeter is about her descent into the underworld to rescue her kidnapped daughter. And in the twilight of the Roman Empire, the idea of an epic ascent between Platonic realms spawned a smorgasbord of competing dualistic philosophies.

From among this Platonic bouquet, the last emperors of Rome plucked Christianity as the state religion of their dying Empire. Rival Platonisms like Gnosticism and Hermeticism became heresies, and their literature was lost or destroyed in the violent crackdowns of the 4th century AD.

The Corpus Hermeticum is the literature associated with the Hermetic movement of that era. Much like the Christian Bible, the Hermeticum is a compilation of books. It contains quotes like the following:

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God.

Though its language evokes the Greco-Roman archetype of a transformative journey, Hermeticism was wholly unpalatable to the Roman authorities. During Rome’s twilight, the Roman Catholic Church established a spiritual monopoly on access to the divine that endured throughout the Middle Ages. But the Hermetic injunction to become god-like posed a direct threat to that monopoly, whereas the Church preferred to keep its flock in a state of spiritual dependence.

But as the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church began to wane a thousand years later, the works of Plato were reintroduced to European society by the Medici family’s Greek translator, Marsilio Ficino. And when Medici agents discovered a crumbling copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, the old patriarch of the Medici clan ordered Ficino to halt his translation of Plato. In the last years of his life, Cosimo de’ Medici wanted a crack at those curious old heresies before he died.

After his death, Cosimo’s descendants went on to develop an obsession with Alchemy, the magical art that sprang up around the Corpus Hermeticum during the Renaissance. Alchemy suggested that the mythic ascent could be achieved through technical improvement, in addition to the moral improvement emphasized by its Platonic cousin, Christianity. This concept became the Magnum Opus, or the “Great Work” of the alchemist, and it is reflected in the great artwork of the Italian Renaissance.

Palazzo Pitti

The Medici kept cabinets full of strange alchemical artifacts, like hairballs and narwhal tusks. They ground up gemstones and drank the powder for magical health benefits. And they designed a vast hedge maze as a physical homage to the Greco-Roman notion of a transformative voyage, or “alchemical journey.”

The Medici hedge maze is located behind Palazzo Pitti, one of Florence’s most imposing addresses. The palazzo served as the grand ducal palace of Cosimo’s descendants. Visitors to Florence can still enter through its towering facade, make their way through the courtyard (where the very first opera was staged in the year 1600), and finally emerge into the Boboli Gardens where the hedge maze is located.

Though the power of the Roman Catholic Church had declined considerably by the time the later Medici constructed the maze, magical arts like alchemy remained dangerous heresies, especially during the dark days of the Inquisition.

Legend has it that the Medici used this hedge maze to test the fluency of visitors to Palazzo Pitti in the heretical ideas of Alchemy. A certain level of facility with magical arts was needed to understand the geometry of the hedge maze’s layout. But most visitors to Palazzo Pitti still admire its lush gardens without ever understanding their titanic historical significance.

Conclusion

The Medici gained their position of prominence within Florentine society by being exceptionally clever. It was they, for example, who popularized the double-entry bookkeeping method that remains the gold standard in accounting to this day. But the hedge maze they built at Palazzo Pitti was their cleverest stroke of all. It’s a subtle celebration of the decline of Church power and the introduction of refreshing new intellectual currents into European society that had lain dormant since the Fall of Rome. The Boboli Gardens are commemorative not only of the broader Italian Renaissance, but also of the forgotten role of magic in the Scientific Revolution that later displaced Church authority and drove the Industrial Revolution.

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It was under the Medici, or in their day, that the humanists captivated the mind of Italy, turned it from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, and revealed to an astonished generation the riches of pagan thought and art.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Renaissance, 1953, page 77

Key Points:

• The most recent date given for the Fall of Rome is neither AD 410 nor AD 476; it’s actually 1453, after the advent of gunpowder.

• The Last Fall of Rome touched off the Renaissance by reacquainting Italy with Greek philosophy.

• The Fall of Constantinople severed the old Silk Road, forcing Christian merchants to sail westward in search of an alternate trade route.

The Last Fall of Rome

The Fall of Rome was a slow-moving cataclysm that lasted for centuries. That fact makes it difficult to assign a particular date to that momentous historical event.

Some consider the key moment to have been in 410 AD, when Alaric the Visigoth sacked the Eternal City. Others believe the year to be 476 AD, when the German Odoacer finally deposed an 11-year-old Romulus Augustulus, the very last Roman Emperor in Italy. His name appropriately meant “Little Augustus.”

But the Eastern half of the Roman Empire endured for another thousand years after these dates, with Constantinople as the capital. The Greek-speaking population of that city thought of themselves as living at the administrative seat of the old Roman Empire. Meanwhile, Roman civilization all but vanished from Italy.

Their city was sometimes called Byzantium, and their version of the Roman Empire is occasionally referred to as the “Byzantine” Empire. But they thought of themselves as Roman subjects.

Constantinople is today called Istanbul, the largest city in Türkiye. It’s a bustling port that sits on the edge of the Sea of Marmara, sandwiched between the Bosphorus Strait and an estuary called the Golden Horn. These geographical features create an easily defensible peninsula that resisted conquest for centuries after Rome fell in the West.

Three years after Alaric the Visigoth pillaged Rome in 411, the Christian Emperor Theodosius II completed a curtain of thick double walls that sealed off Constantinople’s peninsula from the rest of Europe. He didn’t want the new capital to suffer a similar fate as the old one.

The Walls of Theodosius and the Greek-speaking version of the Roman Empire endured throughout the Middle Ages. It would take the advent of gunpowder and the cannons of the Turkish Sultans to finally render them obsolete in 1453, when the final Fall of Rome took place.

Gemistos Plethon Goes to Florence

Sultan Murad II laid siege to Constantinople in 1422. But to confront a sudden uprising back home, his forces were compelled to withdraw prematurely. The Greek-speaking population of Constantinople gave thanks, believing the Roman Empire had been miraculously delivered from destruction by the Theotokos, or the Virgin Mary.

The Emperor John VIII Palaiologos soon departed from his capital on a diplomatic mission to mend fences with the Roman Catholic Church. His own Greek Orthodox Church had observed mutual excommunication with its Latin cousin since the Great Schism of 1054.

But in the 1430s, the situation was desperate. The Emperor thought he could save his people by uniting the estranged Greek and Latin Churches against the Muslim Turks. So the Emperor brought the aging Patriarch of Constantinople with him to what would become the Council of Florence. Tragically, Patriarch Joseph II died during the Council and was buried in that city.

The Emperor also brought with him a scholar named Gemistos Plethon, who was neither a clergyman nor a statesman. But Plethon’s command of pre-Christian Greek literature found receptive ears among the Florentines.

Most pre-Christian Greek and Roman literature had been lost to Western Europe since the 5th century crackdowns of the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius. That’s why Plethon’s lecture series on the Greek philosophy of Plato had a major impact on Cosimo de’ Medici, the patriarch of the ascendant Florentine banking family. Exposure to these lost works inspired Cosimo to found a new version of Plato’s Academy right there in Florence.

Cosimo’s descendants took this reintroduction to Plato even further. As part of their attempt to realize Platonic ideas, the Medici family went on to patronize promising artists. They sought to match the artistic skill evident in old Greek and Roman artifacts that predated Christianity.

The artists bankrolled by the Medici not only succeeded, but also surpassed the masters of Antiquity. Today, we recognize their collective efforts as the Italian Renaissance. At the Council of Florence, Gemistos Plethon became a conduit through which lost Classical knowledge was retransmitted from the Greek East to the Latin West. It was a key moment that ultimately gave birth to the Renaissance.

In 1464, Benozzo Gozzoli created a three-piece series of paintings that still adorn a chapel in the old Medici palace in Florence. The paintings superficially celebrated the three kings who observed the birth of Jesus. But Gozzoli commemorated the Council of Florence by rendering its major figures in his work. A portrait of John VIII Palaiologos stands in for King Balthasar, and the deceased Patriarch Joseph II played the part of King Melchoir. In the third painting, Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo sits astride a white horse as King Caspar. Gozzoli also added the face of Gemistos Plethon to his third painting, in acknowledgement of the role he played in igniting a Florentine fascination with Greek philosophy.

Though the Council of Florence was an intellectual confluence that became a major historical turning point, it failed to save the Byzantine Empire. The Orthodox and Latin Churches remain unreconciled to this day, and—31 years after his father abandoned the siege—Sultan Mehmed II arrived at Constantinople to finish the job.

The Siege of Constantinople

The failure of Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to save his empire ruined his mental health. His attempt to reconcile the Greek East and the Latin West turned out to be deeply unpopular amongst his own subjects. As his failure became clear, the mental health of John VIII collapsed and he died a broken man at the young age of 55.

It fell to his brother, Constantine XI Palaiologos, to muster a futile defense of the old Walls of Theodosius. But the walls that had stood for a thousand years were no match for the cannons of the Sultan. His armies poured into the city and began their rape of Constantinople on May 29, 1453.

Tradition entitled the Sultan’s soldiers to three days of unrestricted plunder when a city refused to surrender. But Mehmed cut them off after only a single day. He planned to make Constantinople his new capital, and he needed to preserve as much of its infrastructure as possible.

Sultan Mehmed II renamed the city Istanbul and slapped prohibitive taxes on Christian merchant ships. This action effectively severed the old Silk Road of Marco Polo. It incentivized the crowned heads of Christendom to finance expeditions westward across the Atlantic Ocean, searching for an alternate sea route to the Orient. Christopher Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage just 39 years after Constantinople fell.

Conclusion

The Greek-speaking people who called Constantinople home lived through a Fall of Rome in 1453, when their city fell and they were dispersed to the four corners of the compass. It seemed like the end of the world. But counterintuitively, this apocalypse birthed our modern world in two important ways. It led to the Age of Exploration and the discovery of two new continents. But more importantly, that historical episode revived intellectual currents that began flowing again after the Council of Florence, as if a great frozen river had finally started to thaw. The siege of Constantinople prompted a cross-pollination of ideas between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. Pre-Christian ideas from Antiquity that had lain dormant under the intellectual winter of the Medieval Church began to bloom like flowers before the spring of the Italian Renaissance.

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Constantine led the defense with desperate resolution. He equipped his 7,000 soldiers with small cannon, lances, bows and arrows, flaming torches, and crude firearms discharging leaden bullets of a walnut’s size. Sleeping only by snatches, he supervised, every night, the repair of the damage done to the walls during the day. Nevertheless the ancient defenses crumbled more and more before the battering rams and superior artillery of the Turks; now ended the medieval fortification of cities by walls. On May 29 the Turks fought their way across a moat filled with the bodies of their own slain, and surged over or through the walls into the terrorized city. The cries of the dying were drowned in the martial music of trumpets and drums. The Greeks at last fought bravely; the young Emperor was everywhere in the heat of the action, and the nobles who were with him died to a man in his defense. Surrounded by Turks, he cried out, “Cannot there be found a Christian to cut off my head?” He threw off his imperial garments, fought as a common soldier, disappeared in the rout of his little army, and was never heard of again.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 182

Introduction

The eternal notion of the Platonic Ascent—in which the journey itself is the destination—takes its most shocking form in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In that epic poem, Dante connected Medieval Italy to the Roman Empire by using himself as a main character, along with the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil.

In life, Virgil had connected the Roman Empire to Greek mythology with his own epic poem. Dante, in turn, connected the late Middle Ages with Rome by exploring the ancient idea of a mythic journey out of Plato’s Cave and bringing it into the late Middle Ages…and beyond.

Key Points

• The Roman poet Virgil linked Rome to the Greek Odyssey and Iliad by writing an epic poem in the style of Homer.

• During the late Middle Ages, Dante linked Florence back to ancient Rome by using Virgil as a character in The Divine Comedy, an epic poem of his very own.

• Dante’s disturbing poetry reflects a Medieval cosmology derived from the Greek philosopher Plato.

Epic Poetry

Whether passed along by word-of-mouth or written down, epic poetry has historically linked together the great civilizations of history with layers of reference.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are the most famous poems in history. Each consists of 24 books and tens of thousands of lines of poetry in dactylic hexameter. While The Iliad recounts the brutal final year of the Greek war against Troy, The Odyssey follows a Greek hero on his long and arduous journey home from that war. Though they have a long and complex history of oral tradition shrouded in mystery, authorship of these epic poems is traditionally attributed to a quasi-historical figure called Homer.

Roman society borrowed much from earlier Greek culture. To forge a national identity for Rome, the poet Virgil welded an origin myth for the Roman Empire onto The Iliad and The Odyssey. He wrote his own epic poem in Latin, and copied the same meter used by Homer. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan prince Aeneas escapes the fall of Troy and arrives in Italy, where his bloodline eventually begets Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of Rome.

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. It was a city racked by political intrigue in Dante’s time. Much of the fighting was over how much influence the nearby papacy in Rome should have over Florentine politics. Rival factions fought to the death in the streets. Dante unwisely took sides in the conflict and found himself banished from his beloved hometown, never to return.

His bitterness inspired him to write an epic poem that—still to this day—deliciously haunts the imaginations of Christians and non-Christians alike.

The Descent into Hell

Over the course of 100 cantos (or verses), Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the first person, as if recounting experiences that actually happened to him. It was called a “comedy” because he wrote it in Italian, rather than Latin. He described a grand tour of Medieval cosmology starting in hell, and ascending through purgatory into heaven. 33 cantos are devoted to each of these realms, with a single canto serving as the introduction to the notorious Inferno, which brings the grand total to 100.

Dante’s Inferno recounts a disturbing journey into hell, chaperoned by none other than the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil. According to Dante, hell is funnel-shaped and comprises nine levels, with the worst sinners confined to the narrow lower levels. His language is chilling, and the torments suffered by the damned are vividly described. Dante populated hell with his political enemies, inventing horrific fates for those responsible for banishing him from Florence.

Filippo Argenti, for example, moved into Dante’s old home after his banishment. Dante avenged himself by condemning Argenti to a gruesome fate on the fifth level of his Inferno. There, the wrathful bite and scratch at each other for all eternity in the filthy waters of the River Styx. Canto VIII 58-60 describes the scene:

“Come get Filippo Argenti!” they all cried,

And crazed with rage the Florentine spirit bit

At his own body. Let no more be said.

Sandro Botticelli began painting an illustrated manuscript of The Divine Comedy in the 1480s. Though he never completed all the illustrations, Botticelli’s Map of Hell remains an iconic visual depiction of the funnel-shaped Inferno described by Dante.

Mythic Ascent in The Divine Comedy

The Greek philosopher Plato organized his cosmology into horizontal planes of reality with vertical routes of access. Platonism in the ancient world emphasized an archetypal ascent between these levels. Early Church Fathers seized upon Platonism as their framework for Christian conceptions of heaven and earth. 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously called Christianity “Platonism for the ‘people’.”

For its part, the Roman Catholic Church went on to become the chief political power during the Middle Ages, and the old Platonic cosmology became the Christian cosmology of Europe during that time. Dante’s epic poem is a compelling illustration of that cosmology, with its horizontal planes and vertical routes of access. That’s how people conceived of reality in the centuries before we had astronomers to tell us that each scattered star is really another sun.

After escaping the Inferno, Virgil and Dante continue their Platonic ascent up the nine levels of Mount Purgatory, where the unrequited love of Dante’s real life, Beatrice, takes over as his tour guide. Beatrice and Dante then ascend through the nine concentric celestial spheres of Paradise together. Each of these is themed by a particular planet, the sun, the moon, or the stars. The Divine Comedy directly reflects the Medieval geocentric model of the solar system, with Earth at the center, which was ultimately displaced by the modern heliocentric solar system model, with which we are familiar.

Dante’s geometry implied that only by going through the Inferno could he hope to climb Mount Purgatory, and eventually ascend into the celestial spheres of Paradise. The format of The Divine Comedy insists that the journey itself is every bit as important as the final destination. Through Dante’s enunciation, Plato’s ancient notion of a Mythic Ascent found its definitive form during the late Middle Ages. His epic poem has become the quintessential Medieval version of Plato’s ascent out of a cave and into divine light.

Conclusion

Virgil bound Greek and Roman mythology together through poetry. Dante created a similar literary bridge between the Roman Empire and Medieval Italy by summoning the ghost of Virgil for The Divine Comedy. This reference to the distant past anticipated the Italian Renaissance, which revived Classical Greco-Roman art and literature to stunning effect. Dante didn’t live to see the Renaissance, but his hometown of Florence became its epicenter about a century after he died in 1321. His epitaph reads, “Here I am shut in, Dante, exiled from my native shores, whom Florence bore, a mother of little love.”

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The Divine Comedy is the strangest and most difficult of all poems. No other, before yielding its treasures, makes such imperious demands. Its language is the most compact and concise this side of Horace and Tacitus; it gathers into a word or phrase contents and subtleties requiring a rich background and an alert intelligence for full apprehension; even the wearisome theological, psychological, astronomical disquisitions have here a pithy precision that only a Scholastic philosopher could rival or enjoy. Dante lived so intensely in his time that his poem almost breaks under the weight of contemporary allusions unintelligible today without a litter of notes obstructing the movement of the tale.
He loved to teach, and tried to pour into one poem nearly all that he had ever learned, with the result that the living verse lies abed with dead absurdities. He weakens the charm of Beatrice by making her the voice of his political loves and hates. He stops his story to denounce a hundred cities or groups or individuals, and at times his epic founders in a sea of vituperation...He promises to remove the ice for a moment from the eyes of Alberigo if the latter will tell his name and story; Alberigo does, and asks fulfillment-”reach hither now thy hand, open my eyes!”-but, says Dante, “I opened them not for him; to be rude to him was courtesy.” If a man so bitter could win a conducted tour through paradise we shall all be saved.
His poem is none the less the greatest of medieval Christian books, and one of the greatest of all time. The slow accumulation of its intensity through a hundred cantos is an experience that no thorough reader will ever forget. It is...the sincerest of poems; there is no pretense in it, no hypocrisy or false modesty, no sycophancy or cowardice; the most powerful men of the age, even a pope who claimed all power, are attacked with a force and fervor unparalleled in poetry. Above all there is here a flight and sustainment of imagination challenging Shakespeare’s supremacy: vivid pictures of things never seen by gods or men; descriptions of nature that only an observant and sensitive spirit could achieve; and little narratives...that press great tragedies into narrow space with yet no vital matter missed. There is no humor in this man, but love was there till misfortune turned it into theology.
What Dante achieves at last is sublimity. We cannot find in his epic the Mississippi of life and action that is the Iliad, nor the gentle drowsy stream of Virgil’s verse, nor the universal understanding and forgiveness of Shakespeare; but here is grandeur, and a tortured, half-barbaric force that foreshadows Michelangelo. And because Dante loved order as well as liberty, and bound his passion and vision into form, he achieved a poem of such sculptured power that no man since has equaled it. Through the centuries that followed him Italy revered him as the liberator of her golden speech; Petrarch and Boccaccio and a hundred others were inspired by his battle and his art; and all Europe rang with the story of the proud exile who had gone to hell, and had returned, and had never smiled again.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 1082

Quick Summary

• The last Emperors of Rome endorsed a narrow definition of Christianity, to the violent exclusion of rival versions of that faith and its Platonic precursors.

• Platonism enjoyed an intense revival during the late Middle Ages, when it inspired the Renaissance.

• Hermeticism is the specific branch of revived Platonic philosophy that gave rise to Renaissance Alchemy.

Platonic Ascent

During the first few centuries AD, theological differences like the Arian Heresy splintered Christianity into factions. Because it came directly out of Plato’s Greek philosophy, the concept of a holy trinity seemed sensible to the Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Roman Empire. But for German-speakers living in the Empire’s northern reaches, the notion that Jesus could be both God and his son simultaneously was impossible to fathom.

During the late Roman Empire, multiple schools of thought descended from Plato’s famous assertion that there exists a hidden realm of idealized perfection beyond the flawed world we experience directly. Christianity—with its concept of heaven—is just one example of Platonic thought. Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism were other examples. Each was organized around the notion of a Platonic Ascent out of a fallen reality and into a higher plane of existence. These schools of thought are Christianity’s cousins in the ideological family tree of Platonism.

As the Roman Empire spiraled into economic decline, its ruling class attempted to shore up waning political power by embracing Christianity. They enshrined a narrow brand of trinitarian Christianity as their new state religion, thereby establishing a singular authoritative body.

So it was that the Roman Catholic Church was born from the Fall of Rome. Largely intolerant of backsliding into old ways, the last emperors engaged in an orgy of destruction and censorship. Along with heretical Christian practices that had not received state sanction, they also suppressed Neoplatonist, Gnostic, and Hermetic schools of thought. Plato’s writing presented intellectual competition to Roman Catholicism, so his work was lost to Christendom as the Church enforced a spiritual monopoly that endured throughout the Middle Ages.

Ad Fontes

During the Middle Ages, miracles not sanctioned by the authorities were known as “magic.” As Europe’s dominant ideological and institutional authority, the Church claimed a monopoly on miracles, sacred knowledge, and divine intervention. Miracles performed by saints or attributed to God through the Church were considered legitimate, while similar phenomena outside its control were condemned as heresy.

But as the Middle Ages wore on, the Roman Catholic Church began to shamelessly monetize their spiritual monopoly by selling the invisible product of sin remission. This naked corruption—along with the Church’s conspicuous inability to stop the Black Death—fueled a renewed public interest in pre-Christian thought.

Ad fontes means “back to the source,” and it was the Latin motto of the Renaissance. In Plato’s original writings, a mythic ascent out of his allegorical cave and into divine light is achieved through dialectical improvement.

This Platonic Ascent is the hallmark of all philosophical traditions descended from Platonism. In Christianity, the mythic ascent out of a fallen world and into a realm of idealized perfection is achieved through moral improvement. And in Hermeticism, a similar ascent is supposed to be achieved through a great work, or a magnum opus.

It was this philosophy that inspired the great flourishing of artwork that defined the Renaissance. The artists of that era devoted decades of their lives to studying and eventually surpassing pre-Christian techniques. One such technique is trompe l’oeil, in which a realistic 3-dimensional illusion is painted onto a 2-dimensional surface. Examples of this technique are usually found on ceilings, where they create illusions of breathtaking verticality.

In his original Allegory of the Cave, Plato used shadows flickering on a cave wall to allegorize the illusion of the senses we’re all trapped inside. His invocation of a 2-dimensional illusion emanating from a 3D source matches the stunning dimensionality of trompe l’oeil illusions achieved by the artists of the Renaissance.

Alchemical Journey

The Medici of Florence almost single-handedly bankrolled the Italian Renaissance. That banking family rescued potential artists from endlessly toiling in the fields by paying their bills, which freed them up to devote themselves entirely to magna opera. The Medici also played a major role in the revival of Plato by scouring the Mediterranean Basin for any scraps of his writing that survived the purges of the late Roman Emperors.

The Medici went so far as to establish a new version of Plato’s Academy in Florence. But when Medici agents discovered a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, the old patriarch of the Medici clan ordered an immediate halt to the translation of Plato. Cosimo de’ Medici was far more interested in translating the contents of that crumbling old book of magic than he was even in Plato.

Much like the Bible, the Hermeticum is a collection of books dating back to the late Roman Empire. These volumes ignited a Renaissance fascination with alchemy. While Hermeticism had been lost to the West between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance, its transfiguration into alchemy occurred within the Muslim societies of the East. The translation of the Hermeticum was Europe’s pivotal introduction to that magical art.

Renaissance alchemists conceived of the Platonic Ascent as an “Alchemical Journey,” where the soul returns to its divine origin. They emphasized the transformative power of the journey itself as the true goal of any quest.

Paolo Coelho’s 1988 novel The Alchemist vividly illustrates the point. It’s the story of a young man seeking treasure under the Great Pyramids, only to finally discover it buried in the village where his story began. The plot of The Alchemist mirrors the Ad fontes motto of the Renaissance, which was a journey back in time to recover something lost during the crackdown of Late Antiquity.

In alchemy, the magnum opus is the means to complete the Alchemical Journey. Where Christianity stresses ascension through moral improvement, Renaissance alchemists and artists alike conceived of ascent through technical improvement. They saw the gradual refinement in skill that comes with relentless repetition of a craft as a ramp they could use to climb between parallel realms of existence.

The Medici could never have imagined how successful they would be. The artists they patronized dramatically surpassed the lost techniques of Antiquity. Names like Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo Da Vinci are even more famous today than the Medici bankers who once patronized them. The Renaissance, in all its glory, epitomized a great changing of the age from the Medieval to the Modern.

Conclusion

In addition to financing the flowering of Renaissance artwork, the Medici also played a major role in popularizing alchemy in Europe. That family engaged in bizarre alchemical practices, like grinding up and drinking gemstones to benefit from their magical properties. They kept bizarre cabinets filled with alchemical oddities, such as hairballs or narwhal tusks. Neither practice yielded much in the way of actual results. But from these and a thousand other strange alchemical experiments, modern chemistry was born during the Scientific Revolution. That revolution displaced a stalwart Church authority that had persisted since the Fall of Rome. Chemistry traces its intellectual heritage all the way back to the schools of Platonic thought that were banned by the last Emperors of Rome. It is a rich historical irony that the Platonic idea of an Alchemical Journey comes down to us after having undergone a journey strikingly similar to the one it preaches about.

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Further Materials

Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems; for in this field, where the Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs. Alchemy, which the Moslems inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations. Practically all Moslem scientists believed that all metals were ultimately of the same species, and could therefore be transmuted one into another. The aim of the alchemists was to change “base” metals like iron, copper, lead, or tin into silver or gold; the “philosopher’s stone” was a substance—ever sought, never found—which when properly treated would effect this transmutation. Blood, hair, excrement, and other materials were treated with various reagents, and were subjected to calcination, sublimation, sunlight, and fire, to see if they contained this magic al-iksir or essence. He who should possess this elixir would be able at will to prolong his life. The most famous of the alchemists was Jabir ibn Hayyan (702-65), known to Europe as Gebir. Son of a Kufa druggist, he practiced as a physician, but spent most of his time with alembic and crucible. The hundred or more works attributed to him were produced by unknown authors, chiefly in the tenth century; many of these anonymous works were translated into Latin, and strongly stimulated the development of European chemistry. After the tenth century the science of chemistry, like other sciences, gave ground to occultism, and did not lift its head again for almost three hundred years.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 244

Quick Summary

• The bustling port city of Alexandria was an intellectual crossroads of the late Roman Empire.

• Christianity began as a revolt against Roman authority, but the Roman oligarchy co-opted one specific strain as their state religion.

• During the Middle Ages, the Church became remarkably similar to the Roman authority it once arose in opposition to.

Alexandria

The city of Alexandria was an intellectual crossroads of the late Roman Empire. Founded on the Nile Delta by Alexander the Great, the city expanded into a bustling trading port during Roman times. The Pharos Lighthouse guided merchant ships into its harbor, while the famed Great Library of Alexandria housed the accumulated wisdom of the ancient world.

Alexandria was an intellectual free market, where ideas cross-pollinated between diverse schools of thought. Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and Hermeticists brushed shoulders with Christians in its crowded streets. While the broader Roman Empire slid into decline during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, Alexandria enjoyed an intellectual renaissance.

During that period, the renowned Greek philosopher and mathematician Hypatia called Alexandria home. She rose to prominence as a skilled lecturer and became a significant figure in the Neoplatonist school of philosophy. A wild story about Hypatia comes down to us from the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Souda. When one of her students fell in love with her, it says, she lifted her skirt and told him, “This symbol of unclean generation is what you are in love with, and not anything beautiful.” This anecdote leaves us with an amusing insight into the unusual nature of Hypatia’s character.

Alexandria was a Greek city that got folded up into the Roman Empire by conquest. Accordingly, its various schools of philosophy were heavily influenced by Plato. That Greek philosopher is best known for his idea that the world we perceive with our senses is merely an illusion derived from a transcendent reality we can detect only with our minds. Christians recognized Plato’s hidden, idealized realm as their concept of heaven.

The intellectual landscape of Alexandria during Late Antiquity was a kaleidoscopic blend of Plato’s many offshoots, Christianity included. The 1945 discovery of writings by Gnostic Christians of that era vividly illustrates the point. So, too, does the biography of St. Augustine, from that other North African port city of Hippo. He began his career as a devoted Neoplatonist, just like Hypatia. Legendary historian Will Durant wrote of Augustine that, “he disliked Greek, and never mastered it or learned its literature; but he was so fascinated by Plato that he called him a ‘demigod’, and did not cease to be a Platonist when he became a Christian.”

Revolutionary Christianity

St. Augustine’s contribution to history was his monumental interpretation of Christianity. For its first few centuries, debt forgiveness was a central tenet of that faith. Jesus warned of an impending apocalypse and preached forgiveness as the only hope of salvation. The Lord’s Prayer reads, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Early Christianity was a rejection of the cruel economic hierarchy of the Roman Empire, where a tiny oligarchy hoarded for themselves the vast majority of the Empire’s wealth. This opposition made Christians into enemies of the state, who faced grim persecution at the hands of Roman authorities. Despite violent repression, its economic message resonated so mightily with the downtrodden Roman working class that Christianity exploded in popularity.

The economics of debt forgiveness could have prevented Rome’s economic collapse by softening the wealth inequality that tore it apart. But that solution would have come at a significant cost to the oligarchy, which would have been obliged to forgive massive debts owed to it.

The Roman oligarchy was financially incentivized to seize upon Augustine’s alternative interpretation of Christianity. Because he had lived a wild life in his youth, Augustine considered the forgiveness offered by Christ to be the antidote to the sexual incontinence that plagued his conscience. His version of Christianity was not the solution to Rome’s dangerous maldistribution of wealth. Rather, he saw it as a vehicle for personal moral redemption. This concept of forgiveness was much more economically convenient for the Roman oligarchy, who eventually installed Augustine’s reinterpretation of Christianity as the state religion of their dying Empire.

Authoritative Christianity

A great irony of history is that after Augustinian Christianity became the state religion of Rome, the new Roman Church turned around and began persecuting other forms of Christianity. Emperors like Theodosius also outlawed rival schools of Platonic thought. The Roman oligarchy established a spiritual monopoly by banning any and all competitors to their new state religion.

Nowhere was the crackdown more apparent than in Alexandria. There, crowds of enthusiastic Christians attacked those who refused to accept the new state faith. Hypatia was cut to ribbons on the streets of her city by shards of pottery.

The mob also tore down the edifices of Alexandria’s vibrant intellectual scene. The demolition of the Great Library was, “a tragedy of some moment,” wrote Will Durant, “for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.”

During the crackdown, the works of Plato himself were lost in the chaos. They wouldn’t be reintroduced to Europe again until the time of the Italian Renaissance. As the Middle Ages began, the Roman Catholic Church forcibly established itself as the exclusive way for Europeans to access the divine.

This absolute authority of the Roman Church persisted throughout the Middle Ages. Just as the Roman elite corruptly enriched themselves during Classical Antiquity, the Church gradually became more and more corrupt during the Medieval period.

The infamous Sales of Indulgences is a prominent example. The Medieval church promoted a conception of reality based on St. Augustine, where people could remit their sins by transferring wealth to the Church. By the time it began this practice during the Late Middle Ages, Christianity had ossified into a corrupt authority very similar to the one early Christians had opposed during Roman times.

Conclusion

In the mid-1300s, the horror of the Black Death raised serious public doubts about the Church’s exclusive claim to being the sole voice of God on Earth. Europeans became insatiably curious about the pre-Christian ideas banned a thousand years before by the Christian emperors of Rome. The authority of the Church was broken as Europeans began to explore the lush bouquet of ideas that once perfumed Alexandria’s intellectual landscape. That city’s Neoplatonist, Gnostic, and Hermetic schools of thought resurfaced as Renaissance magic. Alchemy arose directly out of a resurgence of Hermeticism and, as chemistry, played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. Like early Christianity during Roman times, science emerged as a major challenge to ecclesiastical authority during the Renaissance period and beyond. And similar to Romans being thrown to lions in the Colosseum, practitioners of Renaissance magic were subjected to the horrors of the Inquisition for the crime of heresy.

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Further Materials

In AD 392, the same year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led a rabid mob into “the most beautiful building in the world” and razed it to the ground. It’s unclear if Theophilus (Greek for “beloved of God”) and the Christians he urged on were really after the glimmering statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, or the vast library collection that was cached in his temple precinct. Either way, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—which framed this investigation in the first chapter—lends exquisite detail to the annihilation of the “world’s first public library” and its “hundreds of thousands of volumes.”
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 56

Quick Summary

• The career of Julius Caesar illustrates the class war that gave rise to the Roman Empire and to Christianity.

• The experience of “ego death”—where self is revealed to be an illusion—was a fixture in pre-Christian religion.

• The Crucifixion was a public demonstration of the political power of self-transcendence that changed the course of history.

Julius Caesar

Roman society was history’s first great experiment in not forgiving debts. Across the Ionian Sea in Greece, Solon of Athens inaugurated a golden age for his city with a broad debt cancellation in 594 BC. But when rumors spread that the Roman king was considering a similar policy, Rome’s prominent families drove him out of town before he could cancel debts owed to them.

Thereafter, Rome was governed by a Senate populated by the wealthy. They established a social taboo against kingship so strict that the Latin word rex became an offensive pejorative. Under this guise of democracy, the Roman oligarchy eliminated the king, the only person with the power to protect the financial interests of the poor. So liberated, the Roman elite began amassing an unprecedented hoard of wealth through merciless exploitation.

Predictably, the Roman working class responded to their economic exploitation and their political disenfranchisement with increasingly violent uprisings. A devastating civil war culminated in Julius Caesar marching on Rome as a popularis, or a political representative of the working class.

But the Senate conspired against him in one of the most infamous political assassinations of all time. Caesar’s best friend, Brutus, belonged to an ancient Roman family that had been ringleaders in the ouster of the Roman king five centuries before. Familial duty compelled him to betray his best friend. The conspirators claimed to have killed Julius Caesar because he violated the long-standing Roman taboo against kingship. But in reality, Caesar’s plan to stabilize the Roman economy through redistribution threatened to prune the fortunes of the oligarchy, and was therefore intolerable.

Ego Death

This raging class war was the historical stage onto which Christianity strode. It prescribed the debt forgiveness commanded in Jewish scripture as the only way to prevent an impending apocalypse. Forgiveness, preached Christ, is the only hope for salvation.

This rejection of Rome’s cruel economic hierarchy resonated mightily with the exploited Roman working class. In addition to Jewish scripture, the Christian movement also adopted the symbology of the old Greek mystery religions. For a thousand years, Greek initiates had ritualistically consumed hallucinogens from sacred chalices in Mystery Schools. Much as they did in American society during the Vietnam War era, these drugs came to symbolize resistance to Roman authority. That further bolstered the appeal of the new faith to potential converts.

The psychedelic substances used in the Mystery Schools induced a profound experience known as “ego death”, where both the self and the physical world are revealed to be illusions. This insight profoundly influenced Greek culture. Democracy reflects it by canceling out egoic desires with collective decision-making. Greek drama embodies it with actors who adopt and discard multiple identities on stage. Even Plato’s philosophy, which holds that the physical world is illusory, seems to have been influenced by his initiation into several Mystery Schools.

These fruits of Greek civilization were shaped by the mystery religions that spiritually anchored that society. But in the crucible of a dying Roman Empire, Christianity took the concept of ego death to a shocking new extreme.

The Crucifixion

Ego death undermines the ability of political authorities to control their subjects. The ego is the basis of state power. The authorities can throw bodies in prison or torture bodies to death. But when we stop

identifying as our bodies, they have nothing more to threaten us with.

As Christianity spread, the story of the Crucifixion advertised this practical limit on state power to the entire Roman Empire. Jesus’s fierce advocacy for the poor and condemnation of the rich made his sermons so popular that local religious authorities felt threatened. They appealed to their Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, to destroy the fledgling Christian movement by killing off its leader.

But his execution had the opposite of the intended effect. There exists a vast range of human experience beyond narrow individual identity. Jesus was so confident that he wasn’t just his body that he volunteered it for a gruesome public execution. Word of the equanimity with which Jesus bore his suffering as he died helped early Christianity spread like wildfire.

In the following centuries, Christians followed his lead by enthusiastically volunteering themselves for martyrdom. Though they could destroy the man himself and massacre his followers, the Roman state found that it was powerless to stop the story of Jesus from spreading to every corner of the Empire. Physical punishment is only effective when people are motivated to avoid the torture. When people volunteer for it, that threat of violence is drained of all its political power. The crucifixion was therefore a consummate demonstration of the limits of state power.

“And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross,” says the gospel writer John in Chapter 19, “and the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” In depictions of the cross, Christian iconography often includes the letters INRI, which abbreviate that phrase in Latin: “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum.”

That sign is a fixture in Christian iconography because it’s pregnant with significance. Like Julius Caesar, Jesus stood accused of violating the Roman taboo of claiming kingship for himself. The untimely deaths of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ—just a few decades apart—shows how kingship effectively meant advocacy for the poor. The Roman enforcement of a taboo against kingship was actually a taboo against political representation for people other than the wealthy elite.

Conclusion

A war of ideas ran parallel to the class struggle that defined the course of Roman history. The Roman establishment wielded vast political power the likes of which the world had never seen. But early Christians had a weapon of their own: egolessness, as demonstrated by Jesus during the Crucifixion. This weapon canceled out the political power of the oligarchy. Massacring Christians who volunteered themselves for martyrdom only served to increase the notoriety of the new faith. Ultimately, the Roman oligarchy couldn’t beat the Christian movement, so they joined it instead. As the Empire lapsed into decline and began to crumble, the Roman elite converted to Christianity en masse and, in its twilight, made it the state religion of their dying empire.

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Further Reading

Describing Tarquinius’s hostility to the aristocracy, Livy (1.54) interjects a version of the story related by Herodotus (above, Chapter 2, fn41) about Thrasybulus of Miletus advising Periander to cut off the highest stalks of grain with a scythe. In Livy’s version, Tarquinius takes a messenger from his son Sextus to his garden to reply to a message asking what to do about the town of Gabii that was resisting Rome. Tarquinius is reported to have cut down the tallest poppies—a symbolic gesture for cutting down the leading potential rivals in local aristocracies.
Reacting against public spending by the kings, Rome’s oligarchy embraced an anti-government ideology as passionately as do today’s anti-socialists. Much like the Greek oligarchs who accused reformers seeking popular support by cancelling debts and redistributing land of being “tyrants,” Roman patricians accused reformers of “seeking kingship” by proposing debt reform and assignment of public land to settle the poor instead of letting patricians grab it for themselves. Such advocacy led to the most progressive reformers from the leading families being assassinated in political killings over the ensuing five centuries.
In the republican period the very idea of a king was viewed with an almost pathological dislike. ... The tradition is very likely correct when it says that the first acts of the founders of the Republic were to make the people swear never to allow any man to be king in Rome and to legislate against anyone aspiring to monarchy in the future. What was truly repugnant to the nobles was the thought of one of their number elevating himself above his peers by attending to the needs of the lower classes and winning their political support.
This explains why all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offence, it seems, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor.
This Roman fear of kingship is what Judea’s upper class played upon when they sought to have Jesus condemned after he incited the hatred of the Pharisees and the creditor class with his first sermon (Luke 4), when he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year of the Lord, cancelling debts as called for under Mosaic Law. They accused him of aspiring to be “king of the Jews,” that is, “seeking kingship,” the familiar epithet the Romans applied to leaders whom they feared might cancel debts, including Catiline and Caesar around Jesus’s time.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023, page 187