Wouter J Hanegraaff - Birth of Esotericism

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, DOI: 10.1163/156798910X520593

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The Birth of Esotericism fromthe Spirit of Protestantism

Wouter J. HanegraaffUniversity of Amsterdam

Abstract

La naissance de l’ésotérisme à partir de l’esprit du protestantismeCet article traite de l’émergence et du développement historiques des manières dont

nous entendons actuellement l’“ésotérisme occidental” compris comme domaine relative-ment autonome de la recherche universitaire. Il en traite en explorant un certain nombrede moments possibles de sa “naissance”, en partant du présent et, à partir de là, en remon-tant dans le temps. Déterminantes pour l’émergence de l’ésotérisme occidental en tant queconcept sont les années (L’ésotérisme, d’Antoine Faivre), (création de la premièrechaire d’Histoire de l’ésotérisme occidental, à l’E.P.H.E. [Paris]), (le début des con-férences Eranos), et (l’Histoire critique du gnosticisme, de JacquesMatter). L’auteur posequ’en définissant l’ésotérisme en termes de prétention à la connaissance (recherche de con-naissance secrète, cachée, dissimulée, supérieure, plus profonde, ou intérieure), les approchestraditionnelles, religionistes, aussi bien que les approches discursives contemporaines del’ésotérisme finissent par en faire un concept théorique aux applications potentiellementuniverselles et, du même coup, risquent de faire perdre de vue sa spécificité historique. Al’encontre de ces perspectives, l’auteur défend la manière dont Faivre conçoit l’ésotérisme,c’est-à-dire, comme une série de courants historiques ayant donné lieu à un corpus référentielde textes. Il poursuit en posant que ce que ces courants et ces textes ont en commun n’estpas, comme le dit Faivre, leur participation à une “forme de pensée”, mais leur exclusion, àcaractère polémique, de la part d’un discours “anti-apologétique” dans le Protestantisme duème siècle.

KeywordsEsotericism; Antoine Faivre; Jacques Matter; Ehregott Daniel Colberg; Religionism; Anti-apologeticism

With playful reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous title, the question Iwould like to explore in this article concerns the emergence and development ofour current understanding of “Western esotericism” as a relatively autonomous

Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

field of academic research.1 My central thesis is that this origin is to be foundin a heavily polemical Protestant discourse that developed in Germany in thesecond half of the th century. In line with the metaphor of “birth and devel-opment”, I will approach my topic genealogically: taking the contemporarysituation as my starting-point, I will attempt to trace the “family tree” of West-ern esotericism back into the past as far as possible.

. From Faivre back to Corbin and Eranos

It could well be argued that the present study of Western esotericism as anacademic pursuit was born sixteen years ago, in , with the publication ofAntoine Faivre’s small but influential “Que-sais-je” volume called L’ésotérisme,which by definingWestern esotericism in terms of four intrinsic characteristics,plus two non-intrinsic ones, created a basic paradigm that was quickly takenup by a range of later authors up to the present. In previous publications Ihave referred to this as the “Faivre paradigm”,2 and there can be no doubt thatit has played a crucial role in getting the field established as a discipline witha distinct academic identity, and keeps playing a very important role to thepresent day.

In proposing his novel definition, Faivre was, of course, attempting tospecify and clarify an academic usage that was already in place before .“Western esotericism” had been considered a field of research in its own right atleast since the time of Faivre’s appointment as professor of “History of esotericand mystical currents in modern and contemporary Europe” thirteen yearspreviously, in :3 a date that could therefore be seen as an earlier moment

1) To prevent any misunderstandings: when I speak of the “birth of esotericism” I amreferring neither to the historical origins of the various currents that are seen as belonging tothe field of “Western esotericism”, nor to the historical origins of any purportedly esoteric“worldview”, “spiritual perspective”, “religious orientation”, “form of thought”, or the like.I am concerned simply, and exclusively, with the historical origins of a theoretical category;or in other words, I am interested in the question of when intellectuals and scholars firstbegan to conceive of a relatively autonomous “field of research” resembling the field that wenow study under the label “Western esotericism”, and why this happened.2) In his completely rewritten Introduction to the th edition [] of L’ésotérisme, Faivrehimself briefly mentions this proposal, without further expressing an opinion about it (o.c.,).3) There is no reason to attach any special significance to the fact that this title uses theadjective “esoteric” rather than the substantive. As for the combination of “esoteric” with“mystical”, this had to do mostly with matters of faculty politics internal to the E.P.H.E. Ifthe “mysticism” candidate Michel de Certeau had not lost against the “esotericism” candi-


of birth. That year, however, is no absolute point of origin either, for the chairhad in fact been created under a different title fourteen years earlier, in ,as “History of Esoteric Christianity”. If this first academic chair for esotericismwas therefore born in Paris, at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, its originalconception must be attributed to one of the professors, Henry Corbin, sinceit was he who proposed the idea to his colleagues.4

Corbin, of course, was a central representative of the famous Eranos ap-proach to the study of religion, and certainly had his own vision of esotericismin mind when he made the proposal. As emphasized by Thomas Hakl in hisdefinitive history Der verborgene Geist von Eranos, the “Eranos spirit” implieda view of esotericism entirely different from Faivre’s later definition:

Against the scholarly definition of Antoine Faivre, “esoteric” here means simply theconscious concern with a religiously motivated way “inwards”, with a “know thyself ”(your “divine” self ). Or formulated in different words, the “esotericism of Eranos”is concerned with “individuation”, the “descensus ad inferos = ascensus ad superos”,which takes places not in the rational and intellectual domain, but in the symbolicand spiritual domain of the soul, and nevertheless can be known by the intellect.Hence also the scepsis, which can time and again be noticed at Eranos, against a purelyand exclusively rational attitude, and the deliberate inclusion of analogical “mythical”thought.5

This difference between an Eranos perspective and Faivre’s later definitionis highly important, as will be seen. It closely parallels the basic oppositionbetween a “religionist” concept of esotericism and a historical-empirical one:6an opposition that is present not only in the modern and contemporary study

date Antoine Faivre (see Dosse,Michel de Certeau, –), perhaps “Western esotericism”would not exist as a field of research the way it exists today.4) See Faivre, “La parola ‘esoterismo’ ”. My metaphor of “birth” and “conception” shouldnot be understood as implying that the E.P.H.E. made any deliberate choice to start a newspecialty called “esotericism”: instead, what happened is that almost by chance—simplyby proposing this particular title—Corbin turns out to have “planted a seed” that wouldeventually blossom into the first academic chair devoted to a new academy field (and eventhat happened only because the second chairholder, Antoine Faivre, chose to interpret hisassignment in a much broader and more comprehensive sense than his predecessor). It isonly with the second academic chair (University of Amsterdam, ) that a universitymade a deliberate choice to create an academic setting for the study of Western esotericism(albeit under the title “History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents”).5) Hakl, Verborgene Geist von Eranos, –.6) See e.g. Hanegraaff, ‘Beyond the Yates Paradigm’; id. ‘Study of Western Esotericism’,; Faivre, L’ésotérisme (th ed.), –.


of esotericism, but—as I will argue below—was prefigured already at the timewhen esotericism was born from the spirit of Protestantism in the second halfof the th century.

Coming back to the creation of the chair, it is important to emphasizethat no religionist or Eranos concept of “esotericism” was on the minds ofthe E.P.H.E. faculty members who adopted Corbin’s proposal. Most of themknew nothing about Eranos and even if they did they hardly cared about it.They were simply at a loss as to how to name the chair in a manner that wouldsuit the specialty of the expected candidate, François Secret (whose work onChristian kabbalah was well known to them), and finally accepted Corbin’stitle for want of anything better.7 Secret himself, who indeed got elected, wasnot at all representative of the spirit of Eranos either; on the contrary, he was atypical product of the almost positivist historiography of the Ecole Pratique desHautes Etudes. Only much later, with the appointment of Faivre in , didthe two traditions really come together: the richness and complexity of Faivre’soeuvre as a whole derives in no small measure from the fact that it combines thethorough text-critical historiography typical of the Ecole Pratique, in his greatstudy of Eckartshausen of 8 and many later writings, and—particularlyin his publications during the s and s—a mythical / symbolic visionthat reflects his own involvement in Eranos and his close association withmanyof its central figures, such as Corbin and Eliade.9

Having traced several successive years of birth so far (, , and ),the next logical step would be to look for the birth of the Eranos approach.This, however, is far from easy. The Eranos meetings began in , but theemergence of their characteristic vision cannot easily be linked to a date or ayear—not inappropriately, one might say, for an approach that deemphasizeshistoriography in favor of the illud tempus of symbolism and mythology. Ifanything definite can be said in this regard, it is that the Eranos vision isclearly a reaction against certain dominant trends in the study of religion sincethe th century: against Enlightenment rationalism it emphasizes symbolism,mythology and religious experience; against both materialism and sociologicalreductionism it defends the autonomy and superiority of ideas; and againstth-century historicism (and what Eliade called the “Terror of History”) itlooks for what is universal and cannot be touched by time. Hence, of course, itsoft-noted affinities with such currents as Romanticism, German Idealism and

7) Antoine Faivre, personal communication ( March ).8) Faivre, Eckartshausen.9) See e.g. Hakl, Verborgene Geist von Eranos, –; McCalla, ‘Antoine Faivre’, –.


Traditionalism.10 If any origin of the Eranos vision should be given, we mightultimately have to look for reactions against the complex process referred to byMax Weber as the “disenchantment of the world”.

. Jacques Matter’s “esotericism”

As far as I can see, the next indispensable year in my genealogy prior to isthe year , when Jacques Matter introduced the substantive “esotericism”in his Histoire critique du gnosticisme et de son influence.11 Matter’s work woulddeserve some closer study, not least in view of the intriguing fact that he notonly wrote a major work on gnosticism, but also published about Martinismand Swedenborg. It is not insignificant that Matter’s very definition of gnos-ticism in his book of might be applied without any trouble to Martinezde Pasqually’s vision as well:

The emanation of all spiritual beings out of God; the progressive degeneration, fromemanation to emanation, of these beings; the redemption and return of all to thepurity of the Creator and, after the re-establishment of the original harmony of all, thefelicitous and truly divine condition of all in God: those are the fundamental teachingsof gnosticism. A singular mixture of monotheism and pantheism, of spiritualism andmaterialism, of christianity and paganism, this system does not overlook anything. …

Behold!, it says, behold the light that emanates from an immense source of light, thatspreads its beneficent rays everywhere: this is how the spirits of light emanate from thedivine light. Behold, again, they cry out, all the sources that feed the earth, that beautifyit, that fertilize and purify it: they emanate from one single, immense ocean. This ishow, from the center of divinity, emanate so many rivers (genii pure like watery crystal)which shape and fill the world of intelligences. Behold, they finally say, the numbers,which all emanate from a first number, and which all resemble it, are made from itsessence, and are nevertheless infinitely diverse; and behold the voices, which are madeof so many syllables and elements, all enclosed in the original voice, and neverthelessof an unlimited variety: thus it is that the world of intelligences has emanated from thefirst intelligence, resembling it, and still results in an infinite variety of beings.12

According to Matter, gnosis or gnosticism (the terms are used by him asinterchangeable) emerged as a “third system” between the declining system

10) Apart from Hakl, Verborgene Geist, see Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion.11) As documented in this very volume of Aries, it is only very recently that MonikaNeugebauer-Wölk has discovered a yet earlier, German instance of the substantive “eso-tericism.” I will not discuss the implications of that discovery here, but refer the reader toher contribution.12) Matter, Histoire critique, I, –.


of polytheism on the one hand, and the Christianity that had emerged fromJudaism on the other.13 It was essentially an eclecticism, described by him as‘nothing but the introduction within Christianity of the cosmological andtheosophical speculations that had formed the most important part of theancient religions of the Orient, joined with those of the Egyptian, Greek andJudaic doctrines’ which had been accepted by the platonists.14 Like so manyothers in this period, Matter, too, believed that this new system owed itsoriginal impulse to Zoroastrianism, which by being assimilated into Judaismhad given birth to the kabbalah.15

I have given some special attention here to Matter’s concept for three rea-sons. The first one is simply that, although Matter has been quoted as theinventor of the term “esotericism” ever since Jean-Pierre Laurant called atten-tion to the fact in , not much has been written about what he actuallyunderstood by it, and certainly not in English.16 The second reason is that his“gnosis” or “gnosticism” turns out to be essentially what would be famouslycharacterized, by Adolf von Harnack, as the “acute hellenization of Christian-ity”, and we shall see later how essential this concept is to the “birth of esoteri-cism from the spirit of Protestantism” in the second half of the th century.Thirdly and finally, it is important to clarify what Matter meant by “esoteri-cism”. For him it is concerned with “secret teachings” concerned with superiorknowledge (gnosis), reserved for an elite and passed on from the ancient mys-tery traditions.17 When he speaks of ‘the esotericism of the gnostics’,18 it is thissecret gnosis that he has in mind: hence “esotericism”, for him, is certainly nota label for a series of historical currents, but rather, an important characteristicof a current (gnosis or gnosticism) defined as pagan /monotheistic syncretism.

Matter simply adopted the long-standing use of the adjective “esoteric” asreferring to such secret teachings; the only thing new was that he had the idea(or adopted the earlier German idea) of making a substantive out of it, and thisinnovation was picked up by later authors, notably Eliphas Lévi,19 who began

13) Ibid., I, v.14) Ibid, I, .15) On the pervasive tendency of seeing kabbalah as having sprung from Zoroastrianism,see Hanegraaff, ‘Origins of Occultist Kabbalah’.16) Laurant’s own brief discussion remains the longest of which I am aware (Laurant,L’ésotérisme chrétien, ).17) Ibid., I, –.18) Ibid., II, .19) For more details about the career of the term between Matter and Lévi, cf. Hanegraaff,‘Esotericism’.


to use it as a general label for much more than ancient gnosticism alone. Interms of substance, the birth of “esotericism” as understood byMatter thereforecertainly did not start with him: the adjective “esoteric” can be traced backto the second century20 but the idea of a lineage of secret mystery teachingsis certainly much older, and we shall see that the idea of a “hellenization ofChristianity” leading to pagan /monotheistic syncretism goes back to the thcentury at least.

. Secrecy and Inner Wisdom

Having reached this point in our genealogical investigation, we might noticea peculiar fact. I began my search for the birth-year of “esotericism” fromFaivre’s booklet, which specifically described the field as consisting ofa series of historical currents in Western culture, and argued that they arerelated because they share a certain “form of thought” that can be defined interms of four characteristics (to which two further, non-intrinsic ones mightbe added). But while trying to discover when that idea was born, we have sofar found something very different. On the one hand, we have encountered thereligionist vision of Eranos, which may have influenced Faivre but is certainlynot the foundation of his mature concept of esotericism; and on the otherhand, we have encountered the notion of secret teachings reserved for an elite,which Faivre took pains to distinguish from his own understanding of thefield.21 These two understandings of esotericism remain extremely influentialup to the present day, and are often mingled with one another. Along the linesof Eranos religionism, esotericism is often understood as concerned somehowwith the “inner dimension” of religion, in contrast with its “outer” dimensionsrepresented by official institutions or doctrinal theology;22 this approach relies

20) Hanegraaff, ‘Esotericism’, , with reference to the extensive discussions by Riffard,L’ésotérisme.21) See e.g. Faivre, Access, .22) Such an understanding of Western esotericism as “inner Western traditions” is basic toGnosis magazine, an influential popular journal founded by Jay Kinney, which appearedfrom to , and is linked in various ways to a network of likeminded organizations,publishers, journals and authors that emerged in the United States since the s. Itsuniversalist / counterculturalist understanding of “Western esotericism” is grounded in theTraditionalist notion of a universal “inner” or esoteric truth as opposed to the limited andmerely “outer” visions of religious institutions and dogmatic theologies. It is mainly againstthis orientation that the modern study of Western esotericism had to demarcate itself fromthe early s on: a process that took place notably during the annual meetings of the


on distinctions or polarities such as myth versus history, symbolism versusdoctrine, experiential versus rational knowledge, individual versus collective,and so on. And the notion of esotericism as concerned with secret teachings isoften mingled with this religionist understanding to such an extent that theycan no longer be kept apart. A perfect recent example is Arthur Versluis’s recenttextbook Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism, whichopens as follows:

Strictly speaking, the term esoteric refers to knowledge reserved for a small group; itderives from the Greek word esotero, meaning “within” or “inner”. In our context, theword esoteric implies inner or spiritual knowledge held by a limited circle, as opposedto exoteric, publicly known or “outer” knowledge. The term Western esotericism, then,refers to inner or hidden spiritual knowledge transmitted through Western Europeanhistorical currents that in turn feed into North American and other non-Europeansettings.23

This wholly religionist definition puts “knowledge” into the very center—something, incidentally, which Versluis has in common with the otherwiseextremely different discursive approach to esotericism associated with Kockuvon Stuckrad, who also considers claims of superior knowledge to be crucialto what the field is all about.24

Here I do not mean to contest the centrality of claims for a special, superior“knowledge” or “gnosis” to the field of Western esotericism; on the contrary, Iwould agree that they are among the most promising candidates when it comesto selecting central components for a theoretical definition of Western esoteri-cism.25 We should be wary, however, about the risk of conceptual slippage thatseems hard to avoid in any such approach. By this I mean that starting fromthe statement that claims of higher, deeper, or inner knowledge are central toWestern esotericism as a field of research, one easily reverses the logical order

American Academy of Religion (see Faivre, L’ésotérisme [th ed., ], –; Hanegraaff,‘The Study of Western Esotericism’, – nt ; and Hanegraaff, ‘Kabbalah in GnosisMagazine’), where the basic “Gnosis perspective” was represented by an organization whichcalled itself the “Hermetic Academy”.The perspective typical ofGnosismagazine can also befound in Kinney,The Inner West, Smoley, Inner Christianity, and Smoley & Kinney,HiddenWisdom.23) Versluis, Magic and Mysticism, .24) Von Stuckrad,Western Esotericism, ; idem, ‘Esoterik in der gegenwärtigen Forschung’;idem, ‘Western Esotericism’, –. For a critical discussion, cf. Faivre, ‘Kocku von Stuck-rad’.25) Hanegraaff, ‘Trouble with Images’. –; and cf. idem, ‘Reason, Faith, Gnosis’.


of the argument, and ends up suggesting that anybody who claims a higher,deeper or inner knowledge of some kind therefore falls within the purview ofthe study of esotericism. All cherriesmay be red, but not everything red is there-fore a cherry. In the case of Versluis, he does imply that “Western esotericism” ismerely the Western manifestation of something that can be found universallyall over the world and in all periods of history. In the case of von Stuckrad’sdiscursive approach, structural similarities with the search for “absolute knowl-edge” in scientific disciplines that would seem to be far removed from anything“esoteric”, such as string theory or the modern life sciences, might allow thelatter to be discussed within the context of Western esotericism.26

. Historical Currents

I do not intend to discuss these approaches in further detail here, but ratherwish to highlight what I see as their main disadvantage: a lack of groundingin history. This can conveniently be done with reference to Faivre. In hisbooklet of and in his later publications, Faivre has sought to describethe field of Western esotericism as based neither upon religionist perspectives,nor upon the notion of secrecy; and moreover, an emphasis on some kindof special “knowledge” is conspicuously absent from his approach.27 What wefind instead, as alreadymentioned above, is the notion thatWestern esotericismconsists of a series of specific historical currents; and what they have in common,according to Faivre, is not some particular claim of knowledge but the fact thatthey share a certain air de famille which can be analyzed as a forme de pensée.Now what are the origins of that concept? When and where was it born?

To address that question I wish to call special attention to two aspectsof Faivre’s argument: first, his notion of an “air de famille”, and second, hisemphasis on what he calls the “referential corpus” of Western esotericism.Faivre’s approach is different from all the other ones we have encountered so far,in that it does not start from any abstract notion or concept of “knowledge”—whether secret, hidden, concealed, higher, deeper, or inner—but from concretetextual references.His claim is that, starting in the Renaissance, one can observethe autonomization of a more or less coherent “referential corpus”28 of textual

26) Von Stuckrad, ‘Western Esotericism’, –.27) The closest Faivre comes to emphasizing a special kind of “knowledge” is in his referenceto the imagination as a “cognitive faculty” as part of the rd characteristic of his definitionof Western esotericism.28) The notion of a “referential corpus” was highlighted in Faivre, Access, () and in


sources, which constitutes a field in its own right because, as regards theircontents, its components share a certain “air de famille”. At closer scrutiny,the latter turns out to be based upon a shared “form of thought”, which inturn can be analyzed, according to Faivre, in terms of his famous four / sixcharacteristics.

I have reservations about the notion of a “form of thought”29—a termwhich, by the way, was suggested to him by his colleague Emile Poulat30—and hence about the operational value of Faivre’s definition for defining anddemarcating Western esotericism as a field.31 However, in opposition to the

L’ésotérisme (rd ed., ), . Faivre’s formulation of a process of “autonomization” takingplace during the Renaissance was there from the beginning. Please note a bad translationerror in Access, , which should have read ‘This autonomization of a body of knowledge withrespect to [par rapport à] the official religion—increasingly considered “exoteric”—is truly,in the sixteenth century, the point of departure for what will be called “esotericism” ’ (thepublished version misconstrues the sentence structure so that it ends up suggesting that thenew referential corpus was “exoteric”!).29) In my ‘Empirical Method’, –, I used the theoretical perspective of ArthurO. Lovejoy to interpret Faivre’s “form of thought” as referring to an “idea complex” in thesense of a cluster of related ideas recognizable over time by virtue of family resemblance.Although I would not consider such an approach wholly invalid, I have since then cometo doubt its usefulness for historical research. My objection is that it runs the risk of creat-ing artificial phenomenological continuities, by privileging similarities that exist only on alevel of theoretical abstraction, thereby losing sight of historical specificity. For example, theworldviews of e.g. Pico della Mirandola, Emanuel Swedenborg and Aleister Crowley mayall lay strong emphasis on “correspondences”, but the differences between their understand-ing of that concept are far more interesting to the historian than the fact that they mightbe subsumed under one single category. The latter may be possible theoretically, but resultsin a mere abstraction that teaches us more about the interests and agendas of the scholardoing the subsuming than about the ideas being studied; and moreover, it easily suggeststhat their supposed “universality” is what matters most, and as a result tends to turn ourattention away (certainly quite against Faivre’s intentions) from historical specificity anddetail.30) Antoine Faivre, personal communication ( March ). Faivre adds that he wasnever entirely satisfied by the term, but adopted it for want of having found a better way ofreferring to what he had in mind. The term indeed seems to have taken on a life of its own,sometimes leading to connotations not intended by him.31) See also Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, –; idem, ‘The Study of Western Eso-tericism’, –. Part of the problem has to do with Faivre’s insistence (which is stillthere in the most recent version of his argument, L’ésotérisme [th ed., ], ) that thefour basic elements all have to be present in order for something to fall under the rubricof “Western esotericism”. The inevitable result is that, to give only one example here, afigure as important as Emanuel Swedenborg would have to be excluded from the field


various approaches mentioned earlier, I would like to insist on the validityof Faivre’s understanding of esotericism as consisting first and foremost of aseries of historical currents, which have resulted in a referential corpus of texts,the relative coherence of which derives from a shared “air de famille”. In thisregard I have to part company with the discursive approach defended by Kockuvon Stuckrad, who explicitly sets up his own view of esotericism as a ‘structuralelement of Western culture’ against the notion of esotericism as referring to a‘selection of historical “currents” ’.32

of Western esotericism (see Williams-Hogan, ‘The Place of Emanuel Swedenborg’, whopoints out that the notion of “living nature” runs counter to Swedenborg’s worldview;personally I would go even further, and also emphasize the difference between Sweden-borg’s post-Cartesian understanding of correspondences [cf. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion,–] and earlier Renaissance concepts, as well as the fact that although Swedenborgclaimed to travel to heaven and hell, he did not claim to do so by means of the imagina-tion but purely by divine grace). In terms of definition theory, this problem derives fromthe fact that Faivre’s definition results in the construction of what is technically known asa “monothetic class” (see Snoek, Initiations, –). Some might wish to find a solutionby dropping the requirement that all four characteristics must be present, thereby turn-ing it into a “polythetic class” or a “fuzzy set” (ibid.), as recently proposed by Marco Pasi(‘Il problema della definizione’), but in that case one will have to deal with the theoreti-cal disadvantages of those particularly types of classification: as formulated by R. Needham(see Snoek, o.c., ), members of polythetic classes have the worrying feature that they‘do not in all cases possess any specific features such as could justify the formulation ofgeneral propositions about them’. My suggestion at this point is that Faivre’s definitionmight perhaps remain valid for pointing out something like a “core esotericism” (or eso-tericism in a strong or classical sense), but does not work as a sharp principle of definitionand demarcation. Unfortunately, in quite a number of publications Faivre’s definition hasalready been used (or rather, misused) as a simple “checklist” or lithmus test for decidingwhether something “is esoteric” or not (see Hanegraaff, ‘The Study of Western Esotericism’,).32) Von Stuckrad presents this as his ‘main argument’ in ‘Western esotericism’, . The‘vagueness’ (o.c., ) which he perceives in my approach, and against which he opposeshis own alternative, is explained by him with reference to a formulation from my entry‘Esotericism’ in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Hanegraaff, Dictionary,). But that vagueness seems to exist only because von Stuckrad has lifted the formulationout of its context, where it did not stand formy own approach or ‘depiction of the field’ at all,but merely served to explain the general distinction I was making between typological andhistorical constructs. I had written that such historical constructs are characterized by thefact that they understand the term “esotericism” ‘as a general label for certain specific currentsin Western culture that display certain similarities and are historically related’. The double“certain” to which Von Stuckrad objects so much therefore needed to remain unspecified,not because of any “vagueness” on my part, but because I was making the point that each


In defending these elements of Faivre’s approach (I repeat:minus his notionof a “form of thought” defined by four basic elements), I will go beyond his ownformulations by arguing that the notion of an “air de famille” need not remainsomething vague and intuitive, but has a specific background and historicalorigin that can be precisely defined.My claim is that the basic referential corpuswhich is nowadays taken for granted as central to Western esotericism was firstconceptualized as a more or less automous domain by Protestant theologians inthe second half of the th century,33 as part of their effort to sharply demarcatecertain34 historical currents from biblical Christianity on the one hand, andfrom rational philosophy on the other. What we now refer to as “Westernesotericism” is essentially the very same collection of historical currents thatthese theologians had in mind (plus, of course, their further development andtheir complex Wirkungsgeschichte since the th century). That we nowadayssee them as sharing an “air de famille” does not really have to do with a “form ofthought” but with two other things. On the one hand, largely mediated by theEnlightenment, much of the Protestant polemical discourse was inherited as alargely unexamined and almost unconscious set of assumptions by modernscholars: the demarcations that they were drawing now seem so natural tous that we tend to take them for granted. And on the other hand, theseProtestant theologians really did perceive something real, which I believe isessential to the very nature of Western esotericism but the relevance of whichhas been remarkably overlooked: I am referring to the process known as theHellenization of Christianity (with its parallels in Judaism35) and the effects thatthis process has had in Western culture up to the very present.

such historical construct (whether mine or anyone else’s) is based upon different ideas aboutwhich currents and similarities are most important. In short, Von Stuckrad is setting up astraw man here, and as a result his argumentation fails to address the theoretical validity of“historical constructs” as such.33) It would go beyond the scope of this article to discuss the reasons why I do notbelieve these origins can be found in the Roman Catholic prisca theologia discourse of theRenaissance, which is grounded in the hellenization of Christianity and therefore representsthe logical antithesis of the protestant position under discussion here. This argument willbe developed in detail in a forthcoming monograph.34) Referring to note : I can assure the reader, and Von Stuckrad in particular, that theword “certain” will be given a specific content!35) Even though—surprisingly, to me—in the Jewish context this process was never con-ceptualized as such, nor became a topic of discussion or controvery as has happened inChristianity (Elliot R. Wolfson, personal communication, March , ).


. Colberg’s “Hermetic-Platonic Christianity”

The birth of Western esotericism understood as a series of specific and relatedhistorical currents took place, I would argue, as a result of what has beencalled the “anti-apologetic” tradition in Protestant theology, founded by theLutheran historian of philosophy Jacob Thomasius (–).36 His cen-tral thesis, developed most explicitly in his Schediasma historicum (), wasthat Christianity had been infected not just since the Renaissance, but alreadysince the first centuries by pagan philosophies that were in fact alien to andincompatible with the biblical faith. In other words, Thomasius exposed thehellenization of Christianity as a perversion, and argued for a strict separationof Christian theology and the philosophies of the pagan nations. Thomasius’approach has been called “anti-apologetic” because it attacked the “apologetic”tradition of Roman Catholicism, based upon the concept of a translatio sapien-tiae that allowed for a “concordance” (to use Faivre’s term) between pagan andChristian traditions. For Thomasius and his followers, the very idea of sucha concordance was the essence of heresy: paganism and God’s Word can havenothing in common.The eventual result was a sharp distinction between threedomains: () Christian faith based exclusively on the pure biblical message,() rational philosophy based upon the legitimate but limited capacities of thehuman intellect, and () everything else—which in practice meant not only anykind of pagan religion but, most seriously, also any kind of infiltration of suchpagan religion within the domain of the religions of the book.37

Jacob Thomasius focused on exposing Roman Catholicism as a crypto-pagan perversion of the biblical faith, but that the logic of anti-apologeticismcould also be used for a different purpose was demonstrated by the Lutherantheologian Ehregott Daniel Colberg, in his Platonisch-Hermetisches Christen-thum of /, which must be recognized, in my opinion, as the land-mark book that gave birth to the study of Western esotericism as a specificdomain of research.38Colberg’s central concern was the fight against Protestant

36) For the concept of “anti-apologeticism” and a very important discussion of its mainrepresentatives starting with Jacob Thomasius, see Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in de Welt-geschichte.37) For the later development of this triad in the work of Jacob Brucker, see Hanegraaff,‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography’.38) Faivre seems to have been the first to call attention to Colberg’s importance in thiscontext, in an article co-published with Karen-Claire Voss (Faivre & Voss, ‘Western Eso-tericism and the Science of Religion’, ); but it is thanks to the brilliant work of Sicco


heterodoxy in his own time, particularly the theosophical teachings linkedto Paracelsus, Weigel, Böhme and Rosicrucianism. Debating with hereticsand reading their books, he discovered that their theology was ‘nothing buta wicked mixture of Christian faith with the Platonic and Hermetic phi-losophy’.39 To demonstrate this, he sketched the outlines of a homogeneousheretical tradition based upon the attempt by the weak and imperfect humanintellect to perceive and understand the mysteries of divinity, which in real-ity can never be discovered by man but have to be revealed by the Son ofGod.

… the mingling of Theology and Philosophy happens mainly in two ways. First, ifone tries to be smarter than Scripture, that is, if with the help of philosophy one triesto fathom the nature of the revealed mysteries about which God’s Word keeps silent.Second, if one tries to be smart against Scripture, that is, if one refuses to accept whatdoes not accord with the blind intellect and its invented axioms.40

The second error was represented particularly by Aristotelian philosophy; butthis was not Colberg’s focus. He concentrates on the first error—trying tounderstand the mysteries of Revelation by means of the weak humanintellect—which is represented mainly by the Platonic tradition, significantlyexpanded by Colberg so as to include the teachings of Hermes and the kab-balah.

The human attempt to transcend its own limitations and understand thedivine leads first of all to a focus on “inner knowledge” of the self and ofGod: a search for gnosis that should lead to the soul’s restitution and return tothe divine source. This “way inwards” Colberg associates mostly with Platon-ism, and in the important third chapter of his book he refers to it generally as“kabbalah”. In the same chapter he distinguishes it from the second main man-ifestation of heresy: the “way inwards” of platonism and kabbalah turns out tohave its counterpart in the “way outwards”, which seeks knowledge and dom-ination of the external world. This second domain is associated mostly withthe Hermetic Tradition, and referred to as “magic”. In this manner, Colbergmanaged to describe “platonic-hermetic” Christianity as one single hereti-cal tradition with a double face: the one focused on mystical interiority and“enthusiasm”, the other focused on the occult sciences such as alchemy, astrol-

Lehmann-Brauns, which includes the best and most detailed discussion of Colberg so far(Lehmann-Brauns,Weisheit, –), that his work can now be seen in its proper context.39) Colberg, Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum, .40) Colberg, Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum, –.


ogy and magic. His historical overview led from Pythagorean and Platonicideas through the various gnostic sects, Clement of Alexandria and Origen,manichaeism, Dionysius Areopagita and various medieval heresies, to Ficinoand Agrippa, and from there on to his main targets, to which he devotedentire chapters: Paracelsianism, Weigelianism, Rosicrucianism, the Quakersand Böhmian theosophy, as well as the anabaptists, Antoinette Bourignon,Labadism, and Quietism.

Colberg’s book is the very first one, to my knowledge, that includes essen-tially all the historical currents nowadays regarded as central to “Western eso-tericism”; and at least as important is the fact that it does so not randomly, buton the basis of a clear theoretical concept. Anti-apologeticism has a compellinginternal logic, according to which large areas of Western religion have to bedefined as manifestations of pagan /biblical syncretism. If, within that domain,one then makes the choice of giving mainstream Roman Catholic theology astatus apart, simply because it is mainstream and therefore “respectable”, one isleft with a domain which contains everything (obviously, up to Colberg’s owntime) that we now study under the rubric of Western esotericism.

Such a move was indeed made by the generations after Colberg, and notablyby the virtual founder of the history of philosophy Jacob Brucker, whoseapproach became basic to Enlightenment historiography all over Europe.41Theresult was a new principle of division, categorization or departmentalization, inwhich “philosophy”, “science”, and “theology” each came to inhabit their ownclearly demarcated spaces, whose right to exist and participate in intellectualdebate was generally recognized. But as a side-effect of this new situation, whatwe now call “Western esotericism” was left to its own devices, to inhabit, as bestas it could, a no-man’s land or liminal conceptual space beyond the boundariesof polite society: here could be found “all that other stuff” which clearly didnot belong to official philosophy, science and theology.

Seen from such a perspective, one understands that if scholars are nowbeginning to recover that domain as an object of serious research, this canhave disconcerting implications. Should we be content merely to create a new,separate space for it, next to the traditional ones of philosophy, science andtheology? Or should we be more radical, and challenge the very principle ofdemarcation and compartmentalization that has caused this field to be setapart in the first place? Personally I believe that we must opt for the secondpossibility, but it is true that such a choice has far-reaching implications that

41) Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography’.


might ultimately undermine not only the concept of Western esotericism asa separate category of research, but even our most basic understandings of“Western identity”.42

. Gottfried Arnold and Esoteric Religionism

My argument implies that Faivre’s understanding of “Western esotericism” asconsisting of a specific series of historical currents, reflected in a “referentialcorpus” of texts, has a solid historical foundation. This concept of what thefield is all about was born in , with the first volume of Colberg’s polemic,and was consolidated due to the work of a series of later authors, notablyJacob Brucker. This is what I mean with the birth of esotericism from the(anti-apologetic) spirit of th-century German Protestantism. The furtherimplication is that not the concept of some esoteric “form of thought”, butrather, the polemical discourse about paganism and all that it implies must begiven a central place in our understanding of the field.

To this conclusion, one important further observation must be added,which leads us back to the crucial distinction between religionist and histori-cal / empirical understandings of Western esotericism. Less than ten years afterColberg, another German Protestant published a massive opus, which mightlikewise claim (and in fact, has been claimed) to be a pioneering work in thehistory of Western esotericism. I am referring, of course, to Gottfried Arnold’sImpartial History of Churches and Heretics of . It seems to me that theactual relevance of this work to the historical study of Western esotericism hasbeen greatly exaggerated, and is in fact very minor. If one actually tries to studythe work, one quickly discovers that Arnold makes no attempt to delineateanything that resembles our modern concepts of Western esotericism: his onlyconcern is with showing that, through the centuries, the “true Christian mes-sage” as he sees it has been preserved in so-called heresies as well as in theestablished churches.

Extremely interesting from our present vantage point, however, is the re-markable similarity between Arnold’s approach and that of religionism alongthe lines of Eranos. Central to the entire work is the true Christian’s inner expe-rience of illumination, which, Arnold believes, may be documented historicallybut cannot itself be traced historically. As formulated by Lehmann-Brauns:

42) Hanegraaff, ‘Forbidden Knowledge’; and cf. ‘Western Esotericism in EnlightenmentHistoriography’. This theme will be developed fully in my forthcoming monograph (cf.note ).


The decisive point is not the proof provided by historical materials, but the evidence ofinner illumination. Where this is experienced, all historical-critical objections becomeirrelevant. …The goal of Arnold’s historiography was that of expounding a “historicaltruth” which might be discoved by the criticism of prejudice [Vorurteilskritik] and bycollecting sources, but any adequate evaluation of which remained dependent on theinner illumination of the historian.43

As a result, Arnold’s great book is based upon the same paradox that is foundso frequently in religionism: that of a “history of esotericism” grounded in adenial of the historicity of esoteric experience. Accordingly, although Arnoldwas aware of Colberg and politely quoted him here and there, he refused torespond to him, or to be drawn into any historical-critical discussion of mysti-cal theology and its relation to pagan philosophy:44 in fact, it is amazing to seehow utterly and completely Arnold ignores paganism even in his discussion ofthe first centuries of Christianity. His leading assumption was a purely theolog-ical one: since paganism is obviously something different from the Christianfaith, it is completely irrelevant to a history of Christianity. As a result, he pre-sented the reader with a wholly decontextualized description of the supposedly“real” and “pure” Christian faith, and of its many degenerations, which neverresult from pagan influence (or from any other historical influence, for thatmatter) but must be explained exclusively from the human tendency to sin.Edifying though such an approach may be for those who share or sympathizewith Arnold’s pietist beliefs, clearly it has nothing to do with historiography orscholarship.

. Conclusion

I have argued that the concept of Western esotericism as a field of critical his-torical research, concerned with a specific series of historical currents and theirreferential corpus of texts, was born from the “anti-apologetic” spirit of Protes-tantism in the work of Ehregott Daniel Colberg. The competing religionistunderstanding of esotericism, as grounded in a fundamentally ahistorical (or,as some prefer, transhistorical) experience of illumination paradoxically pre-sented as a historical phenomenon, may well have been born from the spirit ofProtestantism as well, in the work of his counterpart Gottfried Arnold. To bor-row Russel McCutcheon’s terminology here, Colberg was a “critic” and Arnold

43) Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, .44) Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, , –.


a “caretaker”.45 The conflict between biblical and pagan traditions in antiquity,and their long-term historical results, was basic to Colberg, and I suggest itshould be recognized as central to the contemporary study of Western esoteri-cism as well: the dynamics of this conflict is what constitutes the very core, ordriving energy, central to our field of study. In contrast, the greatest weakness ofthe religionist school (including its theological predecessors, such as Arnold)lies in its remarkable lack of interest in analyzing the historiography of thatsame conflict.

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Wouter J Hanegraaff - Birth of Esotericism