“I am very curious to have your work on magic in hand. I confess I would not dare tackle this dark side and mode of spiritual nature or a natural spirit, and I’m all the happier that you will both illuminate it for us and take up a neglected and scorned subject, restoring it to the honor it deserves.” – Letter from Hegel to Windischmann
First off, this book was a slog. Magee is extremely thorough, and this is clearly written for an academic audience. I don’t mean that as a slight against the author, but just a fair warning to anyone interested in the subject about what you’re getting yourself into. I’ve used the example of trying to hear your way through a tough tune – ‘Dolphin Dance’ for instance – at a jam session. It is an exercise that is difficult and at times humiliating, but also educational.
My main takeaway is that Hegel believed in magic. Whatever crazy nonsense you can think of, he believed it. Visiting seances? Yep. Astrology? Yep. Boiling herbs in water and studying the patterns of oil to reveal a hidden spiritual nature? Yep. Using magnets to heal wounds? Yep. (Side note – Ben Franklin himself traveled to Europe and proved the magnet stuff to be nonsense.)
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Silly Prussians, Americans know that magnets aren’t magic.
My second takeaway is that Hegel’s views on magic were not uncommon at the time, and were a product of the reformation and so-called ‘enlightenment rationalism’. First; theological thinking burst outside the confines of Church teaching, second; people ascribed science with determining ultimate truth, and third; many (including Hegel) treated various non-scientific topics as ‘sCiEnCe.’ I will resist making a direct comparison to the madness of 2020 or current climate hysteria here, but suffice to say, this ‘magical’ thinking has not gone into remission.
Why Does Hegel Matter?
Years ago, I would’ve asked, “Who cares about some German from 200 years ago?” Hegel remains important today because his ideas and disciples played pivotal roles in the history of philosophy, politics, and society of the 20th and now 21st centuries. Marx was a Hegelian. Hegel’s work was central to German idealism and continental philosophy. The USSR was heavily influenced by Hegel as was the Nazi party. Marcuse was heavily influenced by Hegel, and he passed many of these ideas on to his student, Angela Davis (I constantly bring her up because her mug is ubiquitous in public institutions and DEI seminars). Today, popular figures on the internet ranging from Zizek to Thomas777 describe themselves as Hegelian.
Influences aren’t always obvious
When I was in college, I knew a sax player who wanted to play ‘free.’ He was supremely interested in smoking a lot of weed and escaping the jazz tradition. He bristled at the teaching of our shared instructor because of the difficult practice assignments. He wanted to play like Eric Dolphy. Practicing from the Omni book1 was passé. I don’t know if he ever realized this, but there are/were two problems with his approach. The first is that one of Dolphy’s biggest influences was Bird2. The second is that whenever my fellow student wanted to raise the intensity of his solos, he was left with a couple Bird licks he probably learned in high school and some Oliver Nelson patterns. In other words, not only had he not freed himself from the jazz tradition, but he had actually failed to move past 1965 or so. If he had learned every Bird solo, he would have understood exactly what was beyond Bird’s long shadow. Similarly, even if I don’t want to be a Hegelian, it is important to study his life and work if, for no other reason, to know what not to do.
Hegel, Germany. and Nationalism
On a more concrete level, the book notes that Hegel, his influences, and his disciples played important roles in German politics. Occult ideas were in vogue. The illuminati was a real organization, although not all that powerful, and short lived. Hegel was friends with some of the former members. Frederick the Great’s nephew, who became the king of Prussia, was a rosicrucian. In later years, when these reactionary occultists were out of power, Hegel wrote papers in support of them during his Berlin period.
I am not a professional philosopher, so take what I write with a grain of salt, but as far as I can tell, much of the way in which we conceive of the nation-state as a metaphysical entity comes to us from, or at least through Hegel:
“If it is remarkable when a nation has become indifferent to its constitutional theory, to its national sentiments, it’s ethical customs and virtues, it is certainly no less remarkable when a nation loses its metaphysics, when the spirit which contemplates its own pure essence is no longer a present reality in the life of the nation”
And last but not least, when it comes to Germany in particular, Hegel is a/the man who brought hermetic ideas into the 19th century and defined them as particularly German; something that would have disastrous consequences in the 20th.
“Now I can study Jakob Bohme much more closely than before, since I was not myself in possession of his writings. His Theosophy will always be one of the most remarkable attempts of a penetrating yet uncultivated man to comprehend the innermost essential nature of the absolute being. For Germany, he has the special interest of being really the first German philosopher.” (emphasis mine)
What is Hermeticism?
“Hermeticists do not rest content with the idea of an unknowable God. Instead, they seek to penetrate the divine mystery.” – Glenn Magee
Growing up, I always remember the priest chanting “The Mystery of Faith” during the Liturgy. “How is this a mystery?” I thought to myself, “We literally read and talk about this every week at church.” Now I understand that the mystery is in the how and why.How did Jesus’ sacrifice free us from sin? Why, in God’s infinite power, did he choose to redeem us through Christ’s passion in 33 AD? We know the what, but the why and how are beyond our understanding. As Christians, we believe that God is infinite and we are finite. Our finite intellects cannot fully comprehend the infinite nature of God. Depending on one’s attitude, this belief can be comforting or discomforting. For those cursed with intellectual pride (like Hegel), it is discomforting.
Magee describes Hermeticism as a middle road between Christianity and Pantheism. Christians believe that God transcends the world. He created us as an act of gratuitous love, but does not need us in any way. Pantheists believe that God is everywhere and everything. Hermeticism proclaims that God transcends the world, yet he needs us (his creation) in order to fully understand himself. Many hermetic thinkers have used the image of a mirror3. The idea is that God sees himself in us. Some well known Catholic figures including Hildegard von Bingen, St. Alfred the Great (teacher of Thomas Aquinas), and Maester Eckhart drifted into this way of thinking at times.
A couple other quotes related to Hermeticism in particular from Magee:
“Hermeticism replaces the love of wisdom with the lust for power.”
“When acquired, the complete speech, which concerns the whole of reality, will radically transform and empower the life of the enlightened one.”
These numbered lists throughout the book are a godsend. Here we see that hermeticism and gnosticism are related.
Systematic Thought
“Hegel’s thought is not a part of the history of philosophy. It represents an altogether different standpoint, one that represents completed wisdom, not the search for wisdom. Hegel is a wise man offering not Philosophie but Wiesenshaft scientia, episteme.” – Glenn Magee
Hegel’s mode of doing philosophy is fundamentally B.S. (baseless speculation). Magee doesn’t say that explicitly, but he does draw comparisons between the many ways in which philosophy is conventionally performed and what Hegel did. Traditionally, metaphysical discussions occur within the realm of myth. For Hegel it is conceptual.4 Traditionally, knowledge and wisdom are engaged passively (you listen to your teacher); for Hegel it is an active process – an invention. Traditionally, new knowledge is treated critically, “did that really happen? How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
Denton isn’t the only JC Hegel has issues with.
For Hegel, it is received (mystically).5 Traditionally, science is performed through repeated experiments (or a tradition tested through experience). For Hegel, alchemy is performed through intuition and speculation. These speculative modes of thought play out in the modern school, academy, voting booth, etc, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
Don’t take my word for it; here is Hegel:
“The philosophers are closer to the Lord than those who lived by the crumbs of the spirit; they read, or write, the cabinet orders of God in the original; it is their duty to write them down. The philosophers are the mystai who have been present at the decision in the innermost sanctuary.”
Behold the Enlightenment! I’m glad we left superstition behind in the ‘dark ages.’
Alchemy
Alchemy is all about turning lead into gold, right? What does that have to do with Hegel? Magee explains:
“In the minds of the true alchemists, transmutation was not just something that happened in a vessel, but a ‘process which transformed the individual from an ordinary mortal immersed in the physical world to a superior, being fully conscious of the mystery of life and death.’”
Magee goes on to point out that Julius Evola (20th century right-wing esoteric thinker) said that alchemy took on language of physical substances to escape detection as a heresy. As far as I understand it, alchemy within the cultural context of Christendom uses physical substances as an allegory to transmit hermetic heresies. Magee includes a few quotes from Jung on alchemy I found noteworthy. According to Jung, alchemy inverts the relationship between God and man:
“For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.”
“Man takes upon himself the duty of carrying out the redeeming opus, and attributes the state of suffering and consequent need of redemption to the anima Mundi imprisoned in matter.”
Kabbalism
I am way out of my depth on this topic, but what else is the internet for? Kabbalism is an important influence on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. Magee shocks the reader with this line:
“If God is absolute idea then it follows that God is merely formal and irreal”
Being=Nothing. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Joachim di Fiore
Magee doesn’t dig too deep into Joachim Di Fiore, but this name keeps popping up in a variety of books I read,6 so he gets his own heading here. Di Fiore believed history had an eidos – a form. Here is a quote from Voegelin:
“The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.” – The New Science of Politics
In layman’s terms, labeling the historical process itself (‘right side of history’ sound familiar?) becomes an issue when the Christian promise of eternal paradise (heaven) is given in a material context. This can never exist because utopia cannot exist.
Di Fiore believed in three phases of history. The first was the age of the father, the second of the son and the third of the holy spirit. In this third age, Di Fiore believed that the church would become irrelevant and ‘wither away’ as enlightened individuals (monks) communed with God directly. This ‘withering away’ of the church is reminiscent of Marx’ withering away of the state. While Di Fiore himself was never excommunicated as a heretic, some of his followers were, and his writings enjoyed a resurgence during the reformation because they helped to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church. Because Di Fiore rejected the Church as an intermediary institution, he is called the father of pietism, and the milieu of Hegel's Swabia was strongly Pietistic.
If all this sounds a bit like hocus-pocus, Hegel believed that the end of history had been achieved in the Prussian state, and another one of his direct influences, Bengel, described Di Fiore’s 3rd age as the ‘Kingdom of a Thousand Years.’ If you can’t see the connection between this line of thinking and certain events in the 1930’s and 40’s, the German word for Kingdom is ‘Reich’.
Wrap Up
Hegel was a superstitious madman. According to Voegelin, he was a sorcerer. That doesn’t mean you can discount his work out of hand. Some of my absolute favorite musicians – not only to play with, but also to speak with, are/were superstitious madmen. It takes a little bit of insanity to think outside the box and bring something new into the world whether in tones or speech. However, what it does mean, is that Hegel shouldn’t be referenced as an authority on anything. As much as I like playing with musicians that are a little nuts, I wouldn’t leave them around children unsupervised. Similarly, we need to be careful with how we interact with Hegel’s ideas. People may grimace at this, but I put Hegel in a category with Ayn Rand – someone who has some interesting ideas, but is dead wrong on some fundamental issues.
The more I read, the more I am shocked at how pervasive esoteric and occult thinking has been in the West – particularly beginning in the enlightenment. Of course I knew that many American founders were Freemasons, but I’ve come to learn that Masonic conspiracies in countries ranging from Italy to Mexico to Portugal (as recently as the 20th century!) brought openly anti-Catholic governments into power under far more contentious circumstances than what happened here in America. Jordan Peterson calls himself a Jungian. Julius Evola – a popular thinker in rightwing circles, and who I mentioned in the section on alchemy, was an occultist. W.B. Yeats was heavily influenced by the Occult. According to Billy Hart, Coltrane was obsessed with ‘The Urantia Book.’ Neil Tyson opened his edition of ‘Cosmos’ with a lengthy tribute to Giordano Bruno — one of history’s most notorious hermeticists with messianic delusions.
I stumbled across this when visiting Rome and snapped this picture. Remember what I said about Freemasons in Italy? They put up this statue near the Vatican to mock the Catholic Church. It stands as a more tasteful iteration of the satanic displays in America today.
The list goes on and on. In short, you cannot divorce the history of Western Civilization from Hermeticism – especially after the enlightenment. As faithful Catholics, we should engage with this as people ‘in the world but not of the world’ much as the Scholastics did with Aristotle. We are not Amish totally divorced from society, but we do not uncritically accept the teachings of our institutions defined by their heresy.
Lastly, in a broader historical context, I occasionally think of the Albigensian crusade. Why was such a bloody war waged over a theological dispute? Were people in the 13th century primitive barbarians? They may not be so different from us. Referring to disputes between left and right-Hegelians, philosopher Richard Rorty said that they “eventually sorted out their differences at a six-month-long seminar called ‘the Battle of Stalingrad.’”
A subtle difference in belief – pronouns, definition of truth, immigration policy & national identity, the nature of ‘justice,’ etc. is never ‘just’ anything. Just as interpretations of Hegel were ‘sorted out’ in 1943, a pronoun debate is not just a word, it is a debate about epistemology that goes deeper than Hegel in fact. This understanding should give us the necessary motivation to approach current topics of belief with seriousness.
For example, in the French revolution, ‘lady Liberty’ was a symbol of Liberty, but Liberty itself was not considered a real entity. For Hegel, the ‘absolute idea’ was a real entity and not just a symbol. It was the dialectic synthesis of being and nothing.
