[First published in Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 30-76, this essay had a long pre-history. An early outline of its arguments was presented in a paper delivered to the research seminar of the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex in November, 1975; subsequent developments appeared in the final chapter of my doctoral thesis (“This Fatal Mirror”: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the Legend and the Context [University of Sussex, 1980]), and in a conference paper, “'The Order of Discovery': Descartes, Faustus, and the Place of Literature in the Teaching of Philosophy,” 14th Atlantic Philosophical Association Conference, Université Sainte-Anne (4-6 November 1983).]

[Index: René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Herrmes

Trismegistus, Jean Calvin, Jacques Derrida]

[Date: 1996]

The Dreamer's Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century

Michael H. Keefer

[Descartes] ne croioit pas qu'on dût s'étonner si fort de voir que les Poëtes, même ceux qui ne font que niaiser, fussent pleins de sentences plus graves, plus sensées, & mieux exprimées que celles qui se trouvent dans les écrits des Philosophes. Il attribuoit cette merveille à la divinité de l'Enthousiasme, & à la force de l'Imagination. . . .

Adrien Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691), paraphrasing Descartes' Olympica manuscript of 1619-1620 (Descartes, 1974, 10: 184)1

Methode ist Umweg.

1 In quoting from Renaissance and seventeenth-century sources, I have modernized u/v and i/j, but have not altered spellings in any other way.

1

Walter Benjamin, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin, 1985, 21, 28)

I

Jacques Derrida begins a recent reflection upon Descartes' Discours de la

méthode by remarking upon the metaphor of the path, the way or road contained within

the etymology of the word 'method': “methodos, metahodos, c'est-à-dire 'suivant la

route', suivant le chemin, en suivant le chemin, en chemin.” Implicit in this metaphor, as

also in any concept of method, he finds a certain historicity: “There can be no method

without, necessarily, an advance (cheminement)..., or proceeding (démarche); ... without

a flow (cours), a sequel, a sequence: so many things which also form the structure of any

history” (Derrida, 1983, 36 [my translation]). If method and history (including the sense

of history as narrative) thus meet and overlap in the metaphor of the road or way—hodos

in Greek, and in Latin via, iter—so too, Derrida suggests, they share a certain iterability.

History, though it may be the domain of the singular event, is only constituted as history

through iteration and reiteration. Method, on the other hand, which consists precisely of

the rules of transposition that ensure iterability and repetition, annuls a certain historicity

of the singular event.

The relation between history and method is thus, he proposes, a paradoxical one

—and this paradox is displayed in an especially provoking form in the singular historical

event constituted by Descartes' autobiographical discourse on method, a story told in a

historically determined language which at the same time sets out to provide the

foundations for a rational and universally valid system of precepts, maxims and laws.

Derrida finds that the etymology of the word 'discourse' compounds the paradox.

Discurrere, meaning to run about, to make an excursion, and also to digress, later came

to signify, in addition, to follow an itinerary in speech. Discursivity is thus in effect

2

itinerant speech, and the notion of a discourse on method acquires an element of

redundancy through the traces in both its terms of the same hodos, cursus, path or

itinerary (Derrida, 1983, 37-40).

After commenting on Parmenides' Poem of the hodos as an inaugural discourse of

the path which resists incorporation either into a Platonic reflection on method or an

Aristotelian system of rhetoric, and on Heidegger's view of the Wegcharakter des

Denkens as a second instance of a discursive itinerary which exceeds the delimitations of

direction, rules, or method, Derrida concludes by remarking on the doubleness, the

duplicity of methodos and its cognates in Greek (in some contexts the word means

artifice, fraud or perversion—voie détournée, meta hodos), and by observing how

insistently roads and paths—“diverses voies,” “le droit chemin”—recur in Descartes'

Discourse on Method (Derrida, 1983, 41-51).

Given Derrida's insistent blurring in this essay of method and history, of

rationality and rhetorical sequentiality; given also his express dissatisfaction with

Heidegger's attempts to ascribe to “the Cartesian moment” the origins of an “ideology of

method” (46),2 it may seem surprising that he does not take this occasion to reinsert the

Cartesian discourse on method into history, to recognize it as a re-direction and extension

of discursive itineraries that had perhaps been well-travelled by Descartes' immediate

predecessors.

Rather than reproaching him for this omission, I would like here to explore a

small stretch of this 'road not taken.' I will not be concerned with what is, for rhetoricians

at least, the most familiar immediately pre-Cartesian 'method,' the dichotomizing

dialectic of Peter Ramus and its anticipations in such earlier writers as Rudolf Agricola

2 Derrida remarks that “there is always a moment in [Heidegger's] analysis when, more or less furtively, discretely, he discloses before Descartes—notably in Plato rather than in Aristotle, but in the Greeks at any rate, the beginnings of this Verstellung, this disfiguration” (46). Derrida would of course object to the notion that any secure point of origin can ever be identified.

3

and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples.3 Descartes was conspicuously not interested in static,

spatial schemata of this kind, preferring instead to elaborate a method which, though

aimed at the discovery of operative eternal truths, was itself conceived of in temporal

terms, as a discursive path, a narrative. Nor do I intend to comment on Descartes'

indebtedness to another more obviously scientific method, the metodo risolutivo and

metodo compositivo developed by Galileo out of the analytic and synthetic logic of

Giacomo Zabarella and the other Paduan Aristotelians (see Randall, 1968, 222-51, and

Randall, 1962-70, 1: 339-60).4

My own method in this essay, following the dictum of Walter Benjamin

—“Methode ist Umweg”—will at times be deliberately digressive. However, my

deviations from some of the standard paths of critical exegesis are undertaken with the

aim of bringing to light certain continuities between Descartes' own narratives and earlier

discursive paths. I want to argue that two of these, Renaissance Hermetism and its near-

opposite, Calvinist theology, are of large (and largely unrecognized) importance in

Descartes' development of his own distinctive path.

Étienne Gilson's demonstration that Descartes' philosophical vocabulary is

affiliated to the scholastic traditions of the via antiqua and the via moderna has not

prevented more recent commentators from continuing to understand Descartes as the fons

et origo of a specifically modern mode of philosophizing. My intention here is less to

3 On Ramus and Agricola see Ong. Ramus was no doubt familiar with Lefèvre's Introductio in Ethicen Aristotelis (Paris, 1525), which begins (sig. a.ijr-v) with a table of dichotomized virtues and vices, states of mind etc., each of which is then treated in three sections: a definition, a sequence of quaestiones, and answers to these (elementa). 4 In addition to a directly methodological indebtedness, one might suggest that Descartes would have found resonances with the 1619 experience discussed in this essay in a passage like the following, from Galileo's The Assayer (1623): “that [philosopher] will indeed be fortunate who, led by some unusual inner light, can turn from dark and confused labyrinths in which he might have gone perpetually winding with the crowd . . .” (Galileo 240). The thinking of Zabarella may also have reached Descartes through other channels: see for example Alister McGrath's suggestive remarks on the influence of Zabarella on Théodore de Bèze's systematizing of Calvin's theology (McGrath 191-95).

4

disrupt than to complicate this perception. I do not wish to challenge Descartes'

originality, much less to suggest that he was passively 'influenced' by two currents of

sixteenth-century thought which, though both obsessively concerned with a recovery of

origins, differ from one another in doctrinal terms as much as from his own project of

returning to first principles. I am interested rather in considering the possibility that

Descartes' originary rationalism may have been marked, in no merely superficial manner,

by tendencies of a quite different order which were implicated in its primal gestures of

constitution and exclusion.

Descartes was, if anything, reacting against Renaissance modes of speculation (in

this sense he belongs to what has been called the “anti-Renaissance”). However, he was

also re-using them, though very selectively. His path remains, by this analysis, original;

but it seems to have begun, in a characteristically Renaissance manner, with a return ad

fontes—in one case to Hermetic sources which owed their prestige to the belief that they

antedated the Greek philosophers, and were as ancient as any of the Hebrew scriptures;

and in another to theological writings which, in their analytical and exegetical rigor, were

professedly a return to the uncorrupted teachings of the early Church.

II

Where better to begin than with the first appearance in Descartes' writings of the

path, the hodos or iter that so interests Jacques Derrida? The text in question, a mere

jotting preserved in the notes which Leibniz made in 1676 from Descartes' manuscript

remains, could hardly be simpler:

Somnium 1619 nov., in quo carmen 7 cujus initium:

Quod vitae sectabor iter? . . . Auson[ius] (Descartes,

1974, 10: 216).

5

(“The dream of November 1619, and in it the seventh poem of

Ausonius which begins: 'What path in life shall I follow?”)

Though simple, this jotting is of enormous import—for according to Descartes'

first biographer, Adrien Baillet, the dream (or rather dreams) referred to here coincided

with what Descartes himself in his Discourse on Method said was the first enunciation of

his philosophical method, and hence the starting point of his path as an independent

thinker. But this brief text is at the same time elusive. Henri Gouhier took it to represent

an inaugural moment—the moment at which, having woken from his dreams, the young

Descartes began the process of retrospectively reconstructing them as a legitimation of

his philosophical project.5 However, it seems no less probable that these words are

Leibniz's rather than Descartes'—that they amount to a reading note, rather than a

transcription from that “petit registre en parchemin” which was found among Descartes'

papers after his death, and which at some time in the eighteenth century was lost or

destroyed. But whatever the authorship of this text, another sentence of Leibniz's—this

time definitely in his own words—confirms Baillet's view of the importance of the dream

or dreams:

Descartes for a long time devoted himself to studies at the Jesuit

college of La Flèche, and as a young man formed the plan of

emending philosophy after some dreams, and long meditation on

5 Ascribing this text to Descartes' Experimenta manuscript, Gouhier identifies it as the experiential basis of the dream-narrative in the Olympica manuscript, according to which Descartes awoke for the third and final time while meditating on the poem of Ausonius beginning “Quod vitae sectabor iter?” Gouhier argues that the further removed in time anything in the narrative is from this waking moment, the more completely it is a retrospective reconstruction rather than an account of any actual dream-experience (Gouhier, 32-41). Resting as it does upon the assumption that the words in question are Descartes' rather than Leibniz's, this argument scarcely justifies Gouhier's reference in inverted commas to “les 'songes' de Descartes.” Even if the words are Descartes', it is not evident to me why one part of an autobiographical text should be privileged as being somehow less a retrospective reconstruction than all the rest of it.

6

that passage of Ausonius: “What path in life shall I follow?”

(Leibniz, 4: 311, qtd. from Browne, 265)6

Moreover, Descartes' own account of this episode is preserved, though in distorted form,

in Baillet's paraphrase of his lost Olympica manuscript.

In what sense, then, is it significant that the question remembered in these brief

annotations—“Quod vitae sectabor iter?”—and remembered, it would seem, as a

metonymy for the whole of Descartes' annunciatory experience of the night of November

10-11, 1619, came to him not as part of a methodical sequence of thought, but in a

dream-revelation, one which he received (to cite his own words, quoted by Baillet) “cùm

plenus forem Enthousiasmo”—in a state, that is, of divine exaltation, inspiration, or

possession? (Descartes, 1974, 10: 179).7 And what should we make of the fact that the

choice of paths presented itself, at the moment which Descartes then and subsequently

understood as the inauguration of his own hodos and his own method, in the form of a

citation from the poet Ausonius, and thus as something already iterated and reiterated?

Let us consider these dreams. Adrien Baillet's Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes

(1691), which paraphrases extensively from the manuscripts to which the biographer had

access, reveals that Descartes' philosophizing in his famous “poêle” in the winter of 1619

was, initially at least, a different process from that orderly sequence of thoughts

recounted in the Discourse on Method. This process appears to have culminated in three

dreams on the night of November 10th, 1619, in the course of which Descartes was

crippled by ghosts, whirled about by a sudden wind, pushed by an evil spirit—this same

6 Leibniz's Latin original: “Cartesius diu Flexiae in collegio Jesuitarum studiis operam dedit, juvenisque emendandae Philosophiae consilium cepit post somnia quaedam et illud Ausonii diu expensum: quod vitae sectabor iter?” 7 'Enthusiasm here carries a sense close to that of 'divine inzpirtion.' See Henry More, Enthusiasmus triumphatis, sect. II (More, 1: sig.s4v). My quotations in English from Descartes' writings are, where possible, based upon the translation of Haldane and Ross (Descartes, 1973)--although in places where this translaton seems to me inaccurate, I have not hesitated to modify it. Page references are in most cases given to the Latin and/or French texts in the editions of Adam and Tannery (Descartes, 1974) or of Alquié (Descartes, 1963-73).

7

wind—towards (of all places) a church, advised that an unnamed person wished to give

him a melon, frightened by thunder, and finally engaged by another unknown person in

conversation over a Dictionary, which signified “nothing other than all the sciences

brought together,” and an anthology of Latin verse, by which Descartes understood

“Philosophy and Wisdom joined together” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 181-84).

For what it may be worth, we have Descartes' word that his meditations in 1619

were bound up with an exercise of deliberate doubt. In Part Two of the Discourse he says

of this aspect of his meditations in the “poêle” that “as regards all the opinions which up

to this time I had embraced, I thought I could not do better than endeavour once for all to

sweep them completely away, so that they might later on be replaced, either by others

which were better, or by the same, when I had made them conform to the uniformity of a

rational scheme” (Descartes, 1973, 1: 89; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 581). If Baillet's Vie

de Monsieur Des-Cartes can be trusted, this was a painful experience: “he had no less to

suffer than if it had been a matter of stripping away his very self.” And according to

Baillet, this self-imposed torment, this attempt to represent his mind to himself “entirely

naked,” led directly to the night of dreams. Descartes' efforts “threw his mind into violent

agitation.... He tired it to such a degree that his brain became overheated, and he fell into

a kind of enthusiasm which so worked upon his already exhausted mind that he prepared

it to receive the impressions of dreams and visions” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 180-81).8 The

dreams thus seem not to have been an accidental by-product of this process, but rather its

8 Baillet's French: “.... il n'eut pas moins à souffrir, que s'il eût été question de se dépouiller de soy-même. Il crût pourtant en être venu à bout. Et à dire vrai, c'étoit assez que son imagination lui présentât son esprit tout nud, pour lui faire croire qu'il l'avoit mis effectivement dans cét état. Il ne lui restoit que l'amour de la Vérité.... Ce fut la matiére unique des tourmens qu'il fit souffrir à son esprit pour lors.... La recherche qu'il voulut faire de ces moiens, jetta son esprit dans de violentes agitations.... Il le fatigua de telle sorte, que le feu lui prît au cerveau, & qu'il tomba dans une espéce d'enthousiasme, qui disposa de telle manière son esprit déjà abatu, qu'il le mit en état de recevoir les impressions des songes & des visions.” Baillet does not indicate any textual source for these statements. For a discussion of the problems raised by the fact that Descartes' Olympica survives only in a few fragments, and in Baillet's paraphrase and commentary, see Moyal.

8

desired consummation. Indeed, Baillet attributes to Descartes' Olympica manuscript the

statements “that the Genius which excited in him the enthusiasm by which he had felt his

brain heated for some days had predicted these dreams to him before he went to bed, and

that the human mind had no part in them” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 186).9

What path can be traced in these dreams? In the first of them, Descartes was

terrified by the apparition of “quelques fantômes,” and thinking he was walking in the

streets, he felt himself to be struck by such a weakness on his right side that he could not

maintain himself upright, and had to “lean to his left side in order to be able to get to the

place where he wanted to go....” Ashamed of this posture, he tried to straighten himself,

but a sudden swirling gust of wind spun him around three or four times on his left foot.

Hardly able to stand, he noticed a school in front of him—one is reminded of the Jesuit

college of La Flèche where he was educated—and entered it “to find a refuge, and a

remedy for his disorder”: he hoped to reach the school church and to pray there

(Descartes, 1974, 10: 181).

The structure of the dream seems clear up to this point. It is the right side of

Descartes' body image that is struck with weakness. If one can apply to the imagery of

this dream some of the conventional associations of 'left' and 'right,' then the phantoms,

the sinister wind and the weakness of Descartes' right side would together represent

opposition, both internal and 'demonic,' to his conscious project of ridding himself of his

former opinions, of stripping his mind naked. The most conspicuous clothing of the mind

(to fill out the Neoplatonic metaphor) is the body; one might say that through the

humiliating terrors of this dream the demonic body is fighting back. And in so doing it

deflects the dreamer from his initial path, meta hodos: almost from the first moment of

his dream, then, he is following a “voie détournée.”

9 Baillet's French: “Il ajoute que le Génie qui excitoit en luy l'enthousiasme dont il se sentoit le cerveau échauffé depuis quelques jours, luy avoit prédit ces songes avant que se mettre au lit, & que l'esprit humain n'y avoit aucune part.”

9

Having decided to enter the church, the dreaming Descartes would seem, rather

curiously, to have begun to find reasons for not doing so. Realizing that he had passed a

man whom he knew without saluting him, he attempted to turn back, but was violently

rebuffed by the wind. At the same time, though, he noticed another person, who called

him politely by name, and informed him that a certain gentleman had something to give

him—the famous melon. As a group of other people formed around him, Descartes, still

hunched over, observed that they stood upright and firm on their feet, and also that the

wind was greatly diminished in force. At this point he awoke—without having entered

the church, one may remark.

The path marked out by this first dream is a paradoxical one. Descartes at its

beginning had a goal, “the place where he wanted to go”; but crippled by the ghosts, and

spun about by the wind, he directed his steps instead to a church as a place of refuge,

only to find that the wind which had previously obstructed him was now pushing him in

that direction, while at the same time blowing against the church (“le vent … souffloit

contre l'Eglise”). What seems really to have frightened Descartes—Baillet's wording is

unfortunately imprecise at this point10—was not so much his own disability, or the

humiliation of being spun around like a top, as the discovery that the wind which had

attacked him was furthering his decision to seek refuge in a church. His own pious will

was suddenly revealed to be in accord with the demonic force which was oppressing him.

10 Baillet wrote as follows: “Etant honteux de marcher de la sorte, il fit un effort pour se redresser; mais il sentit un vent impétueux qui, l'emportant dans une espéce de tourbillon, lui fit faire trois ou quatre tours sur le pied gauche. Ce ne fut pas encore ce qui l'épouvanta. La difficulté qu'il avoit de se traîner, faisoit qu'il croioit tomber à chaque pas, jusqu'à ce qu'ayant apperçu un collége ouvert sur son chemin, il entra dedans pour y trouver une retraite, & un reméde à son mal. Il tâcha de gagner l'Eglise du collége, où sa prémiére pensée étoit d'aller faire sa priére; mais s'étant apperçu qu'il avoit passé un homme de sa connoissance sans le saluër, il voulut retourner sur ses pas pour lui faire civilité, & il fut repoussé avec violence par le vent qui souffloit contre l'Eglise.” The dreamer's terror might have been inspired by the fact that he found himself scarcely able to stagger along, but given that he was a young man with philosophical ambitions, it was more probably prompted by the paradox with which the episode of his turn towards the college church culminates.

10

One could hardly ask for a clearer dream image of psychic overdetermination. The issue

raised is that of autonomy or free-will: if Descartes wills what the wind wills, then what

is his will—or, more precisely, whose is it? The young Descartes has no answer to this

question: as he wrote in what Henri Gouhier believes to have been part of the Olympica

manuscript, “God made three marvels: things from nothing, free-will, and the Man-God”

(Descartes, 1974, 10: 218).11

Descartes' own interpretations of this first dream only heighten the sense of

paradox. On waking, “he felt a real pain, which made him fear that this might have been

the work of some evil genius who wished to seduce him.... He prayed to God, asking to

be guarded from the evil effect of his dream....” But the process of interpretation which

continued after he awoke from his third and last dream complicated this identification of

the power at work in the first one. According to Baillet's paraphrase, “The wind which

pushed him towards the college church when his right side was weakened was none other

than the evil Genius which was trying to throw him by force into a place where he was

planning to go voluntarily.” In the margin Baillet quotes Descartes' own words: “A malo

Spiritu ad Templum propellebar.” He continues: “This is why God did not permit him to

advance further and let himself be carried, even into a holy place, by a spirit whom He

had not sent—although Descartes was convinced that it had been the Spirit of God who

had made him take his first steps towards this church” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 182, 185-

86).12

11 See Gouhier, 11-17, for an analysis of the relations between the Olympica manuscript and the texts preserved in Leibniz's copy under the title Cogitationes privatae. 12 Baillet's French: “Il se réveilla..., & il sentit à l'heure même une douleur effective, qui lui fit craindre que ce ne fût l'opération de quelque mauvais génie qui l'auroit voulu séduire. […. ] Le vent qui le poussoit vers l'Eglise du collège, lorsqu'il avoit mal au coté droit, n'étoit autre chose que le mauvais Génie qui tâchoit de le jetter par force dans un lieu, òu son dessein étoit d'aller volontairement. C'est pourquoy Dieu ne permit pas qu'il avançât plus loin, & qu'il se laissât emporter, même en un lieu saint, par un Esprit qu'il n'avoit pas envoyé: quoy qu'il fût trés-persuadé que c'eût été l'Esprit de Dieu qui luy avoit fait faire les prémiéres démarches vers cette Eglise.”

11

The dreamer's behaviour is thus, in retrospect, doubly overdetermined—first by

the demonic forces represented in the dream, and then, simultaneously, by the God whom

his interpretation inscribes in it as the initial prompter and final preventer of his

movement towards the church, and thus as the unseen author of what had seemed to be

Descartes' own actions. One is left with a disturbing overlap between the (presumably

good) Genius who excited Descartes' state of enthusiasm and predicted his dreams to

him, the evil spirit or evil Genius who in the first of those dreams attempted to push him

into a church, and the God whom his interpretation summoned up to dispose of this

paradox.

Baillet tells us that after dreaming his first dream, Descartes meditated for some

two hours. He then fell asleep again, but was awakened at once by a sound like a clap of

thunder, “and opening his eyes, he saw many sparks of fire scattered about the room.”

This second dream, which he initially found as terrifying as the first, he later understood

to be “the signal of the Spirit of Truth which descended on him to possess him”; the

terror which it inspired was “the remorse of his conscience over the sins he might have

committed in the course of his life till then” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 182, 186).13

The third dream, while lacking the narrative shape of the first, condenses its vivid

imagery into a textual metonymy, and supplements this with what is quite clearly a

13 Baillet's French: “... il crût entendre un bruit aigu & éclatant, qu'il prit pour un coup de tonnére. La frayeur qu'il en eut, le réveilla sur l'heure même; et ayant ouvert les yeux, il apperçût beaucoup d'étincelles de feu répandües par la chambre. […. ] L'épouvante dont il fut frappé dans le second songe, marquoit, à son sens, sa syndérêse, c'est-à-dire, les remords de sa conscience touchant les péchez qu'il pouvoit avoir commis pendant le cours de sa vie jusqu'alors. La foudre dont il entendit l'éclat, étoit le signal de l'Esprit de Vérité qui descendoit sur luy pour le posséder.” A connection between sparks and synderesis appears to be traditional. Meister Eckhart wrote as follows about the parable in Luke 14: 16-17 of the man who prepared a great feast and sent his servant to invite his friends: “It seems to me that this servant is the spark of the soul [daz vünkelin der sele], which is created by God and inserted [into the soul] as a light from above. It is an image of divine nature, contantly opposed to everything that is not of God. But it is not a power of the soul.... It is called a synteresis, and that designates both a connection [with God] and an aversion [from all that is not God]. It has two activities. The one is bitter combat against every impurity. The other is constant attraction to what is good” (qtd. from Ozment, 7).

12

response to the project of Descartes' waking mind. In this dream, which he took to

signify his future, Descartes found two books upon his table, a dictionary and an

anthology of Latin poetry: it was in the latter of these that he found the poem of

Ausonius beginning with the words “Quod vitae sectabor iter?” which he appears later

to have remembered as a metonymy for the whole dream-experience. Before he awoke,

Descartes understood the dictionary to mean “nothing other than all the sciences brought

together,” while the anthology “indicated in particular, and in a distinct manner,

Philosophy and Wisdom joined together”; upon waking, “he was bold enough to

persuade himself that it was the Spirit of Truth who had wished to open the treasures of

all the sciences to him by this dream” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 184-85).14

III

But in what manner were these dreams related to the path Descartes did in fact

follow, or to the philosophical method which is its most important textual residue?

Baillet interpreted Descartes' words “X. Novembris 1619, cùm plenus forem

Enthousiasmo, & mirabilis scientiae fundamenta reperirem &c.” as meaning that on the

day preceding the night of dreams he had discovered, in a state of exaltation, the

foundations of a marvellous science. By this account, the dreams would seem not to have

constituted his discovery, but rather to have confirmed it, and perhaps expanded its

implications.

14 Baillet's French: “Il jugea que le Dictionnaire ne vouloit dire autre chose que toutes les Sciences ramassées ensemble; & que le Recueil de Poësies, intitulé Corpus poëtarum, marquoit en particulier, & d'une maniére plus distincte, la Philosophie & la Sagesse jointes ensemble. [… ] Voyant que l'application de toutes ces choses réüssissoit si bien à son gré, il fut assez hardi pour se persuader que c'étoit l'Esprit de Vérité qui avoit voulu lui ouvrir les trésors de toutes les sciences par ce songe."

13

The nature of the “marvellous science” remains to some extent a mystery. That it

was initially unclear to Descartes himself may be suggested by a marginal note which,

according to Baillet, he added to the Olympica manuscript: “XI. Novembris 1620, coepi

intelligere fundamentum Inventi mirabilis” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 179): “November 11,

1620, I began to understand the foundations of the marvellous invention.”15 This

marvellous science would seem to have included some of the ideas on method developed

in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written by 1628). The concept of a universal

wisdom to be attained through a recognition of the interrelatedness of all the sciences

(Rule 1) is clearly present in the dictionary and the anthology of the third dream. And the

evident parallel between Descartes' “simple natures” theory (Rules 6, 8, 12) and the

geometrical problems upon which he had been working in 1618 and early 1619 suggests

that he had struck upon the idea of generalizing that mathematical logic, which he

described to Isaac Beeckman in March 1619 as a “fundamentally new science,” and also

as “an incredibly ambitious project” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 37-39), into a universal

method of inquiry. More important, from my point of view, is the strong probability that

the meditations which culminated in the dreams of 1619 embodied a process of deliberate

doubt that was aimed at establishing an unshakeable “knowledge of the naked

understanding”—upon which “the knowledge of all things else depends” (Rules for the

Direction of the Mind, Rule 8; Descartes, 1973, 1: 24-25).

Almost a decade after the annunciatory experience of his dreams, Descartes

returned to this use of doubt in a more rigorous manner: in Part III of the Discourse he

dates to the years 1628-29 his formulation of the arguments which led him through a

systematic doubt of everything that could be doubted to the Archimedean point of “I

15 Jacques Maritain followed G. Milhaud in rejecting Baillet's interpretation of the mirabilis scientia and proposing that “the plenitude of enthusiasm, the dream and the discovery are but one and the same event” (Maritain, 189n.). Most interpreters, however, associate the mirabilis scientia with the method, and regard the dreams as an authentication of meditations which preceded them. See, for example, Schuster, 83-84 n. 32, 87 n. 64.

14

think, therefore I am,” and from thence to a reconstruction of philosophy (Descartes,

1973, 1: 100).16 His letters, as R. H. Popkin has noted, also indicate “that around 1628-29

he was struck by the full force of the sceptical onslaught [that is, of the contemporary

revival of Pyrrhonism], and the need for a new and stronger answer to it” (Popkin, 174).

There are clear differences between the doubt of 1619 and that of 1628-29. The

latter formed part of a sophisticated argument, while the former, though in some sense

methodical, and evidently expected to produce a guarantee of reliable knowledge,

appears not to have been integrated into any systematic philosophical construction.

Moreover, while the doubt of 1628-29 could be described as abstract and theoretical, that

of 1619, as the dreams attest, was inextricably linked to the path of Descartes' own life.

But despite these differences, Descartes seems to have seen a close connection between

his meditations in the “poêle” and the argument he constructed almost a decade later. In

Part II of the Discourse (which also contains a masked allusion to the dreams of 1619),17

the description of his doubting in 1619 is closely followed by the enunciation of the four

elementary rules of his method, the first of which proposes a criterion of clarity and

distinctness as the basis for determining which judgements may be accepted as

indubitable. The use of this criterion is thus made a part of the 1619 meditations—even

16 Descartes' allusion to Archimedes occurs at the beginning of the Second Meditation (Descartes, 1973, 1: 149). The Regulae or Rules presumably antedate the precise formulation of these arguments; they show, nonetheless, that he had already worked out some of their elements. Consider his first example of an intellectual intuition: “... each individual can mentally have intuition of the fact that he exists, and that he thinks” (Rule 3; Descartes, 1973, 1: 7). In Rule 12 he writes that “If Socrates says he doubts everything, it follows necessarily that he knows this at least—that he doubts”; and he presents the following propositions as necessary rather than contingent: “'I exist, therefore God exists' … 'I know, therefore I have a mind distinct from my body'” (Descartes, 1973, 1: 43). 17 Descartes writes: “But, like a man who walks alone and in darkness, I resolved to go so slowly, and to use so much circumspection in all things, that even if I advanced only very little, I would at least take care not to fall” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 584). As Georges Poulet observed, “toute cette seconde partie du Discours est, sans que Descartes y fit formellement mention du songe, remplie de l'expérience même que le songe lui communiqua” (Poulet 24).

15

though its philosophical basis is established only in Part IV in the argument which

follows from the systematic doubt of 1628-29.

A more conclusive link between the experience of 1619 and the argument of

1628-29 can be found in the unfinished dialogue La recherche de la vérité par la lumière

naturelle, in which Descartes' spokesman responds to objections against the systematic

doubt which he is proposing with the assurance that

these doubts which alarmed you to begin with, are like phantoms

and vain images which appear at night in the uncertain glimmer of a

feeble light. If you flee from them, your fear will follow you, but if

you approach as though to touch them, you will discover them to be

no more than air and shadow, and will in the future feel more

confident in any such encounter. (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1121)18

This is, unmistakably, an echo of the first of Descartes' three dreams: he was frightened

by phantoms, and crippled by a demonic wind; but he resisted, and after the thunderbolt

of his second dream and the revelation of the third, could look back on these terrors

without fear. Perhaps more importantly, this passage provides a link between the evil

genius of Descartes' first dream and that other evil genius who constitutes the final,

'hyperbolic' form of Cartesian doubt in the Meditations of 1641: the phantoms, who in

the dream of 1619 were clearly allied to the wind, here represent systematic doubt.

This linkage between the doubt and dream-experience of 1619, the argument

refuting scepticism which Descartes developed in 1628-29 and to which he gave literary

form in La recherche de la vérité and in the Discourse, and the Meditations in which he

cemented the metaphysical foundations of his new philosophy, draws our attention to the

18 The French text: “... je vous avertis que ces doutes, qui vous ont fait peur à l'abord, sont comme des fantômes et vaines images, qui paraissent la nuit à la faveur d'une lumière débile et incertaine: si vous les fuyez, votre crainte vous suivra; mais si vous approchez comme pour les toucher, vous découvrirez que ce n'est rien, que de l'air et de l'ombre, et en serez à l'avenir plus assuré en pareille rencontre.”

16

banal fact that the arguments of systematic doubt are a threat to, and the Archimedean

point of cogito, ergo sum a proclamation of, human autonomy. The connection may also

serve as a reminder that what Cartesian philosophy identifies as its own primal scene

remained substantially unchanged between 1619 and the 1640s. The dream-walker of

1619, or the thinker of the Meditations who is willing to assume that his thoughts may be

a dream, encounters or hypothesizes an evil Genius who threatens to make him the

helpless object of its manipulations. In this sense the evil spirit of 1619 poses the more

radical threat, raising the unanswerable question of whether Descartes' decision to seek

refuge in a church was psychologically overdetermined; the power of the evil Genius in

the Second Meditation, in contrast, is restricted to the epistemic level by Descartes'

insistence that his own thoughts “spring up of themselves” in his mind, and are inspired

by nothing beyond his own nature (for the Latin and French versions of this passage, see

Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 183, 417 respectively).

The dreamer escapes from this predicament through an act of resistance—in the

first case by refusing to let the spirit push him into a church, and in the second by

insisting, “let [the evil Genius] deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to

be nothing so long as I think I am something” (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150; cf. Descartes,

1963-73, 2: 183, 415)—an act which is then divinely authenticated. In 1619 Descartes

subsequently discovers in his resistance the agency of a benevolent God who wanted to

reveal to him the treasures of all the sciences; in 1641 he argues the existence of a

similarly benevolent God, who “cannot be a deceiver” (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150

[Meditation II], 1: 171 [Meditation III), and who thus provides him with the criterion of

clarity and distinctness that legitimizes his method of discovery.

IV

17

The very improbability, the extravagance of a path which, beginning in religious

enthusiasm and dreams, appears to lead without detour to the method of Cartesian

rationalism, will perhaps justify a degree of interpretive indirection on our part. The

result may be a kind of fable. But so also, by Descartes' own account, is the Discourse on

Method—which, in a well-known passage, modestly indicating that he does not insist that

others should adopt the paths he himself has followed, he likens to “a history, or, if you

prefer it, a fable....”

Three paragraphs later, speaking not of his own text but of the histories and fables

of the ancients, Descartes remarks that “fables make one imagine many events possible

which in reality are not so, and even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly

misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of

being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least

notable....” He compares the reading of such texts, which he himself abandoned once his

schooling was finished, to travel in foreign lands, too much of which, he says, makes one

“a stranger in one's own country”—this from a man who had spent more than half of the

preceding two decades outside his native France (Discourse, I; Descartes, 1973, 1: 83,

84-85).

One notes with interest the inadvertent warning here, and also the implicit link

between Descartes' own history or fable and those of the ancients, which it seems to be

part of his purpose to supplant. Is there perhaps, in addition, some more intimate

connection between this autobiographical narrative and certain ancient fables (a word

which Descartes' text does not require us to understand in a narrowly literal sense)? In

one of the paragraphs which intervene between the passages I have quoted, he writes that

“la gentillesse des fables réveille l'esprit”: “the grace of fables awakens the mind”

(Discours, I; Descartes 1963-73, 1: 572). He is speaking here of the education of

children. But it may shortly come to appear that the connection between fables and

18

intellectual awakening has deeper resonances in the writings of this dreamer, this

consummate story-teller.

Taking the word 'fable' in its widest sense, as applying not merely to a certain

kind of moralized or didactic narrative, but also more generally to discursive paths and

narratives of legitimation to which we grant at best a partial or conditional assent, let us

ask which of the 'fables' current in Descartes' early manhood could have provided him

with the materials—including the dream-revelation of November 1619—for the

construction of his own history or fable, the Cartesian Bildungsroman.

The answer will not necessarily be a simple one. Writers of the period were

almost inescapably caught up in complex ideological, and often also physical, conflicts.

Descartes was himself serving as a volunteer with the Imperial army in the opening

campaign of the Thirty Years' War when he experienced his dream-revelation, and while

in Germany he experienced some of the excitement generated by the apocalyptic

fantasies of those bizarre offshoots of Lutheranism and Hermetic magic, the Rosicrucian

manifestos (texts which, as Frances Yates showed, there is good reason to connect with

the political and ideological tensions that led to war).19 During his absence from France

there occurred the Huguenot revolt of 1621, one of the instigators of which, the tragic

poet Antoine de Montchrestien, was killed in a skirmish in Normandy that October

(Griffiths, 14-18). And on Descartes' return to Paris in 1623 he was himself briefly

suspected of being one of the Rosicrucian 'invisibles,' over whose supposed arrival in the

city to spread their 'atheistical' and magical doctrines writers like the Jesuit François

Garasse were trying to stir up alarm. For Descartes this was a dangerous situation: in

1619 Giulio Cesare Vanini had been burned at the stake in Toulouse for 'atheism,' and

there seems to have been around this time an epidemic of sorcerer-burnings in France,

one of whose victims in 1623 was a man executed at Moulins for the crime of possessing

19 See Descartes, 1974, 10: 193-200, 214; also Yates, 1975.

19

a copy of that sixteenth-century encyclopaedia of magic, Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta

philosophia.20 The climate, in short, was an increasingly repressive one.

The books written by François Garasse and by Marin Mersenne in the early 1620s

are of interest as showing with some clarity what it was that was being repressed. Garasse

makes clear at the outset of his loose-lipped attack upon the subversive currents of the

age that he is primarily concerned with sceptical and libertine tendencies, with those

“beaux esprits” who set themselves up as opponents of “the heavy yoke of superstition,”

but he sees these tendencies as closely allied to an interest in “le secret des causes

naturelles,” in Neoplatonist mysticism, magic, the cabala, and alchemy (Garasse, 1: 2-

4).21

Although, unlike Garasse, Mersenne was a serious scholar, his Quaestiones

celeberrimae in Genesim also attacks 'atheists' and deists like the unfortunate Vanini

along with magi like Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Cornelius Agrippa, and (most

emphatically) that Hermetic philosopher and avowed supporter of the Rosicrucians,

Robert Fludd, who had recently published an extended cabalistic interpretation of

Genesis—and whom Mersenne calls a “cacomagus,” a “haereticomagus," and (punning

on his name) “one soon to be submerged in the eternal floods” (Mersenne, 1932, 62).22

It would be possible for analytical purposes to distinguish between Mersenne's treatment

of these tendencies, but Robert Lenoble's conflation of the two as related aspects of

“Renaissance naturalism” is probably closer to Mersenne's own view of the matter

(Lenoble, 5 ff.).

20 Vanini combined the Aristotelianism of Averroes and Pomponazzi with the naturalistic philosophy of Cardano and Telesio. On the burnings of sorcerers at this time, see Lenoble, 30 ff. For the man burned at Moulins, see Mersenne, 1932, 51 n3. 21 “[L]e pesant ioug de la superstition” is Garasse's own phrase. Two further books by Garasse, published in 1624 and 1625, repeated and expanded his vituperations, but also brought on a crushing counter-attack by the Jansenist theologian Saint-Cyran which resulted in the condemnation of Garasse's “buffooneries” by the Sorbonne in 1626. See Popkin, 111-15. 22 The wording of Mersenne's pun on Fludd's name (the Latinized form of which was De Fluctibus) is “brevibus submergendum fluctibus aeternis.”

20

Having discharged himself of this counterblast against magical or naturalistic

appropriations of Christian doctrines, this “summa against Renaissance magic, its whole

way of thinking, and all its offshoots in the vast contemporary dissemination of magical

practices” (Yates, 1964, 434), Mersenne in the following year attacked the scepticism of

Pierre Charron, the 'Renaissance naturalism' of Jerome Cardan and the Hermetism of

Giordano Bruno in L'Impiété des déistes, athées, et libertins de ce temps (1624). The

main body of this work, however, is devoted to refuting a Deist poem, the mocking

libertinism of which Mersenne correctly understands as prompted less by these currents

of thought than by the harsh paradoxes of Calvinist theology. Mersenne argues against

this anonymous “Poëte Calvino-déiste” (and also against Calvin) that God's will and his

foreknowledge are in no sense the cause of our sins, and that our actions “do not follow

the absolute will of God” Mersenne, 1624, 572).23 Not surprisingly, his defence of God's

justice slides into the familiar equivocations that it was Calvin's purpose to confront and

to eliminate: arguing in one chapter that we can do nothing, for good or evil, without

divine aid, Mersenne maintains in the next that “God's foreknowledge, his will, and also

his laws and all his works, are in no sense prejudicial to our liberty” (Mersenne, 1624,

471-72, 477-78 [ch. xvii], 517 [ch. xviii]).24

In 1625 Mersenne published another fat book, La vérité des sciences, a dialogue

of some one thousand pages in which the opinions of an Alchemist, who believes his

science “capable of renewing the whole world, and dispersing the shadows of ignorance

by some extraordinary new light” (Mersenne, 1625, 3),25 are demolished by a Sceptic,

23 I have quoted from the title of Ch. xx: “Auquel il est monstré que nos actions ne suivent pas l'absolu vouloir de Dieu....” On p. 539 Mersenne writes, “Pour moy je croy que cet homme a esté Calviniste...”; on p. 580, after attacking the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, he refers to him as “ce Poëte Calvino-déiste.” 24 Mersenne, 1624, 517 (ch. xviii): “... la volonté de Dieu n'est point cause de nos pechez, mais nous tous seuls: … sa prescience, & sa volonté, aussi bien que ses loix, & toutes ses oeuvres ne prejudicient en rien à nostre liberté....” 25 This is in fact the Sceptic's characterization of alchemy: “On diroit à vous ouyr parler, que vostre Alchymie seroit capable de restaurer tout le monde, & faire évanouyr les tenebres de l'ignorance par quelque éclat extraordinaire....”

21

whose tropes are in turn refuted by Mersenne himself in the person of the Christian

Philosopher, and supplanted by his own mitigated, constructive scepticism. But if the

primary target of this book is the current wave of Pyrrhonist scepticism, it also contains a

reminder of Mersenne's opposition to “those magicians and charlatans known as Brothers

of the Rosy Cross, who boast of understanding [Hermes] Trismegistus and all the

cabalists of Antiquity...” (Mersenne, 1625, 566-67).

Catholic orthodoxy, then, saw itself as threatened in the early 1620s by searchers

into “the secrets of natural causes” who, practising one or another form of Hermetic and

Cabalistic magic or alchemy, at the same time appropriated Christian doctrine for their

own purposes; by deists and libertines, whose reaction against the hard doctrines of Jean

Calvin led them to scoff at all of the more punitive tenets of Christianity; and also,

increasingly, by Pyrrhonist sceptics, who threatened not so much the faith as its

appendages of rational theology and scholastic philosophy. Despite their obvious

diversity, these tendencies were not roped together arbitrarily by Garasse and Mersenne:

they in fact overlap in ways that have a direct bearing upon Descartes' meditations in

November 1619.

That Descartes read Montaigne is well known. In the next section of this essay I

wish to show that there is reason to believe that he was also acquainted with a tradition of

sixteenth-century occultism to which Montaigne's scepticism is in certain respects

connected. And in the concluding three sections I will propose that Descartes' thought

took shape as an itinerary across a discursive field structured not only by the scholastic

texts to which modern Cartesian scholarship has so insistently drawn attention, but also

(and decisively) by two diametrically opposed groups of texts: the 'philosophical'

writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and the theological writings of Jean Calvin.

V

22

Montaigne and his successors argued that all human opinions are doubtful, and

that consequently we should not merely suspend our judgment as to their truth or falsity,

but should actually reject their claims to any truth value. Yet as R. H. Popkin has

remarked, sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Pyrrhonists wished not simply to

destroy the supposed certainties of human knowledge, but also to prepare the mind to

receive a superhuman truth that could come only from above: the “nouveaux

Pyrrhoniens” aimed, as much as the mature Descartes did, “to find certain knowledge.

But they hoped”—rather like the Descartes of 1619—“to find it miraculously, to have it

suddenly delivered to them by God” (Popkin, 182). Their Pyrrhonist tropes, demolishing

any human criterion of truth, made them the more thirsty for a divinely authorized

criterion. Thus, for example, Montaigne writes in his “Apologie of Raymond Sebond” (I

quote from the translation of Florio) that Pyrrhonism “representeth man bare and naked,

acknowledging his naturall weaknesse, apt to receive from above some strange power,

disfurnished of all humane knowledge, and so much the more fitte to harbour divine

understanding, disannulling his judgement, that so he may give more place unto faith”

(Montaigne, 1904-06, 2: 233).26

At this point, as has often been observed, Montaigne's debt to the fideism of

Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (1530) is palpable

(see Villey, 2: 166-70). And the writings of this early sixteenth-century humanist and

magician anticipate in a remarkable way the full range of tendencies attacked by Garasse

and Mersenne. Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533), which was of central

importance to magi from John Dee and Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century to

Thomas Vaughan in the 1650s, made him notorious as a Hermetic magician and cabalist;

and a spurious Fourth Book which was widely accepted as authentic exaggerated the

26 What Florio translates as “bare and naked” is “nu et vide” in Montaigne's text (see Montaigne, 1965, 2: 226).

23

demonic implications of his magic. But not only did Agrippa practise and write about all

of the occult sciences, including alchemy, he also wrote against most of them in his De

vanitate. In this book, setting out to demolish or at least to cast doubt upon all human arts

and sciences, he presented himself as at once a radical evangelical reformer, a sceptic,

and a mocking subverter of the established order and its pieties—as, in effect, the

Lucianic ironist and libertine denounced by Calvin in his De scandalis.27

Agrippa seems to have been widely read in France. The Latin text of De

vanitate, first published in 1530, was frequently reprinted, and the work went through at

least five editions in French by 1617 (two more followed in 1623 and 1630).28 Different

editions of Agrippa's Opera were also in circulation, the most recent being the one

printed at Lyons in 1600. Needless to say, he was a controversial figure: Jean Bodin

attacked him in 1580 as “the greatest sorcerer of his age” (Bodin, fol. 20, sig. E4, fol.

219-20, sig. IIi 3v-4), and four years later André Thevet lamented that “Had it pleased

God that Agrippa should have drowned only himself in that abyss of impiety, we would

not today be faced with such a heap of atheists, backbiters and lampooners as this century

has produced.... He hatched infinite swarms both of magicians and of atheists...” (Thevet,

2: fol. 544).29 In the early seventeenth century Agrippa continued to attract comment: in

27 For Calvin's denunciation of Agrippa and other “Lucianici homines,” see De scandalis, in Calvin, 1552, sig. Ccc2-3; and for analyses of Agrippa's ironies and libertine tendencies, Korkowski, 594-607, and Wirth, 609-13. On Agrippa's relation to the 'radical reformers,' see Zambelli, 1969 and 1976. De vanitate has often been discussed as an early instance of sixteenth-century scepticism; R. H. Popkin in surveying these discussions finds the work to be an instance less of scepticism than of “fundamentalist anti-intellectualism” (Popkin, 24); Backus argues for different reasons that the term 'sceptic' is inappropriate. But neither Popkin nor Backus takes any notice of Ch. 7 of De vanitate, where there is a brief but coherent argument to the effect that our senses are often deceived and cannot in any case “attaine to the intellectual nature, and the causes of the inferiour things,” from which it follows that “al these derivations and sciences, which are fast rooted in the senses shalbe uncertaine, erroneous, and deceiptful...” (Agrippa, 1974, 49). 28 See Gouhier, 114, and Graesse, 1: 45. 29 Thevet's French: “Et, pleut à Dieu, que tout seul il se fust noyé en ce goulfre d'impieté, auiourd'huy nous n'aurions un tas d'Athees, de mesdisans & brocardeurs, comme ce siecle les nous a produict.... Pour la Magie & Atheisme Agrippa en a esclos une infinité de formillieres....”

24

1603 Jean Belot criticized (at the same time plagiarizing) his occult philosophy (Belot;

see Secret, 290); in 1623 Mersenne denounced him as an “Archimagus” (Mersenne,

1623, col. 590); and two years later Gabriel Naudé defended his reputation, along with

that of other “great men falsely accused of magic” (Naudé, 400-29).

Perhaps more to the point, Descartes mentions Agrippa in a letter of April 1619 to

Isaac Beeckman. In March of that year he had written to Beeckman of his plans for a

“fundamentally new science” which he contrasted to the Ars brevis of Raymond Lull. In

April, he told of meeting a man who, while admitting that Lull's art and Agrippa's

commentaries on it consisted of a mere ordering of the parts of dialectic, also claimed

that there were, in addition, certain keys which could open up the secrets of this art. To

Descartes' request that he check this in his copy of the book, Beeckman replied that the

supposed keys are in Agrippa's text; “you yourself would have noticed them, not long

ago, had you wished to” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 165-68). During the previous winter, then,

when he and Beeckman were together, Descartes had access to this book—and as Charles

Adam proposed, there is reason to believe that the book in question was the Lyons

edition of Agrippa's Opera published in 1600 (see Descartes, 1974, 10: 63, note d, and

Gouhier, 28, 111). From the contempt with which Descartes wrote to Beeckman of the

Lullian whose claims of secret knowledge inspired his request—“his knowledge, drawn

from books (libris), was on his lips (labris) rather than in his mind”—interpreters of this

episode have too easily concluded that Descartes felt a similar contempt for Agrippa. But

this opinion in fact echoes Agrippa's own dismissal, in De vanitate, of the Art of Lull as

one which “availeth more to the outward shewe of the witte, and to the ostentation of

Learninge, then to gette knowledge, and hathe mutche more presumptuousnesse, then

efficacie” (Agrippa, 1974, 56 [ch. 9]).30

30 Agrippa's Latin reads as follows: “Hoc autem admonere vos oportet, hanc artem ad pompam ingenii & doctrinae ostentationem potius, quàm ad comparandam eruditionem valere, ac longè plus habere audaciae, quàm efficaciae” (Agrippa, 1970, 2: 40).

25

I have no intention of substituting, in place of the “roman rosi-crucien”31 of

certain modern scholars who would have made Descartes an adherent of that shadowy

sect, an even less substantial “roman agrippain.” On the other hand, it might be rash to

accept at face value Descartes' statement in the Discourse that even before leaving La

Flèche he knew well enough what false doctrines were worth “to be subject to deception

neither by the promises of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures

of a magician, or the artifices or empty boasts of any of those who profess to know more

than they do” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 576). For his attitude towards imposture and

artifice was perhaps more complicated than this text would suggest. In La recherche de

la vérité his spokesman Eudoxus lays out the order he will follow in expounding his

method: beginning with “the rational soul, in which all our knowledge resides,” he will

then consider its author and His nature, our knowledge of other creatures, the operations

of our senses, and the manner in which our thoughts become true or false. “Then I shall

display here the works of man upon corporeal objects, and having struck wonder into you

with the most powerful machines, the rarest automata, the most specious visions, and the

subtlest impostures that artifice can invent, I shall reveal to you their secrets, which are

so simple and so innocent that you will henceforth wonder at nothing in the works of our

hands” (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1114). What Descartes promises is to demystify the

impostures of artifice: he will incite wonder only in order to efface it. But the first step

of this double movement is one of self-imposition through artifice—and turning to

Descartes' manuscripts of the years 1619 to 1621, one finds repeated intimations of this

same first step, but no hint of a subsequent demystification. He proposes, for example,

that

In a garden one can make shadows which represent diverse

figures, such as trees and others. . .

31 The expression is Henri Gouhier's; see Gouhier, 150-57.

26

Item, in a room, to arrange that the rays of the sun, passing

through certain openings, represent various numbers or figures:

Item, to make appear, in a room, tongues of fire, chariots of fire

and other figures in the air; all this with certain mirrors which focus

the sun's rays on those points.... (Descartes, 1974, 10: 215-16)

Such “visions apparentes” as these, derived, it would seem, from a reading of Giovanni

Battista Porta's De magia naturali (1558), were part of the stock in trade of Renaissance

natural magic. So also were automata like the famous dove of Archytas, which is

mentioned by Descartes in another note, and which, as Charles Adam remarks, he could

have read about in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia.32

In 1628, according to Beeckman's journal, he and Descartes amused themselves

by mocking Agrippa and Porta (Descartes, 1974, 10: 347). But it seems likely that nine

years earlier, Descartes might easily have understood Agrippa—the more sceptical side

of him, that is, the author of De vanitate—as writing from a situation not unlike his own.

Ferdinand Alquié has remarked of Descartes' account of his schooling in the first part of

the Discourse on Method that “At the end of such a description, one is convinced that

Descartes' doubt was not simply voluntary and methodical. In his youth and at the end of

his studies, Descartes experienced a doubt that was profound and spontaneous, a real

disillusionment” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 576 n.2). This young man apparently had access

to Agrippa's Opera omnia at the time of his encounter with Beeckman in the winter of

1618-19, if not before. He might then have been receptive to the Hermetic illuminism

which pervades both the third book of De occulta philosophia and the later chapters of

De vanitate—where Agrippa insists, for example, that

32 For the evidence that the young Descartes had read Porta, see Gouhier, 112-13. The natural magic of optical illusions could be used to demystify commonly accepted superstitions: thus Vanini had proposed in his De admirandis naturae deaeque (1616) that stories of angelic apparitions could be accounted for by mirrors; see Mersenne, 1623, cols. 475-8, 500-37, and Hine, 167-70. On Descartes' allusion to the dove of Archytas, see Descartes, 1974, 10: 232.

27

God alone contains the fountain of truth, from which he must drink

who desires true doctrines: since there is not, nor can be had, any

science of the secrets of nature, of the separate substances, much less

of God their author, unless it be revealed by divine inspiration. For

divine things are not touched by human powers, and natural things at

every moment flee from the power of sense....33

Another text printed in the same edition of Agrippa's Opera, entitled De magia

seu pneumatica veterum and ascribed to one 'Arbatel,' may help to explain the title of

Descartes' Olympica (the word does not occur in classical Latin)—and may also in some

sense underlie the revelatory experience recorded in that manuscript. Seven of the forty-

nine aphorisms which constitute this short text are concerned with Olympic spirits or the

spirits of Olympus. 'Arbatel' writes that these stellar intelligences are counted among the

angels of God by whom, according to the New Testament and the traditions of the

Egyptians (which is to say the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus), all sciences

have been delivered to mankind; the particular role of Olympic spirits is to declare

human destinies and to impart wisdom (Agrippa, 1970, 1: 710-13 [Arbatel, De magia,

aphorisms 12-15]). A magician is defined in this text as one to whom, by the grace of

God, the spirits have given knowledge of the secrets of nature; shortly thereafter the

writer adds—I quote from a seventeenth-century translation—that “The passage from the

common life of man unto a Magical life, is no other but a sleep, from that life; and an

awakening to this life...” (Agrippa, 1655, 213 [aphorisms 41 and 44]).34 Yet this

33 Agrippa, 1970, 2: 299-300 (cap. C): “DEUS enim solus fontem veritatis continet, a quo haurire necesse est qui vera dogmata cupit, cum nulla sit nec haberi possit de secretis naturae, de substantiis separatis, deque ipsorum authore Deo scientia, nisi divinitus revelata: divina enim humanis viribus non tanguntur, & naturalia quovis momento sensum effugiunt....” 'Separate substances' means spirits or intelligences. On that Hermetic illuminism which is the basis of Agrippa's understanding both of the highest forms of magic and of the Christian religion, see my article “Agrippa's Dilemma” (Keefer, 1988a). 34 Compare Agrippa, 1970, 1: 735: “Transitus de communi hominum vita, ad vitam magicam, non est alius nisi de cadem vita dormientem ad eandem vitam vigilantem.”

28

transition may be a dangerous one, for while “Olympus and the inhabitants thereof, do of

their own accord offer themselves to men in the form of Spirits,” another kind of being is

attracted to us by our sins—evil spirits, who in another aphorism are said to be the cause

of all corruption in human knowledge, “sow[ing] tares amongst the children of

disobedience, as it is manifest out of St. Paul, and Hermes Trismegistus.” Whoever

therefore wishes spiritual illumination must “keep himself from all enormious sins, and

diligently pray to the most High to be his keeper; and he shall break through all the

snares and impediments of the devil...” (Agrippa, 1655, 194, 184 [aphorisms 19, 12,

19]).35

For all its naivety, this text reflects a mind-set not far removed from that of the

dreams recorded by Descartes in his Olympica, in which the assault of an evil spirit and

an incitement to remorse over his past sins was followed by a kind of revelation. His

dreams seem to have authenticated, rather than transmitted, the mirabilis scientiae

fundamenta. But their genre is clearly that of the dreams alluded to in a Paracelsan text

according to which

Many wonderful Arts and Sciences also have seemed to be made

appeare to Artists in their dreams. . . : this oftentimes happeneth, but

the greatest part perisheth in oblivion: some rising early in the

morning, say, This night a wonderful dreame appeared to me, as that

Mercury, or this or that Philosopher corporally appeared to me in a

dreame, who taught me this or that Art; but it is fallen out of my

memory. . . .

The author of the Olympica was presumably familiar with the sort of advice this text

offers: “To whom any such thing hath happened, he ought not to go forth out of his

35 Cf. Agrippa, 1970, 1: 719, 711. The reference in aphorism 12 is to Romans 1: 18-23 and to the 'Hermetic apocalypse' in the Asclepius—for the text of which see Hermes, 1960, 2: 326 ff., and Hermes, 1992, 81-83.

29

chamber, nor speak with any man … until he call to remembrance that which he had

forgotten” (Paracelsus, 47-48).36

VI

My argument does not require us to believe that the young Descartes was

conclusively influenced by the writings of sixteenth-century occultists like Agrippa,

Paracelsus, or 'Arbatel'—most of which he could with good reason have dismissed, even

in 1619, as superstitious, silly, and vain. However, I would propose that he was familiar

—whether directly or indirectly—with the 'philosophical' writings attributed to Hermes

(or Mercurius) Trismegistus. Agrippa and other occultist writers would have pointed him

in this direction: the philosophical Hermetica were a principal source both of

Renaissance magical doctrines and of that prisca theologia, larded with supposedly pre-

Christian anticipations of Christianity, which legitimized this magic. Oddly enough,

more orthodox writers could also have directed him to Hermes. Even for those

polemicists of the 1620s, Garasse and Mersenne, the name of Hermes was not one to be

scoffed at. The former, in speaking of destiny, places “Mercure Trismégiste” at the head

of a list of “les plus sages d'entre les Philosophes” who have written on this subject, if too

obscurely for Garasse's taste (Garasse, 1: 345-46). And Mersenne, the first two chapters

of whose L'impiété des déistes consist of a declamation in the Hermetic manner on the

excellence of man, in a later chapter refers his reader for evidence of the piety of ancient

philosophers to the De perenni philosophia (1540) of Augustinus Steuchus Eugubinus—

a work which, presenting Mercurius Trismegistus as the “most ancient source” from

whom the Greek philosophers derived their theology, also expounds his opinions in some

36 For detailed discussions of the genre of Descartes' dreams in terms of the classical tradition of dream-interpretation, see Browne and Wagner.

30

detail.37 Other writers, whom Descartes might have read before 1619, are very much

more positive. Pontus de Tyard, Bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône, compared the prayer at the

end of the first dialogue of Hermes' Pimander to the psalms of David (Tyard, fol. 112v-

113; qtd. in Walker, 69); and François de Foix, duc de Candale and Bishop of Aire,

believing that Hermes had received from God “the same instruction as had Moses, the

prophets and the apostles,” wrote that “since he agrees with and expounds the scriptures,

… one cannot go wrong in revering his opinion” (Foix, sig. A2; qtd. in Walker, 69).

(Foix de Candale, interestingly, was a mathematician as well as a Christian Hermetist: of

his five published works, “three are editions and translations of the Pimander.... The

remaining two are editions of Euclid's Elements” [Harrie, 503]).38

What, then, could Descartes have found in Hermes Trismegistus? An answer, of a

kind, to that fear of psychological overdetermination which is imaged in the first of his

three dreams (and which Mersenne's attack upon the deists might suggest was prompted

by the doctrines of Calvin)—for the Hermetic writings contain repeated proclamations of

the quasi-divine autonomy of the human mind. But much else besides.

I have proposed that in his meditations of November 1619 Descartes was trying to

separate his mind from his body (the left-right asymmetry of his first dream suggests that

he succeeded in creating such a psychic split), and that he was doing so in the expectation

37 In the first two chapters of L'impiété des déistes Mersenne is clearly appropriating for his own uses that discourse on human power and dignity one of the major sources of which was the Hermetic Asclepius; the speaker in his dialogue who delivers this declamation is “Aesculape.” On p. 140 Mersenne refers the reader to Steuchus—who devoted the major part of I. viii-x, xxiii-xxvi, II. xvii, and X. x of his De perenni philosophia to expounding Hermetic texts; in I. x he writes: “Is ut apparet fuit fons Graecae Philosophiae, inde Theologiam hauserunt”; and in X. x: “Mercurius Trismegistus vetustissimus fons, unde manavit Graecorum Theologia...” (Steuchus, 21, 577). As Mersenne was well aware, Steuchus was also an unimpeachably orthodox Counter-Reformation polemicist whose other books include Pro religione christiana adversus Lutheranos (1530) and Contra Laurentium Vallam, de falsa donatione Constantini, libri duo (1547): see Delph, 104-36. 38 For indications of the range of writings in which the young Descartes could have encountered similarly laudatory references to Hermes, see Yates, 1964, Marcel, and Dronke. On the Hermetic writings, see Festugière, Fowden, and Copenhaver's very useful bibliography in Hermes, 1992.

31

of being rewarded with a visionary revelation. His doubt, his rejection of all his previous

opinions, was also an attempt to recognize and isolate that which in him could truly

know: his own essential self. One need go no further than the first and thirteenth

dialogues of the Hermetic Pimander in order to appreciate the Hermetic orientation of

this project.

The first dialogue, the seminal Hermetic text (whose title Poimandres or

Pimander Marsilio Ficino took to apply to the whole body of Hermetic writings he

translated), consists largely of a vision and a divine discourse which result from the

narrator's meditation de rerum natura: “my intellectual perceptions were borne aloft,” he

says, “and my bodily senses lulled, as commonly happens to those who, through fatigue

or satiety, are oppressed by sleep—when suddenly I perceived a being of immense size

who called me by name, saying: 'What, o Mercury, do you wish to hear, to consider, to

learn and understand?'” To this being, which identified itself as “Pimander, the mind of

the divine power,” he replied: “I want to learn the nature of things, and to know God.”39

The eschatology of this text (which later dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum, the

thirteenth in particular, assimilate to the notion of a this-wordly rebirth or deification)

involves a progressive release of the true self from what envelops it: the inactive

character (ociosus habitus) is “relinquished to the [avenging] daemon and laid aside; the

bodily senses … return to their sources...” (Hermes, 1532, sig. B3).40 Having received his

39 Hermes, 1532, sig. A6: “Cum de rerum natura cogitarem, ac mentis aciem ad superna erigerem, sopitis iam corporis sensibus, quemadmodum accidere solet iis, qui ob saturitatem vel defatigationem somno gravati, sunt: subito mihi visus sum cernere quendam immensa magnitudine corporis, qui me nomine vocans, in hunc modum clamaret: Quid est ô Mercuri, quod et audire & intueri desideras? quid est quod discere atque intelligere cupis? Tum ego: Quisnam es inquam? Sum inquit ille Pymander, mens divinae potentiae, ac tu vide quid velis, ipse vero tibi ubique adero. Cupio inquam rerum naturam discere, deumque cognoscere.” Rather than quoting from Cophenhaver's excellent translation (Hermes, 1992), which is made from the Greek texts of the Hermetica and draws upon the best contemporary scholarship, I have preferred to use Ficino's Latin translation, which was the most widely available version of the Hermetica during the period with which I am concerned. 40 The Latin of Ficino's translation: “Morum ociosus habitus daemoni conceditur atque dimittitur. Sensus corporei partes animae facti, suos in fontes refluunt....” The daemon alluded to here is presumably the avenger mentioned several sentences

32

revelation, Hermes cries out against the “enticement of irrational sleep”; he has learned

that whoever recognizes himself “has obtained the good which is above being”; but he

whom the body envelops “in the deception of love” remains wandering “in darkness,

perceiving by sense the evils of death” (Hermes, 1532, sig. B3v, Bv).41 Secure in his

possession of the truth about the creation of the world, the origins of mankind, and the

way to salvation, Hermes says: “I inscribed the benefaction of Pimander in my innermost

mind, and having obtained all that I had sought, reposed in joy. For the sleep of the body

became sobriety of the mind, and the closing of the eyes true intuition (verus intuitus),

and my silence a fertile gestation of the good, and the speaking of the word a begetting of

all good things” (Hermes, 1532, sig. B4).42

In the thirteenth dialogue of the Corpus Hermeticum, the mystery of a this-

worldly rebirth is associated with a similar kind of experience, and the dualist ascesis of

other tractates (notably the first, fourth, and seventh) is developed into what might be

described as an embryonic instrumental scepticism—instrumental, because its purpose is

to prepare for a revelation which will efface all ignorance and doubt. Hermes' disciple

has prepared himself for rebirth by “banish[ing] the deceptions of the world from [his]

mind” (Hermes, 1532, sig. G4)43; he is then initiated into a mode of understanding from

which the deceptions of the senses are excluded, and which is purely mental. Hermes'

insistence that his own reborn form cannot be perceived by bodily sight excites in his

disciple a state of inspired frenzy or madness—in effect, what Descartes' age called

previously by Pimander (sig. B2v): “Contra ab ignaris, improbis, ignavis, invidis, iniquis, homicidis, impiis, procul admodum habito, permittens eos daemonis ultoris arbitrio, qui ignis acumen incutiens, sensus affligit....” 41 Ficino's Latin: “O populi viri terrigenae, qui vosmetipsos ebrietati, somno, & ignorantiae dedidistis, sobrii vivite, abstinete a ventris luxu vos, qui irrationali somno demulcti estis” (sig. B3v). “Demum qui seipsum recognovit, bonum quod est super essentiam consecutus est. Qui vero corpus amoris errore complectebatur, is oberrabat in tenebris mortis mala sensu percipiens” (sig. Bv). 42 “Ego autem Pymandri beneficium inscripsi penetralibus animi, atque adeptus quae petieram omnia in gaudio requievi: Corporis enim somnus animi sobrietas extiterat. Oculorum compressio verus intuitus. Silentium meum bonitatis foecunda praegnatio. Sermonis prolatio bonorum omnium genitura.” 43 “Ecce iam paratus sum pater, a mente mea mundi deceptiones excussi.”

33

'enthusiasm'—to which Hermes responds in these words: “May you too, my son, go forth

from yourself sleeping, like those who are taken up by visions in their sleep” (Hermes,

1532, sig. G4v).44

What follows, however, is a waking initiation, a regeneration whose author,

according to Hermes, is “the Son of God, the one man, by the will of God” (Hermes,

1532, sig. G4v).45 That which is true, says Hermes, is “that which is unperturbed,

unlimited, without colour, without shape, undivided, naked, clear, comprehensible to

itself, unchangeable, good, and wholly incorporeal.” This truth is accessible to the mind,

because the mind's purged form is what constitutes it: “Return into yourself, and you will

understand: desire it and it will be. Purge the senses of the body; release yourself from

the irrational afflictions of matter” (Hermes, 1532, sig. G4v-G5).46 Rebirth and

deification are achieved when Hermes' disciple is lifted by divine power into

contemplation of the truth: the ten powers of God (of which the first is knowledge of

God) descend into him to expel the twelve afflictions of matter. This descent of the

powers of God is a begetting of intellect which permits a recognition of the self as divine,

and also a form of understanding “not by eyesight, but by an act of mind” which gives an

immediate knowledge, as though from the inside, of all nature (Hermes, 1532, sig. G6).47

44 “Cernis me oculi fili? Quando vero meditaris intentus corpore atque aspectu, non oculis hisce videro. TAT. In furorem me insanumque mentis oestrum ô pater nimium concitasti, in praesentiarum meipsum haud video. TRIS. Utinam fili charissime tu quoque teipsum dormiens transcurrisses, instar eorum qui in somno insomniis occupantur.” 45 “TAT. Dicage quis erit regenerationis autor? TRIS. Dei filius, homo unius voluntate dei.” Passages like this encouraged Renaissance readers to accept Hermes as a pagan prophet of the coming of Christ. 46 “TAT. … Quid ergo verum Trismegiste? TRIS. Quod non perturbatum, non determinatum, non coloratum, non figuratum, non concisum, nudum, perspicuum, à seipso comprehensibile, intransmutabile, bonum, ac penitus incorporeum.” Sig. G5: “TRIS. Absit hoc ô fili: recurre in teipsum, & consequeris: velis, ac fiet: purga sensus corporis, solve te ab irrationabilibus materiae ipsius ultoribus.” 47 “Quicunque igitur propter benignitatem generationis, quae secundum deum est, sensum dimittit corporeum, seipsum cognoscit ex divinis compositum, factusque indeclivis divina potentia tota mente laetatur. TAT. O pater concipio, non oculorum intuitu, sed actu mentis, qui per vires intimas exercentur. In coelo sum, in terra, in aqua, in aëre, in animalibus sum, in arboribus, in corpore, ante corpus, atque post corpus, & ubique.”

34

To his disciple's exultant statement that he now sees the All, and sees himself in the

Mind, Hermes replies: “This, my son, is regeneration: no longer to attend to three-

dimensional corporeality” (Hermes, 1532, sig. G6v).48

There are strong grounds for claiming that Descartes' meditations and dream-

revelation in November 1619 followed the Hermetic paradigm established in these texts.

The dualist ascesis undertaken in the hope of a visionary illumination, the separation of

mind from body, the pervasive 'enthusiasm' and the resulting sense of empowerment and

certainty: all these suggest that Descartes' reading had led him to the writings of Hermes.

“La gentillesse des fables réveille l'esprit”: these, it would seem, were among the fables

which contributed at a crucial moment to the awakening of his mind. And they were

fables in the additional sense that their supposedly ancient author was himself entirely

fabulous. The Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon demonstrated in 1614 that the Hermetic

writings—previously thought to be the work of an approximate contemporary of Moses

—were composed no earlier than the first century A. D.; however, this work of

demolition seems not to have become widely known until the late 1620s (Grafton, 145-

61),49 and because it was published as part of a polemic against the Catholic church

historian Baronius, it was not accepted in some circles until at least several decades later.

There may then be unsuspected reserves of meaning in Descartes' declaration in

the Letter to Father Dinet appended to the Meditations and the Objections and Replies—

a declaration which he admits “may seem paradoxical”—that while in the philosophy

taught in the schools, “in so far as it is Peripatetic and different from others, there is

nothing that is not new, on the contrary there is nothing in mine that is not ancient....” By

this Descartes means that the principles of the Aristotelians were innovations when they

were first introduced, and have since been the subject of constant revisions and

48 “TAT. Eia pater universum video, meipsum in mente conspicio. TRIS. At haec est regeneratio fili, non adesse ulterius corpori quantitate dimenso.” 49 In 1630 Mersenne made use of Casaubon's demolition of Hermes in his controversy with Fludd; his earlier writings show no awareness of Casaubon's work (Yates, 1964, 434-40).

35

wranglings; he, in contrast, accepts only those principles “which up to now have been

known and admitted by all philosophers, and which for that reason are the most ancient

of all...” (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1088). Would it be extravagant to construe these words

as implying some degree of affiliation to that most ancient philosopher Hermes

Trismegistus, who was still, in the 1640s and later, being held up by a distinguished

member of Dinet's Jesuit order as the major source of what Steuchus a century earlier had

called the philosophia perennis? (see Yates, 1964, 416-23).

VII

The Hermetic writings mentioned above would seem to anticipate in certain

respects the movement of Descartes' mature philosophy through scepticism to a

perception of the irreducible incorporeal self, an abstract knowledge of God, and a

division of the world into thinking substance and extension. Whether these anticipations

are sufficiently distinct to be of analytical interest is another matter altogether. Yet it

does seem worth remarking that there appear to be echoes of these texts (and of

derivative Renaissance texts) in Descartes' mature writings.

Consider, for example, the concluding paragraph of the first of his Meditations of

1641. It is here that Descartes introduces for the first time the hypothesis of an “evil

genius not less powerful than deceitful, who has employed all his energies in deceiving

me....” Whatever the logical force of this supposition, its immediate rhetorical effect is to

dispose of the speaker's body: “I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no

flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to have all these things”

(Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 181).50

50 In the French text (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 412) this last paragraph is divided into two paragraphs.

36

One way of responding to the evil genius hypothesis—perhaps, in any context but

the present, a slightly eccentric way—would be to observe that this passage constitutes

part of a rather peculiar sequence of metaphorical exchanges in Descartes' writings.

These exchanges involve two primary terms, the body and the evil genius, and also a

third term—“quelques fantômes”—which in some sense mediates between them. The

sequence can be traced in three texts: in the Olympica and La recherche de la vérité, as

well as in this passage of the Meditations.

In Descartes' first dream of November 10, 1619 the phantoms which make the

right side of his body powerless are apparently allied to the wind, the evil genius. In a

passage transcribed by Leibniz which Alquié believes formed part of the Olympica,

Descartes himself commented on the more obvious of these dream-metaphors:

“Sensibilia apta concipiendis Olympicis: ventus spiritum significat....” “Sensible things

enable us to conceive the things of Olympus: wind signifies spirit....” This linkage of

wind with spirit is unexceptionable—though in the context of the first dream it may seem

peculiar that Descartes makes no attempt to draw a line between the wind which is an

evil genius and a wind blowing from Olympus. But what of the phantoms? Are they not

also a metaphorical vehicle? Another remark copied by Leibniz from the same text

indicates an awareness that metaphorical exchanges can operate in more than one

direction: “Just as the imagination uses figures to conceive bodies (Ut imaginatio utitur

figuris ad corpora concipienda), so the intellect uses certain sensible bodies to figure

spiritual things (ita intellectus utitur quibusdam corporibus sensibilibus ad spiritualia

figuranda)....” (Descartes, 1974, 10: 218, 217). The chiastic form of this sentence makes

explicit a paradoxical doubleness: the figures bodied forth by imagination are an

immaterial representation of the corporeal, while the sensible bodies summoned up by

the intellect are a corporeal figuration of the spiritual. If Descartes' first dream

incorporates a double exchange of this sort, then just as the wind signifies the evil genius,

37

so the phantoms would signify the body from which it had apparently been the dreamer's

waking project to divorce himself.

This imaginative figuration recurs in La recherche de la vérité in what may at

first seem a strikingly different manner: the “phantoms and vain images” by which

Descartes represents the systematic doubt he is proposing will, he promises, be revealed

upon a close approach as nothing but air and shadow: “rien, que de l'air et de l'ombre.” In

what way are these phantoms related to the body?

I would like to suggest that the last word of that sentence in La recherche de la

vérité—“rien, que de l'air et de l'ombre”—may have resonances inaudible to the modern

reader. In a commentary on Paracelsus by Jacques Gohory, a sixteenth-century occultist,

one reads that “The Olympic spirit who plucks away the shadow (Spiritus Olympicus qui

umbram avellit), and in this the cabalistic art consists, is the star in man” (Suavius, 52;

qtd. in Gouhier, 88, n. 7). The shadow or umbra is explained by Marsilio Ficino in his

Theologia Platonica as the term applied by the 'ancient theologians' to the elemental

murk (caligo elementalis) with which the soul is surrounded, most particularly during

this life (Ficino, 233). Iamblichus, similarly, in his De mysteriis Aegyptiis, identifies the

body and matter with shadows and irrationality (Iamblichus, VI. 4, 185). So also does

one of their common sources, the first dialogue of the Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus

—where, in Ficino's translation, the key word is again umbra, and where the insistent

lesson is of a separation of mind from body which will free the self from the deceptions

of the senses and from what in the thirteenth dialogue are called “the irrational afflictions

of matter” (Hermes, 1532, sig. B2).51

51 “TRIS. … cur digni morte sint ii qui in morte iacent? PYM. Quia praecessit proprio corpori tristis umbra, ex hac quidem natura humida, ex hac vero corpus in mundo sensibili constitit....” In the vision of the cosmogonic process with which this text begins (sig. A6v), an “umbra quaedam horrenda” turns into the “natura humida,” with great effects of son et lumière. In the “dialogus decimitertius” Hermes exhorts his disciple: “... purga sensus corporis, solve te ab irrationabilibus materiae ipsius ultoribus” (sig. G5).

38

Did Descartes' Olympic spirit, in proclaiming his destiny, free him from his

umbra at the same time as from any lingering fear of those “ombres” which had appeared

to him at the beginning of his first dream? What then of the act of demystification in La

recherche de la vérité which undoes the metaphor of the phantoms, reducing them to air

and shadow? Might one describe this as a controlled repetition of that foundational

experience? The phantoms which in the dream were linked to the body now signify fears

prompted by doubt—a shift in signifieds which may seem less startling if it is

remembered that what Baillet wrote of as Descartes' attempt to represent his mind to

himself “entirely naked” was recalled by the philosopher in his Discourse as a project of

ridding himself of his former opinions. There is, surely, no reason to regard these two

descriptions as mutually contradictory.

In the Meditations the same complex of metaphorical exchanges resurfaces. One

encounters in the First Meditation not the phantoms of doubt, but in their place the evil

genius (whose earliest appearance, in the dream of 1619, was as their supplement and

ally)—and the act of confronting this demon of doubt effectively does away with the

body by imposing a recognition of the self as incorporeal, as radically disembodied—as a

res cogitans.

The extraordinary labyrinthine simile with which Descartes concludes the First

Meditation may contain less distant echoes of Hermetic texts. Descartes writes that the

task of resisting the hypothetical evil genius, of taking his belief in his own body to be

the result of demonic deceptions, of suspending all judgments,

is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain lassitude leads me back into

the course of my ordinary life. And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys

an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a

dream, fears to be awakened, and conspires with these agreeable

illusions to prolong his deception, so insensibly of my own accord I fall

back into my former opinions, and I am anxious about being roused

39

from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow

the tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but

in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been

discussed. Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 181-82 [Latin text], 1: 412-13

[French version]).52

This simile achieves a remarkable inversion. Ordinary waking consciousness is compared

to a captive's dream of liberty, an agreeable illusion, a state of repose. And the peculiar

disembodied state into which Descartes has projected himself—in which he has raised

the fear of insanity, and suspects he could be dreaming, or subject to the systematic

deceptions of the evil genius—is a true, a strenuous wakefulness (in which, presumably,

resistance to captivity becomes possible). If Plato's allegory of the cave seems the most

obvious source for this passage, that is only because modern Cartesian scholars are more

likely to have read Plato than Hermes. The first dialogue of the Pimander links slavery

and confinement with the enticements of “irrational sleep,” and preaching a return to the

wakeful state in which we were created, calls upon us “who labour in want, enveloped in

the shadows of ignorance,” to recover our true selves (Hermes, 1532, sig. A8v)53

Descartes may have been remembering either—or more probably both—of these ancient

fabulists when he wove together this brilliantly persuasive text.

VIII

52 The translation offered here is largely based on that of Haldane and Ross in Descartes, 1973, 1: 148-49. 53 “Homo igitur harmonia superior extitit: in harmoniam vero lapsus, periclitatus, servus effectus est. Hic utriusque sexus foecunditate munitus ab eo qui amborum sexuum fons est, vigilque factus ab eo qui est vigilans, continetur, atque eius dominationi subjicitur.” Sig. B3v: “O populi viri terrigenae, qui vosmetipsos ebrietati, somno, & ignorantiae dedidistis, sobrii vivite, abstinete a ventris luxu vos, qui irrationali somno demulcti estis.... Revocate iam vosmet, qui laboratis inopia, ignorantiae tenebris involuti.”

40

When Cornelius Agrippa in his De vanitate turned from the labour of refuting the

philosophers to the more congenial business of calling them names, one of the most

provoking things he could think of to say was that philosophy first developed out of the

“trifles and fables” of the poets—which, he says in another chapter, were “written to no

other ende, but to the delite of fooles...” (Agrippa, 1974, 143 [cap. 49], 33 [cap. 4]). I

have been suggesting here that Descartes' philosophy was decisively indebted to those

writers of the first centuries A. D.—one might almost call them poets—who effectively

created Hermes Trismegistus by fathering upon this Hellenized form of the Egyptian god

Thoth a body of quasi-philosophical writings. This is not to challenge Descartes' claim to

have returned to first principles; it is, rather, to give force and specificity to what would

otherwise be a banal observation: namely, that any sense of what first principles are, and

any project of returning to them, must both be textually conditioned.

Descartes' own insistent metaphor of the path suggests as much. Quod vitae

sectabor iter? Before it can be followed, the path must in some sense be already

delineated—failing which, one is at the mercy of that blind curiosity which, in Rule 4 of

the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes says leads men to “conduct their minds

along unknown routes,” hoping to find by pure chance the truth they seek (Descartes,

1963-73, 1: 90). Yet while the existence of a “vrai chemin” which is to be followed is

implied by the notion of method, the formulation of this notion also suggests the

projection of previously undiscovered paths, and the construction of new roads.54 The

metaphor is inescapably duplicitous.

To say that the path which became Descartes' fully elaborated method was in

some sense supplied to him by the revived Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance does not

therefore amount to rejecting what must be obvious—that his interest in certain features

54 For the metaphor of a pre-existent path, see Discours, III (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 594, 598); the notion of building a new road appears in Part II, where the idea is said to be inapplicable to “la réformation des moindres choses qui touchent le public” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 582).

41

of this tradition, partial to begin with, was in most respects rapidly outgrown. In Part II

of the Discourse, speaking of his meditations of November 1619, and of his decision to

strip himself of his former opinions, Descartes writes: “But like a man who walks alone

and in darkness, I resolved to go so slowly, and to use so much circumspection in all

things, that even if I advanced only very little, I would at least take care not to fall”

(Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 584). This, it would seem, is a masked allusion to what I have

called the primal scene of Cartesian philosophy, in which Descartes' best efforts barely

sufficed to keep him from falling—yet it appears to be back-dated from the first dream of

November 10 to the period immediately preceding the dreams. When, by my analysis,

Descartes was re-fashioning himself according to a Hermetic paradigm—entering, that is

to say, a path marked out by Hermes and his Renaissance interpreters—he was thus, by

his own retrospective account, advancing alone, cautiously and in the shadows. The

duplicity of the path metaphor validates this statement: even if one believes that, in

recalling his past, Descartes was also revising it, one can concede that, whatever his debts

to a Hermetic paradigm, he was also in late 1619 engaged in searching out a new path.

This process, as Étienne Gilson demonstrated long since, involved an

appropriation of elements of the scholastic tradition. And to the literary expression of the

resulting system even the egregious François Garasse may have contributed: a sentence

in La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits anticipates closely the famous first sentence of

the Discourse on Method, and may well be its immediate source.55 I will not attempt to

explain how Descartes' Hermetic borrowings may be related to his appropriations of

certain features of scholastic philosophy, much less how he could have read as far as

page 56 of Garasse's book before throwing it aside in disgust. But an indication, in

concluding, of another tradition to which Descartes appears also to have been responding

55 Garasse, 1: 56: “Jamais Platon n'avança plus belle maxime que celle par laquelle il dit qu'il n'y a partage au monde si bien faict que celuy des Esprits, d'autant, dit-il, que tous les hommes en pensent avoir assez, il n'y a si pauvre idiot qui ne s'en contente....” Compare Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 568.

42

may help both to reveal more fully the originality of his itinerary and to complete my

analysis of his relations to Hermetism.

In the second section of this essay I remarked on the image of psychic

overdetermination provided in Descartes' first dream of November 10, 1619 by the

wind's attempt to push him into a church in which he had already decided to seek shelter

from that same wind; and I commented also on the curious overlap, in Descartes' own

interpretation of his dreams, of his good Genius, the evil spirit, and the God who governs

the entire episode. If the wind, and the spiritual force it represents, threatened the

dreamer's autonomy, his resistance implies a counter-assertion by—one might say—

either the self-determining mens of the Hermetists or the nascent Cartesian subject. In the

following section I observed that the arguments of systematic doubt, in the culminative

form of the evil genius hypothesis, constitute an analogous threat to human autonomy—

one which is triumphantly resisted by the proclamation of cogito, ergo sum. Tullio

Gregory and other scholars have with admirable precision situated the evil genius of the

Meditations, and the closely-linked issue of whether God can be a deceiver, in relation to

late-scholastic discussions of the same questions.56 But I would propose that the evil

spirit of the Olympica and the evil genius of the Meditations are more pressingly related

to that Calvinist theology which Mersenne's refutation of the “Poëte Calvino-déiste”

shows to have been a live issue at the time. In confronting these spirits, Descartes was

standing up to the most extreme contemporaneous threat to the autonomy he wished to

assert: he was in effect confronting the God of the Calvinists.

There are several good reasons why a young man who wished to establish a

secure and metaphysically-grounded method of discovering the truth should have found

himself engaged in such a confrontation. Politically speaking, Calvinism may have been

a spent force in France by 1619, but it continued to pose an intellectual challenge as a

56 See Gregory, and the works by other scholars, especially H. G. Frankfurt, R. Kennington, and G. Rodis-Lewis, which are cited in his article.

43

persuasive explanation of the relationship between an omnipotent and omniscient deity

and a creation which is somehow distinct from him.

The insistence on the complete and uncompromised sovereignty of God's will

which is one of the distinguishing features of Calvin's theology entails a rejection of the

autonomy of created beings, the possibility of free-will, and the very notion of

contingency, as derogations from the majesty of the Creator.57 The ethical consequences

of this doctrine are disturbing: God's will, according to Calvin, is the active cause of

every event or action, either good or evil; and God foreknows who will be damned and

saved for the very good reason that he has willed it from all eternity. This judgment

actualizes itself in humans, through divine grace or the lack of it, in the form of the

individual's self-validating conviction (which amounts either to faith or to despair) with

respect to his or her eternal destination.

Calvin can avoid the conclusion that God is evil (a conclusion drawn by the poet

whom Mersenne took such pains to refute in L'impiété des déistes) only by asserting

God's utter incomprehensibility. He distinguishes repeatedly between the inscrutable

reality and the accommodated forms in which the divinity typically represents himself to

humankind. But accommodation, a trope of mediation between the human knower and

the unknowable, is also one which invests with an aura of the fictive the divinely-

authored discourses to which it is applied, making them fables as well as vehicles of—

here one needs inverted commas or scare quotes—of 'truth.' As a result, the attributes

ascribed by God to himself are deprived of any distinct meaning, since they correspond

neither to the incomprehensible divine reality nor to human realities (God's justice and

human justice, to take one example, are said to be incommensurable).58

57 Calvin's view of divine sovereignty and of its consequences with respect to contingency, free-will and human autonomy is set forth in Calvin 1960, 1: 197-217 (I. xvi.1-9, I. xvii.1-5). On free-will, see further II. ii.1-11, II. ii. 26-7, II. iii. 5, II. v.1-19. On the primacy of the divine will, see III. xxiii. 6. In these remarks on Calvin I am drawing upon my essay “Accommodation and Synecdoche” (Keefer 1988b). 58 For instances of Calvin's reliance on the notion of accommodation, see Calvin, 1960, I. xi. 2-3, I. xiv. 3, I. xvii.12-13, II. xi.13, II. xvi. 2. The notion is also

44

In effect, contingency is displaced by this theology from the phenomenal to a

transcendental realm—where it assumes the alarming form of a divine will which the

faithful will term inscrutable, but which others (at their own risk) may prefer to call

arbitrary and capricious. This divine will empties the concept of natural law: according to

Calvin, the sun rises each day by God's command alone (Calvin, 1960, I. xvi. 2), and

“not even an abundance of bread would benefit us in the slightest unless it were divinely

turned into nourishment” (Calvin, 1960, 2: 909 [III. xx. 44]). The system of nature serves

to confirm that state of condemnation which is the common lot of all except those who

receive the arbitrary gift of divine grace: “The purpose of natural law,” Calvin writes, “...

is to render man inexcusable” (Calvin, 1960, 1: 282 [II. ii. 22]). The problem posed on

the ethical level by a deity who cannot reliably be distinguished from the evil spirits who

are among his agents thus appears to resurface on the epistemic level: the natural world is

as much a structure of entrapment as it is an object of knowledge, and any sense that it is

bound by law is subverted by assertions that the divine will which in every respect

controls it is itself both unconstrained and unintelligible.

In his Second Meditation, Descartes determines that whatever the efforts of the

evil genius, “without doubt I exist also if he deceives me”—from which it follows “that

this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I

mentally conceive it” (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 183, 415-16).

But this position of decipior sive cogito, ergo sum is separated by a wide chasm from the

assurance that such a reflexive self-recognition can provide a criterion of certainty from

which other truths can be deduced. Descartes' movement in the Meditations from the evil

genius hypothesis to the assurance that God is the guarantor of truth is, in effect, an act of

implicit in I. xvi. 9 and III. xviii. 9. David Hume was to write, with obvious reference to Calvinism: “The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes, of which we can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. Is the name, without any meaning, of such mighty importance?” (Hume, 158).

45

faith. In his reply to the second set of Objections (composed by Mersenne), he insisted

that an atheist cannot possess true science: “he cannot be sure that he is not deceived in

the things that seem most evident to him...; and though perchance the doubt does not

occur to him … he can never be safe from it unless he first recognizes the existence of a

God” (Descartes, 1973, 2: 39; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 565).

To Mersenne's remark that the Scriptures themselves indicate that God may

sometimes deceive us, Descartes responded with an intriguingly duplicitous use of the

trope of accommodation. “Everyone,” he says, “knows the distinction between those

modes of speaking about God which are commonly used in the Scriptures, and which are

accommodated to the vulgar understanding (ad vulgi sensum accommodatos)..., and

those others which express a more naked truth (magis nudam veritatem)..., and which

everyone should use in philosophy...” (Descartes, 1974, 7: 142; cf. Descartes, 1963-73,

2: 566-67). Yet having thus dismissed inconvenient scriptural passages as irrelevant, on

the grounds that philosophy should concern itself with the underlying verity rather than

with accommodated representations of God, he then refuses even to consider the

possibility that what we perceive as true may appear false to God or to an angel, and

thus, as an accommodated representation, be relatively true but, in absolute terms, false.

“Why should we be bothered with this absolute falsity, since we neither believe in it nor

even suspect its existence? We have assumed a conviction or persuasion so strong that

nothing can remove it, and this is clearly the same thing as perfect certitude” (Descartes,

1963-73, 2: 569-70). Scepticism is thus vanquished, not by necessary arguments, but by

an irresistible subjective conviction that is objectively self-validating.

A suspicion that there is something reminiscent of Calvinism both in Descartes'

evil genius and in his intuitionism can draw support from R. H. Popkin's assertion of

structural parallels between the arguments of the Meditations and Calvin's understanding

of the nature of religious knowledge. In Popkin's words, “The same mental event in

which [the Calvinist] gains his assurance somehow transcends itself and reveals to him

46

God, the source of the event, who then guarantees that the content of the event, the

religious truths, are not only personal beliefs, but also truths that He has ordained.” In an

analogous way, “The cogito leads us to the rule of truth, the rule to God, and God

provides the objective assurance of our subjective certitude. Having started on the way to

truth by experiencing the illumination of the cogito, one ends by realizing that the

indubitability of all clear and distinct ideas is not only a psychological fact that one

accepts and lives with, but is a God-ordained fact, and hence objectively true” (Popkin,

190-91).

However, the analogy is not complete, for Descartes' act of faith follows, not the

Calvinist's admission of total helplessness, but rather a proclamation of irreducible

autonomy. He does not throw himself upon God's mercy; rather, he demonstrates that

even the evil genius whom in the First Meditation he substitutes for the notion of a

possibly deceptive deity could not deprive him of one basic truth—and his defiance of

this demon is a kind of exorcism.

The dreams of November 1619 contained a similar element of exorcism.

Unhappy consciences, Calvin wrote, “find no rest from being troubled and tossed by a

terrible whirlwind...” (Calvin, 1960, 2: 1007-08 [III. xxv. 12). But Descartes' willed

fulfilment of a Hermetic paradigm of regeneration enabled him to confront and to

transcend a similar challenge to his autonomy: having resisted the wind which spun him

around like a top, he was granted a revelation by the Spirit of Truth.

Appropriately enough, given Descartes' interest in fables, this interweaving of

motifs derived from Hermetism and from Calvinism is itself anticipated by the

culminative Renaissance version of a fable which originated in the sixteenth century (and

which in its canonical post-Enlightenment versions has become a vehicle for explorations

of the dilemmas of subjectivity in the modern era). I refer to the legend of Faustus, which

Descartes could have encountered in his youth in Palma Cayet's French translation of the

47

German Faustbook—and, in particular, to Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a play

which Descartes is most unlikely to have encountered in any form.

Marlowe's Faustus proclaims his affiliations in the first scene of the play when he

expresses his desire to be “as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadowes made all

Europe honor him” (Marlowe, 1968, A: 150-51).59 In what might seem to be an

exaggerated anticipation of Part I of the Discourse on Method, but is more clearly a

parody of Agrippa's attempted demolition of all forms of human knowledge in De

vanitate, Faustus dismisses the academic disciplines he has mastered (“Philosophy is

odious and obscure, / Both Law and Physicke are for pettie wits,” and “Divinitie” is

“Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vilde” [Marlowe, 1968, A: 139-42]), and turns

instead to magic, which he praises in terms reminiscent of the more enthusiastic chapters

of De occulta philosophia:

O what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honor, of omnipotence

Is promised to the studious Artizan?

All things that moove betweene the quiet poles

Shalbe at my commaund.... (Marlowe, 1968, A: 83-7)

The extent to which this trajectory parallels the path that led Descartes from a

rejection of “all the opinions to which I had hitherto assented” (Descartes, 1963-73, 1:

581) to a method which promises to make us “masters and possessors of nature”

(Descartes, 1973, 1: 119; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 634) should not be exaggerated. This

stage magician, however, confronts a challenge to his autonomy which is closely

analogous to the problem of overdetermination faced by Descartes in 1619. The key

moment in his turn to magic (and to the invocation of his evil genius Mephastophilis) is a

passage, packed with Calvinistic overtones, in which Faustus finds in the New Testament

59 Quotations from this play are identified by the text cited (A refers to the text of 1604, and B to that of 1616) and by line numbers. The “shadowes” alluded to in A: 151 are usually taken to refer to the spirits of the dead raised in necromancy.

48

an iron doctrine of necessity that condemns him to “everlasting death” (Marlowe, 1968,

A: 76).60 Magic, which at certain points in the play acquires clear Hermetic resonances

(cf. Marlowe, 1991, xlv-xlvi), is thus for Faustus a response to despair, and a despairing

assertion of autonomy and self-determination: “A sound Magitian is a Demi-god, / Here

tire my braines to get a Deity” (Marlowe, 1968, B: 88-89). The futility of this stance is

made evident when, in the play's final scene, Faustus finds himself so thoroughly

permeated by external agencies that he cannot make even the gestures of penitence:

. . . ah my God, I woulde weepe, but the divel drawes in my teares,

gush foorth bloud, instead of teares, yea life and soule, Oh he stayes

my tong, I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they

hold them. (Marlowe, 1968, A: 1416-20)

Like Descartes' dreams, the play contains a scene of reading; in this case,

however, the act of reading appears to be overdetermined, and guided not by the

Spirit of Truth but rather by demonic powers—a notion made explicit in lines

added to the play early in the seventeenth century in which Faustus learns from

his attendant spirit that even his initial dismissal of Christian theology was not an

autonomous act:

'Twas I, that when thou wer't i'the way to heaven,

Damb'd up thy passage, when thou took'st the booke,

To view the Scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves

And led thine eye. (Marlowe, 1968, B: 1989-92)

Even if he never encountered any form of this fable, Descartes might be said to

have effectively revised it: confronting the manipulations of his evil spirit at the

beginning of his itinerary, he subsequently integrated them into an argument designed to

provide a firm metaphysical footing for an autonomous subjectivity.

60 For analyses of the interweaving of Hermetic and Calvinistic motifs in this play, see Keefer, 1985-86 and 1987, and Marlowe, 1991, xlv-lv, 181-211.

49

However, his contemporaries, among them Meric Casaubon, son of the Isaac

Casaubon who in 1614 had dated the Hermetica, were not uniformly impressed with the

resulting rationalism.61 In A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655), Meric Casaubon

ranked Descartes' philosophy with the “Mysticall Theology” of Numa Pompilius and

Minos, who, “to make their law received as oracles, did their best to perswade, that they

did not come by them as other men did theirs, but that they were the fruits of Caves and

darknesse...” (Casaubon, 172-73; qtd. in Spiller, 19-20). And in an unpublished text

written in the late 1660s—a quarter-century still before the publication of Baillet's

biography revealed the details of Descartes' meditations in November 1619—the younger

Casaubon returned to the attack: “... for his Method: I took him for one whome excessive

pride and self-conceit (which doth happen unto many) had absolutly bereaved of his

witts.... A cracked brain man, an Enthusiast … I took him to be...” (Spiller, 21). Meric

Casaubon's writings do not, on the whole, give evidence of unusual perspicuity. But in

recognizing Descartes' method as a product of 'enthusiasm,' he had identified a feature of

it that has been largely neglected by modern readers of the Discourse on Method and the

Meditations.

Casaubon's contemptuous identification of 'enthusiasm' with folly or madness (the

latter deprived, quite clearly, of the heroic resonances given it by Ficino and other

Renaissance interpreters of Plato) is very much a reflex of his time—which was the time,

also, of Butler's Hudibras and of Henry More's polemics against 'enthusiasm.' But

another more interesting and less dismissive understanding of the relation between reason

and madness in the philosophy of Descartes has recently become available. I am

thinking, again, of Jacques Derrida—this time of the well-known essay “Cogito and the

61 In one respect at least, the son followed in his father's footsteps: Isaac had exploded the reputation of Hermes; Meric did the same for Dr. John Dee, the English Hermetist, mathematician and magus, when in 1659 he published a large part of Dee's “spiritual diaries.”

50

History of Madness,” in which he has this to say of Descartes' Evil Genius hypothesis

and its resolution in the 'cogito':

The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad

audacity, which we perhaps no longer perceive as such because,

unlike Descartes' contemporary, we are too well assured of ourselves

and too well accustomed to the framework of the Cogito, rather than

to the critical experience of it—its mad audacity would consist in the

return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a

determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to

them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito,

sum .... for even if the totality of what I think is imbued with

falsehood or madness, even if the totality of the world does not exist,

even if nonmeaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and

including the very contents of my thought, I still think, I am while I

think. Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither

understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so,

and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined

only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and

undetermined totality. This is why, by virtue of this margin of the

possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that

is real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges

madness as its liberty and its very possibility. (Derrida, 1978, 56)

Despite my invocation of Derrida at the beginning and end of this essay, it should

be apparent that the itinerary of this essay is not a Derridean one. For that philosopher,

though claiming to locate “the very historicity of philosophy” in what he describes as a

dialogue between hyperbole of the kind exemplified by the Cogito and “determined

historical structures,” at the same time maintains that the Cartesian hyperbole “cannot be

51

enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding

every finite and determined totality” (Derrida, 1978, 60).

My argument is a quite different one. For while in identifying the indebtedness of

this dreamer's path to the discourses of Hermetism and of Calvinism I would not want to

obscure the sense in which his thinking remains (to borrow the words of Walter

Benjamin) “a leap in the open air of history” (Benjamin, 1973, 263), I hope to have

shown that it is most precisely in the pivotal hyperbolic gestures of his thought that

Descartes makes manifest his participation in a particular historical moment.

It is only, I think, in historical terms that one can begin to appreciate the multiple

ironies of the Cartesian itinerary. A century before Descartes, the magus Cornelius

Agrippa hoped all his life for a miraculous illumination that he never received; nor did

Michel de Montaigne claim to have received the illumination that he thought possible.

Descartes, however, had in 1619 rendered his mind “bare and naked”—and had indeed

received from above a guarantee of truth and certainty. A fitting reward, presumably, for

his belief that the writings of poets, since they are inspired by enthusiasm and the force

of imagination, contain profounder thoughts than those of the philosophers.

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