Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Mark Delp on The Immanence of Ratio in a medieval Hermetic text

Mark Delp "The Immanence of Ratio in the Cosmology of the De sex rerum principiis
in Hermetism from Late Antiquity to Humanism
Some of the most interesting movements in twelfth-century philosophy involved attempts to describe divine immanence in cosmological terms. In contrast to predominantly theological approaches in which divine operations were usually conceived of as acting "upon" nature, mostly under the aspect of the miraculous, or of the salvific power aiding the human spiritual flight from materiality, early twelfth-century philosophy began to conceive of divine operations as acting from within nature, determining in the recesses of the elemental qualities themselves their various modalities in celestial and terrestrial regions. Most important, perhaps, for the methodology of the new theological cosmologies was the fascination with the expansiveness and physicality of pagan attempts to bridge the gap between an immaterial summum bonum and the material cosmos by means of hierarchical orders of hypostases, divine and quasi-divine.
p.63
the Platonic tradition of deriving the cosmos from a divine source by means of a series of hierarchical principles is still evident

(unfortunately it's very expensive, but can be found in good University libraries)

No comments:

Post a Comment