Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge and Western Culture by Wouter J. Hanegraaff (review)

Over the past half century or so esotericism has gradually succeeded in establishing itself as a recognized field of academic study, thanks to the work of a number of dedicated scholars, including the author of the present work, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, who is Professor of the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Whereas previously the subject of esotericism was generally shunned and derided in academe, it now has its own university departments, its learned societies, and its conferences. Commensurately, there is an increasing output of excellent scholarly publications in the field.

Now is therefore a good moment to look at the field of esotericism itself and its place in the academy and in Western intellectual and cultural history. This is what Wouter Hanegraaff has undertaken in this outstanding book. He brings to the task an unusually wide knowledge of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history. He argues his case with great clarity and incisiveness and writes in an eloquent and engaging manner.

The main questions that Hanegraaff sets out to answer are: What is esotericism? How can we locate it within the history of Western thought? Why was it marginalized for so long? And what is its significance in the academic world of today? The book is underpinned by a fascinating and insightful argument, which I will try to summarize.

Hanegraaff begins the story in the Renaissance, with the appearance of a powerful grand narrative, that of "ancient wisdom," which was propounded by Italian humanists such as Marsilio Ficino. This narrative became linked with the tradition known as Christian apologeticism, dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era and involving the notion that the roots of Christianity could be traced back to Moses via an ancient religious lineage that also encompassed the pagan philosophers, who were seen as having anticipated Christianity. This apologetic discourse, having merged with that of ancient wisdom, became a highly important factor in Roman Catholic thought and remained so until it was challenged, mainly from within the Protestant camp, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The story of anti-apologeticism, as Hanegraaff writes, begins with the Leipzig philosopher and theologian Jacob Thomasius (1622-1684). His goal was to "purify" Christianity, which he saw as being contaminated by pagan error. Pagan philosophy and biblical truth were for Thomasius two entirely different animals: blurring the distinction between them resulted in bad history as well as doctrinal confusion. What was it that made these pagan philosophers so alien to biblical revelation? "Historically," Hanegraaff writes, "Thomasius traced all of them to their origin in the dualistic doctrine of Zoroaster and the Persian Magi, which in turn had been inspired by the devil: it was from this barbarian source that philosophy had reached Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers" (104-5). This dualism was based on what Thomasius saw as the "original fallacy," namely, paganism's rejection of the creatio ex nihilo in favor of the eternity of the world. This amounted to a deification of the creation at the expense of its Creator.

Thomasius laid the foundation for "the landmark book that gave birth to the study of Western esotericism as a specific domain of research: Ehregott Daniel Colberg's Platonisch-Hermetisches Christentum of 1690-1691" (107). Colberg, Professor of Philosophy at Greifswald, was motivated by an intense hostility toward the heterodox religious currents of his age such as Paracelsianism, Weigelianism, Rosicrucianism, and Christian theosophy in the tradition of Jakob Böhme. How ironic that, in meticulously cataloguing these beliefs and tracing their historical antecedents, Colberg unwittingly became a pioneering figure in the study of Western esotericism.

Colberg's work was carried further by the historian and Protestant pastor Jacob Brucker, who compiled a vast history of philosophy, published in German from 1731 to 1736 and later in Latin, in which he attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff. Brucker's position, like that of...