DeConick A.D

348
GNOSTICISM OUT ON A LIMB
Cathars. Although very little, if any, of their literature has survived to affect
future generations, legends about them certainly have played heavily
into the modern Gnostic consciousness.
The second Gnostic awakening took place in the late fifteenth century
when Greek classical literature, which had been lost to the Latin West
for centuries, was rediscovered and translated into Latin. In 1471, eighteen
tracts of the Corpus Hermeticum were translated in Italy by Marsilio
Ficino. Although Hermetic Gnostic wisdom had been known and
debated by Islamic philosophers throughout the Middle Ages, during the
Italian Renaissance it emerged again and was distributed extensively into
Western European philosophical discourse. Once these texts came online
again, they became a reservoir for reengagement with Gnosticism by new
generations of people—everyone from Ficino and his European friends,
to early Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, to
contemporary New Age Americans such as Shirley MacLaine.
This reengagement with Gnostic spirituality in its most cosmic-friendly
guise cannot be overemphasized. As we have seen, the Gnostic spirituality
of the Hermetics is quite tempered when it comes to our universe. Our
universe is the best-case scenario of a God who unfolded himself into
lower and lower forms of life. It is this tempered form of Gnosticism, not
the forms that framed our world as a dark, demonic place, that became
the undercurrent of Western spirituality.
In addition to translating the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin, Ficino
worked on translating the collected works of Plato and writing commentaries
on Plato’s major works. He did this, too, for Plotinus, the leading
Neoplatonist in antiquity. Ficino also founded an academy to study Plato
and Plotinus, bringing alive once again a worldview that had influenced
so many Gnostics in antiquity.
Like the ancient Gnostics who read Plato, Ficino became enamored
with God the Good, from whom emanated deities that created the universe
and whose soul embedded itself within the human being. Once
again, the human became the center of the universe, with a soul, a drop
of the divine that could be brought into contact with higher and higher
levels of reality and its entities through contemplation and ascent exercises
that prompted soul journeys. The reintroduction of Plato and Plotinus
into Western philosophical discourse went on to inspire repeated reviv-