Why was Calvin so iconoclastic? Perhaps because of the intensity of his hearing, visual images not so much faded away as were deepened under the leading of faith. Just as there is hearing and Hearing, so also there is seeing and Seeing. But I do not know that he was all that keen on such advanced suspensions of the "viator status"...Patrick Grant's thesis that Calvin and the Puritans after him were terribly on edge about the Renaissance cult of the magus (Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, idolatry, and magic). Perhaps it could be significant then that Michael Servetus was into this area, along with his Anabaptist views. Perhaps it is also significant, against the background of the tenets of Hermetic philosophy, that Calvin would opt so strongly for a "local" body of Christ over the doctrine of "ubiquity". "Ubiquity", in fact, was one of the major attributes of a Hermetic philosopher who had achieved initiation, and I can imagine that there was simply no way that Calvin or the Puritans would ever dare (or want) to identify Christ with anything like this. (Gerard Van Moorsel, _The Mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus A Phenomenolgical Study in the Process of Spiritualisation in the Corpus Hermeticum and Latin Asclepius_, Utrecht: Drukkerij Kemink en Zoon, 1955, pp.86-90. Yet, "even Calvin dared use the metaphor of present anodos" (p.104).) I wonder to what degree Calvin was moved by the classical, pre-Christian invective against magicians, which even Christians came to appropriate to some degree and somewhat uncritically?

May, 1996

mmm

Index