Yatima
I have noted in the thread "Tarot and New Cosmology" (Talking Tarot) that the hierarchical order of the Ptolemeic universe was overthrown by the New Cosmology (without loosing the spiritual dimension at all!).
It is interesting to see where the hierarchical ordering of spheres came from and how it was deconstructed already in the 15th century.
In the philosophical context, the hierarchical orderings of the universe between Earth and God (prime mover) was a hybrid created by the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotin and his followers by merging Platonic and Aristotelic elements. Actually, Plato's universe was not hierarchical, but had a dual structure (differentiating between the phenomena and the ideas). He calls the border between them "chorismos". Aristotle, on the other hand, tried to blur this dualism by initiating a hierarchical and spherical universe reflecting a step by step participation of all levels between matter and God. Plotin and very importantly Pseudo-Dionysus Ariopagita managed to combine both of the philosophies to initiate the Neoplatonic hierarchy between matter and God. Since the Ariopagit had great authority in the Middle Ages (as alleged pupil of St. Paul), this hierarchical structure was taken for granted in medieval theology and philosophy.
Here, Bob O'Neill in his article on "Neoplatonism and Tarot" is right to understand this movement as much as Platonic as it is Aristotelic in origin.
However, it was the extraordinary knowledge of Nicolas of Cusa of all of this philosophy, theology and their real historic groundings in the Antique texts that brought a revolution about to become real in the mid 15th century. He was understood (and is today) as one of the most learned man in his time. He had first hand knowledge of Greek texts (having been in Constantinople with the Eastern Emporer, partly bringing the Eastern scholars, e.g., Phleton, to the West). He was considered as best knowing medieval philosophy and theology as nobody else at his time.
And it was Cusanus who deconstructed the spherical universe on a philosophical (metaphysical, not physical) basis, not only introducing a non-geocentric cosmology (he thought that neither the earth nor the sun is in the "middle" of the universe, because there is no middle in an infinite universe!), but also introducing a new spiritual immediacy of God to all beings in the universe (equally!, regardless their standing an whatever hierarchy). Hence, as the famous philosopher Ernst Cassirer has researched in 1927, he began to think that there is no "chorismos" between the sublunar world of the four elements and the etherical world of the fifth element ascending to God beyond all as Spirit, but that all elements were everywhere (e.g. also in the sun), because God is immediately present to all creatures and all elements are de-centered in all beings wherever they are in the universe.
This was a veritable revolution not only in physical terms (bringing about Galilei, Kepler, Newton, Einstein…) but also in spiritual terms: If there is no hierarchy, everyone can be in immediate contact with God because God is already in their immediacy regardless any hierarchy, sphere, or level of being.
Also, according to Cassierer, the Platonic Academy, foremost Ficino, discussed these themes. Marsilio Ficino came to a similar conclusion: That there is an immediacy of the "infinite" (= God) to the soul so that it has not to raise the planes to meet God.
Later, Giordano Bruno draw on Cusa's conclusions – but than by loosing his life…This was the reaction of the Hierarchy fighting for the hierarchical implications of the hierarchical universe.
To get an impression of this New Cosmology/Spirituality initiated by Cusa and radically followed by Bruno, I quote Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (1908) on Bruno:
[Begin quote] "Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. While still a young man, he entered the Dominican order, but the influence exercised upon him by the writings of Nicolas Cusanus, Raymond Lullus, Telesio, and his profound love of nature, soon turned him against the monastic life and Catholicism. He visited Geneva, where he met with bitter disappointments, Paris, London, and Germany, journeying from Wittenberg to Prague, from Helmstaedt to Frankfort. But Protestantism proved no more satisfactory to him than the religion of his fathers. Upon his return to Italy he was arrested at Venice by order of the Inquisition, imprisoned for two years, and then burnt at the stake in Rome (1600). His adventurous life did not hinder him from writing numerous treatises, the most remarkable of which are the following: Della causa, principio ed uno (Venice, 1584); Del infinito universo e dei mondi (id., 1584); De triplici minimo et mensura (Frankfort, 1591); De monade, numero et fiqura (id., 1591); De immenso et innumerabilibus s. de universo et mundis (id. 1591).
Bruno was the first metaphysician of the sixteenth century who unreservedly accepted the heliocentric system. Aristotle's spheres and divisions of the world he regarded as purely imaginary. Space, he held, has no such limits, no insurmountable barriers separating our world from an extra-mundane region reserved for pure spirits, angels, and the supreme Being. Heaven is the infinite universe. The fixed stars are so many suns, surrounded by planets, which, in turn, are accompanied by satellites. The earth is a mere planet, and does not occupy a central and privileged place in the heavens. The same may be said of our sun, for the universe is a system of solar systems.
If the universe is infinite, we must necessarily reason as follows: There cannot be two infinities; now the existence of the world cannot be denied; hence God and the universe are but one and the same being. In order to escape the charge of atheism, Bruno distinguishes between the universe and the world: God, the infinite Being, or the Universe, is the principle or the eternal cause of the world: natura naturanta [sic!, correctly: naturans]; the world is the totality of his effects or phenomena: natura naturata. It would, he thinks, be atheism to identify God with the world, for the world is merely the sum of individual beings, and a sum is not a being, but a mere phrase. But to identify God with the universe is not to deny him; on the contrary, it is to magnify him; it is to extend the idea of the supreme Being far beyond the limits assigned to him by those who conceive him as a being by the side of other beings, i.e., as a finite being. Hence Bruno loved to call himself Philotheos, in order to distinguish clearly between his conception and atheism. This proved to be a useless precaution, and did not succeed in misleading his judges.
As a matter of fact, the God of Bruno is neither the creator nor even the first mover, but the soul of the world; he is not the transcendent and temporary cause, but, as Spinoza would say, the immanent cause, i. e., the inner and permanent cause of things; he is both the material and formal principle which produces, organizes, and governs them from within outwardly: in a word, their eternal substance. The beings which Bruno distinguishes by the words "universe" and "world," natura naturans and natura naturata, really constitute but one and the same thing, considered sometimes from the realistic standpoint (in the mediæval sense), sometimes from the nominalistic standpoint. The universe, which contains and produces all things, has neither beginning nor end; the world (that is, the beings which it contains and produces) has a beginning and an end. The conception of nature and of necessary production takes the place of the notion of a creator and free creation. Freedom and necessity are synonymous; being, power, and will constitute in God but one and the same indivisible act.
The creation of the world does not in any way modify the God-universe, the eternally-identical, immutable, incommensurable, and incomparable Being. By unfolding himself, the infinite Being produces a countless number of genera, species, and individuals, and an infinite variety of cosmical laws and relations (which constitute the life of the universe and the phenomenal world), without himself becoming a genus, species, individual, or substance, or subjecting himself to any law, or entering into any relations. He is an absolute and indivisible unity, having nothing in common with numerical unity; he is in all things, and all things are in him. In him every existing thing lives, moves, and has its being. He is present in the blade of grass, in the grain of sand, in the atom that floats in the sunbeam, as well as in the boundless All, - that is, he is omnipresent, because he is indivisible. The substantial and natural omnipresence of the infinite Being both explains and destroys the dogma of his supernatural presence in the consecrated host, which the ex-Dominican regards as the corner-stone of Christianity. Because of this real all-presence of the infinite One, everything in nature is alive; nothing can be destroyed; death itself is but a transformation of life. The merit of the Stoics consists in their having recognized the world as a living being; that of the Pythagoreans, in having recognized the mathematical necessity and immutability of the laws governing eternal creation.
Bruno sometimes calls the Infinite, the Universe, or God, matter. Matter is not the µn öv of Greek idealism and the Schoolmen. It is inextended, i. e., immaterial in its essence, and does not receive its being from a positive principle outside of itself (the form); it is, on the contrary, the real source of all forms; it contains them all in germ, and produces them in succession. What was first a seed becomes a stalk, then an ear of corn, then bread, then chyle, then blood, then animal semen, then an embryo, then a man, then a corpse, and then returns to earth or stone or some other material, only to pass through the same stages again. Thus we have here something that is changed into all things, and yet remains substantially the same. Hence, matter alone seems to be stable and eternal, and deserves to be called a principle. Being absolute, it includes all forms and all dimensions, and evolves out of itself the infinite variety of forms in which it appears. When we say a thing dies, we mean that a new thing has been produced; the dissolution of a combination means the formation of a new one.
The human soul is the highest evolution of cosmical life. It springs from the substance of all things through the action of the same force that produces an ear from a grain of wheat. All beings whatsoever are both body and soul: all are living monads, reproducing, in a particular form, the Monad of monads, or the God-universe. Corporeality is the effect of an outward movement or the expansive force of the monad; in thought the movement of the monad returns upon itself. This double movement of expansion and concentration constitutes the life of the monad. The latter lasts as long as the backward and forward motion producing it, and dies as soon as this ceases; but it disappears only to arise again, in a new form, soon after. The evolution of the living being may be described as the expansion of vital centre; life, as the duration of the sphere; death, as the contraction of the sphere and its return to the vital centre whence it sprang.
All these conceptions, especially the evolutionism of Bruno, we shall meet again in the systems of Leibniz, Bonnet, Diderot, and Hegel, which his philosophy contains in germ and in the undifferentiated state, as it were. As the synthesis of monism and atomism, idealism and materialism, speculation and observation, it is the common source of modern ontological doctrines." [end quote]
In order to imagine any influence of this new Renaissance cosmology between Cusa, Ficino and Bruno, we would have to ask whether the hierarchy of the trumps (besides its necessity in the game played with them) really was intended to manifest a spherical-cosmographic universe as without doubt the Mantegna has done, which looks rather (Neoplatonic) "medieval" in light of these new developments, or whether the eschatological imaginary of the last trumps (Death to World) or the second part of the trumps (Hermit/Wheel to World) rather reflect this new view.
Given, e.g., the end of the Bembo-14 with Death and Judgment (and thinking of their connection to the apocalyptic atmosphere realistically experienced with the Black Death and its interpretation of the coming end of this world), the cosmographical and spherical differentiation seems to be rather weak. Without the later added cosmological subjects (Star, Moon, Sun) between, the Judgment is a very immediate conclusion in relation to Death; and Death was experienced as very immediate struck in the flesh of life at any time. Time was seen as "up" (Hermit) or incontrollable overthrowing any order (we might wish to find) (Wheel). Sure, it remains the social order of the first six trumps (as common medieval social hierarchy), but this order is the lowest in the Tarot-order, it is "immediately" trumped by Love, Victory, Time, Change (Wheel), Death, Judgement. Even in the game played with the trionfi, any higher trump immediately takes all lower ones – there is no hierarchy, less a departing one; it rather seems to imitate immediacy from above (finally God) and futility from below.
The introduction of the cosmological subjects, then, should not be seen as an instalment of a spherical cosmology, but a widening of the eschatology already in place. I have put forward some arguments for this in the thread "Star, Moon, Sun".
Finally, the World, whether it means New Jerusalem (see thread "XXI- Le Monde") as New Creation or this World as a whole, would reflect rather smoothly Bruno's God "as" Universe! If you compare it with the Steel-sermon of ca. 1470 "El mondo (cioe Dio Padre)", we could at least imagine that this was understood early at least in the interpretation of the Tarot-imaginary.
Yatima
It is interesting to see where the hierarchical ordering of spheres came from and how it was deconstructed already in the 15th century.
In the philosophical context, the hierarchical orderings of the universe between Earth and God (prime mover) was a hybrid created by the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotin and his followers by merging Platonic and Aristotelic elements. Actually, Plato's universe was not hierarchical, but had a dual structure (differentiating between the phenomena and the ideas). He calls the border between them "chorismos". Aristotle, on the other hand, tried to blur this dualism by initiating a hierarchical and spherical universe reflecting a step by step participation of all levels between matter and God. Plotin and very importantly Pseudo-Dionysus Ariopagita managed to combine both of the philosophies to initiate the Neoplatonic hierarchy between matter and God. Since the Ariopagit had great authority in the Middle Ages (as alleged pupil of St. Paul), this hierarchical structure was taken for granted in medieval theology and philosophy.
Here, Bob O'Neill in his article on "Neoplatonism and Tarot" is right to understand this movement as much as Platonic as it is Aristotelic in origin.
However, it was the extraordinary knowledge of Nicolas of Cusa of all of this philosophy, theology and their real historic groundings in the Antique texts that brought a revolution about to become real in the mid 15th century. He was understood (and is today) as one of the most learned man in his time. He had first hand knowledge of Greek texts (having been in Constantinople with the Eastern Emporer, partly bringing the Eastern scholars, e.g., Phleton, to the West). He was considered as best knowing medieval philosophy and theology as nobody else at his time.
And it was Cusanus who deconstructed the spherical universe on a philosophical (metaphysical, not physical) basis, not only introducing a non-geocentric cosmology (he thought that neither the earth nor the sun is in the "middle" of the universe, because there is no middle in an infinite universe!), but also introducing a new spiritual immediacy of God to all beings in the universe (equally!, regardless their standing an whatever hierarchy). Hence, as the famous philosopher Ernst Cassirer has researched in 1927, he began to think that there is no "chorismos" between the sublunar world of the four elements and the etherical world of the fifth element ascending to God beyond all as Spirit, but that all elements were everywhere (e.g. also in the sun), because God is immediately present to all creatures and all elements are de-centered in all beings wherever they are in the universe.
This was a veritable revolution not only in physical terms (bringing about Galilei, Kepler, Newton, Einstein…) but also in spiritual terms: If there is no hierarchy, everyone can be in immediate contact with God because God is already in their immediacy regardless any hierarchy, sphere, or level of being.
Also, according to Cassierer, the Platonic Academy, foremost Ficino, discussed these themes. Marsilio Ficino came to a similar conclusion: That there is an immediacy of the "infinite" (= God) to the soul so that it has not to raise the planes to meet God.
Later, Giordano Bruno draw on Cusa's conclusions – but than by loosing his life…This was the reaction of the Hierarchy fighting for the hierarchical implications of the hierarchical universe.
To get an impression of this New Cosmology/Spirituality initiated by Cusa and radically followed by Bruno, I quote Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (1908) on Bruno:
[Begin quote] "Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. While still a young man, he entered the Dominican order, but the influence exercised upon him by the writings of Nicolas Cusanus, Raymond Lullus, Telesio, and his profound love of nature, soon turned him against the monastic life and Catholicism. He visited Geneva, where he met with bitter disappointments, Paris, London, and Germany, journeying from Wittenberg to Prague, from Helmstaedt to Frankfort. But Protestantism proved no more satisfactory to him than the religion of his fathers. Upon his return to Italy he was arrested at Venice by order of the Inquisition, imprisoned for two years, and then burnt at the stake in Rome (1600). His adventurous life did not hinder him from writing numerous treatises, the most remarkable of which are the following: Della causa, principio ed uno (Venice, 1584); Del infinito universo e dei mondi (id., 1584); De triplici minimo et mensura (Frankfort, 1591); De monade, numero et fiqura (id., 1591); De immenso et innumerabilibus s. de universo et mundis (id. 1591).
Bruno was the first metaphysician of the sixteenth century who unreservedly accepted the heliocentric system. Aristotle's spheres and divisions of the world he regarded as purely imaginary. Space, he held, has no such limits, no insurmountable barriers separating our world from an extra-mundane region reserved for pure spirits, angels, and the supreme Being. Heaven is the infinite universe. The fixed stars are so many suns, surrounded by planets, which, in turn, are accompanied by satellites. The earth is a mere planet, and does not occupy a central and privileged place in the heavens. The same may be said of our sun, for the universe is a system of solar systems.
If the universe is infinite, we must necessarily reason as follows: There cannot be two infinities; now the existence of the world cannot be denied; hence God and the universe are but one and the same being. In order to escape the charge of atheism, Bruno distinguishes between the universe and the world: God, the infinite Being, or the Universe, is the principle or the eternal cause of the world: natura naturanta [sic!, correctly: naturans]; the world is the totality of his effects or phenomena: natura naturata. It would, he thinks, be atheism to identify God with the world, for the world is merely the sum of individual beings, and a sum is not a being, but a mere phrase. But to identify God with the universe is not to deny him; on the contrary, it is to magnify him; it is to extend the idea of the supreme Being far beyond the limits assigned to him by those who conceive him as a being by the side of other beings, i.e., as a finite being. Hence Bruno loved to call himself Philotheos, in order to distinguish clearly between his conception and atheism. This proved to be a useless precaution, and did not succeed in misleading his judges.
As a matter of fact, the God of Bruno is neither the creator nor even the first mover, but the soul of the world; he is not the transcendent and temporary cause, but, as Spinoza would say, the immanent cause, i. e., the inner and permanent cause of things; he is both the material and formal principle which produces, organizes, and governs them from within outwardly: in a word, their eternal substance. The beings which Bruno distinguishes by the words "universe" and "world," natura naturans and natura naturata, really constitute but one and the same thing, considered sometimes from the realistic standpoint (in the mediæval sense), sometimes from the nominalistic standpoint. The universe, which contains and produces all things, has neither beginning nor end; the world (that is, the beings which it contains and produces) has a beginning and an end. The conception of nature and of necessary production takes the place of the notion of a creator and free creation. Freedom and necessity are synonymous; being, power, and will constitute in God but one and the same indivisible act.
The creation of the world does not in any way modify the God-universe, the eternally-identical, immutable, incommensurable, and incomparable Being. By unfolding himself, the infinite Being produces a countless number of genera, species, and individuals, and an infinite variety of cosmical laws and relations (which constitute the life of the universe and the phenomenal world), without himself becoming a genus, species, individual, or substance, or subjecting himself to any law, or entering into any relations. He is an absolute and indivisible unity, having nothing in common with numerical unity; he is in all things, and all things are in him. In him every existing thing lives, moves, and has its being. He is present in the blade of grass, in the grain of sand, in the atom that floats in the sunbeam, as well as in the boundless All, - that is, he is omnipresent, because he is indivisible. The substantial and natural omnipresence of the infinite Being both explains and destroys the dogma of his supernatural presence in the consecrated host, which the ex-Dominican regards as the corner-stone of Christianity. Because of this real all-presence of the infinite One, everything in nature is alive; nothing can be destroyed; death itself is but a transformation of life. The merit of the Stoics consists in their having recognized the world as a living being; that of the Pythagoreans, in having recognized the mathematical necessity and immutability of the laws governing eternal creation.
Bruno sometimes calls the Infinite, the Universe, or God, matter. Matter is not the µn öv of Greek idealism and the Schoolmen. It is inextended, i. e., immaterial in its essence, and does not receive its being from a positive principle outside of itself (the form); it is, on the contrary, the real source of all forms; it contains them all in germ, and produces them in succession. What was first a seed becomes a stalk, then an ear of corn, then bread, then chyle, then blood, then animal semen, then an embryo, then a man, then a corpse, and then returns to earth or stone or some other material, only to pass through the same stages again. Thus we have here something that is changed into all things, and yet remains substantially the same. Hence, matter alone seems to be stable and eternal, and deserves to be called a principle. Being absolute, it includes all forms and all dimensions, and evolves out of itself the infinite variety of forms in which it appears. When we say a thing dies, we mean that a new thing has been produced; the dissolution of a combination means the formation of a new one.
The human soul is the highest evolution of cosmical life. It springs from the substance of all things through the action of the same force that produces an ear from a grain of wheat. All beings whatsoever are both body and soul: all are living monads, reproducing, in a particular form, the Monad of monads, or the God-universe. Corporeality is the effect of an outward movement or the expansive force of the monad; in thought the movement of the monad returns upon itself. This double movement of expansion and concentration constitutes the life of the monad. The latter lasts as long as the backward and forward motion producing it, and dies as soon as this ceases; but it disappears only to arise again, in a new form, soon after. The evolution of the living being may be described as the expansion of vital centre; life, as the duration of the sphere; death, as the contraction of the sphere and its return to the vital centre whence it sprang.
All these conceptions, especially the evolutionism of Bruno, we shall meet again in the systems of Leibniz, Bonnet, Diderot, and Hegel, which his philosophy contains in germ and in the undifferentiated state, as it were. As the synthesis of monism and atomism, idealism and materialism, speculation and observation, it is the common source of modern ontological doctrines." [end quote]
In order to imagine any influence of this new Renaissance cosmology between Cusa, Ficino and Bruno, we would have to ask whether the hierarchy of the trumps (besides its necessity in the game played with them) really was intended to manifest a spherical-cosmographic universe as without doubt the Mantegna has done, which looks rather (Neoplatonic) "medieval" in light of these new developments, or whether the eschatological imaginary of the last trumps (Death to World) or the second part of the trumps (Hermit/Wheel to World) rather reflect this new view.
Given, e.g., the end of the Bembo-14 with Death and Judgment (and thinking of their connection to the apocalyptic atmosphere realistically experienced with the Black Death and its interpretation of the coming end of this world), the cosmographical and spherical differentiation seems to be rather weak. Without the later added cosmological subjects (Star, Moon, Sun) between, the Judgment is a very immediate conclusion in relation to Death; and Death was experienced as very immediate struck in the flesh of life at any time. Time was seen as "up" (Hermit) or incontrollable overthrowing any order (we might wish to find) (Wheel). Sure, it remains the social order of the first six trumps (as common medieval social hierarchy), but this order is the lowest in the Tarot-order, it is "immediately" trumped by Love, Victory, Time, Change (Wheel), Death, Judgement. Even in the game played with the trionfi, any higher trump immediately takes all lower ones – there is no hierarchy, less a departing one; it rather seems to imitate immediacy from above (finally God) and futility from below.
The introduction of the cosmological subjects, then, should not be seen as an instalment of a spherical cosmology, but a widening of the eschatology already in place. I have put forward some arguments for this in the thread "Star, Moon, Sun".
Finally, the World, whether it means New Jerusalem (see thread "XXI- Le Monde") as New Creation or this World as a whole, would reflect rather smoothly Bruno's God "as" Universe! If you compare it with the Steel-sermon of ca. 1470 "El mondo (cioe Dio Padre)", we could at least imagine that this was understood early at least in the interpretation of the Tarot-imaginary.
Yatima
