Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy. By Elizabeth

Holmes, M.A., B.Litt. (Blackwell. 4e. ad.)

MISS HOLMES' analysis of Vaughan's position, both as mystic and poet, is sympathetic_ and clear. With great aptness she distinguishes him from Marvell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Traherne, with whom he is often too indiscriminately classed, and draws attention to certain affinities with Blake, to his lack of theological dogma, his purely affective attitude towards childhood and nature, his weaknesses, his failures, his un- surpassed successes. As a monograph on Henry Vaughan, her work, if not complete, is at least interesting and helpful. But as soon as she turns towards the poet's philosophical sources, the traditions which he incorporated, her funda- mental ignorance of occultism is revealed. To her statement that " many epidemic ideas visited the seventeenth century, and Plato and Plotinus were studied by select thinkers, and Pico had brought the Cabbala into repute," one can imme- diately object that these ideas were endemic to Western culture, that select thinkers throughout its history have been acquainted with Platonism and the neo-Platonist theories, that the Cabbala remained in repute from its darkest origins right up to the matter-of-fact eighteenth century and was only brought into disrepute by its vulgarizers, the " select thinkers " whom she quotes in her meagre bibliography : Sebonde, Pico, Weigel, Drexelius. These ideas and influences, which she calls, quite wrongly, hermetic (the original books of Hermes, as revealed to Solon by the priests of Sais, were treatises on Egyptian dogma and ritual and their " Atlanti- dean " origins), were long constrained by Catholic orthodoxy and " Aristotelian " scholasticism, also by the difficulties and expense of publication in the Middle Ages and the oath of secrecy imposed, for fear of accusations of heresy, on the initiate. But, as soon as the Renaissance diffused a more tolerant atmosphere, with the aid of printing, these ideas began to be especially fruitful in those lands where the Re- formation gave the greatest liberty, both to the speculative thinker and the publisher. And Miss Holmes' analysis of this philosophic force which transmuted the dull lead of theoretic scholasticism into living gold of Cartesian, Spinozist or Leibnitzian idealism is far from complete.

True, Vaughan is not the perfect type of the initiate amongst the metaphysical poets. His sources, and those of his alchemist brother, were too often derivative, probably on account of the absence of Jews in England and the ensuing low state of Hebraist learning even in the Oxford of their time. But the sources on which Biihme, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Knorr von Rosenroth and many others drew, though unknown to the Vaughan brothers, are to-day perfectly accessible to their commentators. And here Miss Holmes has failed. Thus, when she quotes Raymond de Sebonde's Liber Creatorum, where " each creature appears as a letter made by the finger of God, and man the chief letter," or Weigel's statement that " man, as to his body, is composed of the Elements, and as to his soul, of the Starrs," she should certainly mention the Zoharic theories of the Cabbalist man, and the earlier Sefer Yetzirah where the universe is described as having been

created by permutations of letters, according to the twenty- two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, though even these are probably late echoes of some far earlier Chaldaic oral traditions.

Again, Vaughan's antecedents in his love of nature and his humility before beasts and trees go far beyond Ramon Lulli's Lover and Ladies of Love, back to the " blessed " Galacto- phagoi of the South-Russian Eden or Atlantis, the originators of the myths of Orpheus who charmed trees, rocks and beasts by his music (symbolical of the " microcosmic " harmony of his soul with that, " macrocosmic," of nature), and of the whole vegetarian system of Jainism, the oldest Aryan religion (vide : A. de Paniagua : Gdographie mythique, passim). And, in con- nexion with Vaughan's astral speculations, no reference is made to Leone Ebreo, Giordano Bruno or Jerome Cardan, to whom he certainly, if only indirectly, owed much. Plotinus she has mentioned, but not quoted ; Philo she has not even mentioned, in spite of their vast influence on this whole tradition of occ-

ultism, which can be judged by that of their late disciple, the

author of the Dialoghi d' Amore, Leone Ebreo, or Montaigne and the " hermetic " poet Maurice &eve, or by the amount of

neo-Platonism which masqueraded as Aristotelianism through-

out Arabic, Hebrew and Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages. In connexion with Thomas Vaughan's Laps of the Spirit per Formarum naturalium Seriem, the gnostic theories of Basilides and Valentine's are not mentioned, nor their probable origin in the dualistic cosmogonies of Persian Mithraism or Zoroas-

trianism. And—a far more important omission—two of the most learned and interesting exponents of occultism in the English metaphysical school, Quarles and Benlowes, a study of whose works would have revealed many more influences and sources, are not once referred to, in spite of the fact that Benlowes was living in Oxford during the same years as Thomas Vaughan, and probably communicated with him since their interests and studies were the same.

Had Miss Holmes developed her thesis more fully, she would have discovered that the two chief centres around which her poet's speculations revolve are, in accordance with the best Cabbalist traditions, the Ma'aseh Bereshith, the problem of the Beginning, and the Ma'aseh Merkabah, of Ezekiel's " Chariot-throne," the Residence, or Seat, of the Divine Element in the Creation. Just as Quarles saw in Adam " so many men, nay, all Abridged in one," Vaughan saw the

effects enclosed within the cause and how " the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word," In the Regeneration which opens his Silex Scintillans and on which

his whole experience and poetry were founded, the Silurist heard

" a rushing wind

Which still increased, but whence it stirred No where I could not find"

and, throughout his poetry, sought the bouche d'ombre whence this breath blew, and the place " where trees flower, and