The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  23 Cf. Kristeller, Studies, 221-247.

  24 P. 94, n. 5. “Ter maximus”: Bucer will apply this epithet ironically to Erasmus. Cf. Nicole Peremans, Erasme et Bucer (Liege, 1970), p. 98.

  25 P. 95, n. 1: Conversation with Savonarola and Lawrence, reported by Crinito, Bk. 3, Ch. 2, 104-5.

  26 Cf. Edouard des Places, “Les Oracles chaldaiques dans la patristique africaine,” in Studia patristica, 11 (Berlin, 1972), 27-41; and “Histoire et survie des Oracles…” in introduction to the Chaldean Oracles, Belles Lettres (1971), 8-52.

  27 Cf. his two letters to Ficinus and to an unknown friend, Nov. 1486; Opera, 367-368 and 384-386.

  28 Expression of [author] Eugenio Garin.

  29 Commento particolare, v. finem: “Cabala si chiama, che significa recezione, perche non per scritti ma per successione a bocca l’uno dall’ altro la ricevono. Scienzia per certo divina e degna di non participare se non con pochi, grandissimo fundamento della fede nostra etc.” 580-581. And the Oratio, 156-158.

  30 Apologia: “…quorum locum mihi videntur tenere Cardinales in nostra Ecclesia.” Opera, 177.

  31 Oratio, 158-160. The thing is not impossible.

  32 Secret, 24-26. Sermo de passione Domini, ed. C. Wirszubski (Jerusalem, 1963).

  33 Raffaello Morghen, Medioevo cristiano (Bari, 1962), 146: “…Perfino dei teologi della corte del papa Sisto IV, come ha provato in un acuto studio il Moore, ‘credevano che la Kabbala contenesse dimostrazioni accettabili della dottrina cristiana e la fecero oggetto di attento studio e di meditazione’.”

  34 Hoffman, Usury in Christendom (2013), pp. 380-382.

  35 Cf. Bar-Ilan University Prof. Avi Sagi, “Both are the Words of the Living God: A Typological Analysis of Halakhic Pluralism,” in Hebrew Union College Annual no. 65 (1995). Also cf. Prof. William “Zev” Kolbrenner, “Chiseled from All Sides: Hermeneutics and Dispute in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Association for Jewish Studies Review, no. 28 (2004).

  36 (P. 96, n. 1:) Oratio, 160. Ibid. “In plenum nulla est ferme de se nobis cum Hebraeis controversia, de qua ex libris Cabalistarum ita redargui convincique non possint, ut ne angulus quidem reliquus sit in quem se condant…” The inexact interpretation of Jean Delumeau, Naissance et affirmation de la Reforme (PUF, 1965), 70: Pico would have thought “that the Bible offered to the Christians of his time was incomplete and that a part of Divine Revelation had thus far escaped the Church.” See below, III, 6.

  37 [p. 97, n. 6]

  38 [p. 98, n. 2]

  39 Helen Vedrine, Les philosophies de la Renaissance (PUF, 1971), 38.

  40 [p. 98, n. 7].

  41 P. 98, n. 8: (Latin extract). The famous convert Drach, in the 19th century, will not speak otherwise.

  42 P. 98, n. 9: Citation. Or, as (his nephew) John-Francis said, he wants to show how the poetic theology of the ancient sages can be placed at the service ‘of the mysteries of our theology.’

  43 Conclusiones cabalisticae, 5 and 33… We do not see on what M. J. Delumeau is basing himself when he says “the count of Mirandula seems to prefer Judaic monotheism to the Christian Trinity.”

  44 P. 289, n. 7: Exp. 6, proem. 308-319: “Est Trinitatis divinae in creatura multiplex vestigium, etc.”; cf. 228. He takes up the old doctrine according to which “in animo Trinitatis imago repraesentatur”: Exp. 5, c. 6; 302. Dulles, 56, observes that he thinks, contrary to Scotus, with Henry of Gand, that the three Persons participate in the creative act, not indistinctly, but each according to His own function.

  45 Lectura super Apocalypsim: By following Averroes, the disciples of the Antichrist have meditated ‘profunda et voraginosa dogmata obscurantia solem christianae sapientiae et evangelicae vitae et purum aerem religiosi status ipsius.’ Text published by Gregory in L’Attesa, 277.

  46 P. 250, n. 1: De christiana religione, 1 and 2. There was a bit of overreacting in the warning addressed to him by the Hungarian John Pannonius: “Caveas ne forte curiositas quaedam isthaec renovatio antiquorum (sit?) potius quam religio.”

  47 Page 250, n. 4: Kristeller, Thomisme, 103-104.

  48 Page 250, n. 5: Lyons, 1540. In the Opera, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1578), fol. 1-245. The “ecumenical philosophy” dreamt of by Gratry (Logique, Vol. 2, 249) corresponds rather well to this first concept of a “perennial philosophy.”

  49 P. 339, n. 2: L.-J. Bataillon and C. von Schonborn, giving an account of the work of K. Jacobi, Die Methode des cusanischen Philosophie (FribourgMunich, 1969), in the Rev. des sc. philos. et theologiques, 1972.

  50 P. 339, n. 4: Cf. Henri de Lubac, The Eternal Feminine [French] (1968) 193-202 and 279-294. As much will be said for the generation that followed Pico, that of a Lefevre d’Etaples, then a Luis de Leon.

  51 Pope Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibo) publicly acknowledged as his natural son, the scoundrel Franceschetto Cibo, who was married to Maddalena de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s daughter. The eldest of their six children was Innocenzo Cibo (1491-1550), who, in 1513, would be made a cardinal by his uncle, Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici).

  52 P. 410, n. 3: “…te quemdam alium librum Apologeticum edidisse, in qo easdem conclusiones in meliorem et catholicum sensum declarans interpretabaris, et circa eas intellectum sincerae fidei explicabas…” The word “meliorem” allows the inference that Pico, in explaining himself, was able on one point or other to rectify his doctrine. Thus the self-esteem of the censors is saved.

  53 This is indeed how the document is cited in the edition of the Opera and in Napoli, 117. The Civilta Cattolica, cited elsewhere, deemed that it should have read: “propter editionem et declarationem Apologetici,” because the “Conclusiones” were not “Declarationes.” For the general meaning of the Brief, this discrepancy seems to us to be unimportant.

  54 When Alexander says “Pro potiori cautela tua, ab omni reatu perjurii si quem etim forsan indirecte, dicto juramento tuo… aliquo modo contraveniendo incurrisses, absolventes,” he relieves (absolvit) Pico of an hypothetical censure; he does not absolve him from any fault of heresy or of bad doctrine, of which he declares him, on the contrary, exempt, given the explications of the Apology: he nullifi (extinguimus) the cause inaugurated by the theologians of Innocent VIII.

  55 Published at Bologna, the book, several times reprinted, was never censured. Secret, 256, 268, 343. Garsias has been justly compared to the Cologne Dominican Hoogstraeten, the implacable adversary of Reuchlin.

  56 P. 413, n. 1: Vol. 2, Part I (Rome, 1653), 151, 186-189.

  57 P. 413, n. 2: Pico, Opera, 75, 76, 78, 107, 109. This is last of de Lubac’s notes reprinted in these pages.

  Chapter XV

  Neoplatonic-Hermetic Kabbalism in the Modern Era

  I

  Eliphas Lévi: Patriarch of the incognito Hermetic “Traditional Catholic” movement

  It was the ultra-montane Catholic layman Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), “a proponent of traditionalism,” Minister to Russia under King Victor Emmanuel I, and Minister of State in Sardinia, who worked on behalf of an Illuminati “tradition” in league with the Church of Rome and consonant with the absolute obedience owed to the pontiff. A monarchist and one of the founders of the ultramontanist movement, De Maistre was from 1774 to 1790 at the same time a Freemason of the various masonic orders, among them the powerful Illuminist Scottish Rite (the Chambéry lodge “La Sincérité,” led by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz), as well as simultaneously a member in good standing of the Jesuit penitential order, Grande Congrégation Notre Dame de l’Assomption.

  Maistre’s occult master, Willermoz, was part of the Catholic-Kabbalist movement under the papist occultist Martines de Pasqually (d. 1774), 1who required that members of his inner Order of Elect Coens (Ordre des Elus Coëns), join the Catholic Church, devoutly and faithfully attend the Catholic Tridentine Mass and receive the sacraments from bona fide Catholic priests. Here was another transmission of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic “Perennial Philosophy,” i.e. the Renaissance Catholic “Marsilio Ficino’s original Perennialism,” together with Pico and Recuhlin’s Kabba
lism, manifested within Martinism in the eighteenth century, and through it, the Church of Rome’s doctrine of papal infallibility, as well as the “staunchly Catholic” Right-wing ultramontane movement. 2

  In his unfinished Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, which is a defense of the Kabbalist-papist Martinist movement, Maistre wrote that certain forms of Illuminism, such as that of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), help to erase the disunity caused by Protestantism, through the maintenance of a secret tradition across confessional boundaries. His book Du Pape (1820) served as a groundwork for the papal infallibility movement that culminated in Vatican Council I, decades later. In it he stated, “no sovereign pontiff has ever made a mistake in speaking on matters of faith.”

  The heir to this occult pottage was the “always faithful Catholic” Alphonse Louis Constant, known by his non de plume, Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875). He is the spiritual patriarch of the mostly incognito Hermeticists who have infiltrated the contemporary “traditional Catholic” Latin Mass movement of our time. Ordained a deacon at the Catholic seminary of Saint-Sulpice under the papist-occultist Abbé Frére-Colonna, with the patronage of the Archbishop of Paris, he obtained a supervisory post at the Catholic Collége de Juilly and preached in churches in the vicinity of Solesmes. Devoted to mariolatry (Jesus’ mother as a kind of goddess), in his Le rosier de mai ou la guirlande de Marie (“The Rosebush of Mary’s Garland”), he indulges in erotic vignettes of Mary’s dolorous plight, and in La Mére de Dieu, Mary is the Co-Redemptrix of the Universe. Constant/Lévi was all over the occult map of France, presenting the Kabbalah to French masonic initiates and among the circle of Edward Bulwer-Lytton in England, as well as in his books, among them his manual of Kabbalistic magic and gematria, La clef des grands mystéres (1861). Constant/Levi, despite his Satanic rites and writings (cf. his Dogme et rituel chapter on Necromancy), and rumored summoning of demons (according to his housekeeper and nurse, Madame Gebhardt), and as reported by associates of Bulwer-Lytton (for instance in London, in July, 1854), was never disciplined by the Catholic hierarchy and freely spread his occult contagion. 3

  The appearance of “bleeding hosts” (a “host” is a name for the Catholic communion wafer) is often taken as proof of Transubstantiation, the belief that when a validly ordained Catholic priest who has the proper intention, consecrates a host during the Mass, it literally becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ. For the occult circle of Constant-Levi, these “bleeding hosts” were manifestations of transcendental magic—and masonic and Hermetic symbolism: “Eliphas Lévi combined his occultism with a strong adherence to Catholicism…Lévi was…shocked when the Abbé showed him an album containing pictures of miraculous hosts, three of which particularly caught his attention because of the signs that they bore. The first was stamped with the star of the microcosm, or the magic pentagram…It is the five-pointed star of occult masonry, the star with which Agrippa drew the human figure…The second host bore the signs of two intertwined hermetic serpents.” 4

  Inspired by the Kabbalistic popery of Constant/Lévi, an Anglican priest, the Right Rev. C.W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) became a leader in the “Theosophical” movement.5 Some theosophists combined devotion to the Tridentine Latin Mass with a movement to bring the Antichrist to earth. One hesitates to state a fact so lurid, yet there it is. Beginning in 1909, Leadbeater proposed a Hindu youth in India, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the “World-Teacher.” (This writer was first confronted with the alleged perspicacity of this Krishnamurti individual, by an affluent “traditional Catholic.” Our failure to agree that this Krishnamurti Antichrist was an astute truthteller, put an end to our acquaintance).

  Leadbeater is claimed as an inspiration by many wings of the occult. He is of interest in our study for his advocacy of the Tridentine Latin Mass. In his book The Science of the Sacraments, Leadbeater unveils what he alleges are the occult secrets of the Mass. Leadbeater was part of the occult gnosis which saw in the old Catholic Mass the fulfillment of magical doctrines. Catholics should be aware that when the Tridentine Mass is made an idol in itself, it can become the object of a cult subject to mystification, private revelation and magical thinking that is indifferent to the primacy of Biblical standards. Antiquarians who imagine that the revival of the old Mass is the primary means of sanctification, no matter which pederastic priest or bishop celebrates it, or how sleepy, apathetic or superstitious is the congregation, are in line with Leadbeater’s occult thinking.

  On the other hand, Protestants who seek to abolish the liturgy of the Eucharist, which was clearly a part of the first century worship of the Early Church, are as much in error as those Catholics who imagine that Jesus preached a religion of magic. What Jesus did at the Last Supper was not magic, and Catholics who treat the Eucharist as if it were, build the empire of the occult, not the Kingdom of God.

  II

  Tridentine Judaism

  Ever since the pontificate of John-Paul II, we have witnessed the rise of the religion of Holocaustianity, formerly known in theology as YomHaShoah (or Shoah, for short), the doctrine of the Israeli state inside the Church of Rome. Some “traditional Catholic” leaders, both clerical and lay, have declared that the infiltration of the Shoah theology into the Church of Rome has “no bearing on faith and morals.”

  The old Catholic Mass rite alone, when separated from ancient Christian truth (which is now outlawed by means of the “antisemitism” canard), becomes merely a type of High Church Anglicanism, in which one emasculated wing of the Hegelian synthesis is allowed to participate in the dialectic for considerations of aesthetics and enhancing organizational discipline. This is not Scriptural. The prayer of the Church is a mere totem if it is immersed in a milieu which overthrows the doctrine of the Gospel.

  Under High Church Anglicanism, the Elizabethan Isisgnosis was not challenged, but rather, was accommodated as a quid pro quo for the High Church faction being permitted the liturgy of Edward VI.

  Under Pope Benedict XVI, the masonic, post-conciliar, Hermetic-Talmudic-rabbinic gnosis was not challenged, but rather is accommodated as a quid pro quo for the traditionalist faction being permitted the liturgy of Pius V.

  The medieval prayer of the Church without the medieval belief of the Church is not a remedy, it is an abomination and an alchemical mockery. Many on the Right said in his defense that Pope Benedict was execrated and opposed by the Left, as if this hatred on the part of some Leftists is the universal solvent that reconciles all contradictions. Few seem to be cognizant of elementary principles of human alchemy and mind control as practiced by the Cryptocracy by means of the Hegelian dialectic. The thesis is always played against the antithesis, i.e. the Right is always a stage prop against the Left. The opposition of zealous Leftists to the pontificate of Benedict XVI did not render Benedict a true Catholic. Leftists are enraged that Benedict did not modify church edicts against contraception and women priests. But of what genuine significance is this particular “conservatism,” when a Neoplatonic-Hermetic revolution against the Gospel itself—the radical overthrow of nearly 1500 years of Christian teaching on Judaism—is implemented by Pope Benedict?

  The Left-wing oppositional thesis does not absolve Benedict XVI of his complicity in Paul Vl’s 1965 Nostra Aetate, or John-Paul II’s Shoah business. Benedict’s synthesis of the Leftist thesis and the Rightist antithesis culminated in his continuing perpetuation of the calamitous “Elder brothers in the faith” fraud, and “Holocaust” mania. Both of these modernist innovations were as strong as ever under Benedict’s pontificate and thanks to his astute maneuvering, were repeated by “Roman Catholic conservatives and traditionalists.”

  The mixing of irreconcilable opposites is a hallmark of the human alchemy of the Cryptocracy. This virtuoso amalgamation is what we have in the infernal marriage of the Old Catholic Mass with the new Catholic belief in Holocaustianity, and the notion that Orthodox Judaism does not seriously threaten Catholicism, and is at least somewhat benign, at least in comparison with Islam.

  Benedict XVI c
loaked his modernism in the venerable attire of the Latin liturgy of the high civilization of the European past. He revived the old ceremonies because he and his Vatican understood that it is increasingly difficult to successfully maintain organizational discipline and the loyalty of an increasingly wayward laity under the exclusive auspices of the mediocre reductionism which often attends Pope Paul VI’s “Novus Ordo” Mass.

  Benedict’s cloak fell at least somewhat when he issued the following document, “Letter of his Holiness Benedict XVI to the Bishops of the Catholic Church Concerning the Remission of the Excommunication of the Four Bishops Consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre.” Note the dialectical jargon in the pope’s first paragraph:

  “…A gesture of reconciliation with an ecclesial group (the SSPX) engaged in a process of separation…turned into its very antithesis: an apparent step backwards with regard to all the steps of reconciliation between Christians and Jews taken since the Council — steps which my own work as a theologian had sought from the beginning to take part in and support. That this overlapping of two opposed processes took place and momentarily upset peace between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church, is something which I can only deeply deplore….

  “Certainly, for some time now, and once again on this specific occasion, we have heard from some representatives of that community many unpleasant things — arrogance and presumptuousness, an obsession with one-sided positions etc.

  “…Dear Brothers, during the days when I first had the idea of writing this letter, by chance, during a visit to the Roman Seminary, I had to interpret and comment on Galatians 5:13-15. I was surprised at the directness with which that passage speaks to us about the present moment: ‘Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you are not consumed by one another.’ I am always tempted to see these words as another of the rhetorical excesses which we occasionally find in Saint Paul. To some extent that may also be the case…” 6