The Forbidden Universe (18 page)

After Descartes, natural philosophy bifurcated into two camps, each advocating a different way of acquiring knowledge. There was the mechanist philosophy, in which everything could be reduced to and understood in terms of physical properties – the characteristics of bodies and the forces that act on them. On the other side was the Hermetic approach, which saw things more holistically, every imaginable thing being inextricably part of a great living whole. Ultimately, of course, mechanism won the day, although it was by no means an overnight victory.

With the rise of Descartes’ influence, the philosophy that had driven the Renaissance was at its lowest ebb, seemingly heading for complete extinction. In half a century Isaac Casaubon had challenged it historically, the Thirty Years War had dashed its hopes politically and now Descartes
was undermining it philosophically. But this was not the end of the story. There were those who kept the Hermetic torch alight, even in the heart of Rome itself. And it was yet to see its greatest triumph in the scientific world. 

One might be forgiven for thinking that as the Age of Enlightenment moved inexorably towards the Age of Science, Hermeticism was, if not actually dead then pretty much moribund. But in fact, for the most part, it just continued in disguise. For obvious reasons of
self-preservation
after the polarization of the Thirty Years War, most thinkers who were inspired by the Renaissance occult tradition downplayed that fact, while quietly continuing on their path. Others, meanwhile, took little care to be circumspect, and astonishingly, got away with it. These two approaches – covert and overt – were respectively adopted by two of the seventeenth century’s most remarkable minds: Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz and Athanasius Kircher.

Leibniz (1646–1716) vies with his exact contemporary, Isaac Newton, for the title of the century’s greatest intellect. His output covered every conceivable field of his day, from linguistics through engineering to biology, his mind leaping chaotically from subject to subject. In his lifetime he published about a dozen works, but most of his thoughts, ideas and discoveries were scattered in a vast number of papers, letters and half-completed books, the majority of which have yet to be published. Yet we do know something
particularly significant about Leibniz: he was heavily rumoured to be at the very least a Rosicrucian sympathizer.

Leibniz’s major contributions were in the increasingly important fields of mathematics, logic and metaphysical philosophy. As he devised infinitesimal calculus in the late 1670s, at the same time as Newton, a protracted row between the two men erupted, with Newton accusing Leibniz of stealing his invention. In the end it was Leibniz’s notation that became the standard. He also invented the binary system on which our digital world depends and without which, in fact, most of the modern world could not exist.

Like many intellectual giants of the time, Leibniz’s career was an odd mix of science, philosophy and diplomacy. While working for Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick, he even got involved in negotiations over the English Act of Settlement of 1701. This Act bestowed the crown on the descendants of the Duke’s mother Sophia, establishing the run of over-stuffed and not always totally sane Hanoverian Georges on the British throne. Sophia, to whom Leibniz was mentor and adviser, was the Electress of Hanover and daughter of the Winter King and Queen, Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. And so we find a rumoured Rosicrucian working for the family of the alchemical bride and groom – suspiciously neat.

Born in Leipzig, Leibniz’s first job after receiving his doctorate in law was as an alchemist in Nuremberg, where he was rumoured to have joined a Rosicrucian society. There is probably some substance to the story, which was accepted, for example, by the French mathematician Louis Couturat, author of a 1901 study of Liebniz.
¹
There are potential Rosicrucian connections with Nuremberg: in 1630 Johann Valentin Andreae tried to revive his Societas Christiana in that city, so there may still have been a coterie of fellow travellers there three decades later.

Not only did Leibniz practise as an alchemist, but his later works reveal a deep familiarity with the Rosicrucian manifestos and with Andreae’s writings. He proposed the formation of an Order of Charity and drew up its constitution – part of which is lifted directly from the
Fama Fraternitatis
.
²
So at a conservative estimate, Leibniz certainly had Rosicrucian leanings.

Leibniz’s first major work,
Dissertation on the Art of Combination
(
Dissertatio de arte combinatoria
), published in 1666 when he was just twenty, is about the art of memory – although the non-occult version, simply as an aid for remembering. In the introduction, he acknowledges his debt to previous practitioners such as Bruno, and goes so far as to lift the term
combinatoria
from him.
³

But did Leibniz, as many historians assume, completely abandon these interests when he realized mathematics and logic were the way forward? Certainly Leibniz’s career did seem to be set to embrace all things mechanistic. He devoted himself to absorbing the latest thinking – including certain of Descartes’ then-unpublished writings – during a four-year sojourn in Paris on a diplomatic mission for the Elector of Mainz. During that time, in 1673, he took a trip to London, where he wowed the Royal Society with his innovative calculating machine and was duly made a Fellow.

But later Leibniz realized that the mechanistic approach was limited, writing to a correspondent two years before his death:

Any search for the source of Leibniz’s metaphysical inspiration begins with his devotion to Marsilio Ficino’s ‘perennial philosophy’
⁵
– Hermeticism. Bruno’s influence, too, filters directly through to Leibniz, possibly through the conduit of the Giordanisti.

Leibniz’s search for a metaphysical explanation for ‘ultimate reasons’ led him to formulate his theory of monads, which, to put it politely, is a somewhat abstruse idea. His monads are a kind of metaphysical or spiritual equivalent of atoms, the indivisible building blocks from which everything in creation is comprised and which are attached to physical atoms. Monads all originated at the beginning of the universe and, since they can neither be created nor destroyed, all change consists merely of their transformation.

Monad
is the Greek word for unity, and since the time of the Greek philosophers it has been used to describe basic units and first causes in many different philosophies – it is an important concept in Neoplatonism, for example. Leibniz’s concept of monad, however, was directly influenced by Bruno.
⁶
As Frances Yates pointed out:

In the interests of self-preservation, Leibniz himself was reluctant to acknowledge the influence of the Hermetic tradition. On the one hand, in the volatile new climate after the Thirty Years War Hermeticism was tainted with the whiff of heresy and diabolism, almost entirely because of Bruno. On the other hand – and partly as a consequence of being tainted – the reputation of Hermes’ system in scientific and intellectual circles had suffered, and it was
beginning to look old-fashioned and misguided.

But even if Leibniz was wary of shouting it from the rooftops, his works quite clearly owe a major debt to the Renaissance occult philosophy. Even Leibniz’s system of calculus evolved from this tradition. It developed from his quest to reduce everything, not just scientific principles and laws but also religious and ethical questions, to a common symbolic language: a universal calculus. Building on the art of memory, both the classical and ‘occult’ versions, in order to establish a language of symbols or
characteristica universalis
, Leibniz envisaged a set of images to which all the fundamentals of knowledge could be reduced. This naturally necessitated the cataloguing and codification of all that was known, a growing eighteenth-century preoccupation. By manipulating and setting the symbols in different relationships, he believed that new discoveries could be made.

He specifically likened such a system to Egyptian
hieroglyphs
, which along with Bruno, he believed were used in a similar way. Leibniz also considered, but eventually rejected, Dee’s innovative
monas hieroglyphica
symbol. The Cabala, too, was an influence, since it is based on the idea that certain principles are present in all things. Leibniz even described his
characteristica universalis
as ‘true Cabala’
⁸
– hardly the words of a modern-style rationalist.

Eventually Leibniz came to realize that the best tools for the job were mathematical symbols. This realization then led to the development of his version of infinitesimal calculus, which he intended to be a first step towards the universal calculus. Although Liebniz developed his
concepts
in a mathematical and mechanical direction, in focusing on a universal calculus he was closely following Bruno, who had extended the esoteric art of memory to include complex techniques for combining the images held in the mind in different ways.

In addition to his formulation of the binary system, in this mode of thinking Leibniz was anticipating modern
computer
modelling, which is based on the idea that any system can be defined in mathematical terms, reduced to values, variables and relationships that can be manipulated in the computer to predict how the system will behave under varying conditions. Leibniz laid the foundation for
contemporary
information theory, and also saw the potential for creating machines to do the hard work of combining his
characteristica universalis
. Not only did he invent mechanical calculating machines that could do basic arithmetical operations, but he also tried to design one for more complex algebraic calculations. He even conceived a device that used binary mathematics.