Hermetism: Renaissance imprimir
 
Renaissance and notable persons
The Hermetism, ascending from its deep Alexandrine roots, reach with remarkable importance one of its maximum exponents during and since the “renascentes litterae” (restoration of the literature), or period known as the renaissance, from a resurgence of the neo-Platonism, the re-discovery of all the Hermetic tradition itself with its texts and the Christian adoption of the Cabala. All these changes mainly as part of the triumph of the Humanism, that around year 1450 dominated the Italian culture to then expand to the north of the Alps.
The renaissance can be understood as the culmination of a process that begins in the prior epoch, but does not represents a radical rupture with the Middle Ages. The renaissance, in all its manifestations, at the same time advance to a revalorization of the classic antiquity and performs a revision of the medieval world, becoming an acutely critic cycle, clearly different from the precedent period.
Even though the humanists interested on the Hermetic Tradition were influenced by their medieval predecessors, they took material from the classical pagan world. The hermetic texts had been re-discovered, studied, and circulated as a result of the invention of the printing in the 15th century. These texts had great prestige in an era passionately addict to the Greek and Roman civilizations. In Plato and the neo-platonic, in the Pythagorean tradition, in the hymns of Orpheus and in the Hermetica, was discovered a whole secret wisdom that could go back to remote times, inspired by the idea of the Divinity much earlier than the arrive of the hebrew Jesus.
The radical in the humanism, its more important contribution to the tradition was the reborn of the “conviction about the value and the potential stature of the man, conviction that came to its pick thank to the hermetic movement of that time, mainly due to the contribution of Ficino, Mirandola, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee and Bruno” (History of Magic, Cavendish).
The renaissance achieved to fix in the initiated the ideal of “universal man”, that develops and valorizes all the aspect of his nature, that proudly tends to experiment and dominate all things based on the theory of the correspondences, macrocosms and microcosms, and the man seeing himself as a miniature replica of the world and of god.
The economic transformation with the take-off of the capitalism; the ascension of the bourgeoisie that irrupts with power and models a different man (commercial sense, adherence to the wealth, inclination to the sensible world); the population movements (demographic growth, cities revitalization); the change of mentality (affirmation of individualism); the scientific discoveries (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo) and the gradual admission of the science as the direction for the human progress; the development of the technique (printing, compass, forges); the possibilities of a bigger expansion of the culture (universities, secularization of the knowledge); the different concept of politic (Machiavelli) and of the forms of coexistence, ending in the formation of the modern state; the new religious crisis, that begins with the influence of the greek-roman paganism and derives in a period of religious conflicts (from which, the most spectacular will be the reform); the turn, finally, in the conception of the man and his social projection (the human being as protagonist of the history, owner of his forces and capable to intervene and to transform the world). These are some of the factors that turn the renaissance into one of the pillars of the life and the believes of the current man.
In order to understand the Italian origin of the humanist phenomenon, it is necessary to mention the confluence of two factors:
• Optimal economical and social conditions
• The Greek-Roman cultural legacy, not completely buried yet.
As it was already mentioned, the “humanist” man searches in the sources of antiquity with enthusiasm and fervor, cultivates the classic languages in schools and academies, procures elegance in the expression, foments –directly or indirectly- the resurrection of the paganism, claiming the right of the man to develop himself in the world, resuscitates the platonic idealism (neo-Platonism) against the scholastic philosophy of Aristotle, trying to find a new dimension of the man as intermediary between heaven and earth.
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