It is no accident that Aquinas formulated his doctrine at the same time that the stories of the Grail began to circulate. They describe the same process albeit using different methods.
Though they were enemies — Bacon mocked Aquinas for only being able to read Aristotle in translation — both Aquinas and Bacon were representatives of the impulse of the age: to strengthen and refine the faculty of intelligence. They found magic in thinking. The capacity for prolonged, abstract thought, for juggling with concepts, had existed once before but only briefly and locally in the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, before being snuffed out again. A new, living and more long-lasting tradition arose with Aquinas and Bacon. Both put experience before the dead old categories of tradition, and both were deeply religious men who sought to refine their religious beliefs on the basis of experience. ‘Without experience,’ said Bacon, ‘it is impossible to know anything.’
Bacon was the more practical, but when he explored the mind’s supernatural capacities, he invoked entities from the same spiritual hierarchies that Aquinas categorized. Both applied rigorous analysis and logic, and their mysticism was quite unlike the unthinking, ecstatic mysticism of the Cathars.
A young scholar at Oxford in the 1250s, Roger Bacon resolved, like Pythagoras before him, to know everything there is to know. He wanted to gather together into his own mind all that the scholars at the court of Haroun al Raschid had known.
Roger Bacon became the image of a wizard. Known as Doctor Mirabilis, he sometimes appeared on the streets of Oxford in Islamic robes. At other times he worked without rest day and night in his rooms in college which would be rocked by explosions from time to time.
Bacon busied himself conducting practical experiments, for example with metals and magnetism, discovering gunpowder independently of the Chinese or scaring his students by shining a light on to a crystal in order to produce a rainbow — something which up until that time people had believed only God could do. He also had a magic looking-glass that enabled him to see fifty miles in any direction, because he, unlike anyone else alive at the time, understood the properties of lenses.
But it is undoubtedly true that Bacon had powers beyond the ability of science to explain today. He sent his complete works to Pope Clement IV in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy called John, whom he had taught to know all his many books off by heart in a few days. Bacon used a method that involved prayers and magic symbols. Similarly, he was able to teach students Hebrew so well that they could read all of scripture in a matter of weeks.
All magic is a power of mind over matter. As we are beginning to see, esoteric philosophy is concerned with methods for developing the faculties of the mind so that natural laws can be manipulated.
In Roger Bacon the faculties of intelligence and imagination were highly developed and each worked one on the other. In 1270 he wrote: ‘It is possible to make engines of navigation which have no need of men to navigate them, so that very large sea-going ships may go along with one man to steer and at greater speed than if they were full of men working them. And cars could be made that would move at inestimable speed without animals to draw them. Flying machines can be built so that a man sitting in the middle of the machine may turn an instrument by which wings artificially made will beat there…’ In the Middle Ages this remarkable man had a complete vision of the modern technological world created by experimental science. Bacon was a Franciscan who, like the founder of his order, longed for a better, cleaner, kinder world for the poor and the dispossessed.
There is a telling point in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose when William of Baskerville, Eco’s Sherlock Holmes-like hero, explains that there are two forms of magic, a Devil’s magic that seeks to harm others by illicit means, and a holy magic which rediscovers the secrets of nature, a lost science known to the ancients. Like the Arab alchemists who influenced him, Bacon worked on the borderline of magic and science — and this borderline, we will see, is what alchemy essentially is.
Bacon wrote a treatise called The Mirror of Alchemy and liked to recall a saying of a great scholar of the Cabala, St Jerome: ‘You will find many things quite incredible and beyond the bounds of probability that are true for all that.’
In 1273 Thomas Aquinas, nearing the completion of his massive Summa Theologica, was taking Mass at a church in Naples when he had an overwhelming mystical experience. He wrote ‘What has been revealed to me now, makes all I’ve written worth no more to me than a stack of straw.’
WE’VE HAD HINTS OF THE TRAINING OF THE imagination in Lull and Bacon. Of course idealists have a more exalted view of imagination than materialists. For idealists imagination is a faculty for grasping a higher reality.
The discipline of training the imagination is central to esoteric practice, the initiations of the secret societies and, indeed, of magic.
For esotericists and occultists imagination is also important, because imagination is the great creative force in the universe. The universe is the creation of God’s imagination — imagination, as we saw in Chapter 1, was the first emanation — and it is our imaginations that allow us to interpret the creation and sometimes to manipulate it.
Human creativity, whether magical or non-magical, is the result of a particular channelling of the powers of the imagination. In alchemical tracts, for example, sperm is described as created by the imagination. This is a way of saying that imagination not only informs desire, it also has the power to transform our very material natures.
Powerful magical transformations in the material world outside their bodies can be made by initiates who know how to work on these creative powers of the imagination. An Indian adept is taught from an early age to practise seeing a snake in front of him with such concentrated power, with such a highly trained imagination, that he can eventually make others see it, too.
Of course there is a danger in all this emphasis on the imagination that is perilously close to fantasy. There is always a danger that these workings on the imagination will only end up in delusion. Magic can seem a self-deluder’s charter.
The systematic approach of the secret societies was intended to militate against this.
St Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote the rule book of the Templars, recommended a systematic training of the imagination. By summoning up images of the birth, infancy, ministry and death of Jesus Christ, you could invoke his spirit. If you imagined, say, a domestic scene involving Jesus Christ, imagining the pots and pans, the clothes, his likeness, the lines on his face, the expression in his features, your feelings when he turned to look at you, then if you all of a sudden banished the visual images, what might be left is the very real spirit of Christ.
In thirteenth-century Spain a Cabalist called Abraham Abulafia wrote amplifying the idea of God’s creative word. In earlier cabalistic texts the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet had been described as creative powers. ‘In the beginning’, then, God had combined these letters in patterns, changed them round and made words out of them, and out of this process unfolded all the different shapes of the universe. Abraham Abulafia proposed that the initiate could participate in the creative process by combining and recombining Hebrew letters in the same way. He recommended retiring to a quiet room, dressing in white robes, adopting ritual poses, pronouncing the divine names of God. In this way a state of ecstatic, visionary trance could be achieved — and with this state, secret powers.