When they did begin to retire, it occurred over several generations so that people didn’t find the change remarkable. For the collective memory only slowly relinquishes its notions, and there the sight of angels would long remain a common phenomenon.
IN 1584 a work called On the Nature of Angels was printed in Venice. The author was anonymous, but there is no longer any doubt that it was Antinous Bellori, who some twenty-two years previously had had that hilltop encounter with two angels. We know that from 1565 to 1572 he did his basic studies at the university in Naples and that subsequently he began medical studies, which were to take him to Montpellier, where he studied anatomy, Padua, where he studied surgery, and Bologna, where as well as studying pharmacology and natural history he also received his doctorate, but the great familiarity with scripture and the whole of the theological canon that characterizes his work bears witness to the fact that in all these years he must have immersed himself in questions concerning the existence of angels. There are no descriptions of Antinous from this time, we know little of the sort of life he led, who he met, or how he earned his living, but if one adds to the great scope of the work the portrait he paints of himself in his later notes, we can assume, with relative certainty, that he was so engrossed in himself and his own ambitions that he seldom gave other people a thought, but spent large portions of the day in his own company, bent over his books in some miserable room somewhere, completely possessed by the thought of committing his unique insight to paper and gaining recognition for it. In other words, he was convinced that truth lay outside the realm of collective knowledge, and that he, through his talent and steadfast will, would be the first to arrive at it. In this, perhaps, he more closely resembled the obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all around Europe to think, nervous and tormented and constantly on the edge of breakdown, as portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Hamsun, rather than the image we have of those full-blooded, expansive, life-affirming Baroque characters, but the fact remains that it was here, in the transition between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that this particular persona emerged for the first time. Giordano Bruno was one example, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Isaac Newton others. For all of them knowledge was indissolubly linked to their individual lives, severed from the general context from which it had originally been won, with all the resultant loneliness, spiritual crisis, and megalomania. No one has captured this state better than Shakespeare in Hamlet (1604). Hamlet’s tragedy is knowledge, it’s this that has torn him away from his surroundings, and it is his hopeless attempts to reconnect with them that the play deals with. The isolated subject that began to appear in the philosophy of the time wasn’t merely an image, but also a physical reality, from Descartes’ idealized version, as he describes how he spent the entire winter of 1620 indoors, completely alone, in a heated room, where I could come to terms with my own thoughts in peace and quiet, to the cold and lonely life of Newton, who remained friendless throughout his entire student days at Cambridge and later spent his best years almost totally isolated in his study in the same town. Newton, Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz were mathematicians, and all of them broke the barriers of classical mathematics at an early age. Only Pascal reflected that it was not solely the universe that expanded as a result of their work, but also loneliness. In the posthumously published Pensées (1670), he describes the horror of a world that has been opened up to infinity, where no boundaries exist, neither outer nor inner, for even the minutest thing always reveals something smaller — all of nature’s infinity, with all its stars, planets, valleys and mountains, rivers and seas, animals and insects, is found within the tiniest atom, he writes, which in turn contains the minutest atom in which all of nature’s infinity is found, which in turn contains the minutest atom. . Every attempt to understand this universe, whether by charting its motions, systematizing its products, or searching for its origins, is naturally vain and risible, and Pascal was making real fun of the science of his age. What he never grasped was that the real aim of science isn’t to understand the world, but to close it up. Choosing to turn to God was another mistake, because when reason has once taken the step into infinity, there is no way back, and the God to whom Pascal turned was every bit as abstract and limitless and cold as the mathematics he had some years earlier helped to develop.
It isn’t difficult to picture him sitting there in his apartment in Paris writing, bent over his manuscript, his thin, earnest face barely illuminated by the light of a burning oil lamp, just as it isn’t hard to imagine Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg or Descartes in Utrecht. The emergence of the type of person that each of them in their own way represented, just at the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, is, of course, no coincidence. In antiquity they would never have been understood, either for what they were or in terms of what they wrote. The people of antiquity always studiously avoided the notion of the limitless, they weren’t interested in the boundlessness of either space or time, and they clothed everything beyond the immediate in anecdote. It’s clear that their want of interest in astronomy and history is closely linked to their lack of interest in psychology; they had as little desire to forfeit themselves to infinity outward or backward as they had to forfeit themselves to infinity inward. Hence the purity of their art.
How different to those vast, medieval Gothic cathedrals! Not only did they open the way to the notion of infinite space, they made a cult of it, almost an obsession. Just how close a culture’s concrete productions are to its view of the world and itself is well demonstrated by the fact that the first alchemists began to figure prominently in Europe at the same time as the cathedrals. The results the alchemists achieved or the methods they used are irrelevant in this context, the essential point is the underlying concept they brought with them, that insight into the secrets of life is not unattainable, but can be gleaned by those in possession of the right abilities and knowledge. It was said of Albertus Magnus, for example, that he’d constructed an automaton that could talk and move like a human being, of Théophraste Bartholomeus that he could control the weather, of Robert Foxcroft that he had brought his dead child back to life. It’s not unreasonable to assume that myths like these formed the kernel of the legend of Faust, in which no doubt is left about that limitless art’s demonic character. And what was the legend of Faust warning against, if not the activities of Copernicus, Bruno, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton? We don’t normally see it this way because of the impressively effective operation that was mounted during the Enlightenment, when demonic was the label attached to the obscure and the vague, the speculative and the occult, and truthful to the precise and rational, obvious and provable, with all the fateful consequences that would entail.
Because darkness isn’t the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found.
Antinous Bellori’s name is on the whole remarkable for its absence in such contexts, something that at first glance isn’t in the least bit strange, considering the subjects that preoccupied him. It seems a long way from Newton’s books on optics and gravity to Bellori’s work on angels. But if we put what they wrote about to one side, and concentrate instead on the underlying mentality and philosophy, we will discover that the similarities outnumber the differences. Bellori employed the same methods as the others, he’d read the same literature and possessed the same knowledge. The only thing that distinguished him from them was that he looked in a different direction. That the secret into which he’d thereby gained insight would never be recognized was something of which he was ignorant, just as the other movers of the age hadn’t the slightest inkling of the consequences of their own discoveries. They lived in a period suspended between two contrasting views of the world and, like hermit crabs changing shells, were quite naked and vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell, until they’d crossed the invisible line and the new shell lay closer, after which they simply had to keep pushing on. The openness, fluidity, and uncertainty of the moment is there in Baroque art alongside a fascination with infinity and fixation on death. But the choice was made, the world’s new boundaries were laid, and everything that was outside them sank slowly into oblivion. And rightly so, we might cry today, for Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were right! After all, the ideas of Paracelsus, Landmark, and Bellori are monstrous, unscientific, superstitious. But if we remember that these writings date from the very start of the Enlightenment, before the new world philosophy was determined, it may be easier to see that such channels of thought represented an alternative to the road that was chosen, the one that has brought us to where we are today, and that it’s precisely this choice that makes the ideas in, for example, On the Nature of Angels seem so outlandish and unfashionable. They weren’t then. And therein lies the enticing point: what if Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion?