The Mysterious Science of the Soul in the Age of Reason
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is perhaps the quintessential philosopher of the Enlightenment. His motto ‘Sapere aude!’ challenged modern man to throw off the shackles of self-incurred tutelage [Was ist Aufklärung? (1784)]. Reason and nature, the Enlightenment proposed, should be the twin lights of intellectual enquiry, assisting human progress, and putting an end to superstition, ignorance, and man's arbitrary subjection. The emphasis on reason implied that all ideas and institutions were henceforth exposed to the clear light of logical and critical analysis.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) had already won European renown as a scientist in numerous fields, before his seership from the 1740s onwards made him notorious. If Swedenborg's early career had exemplified modern European thought, his new spiritual vocation seemed at odds with the Enlightenment. By mid-century the worship of nature and reason, so prominent in the thought of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant was accelerating the process of secularisation. Swedenborg necessarily attracted controversy and Kant wrote a scathing and, by his later admission, unjust work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) which damaged Swedenborg's reputation among Enlightenment thinkers. The thought and career of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), famous as the founder of ‘animal magnetism’ for the therapeutic treatment of illness, suffered a similar fate in the reign of reason. Although Mesmer actually regarded himself as a Newtonian, concerned to discover the mechanical laws that operate in the universe, his name became associated with occultist currents in the nineteenth century.

Professor Gabay's book poses a revisionist assault upon the Enlightenment as defined by Voltaire and Rousseau, by addressing the twin influences of Swedenborg and Mesmer on the intellectual and religious culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. In Gabay's view the Enlightenment foregrounded traditional tensions between spiritual gnosis and rational modes of knowledge. Although the age of reason predominantly rejected supernaturalism, it also created the space for a ‘covert’ aspect of the Enlightenment where fresh perspectives were opened on the soul, the human mind and consciousness. While Mesmer insisted on the existence of a physical fluid underlying animal magnetism, his followers the Chevalier de Barbarin and Marquis de Puységur focused on new discoveries involving somnambulism, trances and altered states of consciousness. Mesmerism spread through the French provinces by means of the ‘Harmonial Societies’, where the explorations of magnetic sleep offered wide scope for explorations of inner states and invisible realms. Gabay shows that in Paris, Lyons, Strasbourg and Avignon, Swedenborgian, Mesmerist and other esoteric concerns overlapped in an extensive network of quasi-Masonic secret societies and theosophical sects from the 1770s onwards. He argues that their syncretic programs often adopted a millenarian outlook and incorporated both ritual and practical elements, drawing on Catholicism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism, but also on the ideas of Swedenborg and Mesmer concerning higher and inner worlds inaccessible to profane reason. Gabay sees these spiritual initiatives as still rooted in the Enlightenment because of their application of the language and methods of science to metaphysical concerns. Those individuals who could accept neither religious orthodoxy nor a mechanistic philosophy joined the quasi-Masonic mystical societies, which still apparently absorbed the advances in rational eighteenth-century learning.

Gabay presents extensive documentation of these secret and hierarchical groups including the ‘Harmonial Societies’ and high-grade mystical Masonic lodges in France and their personal contacts with Swedenborgian groups such as the Exegetic and Philanthropic Society at Stockholm, the early Swedenborgian New Church in London and Manchester, the illuminists of the Avignon Society, and the high-grade orders of ‘Scottish’ Freemasonry associated with Jean-Baptiste Willermoz at Lyons.

These complex Enlightenment currents have long been identified. As Kant himself argued in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), reason could not produce absolute knowledge about anything, the ‘thing-in-itself’ (noumenon) remained unknown, while the finite and fallible senses could only describe the ‘thing-as-perceived’ (phenomenon). These doubts about the metaphysical efficacy of empiricism combined with the rule of reason were but the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment. In the late 1920s René Le Forestier compiled major studies of occult and high-grade Freemasonry in the 1770s, while Auguste Viatte documented the late eighteenth-century swathe of illuminist and theosophical societies as a prelude to Romanticism in his pioneering Les sources occultes du romantisme (1928). In his 1969 study of the young Goethe's world-view, involving alchemy and Swedenborg, Rolf Christian Zimmermann wrote of an ‘eclectic Enlightenment’, where pietistic influences prevailed in the early eighteenth century and irrational, pre-Romantic impulses supervened in the period 1765-1785. Isaiah Berlin also identified the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, presenting such figures as the oracular Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) and the polymathic philosopher and historian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) as the representatives of an irrational Sturm und Drang or Pre-Romanticism that challenged the late Enlightenment. These studies also map Gabay's territory.

Gabay has done sterling work in presenting the heirs of Swedenborg and Mesmer on the late eighteenth-century stage of mystical Freemasonry and theosophical societies, together with their sectarian millenarian offspring in the nineteenth century. An interesting aspect of his work is his identification of these phenomena with the Enlightenment. It was precisely in the 1770s that literary Pre-Romanticism flourished, when the rule of reason was felt to be arid, artificial and shallow compared to the realm of feeling and emotion. Gabays' ‘Covert Enlightenment’ thus coincides with the Pre-Romantic phase of the eclectic late Enlightenment. Its explorations of hidden realms already prefigure the Romantic movement that would sweep Europe and America in the early nineteenth century. Gabay's assertion of millennialism (Biblical prophecies) and millenarianism (expectations of eschatological redemption), first evident in the late seventeenth century, as a direct legacy of the secret societies' esoteric discourse proves this point. The release of these utopian and communal impulses in popular millenarian movements during the nineteenth century, especially in America, owes a more obvious debt to the spirit of Romanticism than to the critical reason of the Enlightenment.

Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is Director of the Centre for the Study of Esotericism at the University of Exeter. Web: http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/research/exeseso/index.htm. He is the author of studies on Paracelsus, John Dee, Emanuel Swedenborg, Helena Blavatsky and has (with his wife Clare) recently published ‘G.R.S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest’.