Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism. .

Hakan Hakansson. Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism.

(Ugglan Minervaserien, 2.) Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2001. 373 pp.index.illus.bibl. $49.50. ISBN: 91-974153-0-8.

The problem that scholars have had to confront in their investigations of John Dee's thought, setting aside the intrinsic opacity of his writing, is essentially two-fold. In the first place, there is the remarkable range of topics that Dee engaged in works that include the Propaedeumata aphoristica (1558), devoted to astrology as an "Arte Mathematicall," the Monas hieroglyphica (1564), whose central symbol, the "real kabbalah," would make possible the unification of all knowledge, the Mathematicall Praeface (1570), affirming the value of mathematics and experimentation in the study of nature, and Dee's account of the angelic conversations (1582-89), during which the prelapsarian language of Adam was revealed to himself and his scryer Edward Kelley. Confronted by such an eclectic corpus, scholars have sought to identify the conceptual threads that tie these works together. This task is rendered even more arduous, however, by the difficulties involved both in identifying the diverse sources Dee utilized and in determining their relative significance to understanding his works. Indeed, attempts to perceive Dee's writings as a potentially unified corpus have frequently seemed to depend on privileging particular scientific or philosophical traditions as dominant in his work.

Most recently, for example, Nicholas H. Clulee's important study (John Dee's Natural Philosophy, 1988) has offered a much less reductive alternative to Yates' "Hermetic" Dee by suggesting that the thread that ties his works together is the desire to discover the ultimate realities or causes underpinning the realm of nature, realities that Dee identified most frequently, though by various means, with mathematical principles. Though Hakansson's book deals less fully with the specifics of Dee's texts than does Clulee, it is devoted more systematically to tracing the continuities among them. In particular, Hakansson argues that all of Dee's major works, including the angelic conversations, demonstrate a sustained concern with language as a means of obtaining knowledge of nature and of the divine, and as a means of attaining union with God. Whether the "language" at issue was mathematics, geometry, the signatures in nature, hieroglyphic symbolism, Hebrew, or Adam's prelapsarian speech, Dee's intent, according to H akansson, was consistently to explore the continuities between the languages of man, the Book of Nature, and the divine Logos in order to uncover the creative principle that is at the origin of the cosmos and through which we can experience rebirth. Rather than viewing Dee's works "as exemplary of a specific philosophical school or faction" (334), Hakansson chooses to situate them in the wider context of the Early Modern practice of "symbolic exegesis." That is, whether in the guise of mathematician, philosopher of nature, or magus, Dee was primarily committed to the notion that all knowledge was a matter of seeking and revealing the divine Word of which all created entities were signs. Moreover, Hakansson's use of the notion of "symbolic exegesis," indebted to James J. Bono's The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (1995), allows him to stress the syncretic impulse behind Dee's employment of so many textual sources. Because he suggests that for Dee a ll fields of knowledge were essentially linguistic and interpretive practices seeking to disclose the original Logos, it is less important for Hakansson to privilege one school over another as his principal source. Hakansson skillfully demonstrates how Dee could have perceived seemingly disparate disciplines as part of a "perennial philosophy" (109) ultimately concerned with gaining access to the Word. For example, by tracing the continuities Dee would have perceived between Neoplatonic views of hieroglyphics, Pythagorean mathematics, Roger Bacon's "universal grammar," the emblem tradition, allegorical theory, and kabbalah, he shows how all these traditions cohere in his construction of the Monas symbol.

Though a number of the insights and ideas in this book can be found scattered throughout previous work done on Dee and on early modern occultism (Clulee's book is obviously crucial to the author's understanding of many particulars in Dee's texts), the conception of this work as a whole is both original and ambitious, providing as it does an extremely useful perspective from which to view Dee's often unmanageable oeuvre. Equally useful, moreover, are the author's able summaries of occult theory and practice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Among the various subjects of which he manages to present elegant, concise, and illuminating accounts are "natural" language theory, Pythagorean number symbolism, medieval ritual magic, Roger Bacon's and al-Kindi's theories of celestial influences, Jewish and Christian kabbalah, Florentine and Hellenic Neoplatonism, alchemy, and hermetic philosophy. More generally, Hakansson offers some effective critiques of the tendency still prevalent among scholars today to distinguis h too sharply between "occult" and "scientific" mentalities in the Renaissance, and he reminds us of the significant continuities in this period between Christian theology and liturgy and the discourses of magic and the occult. In these respects, this book will no doubt be valuable to readers not solely interested in Dee. It is, however, Dee's rigorous and persistent devotion to the project of disclosing God's creative Word at work in the universe that Hakansson most ably and at times movingly evokes throughout this study. The Monas symbol that Dee so carefully fashioned as a complex synthesis of various "linguistic" and hermeneutic traditions does not speak to us today with the same force as Milton's Paradise Lost or Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, but like these summative works it was a systematically composed verbal "universe" aimed at the restoration of humankind.