School of Night

After hearing Dr. Sexson's introduction of Sir Walter Raleigh with his pearls and his "princely perfume," I got it into my head that the School of Night was not unlike some of the more pretentious and annoying customers I encountered in my years as a Starbucks barista:  a collection of men in dark clothing that sat around sipping espresso drinks and discussing just how enlightened and generally awesome they are.  After reading Frederick Turner's article I found that that while they were stylish in their melancholy and punk-rock in their atheism, these men actually had something interesting to say. 

It is hard to believe that Marlowe and his sardonic wit when discussing religion could have existed in a time when the monarch played the dual role of the head of the church and atheism was the same as treason. I read Dr. Faustus in another class but I didn't read it as it is explained in Turner's article.  While I imagined the absence of God as being comforting to one so self-important as Faustus, Turner explains that it is in fact terrifying but subsequently frees a  "free thinker" such as the members of The School of Night to philosophize a meaning for life without an omnipotent mediator: "Having no God to mediate the ferocity of its aspiration, the mind must contemplate and prey upon itself, until the veils of habit, tradition, and expectation  are torn away and the soul confronts the essential zero at its core."


I am having trouble reconciling the idea of the School of Night consisting of scientists and atheists with the return of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism.  Hermeticism as I understand it is a belief in an all-encompassing God as well as the notion that every being in the universe is connected while Neoplatonism is a mixture of Christianity and a new understanding of Plato.  Perhaps the men of the School of Night's ideas of men as the brothers of the gods sparked an interest in knowing and understanding what Neoplatonism calls thinking closer to the mind of God than of man such as astrology and alchemy. 

We shall see.