Ambix
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Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe Tara Nummedal To cite this article: Tara Nummedal (2013) Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe, Ambix, 60:4, 311-322, DOI: 10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036
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Date: 26 November 2017, At: 11:59
ambix, Vol. 60 No. 4, November, 2013, 311–322
INTRODUCTION
Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe Tara Nummedal
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Department of History, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA In his musings on the Last Days, printed posthumously in Table Talk, Martin Luther turned to the subject of alchemy. “The science of alchymy I like well, and, indeed, ‘tis the philosophy of the ancients,” he reportedly told his companions. While Luther welcomed “the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extracting, and distilling herbs, [and] roots,” he was drawn to it in the context of his faith as well. “I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day,” he observed. For, as in a furnace the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions, and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass; even so God, at the day of judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly. The Christians and righteous shall ascend upward into heaven, and there live everlastingly, but the wicked and the ungodly, as the dross and filth, shall remain in hell, and there be damned.1
Martin Luther was not an alchemist, of course, but the reformer’s allusion to alchemy in discussing the Day of Judgment hints at how broadly the art resonated as a way of engaging religion in sixteenth-century Europe. Indeed, from the moment alchemical texts and ideas began to circulate in European scholarly circles in the twelfth century, alchemists and theologians alike explored numerous connections between alchemy and Christianity. Like Luther, some drew on alchemy as a way of explicating theological concepts (or vice versa), while others drew analogies between the creation and operation of alchemical materials and Biblical passages, or considered the effects of alchemical medicines on the body in relation to the bodies of extraordinary figures like Adam, the Virgin Mary, or the saints. Still others pondered whether and how alchemists’ skills might 1
Martin Luther, “Of the Resurrection,” Book DCCLX, The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, trans. William Hazlitt (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), 826. For the Latin original, see Martin Luther, D. Martin Luther’s Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe [Abt. 2]. Vol. 1, Tischreden (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912–1921), 1149.
© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2013
DOI 10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036
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be useful during the End Times, or drew on exegetical techniques developed to understand Scripture in order to parse difficult alchemical texts. It is certainly possible to identify points of tension between alchemists and institutional churches, and it is undoubtedly the case that some alchemists saw only a superficial connection between their art and their faith. Nevertheless, many individuals clearly sought to integrate their faith with their work in the laboratory or library, understanding alchemy and Christianity as interlocking methods of exploring the human, divine, and natural worlds.2 Scholars have debated whether alchemy was somehow more closely linked to religion than other branches of natural knowledge in medieval and early modern Europe.3 In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, figures such as Margaret Atwood, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and Arthur Waite interpreted all alchemy as intrinsically and uniquely spiritual. More recently, Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman have articulated a powerful critique of this “spiritual” interpretation of alchemy as simply unsustainable in light of the historical record.4 As they put it in their oft-cited 2001 essay, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” it goes without question that alchemy and religion (or spirituality of various kinds) interpenetrated one another in the medieval and early modern periods, and that each borrowed terms and concepts from the other. This fact is not, however, remarkable in itself, nor is such interpenetration with religion unique to alchemy.5
Although their arguments did not go entirely uncontested, Principe and Newman cleared the way for more rigorous, historical scholarship, and in the past decade scholars have sought to construct a more subtle and nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between alchemy and religion.6 Clearly many European alchemists—just like their fellow naturalists, physicians, and astronomers—saw profound links between the divine order and their manipulations of nature. If it is unsurprising that alchemists were engaged with religion (or, conversely, that theologians were interested in alchemy), the four essays in this issue invite us to consider in more detail precisely how these two traditions intersected in medieval and early modern Christian Europe. The essays span the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, consider Catholic, Protestant, and even Jewish perspectives, and incorporate alchemists’ scholarly, medical, and transmutational aspirations. Each author examines a 2
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For a general overview, see Zachary Matus, “Alchemy and Christianity in the Middle Ages,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 934–45, and Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 61–62, 190–206. Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, for instance, have rejected this claim repeatedly. See, for example, Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 400; Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 311, and The Secrets of Alchemy, 205. Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” especially 396–401. Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 400. For two critiques of Newman and Principe’s claims, see Leah DeVun, “‘Human Heaven’: John of Rupescissa’s Alchemy at the End of the World,” in History in the Comic Mode, ed. Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 251–61, and Bruce Janacek, Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 13–14.
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particular moment in the evolving relationship between alchemy and religion in Christian Europe, whether powerful alchemical interpretations of particular biblical passages or theological concepts, the new exegetical potential of cabala for understanding alchemical texts, or alchemy’s insights about the imminence of the Last Days. Together, however, the essays propose that alchemy—particularly its textual practices and its promise of longevity and the perfection of matter—resonated with medieval and early modern religious culture in ways that were distinctive. This task has its challenges, to be sure. Above all, it requires bridging fields (history of science and the history of medieval Christianity, for example) that each have their own vocabularies and sometimes operate in different professional orbits today.7 The contributors to this volume rise to the challenge by reaching across the scholarly and disciplinary boundaries of our own era to recover earlier and very different earlier maps of knowledge. An additional difficulty is that it is impossible to generalize about either ‘alchemy’ or ‘religion,’ given how dynamic and contested each was in late medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, one of the important lessons of recent work in the history of alchemy has been that ‘alchemy’ encompassed a huge variety of ideas, practices, and participants, while the cultural spaces it has occupied have changed enormously over time, rendering it nearly meaningless to speak of ‘alchemy’ as if it were a timeless, coherent entity.8 The same can be said of Christianity, of course, most obviously during the Reformation, but before and after as well. Neither alchemy nor Christianity, in other words, was monolithic or static. These four essays, therefore, rightly resist generalizations, drawing attention instead to some particularly fruitful and focused examples of places where the intersection of alchemy and Christianity might yield insight into both. It is my hope that these essays may serve as models for future work on this topic. In focusing on the relationships between alchemy and religion, the four contributors to this issue depart in some ways from recent work in the history of alchemy, which has emphasized the revisionist project of rescuing the subject from the realm of ‘pseudoscience’ by demonstrating its historical importance to the development of modern science and medicine. In light of this work, it is now clear that medieval and early modern European alchemy addressed not only intellectual problems, such as matter theory, but also practical concerns such as mining, medicine, commerce, and the limits of technology. As several recent review essays and synthetic works on the history of alchemy make clear, alchemy has now been ‘restored’ to
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There are innumerable works on the topic of “science and religion,” however. For a point of entry into this broad topic, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, eds., The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Tara Nummedal, “Words and Works in the History of Alchemy,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 330–37; Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” 310.
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its rightful place in the history of science or medicine; in other words, historians have shown that alchemy is related to the study of matter, experiment, vitalism, and print culture, all of which lie at the heart of early modern science.9 Resituating alchemy as central to the history of science and medicine has been crucial to demonstrating its broad significance in medieval and early modern culture. In the process of detaching alchemy from ‘the occult,’ however, many of us have minimized or neglected alchemy’s religious dimension.10 This issue, therefore, highlights innovative work that seeks to integrate our increasingly sophisticated understanding of alchemy as science and medicine with new insights into alchemy’s contributions to and reliance on theology, eschatology, hagiography, and exegetical techniques in Christian Europe. Bringing these four essays together also provides an opportunity to draw attention to some of the excellent scholarship that laid the groundwork for this task by establishing some central areas of inquiry and providing important and detailed studies of key figures and themes. The most obvious and well-known locus for exploring the question of alchemy and religion has been alchemical metaphor and imagery, which both drew on Christianity to articulate laboratory processes and concepts, and also offered medieval and early modern Europeans rich material for depicting, understanding, and proving the truths of Christianity. Perhaps the most potent analogy was that between the life of Christ and the stages of the philosophers’ stone. Just as Christ had to be crucified in order to redeem humanity, the logic went, so too must the alchemist’s materials undergo similar torments, even death and resurrection, before they could in turn ‘redeem’ base metals as the philosophers’ stone. The fourteenth-century Franciscan John of Rupescissa offers only one example from this rich tradition.11 In his striking interpretation of an earlier alchemical author, pseudo-Arnald of Villanova, Rupescissa likens the third stage of the philosophers’ stone, a distillation, to the crucifixion. Observing the digestion of alchemical mercury and the ascent of its vapours to the head of the alembic, Rupescissa saw Christ’s ascension on the cross: “mercury is placed in the bottom of the vessel for dissolution,” he wrote, “because what ascends from there is pure and spiritual, and converted into powdery air and exalted in the cross of the head of the alembic just like Christ, as master Arnald [of Villanova] says.”12 Likewise, the alchemical vessel that enclosed the final stage of the red stone resembled “Christ inside the sepulcher.” Once the flames had brought out the internal redness of the 9
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See, for example, the essays by Bruce Moran, Lawrence M. Principe, William R. Newman, Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, and Tara Nummedal in the Focus section on “Alchemy and the History of Science,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 300–37; Marcos Martinón-Torres, “Some Recent Developments in the Historiography of Alchemy,” Ambix 58, no. 3 (2011): 215–37; Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, especially ch. 4; Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). It is noteworthy, for instance, that the subject of “alchemy and religion” does not really feature at all in Marcos Martinón-Torres’s fine 2011 review essay, “Some Recent Developments.” Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 109–16. John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, as cited and translated in DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 113 (hereafter Liber lucis).
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stone, the alchemist was to remove the red stone from its vessel so that it would “ascend from the sepulcher of the Most Excellent King, shining and glorious, resuscitated from the dead and wearing a red diadem, just as Master Arnald has attested.”13 Although Rupescissa spun out this analogy in words, it appeared in image as well, for example, in the successful Rosarium philosophorum, which appeared in print in 1550 as the second volume of a compendium of alchemical texts.14 As Lean DeVun has argued particularly cogently, analogies such as that between Christ and the philosophers’ stone were not just artefacts of the ‘colourful’ religious language of the Middle Ages: Christian imagery offered a tool for both structuring and communicating alchemical concepts.15 Rupescissa’s emphasis on red in this passage—the red stone, Christ’s red diadem—suggested that the analogy between Christ and the philosophers’ stone extended to Christ’s blood and the fecund, redemptive powers it was commonly understood to bear as well. As DeVun described this logic, “The creation of the stone through alchemy reenacts the narrative of the passion; hence, the stone may reenact the curative and salvific powers of Christ.”16 Just as Christ could cleanse the soul, Rupescissa implied, so too could the philosophers’ stone cleanse metals, absolving them of their impurities and transforming them into the noble metals, silver and gold. Several centuries later, the sixteenth-century German Lutheran alchemist Anna Zieglerin drew on the meaning of Christ’s blood elaborated around late medieval blood relics to communicate the nature of her own golden elixir, which she (not accidentally) called the lion’s blood. Like Christ’s blood, the lion’s blood was vivifying, abundant, and generative, capable of generating mineral, vegetable, and even human life; it was also redemptive. Just as late medieval devotional writers emphasized the power of Christ’s blood to wash, cleanse, restore, and cure both bodily and spiritual afflictions, so too could Anna Zieglerin’s lion’s blood cure leprosy in humans and metals alike. Such metaphors and analogies, in other words, were never ‘mere’ language, but constitutive of alchemy itself.17 Zachary Matus’s essay in this issue demonstrates that Christianity offered alchemical authors a great deal more than analogy or metaphor, however. Examining the alchemical writings of Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294), Matus locates the deep roots of the Franciscan friar’s ideas about the prolongation of life via the alchemical elixir in contemporary understanding of the resurrected body. Bacon believed that the elixir could restore the body’s health by balancing its complexion and harnessing 13 14
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Liber lucis, 118. Cyriacus Jacob, ed., De alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum, quorum catalogum sequens pagella indicabit. Cum gratia & privilegio Caesareo., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1550). For a modern facsimile, with German translation and commentary, see Joachim Telle, Rosarium philosophorum: Ein alchemisches Florilegium des Spätmittelalters. Faksimile der illustrierten Erstausgabe Frankfurt 1550, trans. Lutz Claren und Joachim Huber, 2 vols. (Weinheim: VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992). DeVun, “Metaphor and Alchemy,” ch. 6 in Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and DeVun, “‘Human Heaven.’” DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 118. Tara Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, ed. Elaine Yuen Tien Leong and Alisha Rankin (Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 125–41.
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the celestial quality of incorruptibility. Interestingly, Bacon also argued that the elixir could improve the individual’s moral qualities and instil superior cognitive powers in the soul. In order to articulate these qualities of the alchemical body, Matus argues, Bacon turned not only to natural philosophy and medicine, as we might expect, but also to formal theology and hagiography that touched on the soul and the bodies of the resurrected dead. If, as Matus shows, Christianity could inspire the development of new alchemical concepts and practices, then the reverse was true as well. That is to say, alchemy could also offer medieval and early modern Europeans a tool for structuring, communicating, and confirming religious (particularly eschatological) concepts. Again, Rupescissa offers an excellent example. Among historians of science, Rupescissa is perhaps best known for his treatise on the quintessence (De quinta essentia). He referred to the quintessence, essentially alcohol produced by distilling wine, as “human heaven (caelum),” which, as DeVun has noted, had the dual meaning of the sky and heaven in a theological sense. Accordingly, Rupescissa’s distilled quintessence was analogous to the ‘fifth element’ from which, according to Aristotle, the celestial sphere was composed, and that Rupescissa argued could balance the human complexion and thus preserve the human body. However, it was also an extract of theological heaven, in the sense that the quintessence could grant certain humans the incorruptibility that they would otherwise only obtain after death and resurrection. The point of this, for Rupescissa, was to allow elect ‘evangelical men’ the strength to battle Antichrist and withstand the ordeals of the Last Days before the end of time. In other words, DeVun has argued, certain men would obtain the post-resurrection body, the reward of the next world, before the Last Day, in earth’s final moments. The point, according to DeVun, is that it was in part an alchemical technology, distillation, which allowed Rupescissa to develop and articulate his innovative theology of a millennium on earth in which the boundary between heaven and earth would give way on the brink of the eschaton.18 Medieval and early modern alchemists found many other analogies between their alchemy and their Christianity. Spirits, bodies, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, and incarnation all resonated deeply both in alchemical and soteriological or eschatological contexts, and therefore it is not difficult to find alchemical imagery (rhetorical and visual) in ‘religious’ writings and, conversely, ‘religious’ imagery in alchemical writings.19 Textual intersections between alchemy and Christianity also extended to the practice of biblical exegesis. Genesis offered a particularly compelling site of potential concordance between alchemy and scripture because it 18
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DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and “‘Human Heaven.’” See also DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 193–218, which argues that the alchemical rebis stimulated new thinking about Christ’s divinity. See, for example, Chiara Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa margarita novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,” Ambix 20, no. 3 (1973): 178–79; Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique: XIVe-XVe siècles (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982); Joachim Telle, Sol und Luna: Literar- und alchemiegeschichtliche Studien zu einem altdeutschen Bildgedicht. Mit Text- und Bildanhang (Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag, 1980).
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described God’s creation of the world as a process of separation—light from darkness, the division of the waters, and so on—all out of a primordial chaos. This process could be understood in terms of the central operation of alchemical separation or Scheidung.20 Zachary Matus and Georgiana D. Hedesan, however, direct our attention to another part of the Bible that engaged alchemists’ energies. As Matus notes, Roger Bacon pointed to the biblical example of Adam, whose body was perfectly balanced (and thus whose life was prolonged) by the Tree of Life, as a model for the elixir-enhanced alchemical body. Hedesan shows that serious exploration of the link between the biblical Tree of Life and the alchemical elixir was by no means merely a medieval phenomenon, but continued to engage alchemists well into the seventeenth century. If Bacon looked to one set of extraordinary bodies as models for the alchemical body—namely, the resurrected dead—then the seventeenth-century authors Hedesan examines looked to another: Adam and the long-lived Patriarchs. Early modern alchemists took seriously the claim that Adam’s longevity depended on the Tree of Life, she shows, and proposed methods to reproduce its effects alchemically in the post lapsarian world. As Peter Forshaw notes in his contribution to this issue, some alchemists also seized on one of the more novel exegetical techniques that emerged in the Renaissance, namely Cabala, a Christian reworking of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah developed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin. Alchemical authors (particularly, although not exclusively, Paracelsians) deployed innovative cabalistic exegetical techniques in some surprising and creative ways, both to unravel familiar alchemical texts in new ways and to craft new ones. “Cabalchemical” scholars attributed numerical values to words, thus revealing hidden links to other words or, as in one instance, insight into the weights, proportions of substances in laboratory procedures. They constructed complicated ‘Cabalistic’ etymologies, emblems, and layered alchemical words, drew on Cabala’s image as knowledge handed down from Moses to bolster alchemical claims to access divine secrets, or deployed Cabala and alchemy simultaneously as complementary means of exploring God’s revelations. In detailing a wide range of ways in which alchemy and Cabala (even, in one instance, Jewish Kabbalah) intersected in early modern Europe, Forshaw’s piece serves as an important caveat. In the wake of Enlightenment and later efforts to frame alchemy as inherently ‘mystical,’ it may seem natural to us today that alchemists would gravitate to Cabala, or vice versa. What Forshaw demonstrates, however, is that this connection was never inevitable. Rather, it was forged in the Renaissance only with great effort and through the extraordinary creativity of authors who were willing to experiment with novel methods in order to reach ever greater insights into nature and scripture.21 20
Peter Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Responses to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis,” in The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See also Janacek, Alchemical Belief, and Michael Thomson Walton, Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, AMS Studies in the Renaissance (Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2011).
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While theoretical texts offered a particularly rich site of interaction between alchemy and Christianity, practitioners found the laboratory a point of connection as well. As Luther’s comments, or Rupescissa’s vision of Christ on the cross in a digestion of mercury, suggest, laboratory work could re-enact or commemorate some of the central events in sacred history—Christ’s life, for instance, or the incarnation. We should be careful not to trivialize this kind of alchemical commemoration. It was not incidental—a beneficial side effect of producing gold—but integral. Parallels between alchemical processes and sacred events granted long and complicated laboratory operations structure and dramatic narratives. They also reinforced the profound connections between nature and scripture, assuring the alchemist that the book of nature was indeed a source of divine revelation with as much to say as scripture. In this sense, alchemy could also function as a confirmation of faith. If the philosophers’ stone could be likened to Christ (and vice versa), then, by implication, the entire alchemical opus—the process of making and using the philosophers’ stone—was, in some sense, soteriological. Working with the bodies and souls of metals, perfecting nature and matter, the alchemist touches a fundamental truth of faith, its promise of salvation.22 As Chiara Crisciani has argued, moreover, “alchemy could be defined as a concrete and operative prophecy. It is an announcement of truth and salvation because it attains them in operations and facts, in the verified transformations which the alchemist produces through his doctrine, experientia and industria manuum.” By re-enacting sacred history in the laboratory, in other words, the alchemist also announced Christianity’s truths, serving as a kind of prophet: “the prophets’ words come true both in the real history of Christ and in the material process of the elixir, the saviour of matter,” Crisciani writes. “Therefore, the events of the Son of God explain and orientate the material phases of opus.”23 Donna Bilak’s essay demonstrates that alchemy could function as confirmation of millenarian prophecy as well. She examines the seventeenth-century Puritan alchemist John Allin (1623–1683), who assiduously collected and read both alchemical books and scriptural commentaries of a decidedly millenarian bent. Allin also practiced as a minister in Rye, England, and later in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and collaborated on alchemical projects with his close friends in Rye as well as the members of an alchemical “clubb” in London. Allin’s pursuit of the philosophers’ stone, Bilak argues, was tightly linked to his Puritan eschatology, in the sense that he viewed success in the laboratory as yet another sign (and evidently Allin and his friends had already noted numerous others) that the Second Coming was at hand. In particular, Bilak shows, Allin saw the successful completion of the stone as part of a broader restoration of knowledge signalling the return of the prophet Elias and 21
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Paracelsus was particularly influential in this connection by emphasizing God’s double revelation in the “mutually revelatory” books of nature and scripture. Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions,” 112. Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations”; Chiara Crisciani, “Opus and sermo: The Relationship between Alchemy and Prophecy (12th–14th Centuries),” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 4–24. Crisciani, “Opus and sermo,” 22, 21.
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the coming of the Day of Judgment. In the late Middle Ages and especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Europeans’ conviction that the Last Days were at hand led them to scour the books of Nature and Scripture for signs of God’s plan, alchemists’ ability to confirm prophecy through their laboratory operations was no trifling matter.24 Of course alchemists promoted the practical uses of their art during the End Times as well. Rupescissa’s elixir would restore the bodies of the evangelical men in their final battles with Antichrist, while the ‘lion’s blood’ of the sixteenth-century Lutheran, Anna Zieglerin, promised to help to restore the lost fecundity of the post-lapsarian world, contributing to a rejuvenation of nature in the earth’s final moments.25 The connection between alchemy and eschatology appears to have been particularly powerful: alchemy not only confirmed biblical and other prophecies about the operations of nature and the unfolding of earthly time, but also offered true Christians tools with which to engage the imminent Last Days, either by withstanding the tribulations of the End Times, or by restoring the world in its final moments. Even Martin Luther appreciated the way in which alchemical work could, in a sense, ratify prophecies about the fate of the world.26 As these examples show, individual practitioners found a wide range of productive synergies among the ideas, practices, and techniques that constituted their religious and alchemical work. While these connections are perhaps most obvious after what some scholars have termed the ‘religious turn’ in fourteenth-century alchemy, when texts such as Petrus Bonus’s Margarita pretiosa novella (New Pearl of Great Price), Aurora consurgens (The Rising Dawn), and Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (The Book of the Holy Trinity) increasingly presented alchemy as a kind of divine knowledge or donum dei,27 these essays make it clear that alchemists, clerics, theologians, and others also located powerful connections both before and after this moment. Indeed, the continuities that run through these four essays beg the question of whether it is possible to identify any particular turning points in the history of alchemy in Christian Europe. Given the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation, for example, we might ask whether it changed anything about the relationship between alchemy and Christianity. Certainly one can find both Protestants and Catholics pursuing alchemy after the Reformation, so it would be far too simple to map alchemy crudely onto confession. Nevertheless, efforts to locate concordances between Christianity and alchemy seem to have become particularly controversial in the wake of the Reformations of
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Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the German Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Herbert Breger, “Elias Artista—A Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science,” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Novotny (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidell Publishing Company, 1984); Walter Pagel, “The Paracelsian Elias Artista and the Alchemical Tradition,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 16 (1981): 6–19. DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time and Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations.” See n. 1. Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy”; William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 82–97.
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the sixteenth century, which placed the interpretation of Scripture at centre stage. The always contentious Lutheran Andreas Libavius, for example, objected to those (such as the Paracelsians Oswald Croll and Gerard Dorn) who,
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are advanced to such a degree of impiety that they have applied to the Stone the highest benefits of the Son of God, his birth, passion, death, resurrection, the symbols of the Christian faith, [from the] chapters … of Genesis … and other parts of the heavenly teaching, as if the foundation of all wisdom were in the Stone.28
The Catholic Mersenne likewise rejected overly enthusiastic interpretations of Genesis as a description of alchemical processes. Clearly, attempted alchemical interpretations of Genesis were stimulating but also increasingly contested in the wake of the Reformation. As Peter Forshaw observes elsewhere, “The mosaical account of creation in Genesis was evidently an extremely precarious tightrope between God’s Word and Works, not that this seems to have deterred the Paracelsians from their adroit negotiation of his two books.”29 Moreover, the implication of the Reformation for alchemy also might have to do with the establishment of new orthodoxies, whether Protestant or Catholic. Jole Shackelford, for example, has argued that the fortunes of Paracelsianism in Denmark were linked to Lutheran factionalism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Paracelsianism, he argues, fell out of favour with the decline of the more moderate Philippist (for followers of Philipp Melanchthon) party and the ascendancy of a more orthodox (Gnesio) form of Lutheranism and, as he puts it, “the sharpening doctrinal distinctions of orthodoxy and the authorities’ acquisition of the legal means of enforcing conformity to them.” Beyond this, Shackelford has suggested that the “Paracelsian worldview,” which offered a way to unify philosophical and theological worldviews, appealed to people who “for one reason or another dissented from strict Lutheran dogma.”30 As Shackelford has noted, Paracelsianism is a particularly complicated point of entry into the question of the religious affinities among alchemists, since Paracelsus himself was as much a lay theologian as he was physician or natural philosopher, to say nothing of his complicated relationship to chrysopoeia or transmutational alchemy.31 Still, the fortunes of Paracelsian alchemy (and maybe alchemy in general) in Denmark suggest that alchemists’ ‘outsider’ status was as much (if not more) a function of confessionalization and social discipline in the wake of the Reformation as it was rooted in alchemy’s inherent appeal to heterodox religious groups. Once confessional lines were 28
29 30
31
Andreas Libavius, Syntagmatis Arcanorum et Commentationum Chymicarum (Frankfurt: Ammonius & Serlinus, 1660), 269, as cited and translated in Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions,” 124–25. Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions,” 127. Jole Shackelford, “Unification and the Chemistry of the Reformation,” in Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, ed. Max Reinhart (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998), 312. Shackelford, “Unification and the Chemistry of the Reformation,” 292. The literature on Paracelsus is vast, but for good points of entry on the role of religion in his and his followers’ work, see Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), and Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008).
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sharpened, in other words, religious orthodoxy could impose intellectual orthodoxies as well. It is important to underscore that this was not just a Protestant issue. As Reformation historians have shown, confessionalization and social discipline, broadly, were cross-confessional processes.32 As the work of Martha Baldwin, Margaret Garber, and Sylvain Matton has shown, for example, post-Tridentine Catholicism could impose limits on alchemical speculation as well. Jesuits in general were cautious about alchemy, fearing that the desire for gold could easily imperil alchemists’ souls, even leading them to call upon the help of demons for help in the laboratory. They also worried about the implications of transmutation and matter theory for the Eucharist, particularly in connection with the issue of seminal principles. Some Jesuits, including Athanasius Kircher, managed to show a certain openness to some alchemical ideas and practices, while other Catholics, notably the seventeenthcentury Dean of Medicine at the University of Prague, J. Marcus Marci, found a way to reconcile Catholicism with his theory of seminal principles, which was grounded in his knowledge of transmutation. This openness may have receded when it came to theological ideas (such as transubstantiation) that were at the heart of confessional identity, however.33 The relationship between alchemy and institutionalized religion had certainly been strained before,34 and it may have become even more tense after the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, individual alchemists and theologians found potent synergies between alchemical imagery and the central events in sacred history, including the formation of the world in Genesis, the life of Christ, or the Last Days. They explored these connections as scholars through biblical exegesis and as practitioners by drawing parallels between laboratory operations and the crucifixion or incarnation. Alchemy could be deployed not only as analogy, but also literally, as a means to prepare medicines that would protect the elect during the tribulations of the End Times or to redeem a fallen natural world. These connections between alchemy and Christianity were not trivial or incidental, as they could structure, communicate, and even prove fundamental truths. While Protestant biblical literalism might have 32
33
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R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the German Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Martha Baldwin, “Alchemy and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century: Strange Bedfellows?,” Ambix 40, no. 2 (1993): 41–64; Margaret D. Garber, “Transitioning from Transubstantiation to Transmutation: Catholic Anxieties over Chymical Matter Theory at the University of Prague,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications/USA, 2007), 63–76. Sylvain Matton’s Philosophie et alchimie à la Renaissance et à l’âge classique, vol. I, Scolastique et alchimie (XVI e-XVII e siècles) (Paris: S.É.H.A; Milan: Arché, 2009) contains numeous texts that touch on these questions; see especially 1–225 for Jesuit texts related to alchemy. The fourteenth century, for example, saw an increasingly tense relationship between alchemists and the institutional church. Several orders banned their members from studying or practicing alchemy, and Pope John XXII (1316–1334) condemned the art in his well-known 1317 decretal, “Spondent quas non exhibent.” These condemnations derived in part from a concern with counterfeiting, but also out of a worry that alchemists who viewed alchemy as a type of divine revelation were skirting heterodoxy. See Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy”; Crisciani and Guglielmo Fabri, Il Papa e l’alchimia: Felice V, Guglielmo Fabri e l’elixir (Roma: Viella, 2002), 45–46; William R. Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80 (1989): 339–41, and Newman, “Alchemy and the Art-Nature Debate,” chap. 2 in Promethean Ambitions.
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encouraged alchemists to find ever more elaborate concordances between nature and scripture, alchemical analogy and exegesis flourished both before and after the Reformation. Where the Reformation might have been pivotal for alchemy, however, is in creating new orthodoxies (both Protestant and Catholic) that may have reined in—or at least pushed into the category of heterodoxy—some of the more extravagant attempts to align alchemy with Christianity. The significance of the Reformation, clearly, awaits further investigation, as do many other dimensions of the problems outlined here. One final caveat is worth underscoring. It is very easy to ‘free associate’ when reading alchemical texts, for they are often highly metaphorical, and easy points of connection quickly suggest themselves: transmutation/transubstantiation, alchemical redemption of matter/the redemptive power of the crucifixion, and so on. The four essays in this volume remind us to take seriously not only the religious language, but also the religious practices and contexts of alchemy, so that we can understand how they shaped the intellectual, social, and political nature of alchemists’ work. Most of all, however, these contributions underscore the importance of anchoring these kinds of connections in the words and works of individual alchemists and the specific religious contexts in which they operated. This precision is particularly important, given how complex and fluid both alchemy and religion were (and are). It is only through such careful, focused work that we can avoid vague and anachronistic generalizations about alchemy being somehow intrinsically or uniquely ‘religious,’ ‘spiritual,’ or ‘mystical,’ and come to understand, instead, precisely how and why alchemists, exegetes, and theologians worked so hard to forge connections between their alchemical and religious endeavours in medieval and early modern Christian Europe.
Acknowledgements My thanks to Jennifer Rampling for inviting me to guest edit this issue of Ambix, and for her innumerable consultations and contributions along the way.
Notes on contributor Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Science and Technology Studies Program at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago University Press, 2007) and is currently completing “The Lion’s Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in Reformation Germany.” Address: Department of History, Box N, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; E-mail:
[email protected]
