The Reenchantment of the World (16 page)

 

 

The second factor contributing to the split between the esoteric
and exoteric traditions was organized religion, both Catholic and
Protestant. It was the very intimacy between magic and Catholicism which
led to an exaggerated emphasis on alchemy's esoteric aspects (indeed,
prior to this, alchemy was not seen as having "aspects"), an emphasis
that served to sharpen the distinction between the esoteric tradition
and the growing body of technological studies which were rejecting
that tradition in the first place. This same intimacy also left magic
extremely vulnerable to Protestant rationalism, both during and after
the Reformation.

 

 

According to Keith Thomas, the church was quite heavily involved in
magical practices on the local level during the Middle Ages. Indeed,
without the network of rituals and sacraments it is doubtful that the
church could have had the leverage that it did. The liturgy of the time
included rituals for blessing houses, tools, crops, and people setting out
on journeys; rituals to insure fertility; and rituals of exorcism. In the
popular mind, the priest had special powers, and a whole range of beliefs,
or superstitions, had grown up around the ceremony of the Mass. Thus the
wafer was seen as having the power to cure the blind, and it could also
be crushed and sprinkled in the garden to discourage caterpillars. At
the same time, the church deliberately blurred the distinction between
prayers, which were appeals for supernatural help, and the tools of magic,
such as charms or spells, which were supposed to work automatically. The
church recommended the use of prayers when gathering medidnal herbs;
and the repetition of 'ave marias' or 'pater nosters' fostered the
notion that these Latin "incantations" had a mechanical efficacy. All
in all, despite the church's opposition to magic on the official level,
it appeared to the populace "as a vast reservoir of magical power,
capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes."54

 

 

As for alchemy, its relationship to the church, at least during the
Middle Ages, was practically heretical, for it occasionally claimed to
provide the inner content of Christianity which it felt no organized
religion could supply.55 Thus it argued, every so often, for an analogy
between Christ and the alchemical work itself, the so-called lapis-Christ
parallel. This analogy and the claim of material transformation resulted
in several encyclicals and papal bulls against the art, but as the social
structure of the church began to crumble in the fifteenth century, alchemy
and religion became intertwined in a most unusual way. In particular,
the soteriological (salvationist) aspect of the art began to receive
more attention even as the "puffers" and charlatans were subject to
increasing attack. This development was, in fact, another facet of the
esoteric-exoteric split. Sir George Ripley (1415-90), canon of Bridlington
and an alchemist as well, frankly stated that the purpose of alchemy
was the union of the soul with the body. By the sixteenth century, the
church had drawn up a document establishing correspondences between the
various alchemical processes and church sacraments. Hence putrefaction
was extreme unction; distillation, ordination; calcination, repentance;
coagulation, marriage; solution, baptism; sublimation, confirmation;
and of course, transmutation, the Mass.56 We might infer from these
correspondences that the collapse of church magic under the pressure
of heretical sects, and later, the Protestant Reformation, led to an
overemphasis on the religious dimension of alchemy. This, in addition
to the attack being mounted by the growing technological literature,
ultimately served to split it off from the exoteric tradition.

 

 

It was during the Renaissance that the soteriological aspect of alchemy
was pushed to its extreme, becoming, says Jung, "an undercurrent
of the Christianity that ruled on the surface." In addition to the
lapis-Christ parallel, some texts referred to mercury as the Virgin Mary,
and the spirit of mercury as the Holy Ghost. Sir George Ripley constantly
intermingled Christian and alchemical symbols in a way that turned into an
unwitting parody of Catholicism. In one of his sketches, for example, the
green lion lies bleeding in the lap of the virgin, an obvious caricature
of the Pieta.57 The Christian attitude toward alchemy at this time is
also revealed in the choice of animals used as metaphors for Hermes,
which were the same as had been used for Christ in patristic literature:
dragon, fish, unicorn, eagle, lion, and snake. Transubstantiation was
seen as, in essence, an alchemical process. Ripley and others praised
the making of the stone as the Second Coming which, Jung notes, "sound[s]
very queer indeed in the mouth of a medieval ecclesiastic." Indeed, what
we see is an unwitting distortion of Christianity, an apotheosis that was
at the same time a melting down. The medieval Christian synthesis was
thus recast in alchemical terms, and this tendency reached its climax
at the end of the sixteenth century with the rise of the Rosicrucians,
a semisecret, occult brotherhood that still exists today.

 

 

By the end of the sixteenth century, the intimate relationship between
magic and the church had become such an obvious target for the Reformation
that magical practices of all kinds began to draw fire from Catholic
as well as Protestant quarters. The story is rather complicated,
because Catholic-Protestant relations themselves were very complex,
and the attack on magic was part of an internecine cross fire that is
not easily unraveled. Catholic opposition to magic was facilitated by
a Protestant commitment to the Hermetic tradition on the part of those
who, suggests Jung, saw that tradition (perhaps unconsciously) as a
way of remaining Catholic. Thus toward the end of the sixteenth century
in Germany, a group of occult practitioners began to argue openly for
Hermeticism as being the path to divine illumination, explicitly stating
the lapis-Christ parallel.58 This group began to have an impact on
Lutheran circles, and to rally behind those Protestant forces that could
offer it protection from the long arm of the Inquisition. The movement
thus acquired a political tinge, which emerged in anonymous manifestoes
of 1614-15 defending Rosicrucianism and the occult sciences.

 

 

Europe soon found itself swept up in a frenzy over Rosicrucianism and its
heretical implications. Orthodox religion, was convinced of the existence
of, something approaching a world-wide conspiracy, a charge explicitly
denied by the alchemist Michael Maier in his "Laws of the Fraternity
of the Rosie Cross" (Latin edition 1618) -- a book that nevertheless
affirmed the existence of a secret brotherhood of enlightened mystics
dedicated to the improvement of mankind. Two years prior to this, the
English physidan and alchemist Robert Fludd published his own defense
of the brotherhood ("Apologia Compendaria Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce")
which he followed with a series of volumes from 1617 to 1621. Fludd argued
for the inner content of the occult sciences, an alchemical interpretation
of the Bible (e.g., seeing the creation as a divine chemical separation),
and the view of nature as one vast alchemical process.

 

 

Of course, the emergence of a fraternity or alchemists arguing in
support of alchemy, as well as of publications defending this group,
probably reflected not the strength of the tradition but the fact
that it was dying. As frightening as a defense of religious alchemy
was to the church, it is clear from hindsight that it came about, in
part, as an attempt on the part of some to maintain and preserve what
they regarded as the genuine spiritual content of Catholicism. In the
context of the times, however, alchemy's claim to provide the only true
salvation could not be regarded as anything but pernicious heresy. Thus
in 1623, a proclamation appeared in Paris announcing the arrival of the
brotherhood, which declared that it would remain invisible but would
lead people onto the true path. The following year, an open meeting
held to defend alchemical theses was dispersed by order of Parlement,
and its leading spokesman (one Estienne de Clave) arrested. It was in
such a context that the Minorite friar Marin Mersenne set out to save
both church and state, as well as philosophy itself, from this dangerous
turn of events. This attack so snowballed, enlisting as it did the finest
minds of Europe, that it has rightly been regarded as the death knell
of animism in the West. It involved not merely a widespread rejection
of esoteric alchemy, but possibly the first clear enunciation of both
the fact-value distinction and the positivist conception of science.

 

 

As a man deeply interested in religion and natural philosophy, Mersenne
was alarmed not only by the Rosicrucian phenomenon but also by the fact
that the growing aversion of scholars to Aristotelianism had led them
to Hermeticism, which offered a more active and experimental approach
to nature. He saw that it would be necessary not only to refute Fludd,
but to work out a Christianized version of Aristotelian rationalism which
would simultaneously facilitate a more dynamic approach to the natural
world. In lengthy works written and published over the period 1623-25,
Mersenne denounced Fludd as an "evil magician" and attacked alchemy as
an attempt to offer salvation without faith, that is, to set itself up
as a counter-church. By attributing power to matter itself, the Hermetic
tradition had denied the power of God, Who should rightly be seen as
Governor of the world, not immanent in it. Instead of advocating the
abolition of exoteric alchemy, however, Mersenne proposed something that
was ultimately far more effective in this regard: that the state should
establish alchemical academies to police the field of charlatans. These
academies would clean up the language of alchemy, substituting a clear
terminology based on observed chemical operations. They would also
avoid all discussion of religion and philosophy. He proposed, in effect,
the deliberate divorce of fact from value which would soon become the
distinguishing hallmark of modern science.

 

 

In the course of his attack on Fludd, Mersenne enlisted the aid of
his fellow Minorite Pierre Gassendi. A professor at Aix-en-Provence,
Gassendi moved to Paris in 1624, eventually (through the influence of
Cardinal Richelieu) becoming Provost of the Cathedral of Digne and
Professor of Mathematics at the Collège Royale. His attack on Fludd
was, like Mersenne's, religious, accusing the Englishman of trying to
make alchemy "the sole religion of mankind"; but it was a scientific
critique as well, arguing that Fludd's central notions could not be
empirically demonstrated. There was no way, for example, to prove that
all human souls contained a part of God, or that a world soul actually
existed. Gassendi's attack on Fludd may have been, in effect, the earliest
statement of scientific positivism. This equating of the measurable with
the real was another version of the public stance Newton adopted when
the concept of gravity was challenged as an occult cause.

 

 

Gassendi's attack, however, was much more than a critique. In the course
of the 1630s he elaborated a world view of matter and motion that, despite
its differences from the ideas of Hobbes and Descartes, amounted to a
billiard-ball conception of the universe. Change was external, occurring
through physical causation, rather than through the internal (dialectical)
principles posited by the alchemists. All we can know, he argued, are
appearances, not things in themselves. Matter, as well as the earth,
is effectively dead; and God is not a world soul, but a world director.59

 

 

The similarities that the reader may have noted between Cartesian physics
and the views of Mersenne and Gassendi are not accidental. Descartes was
also close with Mersenne, moving to Paris in 1623 and contributing to the
common effort of providing a Christianized atomism that would preserve
religious and political stability. In the "Principles of Philosophy,"
the world spirit of the alchemists had become a world mechanism (ether
moving in vortices), with mind expunged from matter and God relegated to,
the periphery. The destruction of participating consciousness, and the
role of God as external director, were hardly unwitting features of the
system. Both provided "scientific" sanctions against independent religious
or political thought. As Descartes wrote Mersenne in 1630, "God sets up
mathematical laws in nature, as a king sets up laws in his kingdom."

 

 

The collapse of alchemy was the result, not merely of learned
publications, but of the very organization of science. Mersenne's
monastic cell became the virtual nerve center of European science. He
conducted weekly meetings and a vast correspondence with scientists in
every country, introducing their works to each other and to the educated
public. Proponents of mechanism, such as Galileo, were translated or
explicated. Contacts were made with men who would later be key figures
in the Royal Society of London, and these ties were strengthened when
a number of them went into exile in Paris during the Civil War. Walter
Charleton introduced Gassendi's ideas to England in 1654, and soon
thereafter Robert Boyle began a series of publications attacking alchemy
and arguing for the mechanical world view, which, he tried to show by
experiment, conformed to actual experience. Alchemical doctrines were
"chemicalized" by a process of linguistic clarification and translation
into strictly exoteric terms. The mechanical philosophy, and the divorce
of fact from value, were built right into the guidelines of the Royal
Society.

 

 

After Mersenne's death, Gassendi presided over the weekly meetings, which
now took place at the house of the wealthy Habert de Montmor. This house
became the Montmor Academy in 1657, and its meetings were attended by the
secretaries of state, several abbés of the nobility, and other top-ranking
officials. The Academy championed the mechanical philosophy and maintained
close ties with the Royal Society. In 1666, Louis XIV's minister Colbert
reorganized the Academy as the French Academy of Sciences. As was the
case with the Royal Society, the notion of a value-free science was
part of apolitical and religious campaign to create a stable social
and ecclesiastical order throughout Europe. What modern science came to
regard as abstract truths, such as the radical separation of matter and
spirit, or mind and body, were central to this campaign. The success of
the mechanical world view cannot be attributed to any inherent validity
it might possess, but (partly) to the powerful political and religious
attack on the Hermetic tradition by the reigning European elites.60