Subversive Fire

CHAPTER 5 “THOSE PONDERABLE FIRE PARTICLES…” DECIPHERING NATURE’S SECRETS IN THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. John 14:12 For that nothing parcel of the world, is denied to Mans enquirie and invention: hee doth in another place rule over; when hee sayth, ‘The Spirite of Man is as the Lampe of God, wherewith hee searcheth the inwardnesse of all secrets.’ Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning1 There are, of course, particular events that we call experiments, in which the operation of these laws is most clearly manifested, just as there are focused moments of encounter with the divine . The difference is that experiments can be contrived but moments of intense religious experience are given . Yet, just as we can be aware of natural laws outside the laboratory . so God is not con- fined to the realm of the conventionally sacred. John Polkinghorne2 Traditional symbols can have revolutionary consequences . Symbols can in- vert as well as reinforce social values . Old symbols can acquire new meanings, and these new meanings might suggest a new society. Caroline Walker Bynum3 In the opening pages of The Story of Christianity, Justo González suggests that the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament is really “not so much” about “the deeds of the apostles as the deeds of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and others.”4 While his bold perspective is not typical among historians trained in modern positivism or postmodern critical theory, it does raise significant questions about reason and faith, as well as of continuity and discontinuity in the long sundry story of Christian pneumatological traditions. The period surveyed in this chapter might be described as the fulcrum of the epochal break between the medieval religious worldview and the modernist enterprise of scientific em- piricism, an era characterized by a gradually increasing Euro-Western individu- alism that led to many of the achievements of scientists, inventors, scholars and artists over the last five centuries. The writers and movements examined in the following pages began their investigation of Nature and uttered their burning 191 192 CHAPTER 5 pleas for the reform of Christian learning with a deep sense of wonder about God’s role in Creation and about humanity’s place in the universe. If González’ insight about the history of Christianity as “a history of the deeds of the Spirit in and through the men and women who have gone before in the faith”5 resonates with believers everywhere, then the protagonists we are about to meet in this chapter pondered the meaning and mystery of the Holy Spirit no less faithfully than their ancient and medieval predecessors. Each protagonist considered himself a devout and pious Christian, even while church leaders and contemporaries accused some of sorcery or heresy. In their vigorous pursuit of knowledge about the natural world, of Nature’s causes and effects, they, too, uttered the age-old Pentecostal inquiry: What does this mean? Their fascination with chemical op- erations, spiritual energy, and force fields grew out of a profound respect and curiosity about the Spirit’s relationship to matter, described by scientific pioneers like Jan Baptiste van Helmont and Robert Boyle as “those ponderable fire particles.” Van Helmont lived at a time when alchemy was giving way to modern chemistry, and once, when feeling at a loss for words about his new profes- sion and research agenda, identified himself as a philosophus per ignem, literally as a “philosopher of fire.”6 This chapter examines the intersection of Christian pneumatology and con- ceptions of Pentecost with the early modern emphasis on scientific knowledge about the natural world. This was a convergence that, from the Florentine Re- naissance in the late 1400s to the founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660, generated dramatic reformulations of European life and thought along with the eventual reordering of Christian tradition, theology, and pedagogy that produced a “new society” by the eighteenth century, which as quoted above from Bynum’s study of symbolism and tradition reminds us that: “traditional symbols can have revolutionary consequences.” MEDIEVAL SCIENCE: MAGIC AND THE HOLY SPIRIT The history of both Christianity and experimental science can be better understood by studying the pneumatological convictions of early modern esoteric movements whose founding figures and writers were among the earliest precur- sors and pioneers of experimental science. In her landmark study on the Rosi- crucian Renaissance, Frances Amelia Yates suggested that, given the particular historical circumstances and intellectual innovation of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, any early-modern European nation that “did not over-persecute for magic would therefore be a country in which science would develop fairly freely.”7 Magic, especially in its manifestation as philosophical and practical alchemy, served since the 1200s as the proto-experimental repository of a steadi- ly growing scientific rationalism focused on decoding, understanding, and final- ly employing the “secrets of Nature” (secretum Natura). In the hands of devout Christian priests and theologians, its aim was both the alleviation of human suf- fering (medicina chimica) and the promotion of human flourishing (Beatitudo). Yates firmly believed “such a country was Elizabethan England,” but also noted these tendencies in early modern Germany, Bohemia, France, and the Nether- “Those ponderable fire particles…” 193 lands. As observed by B. J. Gibbons: “The securing of health and long life was one of the traditional goals of alchemy; this, after all is the purpose of the elixir of life.”8 This notion of the healing arts, found in both medieval Christianity and the various esoteric mystical traditions, was quite fond of the medical epithet: Natura naturam curat. In the late 1920s, Lynn Thorndike began writing his mas- terful eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science by explaining “that magic and experimental science have been connected in their development; that magicians were perhaps the first to experiment; and that the history of both magic and experimental science can be better understood by studying them to- gether.”9 Most historians of science and European intellectual history today ac- cept these connections as foundational to the rationalist enterprise of the 1500s and 1600s, but few of us working on the history of Christianity have paid careful attention to the role of pneumatological ideas and sensibilities in this most defin- itive permutation of Christian tradition at the dawn of modernity. This reformu- lation of traditional Western and Christian symbols exerted a vast influence on modernity despite the great divide which later opened up between that which science classified as empirically unverifiable or ontologically unknowable, and that which Christians, by then identifying each other as Roman Catholics or Protestants, still regarded as the verifiable and knowable mystery of God’s lov- ing presence in Nature and in the human heart through the Holy Spirit. Although unbeknownst to many devout Christians today, and though ne- glected by most contemporary historians of Christianity, pneumatology and the rise of science intersected among the esoteric, spiritual pathways of magic, alchemy, Hermeticism, Cabala, and mysticism. This was the point at which religious experience and curiosity about natural phenomena coalesced from about 1470 through 1670 before going their separate ways. The medieval and early modern Christian discourse on magic was replete with warnings about conjuring demons and malevolent spirits (black magic), while its nearly forgotten counter- discourse known as theologia magica (or white magic) was conducted under the protective aura of the Holy Spirit. In other words, concern about daemonic spirits preying on human frailty and hubris rendered the magician’s magnum opus suspect and prone to charges of heresy or sorcery often leading to imprisonment. In contrast, acknowledging the sanctifying and empowering presence of the Ho- ly Ghost with reverence and humility, while reminding one’s colleagues or read- ers of Scholastic authorities and Christian saints, like Albertus Magnus, who also dabbled in this miraculous realm, rendered the magician’s attempt to com- mand the powers of Nature theologically and morally acceptable as a magnum miraculum Christianum. During early modern times, Pentecost and the Holy Spirit was imagined by esoteric Christian movements such as the Rosicrucians in Germany, and the Freemasons in England and Scotland, as providing the pneumatological influx or motivational cause for the transformation of both individual and society. Even the English founder of the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon, envisioned a “Second Pentecost” based upon the gifts of scientific reasoning in his novella The New Atlantis (1627). Modern science, indeed, flowed out of this early- modern fascination with the inexplicable interaction of Spirit (Sancti Spiritus) 194 CHAPTER 5 and primary matter (materia prima) in the physical world. With this chapter, the book’s historical narrative concludes in the same domain that our exploration began in Chapter Two, in the imaginal space where Nature’s chemical secrets and rhythmic cycles intersect with the mystery of the Holy Spirit. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY Several

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