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An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge:  E ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) Is Divided Into Two Main Parts

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An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge:  E ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) Is Divided Into Two Main Parts AN ALCHEMICAL UEST FOR UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE History of science credits the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) for his contributions to the development of chemistry and medicine. Yet, as this book makes clear, focussing on Van Helmont’s impact on modern science does not do justice to the complexity of his thought or to his in uence on successive generations of intellectuals like Robert Boyle or Gottfried Leibniz. Revealing Van Helmont as an original thinker who sought to produce a post- Scholastic synthesis of religion and natural philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan recon- structs his ambitious quest for universal knowledge as it emerges from the text of the Ortus medicinae (1648). Published a er Van Helmont’s death by his son, the work can best be understood as a compilation of nished and un nished treatises, the his- torical product of a life unsettled by religious persecution and personal misfortune. e present book provides a coherent account of Van Helmont’s philosophy by ana- lysing its main tenets. Divided into two parts, the study opens with a background to Van Helmont’s concept of an alchemical Christian philosophy, demonstrating that his outlook was deeply grounded in the tradition of medical alchemy as reformed by eo- phrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541). It then reconstitutes Van Helmont’s biography, while giving a historical dimension to his intellectual output. e second part reconstructs Van Helmont’s Christian philosophy, investigating his views on God, nature and man, as well as his applied philosophy. Hedesan also provides an account of the development of Van Helmont’s thought throughout his life. e conclusion sums up Van Helmont’s intellectual achievement and highlights avenues of future research. Georgiana D. Hedesan is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical History and Humanities at University of Oxford, working on a research project on the quest for universal medicine and radical prolongation of life in seventeenth-century alchemy (2013–2016). Prior to this, she held a short-term Cantemir Junior Fellowship at University of Oxford and a Frances A. Yates fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. A PhD in History from University of Exeter (2012), she is the author of sev- eral articles and reviews in scholarly journals dealing with Paracelsus, Van Helmont and alchemy, including articles published in Medical History and Ambix, as well as chapters in books either published or to be published by University of Chicago Press, Ashgate and Routledge. Universal Reform: Studies in Intellectual History, 1550–1700 Series Editors Howard Hotson, St Anne’s College, Oxford, Vladimír Urbánek, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague e ssion of the western Church in the Reformation era released great quantities of energy, not all of which was contained by the confessional churches. Alongside the well-studied process of confessionalisation and the persistence of variety within pop- ular religion, the post-Reformation period witnessed a series of poorly understood attempts by a wide variety of intellectuals to extend the reforming impulse from the spheres of church and theology to many di erent areas of life and thought. Within these ambitious reforming projects, impulses originating in the Reformation mixed inextricably with projects emerging from the late-Renaissance and with the ongoing transformations of communications, education, art, literature, science, medicine and philosophy. Although specialised literatures exist to study these individual develop- ments, they do not comfortably accommodate studies of how these components were sometimes brought together in the service of wider reforms. By providing a natural home for fresh research uncomfortably accommodated within Renaissance studies, Reformation studies and the histories of science, medicine, philosophy and educa- tion, this new series will pursue a more synoptic understanding of individuals, move- ments and networks pursuing further and more general reform by bringing together studies rooted in all of these subdisciplinary historiographies but constrained by none of them. An Alchemical uest for Universal Knowledge e ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) GEORGIANA D. HEDESAN First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 ird Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Georgiana D. Hedesan e right of Georgiana D. Hedesan to be identi ed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or repro- duced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or herea er invented, including photocopy- ing and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data e LOC data has been applied for. ISBN: 9781472469168 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315566733 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Preface ix PART I Van Helmont in Context 1 1 e Medical Alchemical Background of Van Helmont’s Christian Philosophy 3 Paracelsus and His Astronomia Magna 3 Early Paracelsianism: Petrus Severinus (1542–1602) 5 Middle Paracelsianism: Joseph Du Chesne (1544–1604) 6 Middle Paracelsianism: Oswald Croll (1563–1609) 8 Alchemical Trends in the Early Seventeenth Century 9 2 Van Helmont’s Life 13 Van Helmont’s Childhood and Youth (1579–1608) 15 Maturity and Persecution (1609–1636) 23 Old Age (1637–1644) 35 3 Van Helmont’s Ortus Medicinae and Some of its Problems 39 PART II Th e Principles of Van Helmont’s ‘Christian Philosophy’ 49 4 God 51 Apophatic and Cataphatic eology 52 Voluntarist eology 54 God in Nature 58 God in Man 63 Conclusions: e Innerness of God 73 5 Nature 75 Van Helmont’s Views of Nature 77 Matter 86 Spirit 104 Conclusions 134 6 Man 137 Van Helmont’s Views on Human Nature 138 vi CONTENTS Van Helmont’s eory of the Human Soul 142 Self- Knowledge and Scientia 153 Conclusions 166 7 Applied Philosophy: Alchemy and Medicine 167 Christian Charity and Medicine 168 Alchemy and Adeptship 170 Alchemical Medicine 172 Alkahest 177 Drif or Lapillus, the Universal Medicine 183 e Philosophers’ Stone 186 e Arbor Vitae and the Alchemical Prolongation of Life 189 General Conclusions 193 Van Helmont’s Universal Vision 193 e In uence of Van Helmont’s Philosophy: Some Future Directions 199 Appendix: List of Chapter- Treatises in Ortus Medicinae 205 Bibliography 213 Index 235 List of Figures 3.1 Ortus medicinae table of contents (1652 edition) 41 5.1 Van Helmont’s view of the transformations of water in higher atmosphere 94 5.2 A representation of Van Helmont’s structure of the water atom 103 5.3 A schematic representation of Van Helmont’s process of generation 107 Acknowledgements I am thankful to a number of wonderful scholars that have supported me in the ardu- ous process of writing this book. e book grew out of my PhD thesis at University of Exeter, supervised by the regretted Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and by Pro- fessor Mark Wynn. I am grateful to both for their tremendous support and guidance throughout the PhD years. I am also thankful to Dr Stephen Clucas and Professor Jonathan Barry for their comments and advice as examiners of my thesis. I would not have been able to nish my PhD without the partial nancial support of the Univer- sity of Exeter and my Teaching Assistant position at its EXESESO Centre. In the process of devising this manuscript, I have also bene tted from inesti- mable advice from a number of scholars. I would rst single out Dr Margaret Pelling, the unsung editor of Walter Pagel’s book on Van Helmont, who provided invaluable comments on chapters of my book manuscript. I am also thankful to Prof Howard Hotson, Prof Robert Halleux, Dr Jennifer Rampling, Dr Anna Marie Roos, Dr Erica Charters, Dr Guido Giglioni and the series’ anonymous reviewers for their guiding advice at various stages of book development. is book has greatly bene tted from a research trip at the Mechelen Archives in Belgium. In this sense, I am grateful for the nancial support of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry’s ‘New Scholar Award’ (2011). I wish to also thank the Diocesan Pastoral Centre in Mechelen for hosting me, and archivist Dr Gerrit Vanden Bosch for his support in the Mechelen archives. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family: my sister Andreea, who has unconditionally supported me throughout the PhD and early career, and my parents, Petruta and Gheorghe. I would not be here without their love. Preface On 4 March 1634, the Flemish philosopher, physician and alchemist Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644)1 was arrested by the Mechelen ecclesiastical court on sus- picion of heresy. His imprisonment, occurring barely a year a er the sentencing of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) to inde nite house arrest, was also incited by the Inqui- sition. It occurred in a period when Counter- Reformation e orts were being directed toward challenges of orthodoxy originating within Catholic lands themselves. Like Galileo, Van Helmont was a born Catholic espousing a ‘new philosophy’ that sig- ni cantly deviated from traditional Aristotelian Scholasticism. Like Galileo’s, Van Helmont’s natural philosophy also appeared to stand in contradiction with Catholic theology.
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