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Home , Paracelsus

CHAPTER EIGHT

PARACELSUS: ASTRAL

Then has this Madness been the Parent of all those mighty Revolutions, that have happened in Empire, in Philosophy, and in Religion. Tale 171

To encounter clinical experiment, anatomy, , and sophisticated understanding of object relations in the Digression on Madness is to be introduced to Paracelsus,1 the father of modern , and one of the Tale's major targets. Paracelsus epitomized for Swift the rise of modern science and millennial movements, in lock step with both Luther's Reforma• tion and Calvin's Puritanism. In the process of advancing modern medicine, science, and Christianity, Paracelsus connected them to , chem• istry, , , the occult, white , , and the Book of Genesis—all subjects of the Tale. His ideas have won diverse and far-flung disciples ever since, and his cosmology remains at the center of the modern Jungian unconscious and twentieth-century holistic medicine. In the fifteenth century 's Florentine Academy rearranged the alliance between classical learning and Christianity; Plato replaced Aris• totle with profound implications for the rise of science, the north European Reformation, and the modern European world. In medicine, the momentous Renaissance changes in learning and religion pitted the four humors tradition of the rationalist against the holistic medicine of the Neoplatonic empiricist Paracelsus in a philosophical clash that has continued to divide medicine to the present. For Swift, satire and medicine were closely allied and humoral diseases of the mind could be treated as effectively in literature as those of the body were in medicine. Thus to challenge Galen's medical cosmos was to challenge the classical satirist's. But the changes in humoral medicine and literature were symbolic of an entire reformation in the European world; and Swift pitted his genius against the modern configuration. Plato's man as microcosm,

1 Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493?—1541). His real name was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. 160 PARACELSUS: ASTRAL CHEMISTRY

Paracelsus's astral psyche, and Calvin's inward light were all one to the satirist. The ideas of an inner-directed human attuned to cosmic forces were moving inexorably on a millennial course toward a new theosophy, marked by optimism and faith in linear human progress. Within the framework of both humors traditions, however, the modern movement underestimated and self- servingly misinterpreted the spiritual, animal, and mortal aspects of human nature. In the Tale's cosmos—and reemerging in the postmodern world—a contest exists between opposing views of the human condition. The Tale addresses the interrelated issues, employing a profound knowledge of medi• cine and of Paraclesus. Swift single-handedly intended to combat the com• bined influence of Neoplatonism, Paracelsus, and Calvin by assuming the role of the primitive satirist as physician. Responding to the ghost of Thomas More, Swift set down the priorities of the Renaissance humanist: "God's servant first," classical ideals, the humanities, lasting human values, the reflective life, and nobility of soul. Swift considers the influence of Paracelsus on this awesome macrocosmic scale. Among the Tale's select list of "the [six] great Introducers of new Schemes in Philosophy" (166), Epicurus, Diogenes, Apollonius, and Lucretius are his ancients. Only the relatively modern Paracelsus and Descartes deserve comparable ranking in his company of those who have advanced new systems. These latter-day world changers represent the chemi• cal and mechanical givens in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. The satirist gives the two extravagant innovators macrocosmic significance and also evaluates their contributions within the empirical vocabulary of anatomy—that is, at the microcosmic level—used in Paracelsus's own clinical examinations. Paracelsus's critical Neoplatonic terminology referred to fac• ulty, soul, seeds or semina, and qualities. Imitatively, the Tale asks "What Faculty of the Soul" causes mortal man to advance new systems? "From what Seeds" does this disposition spring? "And to what Quality of human Nature" are these great innovators "indebted for their Number of Disciples?" (166). An analysis of the specifics of Paracelsus's mystical-medical cosmos, both clinically and theoretically, helps to answer Swift's large rhetorical question about what pathological abnormality best defines the four ancient and two modern systematizers and myth makers: For, what man in the natural State or Course of Thinking, did ever conceive it in his Power, to reduce the Notions of all Mankind, exactly to the same Length, and Breadth, and Height of his own? (166)

Paracelsus had moved significantly in this direction. He redefined medicine by looking imaginatively at the supernatural in the psyche and in all matter.