ISSUES on Greek Alchemy Issues on Greek Alchemy 2 This research has been sponsored by DACALBO project (Digital archive concerning alchemy in Byzantium and in Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire), Thales, National Strategic Reference Framework 2007-2013 THALES-DACALBO Issues on Greek Alchemy 3 Table of Contents Vangelis Koutalis, The mutations of alchemy and the development of ‘chymistry’ during the post-Byzantine era in the Greek-speaking ………….. 4 Cristina Viano, Olympiodore l'alchimiste et la taricheia. La transformation du minerai d'or: technê, nature, histoire et archéologie…………………………. 19 Maria K. Papathanassiou, Stéphanos d’Alexandrie: La tradition patristique dans son œuvre alchimique ……………………………………………………… 34 Matteo Martelli, Byzantine Alchemy in Two Recently Discovered Manuscripts in Saint Stephen’s (Meteora) and Olympiotissa (Elassona) Monasteries........... 73 Gianna Katsiampoura, The relationship between alchemy and natural philosophy in Byzantine times…………………………………………………… 109 Rémi Franckowiak, Athanasius Rhetor and the Greek Chemistry in the 17th century Ottoman Empire…………………………………………………………. 126 Didier Kahn, Alchemical interpretations of ancient Mysteries…………………. 152 Lawrence M. Principe, Texts and Practices: The Promises and Problems of Laboratory Replication and the Chemical Explanation of Early Alchemical Processes………………………………………………………………………….. 167 Kostas Skordoulis, Kostas Exarchakos, The educational applications of the historical material and on the reproduction of alchemical procedures………….. 186 THALES-DACALBO The mutations of alchemy and the development of “chymistry” during the post-Byzantine era in the Greek-speaking communities (Looking into some first interesting indications) Vangelis Koutalis Introductory remarks: between national science and non-science The Greek historiography of the Enlightenment in SE Europe has highlighted the emergence, during the second half of 18th century, of ideological orientations among the strata of Greek-speaking Ottoman Christian scholars, clerics, merchants and officials, which were both new in the descriptive sense of being radically different from the hitherto dominant practices and prone to justify, or even exalt, novelties as such. New aspirations grew and were loudly voiced, deviant ways of thinking were espoused, oppositional collective identities were gradually formed, the very feeling of belonging to a community was restructured, the sense of identifying oneself as a Greek started being redefined. Within this cluster of dislocations and shifts, one of the most conspicuous elements is the proliferation of writings and educational courses ‘on nature’, employable for the dissemination of theories drawn from the rich repertoire of the modern, Cartesian or Newtonian philosophia naturalis as markers of a major cultural change already well underway in the societies of Western Europe1. During the last decades, historians working on this area of research have admittedly made one great step forward, conceding that this dissemination must be interpreted more as an “appropriation” of means of knowledge production by active agents than 1 The English-speaking reader may consult the following general studies: G. P. Henderson, The Revival of Greek Thought 1620-1830, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970; P. Kitromilides, Tradition, enlightenment and revolution: Ideological change in eighteenth and nineteenth century Greece, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1978; idem, Enlightenment and revolution: The making of modern Greece, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2013. There is also in French the study of C. T. Dimaras, La Grèce au temps des lumières, Genève: Droz, 1969. For the specific term “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment” routinely used in Greek historiography, and some of its ideological connotations, see: M. Patiniotis, “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment: In search of a European identity”, in: T. Arabatzis, J. Renn & A. Simões (eds.), Relocating the history of science: essays in honor of Kostas Gavroglu, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 312, Cham et al.: Springer, 2015, pp. 117-130. For the construction of a modern Greek identity resulting from the developments initiated during the second half of the 18th century see S. Myrogiannis, The emergence of a Greek identity (1700-1821), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, especially: pp. 83-129. Issues on Greek Alchemy 5 as a “transfer” of knowledge products to passive recipients. One principal question, though, remains pending: what was really the upshot of the articulation of various theories, conveyed from Western Europe –as well as theories, in not a few cases, sanctioned by existing, prior to Enlightenment, traditions– into new fields of knowledge? Historians find themselves in a quandary about what answer should they pick out. At the one end of the balance, the answer proposed is that the process of appropriation brought about a peculiarly “Greek” scientific discourse. A new, specifically “Greek” kind, therefore, of science have seen the light of day: “Greek”, in so far as the Greek-speaking scholars, despite the lack of original scientific production, did not confine themselves to the role of translators, but incorporated, instead, the new knowledge into “a pre-existing edifice”, without breaking the cultural continuity, and offering thus “new syntheses which shaped, by and large, a different view regarding education, a new scientifico-philosophical insight into the phenomena, a new, different spiritual consciousness”2 (we shall call this, Thesis I). At the other end of the balance, we are induced to resolve that the appropriation led merely to a “sound philosophy”, a discourse on nature suited howsoever to serve moral edification, all the more so, in a period where the ideals of individual prudency, self-reflectivity, and self-governmentality had gained considerable ground, but, for all that, bereft of those requirements of rationality and objectivity that are meant to demarcate science proper from philosophy3 (Thesis II). In the first case, the difference in the national context of appropriation differentiates what is appropriated. It results in a different species of science, with dissimilar criteria of evaluation to those that have prevailed in the other, West European species, most commonly known to our days as science proper. In the second case, the difference in the dynamics of appropriation inhibits appropriation itself. The “absence of any discussion concerning the character of the rules of new ways to study nature, the processes of legitimizing the new viewpoint and the initiation of consensual activities to consolidate the new attitude about the ways of dealing with natural 2 I. Karas [Γ. Καρᾶς], Ἡ Ἑλληνικὴ ἐπιστήμη καὶ ὁ Βαλκανικὸς χῶρος, Ἀθήνα: «Δαίδαλος»-Ἰ. Ζαχαρόπουλος, 2001, pp. 40-41. 3 This is the approach of D. Dialetis, K. Gavroglu & M. Patiniotis, “The sciences in the Greek speaking regions during the 17th and 18th Centuries – The process of appropriation and the dynamics of reception and resistance”, in: K. Gavroglu (ed.), The sciences of the European periphery during the Enlightenment, Archimedes; New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology 2, Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, pp. 41-72. THALES-DACALBO Issues on Greek Alchemy 6 phenomena”, an absence readily ascertainable within the various Ottoman Christian scholarly milieus, is interpreted here as an indication, not of a different kind of science, but of the absence of science itself. “In introducing the new sciences, the Greek scholars did not attempt to introduce natural philosophy per se, but, rather, they sought a new way of philosophizing”: the type of discourse they developed “lacked the constitutive features of the discourse of natural philosophy as it was being articulated and legitimized in Western Europe and it was primarily a philosophical discourse”4. What is scientific in the West, and remains scientific after being disseminated to the Western periphery (e.g. to the Iberian Peninsula), is transformed into something strictly, or essentially, philosophical, when it is appropriated in the Eastern periphery. In either case, Ottoman Christian scholars are confessedly presented as active agents, since they appropriate, indeed, scientific knowledge. But their agency ends up distorting this knowledge. Either by altering arbitrarily, just for the reason that another cultural community is posited as the context of its appropriation, the standards of its evaluation, namely, the yardsticks that permit a rational decision to the question whether this knowledge qualifies to pass as scientific or not. Or by altering its nature: diluting scientific knowledge to such a degree that it is not scientific any more. The distortion carried out is so extensive that we can hardly compare the input of the appropriation process with its output, or even critically relate the one with the other. In Thesis I, the only element that remains common, after the appropriation has been through, is one signifier, “science”, devoid of any meaningful content. In Thesis II, the historian of science can only confirm that some modern theories on natural phenomena eventually passed the borders of this peripheral territory. After getting this done, she has no jurisdiction of going further than noting that what was produced in this territory through appropriation falls short of the mark: it can no longer bear the credentials of being science. Other specialties,