Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), colloquially known as Paracelsus, emerges as a pivotal figure in the transition from medieval to early modern scientific paradigms. Within the realm of Anglo-Saxon scholarly discourse, Paracelsus and his adherents symbolize a seismic shift in medical doctrines, marked by the embrace of an ontological disease etiology and the explicit rejection of humoral pathology. This epoch also witnesses the pivotal ‘chymical’ turn in medicine, a transformation broadly attributed to Paracelsian influence. Simultaneously, in the annals of chemistry, Paracelsus’ theoretical construct of the tria prima – comprising mercury, sulfur, and salt – is credited with dismantling the hegemony long held by the scholastic theory of four elements over matter theory.
Yet Paracelsus transcended the roles of mere medical practitioner and alchemist; he assumed the mantle of a lay theologian and preacher, deeply rooted in biblical wisdom as his primary source of insights about the natural world. While the religiosity of Paracelsus is not a novel revelation, the influential works of Walter Pagel and Allen Debus focused predominantly on his medical and scientific contributions, for the most part neglecting substantive consideration of his biblical references. Unfortunately, an approach that isolates Paracelsus’s musings on medicine and natural philosophy (which ranged from astronomy and alchemy to meteorology and the nature of the subterranean realm) without delving into the intricate interplay with his biblical readings, medieval Christian theology, and his profound imperative to delineate the connection between the human and the divine, inevitably obscures the coherence of his intellectual oeuvre.
As Andrew Weeks cogently argued years ago, the specter of hostile scrutiny during his sojourn in Salzburg in 1524/25 likely dissuaded Paracelsus from publishing overtly religious commentaries. Instead, he redirected his efforts toward disseminating equally unorthodox treatises on ostensibly less perilous philosophical and medical subjects. Subsequent generations of scholars and Paracelsian enthusiasts, embarking on the publication of the copious manuscript treatises he left behind after his demise in 1541, commenced this endeavour in the 1560s. However, they focused predominantly on texts perceived to be Paracelsian (although a number were spurious) that emphasized medical, philosophical, alchemical, and magical themes. Regrettably, this collective endeavour sidelined numerous commentaries on biblical books, Christology, and Christian anthropology that Paracelsus prolifically elaborated during his itinerant physician phase post-Salzburg.
This selective trajectory persisted as those compiling collected works or anthologies of Paracelsus’ treatises in the 1590s eschewed the religious texts, some of which were linked to the circles around Valentin Weigel advocating for a sustained Reformation beyond the confessional rigidity of late-sixteenth-century Protestantism. Subsequent biographical, bibliographical, and philological scrutiny in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, particularly through Karl Sudhoff's edition of the collected works (1922–1933), predominantly focused on editing and printing philosophical and medical writings. Only a solitary edition of the theological works saw the light before the advent of World War II disrupted scholarly pursuits. While Kurt Goldammer and his associates resumed the publication of other theological treatises post-war, it is only in the last quarter century that historians of science and medicine, prompted by George Huntston Williams’ categorization of Paracelsus among the ‘radical reformers’ in 1962, have earnestly mined these works for contextual insights into Paracelsus’ worldview. Progress has been gradual, with much of the scholarly discourse conducted in German and French.
Building upon this scholarly corpus, alongside recent English-language contributions from figures like Charles Webster and Andrew Weeks, the present compilation of articles strives to rectify the imbalance found in the older literature. It deliberately focuses on the ‘Bible-based’ dimensions of Paracelsian science and natural philosophy – a term aptly coined by Dane Daniel. In addition to advancing this scholarly endeavour, the present papers serve as a useful introduction to contemporary European scholarship for an Anglo-American audience and revisit seminal English-language studies spanning the past several decades.
Urs Leo Gantenbein, in ‘The two lights of Paracelsus: Natural philosophy meets theology’, offers an overview of the evolution of Paracelsus since his beginnings in Salzburg as an independent theologian until his last writings, based on the most recent advances of Paracelsus scholarship. The ultimate goal of this overview is to show how Paracelsus’s theology was intimately blended with medicine, natural philosophy, and natural magic. Gantenbein manages to historically contextualize some typical Paracelsian topics such as the light of nature vs. the light of the spirit, gives examples of intertwining between natural philosophy, medicine, and Paracelsus’s doctrine of the Eucharist, and discusses the five different commentaries of the Swiss physician on the Gospel of Matthew, underlining his medical and magical approach to the Gospels. Works on the Last Supper are discussed as well. As a whole, this article is an extremely useful, detailed summary, or introduction, to Paracelsus’s theology, replete with new insights and discussions. As argued above, informed readers of Paracelsus can no longer ignore these religious dimensions of his worldview.
Dane Daniel and Charles Gunnoe’s article ‘Heretical Microcosmogony’ focuses on varying interpretations of man’s creation in the work of Paracelsus himself, in that of Martin Luther, and in the later Nachlass of Valentin Weigel and his school. In the course of their analysis, Daniel and Gunnoe manage to throw light on a number of vexed issues. First they address the problem of literalness: while Paracelsus himself may well have considered his exposition to be a literal exposition of the Bible’s meaning (as implied by Newman’s article in this volume), his exegesis violated the principle of interpreting Holy Writ sola scriptura, that is, without external additions drawn from non-Biblical sources, a principle adopted by Luther and many of his followers. The recognition of Paracelsus’s heteroclite hermeneutics by Lutheran critics lay at the heart of their frequent rebuke of the Swiss chymist. A further ground for rejection lay in Paracelsus’s adoption of the ultimately Neoplatonic distinction between soul and spirit, according to which the former was the immortal image of God (Paracelsus’s Bildniss) and the latter the ‘sidereal body’, a corruptible, ethereal being located between the fully material body and the immaterial soul. This contradicted the Biblical idea of spirit as the highest entity and soul as the bond between spirit and body. As Daniel and Gunnoe show, even Weigel and his followers seem to have found Paracelsus’s valorizing of soul over spirit to be unsatisfactory, leading them to restore the Scriptural hierarchy of spirit-soul-body. By following out the objectionable and innocuous strands in Paracelsus’s work, Daniel and Gunnoe pave the way to a more granular understanding of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century development of Theophrastia Sancta, the religious movement(s) spawned by the theological and philosophical works of Paracelsus.
In his paper ‘A Chymist Among Beasts’, William Newman focuses on the seeming metaphor of men-beasts in Paracelsus. His main point, however, is to show that Paracelsus, consistently with his peculiar literal interpretation of the Bible, explicitly meant some of these comparisons to be literal identities and not analogies, and was perfectly able to distinguish between both with great clarity. This new insight should be taken into great consideration by further scholars: far from being isolated, the case of men-beasts pointed out by Newman parallels that of the vegetal language used by Paracelsus on a much larger scale, as demonstrated by Matti Leprêtre’s research in both a master’s thesis and a forthcoming article. From now on, apparent metaphors used by Paracelsus should be carefully scrutinized in order to determine whether they are mere comparisons, or bear a deeper meaning to Paracelsus. Newman’s article also contains a translation of a chapter from Paracelsus’s late text De lunaticis, which will be useful to Anglophone readers of the Swiss chymist.
Charles Gunnoe’s independently written paper follows up his ongoing investigation of Paracelsus’s plague treatises, already formulated in several articles, by discussing here the most practical of these texts, known as the Sterzing treatise. It was addressed to the city of Sterzing, in Tyrol, in 1534, when an outbreak of plague hit the city. After a brief survey of Paracelsus’s plague writings, Gunnoe successively summarizes his plague theory as developed in the 1530s, manages to document the 1534 Sterzing plague better than it was done until now, and engages with the text – which may have been transmitted by the Tyrolean Paracelsian Michael Toxites, who first edited it in 1576. Contrary to Paracelsus's other plague treatises, this one does not mention his plague theory other than by alluding to the astral origins of plague. Nor does it insist on plague as a divine punishment, which was a well-developed feature, based on Biblical accounts, in Paracelsus’s De peste libri tres (ca. 1531–1535). Instead, the text offers remedies and therapeutic advice far more conventional than might be expected, which makes it an outlier compared with the other plague treatises. This discrepancy raises several questions, but is best explained by the audience Paracelsus addressed.
In ‘The chymistry of rainbows, winds, lightning, heat and cold’, Didier Kahn offers detailed examples of how Paracelsus explained various meteorological processes. To this purpose the Swiss physician actually devised an entirely new understanding of nature, based on the pervasive presence of the tria prima as the prime matter of all created things, including the heavens and stars. This chymical approach to nature rested on an interpretation of Genesis introducing the tria prima as material instantiations of the Holy Trinity in the natural world, bearing the threefold imprint of God’s fiat lux. By doing so, Paracelsus deliberately ignored all philosophical and scientific explanations on meteorological phenomena available in his time. His goal was, obviously, to replace the Aristotelian-scholastic worldview with his own chymical one. Among his numerous meteorological writings, the Philosophia de generationibus et fructibus quatuor elementorum stands out as the philosophical basis on which Paracelsus both established the omnipresence of the tria prima and built his more famous medical work, the Opus Paramirum.
Finally, in his ‘First Entities in the De renovatione et restauratione’, Andrew Sparling explores a puzzling notion in the alchemy of Paracelsus, that of primum ens, discussed by Paracelsus in one single text on the prolongation of life. This text has been rarely examined: its most detailed accounts are only a summary by Udo Benzenhöfer (2005) and a few pages by Didier Kahn (2018). Sparling begins with explaining the many ways in which this difficult text may confuse the reader. Then he considers the prima entia, which he describes as ‘as-yet-not-fully-actualized substance[s] on [their] way to becoming something in particular, in accordance with [divine predestination]’. This explanation matches the puzzling words of Paracelsus well, as the reader shall see. Sparling shows how this treatise is one of the scarce testimonies of Paracelsus’s interest in transmutation, and underlines the Biblical notion of rebirth that lies, in some cases, behind what Paracelsus means with ‘renovation and restoration’. He even shows that one use of the primum ens of plants described by Paracelsus is the very first occurrence of botanical palingenesis, i.e. chymical rebirth of plants in a ghostly form: a topic later invoked by Paracelsians as an experimental proof of the resurrection of bodies on the Last Judgment.
In sum, the reader will find much that is new in the papers assembled here. Previously unknown insights on the early and developing religious ideas of the Swiss chymist and lay theologian, accompanied by a thoroughly revised picture of the religious enthusiasts who chose to adopt his Theophrastia sancta and their critics, followed immediately by an analysis of his idiosyncratic Biblical exegesis and its implications for his thought in general, then by a study of his plague treatises, a detailed investigation of his sometimes biblically-inspired meteorology, and a new approach to alchemical transmutation in an author who was traditionally said to reject transmutation, all point to the striking transformations that are currently taking place in the study of this influential and often misunderstood figure. These collected papers will introduce the reader to the cutting edge of scholarship in a rapidly developing area of historical reconstruction while also advancing the field itself.