Paracelsus(1493–1541)
Paracelsus was the pseudonym of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus (Baumastus) von Hohenheim, the reformer of medicine and pharmacology, chemist, philosopher, iconoclast, and writer. If he himself assumed this name, it could signify "higher than high," or "higher than Hohenheim," a jibe at his illegitimate paternal grandfather. Born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, where his father practiced medicine, Paracelsus later lived at Villach in Carinthia (Austria), a center of mining, smelting, and alchemy—metal lores that were to occupy him for the rest of his life. From the age of fifteen his life was migratory. After medical studies at various German and Austrian universities, he seems to have completed his doctorate in 1515 at Ferrara under a faculty that was Scotist, Platonist, and humanist.
For the next eleven years, Paracelsus traveled throughout Europe, jeopardizing his authority as a physician by practicing surgery (then a craft, not a learned profession) in the army of Charles V and by experimental prescriptions. He visited spas, analyzed the waters, treated by hypnosis, and sometimes alleviated pain with laudanum. At Salzburg he narrowly escaped execution for participating in a peasants' revolt. When, in 1526, he settled at Strasbourg to establish himself in medical practice, he was famous as an object of superstitious distrust. But his spectacular cure of the printer Johann Froben quickly led to friendships with such men as Desiderius Erasmus and Oecolampadius and an appointment—against the will of the faculty—as medical lecturer at the University of Basel.
His eminence was short-lived. Lectures in German (rather than Latin), rejection of the canonical theory of Avicenna and Galen, denunciation of the apothecaries, and a public burning of the works of Avicenna were topped by the death of Froben. Those whose vested interests had been threatened tricked Paracelsus into behavior that could justify dismissal and arrest.
From 1528 until his death, his life was once again nomadic. Unkept promises and unstable patronage led him to Colmar, Nuremberg, Saint Gall, Villach, Vienna, and finally to Salzburg, where he died, probably of cancer, perhaps of metal poisoning.
Among his medical innovations were chemical urinalysis; a biochemical theory of digestion; chemical therapy; antisepsis of wounds; the use of laudanum, ether (without awareness of its anesthetic properties), and mercury for syphilis; and the combining of the apothecary's and surgeon's arts in the profession of medicine.
Paracelsus's numerous books are mostly variants on the theme of man (the microcosm) in relation to nature (the macrocosm). The most important are Archidoxis (c. 1524); the treatises on syphilis (c. 1529); Opus Paragranum (c. 1529); Opus Paramirum (c. 1530); Philosophia Sagax (c. 1536); and Labyrinthus Medicorum (1538).
Paracelsian philosophy was both traditional and new. Its medieval elements are traceable to alchemy and Kabbalism, which are branches of a trunk rooted in Hellenistic Neoplatonism, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Gnosticism. These occult lores shared the concept of creation through corruption; the axiom "That which is above is one with that which is below"; belief in a bisexual, homogeneous, hylozoic universe; a cyclic theory of time; and an animism approximating pantheism.
A mystery religion of life rather than merely of gold, medieval alchemy employed Semitic and Greco-Roman mythology as a screen against the unenlightened and as a vehicle of private communication for adepts. Although Paracelsus counted himself an adept, he abandoned the tradition of reserve and discarded most of the mythological symbolism. Unlike his predecessors, he wrote to clarify. He explained that alchemy's real desideratum was the secret of life.
Like Kabbalists and alchemists, Paracelsus believed in the theory that decay is the beginning of all birth. Nature emerges through separations: First, prime matter separates out of ultimate matter (also called Yliaster or Mysterium Magnum), which is eternal and paradoxically immaterial. "The first was with God … that is ultima materia; this ultima materia He made into prime matter … that is a seed and the seed is the element of water [fluid]." God spins ultimate matter out of himself. This yields, by separation, the prime matter of individual objects, a watery matrix, perpetually spawning nature, perpetually resolvable back into ultimate matter. Human creativeness in art, alchemy, or pharmacology repeats the primal act. The human demiurge, like God, separates rather than combines.
The Paracelsian theory of time resembles that of Plotinus. Time is qualitative change: growth, transition—even fate. Given the basic concept of cyclic generation and decay, Paracelsian time would be for the material cosmos a cycle of becoming. But there are two orders of time: force time (within) and growing time (without). Like the Paracelsian concept of "prime matter" in relation to "ultimate matter," this theory of time is essentially dualist.
"Above" and "below" are substantially the same: "Heaven is man and man is heaven, and all men together are the one heaven," but microcosm and macrocosm are contained by membranes or partitions.
Paracelsus rejected the concept of humors as governed by planets and substituted a chemical theory of humors as properties: salt, sweet, bitter, and sour. He retained the medieval alchemistic variant of the four elements and a quintessence, the fifth element, that is life. He tended to treat fire as less elementary than the combustible principle, sulfur. Medieval alchemy had stressed the sexual polarity of two elements, fire (identified with the male principle) and water (identified with the female principle), and contrasted flame with flow and sulfur with mercury. Paracelsus reinterpreted these as principles rather than as elements and added a third principle, salt. These are properties or states—combustible, fluid or vaporous, and solid; each confers on matter its structure, corporality, and function. As constituents of ultimate matter, these are absolutes; as components of nature, they are infinitely variable in all sensuously discernible properties. Every natural object has its own sulfur, salt, and mercury, as well as its own quintessence.
Absolute life comes from Ens Seminis, the cosmic protoplasm. Ens Astrale is to the microcosm (man) as the firmament is to the macrocosm (nature). It can sustain or poison from within, as a toxic atmosphere can poison sea water and fish. Ens Veneni is the poison from without. Nature lives by dying; life eats life. Man may eat the flesh of an animal whose food would poison him, but within every living body there is an alchemist that selects what is food for that body. Ens Naturale is the bodily harmony of the chemical humors. Ens Spirituale has its equivalent in what psychiatry calls the psyche. Against the common belief of his day, Paracelsus argued that madness was not demonic possession and that evil dreams were not intercourse with incubi or succubi. Mind produces diseases both in itself and its own body or in another mind or body through hypnosis, fetishism, or demonstrable ill will. Most diseases are positive evils, but there is Ens Dei, God's will, which no doctor can circumvent.
Although accused by Erasmus of dualist heresy because of the importance he gave primal matter and because he described illness as intrinsically evil, Paracelsus died in the Church of Rome, and his burial place became a shrine.
Avicenna; Erasmus, Desiderius; Galen; Gnosticism; Kabbalah; Macrocosm and Microcosm; Neoplatonism; Pantheism; Plotinus; Time.
Bibliography
Works by Paracelsus
Opera Omnia. 12 vols, edited by John Huser. Basel, 1589–1591. The original German text.
Opera Omnia. 3 vols, edited by F. Bitiskius. Geneva, 1658. In Latin.
Sämtliche Werke. 15 vols, edited by Karl Sudhoff and E. Matthiessen. Munich, 1922–1933. In German; the standard critical edition.
Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, edited by Henry Sigerist, C. Lilian Temkin, George Rosen, and Gregory Zilboorg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941.
Selected Writings, edited by Jolande Jacobi; translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Pantheon, 1951 and 1958. Contains an introduction by the editor. Excellent.
Works on Paracelsus
Browning, Robert. Paracelsus. London, 1835.
Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Debus, Allen G. The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Science History Publications, 1977.
Debus, Allen G. "The Paracelsian Compromise in Elizabethan England." Ambix 8 (June 1960): 71–97.
Donne, John. Ignatius His Conclave. London, 1613.
Koyre, Alexandre. "Paracelsus (1493–1541)." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 24 (1) (2003): 169–208.
Pachter, Henry M. Magic into Science. New York: Schuman, 1951. Represents Paracelsus as a proto-Faust; readable.
Pagel, Walter. "Paracelsus and the Neoplatonic and Gnostic Tradition." Ambix 8 (October 1960): 125–166.
Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus. An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. New York: Karger, 1958. Excellent.
Pagel, Walter. "The Prime Matter of Paracelsus." Ambix 9 (October 1961):, 117–135.
Stillman, John Maxson. Paracelsus. London: Open Court, 1920. Emphasis on science.
Stoddart, Anna M. The Life of Paracelsus. London: Murray, 1911. Browning's interpretation.
Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
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