Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (review)

Positivist historians of medicine and science in the nineteenth century mined the writings of Paracelsus for traces of modern science: his overthrow of Galen, his theory of the three chemical principles, his assertion that diseases are caused by individual entities rather than by an imbalance of the humors. They were ambivalent about, or they ignored, his religious writings and his mysticism. When the great medical historian Karl Sudhoff began his life’s work on Paracelsus, he was spurred by such impulses, and he edited and published the medical and scientific works of Paracelsus first, seeing these as prior to and foundational for the theological works. Carl Jung’s interest in Paracelsus’s alchemy as shedding light on humanity’s relation to the unconscious was only one impetus (others, such as German nationalism and National Socialism, were far less savory) for the climax of interest in Paracelsus in the 1930s and 1940s. With the work of Walter Pagel and Kurt Goldammer in the 1950s, Paracelsus came to be regarded as central to the transition from medieval alchemy to modern empirical science. Alan Debus and Charles Webster developed and filled out this approach, taking account of Paracelsus’s religious work, but continuing to regard his natural philosophy as primary.

More recently, historians have opposed emphasis on Paracelsus’s medical and scientific work at the expense of his religious tracts. This is the thrust of recent work by Hartmut Rudolph, among others, and it is the line that Weeks follows in the book under review. This is perhaps not surprising from an intellectual historian who has written on Jacob Boehme and German mysticism. Weeks believes that the dating by Sudhoff of Paracelsus’s first works must be revised: he opposes the assertion that Paracelsus wrote first on natural science (beginning in about 1520) and later on theology. Instead, like other recent Paracelsus scholars, he argues that Paracelsus’s medical work is completely informed by and imbued with his religious thought. Furthermore, he does not see much evidence of empirical observation in Paracelsus’s work, and believes that his medical theories were mainly worked out, not in response to empirical observations, but rather as a rhetorical weapon against his opponents.

In this synthetic treatment of recent secondary work on Paracelsus with Paracelus’s own writings, Weeks begins by examining the tradition of plague tracts and making the case that Paracelsus’s first works should be seen in this tradition. Because plague tracts were equally concerned with temporal cure and eternal salvation, he argues that we can thus regard Paracelsus’s first writings as intimately combining medicine and theology. He moves on to discuss the importance of nature to Paracelsus: not as a manifestation of protomodern science, but rather because of its status as the first revelation of—indeed, image of—God. Paracelsus believed that God’s image was stamped onto all of Nature, and he thus regarded the relation of “bilt” and “biltnuss” to objects as being of prime importance. Weeks weaves into this discussion Paracelsus’s disgust with the ancients (because they saw nature as uncreated and eternal), the iconoclasm of religious reformers, and, most interestingly, the impassioned debates about the relationship of matter to spirit. Paracelsus wrote on both the Eucharist and alchemical transmutation, a connection that Weeks might have treated in more detail. The last chapter lays out his interesting idea that Paracelsus developed his grand medical theories as he wandered through the southern German territories, outcast and increasingly bitter, after his expulsion from Basel in 1528. Weeks views Paracelsus’s theories as primarily an attempt to answer his critics, both medical and theological.

Weeks claims to be providing an account of Paracelsus that, while not original, is sensitive to social context. He does provide an interesting discussion of Paracelsus’s intellectual context, but his reading of the social context is diffuse and sometimes limited to statements about the “general turmoil...