Paracelsus: Das Werk-Die Rezeption (review)

Significant research in recent years has been brought to bear upon the medical and religious views of Paracelsus. The most recent collection of essays results from a symposium held at the University of Basel in December 1993. In this collection Gundolf Keil strikes a polemical chord by tracing the image of Paracelsus from a marginal esoteric figure in the early nineteenth century to his idolization in the early twentieth century following the appearance of Karl Sudhoff’s edition of Paracelsus’s medical, scientific, and philosophical works. Sudhoff, according to Keil, not only institutionalized the history of medicine but, as a result of his Paracelsus-Edition, contributed to a growing national self-identification in Germany. Although Sudhoff did not experience the near-ecstasy of the Paracelsus celebrations in 1941, his influence was significant. The texts that he edited have continued to serve as core sources for many of those honoring the anniversary of Paracelsus’s birth in 1993. However, in this celebration not much is left of the heroic picture. Instead, Keil describes Paracelsus as a strange, humpbacked little man, an almost laughable creature, full of contradictions, who left behind a desert of heterogeneous writings hardly comprehended by any contemporary or even himself. His ideas were mostly derivative, and Keil (in this, and in two essays written for other occasions but included in this volume as “additamenta”) is passionate about denouncing claims to singularity or originality. With rhetorical flourish he argues that nothing seems genuine in the man from Hohenheim. The doctrine of the “tria-prima,” for instance, stems from medieval alchemical traditions leading back to Michael Scotus and mediated through the alchemical text known as the “Book of the Sacred Trinity”—an indication of the “fuzzy architecture of spoils” (krausen Spolienarchitektur [ p. 34]) that Keil considers characteristic of Paracelsus’s works. Later in the collection Bernhard Dietrich Haage returns to much the same view, pointing out that alchemical medicinal preparations and a dependence upon experience were not new with Paracelsus, but had already been well articulated within medieval traditions.

Several essays take a different approach and present Paracelsus’s ideas as representative of far more coherent systems of thought, or suggest new avenues of historical significance. Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, for instance, explains in detail the individuality and internal logic of Paracelsus’s notion of the macro-microcosm relative to Renaissance conceptions. Hartmut Böhme links Paracelsus to a historic turning point in medicine in which objects of nature, the body, and medicine itself came to be understood as semiotic structures. Hartmut Rudolph’s study of the concept of predestination in specific texts of Paracelsus underscores the existence of an inner unity between medicine and theology in Paracelsus’s writings and identifies Renaissance Neoplatonism as an important ingredient in the structure and context of Paracelsian thinking.

Years ago, Walter Pagel identified what he thought to be Neoplatonic (as well as Gnostic and Cabalistic) influences in Paracelsus’s medical cosmology and natural philosophy. Kurt Goldammer later argued that while similarities existed between the cosmological theories of Paracelsus and Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Agrippa of Nettesheim, no direct dependence upon these Renaissance sources could be established. In the present collection, support for a Neoplatonic context for Paracelsus’s ideas seems once again to have been found. On the other hand, Stefan Rhein suggests listening to Paracelsus himself on the subject of influence: the sources of his knowledge were not books, but rather executioners and vagrants. In this way Paracelsus’s mental horizon depended in large part upon an oral folk culture, including elements of an agrarian materialism, which he reshaped in his own writings.

In other essays, Vivian Nutton notes that the cliché describing Paracelsus as the “Luther of medicine” is inconsistent with Paracelsus’s own more...