On Christmas Day, Robert Southwell had a vision of Jesus Christ as an alchemical experiment. Or so his poem “The Burning Babe” tells us. As the poem’s speaker shivers in the snow, he is surprised by “sodaine heate,” and he lifts his eyes to see a “pretty Babe all burning bright” with love for humankind.1 This vision owes much to nonalchemical sources, including the Petrarchan lover’s suffering simultaneous cold and heat and Ignatius Loyola’s meditations on the transcendent warmth of the Savior’s birth in the cold of winter. But the fact that the fire in the incendiary babe’s “faultless breast” is fueled in a “furnace” means that the vision also evokes an ideal alchemy, one that successfully purifies “The mettall in this furnace wrought, / . . . mens defiled soules” (23–24). In fact, Christ in “The Burning Babe” seems to arrive on this earth with a complete complement of alchemical apparatus. Not only with a furnace, but also with the solvent, the bath or “balneum,” required to dissolve the basic ingredients with which the alchemical distillation begins. “[A]s now on fire I am / To worke them to their good,” says Baby Jesus, “So will I melt into a bath, / To wash them in my blood” (25–28). A mid-seventeenth-century manual for making the philosopher’s stone warns that maintaining the perfect heat for the alchemical bath is a tricky business: “Whosoever therefore keeps not this our heat, our fire, our balnium . . . continually burning in one quality and measure within our Glasse . . . shall labour in vain, and shall never attain this Science.”2 Christ’s fiery alchemical bath, evidently, will present no such trouble.
It is not terribly odd that Southwell associates Christ’s salvation of humankind with alchemy. Alchemists themselves felt free to imply this association—for example, readily describing the warmed bath of sulfur and mercury, the basic elements of the alchemical process, as a kind of baptism. When Paracelsus deliberately Christianized alchemy in the early sixteenth century by revising the traditional Aristotelian four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) into a trinity (sulfur, salt, and mercury), he explicitly encouraged a sacramental interpretation of what happens when alchemists make base matter better. At the same time, though, Southwell’s alchemical incarnation of Christ takes the poet-priest into both theologically and scientifically dangerous waters. With its alchemical imagery, “The Burning Babe” enters into a centuries-long debate that drives to the heart of one of the great intellectual problems of the period of late humanism: the inability to conceive what earthly matter is made of. This debate sprang from, and was inseparable from, pre- and post-Reformation Europe’s wrangling over the material composition and transformation of the Eucharist—what we would now call its physics. Subject to serious question from the moment transubstantiation became Roman Catholic dogma in 1215 (and even before), the physics of the Eucharist nevertheless became the essential proving ground for the physics of the world.
Because medieval physics’ theories of matter were predicated on the truth of transubstantiation, and because transubstantiation was the object of skepticism even for thinkers who accepted it as church dogma, medieval matter theory did not bear too close an examination or too firm a belief. And yet, that was the primary matter theory that was available well into the seventeenth century. For the three seventeenth-century poets I discuss in this chapter, alchemy’s affinities with transubstantiation thus do not lend themselves to a settled understanding, either spiritual or scientific, of what constitutes earthly matter. Rather, they lead to an acknowledgment that the current state of this understanding is unsatisfying, and a better state of understanding impossible.
I outline in the first section of this chapter how medieval matter theory adapted Aristotle in large part to supply a prop for transubstantiation. When the Reformation discarded transubstantiation, then, it also, willy-nilly, began to dismantle a received physics: not only was transubstantiation declared bad doctrine but also the Aristotelianism on which it was based was exposed as bad matter theory. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thus saw increasing calls for an alternative to Aristotelian theories of material substance and material change. But just as Protestantism did not supply a satisfactory alternative doctrine of how, exactly, Christ could be present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, so too did learning as it existed in the period of late humanism not immediately supply a satisfactory alternative analysis of matter and its metamorphosis. Despite flirtations with atomism, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not agree upon a new way of imagining the world’s essential makeup.
The absence of an adequate physics proves something of a problem for metaphysical poets. A problem, and an opportunity. For John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, all poets obsessed with how earthly matter (including the matter of human flesh) communes with the divine, alchemy crops up in what seem like transubstantiative contexts as a way of suggesting how contemporary physics was of little help in approaching this issue. But these poets also deploy alchemy as a poetic device for diminishing that issue or keeping it usefully at bay. Indeed, alchemy comes to signify a way in which the matter of matter may be forgotten about: not wiped from memory entirely but forgotten about in the way we say “Forget it” when a friend apologizes for a slight. It is labeled as inconsequential. And for good reason. In an age lacking a physics and tired of the religious controversy that can flare when physics comes up, forgetting about it seems like a relief. If alchemy may be used, in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terms, as a “thing to think with,” it may equally be used as a “thing not to think with” when not thinking does some desirable textual and cultural work. For these poets, alchemy survives the demise of transubstantiation to become, curiously, not a way of asking what physical matter is but rather a highly sophisticated device for forgetting we ever cared about the question.
Alchemy and the doctrine of transubstantiation were first proposed in medieval Europe at about the same time, the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries. They gained traction for exactly the same reason: both attached themselves to the era’s most sophisticated physics. After Aristotle’s Metaphysics, his treatise on substance and material change, was accepted and disseminated in the thirteenth century, Europe’s intellectuals came to believe that a body or object was composed of a substantial form cloaked by incidental accidents. Aristotle thus made the doctrine of transubstantiation physically possible in that the essence of the body of Jesus Christ as it appears in the Eucharist could be imagined as independent from its accidental qualities—the color, smell, taste, and mouth feel of human flesh and blood. Similarly, Aristotle made alchemy physically possible in that all substantial forms, in Aristotelian terms, originate in the prime matter that underlies them. Alchemy’s aim was to return matter to prime matter so that a new substantial form could be imposed.
But Aristotle required tweaking, and both transubstantiation and alchemy help explain why. Transubstantiation and alchemy both answer to the dream of matter that does not obey ordinary rules—a dream that Aristotle, who theorizes that all matter follows the same dicta, could not be used to endorse. At the moment the Host is consecrated, it transforms into a singular body whose substantial form does not match its accidents in any way. At the moment the alchemical project succeeds, it similarly exceeds the capacities of transformational processes normally found in nature. It is because they both argued for exceptions to Aristotelian physics that theories of transubstantiation and of alchemy also share a history of being challenged from their very inception.
Furthermore, the fact that alchemy shares its physics with transubstantiation destabilizes two crucial and coinciding stories that we tell ourselves of the progression from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. First, if the shaky matter theory behind transubstantiation was linked, quite early on, to the intellectually suspect matter theory behind alchemy, then we must revise our sense that the Protestant reform of the sacraments involves the early modern disenchantment of a medieval magical belief. Rather, Protestantism merely reiterates and reinforces a skepticism about unlikely sacramental matter that had been part of Eucharistic theological debate all along. Second, if transubstantiation and alchemy share a history of dubiousness, then we must reevaluate the way they continue to be evoked in tandem in the seventeenth century. As we will see later in this chapter, seventeenth-century metaphysical poets’ habit of yoking alchemy to transubstantiation does not simply evince nostalgia for old certainties now gone by. Rather, the conjunction of alchemy and transubstantiation reflects these poets’ acknowledgment of the continuing utility of a physics that, however long-standing and however intriguing, had always been subject to charges of balderdash.
Transubstantiation, first proposed as Eucharistic theory in the late eleventh century, became official Roman Catholic doctrine in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Miri Rubin has argued that the church codified transubstantiation as part of a larger agenda of transitioning matters of faith from local to centralized control.3 It may have been almost incidental, then, that the church’s desire to consolidate spiritual and political authority required a particular theory of matter. But in the case of transubstantiation, that is exactly what happened. In turn, scrutiny of the Eucharistic sacrament brought up two crucial physics questions: What was transformed? In what sense was that transformation singular?
To be sure, the nature of the Eucharist had been under debate since the fourth century, when Ambrose’s realist view of the sacraments opposed Augustine’s essentially significative view.4 It was not until the late eleventh century, though, that questions of what we would call physics arose in connection with the Eucharist, when Berengar of Tours began to query what, exactly, happens to the matter of the bread and wine when they are consecrated. Although the foremost issue for Berengar was grammatical (since Christ’s meaning when he says “This is my body” and “This is my blood” depends on what the meaning of “is” is), he also questioned what nature Christ’s body might possess if it appeared in the Eucharist.5 Christ’s resurrected body was at the right hand of God, not on the altar. How could it be in two places at the same time—or, really, in many places at the same time, given that many Masses may be performed simultaneously?6
While Berengar was forced to recant and declare that the bread and wine literally became Christ’s body and blood, his questions about the physics of the Eucharist continued to bedevil the church. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 declared transubstantiation true, but it was the work of the following century to work out how it was true. That how was enabled, as it turned out, by historical accident. The doctrine of transubstantiation gained credence and philosophical authority only later in the thirteenth century, when the introduction and dissemination in Europe of Aristotle’s Metaphysics meant that Aristotelian theory came to dominate scholarly discussions of material form and material change. For Aristotle, as I have mentioned, any individual physical body is made up of its substantial form—its essence, a composite of prime matter and the form that nature imposes on that prime matter—and its accidents, inherent qualities that, were they to change, would not change the essence of the physical body. (Aristotelian matter theory is thus called hylomorphism: “matter-form.”) These accidents are nine in number: quantity, quality, relation, place (or situation), time, position, state of possession, activity, and passivity (or the quality of being acted upon).7 Importantly, Aristotle found it nonsensical to imagine a substantial form’s ever being separated from all of its accidents. He considered some accidents more loosely connected to substantial form than others, of course: a man can lose an arm, part of his “quantity” or extension in space, and still be a man; some of his “quality” may change—his hair from brown to white, for example—and he is still the same man. Still, accidents appropriate to humanity and to masculinity must inhere in his substantial form for him to be a man.
Medieval theologians found it easy to Christianize Aristotle by substituting “God” for “nature” as the agent who stamps form upon matter, and by defining the substantial form of a human being as the union of body and soul that constitutes God’s creation of each individual.8 But the Eucharist posed a conundrum for medieval Aristotelianism. What the priest consecrates at the altar must transform from the substantial forms of bread and of wine to the substantial form of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. At the same time, however, the accidents of bread and wine, their taste, smell, color, and texture, must remain; if they did not, we would be repulsed by the prospect of cannibalizing Christ and would not be able to stomach the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas solved this problem by postulating that in this one singular case, the case of the Eucharist, a substantial form might be severed from all of its accidents. While the bread and wine’s substantial forms are annihilated, replaced by the substantial form of Christ’s body and blood through divine miracle, their accidents remain.9
Crucial for Aquinas’s theory of Eucharistic matter was his reconceptualization of one particular accident: the accident of quantity. Remember the physics question that Berengar of Tours raised. If Christ’s body and blood are truly in the sacrament, how could he possibly be in so many places, so many Masses, at the same time? The usual Aristotelian explanation that a body’s accidents inhere in its substantial form fails to answer this question. As Aquinas points out, the accidents of the consecrated bread and wine—its taste, smell, color, and so forth—cannot inhere in the body and blood of Christ, since Christ’s resurrected body is in heaven, at the right hand of God. Nor can they inhere any longer in the bread and wine, whose substantial forms have been annihilated and replaced by the substantial form of Christ. Rather, Aquinas proposes, the bread and wine’s taste, smell, color, and texture inhere in the bread and wine’s “dimensive quantity,” their extension in space. In the special case of the Eucharist, in other words, the accident of quantity serves as a kind of substitute substantial form, one in which the rest of the bread and wine’s accidents inhere. Thus, there can be endless supplies of consecrated bread and wine without there having to be infinite quantities of the body and blood of the risen Christ.10
It was this Thomistic revision of Aristotelian matter theory for the purposes of making transubstantiation true that became the grounds for debate over the physics of transubstantiation from the thirteenth century up through the Protestant Reformation. Although Aquinas’s theory was endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church, the matter was never settled, since the physics of transubstantiation as Aquinas proposed it never did seem entirely plausible.11 Even Scholastics who were in sympathy with the theological use of Aristotle simply could not agree with Aquinas’s rather precious reclassification of the bread and wine’s accident of quantity as a kind of substitute substance in which the rest of the bread and wine’s accidents might inhere. William of Ockham argued that you cannot differentiate between a substantial form and its accident of quantity: a body is coextensive, axiomatically, with its extension. If Christ’s substance is present in the Eucharist, his quantity must be there, as well—a logical absurdity, since that would require Christ’s body and blood to multiply vastly in quantity to supply every Mass that will ever take place. On the other hand, if Christ’s quantity is not there in the Eucharist, his substance is not there, either.12 In short, William of Ockham’s equation of substantial form with the accident of quantity denied the Real Presence, and he knew it. In the end he, like Duns Scotus, evaded charges of heresy only by asserting that he accepted the doctrinal version of transubstantiation simply because it was doctrinal and not because it was good physics.13
When later generations of dissenters and reformers critiqued the Roman Catholic Church’s nonscriptural dogma of transubstantiation, they revived the Scholastic debate over the physics of the Eucharist on the grounds that transubstantiation violated Aristotelian principles. John Wyclif, for example, declared transubstantiation impossible because “accidents could never be without their substance.”14 Furthermore, he noted that if God could require Christ’s substantial form to be in multiple places at once—as it must be, in transubstantiative terms, when simultaneous Masses are performed—then God could require the same of any object or body, a conclusion that would eliminate the coherence of time and space.15 Both humanist and counter-humanist philosophical and logical innovations (Neoplatonism and Ramism) complicated the picture somewhat after Wyclif’s time, but the continuing dominance of Aristotelianism in matter theory meant that theological arguments that impinged on the nature of matter continued to pick up the terms of the Scholastic debate over transubstantiation.16 Aquinas’s logical manipulation of the accident of quantity remained a major sticking point, with John Calvin arguing that to make Christ’s substance ubiquitous in the Eucharist is to deny him his humanity: “The presence of Christ in the Supper . . . must, moreover, be such as neither divests him of his just dimensions, nor dissevers him by differences of place, nor assigns to him a body of boundless dimensions, diffused through heaven and earth. All these things are clearly repugnant to his true human nature.”17
One might expect that Aquinas’s designation of transubstantiation as a unique category of divine miracle, and the Eucharist as a unique category of matter, would have marginalized the Eucharist’s place in post-Reformation physics. But as religious dissenters’ familiarity with the Scholastic debate suggests, transubstantiation was so central to matter theory in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries that theories of matter alternative to Aristotelianism, even if they did not mention the nature of the sacraments, were either taken up as part of the Eucharistic debate or understood as challenging the nature of the Eucharist. While Pietro Redondi overstates the case when he postulates that the Inquisition saw Galileo’s real heresy as atomism, not heliocentrism, he is quite right that the Roman Catholic Church found Galileo’s experiments in optics challenging because they proved transubstantiation impossible. Having observed a luminescent mineral substance (now known to be barium sulfide), Galileo proposed that light was a substance and not—as Aristotelianism declared it to be—an accident inhering in a transparent medium such as air. All the properties of light, claimed Galileo, permeate each tiny corpuscle of the substance of which light is constituted.18 If light is a substance, and if its properties are inseparable from it, then there are two possible conclusions. Either there are no such things as accidents, which would nullify Aristotle and make Aquinas’s theory of transubstantiation impossible, or accidents are inseparable from their substance, which would confirm Aristotle but also make the exceptional case of transubstantiation impossible.19 Later experiments in optics, like seventeenth-century protobarometers that left a vacuum at the top of a glass tube, similarly were considered worthy of notice in part because they challenged transubstantiative physics. That challenge held whether light was considered a substance (as Galileo believed) or an accident (as Aristotle would have it). If the vacuum in the tube contains only light and if light is a substance, then Galileo’s point of view is right and transubstantiation is impossible. Conversely, if the light in the tube is an accident rather than a substance, then this accident, because it exists in a vacuum, can exist without a substance—that is, without the air that light usually illumines: this conclusion disproves the uniqueness of the matter of the Eucharist.20
Given the ongoing wrangles about the physics of transubstantiation, it is perhaps not surprising that, in the religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many on the Reformed side dismissed the discussion of transubstantiative physics as a silly sidetrack to theology, something not worth bothering about. While Martin Luther remained devoted to the doctrine of the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and while he developed a none-too-precise theory—usually (if improperly) labeled “consubstantiation”—in which the body and blood of Christ are “in, with, and around” the bread and wine, he objected to the doctrine of transubstantiation because he found it ridiculous that it be a litmus test for orthodoxy.21 It is possible to argue, as William West has done, that in the main, the Reformist response to Eucharistic controversy was to decline to think any longer about Holy Communion in terms of matter theory.22 While the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, referring to the long-standing debate over Eucharistic physics, declared, “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ,” the 1562 revision of the articles removed the 1552 admonition, “A faithful man ought not either to believe or openly confess the real and bodily presence . . . of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament.” Instead, the Book of Common Prayer ultimately makes way for the Eucharist to be viewed either of two ways: either as the transubstantiated body and blood of Jesus Christ, or as only symbolic of that body and blood.23 Believe what you like. Or, as William Tyndale suggests, simply don’t think about it too hard: “Of the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament, meddle as little as you can, that there appear no division among us.”24 Richard Hooker, evidently lumping the physical nature of the Eucharist into the category of what he elsewhere calls a “thing indifferent,” makes precisely the recommendation that we simply not trouble our heads with the issue: Christ’s “omnipotent power . . . maketh it his body and blood to us, whether with change or without alteration of the element such as they imagine we need not greatly to care nor inquire.”25
Not caring or inquiring about the physics of Holy Communion has its advantages. Moreover, in the seventeenth century you did not have to be a Protestant to see what those advantages were. One of them was simply to stop fighting about it. As Michel de Montaigne remarked about centuries of dispute over the meaning of Christ’s saying “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” “How numerous and how important are the quarrels produced in the world by doubt about the meaning of this syllable: hoc [this]!”26 Leaving matter theory aside was not, however, an option for alchemy, whose physics as it was developed in medieval Europe proved very similar to, and was even imbricated with, the physics of transubstantiation. Alchemy was like transubstantiation in that it reached Europe before the Aristotelian revolution in science and in that its credibility depended in part on an aura of mysticism and on its practitioners’ belief in the efficacy of ritual. However, it was also like transubstantiation in that its survival and popularity depended on its first adopting and then revising Aristotelian theories of matter—revising them so that the alchemist, like the Thomist theologian, could claim to have proved the existence of a form of matter that was exceptional. And as with transubstantiation, alchemy’s physics were called out as implausible by those who questioned whether any kind of matter could be exceptional in the fashion alchemy claimed it to be.
Any medieval account of alchemy had to cope with Avicenna’s influential axiom, mentioned in Chapter 1, that one substance cannot be changed into one another by artificial means.27 Only God and his agent, nature, could effect such transformation. William Newman cites the Dominican chronicler Martinus Polonus, whose thirteenth-century Margarita decreti declares that “alchemy seems to be a false [reprobata] art, because he who believes one species to be able to be transferred into another, or into a similar one, except by the Creator Himself, is an infident and worse than a pagan.”28 One version of alchemy, it must be pointed out, did not lay claim to any such transformative power, asserting only that alchemy separated the components of mixed matter.29 But just as common as this rather modest claim was the more grandiose assertion that, while alchemy merely imitated nature in being able, with God’s help, to transmute one substance to another, alchemy accelerated the change. What nature spent an age forging in the earth an alchemist could spend a week (or a month or a year) forging in his furnace.
The introduction of Aristotelian physics into Europe both made this theory of alchemy as sped-up nature necessary—since it was Aristotle who originated the dictum that substantial change must come from nature—and gave it physical grounds. Some alchemists cited Aristotelian matter theory to explain the process of alchemical change, arguing that alchemy works first by breaking material down into the very source of all substantial forms, prime matter (Aristotle’s hyle), and then by introducing a new substantial form in the place of the previous one.30 This argument for alchemy’s ability to reduce materials to prime matter drew heavy fire, however, for its encroachment upon divine prerogative.31 Alchemy’s claims to godlike power only intensified with the innovations of Paracelsus, whose revisions of Aristotelian matter theory in the first half of the sixteenth century not only granted the alchemist quasi-divine powers of transmutation but also attributed divine qualities to the very elements and processes of alchemy itself. As I have already mentioned, Paracelsus, never a cautious thinker, contravened Aristotelian orthodoxy by tossing aside the four traditional elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and putting in their place three elemental principles (sulfur, salt, and mercury). Paracelsus’s sulfur, salt, and mercury signify not the common household or workshop substances given those names but rather “principles of constitution” of the particular form and features of every body and every object: sulfur is the principle of heat or organization, salt the principle of mass or solidity, and mercury the principle of activity or liquidity. The force of Paracelsus’s theory is the contention that alchemy is always happening in every material that undergoes change, from metals underground to the human body to the stars above. The alchemist merely controls the emergence and interactions of these ubiquitous spiritual forces, whether in the alchemical furnace or in the human body by way of alchemical medicine.32
Paracelsus’s tripartite elemental scheme obviously reiterates the Holy Trinity, but not after the fashion of an analogy. He means that reiteration literally. The spiritual forces of Paracelsus’s three elements are, in fact, derived from and equivalent to the powers of the Triune God. Sulfur provides the heat and the organizational principles of God’s fiat; salt the mass and solidity embodied in the incarnate Christ; and mercury the fluid inspiration toward activity prompted by the Holy Spirit.33 All matter contains some degree of this Trinitarian life force; the degree of life force depends only on where the matter is on the scale from most earthy to most ethereal, from rocks to trees to animals to humans to angels. For Paracelsus, therefore, alchemically created matter is exceptional not because it demonstrates the hastening of the usual time line of natural change but because it participates more fully in the divine than ordinary matter does. One can easily see why Paracelsus was deemed theologically dangerous: the alchemist, like God Almighty, could endow dumb matter with the spirit of the angels.34
Paracelsus’s work, intertwined as it was with his own highly eccentric desire for radical reform not just of religion but of the world and all its contents, was immediately seen as having implications for Eucharistic theology.35 His matter theory has the effect of denying transubstantiation, because if all matter participates in the divine, then nothing special is happening in the Eucharist.36 As he asserts in a commentary on the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Christ’s Words of Institution mean not that his body and blood are (in Thomistic terms) substantially in the Eucharist but that we, like Christ, are divine: “he says, as he holds the bread in his hand, ‘This is my body,’ and as he holds the wine, ‘This is my blood.’ . . . [W]e come from that very Flesh, and are not lacking the heavenly body that has become incarnate through the Holy Spirit. . . . For this reason he is in us and we in him, so that thence we are born from God and are of his body and blood, risen from heaven; so is the Word become flesh in our hands.”37 No wonder that, when the implications of Paracelsus’s work for Eucharistic theology became better known, his work—like Galileo’s and René Descartes’s after him—was placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.38
Even though Paracelsus’s theory of a shared divinity among all bodies nullifies transubstantiation, he liberally samples from Eucharistic terminology and imagery when describing his method’s efficacy. In this he follows the example of his alchemical predecessors, who had long laid claim to transubstantiative power. Indeed, the very word transubstantiation seems to have entered English not in relation to the Eucharist but in relation to alchemical change. The Ordinal of Alchemy by fifteenth-century alchemist Thomas Norton carefully applies this useful new term to distinguish between a material that has merely changed its external properties or discardable accidents and one that has alchemically changed its substantial form. The “stone Microcosmos,” or philosopher’s stone, is that “wherebie of metallis is made transmutacion / Not only in colour, but transubstanciacion.”39 The popular Aurora consurgens, an alchemical text likely from the fifteenth century but attributed to Thomas Aquinas, also plainly puts alchemy in transubstantiative terms. As the alchemist undertakes the very final step in his great work, the production of the quintessence, he accepts a mystical Eucharistic invitation from Christ himself: “eat my bread and drink the wine which I have mingled for you, for all things are made ready for you.”40 Paracelsus cleverly integrated these Eucharistic connotations into the basic elements that governed his alchemy. His notion that the principle of salt, which grants solidity to material bodies, channels the same energies as Christ’s incarnation draws from the traditional Roman Catholic association between the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist and Christ’s incarnation on earth as a human being.41
Alchemy’s associations with transubstantiation only became more explicit in the seventeenth century, perhaps due to Roman Catholicism’s intensified Counter-Reformation commitment both to transubstantiation as dogma and to Aquinas’s transubstantiative physics as the sole scientific support of that dogma. German alchemist Johann Valentin Andreae’s Chymische Hochzeit (Chemical wedding) of 1616 describes a mystical alchemical vision received, signally, on the eve of Easter. The alchemist, having prayed and “being now ready to prepare in my Heart, together with my dear Paschal Lamb, a small unleavened, undefiled Cake,” is blessed by a vision punctuated by frequent images of altars and blood, including one episode in which the developing philosopher’s stone, having been heated in the alchemical furnace, is treated as the Host, laid “upon a long Table, which was covered with white Velvet” and then itself covered “with a piece of fine white double Taffeta.”42 Even more obvious in its transubstantiative parallels is Nicholas Melchior Cibinensis’s “Alchemical Mass” (“Addam [sic] et processum sub forma missae”), first published in 1602 in Lazarus Zetzner’s encyclopedic Theatrum chymicum and later included in alchemist Michael Maier’s popular Symbola aureae mensae (1617), a book that also includes an illustration of an alchemist, priest-like in Eucharistic vestments, kneeling at an altar and raising his hands as if saying the Mass.43 Elevated behind the priest in this illustration, as if he has conjured her up in his vision, is a figure resembling the Virgin Mary suckling a child—the “philosophical child” that is the product of alchemy but also the incarnate Christ who comes down to believers in the form of the Eucharist.44 Based on the persistence of these sorts of images, Mary Baine Campbell argues that transubstantiation “was a process that became at least potentially susceptible to ‘chymical’ explanation in the intellectual world of the Reformation.”45 Gabriel Naudé, librarian to Cardinal Mazarin, found exactly this kind of “chymical” explanation of transubstantiation in “our Alembick-Idolators and Alchymists,” who he complained “are a sort of people so strangely besotted with the Philosophers stone, that . . . they have been so prophane as to take the sacrifice of the Masse, and the miracle of the Incarnation for Emblems and figures of . . . that Soveraign [alchemical] transmutation.”46
In binding itself so explicitly with transubstantiation, however, alchemy ironically ran the risk of augmenting its own reputation for falsehood with the skepticism that, as we have seen, greeted transubstantiation theory from its inception. For Protestants inveighing against the suspect practices of Roman Catholicism, the equation between alchemy and transubstantiation was irresistible.47 An especially snarky example comes from Puritan William Prynne’s Aurum reginae (1668), which suggests that if priests can perform transubstantiation, they might as well take up alchemy, too: “Now if every Pope and ordinary Masse-Priest can thus daily transubstantiate the Sacramental bread into the very natural body of Christ . . . then they may more confidently believe and affirm, they can transubstantiate Copper, Brasse, Tinne, Lead, and other baser metals, into real Gold and Silver, since they all agree in the genus of metals, and are not so far different from each other as bread and Christs natural body.” Prynne goes on to suggest flippantly that it was for this very reason that, in the fifteenth century, England’s King Henry VI had employed “Monks and Masse-Priests” whose creation of the philosopher’s stone would help wipe out the national debt.48 Similar snide comparisons between transubstantiation and alchemy come from all quarters of English Protestantism, from the most High Church to the most Puritan. The Arminian Benjamin Lany, staunch royalist and eventually Bishop of Ely, distinguishes Protestants from Catholics in noting that “we [Protestants] pretend not to that Mystical Art and Chymistry, to turn the Elements of Bread and Wine into the Natural Body and Blood of Christ.”49 The religiously moderate John Donne refers in a sermon to “Our new Romane Chymists . . . that can transubstantiate bread into God.”50 The virulently anti-Catholic George Goodwin’s “Of that Loude Lye, and Fond Fiction of Transubstantiation” specifically jokes about alchemy’s and Catholicism’s shared claims of being able to create exceptional matter:
But Popish Chymicks make a thousand Gods:
Priests (then) are greater gods than God, by odds.
Surely, hee hath some rare resistlesse power:
Whereby hee makes and unmakes God, each houre.51
The habit of associating alchemy and transubstantiation seems so ingrained for Protestant writers that when Milton uses the verb “transubstantiate” to note that angels eat the same way humans do, “with keen dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate,” he undercuts his own point with a wry comparison between angelic alimentation and the rather shady “Empiric Alchemist” who “Can turn, or holds it possible to turn / Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold.”52
At the base of this comparison between transubstantiation and alchemy—at least for thinkers well versed in the Thomist physics that underpins transubstantiation—is a real acquaintance with the shakiness of Aristotelian matter theory as it was used and modified in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In a remarkably learned if poetically awful bit of verse, for example, seventeenth-century polymath William Vaughan (no relation to the Vaughan brothers, poet Henry and alchemist Thomas) takes us through a history of Aristotelian matter theory and its absorption by Scholasticism, arguing that the doctrine of transubstantiation was inspired by alchemy’s perversion of Aristotle and alluding along the way to Berengar of Tours’s skepticism about transubstantiation’s plausibility. In the age of Scholasticism, he says,
Bare Accidents by Whymsyes of the Braine
To Substances turn’d of Promethean straine,
Baals sophistry, and Chymickes Transmutation
Begot and coyn’d Transubstantiacion.
For neere about that time did Alchymy
Begin to raigne with Schoole-Theology.
Woe to the time that our West Church forsooke
The New-Mans way, which Berengarius tooke,
And dar’d Christ [sic] Body so to understand
Which till Doomes day doth sit on Gods Right hand
Since his Ascent, and there in Heaven stayes.53
As indicated by William Vaughan’s affirmation that Christ’s body is on God’s right hand and by George Goodwin’s sneer that “Popish Chymicks make a thousand Gods,” the issue with transubstantiation here is truly a physics problem—namely, the problem discussed above: the accident of “quantity” or extension. To reiterate that problem, this time in the words of John Donne, “They that pretend to enlarge this [risen] body [of Christ] by multiplication, by making millions of these bodies in the Sacraments, by the way of Transubstantiation, they doe not honour this body, whose honour is to sit in the same dimensions, and circumscriptions, at the right hand of God.”54 How can Christ’s body be here on earth and there in heaven at the same time? The language accompanying the discussion of quantity, however, also conflates alchemy with transubstantiation. Protestant polemicists regularly accuse priests of “multiplying” Christ during the Mass, using a term so often attached to alchemy in early modern England that it seems, for most people, that “multiplying” defines what alchemists do.55 While alchemists like Thomas Norton take care to distinguish true alchemical savants from “such lesyngis as multipliers use,” alchemists themselves also regularly referred to “multiplication” as the penultimate stage of alchemical purification.56
What seems like a grandiose claim on the part of alchemy, then, is actually a balloon easily deflated. Sure, alchemy is just like transubstantiation, but how good is that? Both alchemy and transubstantiation, based as they are on rather unsatisfying revisions of Aristotelian matter theory, may be derided as junk science. Nevertheless, theories of both transubstantiation and alchemy do answer, even if badly, to urgent questions related to material change: What is matter made of? How does it transform? And is all matter the same, or can some matter be exceptional? While the seventeenth century is renowned for its “new science,” a novum organum that departed from medieval models, in this particular arena natural philosophers struggled with offering a better theory than the Scholastic Aristotelianism they suspected was wrong. Even atomism, an anti-Aristotelian theory of matter that has received much attention of late in early modern literary criticism, seemed to many in the first half of the seventeenth century to be as fanciful as Aquinas’s accidents that could be separated from their substantial forms. (I discuss atomism later in this chapter, in connection with George Herbert.) Oddly enough, it is dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian Alexander Ross, the seventeenth-century clergyman who made a place for himself in history by trying to confute Galileo, René Descartes, and William Harvey, who states the problem most cogently: “Transmutation then of species is impossible to Nature, not to Chymists, who think to transform silver into gold: not to the Roman Church, which holds a transubstantiation of bread into Christs body: not unto Poets, who sing of so many metamorphoses and transformations of men into beasts: nor of those who think Witches can transform themselves into Cats, Hares, and other creatures.”57 Here Ross offers no answers to the puzzle of matter’s essential makeup and its transmutation, since his outmoded Aristotelianism gives him none that will hold water. Rather, he leaves the imagination of these things to those whose theories of the material world seem equally fanciful: the witch, the alchemist, the priest, and the poet.
We have already seen that John Donne’s sermons cite alchemy and transubstantiation as equally discreditable, equally wrong. Priests who claim to call the actual body and blood of Christ into bread and wine as they say the Words of Institution are no better than the alchemists who “multiply” gold. In contrast, Donne’s secular poetry also evinces a certain nostalgia for transubstantiation, and, as we shall see, that nostalgia is sometimes expressed through alchemy.
Donne’s dismissal of and interest in transubstantiation are not, however, mutually exclusive attitudes—not if both dismissal and interest are predicated on understanding transubstantiation as what Luther called it, a truly trivial doctrine. For Donne, a fascination with transubstantiation derives not from fondly remembering its former status as dogma but from fondly remembering its dependence on preposterous theories of the transmutation of matter. In other words, Donne’s resuscitation of transubstantiation constitutes not a longing for an old, now unattainable certainty, but rather a longing for old nonsense.58 In frequently emphasizing the way transubstantiation shared with alchemy a reputation for junk physics, Donne’s secular alchemical poems thus present a far different picture than we might expect of both his theological commitment and his scientific engagement. These poems, in fact, present a Donnean point of view that disclaims either substantial theological commitment or significant scientific engagement. When theology is represented by transubstantiation and science by alchemy—and even more, when transubstantiation and alchemy go hand in hand—both theology and science may easily be deemed inconsequential.
The inconsequentiality of transformed matter contradicts what we might expect to be compelling about transubstantiation for Donne, both before and after his Protestant conversion—that is, its promise of the existence of singular earthly substances. Specifically, following Ramie Targoff’s recent work on Donne’s obsession with the perfected bodies believers will regain after the Resurrection, we might expect Donne also to be compelled by the prospect of exceptional human bodies here on earth.59 Conjoining transubstantiation with alchemy might allow Donne to transfer the unique qualities of Christ’s flesh and blood as they are present in the Eucharist to human flesh and blood that was once ordinary but is now alchemically refined.
Donne’s poetry and prose, however, repeatedly debunk the dream of the alchemically refined body by demonstrating that it, like the doctrine of transubstantiation itself, is a wrong idea. Yet it is no less appealing for that. Quite the contrary, this transubstantiated, alchemical physicality is all the more important to Donne because its existence is patently impossible. Furthermore, the reason it is important does not have to do merely with Donne’s propensity to devise and ponder scientific and theological puzzles. Donne means also to explore how confessing one’s knowledge system false at its base neither causes that knowledge system to collapse nor puts one in a state of epistemological anguish. Through cross-referencing alchemy and transubstantiation, both of them improbable, Donne establishes an alternative way of thinking. Modeled after the history of Eucharistic theology, that alternative amounts to a third way, beyond either hoping for a theory that both compels belief and makes intellectual sense (Thomas Aquinas and his inheritors) or reluctantly swallowing a theory of physical makeup that compels belief even though it does not make intellectual sense (William of Ockham and his inheritors). This third way proposes knowing that a coherent theory of physical change does not exist, but deciding not to worry about it.
A Donne who is eager not to consider Eucharistic quandaries is not a Donne most critics would recognize. Obviously it is not the Donne of the Holy Sonnets and other sacred lyrics, which are rife with anxiety about Christ’s presence and its meaning. Curiously, though, while Donne’s sacred lyrics also use alchemical imagery, in these poems he cordons off alchemy from the Eucharist, never once couching explorations of the Real Presence in alchemical terms. Instead, it is his secular lyrics that take on questions about the exact physical mechanism of Eucharistic transformation from the realm of the sacred into the realm of the secular. This bifurcation of Eucharistic discussion—Christ’s presence in the sacred lyrics, Christ’s physics in the secular lyrics—sets up an equally bifurcated reaction to epistemological difficulty. Whereas Donne’s sacred lyrics take on Eucharistic issues with head-splitting seriousness and genuine questions of faith, his secular lyrics often accompany Eucharistic physics with the trivializing relief of alchemy.
Why might Donne require a venue in which the Eucharist need not be taken seriously? One cause may be cultural: his audience and readers might have appreciated an alchemical digression from Eucharistic matters. Even though the Lord’s Supper, once the chief sacrament, was much less emphasized in the Reformed church of the later sixteenth century than it had been in the pre-Reformation or early Reformation English church, many otherwise perfectly conformist churchgoers seem to have had trouble making it to Communion the bare minimum of once a year—indicating, perhaps, a weariness with having to confront such hot-button topics as the Eucharist’s importance, and a desire to avoid the whole issue.60 Donne’s own evasive tactics, though, may have to do not only with the painfulness of this particular topic but also with the way that evasion allows him to cultivate a useful and pleasurable epistemological stance. My sense of his secular alchemical-transubstantiative poems is that collectively their intellectual process is not simply to mull over the cultural problem of the Eucharist but rather also to constitute a lyric process that ultimately excuses the speaker from having to take this serious topic seriously. By means of the tincture of alchemy, Donne rehearses all of the issues behind Eucharistic dogma. But by means of the tincture of alchemy, these issues also take on the quality of something both terribly pressing and terribly diversionary. This odd combination, however, follows perfectly from Donne’s perception that the natural philosophy of his day is utterly incapable of proposing an alternative matter theory superior to the Aristotelian physics that, as we have seen, was beginning to be dismantled. In his secular poems, Donne provides the alternative of both preserving the old system of learning that one knows to be wrong and also forgetting about its errors.
In the secular poems I discuss in this section, this dynamic of exceptionally graceful sidestepping is often brought to bear on Donne’s contemplation of the nature of human physicality. Frequently, as we shall see, the physics questions that unite alchemy and the Eucharist intersect in Donne’s treatments of the female body—that is, exactly the kind of body that Donne finds both paramount and negligible. Another kind of alchemical flesh comes into play in this regard, as we shall also see: the compellingly disgusting, quasi-Eucharistic Paracelsian remedy of mummy.
We have no reason to think that Donne’s postconversion beliefs about the Eucharist ever went outside the admittedly large tent of the Church of England’s doctrine. In Ignatius His Conclave, Donne joins every Reformist thinker in referring to transubstantiation as an unjustified, extrascriptural innovation by the Roman Catholic Church. On his tour of hell, the narrator of this text doesn’t bother to look for purgatory, pronouncing it a mere fabrication concretized into doctrine by the recent Council of Trent, which, “Beeing not satisfied with making one Transubstantiation, purposed to bring in another: which is, to change fables into Articles of faith.”61 In a sermon, Donne later puts the matter even more baldly, calling transubstantiation “repugnant to the plaine wordes of Scripture.”62
Furthermore, Donne joins Wyclif and other similarly erudite detractors of transubstantiation in objecting to this dogma on account of its flawed physics. His anti-Catholic Christmas Day sermon of 1626 derides the way that Thomist physics twists Aristotle’s theory of substantial form and accidental properties to create a singular exception for the Eucharist: “since miracles are so easie and cheape, and obvious to them, as they have induced a miraculous transubstantiation, they might have done well to have procured one miracle more, a trans-accidentation, that since the substance is changed, the accidents might have beene changed too.”63 As I have already noted, Donne joined skeptics from Duns Scotus on in recognizing that the logical problem in transubstantiative physics is the “quantity” or extensive property of Christ’s body. In the sermon in which he charges Roman Catholic priests with illogically “multiplying” Christ’s body, he compares the sacramental bread to a portion of air illumined by light, something whose size and substance do not change even if it is called by a different name: “You would have said at noone, this light is the Sun, and you will say now, this light is the Candle; That light was not the Sun, this light is not the Candle, but it is that portion of aire which the Sun did then, and which the Candle doth now enlighten.”64
At moments when he is debunking transubstantiation, Donne, like many of his contemporaries, seems naturally to reach for comparisons with alchemy. Both Roman Catholics and alchemists share a habit, he suggests, of rewriting fanciful suppositions as fundamental truths. In a sermon preached to King Charles I, in the course of deriding the Gregorian calendar Donne calls Catholicism alchemical in the number of accretive, extraneous principles it requires believers to adopt as axiomatic: “If wee should admitt their Metaphysiques, their transcendent Transubstantiation, and admitt their Chimiques, their Purgatorie Fires, and their Mythologie, and Poetrie, their apparitions of Soules and Spirits, they would binde us to their Mathematiques too, and they would not let us bee saved, except wee would reforme our Almanackes to their tenne dayes.”65 Like alchemists, Roman Catholics can find textual confirmation for their fanciful theories just about anywhere, “and as our Alchymists can finde their whole art and worke of Alchymy, not onely in Virgil and Ovid, but in Moses and Solomon; so these men can finde such a transmutation into gold, such a foundation of profit, in extorting a sense for Purgatory, or other profitable Doctrines, out of any Scripture.”66 Donne has absorbed his times’ habit of associating transubstantiation with alchemy on the grounds of their both being physically impossible.
And yet it is precisely because it is physically impossible that alchemy is intriguing to Donne. Alchemy’s constellation of metaphors does more than supply attractive poetic devices and intellectual structures through which to imagine the purification of bodies, minds, and souls.67 It also offers Donne a mode of imagining matter that flagrantly disobeys the laws of physics. The difference between these two uses of alchemical metaphor is like the difference between employing the trope of gold beaten to airy thinness and employing the trope of gold beaten to such airy thinness that it joins lovers’ souls across any physical distance, as Donne does in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: whereas the first draws upon plausible metallurgy, the second grants such fantastical qualities to metal that the metaphor, lovely as it is, is as far-flung as such gold would be. When alchemy keeps company with transubstantiation, the potential for imagining unbelievable matter only becomes magnified, as does the opportunity to create extraordinary images of those implausible substances.
For Donne, however, such a conjunction of elements also provides the occasion to query why, or even if, one would pursue such a substance in the first place. And when it comes to querying why one would want an evidently desirable thing, his mind often turns to women. Even when they do not refer to transubstantiation, Donne’s alchemical poems are often about the possibility of refining the female body and heterosexual union with that body into something purer. Take, for example, “The Canonization,” where the “Phoenix ridle” that converts both sexes to “one neutrall thing” is derived from the alchemical progression from coniunctio, the marriage of masculine sulfur and feminine mercury, to exaltatio, the production of the nonsexed alchemical product—gold, the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s stone.68 Or take “The Ecstasy,” in which, before the union of their bodies is even contemplated, the lovers’ souls are so thoroughly and alchemically commingled that an onlooker “Might then a new concoction take, / And part farre purer than he came” (27–28). Something different happens, however, when Donne’s alchemized female bodies also take on the qualities of the Eucharist.69 In that case, the legitimacy of this purification comes into question, leading the way for a second-order questioning of whether the game is worth the candle. All of this transubstantiated, refined flesh, but to what end, if neither transubstantiation nor alchemical refinement works?
To begin my discussion of poems that ask this question, I turn to Donne’s “Air and Angels,” a poem that considers the fundamental physics that underlies both transubstantiation and alchemy even if it is not about either one. Since “Air and Angels” addresses the incarnation of the soul in the body, it engages a number of the same physical issues that transubstantiation and alchemy do, and it does so in the context of considering whether a woman may assume an exceptional kind of physical virtue. At least since the time of Aquinas, as I mentioned above, Christian thinkers had repurposed the same Aristotelian matter theory that underlay the dogma of transubstantiation for Christian theories of ensoulment: God’s quickening of a human fetus with its soul occurs at the same moment—indeed, is the same action—as his imposing a substantial form upon what had previously been an indistinguishable blob of prime matter.70 In consequence, a living human body is inseparable from its soul, just as the prime matter out of which a physical body is made is inseparable from its substantial form, which in turn is inseparable from the sum of its accidents. As “Air and Angels” puts it, “my soule . . . / Takes limmes of flesh, and else could nothing doe” (7–8). All of this is always true for every human.
Always true, that is, except in the case of the incarnate Christ, whose resurrected body must be materially different from his first and ordinary earthly body for the physics of the transubstantiated Eucharist to be valid, and for Christ’s body to be present in every consecrated Host, every time, everywhere. That same issue of Christ’s embodiment—how can one human body be so fundamentally different from another?—arises in “Air and Angels,” and is resolved in the same way that Thomist theory resolves the physics of the Eucharist. Just as Christ’s resurrected body is materially superior to his initial body, “Air and Angels” proposes one form of bodily incarnation superior to another. In this case, it is a hierarchy based on sex. Man’s embodied love is superior to woman’s, just as angels are purer than the bodily features—the “face, and wings” of air—they assume (23). So far, so good: Donne seems to have cleverly, if misogynistically, elaborated a scale of material analogy in which angels are more refined than air, just as men are more refined than women.
But matters (and matter) prove more complicated than this, in ways that start to take on the overtones of Eucharistic controversy. In the case of the consecrated Eucharist, as we have seen, Aquinas struggled with the exact physics of how the immaterial substantial form of Christ’s body and blood acquired the material accidents of the bread and wine. Once transubstantiation occurs, these accidents must inhere in something, but they cannot inhere in Christ’s substantial form. Thus, Aquinas theorized, the baser accidents of bread and wine (their taste, smell, color, and texture) inhere in the “prime” (and purest) accident of bread and wine, that of quantity or extension. This tripartite scheme—baser accidents inhere in another but purer accident, which in turn inheres in an entirely separate, ideal substantial form—appears in “Air and Angels” in the tripartite physics that composes the beloved woman. It cannot be as simple as her body inhering in the man’s love, since her physical accidents cannot intermingle with the ideal state of his love’s substantial form. Hence Donne introduces a third term: her love. The baser accidents of her body (her hair, her lips, etc.) inhere in her love, which as prime accident inheres in the interior purity of his love, the true essence and substantial form that is entirely different in kind from the accidental properties she has to offer. Just as the substantial form of Christ’s body and blood deigns to “wear” the accidents of the bread and wine, and just as an angel, entirely different from and superior to the air, deigns to wear the air as its face and wings, “So thy love may be my loves spheare” (25).
The implausible transubstantiative physics behind this transmutation, however, marks it as suspect; and indeed, upon closer examination, we see it as no transmutation at all. First of all, the change in “Air and Angels” is not a physical change but a change of mind. The female beloved is not truly refined to match the male speaker. Rather, his superior, immaterial love has simply consented to be associated with her otherwise ordinary material qualities: “and now / That [love] assume thy body, I allow” (12–13; emphasis added). Furthermore, even that change of mind is ultimately identified as ironic. Preceded by the same improbable physics that backs transubstantiation, the misogynistic disappointment of the poem’s final tercet may be read, not as a surprise, but as an inevitability:
Just such disparitie
As is twixt Aire and Angells puritie,
’Twixt womens love, and mens will ever bee.
(26–28)
Air cannot be refined into angels, women’s love cannot be refined into men’s.
In the end, “Air and Angels” is a poem less about any real prospect of feminine refinement and more about how far we are willing to entertain theories we know to be untrue. Clued in by the poem’s reference to a jury-rigged Thomist manipulation of Aristotle that allows an accident to adhere in another accident, we never entirely trust that such refinement can occur. Nevertheless, for twenty-five lines before its three-line conclusion, “Air and Angels” strings along a promise of purer feminine matter that is underlain by patently preposterous physics. The nonsurprise of the unsuccessful refinement at the end proves that the poem has undertaken not merely a quasi-scientific study of the quasi-physical attributes of love and lovers but also an epistemological study of how long false notions can hold. The answer? Twenty-eight lines, the length of two sonnets. And they are not even perfect sonnets: the scattering of truncated rhythms (trimeter and tetrameter) across those twenty-eight lines corresponds to the strained credulity the poem induces. We can entertain the idea that women can be made purer, but not for long.
Like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, then, Donne’s speakers seem to be in the business of believing six impossible things before breakfast—except that they tip their hand that this state of belief is also a state of knowing that their belief is incorrect. The speaker of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day” similarly puts pressure on how, and how long, we may grant credence to incredible ideas of fantastical physical matter, this time by explicitly joining the physics of transubstantiation and the physics of alchemy—with a Paracelsian twist.71 Here, the matter in question is that of the speaker. The poem begins with the Paracelsian assumption that there is a “generall balm” or spiritual force in which everything in the world partakes (6). In this light, the speaker’s recommendation that lovers study him—in that he is “every dead thing, / In whom love wrought new Alchimie”—initially promises a Paracelsian alchemical revivification. If the general balm is currently at low ebb, then spring surely will see it coursing through the speaker as it does through all who have had the good sense to take their Paracelsian medicine. In that case the speaker, though a “dead thing,” is not really dead.
But Paracelsus’s version of matter theory starts to go awry as the speaker turns more specifically to how he does and does not conform to a Eucharistic physics. While the speaker continues to describe himself alchemically, in his case no alchemical renewal is achieved:
For [love’s] art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.
(14–15, 17–18)
In the terms of Aristotelian physics, the speaker’s “re-begotten” self is an impossible thing: a substantial form imposed on nothing. And not even an ordinary nothing, like a shadow—which is itself the sign, the accidental property, of a substance—but rather the “Elixer” of “the first nothing” (29). This elixir seems to be an alchemical product that is, paradoxically and impossibly, concocted not from prime matter but from the “first nothing” that existed before God created prime matter in order then to create the world ex nihilo.72 If it were successful, the physics experiment of the speaker of the “Nocturnal” would be the most astounding alchemy ever achieved. More than breaking down base matter into prime matter, the speaker has broken down matter into the nothingness that preceded creation. Surely this is a position of tremendous potential.
Yet the “Nocturnal” suspends potential by suspending the operation. Circling back at its end to its beginning—the year’s midnight, and the day’s—the “Nocturnal” reveals that the speaker’s condition is not the result of an alchemical transformation but rather the preparation for it: “Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call / This houre her Vigill, and her Eve” (43–44). As in “Air and Angels,” then, the speaker’s condition is a state of mind, not a state of matter (or nonmatter). While the speaker earlier insisted that absolute nothingness has come to pass, in terms of physical change nothing has in fact yet happened. The speaker’s proposal that all lovers “study” him (10) thus establishes that, like “Air and Angels,” the “Nocturnal” is an exercise not in physical change but in knowledge making. What is it that lovers are supposed to learn and imitate of the speaker’s claiming an impossible physical being? They cannot be that body, because even the speaker is not yet and cannot ever be that body. Rather, what they can learn and imitate is the speaker’s talent for asserting a physical state that is manifestly contrary to fact, an elixir of “the first nothing” that has “grown” even though no alchemy has yet commenced (29). The speaker of the “Nocturnal,” like the speaker of “Air and Angels,” is interested in what kinds of knowledge-making practices he can get away with for as long as the poem can pretend that something physical has happened, even though we learn it hasn’t. “Study” him, lovers, he exhorts near the poem’s beginning. Yet, at the poem’s end, he asks permission to commence that operation whose product they have already supposedly studied: “Let mee prepare towards her” (43). His implication is that permission, or credulity, may be denied; if so, and if the study happens nonetheless—as it must have, if we have gotten this far in the poem—then we willingly study that in which we do not believe.
The “Nocturnal” is a peculiar (and exceptionally sophisticated) Donnean variation on the matter theory that brings together alchemy and transubstantiation. Having no substantive body at all is not typically Donne’s aim in either his secular or his religious poetry. In other poems, Donne’s interest in Paracelsian alchemy, and particularly in Paracelsian medicine, enables him more straightforwardly to transfer the physics of exceptional matter from the transubstantiated Eucharist to the human self. I am not the first to notice that Donne is interested in appropriating the power of the sacraments: a number of critics have argued that Donne tends to invest poetry itself with a sacramental function, and others have been interested in Donne’s conveyance of sacramentality to physical matter.73 Frances Cruickshank, for example, has argued that Donne’s sacramental impulses are tied to his somewhat forlorn hope that God may inhere in earthly materiality, a hope that Targoff connects to Donne’s obsession with the prospect of regaining his own, individual body, in perfected form, at the time of resurrection.74 Appropriating sacramental power thus can return Donne to the question of what the sacrament of the Eucharist, which imparts Christ’s resurrected flesh and blood to living believers, is actually made of. And Donne finds Paracelsus’s answers to that question, though heretical, marvelously compelling. They are, however, compelling not because they are right but rather because they are so manifestly wrong.
Donne’s acquaintance with Paracelsus seems unusually thorough for even a well-educated person of his time, given that Paracelsian medicine did not really take off in England until the turn of the seventeenth century.75 True, the Paracelsus of Ignatius His Conclave is a reckless physician, one who has killed any number of patients through an unfortunate habit of barely bothering to test his “uncertaine, ragged, and unperfect experiments” before administering them as medication.76 And Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions credits only God, not the physician, with making an effectively “powerfull Cordiall.”77 Still, Donne’s poetry turns again and again to the matter theory that underlies Paracelsian medicine and that authorizes its curative capacities.
The most interesting case of that matter theory? The ostentatiously Eucharistic Paracelsian remedy of mummy. Recall that Paracelsian alchemy nullifies transubstantiation in that it envisions the Eucharist as merely another kind of body that, like all matter, contains some degree of divine energy. Recall also that this life force, often called “balm” or “balsam” by Paracelsians, was associated in Paracelsus’s Trinitarian elemental scheme with the solidifying element of salt, which has preservative powers and is aligned specifically with Christ, who assumed solid form in his incarnation in human flesh. Balsam could be conveyed medicinally through the administration of one Paracelsian alchemical ingredient: mumia, or mummy. Paracelsus was not the first to consider mummy medicinally useful, but he seems to have been the first to theorize its operations in the context of this larger theological, physiological, and alchemical vision. Mummy, in his view, transmitted balsam’s Christlike resistance to physical decay.78
Originally, the “mummy” valued for medicinal purposes seems to have meant the bitumen (naturally occurring asphalt) that was used to mummify Egyptian corpses and that could be retrieved when those mummies were unearthed. From this usage, however, the term was metonymically transferred to the Egyptian mummies themselves.79 And finally, by Paracelsus’s time and probably largely because of his influence, mummy came to mean, at least in northern Europe, either fresh or (more often) dried bits of recently deceased human corpses.80 Following Paracelsus’s lead, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemical recipes for medicinal cordials began to feature mummy as a crucial ingredient. “Elixir of Mummie is made thus,” advises John French in his Art of Distillation (1653): “Take of Mummy (viz. of mans flesh hardened) cut small four ounces, spirit of wine terebinthinated [that is, infused with turpentine] ten ounces, put them into a glazed vessell . . . which set in horse dung to digest for the space of a month, then take it out and express it. . . . This Elixir is a wonderful preservative against all infections, also very balsamicall.”81
Since prescribing mummy literalizes the licensed cannibalism of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, associations between this alchemical medicine and the Eucharist were perhaps inevitable. Richard Sugg and Louise Noble both argue, in fact, that medicinal mummy was acceptable in parts of early modern Europe because it served as a Protestant substitute for the ingestion of Christ’s divine body.82 The association between mummy and the body and blood of Jesus Christ had two interesting consequences. On the one hand, the Reformist horror at consuming Christ in Holy Communion—a horror that never forgot Berengar of Tours’s being forced to swear that Christ’s body is literally “crushed by the teeth of the faithful”—acquired new waves of nausea via the alchemically endorsed consumption of mummy.83 Reformist controversialist Daniel Featley, for example, records in his account of a debate on the nature of the Eucharist the alleged Roman Catholic opinion that eating human flesh in the form of the Eucharist was no sin because it was just the same as eating mummy in the form of medicine. In response, Featley invokes “The horror of the sinne of Anthropophagy, or eating mans flesh . . . and chamming it with the teeth.”84 On the other hand, the Paracelsian view that anthropophagy enhances health and well-being bolstered, even among Protestants, a comforting metaphorical association between Holy Communion and a sovereign cure for what ails you. As the pseudo-Paracelsian tract De natura rerum promises, with the administration of mummy “that which is mortified, may bee both raised again, and revived.”85 Donne, whose belief in Paracelsus’s “balsam” and whose faith in Paracelsian medicine extended—in a letter he wrote to Henry Goodyer—to labeling mummy a product that can restore our “naturall inborn preservative” when it “is corrupted or wasted,” refers in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions to the Eucharist as exactly a medicinal cordial along these lines: “I have drunke of thy Cordiall Blood, for my recoverie, from actuall, and habituall sinne.”86 Donne explains the logic by which he extends the mummy cure to Christ’s salvation of humankind later in the Devotions, when he muses on the curious fact that “if my body may have my Physicke, any Medicine from another body, one Man from the flesh of another Man (as by Mummy, or any such composition,) it must bee from a man that is dead.”87 His analogy is clear: it is Christ’s crucified body that cures the living man.
One interpretation of Donne’s interest in transferring Eucharistic power from holy sacrament to alchemical medication might be that it is a benign form of nostalgia for his Roman Catholic days. Relying on Paracelsian pharmaceuticals might allow Donne and his poetic speakers to have their balsamic cake and eat it too. They may partake of the restorative powers of Christ’s body by imagining it as alchemical mummy while at the same time not having to adhere to either the doctrine or the bad physics of transubstantiation. In practice, mummy does not, of course, effect such a spectacular conversion of human flesh, and the early moderns, no fools, were well aware of mummy’s failures. Physician Ambroise Paré, expressing the frustration that many a doctor and patient must have felt, dismissed mummy on the grounds that he had “tryed it an hundred times” and it simply “doth nothing helpe the diseased,” inducing nothing but chest pain, vomiting, and halitosis.88 Mummy’s practical inefficacy forces us to revise a reading that would have Donne safely expressing nostalgia for transubstantiation through the medium of mummy. Why be nostalgic for something manifestly untrue?
To answer this question I turn now to some of Donne’s most obviously Eucharistic and/or obviously alchemical secular poems, which elucidate spectacularly how the substitution of alchemy for transubstantiation merely perpetuates transubstantiation’s failures. In the process, these poems lay out the same epistemological framework as “Air and Angels” and “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”: they invite—perhaps even require—us to develop an intimate acquaintance with the operations of disknowledge. The issue is not only that Donne continues to imagine the transformation of ordinary into sublime matter and then to deflate such transformations as theoretically impossible. The issue is also that the poems acknowledge all along that such transformation is untenable. As a result, reading these poems is not an experience of being disappointed when Donne ultimately brings his magnificent tropes of refined physical matter down to earth. Rather, reading these poems conveys an experience of engaging viscerally, sometimes even pleasurably, in the prospect of refinement even while understanding that prospect to be wrongly theorized from the start. As I described it in this chapter’s introduction, the mode of disknowledge applied here labels that understanding inconsequential. We know the physics to be all wrong, but forget we ever cared about its being right.
Since Donne, in his secular poems, demonstrates the irredeemable ordinariness of typical matter through the ordinariness of typical women, it would follow that he would choose the exceptional woman to exemplify the possibility of extraordinary matter. Indeed, several of his verse letters to aristocratic women patrons flatter his addressees by suggesting they have been alchemically refined.89 When he is not going about cementing patronage, however, Donne considers it not so easy for even an exceptional woman to possess equally exceptional physical matter. The grounds of his skepticism about female exceptionalism, once again, have to do with whether Aristotelian physics have been violated.
“Twickenham Garden,” which begins with the “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” conceit of the male speaker’s command of transubstantiation—“I do bring / The spider love, which transubstantiates all, / And can convert Manna to gall” (5–7)—turns to discussing the extraordinary woman, the one who is true when ordinary women are uniformly false, in terms of whether her exterior matches her interior. The word “transubstantiate” is followed in this poem, as in “Air and Angels,” by the Eucharistic physics problem of material accidents’ not belonging to the substantial form they cloak. The poem draws to a close with the premise that the being of the typical woman, always a false lover, may be analyzed as a matter of misleading exterior attributes: “Nor can you more judge womans thoughts by teares, / Then by her shadow, what she weares” (24–25). The analogy between the typical woman’s tears and her shadow is awkward, though. Could it be that, as a false woman’s crocodile tears mask her thoughts, her shadow masks her clothing? Not really. Her shadow is, in fact, an accidental property of those clothes, and more or less truly denotes them. Following this logic, if the perfect “she” of the poem, the one true woman on earth, is unlike all ordinary women (26), then her shadow is not denotative; it is an accident detached from her substance. She is as extraordinary a substantial form as Christ in the Eucharist.
It is the heart of this poem’s paradox, however, that this transubstantiation, like the manna transubstantiated to gall at the poem’s opening, ultimately converts the miraculous to the quotidian. Helen Gardner’s commentary on this poem’s final lines, in which this extraordinary woman proves to be like all others—“O perverse sexe, where none is true but shee, / Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills mee” (26–27)—explains why: “Although unlike all other women she is true, she is like them in not being what she seems, for her ‘truth’ to another is really only cruelty” to the speaker.90 Hence “Twickenham Garden” joins poems like “Air and Angels” and others (for example, “Community”) in developing the association between all femininity and crass matter. No amount of transubstantiative imagery can change what women are. But that is precisely the point: transubstantiative imagery will always confirm femininity as crass matter because, as we see in the poem’s final lines, the physics of transubstantiation simply does not hold up. Even the speaker’s declaration that his tears “are loves wine” (20) does not bear scrutiny in transubstantiative terms, since the metaphor inverts the physical structure of the Eucharist. Unlike the transubstantiated wine of Holy Communion, in which the accidents of ordinary wine cloak the unique substance of Christ’s blood, the uniqueness of the speaker’s wine-tears resides in their unique accidents, their unusual taste: “all [tears] are false, that tast not just like mine” (22). Nonetheless, the speaker of “Twickenham Garden” takes the typical Donnean position of addressing an audience of “lovers” who will put his tears to the test. That disappointed audience shares the speaker’s ironic pleasure at having always known that all women are not to be trusted. That knowledge, Donne’s speaker intimates, frames the epistemological experience of that shared knowledge as a curious bliss of disappointment. The “True paradise” of Twickenham Garden, he declares, is the one of failure, the one to which “I have the serpent brought” (9).
For a palliative to this situation we might, as other critics have, turn to “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World,” which proposes the dead Elizabeth Drury as truly exceptional matter with alchemically transubstantiative properties. This poem’s subject alchemically assumed female form just to show how (unusually) pure she could be:
She in whom vertue was so much refin’d,
That for Allay unto so pure a minde
Shee took the weaker Sex, she that could drive
The poysonous tincture, and the stayne of Eve,
Out of her thoughts, and deeds; and purifie
All, by a true religious Alchimy,
Shee, shee is dead.
(177–83)
Since her death those qualities have vanished. The world is in a state of Paracelsian illness, having lost her as its balsam and preservative:
Sicke world, yea dead, yea putrefied, since shee
Thy’intrinsique Balme, and thy preservative,
Can never be renew’d, thou never live.
(56–58)
So, it seems, alchemy belongs with the other eternal verities that have been lost with the advent of the “new Philosophy” that “cals all in doubt” (205). The prospect of spiritual perfection was real, even if it died with Elizabeth Drury.91
But not so. Elizabeth Drury’s alchemy proves to have been like all alchemy, ineffectual:
She from whose influence all Impressions came,
But, by Receivers impotencies, lame,
Who, though she could not transubstantiate
All states to gold, yet guilded every state,
Shee, shee is dead.
(415–18, 427)
Merely “gilded” gold is, by definition, failed alchemy; the dead girl was just as ineffective as alchemy is at inculcating virtue in the world. The comparison of her alchemy to transubstantiation only reinforces that failure. It is not her fault, really: her receivers’ impotence lames her potency. Nevertheless, this memory of her alchemy as a mere “gilding” puts the lie to the poem’s earlier assertion that it is only nowadays that alchemy adulterates or falsifies what it claims to make pure (345–46). Nothing extraordinary was ever made through Elizabeth Drury and her alchemy.
And yet, even though alchemy is ineffectual, it does valuable work for Donne in “The First Anniversary.” Specifically, it marks out a type of epistemological maneuver that not only is useful in the moment but also serves as a device to compartmentalize memory. “The First Anniversary” extends the fundamental proposition of elegy, that “things were better then,” to the materiality of the world, now distempered in every way. At the same time, the poem, as I have been arguing, discounts transubstantiative and/or alchemical material refinement as always having been a fantasy. We thus have two choices. We could simply recognize that not only are things getting worse, but they were never good. Or, while still retaining the knowledge that our always dismal world is only deteriorating, we could forget that knowledge enough to speak of improvement as on the horizon even when we know it is not. In other words, we could forget what we know even as we know it. The poem’s crucial analogy in this regard is the one between transubstantiation (even if a failed transubstantiation) and gilding (which is failed alchemy). Like the speaker’s wine-flavored tears in “Twickenham Garden,” but now in a more explicitly theological register, the analogy posits inverted Eucharistic transubstantiation: something equivalent to a host that is gilded with the true body of Christ but stays just bread in the middle. Could the bread be the substance of the Host, and Christ its accidents? That would be preposterous. But in dangling the promise of an alchemical transubstantiation that is not occult but rather readily apparent to the senses—Christ as tangible accident—this analogy also dangles the prospect of distracting ourselves with shiny gilded objects from our certain memory of how the material refinement of transubstantiation was, as Donne well knew, always a dubious physical proposition.
This forgetting of an unforgotten memory has a poetic purpose as much as it does a theological one. As the poem comes to its end, and as it makes its argument that Elizabeth Drury’s mourners are both alchemical products and alchemical agents—“her creatures, whom she workes upon / And have [their] last, and best concoction / From her example, and her vertue” (455–57)—it also defines part of their alchemized function as remembering “The First Anniversary” itself. That is, remembering it badly. As part of his final word, the speaker defends the choice of poetry, rather than chronicle, as a vehicle for Elizabeth Drury’s memory by calling to mind that God’s final word to Moses was in the form of “song,” not law. What the poem omits, though, is that God’s song to Moses was of the Israelites’ inevitable future failure: “then shal they turne unto other gods, and serve them, and contemne me, & breake my covenant. And then when manie adversities and tribulacions shal come upon them, this song shal answer them to their face as a witnes . . . for I knowe their imaginacion, which they go about even now” (Deut. 31:20–21). God’s warning and the Israelites’ heedless “imagination”; alchemical failure and continued alchemical effort; a poem that admits as it draws to a close that it can only “emprison” its object and a poem that insists, in its final breath, that “verse the fame enroules” (470, 474). The contradictions in “The First Anniversary” are too compressed to represent authentic forgetting. Rather, they represent remembering perfectly well alongside remembering not at all.
The most compact and complex Donnean example of how alchemy stands for the simultaneous possession of two incommensurable states of knowledge is “Love’s Alchemy,” a poem in which alchemy is implemented as a matchless design for disknowing that which is no longer desirable to know. The poem’s first stanza presents us with alchemy’s stupidity:
Some that have deeper digg’d loves Myne than I,
Say, where his centrique happinesse doth lie:
I’have lov’d, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not finde that hidden mysterie;
Oh, ’tis imposture all:
And as no chymique yet th’Elixar got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinall,
So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summers night.
(1–12)
The comparison here, obviously, is between alchemy and other things that are futile pursuits. Alchemy and love are fools’ games, something only a “chymique” would credit, in the same way that he glorifies his “pregnant pot” of a furnace even when it yields him nothing of worth. Whatever benefits love or alchemy produces are merely “by the way,” accidental by-products of a process that never achieves its intent.
Juxtaposing what begins this stanza, however—digging for something that is not found—with the accidental benefits that by chance befall the alchemist brings us into the neighborhood of Francis Bacon’s Aesopian fable, discussed in Chapter 1, that alchemy is like digging for nonexistent gold in an inherited vineyard: an activity that is of no use but that ought to be undertaken anyway. If alchemy and desire amount to the same thing, and if they are both inutile but still essential diversions, from what do they divert? The answer comes in the next stanza, when, after dismissing hopes of things rarefied, Donne’s speaker rather unexpectedly turns to the Paracelsian alchemical ingredient of mummy:
Our ease, our thrift, our honor, and our day,
Shall we, for this vaine Bubles shadow pay?
That loving wretch that sweares,
’Tis not the bodies marry, but the mindes,
Which he in her Angelique findes,
Would sweare as justly, that he heares,
In that dayes rude hoarse minstralsey, the spheares.
Hope not for minde in women; at their best,
Sweetnesse, and wit they’are, but, Mummy, possesst.
(13–14, 18–24)
Donne’s final image of “mummy” is less startling once we remember its alchemical associations, which are also pointedly transubstantiative associations. A woman who is “mummy, possessed” might be merely a bit of mummy that is owned, uselessly, like the bit of dried flesh kept on the alchemist’s shelf until it is needed for a Paracelsian cordial. Yet she might also be “mummy, possessed,” inhabited by a spirit, revivified in the fashion of Christ’s living body in the Eucharist. Either she is dead or she raises the dead. Either way, mummy must be acquired to be eaten, in a nasty parody of what some considered the already revolting ritual of Eucharistic cannibalism.
This poem’s alchemy, though, rescues us from this horror, if only by way of laying bare mummy’s inefficacy. Because mummy belongs not merely to Eucharistic debates but also to alchemy, the second stanza’s woman who is mummy circles back to the first stanza’s “chymique” who glorifies his pregnant pot. The pot, like the woman, is possessed: possessed because his; possessed because pregnant, full of something mysterious and unexpected. But the pot is not full, as it turns out, or at least not full of anything the alchemist originally aimed for. Once we draw the thread from the alchemist’s pot to the mummy possessed and back again, transubstantiation helps serve the speaker’s turn of forgetting his own epistemological failure. It is not that the Eucharist emerges as the “real” topic from underneath that bitterly witty alchemical analogy. It is that the devolution of the woman’s body into mummy, degraded not only as female but also as alchemical fantasy, credits the speaker with knowing something: he knows that pure matter—alchemical gold, true mummy, a woman with a mind—is not to be had. Admitting that there is no tenable physics of exceptional matter is preferable to admitting, as the speaker does at the beginning of the poem, that some who have “deeper digg’d loves Myne” than he know the secret of love’s happiness that he does not. Forgetting about that shortfall of knowledge and experience, the speaker revels in revealing natural philosophy in dire straits.
Thus “Love’s Alchemy” adds yet another tool to disknowledge’s epistemological kit. Alongside the simultaneous knowing and unknowing of physical impossibility of such poems as “Air and Angels,” the “Nocturnal,” and “Twickenham Garden,” and alongside the simultaneous remembering and not remembering of “The First Anniversary,” “Love’s Alchemy” adds the option of simultaneously knowing that one is in possession of junk science and not minding that fact. As I suggested earlier, this kind of epistemological movement proves quite useful for the Protestant invention of a new split between science and faith. What is the advantage of knowing but not caring? Donne’s remark in his Essays on Divinity that “Almost all the ruptures in the Christian Church” have been caused by too much passion over physics questions—issues of “Natural Divinity” such as transubstantiation—hints at what might have come to pass had such passion never been exercised.92 Imagining a millennium and a half of history without “ruptures in the Christian Church,” Donne institutes disknowledge as the principle behind ecclesiastical harmony. In this way he takes part in what Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote have described as the important, deliberate Reformation work of “forgetting faith”: in an age of religious seesawing, “the forgetting of faith [is] a valid and important strategy for dealing with confessional conflict, be it in the form of religious conversion, toleration, dissimulation or de-escalating, playful disregard.”93
But there is more in play here than a kind of theological ceasefire. Had we never cared about theological dispute, Donne proposes, we might have remained in a golden age of churchly union. It seems like a throwback strategy. But by means of percolating his theology through alchemy, Donne is in fact showing the way forward, toward a certain kind of modernity. In two important essays that I also discussed in Chapter 1, Lee Patterson has argued that alchemy ushers in modernity in two different ways: it replaces faith in the sacramental with faith in technology; and it instantiates as normal the distinction between language and the endlessly deferred truth that language claims to represent.94 For Patterson, both of these alchemical moves toward the modern are cause for some mourning, as stability gives way to endless change. I would like to revise Patterson’s sadness about modernity, though, by combining his insights and applying them to Donne. If alchemy represents, for a poet like Donne, both a defunct (because never provable) sacramental physics and a defunct (because never true) ideal of the true logos, then alchemy may also represent the freedom to say openly, via its link between outmoded dogma and outmoded notions of truth, that religious doctrine no longer need worry about either confirming or denying scientific theory. In that case, alchemy might usher in modernity as a cheering rather than an alienating experience. For the otherwise permanently alienated Donne, the most reassuring version of modernity might mean not developing new ways of knowing—new science or secular skepticism—but rather constructing a safe venue where knowledge is not required.95
Forgetting about the once crucial, always dubious foundation of matter theory in Eucharistic physics thus proves for Donne to be a good strategy for even more than smoothing over England’s past religious controversy or his own past Catholicism. That forgetting also allows Donne to anticipate, even in an age when an alternative physics is not yet in place, what it would be like for religious doctrine to forget about matter theory. The secular poems I have been discussing enact, on a microlevel, what Donne’s sacred lyrics enact on a macrolevel when they segregate Eucharistic from alchemical imagery. In the sacred lyrics, that segregation absolves doctrine from having to answer to this particular kind of scientific question. The secular poems, in uniting the Eucharist and alchemy, undertake a quite different process, but to the same end: they not only demonstrate that matter theory and theology are now separate intellectual enterprises but also show how the intellect, even a superb one such as Donne’s, can undertake that separation and be quite content with it. These secular poems leave physics and its quandaries behind as something Donne does not wish to know.
Let me turn from this essentially theoretical, epistemological point to a more historically located one. In terms of how to assess the state of knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century, Donne’s strategic ignorance of matter theory amounts to a defense of retaining the humanist reverence for the classical text despite its manifest shortcomings. No longer caring about the makeup of matter allows him to retain Aristotelian natural philosophy, no matter how superannuated or how cockeyed it may be. In his funeral sermon for wealthy merchant Sir William Cokayne, preached on the story of the raising of Lazarus, Donne likens the outdated but still relied-upon theories of Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy to “a child that is embalmed to make Mummy. . . . rather conserved in the stature of the first age, then growne to be greater.” And yet this mummy—at once a stunted knowledge base and an ineffective alchemical preservative of human bodies—is better than anything that has come along since: “if there be any addition to knowledge, it is rather a new knowledge, then a greater knowledge; rather a singularity in a desire of proposing something that was not knowne at all before, then an emproving, an advancing, a multiplying of former inceptions.”96 The new science is too “singular”: its propositions are entirely new, rather than improving, advancing, or multiplying the old. It is possible that here Donne’s diction associates the old science further with alchemy. However incorrect it may be, the old science has valuable “multiplying” capacities—a word that, especially in the context of mummy and especially given Donne’s use of it elsewhere, invokes alchemy’s sham physics of “multiplication.” In Donne’s complex analogy, then, we are urged to stick with the knowledge analogized to alchemical remedy, even though it is known to be wrong. Although bound to fail, its inventive “multiplying,” as we have seen, is a welcome alternative to having to assimilate the kinds of new knowledge that will make us uncomfortable. Better mummy than novelty; better old, wrongheaded ideas than up-to-date discomfiting ones.
Donne’s alchemy thus proves an all-purpose disknowledge system, one both anti-mnemonic and anti-erudite. Handy for forgetting about the disputes that were at the heart of the Reformation, however well-known their details remain, it is also handy for not allowing the new science to change cherished humanist presumptions, however erroneous they may be. When theology meets matter theory, Donne uses the occasion to construct a magnificent model of intellectual negligence. True, it is a bit strange to read Donne, one of the Renaissance’s great thinkers about ideological flash points, as choosing not to think too hard. I would wager, in fact, that not thinking is the one intellectual strategy that has never previously been attributed to this brainy poet. Nonetheless, the undeniable pleasures of intellectual disengagement seem to be as strong a motivator for the eccentric directions of many of Donne’s poems as are the ideological and theological motivators that Donne critics have stressed in the last several decades. Donne’s immediate poetic successors, as it turns out, were discerning readers of his poetry in this regard. In the following two sections we shall see how George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, in chewing over the same issues of matter theory that occupied Donne, also take up the question of whether it is better not to care.
In George Herbert’s poetry, as in John Donne’s, alchemy emerges at points that gesture toward issues either of Eucharistic doctrine or of the matter theory with which the Eucharist is associated. The dynamics of the relationships among these three elements—alchemical change, Eucharistic change, and material change—have a different telos for Herbert than they do for Donne, however. Whereas Donne ultimately references alchemy as a way to model not caring about religious doctrine’s incapacity to cope with physics, Herbert takes the alliances between alchemy and transubstantiation to discipline-specific inquiries into the physical nature of the world. Unlike Donne, who loves fripperies, Herbert thus does not emphasize alchemy’s triviality. Coupled with Herbert’s deep concern for the material world is a real curiosity about the nature of that world, down to the level of its physical makeup. While it is Donne who holds the reputation of delving deeply into natural philosophy, in this arena Herbert is the more thorough and more thoughtful scientist. Despite this distinction, however, Herbert does share one science-related habit with Donne: he deploys alchemy as a means of not thinking about difficult subjects. Only, however, when thinking has failed to produce an answer. And here, as with Donne, alchemy is a useful tool. Herbert designates alchemy as a way of relieving him of an intellectual responsibility that he evidently felt quite deeply: the responsibility of determining what matter is made of.
The central section of Herbert’s The Temple (first printed in 1633), “The Church,” opens by teasingly referencing the Eucharistic problem in ways that criticism has not yet remarked upon. On first glance, the famous shaped poem “The Altar,” which opens this section of the volume, is a starkly uncluttered edifice, seemingly unburdened with the physical accouterments of Holy Communion. As a typographical construct, it is as plain as can be; as an altar described, it is made entirely of stone—or, metaphorically, of the speaker’s stony heart for which it stands. It bears nothing, it promises nothing. As a result, “The Altar” seems to have already taken a position on the controversy over how Christ is present in the bread and wine. As in more Calvinist-leaning Reformation theology, including the official position of the Church of England in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the nature of the “sacrifice” referenced by the speaker of “The Altar” is Christ’s sacrifice replicated in the communicant—“O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine”—not an event that takes place upon the altar itself.97 The bread and wine are not even in view, much less an object of inquiry.
Figure 1. “The Altar” in the Williams manuscript of The Temple (Dr Williams’s Library MS 28.169, fol. 15v). By permission of the Trustee of Dr Williams’s Library.
And yet the poem delivers a visual pun on the nature of the Eucharist that brings the question of the Eucharist’s physical matter back to the table, so to speak. In both manuscript and print versions of this shaped poem, there are in fact two things upon the altar: the two words of the poem’s title, “The” and “Altar.” These words effectively mark a place for the bread and the wine, the two things that must be on the altar for Holy Communion to be celebrated. The Williams manuscript and the Bodleian manuscript of Herbert’s poems both create this effect by laying a horizontal rule (or double rule) on top of line 1 of the poem, creating a surface on which “The” and “Altar” rest (see Figures 1–2). In the first printed edition of The Temple (1633), this portrayal of two items resting on an altar-like surface is, quite literally, embroidered (see Figure 3). The border that bounds the top and the bottom of the entire poem (including the title) is lacelike, replicating the lace edging of the “fair white linen cloth” that must be put on the Church of England Communion table before the holy feast is celebrated.98 When these design elements creating the Communion table are added to the rather obvious “altar/alter” pun of the poem’s title, we begin to wonder not only what two elements rest upon the altar, but also how they are altered and how that alteration might be visually apprehensible. What do we see when we see the bread and wine? Have they been transmuted? How?
Figure 2. “The Altar” in the Bodleian manuscript of The Temple (Bodleian MS Tanner 307, fol. 15v). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
Figure 3. “The Altar” in the first print edition of The Temple (Cambridge, 1633). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Herbert, like the converted Catholic Donne and the Catholic priest Robert Southwell before him, turns out to be keenly interested in Christ’s blood in a way that seems odd if he is, as some have argued, a Protestant of more Calvinist bent. Yet no matter where on the Laudian-Puritan continuum Herbert lies (a question that, I might add, I have no interest in adjudicating), his sanguinary obsession might be accounted for by the Paracelsian point of view that he seems to share with his friend Donne. When it comes to Christ’s blood and sometimes even Christ himself, Herbert is, generally speaking, operating in the same vein of Paracelsian alchemical medicine that Donne is. Herbert describes Christ’s blood—whether sweated in Gethsemane or shed on the cross—as “balsam” in a number of poems, and in others suggests that balsam is of alchemical derivation, a golden cordial.99 Taken in sum, these references modulate Herbert’s occasional identification of the “physick” of Christ’s sacrifice with the wine of the Eucharist into Paracelsianism, as in “Conscience”: “when ever at his board / I do but taste it [my Savior’s blood], straight it cleanseth me” (14–15).
Along with imagining the healing effects of Christ’s blood alchemically, however, Herbert also gestures toward the question of whether Christ’s blood in the Eucharist is constituted according to the Thomist physics of Christic substance and comestible accidents—a question that Herbert, like Donne, knew full well was at the heart of long-standing theological controversy. In “The Agonie,” in fact, Herbert portrays the wine of Holy Communion precisely as exceptional matter along Thomist transubstantiative lines, matter like which there is no other—blood for Christ, and wine for us:
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach;
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
(13–18)
Here the poem ends, though, leaving us hanging if we want to know why the crucified Christ’s blood tastes like wine to the speaker. While he knows that his dual metaphor-plus-simile for what the communicant receives (love = liquor = blood, love = liquor = wine) engages the topic of material properties and material change, Herbert simply will not touch these issues.100
What is at stake in Herbert’s going only so far and no further in investigating the nature of Eucharistic matter? We could, certainly, ally Herbert with those who, like Richard Hooker, recommended that the exact operation of the Real Presence is a question about which we ought not to worry too much. Indeed, Herbert pronounces in the Williams manuscript’s poem “The H. Communion” that he simply does not care about the issue:
I am sure, whether bread stay
Or whether Bread doe fly away
Concerneth bread, not mee.
(7–9)
But there’s a whiff of special pleading in this assertion. When the Williams “H. Communion” poem asserts that the nature of the Host “Concerneth bread, not mee,” the parallelism of the concerns of bread (which ought to care about what it is) with the concerns of the speaking self (who does not care what the bread is) not only imputes to bread the power of human concern but also reciprocally imputes to the speaking self the quality of unthinking, bready materiality. This parallelism suggests that the real issue is not narrowly the matter of the Eucharist but rather matter itself. While indeed the speaker of this poem may not be concerned with Eucharistic physics, that physics nonetheless brings up the question of the physical composition of his own self. What am I made of, and is the stuff of my body no more special than a wafer of Communion bread?
Unlike Donne, Herbert does not experiment with concocting exceptional matter out of the human body and then with analyzing why such experiments fail. Rather, Herbert’s response is consistently, as in “The Agonie,” to raise but then to cordon off the question of physical change and the terms in which early seventeenth-century Europe discussed this question. And it is alchemy that consistently helps him do so. In fact, alchemy marks the exact point of avoidance. For example, Herbert revises “The Elixir,” his poem most explicitly on the subject of the Eucharist, to make it clear that the elixir in question is not simply a vaguely medicinal “tincture” (15) but rather the alchemical magnum opus, the philosopher’s stone “That turneth all to Gold” (22).101 This revision serves to focus attention upon the matter of the Host and its effects. Yet “The Elixir,” in its revised form, turns aside the very question it raises: what the Eucharist as the miraculous philosopher’s stone does, exactly. Just as “The Agonie” ends with an airy and inconclusive wave toward the physical connection between Christ’s blood and the Holy Communion’s wine, “The Elixir” stops at the moment it declares the Eucharist the philosopher’s stone, with no elaboration of what properties in the stone effect transmutation.
We might excuse a less lettered and less well-connected poet for not delving further into what constitutes physical and creaturely bodies, but it seems rather extraordinary that Herbert, of all early seventeenth-century poets, should highlight how he retreats in the face of these questions. On the evidence of his reading and writing, Herbert’s profound interest in nature ought not to stop when it comes to the makeup of natural matter. His acquaintance with and admiration for Francis Bacon, and specifically his admiration for the Novum organum—whose 1620 publication he lauded with Latin poems praising “the author of The Great Instauration”—seem to demonstrate Herbert’s enthusiasm for Bacon’s demolition of prior natural philosophy, including matter theory.102 Classifying both ancient and Scholastic natural philosophy as “Idols of the Theater,” or “philosophies that have been received or invented as so many stage plays creating fictitious and imaginary worlds,” Bacon insists that we must discard the entirety of Aristotelian physical theory, from its assumption of four elements to its schema of a body’s comprising its substantial form and its accidents: “substance, quality, passion [that is, being acted upon], even existence itself, are poor notions; much worse are heavy, light, dense, rare, moist, dry, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form and the like; all these are ill-defined and fantastical.”103 Bacon sets out, as the first order of business in beginning an “interpretation of nature” from scratch, a program for a new analysis of the physical makeup of material bodies, including their form, motion, transformation, and composition out of “real particles, such as are found [that is, such as truly exist].”104
Still, although Herbert may be taken to task for shying away from a Baconian exploration of what lies beneath material form and material change, he should also be forgiven for having no solutions to propose. Like his older contemporary Donne, Herbert would have been keenly aware that matter theory was at an impasse. As I have mentioned, while Aristotelian physics seemed patently ridiculous—at least to some—in the early seventeenth century, no satisfactory theory had as yet arisen to replace it. Recent work by Michel Serres, Jonathan Goldberg, and Stephen Greenblatt, among others, has drawn our attention to the early modern period’s flirtation with atomism, the counter-Aristotelian theory that held the universe to be made of infinitely tiny, uniform particles careening about in a vacuum and that derived from the intellectual line comprising the philosophical school of Epicureanism, especially as expressed in Lucretius’s De rerum natura.105 But despite the many ways in which scholars now see Renaissance atomism as anticipating modern scientific, theological, and philosophical principles, the seventeenth century was not so sure that atomism offered anything in the way of scientific truth.106 Whatever their fascination with Lucretius, the more scientific of early modern authors feared that basing a new physics on yet another set of ancient texts would only replicate—albeit with a different classical imprimatur—the humanists’ error of adhering to Aristotelianism. As Gerard Passannante has brilliantly explicated, the rediscovery of Lucretius in the early fifteenth century meant that its reception and absorption in early modern Europe were, for several centuries, the stuff of humanism rather than of natural philosophy.107 As humanism’s veneration of classical learning came to be mistrusted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, atomism could easily share its fate. Montaigne, for example, thought of atomism as a rhetorical construct: he proposed that Epicurus’s atomism, along with Plato’s ideas and Pythagoras’s numbers, were merely “inventions that had at least a pleasant and a subtle appearance provided that, however false, [this appearance] could be maintained against arguments to the contrary.”108
By the time of his Novum organum, Bacon himself had rejected Epicurean atomism in part on the grounds that it was not experimentally provable; it was more a literary theory than a scientific one.109 Bacon’s objections were quite different from theological objections to Epicurean atomism, whose reasons included atomism’s denial of divine causation and its dictum that earthly matter could not ultimately be destroyed (a principle that contradicted Christian eschatology). Nevertheless, whether taken separately or added together, the Baconian suspicion that atomism was not scientific and the doctrinal objection that atomism was not Christian should have given Herbert significant pause and may have discouraged him from seriously proposing atomism as a replacement for discredited Aristotelian physics. Indeed, it was not until well after Herbert’s death in 1633 that either of these objections could even begin to be met, as Pierre Gassendi attempted to Christianize Epicurean atomism, and as Gassendi and ultimately Robert Boyle attempted (even if unsuccessfully) to give atomism some kind of empirical proof.110
Baconian and theological objections aside, Herbert may also have found atomism unpalatable because, in its early seventeenth-century form at least, it proposed that matter is at base nonknowable. Unlike the Aristotelian base elements of earth, water, air, and fire, Epicurean atoms do not present themselves to human perception by means of familiar properties; rather, what humans perceive is only the “effluxes” of those atoms as they collide and shed their skins.111 This aspect of Epicurean atomism, filtered through Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” would ultimately influence Descartes, who (despite his flat rejection of atomism) proposed that bodies have no sensible qualities at all and that whatever we believe we sense is purely a product of our own perception: “what affects our senses,” noted Descartes, “is simply and solely the surface that constitutes the limit of the dimensions of the body.”112 Other than its extension in space, none of what we perceive as “qualities” of a body is a true quality of that body. Digging further into the makeup of matter might get you to exactly nothing or, worse yet, only to a reflection of your own mind.
Such a discomfiting prospect is what Herbert confronts and then evades in “The Banquet,” a poem that squarely takes on—and then conspicuously veers from—the question of what happens to Eucharistic matter during Holy Communion. The poem begins with the proposition that the “delight” of the Eucharist, its “sweet and sacred cheer,” “Passeth tongue to taste or tell” (1–6). What makes it delightful, then? It is not the properties retained from bread and wine, what Thomas Aquinas would call their “accidents.” We cannot credit the notion that “some starre (fled from the sphere) / Melted there, / As we sugar melt in wine” (10–12) or that “sweetnesse in the bread / Made a head / To subdue the smell of sinne” (13–15). Rather, what we encounter in Holy Communion is a delightfulness imparted by God:
Onely God, who gives perfumes,
Flesh assumes,
And with it perfumes my heart.
(22–24)
What is consumed in the sacrament is not a flesh whose pleasant qualities we can somehow perceive truly beneath the overt qualities of bread and wine. (A thesis that would smack, in any case, of taking pleasure in cannibalism.) Rather, these lines’ disjunction between “flesh” and “perfume,” a disjunction that is self-evident unless Christ habitually doused himself in civet, emphasizes that we perceive “perfume” in the Eucharist not because perfume is an inherent quality of the Real Presence but because God has conditioned us to associate our ingestion of the sacramental bread with an experience of perfumed sweetness.
At this point, however, the poem swerves to avoid this proto-Cartesian implication that the qualities of Eucharistic matter are not truly known but are perceived only through preinstilled habit. The second stanza describes what we perceive of the Eucharist as a heuristic device by which God demonstrates the capacities of his divine love. The Eucharist’s sweetness is neither an inherent accidental property of bread and wine nor a perception by the communicant’s senses; it is a divinely added—and in that sense miraculous—property.
But as Pomanders and wood
Still are good,
Yet being bruis’d are better sented:
God, to show how farre his love
Could improve,
Here, as broken, is presented.
(25–30)
Herbert flees so swiftly from the nature of matter in this stanza that, having explicitly evoked the classic Aristotelian physics question of whether a piece of wood still bears wood’s substantial form once it is broken into smaller and smaller bits or once it is burned in a fire, he then adds the caveat that the Eucharist, unlike the piece of wood, is not really split into pieces at all. The Eucharist is merely “presented as broken,” a simulacrum of subdivided matter. We need not—indeed, we cannot—determine what it is made of if it is never anything but whole.
Refusing to consider questions of material composition puts Herbert somewhat at odds with his own poetic project, which requires the material world to aid in his longed-for conversation with the divine. I agree here with Jonathan Gil Harris, who argues against a long-standing critical tendency to “dematerialize” Herbert.113 As Harris suggests, Herbert’s attachment is not to the chimera of exceptional matter, as it was for Donne, but rather to the ordinary things of this world. The more ordinary the better, in fact. As David Glimp points out, Herbert even thinks of God’s “creatures”—that is, living things of a lower order than human beings—as being capable, unlike humans, of an unproblematic, untrammeled relationship of praise toward their Lord.114 If God speaks through ordinary things and if ordinary things speak to and of God, then it would seem to follow that knowing the nature and makeup of those ordinary things is paramount. And yet this is a knowledge that Herbert’s poetry has in sight but will not pursue.
In this regard the Eucharist’s material composition is merely a special and especially knotty instance of a universal problem. Ironically enough, Herbert recommends in A Priest to the Temple, or, the Country Parson that the First Communion should take place “When any one can distinguish the Sacramentall from common bread, knowing the Institution, and the difference.”115 Trying to distinguish between sacramental and common bread, the unsolvable paradox of six centuries of Christian theology, inevitably leads one to inquire into the makeup of “common” and unusual matter alike. How does Herbert expect a child to conduct such an inquiry when it is one that he will not himself undertake? In the case of the nature of Eucharistic matter, Herbert expediently relieves himself of the problem by punting the question to Christ himself: “Especially at Communion times [the parson] is in a great confusion, as being not only to receive God, but to break, and administer him. Neither findes he any issue in this, but to throw himself down at the throne of grace, saying, Lord, thou knowest what thou didst, when thou appointedst it to be done thus; therefore doe thou fulfill what thou didst appoint.”116 On the question of the nature of ordinary matter, however, it is a bit more difficult to resort to the explanation that “it is whatever Christ says it is.”
Hence the advantage for Herbert in not thinking terribly hard about matter theory, even when it is he himself who brought up the question. Ordinary things and ordinary creatures may speak to and of God, but neither those things nor God Almighty has anything to tell us about matter’s makeup. And that is the problem. David Hawkes has described Herbert as suspicious of Baconian empiricism because it promises to disjoin the material from the spiritual.117 And indeed Herbert seems to anticipate, as the too-close-for-comfort atomism of “The Banquet” hints, that the seventeenth century’s most challenging alternatives to Aristotelian physics will begin to exclude God’s participation in the properties of the stuff of this world. Descartes, who describes matter as made up of tiny corpuscles with no void or vacuum between them, defines motion as always caused by the collision of one body against another. Having surmised that the original of all material motion is God’s initial “push,” which was transferred into all motion that will ever take place in the universe, Descartes seems to need no God to keep things going in his mechanistic system.118 Thomas Hobbes, following upon Bacon’s somewhat Paracelsian suggestion that experiment might demonstrate a “vital spirit” common to all matter, conversely proposes in Of Human Nature that all spirit is corporeal and that all material objects are coextensive with material spirit.119 Donne’s evasion of matter theory leaves him happily playing in the outmoded field of learning called humanism, but Herbert’s evasion has even higher rewards: it preserves a corporeal experience of God’s workings in the world.
If George Herbert retreats from matter theory, his poetic acolyte Henry Vaughan refuses even to scout out the battlefield. To be sure, Vaughan is intensely interested in the stuff of this world. For him, Alan Rudrum argues, the nature of God is unmanifest to humans; the nature of nature, in contrast, is entirely apprehensible. Moreover, Vaughan sees nature as perfectible.120 Sometimes, in fact, even the flesh of the speaker of Vaughan’s poetry is subject to being perfected; and furthermore, sometimes that perfecting process is alchemical. Finally, Vaughan’s pointed imitations of Herbert commit him to considering the effects of Holy Communion on the believer. Schooled by Vaughan’s predecessor poets, as well as by the ongoing seventeenth-century doctrinal and scientific debates over the transmutation of physical matter, we would be justified in expecting Vaughan to constellate all of these themes—alchemy, materiality, and Holy Communion—into a single discussion. But in a conspicuous avoidance of the intertwined theological and physical questions engaged by Donne and especially by Herbert, Vaughan never portrays either the poetic speaker’s flesh or the process by which it is perfected as Eucharistic in nature. In this way Vaughan goes Herbert one further in disknowledge. Vaughan not only avoids proposing an answer to what matter is made of and how it changes; he also avoids even the occasion for asking the question.
The absence of a topic in an author’s work does not mean that she is avoiding the topic, of course. I would not accuse any run-of-the-mill metaphysical poet of neglecting matter theory on the basis of the fact that he does not mention matter theory. Of the three poets addressed in this chapter, however, Henry Vaughan has the closest relation to the debates over physics in which both alchemy and theology were engaged. Literally the closest relation: Vaughan’s brother (and perhaps identical twin) Thomas Vaughan was an alchemist in the business of manufacturing Paracelsian pharmaceuticals. Under the pseudonym Eugenius Philalethes, Thomas Vaughan published prolifically in defense of alchemical principles, in treatises notable for the way they rooted Paracelsian alchemy deeply within the matter-theory controversies of the seventeenth century. Henry Vaughan’s reliance on Thomas Vaughan’s alchemical scholarship has long been recognized, and Thomas Vaughan even published one of his brother Henry’s forays into translating alchemical treatises, his translation of Henry Nollius’s The Chymists Key.121 It is fairly safe to assume, therefore, that Henry Vaughan was acquainted with Thomas Vaughan’s views regarding the transmutation of matter.
Thomas Vaughan’s views were quite strongly stated and, in terms of mid-seventeenth-century physics, relatively advanced. First of all, Thomas Vaughan—who quarreled pugnaciously and in print with the likes of Cambridge Neoplatonist Henry More—firmly and explicitly rejects Aristotelian matter theory on the grounds that it limits new discovery: “we are still hammering of old elements, but seek not the America that lyes beyond them.”122 Specifically, Thomas Vaughan critiques Aristotle for assuming that substantial forms exist and then dwelling on their operations rather than investigating what makes up a substantial form in the first place.123 For the most part, it must be said, Thomas Vaughan has nothing new to add to the seventeenth century’s discussion of how Aristotle might be replaced; he is generally orthodox in his Paracelsianism, and indeed replicates the kind of Paracelsianism that had been available to Donne fifty years previous, at the turn of the seventeenth century. Occasionally, however, Thomas Vaughan does venture assertions that seem to anticipate Boyle in founding a new physical chemistry on experimentation rather than on prebuilt theory. While he supports a Paracelsian idea of prime matter, for example, he suggests that we not take the operations of that prime matter upon faith but instead establish them through observation and experimentation. Examining vegetables, and noting that in their previous form of seeds they did not resemble vegetables, he arrives not at the Epicurean atomist notion that the world came from seeds but rather at the supposition that even seeds must come from something prior: “This Observation I apply’d to the World, and gained by it this Inference: That the World in the beginning was no such thing as it is, but some other seed or matter out of which that Fabricke which I now behold, did arise. . . . [B]ut what that matter should be I could not guesse.”124 Here Thomas Vaughan readily classifies the nature of matter as something neither already known nor ineffably mysterious. Rather, the nature of matter is something that ought to be on his research agenda. Until you know, don’t guess; but even if you don’t yet know, you can confidently set a future standard by which you may judge your knowledge as better than guessing. For this reason, Thomas Vaughan headed his 1650 treatise Anthroposophia magica with the epigraph Bacon’s Novum organum took from the book of Daniel: “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Dan. 12:4).125
Henry Vaughan, in contrast, has evidently decided that the entire knowledge game is not worth the candle. Indeed, he pulls ahead of Herbert in the ambitiousness of his disknowledge. While Vaughan’s preface to the second edition of Silex Scintillans (1655) declares his indebtedness to “Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, (of whom I am the least),” Vaughan’s tracking of The Temple is remarkable not only for his poems’ close attention to Herbert’s topics and style but also for their deliberate and blatant circumvention of the ways that Herbert comes close (though not too close) to considering matter theory.126 “Deliberate and blatant,” I say, because this circumvention occurs during the course of poems that overtly cite Herbert on the Eucharist. Indeed, we see Vaughan feinting toward and then steering clear of Herbert on matter theory from the very beginning of Silex Scintillans. Vaughan’s opening poem, “Authoris (de se) Emblema” (The author’s emblem of himself), pays homage to Herbert’s opening poem “The Altar” in describing an object made of stone and the conversion of nonhuman matter into flesh. Vaughan’s stony object, though, is solely the speaker’s heart, not Herbert’s heart-as-altar; and it is solely the heart that may undergo change. Where Herbert’s concretely shaped poem demands that we query what Eucharistic transmutation, if any, might take place on the altar, Vaughan begins his volume with a deliberately non-Eucharistic transmutation. His poetry changes hearts and minds, not bread and wine.
If the truth be told, the poetic speaker of Silex Scintillans seems far more interested in his own blood than in Christ’s; the speaker’s blood is a virtual reservoir for allusions appropriated from every stage of Christ’s life. Recalling Christ on the Sea of Galilee, “The Storm” recounts a tempest that needs to be calmed—in the speaker’s blood, that is, and not by Christ’s command. Offering to assume the place of Christ in Gethsemane, the speaker likewise vows in “Anguish,” “My God, could I weep blood, / Gladly I would” (7–8). He will even happily bleed in the place of Christ on the cross. In “Misery,” the speaker’s plea that God “hear him, whose blood / Speaks more and better for my good” (105–6) immediately turns into a cry to God that is “not poured with tears alone, / . . . But with the blood of all my soul” (108–10). Most ambitiously Christlike of all is the speaker of the poem “Midnight,” who compares the stars’ “emanations, / Quick vibrations” to his own soul’s “thin ejections, / Cold affections” (11–12, 15–16) and prays that God may “Shine on this blood, / And water in one beam” (22–23). While the “water” of these lines is presumably the water of baptism, since the poem’s postscript is Matthew 3:11 (“he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire”), the syntax of the lines—“shine on this blood / And water in one beam”—joins water with the speaker’s blood in such a way that it seems that the speaker, like the crucified Christ, miraculously has both blood and water in his veins. Sanguinary egotism seems to be Vaughan’s watchword.
When Vaughan associates body and blood with alchemical operations, then, it is likewise the speaker’s body and blood that are at issue, not Christ’s. Such is the case even when Holy Communion is either the poem’s explicit topic or its frame of allusive reference. Vaughan, a Paracelsian physician himself, is interested in the way that alchemical “spirits” may be curative of his body and blood, but those “spirits” are never Christ’s spirit communicated in the Eucharist. Instead, cure arrives from worldly sources alone, not from heaven. In Vaughan’s poetry, the stuff of this world sometimes seems to be a closed system that exists entirely for the benefit of the speaker. A signal example is “The Morning-Watch,” in which the speaker is the cheerful recipient of the “dew” of a good night’s sleep, which “fell on my breast; / O how it bloods, / And spirits all my earth!” (7–9; emphasis in the original). For Donne or for Herbert, the conjunction of blood and spirit would designate Christ’s offering of his own spirit as sovereign Paracelsian cure. For Vaughan, in contrast, that blood that “spirits all [his] earth,” though initially vaguely Eucharistic, is never identified as Christ’s.
If Christ’s body and blood don’t matter, then certainly the nature of their matter in the Eucharist doesn’t matter, either. The primacy of the speaker’s own flesh and blood, and the immateriality of the material of the Eucharist, come to the fore in poems by Vaughan that follow Herbert very closely, sometimes specifically tracking Herbert’s poems on the Passion and on Holy Communion. This effect is perhaps most striking in Vaughan’s “The Passion,” which cites Herbert’s memorable final lines in “The Agonie”—“Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine”—in such a way as to void Herbert’s query about the transmutation of one substance into another. Vaughan’s revision expostulates,
Most blessed vine!
Whose juice so good
But thy fair branches felt as blood,
How were thou pressed
To be my feast!
(15–20)
What is felt as blood is so obscurely stated in Vaughan’s imagery—“Most blessed vine! / Whose juice . . . / thy fair branches felt as blood”—that it is entirely unclear what the branches are, why branches should feel the “juice” of the “vine” as blood, or who might be feeling that juice as blood in the first place. Amid this confusion Christ’s physicality recedes, as does the Real Presence, and the speaker’s perceptions and sensations come to the fore instead. Moreover, the disconnection between those perceptions and sensations and the inner nature of the Eucharist causes the poem no trouble. Unlike in Herbert’s “The Banquet,” where the solipsism of proto-Cartesian matter theory momentarily threatens to undo the speaker’s entire relationship to the sacrament, here solipsism crowds out a consideration of matter theory and thus preserves, rather than endangers, the speaker’s satisfactory experience. Similarly, Vaughan’s “Affliction (I),” while calling attention to the typically Herbertian word elixir, applies that term not to the Eucharist but to the speaker’s own affliction itself, “the great elixir that turns gall / To wine, and sweetness” (4–5; emphasis in the original). Vaughan’s alchemical terminology here signals precisely how little he cares about the precise mechanics of material transformation. In the end, even alchemy is entirely absorbed by how the speaker feels about what the poem “The Check” calls (his own) “dear flesh” (11).
Egotism abetting a lack of interest in matter theory: this Vaughanian habit might be merely a version of the poetic “detachment” from worldly affairs for which Silex Scintillans has been both lauded and reprehended. Several critics have viewed that detachment as Vaughan’s mechanism for self-preservation during the period of the British commonwealth. As a royalist who had served in combat against Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentary forces, Vaughan might have had good reason to skirt the issue of what the Eucharist is made of.127 Under Puritan influence, the English church at the time was being encouraged to forget about the Eucharist once and for all. As Rudrum points out in his study of the value of alchemical “hiddenness” in Vaughan’s poetry, the Westminster Assembly wished to abolish the Book of Common Prayer and “to end the virtually universal admission to the service of Holy Communion which had been the Anglican tradition.”128 Rudrum connects the Puritan impulse to shove aside the material aspect of this sacramental ritual with a marked Puritan tendency to degrade matter entirely and to drive a wedge between spirit and the material of this fallen world.
We should not, however, overestimate Puritanism’s censorship effect on Vaughan. After all, as Rudrum notes, only one commonwealth era case of prosecution for the use of the Book of Common Prayer has so far been discovered, and Vaughan felt free to include material relating to Holy Communion in his Mount of Olives, or, Solitary Devotions (1652).129 That freedom does not stop Vaughan, however—despite his royalist affiliations—from flirting with Puritanism’s degradation of matter. For Protestant-inflected intellectual history, the ultimate consequence of that degradation was exactly what Donne’s Eucharistic-alchemical poems anticipate: the separation of physics from theology.130 (A separation that the Roman Catholic Church was not able to countenance until the twentieth century, and to which many Christians have not yet acceded.) For Vaughan, in contrast, the consequence is the separation of physics from poetry. In Vaughan’s literary division of the disciplines, alchemy and poetry remain companions: no one can deny his deep and abiding attraction to alchemically imagined structures of secrecy, of transmutation, and of purification.131 So too do the Eucharist and poetry remain companions: Vaughan writes poetic versions of his devotional prose on the restorative effects of Holy Communion.132 And yet neither alchemical nor Eucharistic imagery ever leads Vaughan, who knew well from his alchemist brother Thomas’s work what a serious inquiry into the nature of matter would look like, to venture in his poetry upon that inquiry. If Donne is eager to relieve theology of the quandaries of matter theory, and if Herbert avoids a too-close consideration of matter theory because he anticipates the answers will preclude the participation of the divine in the stuff of this world—that is to say, because physics will displace religion—Vaughan is only too happy to imply that physics is not a topic that poetry need touch at all.
What sort of cause may we posit for Vaughan’s evasion of questions of matter theory? His negligence entails something other, I think, than the kind of paradoxically conspicuous forgetting that often emerges in the aftermath of historical periods of violent crisis. (For example, when individuals and groups pass over their complicity in genocide.) Vaughan’s silence puzzles: we do not know why he does not care to know. We can only observe what he has declined to mention. It is as if he has simply forgotten that the topic is important. Though how could he have forgotten? And should he bear any blame for this omission? The fact that Vaughan felt perfectly comfortable, even in a Puritan age, to write about the Real Presence in other contexts means, as I have suggested, that history will not suffice to explain his choice. An explanation deriving from the theological or philosophical context of the mid-seventeenth century seems similarly inadequate. Vaughan might protest that he, like any Protestant of the second half of the seventeenth century, need no longer care about how medieval physics was built on the admittedly shaky ground of the truth of transubstantiation. But as a close reader and imitator of Herbert, not to mention as a medical practitioner and a dabbler in alchemical theory, Vaughan ought to care what the world is made of. Or at least, like Donne, he ought to be more open to the advantages of not caring. But whereas Donne and Herbert keep track of the intellectual lineage of matter theory, Donne exploiting medieval physics’ collapse and Herbert wondering what would take its place, Vaughan leaves it alone. My best guess for his reasons derives not from his historical or intellectual milieu but rather from his place in literary history. Vaughan is, in effect, a poet of the avant-garde, anticipating modernity in the form of anticipating a new kind of literary voice. With a poetry that appropriates nature to the poetic ego while abnegating the responsibility to examine nature’s minutest structures, Vaughan forecasts Romanticism in its most unfortunately stereotypical form. Vaughan’s version of poetry’s future has the poet failing to learn natural philosophy—and proud of it, too.
