The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature

PARACELSUS 1

[1] That remarkable man, Philippus Aureolus Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Theophrastus Paracelsus,2 was born in this house on November 10, 1493. His medieval mind and questing spirit would not take it amiss if, in respectful remembrance of the customs of his day, we first glance at the position of the sun at the time of his birth. It stood in the sign of Scorpio, a sign that, according to ancient tradition, was favourable to physicians, the ministers of poisons and of healing. The ruler of Scorpio is the proud and bellicose Mars, who endows the strong with warlike courage and the weak with a quarrelsome and irascible disposition. The course of Paracelsus’s life certainly did not belie his nativity.

[2] Turning now from the heavens to the earth on which he was born, we see his parents’ house embedded in a deep, lonely valley, darkly overhung by woods, and surrounded by the sombre towering mountains that shut in the moorlike slopes of the hills and declivities round about melancholy Einsiedeln. The great peaks of the Alps rise up menacingly close, the might of the earth visibly dwarfs the will of man; threateningly alive, it holds him fast in its hollows and forces its will upon him. Here, where nature is mightier than man, none escapes her influence; the chill of water, the starkness of rock, the gnarled, jutting roots of trees and precipitous cliffs—all this generates in the soul of anyone born there something that can never be extirpated, lending him that characteristically Swiss obstinacy, doggedness, stolidity, and innate pride which have been interpreted in various ways—favourably as self-reliance, unfavourably as dour pigheadedness. “The Swiss are characterized by a noble spirit of liberty, but also by a certain coldness which is less agreeable,” a Frenchman once wrote.

[3] Father Sun and Mother Earth seem to have been more truly the begetters of his character than were Paracelsus’s own begetters by blood. For, at any rate on his father’s side, Paracelsus was not a Swiss but a Swabian, a son of Wilhelm Bombast, the illegitimate offspring of Georg Bombast of Hohenheim, Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of St. John. But, born under the spell of the Alps, in the lap of a more potent earth that, regardless of his blood, had made him her own, Paracelsus came into the world by character a Swiss, in accordance with the unknown topographical law that rules a man’s disposition.

[4] His mother came from Einsiedeln, and nothing is known of her influence. His father, on the other hand, was something of a problem. He had wandered into the country as a doctor and had settled down in that out-of-the-way spot along the pilgrims’ route. What right had he, born illegitimate, to bear his father’s noble name? One surmises the tragedy in the soul of the illegitimate child: a grim, lonely man shorn of his birthright, nursing resentment against his homeland in the seclusion of his wooded valley, and yet, with unconfessed longing, receiving news from pilgrims of the world outside to which he will never return. Aristocratic living and the pleasures of cosmopolitanism were in his blood, and remained buried there. Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. So we may expect this father to have exerted the most powerful influence on the young Paracelsus, who will have reacted in just the opposite way.

[5] A great love—indeed, his only love—bound him to his father. This was the only man he remembered with love. A loyal son like this will make amends for his father’s guilt. All the father’s resignation will turn into consuming ambition in the son. The father’s resentment and inevitable feelings of inferiority will make the son an avenger of his father’s wrongs. He will wield his sword against all authority, and will do battle with everything that lays claim to the potestas patris, as if it were his own father’s adversary. What the father lost or had to relinquish—success, fame, a free-roving life in the great world—he will have to win back again. And, following a tragic law, he must also fall out with his friends, as the predestined consequence of the fateful bond with his only friend, his father—for psychic endogamy is attended by heavy punishments.

[6] As is not uncommon, nature equipped him very badly for the role of avenger. Instead of an heroic figure fit for a rebel, she gave him a stature of a mere five feet, an unhealthy appearance, an upper lip that was too short and did not quite cover his teeth (often the distinguishing mark of nervous people), and, so it seems, a pelvis that struck everybody by its femininity when, in the nineteenth century, his bones were exhumed in Salzburg.3 There is even a legend that he was a eunuch, though to my knowledge there is no further evidence of this. At all events, love seems never to have woven her roses into his earthly life, and he had no need of their thorns, since his character was prickly enough as it was.

[7] Hardly had he reached an age to bear arms than the little man buckled on a sword much too big for him, from which he seldom let himself be parted, the less so because, in its ball-shaped pommel, he kept his laudanum pills, which were his true arcanum. Thus accoutred, a figure not entirely lacking in comedy, he set forth into the wide world on his amazing and hazardous journeys which took him to Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. An eccentric thaumaturge, almost a second Apollonius of Tyana, he is supposed, according to legend, to have travelled to Africa and Asia, where he discovered the greatest secrets. He never undertook any regular studies, as submission to authority was taboo to him. He was a self-made man, who devised for himself the apt motto Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest,4 a right and proper Swiss sentiment. All that befell Paracelsus on his endless journeys must remain forever in the realm of conjecture, but probably it was a constant repetition of what happened to him in Basel. In 1525, already famed as a physician, he was summoned to Basel by the town council, the latter evidently acting in one of those rare fits of clear-headedness which now and then occur in the course of history, as the appointment of the youthful Nietzsche also shows. The appointment of Paracelsus had a somewhat distressing background, as Europe at that time was suffering under an unexampled epidemic of syphilis which had broken out after the Neapolitan campaign. Paracelsus occupied the post of a town physician, but he comported himself with a lack of dignity not at all to the taste of the university or of the worshipful public. He scandalized the former by giving his lectures in the language of stable-boys and scullions, that is, in German; the latter he outraged by appearing in the street, not in his robe of office, but in a labourer’s jerkin. Among his colleagues he was the best-hated man in Basel, and not a hair was left unscathed in his medical treatises. He was known as the “mad bull,” the “wild ass of Einsiedeln.” He gave it all back, and more, in studiedly obscene invective, a far from edifying spectacle.

[8] In Basel, fate dealt him a blow that struck deep into his life: he lost his friend and favourite pupil, the humanist Johannes Oporinus, who meanly betrayed him and supplied his enemies with the most powerful ammunition. Afterwards, Oporinus himself regretted his disloyalty, but it was too late; the damage could never be mended. Nothing, however, could dampen the arrogant and obstreperous behaviour of Paracelsus; on the contrary, the betrayal only increased it. He soon took to travelling again, mostly poverty-stricken and often reduced to beggary.

When he was thirty-eight, a characteristic change showed itself in his writings: philosophical treatises began to appear alongside his medical ones. “Philosophical” is hardly the right word for this spiritual phenomenon—one would do better to call it “Gnostic.” This remarkable psychic change is one that usually occurs after the midpoint of life has been crossed, and it might be described as a reversal of the psychic current. Only rarely does this subtle change of direction appear clearly on the surface; in most people it takes place, like all the important things in life, beneath the threshold of consciousness. Among those with powerful minds, it manifests itself as a transformation of the intellect into a kind of speculative or intuitive spirituality, as for instance in the case of Newton, Swedenborg, and Nietzsche. With Paracelsus, the tension between the opposites was not so marked, though it was noticeable enough.

[9] This brings us, after having touched on the externals and the vicissitudes of his personal life, to Paracelsus the spiritual man, and we now enter a world of ideas that must seem extraordinarily dark and confusing to the man of the present, unless he has some special knowledge of the late-medieval mentality. Above all, Paracelsus—despite his high estimation of Luther—died a good Catholic, in strange contrast to his pagan philosophy. One can hardly suppose that Catholicism was simply his style of life. For him it was probably such a manifestly and completely incomprehensible thing that he never even reflected upon it, otherwise he would certainly have got into difficulties with the Church and with his own feelings. Paracelsus was evidently one of those people who keep their intellect and their feelings in different compartments, so that they can happily go on thinking with the intellect and not run the risk of colliding with what their feelings believe. It is indeed a great relief when the one hand does not know what the other is doing, and it would be idle curiosity to want to know what would happen if the two ever did collide. In those days, if all went well, they did not collide—this is the distinctive feature of that peculiar age, and it is quite as puzzling as the mentality, say, of Pope Alexander VI and of the whole higher clergy of the Cinquecento. Just as, in art, a merry paganism emerged from under the skirts of the Church, so, behind the curtain of scholastic disputation, a paganism of the spirit flourished in a rebirth of Neoplatonism and natural philosophy. Among the leaders of this movement it was particularly the Neoplatonism of the humanist Marsilio Ficino which influenced Paracelsus, as it did so many other aspiring “modern” minds in those days. Nothing is more characteristic of the explosive, revolutionary, futuristic spirit of the times, which left Protestantism far behind and anticipated the nineteenth century, than the motto of Agrippa von Nettesheim’s book De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1527):

Nullis his parcet Agrippa,

contemnit, scit, nescit, flet, ridet,

irascitur, insectatur, carpit omnia,