Providence and Alchemy: Paracelsus on How Knowledge Unfolded, Matter Developed, and Bodies Might Be Perfected.
type: CreativeWork
description: Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), a medical reformer and lay theologian, maintained throughout his voluminous writings that providence operated everywhere in the Creation to bring about change and to make the unknown known. Every sort of development or revelation was part of the wonderful, orderly, and preordained unfolding of God's plan for the world. A term that Paracelsus used broadly for providential transformation was 'alchemy.' Contrary to the current consensus view in the scholarship, however, I show that in addition to this broad usage of the term, Paracelsus remained a believer in and practitioner of metallic transmutation also. By connecting Paracelsus's providential outlook to his alchemical interests, including his transmutational interests, I revise our understanding of the ways in which early modern science, magic, and religion could sometimes develop - not as domains with clear boundaries in mutual interaction, but maybe as one tangled thing, viewed from three different angles. The dissertation is based on extensive close reading of Paracelsus's texts, which amount to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75 million words. The texts have traditionally been divided into "theological and religious" on the one hand and "medical and scientific" on the other, a distinction that must be set aside on methodological grounds. A methodological problem less easily solved is how to write intellectual history about a person who, although an intellectual, was not a scholar. Paracelsus bragged about not having read a book in decades, and he may have had little formal education. His brand of free-form disquisition, which he called Theoric, engaged with philosophy but did not belong to philosophy (considered either as a discipline or genre). Overall I find deeper continuities than have generally been supposed between both Paracelsus and his ancient and medieval predecessors on the one hand and his early modern successors on the other. Those findings c…
abstract: Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), a medical reformer and lay theologian, maintained throughout his voluminous writings that providence operated everywhere in the Creation to bring about change and to make the unknown known. Every sort of development or revelation was part of the wonderful, orderly, and preordained unfolding of God's plan for the world. A term that Paracelsus used broadly for providential transformation was 'alchemy.' Contrary to the current consensus view in the scholarship, however, I show that in addition to this broad usage of the term, Paracelsus remained a believer in and practitioner of metallic transmutation also. By connecting Paracelsus's providential outlook to his alchemical interests, including his transmutational interests, I revise our understanding of the ways in which early modern science, magic, and religion could sometimes develop - not as domains with clear boundaries in mutual interaction, but maybe as one tangled thing, viewed from three different angles. The dissertation is based on extensive close reading of Paracelsus's texts, which amount to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75 million words. The texts have traditionally been divided into "theological and religious" on the one hand and "medical and scientific" on the other, a distinction that must be set aside on methodological grounds. A methodological problem less easily solved is how to write intellectual history about a person who, although an intellectual, was not a scholar. Paracelsus bragged about not having read a book in decades, and he may have had little formal education. His brand of free-form disquisition, which he called Theoric, engaged with philosophy but did not belong to philosophy (considered either as a discipline or genre). Overall I find deeper continuities than have generally been supposed between both Paracelsus and his ancient and medieval predecessors on the one hand and his early modern successors on the other. Those findings c…
author: Sparling, Andrew Walter
keywords: alchemy, Augustinianism, early modern Europe, metallic transmutation, providence, Reformation history
date published: 2018
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:46:52Z
provider: University of Nevada - Reno
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Nevada - Reno

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property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11714/3349