Franciscans and the Elixir of Life. Zachary A. Matus
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cardinal bishop of Albano. He died in 1327.12 Vitalis was a staunch supporter of the conventual movement and was a strong ally of the pope almost to the end of his life. Like many of his confreres, Vitalis objected to John XXII’s attacks on the Franciscan understanding of the absolute poverty of Christ. He rather spectacularly fell out of favor when the pope viciously harangued him in consistory.
John of Rupescissa was born around 1310.13 We do not know much about his early life, except that he was born into the lesser nobility in Aurillac and obviously procured enough education for himself to enroll at the University of Toulouse in 1327. Later in life he remembered his university years as a tumultuous time, where he was caught up in worldly things. John remained at the university for five years before joining the Order. In the same year he took the Franciscan habit he claims to have had his first vision of Antichrist. John initially kept his visions to himself, only revealing them some years later in a Franciscan chapter meeting in 1335 or 1336, along with his prediction of hostilities between England and France, which led eventually to his fame as a prophet of the Hundred Years War.
John’s initial reluctance to share his visions appears to have been justified, for his Franciscan superiors did not share his conclusion that God desired him to speak of what he had seen. By 1344, these superiors, led by Guillaume Farinier, provincial of Aquitaine, had heard enough. They confined John to a small cell in the Franciscan convent of Figeac. John remembers the time in Figeac as one of great suffering. He was placed on a rack for treatment of a broken leg, and left bound in irons to rot in his own filth for more than three months, with maggots crawling over his infected wounds. John survived, strengthened in his own belief that God had granted to him a special enlightenment. The bodily trials of Figeac subsequently gave way to trials of a legal nature. John was shuttled between various Franciscan convents and was tried for heresy for the first time in 1346 by a local Dominican inquisitor. The conclusion of the inquisition apparently did not suit Farinier, who rearrested John and sent him to be imprisoned in Toulouse and later in Rieux.
John’s sufferings continued. He contracted the plague while in prison, prompting more visions. But again, he survived. He eventually managed to convince a sympathetic captor to take him to the papal court at Avignon instead of to the next in the lengthening series of Franciscan convents that served as his jails. At Avignon, John was treated better, and as part of his examination by the cardinal inquisitor, he was asked to compose a lengthy description of his visions of the future, rather than merely to submit whatever previous writings he had with him. After much debate, and after a trial in which John roundly condemned the excesses of the clergy, he finally was declared fantasticus, but not hereticus. Upon this finding, he was remanded again to prison, where he would stay until he was allowed to enter the local Franciscan convent just prior to his death. Though John railed against his jailing, the papal prison in Avignon proved an excellent writer’s workshop. It was there that he composed all his surviving works. Indeed, John became a fecund author, with more than twenty books written before his death, and he was frequently sought out for prophetic advice.
Each of these friars contributed to alchemical discourse and the elixir tradition in his own way, yet they also represent a particular period in the history of alchemy. I consider only these works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not simply as a means to limit the scope of the project, but also because the turn of the fifteenth century heralded a shift in alchemical writing and praxis. It was around this time when, as Pamela Smith has noted, there was a surge in the production of technological books written in the vernacular—a change in the production of alchemical treatises that intensified with the invention of printing.14 In the wake of these developments, alchemy became a much more widespread practice both in the marketplace and at home, changing the character of the discipline.
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It is worth asking whether Bacon, Vitalis, and John were tied together by something more than their membership in the Friars Minor and their interest in the elixir. Was there a Franciscan alchemy? If by Franciscan alchemy we mean something along the lines of a school, I think not. On the other hand, lived Franciscanism—insofar as each author understood or experienced it—played a significant role in the alchemical works of each. It is the nexus between Franciscanism and alchemy that is the subject of this book. It is through the particularities of these relationships that broader connections and ruptures between medieval religion and science come into view.
I have conceptualized this study, therefore, as a history around science. At its most basic, it describes and situates the pursuit of the elixir within the intellectual, religious, and political culture of the friars who wrote about it.15 Taking this method further, I present three related, but distinct arguments. First, writing about alchemy—no matter how few Franciscans did so—did not require a radical intellectual break with the rest of Franciscan intellectual culture. This is especially true of writings on the elixir, but can be applied more broadly to alchemy as a whole. Second, for the friars of this study alchemy’s materiality and attention to the physical world was what conspicuously linked it to religion. Alchemy’s focus on the corporeal was neither an impediment nor superfluous to its connection to religion, nor was it a degradation of an erstwhile purely spiritual experience. Instead, the development of these Franciscan alchemies emerged in a period when Christians across Europe were focusing on and seeking for material evidence of their faith and material means of practicing their devotion. The doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection dealt inherently with the material world, but more to the point Christian practice was thoroughly intertwined with matter. The Eucharist, baptism, devotional art, relics and reliquaries, and even the smells and sounds of the Mass speak to the importance of the corporeal.16 Third, the religious and even the liturgical world of the Franciscans left an impact on their alchemical works.
The intellectual genealogy of this latter argument owes much to the work of Leah DeVun and Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, both of whom have explored this topic as it relates to John of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon, and each has demonstrated the importance of reading alchemical texts in light of an author’s larger oeuvre and other circulating discourses.17 Adopting this method myself, I also want to add what may seem a counterintuitive argument—that not only did religious thought influence alchemical writings, but also religious practice. By practice I mean principally Franciscan ritual life. Ritual life was frequently formalized into liturgical structures, but these structures did not necessarily limit improvisation and imagination. Too often ritual is understood in terms of things that are “ritualistic,” overemphasizing formulas or ossified repetitions. Here, I mean ritual as a mode of being in the world. Following the work of J. Z. Smith and, more recently, of Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon, I focus on ritual as a means of approaching the world subjunctively, that is, as it could or should be. Like the ritual itself, subjunctivity is ephemeral and fleeting, but it privileges the experience of meaning and connection. Franciscan ritual life therefore had implications for how one “thought” alchemy, for it could explain both the extraordinary potential of alchemical science and the inevitable clash between potentiality and the empirical inability of the elixir to achieve its reputed effects. Alchemy as a subjunctive science expresses conditional truths.
The fact that religious and scientific thought are deeply imbricated with one another in discussions of the elixir points to something deeper than a mere overlay of religious language onto alchemical theory. While it is possible to disentangle the alchemical praxis (the production of a chemical compound) from religious aspirations, the character of the substances created—the nature of the elixir of life—is deeply influenced by theological and ritual assumptions that are too tightly entangled in the science to be unwound. Moreover, there is a real danger of fundamentally misunderstanding the historical actors and their ideas if we attempt to remove the scientific marrow and examine it separately from its context.18
Medieval distinctions in genre have little to do with separating “science” from “religion,” in any case. Both terms—religion and science—are in fact anachronisms when applied to the Middle Ages. The basic meaning of scientia was knowledge, but the actors in this study better understood scientia a field of knowledge that was systematically organized and intelligible via the application of reason. Hence, theology and ethics were scientiae just as was optics or (another difficult