Franciscans and the Elixir of Life. Zachary A. Matus
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commentaries, theological claims, and scriptural writings—but not always from the same sources, and they did not draw identical conclusions. Important similarities and themes emerge among various writers that are respective of their context, but the works fit comfortably neither in a narrative of progress nor as an expression of a singular idea.
Historical context is the subject of Chapter 1. In this chapter, I examine Franciscan discussions of the natural world. Remarking on the Franciscan pursuit of alchemy, Lynn Thorndike offered this gem: “The recording angel must smile frequently at the little ironies of history. One of these amusing inconsistencies of real life is that followers of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty, should have interested themselves in making gold.”27 While the accumulation of wealth would certainly have appeared unseemly to critics of the Order, the pursuit of alchemy in and of itself was in fact consistent with the Order’s interest in the natural world. Multiple generations of Franciscan authors, including the Order’s founder, are deeply invested in the celebration and investigation of the natural world. As Francis’s Canticle to Brother Sun illustrates, the earth and the very elements that formed it were a donum Dei, a gift of God. The Order’s founder saw no conflict between the spiritual life and the material world. Later commenters would turn the focus of Francis’s devotion to a more considered treatment of natural philosophy. Bonaventure and Peter Olivi in particular argued that natural philosophy was essential to plumbing the spiritual value of the cosmos. Olivi’s adherence to a literal understanding of Genesis only reinforced the pursuit of natural philosophy as a necessity. Therefore, however marginal the study of alchemy was to Franciscan intellectual life, it was hardly out of step with general intellectual currents within the Order.
The second chapter turns to the elixir tradition proper. Tracing the genealogy of various elixirs underscores the centrality of cosmological traditions and assumptions in the formulation of this cure-all. Though each author maintains an adherence to a broad Aristotelian concept of alchemy and natural philosophy, Christian theology and canon law are critical to the development of specific iterations of the elixir. Roger Bacon models the elixir’s powers on the Christian concept of the resurrected body. The alchemy ascribed to Vitalis of Furno appears to be shaped narrowly to fall within the confines of what is licit according to the Franciscan Order and the papal curia. John of Rupescissa considers his elixir to be a literal distillation of heaven. While each substance is a cure-all, there is great diversity in the nature of the compounds, not all of which can be explained solely by resort to alchemical traditions. Religion may constrain or inspire the alchemist, but it is never incidental.
In the third chapter, I take up the role of apocalypticism in relation to alchemy. The Franciscan Order was thoroughly embroiled in apocalyptic speculation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As intramural disputes over poverty and the legacy of Francis heightened apocalyptic rhetoric, those brothers not consumed with the approach of the end times still had to deal with those who were. Apocalyptic speculation was part of the oeuvre of each of the alchemical authors under consideration, and, as such, I treat it independently of other religious ideas. Given the few alchemical texts emerging from the Order in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it would be foolish to suggest that Franciscan theology or apocalyptic thought generated alchemical thought. Yet, on their own both alchemy and apocalyptic thought offered the possibility of realizing the spiritual in the material world. Taken together, these practices could be mutually reinforcing.
Chapter 4 takes on the issue of Franciscan religious practice. While there is a tradition of alchemy as a religious practice in late antiquity, I argue that the devotional aspects of Bacon’s and Rupescissa’s elixirs are better approached through the lens of Franciscan ritual life. Franciscans, like all regular orders, marked their days, years, and lives liturgically. I discuss briefly how these liturgies opened up a means of recontextualizing the relationship to God and the cosmos. While I do not argue that alchemy was a ritual per se, the production of the elixir seems to be enhanced when the alchemist enters the ritual mode. The devotional approach to alchemy opened new avenues for these medieval theorists to interpret their practice and their results.
CHAPTER 1
Franciscans and the Sacral Cosmos
(The Context of Franciscan Alchemy)
Praise be to you, my Lord, and to all your creation….
—Francis of Assisi, Canticle of Brother Sun (1224/5)
The goal of this chapter is to illustrate in brief Franciscan considerations of the natural world. This discussion is more than just a backdrop to the elixir. It also provides a sense of how and why Franciscan discussion of the elixir became entwined with religious ideas and language. The discussion that follows complements, but also offers important context to, the arguments that have been made about the religious turn in alchemy in the fourteenth century.1 The religious turn must be considered in light not just of changes in alchemical discourses, but also of corresponding developments in theology and devotional practices. Religion and religious language emerged in Franciscan alchemy because friars were already busy drawing theological conclusions from nature and philosophical conclusions from scripture. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for an order that eschewed monastic enclosure, the friars embraced the created—that is to say, the material—world.
In spite of the variety of intellectual approaches taken toward the natural world, the principal concern of Franciscan writers—and likely of all clerical scholars of the era—was not with nature per se, but with creation. Natura in any case did not mean nature in quite the way we mean it today. Medievals had no notions of ecology or ecosystems. Rather natura, when considered as an intellectual category, tended to follow Hugh of St. Victor’s influential definition.2 Hugh considered a tripartite division between inclinations or properties of a specific thing or of a group of things. Hence, horses have a nature that is common to them that explains horse-like behavior. Likewise, a specific horse has its own nature—fast, slow, temperamental, calm—in comparison to other horses. Hugh also notes, however, that sometimes natura was used to mean something more like the natural order.
It is this latter definition that is pertinent to the discussion in this chapter, and is the one that arrives closest to nature as a kind of cosmological category. The natural order was inextricably linked to the medieval understanding of the creation of the world as outlined in Genesis. “Regarding corporeal nature, namely how it came to be,” writes Bonaventure, “we must comprehend that it was produced in six days, such that in the beginning before any day, God created heaven and earth.”3 There is no substantive divide, then, between the natural order of things and the medieval notion of creation.
The link between God and nature is something of a truism for medieval writers. Franciscans, however, beginning with Francis himself, did not limit themselves to a kind of standard preamble of nature’s ontological link to God before engaging in Aristotelian speculation. Nature was not a neutral philosophical category. Instead, Franciscans developed sacral ideas of creation. Their philosophical discussions of the natural world were not just inflected by Christian religion, but aimed at understanding the role of the created world in salvation. At times mystical, at times manifestly Aristotelian, Franciscans’ ruminations on the universe probed the nature of God’s relationship to humankind and the human relationship to the rest of the cosmos.
Much scholarly discussion, in the Middle Ages as well as lately, has focused on the rigors of Franciscan poverty and humility, and the ensuing divisions fomented by various interpretations of Francis’s commands and practices.4 For all its ascetic tendencies, however, Franciscan piety was not fueled by mistrust of the material world. Franciscans certainly drew—as did most of the religious of the Middle Ages—on the eremitical tradition handed down from the desert fathers, but the poverty and spiritual discipline practiced by the friars should not be mistaken for dualism or a fundamental suspicion of material things. Sin, argued Francis, was a result of the will, not a result of merely inhabiting the world.5