Webb, The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God - The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern Thought

8/8/2019 Webb, The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God - The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern Thought

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The University of Notre Dame

The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God: The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in ModernThoughtAuthor(s): Eugene WebbSource: Religion & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 47-60Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059263

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THE ALCHEMYOF MAN ANDTHE ALCHEMYOF GOD:THE ALCHEMIST AS CULTURALSYMBOLIN MODERN THOUGHTEugene Webb

At the center of any cultural system is a cluster of authoritativesymbols, accepted images of human excellence, that are offered, andindeed urged, for imitation. In the process of enculturation or cul-tural formation the individual becomes formed by internalizing thevalues represented n these images, using them as models upon whichto patternhimself and as criteriaby which to measure his own worth.By conforminghimself to an appropriatemodel fromthe acceptedset,he becomes a properlydeveloped person, as this is defined within hiscommunity.Comparatively simple societies present only a few such culturalmodels for imitation. As societies become more complex, they offerincreasinglyvariedpossibilitiesof choice. This makes for greaterfree-dom, but it may also make for confusion. In the modern West it isobvious that the sense of confusionhas become acute. Its exact natureand causes, however, are less easy to discern. A considerationof oneof the major cultural symbols of the Western tradition may serve tothrow light on the process that has led to our present situation.The conceptof alchemyhas been an inherently ambiguousone- interms both of its meaningand of the ways in which it has been valued.1If one looks back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance when thetradition of alchemy was being imported from the Arab world andassimilated into European thought, one finds alchemy being viewedfrom two angles. Depending upon the intention of the practitioner,it was seen either as a cooperationwith God or as a form of oppositionto Him. In his InfernoDante places alchemists along with wizards,fortunetellers, seducers, and others who deform God's creation

- inR&L 17.1 (Spring 1985)

47


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48 Religion & Literaturethe eighth circle of hell. Applied to God and Christ, on the otherhand, alchemical imagery could be used to refer to divine redemptiveaction worked upon man for his transfiguration and glorification.Martin Luther said, for example, "The science of alchemy I like verywell ... for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, whichis exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the lastday" (quoted in Linden, "Alchemy and Eschatology"). And RichardSibbes, in A LearnedCommentary1656), said that "... the Grace ofGod is a blessed Alcumist, where it toucheth it makes good, and reli-gious"(quoted in Haller 125 and in Linden, "Alchemyand Eschatology").In the case of the human practitioner of alchemy, despite the con-demnatory attitude of a long tradition of literary satirical treatments,there was also a widespread belief in the possibility of an alternativebetween God's grace on the one hand and a virtually Satanic attemptto usurp the role of God on the other.2 The Elizabethan Puritanpreacher and alchemist, William Blomfild, for example, claimed tohave received the secret knowledge of alchemy not from man, butfrom God, and considered it to go hand in hand with the other giftsof God to His spiritual elect (Schuler 303-4). Similarly, numerousEnglish poets of the sixteenth century, including Spenser, Shake-speare, Sidney, and Donne, saw a parallel between their art and al-chemy and interpreted both as connected with the power of good hu-man beings to call upon the divine through prayer (Mazzeo 60-89).This conception presupposed, of course, that the human practitionerexercised his divinely given powers for divinely authorized ends, andthere was usually a recognition that power brings with it the possibil-ity of its misuse - hence the frequent note of apprehensiveness or dis-trust in the portrayal of the alchemist as a human figure, even whenhis art is seen as divinely founded. The human alchemist might actas a co-worker with God, but he was always susceptible to the tempta-tion to try to usurp for his own ends the power he exercised. Evenwhen the alchemist was attacked as a charlatan and his powers denied,he retained sinister associations. Such an attitude of moral disapprovalwas still clearly pronounced in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610),where the title figure, Dr. Subtle, is represented as a trickster, but adangerously potent one nonetheless, whose real skill lay in the manip-ulation of his victims through appeal to their various lusts.To an increasingly influential undercurrent of medieval and ren-aissance society, on the other hand, the traditional reservations aboutthe human alchemist were gradually being displaced by his develop-ment into an image of true excellence, a symbol of humanity broughtto the peak of its powers. Francis Bacon's attitude toward alchemy


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EUGENEWEBB 49shows something of the pattern of transition, and since he has becomehimself a culture-hero of the modern west, a symbol of the culturalideals that took shape in part under his influence in the early modernperiod, he is of special interest in connection with the theme of thepresent essay. Bacon is well known as a major source of the modernideal of empirical science as a rational, collaborative, anti-esotericenterprise - the virtual antithesis of alchemy - and he is rememberedfor his condemnation of the pretenses of the alchemist and the magi-cian. Nevertheless, as Paolo Rossi has shown, Bacon's own imagina-tion was "saturated in magic and alchemy" (xiii; see also Linden,"Francis Bacon and Alchemy," 547-60). Bacon believed, for example,that all substances contain "spiritual" bodies, which can serve as thebasis for the transmutation of metals, and he considered this trans-mutation to be one of the highest aims of science (Rossi 13, 15). Itis generally remembered that Bacon's appeal to the British crown forthe establishment of scientific institutions was the impetus behind theeventual establishment of the Royal Society, but it is largely forgottenthat in addition to a research library, a botanical garden, and a zoo,Bacon wanted the King to establish a laboratory for the discovery ofthe philosopher's stone (Rossi 24).Bacon's ideal of the scientist as simultaneously the master of natureand its servant and interpreter was precisely the ideal of the magicianand the alchemist, who traditionally believed that their operationswere based on a knowledge of lawful natural processes which theyassisted and thereby controlled.3 For Bacon, as for the magician andthe alchemist, knowledge was power, and truth was pragmatically ef-fective. This way of thinking and the values it was rooted in stood infundamental opposition to those of traditional Christian culture, forwhich the highest truth was contemplative and the position of man increation was defined not primarily in relation to nature, but to God,Who was the true source of all power and to Whose ends alone itshould always be subordinated.The eventual success of Bacon's program of science in capturingthe European imagination amounted to a major shift in cultural val-ues, a virtual coup in which what had been a subculture took posses-sion of the centers of political and economic power and gradually be-came itself the mainstream of culture. As Eric Voegelin has put it,

The interrelationof science and power, and the consequent cancerous growthof the utilitariansegment of existence, have injecteda strongelement of magicculture into modern civilization. The tendency to narrow the field of humanexperienceto the area of reason, science, and pragmaticaction, the tendencyto overvalue this area in relation to the bios heoretikosnd the life of the spirit,


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50 Religion & Literaturethe tendency to make it the exclusive preoccupationof man, the tendency tomake it socially preponderant througheconomic pressure in the so-called freesocieties and throughviolence in totalitarian communities- all these are partof a culturalprocess that is dominated by a flight of magic imagination, thatis, by the idea of operating on the substanceof man through the instrumentof pragmaticallyplanningwill. We have ventured the suggestion that in retro-spect the age of science will appear as the greatest power orgy in the historyof mankind; we now venture the suggestionthat at the bottom of this orgy thehistorian will find a gigantic outburst of magic imagination after the break-down of the intellectual and spiritualform of medieval high-civilization("TheOrigins of Scientism"488).The literarytraditiontended on the whole to be more conservative,culturally, than the scientific. Reading eighteenth-century Englishliterature, for example, one sees far more criticism of the Baconianmovement than advocacyor celebration,and it is the criticalvoices wetend to remember. Swift'sparody of the Royal Society as the Acad-emy of Lagado is a landmarkwe all recognize;on the other hand, canwe even recallthe names of those who wrote odes in honor of the dis-coveries of Isaac Newton? It was much more recentlythat the literaryclassics of Greece and Rome were displaced as the principalvehiclesfor the approved cultural formation of the young and that what hascome to be called "social science" arose as a rival to literature and

philosophy in the study of man.Nevertheless, in literarycultureas well, the system of values deriv-ing from the traditions of magic and alchemy has graduallycome tooccupy a central place. The process by which this has happened hasbeen gradualand complex, as can be seen in the contrastbetween theFaustus plays of Marlowe and Goethe. In both, Faustus is an adeptof all branches of learning, licit and illicit, and in both he is a seekerof power. Marlowe'sfigure proceeds straightforwardlyo damnation,in accord with thejudgment of the earlier cultural tradition.Goethe's,on the other hand, arrivesat an end that is highly ambiguous: Faust,part 2, shows him being received into eternal bliss as an angel sings,"Wer immer strebend sich bemuht,/ Den konnen wir erlosen"(11936-7: "He who strives unceasingly, him can we save.").And thisjust after his final earthly act has been to order the slaying of a piouselderly couple who resisted the incorporationof their own land, hal-lowedby its littlechapel, into the earthlyparadisehe had built throughhis darkpowers. Goethe underscores the ambiguity by having Meph-istopheles allude in connection with this (11286-7) to the episode ofNaboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21.Among twentieth-century writers, Thomas Mann, as one mightexpect, preserves more than others the Goethean ambiguity toward


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EUGENE WEBB 51the enterpriseof the scholar-mageandthevalues on whichit is founded.For many writers the magician and the alchemist have become une-quivocally positive figures. Indeed, for many they seem to representa culturalsymbol with which to counter the prestigeof the natural orsocial scientistwhile implicitly acceptingthe fundamentalvalues- thecult of power- which, consideredas a culturalsymbol, he stands for.Mallarme, for example, was disdainful of the utilitarian pursuits ofthe scientist, but he was fascinatedby the image of the poet as heirof the ancient tradition of magic who wields the power of the "livre"("book") s "instrumentpirituer "spiritual ool")and is able to act as arival creator to the God of nature (378). James Joyce seems to havesharedmuch of this attitude, at least insofaras his StephenDaedalus'sthought patternsmay be interpretedas reflecting aspects of his own.Marcel Proust, on the other hand, while interpretinghis own art inexplicitly alchemical terminology, used this in ways that conformedit to a surprisingdegree to the value system of the earlier tradition.It will not be possible in the space of a short essay to explore thistheme in great detail in relation to each of these writers, but to notea few highlights in each case should serve to indicate its complexityas well as its importancein the writings of these major, and in manyways representative, figures of modern literature.To begin with Mallarme, who was seminal for so much of themodern tradition and for each of the writersjust mentioned, inter-pretationof his own role as poet was explicitly cast in the imagery ofa modern magician-alchemist.In his "Prose(pour des Esseintes)" orexample, the poet invokes his own artistic powers in the followinglanguage:

Hyperbole! de ma memoireTriomphalement ne sais-tuTe lever, aujourd'huigrimoireDans un livre de fer vetu:Car j'installe, par la science,L'hymne des coeurs spirituelsEn Foeuvrede ma patience,Atlas, herbiers, rituels. (55-56)["Hyperbole!Do you not know how to rise triumphantlyfrom my memory to-day as a magicaltext clad in ancient iron? Because I establish, by science, thehymn of spiritualhearts in the productof my patience, atlas, manuals of herbs,rituals."]

And in his lecture on "Music and Literature"he speaks of how thepoet takesthe twenty-four ettersof the alphabet("our egacy from the


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52 Religion & Literatureancient books of magic")and through their power effects a "transfig-uration" of language onto a supernatural plane (646).Despite his imageryof ancient"grimoires" allarme'sconceptionofthe context of reality within which the magical "science"of poetryworks is distinctlymodern and representsan extensive acceptanceofthe worldview associated with the standard sciences. In the lecturejust cited, for example, he espouses a view accordingto which mater-ial reality alone genuinely exists, and he interpretsliterature as thepracticeof a delusion by which we free ourselves from, as he puts it,the solid preponderant realityof nature in order to cultivate our will-ful, solitary celebrations in the void (647).In keeping with his consignment of physical reality to the domainof the modern sciences of nature, he speaks, in "Magie,"of his ownmagic as a purely mental continuation of that of his predecessors:

Quelque deference . . . envers le laboratoire eteint du grand oeuvre, con-sisterait a reprendre, sans fourneau, les manipulations, poisons, refroidisautrement qu'en pierreries, pour continuer par la simple intelligence (399).[What deference . . . toward the extinct laboratory of the great work therewould be in taking up again, without an oven, the manipulations, poisons,congealed in other ways than in jewels, to carry on by intelligence alone.]There are also reasons, other than the factthat the physicalscienceshad preemptedthe field, why Mallarmemight have preferredthathisalchemy be mental only. He seems to have felt for physical reality adisdain akin to that of some of the ancient Gnostics, with whom heshared a longing for an anti-cosmic salvation, and his own poeticalchemy served this motive of escape into an alternative creation.His poem, "LesFenetres,"can serve as an example of this attitude.In it the world is imaged as a mournfulhospitalin which the poet feelsutter disgust toward those who breed children and wallow in mun-dane happiness. His only solace is the mirror of art, imaged here ashis own reflection in a windowpane: "Jeme mire et me vois ange!"(33: "I marvel at myself and see myself an angel"). He realizes,however, that the reflection is illusoryand he a captive of an alien ex-istence; if he were to break through the glass to try to fly beyond, hewould find only a void in which he would fall throughout eternity.Of the modern writersmentioned, Joyce is probably the one whocarriedforwardmost consistentlythe conception of art deriving fromMallarme. With him Joyce seems to have shared the belief that the

world is essentiallyalien and that the only deliverance lies in art. Healso shared the conception of the artist as a latter-daymage workingwithin a truncatedframeworkof reality, as William York Tindall re-marked, "... for writerslikeJoyce, who had lost belief in the upper


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EUGENEWEBB 53half of Hermetic reality, except insofar as it could be equated with thepoetic imagination or the unconscious, correspondences were gen-erally horizontal, and the Emerald Tabletwas modified [from "asabove,so below"] ... to mean as here, so there" (34-5).From the evidence of his personal library as well as the internalevidence of his works, Joyce seems to have read extensively in theHermetic literature, and although one must be cautious in using APortraitof theArtist as a YoungMan as an autobiographical document,the self-associations of Stephen with the craftsman Daedalus, the Egyp-tian Thoth (225, "the god of writers"), and with Giordano Bruno asvictim of the Church, seem to express Joyce's sense of his own mis-sion. Frances Yates has described the burning of Bruno as proceedingfrom a mounting conflict in the Renaissance between the Church andthe new messianic magus figures who challenged its cultural preemi-nence. This conflict Joyce himself reenacted belatedly in Ireland -which he would probably have said was characteristically a few cen-turies behind the rest of Europe. When he described Stephen's aspira-tion to create "out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaringimpalpable imperishable being" (169) and to "forge in the smithy of[his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race"(253), he was describ-ing his own program as well, and in terms that make clear its continu-ity with that of the alchemical tradition. Joyce's treatment of Stephenwas strongly critical with regard to his performance, but not with re-gard to these aspirations.Thomas Mann, in TheMagic Mountain, offers another representa-tion of human renewal as a transmutation. At the end of that novelthe narrator asks, "May we take it that our simple hero, after so manyyears of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage ofbeing to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious ofthe 'meaningfulness' of his love and the object of it" (651). And heanswers, "We assert, we record, that he has." He goes on, moreover,to say that the reason Hans's thoughts, by the end of his time on themountain, have been able to soar so high is that "they were alchemis-tically enhanced" (653). This has happened, we are told, through twoagencies. One was the art of music, a humanly exercised power of"soul-enchantment." The other was the genius loci, the spirit of themountain, a superhuman power that seeks out potential subjects fortransmutation and then leads them, through whatever means willavail, to insight and integration.The source of both types of power seems clearly superhuman, butperhaps less clearly divine, and their means may be, as Mann termsthem, "highly questionable." As Hans himself phrases the issue, there


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54 Religion & Literatureare two paths in life, one the direct and honest, the other the genialor inspired, which, though pedagogic, is evil and leads throughdeath(596). In TheMagicMountain he treatment of the latter path, despitesuch intimations of danger, is generally positive. Yearslater, when theloss of his homeland and the devastation of much of Europe throughanothergenialerndividual had rendered the sense of the questionablemuch more acute, Mann looked at the negative side more closely.The narratorof his DoctorFaustus ays of the word "questionable"hat"itchallenges one both to go in and to avoid; anyhow to a very cau-tious going-in"(110). That novel is an explorationof the question ofwhether such going-in can be justifiable at all.In this work, the alchemical theme and its relation to art are ren-deredexplicit.AdrianLeverkuhn,the Faustusof the title, is an apostle,like Mallarme orJoyce, of autonomous art- art not in the service ofa transcendentnorm, but under the controlof the human agent, whoexploits it for his own ends. He likens this to alchemy and magic:"... music has always seemed to me personallya magic marriagebe-tween theology and the so divertingmathematic. Item, she has muchof the laboratory and insistent activity of the alchemists and nigro-mancers of yore, which also stood in the sign of theology, but at thesame time in that of emancipation and apostasy. . ." (131). ForMallarme and Joyce, the autonomous artist exerting his power overthe imaginationsof the men whose consciences he sought to form wasa benign or at least a harmless figure. Adrian, however, even as herevels in his dreams of the power of art, hears an inwardvoice warn-ing him: "O homo fuge"("Oman, flee").He realizes also that to gainsuch power for himself, he will have to violate the norms of the civili-zation that subjecteditself to the service of God. He chooses to rejectthe warning and pursue that path of genius and violation systemati-cally, cultivatingdisease, madness, and diabolismin a trajectorypar-allel to that of his country and its sorcerer-leader.4Leverkuhnwentinto the "gold-kitchen"eeking power. At the end, the narratorwouldlike to hope he may also have been seekingbenefits for mankind. Thequestion, however, is left unresolved.DoctorFaustuswas not Mann's last statement on this subject. Thetheme of the artist-alchemistand of the questionablegenialeWegper-plexed him to the end. In The Confessionsof Felix Krull: ConfidenceManhe was still exploring the implications of the image of the Faustianartist attempting a transmutation of the merely natural. This time,however, the tone is lighter ("themusic is by Gounod,"as a tempterin DoctorFaustuswould have phrasedit) and the alchemicalprocess isagain under what seems something like transcendentaldirection, the


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EUGENEWEBB 55genius loci in this case playing the role of theatrical impresario anddirector of a cosmic bull ring. There is no reason, however, to sup-pose that the questionable seemed less so to Mann at the end of hislife - rather it was his characteristic to look at questions from manyangles. The fundamental issue must have seemed to him beyond hispower to resolve: that of whether the enterprise of surpassing thenatural human condition was a divinely guided initiation or a humanusurpation of divine power. Beneath that issue, moreover, and com-plicating it in Mann's picture of the problem as a whole, was the ques-tion of the character of God: whether God in His reality is perhapsnot the unlimited Good that the traditional Christian believed in, butrather a sort of consummate union of good and evil, Who could beapproached only in the way Adrian Leverkuhn attempted, by deliber-ately espousing evil in oneself. This way of thinking about the divineis at the heart of the alchemical tradition, in which the sought-afterquintessence is the conjunctio ppositorumunion of opposites) and is tobe found only through a corruption making possible a combinationof all possible qualities. Joyce, too, knew this side of the alchemicalheritage, but he never seems to have sensed as Mann did that its

im-plications could be potentially sinister.In the case of Marcel Proust, the use of alchemical imagery to in-terpret both art and human life exhibits none of the sense of moralambiguity that Mann felt. But then also, the alchemical process heportrayed and saw his art as furthering was much less tangential tothe Judaeo-Christian cultural scheme than was that depicted by theothers. In Proust's final conception, the alchemical process does notaugment specifically human power or attempt to replace God withart. On the contrary, it amounts to a virtually Dantesque ascent to-ward truth - toward a transcendent reality that demands courage,self-denial, and humility of those who would approach it. In the earlypages of Swann's Way, the narrator, Marcel, shows how far his ownway of thinking is from that of at least one side of the Symbolistheritage deriving from Mallarme; he describes his perplexity whenhis friend Bloch states "that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if youplease, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) wereall the finer if they meant absolutely nothing" (127). Bloch speaks inthis way during his own short-lived decadent phase, but Marcel'saspirations as here described remain constant throughout the sevenvolumes of Remembrancef Things Past, changing only in that he de-velops a more mature realization of the difficulty of discerning truthbehind the veil of appearances. During the course of the novel heundergoes one disillusionment after another as he seeks supreme re-


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56 Religion & Literatureality and beauty in this person and that and in ephemeral activitiesof the imagination. Eventuallythis culminates, in ThePastRecaptured,in his total disillusionment with both man and art. The resultsare en-nui and despair. But these serve as preparationfor other, genuinelyrevelatory experiences. The latter at first make no sense to him, butfinally, after complete despair forces him to surrender his auton-omous efforts to become a writer, they disclose their true meaningand offerhope that a life dedicated to its servicewill redeem art fromits tendency to circle about the fantasies of the human ego. These ex-periences are the moments of involuntary memory that come uponhim unforeseen, as gracious presences from a higher realm, bringingglimpses of the very truth he had mistakenly sought in Gilberte, theDuchesse de Guermantes, and Albertine. He had mistakenlysoughtit also in his unachieved works of art; but without the necessaryseeding by the moments of involuntary memory these would havebeen the mere bricolage f his own imagination as it recombinedfragments of mundane experience.As Marcel comes to conceive it, there are two types of alchemy, or,to put it more accurately, two forms that a single alchemicalprocessmay take in relation to us, its subjects. One is that in which a higherlife, its grace received and accepted, is forming the soul, the true be-ing, of the individual person:

The being which had been reborn in me when with a sudden shudder of hap-piness I had heard the noise that was common to the spoon touching the plateand the hammer strikingthe wheel, or had felt beneath my feet, the uneven-ness that was common to the paving-stonesof the Guermantes courtyardandto those of the baptistery of St. Mark's, this being is nourished only by theessences of things, in these alone does it find its sustenance and delight. In theobservation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it with this food, itlanguishes, as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellector in the anticipation of a future which the will constructswith fragmentsofthe present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces bypreservingof them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowlyhumanpurpose for which it intends them. (134)The other alchemicalprocess is that of a literaryart that draws itssubjectmatterfromthese moments of revealedtruth,"which ife com-municates to us against our will in an impression which is materialbecause it enters us throughthe senses but yet has a spiritualmeaningwhich it is possible for us to extract" 138). What is needed, Marcel

reflects, is a method by which to "convert"he truth-bearingsensation"intoits spiritualequivalent,"to distill from it the lifegiving essence:"And this method, this apparentlysole method, what was it, but thecreation of a work of art?"(139). To accept this means both the


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EUGENEWEBB 57humiliation and the truth fulfillment of the artist. It requires that hegive up his own efforts of creation and subordinate his imaginationto a truth of which it becomes the organ of perception. It deprives himof any pretensions of his own, but it also gives to him the dignity ofa collaborator in a work that is eternal and promises true life for allmankind:

No longer was I indifferent to my fate as I had been on those drives back fromRivebelle; I felt myself enhanced by this work which I bore within me as bysomething fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me and which Ishould have liked to deliver intact into the hands of those for whom it was in-tended, hands which were not my own. ... I knew that my brain was like amountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of greatprice. (263)5These writers, then, representa samplingof the diverse forms thatthe alchemical theme has taken in modern thought. In Proust thealchemy is primarilythe activity of a transcendentprinciple workingupon man througha kind of grace, which despite the emphasison theaesthetic, remains recognizablyakin to that which in the Commedias

depicted as guiding Dante toward the beatific vision. Neither Mal-larme norJoyce, on the other hand, retained any belief in an actualtranscendentreality, and forboth the image of the magician-alchemistwas a symbol of their sense that if any real satisfaction for humanlongings was to be found, it would have to be in creations of theautonomous human imagination- creations which, of course, hadthe poignant disadvantage for their creators of being palpably arti-ficial. This way of thinkinghas been by far the more common amongmodern writers, whether they image the artist as alchemist or not,and it would be interestingto explore the permutationsof alternatingprideand despairto which this conceptionof art has given rise. Goetheand Mann represent a somewhat less common, but also character-isticallymodern view of the issue, expressing mingled attractionandsuspicion toward the magical-alchemical enterprise and the ideal ofthe autonomous human exploiter of superhuman powers.What are some reasons the image of the alchemist has had appealfor the modern imagination?What the alchemistand magician share,and what makes them perpetuallyfascinatingto the human imagina-tion and will, is the dream of autonomous power, of a knowledgewhich could give both cognitive and pragmatic mastery of existenceto the one who wields it. That this should tempt an artist is no moresurprisingthan that it shouldtempt a Bacon or a Descartes, especiallyif, as in the case of so many in the modern world, one no longer feelsable to believe that there is any other, higher power in which to trust


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58 Religion & Literatureand to which one could and should subject one's ends. Where thereis a vacuum of power, the human will rushes to fill it.The temptation can carry with it its nemesis, however, as Proustrealized explicitly and as some others have come to feel at least im-plicitly. When man becomes the sole master of existence and the cre-ator through his own imaginationof any meaning that is to be foundin life, he finds himself, once the elation of autonomy subsides, inperil of incurable ennui. As Eric Voegelin has said, "When the godsare expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes bor-ing"("OnHegel"335). This is that boredom of which Flaubertasked,"Do you know what boredom is? Not that common, banal boredomthat comes from idleness, but that modern boredom that eats the veryentrails of a man and turns an intelligent being into a walking shade,a thinking ghost" (Letter of June 7, 1844, 28). It is also the effect ofthe alchemy describedby Baudelairein his "Alchimie de la douleur"("Alchemyof Woe"):

Hermes inconnu qui m'assistesEt qui toujours m'intimidas,Tu me rends l'egal de Midas,Le plus triste des alchimistes;Par toi je change Tor en ferEt le paradis en enfer. . . . (73)["Ounknown Hermes, who aid me and constantly frightenme, you make methe equal of Midas, the saddestof alchemists;by you I change gold into ironand paradise into hell."]To returnto this essay's point of departure, I said in the beginningthat for the mainstream of the classical-Christian cultural traditionthere were essentially two alternatives in alchemy: the alchemy ofman and the alchemy of God, with the first seen as a pretension topowers that belonged properly to God. An element in the transitionto the distinctly modern cultural enterprise was the rejection of thisdichotomyin favor of the idea of a purelyhuman, but unambiguouslybeneficent alchemy. The pursuit of autonomous human power, forwhich the alchemist is one of many symbols, has been a dominanttheme of modern culture, and to many in the period it has seemedto offer the unequivocal promise of a new earth and a new heaven ofart. Some modern writers, such as Mallarme and Joyce, have usedthe figure of the alchemist as a symbol to express this sense of humanpower and fulfillment. Still, the moral and spiritualambiguity of thesymbolhas never entirelyfaded from view. To at least some represen-tatives of modernthoughtthe alchemist'senterprisehas come to seem,


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EUGENEWEBB 59in Mann's phrase, "highly questionable." Such writers as Baudelaire,Mann, and Proust have the virtue for us, at our present point in thetroubled history of modernity, of renewing our sense of the funda-mental questionability of the enterprise we are all of us to some degreecaught up in: If such power is ours to use, how can we be sure thatwe will use it well?

Universityof WashingtonNOTES

'Although magic and alchemyaredistinguishable,the distinction is often not easyto make, since both arts have tended to interest the same figuresfor the same reason:the power they confer. Except where they become clearly distinct, the present essaywill treat them together, since they expressbasically identical cultural values. For ahelpful bibliographicsurvey of both areas, see McKnight.2Fora list of satiricaltreatmentsamong both majorand minor writers in medievaland renaissance England, see Stanton J. Linden, "FrancisBacon and Alchemy":547-8.3Thispatternof thought has quite ancientroots. Mircea Eliade (42, 47, 57) tracesit back to the earliest exponents of the art of metallurgy, who spoke of the furnaceas an artificialwomb in which nature'sgestation of minerals could be hastened byadditional heat; they looked upon this act as a sort of transgressionwhich must bejustified by the claim to be aiding rather than forcing the maternal power of theEarth.4This last phrase is more thanjust a figure of speech; on the role of magic in theNational Socialist imagination see Vondung.5It is perhapsworth mentioning that the reference to mining ores in this passagelinks the traditionof alchemyto those of mining and metallurgy,to which it has beenclosely related historicallyas was indicated in note 3 above.

WORKS CITEDBaudelaire, Charles. OeuvresCompletes, d. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois.Paris: Gallimard, 1961.Eliade, Mircea. TheForgeand The Crucible:The Originsand Structures f Alchemy. Trans.Stephen Corrin. New York: Harper, 1971.Flaubert, Gustave. Selected etters.Trans, and ed. Francis Steegmuller. New York:Farrar, 1954.Haller, William. TheRise of Puritanism.New York: Harper, 1957.Joyce, James. A Portrait f theArtistas a YoungMan. New York: Viking, 1964.Linden, Stanton J. "Alchemy and Eschatology m Seventeenth-Century Poetry.MLA Convention. San Francisco, 28 Dec. 1979. . "FrancisBacon and Alchemy: The Reformation of Vulcan. Journalof theHistoryof Ideas35 (1974): 547-60.


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60 Religion & LiteratureLuther, Martin. The TableTalkofMartinLuther.Ed. William Hazlitt. London: Belland Daldy, 1872.Mallarme, Stephane. OeuvresCompletes.Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry.Paris: Gallimard, 1945.Mann, Thomas. TheMagicMountain.Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf,1955. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the GermanComposerAdrian LeverkuhnAs Told by aFriend.Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1948.Mazzeo, Joseph A. RenaissancendSeventeenth-Centurytudies.New York: ColumbiaUP, 1964.McKnight, Stephen A. "The Renaissance Magus and the Modern Messiah." Re-ligiousStudiesReview5 (April 1979): 81-89.Proust, Marcel. Swanns Way.Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: ModernLibrary, 1928. The PastRecaptured.rans. Andreas Mayor. New York: Vintage, 1971.Rossi, Paolo. FrancisBacon:FromMagicto Science.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.Schuler, Robert M. "Some SpiritualAlchemies of Seventeenth-Century England."Journalof theHistoryof Ideas41 (1980): 293-318.Tindall, William York. "JamesJoyce and the Hermetic Tradition."Journalof theHistoryof Ideas 15 (1954): 23-29.Voegelin, Eric. "OnHegel: A Study in Sorcery."StudiumGenerate4 (1971): 335-68. "The Origins of Scientism." SocialResearch 5 (1948): 462-94.Vondung, Klaus. "SpiritualRevolution and Magic: Speculationand PoliticalActionin National Socialism."ModernAge23 (1979): 394-402.Yates, FrancesA. Giordano runo ndtheHermeticTradition.Chicago: U of Chicago P,1964.

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Webb, The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God - The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern Thought