Of course, the emergence of a fraternity or alchemists arguing in support of alchemy, as well as of publications defending this group, probably reflected not the strength of the tradition but the fact that it was dying. As frightening as a defense of religious alchemy was to the church, it is clear from hindsight that it came about, in part, as an attempt on the part of some to maintain and preserve what they regarded as the genuine spiritual content of Catholicism. In the context of the times, however, alchemy's claim to provide the only true salvation could not be regarded as anything but pernicious heresy. Thus in 1623, a proclamation appeared in Paris announcing the arrival of the brotherhood, which declared that it would remain invisible but would lead people onto the true path. The following year, an open meeting held to defend alchemical theses was dispersed by order of Parlement, and its leading spokesman (one Estienne de Clave) arrested. It was in such a context that the Minorite friar Marin Mersenne set out to save both church and state, as well as philosophy itself, from this dangerous turn of events. This attack so snowballed, enlisting as it did the finest minds of Europe, that it has rightly been regarded as the death knell of animism in the West. It involved not merely a widespread rejection of esoteric alchemy, but possibly the first clear enunciation of both the fact-value distinction and the positivist conception of science.
As a man deeply interested in religion and natural philosophy, Mersenne was alarmed not only by the Rosicrucian phenomenon but also by the fact that the growing aversion of scholars to Aristotelianism had led them to Hermeticism, which offered a more active and experimental approach to nature. He saw that it would be necessary not only to refute Fludd, but to work out a Christianized version of Aristotelian rationalism which would simultaneously facilitate a more dynamic approach to the natural world. In lengthy works written and published over the period 1623-25, Mersenne denounced Fludd as an "evil magician" and attacked alchemy as an attempt to offer salvation without faith, that is, to set itself up as a counter-church. By attributing power to matter itself, the Hermetic tradition had denied the power of God, Who should rightly be seen as Governor of the world, not immanent in it. Instead of advocating the abolition of exoteric alchemy, however, Mersenne proposed something that was ultimately far more effective in this regard: that the state should establish alchemical academies to police the field of charlatans. These academies would clean up the language of alchemy, substituting a clear terminology based on observed chemical operations. They would also avoid all discussion of religion and philosophy. He proposed, in effect, the deliberate divorce of fact from value which would soon become the distinguishing hallmark of modern science.
In the course of his attack on Fludd, Mersenne enlisted the aid of his fellow Minorite Pierre Gassendi. A professor at Aix-en-Provence, Gassendi moved to Paris in 1624, eventually (through the influence of Cardinal Richelieu) becoming Provost of the Cathedral of Digne and Professor of Mathematics at the Collège Royale. His attack on Fludd was, like Mersenne's, religious, accusing the Englishman of trying to make alchemy "the sole religion of mankind"; but it was a scientific critique as well, arguing that Fludd's central notions could not be empirically demonstrated. There was no way, for example, to prove that all human souls contained a part of God, or that a world soul actually existed. Gassendi's attack on Fludd may have been, in effect, the earliest statement of scientific positivism. This equating of the measurable with the real was another version of the public stance Newton adopted when the concept of gravity was challenged as an occult cause.
Gassendi's attack, however, was much more than a critique. In the course of the 1630s he elaborated a world view of matter and motion that, despite its differences from the ideas of Hobbes and Descartes, amounted to a billiard-ball conception of the universe. Change was external, occurring through physical causation, rather than through the internal (dialectical) principles posited by the alchemists. All we can know, he argued, are appearances, not things in themselves. Matter, as well as the earth, is effectively dead; and God is not a world soul, but a world director.59
The similarities that the reader may have noted between Cartesian physics and the views of Mersenne and Gassendi are not accidental. Descartes was also close with Mersenne, moving to Paris in 1623 and contributing to the common effort of providing a Christianized atomism that would preserve religious and political stability. In the "Principles of Philosophy," the world spirit of the alchemists had become a world mechanism (ether moving in vortices), with mind expunged from matter and God relegated to, the periphery. The destruction of participating consciousness, and the role of God as external director, were hardly unwitting features of the system. Both provided "scientific" sanctions against independent religious or political thought. As Descartes wrote Mersenne in 1630, "God sets up mathematical laws in nature, as a king sets up laws in his kingdom."
The collapse of alchemy was the result, not merely of learned publications, but of the very organization of science. Mersenne's monastic cell became the virtual nerve center of European science. He conducted weekly meetings and a vast correspondence with scientists in every country, introducing their works to each other and to the educated public. Proponents of mechanism, such as Galileo, were translated or explicated. Contacts were made with men who would later be key figures in the Royal Society of London, and these ties were strengthened when a number of them went into exile in Paris during the Civil War. Walter Charleton introduced Gassendi's ideas to England in 1654, and soon thereafter Robert Boyle began a series of publications attacking alchemy and arguing for the mechanical world view, which, he tried to show by experiment, conformed to actual experience. Alchemical doctrines were "chemicalized" by a process of linguistic clarification and translation into strictly exoteric terms. The mechanical philosophy, and the divorce of fact from value, were built right into the guidelines of the Royal Society.
After Mersenne's death, Gassendi presided over the weekly meetings, which now took place at the house of the wealthy Habert de Montmor. This house became the Montmor Academy in 1657, and its meetings were attended by the secretaries of state, several abbés of the nobility, and other top-ranking officials. The Academy championed the mechanical philosophy and maintained close ties with the Royal Society. In 1666, Louis XIV's minister Colbert reorganized the Academy as the French Academy of Sciences. As was the case with the Royal Society, the notion of a value-free science was part of apolitical and religious campaign to create a stable social and ecclesiastical order throughout Europe. What modern science came to regard as abstract truths, such as the radical separation of matter and spirit, or mind and body, were central to this campaign. The success of the mechanical world view cannot be attributed to any inherent validity it might possess, but (partly) to the powerful political and religious attack on the Hermetic tradition by the reigning European elites.60
Just as the Mersenne circle's opposition to Hermeticism took the form of an attack on the occult affiliations of Protestantism, so was the Protestant attack on magic an integral part of its opposition to Catholicism. We have already seen how intimate were the ties between magic and the church on the local level, and how essential these were to the maintenance of its authority. We should not be surprised, then, to discover that the Reformation adopted a deliberately rationalist front. All the sacraments were scrutinized for their magical affiliations. Lists of popes who had allegedly been conjurers were compiled and circulated, and even such practices as saying "God bless you" when a person sneezed were attacked as superstitious claptrap. Ultimately, the attack succeeded. By 1600 the view that God could not be conjured, and that ritual ceremonies (such as transubstantiation) could not have material efficacy, was gaining ground. The idea that physical objects had Mind, or 'mana' behind them, and could be altered by exorcism or alchemical procedure, began to be seriously attenuated.61
In addition, Protestantism was able to undercut the soteriological claims of Hermeticism with the concept of secular salvation. It is interesting that this concept adopted the stru
cture of magical practice exactly. As we have already noted, the efficacy of the practitioner was seen as being a function of his inner purity or virtue. In the same way, the evidence of grace in, for example, Calvinism, was worldly success, As Weber described at length, money was now viewed as salvation made manifest, the touchstone of real piety. And in the context of nascent capitalism, the concept of personal salvation through internal psychic regeneration, which was now openly advocated by groups such as the Rosicrucians, simply could not compete. For the middle and upper classes, at least, the vacuum left by the Protestant attack on the supernatural could be filled by prayer and worldly success. But since secular salvation was so obviously a "winner's" philosophy, Protestantism was in the position of imposing a doctrine on a populace long used to other types of explanation.62 Throughout Northern Europe, both the notion of secular salvation and the mechanical philosophy informed the world view of the rising bourgeoisie; it was their spiritual needs alone that would be catered to. The imposition of this new doctrine involved not only oppression of others, but repression of self. The Puritan values of competitiveness, orderliness, and self-control came, to typify a world that had previously regarded such behavior as averrant; or, in the case ol Isaac Newton, as frankly pathological.63 As Christopher Hill puts it, the "preachers knew what they were doing. . . . They were up against 'natural man.' The mode of thought and feeling and repression which they wished to impose was totally unnatural."64 Today, we have to live with the consequences of their success, and regard it, and the mechanical world view, as "normal." But if Hermeticism does correspond to an archaic substrate in the human psyche, as Jung's work seems to indicate, and if creativity and individuation are drives inherent in human nature, then our modern view of reality was purchased at a fantastic price. For what was ultimately created by the shift from animism to mechanism was not merely a new science, but a new personality to go with it; and Isaac Newton can rightly be seen as a microcosm, or epitome, of these changes. I wish, then, to complete this survey of the collapse of participating consciousness with a separate examination of Newton's life and work in relation to the political and religious events of his day. Only then will we be in a position to assess the cost of the loss of holism in the West and to open the question of what is still possible for those of us who are, both philosophically and psychologically, the heirs of the Newtonian synthesis.
4 The Disenchantment of the World (2)
For nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids; fixed things out of volatile, and volatile out of fixed; subtle out of gross, and gross out of subtle; some things to ascend, and make the upper terrestrial juices, rivers, and the atmosphere, and by consequence others to descend for a requital to the former. -- Isaac Newton, from a letter to Henry Oldenberg, 25 January 1675/6
[I]t seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties and in such proportion to space as most conduced to the end for which he formed them. . . . And therefore, that nature may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations and new associations and motions of these permanent particles. . . . -- Isaac Newton, 31st Query to the "Opticks," 4th edition, 1730
Isaac Newton is the symbol of Western science, and the "Principia" may rightly be called the hinge point of modern scientific thought. As we saw in Chapter 1, Newton defined the method of science itself, the notions of hypothesis and experiment, and the techniques that were to make rational mastery of the environment a viable intellectual program. Through the public stance adopted by Newton and his disciple Roger Cotes, the positivist conception of truth first advanced by Mersenne was stamped upon the European mind. And although twentieth-century physics has modified the details of the Newtonian synthesis significantly, all modern scientific thinking, if not the character of contemporary rational-empirical thought in general, remains, in essence, profoundly Newtonian.
It was thus with some amazement that, when masses of Newton's manuscripts were auctioned off by his descendants at Sotheby's in 1936, the British economist John Maynard Keynes read through them and discovered that Newton had been steeped in, if not obsessed by, the occult sciences, particularly alchemy.1 As a result, Keynes could not avoid making the following judgment:
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians. . . . He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosophers treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and this is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty.2
Keynes realized that the eighteenth century had essentially "cleaned Newton up" for public viewing; that the "Principia" and the "Opticks" were but the published portion of a larger quest that had much more in common with the world view of, say, Robert Fludd than with that of a nineteenth-century physicist. But the recent biography of Newton by Frank Manuel, and the brilliant study of Newton and his cultural context by David Kubrin, have shown that to a great extent, Newton cleaned himself up as well.3 To find the answer to the riddle of gravity on the particulate level, Newton turned to the Hermetic tradition; and he came to see himself, Keynes suggests, as the contemporary representative, indeed even the God-chosen inheritor of that tradition, But for both psychological and political reasons, Newton found it necessary to repress that side of his personality and his philosophy, and to present a sober, positivist face. In significant ways, the evolution of Newton's consciousness reflects not only the fate of the alchemical tradition in Restoration England, but also the evolution of Western consciousness in general. Indeed, Manuel has suggested that his personality and outlook were but extreme expressions of the age.4
Newton's childhood was characterized by an intense dose of the separation anxiety that is a part of all of our early lives and that later serves as a model for the sensation of bodily responses that occur whenever we face object-loss. Newton's father died three months before he was born, and his mother remarried when he was just about three years of age. She went to live a mile and a half away with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving Isaac with his grandmother in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the town of his birth. She returned to Woolsthorpe only when her second husband died. by which time Newton was about eleven. Hence Newton was quite literally abandoned during a crucially formative period, after a period in which his mother had been the sole parent. As a result, writes Manuel,
his fixation upon her was absolute. The trauma of her original departure, the denial of her love, generated anguish, aggressiveness, and fear. After the total possession -- undisturbed by a rival, not even a father, almost as if there had been a virgin birth -- she was removed and he was abandoned.
"The loss of his mother to another man," continues Manuel, "was a traumatic event in Newton's life from which he never recovered." Newton recorded in one of his adolescent notebooks "sins" such as "threat[e]ning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them," and "wishing death and hoping it to some."
It should also be noted that Newton's belief that he was part of the 'aurea catena,' the "golden chain" of magi, or unique figures designated by God in each age to receive the ancient Hermetic wisdom, was reinforced by the circumstances of his birth. He was born prematurely, on Christmas Day 1642, and was not expected to live. Indeed, that particular parish had a high rate of infant mortality, and Newton later believed that his survival (as well as his escaping the ravages of the plague while still a youn
g man) signified divine intervention. The same parish, according to Manuel, also credited some form of the widespread belief that a male child born after his fathers death is endowed with extraordinary powers. This attitude, combined with Newton's great fear of object-loss, produced his peculiar stance with respect to past and present thinkers. Moses, Thoth, Thales, Hermes, Pythagoras, and others like them enjoyed his praise; contemporary scientists were by and large a threat. Newton went into extreme rages in his arguments over priority with men such as Hooke and Leibniz, and regarded the system of the world described in the "Principia" as his personal property. He was certain that "God revealed himself to only one prophet in each generation, and this made parallel discoveries improbable." At the bottom of one alchemical notebook Newton inscribed as an anagram of his Latin name, Isaacus Neuutonus, the phrase: 'Jeova sanctus unus' --- Jehovah the holy one.
Alongwith these psychological traits, Newton manifested those common to Puritan morality: austerity, discipline, and above all, guilt and shame. "He had a built-in censor," says Manuel, "and lived ever under the Taskmaster's eye. . . . " Such conclusions emerge from a study of Newton's adolescent exercise notebooks, which include sentences chosen for translation into Latin in the manner of free association -- sentences in which dread, self-disparagement, and loneliness abound as themes. Hence:
The Reenchantment of the World Page 12