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The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God: The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern
Thought
Author(s): Eugene Webb
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 47-60
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059263
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THE ALCHEMY OF MAN AND
THE ALCHEMY OF GOD:
THE ALCHEMIST AS CULTURAL
SYMBOL IN MODERN THOUGHT
Eugene Webb
47
48 Religion & Literature
the eighth circle of hell. Applied to God and Christ, on the other
hand, alchemical imagery could be used to refer to divine redemptive
action worked upon man for his transfiguration and glorification.
Martin Luther said, for example, "The science of alchemy I like very
well ... for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which
is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last
day" (quoted in Linden, "Alchemy and Eschatology"). And Richard
Sibbes, in A LearnedCommentary(1656), said that "... the Grace of
God is a blessed Alcumist, where it toucheth it makes good, and reli-
gious" (quoted in Haller 125 and in Linden, "Alchemy and 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 alternative
between God's grace on the one hand and a virtually Satanic attempt
to usurp the role of God on the other.2 The Elizabethan Puritan
preacher and alchemist, William Blomfild, for example, claimed to
have received the secret knowledge of alchemy not from man, but
from God, and considered it to go hand in hand with the other gifts
of God to His spiritual elect (Schuler 303-4). Similarly, numerous
English 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 practitioner
exercised his divinely given powers for divinely authorized ends, and
there 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 when
his art is seen as divinely founded. The human alchemist might act
as 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. Even
when the alchemist was attacked as a charlatan and his powers denied,
he retained sinister associations. Such an attitude of moral disapproval
was still clearly pronounced in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610),
where the title figure, Dr. Subtle, is represented as a trickster, but a
dangerously 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 about
the human alchemist were gradually being displaced by his develop-
ment into an image of true excellence, a symbol of humanity brought
to the peak of its powers. Francis Bacon's attitude toward alchemy
EUGENEWEBB 49
The interrelation of science and power, and the consequent cancerous growth
of the utilitarian segment of existence, have injected a strong element of magic
culture into modern civilization. The tendency to narrow the field of human
experience to the area of reason, science, and pragmatic action, the tendency
and the life of the spirit,
to overvalue this area in relation to the biostheoretikos
50 Religion & Literature
are two paths in life, one the direct and honest, the other the genial
or inspired, which, though pedagogic, is evil and leads through death
(596). In TheMagicMountainthe treatment of the latter path, despite
such intimations of danger, is generallypositive. Years later, when the
loss of his homeland and the devastation of much of Europe through
another genialerindividual had rendered the sense of the questionable
much more acute, Mann looked at the negative side more closely.
The narratorof his DoctorFaustussays of the word "questionable"that
"it challenges one both to go in and to avoid; anyhow to a very cau-
tious going-in"(110). That novel is an exploration of the question of
whether such going-in can be justifiable at all.
In this work, the alchemical theme and its relation to art are ren-
dered explicit. Adrian Leverkuhn,the Faustusof the title, is an apostle,
like Mallarme or Joyce, of autonomous art- art not in the service of
a transcendent norm, but under the control of the human agent, who
exploits it for his own ends. He likens this to alchemy and magic:
"... music has always seemed to me personally a magic marriage be-
tween theology and the so diverting mathematic. Item, she has much
of the laboratory and insistent activity of the alchemists and nigro-
mancers of yore, which also stood in the sign of theology, but at the
same time in that of emancipation and apostasy. . ." (131). For
Mallarme and Joyce, the autonomous artist exerting his power over
the imaginations of the men whose consciences he sought to form was
a benign or at least a harmless figure. Adrian, however, even as he
revels in his dreams of the power of art, hears an inward voice warn-
ing him: "O homo fuge"("O man, flee"). He realizes also that to gain
such power for himself, he will have to violate the norms of the civili-
zation that subjected itself to the service of God. He chooses to reject
the warning and pursue that path of genius and violation systemati-
cally, cultivating disease, madness, and diabolism in a trajectorypar-
allel to that of his country and its sorcerer-leader.4Leverkuhn went
into the "gold-kitchen"seeking power. At the end, the narratorwould
like to hope he may also have been seeking benefits for mankind. The
question, however, is left unresolved.
DoctorFaustuswas not Mann's last statement on this subject. The
theme of the artist-alchemistand of the questionable genialeWegper-
plexed him to the end. In The Confessionsof Felix Krull: ConfidenceMan
he was still exploring the implications of the image of the Faustian
artist attempting a transmutation of the merely natural. This time,
however, the tone is lighter ("the music is by Gounod," as a tempter
in DoctorFaustuswould have phrased it) and the alchemical process is
again under what seems something like transcendentaldirection, the
EUGENEWEBB 55
genius loci in this case playing the role of theatrical impresario and
director 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 his
life - rather it was his characteristic to look at questions from many
angles. The fundamental issue must have seemed to him beyond his
power to resolve: that of whether the enterprise of surpassing the
natural human condition was a divinely guided initiation or a human
usurpation 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 perhaps
not the unlimited Good that the traditional Christian believed in, but
rather a sort of consummate union of good and evil, Who could be
approached only in the way Adrian Leverkuhn attempted, by deliber-
ately espousing evil in oneself. This way of thinking about the divine
is at the heart of the alchemical tradition, in which the sought-after
quintessence is the conjunctiooppositorum(union of opposites) and is to
be found only through a corruption making possible a combination
of all possible qualities. Joyce, too, knew this side of the alchemical
heritage, 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 moral
ambiguity that Mann felt. But then also, the alchemical process he
portrayed and saw his art as furthering was much less tangential to
the Judaeo-Christian cultural scheme than was that depicted by the
others. In Proust's final conception, the alchemical process does not
augment specifically human power or attempt to replace God with
art. 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 early
pages of Swann's Way, the narrator, Marcel, shows how far his own
way of thinking is from that of at least one side of the Symbolist
heritage deriving from Mallarme; he describes his perplexity when
his friend Bloch states "that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if you
please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) were
all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing" (127). Bloch speaks in
this way during his own short-lived decadent phase, but Marcel's
aspirations as here described remain constant throughout the seven
volumes of Remembranceof Things Past, changing only in that he de-
velops a more mature realization of the difficulty of discerning truth
behind the veil of appearances. During the course of the novel he
undergoes one disillusionment after another as he seeks supreme re-
56 Religion & Literature
ality and beauty in this person and that and in ephemeral activities
of the imagination. Eventually this culminates, in ThePastRecaptured,
in his total disillusionment with both man and art. The results are en-
nui and despair. But these serve as preparation for other, genuinely
revelatory experiences. The latter at first make no sense to him, but
finally, after complete despair forces him to surrender his auton-
omous efforts to become a writer, they disclose their true meaning
and offer hope that a life dedicated to its service will redeem art from
its tendency to circle about the fantasies of the human ego. These ex-
periences are the moments of involuntary memory that come upon
him unforeseen, as gracious presences from a higher realm, bringing
glimpses of the very truth he had mistakenly sought in Gilberte, the
Duchesse de Guermantes, and Albertine. He had mistakenly sought
it also in his unachieved works of art; but without the necessary
seeding by the moments of involuntary memory these would have
been the mere bricolageof his own imagination as it recombined
fragments 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 alchemical process
may take in relation to us, its subjects. One is that in which a higher
life, 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 plate
and the hammer striking the wheel, or had felt beneath my feet, the uneven-
ness that was common to the paving-stones of the Guermantes courtyard and
to those of the baptistery of St. Mark's, this being is nourished only by the
essences of things, in these alone does it find its sustenance and delight. In the
observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it with this food, it
languishes, as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect
or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of
the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by
preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human
purpose for which it intends them. (134)
The other alchemical process is that of a literary art that draws its
subject matter from these moments of revealed truth, "whichlife com-
municates to us against our will in an impression which is material
because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritualmeaning
which it is possible for us to extract"(138). What is needed, Marcel
reflects, is a method by which to "convert"the truth-bearingsensation
"into its spiritual equivalent," to distill from it the lifegiving essence:
"And this method, this apparently sole method, what was it, but the
creation of a work of art?" (139). To accept this means both the
EUGENEWEBB 57
and to which one could and should subject one's ends. Where there
is a vacuum of power, the human will rushes to fill it.
The temptation can carry with it its nemesis, however, as Proust
realized 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 imagination of any meaning that is to be found
in life, he finds himself, once the elation of autonomy subsides, in
peril of incurable ennui. As Eric Voegelin has said, "When the gods
are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes bor-
ing"("On Hegel" 335). This is that boredom of which Flaubert asked,
"Do you know what boredom is? Not that common, banal boredom
that comes from idleness, but that modern boredom that eats the very
entrails 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 of
the alchemy described by Baudelaire in his "Alchimiede la douleur"
("Alchemy of Woe"):
Hermes inconnu qui m'assistes
Et qui toujours m'intimidas,
Tu me rends l'egal de Midas,
Le plus triste des alchimistes;
Par toi je change Tor en fer
Et le paradis en enfer. . . . (73)
["O unknown Hermes, who aid me and constantly frighten me, you make me
the equal of Midas, the saddest of alchemists; by you I change gold into iron
and paradise into hell."]
Universityof Washington
NOTES
'Although magic and alchemy are distinguishable, the distinction is often not easy
to make, since both arts have tended to interest the same figures for the same reason:
the power they confer. Except where they become clearly distinct, the present essay
will treat them together, since they express basically identical cultural values. For a
helpful bibliographic survey of both areas, see McKnight.
2Fora list of satirical treatments among both major and minor writers in medieval
and renaissance England, see Stanton J. Linden, "Francis Bacon and Alchemy":
547-8.
3This pattern of thought has quite ancient roots. Mircea Eliade (42, 47, 57) traces
it back to the earliest exponents of the art of metallurgy, who spoke of the furnace
as an artificial womb in which nature's gestation of minerals could be hastened by
additional heat; they looked upon this act as a sort of transgression which must be
justified by the claim to be aiding rather than forcing the maternal power of the
Earth.
4This last phrase is more than just a figure of speech; on the role of magic in the
National Socialist imagination see Vondung.
5It is perhaps worth mentioning that the reference to mining ores in this passage
links the tradition of alchemy to those of mining and metallurgy, to which it has been
closely related historically as was indicated in note 3 above.
WORKS CITED