Part 8
But the spiritist further drags the spirit down into a lower sphere. Instead of explaining something that happens in space, and that he perceives through his senses only, in terms of forces and beings which in their turn are spacial and perceptible to the senses, he resorts to “spirits,” which he thereby places exactly on a level with the things of the senses. At the very root of such a way of viewing things, there lies a lack of the power of spiritual apprehension. We are unable to perceive spiritual things spiritually; we therefore satisfy our craving for the spiritual with mere beings perceptible to the senses. Their own inner spirit reveals to such men nothing spiritual; and therefore they seek for the spiritual through the senses. As they see clouds flying through the air, so they would fain see spirits hastening along. Agrippa von Nettesheim fought for a genuine science of Nature, which shall explain the phenomena of Nature, not by means of spirits phenomenalising in the world of the senses, but by seeing in Nature only the natural, and in the spirit only the spiritual.
Of course, Agrippa will be entirely misunderstood if one compares _his_ natural science with that of later centuries which dispose of wholly different experiences. In such a comparison, it might easily seem that he was still actually and entirely referring to the direct action of spirits, things which only depend upon natural connections or upon mistaken experience. Such a wrong is done to him by Moriz Carrière when he says, not in any malicious sense, it is true:
“Agrippa gives a huge list of things which belong to the Sun, the Moon, the Planets and the fixed stars, and receive influences from them; for instance: to the Sun are related Fire, Blood, Laurel, Gold, Chrysolite; they confer the gifts of the Sun: Courage, Cheerfulness, and Light.... Animals have a natural sense, which, higher than human understanding, approaches the spirit of prophecy.... Men can be bewitched to love and hate, to sickness and health. Thieves can be bewitched so that they cannot steal at some particular place, merchants, that they cannot do business, mills, that they cannot work, lightning flashes, that they cannot strike. This is brought about through drinks, salves, images, rings, incantations; the blood of hyenas or basilisks is adapted to such a purpose--it reminds one of Shakespeare’s witches’ cauldron.” No; it does not remind one of that, if one understands Agrippa aright. He believed--it goes without saying--in many facts which in his time everybody regarded as unquestionable. But we still do the same to-day. Or do we imagine that future centuries will not relegate much of what we now regard as “undoubted fact” to the lumber-room of “blind” superstition?
I am convinced that in our knowledge of facts there has been a real progress. When once the “fact” that the earth is round had been discovered, all previous conjectures were banished into the domain of “superstition”; and the same holds good of certain truths of astronomy, biology, etc. The doctrine of natural evolution constitutes an advance, as compared with all previous “theories of creation,” similar to that marked by the recognition of the roundness of the earth as contrasted with all previous speculations as to its form. Nevertheless, I am vividly conscious that in our learned scientific works and treatises there is to be found many a “fact” which will seem to future centuries to be just as little of a fact as much that Paracelsus and Agrippa maintain; but the really important point is not _what_ they regarded as “fact,” but _how_, in what spirit, they interpreted their “facts.”
In Agrippa’s time, there was little understanding or sympathy for the “natural magic” he represented, which sought in Nature the natural--the spiritual only in the spirit; men clung to the “supernatural magic,” which sought the spiritual in the realm of the sensible, and which Agrippa combated. Therefore the Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim was right in giving him the advice to communicate his views only as a secret teaching to a few chosen pupils who could rise to a similar idea of Nature and spirit, because one “gives only hay to oxen and not sugar as to singing birds.” It may be that Agrippa himself owed to this same Abbot his own correct point of view. In his _Steganography_, Trithemius has produced a book in which he handled with the most subtle irony that mode of conceiving things which confuses nature with spirit.
In this book he apparently speaks of nothing but supernatural occurrences. Any one reading it as it stands must believe that the author is talking of conjurations of spirits, of spirits flying through the air, and so on. If, however, one drops certain words and letters under the table, there remain--as Wolfgang Ernst Heidel proved in the year 1676--letters which, combined into words, describe purely natural occurrences. (In one case, for instance, in a formula of conjuration, one must drop the first and last words entirely, and then cancel from the remainder the second, fourth, sixth, and so on. In the words left over, one must again cancel the first, third, fifth letters and so on. One next combines what is then left into words; and the conjuration formula resolves itself into a purely natural communication.)
How difficult it was for Agrippa to work himself free from the prejudices of his time and to rise to a pure perception is proved by the fact that he did not allow his “Occult Philosophy” (_Philosophia Occulta_), already written in 1510, to appear before the year 1531, because he considered it unripe. Further evidence of this fact is given by his work “On the Vanity of the Sciences” (_De Vanitate Scientiarum_) in which he speaks with bitterness of the scientific and other activities of his time. He there states quite clearly that he has only with difficulty wrenched himself free from the phantasy which beholds in external actions immediate spiritual processes, in external facts prophetic indications of the future, and so forth.
Agrippa advances to the higher knowledge in three stages. He treats as the first stage the world as it is given for the senses, with its substances, its physical, chemical and other forces. He calls Nature, in so far as it is looked at on this level, “elementary Nature.” On the second stage, one contemplates the world as a whole in its natural interconnection, as it orders things according to measure, number, weight, harmony, and so forth. The first stage proceeds from one thing to the next nearest. It seeks for the causes of an occurrence in its immediate surroundings. The second stage regards a single occurrence in connection with the entire universe. It carries through the idea that everything is subject to the influence of all other things in the entire world-whole. In its eyes this world-whole appears as a vast harmony, in which each individual item is a member. Agrippa terms the world, regarded from this point of view, the “astral” or “heavenly” world. The third stage of knowing is that wherein the spirit, by plunging deep into itself, perceives immediately the spiritual, the Root-Being of the world. Agrippa here speaks of the world, of soul and spirit.
The views which Agrippa develops about the world, and the relation of man to the world, present themselves to us in the case of Theophrastus Paracelsus, in a similar manner, only in more perfected form. It is better, therefore, to consider them in connection with the latter.
Paracelsus characterises himself aptly, when he writes under his portrait: “None shall be another’s slave, who for himself can remain alone.” His whole attitude towards knowledge is given in these words. He strives everywhere to go back himself to the deepest foundations of natural knowledge, in order to rise by his own strength to the loftiest regions of cognition. As Physician, he will not, like his contemporaries, simply accept what the ancient investigators, who then counted as authorities,--Galen or Avicenna, for instance, asserted long ago; he is resolved to read for himself directly in the book of Nature. “The Physician must pass Nature’s examination, which is the world, and all its origins. And the very same that Nature teaches him, he must command to his wisdom, but seek for nothing in his wisdom, only and alone in the light of Nature.” He shrinks from nothing, in order to learn to know Nature and her workings in all directions. For this purpose he made journeys to Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and the East. He can truly say of himself: “I have followed the Art at the risk of my life, and have not been ashamed to learn from wanderers, executioners and sheep-shearers. My doctrine was tested more severely than silver in poverty, fears, wars and hardships.”
What has been handed down by ancient authorities has for him no value, for he believes that he can attain to the right view only if he himself experiences the upward climb from the knowledge of Nature to the highest insight. This living, personal experience puts into his mouth the proud utterance: “He who will follow truth, must come into my monarchy.... After me; not I after you, Avicenna, Rhases, Galen, Mesur! After me; not I after you, O ye of Paris, ye of Montpellier, ye of Swabia, ye of Meissen, ye of Cologne, ye of Vienna and of what lies on the Danube and the Rhine; ye islands in the sea, thou Italy, thou Dalmatia, thou Athens, thou Greek, thou Arab, thou Israelite; after me, not I after you! Mine is the Monarchy.”
It is easy to misunderstand Paracelsus because of his rough exterior, which sometimes conceals a deep earnestness behind a jest. Does he not himself say: “By nature I am not subtly woven, nor brought up on figs and wheat-bread, but on cheese, milk and rye-bread, wherefore I may well be rude with the over-clean and superfine; for those who were brought up in soft clothing and we who were bred in pine needles do not easily understand one another. When in myself I mean to be kindly, I must therefore often be taken as rude. How can I not be strange to one who has never wandered in the sun?”
In his book about Winkelmann, Goethe has described the relation of man to Nature in the following beautiful sentence: “When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole; when he feels himself as one with a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole; when the sense of harmonious well-being gives him a pure and free delight; then would the Universe, if it could be conscious of its own feeling, burst forth in joy at having attained its goal, and contemplate with wondering admiration the summit of its own becoming and being.” With a feeling such as finds expression in these sentences, Paracelsus is simply saturated. From out of its depths the riddle of humanity takes shape for him. Let us watch how this happens in Paracelsus’s sense.
At the outset, the road by which Nature has travelled to attain her loftiest altitude is hidden from man’s power of comprehension. She has climbed, indeed, to the summit; but the summit does not proclaim: I feel myself as the whole of Nature; it proclaims, on the contrary: I feel myself as this single, separated human being. That which in reality is an achievement of the whole universe, feels itself as a separated, isolated being, standing alone by itself. This indeed is the true being of man, _viz._, that he must needs feel himself to be something quite different from what, in ultimate analysis, he really is. And if that be a contradiction, then must man be called a contradiction come to life.
Man is the universe in his own particular way; he regards his oneness with the universe as a duality: he is the very same that the universe is; but he is the universe as a repetition, as a single being. This is the contrast which Paracelsus feels as the Microcosm (Man) and the Macrocosm (Universe). Man, for him, is the universe in miniature. That which makes man regard his relationship to the world in this way, that is his spirit. This spirit appears as if bound to a single being, to a single organism: and this organism belongs, by the very nature of its whole being, to the mighty stream of the universe. It is one member, one link in that whole, having its very existence only in relation with all the other links or members thereof. But spirit appears as an outcome of this single, separated organism, and sees itself at the outset as bound up only with that organism. It tears loose this organism from the mother earth out of which it has grown. So, for Paracelsus, a deep-seated connection between man and the universe lies hidden in the basic foundations of being, a connection which is hidden through the presence of “spirit.” That spirit which leads us to higher insight by making knowledge possible, and leads on this knowledge to a new birth on a higher level--this has, as its first result for us men, to veil from us our own oneness with the whole.
Thus the nature of man resolves itself for Paracelsus in the first place into three factors: our sensuous-physical nature, our organism which appears to us as a natural being among other natural beings and is of like nature with all other natural beings; our concealed or hidden nature, which is a link in the chain of the whole universe, and therefore is not shut up within the organism or limited to it, but radiates and receives the workings of energy upon and from the entire universe; and our highest nature, our spirit, which lives its life in a purely spiritual manner. The first factor in man’s nature Paracelsus calls the “elementary body”; the second, the ethereal-heavenly, or “astral body”; and the third he names “the Soul.”
Thus in the “astral” phenomena, Paracelsus recognises an intermediate stage between the purely physical and the properly spiritual or soul-phenomena. Therefore these astral activities will come into view when the spirit or soul, which veils or conceals the natural basis of our being, suspends its activity. In the dream-world we see the simplest phenomena of this realm. The pictures which hover before us in dreams, with their remarkably significant connection with occurrences in our environment and with states of our inner nature, are products of our natural basis or root-being, which are obscured by the brighter light of the soul. For example, when a chair falls over beside my bed and I dream a whole drama ending with a shot fired in a duel; or when I have palpitation of the heart and dream of a boiling cauldron, we can see that in these dreams natural operations come to light which are full of sense and meaning, and disclose a life lying between the purely organic functions and the concept-forming activity which is carried on in the full, clear consciousness of the spirit. Connected with this region are all the phenomena belonging to the domain of hypnotism and suggestion; and in the latter are we not compelled to recognise an interaction between human beings, which points to some connection or relation between beings in Nature, which is normally hidden by the higher activity of the mind? From this starting point we can reach an understanding of what Paracelsus meant by the “astral” body. It is the sum total of those natural operations under whose influence we stand, or may in special circumstances come to stand, or which proceed from us, without our souls or minds coming into consideration in connection with them, but which yet cannot be included under the concept of purely physical phenomena. The fact that Paracelsus reckons as truths in this domain things which we doubt to-day, does not come into the question, from the point of view which I have already described.
Starting from the basis of these views as to the nature of man, Paracelsus divides him into seven factors or principles, which are the same as those we also find in the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians, among the Neoplatonists and in the Kabbalah. In the first place, man is a physical-bodily being, and therefore subject to the same laws as every other body. He is, in this respect, therefore, a purely “elementary” body. The purely physical-bodily laws combine into an organic life-process, and Paracelsus denotes this organic sequence of law by the terms “_archæus_” or “_spiritus vitæ_.” Next, the organic rises into a region of phenomena resembling the spiritual, but which are not yet properly spiritual, and these he classifies as “astral” phenomena. From amidst these astral phenomena, the functions of the “animal soul” make their appearance. Man becomes a being of the senses.
Then he connects together his sense impressions according to their nature, by his understanding or mind, and the “human soul” or “reasoning soul” becomes alive in him. He sinks himself deep into his own mental productions, and learns to recognise “spirit” as such, and thus he has risen at length to the level of the “spiritual soul.” Finally, he must come to recognise that in this spiritual soul he is experiencing the ultimate basis of universal being; the spiritual soul ceases to be individual, to be separated. Then arises the knowledge of which Eckhart spoke when he felt no longer that _he_ was speaking within himself, but that in him the Root-Being was uttering Itself. The condition has come about in which the All-Spirit in man beholds Itself. Paracelsus has stamped the feeling of this condition with the simple words: “And that is a great thing whereon to dwell: there is naught in heaven or upon earth that is not in Man. And God who dwelleth in Heaven, He also is in Man.”
With these seven principles of human nature, Paracelsus aims at expressing nothing else than the facts of inner and outer experience. The fact remains unquestioned that, what for human experience subdivides itself into a multiplicity of seven factors, is in higher reality a unity. But the higher insight exists just for the very purpose of exhibiting the unity in all that appears as multiplicity to man, owing to his bodily and spiritual organisation. On the level of the highest insight, Paracelsus strives to the utmost to fuse the unitary Root-Being of the world with his own spirit. But he knows that man can only cognise Nature in its spirituality, when he enters into immediate intercourse with that Nature. Man does not grasp Nature by peopling it from within himself with arbitrarily assumed entities; but by accepting and valuing it as it is, as Nature. Paracelsus therefore does not seek for God or for spirit in Nature; but Nature, just as it comes before his eyes, is for him wholly, immediately divine. Must one then first ascribe to the plant a soul after the kind of a human soul, in order to find the spiritual?
Hence Paracelsus explains to himself the development of things, so far as that is possible with the scientific means of his age, altogether in such wise that he conceives this development as a sensible-natural process. He makes all things to proceed from the root-matter, the root-water (Yliaster). And he regards as a further natural process the separation of the root-matter (which he also calls the great Limbus) into the four elements: Water, Earth, Fire and Air. When he says that the “Divine Word” called forth the multiplicity of beings from the root-matter, one must understand this also only in such wise as perhaps in more recent natural science one must understand the relationship of Force to Matter. A “Spirit,” in a matter-of-fact sense, is not yet present at this stage. This “Spirit” is no matter-of-fact basis of the natural process, but a matter-of-fact result of that process.
This Spirit does not create Nature, but develops itself out of Nature. Not a few statements of Paracelsus might be interpreted in the opposite sense. Thus when he says: “There is nothing which does not possess and carry with it also a spirit hidden in it and that lives not withal. Also, not only has _that_ life, which stirs itself and moves, as men, animals, the worms in the earth, the birds in the sky and the fishes in water, but all bodily and actual things as well.”
But in such sayings Paracelsus only aims at warning us against that superficial contemplation of Nature which fancies it can exhaust the being of a thing with a couple of “stuck-up” concepts, according to Goethe’s apt expression. He aims not at putting into things some imaginary being, but at setting in motion all the powers of man to bring out that which in actual fact lies in the thing.
What matters is not to let oneself be misled by the fact that Paracelsus expresses himself in the spirit of his time. It is far more important to recognise what things really hovered before his mind when, looking upon Nature, he expresses his ideas in the forms of expression proper to his age. He ascribes to man, for instance, a dual flesh, that is, a dual bodily constitution. “The flesh must also be understood, that it is of two kinds, namely the flesh that comes from Adam and the flesh which is not from Adam. The flesh from Adam is a gross flesh, for it is earthly and nothing besides flesh, that can be bound and grasped like wood and stone. The other flesh is not from Adam, it is a subtle flesh and cannot be bound or grasped, for it is not made of earth.” What is the flesh that is from Adam? It is everything that man has received through natural development, everything, therefore, that has passed on to him by heredity. To that is added, whatever man has acquired for himself in his intercourse with the world around him in the course of time.
The modern scientific conceptions of inherited characteristics and those acquired by adaptation easily emerge from the above-cited thought of Paracelsus. The “more subtle flesh” that makes man capable of his intellectual activities, has not existed from the beginning in man. Man was “gross flesh” like the animal, a flesh that “can be bound and grasped like wood and stone.” In a scientific sense, therefore, the soul is also an acquired characteristic of the “gross flesh.” What the scientist of the nineteenth century has in his mind’s eye when he speaks of the factors inherited from the animal world, is just what Paracelsus has in view when he uses the expression, “the flesh that comes from Adam.”