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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Franciscans and the Sacral Cosmos
(The Context of Franciscan Alchemy)
Praise be to you, my Lord, and to all your creation….
—Francis of Assisi, Canticle of Brother Sun (1224/5)
The goal of this chapter is to illustrate in brief Franciscan considerations of the natural world. This discussion is more than just a backdrop to the elixir. It also provides a sense of how and why Franciscan discussion of the elixir became entwined with religious ideas and language. The discussion that follows complements, but also offers important context to, the arguments that have been made about the religious turn in alchemy in the fourteenth century.1 The religious turn must be considered in light not just of changes in alchemical discourses, but also of corresponding developments in theology and devotional practices. Religion and religious language emerged in Franciscan alchemy because friars were already busy drawing theological conclusions from nature and philosophical conclusions from scripture. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for an order that eschewed monastic enclosure, the friars embraced the created—that is to say, the material—world.
In spite of the variety of intellectual approaches taken toward the natural world, the principal concern of Franciscan writers—and likely of all clerical scholars of the era—was not with nature per se, but with creation. Natura in any case did not mean nature in quite the way we mean it today. Medievals had no notions of ecology or ecosystems. Rather natura, when considered as an intellectual category, tended to follow Hugh of St. Victor’s influential definition.2 Hugh considered a tripartite division between inclinations or properties of a specific thing or of a group of things. Hence, horses have a nature that is common to them that explains horse-like behavior. Likewise, a specific horse has its own nature—fast, slow, temperamental, calm—in comparison to other horses. Hugh also notes, however, that sometimes natura was used to mean something more like the natural order.
It is this latter definition that is pertinent to the discussion in this chapter, and is the one that arrives closest to nature as a kind of cosmological category. The natural order was inextricably linked to the medieval understanding of the creation of the world as outlined in Genesis. “Regarding corporeal nature, namely how it came to be,” writes Bonaventure, “we must comprehend that it was produced in six days, such that in the beginning before any day, God created heaven and earth.”3 There is no substantive divide, then, between the natural order of things and the medieval notion of creation.
The link between God and nature is something of a truism for medieval writers. Franciscans, however, beginning with Francis himself, did not limit themselves to a kind of standard preamble of nature’s ontological link to God before engaging in Aristotelian speculation. Nature was not a neutral philosophical category. Instead, Franciscans developed sacral ideas of creation. Their philosophical discussions of the natural world were not just inflected by Christian religion, but aimed at understanding the role of the created world in salvation. At times mystical, at times manifestly Aristotelian, Franciscans’ ruminations on the universe probed the nature of God’s relationship to humankind and the human relationship to the rest of the cosmos.
Much scholarly discussion, in the Middle Ages as well as lately, has focused on the rigors of Franciscan poverty and humility, and the ensuing divisions fomented by various interpretations of Francis’s commands and practices.4 For all its ascetic tendencies, however, Franciscan piety was not fueled by mistrust of the material world. Franciscans certainly drew—as did most of the religious of the Middle Ages—on the eremitical tradition handed down from the desert fathers, but the poverty and spiritual discipline practiced by the friars should not be mistaken for dualism or a fundamental suspicion of material things. Sin, argued Francis, was a result of the will, not a result of merely inhabiting the world.5 Hence Franciscans, like other orders of friars, eschewed the rhetoric and practice of enclosure and engaged with society and the world around them. Even more telling, Francis’s own writings focused more on traditional Christian practices of material piety, such as care and reverence for the Eucharist, than they did on poverty, so often seen as central to the Franciscan ideal.6
This Franciscan focus on the natural world and material aspects of Christian practice also emerged in the context of the Church’s conflict with heretics, both real and imagined. While the facticity and prevalence of heretics has been the subject of scholarly debate for decades, that the Church perceived a threat is not in doubt.7 Especially, though not exclusively, Cathars offered alternative theologies of the material world that repudiated its essential goodness. Christians were no strangers to the notions that the physical body presented a hurdle to salvation and that the world possessed a myriad of dangers and temptations, but the promised Resurrection provided a final exclamation point to the idea that God had created people and the world as fundamentally good. Saint Francis himself stressed that the root of sin was found in the human heart—a flaw of the postlapsarian individual, rather than of the postlapsarian world. Cathars, however, believed that the physical world was a mistake, created by the Devil or a flawed demiurge and hence inextricably linked to sin. Only the shedding of the material world offered salvation. The evil of the body and the material world was not limited to sexual sins, but to materiality more generally. Cathar perfecti, the “Good men” and “Good women” who made up the supposed Cathar prelacy, had to refrain as much as possible from dirtying themselves with the physical world. Hence they refrained—at least nominally—from sex, eating meat or other “products of coition” (this left fish as a possible meal, since they were thought to be generated spontaneously from flowing water), as well as other more standard sins. Any deviation from this path resulted in the loss of their saved status.8
Again, whether or not Cathars actually practiced or preached dogmatically rigid dualism, it was the clear understanding of the Catholic Church that they did. The anti-material doctrine and austere lives of Cathar perfecti resonated with the eremetical traditions of Christianity only recently revived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And, regardless of how many perfecti may have been wandering the Languedoc, the Rhineland, or northern Italy, their spare frames and poor mien offered an implicit critique of the Latin Church. The Franciscans, much like the Dominicans, were in the vanguard of opposition to these heretical ideas, and it is in the context of such an imagined battleground that Franciscan spirituality and exhortation arose. Proving the essential goodness of creation, especially via preaching, was a key strategy in reinforcing orthodoxy.9 Therefore, didactic material on nature produced by the Order—everything from Francis’s own teachings and poetry, to the legends of his life, to encyclopedia entries—was at some level apologetic. Yet, none of this was simply rhetoric either. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the teaching of the Church on the inherent goodness of creation resonated deeply with Francis and his followers.
What follows is a deeper exploration of Franciscan views on the cosmos. The sacral orientation of Franciscan writing on nature is a crucial context for understanding Franciscan alchemical writing, serving as a link between alchemy as found in the Franciscan encyclopedias and the seemingly more radical speculation of Joachite-inspired alchemists, such as John of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon. Indeed, the latter writers, while long considered central to the development of medieval alchemy, have frequently been seen as outliers among their Order, thanks to their alchemical speculation. The discussion that follows demonstrates that while alchemy might have been a marginal practice, it is deeply tied to broader currents of Franciscan intellectual life and, as importantly, sheds some light on more mainstream Franciscan considerations of the material world.
The Natural and the Mystical: Francis and Bonaventure
The identity of no religious order was so tightly intertwined with the life of its founder as that of the Friars Minor. Christendom’s greatest saint—no other held the title of alter Christus—Francis held an undeniable sway over the Franciscan imagination both before and after his death. The standard set by Francis’s humility, poverty, and charity was likely an impossible one to live up to collectively. And, as debates over the role of the friars regarding adherence to apostolic poverty and involvement in elite learned culture evolved over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, interpretations of the life and teachings of Francis were fraught with apologetic intent. Therefore, while the various lives of Francis include a rather substantial amount of material on the saint’s relationship to nature, it is best to begin with Francis’s own writings. For, in spite of Francis’s reputation as a lover and friend of nature, only one authentic work of his on this topic survives: the Canticle of Brother Sun.
The Canticle is likely the earliest Italian poem to survive into the present day, and scholars have long noted with little controversy that it draws much of its structure from Christian liturgy. Its structure and call to prayer strongly resemble Psalm 148, the Laudate, which Francis, like other religious, recited every morning.10 There are questions about how much Francis may have been influenced by troubadour poetry, but he did mean the Canticle to be sung by Franciscans as troubadours of Christ. Indeed, its first public performance appears to have facilitated a rapprochement of the feuding secular and clerical factions in Assisi.11 Leaving aside questions of what influenced Francis stylistically, let us take a look at the Canticle itself. It is relatively short, so I have quoted it here in full.12
Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore,
Tue so’ laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedizione.
Ad Te solo, Altissimo, se konfane,
et nullu homo ène dignu Te mentovare.
5
Laudato si, mi’ Signore, cum tutte le Tue creature,
Spezialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significazione.
10
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora Luna e le stelle:
in celu l’ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per frate Vento
e per aere et nubilo e sereno et onne tempo,
per lo quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento.
15
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sor’Aqua,
la quale è multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per frate Focu,
per lo quale ennallumini la notte,
et ello è bello et iocundo e robustoso e forte.
20
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra matre Terra,
la quale ne sustenta e governa,
e produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per quelli ke perdonano per lo tuo amore
e sostengo infirmitate et tribulatione.
25
Beati quelli ke ‘l sosterrano in pace, ka
da te, Altissimo, sirano incoronati.
Laudato si’ mi’ Signore per sora nostra Morte corporale,
da la quale nullu homo vivente pò skappare:
guai a quelli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali;
beati quelli ke trovarà ne le tue santissime voluntati,
ka la morte secunda no ‘l farrà male.
30
Laudate et benedicete mi’ Signore’ e ringratiate
e serviateli cum grande humilitate.
Most high, almighty, good Lord,
Praise, glory, and honor, and all blessings are yours.
To you alone, most high, do they belong,
And no man is worthy is to speak your name.
5
Praise be to you, my Lord, and to all your creation,
Especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is our day, and you give us light through him.
And he is beautiful, shining with great splendor.
From you, most high, he takes his meaning.
10
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Sister Moon and the stars:
In the heavens you have formed them, shining and precious and beautiful.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Brother Wind,
And from the air and cloud and calm and all weathers,
Through which you give your creatures nourishment.
15
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Sister Water,
Who is so useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Brother Fire,
Through whom you lighten our night:
And he is handsome and merry and vigorous and strong.
20
Praise be to you, my Lord, from our sister Mother Earth,
Who nourishes and sustains us,
And brings forth her various fruits, with many-colored flowers and grasses.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from those who forgive for love of you,
Bearing illness and tribulation.
25
Blessed are those who bear them in peace,
For by you, most high, will they be crowned.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from our Sister bodily Death,
From which no living man can escape:
Woe to those who die in mortal sin:
Blessed are those whom she shall find doing your most holy will,
For the second death shall not harm them.
30
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks
And may you serve him with great humility.
The central debate over the meaning of the poem—a debate that reaches back to the Middle Ages—is how to interpret the Italian per first found in line 10: “Laudato si, mi signore, per sora luna e le stelle.” The issue is that the term per can be translated as either “for” or “by,” depending on whether one reads the term as closer to the Latin propter or the French par.13 So, one could read this line as either commanding that God be praised for his creations, Sister Moon and the stars or, more controversially, by duly anthropomorphized celestial bodies. One could also see per as meaning through. There are pros and cons to each translation, and it is fully possible that Francis may have intended the passage to be somewhat ambiguous. After all, his use of the Umbrian dialect rather than Latin is quite deliberate. Though Francis’s works are few and usually brief, only one other piece, a Canticle composed for the Poor Clares the same year (1225), is in Italian, or, more properly speaking, the Umbrian dialect. The rest of his writings are in Latin.14
The issue of how to translate per bears on more than just linguistics. It lends weight to various interpretive arguments. If we take what I would consider to be the narrow reading of per as “for,” then the theme of the Canticle is rather simple—a praise to God for creation. This more conservative reading has been favored to varying degrees by Thomas Nairn, O.F.M, Andre Vauchez, and Augustine Thompson, O.P.15 These scholars emphasize this reading as fitting the Middle Ages and as an important corrective to earlier scholarly claims that Francis expressed a kind of pantheism in the poem. Written while Francis was dying and nearly blind, the poem stresses the goodness of creation and humankind’s duty to praise God for such a gift.16 Michael Blastic likens the poem, appropriately, I think, to a sermon, and Vauchez has called it a Mass for the world.17 The argument in favor of this conservative translation is that the Canticle’s simplicity should be considered not a slight to Francis’s work, but rather a sign of its depth and power.
Other readers have favored, however, reading per as “by,” which significantly alters the meaning of the poem. Roger Sorrell in the 1980s did much to popularize this view in Anglophone scholarship, but his argument has been undercut by his claims that Francis was a nature mystic, and by (to be frank) somewhat unfair readings of his work, which have overlooked much of the nuance of his discussion of embedded mysticism within the poem.18 Perhaps the best argument to be put forward recently for interpreting per as by or through has been made by the Italianist Brian Moloney. To be clear, Moloney favors a more ambiguous reading of the poem, but offers a fairly strong defense for why one could consider per as “by” instead of “for.”19 At the beginning of the poem, the speaker says that he is not worthy to say the name of God. If this is so, then it begs the question of who exactly is doing the praising. There is precedent here in Francis’s first Rule—one that was never papally approved—where he invokes Christ and the Holy Spirit to give thanks to God since he is not worthy to speak God’s name. This is, ultimately, an Augustinian claim, and not altogether new. Likewise, in Psalm 148, on which the Canticle is modeled, the Vulgate text uses the imperative mood to command creation to praise God. Perhaps most important, this interpretation is precisely what Francis’s immediate followers thought he meant. Both the compiler of the very early Assisi compilation—stories about Francis that were gathered to be used in his official Life—and no less a personage than Saint Bonaventure believed the Canticle was a paean by creation, not for it. Bonaventure went so far as to replace the preposition per with the much more straightforward da, to emphasize that praise was to be given by creation.
This latter reading of the Canticle, as I have mentioned, has been related to readings of the Canticle as an expression of Francis’s mysticism. Moloney points out a key passage from one of Celano’s lives of Francis that supports such a conclusion: “Often as he walked along a road, thinking and singing of Jesus, he would forget his destination and start inviting all the elements to praise Jesus.”20 Here we see a strong connection to the Canticle, where beginning in line 10 and running through line 22, the elements are specifically called on to praise their Creator. In the passage from I Celano, however, Francis’s prayers are Christocentric. This is fitting with much of what Francis has left us in his writings, where the Son is the principal person of the Trinity whom Francis engages, contemplates, and remembers. Yet, toward the end of his life, his writings shift from an emphasis on Christ to the Father, which fits the theme of the Canticle.21 In the Canticle it is the Father, the Lord, who is the principal object of praise.
We do need to be cautious, however, regarding Thomas’s description of Francis’s enraptured prayers as definitive. Thomas’s description of Francis could have drawn on traditional Augustinian and pseudo-Dionysian themes of mystical experience. In this formulation, one’s focus is so entirely upon God that he or she is alienated from earthly senses. In both the first and second life, when Thomas also describes Francis as spiritually absent from earth during some of his contemplations of God, he seems to portraying Francis in ways that fit with this tradition. It is not clear whether Francis knew of such descriptions, but Thomas presumably did. This is not to say that Francis was not lost in contemplation, but the hallmark of pseudo-Dionysian mysticism is alienation from the world, not its celebration.
Parallel descriptions in Bonaventure’s legenda maior are even more suspect, as Bonaventure’s own mystical works were deeply influenced by pseudo-Dionysius. Bonaventure clearly regarded alienation from the world as congruent with mystical union. Indeed, in the last chapter of his Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure explicitly cites Francis as having developed disaffection from the senses and the world to the point that he would have appeared outwardly dead (quasi exterius mortuus) while rapt in mystical contemplation (in excessu contemplationis).22 Though we will get to Bonaventure’s views on nature shortly, it can be said for the moment that Bonaventure agrees God is reflected in the creation—“Anyone who is not illuminated by the splendor of created things is blind,” he states. Alienation therefore is not the same as rejection: “Created things of every kind in this sensible world signify the invisible things of God, mainly because God is the origin of every creature, its exemplar and end.”23 Bonaventure considers contemplation of creation to be a lower rung of the ladder of mystical speculation, but a necessary one. If we are to consider the Canticle as a kind of mystical poem, or the result of mystical contemplation of God, the progression from contemplation of creation to celebration of God is much more direct and much shorter than Bonaventure’s intellectual scheme.24 I am not convinced that formal mysticism should be attached to the Canticle, but if it is, it speaks more to a kind of passionate, immediate experience of God in nature that is particular to Francis and an experience that needs to be appropriated or at least mediated by Bonaventure to fit within a more conventional understanding of mystical union.
I want to return now to the description of creation in the Canticle. In lines 10–22, Francis invokes the four elements—air/wind, fire, water, and earth—to praise God. Most scholars describe this passage as a depiction of the Aristotelian elements, but such a distinction implies a more philosophical stance than is likely present. Francis was not calling on the elements as a sort of proto-periodic table. The import of the four elements as building blocks of the universe was more foundational—more of a truism than anything else.25 Naming the elements does not necessarily imply philosophical contemplation of them. Modern analogies are hard to come by, but it is something like saying the earth is part of the solar system—a common fact most people assume to be true whether or not they know anything about astronomy.
Francis invokes these elements immediately after the heavenly bodies. From the twelfth century onward the view became prevalent that the heavenly bodies were not fiery bodies but rather concentrations of a fifth element—an unchangeable and perfect element fitting of heaven, whose luminosity was the result of relative density.26 If Francis was familiar with this view, which circulated during this period though not axiomatically like the rest of the four elements, then it could be possible that he saw nature in what was, in that time, a scientific manner. The evidence for such a view is rather tenuous. Some scholars believe Francis was familiar, through Brother Elias, with the basic tenets of alchemy, where many adherents did consider a fifth essence to be part and parcel of the created world.27 Evidence for Elias’s alchemical activity is sparse and indirect, however, and Francis certainly leaves no direct trace of such knowledge anywhere in his works.28 In any case, later friars themselves disagreed on the question of the fifth element. Bonaventure, in his thirteenth collation on the six days of creation, says that no one knows the truth about the substance of the heavenly bodies, though in earlier works, such as his Sentence Commentary and his Reduction of Arts to Theology, he assumes that “there are four elements and a fifth essence,” all of which can be grasped by human senses.29 Bonaventure’s contemporary Roger Bacon outlined in a variety of works an almost unquestioned assumption that the heavens were made of a fifth essence. This latter view seems to have won out (probably not thanks to Bacon), and by the early fourteenth century the biblical commentator Nicholas of Lyra can include it without justification in his discussion of creation.30
The logic of the Canticle, however, makes more sense if we consider it less as a philosophic statement on the universe than as a circular progression from the personal to the cosmic to the personal. After the initial laud given by the speaker of the poem come the heavens—the cosmos around the earth—and then the focus descends to the world itself (the four elements). The next verse is something of an anomaly. It was added later, and there is neither Sister nor Brother as its subject. Finally we move to Sister Death, the end of worldly things, who deserves a personal welcome from each of us. This is a difficult verse, since biblical sources frequently treat death as something to be conquered and hold that death is not the creation of God. It is important to remember, however, that Francis knew well he was close to death at the time of the composition of the Canticle and, I think, wanted to express that the nearness of death should not dampen one’s admiration for creation and for God. Thus, the last verses deal with human experience.
While the poem is far from a theological statement on creation, nevertheless a certain theology underpins it, namely the familial treatment of creation. Francis called members of his Order Brothers (and the Poor Clares, Sisters), and made a point of rejecting his birth family for his spiritual one. Francis clearly wanted to convey a sense of community, even family, with creation. There is a tension, then, in the poem between what I would describe as a vertical and a horizontal relationship with creation. The vertical relationship is typical of the medieval period and is expressed in how the elements (or plants, trees, and various animals) are useful to humanity. The horizontal is the more radical aspect and expresses the familial aspect of creation—humanity is no more or less a creature than anything else.
This tension is what unites the Canticle with other aspects of Francis’s relationship with nature. The horizontal relationship to nature is frequently expressed in stories of Francis and animals. The sermon to the birds, for instance, though problematic in its many versions, expresses this kinship, as do Francis’s encounters with other animals. At the same time, he did have his difficulties with animals—he saw mice as tools of the devil and called one companion Brother Fly as a rebuke to his laziness. Moreover, Francis was hardly a vegetarian and, somewhat unusually, allowed his brothers to eat meat. And while he frowned on the riding of horses by brothers, he did so not out of compassion for the animal, but because such actions did not befit the humility of the Friars Minor.31 Thus, Francis embraced the traditional vertical medieval view, but also incorporated a very personal, intense, and direct relationship with creation that stressed universality and community, where all things had their origin in God.
Francis’s concern for nature was, in the Middle Ages as it is today, one of his defining characteristics. Neslihan Şenocak has determined that Francis’s special relationship to the natural world was one of the few things many of the first couple of generations of brothers actually knew about their founder. Materials used to generate Francis’s life were not collected until 1244, and generally speaking the first brothers outside central Italy knew very little about Francis himself, outside his reputation for holiness.32 Yet one of the first brothers to reside at the nascent convent near the University of Paris, Julian of Speyer, was keen to point out Francis’s affinity for the created world:
What do you think he drank in of true knowledge, sweetness and grace in the sun, the moon, the stars and the firmament, in the elements and in their effects or embellishments? What, I ask, did he drink in when he contemplated the power, the wisdom and goodness of the Creator of all in all things? Surely, I do not think that it would be possible for any mortal to express this in words. Since he traced all things back to their one first beginning, he called every creature “brother,” and, in his own praises, continuously invited all creatures to praise their one common creator.33
Whether or not the Canticle was copied down or sung, it is at least clear that friars in the academic milieu of Paris were familiar with Francis’s special rapport with nature. It was likely, however, that most friars understood this to be a personal characteristic rather than part of the Franciscan identity—Francis’s own works seem to bolster this idea, since traditional Franciscan topics such as humility, obedience, and poverty are the cornerstones of his own writings. It is also significant that in Bonaventure’s legenda maior, which came to be the definitive life of Francis, Francis’s horizontal relationship with animals is subtly transformed into what Augustine Thompson has characterized as the prototypical “white magic” of the saints, where Francis commands nature as much as he finds fellowship in it.34 André Vauchez believes that much of this reinterpretation of Francis by Bonaventure was deliberate. Bonaventure was seeking to forestall the rending of his order by the pull between imitating Francis and serving the needs of the Church and the papacy.35 Bonaventure does not, however, impugn the importance of nature, and in fact comments on it frequently in his works. As a follower of Francis and a mystic himself, Bonaventure was deeply moved by Francis’s connection to the created world. And, as a theologian, Bonaventure linked the encounter with the world to more traditional avenues of thinking about the created universe.
Genesis and Natural Philosophy
The notion that the opening chapters of Genesis constituted a text of natural philosophy is recognizable at the beginning of the scholastic era. Masters of cathedral schools such as William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres considered the cosmology of Genesis from a philosophic standpoint. Peter Abelard, in his commentary on the Hexaemeron, to take another example, begins his gloss of Genesis 1:1 (In the beginning God created heaven and earth) by stating that this passage refers to the creation of the four elements, which are themselves the basis of all material created things.36 Written before the widespread dissemination of the Aristotelian corpus, Abelard’s discussion of Genesis relies on the Platonic cosmology discussed in Timaeus. For example, he considers heaven properly speaking to be composed of fire, rather than of a fifth, immiscible element, and later refers to these initially created elements as hyle, or prime matter.
While the discussion of heaven or aether as fire is cause for some mental gymnastics when discussing the separation of the waters (Gen 1:6), this in itself is a notable point. Rather than spiritualizing the text of Genesis to skip over what appears to be a plain contradiction to Plato’s cosmology, Abelard goes to great length to explain and synthesize.37 This is rather a common refrain in later Franciscan commentaries as well. Like Abelard, who relegates the spiritual value of Genesis to a brief passage at the outset of his work, Franciscan exegetes concentrate almost exclusively on the natural philosophic or cosmological implications of the six-day work. Abelard also understood Genesis as a jumping-off point for discussions of practical philosophic elements. Abelard does not discuss alchemy—the alchemical corpus translated and adapted from Muslim scholars were not yet fully diffused in Latin Christendom—but Abelard does connect the six-day work to the practice of astrology.38 This leap from biblical to philosophical is made natural by Abelard’s offhand comment that Moses, according to tradition the author of Genesis, learned astronomy among the Egyptians.39 The implication of such a comment is that Moses knew full well he was writing a philosophical text when he penned Genesis and intended it to be understood precisely in the way Abelard wrote about it.
Latin Christians inserted Genesis into discussions of alchemy almost as soon as they began to compose original treatises. In the 1257 Liber seceretorum alchimie, Constantine of Pisa (or the master who taught him) took pains to adapt the Neoplatonic heritage of alchemy to the manifest reality of the truth of Genesis.40 Though not a clerical author per se, Constantine is pressed to make Genesis present in his work. As the word of God, the book of Genesis presented an authoritative view of the world. This view in turn colonized and rewrought surviving Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories.
Genesis, like any text, derived its meaning as much from the context in which it was read as from its content. Among Franciscan scholastics the Hexaemeron was certainly a font of spiritual wisdom, but such wisdom came from meditation on the nature of the material world described therein. Just as was the case in the meditations of Francis, spiritual value flowed from meditation on the material. The physics of creation was not an ancillary aspect of Genesis. Rather, the nature of the material world undergirded spiritual assumptions and religious truths. Assumptions about the physical composition of the world were imbricated with assumptions about God, and humanity’s relationship to Him. Neither the physical nor the spiritual could sidestep the other.
Bonaventure’s Book of the World
A century after Peter Abelard, Bonaventure approached the story of Genesis in a rather different manner in his Breviloquium. Bonaventure composed the Breviloquium the year (1257) he left his academic post at the University of Paris to take on the role of Minister General of the Franciscan Order. Unlike the Collationes in Hexaemeron, which approaches creation almost entirely symbolically, the Breviloquium addresses scripture as “partly plain speech, partly mystical (partim plana verba, partim mystica).”41 Like the Summa produced by Aquinas and other like texts spawned by Bonaventure’s contemporaries in the universities, Bonaventure idealized the Breviloquium as an introductory theological text that was, as Dominic Monti has said, a “coherent synthesis” of critical theological issues. Yet, as a text that achieved (and not just aspired to) brevity and that used deductive logic, the Breviloquium was not typical of the theological treatises of its era. Bonaventure forewent the quaestio method he employed in his Sentence Commentary, and penned instead a cogent and authoritative treatise that invited neither debate nor argument.42
While the Breviloquium is not a work of exegesis per se, the authority of Bonaventure’s authorial voice emerges from his assumption that he is presenting the essential wisdom of Christian scripture, rather than engaging in a kind of specific philosophical or theological inquiry. Scripture, Bonaventure points out in his prologue, is not restricted (coarctatus) by reason or philosophical condition. Rather, it deals with every aspect of the universe pertinent to salvation.43 While modern readers might see salvation as a limiting factor to philosophical discussions, this was not the case among Bonaventure’s contemporaries—at least in theory. Bonaventure elsewhere was quite caustic in regard to philosophical speculation, especially Aristotelian philosophical speculation, which had no spiritual aims, though he was happy to employ Aristotelian logic and principles when useful.
Fortunately for this discussion, the creation of the physical world did pertain to salvation, and hence makes up the subject of the second part of the Breviloquium. After dealing succinctly with any possible opinions contrary to the notion that God made the universe from nothing (an argument against Aristotle’s claim that the cosmos was eternal), Bonaventure proceeds to outline the six days, listing the things created on each (day 1, light; day 2, firmament; day 3, separation of the waters to make land; day 4, heaven adorned with celestial bodies; day 5, air and water filled with birds and fish respectively; day 6, the land gets animals and human beings). Bonaventure is keen to note that the six days allow for many groupings of threes, which he regards as a sign of the Trinity.44 The religious symbolism, however, does not detract from his focus on the physical description of the cosmos, but rather relies on it. “The creation of the world is like a kind of book, in which the Trinity, its artificer, shines forth, is represented, and is read.”45 Bonaventure regards the world not merely as a creation to be praised, but as a manifestation of God.46
In the Breviloquium, Bonaventure reads the book of the world quite literally. Having detailed the six days, Bonaventure describes the present world schematically, by creating a series of subdivisions. The first division is between the heavenly (caelesti) and the terrestrial (elementari). Heaven he subdivides into, not surprisingly, “three principal (tres principales)” categories, the empyrean, the crystalline, and the firmament. This does not include the starry heaven, which is somewhat awkwardly tacked on to the “principal” categories, until he promptly divides it into seven parts for the seven planets. Therefore, when Bonaventure later states that the world is perfectly ordered, part of his argument rests on the implicit correspondence between significant Christian numbers and the observable world. Bonaventure also notes the traditional four elements as terrestrial spheres. His discussion of the elements is interesting, for even though the elements are changeable and prone to degradation, Bonaventure notes that they too are part of the perfect order as they allow for a diversity of forms to exist.47
Bonaventure is particularly concerned about the relationship between heaven and earth, which he understands to be mediated by the planets. Therefore, like Peter Abelard before him, Bonaventure uses his reading of Genesis to make some statements about astrology. While Bonaventure objects to the concept of fate, he does hold that the seven planets correspond to the three heavens and the four elements.48 The effect of celestial bodies on the terrestrial world is his focus here. Celestial influences, according to Bonaventure, affect “the production of generable and of corruptible things, such as minerals, plants, sentient creatures and human beings.”49 The relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial will be discussed in much more detail in the following chapter, but here it demonstrates Bonaventure’s attention to the “facts” of the observable world, as well as to the meaning of the structure of the cosmos.
While it might seem that Bonaventure is traveling fairly far afield from Genesis, it is quite clear that he understands Genesis to lead to and perhaps require a natural philosophic analysis. Reading the Book of the World to find the vestiges of God requires examining the world in detail, not simply overlooking the physical in favor of the spiritual. Perhaps sensing this objection, he turns in the fifth chapter of the Breviloquium to a discussion of how we arrive at a discussion of natural philosophy even if the Bible itself does not tell us about “the distinction of the spheres, nor the heavens, nor the elements.”50 While he goes on at some length to answer the question, the basic upshot is that scripture ought to be understood in comparison to the Book of the World. Scripture, for Bonaventure, is about the revelation of Christ and his teaching. It is redemptive or repairing. The Book of the World, namely creation, is a book about the Father, the Creator. Thus, scripture includes only what readers need to know about redemption, and should not be seen as somehow closing off knowledge of the world. Scripture is sufficient, but not all-encompassing.51
The Book of the World, however, is mostly closed, according to Bonaventure. While the order of the created world might once potentially have led human beings to the divine (as it did in the Garden), postlapsarian human beings are not so fortunate.52 In his Collations on the Six Days, a treatise where creation serves a metaphorical purpose, Bonaventure is quite clear that people cannot simply observe nature and know God, that is, there is no sense of any kind of natural religion.53 Bonaventure argues, then, that the role of scripture is to begin to repair what was lost to human beings at the fall, namely, their “eye of contemplation (oculum contemplationis)” as Hugh of St. Victor called it.54 God endowed humanity at creation with an eye of flesh, an eye of reason, and an eye of contemplation. The eye of flesh allows people to see around them; this is the literal function of an eye. The eye of reason is what allows one to see inside oneself, that is, to think. The eye of contemplation, however, is what allows the other kinds of eyes to look heavenward in an anagogical sense. With the contemplative faculty damaged after the fall, the physical world can be seen, described, catalogued, and theorized, but it does not ultimately lead, as it should, to the manifestation of God.55 Through recalling the beauty and goodness of God, scripture (along with grace) aids in the repair of the senses, so that the science of creation reveals its author.56
What Bonaventure adds to the Franciscan understanding of nature is a sense that the kind of immediate sacrality felt by Francis in his apprehension of God in creation can also emerge through reason, philosophy, and theology. It is implied that the saintly Francis was able to read the Book of the World, and immediately see its truth. Bonaventure’s path is more deliberate, but it embraces every kind of knowledge about the natural world that leads to the divine. The four elements and three heavens are not biblical in origin, yet to the Christian who also reads the scriptures, they can be seen to refer to the seven days of creation, or (in the case of the heavens) to the Trinity. That said, natural philosophy is not an end in itself. Even when it leads to knowledge of the Creator, it is not the highest kind of knowledge. Bonaventure reserves that for the kind of mystical union discussed in the earlier part of this chapter. Bonaventure’s distinct celebration of the natural world, however, would resonate in the next generation of Franciscan scholars. We turn now to one of those, Peter Olivi.
Creation as a Mirror of the Trinity: Peter of John Olivi
Peter of John Olivi’s reputation has grown recently, thanks to a great deal of scholarly work that has more firmly established the context of his life and thought. In particular, scholars such as David Burr, David Flood, O.F.M., and Kevin Madigan have read Olivi in the context of his era rather than through the lens of later Spiritual Franciscans and fraticelli who appropriated his views. Olivi is now considered one of the premier intellects of the Franciscan Order at the end of the thirteenth century. The marginalization of his ideas was a product of historical contingency rather than a reflection on their relative merit. Olivi’s allegiance to the exegetical methods (and apocalyptic fears and hopes) of twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore certainly had much to do with opposition to his ideas in his own period, but he was far from the only Franciscan to suffer on account of his attachment to Joachism. The apocalyptic strains of Joachism will be tackled in more depth in Chapter 3, but to understand Olivi’s views on creation, it is necessary to outline a few of the salient details of Joachim’s mode of exegesis which Olivi adopted.
Discussion of Joachite exegesis often highlights its more radical and apocalyptic features. Olivi’s fidelity to this exegetical strategy, however, displays the more subtle aspects of its inventiveness, especially the principle of concordia. Like traditional typological readings of scripture, concordia argues for intertestamental links. It does not, however, stop there, as the intertestamental relationships could also describe future events. According to Joachim, the two testaments are a complete work of scripture that cannot be superseded, but they record a history of an age of the Father (identified with the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament), and the beginning of an age of the Son. By understanding the parallels between the two testaments one can use them to intrepret history since the age of the apostles and thus deduce the structure of the remaining age of the Son and the third age of the Holy Spirit. Concordia highlights the numerical patterns of the Bible as particularly instructive, as they can be found in a wide variety of places. We saw this to a degree in Bonaventure, who adopted some of the exegetical strategies of Joachim, but opposed the Joachite idea that the books of the Bible could be used to see the order of the future.57 Olivi, however, is sympathetic to this view, and in his commentary on Genesis puts special emphasis on patterns of three that mirror the Trinity. In the prologue to the commentary, Olivi puts concordia front and center. Again, the principle of concordia relies on earlier biblical typology, and its novel aspects are not always immediately obvious. For instance, citing Genesis 18:4–5, when Abraham greets the three angels, Olivi tells his readers that these three angels signify the three persons of God.58 This Trinitarian formulation is at the heart of Olivi’s Genesis commentary, but was already a longstanding typological interpretation. Yet, in the friar’s view, there is no aspect of creation that fails to reveal the Trinity and enrich one’s understanding of it.
Genesis, Olivi tells us, is like a tree. Its roots are the six days, its trunk is the line of patriarchs, and its branches are their descendants, divided into the twelve tribes of Israel. Its leaves are the laws, and its flowers the wisdom literature and the prophets.59 Again, Olivi’s tree metaphor is not new. The tree long served exegetical thinkers as a means of mapping the genealogies beginning in Genesis (and concluded in the Gospels). Yet, for Olivi the story of Genesis does not—and should not—stand on its own. “Under the tree,” he says, “is the entire Trinity of God, the threefold hierarchy of angels, and the three types of existence of men: under the law of nature, under the law of Scripture, and under the law of grace” (emphasis mine).60 The italicized portion at the end of this passage communicates Olivi’s understanding of concordia, that the Hebrew Bible prefigures not only the events and persons of the New Testament, but events throughout the whole of salvation history, here divided into yet another pattern of three.
Olivi’s discussion of human existence may not, at first blush, seem entirely novel. It looks something like the usual binary between law and grace, but, as Burr rightly shows, it emerges from Jewish exegesis and had been employed by Christian authors prior to Olivi as a a typical means of “citing Judaism against itself.” Olivi himself likely was drawn to the idea because the threefold structure is suggestive of its compatibility with Joachite apocalyptic thought, a point that is underscored by his employment of the same phraseology in his commentary on the Apocalypse.61 Olivi, like Joachim before him, conceived of sacral history as unfolding in three ages—those of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The schematic rendering of a threefold history by Jewish sages was simply more evidence that Joachim and Olivi were correct.
Olivi likely believed himself and his fellow Christians to be on the cusp of a transition to the third and final epoch. Such a transition would not obviate prior biblical writings, nor require additional scripture, but would include a deeper and more spiritual understanding of the mysteries encoded within the Bible. Hence, each era was aligned with a person of the Trinity and a moment of scriptural awareness.62 It is likely that penetrating deeper into the biblical texts was precisely Olivi’s point in writing. Hence, when Olivi writes on Genesis (or any other piece of scripture) he is never writing just about Genesis. Genesis is always in conversation with other scriptures, as well as fundamental theological truths, such as the nature of the Trinity, and salvation history.
Probably the best example of this comes early in the commentary, when Olivi discusses the six days of creation (and final day of rest) as a historical model. The six days of creation (and the day of rest) had been a model of salvation history since the patristic era, so Olivi is hardly breaking new ground, but he builds a more complex picture than seven phases of history corresponding with the seven days. For example, Olivi argues that the pattern of seven asserts itself in both Testaments. In the Old, history occurs in seven distinct phases, which Peter calls both a tempus and an opus: 1) the ornamentation of nature (that is, creation), 2) the events leading up to and including the Flood, 3) the covenant with Abraham, 4) the establishment of the Law, 5) the glory of the kings of Israel, 6) the time of the prophets, and 7) a time of quiet in which the Temple was rebuilt.
Likewise the seven days set a pattern for the tempora or opera of the New Testament and the period after it. Since not all this era is yet consigned to history, Peter uses the events of the first seven days to mystically (mystice) explain the unfolding of salvation history both past and future. On the first day, God created light; hence, the first opus or tempus of the New Testament is the sowing of grace, that is, the time of Christ and the apostles. The separation of the waters on the second day provides a metaphor for the “baptism” of the blood of the martyrs. On the third day, dry land appeared, corresponding to the early Church from Pope Sylvester through the general councils of late antiquity. Here the close visual and visceral connection to the days of creation and eras of breaks down, as the fourth and fifth ages belong to Justinian and Charlemagne respectively. The sixth opus is somewhat vague from a temporal standpoint, as it is the era in which Olivi positions himself, a time of deepening faith and the emergence of a Christ-like way of life. In regard to the latter, Olivi probably had in mind his own Order, but likely also other friars and monastic orders. He sees this period as having begun with the growth of formal theology as a discipline. Finally, the day of rest is a future event, the opening of the seventh seal as described in the Apocalypse.63 While one might expect similar and very spiritual readings of Genesis to follow, instead we find that Olivi changes course quite quickly, and focuses almost exclusively on natural philosophy for the rest of his discussion of the Hexaemeron. The commentary on the six days alone is quite long, and summarizing its contents is difficult, as Olivi tackles a range of subjects. Instead, a few examples will serve to show how Olivi used his Genesis commentary as a means of explicating natural philosophy and truths regarding the natural world.
At times it seems that Olivi is using Genesis as an excuse to tackle ad hoc philosophical questions. One such example comes from the second of his two chapters on the six days of creation. Taking up Genesis 1:3 (And let there be light), Olivi jumps into a discussion of optics, specifically whether rays of light retract or not. “Some people” says Olivi, not naming his philosophical adversary whether real or imagined, “think that light does not move from its place—that after the space of a usual day when it has illuminated the world it retracts its rays and thus it becomes night in the whole world.”64 Olivi naturally thinks this is impossible, and argues that light rays are accidents of luminous bodies that do not retract themselves. Olivi argues that such an action would require a miracle of God, but he doubts this has ever occurred. Light emanates from its source, argues Olivi, and the kind of mutation required to make light retract itself would be unnatural. Olivi later connects this argument to the kind of light emanated by saintly bodies and by Christ, but they are examples of his theoretical claims rather than their aim.
In Olivi’s desire to connect the seven days to salvation history, the Trinity, and other Christian truths, he never considers the notion that the six days were metaphorical nor only meant to be understood allegorically or spiritually. Olivi understood creation literally, as a six/seven day event in which God formally created the universe. It is this literal view that informs the naturalist aspect of his commentary, and also prompts him to take on the Augustinian reading of Genesis as a spiritual text rather than as an accurate account of the physical nature of the world. Olivi takes on Augustine early in his commentary, again when discussing Genesis 1:3. Here Olivi argues that the light of Genesis 1:3 refers to actual light and the division of the days rather than the enlightenment of angelic or human nature. Augustine was deeply interested in drawing out the spiritual dimensions and lessons of Genesis, a general sentiment to which Olivi was quite friendly, but did so at the expense of what Olivi considered to be a representation of the physical composition of the cosmos. This allows Olivi to agree with some of Augustine’s more specific assertions, such as the fact that the Hexaemeron suggests the Trinity, and pay lip service to Augustine’s insight. Both authors agree that Genesis is a meditation on the relationship between the divine and the human, but disagreement on the details overshadows Peter’s claims of broad thematic agreements.65 Augustine for his part sees Trinitarian unity expressed in the first two verses of Genesis. The pericope “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” contains two persons of the Trinity—the Father (God) and the Son or Word (the beginning).66 The third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is found in Gen 1:2, “And the Spirit of God was being borne over the water.”67 This is, to Augustine, a “complete reference (conpletam commemorationem)” to the Trinity, already established before the work of creation, which is signified by lux fiat in Gen 1:3.68 At issue for Augustine is the coeternal nature of the persons of the Trinity, a much debated point of theology in the early Church. Augustine therefore considers that the six-day course of creation was nothing more than an allegory and that creation occurred all at once. Olivi, for his part, sees the Trinity as being revealed over time. This is not to say that he denies the coeternality of the Trinity (he does not). This was, in Olivi’s era, assumed to be true. For Olivi, the Trinity always existed, but scripture reveals the nature of the three persons gradually over the six-day work of creation, as part of a series of patterns of threes.69 Temporality thus becomes the crux of Olivi’s dispute with Augustine.
What bothers Olivi is that Augustine’s contemplation of the text—that is, a broadly allegorical reading—does not meet Olivi’s understanding of a literal commentary.70 Olivi is so put off by Augustine’s reading of Genesis 1:3 that he cannot help but blurt out that Augustine’s reading is just flat out untrue according to any reasonable interpretation of the text. Taking an implied shot at the title of Augustine’s work, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Olivi continues, “It certainly isn’t literal, since the whole of scripture prior to the first day up through the seventh clearly points out that it is talking about real days and nights.” To be clear, Olivi stresses his agreement with Augustine that Genesis has a spiritual message, as his Joachite approach would suggest, and he often validates mystical readings of Genesis and relies on Augustine elsewhere.71 Yet, Olivi makes a clear break with exegesis that, in his mind, appears to twist the words of scripture to mean something that a plain reading would not suggest, that is, Augustine’s claim that everything was created in an instant and that the subsequent description of creation existed only to assert certain theological truths.
Where earlier generations of exegetes had passed over literal readings of the scriptures as a kind of preamble to the meat of exegesis, the drawing out of the moral and spiritual meanings of a text, Olivi was keen to suggest the value of the literal. Some of his concern likely stemmed from his attachment to Joachism. For one, the Joachite principle of concordia relied heavily on the chronology or chronologies of the Bible. Seeing harmony between the texts relies not only on a typology of persons, but also on typologies of events—chronological and numerical patterns that emerge over and over within the text and, hence, within history. Augustine’s compression of creation to a single moment of “God created the heavens and the earth” is antithetical to the parallelism of Joachite readings.
Olivi was also concerned with demonstrating the philosophical order of creation, asking whether or not the sequence of the six-day creation was a mystery or whether there was some other reason behind it. While admitting that there were many mysteries, he first put forth a rational and philosophical justification for how creation unfolds. The first three days, he argued, dealt with distinguishing undifferentiated confusion (via the lux fiat), and then fixing distinct bodies into place (dividing the waters and separating the land). This was also the period during which the terrestrial elements became distinguished from one another and heaven became incorruptible as a means of distinguishing it from the terrestrial world. The next three days dealt with “adornment,” that is, the populating of the cosmos, with celestial bodies, birds and fish, and finally animals and human beings. Human beings came last, Olivi says, because they were the most important part of creation, and relied on everything created before.72
Olivi also weighed in on a number of additional issues that would have been critical to alchemists. For instance, Olivi frequently makes reference to the protean stuff of creation (moles). Olivi discusses it as an intermediate step (intermedio modo) in creation, but not necessarily as prime matter. Rather, Olivi seems to understand it as a confused mix of elements, all tangled up with one another.73 They must have existed by the third day in some form, he argues, since Genesis does not say they were created (rather that they were separated or passed over). Yet, if they were fully formed, then Olivi believed Genesis would be talking only about accidents or particularities, rather than about creation. Instead, some kind of confused or indistinct matter existed.74 It would be wonderful to know if Olivi thought this indistinct matter might be made by art, but Olivi does not oblige. What his text does show is that the Hexaemeron was a ripe source for speculation on questions of natural philosophy. While Olivi himself does not take up alchemical questions, it is clear that he is quite interested in in dissecting the composition of the world. His concentration on these questions, often to the exclusion of more spiritual readings, is very much in line with the kind of speculation recommended by Bonaventure.
The Franciscan exegete Nicholas of Lyra, writing a generation later, reflects Olivi’s concern for the literal interpretation.75 Nicholas’s principal concern is to demonstrate the appropriateness and the order of the account of creation in Genesis. For instance, the mixtures of inanimate elements were made for the benefit of animate creatures, which likewise were made for the benefit of human beings. However majestic the act of creation, Nicholas wants his readers to see the obvious logic embedded in the creative act itself. Unsurprisingly, then, Nicholas relies heavily on Aristotelian terminology.76 Following Averroës, he describes the work of creation as subdivided into discrete acts of creating new specific forms (forma seu distinctio), such as light. Light generally then, after its creation, is subdivided into specific lights, such as the various heavenly bodies. Nicholas describes this as the act of adornment and disposition in which specific qualities are attached to created forms.77 It is important to note that the philosophical description of creation is Aristotelian rather than Platonic. The notion of form Aristotle uses in the description of light is not ideal. Nor is there a sense that the distinction of light (lumen) into lights (luminaria) diminishes their “lightness.” Nicholas relies on other aspects of Aristotelian philosophy more specifically later in the text.
There are two points, however, that need to be emphasized in Nicholas’s description of creation. First, not only is creation described in Aristotelian terms, but God works like a philosopher, carrying out creation according to a logic that is knowable to human beings. To Nicholas, this is the clear meaning of the text of Genesis, not an approximation. His literal reading of the six days is designed to tell his readers not just what to think about Genesis, but what really happened. And, in this case, God creates the universe according to an Aristotelian logic. By extension, then, Aristotelian accounts of matter, its mutability, and properties are also true. A second key point to emphasize is that this Aristotelian creation account is not a separate explanation from the sacral account of creation. Rather, the sacrality of creation is expressed within the frame of Aristotelian logic, and vice versa. For example, take the differentiation of the creation of form from that of adornment. According to Nicholas, this leaves us with three (rather than two) modes of creation expressed in the six days: creation, generally speaking, and the subdivision described above. General creation, he says, is described “in advance of each day (ante omnem diem).” Creation of form is described in the first three days, ornamentation in the following. Thus, what Nicholas has done is to overlay a pattern of two, three, and seven, neatly encapsulating the three most important numerical patterns of biblical exegesis. Nicholas was not a Joachite, but he interpreted the narrative of creation as an integrated Aristotelian account of the material world as well as an expression of fundamental Christian truths.78
Throughout the works surveyed here, there has been no mention of alchemy. Nevertheless, it is clear that Franciscan alchemists worked in an environment where discussion of natural philosophy was not only widespread, but curious, inventive, and appreciative. Not only did the inherently good created world lend itself to the revelation of the divine, but plumbing natural philosophy served religious, even devotional ends. In the sense that alchemy as theoretical knowledge explicated the building blocks of the natural universe, there is nothing about theoretical alchemy that is inherently at odds with the kind of discussions of nature seen here.79 As a scientia of the physical world, alchemical concepts and ideas are wholly consistent with the kind of trends being discussed in the various natural theologies of Bonaventure, Olivi, and Nicholas. Beginning with their founder, Franciscans as a group revered the natural world. Moreover, scriptural accounts of creation could be fully in harmony with what natural philosophy could say about the cosmos. Pagan philosophers might have wandered into error due to natural philosophy, but that was not the fault of natural philosophy exclusively. Instead, what these accounts of the created world suggest is that pagan natural philosophers wandered into error because they were not armed with Genesis. The fact that theology faculties and clerical authorities condemned Aristotelian natural philosophy repeatedly in the thirteenth century should not obscure the popular notion that harmonious accord between philosophy and scripture was possible. The condemnations of Aristotle’s libri naturales were, after all, aimed principally at wrong conclusions (either real or imagined), rather than expressing a disdain for knowledge of the natural world.80
If, as seems to be the case, Franciscans were reading Genesis as a critical text in natural philosophy, it seems unlikely that alchemical speculation could have been free from religious overtones. While other scholars have argued that we should take seriously the introduction of religious language during and after alchemy’s religious turn—an idea with which I wholly agree—we should push somewhat further.81 The religious turn was not solely or simply an irruption in the alchemical tradition. When viewed through the lens of hexaemeral commentaries and Franciscan concern for “the book of world,” the religious turn emerges as a logical consequence of broader, even normative, intellectual trends. The explicative function of religious metaphor laid out in the introduction tells only part of the story. Alchemy in the fourteenth century was also catching up with, and innovating within, a discourse on the created universe where the divine was written into the physical fabric of the world.
