Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

72 RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OUTSIDE ITALY
human benefit. There is no reason why these concerns should not be shared by
the same people, as to some extent they were. They might, moreover, be given
almost equal emphasis, as they were in the case of the Christian Cabbalist F.
M.van Helmont, who in his own day was celebrated throughout much of Europe
as a physician whose alternative medicine brought some spectacular cures where
other doctors had failed. None the less there is some justification for the
distinction between religious Neoplatonism and the occult philosophy. If the
theoretical claims of the former brought charges of heresy, the practical bent of
the occult philosophers led them to attach importance to experience.
One of the most influential figures in the Renaissance tradition of occult
philosophy was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (c. 1493–1541), who
styled himself and is generally known as Paracelsus. Paracelsus was a self-taught
Swiss physician who, like Agrippa and perhaps partly under his influence, set
himself against all established scientific authority. ‘My proofs’, he insisted,
‘derive from experience and my own reasoning, and not from reference to
authorities.’ 23 In some ways Paracelsus and Agrippa belong in the modern period.
But their empiricism was unrigorous and their rejection of past assumptions and
traditional authorities was not thoroughgoing. Both accepted the Neoplatonic
view of humankind as a microcosm of the universe. Paracelsus based his
medicine on this assumption. There are, for him, all sorts of correspondences
between what we discover in man and what we discover in nature. These
correspondences are evidence of hidden causal relations which the occult
philosopher can learn to trigger and so manipulate the course of nature in a
magical way. The discovery of such correspondences is a matter of what Agrippa
termed ‘long experience’. But the occult philosophers lacked a rigorous
methodology for identifying them reliably. The kidney bean may look like a
kidney but, contrary to what Paracelsians supposed, such beans have no special
powers to cure kidney disorders.
Paracelsus, like other practitioners of an alternative medicine, had an erratic
career as a physician, but he was credited with some spectacular cures. He did
introduce some specific treatments of value, such as the use of laudanum as a
pain-killer. Moreover some of his ideas would have been of great benefit had
they been adopted. On his account all disease is natural and this led him to reject
the view that mental disorders are due to inhabitation by demons. At the same
time he was overly optimistic in his belief that nature had a cure for every
disease.
Amongst the Paracelsians were some, including Boehme and the younger van
Helmont, who have here been categorized as religious Neoplatonists. Mention
should be made, however, of John Baptiste van Helmont (1577–1644)—who,
though less of a philosopher than his son, is an important figure in the history of
chemistry and is credited with the discovery of gases. 24 The Paracelsians were
influential through much of the seventeenth century, when they were represented
in England by Robert Fludd (1574–1637) and others. 25 But they and many of the
religious Neoplatonists were opposed by, and some later opposed themselves to,