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This method sharpens our insight into the origins of texts and ideas.
The section on Alsted’s millenarianism is a good example. Hotson
demonstrates that Alsted became a millenarian only as the result of
complicated interactions between scholarly interests and political
experiences. Theological and philosophical (hermetic) reading reacted
with political circumstances (the experience of war in the 1620s) to
convince Alsted, who until then had expected the end of the world to
be imminent, that a thousand-year reign of peace on earth would
begin in 1694.
Alsted is particularly well-suited to being read as an exemplary
figure: ‘Alsted is not the greatest theologian of the second reformation,
its greatest philosopher, its most radical hermeticist, its leading
polemicist, or its most successful irenicist; but he, more than anyone
else, unites all the conflicting tendencies of the movement within himself’
(p. 228). His early programme of a ‘reformation of the individual,
conceived as the restoration of the image of divine perfection to each
of the human faculties through an encyclopedic education’ (p. 222),
was based on his reading of heterogeneous texts and owes much to
the fact that he came to grips with a number of very different philosophical
traditions and directions: Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée),
Bartholomäus Keckermann, and Giordano Bruno (whose Artificium
perorandi Alsted edited), Lullism, hermeticism, and alchemy.
After 1612, Alsted’s ambitious pansophical programme was gradually
scaled back. Its basic assumption of the perfectibility of
mankind was directly opposed to the Calvinist doctrine that human
reason was not the path to salvation. In 1618–9 the Synod of Dort
(Dortrecht) enshrined the inadequacy of human reason as dogma.
Alsted took part in the synod, along with Johann Biesterfeld of
Siegen, as the representative of the Wetterau counts. On his return to
Herborn, he was appointed professor of theology. According to
Hotson, Alsted’s rise through the theology faculty was not the only
reason for the disappearance of Lullism, hermeticism, and alchemy
from his publications. He suggests that the debates and unrest precipitated
by the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and the
outbreak of the Thirty Years War, which polarized the confessional
parties, also played an important part. Alsted’s reform programme
was predicated on harmony and the quiet power of persuasion, not
on confrontation and polarization. Alsted was not a radical thinker;
when the times became unfavourable for his irenicism, he retreated
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Johann Heinrich Alsted