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from it. Schmidt-Biggemann interprets Alsted’s abandonment of his
occult interests as an ‘inner development’. 5 Hotson challenges the
idea of any such ‘intellectual reorientation’: ‘In fact, if we peer behind
the facade of his published works and into the more personal domain
of his correspondence, a private world will begin to emerge more
thoroughly hermetic than even the most audacious writings of his
youth’ (p. 143). Hotson argues that Alsted’s pansophical reform project
disappears only from his publications. If we look at the ‘private’
Alsted, it is still there at the end of his life. Hotson supports his thesis
by reference to scattered, mostly unpublished, sources. These
make it possible to reconstruct an underground strata of reading, aspirations,
and alchemical practices of which Alsted’s published writings
make no mention.
Alsted himself seems to have experienced the opposition of ‘private’
hermeticism and ‘published’ Calvinist doctrine as a distressing
tension. In any case, this is suggested by a letter, quoted by Hotson,
concerning Alsted’s final hours in Transylvania, where he spent his
last years teaching at the newly established Calvinist academy in
Gyulaferhérvár (Alba Julia). On his deathbed, Alsted asked for his
manuscripts to be placed sub anathemate and burned. His friends
refused, ‘but he threw them in front of us and cut up some of them
with great physical effort and (let it be written decently) threw them
into the “shadow seat” ’ (p. 179). A beggar was charged with retrieving
the manuscripts. Hotson interprets this passage as the dramatic
closing chord of Alsted’s intellectual biography between hermetically
inspired philosophy and theological orthodoxy, as ‘a final great act
of symbolic renunciation’: ‘the dying Alsted finally realized that too
much filth of the Lullists and kabbalists and alchemists which he had
picked through had clung to his most ambitious unpublished works’
(p. 180). Although elegant, this interpretation is of doubtful soundness.
In the early modern period, rhetoric was dominated by ‘political’
strategies as much as behaviour and action itself. Thus the context
of the quoted passage suggests that the description of the
deathbed scene was motivated more by the desire to present Alsted
as a ‘perfectly orthodox and knowledgeable theologian’ (p. 179).
In interpreting the works, Hotson draws heavily on Alsted’s egodocuments
and programmatic statements (in prefaces, dedications,
5 Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis, pp. 101, 139.
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