The University of Notre Dame

The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God: The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern
Thought
Author(s): Eugene Webb
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 47-60
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059263
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 THE ALCHEMY OF MAN AND
THE ALCHEMY OF GOD:
THE ALCHEMIST AS CULTURAL
SYMBOL IN MODERN THOUGHT

Eugene Webb

At the center of any cultural system is a cluster of authoritative

symbols, accepted images of human excellence, that are offered, and
indeed urged, for imitation. In the process of enculturation or cul-
tural formation the individual becomes formed by internalizing the
values representedin these images, using them as models upon which
to pattern himself and as criteria by which to measure his own worth.
By conforming himself to an appropriatemodel from the accepted set,
he becomes a properly developed person, as this is defined within his
community.
Comparatively simple societies present only a few such cultural
models for imitation. As societies become more complex, they offer
increasinglyvaried possibilities of choice. This makes for greater free-
dom, but it may also make for confusion. In the modern West it is
obvious that the sense of confusion has become acute. Its exact nature
and causes, however, are less easy to discern. A consideration of one
of the major cultural symbols of the Western tradition may serve to
throw light on the process that has led to our present situation.
The concept of alchemy has been an inherently ambiguous one - in
terms both of its meaning and of the ways in which it has been valued.1
If one looks back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance when the
tradition of alchemy was being imported from the Arab world and
assimilated into European thought, one finds alchemy being viewed
from two angles. Depending upon the intention of the practitioner,
it was seen either as a cooperation with God or as a form of opposition
to Him. In his InfernoDante places alchemists- along with wizards,
fortunetellers, seducers, and others who deform God's creation- in
R&L 17.1 (Spring 1985)

47
48 Religion & Literature

the eighth circle of hell. Applied to God and Christ, on the other
hand, alchemical imagery could be used to refer to divine redemptive
action worked upon man for his transfiguration and glorification.
Martin Luther said, for example, "The science of alchemy I like very
well ... for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which
is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last
day" (quoted in Linden, "Alchemy and Eschatology"). And Richard
Sibbes, in A LearnedCommentary(1656), said that "... the Grace of
God is a blessed Alcumist, where it toucheth it makes good, and reli-
gious" (quoted in Haller 125 and in Linden, "Alchemy and Eschatology").
In the case of the human practitioner of alchemy, despite the con-
demnatory attitude of a long tradition of literary satirical treatments,
there was also a widespread belief in the possibility of an alternative
between God's grace on the one hand and a virtually Satanic attempt
to usurp the role of God on the other.2 The Elizabethan Puritan
preacher and alchemist, William Blomfild, for example, claimed to
have received the secret knowledge of alchemy not from man, but
from God, and considered it to go hand in hand with the other gifts
of God to His spiritual elect (Schuler 303-4). Similarly, numerous
English poets of the sixteenth century, including Spenser, Shake-
speare, Sidney, and Donne, saw a parallel between their art and al-
chemy and interpreted both as connected with the power of good hu-
man beings to call upon the divine through prayer (Mazzeo 60-89).
This conception presupposed, of course, that the human practitioner
exercised his divinely given powers for divinely authorized ends, and
there was usually a recognition that power brings with it the possibil-
ity of its misuse - hence the frequent note of apprehensiveness or dis-
trust in the portrayal of the alchemist as a human figure, even when
his art is seen as divinely founded. The human alchemist might act
as a co-worker with God, but he was always susceptible to the tempta-
tion to try to usurp for his own ends the power he exercised. Even
when the alchemist was attacked as a charlatan and his powers denied,
he retained sinister associations. Such an attitude of moral disapproval
was still clearly pronounced in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610),
where the title figure, Dr. Subtle, is represented as a trickster, but a
dangerously potent one nonetheless, whose real skill lay in the manip-
ulation of his victims through appeal to their various lusts.
To an increasingly influential undercurrent of medieval and ren-
aissance society, on the other hand, the traditional reservations about
the human alchemist were gradually being displaced by his develop-
ment into an image of true excellence, a symbol of humanity brought
to the peak of its powers. Francis Bacon's attitude toward alchemy
 EUGENEWEBB 49

shows something of the pattern of transition, and since he has become

himself a culture-hero of the modern west, a symbol of the cultural
ideals that took shape in part under his influence in the early modern
period, he is of special interest in connection with the theme of the
present essay. Bacon is well known as a major source of the modern
ideal of empirical science as a rational, collaborative, anti-esoteric
enterprise - the virtual antithesis of alchemy - and he is remembered
for his condemnation of the pretenses of the alchemist and the magi-
cian. Nevertheless, as Paolo Rossi has shown, Bacon's own imagina-
tion was "saturated in magic and alchemy" (xiii; see also Linden,
"Francis Bacon and Alchemy," 547-60). Bacon believed, for example,
that all substances contain "spiritual" bodies, which can serve as the
basis for the transmutation of metals, and he considered this trans-
mutation to be one of the highest aims of science (Rossi 13, 15). It
is generally remembered that Bacon's appeal to the British crown for
the establishment of scientific institutions was the impetus behind the
eventual establishment of the Royal Society, but it is largely forgotten
that in addition to a research library, a botanical garden, and a zoo,
Bacon wanted the King to establish a laboratory for the discovery of
the philosopher's stone (Rossi 24).
Bacon's ideal of the scientist as simultaneously the master of nature
and its servant and interpreter was precisely the ideal of the magician
and the alchemist, who traditionally believed that their operations
were based on a knowledge of lawful natural processes which they
assisted and thereby controlled.3 For Bacon, as for the magician and
the alchemist, knowledge was power, and truth was pragmatically ef-
fective. This way of thinking and the values it was rooted in stood in
fundamental opposition to those of traditional Christian culture, for
which the highest truth was contemplative and the position of man in
creation was defined not primarily in relation to nature, but to God,
Who was the true source of all power and to Whose ends alone it
should always be subordinated.
The eventual success of Bacon's program of science in capturing
the European imagination amounted to a major shift in cultural val-
ues, a virtual coup in which what had been a subculture took posses-
sion of the centers of political and economic power and gradually be-
came itself the mainstream of culture. As Eric Voegelin has put it,

The interrelation of science and power, and the consequent cancerous growth
of the utilitarian segment of existence, have injected a strong element of magic
culture into modern civilization. The tendency to narrow the field of human
experience to the area of reason, science, and pragmatic action, the tendency
and the life of the spirit,
to overvalue this area in relation to the biostheoretikos
50 Religion & Literature

the tendency to make it the exclusive preoccupation of man, the tendency to

make it socially preponderant through economic pressure in the so-called free
societies and through violence in totalitarian communities - all these are part
of a cultural process that is dominated by a flight of magic imagination, that
is, by the idea of operating on the substance of man through the instrument
of pragmaticallyplanning will. We have ventured the suggestion that in retro-
spect the age of science will appear as the greatest power orgy in the history
of mankind; we now venture the suggestion that at the bottom of this orgy the
historian will find a gigantic outburst of magic imagination after the break-
down of the intellectual and spiritual form of medieval high-civilization ("The
Origins of Scientism" 488).
The literary tradition tended on the whole to be more conservative,
culturally, than the scientific. Reading eighteenth-century English
literature, for example, one sees far more criticism of the Baconian
movement than advocacy or celebration, and it is the criticalvoices we
tend to remember. Swift's parody of the Royal Society as the Acad-
emy of Lagado is a landmarkwe all recognize; on the other hand, can
we even recall the names of those who wrote odes in honor of the dis-
coveries of Isaac Newton? It was much more recently that the literary
classics of Greece and Rome were displaced as the principal vehicles
for the approved cultural formation of the young and that what has
come to be called "social science" arose as a rival to literature and
philosophy in the study of man.
Nevertheless, in literary culture as well, the system of values deriv-
ing from the traditions of magic and alchemy has gradually come to
occupy a central place. The process by which this has happened has
been gradual and complex, as can be seen in the contrast between the
Faustus plays of Marlowe and Goethe. In both, Faustus is an adept
of all branches of learning, licit and illicit, and in both he is a seeker
of power. Marlowe'sfigure proceeds straightforwardlyto damnation,
in accord with the judgment of the earlier cultural tradition. Goethe's,
on the other hand, arrives at an end that is highly ambiguous: Faust,
part 2, shows him being received into eternal bliss as an angel sings,
"Wer immer strebend sich bemuht,/ Den konnen wir erlosen"
(11936-7: "He who strives unceasingly, him can we save."). And this
just after his final earthly act has been to order the slaying of a pious
elderly couple who resisted the incorporation of their own land, hal-
lowed by its little chapel, into the earthly paradisehe had built through
his dark powers. Goethe underscoresthe ambiguity by having Meph-
istopheles allude in connection with this (11286-7) to the episode of
Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21.
Among twentieth-century writers, Thomas Mann, as one might
expect, preserves more than others the Goethean ambiguity toward
 EUGENE WEBB 51

the enterpriseof the scholar-mageand the values on which it is founded.

For many writers the magician and the alchemist have become une-
quivocally positive figures. Indeed, for many they seem to represent
a cultural symbol with which to counter the prestige of the natural or
social scientist while implicitly accepting the fundamentalvalues - the
cult of power- which, considered as a cultural symbol, he stands for.
Mallarme, for example, was disdainful of the utilitarian pursuits of
the scientist, but he was fascinated by the image of the poet as heir
of the ancient tradition of magic who wields the power of the "livre"
("book")as "instrument spirituer("spiritualtool")and is able to act as a
rival creator to the God of nature (378). James Joyce seems to have
shared much of this attitude, at least insofar as his Stephen Daedalus's
thought patterns may be interpreted as reflecting aspects of his own.
Marcel Proust, on the other hand, while interpreting his own art in
explicitly alchemical terminology, used this in ways that conformed
it to a surprising degree to the value system of the earlier tradition.
It will not be possible in the space of a short essay to explore this
theme in great detail in relation to each of these writers, but to note
a few highlights in each case should serve to indicate its complexity
as well as its importance in the writings of these major, and in many
ways representative, figures of modern literature.
To begin with Mallarme, who was seminal for so much of the
modern tradition and for each of the writers just mentioned, inter-
pretation of his own role as poet was explicitly cast in the imagery of
a modern magician-alchemist. In his "Prose(pour des Esseintes)"for
example, the poet invokes his own artistic powers in the following
language:
Hyperbole! de ma memoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vetu:
Car j'installe, par la science,
L'hymne des coeurs spirituels
En Foeuvre de ma patience,
Atlas, herbiers, rituels. (55-56)
["Hyperbole!Do you not know how to rise triumphantly from my memory to-
day as a magical text clad in ancient iron? Because I establish, by science, the
hymn of spiritualhearts in the product of my patience, atlas, manuals of herbs,
rituals."]

And in his lecture on "Music and Literature"he speaks of how the

poet takes the twenty-fourletters of the alphabet ("ourlegacy from the
52 Religion & Literature

ancient books of magic") and through their power effects a "transfig-

uration"of language onto a supernatural plane (646).
Despite his imagery of ancient "grimoires" Mallarme'sconception of
the context of reality within which the magical "science"of poetry
works is distinctly modern and represents an extensive acceptance of
the worldview associated with the standard sciences. In the lecture
just cited, for example, he espouses a view according to which mater-
ial reality alone genuinely exists, and he interprets literature as the
practice of a delusion by which we free ourselves from, as he puts it,
the solid preponderantreality of nature in order to cultivate our will-
ful, solitary celebrations in the void (647).
In keeping with his consignment of physical reality to the domain
of the modern sciences of nature, he speaks, in "Magie,"of his own
magic as a purely mental continuation of that of his predecessors:
Quelque deference . . . envers le laboratoire eteint du grand oeuvre, con-
sisterait a reprendre, sans fourneau, les manipulations, poisons, refroidis
autrement qu'en pierreries, pour continuer par la simple intelligence (399).
[What deference . . . toward the extinct laboratory of the great work there
would be in taking up again, without an oven, the manipulations, poisons,
congealed in other ways than in jewels, to carry on by intelligence alone.]
There are also reasons, other than the fact that the physical sciences
had preempted the field, why Mallarme might have preferredthat his
alchemy be mental only. He seems to have felt for physical reality a
disdain akin to that of some of the ancient Gnostics, with whom he
shared a longing for an anti-cosmic salvation, and his own poetic
alchemy served this motive of escape into an alternative creation.
His poem, "LesFenetres,"can serve as an example of this attitude.
In it the world is imaged as a mournful hospital in which the poet feels
utter disgust toward those who breed children and wallow in mun-
dane happiness. His only solace is the mirror of art, imaged here as
his own reflection in a windowpane: "Je me mire et me vois ange!"
(33: "I marvel at myself and see myself an angel"). He realizes,
however, that the reflection is illusory and he a captive of an alien ex-
istence; if he were to break through the glass to try to fly beyond, he
would find only a void in which he would fall throughout eternity.
Of the modern writers mentioned, Joyce is probably the one who
carried forwardmost consistently the conception of art deriving from
Mallarme. With him Joyce seems to have shared the belief that the
world is essentially alien and that the only deliverance lies in art. He
also shared the conception of the artist as a latter-day mage working
within a truncated frameworkof reality, as William York Tindall re-
marked, "... for writers like Joyce, who had lost belief in the upper
 EUGENEWEBB 53

half of Hermetic reality, except insofar as it could be equated with the

poetic imagination or the unconscious, correspondences were gen-
erally horizontal, and the EmeraldTabletwas modified [from "as above,
so below"] ... to mean as here, so there" (34-5).
From the evidence of his personal library as well as the internal
evidence of his works, Joyce seems to have read extensively in the
Hermetic literature, and although one must be cautious in using A
Portraitof the Artist as a YoungMan as an autobiographical document,
the self-associations of Stephen with the craftsman Daedalus, the Egyp-
tian Thoth (225, "the god of writers"), and with Giordano Bruno as
victim of the Church, seem to express Joyce's sense of his own mis-
sion. Frances Yates has described the burning of Bruno as proceeding
from a mounting conflict in the Renaissance between the Church and
the new messianic magus figures who challenged its cultural preemi-
nence. This conflict Joyce himself reenacted belatedly in Ireland -
which he would probably have said was characteristically a few cen-
turies behind the rest of Europe. When he described Stephen's aspira-
tion to create "out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring
impalpable imperishable being" (169) and to "forge in the smithy of
[his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race" (253), he was describ-
ing his own program as well, and in terms that make clear its continu-
ity with that of the alchemical tradition. Joyce's treatment of Stephen
was strongly critical with regard to his performance, but not with re-
gard to these aspirations.
Thomas Mann, in The Magic Mountain, offers another representa-
tion of human renewal as a transmutation. At the end of that novel
the narrator asks, "May we take it that our simple hero, after so many
years of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of
being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of
the 'meaningfulness' of his love and the object of it" (651). And he
answers, "We assert, we record, that he has." He goes on, moreover,
to say that the reason Hans's thoughts, by the end of his time on the
mountain, have been able to soar so high is that "they were alchemis-
tically enhanced" (653). This has happened, we are told, through two
agencies. One was the art of music, a humanly exercised power of
"soul-enchantment." The other was the genius loci, the spirit of the
mountain, a superhuman power that seeks out potential subjects for
transmutation and then leads them, through whatever means will
avail, to insight and integration.
The source of both types of power seems clearly superhuman, but
perhaps less clearly divine, and their means may be, as Mann terms
them, "highly questionable." As Hans himself phrases the issue, there
54 Religion & Literature

are two paths in life, one the direct and honest, the other the genial
or inspired, which, though pedagogic, is evil and leads through death
(596). In TheMagicMountainthe treatment of the latter path, despite
such intimations of danger, is generallypositive. Years later, when the
loss of his homeland and the devastation of much of Europe through
another genialerindividual had rendered the sense of the questionable
much more acute, Mann looked at the negative side more closely.
The narratorof his DoctorFaustussays of the word "questionable"that
"it challenges one both to go in and to avoid; anyhow to a very cau-
tious going-in"(110). That novel is an exploration of the question of
whether such going-in can be justifiable at all.
In this work, the alchemical theme and its relation to art are ren-
dered explicit. Adrian Leverkuhn,the Faustusof the title, is an apostle,
like Mallarme or Joyce, of autonomous art- art not in the service of
a transcendent norm, but under the control of the human agent, who
exploits it for his own ends. He likens this to alchemy and magic:
"... music has always seemed to me personally a magic marriage be-
tween theology and the so diverting mathematic. Item, she has much
of the laboratory and insistent activity of the alchemists and nigro-
mancers of yore, which also stood in the sign of theology, but at the
same time in that of emancipation and apostasy. . ." (131). For
Mallarme and Joyce, the autonomous artist exerting his power over
the imaginations of the men whose consciences he sought to form was
a benign or at least a harmless figure. Adrian, however, even as he
revels in his dreams of the power of art, hears an inward voice warn-
ing him: "O homo fuge"("O man, flee"). He realizes also that to gain
such power for himself, he will have to violate the norms of the civili-
zation that subjected itself to the service of God. He chooses to reject
the warning and pursue that path of genius and violation systemati-
cally, cultivating disease, madness, and diabolism in a trajectorypar-
allel to that of his country and its sorcerer-leader.4Leverkuhn went
into the "gold-kitchen"seeking power. At the end, the narratorwould
like to hope he may also have been seeking benefits for mankind. The
question, however, is left unresolved.
DoctorFaustuswas not Mann's last statement on this subject. The
theme of the artist-alchemistand of the questionable genialeWegper-
plexed him to the end. In The Confessionsof Felix Krull: ConfidenceMan
he was still exploring the implications of the image of the Faustian
artist attempting a transmutation of the merely natural. This time,
however, the tone is lighter ("the music is by Gounod," as a tempter
in DoctorFaustuswould have phrased it) and the alchemical process is
again under what seems something like transcendentaldirection, the
 EUGENEWEBB 55

genius loci in this case playing the role of theatrical impresario and
director of a cosmic bull ring. There is no reason, however, to sup-
pose that the questionable seemed less so to Mann at the end of his
life - rather it was his characteristic to look at questions from many
angles. The fundamental issue must have seemed to him beyond his
power to resolve: that of whether the enterprise of surpassing the
natural human condition was a divinely guided initiation or a human
usurpation of divine power. Beneath that issue, moreover, and com-
plicating it in Mann's picture of the problem as a whole, was the ques-
tion of the character of God: whether God in His reality is perhaps
not the unlimited Good that the traditional Christian believed in, but
rather a sort of consummate union of good and evil, Who could be
approached only in the way Adrian Leverkuhn attempted, by deliber-
ately espousing evil in oneself. This way of thinking about the divine
is at the heart of the alchemical tradition, in which the sought-after
quintessence is the conjunctiooppositorum(union of opposites) and is to
be found only through a corruption making possible a combination
of all possible qualities. Joyce, too, knew this side of the alchemical
heritage, but he never seems to have sensed as Mann did that its im-
plications could be potentially sinister.
In the case of Marcel Proust, the use of alchemical imagery to in-
terpret both art and human life exhibits none of the sense of moral
ambiguity that Mann felt. But then also, the alchemical process he
portrayed and saw his art as furthering was much less tangential to
the Judaeo-Christian cultural scheme than was that depicted by the
others. In Proust's final conception, the alchemical process does not
augment specifically human power or attempt to replace God with
art. On the contrary, it amounts to a virtually Dantesque ascent to-
ward truth - toward a transcendent reality that demands courage,
self-denial, and humility of those who would approach it. In the early
pages of Swann's Way, the narrator, Marcel, shows how far his own
way of thinking is from that of at least one side of the Symbolist
heritage deriving from Mallarme; he describes his perplexity when
his friend Bloch states "that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if you
please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) were
all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing" (127). Bloch speaks in
this way during his own short-lived decadent phase, but Marcel's
aspirations as here described remain constant throughout the seven
volumes of Remembranceof Things Past, changing only in that he de-
velops a more mature realization of the difficulty of discerning truth
behind the veil of appearances. During the course of the novel he
undergoes one disillusionment after another as he seeks supreme re-
56 Religion & Literature

ality and beauty in this person and that and in ephemeral activities
of the imagination. Eventually this culminates, in ThePastRecaptured,
in his total disillusionment with both man and art. The results are en-
nui and despair. But these serve as preparation for other, genuinely
revelatory experiences. The latter at first make no sense to him, but
finally, after complete despair forces him to surrender his auton-
omous efforts to become a writer, they disclose their true meaning
and offer hope that a life dedicated to its service will redeem art from
its tendency to circle about the fantasies of the human ego. These ex-
periences are the moments of involuntary memory that come upon
him unforeseen, as gracious presences from a higher realm, bringing
glimpses of the very truth he had mistakenly sought in Gilberte, the
Duchesse de Guermantes, and Albertine. He had mistakenly sought
it also in his unachieved works of art; but without the necessary
seeding by the moments of involuntary memory these would have
been the mere bricolageof his own imagination as it recombined
fragments of mundane experience.
As Marcel comes to conceive it, there are two types of alchemy, or,
to put it more accurately, two forms that a single alchemical process
may take in relation to us, its subjects. One is that in which a higher
life, its grace received and accepted, is forming the soul, the true be-
ing, of the individual person:
The being which had been reborn in me when with a sudden shudder of hap-
piness I had heard the noise that was common to the spoon touching the plate
and the hammer striking the wheel, or had felt beneath my feet, the uneven-
ness that was common to the paving-stones of the Guermantes courtyard and
to those of the baptistery of St. Mark's, this being is nourished only by the
essences of things, in these alone does it find its sustenance and delight. In the
observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it with this food, it
languishes, as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect
or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of
the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by
preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human
purpose for which it intends them. (134)

The other alchemical process is that of a literary art that draws its
subject matter from these moments of revealed truth, "whichlife com-
municates to us against our will in an impression which is material
because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritualmeaning
which it is possible for us to extract"(138). What is needed, Marcel
reflects, is a method by which to "convert"the truth-bearingsensation
"into its spiritual equivalent," to distill from it the lifegiving essence:
"And this method, this apparently sole method, what was it, but the
creation of a work of art?" (139). To accept this means both the
 EUGENEWEBB 57

humiliation and the truth fulfillment of the artist. It requires that he

give up his own efforts of creation and subordinate his imagination
to a truth of which it becomes the organ of perception. It deprives him
of any pretensions of his own, but it also gives to him the dignity of
a collaborator in a work that is eternal and promises true life for all
mankind:
No longer was I indifferent to my fate as I had been on those drives back from
Rivebelle; I felt myself enhanced by this work which I bore within me as by
something fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me and which I
should have liked to deliver intact into the hands of those for whom it was in-
tended, hands which were not my own. ... I knew that my brain was like a
mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great
price. (263)5

These writers, then, represent a sampling of the diverse forms that

the alchemical theme has taken in modern thought. In Proust the
alchemy is primarily the activity of a transcendent principle working
upon man through a kind of grace, which despite the emphasis on the
aesthetic, remains recognizably akin to that which in the Commedia is
depicted as guiding Dante toward the beatific vision. Neither Mal-
larme nor Joyce, on the other hand, retained any belief in an actual
transcendentreality, and for both the image of the magician-alchemist
was a symbol of their sense that if any real satisfaction for human
longings was to be found, it would have to be in creations of the
autonomous human imagination- creations which, of course, had
the poignant disadvantage for their creators of being palpably arti-
ficial. This way of thinking has been by far the more common among
modern writers, whether they image the artist as alchemist or not,
and it would be interesting to explore the permutations of alternating
pride and despairto which this conceptionof art has given rise. Goethe
and Mann represent a somewhat less common, but also character-
istically modern view of the issue, expressing mingled attraction and
suspicion toward the magical-alchemical enterprise and the ideal of
the autonomous human exploiter of superhuman powers.
What are some reasons the image of the alchemist has had appeal
for the modern imagination? What the alchemist and magician share,
and what makes them perpetually fascinating to the human imagina-
tion and will, is the dream of autonomous power, of a knowledge
which could give both cognitive and pragmatic mastery of existence
to the one who wields it. That this should tempt an artist is no more
surprisingthan that it should tempt a Bacon or a Descartes, especially
if, as in the case of so many in the modern world, one no longer feels
able to believe that there is any other, higher power in which to trust
58 Religion & Literature

and to which one could and should subject one's ends. Where there
is a vacuum of power, the human will rushes to fill it.
The temptation can carry with it its nemesis, however, as Proust
realized explicitly and as some others have come to feel at least im-
plicitly. When man becomes the sole master of existence and the cre-
ator through his own imagination of any meaning that is to be found
in life, he finds himself, once the elation of autonomy subsides, in
peril of incurable ennui. As Eric Voegelin has said, "When the gods
are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes bor-
ing"("On Hegel" 335). This is that boredom of which Flaubert asked,
"Do you know what boredom is? Not that common, banal boredom
that comes from idleness, but that modern boredom that eats the very
entrails of a man and turns an intelligent being into a walking shade,
a thinking ghost"(Letter of June 7, 1844, 28). It is also the effect of
the alchemy described by Baudelaire in his "Alchimiede la douleur"
("Alchemy of Woe"):
Hermes inconnu qui m'assistes
Et qui toujours m'intimidas,
Tu me rends l'egal de Midas,
Le plus triste des alchimistes;
Par toi je change Tor en fer
Et le paradis en enfer. . . . (73)

["O unknown Hermes, who aid me and constantly frighten me, you make me
the equal of Midas, the saddest of alchemists; by you I change gold into iron
and paradise into hell."]

To return to this essay's point of departure, I said in the beginning

that for the mainstream of the classical-Christian cultural tradition
there were essentially two alternatives in alchemy: the alchemy of
man and the alchemy of God, with the first seen as a pretension to
powers that belonged properly to God. An element in the transition
to the distinctly modern cultural enterprise was the rejection of this
dichotomy in favor of the idea of a purely human, but unambiguously
beneficent alchemy. The pursuit of autonomous human power, for
which the alchemist is one of many symbols, has been a dominant
theme of modern culture, and to many in the period it has seemed
to offer the unequivocal promise of a new earth and a new heaven of
art. Some modern writers, such as Mallarme and Joyce, have used
the figure of the alchemist as a symbol to express this sense of human
power and fulfillment. Still, the moral and spiritual ambiguity of the
symbol has never entirely faded from view. To at least some represen-
tatives of modern thought the alchemist'senterprisehas come to seem,
 EUGENEWEBB 59

in Mann's phrase, "highly questionable." Such writers as Baudelaire,

Mann, and Proust have the virtue for us, at our present point in the
troubled history of modernity, of renewing our sense of the funda-
mental questionability of the enterprise we are all of us to some degree
caught up in: If such power is ours to use, how can we be sure that
we will use it well?

Universityof Washington

NOTES

'Although magic and alchemy are distinguishable, the distinction is often not easy
to make, since both arts have tended to interest the same figures for the same reason:
the power they confer. Except where they become clearly distinct, the present essay
will treat them together, since they express basically identical cultural values. For a
helpful bibliographic survey of both areas, see McKnight.
2Fora list of satirical treatments among both major and minor writers in medieval
and renaissance England, see Stanton J. Linden, "Francis Bacon and Alchemy":
547-8.
3This pattern of thought has quite ancient roots. Mircea Eliade (42, 47, 57) traces
it back to the earliest exponents of the art of metallurgy, who spoke of the furnace
as an artificial womb in which nature's gestation of minerals could be hastened by
additional heat; they looked upon this act as a sort of transgression which must be
justified by the claim to be aiding rather than forcing the maternal power of the
Earth.
4This last phrase is more than just a figure of speech; on the role of magic in the
National Socialist imagination see Vondung.
5It is perhaps worth mentioning that the reference to mining ores in this passage
links the tradition of alchemy to those of mining and metallurgy, to which it has been
closely related historically as was indicated in note 3 above.

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