The Alchemy of Conquest

Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

Ralph Bauer, Anna Brickhouse, Kirsten Silva Gruesz

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942551
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period.

As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds, " and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

Part I

The Alchemy of Exception

1

The Hermeneutics of Secrecy

Aristotle and Discovery

In order to illustrate the problem, we may begin with semantics. In 1500 the meaning of the word “to discover” was not yet limited to the rather narrow modern sense of finding something new or previously unknown; rather, it could still have several meanings, some of which were synonymous with the verb “to invent” (from Latin invenire, to come upon, to find). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the early modern semantic field of the word “to discover” included the modern sense of “obtain[ing] sight or knowledge of (something previously unknown) for the first time;” but it also included several now obsolete or archaic meanings. For example, we find the now obsolete sense of “to manifest, exhibit, display (an attribute, quality, feeling, etc.).” We also find the now obsolete sense of “to explore” and to “bring to fuller knowledge” (i.e., of something that is already partially known). Finally, we find the (now archaic) sense of “reveal[ing]” or “uncover[ing]” something that had been hidden by something or someone, especially in the sense of exposing something that had been kept “secret.” Lacking the oppositions between tradition and innovation, the known and the unknown, the early modern word “to discover” still had various meanings that we moderns would deem to be mutually exclusive. By the nineteenth century, it appears, the semantic field of the word “to discover” had completed a process of contraction toward the more exclusive and restrictive modern sense of finding by empirical means something new or previously unknown.1

The semantic change in the word “to discover” in English and other modern Western languages over the last five hundred years reflects a more fundamental epistemological transformation in scientific hermeneutics, in what it means to discover something. However, the roots of this modern transformation reach back to the later Middle Ages. For such early Christian church fathers and doctors as Clement, Origen, and Augustine, discovery meant primarily the finding of truth by means of divine revelation and Neoplatonic scriptural hermeneutics aimed at reconciling the New and Old Testaments. Since the twelfth century, however, discovery was in Europe increasingly understood in terms of the works of Aristotle, many of which had previously been unknown in the Latin West and become available only via translations from the Arabic in the context of the Christian Reconquest of southern Europe from Muslim domination.2 For Aristotle, all inquiry began with sensory perception. In the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes: “By nature, all men long to know. An indication is their delight in the senses. For these, quite apart from their utility, are intrinsically delightful, and that through the eyes more than the others.”3 While historians of science now generally give due credit to the tremendous importance of medieval Aristotelianism—also known as the Thirteenth-Century Scientific Revolution—for the history of modern science,4 one of the significant differences between the Thirteenth- and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution is that the former did not result in a “paradigm shift” (in the Kuhnian sense) in what it means to discover something, as the impact of Aristotelianism resulted in a variety of “Aristotelian” traditions that had previously led separate lives and even had distinct origins in the many works of Aristotle. Thus, in the Topics, Aristotle had elaborated a procedure of discovery as “invention” that was designed to serve as a guide in the choice of appropriate evidence and the most fruitful questions to ask in a variety of fields, including natural philosophy, ethics, politics, and rhetoric. However, when later elaborating more fully his system of logic in the Organon, especially in the Prior and the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle mainly focused on demonstration—the presentation of results in order to establish conclusions on the basis of accepted premises by syllogistic reason. In other words, the earlier emphasis on invention in the Topics had given way to a concern with demonstration in the Organon. The Topics subsequently played an important role in a continuous Western tradition of rhetoric, there being developed by Roman thinkers, most prominently Cicero and Quintilian, and later by Renaissance humanists such as Peter Ramus. By contrast, Aristotle’s method of demonstration by syllogistic reason, as outlined in the Organon, became the dominant epistemology in medieval Scholastic natural philosophy.5

Many of the theologians of the Dominican Order—including Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, Robert Kilwardby, and most of all, Thomas Aquinas—were on the forefront of elaborating this late medieval assimilation of Aristotelian natural philosophy in the Latin West that has come to be known as “Scholasticism,” the synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy and Neoplatonic Christian theology. The “dogs of the lord” (as the Dominicans were known) had been newly founded in southern France in order to combat various brands of lay spirituality emerging from the impact of (Arabized) Aristotelian naturalism, especially the Albigensian Heresy, which had revived the old Manichean idea of the dual active principles of good and evil in the world that had already tempted St. Augustine.6 Although the “Cathars” were defeated in a bloody crusade, the theological debate over how to reconcile Aristotle’s pagan ideas with Christian Scripture continued. On the one end of the spectrum were the Christian followers of the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Averroës (aka Ibn Rushd), who had elaborated a synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy and Islamic theology. Ensconced in the arts faculties at the University of Paris, the Averroists insisted on a “double truth”—the notion that Aristotelian reason and the Christian faith were separate and ultimately irreconcilable epistemologies that had to be pursued in distinct disciplines. On the other end of the spectrum was the natural theology of such prominent Franciscan theologians as Roger Bacon (ca. 1219–1292), Bonaventure (1221–1274), John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308), and William of Ockham (ca. 1280–1347). The central tenet of Franciscan natural theology was the concept of reductio, the “reduction” (or leading back) of all of the pagan liberal arts to the study of Christian Scripture (reductio artium ad sacram scripturam).7

Aquinas’s influential compromise between the two extremes has come to be known as “Thomist” natural law metaphysics. According to the Thomists, the universe is governed by four realms of law—eternal law (the law by which God Himself acts); divine law (that which He revealed in the Bible and on which the church is founded); natural law (that which God implants in all men so that they should be able to understand his design and intention for the world); and human, or positive, law (that which men enact in order to govern themselves). Although the Thomists drew a distinction between these four realms, they did so in terms not of a separation but of a nested hierarchy in which human law was a subsection of natural law; natural law a subsection of divine law; and divine law a subsection of eternal law (see fig. 4). Because the four levels were congruous, eternal and divine laws were partially knowable insofar as men participated in them through their experience and natural reason. As Aquinas had put it in the Summa, “natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.”8 Conversely, everything in the world happened on account of the first cause of eternal law, but it manifested itself through and was mediated by the secondary causes of natural law.

For the Thomists, natural law thus consisted of certain higher and universal principles that were reflected in the multiplicity of all positive human laws, regardless of culture and religion. Human societies and governments, whether Christian or pagan, originated from this innate principle of human nature. They were “perfect” insofar as they were in themselves complete, having evolved according to natural principles that are entirely independent from Christian revelation and Salvation history. The claim for a human participation in divine law was theologically grounded by the revelation in Genesis that Adam was created in God’s own image and that all men descended from Adam. Although the biblical Fall had “wounded” (as Aquinas put it) men’s direct experience of God, they retained a natural and innate tendency to want to know His truth. The Thomists referred to this innate tendency as “synderesis,” meaning the principle in the moral consciousness of every human being which directs the agent to good and restrains him or her from evil. It is the human counterpart of animal “instinct” inhering in reason; for what all humans shared—and what distinguished them from other living things in Aristotelian natural philosophy, such as animals and plants—is that they have reason, or (as Aristotle understood it) a “rational soul.”9

Figure 4. Thomist natural law metaphysics. (© the author.)

However, Thomist metaphysics never attained a paradigmatic status within late medieval Scholasticism but found itself in constant contest with various other ways of understanding the world. One of the major controversies that emerged from the attempt of reconciling Aristotelianism with Christianity during the late Middle Ages was the so-called Wegestreit, the conflict between the Thomists’ via antigua of metaphysical realism and the Franciscans’ via moderna of metaphysical nominalism. In essence, the controversy revolved around the question of whether or not abstract universals have “real” existence; that is, whether or not they were part of God’s original Creation. Whereas the realists insisted that the original Creation consisted of particulars and universals, the nominalists held that reality consisted of particulars only and that universals are “but names”—the creations not of God but of man’s (fallible) fancy—that have no “real” existence.10 The Franciscans’ via moderna of metaphysical nominalism was rooted in the extreme theological voluntarism of some of their most prominent thirteenth-century theologians, especially John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who insisted on the absolute sovereignty of the divine will. Thus, whereas the Thomists held that reality is the manifestation of the “second causes” of natural laws and principles that are intelligible to human reason and that are rarely broken by God’s supernatural and direct intervention, the nominalists held that reality was the direct manifestation of the “first cause” of a divine will that was, by definition, inscrutable. By the end of the fourteenth century, Franciscan voluntarism had gained a position of dominance at the influential theology faculty at the University of Paris, with such prominent Conciliarists as Jean Gerson and Pierre d’Ailly.11

The controversy in Scholastic metaphysics between the adherents of the via antigua and the via moderna held important implications for the history of discovery in natural philosophy. According to the Thomists’ realist metaphysics, all reasonable men could begin with empirical observation and, by reasonable deduction (syllogism), arrive at metaphysical truth, as though ascending a ladder based on a foundation of experience and constructed of steps of reasonable deductions. The nominalists, by contrast, doubted the consistency between man’s reason and metaphysics. As David Herlihy has put it, in the nominalist understanding, “the human intellect had not the power to penetrate the metaphysical structures of the universe. It could do no more than observe events as they flowed. Moreover, the omnipotent power of God meant in the last analysis that there could be no fixed natural order. God could change what He wanted, when He wanted. The nominalist looked on a universe dominated by arbitrary motions.”12 The upshot of this via moderna was threefold. Epistemologically, it disaggregated naturalist inquiry from metaphysics; politically, it shored up monarchical pretensions to power by likening God to an absolutist tyrant who had created the laws of nature but could break them at his pleasure at any moment; and legally, it undermined the centrality of natural law as a nexus between the human and the divine. As Heiko Oberman has explained, this shift in the terms of debate about the existence of universals had profound consequences for the history of science in the West in a decisive turn from the deductive to the inductive method during the early modern period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.13 As we will see in chapter 2, this background in nominalist metaphysics also helps to explain why, during the later Middle Ages since the thirteenth century, alchemy and apocalyptic expectancy flourished primarily in Franciscan circles.

While the nominalist opposition to the Thomist synthesis was registered already by thirteenth-century Franciscan contemporaries of Aquinas on theological and philosophical grounds, it gained momentum during subsequent historical events of cataclysmic crisis during the fourteenth century. The first one of these events came when Europe lost one-third of its population to the Black Death. In the face of apocalyptic catastrophe, the cause and course of which seemed utterly inscrutable, Aquinas’s sublime sense of order was difficult to reconcile with lived reality. The second crisis came in form of the Great Papal Schism in 1378, in which two competing popes temporarily tore apart the Catholic Church. In the fifteenth century, a new generation of influential nominalist theologians such as Gabriel Biel laid the foundation for the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.14 And while the sixteenth century saw a resurgence of Thomism at the influential University of Salamanca in such Dominican theologians as Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, the nominalist tradition continued to flourish at the University of Paris with such prominent figures as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and John Mair; as well as at Salamanca in the writings of Bartolomé de Castro and Antonio Coronel; and at the newly founded University of Alcalá de Henares with such formidable theologians as the Erasmian humanist Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros.15

I will return to the historical connection between metaphysics, alchemy, and conquest in later chapters. As I will argue, it is no coincidence that many of the “moderns” such as Mair and Cisneros played an important role in the theological defense of violent conquest and the Spanish rights of discovery in the New World. Conversely, it is no coincidence that many of the Neo-Thomist proponents of realist metaphysics (such as Vitoria and De Soto) were generally (with some caveats) among the harshest critics of the Spanish conquest. Here, it will suffice to note that, while Aristotle’s Politics played an important role in this metaphysical debate about conquest and the elaboration of a theory of the “rights’” of discovery in the early modern law of n...