Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy

Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer and the Hartlib Circle

John T. Young

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138625433
• eBook ISBN: 9780429862137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in 1998, this is a fundamental re-assessment of the world-view of the alchemists, natural philosophers and intelligencers of the mid 17th century. Based almost entirely upon the extensive and hitherto little-researched manuscript archive of Samuel Hartlib, it charts and contextualises the personal and intellectual history of Johann Moriaen (c.1592-1668), a Dutch-German alchemist and natural philosopher. Moriaen was closely acquainted with many of the leading thinkers and experimenters of his time, including René Descartes, J.A. Comenius, J.R. Glauber and J.S. Küffler. His detailed reports of relations with these figures and his response to their work provide a uniquely informed insight into the world of alchemy and natural philosophy. This study also illuminates the nature and mechanisms of intellectual and technological exchanges between Germany, The Netherlands and England.

PART ONE

Johann Moriaen: A Biographical Sketch

CHAPTER ONE

Servant of the Church

‘Morian […] is admirably skilful but can bring nothing to perfection but is very inconstant and falls from one thing to another’ – Kenelm Digby, cited in Ephemerides, 1654, HP 29/4/11 A.

Origins and Upbringing

The minister, physician, natural philosopher and would-be alchemical adept Johann Moriaen was born in Nürnberg in the latter half of 1591 or shortly thereafter.¹ His father Frans was almost certainly a Dutch Calvinist exile of comfortable means, and Johann grew up in the tight-knit society-within-a-society of the refugees, who were aliens both by nationality and religion.

In the late sixteenth century, the Free Imperial City of Nürnberg was a commercial centre strategically located at a nexus of major European trade routes. Long before the Reformation, it already had a substantial Dutch population purely on the strength of its economic connections with the Netherlands. This in itself recommended it as a possible destination to the Dutch refugees driven out of their homeland after the Netherlands, at this time hereditary lands of the Habsburgs, fell to Felipe II of Spain in 1556 and the new ruler set about extirpating Protestantism from his dominions. The Nürnberg authorities viewed this influx with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the vast majority of such exiles were Calvinists, and the Stadtrat or City Council, though humanistically inclined and averse to rigid dogmatism, did not wish to see the faith of the solidly Lutheran populace tainted with the new heresy, or the city a prey to partisan strife. Nor did it wish to provide the city’s great Catholic neighbour Bavaria with an excuse for territorial aggression by overtly fostering a religion that had no legal existence within the Holy Roman Empire under the terms of the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg. On the other hand, the city’s market-based economy, which had suffered from the political upheavals of mid-century, stood to benefit from an infusion of skilled artisans and craftsmen. It was precisely from this walk of life that the overwhelming majority of the Dutch refugees hailed – exile being for them, as it was not for unskilled labourers and peasants, a financially viable option. Like a number of other commercial centres in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,² Nürnberg discovered that a measure of religious toleration was good for business.

In 1569, as the notoriously bloody measures of Felipe’s new lieutenant the Duke of Alva (appointed Governor 1567) led to a redoubling of the exodus from the Netherlands, the Nürnberg City Council moved from toleration to positive encouragement of the immigrants, or at least of certain selected ones, having spotted an opportunity to capitalise on the textile trade that was being driven out of the Netherlands along with Protestantism. It paid the travelling expenses of and found or even built accommodation for a handpicked group of skilled workers in this field – dyers, weavers, stitchers and embroiderers – who with their families numbered about forty. Far greater numbers of exiles who arrived of their own accord were also admitted. Many such immigrants acquired Nürnberg citizenship, a stipulation for this being that they should undertake not to set up any separate church or ‘sect’ within the Lutheran city, or make any attempt to convert or quarrel with any of the native populace. In other words, the city authorities wanted their technical expertise and commercial experience badly enough to be prepared to put up with their obnoxious opinions, provided they in turn were prepared to keep those opinions to themselves. Thus there was from the mid-sixteenth century a substantial and almost exclusively immigrant Calvinist population in Nürnberg, principally Dutch but including French Huguenots and English Puritans, unable (in principle at least) to make any public profession of their faith or conduct any communal worship, but accepting this as the price of shelter in a city where it was at least tacitly accepted that they practised it in private. Though there were periodical investigations of secret religious services being conducted within the Calvinist community, leading to the issuing of threats and admonishments, the authorities were decidedly lukewarm about taking real reprisals against such activity. It was not, however, until 1650, in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia, that a Reformed Church was officially recognised in Nürnberg.³

Among these immigrants was a braid-maker by the name of Hans Morianus, who acquired Nürnberg citizenship on 12 April 1581.⁴ Two years later, this Morianus featured in a group of nine immigrant citizens and denizens who were summoned before the city court for having had their children baptised in Reformed churches of the Upper Palatinate instead of Lutheran ones in Nürnberg.⁵ That they had done so testifies to the tenacity of their faith, since such a journey entailed three days’ travelling (with, obviously, a young infant in tow). The City Council admonished its stiffnecked asylum-seekers to stop visiting churches outside the city boundaries, but appears as usual not to have imposed any actual penalties – or to have had much effect on their subsequent conduct⁶

The surname Morian[us] is a highly unusual one, and it is beyond the bounds of plausible coincidence that this Hans Morianus should not have been related to Moriaen’s father Frans and his wife Maria, née von Manten (which is probably a Germanisation of Van Manten).⁷ While there is no documentary evidence that the family was Dutch, the Netherlands are far and away the likeliest place of origin for Calvinist immigrants to Nürnberg at this period. The assumption is effectively clinched by the fact that Moriaen consistently spelled his name in the Dutch manner, in preference to the much more Germanic ‘Morian’ favoured by almost everyone else at the time or since,⁸ and that he was fluent in Dutch well before he settled in Amsterdam in 1638.⁹ He was not baptised in Nürnberg, which suggests that the family persisted in the practice of sneaking out of Nürnberg to the Upper Palatinate to celebrate communion, weddings and baptisms according to the rites of their own faith.

The few other facts about Moriaen’s family discernible from his letters can be quickly summarised. He had at least two sisters. One married the merchant Abraham de Bra, another member of the Nürnberg Dutch community.¹⁰ He left the city in 1633, probably for Amsterdam, and subsequently became a leading figure in the Dutch West India Company.¹¹ Another sister married into the Abeele family – a transparently Dutch name.¹² Her husband may well have been related either to the Jan Abeels of Flanders who was an elder of the important Dutch Reformed Church of Austin Friars in London, from 1604 to 1611 or earlier, or the English-born John vanden Abeele who was elder from 1630–36, both of them merchants.¹³ Moriaen also had at least one brother, whose daughter in 1649 or 50 married into the family of the renowned Frankfurt printer and engraver Matthias Merian.¹⁴ Other members of his family lived in Cracow, whence Catholic persecution drove them into exile in Danzig.¹⁵

The first surviving documentary evidence of Moriaen is his matriculation at Heidelberg University in 1611.¹⁶ Later, Moriaen fondly recalled his student days at Heidelberg and his friendship there with Georg Vechner (later a collaborator and editor of Comenius), for whose accommodation he apparently paid.¹⁷ His family evidently had the funds and the will to ensure he was well provided for. Since Moriaen subsequently became a Reformed minister, it is altogether likely that he studied theology, but the records yield no more than the date of matriculation, with no indication of how long he remained in Heidelberg or what degree, if any, he obtained.

Heidelberg, capital of the Palatinate, was a stronghold of Calvinism at this period. The Reformed faith had been imposed on the province in 1562 (and again, after a Lutheran interlude, in 1583), thus gaining for the cause the oldest university in Germany, and one of the most reputable. Though it initially remained academically conservative by comparison with the newly-founded Reformed academies such as Herborn (established 1584), the ethos was changing at the very moment of Moriaen’s arrival. In particular, the logical and pedagogical ideas of Bartholomaus Keckermann (1571–1609) were (somewhat belatedly) meeting with an enthusiastic reception. Keckermann had set out to define what he called ‘methodical Peripateticism’, a synthesis of the traditional Aristotelian logical methodology with the newer and ostensibly anti-Aristotelian ideas of Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus) which had become a standby of Reformed education. Ramism, as Howard Hotson puts it, ‘was an instrument adopted in order to achieve a Second Reformation’, and Keckermann’s achievement was a fusion of ‘Ramist clarity with Peripatetic substance’.¹⁸ Keckermann was a founder of the encyclopedic tradition that led through Alsted to Comenius and his notion of Pansophy, of which Moriaen was later to become a prominent champion and supporter. Though there is not a single mention in his surviving correspondence of either Ramus or Keckermann – or, for that matter, Aristotle – his university education took place at the same time Comenius was studying under Alsted in Herborn, just the time when the notions of universal method and encyclopedic knowledge were achieving their greatest vogue, especially in Reformed establishments.¹⁹ It is even possible Moriaen first met Comenius during the latter’s brief spell at Heidelberg in 1613, but it is by no means certain Moriaen was still there by then.

Under the Cross

There is no record of Moriaen at all for the next eight years, but at some point during this period he became a minister in Frankfurt am Main. The situation there must have been familiar enough. Like Nürnberg, Frankfurt was an Imperial city under Lutheran control, cautiously and uneasily tolerating a substantial Calvinist minority of largely Dutch origin which was accorded no officially recognised church. Services and sacraments could be delivered only secretly, in private houses, just as they were in Nürnberg. As a boy, Moriaen would have attended such clandestine religious gatherings in his home city; as a young man, he conducted them in Frankfurt.

A new experience for him at this time, which may well have had an impact on his later thought and attitudes, will have been the Jewish ghetto. There was a sizeable Jewish community in Frankfurt, tolerated like the Reformed Christians because it was economically useful, but very much on sufferance and with far more severe circumscriptions. The Jews were subject to a strict curfew, being confined to their ghetto after dark and on Sundays, and at no time permitted to leave it without sporting the stigma of a prominent yellow circle sewn onto their clothing, or to assemble outside it in groups of more than two.²⁰ No comment whatsoever by Moriaen survives concerning his time in this city, but it is a reasonable conjecture that his experiences or observations in Frankfurt had a bearing on the keen interest he later displayed in Judaism, and the considerable sympathy he showed, by the standards of the day, for its practitioners.

In 1619, at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, he was summoned by his Church to the still less congenial surroundings of Cologne, one of the most staunchly and intransigently Roman Catholic enclaves of the entire Empire. The records of the German Reformed Church there (henceforth Protokolle) note that on 27 February 1619,

Since the Brothers have decided to summon a third minister, and one by the name of Johannes Moriaen has been suggested to us, who is prepared to be seen next week in Frankfurt, Brothers Wilhelm Engels and Johann Fassing are to arrange for the said Moriaen’s preaching to be heard by the leading members of the church, that we may judge whether he might fruitfully serve this congregation.²¹

Apparently his preaching met with the approval of the church au...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part One: Johann Moriaen: A Biographical Sketch
• Part Two: Universal Wisdom
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index