Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus Claire Fanger KEY WORDS Franciscans, Medieval Europe, 13th century, 14th century, alchemy, elixir of life, Roger Bacon, Vitalis of Furno, John of Rupescissa, Christianity, apocalypticism, Joachim of Fiore zachary a. matus. Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 216. This book is focused on three late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century Franciscans concerned with alchemy, and in particular interested in the alchemical notion of the elixir of life. The elixir was a material substance with spiritual properties; its formula was occult (though tended to involve distillation). It was understood as a medicine of wide application that could extend lives and that conferred spiritual gifts, enhancing intellect and other virtues and powers of the soul. The authors primarily under scrutiny are Roger Bacon (˚c. 1292), Vitalis of Furno (˚1327) and John of Rupescissa (˚after 1365). Matus does not suggest there is anything like a Franciscan “school of alchemy” or even a single way of thinking about the elixir itself; rather he is interested in the nexus between the alchemy and the Franciscanism of each author, and uses his analysis of this relation as a way of fingering broader connections between religion and science in the period. In a general way it is not news that that premodern alchemy in all of its cultural milieus has religious ramifications. In Christian culture, alchemical processes, for the writers that countenance them, are likely to be treated as sacral, and to be associated with allied Christian processes or substances linking the material and spiritual, such as the Eucharist, or resurrected bodies. Yet I know of no other book that sets out to examine Christian thinking about alchemy using such a specific set of focal points within a specific tradition of Christian religiosity. This is a valuable book from many angles; it is [End Page 489] readable, curates its data points well, and conveys fascinating information in a useful package. The book comprises four chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter 1, “Franciscans and the Sacral Cosmos,” examines historical contexts for the Franciscan interests in the natural world that ground the alchemical discourse, starting with Francis’s Canticle of Brother Sun, and drawing interestingly on Peter John Olivi and his views on Genesis. Chapter 2, “Three Elixirs,” concerns the traditions surrounding the elixir of life that informed the theological and cosmological models of each of his Franciscan subjects: Roger Bacon connects the elixir to the resurrected body; John of Rupescissa reads it, as the quintessence, a literal distillation of heaven. The treatment in Vitalis’s largely compilatory work, Pro conservanda sanitate (On Preserving Health), examined as a kind of bridge between the two views, is important largely because it draws on widely available encyclopedic texts. Vitalis understands the elixir as distilled wine or brandy, though with numerous applications for it that move this mundane substance into esoteric realms. Chapter 3, “The Apocalyptic Imperative,” looks at apocalyptic speculations and how these connected to alchemy. This chapter is a kind of keystone for the book, not only because all the authors under scrutiny had an urgent sense of impending apocalypse which they tended to view (with greater or lesser degrees of openness) through a Joachite lens, but because their thinking touches on crucial events in the history of the Franciscan order in the controversies over the Spiritual Franciscans who were suspected of heresy and periodically repressed after 1295—a point when, as Matus notes (101), the condemnation of alchemy and other esoteric sciences also becomes more acute. The chapter draws in a useful treatment of Joachim of Fiore and his Trinitarian understanding of sacred history and shows how concerns with esoteric science and the natural world come to seem vital under pressure of imminent apocalypse. Chapter 4, “A Subjunctive Science,” discusses how Franciscan ritual life opens up a way of adumbrating the human relationship to God and the cosmos. The term “subjunctive science” refers to the way knowledge was understood to concern that which must happen as importantly as that which actually happens—“the world...