Alchemy as a sacramental science, a baptism of fire, a spiritual communion and a theophanic transfiguration.

Alchemy as a sacramental science

a baptism of fire, spiritual communion, and a theophanic transfiguration.

The modern narrative tells us that alchemy, despite all its metaphysical speculations and its unbridled pretensions to transform the elements (to make gold from lead and others), was photochemistry and this is what must be rescued. With alchemy it happened, university professors tell us, something similar to what happened with astrology, which in all its madness and superstition ended up, directly and indirectly, generating astronomy, and we can discard everything magical-spiritual and stay with the chemical or physical So then, what Newton did at night in his alchemical laboratory - or his apocalyptic speculations - is just a curious story anecdote to which we should not pay much attention.

But wanting to appropriate alchemy by suggesting that it has historical value but only as an antecedent is to disarm it and steal its own quintessence. For alchemy is not a crazy project that was then redirected to the limits of scientific instrumental reason, which was saved from itself. Alchemy is part of a radically different view from that of modern science, although it shares with it its investigation of the matter. Alchemy is far from certain Platonic and Neoplatonic readings that conceive asceticism or philosophical practice as forgetfulness of the body and as a purely spiritual and celestial direction.

Well, and in this sense, it is similar to tantra and theurgy, alchemy recognizes that for the liberation or redemption of the soul and the world it is necessary to operate in the matter, either in nature as a whole or in the body of the human being. Alchemy is a spiritual science - a science of spiritualizing the world, of creating, as the apostle Paul exhorted, a soma pneumatikon - and therefore a contradiction concerning modern science, which is not science but because it is only material. In this sense, it is obvious that Western alchemy should be considered mostly as a Christian (and Islamic heterodoxy in its transition from antiquity to Renaissance Europe). Already Carl Jung studied extensively the relationship between Christ and the philosopher's loss, being the great work of alchemy in some way the alchemist's christification or, at the same time, the purification of nature - of the sin of the world - so that the spirit can incarnate and vehicular the world towards a paradisiacal state.

Jung's reading of alchemy is well known - and controversial in many ways, although not in the preponderance of Christ in the opus, this being the archetype of the god-man or deification of the alchemist. Less known is the interest in the alchemy of orthodox theologian Olivier Clément (1922-2009), a man of enormous scholarship who became interested in alchemy, cabal and oriental religions in his youth. Clément writes insightfully in his essay L'oeil du feu:

The alchemy contrary to what is repeated in the stories of science has never been, except in its most opaque aspects, a type of infantile and hesitant chemistry. It was a "sacramental" science for which material appearances had no autonomy, but only represented the "condensation" of mental and spiritual realities. Nature, when one penetrates its spontaneity and its mystery, becomes transparent: on the one hand it is transfigured under the luminosity of divine energies and on the other it incorporates and symbolizes the "angelic" states that fallen man can only experience for brief moments, listening to a piece of music and contemplating a face.

This paragraph recalls what was said by Professor Gilles Quispel, who suggested that alchemy was "the yoga of the Gnostics." However, Clément is not so quick to relate alchemy to Gnosticism and considers that in reality alchemy and Christianity grew symbiotically. In this sense, it is worth remembering that, to name just a few examples, Alberto Magno, Roger Bacon, and presumably Thomas Aquinas himself practiced this hermetic art. And Hermes Trismegisto himself had been included in the college of saints in a panel in the Cathedral of Siena.

Clément's reading hits the mark when he points out that alchemy was a sacramental science, where nature itself was seen as a temple in which to celebrate the Eucharist or some other sacrament with which man united with God, and heaven with the Earth. The word sacrament is used to translate "mystery" in Christianity. The sacrament is the encounter with the mystery; For the alchemists, nature was that living temple that contained the mystery of the redemption of the world and the resurrection of the body. And the transmutation of the elements was also a transfiguration of the alchemist, a recapitulation of the creation of the cosmos and the passion of Christ.