Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Depiction of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont on the right behind his father

Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (* before October 20, 1614 (baptism date) in Vilvoorde , Flemish Brabant , † 1699 in Cölln near Berlin) was a Flemish polymath, writer and diplomat. He is the son of Johan Baptista van Helmont .

life and work

In 1648 Helmont published the works of his father, who, based on alchemy , pioneered scientific chemistry under the title Ortus Medicinae (ed. In Amsterdam) . After the death of his father in 1644, Helmont renounced his inheritance and began a life that he himself called Eremita peregrinans (the wandering hermit). In addition to hermetic , alchemical and medical work, he mainly dealt with theosophy and Kabbalah and worked with Henry More , a representative of the Cambridge Platonists . Together they edited the translations of cabalistic texts by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth . Franciscus van Helmont had important contacts in the Netherlands, where he was known to Adam Boreel (1603–1667) and Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669). Later he maintained contact with the 'lantern', a circle around the merchant Benjamin Furly from Rotterdam, which included John Locke .

He influenced Franciscus van den Enden (* around 1602, † 1674) and the Spanish medic Juan de Cabriada (1665-1714). In Amsterdam around 1690 he was working on a theory that supported Johann Konrad Ammann's work with deaf people.

Van Helmont spent a lot of time in Germany and England. From 1644, when his father died, to 1656, when he was elevated to the nobility by the German emperor, he was constantly diplomatically active for German princes and their families. From 1648 until his death he was constantly traveling between England, the Netherlands, Hanover, Berlin, Heidelberg, Sulzbach , Vienna, Switzerland and Italy. His intellectual abilities, his diplomatic dexterity and his reputation as a doctor gave him access to the royal courts of Europe. Above all, he worked for the Palatinate family ( Elisabeth von Herford , Prince Ruprecht and Sophie von Hanover ) and for Duke Christian August von Pfalz-Sulzbach as a doctor, consultant and diplomat. In 1661 he was arrested in Kitzingen by soldiers from Duke Philipp Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg . He was brought to Rome, where he was interrogated and even tortured by the Inquisition . He was only released after eighteen months. In 1667 he published a treatise in Latin Alphabeti veri naturalis hebraici brevissima delineatio (German Kurtzer draft of the actual natural alphabet of the sacred language ) on the " Adamite language ", which he equated with Hebrew . He argued that the Hebrew alphabet, like musical notes, implicitly gives pronunciation guidelines.

By van Helmont mediation was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth 1,668 yards and councilor of Duke Christian August at his court in Sulzbach . Helmont was also a friend of Leibniz , who later also wrote his obituary. In 1671 he introduced Leibniz and Knorr von Rosenroth to one another. Van Helmont worked on the publication Aufgang der Artzney-Kunst , a German translation of the Ortus Medicinae , published by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth in Sulzbach in 1683 .

In 1670 he traveled to England, where he met King Charles II . He was active in a diplomatic mission for Elisabeth von der Pfalz . There he also met Robert Boyle , a leading chemist in his father's tradition.

Through his work as Anne Conway's doctor , he began attending Quaker meetings in 1675 . In return, he introduced them to Kabbalah. From 1671 until her death in 1679 he lived with her at Ragley Hall. Twenty years later he was the subject of the "Keithian Controversy", a controversy within Quakerism, in which van Helmont took the side represented by George Keith , which eventually split off.

In the text A Cabbalistical Dialogue (published 1677 in Latin, 1682 in English) he defended the Kabbalistic metaphysics . For him it is closely related to the Kabbalah Denudata by Knorr von Rosenroth and places matter and spirit in a continuum by describing matter as a "coalition" of monads . There are various aspects of the development of the concept of the monad that Conway and van Helmont shared with Leibniz. In the same period, his work Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae , which was often attached to the Kabbala Denudata as an anonymous essay, claimed to be a treatise on the conversion of Jews to Christianity. At the same time it served as an introduction to Christian Kabbalah and the identification of Jesus Christ with Adam Qadmon in the sense of the Lurian Kabbalah.

He spent the last years of his life in Germany and continued his close collaboration with Leibniz. There is speculation that the last book to be published under Helmont's name, the Premeditate and Considerate Thoughts on the first chapters of the book of Genesis , actually came from Leibniz.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ In the foreword to his publication Ortus Medicinae
  2. ^ Richard Popkin (editor), The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (1999), p. 363.
  3. ↑ Jonathan Israel , The Dutch Republic (1995), p. 589.
  4. ^ John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and 'early Enlightenment' Europe (2006), p. 494.
  5. ↑ Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (2001), p. 170 and p. 530
  6. ↑ Jonathan Rée , I See a Voice (1999), p. 62.
  7. ^ Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury Van Helmont (1614-1698) (1999), p. 34.
  8. ↑ Klaus Jaitner, The Sulzbacher Musenhof in the European history of ideas , in: Elisabeth Vogl, Johannes Hartmann (eds.): Eisenerz and Morgenglanz . Amberg 1999
  9. ↑ James Hardin, Translation and Translation Theory in Seventeenth-century Germany (1992), note pp. 77-8.
  10. ^ Grace B. Sherrer, Francis Mercury van Helmont: A Neglected Seventeenth-Century Contribution to the Science of Language , The Review of English Studies, Vol. 14, No. 56 (Oct. 1938), pp. 420-427.
  11. ↑ Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice (1999), p. 76.
  12. ^ Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (1995), p. 6.
  13. ↑ http://www.themasonictrowel.com/Articles/apendent_bodies/scottiest/the_true_history_scottish_esoteric_masonry.htm#58
  14. ^ Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (2002), p. 677.
  15. ^ Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers (2000), article Van Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius , pp. 840-843.
  16. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  17. ↑ http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/conway/
  18. ^ Daniel Garber (editor), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2003), p. 1416.
  19. ^ Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury Van Helmont (1614-1698) (1999), p. 241.
  20. ^ Allison Coudert, Forgotten Ways of Knowing , pp. 87-88, in Donald R. Kelley, Richard Henry Popkin, The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (1991).
  21. ^ BJ Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult from the Renaissance (2001), p. 22.
  22. ^ Sheila A. Spector, Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Myth (2002), p. 32.
  23. ↑ Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p. 185.
personal data
SURNAME Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Helmont, Franciscus van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Flemish alchemist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH baptized October 20, 1614
DATE OF DEATH 1699
Place of death Cölln near Berlin