 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Unpast Waters, Undreamed Shores, Robert Flood. In the last episode, I started with the thought that the Renaissance ended in about 1600, which is indeed where I'm drawing the line in this and the past few series of the podcast devoted to the period between medieval and early modern philosophy. But as we've often noted, typically Renaissance phenomena like humanism and even typically medieval phenomena like scholasticism survived in Europe well beyond 1600. So it's perfectly reasonable that one of the more important books on the figure of interest to us today should be called Robert Flood and the End of the Renaissance, even though Flood did not die until 1637. With this title, the author, William Huffman, suggests that Flood, contrary to his name, represents only the last ebb of a certain tradition of thought, one that is distinctive to the Renaissance. It's the tradition we associate with figures like Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and John Dee. These were men who looked back to antiquity for inspiration and liked what they saw. A near unanimous chorus of agreement praising divine transcendent principles that govern the crude matter of our cosmos. Aristotle, so central in the eyes of the scholastics, seemed in comparison a rather limited thinker and also something of an outlier within antique philosophy. His pedantic writings put him out of step with the perennial wisdom that could be found in Plato and the Neoplatonists before them in the Presocratics and still further afield in the venerable teachings of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Indians. To delve into these sources was to discover the underlying harmonies of the universe and to uncover its secret powers. What more narrow-minded contemporaries might attack as black magic or demonology was in fact a philosophical and scientific enterprise. After all, there could be no doubt that God had endowed natural things with many occult properties. As we just saw last time, magnetism was important as an obvious case of an occult power alongside its practical uses, especially in navigation. True, the Devil is real and works evil in the world, but those who label any and all mastery of hidden forces as demonic are quite literally fearing what they do not understand. And if the most ancient wisdom is both true and scientific, there is no reason not to combine it with the latest findings of mathematics and natural philosophy. That explains why someone like John Dee could see astronomical observations, mathematical inquiries, and communication with angels as part of a single enterprise, and why the Paracelsan approach to chemistry was magical and empirical in equal measure. Medicine too was a field where the supernatural and the natural both played an important role. Think for example of Ficino's astrological and talismanic prescriptions on prolonging life. In fact, the range of ideas I've just described did not die with Robert Flood. For example, one key figure of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton, was fascinated by alchemy. Still, Flood is as good a choice as any to represent the end of the Renaissance in England, or at least of this particular aspect of the Renaissance. He was born in the early 1570s in Kent and as the son of a knight. Noble lineage was important to him. In one of several works where he tangled with critics, he managed to pack modesty and immodesty into a single remark by saying that he was, Noble enough by birth, but of the lowest rank of medical doctor at London. Flood gained his expertise in medicine at St. John's College in Oxford, where, as Huffman points out, he was unusual as a nobleman who chose to study this topic. In another move atypical for the nobility, he actually finished his university degree. But his time at Oxford was interrupted by a voyage of discovery around Europe. He spoke proudly of imitating his ancient heroes like Plato, Hermes, Pythagoras, and other pre-Socratics who ventured abroad to Egypt, Ethiopia, or Asia in search of wisdom. Flood himself didn't get that far, but did go to such places as Paris, Rome, and Heidelberg, where he deepened his knowledge of Paracelsan science and other philosophical and occult traditions. After returning home and graduating, he set himself up as a physician in London. He also continued his interest in chemistry, even receiving a royal patent for an improved technique in making steel. Flood tried to make it patently clear that he was stealing his ideas from the best, but the system he forged is nothing we can find easily in other Renaissance occultists and still less in Plato or other ancients. One reason for his unadmitted originality is his creative harmonization of Christian scripture with pagan philosophy. Flood even claims that Plato was influenced by Moses, which is just one reason that this Greek thinker ranks so highly in Flood's estimation. By contrast, he says that Aristotle departed pridefully from the grand tradition of ancient wisdom. By his vain glory, he added to some truths many of his own inventions, making, as it were, a galimauphery of good and bad, of true and false, of wisdom and folly, together. As we see here, and we'll see again, Flood had a flair for stylish insults. The biblical passage most central to Flood's system comes right at the beginning of the book of Genesis. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Here we have all three main principles of Flood's cosmology, darkness, light, and water. He explains the interaction of these principles in such works as his Philosophical Key, dedicated to King James I, and the Mosaical Philosophy, whose title means that it is based on Moses, not that it is a mosaic put together from various parts, though that might also be true. Darkness and light represent the positive and negative will of God. They can also be understood in Aristotelian terms as privation or prime matter and form. The two interact when God gives light to darkness, also known as chaos or void. This produces the first determinate kind of matter, which is water. Like Thales, who is having a bit of a renaissance of his own here on the podcast, given that I mentioned him last time for saying that the magnet has a soul, Flood thinks that water is the fundamental element from which other elements and bodies are made. The coldness and wetness of water are complemented by the heat and dryness of light or fire. As in Aristotle, these four contrary qualities underlie all natural phenomena. Flood tries to support his theory with empirical observation, or by ocular proof, as he puts it. Plants and animals are quite literally sparked into life by a warm inner spirit which is associated with divine light. Even minerals have this principle in them, as seen best in the brilliance of the most valuable minerals like gold or gemstones. It's handy for Flood that there are three basic constituents in Paracels and Chemistry, namely salt, sulfur, and mercury. He relates these to darkness, water, and fire. At a grander scale, the heat of the sun causes circulation of the air, something Flood compares to the circulation of vital power in human blood. When William Harvey came along with his pioneering theory of the circulatory system, Flood welcomed it as being fully in agreement with his own thought. But the context of Flood's proposal was very different. He wanted to establish a pervasive analogy between the world of nature and the human body pursuing the ancient idea of the human as a microcosm. Indeed, another of his works on these themes is called History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm. In this work, Flood notes the tendency of air to expand when it is heated. And in the Mosaical Philosophy, he describes an instrument that can be used to study this phenomenon experimentally. It's a so-called weather glass, which contains a column of water below a column of air in a glass tube. As the surrounding temperature changes, the air contracts and expands, as shown by the level of the water in the glass. Flood is clearly immensely pleased with this device and compares it to both the human body and the whole atmosphere. We might compare this to Gilbert's inferences about the magnetism of the whole Earth drawn from the study of spherical magnets. In both cases, global phenomena were being inferred from observations that could be made at a smaller scale in a laboratory. Nor was that the full extent of Flood's experimentation. Alongside minerals, meteorology, and the human body, he was keenly interested in plants and agriculture. In particular, he had a thing for wheat, which he calls the principalist of vegetables. He passes over the most convincing argument for this claim, which is that wheat can be used to make almond croissants, the principalist of pastries. His rationale is rather that wheat has a body dominated by salt, but containing a vegetating fire that gives it innate warmth. This allows wheat to multiply itself as it grows through what Flood calls a magnetic virtue that draws life out of the air and sun. So again, we have here the fundamental principle of light giving rise to vital power, in this case in a plant. The theory might sound like pure speculation, but again, Flood claimed empirical support for it. He heated up wheat to break it down into its constituents and claimed that he had successfully used a balm of wheat to heal a persistent pain in his own hand. That allusion to the magnetism involved in the growth of wheat was no passing fancy on Flood's part. He was aware of Gilbert's work and saw the magnet as illustrating the Paracelsan principle that like attracts like. He invoked magnetism to explain another healing technique known as the weapon salve. The idea was to put a special compound or salve on the bloody weapon that had caused a wound. Supposedly this could heal the victim of the wound even from miles away. So like a magnet, this procedure involved action at a distance, and like a magnet, claims of its efficacy were polarizing. Recommended by Paracelsus, the weapon salve was a matter of controversy among numerous authors, including Daniel Sennert. Of all the writings devoted to the topic, the one with the second best title was composed by William Foster. Released in 1631, it was called A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon Salve. Foster nailed the title page to Flood's door to mock his devotion to such magical practices. This provoked a treatise with an even better title, Dr. Flood's Answer to Foster, or The Squeezing of Parson Foster's Sponge. It was a forthright defense of medicine exploiting unknown occult powers. Flood offered numerous parallels to show that such action at a distance was entirely possible. The magnet, of course, but also contagious diseases, and for that matter even fire, which can warm us from across a room. Flood's explanation for the weapon salve cure is that there is a causal sympathy between the blood on the weapon and the body of the wounded man, so that treating one causes the other to heal. He offers empirical evidence in support of this principle, telling of an Italian nobleman who lost his nose in a fight. As we saw, when Tico Brahe was faced with the same situation, he simply wore an artificial nose. This nobleman was more resourceful and more brutal. He used flesh taken from a slave's arm to make himself a new nose. But when the slave died, it rotted off. This story reveals more about early European slavery than it does about reconstructive surgery, but it also tells us something about Flood's ideas of nature and causation. His world is one of hidden connections and harmonic resonances between things. In fact, he compares the sympathetic relation between the blood on the weapon and the wounded person to strings that reverberate on the same note. Thus, where Foster condemned the weapon salve as engaging in diabolical sorcery, Flood satisfied himself that it was instead an example of natural magic. He did, however, hasten to add that he had never used the technique himself. This seems to be a habitual strategy on Flood's part. We see it again in his writings on a mysterious group called the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, whose anonymous writings were circulating around Europe, provoking curiosity and condemnation among intellectuals. In 1616, Flood published a so-called apology, in other words, defense, of the Rosicrucians against one of their more forthright critics, Andreas Libavius. Again, the title is an enjoyable one. It punningly says that the goal of the work is to cleanse the reputation of the Rosicrucians with as it were a flood of truth. Much as he endorsed the weapon salve without ever trying it, Flood says that he hoped to make contact with the Brotherhood, but had never managed to do so. Still, he's convinced that they are wise philosophers and good Christians. So far from consorting with the devil, the slander thrown at Rosicrucians by Libavius, they were no doubt receiving their inspiration directly from the Holy Spirit. That is how they had learned to exploit occult powers in nature. But how can we be sure that this is holy magic and not evil sorcery? Simple, demonic practices can only bring bad results, so anything that causes benefit is done in the name of God. Flood's taste for the arcane notwithstanding, we might see here a resonance with more mainstream Protestant ideas. Like Calvin, Flood insists that it is actually God who makes everything happen, so that the pious and effective magician must rely entirely on divine assistance. These two controversies over the weapon salve and Rosicrucians are only the beginning of the numerous debates in which Flood defended the theory and practice of the occult arts. In 1623, he was moved to refute an obscure author named Patrick Scott, who had raised skeptical doubts about alchemy. In his reply, Flood argues for the possibility of creating the so-called elixir, or philosopher's stone, which he defines as, A spiritual body made worthy by the action of nature and the assistance of art, to receive the spark or beam of wisdom. For Scott, the very idea was anathema to both philosophy and religion. As usual, transforming the worst accusations into the highest praise, Flood insisted that the elixir in fact serves wisdom and is thus the philosopher's greatest friend. Furthermore, its feasibility is supported in scripture. Sadly, there isn't a passage in the Bible that says, guys, alchemy works. So to make this case, Flood needs to invoke his scripturally based cosmology, particularly the idea of a divine spirit that gives life to created things. This is the spark or beam of wisdom mentioned in his definition of the elixir. Actually, God's spirit is present in everything, which is for Flood what Plato meant when he talked about the world soul or the bestowal of form upon matter. In a sense, the elixir's power is just an extraordinary illustration of a universal phenomenon, one we can learn about by consulting both religious and pagan philosophical texts. In that very same year, 1623, Flood was concluding a further debate and beginning another. The new opponent was Marine Mersenne, who is best known for his correspondence with Descartes. Mersenne was appalled at the sinister activities of Flood and called him a evil magician, a doctor and propagator of foul and horrendous magic, a heretical magician. Flood, never one to back down from a fight, referred to Mersenne and Foster, his rival in the weapon self controversy, as roaring, bragging, and freshwater pseudo-philosophers without parallel in Europe. Flood's most famous critic was a man we just recently saw having a difficult exchange of ideas, or rather, a failure to exchange ideas, with Thomas Harriot. This was Kepler. The exchange of refutation and counter-refutation between Kepler and Flood began in 1619 and ended in 1623, with Kepler attacking Flood's theory of the microcosm and macrocosm. It's tempting to say that Kepler aimed his invective at Flood in spite of the fact that he himself had similar platonic and occultist leanings. But in fact, it was precisely because their views were so similar that the two came into conflict. As Huffman writes, the argument between the two was the question of whose neoplatonic structure of the heavens was the correct one. Of course, Kepler would have been the last to deny that mathematical harmonies are woven into the universe. As we know, his own works were based entirely on this assumption. The problem was just that Flood had, in his estimation, chosen the wrong mathematical description for those harmonies. Flood was no less dismissive. He charged Kepler with trying to work backwards from natural phenomena to immaterial truths, whereas Flood was arguing directly from mathematical first principles. Thus he remarked, Kepler has hold of the tail, I grasp the head. Despite this line of response, we should remember that Flood was willing, indeed eager, to invoke empirical observations in defending his philosophical theories. The two ideas are not inconsistent. Flood began from the best possible starting points, namely pure mathematics, platonic literature, and the Bible itself. But he sought confirmation in physical phenomena, whether these took the form of dubious anecdotes about Italian noblemen with missing noses, or the very real functioning of his weather glass. Perhaps then we should, after all, think of him not as the end of something, but as a transitional figure. Like Agrippa, Ficino, and Dee, Flood was steeped in ideas of magic and alchemy, pagan philosophy, and Christian religiosity, a heady brew that we readily associate with the Renaissance. But like Dee, Harriet, and Gilbert, he was also involved in scientific experimentation and instrument building, which we just as readily associate with the 17th century. It's appropriate that in the philosophy of Flood, which derives all things from water, Renaissance philosophy was flowing forward into the age of enlightenment, even if Flood would have insisted that the light had been present all along. Still, in one respect, Flood does mark an ending. He's the last figure I'll cover in this series on the Renaissance and Reformation in Britain. To continue the watery theme, we'll soon be considering the reign in Spain, that is, the reign of philosophy during this period in the Iberian Peninsula. I'm currently working on a new batch of episodes for you to stream, which deal with philosophy and the Counter-Reformation. We'll mostly be showering our attention on Spain and Portugal, but will occasionally drop in again on Italy. To tide you over until we start that new miniseries though, I'll be talking next time to an interview guest who will transform your ideas about alchemy. She quite literally wrote the book on this occult science, as it developed in England from medieval to early modern times. So don't miss this golden opportunity to hear from Jennifer Rampling, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.