Paracelsus’s Two Sources of Knowledge

The doctrine on which Paracelsus founds his whole enterprise is the equal authority of two sources of knowing: the lumen gratiae of revelation and the lumen naturae of nature. “There are, therefore, two kinds of knowledge in this world: an eternal and a temporal. The eternal springs directly from the light of the Holy Spirit, but the other directly from the Light of Nature” (Paracelsus, Philosophia sagax, quoted Jung 1967, CW 13 §149). Man is twofold, and “each part takes its light from God, both the temporal and the eternal.” The light of nature is ambivalent — “both good and bad” — but its authority is not derivative.

The move is structurally what Jung will repeat four centuries later: the psyche has its own evidential authority, not as supplement to revelation but as independent seat of knowing. Paracelsus, “as a medieval Christian, still lived in a unitary world and did not feel the two sources of knowledge, the divine and the natural, as the conflict it later turned out to be” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §149). The unity he assumed the Jungian project had to recover by argument. The objective psyche is the name Jung gives to what Paracelsus held as the light of nature.

For Hillman, the two-sources doctrine names the specifically Paracelsian refusal to collapse the middle ground into either theological spiritualism or empirical materialism — the “mercurial middle ground of soul or psychic reality” (Hillman 2010). The third principle in the tria-prima is, structurally, the same move: the refusal of the dyad, the insistence on the mediating term.

Sources

• paracelsus: the Philosophia sagax formulation, equal authority of lumen gratiae and lumen naturae
• carl-jung: the psyche has its own evidential ground
• james-hillman: the mercurial middle ground as Paracelsus’s specific contribution