When Anthony Grafton began to address Isaac Casaubon's exposure of the Corpus Hermeticum, he cautioned, “To meet Causabon on his own ground we must journey through some of the worst-mapped and most forbidding territory known to intellectual history: the controversial theology of the years around 1600, when Calvinists, Jesuits, and Gallicans competed to attain new levels of invective and inhumanity” (Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 [Harvard University Press, 1994], 145). Since Grafton wrote those words, the territory has become better mapped—in no small part because of his cartographic efforts in this very region of intellectual history. However, that landscape was no less forbidding precisely because of the power of occult traditions. Georgiana D. Hedesan pursues that line of inquiry in An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644). Thanks to Hedesan, the landscape of early seventeenth-century perceptions of God, nature, and humanity is sharper and more defined. That world, however, may remain as forbidding because of the malleable and remarkably enduring power that alchemy possessed at that time, a power that Hedesan appreciates.

Hedesan's study speaks to historians of science and religion, historical theology, philosophy, and early modern history of ideas, so its audience is intellectually broad. Perhaps for that reason, she devotes time to material that may be familiar background for specialists in the history of science and religion but that is all for the good to reach such a broad audience.

While this book is at most an intellectual biography, she certainly addresses crucial moments in this Flemish natural philosopher's life: his exposure to such heterodox beliefs such as Paracelcianism and his deep introspection of the education he was receiving at the University of Louvain that led to, in her words, a “crisis of faith” (16).

It is Van Helmont's work that receives Hedesan's real attention. She tackles the complex context in which Van Helmont's treatise Ortus Medicinae (1648) was posthumously published. Although it was published in two parts, there is evidence that Van Helmont did not conceive of the two parts of this treatise as creating a whole. Frustratingly, Van Helmont passed before he could complete the editorial work that might have provided a more ordered manuscript than what survived. She invites historians of early modern scholarship to pursue further this tantalizing line of inquiry.

The focus of the book is the principles of Van Helmont's Christian Philosophy. He personified and perhaps even defined the complexity of early seventeenth-century thought. The historical moment in which he lived made his perceptions of Christianity seem problematic, even heterodox—which explains why he was arrested by an ecclesiastical court for suspicion of heresy but later released. However, he always bestrode the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. At the same time, no topic was too vast for Van Helmont, and no one understands that reality better than Hedesan. Consequently, she titles chapter 4 “God,” chapter 5 “Nature,” and chapter 6 “Man”.

Hedesan argues that Van Helmont's perceptions of God transcended the religious divides of the time. Her deep learning is evident in the clear, succinct explanations to elusive theological and philosophical concepts. Moreover, there is an almost pedagogical quality to the study and not just in its clarity. She employs schematic representations of Van Helmont's understandings, such as of how water was transformed in higher atmosphere (94), the structure of a water atom (103), and how Van Helmont thought life itself formed (107). Such contemporary diagrams are helpful, however uncommon they may be.

Unsatisfied with the traditional Scholastic doctrine that God was the cause of being (causa essendi), Van Helmont “postulated a stronger form of divine immanence, ‘panentheism’” (58). However, this distinction, which differs from the Scholastic one to such a degree that its adherents all at one time or another fell under suspicion of heresy, is not as clear as it might have been.

Van Helmont slipped into theologically murkier waters in his understanding of Christ. While Christ retained his central Trinitarian role as Redeemer, the significance and relevance of Christ went beyond that responsibility. For Van Helmont, Christ was “knowledge itself, the scientia which Van Helmont sought in nature” (74).

In other ways, Van Helmont could hardly be more conventional. In the chapter titled “Nature,” Hedesan tells us that he “set great store by his Biblical interpretation, and particularly that of the Book of Genesis” (87). That perception is one of the reasons why the early decades of the seventeenth century remain so intellectually complex, even perilous. While new efforts attempted to address the Bible with greater objectivity, vigorous efforts to retain the immutable spiritual—and literal—value of Holy Scripture continued.

In the chapter devoted to “Man,” Van Helmont again followed the long-standing argument that only Adam was formed in the image of God, and his belief in imago Dei defined how he viewed humanity's fall and redemption. For Van Helmont, the mind was as apophatic as God. God was, in his words, “A unique, pure, simple, formal, homogeneous, undivided, and immortal act, which the incomprehensible Image of God immediately, incomprehensibly and essentially consists and forms” (148).

While alchemy never receives the central attention that God, nature, and man do, it is no less significant than any other subject that concerned Van Helmont. He integrated alchemy into his theology and philosophy profoundly, resulting in the almost ineluctable conclusion that Hedesan makes: alchemy made Van Helmont's theology and philosophy coherent. We learn how, for example, the theological aspects of Paracelsianism helped Van Helmont to improve his understanding of communion and baptism. Alchemy was the axis upon which Van Helmont's thought revolved. However—and this is not particularly unusual—there is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that Van Helmont ever practiced alchemy despite its intellectual and spiritual influence on his work.

The elusive complexity of Van Helmont explains why he has not received as much attention as his peers, but Hedesan's knowledge and insights provide students of early modern theology, philosophy, and history of ideas—and of course science and religion—lasting benefit.