Robert Fludd

English physician and philosopher

• Born: January 17, 1574 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Bearsted, Kent, England
• Died: September 8, 1637
• Place of death: London, England

A physician of encyclopedic learning, Fludd compiled a systematic account of the old cosmology, in which the heavens and earth mirrored each other and man was the epitome of all things. He defended this cosmology against attacks from thinkers who wanted science to be more strictly empirical and more fully separated from religion. He supported the Rosicrucian movement but had no personal contact with Rosicrucians.

Early Life

Robert Fludd was born into a wealthy family, the son of a landowner who had been knighted for service to Queen Elizabeth I. Fludd received the best available education: After earning two degrees in arts from Saint John’s College, Oxford, he traveled on the Continent for six years, making many connections in the Protestant states and collecting books on subjects little known in England. He returned to Oxford, where he earned two degrees in medicine from Christ Church College. He then settled in London, where he spent the rest of his life.

In 1606, Fludd applied for membership in the elite Royal Society of Physicians of London, but he did not gain admission for several years, because he was too enthusiastic about new chemical medicines and too dismissive of older herbal medicines in the eyes of several examiners. He was finally admitted in 1609 and formed close professional associations with several members, including William Harvey. Fludd prided himself on being the first writer to defend Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood.

Fludd enjoyed considerable popularity as a physician to London’s wealthy citizens. He could afford the services of a secretary to take careful notes on his cases and an apothecary to prepare chemical remedies. He could also sit with his patients and try out his religious and philosophical ideas, which had the consoling effects of a good bedside manner.

Life’s Work

Once back from his European travels, Fludd began work on a wide-ranging study of all the arts and sciences. He made notes on music and acoustics, theater and optics, drawing and geometry, and divination of all sorts, from astrology to palmistry. He published nothing, however, until a literary event in Germany began to influence thinkers all over Europe.

In 1614 and 1615, two manifestos were published in Germany, purporting to contain the story of Christian Rosenkreutz and the philosophy of his secret society, the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross. The Rosicrucian manifestos have been traced to a circle of Lutheran scholars in Tübingen and are sometimes attributed to a member of that circle, the young Johann Valentin Andreae. They were published anonymously, however, and offered no means of contacting the Fraternity other than publishing a new book or pamphlet. Intrigued by the promise of universal knowledge based on the signs of nature and the message of the Bible, hundreds of educated people published appeals over the next decade. Meanwhile, many religious and academic officials denounced the fraternity. At a time when witch trials were still common, several alleged Rosicrucians were tried for heresy.

Thanks to his European contacts, Fludd followed the polemics surrounding the Rosicrucians in print. Writing in Latin, the universal language of scholarship, he prepared a short apology for the Rosicrucian ideals in 1616 and expanded it in 1617. In Tractatus apologeticus integritatem societatis de Rosea Cruce defendens (1617; apologetic tract defending the integrity of the society of the Rosy Cross), Fludd tried to move beyond contemporary controversy and place Rosicrucian ideals in the context of European philosophy from antiquity to the present. Fludd claimed no familiarity with the Rosicrucians, and later lamented that he never heard from them. (He did not conclude that the Fraternity was a literary hoax, as Andreae later claimed.) Meanwhile, however, readers of Fludd’s other books assumed that the “Fluddean philosophy” (philosophia Fluddana) was Rosicrucian.

By the time that he revised his apology for the Rosicrucians, Fludd had found a publisher for the first and largest of his own books. This was no easy task, for he specified that the book must be illustrated with dozens of engravings. He found a remarkable firm of printers and engravers in Oppenheim, Germany, which produced his Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, phsycica atque technica historia (part I 1617, part II 1618, combined edition 1619; metaphysical, physical, and technical history of both worlds).

The two worlds referred to in Fludd’s opus are the greater and lesser cosmos. The controlling idea of the work is that the macrocosm is mirrored in the microcosm, the great world of God’s creation in the little world of humanity. This idea underlies the two-part structure of the work and is presented visually in some of the book’s most famous engravings. Fludd elaborated the basic distinction in Latin works on medicine such as Medicina Catholica (1629; universal medicine). He found most of his readers outside England, but an English translation appeared of his final, posthumously published work, Philosophia Moysaica (1638; Mosaicall Philosophy , 1659).

Although Fludd never claimed to speak for the Rosicrucians or any other group, his statements were generally assumed to be representative of a Rosicrucian or occult tendency in European thought and were attacked by some prominent scientists of the age. The Dutch scholar Isaac Casaubon challenged Fludd’s too easy acceptance of the extreme antiquity of occult figures like Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of alchemy. The French monastic Marin Mersenne rejected Fludd’s use of the Bible in scientific arguments, as did several of Mersenne’s scientific associates. Most famously, the German astronomerJohannes Kepler began a private correspondence with Fludd that led to public debate over the relative importance of music and mathematics in the study of astrology and astronomy, conducted in weighty books at a time when astronomy and astrology were often hard to distinguish.

Culminating these exchanges was a response to Mersenne by a purported friend, one Joachim Fritzius, that made a comprehensive case for the occult sciences and, at the same time, a final apology for the Rosicrucians. Some scholars think that Summum Bonum, quod est verum magiae, cabalae, alchymae verae, Fratrum Roseae Crucis verorum subjectum (1629; the supreme good, which is the true subject of the magic, cabala, and true magic of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross), though attributed to Fritzius, is actually a pseudonymous book by Fludd. Meanwhile, Fludd was challenged at home for championing such occult theories of medicine as the “weapon-salve,” a sympathetic cure for wounds made by treating the instruments that caused them. Doctor Fludd’s Answer (1631) to this challenge was one of his last books.

When Fludd died in 1637, printing was closely regulated in England and included none of the Rosicrucian works associated with Fludd. As freedom of the press emerged with the English Civil War in the next decade, many books on Rosicrucian themes appeared in English translation, including the original manifestos, which appeared as The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R:C: (1652). To alchemists and philosophers of this generation, Fludd was a leading light.

Significance

History has proved Fludd to be on the losing side in the debates that launched the Scientific Revolution. He celebrated scientific discoveries, such as the circulation of blood, but tried to place them in a “macrocosmic” scheme that is now considered pseudo-scientific. He defended freedom of thought, but did so by defending the believer’s right to interpret scripture rather than the separation of science and religion. His highly schematic mind found its most lasting expression in the illustrations he specified for his works, engravings that are now familiar, even to many who have never heard of Robert Fludd.

Bibliography

Debus, Allen G. The Chemical Philosophy. 1977. Reprint. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002. A comprehensive study of Paracelsian medicine. Includes a long chapter on Fludd.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. A large-format review of Fludd’s major publications on man and the cosmos. Includes 126 illustrations from his books with a brief commentary on each illustration.

Huffman, William H. Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance. New York: Routledge, 1988. The fullest study yet of Fludd’s life and works. Traces both his personal and intellectual connections.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Robert Fludd. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2001. Seven selections from Fludd’s writings, with helpful introductions. Also includes excerpts from a classic study of Fludd’s controversy with Kepler, written by C. G. Jung’s associate Wolfgang Pauli.

Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1972. A lively study of the Rosicrucian manifestos, reprinted in translation, with attention to sources of the ideas and major proponents. Includes a chapter on Fludd and his engraver.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Theatre of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. A study of memory theaters in the Renaissance, by the leading authority, with two chapters on Fludd. Makes fascinating claims for Fludd’s influence on the Elizabethan stage, some of which have been qualified or disproved by subsequent research.