Book Review: Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist chemist and physician

Rina Knoeff's goal is to prove the influence of Calvin on Boerhaave, to show that his religious ideas vitally informed all areas of his work including his natural philosophy, his medicine, and his chemistry. As she puts it, “nothing in Boerhaave's life was more important than his religion” (p. 1). This study can thus be seen as part of the new scholarship in the history of science, which recognizes the importance of extra-scientific ideas on important scientific figures of early modern Europe. Knoeff isolates two essential Calvinist tenets of Boerhaave's science: first, an appreciation of the wisdom of God in creation and, second, a recognition of God's overwhelming power, especially as compared to the inherent limitations of human beings. She contends that Calvinism provided an impetus to science because Calvin's understanding of God, as having determined everything absolutely, obliged man to study nature as his creation. The pursuit of science was intended to indicate man's thankfulness to God and to detect God's will in his creations. Knoeff focuses on four specific themes: the charge levelled against Boerhaave that he was a Spinozist; Calvin's ideas on creation, providence, and knowledge as a fundamental influence on Boerhaave; Boerhaave's chemistry as a practical application of his Calvinism; the relationship between Boerhaave's chemistry and medicine. Each claim yields some interesting correlations between religion and science. For example, on the charge of Boerhaave's reputed Spinozism, Knoeff contends that, while Boerhaave, like Spinoza, wished to separate theology and science, Boerhaave separated the two to serve theology. Thus Boerhaave admired Spinoza's religious toleration and belief in the freedom of the mind (in essence, separating religion and science) but remained a committed Calvinist. Boerhaave's chemistry was intended to expunge it of an erroneous alchemy rooted in a false reading of the Bible. Both his theology and his chemistry are rooted in a desire to explore God's creation. Boerhaave retained occult ideas in his science as indications of the work of God's creation and appreciated Newton because of the comparability between Newton's ether and his own proposed occult qualities. This book makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Boerhaave by taking the influence of religion on his science very seriously. But the connection is presented as so all-inclusive that, at some points, it is no longer entirely persuasive and seems instead overly and rather narrowly deterministic. Ideas are at times too readily conflated with Calvinism. For example, Boerhaave's appreciation of virtually any other thinkers—Spinoza, Newton, etc.—all become aspects of Calvinism. At one point Knoeff announces, “his ideas might look Cartesian, but they effectively resulted from his Calvinist convictions” (p. 89). If Boerhaave accepts Spinoza's ideas or appreciates Newton, Knoeff subsumes those views under his Calvinism. The notion that the study of God and his creation is a motive for science may well characterize Boerhaave's pursuit of science, but such a quest galvanized early modern figures of many religious persuasions. So too Boerhaave's interest in simplicity and truth in both theology and chemistry might express the early modern exasperation with theological division as much as adherence to a distinctly Calvinist point of view. Knoeff argues that, because Calvinism emphasizes the inability of man to come to knowledge by his own efforts, Boerhaave turned to experimentation. As man could not find truth through reason, experiment is meant “to reveal the incomprehensibility of God's wisdom and power in his creation” (p. 212). Although Knoeff insists that Boerhaave is very indebted to Calvin and while she discusses at great length tenets of Calvinism, she also frequently acknowledges that Boerhaave is not a conventional Calvinist, and thus it is sometimes difficult for the reader to see a clear link between the two. This study makes Boerhaave's religious ideas central to his science and, as a result, adds a significant dimension to our understanding of him and his place in the scientific culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.