Alchemy, Resurrection, and the Long Unfolding of Modernity

(Complete Version)

Our project has argued that modern addiction is not merely a medical contingency but a historically intelligible answer to a specific spiritual condition: the completion of transcendence and the relocation of “the Absolute” into operational systems (technique, administration, pharmacology, optimization). In that condition, obligation remains, but its traditional guarantees do not. The modern subject is pressed into responsibility without metaphysical consolation—what we have called Born Man. The question now is how to narrate the historical corridor that produced this condition without collapsing into either (a) “secularization” as mere loss, or (b) a romantic retrieval of religion as if modern consciousness could simply go back.

Alchemy matters here because it names a middle history—a long subterranean labor in which Western consciousness attempted to perform, in image and practice, what official Christian dogma could not fully metabolize: the reconciliation of opposites, the transformation of matter and soul together, and the production of a “body” adequate to spirit. In other words, alchemy is not an eccentric pre-science; it is a deep symptom of Christianity’s own inner tensions as they work themselves forward into modernity.

1. The Christian Tension: A World Split in Two

The decisive claim of the New Testament is not simply that the soul survives. It is that the dead are raised—bodily—and that salvation is not an escape from embodiment but its transformation. Paul stakes everything on this. If Christ is not raised, then faith is “vain,” sin remains, and the dead are “perished” (1 Cor. 15). The stakes are metaphysical and historical, not merely devotional. Paul’s argument makes resurrection the hinge of reality: if the dead are not raised, then the Christian proclamation collapses from within (1 Cor. 15:12–19). In the Scofield text, Paul’s insistence is framed precisely as the “importance of Christ’s resurrection” and the logic that follows if resurrection is denied.The Scofield reference Bible _ …

But Paul’s teaching is more specific than “life after death.” He describes a transformation of embodiment: what is “sown in corruption” is “raised in incorruption”; it is “sown a natural body” and “raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:42–44).The Scofield reference Bible _ … This is not a rejection of the body but a claim that embodiment itself can be reconstituted—made adequate to divine life. Scofield’s own doctrinal summary makes the point in plain terms: the resurrection body will be “incorruptible, glorious, powerful, and spiritual,” and the relation of mortal to resurrected body is likened to seed and harvest (1 Cor. 15:37–38, 42–44).The Scofield reference Bible _ …

This creates a pressure inside Western consciousness: Christianity demands a transformation that is simultaneously spiritual and bodily, historical and metaphysical, moral and ontological. Yet Christian life—especially in its later moral and doctrinal stabilization—often risks becoming a religion of tension without resolution: spirit against flesh, heaven against earth, purity against corruption, good against evil. That tension is not an accident; it is part of Christianity’s historical engine. But it generates a problem: where does the work of transformation go when the official forms cannot hold it?

Jung’s answer—whatever one thinks of his metaphysics—is historically incisive: alchemy functions as an undercurrent to Christianity, a compensatory dream-life beneath the surface of dogma. “Alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream is to consciousness…alchemy endeavours to fill in the gaps left open by the Christian tension of opposites.”C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc…

That sentence gives us a model of history: not replacement, but compensation; not an external enemy of Christianity, but an internal continuation of its unresolved labor.

2. Alchemy as Christianity’s Subterranean Workshop

Jung identifies a key alchemical axiom—attributed to Maria Prophetissa—as a leitmotif of the entire tradition: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.”C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… The formula is not merely numerology; it is a grammar of transformation: unity differentiates, tension intensifies, a third term mediates, and then a higher unity (a “fourth”) appears—not a return to naïve oneness, but a unity that includes what was excluded.

Notice how directly this speaks to our project’s logic. Addiction, too, is a grammar of transformation—but a perverse one. It manufactures a false “fourth,” a chemical reconciliation that feels like unity precisely because modern consciousness cannot endure the split it inhabits. Addiction promises integration without truth, relief without reconciliation, certainty without obligation. The drug becomes a micro-absolute: immediate, repeatable, operational.

Alchemy, by contrast, is the attempt to produce a unity through the tension, not by bypassing it. This is why Jung can say that alchemy compensates the “Christian tension of opposites.”C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… In alchemy, what Christianity often moralizes or excludes—earth, chthonic femininity, ambiguity, the “regions under the earth,” even “evil itself”—returns as necessary material for transformation.C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… It returns not as permission to sin, but as an admission that wholeness cannot be achieved by denial.

This is the moment where modern people often misunderstand the tradition. They imagine alchemy as either (a) superstition on the way to chemistry, or (b) mystical self-help on the way to psychology. Jung explicitly resists both reductions: science noticed alchemy as proto-chemistry, but its “cultural importance is still so little known” because it belongs equally to religion and philosophy as a symbolic labor of transformation.C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc…

And crucially: Jung does not simply equate alchemy with Christianity. He emphasizes that while alchemical symbolism is “steeped in ecclesiastical allegory,” it is “exceedingly doubtful” that the alchemical opus is merely a transmogrification of Christian rites and dogmas (including “death, and resurrection”).C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… The deeper point is sharper: alchemy draws on pagan and especially Gnostic sources, and Christianity itself was historically assimilated through those currents in complex ways.C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… Translation: the West’s transformation-work cannot be told as a clean Christian story. It is a mixed inheritance, and the “undercurrent” is not a footnote; it is part of the engine.

3. Resurrection as the Demand for a New Body

Why does alchemy matter for Paul? Because Paul’s resurrection teaching is not simply an afterlife claim—it is a demand for a body adequate to spirit: “raised a spiritual body.”The Scofield reference Bible _ … This is precisely what alchemical imagination repeatedly stages: the production of the lapis, the transformed substance, the “body” of reconciliation.

Jung calls attention to the “lapis-Christ parallel” and acknowledges how deeply alchemical language borrows from Christian narrative motifs—conception, birth, passion, death, resurrection—even while insisting that the roots of alchemy cannot be reduced to Church doctrine.C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… The relationship is not identity; it is resonance. Christianity demands transformation of the whole person; alchemy dramatizes the labor of that demand in the medium of matter, image, vessel, fire.

Here we can say it in our project’s terms: Christianity is the metaphysical announcement; alchemy is one long historical attempt to imagine the process.

And this helps clarify why modernity becomes so prone to addiction. When the symbolic workshop collapses—when the imagination can no longer metabolize tension through living forms—the modern subject still needs transformation, still needs relief, still needs a “new body,” but now seeks it through operational substitutes: pharmaceuticals, compulsions, rituals of consumption. The demand remains; the mediations change.

4. From Alchemical Vessel to Scientific Laboratory

Alchemy is also a hinge because it stages the transition from symbolic transformation to operational control. Jung notes that science long cared about alchemy chiefly for its role in developing chemistry, ignoring its religious-psychological depth.C. G. Jung – Psychology and Alc… Historically, that “ignoring” is itself decisive. It marks the point where the West begins to split transformation into two separate tracks:

• Technique: control of matter (what becomes modern science)
• Morality/meaning: control of the self (what becomes secular ethics, therapy, and later the management paradigms of “recovery”)

Our project claims that this split is not simply the death of religion but its fulfillment in bifurcated form: the world becomes manipulable as system; the human becomes governable as subject.

Alchemy sits right at the seam. It still imagines transformation as one work—spirit and matter together—but it also provides the imagery and discipline that can be abstracted into the laboratory. The vessel becomes literal; the fire becomes measurable; the opus becomes procedure.

The result is our present moment: transformation without transcendence. We still need a “new body,” but we now seek it through technique. Addiction becomes the private, chemical parody of what modernity promises publicly through science: certainty, repeatability, relief from suffering, a managed self.

5. The Present Moment: Obligation Without Guarantee

If alchemy is Christianity’s undercurrent, then modern addiction is modernity’s undercurrent: the compensatory dream-life beneath the surface of rational technique and moral discourse. Modernity condemns symbolic anesthesia (myth, ritual, sacrament) as illusion while simultaneously moralizing chemical anesthesia as vice. Yet both once performed overlapping functions: regulating affect, organizing suffering, preventing abandonment. When neither a living sacramental world nor a credible symbolic workshop remains, the modern subject becomes dangerously alone with consciousness.

Paul’s resurrection teaching cuts against this loneliness in a precise way. It does not promise mere “spiritual consolation.” It promises the redemption of embodiment—what Scofield’s summary calls “the redemption of the body.”The Scofield reference Bible _ … In Romans 8, this bodily redemption is bound to groaning, endurance, and hope that is not yet seen: we “wait…for the redemption of our body.”The Scofield reference Bible _ … This is not optimism; it is an ethic of waiting under conditions of suffering and incompletion.

And here is where our project can speak in a way that neither medical reductionism nor spiritual bypass can manage:

• Addiction offers a premature resurrection: immediate relief, a counterfeit “spiritual body” produced chemically—incorruptible only in the sense that it refuses time, grief, and obligation.
• Endurance, by contrast, is the refusal of premature resurrection. It is the willingness to remain in the tension without falsification, without substitute, without abandoning the real.

Alchemy becomes instructive—not as a technique to revive, but as a historical witness that the West long knew transformation is work, not hack. It requires vessel, heat, time, confrontation with what is excluded. Christianity names the telos (resurrection); alchemy dramatizes the labor (transformation); modernity operationalizes the method (science) while leaving the soul exposed to tension without symbolic mediation; addiction becomes the emergency replacement (micro-absolute).

6. What We Take Forward (Without Romanticism)

To integrate alchemy into our genealogy is not to recommend medieval practice, occult revival, or a new spirituality-as-aesthetic. It is to restore historical depth to the modern predicament.

Alchemy tells us:

1. The West’s “crisis of meaning” is not a sudden collapse; it is the late phase of a long transformation in which opposites were intensified and mediations were slowly relocated.
2. The demand for transformation is structural; it does not disappear when belief collapses. It migrates.
3. When transformation is stripped of living symbolic forms, it reappears as compulsion—because the psyche will not consent to mere flatness.

If we speak in the blog’s most central terms: the end of addiction is not the return of transcendence, but the reconstitution of obligation and endurance after transcendence. Paul’s resurrection language—precisely because it is bodily, not merely “spiritual”—lets us name what is at stake: not the management of behavior, but the possibility of a human life that can suffer, remain conscious, and not abandon others. Alchemy’s long undercurrent, read soberly, lets us see that the West has always been trying to produce a body adequate to its spirit. In modernity, that work is displaced into systems. Addiction is the private system that claims to finish the work quickly.

Our task is not to finish it quickly.

It is to refuse false resurrections, and to build forms of life—clinical, ethical, communal—that can bear the tension without substitutes.

Brenton L. Delp