Cure by Contraries: Paracelsus, Melancholy, and the Limits of the Concept of “Homeopathy” in Milton’s Samson Agonistes

This article reassesses the long-standing critical tradition of associating the treatment of melancholy in Milton’s Samson Agonistes with Paracelsian “homeopathy.” Tracing the association from nineteenth-century editorial commentary to modern Milton criticism, it argues that the reading rests on a misunderstanding of Paracelsus’s therapeutics. Milton scholars have tended to treat this homeopathy as a universal principle, to reduce it to simple similitude, and to align Paracelsian toxicology too readily with modern notions of hormesis. A diachronic reading of Paracelsus’s writings reverses this picture: his explanations of the causes of melancholy vary considerably, while his therapeutics remain remarkably consistent. Cure is structured less by likeness than by the arcanum, whose relation to disease is more restricted than later accounts allow. Moreover, in his sustained discussions of melancholy, Paracelsus neither defines the disease through the tria prima nor proposes a cure by similars; he repeatedly recommends remedies operating by contraries (contraria). Paracelsian homeopathy can therefore no longer serve as a premise for interpreting Samson Agonistes: cure operates through the contrary properties of similar things, and for melancholy by contraries alone.