During the sixteenth century, Lutheranism was a considerable impediment to the dissemination of Hermetic philosophy in Germany, but it spread widely nonetheless. Luther himself, although he rejected mystical “excesses,” incorporated vivid quasi-mystical imagery in his sermons. (Commenting on Luther’s condemnation of Aristotle for rejecting Plato’s theory Of Ideas, Lewis White Beck writes, “Only if Plato is thought of in terms of Neoplatonism, and Neoplatonism is seen through the eyes of Christian mystics, is such a strange judgement intelligible at all in a man like Luther.”) Oddly enough, though, Luther had nothing but praise for alchemy:
The science of alchemy I like very well, indeed, it is truly the natural philosophy of the ancients. I like it not only for the many uses it has in decorating metals and in distilling and subliming herbs and liquors, but also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the Last Day. For, as in a furnace the fire retracts and separates from a substance the other portions, and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass even so God, at the day of judgement, will separate all things through fire, and righteous from the ungodly.
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p. 30