Flesh in the Age of Reason (2 page)

He was uncommonly sensitive to the conundrum of embodiment. In flesh and blood lay the self and its articulations. With its own elaborate signlanguage of gesture and feeling, the body was the inseparable dancingpartner of the mind or soul – now in step, now a tangle of limbs and intentions, mixed emotions. Organism and consciousness,
soma
and psyche, heart and head, the outer and the inner – all merged, and all needed to be minutely observed if the human enigma were ever to be appreciated.

What Porter writes appreciatively of Sterne could also, of course, be written of Porter. And if it is to our everlasting chagrin that such appreciation now comes in the form of an epitaph, this colossal and intellectually thrilling work is at least a vindication of another of its more hopeful, authentically eighteenth-century themes: that though the body may perish, the mind does indeed live on.

S
IMON
S
CHAMA

Key developments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe heightened age-old tensions as to the nature of man. In certain respects, the body grew more beset and battered. Endemic warfare, epidemics of bubonic plague, typhus and other urban fevers and the hideous new horrors of syphilis sharpened the woes of this mortal coil. And the prevalent sense of danger and desperation was amplified by the hellfire religious terrorism thundering from Calvinist and Counter-Reformation pulpits and the morbid disgust expressive of extreme Mannerist and Baroque sensibilities.

Yet this was also the age when the humanist revival offered alternatives to the macabre mind-set pervasive since late-medieval times; the body noble, beautiful, orderly, ideal, the dignity of human nature. Vile bodies might still be calumniated, and fleshpots remained siren snares, but the human physique was now equally honoured, thanks to the Renaissance recovery of classical aesthetics, with its veneration for those macrocosmic–microcosmic harmonies which made the human form the measure and model of all things.

Innovations in medicine, spearheaded by the techniques of dissection developed by Vesalius, further opened the tangible body, the body of the senses, to the probing, penetrative curiosity of the scalpel. Once within the anatomy theatre, the corpse ceased to be inviolable and taboo, and carnal knowledge was no longer forbidden: would not the data gleaned through dissection reveal the glories of Creation and its Divine Artist, and lead to the improvement of medical knowledge and practice? The art and science promoted by the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution thus promised to metamorphose and resurrect the body in a more secular guise. Meanwhile, however, the Churches continued to elaborate their own teachings about the body:
the Catholic cult of the sacred heart was contemporaneous with William Harvey’s
De Motu Cordis
.

Élite drives for the ‘reformation of popular culture’ aimed to widen the
cordon sanitaire
between bodies superior and inferior. Refined bodily manners would be elevated above coarse flesh via the ‘civilizing process’; vile bodies would be firmly consigned to their place; and their subjugation would be reinforced through the pains and penalties of the law (corporal and capital punishment), through training and work discipline (the curse of labour), and through more stringent control of leisure and sexuality.

Not least, intense inquiries – philosophical, medico-scientific, theological – were turning the flesh into a ‘body in question’. Down the centuries, it had been the Churches which had arrogated to themselves the authority to pronounce on the riddles of life, from before the cradle to beyond the grave, by way of their canons on the Creation, Fall and Atonement, and specifically on eschatology (study of the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell). The state for its part devised doctrines of its own respecting the ‘king’s two bodies’, the ‘sacred touch’ of the monarch who ruled by Divine Right, and the prince’s relation to the ‘body politic’. Sacred and temporal, all such tenets were to come under fire from radicals, critics and wits in the free-thinking atmosphere of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, magical and folklorish beliefs about the flesh (the curative properties of the blood of a hanged man, for instance, or the incorruptibility of the remains of the holy) were being discounted by the élite as ‘vulgar errors’.

New metaphysical enigmas loomed. Precisely what were the links between mind and matter, body and soul? Might life be not a divine benefaction after all, but something merely material, a chemical curdling or an electrical spark which triggered vitality? Was the human body, indeed, a machine, pure and simple, of a piece with nature at large as conceived by the new mechanical philosophy? Were the passions to be tamed, or could they be trusted, as part of the wisdom of the body? Was there a
vis medicatrix naturae
, a healing
power of Nature, which would preserve life against disease and dissolution? Not least – profanely Promethean thought! – was there any escape from the doom of death? The body Christian, the body pagan; the body medical, the body scientific; the body noble, the body debased; the body free and the body disciplined; the body natural and the body artificial; the body solitary and social; the body sacred and profane – all these were in the melting pot in that great ‘crisis’ of European thought marking the early Enlightenment, and such questions and attempts to resolve them surface again and again in the body of this book

It will become obvious to readers that certain aspects of this subject receive scant attention. I particularly regret not addressing – for reasons of ‘ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance’ – changing visualizations of flesh and the self in portraits and caricature in the scholarly tradition pioneered by David Piper and continued by Marcia Pointon, Ludmilla Jordanova and others. I have also made no attempt to explore the problem of personal identity in terms of the preoccupations of contemporary philosophy. The interest in such questions as the ‘other minds’ debate shown by today’s professional philosophers strikes me as ‘merely’ academic; for those surveyed in this book what was at stake was truly personal, practical and pressing. By way of a final disclaimer, I must make it clear that I engage below almost wholly with the thinking of literate (indeed, literary) élites: a parallel exploration of low and popular culture would be immensely rewarding.

This book follows on from my
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(Allen Lane, 2000). Noting various themes omitted from that book, particularly ‘the controversies which raged over mind and body, heaven and hell, the soul, the afterlife, and the
je ne sais quoi
of the self ’, I announced that ‘I plan to address such topics in my next book, which will examine the triangle of the moral, the material and the medical in the anglophone Enlightenment’. This is that. Building upon its broad account of British enlightened thinking, I here present detailed explorations of dilemmas about personal
identity in the light of changing beliefs about man’s place in nature and human nature. I have not attempted a ‘textbook’ coverage; rather I present a gallery of contrasting yet interlocking studies meant to be engaging and stimulating rather than encyclopaedic.

Much of the research for this book was undertaken during the two happy decades I spent at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. Writing began during the first year of its successor, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and it has been completed in the months following my retirement. I am deeply grateful for the facilities generously extended to me since then by Hal Cook, its Director, and its Administrator, Alan Shiel. I am also delighted to acknowledge the unstinting support given to me by members of its staff, notably my former secretary, Emma Ford. Over the years Caroline Overy, Sharon Messenger and Jane Henderson have helped me with research – and Jane has additionally compiled the excellent index. Claire Henderson-Davis also contributed valuable research on folklore. Typing of the seemingly endless proliferation of redrafts has been done by Emma and (as always) by Sheila Lawler. Thanks also to Jed Lawler for coming to the rescue of a computer illiterate. I have been fortunate to have a highly capable copy-editor in Elizabeth Stratford.

Roy Porter completed the final draft of this book very shortly before his death. The endnotes were in a half-finished state and these have been dropped. A full bibliography is to be found at the end of the text. Roy often worked from a number of different editions of the same text and without his aid it has proved impossible to construct these references.

The publishers would like to thank Natsu Hattori, Gill Coleridge, David Cannadine and Simon Schama for all their help and comments.

Who are we?

Our contemporary Western secular sense of identity stems directly from transformations occurring in the centuries since the Renaissance. These developments are often characterized as the ‘death of the soul’; but inseparable from such a process, and no less salient, has been the reappraisal of the body. The two have been symbiotic in the refiguring of the self.

The history of the self is commonly told as the rise of modern individualism, the maturing self-consciousness of the self-determining individual. Here lies the fulfilment of the cherished ideals first of ‘knowing yourself’ – the
gnothi seauton
of the Delphic oracle – and then of ‘being yourself’: ‘this above all, to thine own self be true’, as Polonius puts it in
Hamlet
, wearying his son as ever with unwanted advice. In this triumphalist telling, the secret of selfhood is located in authenticity and individuality, and the story presented is one of the surmounting of intractable obstacles in the achievement of autonomy. This great labour of inner character-building typically involves breaking free from religious persecution, political tyranny and the shackles of hidebound convention. Such ideals of self-realization, nobly voiced a century and a half ago in John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
, still carry a strong appeal, and they square with other values – democracy, freedom of speech, equal opportunities, doing your own thing – which we all hold dear and to which the ‘free world’ at least pays lip-service.

Received ideas of identity in the West thus presuppose some real and essential ‘inner self’. Favoured ways of imagining its realization include the metaphor of a seed maturing into a flower, or
the growth-process from birth to adulthood, from dependency to self-sufficiency. These organic metaphors are reflected in popular narratives, or myths, of the historical evolution of the self through the rise of civilization.

It is a tale which begins with the fabled dawn of consciousness. ‘Primitive societies’ have been deemed to possess a ‘tribal’ mentality, with all thought-processes being collective and all activities communal. This ‘savage mind’ was supposedly so gripped by supernatural and magical outlooks, by group rituals and customs, as to preclude any genuine individuality.

It was the golden age of Greece, the story continues, which brought the first stirrings of true individual consciousness, asserted in defiance of clannish taboos and the inexorable decrees of the gods. Socrates and other philosophers began to give expression to ideals of inner goodness, truth and sacred conscience. So threatening to traditional values did such new convictions prove that even the advanced Athenians forced Socrates to drink the hemlock. For their part, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides showed in their dramas how emergent conflicts between the individual and divine and dynastic order were fated to end in tragedy. In later centuries, under imperial despotism in Rome, Stoic philosophers like Seneca valued suicide as the only permitted expression of freedom and autonomy.

The age of faith brought partial advances towards realizing the sovereignty of the inner self. Christianity’s core doctrine of a unique, eternal soul inspired those brave acts of personal integrity, modelledon the Crucifixion, which were the making of martyrs; and St Augustine’s
Confessions
at the end of the fourth century gave a remarkable selfportrait of the inner trials of the soul of a guilty sinner.

But the Catholic Church had no investment in self-exploration for its own sake. Egoism was anathema. The Church’s mission was to teach how mankind’s first parents, Adam and Eve, had been punished for disobedience. Did not the early theologian Tertullian insist that ‘we have no need for curiosity, after Jesus Christ, nor for investigation after the Gospel’? It was idle curiosity that hankered after forbidden knowledge. The lesson of Original Sin was that the devout must obey
the Commandments; self was the wellspring of sin, and Lucifer’s fate showed how rebellion (
non serviam
) would be rightly and relentlessly crushed.

Self-denial was the supreme good, as expressed in monastic asceticism and celibacy; saints and mystics transcended their selves in divine love, St John of the Cross seeking the ‘annihilation of the self’. All such Christian ideals of self-distrust, of trampling down pride and vanity through submission and selflessly serving in the
Corpus Christi
, the community of the faithful, squared with the medieval feudal principle that everyone had a preordained position in the divine Great Chain of Being, in the hierarchical order of lord and serf, master and man, husband and wife, parent and child; the whole was greater than the part. If the cause of individuality was advanced under medieval Christianity it was largely by those heretics who defied it.