Flesh in the Age of Reason (8 page)

Characteristic of these pious and didactic dialogues was the Puritan William Prynne’s ‘The Soules Complaint against the Bodies Encroachments on Her’ (a poem written during his imprisonment in the 1630s and published in 1642), a supplication made by the Soul in which the Body remains duly silent. In its absence, asserts the Soul, the flesh can achieve nothing:

What is the body, but
a loathsome Masse
Of dust and ashes, brittle as a glasse
.

Along similar lines is an image in Francis Quarles’s
Emblems
(1635). Armed with a lengthy spyglass, Spirit can see much farther than Flesh. While the latter heeds objects close at hand which seduce the senses, Spirit descries a vision of the Last Judgement and urges Flesh to renounce its ‘present toyes’ for ‘future joyes’.

Written in the 1650s, Andrew Marvell’s ‘Dialogue between the Soul and the Body’ marks a watershed by departing significantly from traditional religious didacticism. In content it is far removed from the medieval templates, for all references to sin have disappeared, and its tone is philosophical rather than pious. Marvell dramatizes the ceaseless warfare being waged within Everyman. In conventional Christian-Platonic terms, Soul implores:

O who shall from this Dungeon, raise
A Soul inslav’d so many wayes?
With bolts of Bones, that fetter’d stands
In feet; and manacled in hands.

But the twist is that Soul does not have all the best lines. Body protests at how Soul visits upon the flesh all manner of spiritual ailments which prove terrible torments:

But Physick yet could never reach
The Maladies Thou me dost teach;
Whom first the Cramp of Hope does Tear:
And then the Palsie Shakes of Fear.
The Pestilence of Love does heat:
Or Hatred’s hidden Ulcer eat.

Body is indignant at having to take the rap: if the flesh is indeed a tub of troubles, who inflicted them in the first place?

What but a Soul could have the wit
To build me up for Sin so fit?

Turning the tables on conventional tropes, and surely echoing the struggles of people against monarch in a Civil War in which Marvell’s own sympathies were divided, it is Body no less than Soul which craves release:

O who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this Tyrannic Soul?
Which, stretcht upright, impales me so,
That mine own Precipice I go…
A Body that could never rest,
Since this ill Spirit it possest.

After several sharp rallies, the contest proves an honourable if bad-tempered draw, or stalemate. Marvell, an MP as well as a poet, was a political trimmer – and his irenical moral is the interdependence, if insurmountable quarrelsomeness, of both elements in man’s divided nature, rather as in a stormy marriage. His poem marks a new era
which reworked, as much as it reiterated, the old Christian truths.

As a devotional genre, the body–soul
querela
had petered out by the eighteenth century. But, poetically at least, the ‘body and soul’ pairing remained as pervasive as ever, and its archetypes constituted a powerful way of representing gendered and sexual relations. Love poets had, of course, long distinguished antithetical kinds of love – the one earthbound, the other heavenly,
eros
and
agape
, or
cupiditas
and
caritas
. Other possibilities, too, were explored – indeed, done to death. Of all the metaphorical analogues for the soul–body duo, the most popular and explosive was that of husband and wife. Typically, the body was identified with sensual Eve and the soul, or reason, with Adam. However deployed, body–soul thinking told of the union of opposites, habitually discordant but mutually indispensable.

The finest expressions of the Christian vision in the English-speaking world were
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
. These works formed the consummation of a tradition while also marking its dissolution.

Milton’s God is omnipotent, His moral law inexorable and eternal. But the Lord makes man free (as Milton elsewhere wrote, ‘For what obeys reason is free/And reason He made right’), since without freedom of choice there can be no moral order. Lucifer has the liberty to break God’s decrees, though the price is expulsion from Heaven. It was God’s will to create an earthly Paradise; all He required was that man should live in it according to His law. In Book V, Adam is warned:

God made thee perfect, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power; ordain’d thy will
By nature free, not over-rul’d by fate
Inextricable, or strict necessity.

The two epics spell out the consequences of man’s disobedience. The original nature of man, glorious in body, lay in Adam and Eve as depicted in the Garden in Book IV:

Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seem’d lords of all:
And worthy seem’d: for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone.

In this divine order, Adam was the superior: ‘He for God only, she for God in him’. Yet Eve (body) proved more persuasive, as we see in Book IX:

She gave him of that fair enticing fruit
With liberal hand: he scrupl’d not to eat
Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d,
But fondly overcome with Female charm.

Nature was the physical manifestation of God’s design for the universe, associated with light and growth. Man was not simply a part of material nature: he was not like the animals, indeed, for he had been given dominion over them. He had a soul, and hence a moral consciousness, and a freedom of choice which set him closer to Heaven than to Earth.

The path of wisdom and goodness was to recognize and obey the will of God. In Book VIII Milton shows the Ptolemaic Adam in conversation with Raphael, questioning the meaning of the universe: could it have been created simply so as to orbit the tiny Earth once in twenty-four hours? The Archangel’s answer was also, by implication, Milton’s. It was natural that men should speculate (‘for Heav’n/Is as the Book of God before thee set’), and from astronomy men could calculate the times and seasons. But further than this man need not go – here lay the lures of forbidden knowledge. Raphael warned against idle speculation:

                                Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds.

Though himself a humanist and for many a heretic, what Milton feared was the misuse of reason. In Book IV of
Paradise Regained
the Devil tempts Christ, painting a seductive picture of Greek philosophy and art. From Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, insinuates Satan, Christ can learn the political wisdom he will need to be a real ruler in Heaven. Christ replies:

But these are false, or little else but dreams,
Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm.

All one needed was divine truth. Philosophers had perplexed themselves and others:

Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how men fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending.
Much of the soul they talk, but all awry…

Thus Milton put the new science, rationalist philosophy and profane curiosity in their place. Human wickedness took the form of a headstrong conceit and an aversion to submit to God’s moral law. The wisdom of salvation was contained in the Scriptures.

Paradise Lost
ends with Adam and Eve walking sadly out of Eden:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through
Eden
took their solitarie way.

The world was also all before Milton’s contemporaries, as they took their hesitant steps away from that closed Christian world of revealed truth and forbidden knowledge towards – they knew not what.

We are all like the most of the ladies of Paris: they live extremely well without knowing what goes into the stew; in the same way we enjoy bodies without knowing what they are composed of.

VOLTAIRE

What then is matter? What is spirit? How does one influence the other, and vice versa?

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Our sense of self presupposes an understanding of our bodies. But how do we know them? We think we know them instinctively, we speak of ‘our bodies, ourselves’; the original meaning of ‘autopsy’ is to look into one’s self.

But here lie problems. It is an elementary fact that we cannot see or, mostly, even feel what is going on inside the skin envelope. Nor do we generally, by act of will, exert much control over our metabolic functions (though this, one of the aims of the yogic and tantric traditions, became, as we shall see in
Chapter 23
, a hope of the utopian rationalist William Godwin). We may wish and wish, but (most probably) we won’t grow a centimetre taller. We cannot command our hair not to fall out, tell our kidneys to secrete or our heart to beat. And we are quite unaware of internal events (digesting food, making cells), unless they are giving us discomfort. The idea of intuitive, internal self-knowledge of bodies (to say nothing of control over them) is thus far more problematic than that of mental introspection. To a large degree our sense of our bodies, and what happens
in and to them, is not first-hand but mediated through maps and expectations derived from the culture at large.

Bodies are studied objectively, scientifically, not least by ‘autopsies’ in the modern sense; and such ‘outsider’ knowledge shapes and shades our personal ways of thinking the self. Central to those sciences of the body – today the range of natural, human and social sciences is huge – has been medicine: after all, our need to know about our bodies is most pressing when something goes wrong.

Theoretical accounts of what makes up the body, and how it works, in sickness and in health, were first written down in the West by the Greeks and transmitted (through Islam) down the Middle Ages, before being consolidated yet challenged by the spectacular dissections of the Renaissance and the physiological investigations of William Harvey and others in the seventeenth century.

Unlike the medicine of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the model of the body championed by Greek-learnt medicine was emphatically, even aggressively, secular. The body was part of a natural order which was law-governed, disease was a regular irregularity. That view was indicative of a bid by a corps of physicians to present themselves as superior to the existing mishmash of soothsayers, magicians, quacks and folk practitioners, those practising what might loosely be called religious, mystical or traditional modes of healing. The ambitious new professional physicians of Greece and Rome insisted that the body functioned within the order of nature, and for that reason was the proper turf of knowledgeable medical men: beware consulting others!

As first recorded in the Hippocratic corpus (fourth century
BC
: supposedly the thoughts of a distinguished physician from the island of Cos) and codified by the illustrious and amazingly prolific Galen (second century
AD
), learned medicine repudiated earlier supernatural and magical accounts of health and sickness, which saw them as god-sent. Its explanatory repertoire centred on the ‘humours’, bodily fluids (generally taken to be four in number) whose equilibrium was adjudged vital for the maintenance of life: the body must not become too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Humoral theory voiced the
Greek assumption that healthiness involved a balance of the key fluids in the body and sickness a maladjustment. It was also elaborated to explain much else: sexual and racial differences, character, disposition, psychological traits – in fact, every significant aspect of human life.

What was being kept in equilibrium or upset were bodily fluids or
chymoi
(translated as ‘humours’). Sap in plants and blood in animals were viewed as the fount of life. Other and perhaps less salutary bodily fluids appeared mainly in case of illness – for example, the mucus of a cold or the runny faeces of dysentery. Two fluids, bile and phlegm, were particularly associated with illness; though naturally present in the body, both seemed to flow immoderately in sickness. Winter colds were due to phlegm, summer diarrhoea and vomiting to bile, and mania resulted from bile boiling up in the brain. The Hippocratic tract
Airs, Waters, Places
also attributed national characteristics to bile and phlegm: the pasty, phlegmatic peoples of the North were contrasted with the swarthy, hot, dry, bilious Africans – and both were judged inferior to the well-balanced Greeks living in their ideally equable climate.

Bile and phlegm were visible mainly when exuded in sickness, so it made sense to regard them as largely harmful. But what of other fluids? From time immemorial, blood had been associated with life, yet even blood was expelled naturally from the body, as in menstruation or nose-bleeds. Such natural evacuation of the blood suggested the practice of blood-letting, devised by the Hippocratics, systematized by Galen, and serving for centuries as a therapeutic mainstay in case of fevers.