Flesh in the Age of Reason (35 page)

Is it in heav’n a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a Lover’s or a
Roman’s
part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For those who greatly think, or bravely die?

Crucial to this reconceptualization of suicide was the rise of print culture and its final triumph over the pulpit. The role heretofore played by the Church in fixing its meaning – overwhelmingly punitive – was usurped by the media, whose line was humanitarian through and through. Newspapers and magazines turned suicides into ‘human interest’ stories, indeed sensations, and encouraged vicarious, often morbid, public involvement, with the printing of suicide notes, last letters and tales of blighted love. Here, as elsewhere, the media gave voice to secular meanings, expressive of enlightened ‘humanitarian narratives’. Like living itself, suicide was secularized. This shift in status from pariah, malefactor or sinner to object of pity, evident in the cases of suicides (and also the insane), was mirrored in many other walks of life, where behaviour which had heretofore attracted blame now found ambivalent exculpation in victim status.

Considerable transformation thus occurred in beliefs about death and the rituals which expressed them. The melodrama of the Christian ‘good death’ receded, to be replaced in many cases by the ideal of a calm departure (like falling asleep); to some degree the presence of the clergy yielded to the physician in attendance. For some brave spirits and freethinkers, to face death without the Christian calling on God was a bold and unflinching declaration and test of a new code of life and sense of self. As is suggested by Mary Wollstonecraft’s reflections, death became newly experienced less as the portal to life eternal than as a framing device on life.

Typically of the theosophies and philosophies emerging from the Eastern Mediterranean in the Roman era, Christianity problematized the flesh, and down the centuries graphic rhetorics of denunciation harped on the associations between flesh, sex and sin. ‘I come from parents who made me a condemned man before even I was born. Sinners begot a sinner in sin, and nourished him in sin,’ declared Hugh of St-Victor in the early twelfth century:

I received nought from them but misfortunes, sin, and the corrupt body I wear. I hurry to those who have already departed through the death of their bodies. When I look at their graves, I see nothing but ashes and worms, stench and horror. That which I am now, they once were. What am I? A man born of a slimy humour, for at the moment of conception I was conceived out of a human seed. This form then coagulated and, in growing, became flesh. After which I was thrown out into the exile of this world, wailing and crying.

A hundred years later, posing the same ‘what am I?’ question, Pope Innocent III, too, vilified salacious flesh with no more mercy:

Man is formed of dust, mud, ashes, and, what is even viler, of foul sperm… Who can ignore the fact that conjugal union never occurs without the itching of the flesh, the fermentation of desire and the stench of lust? Hence any progeny is spoiled, tainted and vitiated by the very act of its conception, the seed communicating to the soul that inhabits it the stain of sin, the stigma of fault, the filth of iniquity.

To contain the flesh, the early Church commended asceticism, desert fathers mortified the flesh, medieval holy men and women, saints and mystics suffered heroic denial and legendary feats of fasting,
while ordinary Christians were required to follow suit according to their lights – for instance through the discipline of Lenten abstinence.

The shifts of temper associated with Protestantism, rationalism and capitalism did not so much supersede traditional suspicions about the flesh as bring new suspicions about the suspicions. Was not spectacular fasting itself a manifestation of vainglory, or perhaps of sickness? Were not many traditional reports of triumphs over the flesh, as recorded in lives of the saints, incredible, superstitious and thus at risk of scandal? In any case, was it not all rather misguided? For Protestants, the preferred discipline of the body did not take the form of pious infirmity but of regular labour in one’s calling, while the Catholic celebration of chastity and virginity yielded to praise of godly procreation and parenthood. Marital sex became a God-given solace: the genuine Christian should produce and reproduce.

Established Christian asceticism was thus not so much abandoned as rationalized and naturalized in emergent early modern practices of bodily control. By the long eighteenth century, medicine, cleanliness and hygiene (including sexual) became prime vehicles of the regulation of flesh which if corrupt and fallen could also be seen as a glorious gift of God. Building for instance upon William Harvey’s demonstration in his
De Motu Cordis
of the functions of the heart as a pump, advances in physiology boosted confidence that the machinery of the body was becoming understood, thereby encouraging the cultivation of a genre of sacred anatomy which proclaimed that the organism, properly investigated by science, would further reveal God’s design in the perfect proportions and divinely crafted contrivances of the
machina carnis
. If it was highly dishonourable, as Robert Boyle reflected, ‘for a Reasonable Soul to live in so Divinely built a Mansion, as the Body she resides in, altogether unacquainted with the exquisite Structure of it’, that great experimenter and others were striving to overcome such lamentable ignorance. Science was discovering the new-found lands of the great bodily systems, and (as we have seen with Addison and Steele) popularizers trumpeted news of what had, till recently, been
terra incognita
. Cited in the
Spectator
, the versified anatomical descriptions presented by Sir Richard Black-more
in
Creation
represent the most august, if hopelessly fustian, example of pious veneration of the divine handiwork:

The salient point, so first is called the heart,
Shap’d and suspended with amazing art,
By turns dilated, and by turns comprest,
Expels, and entertains the purple guest.
It sends from out its left contracted side.

What admirable proofs of the wise and benevolent Contriver were the heart and the vascular system!

Daily life remained a grind for the great majority in the eighteenth century. Most power was still muscle power; long childbearing careers were the curse women bore (many could not take the strain and died prematurely); cold, damp, overwork and poor diet were ubiquitous. But whereas the thrust of medieval Christian teachings lay in resignation and the tropes of heaven, a new stress was emerging upon the right, and the responsibility, of the cultivation of vigorous health.

Christian piety had always poured scorn on undue concern for the welfare of the body as vanity: consider the lilies of the field, take no thought for the morrow, God will provide – the thread of life depended upon grace and the mysteries of Providence. Eighteenth-century Christians, however, cast aside certain vestiges of medieval mortification and unconcern for the welfare of the flesh. The Anglican clergy were prominent in founding hospitals and promoting smallpox inoculation – traditional Calvinists, we have seen, viewed this as defying Providence – while John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote the century’s most popular medical self-help text,
Primitive Physick
(1747). Dissenters, too, moved with the times. ‘Lord teach me to prize health,’ beseeched the Presbyterian, Richard Kay, in the 1730s, then just beginning a brief career as a physician in Lancashire (death from fever cut him off in his thirties). A century later, the Cambridge churchman Charles Kingsley averred that there was actually ‘something impious’ in that ‘neglect of personal health’ which the ‘effeminate ascetics’ of the Oxford Movement enjoined to prove their unworldiness: a complete reversal of values. For ‘muscular
Christians’ like Kingsley, a healthy body was the vessel, and the mark, of a healthy soul:
mens sana in corpore sano
. Physical feebleness was a perverse affectation which smacked of monkish popery; God’s work needed strength and energy.

If the rational Christian thus had a duty to foster health, how precisely was it to be safeguarded and improved? Advice filled the air, and home-care books flooded the market. Works like John Burton’s
Treatise on the Non-Naturals
(1738) and John Arbuthnot’s
An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments
(1731) explained to the educated the ideas behind health care, while Wesley’s
Primitive Physick
told the poor how to look after themselves with little more than a pot of honey, a string of onions, a pitcher of cold water and a besom.

The
sine qua non
for positive health, everybody understood, lay in establishing and maintaining a robust constitution that would serve as an investment and security against illness. Contrariwise, a corrupt constitution was as disastrous for the individual as for the body politic. Specific spasms and bouts of disease were alarming, but nothing boded worse than the erosion of one’s very system. ‘I wish I could speak more favourably of poor Clarke,’ Edward Gibbon confided to his friend Lord Sheffield, ‘but… his Constitution is broke up.’ Such vitiation was irremediable. ‘My constitution will no longer allow me to toil as formerly,’ complained the asthmatic surgeon and author Tobias Smollett. What did he mean? ‘I am now so thin you would hardly know me. My face is shrivelled up by the asthma like an ill-dried pippin, and my legs are as thick at the ancle as at the calf.’ In his novel
Humphry Clinker
(1771) particularly, Smollett showed bodily disease and disorder fuelling weakness of character and bad behaviour.

The constitution was the reservoir of inner strength and resistance, that vigour which abounded when all one’s organs co-operated effectively, directed by the mind through sprightly animal spirits. Life was a flame – a favourite metaphor – which should burn bright and hot, and one’s constitution was the tallow, the oil and the wick. If one lacked a good constitution in the first place, or if it fell into decay with time or was wrecked by reckless living, medicines would not
avail when infection or affliction struck. Doctors were thus seen as secondary, auxiliaries useful largely by dint of their capacity to give good health advice and to prescribe drugs which would reinforce spontaneous, internal powers of recuperation – the ‘healing power of nature’.

Thus, the constitution was the very foundation of individual well-being (the political analogy with the British Constitution was clear). Suffering from ‘scurvy’, some non-specific form of skin complaint, Isabella Duke told her physician – none other than the philosopher John Locke – that she had no hope of recovery from her specific ailment, ‘unless it be by mending the Habit of my Body in general, and sweetning my Blood’.

To enjoy this good constitution, sound foundations had to be laid in infancy and consolidated in youth. The plan spelt out by Locke himself in his
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693) commended early hardening of the young, and hence still pliable, body. Nothing could be worse than spoiling the new-born with cosseting, for ‘cockering and tenderness’ would create and then confirm physical frailty in the infant, thereby spawning spindly, hothouse youths destined to turn into lifelong valetudinarians dependent on stimulants and medicines.

Babies, according to Locke and his army of followers, needed a cool environment, loose clothes, freedom of movement and simple nourishment (initially, the mother’s breast). In time they should be systematically exposed to a more bracing regime, including unheated bedrooms, going barefoot, cold-water bathing and even – Locke’s rather fiendish suggestion – wearing shoes that would ‘leak water’ when it rained. (His disciple James Nelson thought this a bit much.)

This ‘hardening’ regime had powerful emotional and ideological resonances, chiming among other things with the fashionable bucolic myth that peasants, forced to live hard, must be healthier and more resilient than the pampered urban rich, and belief in the healthiness of the ‘noble savage’. The Newcastle engraver and nature-lover Thomas Bewick praised the ‘hardy inhabitants of the fells’ of Northumberland who, ‘notwithstanding their apparent poverty’, were able
to ‘enjoy health and happiness in a degree surpassing that of most other men’. Constitutional ‘hardening’ long enjoyed an English vogue as the best way of ‘immunizing’ the body. ‘Delicacy’, warned
On the Management of Children
by ‘Seymour’ (
nom de plume
of Sir John Hill), ‘is the Portent of a thousand Mischiefs.’

By avoiding mollycoddling and trusting to nature, a stout constitution could be established as a treasure-chest of health. How could such ‘stamina’ be safeguarded throughout adult life? As attitudes and actions show, many believed the answer lay in faithfully following a health regime. It was vital that each department of life – diet and dress, the ensemble of activities making up the day – should be ordered in light of their health implications, so that each element should be beneficial, and the whole would provide a balanced economy of living. Nothing could be taken for granted, everything counted. Rich or poor alike, each individual had the power in myriad minor ways to promote healthy living – or hazard it. ‘I’m a great friend to Air,’ recorded Lady Mary Coke, delighted to get back into her own home ‘where I might have as many windows op’ned as I pleased’. While visiting Lady Lucy Howard, ‘I was of infinite use both to her & her House,’ this bossyboots reported, ‘by opening all the windows, which were as closely shut as if it had been the coldest day in Winter, but I suppose you know She has always a fire in her Bed Chamber the hottest day in summer; how can She have her health with such management?’ Evidently Lady Mary was a good Lockean.