Flesh in the Age of Reason (5 page)

A human being, these doctrines explained, was a compound of two distinctive elements, soul and flesh. Composed as it was of spirit, the divine soul by its very nature was immaterial and immortal. Somehow – and this aspect was highly controversial – this soul docked with the quickened foetus in the womb, thereafter cohabiting with the flesh during earthly life. Upon death the soul continued to be sentient, being finally reunited with the resurrected body at the Last Judgement, when it would, for the saved, everlastingly take its place among the heavenly host; otherwise it would end up frying in eternal torment below – the predestined fate, Calvinists taught, of the majority.

Faiths and philosophies the world over have entertained prospects of some existence beyond the grave (perhaps in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls), and belief in ghosts, shades or the wandering spirits of lost souls has been ubiquitous. Any culture crediting supernatural powers is likely to entertain an afterlife of sorts. But this Christian identification of the self with a ‘separate soul’ which transcended the flesh was especially indebted to theosophies rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Old Testament Judaism, the immediate seedbed of Christianity, was exceptional in this regard, for it had no developed doctrine of an afterlife in which souls would posthumously participate.
*
The Promised Land of the children of Israel is emphatically not some post- and extra-terrestrial heaven: and while Jehovah frequently threatens to visit dire punishments upon His Chosen People, they are to fall ‘unto the third or fourth generation’ of the living rather than upon the shades of the damned in some anticipation of the Christian hell.

While in key ways it was the offshoot of Hebraic monotheism, the theology which became systematized as Christianity, and which established itself, from the fourth century, as the official faith of Imperial Rome, incorporated aspects of Near Eastern Gnostic faiths and Greek metaphysics, including belief (virtually absent from Old Testament Judaism) in a separate, immaterial and immortal soul. Yet while Christ’s teachings and Christian theology thus brought this major departure from Judaism, they also absorbed one of its most distinctive features, one repugnant to Asiatic and Hellenistic asceticism: respect for the flesh itself. Levantine Gnostic sects expressed a contempt for the body, regarding it as a dungeon of the spirit and a hothouse of vile appetites. While such leanings clearly left their mark on Christian doctrine (accounting for its teachings on the evils of carnality and the need for the mortification of the flesh), the Church also set a positive value upon the embodied self unknown in matching faiths. After all, did not Scripture teach that man was created by the Father in His own image, and that God Himself became flesh and died upon the Cross? Incarnation was crucial to the Passion – the ‘doubting’ disciple Thomas needed to finger Jesus’s wounds in order to grasp the Resurrection. And, as prefigured by Christ’s death and resurrection, in the flesh man would finally rise again.

Far from washing its hands, Christianity thus implicated itself utterly in the dilemmas and dramas of the flesh. Christ performed
over thirty healing miracles, giving sight to the blind, making the lame walk, raising the dead. The faith’s popular appeal in the Roman Empire owed much to the fact that, while preaching heavenly salvation, it also, following the parable of the Good Samaritan, tended to bodily needs – for example, by encouraging alms, service and, in due course, the founding of hospitals. Lofty Stoics and wild Cathar heretics might deride such preoccupation with earthly matters as a demeaning bondage to the flesh – hence the Stoic advocacy of noble suicide – but, as Gibbon cynically noted, it was Christianity which successfully appealed to the suffering masses. Through the Eucharist, the doctrine of
Corpus Christi
, the cults of the Virgin, martyrs and holy ascetics, developments in medieval Catholicism further valued and even fetishized the flesh.

The Church’s teachings about the mysteries of the flesh and the miracles of saints were wondrous indeed, and controversy was bound to arise once, in less pious times, these truths ceased to be swallowed on faith or authority. The dread of mortality was allayed by the Universal Resurrection at the Last Trump, but how exactly that miracle was to be effected was a true test of faith.

As the following chapters will show, dogma and sedimented popular beliefs were increasingly questioned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by those – be they scholars, scoffers or sceptics – for whom the Christian soul, the Resurrection, and all which hinged upon them were puzzles, wish-fulfilments, sick men’s dreams, bizarre blather or pious frauds. Christian teachings about the heavenly hereafter of the rejoined body and soul, cynics eagerly pointed out, especially suited Rome because of the tollbooth the Catholic Church claimed on the stairway to heaven: through indulgences, prayers for the dead and requiem masses, it would ensure that the soul, temporarily detained in purgatory, would ultimately attain its divine destination. All such doctrines of an afterlife might be, as unbelievers avowed, the fabrications of clergy on the make, but they were also fundamental to the hopes of the faithful at large – especially those whose daily life was blighted with poverty, affliction and violence –
those for whom the prospect of eternal bliss was the only redress for this vale of tears: religion, indeed, as the opium of the people.

From Luther onwards, Protestantism had thrown a spanner into the works by repudiating purgatory. While the rejection of purgatory no doubt expressed popular loathing for priestly mercenariness, it must also have been deeply unsettling to those now denied the expected helping hand to heaven. And its erasure from the map of salvation inevitably raised questions about what exactly would happen, after all, to that separate soul when released from the body at death. Where did it go, and tarry? What existence did it enjoy or endure
post mortem
? In lashing the corruptions of the Catholic Church, Protestantism thus prompted the brash questions of rationalists and the later qualms of Victorian honest doubters.

Did the British continue to uphold traditional Christianity as taught by the Anglican catechism and liturgy? Many obviously did: those epics of the biblical narrative,
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
, lastingly appealed to Protestant tempers, as did the contemporary spiritual autobiography of the redeemed Baptist, John Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding
(1666). Gibbon sneeringly depicted his pious maiden aunt Hester swallowing biblical literalism whole, confidently expecting to be translated to a heaven where she would join a angelic choir singing its hallelujahs.

This book will not, however, concentrate on the persistence of orthodoxy, though it will discuss some of those thinkers who, like Samuel Johnson, upheld its tenets, including belief in eternal damnation. Rather, it will address new responses to such pressing questions as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What will become of me?’, that were formulated by liberal Christians and other educated laity.

In part prompted by doubts and criticisms, such new responses were also fanned by winds of cultural change. By consequence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Anglican Church finally lost its quasi-monopoly over the promulgation and policing of religious truth in England. Faith was irrevocably splintered into antagonistic factions – Anglicans both high and low, the Catholic remnant, those Calvinist
Puritans who had been in the driving seat around the time of the Civil War, and the more populist sects which had rooted and shooted since then – Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and the motley underground conventicles of Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Free Spirits, Muggletonians and others who would preach, prophesy and practise as the spirit moved them. Doctrinal controversy – sometimes radical, typically hairsplitting – became endemic: since it bade all to scrutinize the Scriptures, what else could Protestantism expect?

Such developments were spurred, too, by the spread of education, literacy and print, by the temporary breakdown of censorship during the Civil War and Commonwealth, and then by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, after which pre-publication censorship never returned. The Act of Toleration (1689) permitted all to express and practise their faith with a fair prospect of impunity. England thereafter resounded with a cacophony of views about divine providence and human destiny, and God’s Englishmen resolutely advanced views of their own on fundamentals rather than docilely taking their cue from the Prayer Book of the Church by law established.

Debate, doubt and difference were fuelled by the print revolution. The explosion of newspapers and magazines, and the emergence of Grub Street around the turn of the eighteenth century inevitably brought, in a free and flourishing country, that proliferation of new-minted truths, discoveries and visions which so incensed Jonathan Swift, who exposed how the novelty of authorship gratified the vain presumption of opinionated egoists and knew it would bring confusion, strife and anguish. The ‘Bulk of Mankind’, that misanthropic Anglican divine and Tory satirist judged, ‘is as well qualified for
flying
as
thinking
’.

All such new beliefs about man and his fate were also adjustments to socio-cultural change. England was fast urbanizing. Its expanding middle classes were possessed of some learning in their heads and money in their pockets, and its propertied élite was newly basking in civilized refinement. A population was emerging that was no longer submissively inured to the pains and privations of this vale of tears but eager to participate in the pleasures of polite prosperity. If some,
like Samuel Johnson, continued to hold that there was more in life to be endured than enjoyed, many were keen to change that, and the quest for social pleasures became a prime mover in the new Georgian order.

Only for a tiny minority did this new worldly milieu and flexible climate of opinion, fostered by print culture and coffee houses, prompt the abandoning of Christianity root and branch; but it certainly kindled questioning and it led the Churches themselves to hearken to their flocks and amend their priorities. There was perhaps less tortured heart-searching now given over to the question: ‘What shall I do to be saved?’, with its commitment to the prime duty of ‘living to die and dying to live’. The ancient priorities of the
ars moriendi
and the
memento mori
retreated in the face of the upcoming assumption that temporal life was meant to be enjoyed – had not a benevolent Deity ordained happiness on earth as an earnest of bliss eternal? Pelagians, Arminians, Latitudinarians and other rational and liberal Christians rejected as unworthy of true religion the notion of a hammer-fisted Almighty meting out woes in this world as a prelude to eternal retribution in the world to come.

As the business, profits and pleasures of temporal existence crowded out the mysteries of eternity, as the big issue turned from ‘Shall I be saved?’ to ‘How shall I be happy?’, a further question cast its shadow: ‘What is it, then, that I am?’ Few educated people explicitly denied that man was, as Christian humanism had taught, the son of Adam, somehow compounded of soul and flesh – incarnated soul or ensouled body – endowed with free will, located a rung beneath the angels on the Great Chain of Being. But exactly what that amounted to was troublingly ambiguous and hotly contested.

In the seventeenth century, as already noted, Descartes signally reiterated the ascendancy of the immaterial by casting it essentially as
res cogitans
, a thinking self. Cartesianism thereby encouraged the naturalistic turn taken by the new rationalism, for this
cogito
stood on its own rational feet, independent of Bible or decretals. Whereas in Christian theology, as in Platonic philosophy, an eternal cosmic order guaranteed the ego within, Descartes’s view that our moral resources
lie entirely within us inevitably if inadvertently paved the way for modern subjectivity.

Cartesianism, of course, became mired in difficulties of its own, partly because of problems as to precisely how this non-material consciousness was ‘earthed’ with the body. Descartes’s view that the two met at the pineal gland attracted more satire than support. His denigrators, however, put themselves under an obligation to come up with a better alternative, and subsequent philosophical, medical and scientific speculations returned time and again to the nagging difficulty of precisely how soul and body, mind and matter, could mesh and sympathize with each other.

The ‘new philosophy’ also provoked fresh speculations about the soul, especially, of course, among thinkers who, for varied reasons, were militantly materialist. For some, notably Thomas Hobbes, philosophical materialism served anti-clerical ends; for others, such as Joseph Priestley a century later, materialism was conscripted to reinforce the Christian gospel, however bizarre and heretical that stance seemed to the devout.

Moreover, a materialistic worldliness was to spread in the bubbling commercial atmosphere of the eighteenth century and the birth of ‘the consumer society’. With the growth of prosperity and creature comforts, the moneyed became absorbed in the here-and-now, in matters tangible, buyable, disposable; in items of fashion and taste, manufactures, commodities, privacy, domesticity and a new sexualization of existence. These trends were doubtless, in broad terms, secularizing, but they emphatically did not lead to the deposing of the Christian soul by a new predilection for the flesh as such. For the ‘body’ remained hardly less puzzling than the soul and, if more concrete, far more objectionable.

Although destined for resurrection, the flesh had, of course, been ceaselessly vilified in medieval preaching and teaching as concupiscent and corrupt. And it appeared hardly less unsatisfactory, if for different reasons, to the avant-garde of enlightened polite culture. It was, to be sure, indubitably solid and the stuff of science – only the fanciful Bishop Berkeley could dismiss brute matter as some
metaphysical chimera. ‘Doctor Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, a very worthy, ingenious and learned man,’ Lord Chesterfield bantered to his son,