Flesh in the Age of Reason (7 page)

This ‘form and content’ doctrine underpinned Aristotle’s view of soul and body. He proposed a far snugger alliance of the two than Plato: where his mentor saw strife, he emphasized the necessity for their union. The body, for Aristotle, was not the enemy of the soul. Rather, the soul needed to be wedded to the flesh, since only through the body could it function. The two were thus not estranged and competing sovereign entities, but were related as means to ends, potentiality to actualization.

This intimate rapport between body and soul challenged Plato’s clear-cut value-judgement distinctions. The Aristotelian soul was neither immured within the body nor the casualty of its cravings, but originated with and within the body, being sexually transmitted through the semen. Moreover, the tripartite soul of the
Timaeus
(reason, spirit, appetite) was simplified to become twofold in Aristotle, rational and irrational – the latter itself being further subdivided into the vegetative and sensitive faculties. These ‘lower’ souls were also present in plants and animals: nutrition, growth and sense were all attributed to the actions of the respective vegetative and sensitive souls. The Aristotelian viewpoint, which thus stressed continuities rather than polarities between plants and animals on the one hand
and humans on the other, proved lastingly influential in science and medicine, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Beyond this subrational soul lay
nous
, the intellect or rational soul.
*
The lower part of
nous
, the ‘passive intellect’, was tied to the body and perished with it – it was, so to speak, the materialization of thought. The active
nous
was, however, divine, immortal, detached from the body and thought of less as a substance than as an activity. This rather elastic account of reason or
nous
eased the assimilation of Aristotelian metaphysics into Christian theology.

Stoicism, too, had a considerable input into Christian formulas. St Paul drew for his notion of the spiritual soul upon the Stoic concept of soul (
pneuma
), viewed by the Apostle as the creative in-breathing of God (‘inspiration’ in the literal sense). And the Stoic belief that man’s end was to live in conformity with the Ruling Principle or Universal Reason, which involved not merely quelling but actually eradicating desires in a positive state of ‘apathy’ (literally: being without feeling), commended itself to Christian asceticism.

Christianity was an outgrowth from Judaism, and it took the inspiration for its new dispensation for man’s salvation from the Old Testament master-narrative which began with Creation as related in Genesis and would end in the New Jerusalem. Christ’s prophetic message, as recorded in the Gospels (written up long after His
death), incorporated and enlarged upon Ezekiel, Isaiah and the other prophets; the New Testament is plotted by their apocalyptic expectations, which were further elaborated and reinterpreted down the ages by the Church.

Incorporating earlier biblical texts (especially Genesis, Exodus, the books of the prophets and the apocalyptic visions of Daniel), the book of Revelation, which concludes the New Testament, unveils a succession of events destined to terminate the present wicked world-order, which, through Christ’s Second Coming, is to be replaced by the regeneration of mankind. In this sacred chronology, Revelation taught a model of time foreign to the classical world. Unlike Graeco-Roman cyclicalism (Plato’s ‘great year’, the theory of eternal recurrence), the Bible grants earthly history a single storyline, with an opening (‘In the beginning’: the
fiat
of Creation), a catastrophe (the Fall), a crisis (the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ), and an imminent end (the Second Coming of Christ as King, followed by ‘a new heaven and a new earth’), which will bring the ‘tragedy’ of man to a happy ending (hence Dante’s ‘divine
comedy
’). This historical drama, furthermore, had a heavenly Author: ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.’

Mankind is but a pawn in the blood-curdling chiliastic narrative whose protagonists are the titanic opposing forces of good and evil, light and darkness. Satan, the Beast and the Great Whore – collectively, ‘Antichrist’ – are ranged against God, Christ and the company of saints. History’s consummation will occur only after the annihilation of the forces of evil in this ‘war in heaven’.

Early Christians expected ‘apocalypse now’ to bring about the ‘kingdom of God’. This failed to happen. But the Apocalypse, as Milton observed, rises ‘to a Prophetick pitch in types, and Allegories’, and so it proved easy to adjust apocalyptic symbols to changed circumstances. Over time, the evil empire of the Beast was variously re-identified (and still is) with the Jews, Islam, the Vatican, Communism and so forth. Moreover, a tendency to internalize eschatology via a spiritual reading had begun as early as St Paul’s ‘behold, the kingdom of God is within you’. Rejecting literal readings of the
millennial promise, St Augustine also directed apocalyptic prophecy to the individual soul. His
Confessions
were to form the template for later spiritual autobiographies and allegories like Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, which depicted the believer wending his spiritual way through the temptations of Satan towards the ‘new Jerusalem… prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’.

Christianity thus adopted (and universalized) Judaism’s providential vision of the destiny of Zion’s children unfolding in linear (‘real’) time. But the soul–body dualism which became equally fundamental to Christian theology was derived not from the Hebrew heritage but from admixtures of Levantine theosophy and Greek philosophy. The Old Testament viewed man primarily as a divinely animated body, not, as in Plato, an immaterial soul, temporarily enfleshed. Admittedly, in Jewish circles around the time of Christ the Pharisees were promoting doctrines of the immortal soul, but this innovation was opposed by powerful Sadducees who upheld the traditional doctrine that the soul perishes with the body.

The Hellenization of Christianity, with its metaphysics of the separate soul, began, perhaps ironically, with Philo the Jew, a first-century Alexandrian deeply sympathetic to Greek thinking. Drawing on the Stoic idea of
pneuma
as the divine substance or soul breathed into man, Philo proposed a radical body–soul dualism that was foreign to Old Testament faith. He also drew on Plato’s
Phaedrus
myth of the ‘fall’ of the soul; dwelling in the body as in a tomb, the soul was condemned to be a ‘pilgrim and sojourner’ while on earth. In the thinking of the second-and third-century Church Fathers, this model of the polarization of soul and body crystallized, as did the image of the soul trapped in the world – experience of savage persecution evidently made the Neoplatonic body–soul conflict particularly pertinent to early Christians.

For Christians, however, unlike Platonists, certain doctrines integral and singular to Christianity, specifically the Incarnation and Resurrection, precluded wholly negative views of the flesh. Within the Christian eschatology, the immortal life of the soul required the reanimation of the body: had not Christ taught (and St Paul
expounded) how His Resurrection after the Crucifixion was the guarantee of a general resurrection? Without that, would not the Saviour have died in vain?

In any case, the need to combat Gnostics, Manichees and members of other ascetic sects and heresies, who execrated the flesh as the Devil’s work (tainted by profane earthly powers), also weighed heavily with the Fathers. Countering Gnosticism, Irenaeus (late second century) insisted that it was soul and body melded together which made up a complete person – man was the union of soul, which had received the divine spirit, with flesh, made in God’s image. Irenaeus’ contemporary, the brow-beating, heretic-hunting Tertullian, demanded respect for God-created flesh.

But other winds were blowing. The third-century theologian Origen gave pride of place to the immateriality of the soul and, in allegorical readings of Scripture, deemed its entry into the material world a ‘descent’. The soul of man was pre-existent, he stressed in Neoplatonic manner, and so its embodiment must be punishment for some prior sin. Whereas Tertullian had cast the soul (in a rather Jewish manner) as part and parcel with the flesh, Origen constantly avowed its self-sufficient immateriality. His reputed self-castration squares with such flesh-despising views.

Augustine (354–430) gave Christian thinking yet another twist – one which proved lastingly influential. In his youth he was a Manichee who held, like the Gnostics, that matter was evil and a threat to the soul. Repudiating such views upon becoming a Christian – and putting aside his concubine – he later taught that man’s corruptibility and mortality derived not from the flesh
per se
but from the sin of Adam. Without Original Sin, man as a unity – body and soul – would have been immortal: only after the Fall did flesh and spirit descend to civil war. Through the Resurrection, however, the glorified but still physical body, reunited to the soul, would return man to his pristine perfection. Although the corrupt concupiscence of the body in this life – upon which Augustine never failed to dwell – was symptomatic of man’s lapsed condition (the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak), the flesh was not in itself base or even (despite the
Christian Platonists) the cause of the Fall, for the first sin came from the soul. When Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was first and foremost a disobedience of the will.
*

While softening the detestation of the flesh characteristic of his Manichee phase (and of Christian Platonists), Augustine thus presented body and soul as the two components of a torn and divided self. The immateriality of the soul was upheld without naïvely elevating it above the body in a way which would have betrayed the specificity of the Christian gospel. Over a thousand years later, in a rather similar manner, that great Augustinian Martin Luther was likewise to insist, against the Platonizers, that the body in itself was not a punishment for Original Sin. Man would have had a bodily presence, flesh and bones, had he never fallen. In a tradition from Augustine to Luther, Christian doctrine thus tried to steer a middle way between the Jewish lack of a separate soul and the Neoplatonic contempt for the flesh.

Throughout medieval and, in due course, Reformation and Counter-Reformation thinking, the human animal continued to be defined as
homo duplex
, the union, incurably discordant, of earthly body and immortal soul – a notion enshrined in the Anglican Prayer Book’s reference to ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’. Rival readings of this alliance vied for supremacy. The Aristotelian scholasticism pioneered by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century (and long the staple fare of the universities) portrayed the flesh as the
instrument
of the soul; Christian Platonists by contrast viewed it as the soul’s
dungeon
. For some Christian teachers, the body, identified by St Paul with flesh embattled against the spirit (Galatians 5: 17: ‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are
contrary the one to the other’), was the inexorable enemy. On the other hand, the divinely created human frame could be depicted as ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost’ (St Paul again: 1 Corinthians 6: 19), a view sanctified by the Incarnation.

The Church’s teachings were further complicated, moreover, because from the earliest Fathers body and soul were not thought of merely as literal objects but metaphorical – in other words, flesh and spirit, denoting degenerate and pure impulses respectively. St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, just quoted, served as a standard source for this rhetoric of two warring protagonists at large, with its identification of the ‘works of the flesh’ as ‘adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like’. The terms of this rhetorical war provided pulpit orators with limitless ammunition. In his
Of the Combat of the Flesh and Spirit
(1593), the Cambridge Puritan William Perkins explains that ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ signify contrary impulses within man, the spirit being a ‘created quality of holiness’ and flesh ‘the natural corruption or inclination of the mind, will, and affections’. Both – here Perkins is clearly speaking with a Platonic tongue – are qualities within the soul.

As heathen Europe underwent conversion from the Dark Ages, all such high-theological teachings became intertwined in myriad ways with popular and pagan lore about the supernatural, ghosts and the afterlife. The emergent mission of the Church and the needs of the faithful led to the formulation of much that was barely biblical: the Trinity (with its evident echoes of Plato’s tripartite soul), the Eucharist, the Devil (and the Faustian idea of selling one’s soul to Satan) and, from the thirteenth century, the doctrines of purgatory and limbo. Superstitions and saints’ lives embroidered awesome tales of miraculous bodies and wonder-working souls.

All such teachings were popularized, through the liturgy and sermons, through offices of piety and the frescoes which emblazoned the interiors of churches. A tradition of earthy and sometimes droll body–soul dialogues emerged, dramatizing typically bitter recrimi
nations between a deceased person’s body and soul, contesting responsibility for his failings. The Soul blamed sin on the flesh, which it charged with every imaginable carnal enormity. Not so, rejoined the Body: it could not be censured for sin, because it was only passive and subordinate matter acting under orders: evil, as Augustine had argued, began in the mind or will. In any case, should the Soul not have been vigilant in the first place?

Parallel literary genres, like the Dance of Death that was popular after the Black Death, juxtaposed body and soul; and the clichés of the ‘body and soul’ dialogues – were they not partners in crime? – formed the daily bread of sermons, homilies and devotional tracts. Certain motifs constantly recur in texts and images:
contemptus mundi
, the deathbed with its ever-present devils or the soul escaping from the mouth or nostrils, and gothic visions of souls burning in hell.