Flesh in the Age of Reason (70 page)

It is, nevertheless, worth attempting to highlight some salient changes. Practically all seventeenth-century thinkers derived their ideas of the self from fundamental Christian doctrines. That is true even of those who were heterodox (like the mortalists) or idiosyncratic (for instance, John Asgill) or those who, like Thomas Hobbes, were outed as the Devil quoting Scripture. This authorized version, preached by the Churches, held man to be a compound of mortal earthly clay and an immaterial and immortal soul that was destined to outlive the dissolution of the flesh, until reunion at the Last Judgement. Psychologically satisfying for individual believers, this doctrine equally met the needs of Church and State for a regulatory, disciplinary and punitive model of accountability infinitely extended beyond life on earth. It had biblical sanction; it found incarnation as epic verse in
Paradise Lost
, Edward Young’s
Night Thoughts
, and in myriad other poetic and painterly forms; and it had been given rational, philosophical sanction through Greek philosophies, with their championing of the separateness and superiority of the soul, as codified by the Schoolmen and reinforced by Descartes’s dualism and the mechanical philosophy.

This standard model experienced various challenges, and became soft-pedalled, sidelined or superseded. Traditional theological teachings about life after death came under fire from freethinkers for being irrational, incoherent, incredible or, in the eyes of liberal Deists, repugnant and immoral. Biting critics dismissed such doctrines of the soul as the cankered fruits of superstitious fears, exploited by priestcraft. In particular, as religion in Britain became lay-driven, responsible more to the formulations of Addison and Steele than the pontifications of prelates, a more populist ‘bourgeois’ fantasy of life after death gained support. Heaven became pictured as a kind of
retirement home, or an extension of domestic life, or even an idealized state which only the vulgar would view in the infantile terms of angels chanting hallelujahs. Once Protestantism had abandoned purgatory, the gulf between the living and the dead widened, indeed grew unbridgeable, and it became far more difficult for the Churches to keep control of believers’ visions of the life beyond.

One consequence of all such developments was a naturalization or even secularization of the self in which, while life beyond the grave was rarely explicitly denied, the emphasis was increasingly set upon one’s earthly existence as an end in itself. This entailed a kind of practical utilitarianism in ethics and lifestyle: worldly happiness could now, for the first time within Christendom, be presented as a worthy design.

Under the new banner of progress, such secular prophets as Erasmus Darwin, William Godwin and Robert Owen focused their sights on the perfection and prolongation of life on earth, independently of whatever otherworldly prospects might be in store. The fortune of the self became figured in terms of an enticing career on earth rather than the Christian
memento mori
– ‘live to die and die to live’. Within enlightened ideology, paradise
now
in heaven
below
became the new call.

Another key theme of this book, sharply focused by these religious changes, has been, of course, the evaluation of the flesh itself. On the body and carnality, the ‘authorized version’ presented a plausible and coherent package. On the one hand, the flesh was vile, bodies sordid, desires concupiscent, carnal knowledge suspect: viewed thus, the flesh was endlessly flayed and punished by the Churches. Yet it was also given a key and honourable function, unique within world religions and philosophies. God had become incarnate in Jesus Christ who had died on the Cross; man was made in God’s image, and he would be reunited with his flesh at the Last Judgement and translated, triumphantly re-embodied, to heaven. Christianity thus catered in subtle ways for deep personal psychological attachment to the body.

Enlightened élites found this Christian preoccupation with the flesh – in both punishment and salvation – naïve, vulgar, implausible
and gross. Such reactions manifested themselves in many ways – for example, in the growing emphasis among progressives upon the benightedness of corporal and capital punishment. Making the body an object of retribution seemed wrong-minded – for reasons both of humanity and of superior efficiency, criminal justice must address the mind rather than the flesh, as only thereby would correction lead to true repentance and reform.

In many departments of life, emphasis was shifted from the physical to the psychological. The true object of the perfection of man became the cultivation of mind or sensibility. With the displacement of the expressly Christian idea of the soul, consciousness itself moved centre stage. Mind was enshrined as the principle of freedom of the will, the repository of memory. It should, proclaimed men and ladies of sensibility, be tinglingly excited, or, for others, the agent of progress. Empirical psychologists insisted that mind was a faculty which emerged, through natural, law-governed activities, from the operations of the senses and education: mind was rooted in the mundane and the temporal. Indeed, for a powerful, if minority, tradition, grounded in Locke and associated with Hartley, Priestley and Godwin, mind was programmatically figured as mechanical, predicated upon the operations of the body, and thus completely independent of the ‘authorized version’ Christian soul.

That is not to say that thinkers of this Hartleyan materialist tendency consequently celebrated the superiority of the flesh, the corporeal over the conscious, nor that they became crass hedonists. Far from it. They set about creating new structures, paralleling those of the old-style Church belief they were replacing, which would set the psyche on the throne in place of the traditional immortal soul, figured as the captain of the self, exactly as the secular intellectual élite was replacing the clergy as the superior guiding force of society. The representatives of gross corporeality were the vulgar, the labouring poor; élites upheld their own superiority as creatures of mind rather than base matter.

Mind was meant to surpass matter in many ways. It could be engaged in disciplining the body through a stiff upper lip neo-
Stoicism, in a new reserve and control of the body prefiguring the Victorian culture of denial. It could be the preoccupation with delicate and superfine feeling that was displayed in the cult of sensibility. It might be the Romantic cult of the imagination, soaring above the moils and toils of the world that is too much with us. It could be the radical dictatorship of the body by the mind that was so provocatively advanced by William Godwin.

In other words, although there were tendencies towards naturalization, even secularization, in the long eighteenth century, this does not mean that the new self was identified with, reduced to, or seen as coterminous with the flesh. Rather it meant the moulding, disciplining and subordination of the flesh, the analysis and subordination of the
soma
which mind, imagination and education would bring.

This required uneasy and unstable compromises. In the nineteenth century powerful trends deplored what was regarded as the excessive prominence of or reliance upon the flesh spelt by commercial, industrialized and mechanized society. The reduction of workers to hands, the dissection of animals in laboratories – all these seemed, to many traditionalists, dangerous surrenders to a materialism whose explicit or implicit tendency was reductionism and the erosion of all moral and social order.

Equally, the Victorian era brought powerful psychological conflict. With new ambiguities about the immortal soul and growing stress upon the sovereignty of mind, death itself became all the more unthinkable and unspeakable. One consequence was the mawkish Victorian cult of death, with all its palaver and mystifications of belief masking a fundamental denial. The decline and fall of the traditional biblical and Christian story of the self did not result in the triumph of any single rival, but brought new and lonely agonies, evidenced for instance in Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
(1850), with its hope of a future life, or, more positively, in John Henry Newman’s
The Dream of Gerontius
(1865).
*

To reduce such changes to the grossest of functionalist terms, the mission of the emergent lay élites of the long eighteenth century was to elbow aside the traditional clergy, and so the old Christian soul became displaced; and to lord it over the plebs – hence its resistance to any embracing of or identification with the body as such. The new mental and cultural élites had a stalking-horse and shibboleth of their own: it was mind, and soon the march of mind, and for them progress became the secularization of salvation. The doctrine of mind over matter stood for power over the people.

Mary Abbott,
Family Ties: English Families, 1540–1920
(London: Routledge, 1993).

Mary Abbott,
Life Cycles in England 1560–1720: Cradle to Grave
(London: Routledge, 1996).

R. M. Adams,
The Land and Literature of England: A Historical Account
(London: W. W. Norton, 1984).

Joseph Addison,
The Freeholder
, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

John Addy,
Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century
(London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

John Addy,
Death, Money and the Vultures: Inheritance and Avarice 1600–1750
(London: Routledge, 1992).

Jean-Christophe Agnew,
Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

William Albert,
The Turnpike Road System in England 1663–1840
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

Geoffrey Alderman,
Modern Britain: 1700–1983: A Domestic History
(London: Croom Helm, 1986).

Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (eds.),
Outsiders and Outcasts: Essays in Honour of William J. Fishman
(London: Duckworth, 1991).

David Alexander,
Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution
(London: Athlone Press, 1970).

Beverly Sprague Allen,
Tides in English Taste (1619–1800)
(New York: Pageant Books, 1958).

David Elliston Allen,
The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History
(London: Allen Lane, 1976).

Robert Joseph Allen,
The Clubs of Augustan London
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).

Richard D. Altick,
The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978).

Richard D. Altick,
Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985).

Susan Dwyer Amussen,
An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

Susan D. Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England’,
Journal of British Studies
, 34 (1995), 1–34.

Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.),
Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

Michael Anderson,
Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

Michael Anderson,
Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1914
(London: Macmillan, 1980).

Michael Anderson,
Population Change in North-Western
Europe, 1750–1850
(London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1988).

M. S. Anderson,
Historians and Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715–1789
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

M. S. Anderson,
War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1789
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988).

Patricia Anderson,
The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

R. D. Anderson,
Education and the Scottish People 1750–1918
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

Donna T. Andrew,
Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

Raymond A. Anselment,
‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

Raymond A. Anselment,
The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England
(Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1995).

Joyce Oldham Appleby, ‘Locke, Liberalism and the Natural Law of Money’,
Past and Present
, 71 (1976), 43–69.