Flesh in the Age of Reason (14 page)

The emergent Church, as indicated in
Chapter 2
, had consolidated a corpus of philosophical theology which showed that Creation was permeated by Holy Spirit and proved that the divine and immaterial was superior to mutable and perishable matter. To explain man, the offshoots of Platonism, Aristotelianism and Galenism which dominated medieval and Renaissance university curricula taught of a nest of life-bearing distinctive souls – rational, animal and vegetative – which were the active principles of will, life, form, growth and generation, operative through the medium of ‘spirits’, those superfine fluids inherent in living bodies.

Above all, Christianity embraced the immaterial, eternal individual human soul, which gave man his unique place on the divine Chain of Being. The twin doctrines of base flesh and the salvation of the soul afforded solace and hope to the wretched feudal masses overwhelmed by the insecurity of life and the certainty of death.
But, equally, they reinforced the authority of Church and State, by dictating inescapable accountability, the meting out of rewards and (especially) punishments for all eternity. Crime, sin and apostasy would mean not just the lash, the gibbet or the faggot in the here-and-now, but the doom of burning in hell everlastingly. Indeed, early modern heretics and Enlightenment freethinkers held that all those beyond-the-grave terrors had been cooked up in the first place by scheming churchmen to intimidate and fleece the laity: Christian eschatology and soteriology (the theory of salvation) thus served the powers that be very nicely.

This helps to explain why orthodox teachings about the spiritual realm came under such fire in England during the upheavals of the Civil War and Commonwealth (1642–60): after all, if there were no soul as taught in the catechism, there would be no hell – so what the hell? Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and other tub-thumpers bent on exploding the magic and majesty of power exposed the doctrines of eternal rewards and punishments as fictions fabricated by cunning clergy. Advocating agrarian communism, the Digger spokesman Gerrard Winstanley explained that heaven and hell were not in truth the shape of things to come but figurative – inner, subjective states: ‘Why may we not have our Heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the Earth)?’ Why indeed?

Symptomatic of this mutiny was the popularity of ‘mortalism’, the heresy that, upon death, the soul sleeps until the Last Judgement. ‘Some believe’, thundered a pillar of Puritanism, Edmund Calamy, in 1646, ‘that the
Soul dyeth with the Body
’, rising again only on the Day of Judgement. One notorious advocate of this ‘soul-sleeping heresy’ was Thomas Hobbes. Crucial to his dynamiting of priestcraft was rejection of the soul’s intrinsic immortality. That fallacy – the doctrine that souls were incorporeal principles, living on after death by virtue of their inherent nature – had been smuggled in by the Church from the trash of Greek metaphysics. The Bible – Hobbes, of course, loved playing the Devil citing Scripture – gave not a word of warrant for any such natural immortality: in the sacred writings, ‘soul’ simply meant life or breath. As earlier discussed, the Hobbist denial of spirit
was generally read as a veiled denial of God, and thus as a green light for ‘anything goes’ libertinism.

Mortalism not only squared with Hobbes’s anticlerical immoralism. It also appealed to populists like the Levellers. Twisting Aristotle for his own ends, Richard Overton, for one, argued for the inseparability of body and soul, and of form and matter. The soul in reality was ‘the internall and externall Faculties of Man joyntly considered’: soul and body ‘must as well end together as
begin
together; and
begin
together as
end
together.… they neither can
Be
, nor consist without other’. The soul could not naturally outlive the body; grace would come only on the Last Day. Such formulas of faith, which downplayed the separate soul, released the laity from the vice-grip of the Church.

What made mortalism so plausible, yet disturbing, was that it flowed inexorably from Luther’s rejection of the popish doctrine of purgatory and the whole probationary palaver of indulgences, invocation of saints, passing bells, requiem masses and other abuses which it bred. For Protestants, there was no such place. In that case, demanded radicals, in what celestial way-station could the soul actually be lingering between death and the Last Trump? Mortalism’s watertight logic on this point commended it to intellectuals like Milton, eager to cleanse Christianity of the dregs of popish hocus-pocus and ‘vulgar errors’, and it was also attractive to plebeian radicals because of its exposé of the outrageous prolongation of the power of throne and altar beyond the grave.

Nor was mortalism the only teaching which, in Christopher Hill’s apt phrase, was turning the world upside down in the wake of the Civil War. The old order was also being defied, for instance, by all those antinomian preachers and self-styled ‘saints’ who claimed to be personally inspired with the Holy Spirit (again bypassing the clergy). Did not the Bible teach that to the pure all things were pure? Why then must free spirits obey the powers that be? The doctrinal, social and political anarchy thus brewing up gave the coming ‘new philosophy’ a particular appeal to those who saw in science a buttress of order, intellectual, social and cosmic alike.

*

In its account of the order of nature, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ sought to replace superannuated scholasticism with a fruitful utilitarian philosophy of works not words. But it was not merely a superior research tool; for its advocates, it had a nobler mission. Ultimately derived from Aristotle, the teachings of the ‘schoolmen’ – principally, of course, Roman Catholic priests – perpetuated the essential defects of that pagan: idolizing Nature as they did, their drift was materialistic and atheistic. Basic to such ‘peripatetic’ thinking was the commitment to a teleological, self-moving organic Nature: did that not mean, alleged critics, that spirit was subordinated to substance or matter, and God the Creator and Sustainer dethroned?

It was in part because of this anti-scholastic groundswell that the doctrines of Descartes, outlined earlier, initially won a warm welcome in England, notably among a clutch of Cambridge academics who were alarmed by common-man ‘atheism’ but equally disaffected with the hard-line Calvinism dominant in the 1640s. The Calvinists’ doctrinaire, predestinatory denial of human free will, their conviction of radical sinfulness, was countered by these Cambridge ‘Latitude men’ or ‘Latitudinarians’ (the slur-words of their enemies) through appeal to the Christian humanist ideal of the dignity of man, and in particular to the image, derived from Proverbs 20: 27, of reason in man as the ‘candle of the Lord’, a natural light to complement the divine.

The divine Henry More, a fellow of Christ’s College (Milton’s Alma Mater), was one who in his youth had been tormented by the Calvinist threat of being predestined to hell. In 1653 he hailed Descartes, with whom he had been corresponding, as a ‘sublime Mechanick’ (that is, champion of the mechanical philosophy), ‘a man more truly inspired in the knowledge of Nature, than any that have professed themselves so this sixteen hundred years’; and he declared himself ‘ravished with admiration of his transcendent
Mechanical
inventions, for the salving the
Phaenomena
in the world’.

Cartesianism thus initially seemed just the ticket for More and his colleagues: its dualism sanctioned daring new explorations of nature while gloriously upholding reason and free will. It was rapidly to
prove a false friend, however. It did not take long for More and other such ‘men of latitude’ to conclude that, despite its welcome anti-Calvinist endorsement of free will, the drift of Cartesianism, with its
a priori
tenet that nature was nothing but matter in motion, was to banish God from His Creation and thus serve as the slippery slope to unbelief. Reason was desirable, no doubt, but was not the Cartesianism brand which dictated mechanistic materialism blinkered, shallow and debasing? ‘I oppose not rational to spiritual,’ insisted another of the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote, ‘for spiritual is most rational.’

Small wonder that by 1665 More himself was declaring to the Hon. Robert Boyle, doyen of the experimentalists and founder-fellow of the Royal Society, ‘that the phaenomena of the world cannot be solved merely mechanically, but that there is the necessity of the assistance of a substance distinct from matter, that is, of a spirit, or being incorporeal’. Creation could not function by mechanical causes alone. In his
Enchiridion Metaphysicum
of 1671, More, by then also a fellow of the Royal Society, distanced himself huffily from the ‘upstart Method of
Des Cartes
’, explaining that his ‘Mechanical Philosophy’ was not at all ‘the Experimental Philosophy’ espoused by that august body. ‘This Profession’, he scoffed, Cartesianism in his sights, ‘cannot rightly be called the
Mechanical Philosophy
, but the
Mechanical Belief or Credulity
.’ Divorcing himself in this way from his former allegiance, More strategically rescued ‘true’ mechanical philosophy from the false (Cartesian) version of it, now exposed as being derived from those ‘infidel’ philosophers of Antiquity, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius.

This thumbs-down for Cartesianism owed much, of course, to the growing notoriety of the home-grown mechanist (and supposed atheist) Hobbes. Their teachings were poles apart. Hobbes was a ‘naturalist’, the Cambridge divines idealists; he posited an exclusively material world, they celebrated a universe vibrant with spirits; he postulated determinism in a mechanical order governed by iron laws, they portrayed man as a free agent within a vital, dynamic, ‘plastic’
nature. He accepted nothing transcendental, they savoured the delights of the divine.

In their mature writings, the Cambridge Platonists thus expounded doctrines which, while discrediting scholasticism, distanced themselves equally from Cartesian mechanism and its no less atheistical drift. In those times of exceptional freedom, proclaimed More, ‘the Tempter would take advantage where hee may, to carry men captive out of one darke prison to another, out of
Superstition
into
Atheisme
it self’. True empirical study of nature was called for, since it was that which would reveal not only that there was a God but that Creation was spiritual through and through and that man had a soul and free will.

Nature’s workings, More was convinced, could not be explained by the billiard-ball model of matter advanced by Descartes or Hobbes. It was of the essence of body that its ‘parts cannot
penetrate
one another, is not
Self-moveable
, nor can
contract
nor
dilate
it self, is
divisible
and
separable
one part from another’. Given that matter was thus perfectly inert, something else must co-exist in nature besides, to account for its operations; and that was its opposite and complement, that is, spirit: ‘I conceive the intire Idea of a
Spirit
in generall… to consist of these severall powers or properties, viz.
Self-penetration, Self-Motion, Self-contraction
and
Dilation
, and
Indivisibility
.’ Generating activity as it did, it was ‘plain that a
Spirit
is a notion of more perfection than a
Body
’, insisted More, adopting the old Platonizing tendency to view the world in hierarchical, evaluative terms.

It was, moreover, fundamental to Platonism that the higher could never be engendered by, derived from, or explained in terms of, the inferior. Hence, spirit could not possibly be a product of matter, or order the outcome of chance. Such hierarchical anti-reductionism had crucial implications for More in his account of the human soul, in particular respecting the Hobbist doctrine that the mind was wholly determined and conditioned from without. ‘
The soul of Man is not
Abrasa Tabula,’ insisted More (Locke, of course, was to take issue with this). Nor could the soul be an emanation or secretion of
the body. ‘I demand therefore’, he silenced a potential reductionist objector,

to what in the body will you attribute
Spontaneous Motion?
I understand thereby a power in our selves of wagging or holding still most of the parts of our Body, as our hand suppose or little finger. If you will say that it is nothing but the
immission
of the
Spirits
into such and such Muscles, I would gladly know what does
immit
these
Spirits
and direct them so curiously. Is it
themselves
, or the
Braine
, or that particular piece of the Braine they call the
Conarion
or
Pine-kernell
[pineal gland]?…

If you say the
Brain
immits and directs these Spirits, how can that so freely and spontaneously move it self or another that has no Muscles?

Dissection yielded no evidence of the seat or operation of imagination, memory or any other mental or spiritual faculties: soul could nowise be reduced to brain. QED.

Intended as a refutation of ‘atheism’, a celebration of cosmic order and a defence of human dignity,
The True Intellectual System of the Universe
(1678) by More’s colleague Ralph Cudworth offered a systematic refutation of rigid mechanism and endorsement of the spiritual as part of a vision of the Great Chain of Being or Scale of Nature, presided over by the Universal Mind. Claiming, in the subtitle to this vast mausoleum of erudition, that his was a work
Wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; And its Impossibility Demonstrated
, Cudworth, Master of Christ’s College, set out to prove the existence of a God defined as ‘a perfect conscious understanding Being (or Mind) existing of it self from eternity, and the cause of all other things’. An incorporeal Deity, he stressed,