The Smoke of the Soul

Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England

R. Sugg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137345592
• eBook ISBN: 9781137345608
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

What was the soul? Christians agreed that it was the immortal core of each human being. Yet there was no agreement on where the soul was, what it was, or how it could be joined to the body. The Smoke of the Soul explores the anxieties and excitement generated by the mysterious zone where matter met spirit, and where human life met eternity.

1

The Physiology of the Soul

We are now travelling back into the darkness of the past: into a world where standard medical practices included the eating or drinking of human flesh or bone, and the blowing of dried excrement into a diseased eye; where the Devil walked the streets of any town or village at any hour, in the shape of a muttering old woman, a black dog or cat, or even a humble toad. How might we begin to reconnect ourselves with this curious and distant country? There is one ambiguous tool which we can take with us; which, indeed, we will all take with us on any journey, however forgetful we might be. For all the layers of myth which have grown up between us and the legendary figures of Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and John Milton, we have one thing in common: namely, the body. Shakespeare had to eat and digest food, to expel urine and excrement.He shivered, frowned, laughed, slept – felt a sudden delicious wave of satisfaction prickle his skin as the rhythms of his thought and language finally snapped, at eleven thirty on a Friday morning, into one perfect indestructible phrase.

And yet, even as we clutch gratefully at this comforting anchor of sameness and stability, we find that the body begins to mutate and dissolve in our grasp. Shakespeare’s rush of pleasure, for example, chiefly involved spirits or humours, rather than blood. The diseases that so fiercely assailed him and his contemporaries had not only different names, but seemingly fantastic origins and methods of transmission (to say nothing of the range of cures, almost infinitely diverse, united only by their collective futility.) His food probably meant different things to him even before he ground it between his teeth, and immediately began to behave in quite surprising ways once it reached his stomach. And so, as we seek to make contact with this vanished world, we need to keep shifting with the utmost care and deftness between two broad positions. I want to explore here an elusive yet not impossible subject. What did it feel like to have a Christian soul? On one hand, we can take as a very basic starting point the pulse of our hearts, flux of our blood and flicker of our thoughts. The body does have a certain ultimate materiality, defiant and resilient under the grid of words with which we attempt to control it.

Yet, on the other hand, we also need to take seriously a broadly opposite point of view. If someone felt that not their blood, but the vital spirits of their heart were flooding out to the pores of their skin in a moment of exultation (a word which itself quite literally means ‘leaping out’, rather than (say) flowing out), then this was precisely what was happening for (if not to) them. Their belief was inseparable from their experience. The Renaissance body into which we are about to descend was seemingly quaint, bizarre, at times all but comical in its psychosomatic interactions. But the intellectual system which flowed into and radiated out of this frail organism was, finally, a broadly coherent and satisfying one. How else, after all, could it have survived so many centuries? It felt just as normal, just as reasonable, just as commonsensical as our own bodies and our own theories of biology and medicine. And, more importantly, it could be materially proved.

Or, it could, up to a point. In this chapter I want to present the early modern body and soul as accepted by a large number of educated people between about 1550 and 1700. Following chapters will then show how more critical thinkers overtly or covertly pointed up the flaws in that generally accepted model. That second, more buried narrative is in part a chronological one, running from the anatomical innovations of Vesalius, c.1543, to those of Thomas Willis, c.1670. In the present chapter I will present a more or less synchronic view of body–soul relations. This is necessary, at one level, because the sheer strangeness of the physiology involved requires us to pause at length if we are to absorb it in any meaningful way. It is also useful, at another level, to show us how certain educated Christians persisted in their attachment to older notions of body and soul, with seemingly flagrant disregard for the narrative grids of progress later imposed by historians of science and medicine.

So many aspects of our life have now been powerfully medicalised, in a culture where medicine is united with science. If a person’s behaviour is peculiarly puzzling or frustrating, we often find it natural (and satisfying) to try and make an amateur medical diagnosis (they are slightly autistic, for example, or obsessive compulsive, manic depressive ...). We are far less likely to view their failings in terms of sin or election (or even, a little more simply, as waywardly human). When attempting these seemingly natural acts of interpretation, we are revealing our place within a society that has been medicalised only relatively recently. We are also, implicitly, accepting a medical authority which can now appear well established, but which was very slightly accepted circa 1600, or even come 1750.¹

In many ways Renaissance medical theory was extremely monolithic and homogeneous. It derived substantially from the works of two authors, Aristotle and Galen. And not merely the privileged, but the uneducated and illiterate agreed and acted upon the basic concept of the four humours. Yet the potential unity of belief we might be tempted to infer is complicated by various factors. In what follows, it will not be possible to simply rank ‘standard’ or ‘official’ beliefs above those which might strike us initially as far more whimsical or fantastic. Firstly, Galenism was increasingly undermined in the seventeenth century, giving way to a legitimate pluralism of competing beliefs. Secondly, physicians simply did not have the largely unquestioned authority which they would later develop. It is in fact not strictly possible to speak of a medical ‘profession’ in this era. London’s Royal College of Physicians continually strove to assert its intellectual dominance, but in doing so probably only confirmed many people’s opinion that its members were corrupt, cruel, monopolising and arrogant.²

Related to this surprisingly open and fluid range of beliefs is another point concerning medical discovery. It is certainly important to realise that William Harvey’s new claims for the circulation revolutionised notions of physiology. But even once these were generally accepted (after a notably hard struggle), people still clung to the old functions of the spirits, rising into and out of the otherwise reconceived human heart. Indeed, come the 1660s we still find Robert Boyle equating the medical spirits of the body with the ‘spirit of blood’ which he distils out of this fluid for use as a medicine.³ There, the spirit-based physiology of the era seems to gain a kind of experimental proof, via the rise of Boyle’s proto-scientific chemistry.

The Biochemistry of the Humours

My central interest here is with the soul, and with the spirits that steamed in and out of it, in unceasing flux and process, between liver, heart and brain. But the soul and spirits were themselves woven up in a mesh of other bodily activities: ones now equally abandoned by us, though still stubbornly lodged within our most casual turns of phrase. The body contained four humours: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Four temperaments matched the four humours: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Again, both groups were derived from the four primary elements, air, fire, earth and water; and both corresponded to the four basic qualities of dry, hot, cold and moist. When we encounter references to these groupings in the period’s literature they tend to register rather loosely or even blankly in our imaginations. Yet for the Renaissance individual, humours were quite as real as cholesterol, blood sugar, endorphins and serotonin are for us. In terms of accessibility, they were far more so. On 23 August 1592, for example, the astrologer and mathematician John Dee felt ‘the humour so suddenly falling into the calf of my left leg as if a stone had hit me’. This sensation itself was probably related to the agonising cramps he complained of on 19 September.⁴ We, by contrast, are never going to see the endorphins or serotonin which we understand to be secreted and released in our brains under various physical and emotional stimuli. For all the much-vaunted scientific empiricism of our time, we are in some ways more alienated from these bodies than Renaissance individuals were.

Humours were also very real insofar as they lay at the centre of a highly versatile, complex and cosmically integrated system of medicine and physics. People would be classified into different humoral groups, depending on the behaviour of their bodies and minds. There was no final agreement on the most desirable of these. The religious minister, Thomas Walkington, author of a popular work on the humours, favoured the sanguine, going so far as to assert that ‘this humour being spent, our life also must needs vanish away’.⁵ Walkington in fact identifies nine possible temperaments, on the basis that certain humours or qualities could mix (although, understandably, not all of them, as for example, fire and water).

Once your type had been identified, it would be taken seriously. You knew that you and your body had inherent strengths and weaknesses, and you adjusted your lifestyle accordingly. For the humours were caught up in a continual interplay of different factors: spatial, generational, seasonal and climatic. In Robert Burton’s monumental Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) we hear of how blood predominates in the young and in the springtime; of the numerous different kinds of food and drink allowed or forbidden to the melancholy; and of the effects of local or global climate. As Burton neatly observes: ‘such as is the air, such be our spirits; and as our spirits, such are our humours’.⁶ We hardly need to make a mathematical calculation to see that the permutations of temperament which resulted were numerous, complex and subtle.

It is perhaps also unsurprising to find that the early modern body was notably unstable. The best state of health one could hope for was a precarious equilibrium. As John Donne put it, ‘physicians say that we / at best enjoy but a neutrality’.⁷ The Renaissance body, we might say, was not so much an entity as a process. Secondly, this body was relatively open, relatively permeable. At first glance, the humoral body might appear to us to be quite deterministic. To some degree it no doubt was, and it is especially important to bear in mind that the theory divided sharply between the genders. Men were intrinsically hotter and drier; women naturally colder and more moist – states believed to influence not only their bodies but their minds and their souls. But, in addition to the supposed control one had over temperament, we need also to realise that another factor crucially influenced the body in the era of melancholy. For it was open, not simply to the dry breezes, the fogs or rains or stenches of London or Lincoln, but to the whole dark envelope of the cosmos itself. The turning planets showered vapours through your heart. Your brain (as William Harvey, among others, agreed) grew or shrank with the waxing or waning of the moon. Most of all: God, Christ and Satan were continually monitoring the motion of your heart – quite as obsessively as any cardiologist, and with far more serious consequences.⁸

The Biochemistry of the Soul

In 1621 the clergyman Thomas Granger, alluding to Christ’s raising of the dead Lazarus, talked of how the dead man’s ‘soul being re-entered’, it naturally ‘causeth motion of the spirits, first in the heart, then of the pulses, and blood, then of a leg, or arm ... till at length he be risen wholly out of the grave’.⁹ These words were undoubtedly pious and serious. For us, the carefully staged physiological revival is perhaps a little surprising. But, miraculous as this event may have been, for Granger it was explicable within the period’s at once complex and commonplace ideas of bodily spirits. So deeply embedded and essential were these ideas that they could reach back, more or less effortlessly, some 1600 years, into the realm ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Physiology of the Soul
• 2 The Soul in Three Dimensions: Pietro Pomponazzi and Andreas Vesalius
• 3 Aspiring Souls (I): Tamburlaine the Great
• 4 Aspiring Souls (II): Doctor Faustus
• 5 Painful Inquisition: Body–Soul Problems in Early Modern Christianity
• 6 The Differential Soul: Women, Fools and Personal Identity
• 7 The Dying Soul (I): Christian Mortalism as Religious Heresy
• 8 The Dying Soul (II): Mortalism as Literary Fantasy
• 9 Anatomy and the Rise of the Brain
• Conclusion: The True Location of the Soul
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index