Embodying the Soul

Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe

Meg Leja, Ruth Mazo Karras

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812298505
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

Embodying the Soul explores the possibilities and limitations of human intervention in the body's health across the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Early medieval medicine has long been cast as a superstitious, degraded remnant of a vigorous, rational Greco-Roman tradition. Against such assumptions, Meg Leja argues that Carolingian scholars engaged in an active debate regarding the value of Hippocratic knowledge, a debate framed by the efforts to define Christian orthodoxy that were central to the reforms of Charlemagne and his successors.From a subject with pagan origins that had suspicious links with magic, medical knowledge gradually came to be classified as a sacred art. This development coincided with an intensifying belief that body and soul, the two components of individual identity, cultivated virtue not by waging combat against one another but by working together harmoniously. The book demonstrates that new discussions regarding the legitimacy of medical learning and the merits of good health encouraged a style of self-governance that left an enduring mark on medieval conceptions of individual responsibility. The chapters tackle questions about the soul's material occupation of the body, the spiritual meaning of illness, and the difficulty of diagnosing the ills of the internal bodily cavity.Combating the silence on "dark-age" medicine, Embodying the Soul uncovers new understandings of the physician, the popularity of preventative regimens, and the theological importance attached to dietary regulation and bloodletting. In presenting a cultural history of the body, the book considers a broad range of evidence: theological and pastoral treatises, monastic rules, court poetry, capitularies, hagiographies, biographies, and biblical exegesis. Most important, it offers a dynamic reinterpretation of the large numbers of medical manuscripts that survive from the ninth century but have rarely been the focus of historical study.

PART I An Ever Closer Union

CHAPTER 1 The Soul

“I Take You, Body, to Be My Lawful Partner”

At a monastery in western Francia in the late 670s, a monk named Barontus experienced a temporary heavenly journey before being returned to his earthly body. As he lay sick in bed, only half-alive (semivivus) and surrounded by brothers singing psalms, the archangel Raphael “plucked” Barontus’s soul out of his body and carried it off to Saint Peter to be judged. In describing this unusual event, the author of the Vision of Barontus struggled to communicate the intangible appearance of the disembodied soul:

I will describe how small my soul seemed to me. It seemed as small as a hen’s chick when it comes out of the egg. But, small as it was, it took with it my head, eyes and the rest, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, though it could not speak at all.¹

The author could offer only similes and a vague sense of difference in attempting to portray this provisional separation of spirit from matter. Questions about the soul’s substance, form, and bond with the animated body were not unique to the Vision of Barontus, but it was not until the early ninth century that they would be addressed systematically in the first theological treatise on the subject to be composed in Francia since the fifth century.² Beginning with Alcuin’s On the Nature of the Soul and ending with a cluster of texts from the 850s, this chapter considers the doctrinal arguments advanced to explain the mode of the soul’s earthly existence. Alongside the works of prominent Carolingian intellectuals, it explores anonymously authored testimonies that circulated in the medical corpus of the ninth century. While not a comprehensive survey, this study of diverse material exposes the imaginative landscape of solutions to questions raised by the Vision of Barontus and its attempt to account for the entity hidden within the body.

In seeking clarification about the characteristics of the soul, the Carolingians were hardly engaging in new avenues of inquiry; their libraries were well supplied with writings from Late Antiquity, works by Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, and Cassiodorus, for example, offering authoritative opinions on the soul.³ Yet, while the conversation about the soul was old, the terms of debate reflected contemporary religious concerns.⁴ Indeed, councils called to stem heresy in the Adoptionist (794), Iconoclasm (794 and 825), and Predestination (847–60) controversies may well have spurred continued interest in defining the soul and its capacities. So may have evolving beliefs about postmortem punishment and the existence of purgatory.⁵ Neither theological nor medical treatises were simple reiterations of earlier opinions, and a careful analysis of the differences among Carolingian authors can highlight how specific concerns about the soul-body union were brought to the fore. There was a set of points upon which most scholars converged: that the individual was bipartite—composed of a body and a soul—and that the latter could be defined by its rational nature and ability to animate fleshy matter. Consensus, however, only went so far; there may not have been demarcated factions, but ninth-century writings on the soul display clear lines of disagreement and tension.

In reflecting on the duties of an abbot, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (d. ca. 840) observed that the care of souls was an onerous task because the soul “is something fine and laborious to grasp, is very subtle and precarious to ponder, and is therefore laborious and arduous to govern.”⁶ Authors across the first half of the ninth century sought to elucidate this distinctive subtlety of the soul, driven by the assumption that correctly ascertaining the nature of the soul was not an abstract theological exercise but was central to the practical reformation of pastoral care so important to the Carolingian elite.

The Soul in Medical Literature

The Carolingians may never have held public disputations on the nature of the soul, as they did for doctrinal controversies such as Adoptionism, but the scientific literature in their libraries offered a dramatic (if imaginary) debate between two well-known pagan authorities on the natural world and the soul’s substance.⁷ The Dispute of Plato and Aristotle, which survives in several ninth-century witnesses, begins by setting forth the question over which the philosophers ostensibly disagreed—in which humor does the soul reside and travel throughout the body?⁸ There is no prefatory information that might explain why the soul is assumed to have its home in a liquid or who these two philosophers are and what led to their quarrel. Indeed, the text seems to assume a preexisting familiarity with the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, and yet these bear little resemblance to what we now recognize to be Platonic and Aristotelian thought. The Dispute is not concerned with logical reasoning but rather with proving what appear to be, by the end of the interaction, self-evident truths.

The text employs direct speech and “empirical” tests to signal to the reader that these are trustworthy investigations of the natural world. Speaking first, Plato declares that there are three elements and that the soul “has its dwelling place (mansionem) in a humor similar to blood.”⁹ Aristotle responds that the human being must obviously be divided into four elements, given that the seasons and cardinal points display a fourfold division. In order to resolve the uncertainty, the two philosophers agree to a test: a man in need of bloodletting is brought forth, his arm is bound, and blood is drawn off into a container. As the blood cools, it separates into two parts, with a liquid (humor) floating above the blood like oil over water.¹⁰ Plato turns to Aristotle and mockingly asks, “What good is your teaching now?” The fact that the humor is lighter than blood and separates from it apparently indicates to Plato that the soul cannot be blood but is a substance that travels within the blood, called spirit or pneuma.¹¹ To this, Aristotle calmly replies that Plato has not won yet—it is time for a second test! This time, the man’s arm is not bound and blood is allowed to flow out unchecked, which results in the man collapsing on the floor, his eyes rolling, color drained, and limbs rigid. Aristotle does not even have to voice his point. Plato willingly concedes: “By God, father Aristotle, you have convinced me that the soul is blood!”¹² Aristotle takes on his (now certified) position as teacher and instructs Plato on the four parts of the human body, each of which is home to a specific humor that dominates during one of the four seasons of the year.¹³

As should now be apparent, the terms and theories underpinning this dispute are far from clear. The text is more concerned with drama than sequential philosophical inquiry. It promotes the idea that complex questions about creation can be deduced from simple observation: people die when they are drained of blood; hence, the soul, as the life force, must be blood. The annual cycle is divided into four; hence, humans must also consist of four parts. The principles are straightforward.

Although certain Carolingian scribes evidently believed that the Dispute contained information worthy of preservation, not all were willing to grant the truth of its conclusions. A revised version of the debate survives in two ninth-century manuscripts.¹⁴ This text proclaims its distance from the original in immediately foregrounding the author as the mediator between pagan philosophy and Christian truth:

We read that Plato and Aristotle, pagan philosophers, held a dispute about the human soul and the order of the elements and seasons. But in this letter, we [find] that all of Plato’s reasoning was deceptive. The truthful things that Aristotle said we accept, but whatever he unknowingly spoke falsely about we do not receive but cast aside.¹⁵

Aristotle’s teachings about the harmony among the seasons, elements, and humors are retained—because they demonstrate God’s rational order—but his notion that the soul is blood is disparaged. In order to demonstrate the absurdity of this notion, the reviser employs the very same experimental “proof.” This time, a man is bled, too much blood is allowed to flow out, the man dies, and dogs come and lick up the spilled blood. Again, the conclusion is self-evident: “If the soul had been blood, the dogs who lick up the blood would have been able to gulp down the soul; just consider how stupid it would be to say that. Whoever thinks this demonstrates that he is an idiot!”¹⁶

Although the reviser overturns the false opinions of the ancient philosophers, s/he readily accepts that humans can discover the truths of creation through analyzing phenomena of the natural world. The edited Dispute offers its own elucidation of human anatomy (both visible and invisible) by explaining what occurs when a person cuts deeper and deeper into the body (see Figure 2).¹⁷ One sees, sequentially, that the skin encloses the flesh, which encloses the veins, which enclose the blood; when the veins are cut and too much blood flows out, an observer can see that the person stops breathing and then dies, from which it can be deduced that the veins enclose the blood, which encloses the breath and vital heat, which, in turn, enclose the soul.¹⁸ The reviser avoids equating the soul with blood but cannot escape the outcome of Aristotle’s original experiment. The solution is to present the body as a series of nested Russian dolls, in which the relationship between two substances depends upon physical proximity and the more abstract notion of a dwelling place. Although they are hidden beneath the skin, the veins can be pictured as containers for liquid blood with relative ease, and the reviser uses this visual image to convey (but not explain) the more intangible bond between the soul and the blood.

Figure 2. Cautery images are the earliest depictions of surgical operations. This one, the first in a series, shows where on the body to burn in order to relieve pain in the head, inflammation of the chest and hands, and suffering in the knees and feet; the monk-physician holds a bowl with pain relief. The manuscript here also contains the Disputatio Platonis et Aristotelis. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, Sloane 2839, f. 1v.

In order to ensure that no unorthodox belief can be gleaned from the text, the reviser includes a clear doctrinal statement: “The Lord God created the soul of man in his own image, and he made it such that it would be immortal and invisible and would receive either punishments for its sins or eternal life for good works.”¹⁹ As we will see, this statement corresponds closely to definitions found in theological writings of the ninth century. It is important to note that the reviser claims that the soul is immortal and invisible but not incorporeal (a quality that would make it unable to be delimited by physical boundaries). The very capacity of the soul to be localized within the veins is what allows the reviser to explain (just as firmly as Aristotle had done) exactly how the soul is joined to the body, and why death is both a spiritual and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Manuscript Transcriptions and Translations
• Introduction
• Part I. An Ever Closer Union
• Part II. Medicine for the Body and Soul
• Part III. Medical Order and Disorder for Self and Society
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments