Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul

Debates about the Nature of the Soul

L. Linker

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137399885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

How did writers understand the soul in late seventeenth-century England? This book considers depictions of the soul in literary texts that engage with Lucretius's Epicurean philosophy in De rerum natura or through the writings of the most important natural philosopher to disseminate Epicurean atomism in England, Walter Charleton (1619-1707).

1

Competing Motions

Abstract: Chapter 1 examines the “Competing Motions” of the corporeal and incorporeal souls in Walter Charleton’s satirical narrative, The Ephesian Matron (1659), which features long interpolated digressions on Cartesian and Lucretian philosophies. The matron, mourning her husband, experiences intense lust for a soldier. Their encounter gives occasion for Charleton to draw on Lucretian atomism in De rerum natura to discuss the nature of the corporeal soul. In the text, Charleton revises Aristotle’s view of the tripartite soul and mind in De anima and Descartes’s separation of the body from the soul in Les Passions de L’Ame (1649). Charleton features a dual soul model, one immortal, also called one’s “rational” soul, and the other the corporeal, or “sensitive” soul.

Keywords: Lucretius; the Passions; the Soul; The Ephesian Matron; Walter Charleton

Linker, Laura. Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137399885.

The most prolific medical writer in England during the Restoration was Walter Charleton (1619–707). Though primarily known for his many medicophilosophical texts, Charleton also wrote one of the first amatory works of fiction in England,¹ also a satirical narrative, The Ephesian Matron (1659, republished in 1668),² to examine the relationship between atomism and nerves in digressions about the soul interpolated into the narrative. The work, largely neglected by scholars, helped transmit to a wider audience Charleton’s medical theory about the motion of animal spirits in the corporeal soul. In the text, Charleton revises Aristotle’s view of the tripartite soul and mind in De anima and Descartes’s separation of the body from the soul in Les Passions de L’Ame (1649). Charleton features a dual soul model, one immortal, also called one’s “rational” soul, and the other the corporeal, or “sensitive” soul.³ In The Ephesian Matron, Charleton explains that the corporeal soul controls the passions and fluctuates in response to atomic motion. Drawing on Willis’s and Gassendi’s models of the two souls, Lucretius’s account of atomic motion in De rerum natura, and Descartes’s argument about the passions in Les Passions de L’Ame, Charleton combines these theories to describe what happens to the matron and her lover. The lovers’ nerves and sexual organs are moved by atoms circulating through animal spirits originating in the corporeal soul, while the incorporeal soul remains largely unmoved.

The Ephesian Matron retells the classical story about the widow of Ephesus from Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon. The story was so frequently circulated and retold in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England that Charleton’s readers likely knew it. Some might have seen or remembered productions or revivals of George Chapman’s Jacobean tragicomedy, The Widow’s Tears (ca. 1605), a theatrical adaptation of the story. Charleton targets the matron, following Petronius and earlier translators and interpreters of the text, but he is less interested in judging her actions than in explaining her sensations in the corporeal soul. In Charleton’s version, the widow stays in the tomb of her recently deceased husband to sacrifice her life to his memory. She becomes distracted, however, when she encounters a young, handsome soldier, who guards the body of an executed thief near the tomb. The soldier enters the tomb, reviving the starving matron with food and wine before seducing her. After their encounter, the soldier discovers that the criminal’s body he has been charged with guarding has been stolen. As in the original version, both characters forget their duty in their overwhelming lust. Charleton goes further than Petronius, however, and indicates that the widow transfers her strong feelings for her deceased husband to her new lover. Her dead husband, who inspires nearly suicidal grief in the matron at the story’s opening, literally replaces the body of the now stolen villain, a scheme the matron devises to protect the soldier. In the process of moving the body, the lovers tear apart his remains, described like displaced atoms. It is an indirect allusion to Lucretius’s descriptions of desecrated bodies in Book Six of De rerum natura.

Following Lucretius, Charleton endorses the Epicurean ethos of kinetic (moving) and katastematic (static) pleasure, but he Christianizes it with his belief in a benevolent God and what he calls the “reasonable” incorporeal soul.⁴ Charleton endorses Lucretius’s argument that any divine agent is “far removed from our senses” (DRM 5.149),⁵ arguing in The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657) for a direct relationship between one’s incorporeal soul and a divine, immortal world. The Ephesian Matron provides little evidence that this incorporeal soul exists in the lovers. The matron’s husband is dehumanized, and his body is dismembered in the struggle to replace him for the villain’s body before discovery.

Charleton repeatedly interrupts the narrative to offer medical explanations for the nature and operation of the two souls and to describe the matron’s “luxuriant humours” (10), which account for her increased sexual passions and her strange post-coital attitude and behavior. Though Charleton’s narrative invokes the classical explanation for the imbalance of the humours, his digressions about the matron’s actions adjust the classical view to account for her disordered animal spirits. He does not judge the matron, arguing that she cannot help her body’s reactions. Charleton follows Descartes’s explanations of carnal desire in Les Passions de L’Ame. There, Descartes argues that sexual desire cannot be a problem of will, which is caused by the physical motions of the body rather than the immaterial motions of the incorporeal soul.⁶ In describing the corporeal soul, Charleton also alludes both to Vesalius’s theory of nerve pathways first proposed in De humani corporis fabrica and Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) to explain how motions affecting the corporeal soul operate through the nerves, first formulating ideas that will inform his most important medical conclusions in the Natural History of the Passions (1674), a work examined in Chapter 3 of this study. Charleton’s description of the matron is markedly different from earlier depictions of her because he separates the matron’s physical sensations from her essential “goodness.” Her passions, affected by the animal spirits, cannot be controlled, and he urges the reader not to judge her harshly.

In the Preface, Charleton describes the widow as a character originating from no particular country or region. Her humours are “a little subject to changes, seldom out of extreams” (8), an important point that Charleton emphasizes to explain what happens to her fraught nerves and overextended animal spirits, which suffer from extremes later in the text. At first, she mourns as a “proper” wife should by offering to sacrifice her life despite others’ pleading for her to leave the tomb. It is only when the guard revives her spirit and body with wine that she develops stronger sexual desires that affect her corporeal soul and seems to shed her earlier grief.

The narrator indicates that the matron reveals certain “weaknesses” in the female sex, ones he wants to understand and explain to the reader. The matron,

. . . knows no flames, but such as arise from the difference of Sex, and are kindled in the blood, and other luxuriant humours of the body: and that her Amours always tend to the propagation of somewhat more Material, than the simple Ideas of vertue [sic], of which our Philosophical Ladies so much talk. (10–11)

The narrator describes the matron as a libertine, alluding elsewhere to the notorious professed Italian erotic writer, Pietro Aretine. The narrator attributes her ardor both to her humours, now thrown out of balance by her corporeal soul’s passions, and to circulatory fluctuations set in motion by the animal spirits. Charleton draws on the vital “flame” in the blood to describe the matter coursing through her animal spirits, which the narrator considers in relation to her nerves. The animal spirits generate a “Material” fluctuation in the corporeal soul rather than a moral problem. The narrator explains the change by describing the motions of the “somewhat more Material” soul, composed of atoms that animate the body.

The incorporeal soul, by contrast, cannot be affected by atomic motion or the wine the matron consumes:

Here some witty Disciple of Epicurus (arresting us in the middle of our Narration) may take advantage to disparage the excellency and immortality of that noble essence, the reasonable Soul of man; and from the example of the soveraign operation of the Wine upon this deplorable Lady, thus argue against it. If our inclinations and wills be so neerly dependent upon the humours and temperament of our bodies, as to be, in a manner, the pure and natural consequents or results from them; and that our humours and temperament be so easily and soon variable, according to the various qualities of meats and drinks received into our stomachs; both which seem verified in the instance of this Ephesian Woman, who by the generous quality of the Wine, and nutritive juice of the Meat, was, as it were, in a moment altered in her whole frame; of a highly discontented and desperate wretch, becomming a quiet, tractable, and good humour’d creature, quitting her morosity and contumacy in a murderous resolution, for frank affability, yieldingness, and alacrity; Why should not men believe, with his Master. Epicurus, that the Soul is nothing else but a certain composition or contexture of subtle Atoms, in such manner figured and disposed, and natively endowed with such activity, as to animate the body, and actuate all the members and organs of it; or, with Galen, that the Soul is but the Harmony of Elements, concurring in the composition of the body, at first, and in the same tenour continued afterward during life, by supplies of the most subtle and refined parts of our nourishment? (34–5)

The humours, like the wine, also cannot affect the matron’s “reasonable” incorporeal soul; instead, the humours alter the motions of the corporeal soul, which controls her sexuality through the animal spirits. The matron’s drunkenness can affect the movement of the “subtle atoms,” but the narrator repeatedly emphasizes that this is not a moral failing. The wine itself can only affect the corporeal soul, moved by the atomic “swerve” Charleton adapts from book two of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Though Lucretius argues that the atoms can move to the side, they more generally and forcefully move downward. In the body, atomic movement affects the sexual organs, animating them and accounting for the sudden changes in the widow’s sexual yearnings in Charleton’s narrative. The wine sets the animal spirits in motion inside the nerves and circulates them through her body alongside the humours and the blood, pumping passions from the corporeal soul through the nerves. These sensations are too strong for her to overcome and create “luxuriant” vapors that cloud her reason.

In describing this motion in the corporeal soul, Charleton looks to Lucretius, who explains the effect of atoms on the animal spirits, life forces that are “vital” and pervasive:

this vital spirit, then, is present in the whole body. It is the body’s guardian and preserver. For the two are interlocked by common roots and cannot be torn apart without manifest disaster . . . [and] neither body nor mind by itself without the other’s aid possess the power of sensation: it is by the interacting motions of the two combined that the flame of sentience is kindled in our flesh. (DRM 3.323–5; 334–6)

Further, Lucretius argues that the “spirit so interpenetrates veins, flesh, sinews, bones, that our very teeth share in sensation” (DRM 3.691–2). The motions of the matron’s animal spirits create a “burning appetite” that illustrates Lucretius’s ideas. Charleton later works out the relationship between atomic motion, animal spirits, and nerves in the corporeal soul in the Natural History, his wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Great Vibrations
• 1  Competing Motions
• 2  Outrageous Motions
• 3  Hysterical Motions
• 4  Contrary Motions
• Conclusion: The Spirits of the Soul
• Bibliography
• Index