Free Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter

Book IV:
Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seem’d lords of all:
And worthy seem’d: for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone.
     
    In this divine order, Adam was the superior: ‘He for God only, she for God in him’. Yet Eve (body) proved more persuasive, as we see in Book IX:
She gave him of that fair enticing fruit
With liberal hand: he scrupl’d not to eat
Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d,
But fondly overcome with Female charm.
     
    Nature was the physical manifestation of God’s design for the universe, associated with light and growth. Man was not simply a part of material nature: he was not like the animals, indeed, for he had been given dominion over them. He had a soul, and hence a moral consciousness, and a freedom of choice which set him closer to Heaven than to Earth.
    The path of wisdom and goodness was to recognize and obey the will of God. In Book VIII Milton shows the Ptolemaic Adam in conversation with Raphael, questioning the meaning of the universe: could it have been created simply so as to orbit the tiny Earth once in twenty-four hours? The Archangel’s answer was also, by implication, Milton’s. It was natural that men should speculate (‘for Heav’n/Is as the Book of God before thee set’), and from astronomy men could calculate the times and seasons. But further than this man need not go – here lay the lures of forbidden knowledge. Raphael warned against idle speculation:
                                Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds.
     
    Though himself a humanist and for many a heretic, what Milton feared was the misuse of reason. In Book IV of
Paradise Regained
the Devil tempts Christ, painting a seductive picture of Greek philosophy and art. From Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, insinuates Satan, Christ can learn the political wisdom he will need to be a real ruler in Heaven. Christ replies:
But these are false, or little else but dreams,
Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm.
     
    All one needed was divine truth. Philosophers had perplexed themselves and others:
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how men fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending.
Much of the soul they talk, but all awry…
     
    Thus Milton put the new science, rationalist philosophy and profane curiosity in their place. Human wickedness took the form of a headstrong conceit and an aversion to submit to God’s moral law. The wisdom of salvation was contained in the Scriptures.
    Paradise Lost
ends with Adam and Eve walking sadly out of Eden:
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through
Eden
took their solitarie way.
     
    The world was also all before Milton’s contemporaries, as they took their hesitant steps away from that closed Christian world of revealed truth and forbidden knowledge towards – they knew not what.

3

MEDICINE AND THE BODY
     
We are all like the most of the ladies of Paris: they live extremely well without knowing what goes into the stew; in the same way we enjoy bodies without knowing what they are composed of.
     
    VOLTAIRE
What then is matter? What is spirit? How does one influence the other, and vice versa?
     
    GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
    Our sense of self presupposes an understanding of our bodies. But how do we know them? We think we know them instinctively, we speak of ‘our bodies, ourselves’; the original meaning of ‘autopsy’ is to look into one’s self.
    But here lie problems. It is an elementary fact that we cannot see or, mostly, even feel what is going on inside the skin envelope. Nor do we generally, by act of will, exert much control over our metabolic functions (though this, one of the aims of the yogic and tantric traditions,