Medical Science and the Anatomia Animata in Milton's Paradise Lost

Thesis overview
Each chapter of my dissertation explores different areas of Paradise Lost, but
each chapter also revisits certain central passages and themes in the light of new layers
of natural philosophy, medical doctrine and research. Satan’s attempt upon the sleeping
Eve provides one of the most detailed representations of the workings of body and spirit
in Paradise Lost; the borders between chaos and the created world and the interactions
of light and matter in the cosmology of Paradise Lost give a wider context of natural
philosophy in which to place the human body-soul composites and the angels they
encounter; Raphael’s comments on angelic love and digestion and his “one first matter
all” speech are for me, as for many students of Milton, invaluable resources in
understanding the natural philosophy of the body and the natural world in the poem.
Finally, Milton’s insistence in the Christian Doctrine on the coincidence of nature,
Aristotelian causality and divine agency is a central motif in this study, which aims to
set Milton’s representation of body and soul harmoniously within the context of both
contemporary medical theory and his own fundamental theological criteria.
Chapter 1 begins with an examination of Milton’s comments on the soul and its
embodiment in the Christian Doctrine; noting his consistent use of the language of
natural philosophy in describing the body-soul composite, this chapter explores the way
that natural philosophy serves Milton’s materialist theology. Focusing on his evident
traducianism, in which the rational soul is produced through the same process of
generation that produces the body, the chapter notes the amalgamation of the
traditionally immaterial rational spirit with the bodily spirits of medical tradition and
charts some of the objections that this heresy drew from other commentators.
Traducianism relied upon the theory that out of matter or material forms could come,
eventually, rational thought, and thus it demanded a re-evaluation of the ontological
status of matter as active, or even vital. This ‘hylozoism’ was defined by Ralph
Cudworth (amongst others) as one of the four fundamental heresies that support
atheism, but for Milton the orthodox theory of creationism (or indeed any theory of
generation that attributes the origin of the fallen soul to God) could not be integrated
with a coherent theodicy. Comparing Francis Glisson’s ‘hylozoistic’ natural philosophy
to Milton’s animist materialism, I note that there are fundamental similarities between
Glisson’s vitalism and the natural philosophy expressed in Raphael’s “one first matter
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