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

The overall argument gives a combination of theological imperatives – the
necessity of working from the Genesis account of creation with accuracy and the
necessity of theodicy – which are then supported by a matrix of natural philosophy in
the form of Galenic categories and Aristotelian materialism. It is no surprise that Milton
should have a notion of the body-soul composite that supports his theodicy, nor that he
should have worked it out and represented it in some detail. Milton’s final comments in
this discussion turn to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as defined by the
scholastic position, anima est tota in toto, et tota in qualibet parte:
which I think a very strong one indeed, that if the soul is wholly
contained in all the body and wholly in any given part of that body,
how can the human seed, that intimate and most noble part of the body
be imagined destitute and devoid of the soul of the parents. 77
This scholastic tag obviously resonates with Milton’s assertion that the whole man is the
soul and the soul the whole man; this coincidence of body-soul models is taken further
however when Milton mentions the materiality of Aristotelian form. Briefly, he
comments that “nearly everyone agrees that all form – and the human soul is a kind of a
form – is produced by the power of matter.” 78
But, of course, the fact is that while forms
per se were conceived of as material, or rather that the division of form and matter were
given by Aristotelian orthodoxy as only divisible by intellectual abstraction, the human
soul was consistently conceived of as the exception to this rule.
ii. The contemporary medical body: some terminology
Since Milton’s representation of the body-soul composite is couched in terms
of natural philosophy, let us look at the words in some very early contexts to build up a
sense of their original meanings. In the opening paragraphs of Galen’s On the Natural
Faculties he gives a compact series of definitions of his own terminology thus:
I mean by an effect that which has already come into existence and
has been completed by the activity of these faculties - for example,
77 CPW 6. 321-2. Milton continues, qualifying this basic statement with the paternalist note “or at least of
the father, when communicated to the son in the act of generation”. This is one of many examples of how
Milton’s belief in rational human free will and his patriarchal assumptions occasionally confound each
other; as it is an aside I shall leave it as one.
78 CPW 6: 322.
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