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

assumption that if the res ipsa (thing in itself) had caused its own existence then the
power of God was somehow nullified. It is, after all, Satan’s claim to be self-created
that is the foundation of his apostasy. However vitalist monism and self- determining
matter do not necessarily deny God’s position as creator. It is essential to the theological
aspect of this debate to differentiate between the self-causing theory of the apostate
Satan and the self-determining state of Milton’s human body-soul composites. Let us
ask, then, how Milton can claim that the self-determination of a material body-soul
composite, generated out of vital matter and spirit, does not preclude the causal agency
of divinity. The following chapters will examine more closely the representation of
cause in the works of both the poet and the doctors who were his contemporaries to see
if the causal agency of divinity can be retained within a traducian paradigm.
This association of vital matter with the denial of God’s existence is not
necessarily made through irreproachable logic. Giglioni has claimed that the
development and acceptance of the practice of anatomy was inevitably a secularising
process in medicine because, “otherwise anatomy becomes a subset of natural theology”
but it is possible to argue that, during the period of Glisson’s practice, natural theology
was a definition of their work that anatomists would have welcomed. 104 Certainly,
medical writers made clear efforts to preface and explain their work as respectful and
devout investigations of God’s creation; to write all this off as cynical pandering to
religious hegemony seems reductive. To imply that “Glisson was upholding atheistic
doctrines” would hold more in common with the accusations levelled by More and
Cudworth than with Glisson’s own assertions. 105
Medical practice and theory were
challenging to religious orthodoxy in many ways; the power shifts in the body of man
have been shown to relate to the power shifts in the contemporary body politic,
certainly, but both the contemporary scandal and the modern celebration seem to codify
the relation into a binary opposition between a suspiciously simplistic godless physic
and an unconvincingly hegemonic ‘religion’. For our purposes, the reassessment of this
‘rift’ means an investigation of doctrinal notions which can be found encoded in
contemporary ‘scientific’ works as well as the theological implications of materialism;
perhaps in this matter, Milton’s work using materialism as a support for his theodicy in
the Christian Doctrine can illuminate the religious dimension of Glisson’s radical
theory of biousia (the life of matter) which drew such vitriolic accusations of atheism.
104
Giglioni, ‘Genesis of Francis Glisson’s Philosophy of Life’, 68.
105
Giglioni, ‘Anatomist Atheist’, 124.
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