Flesh in the Age of Reason (16 page)

Natural philosophers were thus in a cleft stick. Convinced that true science would disclose God’s agency in Nature (and thereby prove the soul), they sought to naturalize the spirit by bringing it under laboratory control. Via the air-pump and the test-tube, spirits could be made visible and so be rendered safe and effective: good spirits would toe the line. Reactionary and bigoted divines who charged science with atheism could thus be rebutted: were not experiments the best way to give proof of the supernatural and so win over unbelievers?

But in speaking of spirits and the soul, immense risks lurked in mechanizing and rationalizing their action. The strategy had to be to undertake investigations to demonstrate the reality of spiritual activities without reducing these to the everyday and commonplace – for that way atheism, or at least Deism, lay.

It was the booby-trapped nature of that enterprise which gave Jonathan Swift such sport at the expense of the new philosophy. His
Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
(1710) in particular felled both religious enthusiasts and natural philosophers with one stone: once the guileless mechanical philosopher naïvely reduced the soul to a cog in a machine, the Christian cause was lost – and natural philosophers were exposed as enthusiasts themselves, no saner than the sectaries. Did this not seem to bear out Sir Thomas Browne’s fear that ‘They who wou’d prove Religion by Reason, do but weaken the cause which they endeavour to support’?

And the dilemma worsened. For it soon ceased to be intellectually kosher or politically correct for progressives to look to the sighting of witches or ghosts: that path seemed to make too many concessions to credulity and to the enthusiasts. This inevitably left the human soul more vulnerable – or still more singular.

There is no need of debating the point about a man’s being the same person with himself at the
present time
, because a man’s own present consciousness will secure to him his own personal identity, though perhaps it will not confine it to himself alone. But the chief difficulty relates to his being the same with himself at
distant times
.

ISAAC WATTS

Seeking a satisfactory sense of the self, Locke, as we have seen, held that ‘this personality extends it
self
beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness’. The integrity of the self from past to present thus lay not in the permanence of the flesh but upon the fine thread of consciousness or memory. What, then, of the future? What, to be precise, about that prophesied point when, at the Last Judgement, we might reach the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven?

Since the self was marked out ‘only by Identity of consciousness’, Locke took the view that on the Last Day a person would be made happy or miserable irrespective of ‘in what Bodies soever they appear or what Substances soever that consciousness adheres to’. Why was he thus indifferent to, or impatient with, bodies (‘scholastic substances’) beyond the grave? As a Christian he clearly held that in the equation of identity with self-consciousness lay the best rebuttal of materialism: whether Hobbes’s corporeal God in a corporeal heaven was in bad faith or a joke in bad taste, it needed to be seen off. And as a Christian intellectual, Locke held the understanding to be the supreme, the most divine part of a human.

Yet Locke’s formulation did not spare him the bafflement or wrath of orthodox churchmen, for whom Holy Writ, divine justice and common sense clearly required the presence of the actual physical bodies of the departed present, in resurrected form, at the Last Judgement. How else, pray, was divine accountability to work? Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was quick to contend that Locke’s psychologizing of personal identity called into question the resurrection of the dead. Personhood could not be all in the mind: there needed to be material continuity, insisted the prelate, ‘a
Vital Union
between the Soul and Body and the Life which is consequent upon it’: bodily survival and revival were essential to divine sovereignty, in the last resort because it was upon the flesh of the damned that the Lord’s retributive justice would ultimately be delivered.

In
The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter
(1697), Stillingfleet further criticized Locke’s disembodied selfhood by appealing to St Paul, who unequivocally states that the dead will receive physical rewards and punishment proportionate to what they have done in the flesh (‘every one may receive the things done in the body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad’: 2 Corinthians 5: 10). By implicitly questioning whether the dead would be resurrected in the same flesh as they had lived, Locke (accused Stillingfleet) contradicted the teachings of the Scriptures as well as eroding divine justice.

By the time
Mr Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter
appeared in 1699 – the controversy rumbled on and on – Thomas Beconsall, fellow of Brasenose College Oxford, had further argued, in a sermon on
The Doctrine of a General Resurrection: wherein The Identity of the Rising Body is asserted, against Socinians and Scepticks
, that Locke’s account of personal identity allowed for ‘no distinction between the Righteous and the Wicked’:

For if the Wicked at the point of Death do not immediately vanish into Air, or if Mankind do not usually judge before-hand, and thereupon deny ’em the Office of Burial, or if the Allotments of Life and Damnation are not indiscriminately ascertain’d (to affirm any of which would be a gross a
palpable Ab[s]urdity) then the Wicked must come forth of their Graves; and make their Resurrection, tho’ a most Fatal one, even the Resurrection of Damnation.

Locke seemed to threaten due punishment of the wicked.

Three years later, Philip Stubbs, a former fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, similarly insisted that that final reunion of body and soul on which Locke hedged his bets was essential for the accomplishment of ‘a compleat state of Happiness and Misery’. These were but some of the charges, predictably mainly from reactionary High Church Oxford, that were levelled against Locke (himself an Oxford graduate, but by then in bad odour at his Alma Mater for his political as well as religious liberalism) in defence of reincarnation.

The posthumous appearance in 1707 of Locke’s
Resurrectio et quae sequuntur
added fuel to the flames. In this work he sketched the eschatological framework underpinning the views on identity and resurrection he had developed in the
Essay concerning Human Understanding
. While the righteous would be raised to immortality in a spiritual mould, sinners, Locke held, would be cast into hellfire, but not
everlastingly
: they would be spared that fate by being eventually annihilated.

The cat seemed out of the bag: critics took Locke’s double-standard eschatology as evidence of his long-suspected heretical leanings: was he not too soft on sinners, letting them off the hook? Denial of the eternity of hellfire was common among Socinians (those who disbelieve the divinity of Christ). In 1719 the Oxford scholar Winch Holdsworth, in a defence of reincarnation, specifically dubbed Locke ‘that Celebrated Writer of the Socinian Kind’, and his heterodoxy on bodily identity was repeatedly censured as a threat to the Christian order: once question eternal punishment, and how would law and order be upheld? What then was to stop your servant ravishing your wife and filching your silver? To question bodily resurrection was as stupid as axing the gallows.

Locke, however, was not alone in his disquiet about traditional
pulpit teachings on the afterlife. Indeed, the decades of amazing intellectual effervescence, or turmoil, around 1700 threw up a galaxy of new formulations about the Beyond. One contemporary who declared himself to be a true Christian yet whose views scandalized his age was John Asgill, a lawyer, commonwealthman and freemason who had the dubious distinction of being the first MP ever to be expelled from the House of Commons of Great Britain – that is, Parliament as convened after the 1707 Act of Union. The reason lay in the ‘many profane and blasphemous Expressions’ contained in his
An Argument Proving that According to the Covenant of Eternal Life Revealed in the Scriptures, Man may be Translated from Hence into that Eternal Life without Passing through Death
, published in 1700.

While it was certainly idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek even, Asgill’s reading of the Bible had a certain Christian logic to it. His case for the escape from death proclaimed in his title hinged upon the doctrine of the Cross. Through Adam’s sin, mortality had come into the world, but Christ had then been crucified to annul the law of death. So, subsequent to the Son’s sacrifice, why should anyone ever perish? Believers in Christ’s covenant need not die but should soar straight to heaven, like Elijah in his chariot of fire. Why then did people apparently go on dying? The reason was all in the mind: they died only because of their fear of death. ‘I shall not go hence
by returning unto the Dust
,’ proclaimed Asgill, ‘but that I shall
make
my Exit by way of
Translation
, which I claim as a dignity belonging to that Degree in the Science of Eternal Life’ that was broadcast in the Scriptures. The idea of a posthumous probationary period for the soul was unscriptural, smacking of the Romish abomination of purgatory, insisted the Pope-hating Asgill; the Kingdom of Heaven would be instantaneous for those with faith in simultaneous translation.

Asgill drove to its logical conclusion the mortalist exposure of Greek metaphysics and Catholic theology propping up an independent, immaterial soul untouched by the dissolution of the flesh. His was another blow struck against the clutches of power-mad Churches on the individual even beyond the grave. Eternal life must mean survival of body and soul conjoined: ‘The Spirit is so perfectly mixed
with, and diffused through the whole Body,’ he insisted, touting a materialism that seemingly anticipated Priestley, ‘that we can’t now say which is
Spirit
, nor which is Earth, but the whole is
one intire living Creature
.’

Asgill’s effusion was patronizingly dismissed by Daniel Defoe as the ‘Enthusiasm of pious Lunacy’, but there was method in his madness and, as is shown by his expulsion from the House of Commons, many judged such views not mad but bad. Not only were they heterodox but, like mortalism in general, they subverted the economy of posthumous judicial rewards and punishments which underwrote earthly law and order.

As ever in theological controversies, Asgill’s attempted elucidations of the faith made confusion worse. If Christ, as Asgill held, had truly cancelled the Law of Death, then what possible necessity could there be – asked the quarrelsome Defoe – even for translation? ‘We may as well
save God Almighty the Trouble
,’ he exploded, ‘abide where we are, and go all to Heaven at once.’ Parliament chose not to wrangle; in April 1707 it ordered the burning of his book, on grounds of heresy. Around the same time he was, moreover, detained in the Fleet Prison for debt and, still confined, he died, it seems untranslated, thirty years later.

Asgill may have been a gadfly and trouble-stirrer but, even so, such matters as heaven and hell were a minefield. Take, from the other end of the ideological spectrum, Henry Dodwell. He refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary and was a renowned High Churchman, but was even so no pillar of orthodoxy.
An Epistolary Discourse, Proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal, but Immortalized Actually by the Pleasure of God to Punishment or to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal Spirit
(1706), was a statement of pious mortalism. God had created Adam out of the dust, afterwards adding his breath of life (
pneuma
), so that man became a ‘living soul’. Hereafter, continued Dodwell, the Lord then superadded his divine breath (
pnoe
, imparted at baptism) which bestowed upon man the capacity for immortality. At the Fall, the
pneuma
had been lost and so post-lapsarian man became mortal; yet
he retained the divine breath, conferred at baptism into the Church, so long as it pleased God to sustain it. Thus, as a result of Original Sin, man lost his
natural
immortality, yet was not thereby reduced to a Hobbesian state of non-existence at death, for souls
post mortem
were
supernaturally
sustained (by the sacrament of baptism). The divine breath, he explained in a later
Defence
, ‘seems to be the
Principle
that enables
Humane Souls
to subsist in
Hades
in their
separate
State’.

Thus, in a curious convergence with the radical mortalists, Dodwell posited a naturally mortal soul. Unlike them, however, he championed a divine soul-life proceeding continuously after death, thanks to baptism. But, he had to ask, confronting one of the perennial stumbling-blocks to consensus over salvation, after death where exactly did this soul go? Tackling this ‘temporary accommodation’ predicament – one rendered controversial by the Protestant elimination of purgatory – Dodwell held that the location after death of separate souls lay in transit stations in the firmament, equidistant between heaven and hell. The righteous and the wicked would occupy different quarters, the former being confined below the moon, the latter just above. In the lowermost zones of heaven, the less perfect would undergo expiation to prepare them for their promotion to the higher regions. Finally, on Resurrection Day, bodies would be levitated out of their earthly graves into the skies, to be reunited with the waiting souls. At that point, Dodwell maintained, ‘our
Bodies
also will by him be made
Pneumatical
, when they are
fashioned like his glorious
Body’.