Chapter 2: Jean Fernel on the Divinity of the Soul

Chapter 2 turns to the French physician Jean Fernel (1497-1558), and his interpretation of Galen in the neo-Platonic flavour. Contrary to Leoniceno via Simplicius, Fernel draws upon Marsilio Ficino to argue for the divinity of the soul. This chapter’s primary aim is to establish Fernel’s position on the status of the soul as essentially divine and argue for the divine presence in natural and medical philosophy. Using the “World-Soul” theory of Ficino, Fernel tried to reconcile Plato with Aristotle via Galen. Hence, it is natural that Fernel holds the view he holds, since his primary source of reference is, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Galen, who held that the soul must be divine, even though Galen himself does not know what that view would entail. So one may see Fernel’s attempt to explain the divinity of the soul as an elaboration of what Galen could have argued for, given his commitment to the divine origin of the soul.

Fernel’s Worldview

Having argued that the heaven as the fifth element furnishes the composite natural beings with the forms or species, and the eternal circular motion of the heaven is the cause of generation and corruption, he adds that Aristotle held that God the simple and immutable divine substances inside and outside heaven, which in turn sustain the life of all natural beings and enable heaven to rotate on its axis with regularity. So the life on earth depends upon the circular motion of the heavens, but that circular motion in turn depends upon the life on earth, which is sustained by these simple, immutable and divine substances. What are these divine substances? Fernel explains that they are the forms or the seeds according to kinds and species, and the infusion of the forms into matter “activates” life on individual things.

Nothing is more divine in a natural body than the form, which is simple and indestructible. While the matter is a composite of the terrestrial and corruptible elements, the form does is not composed of the mixture of the elements, but rather partakes in the divinity. According to Fernel, the forces of the form are much more powerful than that of the four elements, but at the time, we humans cannot know what they are or how and where they originate because we are limited in our human capacity to know what is hidden by God and made inaccessible to human mind. These hidden things in nature are called occult properties. Since these occult properties exceed the limits of natural philosophy, they are rightly called divine and belong to the realm of divinity. Here, Fernel does something Galen didn’t. While Galen remained agnostic about the nature of the soul and did not explicitly admit the divinity in explaining the realm of natural things, Fernel explicitly introduced the notion of divine force into the natural beings, bringing it down to earth.

Fernel went beyond Galen, and thus expanded on Galen’s conviction that the soul must be divine. In short, Fernel went from “the soul must be divine” to “the soul is of divine nature.” Further, what makes the soul divine is that it pertains to the simple and immutable form that God created and infused upon the natural beings on earth.

God the Creator and Fetal Formation

Fernel advances his own interpretation of Galen that there is supreme intelligence and power in fetal formation and argues for the presence of an architect with a plan as if by theatrical machinery. But this power is not the same as the soul of the fetus, at least not in the sense the Stoics meant by “nature” which lacks any reason-principles. It is rather, according to Galen, some very wise and powerful force, introduced from the outside. Galen held that the efficient and the formative cause of the body is the animal’s congenial heat: a single substance, such as ‘soul’, ‘nature’, ‘native heat’ and ‘implanted temperament’. But Fernel here wants to reject this materialistic conception of the soul as corporeal and destructible substance. For if the soul is simply a congenial heat and a temperament, it is nothing but a mixture of the four elemental qualities, making the soul corruptible and subject to decay. Although Galen usually attributed the causes of natural phenomena to the forces of the temperament and of the elements, he also criticized those who did not recognize a crafting faculty in the body as the formative cause of the body. Drawing upon Galen’s On the Temperaments and On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Fernel concludes that Galen, along with Aristotle, considered the formative cause to be beyond the realm of the four elements. In the passage quoted below, Fernel makes Aristotle, Galen and Plato all agree on the influence of the higher intelligence on the terrestrial sphere. In this way, Fernel concludes that even Galen, who did not discuss about the immediate causes of the formation of living beings, affirmed and argued that there must be the primary cause that is responsible for the formation of living beings. Such ultimate cause must, then, be the divine Creator, and neither his substance nor his way of operation can be grasped by the human mind.

The Divine and Celestial Nature of the Soul

Fernel tackles the problem of what the essence of the soul is by citing Galen. According to On the Doctrine of Hippocrates and Plato, Galen’s view states that the soul is a completely simple, and uniform, incorporeal substance, and is more excellent than the pneuma, which is the soul’s primary instrument for its functions. Upon the departure of the pneuma, the life ceases to function and, on the contrary, life is restored when pneuma returns to the soul. Pneuma is distinguished from the soul in yet another way that the former is corporeal and essentially belongs to the body, whereas the latter is free of body and can subsist by itself. Galen further elucidates the status of the soul in his later work, On My On Opinions, that the soul is neither a property of the bodily substance nor simply an incorporeal substance. It is somewhat half way between being a substance and being a property. What this means is that the soul is both incorporeal and subject to the needs of the body. It needs the body as its house to function, so it is not a substance in a complete sense. It can subsist by itself but it needs the body to function. Fernel agrees with Galen and advances his own argument as to what the consequence of such a reasoning may be. For if the soul is constrained by the bodily boundary, it is not free and independent of body to exercise its functions. If the soul is inextricably attached to the body, it also runs the risk that the soul can be damaged when the host body becomes ill or poisoned. To this, Fernel answers that the soul does not suffer any damage that the body may undergo, despite the fact that it is inextricably attached to the body. What gets damaged is the chain of bonds, or the mode of union, that connects the soul and the body. So if a body suffers poison, then this union gets loosened, as it were, and when the union is broken, the soul flees itself, as if it had been freed from a chain tied to the body. This union or bond is nothing but the innate heat or spiritus, Fernel explains. In this way, the relation of mind to the body is likened to the relation of God to nature, that is, the soul is not linked to the body in such a way that it requires the body’s constant aid, but neither God nor soul is tied down to the body of whose control it has charge. “For in order to think,” Fernel continues, “the soul has no need of the agency of anything to use as an instrument, but by itself and on its own it enters upon reasoning and achieves understanding.”

In short, spirit or the innate heat is what connects the soul and the body, and this mode of union is dissolved, the soul departs the body, and body ceases to be alive.

On the Notion of Faculty and the Formative Force

Fernel explains that by faculty (dunamis) all that Galen meant was the efficient cause of each thing by the term. Faculty is a potency of action and something that the substance of a thing uses as a principle for action. In other words, it is that which designates the active property, which resides in a thing but is different from the thing itself. It is something that emanates from the substance itself.

So the formative force is the same as that which is an efficient cause and theprinciple of action for the substance, distinct from the substance itself. Because this formative power arises out of the substance from the very beginning, and is distinct from it while sharing intellect, not only the highest part of soul, i.e. rational soul, but also the inferior parts of the soul too must possess some divinity as well. Fernel argues this by citing Galen where he argues that “there should be one soul that both shaped us and the past and makes uses of our individual parts in the present.”

Fernel takes this as Galen making connection between the force which forms the body and the force which governs the body. So, the force which forms the body is formative power that emanates from the substance itself and shares divinity, while the force which governs the body is the tripartite souls of the ancients. Instead of seeing them separately, Fernel argues that Galen advocated one soul to perform both functions. So there is a conflation of the view between the formative power and the souls in Fernel that what molds the body also possess the ability to function each part of the formed body. Because the formative power is divine as has been established, the soul that governs too must be divine as well, being one and the same soul. This all powerful soul is identified with the cosmic mind in Galen, which builds the parts of the human body and embraces all bodily parts without discrimination.

However, such conception of the seed as the substance which gives rise to this celestial mind may be seen to be inconsistent with the earlier claims that 1) if the celestial mind in the seed receives its force form the seed as Galen suggested, this nature cannot produce these forces by itself since it comes after the seed, nor can it be described as celestial or divine since it derives its origin in the earthly matter. Further 2) this view of the seed’s possessing the power to give rise to this formative force may be seen as claiming that the seed which is material is the active principle, rather than a vehicle that carries such power. Fernel responds to the first objection that Galen was here simply speaking commonsensically to make the analogy so we understand in what manner this formative power is in the seed. To the second objection, Fernel is careful to add that the seed is not identical with the formative power, but the celestial mind is placed in the seed.

Recap: The formative force is different from the seed, but the seed is merely a vehicle which carries the divinely arrived formative power. This formative power in turn is identified with the soul that governs the body and the human soul to that extent shares its part in divinity. Further, the formative power needs the body as a house to function well. When the house is damaged, the bond that linked the body and the soul/formative power is broken, resulting in the fleeing of the soul from the body, causing the body death.

The Spiritus and the Innate Heat = On the Union of Mind and Body

Spiritus is more like a body, though it is close to incorporeal beings by virtue of being invisible. It is a means used by any substance devoid of body and hidden to human senses to communicate its force to the body. God too communicates his power through the spiritus and this divine spiritus potentially holds souls and directs them wherever it wishes. Such spiritus is the all-penetrating animus mundi, or the World –Soul, of Plato. So the spiritus is naturally said to be the basis of the soul and its forces, and in it lies the innate heat as well. The nature and the soul’s forces are enclosed in the spiritus and the innate heat. Spiritus and the innate heat, hence, are of divine origin, not sharing in the elementary bodies. The nature residing in the spiritus, then, has a more excellent and divine character than the spiritus itself.

So this “nature” is necessarily God, who uses his spiritus and innate heat to form the living beings. So, when this spiritus and its innate heat are extinguished, having lost its vitality, the life ceases to be. Fernel holds thus that this divine spiritus is that which maintains life in living beings and its extinction causes naturally their death.

What exactly doe she mean by ‘divine’? Fernel answers that it is anything that corresponds and shares with the element of the stars, i.e. the fifth element and aether, and that such element too bestows its own force when the four terrestrial elements merge into the composition of natural beings. Hence, for Fernel, this aether provides the soul’s powers and implants the spiritus in natural beings, determining their form. What is divine is determined by whether the effect of a natural thing exceeds the force of nature or not. So, the composition and mixture of the elements can be the force of nature but the formation of specific organs and heterogeneous parts seems to exceed the capacity attributed to nature. In other words, there needs some other extraneous principle to guide through the formation of fetuses and living beings. Hence, Fernel attributed the cause of concoction to celestial heat, and not merely to the mixture of elements and their moderate heat. Without the celestial aid, concoction is noxious and destructive.

This conclusion has a medical significance, for it supposes a new etiology of diseases, because it is no longer just the imbalance of the four elements/humours that causes the disease, but the elemental heat itself s conceived as something that is potentially bad for the body.

In sum, the living body is seen as a house in which the soul resides, and the spiritus and its innate heat are the instruments of the soul that enables incorporeal power to affect the corporeal body. It is the link or the bond that ties the soul and the body together. Because of this, when this link is broken, the heat is dintiguished and hence the life ceases to be. Such divine spiritus cannot have the terrestrial origin, for then it would be destructible and without reason. The very idea that the formative power is endowed with a rational principle prevents Fernel from concluding that the spiritus is made up of the terrestrial elements. Because it is more divine than the four elements, what controls it, i.e. the world soul, must be more divine than the spiritus it uses. As the spiritus cannot come from the simple mixture of the four elements, it must be implanted into the natural beings at the time of generation, from then onwards directing the fetal formation and taking charge of the nourishment of the body. To this extent, the spiritus of the living body is governed by and closely united with the World Soul.

Fernel quoted in Hiro Hirai, Medical Humanism, 53-54. “Who could be such a crazy enemy and opponent of the works of nature as not to see at once right at the start, from the skin itself, the skill of the creator? Who will not go on to reflect that some mind or intelligence, endowed with marvelous power, travels through the lands and extends into all parts? For there is nowhere that creatures are not seen to be generated, creatures that all have received some remarkable structure… If some animals are generated in mud, filth, bogs, plants and fruit when they rot – animals that display the marvelous brightness of the being that generates – what should we think [happens] in higher bodies? If the mind and intelligence that reached into such filth is outstanding, how great should its excellence be reckoned in the case of the sun, moon and most of the stars? Certainly, when I brood over this, a mind of no small dimension seems to extend throughout the air surrounding us. If anyone gazes round thoroughly on this with unfettered mind, seeing a mind residing despite it all in such a welter of flesh and humours, seeing too makeup and structure of each living thing (for they all display the evidence and standing of their wise creator), he will admire the greatness and excellence of the mind that is in the heavens.

Hiro Hirai, Medical Humanism, 61. Fernel quoted, “[w]hen a craftsman is in sound health, yet confined to a house, if he is going to complete any task correctly, he should not just be provided with a suitable tool, but also with a properly lit house, which should not be dark or gloomy; I certainly declare that in the same way the soul, while enmeshed the toils of the body, for the purpose of reasoning and understanding needs a sound state of body, not as an instrument but as a house.”

Ibid.

Fernel in Hiro Hiral, Medical Humanism, 66-67. “The incorporeal nature confined in the seed receives its powers from this [seed] just as a craftsman receives his [force] from his instrument. But in reality they have arrived divinely.”