Transitions from Medieval to Modern Thought

I read C. S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image some time ago and have found it very interesting and very useful ever since. For instance, I have recently read Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, a couple of Shakespeare plays (with M!), I've been slowly working my way through Dante's Divine Comedy, and now I've been reading some poetry by Alexander Pope, including Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and selections from Cavlin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. In each of these, I have run across statements that I would not correctly understand if I had not read Lewis' book.

For instance, when Calvin makes his argument for the immortality of the soul, he explicitly relies on the science of his day - that the earth is fixed and the spheres of the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars are concentrically arranged about the earth; that heaven is beyond the sphere of the fixed stars; that below the sphere of the moon all things are corrupted and mortal, whereas above the sphere of the moon there is perfection and unchanging; that there are a few basic elements which have their natural places in the universe, either in the earth (the element "earth"), or on top of the earth ("water"), or above that ("air"), or above that ("fire"). Finally, above all these things comes "spirit", which has its natural place in heaven with God. As I understand it, Calvin basically argues that conscience is a flight of the soul to the judgement seat of God. If the soul flies upward to God in the heavens, it must be of an incorruptible, immortal nature since all corruptible and mortal things remain closer to the earth.

Almost 200 years later, Pope declares basically the same thing: "As into air the purer spirits flow, /And separate from their kindred dregs below; / So flew the soul to its congenial place". He describes the flight of the soul to its natural ("congenial") place as a process of chemical distillation, in which the body is left behind much like a residue in a chemical reaction.

Pope also, in Windsor Forest, describing the paradisical British Empire at peace, claims that "For me the balm shall bleed, and amber flow, / The corral redden, and the ruby glow, / The pearly shell its lucid globe infold, / And Phoebus warm the ripening ore to gold." What I want to point out here is the last line. Whether in an alchemical sense or a mythical sense, the medievals associated various planets (and the sun and moon) with various minerals in the earth. The moon was associated with silver, Jupiter with tin (I think), and so on. The sun (Phoebus) was associated with gold. It was thought by some that the sun would turn ordinary metals into gold if the conditions were right. Pope didn't necessarily agree with this, but he is happy to use the then-well-known imagery.

Another example from Pope comes from the Essay on Criticism (it's actually a poem), when he states "In some fair body thus the informing soul / With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole, / Each motion guides, and every nerve sustains; / Itself unseen, but in the effects, remains." Here now is an example of medieval physiology. There is a soul which forms in ("informs", not meaning "to give information" in this case) and sustains the body. It was thought that only humans have a soul; rather, that there were three aspects of the soul, and only humans have all three. The lowest aspect which animals and plants have is called the vegetable soul. The second part was the sensitive soul. The third part was the rational soul. Since I still don't know enough about these on my own, I will simply quote Lewis:

"The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth, and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable [...]. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. [...] The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply 'Reason', and the Sensitive Soul simply 'Sensuality'. [...] All three kinds of soul are immaterial."

So Pope says that the soul "informs" the body, feeding it with "spirits" and "vigor", guiding each motion and sustaining each nerve. The body was thought to contain several fluids which acted on the body to make it move and sense (these might be what Pope has in mind when he speaks of "spirits" and "vigor", or he may be referring to the Vegetable and Sensitive Souls, or there could be some mixture of both). For example, the four "humors" of the human body were blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy.

As interesting as all this is, I have been surprised to find so much of this Medieval way of talking in Pope. Why? Because Pope lived in the generation after Newton. Pope was 40 years younger than Newton, and of course Newton is a pivotal figure in the history of science and how we look at the world. Newton can be thought of as the major transition from Medieval science to modern science. And yet old habits die hard, it seems. It takes some time for the new understanding to sink in, and even longer for the old verbal habits to die out. For instance, by demonstrating that the moon orbits the earth by means of the same force of gravity that causes an apple to fall from a tree, and that the same gravity causes the planets to orbit the sun - by demonstrating these things, Newton essentially declared that the nature of things in the heavens and the earth are the same. This completely exploded the notion that corruption was beneath the sphere of the moon and perfection above it. (Actually, this change in thinking was already underway 100 years before Newton, when Galileo observed the heavenly bodies with his telescope.)

And yet Pope can still say "So flew the soul to its congenial place."

This is interesting by itself, but I have another point... Well, its more of a question, or a hypothesis, or a suspicion. I haven't read a lot of Kant, but what I have read leads me to think that perhaps it is worth thinking of him as a transitional figure - bridging the Medieval and Modern worlds of philosophy. Granted, Kant lived another generation after Pope, but still close enough in time to Newton that I think he must have been very familiar with the Medieval way of thinking, or at least talking. I'm curious to try reading Kant from this perspective - to see if it makes him any easier too understand. (So far, he's hard.)

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. :-)