Monsters and the Problem of Naturalism in French Thought
- Monsters and the Problem of Naturalism in French Thought
In the mid-1670s, a doctor-regent of anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, Guillaume Lamy, gave a series of public lectures against Galenist finalism. Galenism, as it came to be known, was the rich and teleological natural philosophy of anatomy and medicine that dominated the Faculty of Medicine. For Galen and for his philosophical heirs at the faculty, God had designed the forms, organs, functions, and proper propensities of living beings in order to fulfill the providential ends He had willed for them. Nominally, Lamy’s questioning of this finalist philosophy merely called for a more humble, descriptive, mechanistic interpretation of anatomy that did not presume to pronounce on matters of divine intention. Substantively, however, he was challenging the view that the human body as generally known was in any sense ideal, and that deviations from that ideal were in any sense monstrous violations of the natural order.
Indeed, Lamy argued, one could imagine a better body. For example, life would be better if we had wings. For his Galenist contemporaries, to suggest that such a monstrosity would be superior to God’s design was both absurd and theologically dangerous. Although Lamy’s title and eminence protected him from the latter charge, he nonetheless found himself in a series of published debates about, among other things, the alleged superiority of the human body to other possible designs, and, indeed, the rewards and costs of potential human wings. If Lamy were correct, there was no normative value to the human body as generally constituted. Bodies simply happened, diversely, according to the “roll of dice” of nature. The ability of the French mind to think about monstrosities changed dramatically precisely in terms of the growing resonance of Lamy’s arguments.
One should contextualize the drama of early-modern changes in thinking about monsters in terms of the deepest conceptual categories of early-modern thought. The issues raised by such changes touched nothing less than the culture’s sense of the reality in which it found itself. The critical intellectual context in which this occurred was the early-modern attempt to dismiss any unmitigated form of naturalism and to maintain the systematic [End Page 23] intellectual edifice of the “argument from design,” an argument from final causes (purpose, or telos) deemed the most indomitable barrier against such naturalism.
The spectre haunting Christian philosophy always had been absolute naturalism, the elimination of God and the supranatural from an understanding and explanation of the world. For philosophical believers, the worst error that a mind could make was to deny a natural order dependent upon God for its existence, its attributes, and, most accessible, philosophers believed, its purposeful behaviors and forms.
The term “naturalism” always has been equivocal. The critically influential Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis on Aristotle had noted, simply concerning the Physics, “the manifold meanings of ‘nature’,” whose diversity of significations threatened to impede clear thought: that which creates; that which makes something uniquely what it is; the sum of created things; innate propensity; that which makes the actual from the potential; the generative principle; and the principle and cause of motion and rest. 1 By the early-modern period, however, the theological error of naturalism generally meant the attempt to explain the existence, phenomena, and seeming order of nature without reference to the power of God.
This always had been been the essential Christian abhorrence of a pure naturalism. In his Summae Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas, after establishing the possibility of demonstrating God, formulated only two essential and general objections to the enterprise of proving that God existed: the presence of evil, and the sufficiency of natural explanation. He gave voice to the second objection in these terms:
If a few causes fully account for some effect, one does not seek additional causes. Now, it appears that everything that we observe in this world can be explained fully by other causes, without positing a God. Thus, the effects of nature are explained by natural causes and the effects of artifice are explained by human reason and will. Therefore, there is no need to assume that a God exists...
