Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle

Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, & Harvey Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey Giotto di Bondone. Charity. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. Courtesy of: ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada ISBN 978-3-319-93652-9 ISBN 978-3-319-93653-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93653-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951591 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, 1555, p. 705. This image is from Vesalius’s personal annotated copy. Reproduced by permission of the owner, Dr. Gerry Vogrincic. Photo Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland The new chapters in this book are dedicated to scholarly friends: on Aristotle, to Vivian Nutton; on Augustine to †Walter H. Principe; on Aquinas, to David Novak; on Calvin, to †William J. Bouwsma. PREFACE The heart is familiar literally as the physical organ for the vital circulation of the blood and metaphorically as the profound site of emotions, iconic ♥ for love. But it was not always so. This book revises ordinary assumptions by original research on significant concepts of the heart in important ancient to early modern thinkers. For, the identity and the function of their hearts differed significantly from modern physiological knowledge and psychological attribution. Their hearts were the agents for or against the divine law; they were the seats of the soul with its intellect and imagi- nation; and they were the furnaces of the blood. Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey discovers the unfamiliar heart in four new substantial and surprising studies. These investigations establish the medical foundation of the heart in Aristotle’s natural philosophy; reveal Augustine’s social critique of his outlaw heart; analyze grammatically and logically the heart of Aquinas’s natural law of morality; and present theologically Calvin’s personal emblem of the divided heart in hand. The book also reprints one of the author’s eleven articles on the heart published in scholarly journals. This article unmasks William Harvey’s heroic persona as the discoverer of the heart’s circulation of the blood, a mystery physicians believed “almost known to God alone.” These cultural anatomies are innovative in their scholarly topics and interdisciplinary methods. Anatomy was historically the physical dissection of the body for medical knowledge. It was practiced traditionally on an animal carcass, eventually also on a human cadaver, usually that of a crimi- nal. As a cultural anatomy of beliefs and ideas about the heart, this book is a scholarly examination of texts for conceptual knowledge. It does not vii viii PREFACE palpate the surface of the heart but cuts into its substance with acute inci- sions to lay bare human existence for inspection and analysis. For context and continuity, this Preface to the book integrates the author’s published research on the heart with the four new anatomies here. That research spanned a history from an ancient poem of triumph in the wilderness to an early modern scientific record in a laboratory. It began by plunging into the biblical “heart of the sea” to fathom the divine punishment that made a path for the Exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. And it ended by probing beneath the skin of a ligated arm, through its labyrinthine venous membranes, to a reasoned inference of the blood flow originating in the heart. The hearts of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin anat- omized in this volume advance the history of the heart significantly. ANCIENT REALITIES In the beginning, in the Hebrew Bible, lēb/lēbab translated as “heart” appeared more than 800 times as its principal anthropological concept. Its initial entry in the standard Hebrew lexicon is “the quivering, pump- ing organ, the heart.” However, since not even Harvey’s authoritative Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628) modeled a pump for the heart’s circulation of the blood, that definition is a serious anachronism. Christian adoption of the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament extended the importance of biblical heart through cita- tion and interpretation. However, for want of both linguistic knowledge and historical method, through classical acculturation Christian exegesis early subsumed Hebrew heart to Greek philosophy and medicine and usually in Latin translation. Those applied classical disciplines so over- whelmed the biblical sense that modern reference works impute anachro- nistic and foreign meanings to biblical heart. Christian exegesis has insisted that the Bible meant by “heart” a classical facultative psychology of the intellect, with reason and will. It has further asserted that the Bible had a precocious and precise medical knowledge of the heart. A major biblical dictionary retroactively assumes Harvey’s heart as the circulator of the blood to be the ancient basis for “heart” as the seat of personal energies, from which circulate all mental and moral activities. This is obviously another anachronism. The physical heart’s circulation of the blood, which was only discovered in the seventeenth century C.E., and that with an Aristotelian philosophical inference, cannot be the premise for ancient biblical “heart” as the human soul or mind. Yet, standard PREFACE ix modern reference works erroneously claim for the Bible a precise physical cardiac knowledge. This author’s publications on biblical “heart” in the Torah, prophets, histories, and psalms have exposed the context of their “heart” as legal, not psychological or physical. “‘In the Heart of the Sea’: Fathoming the Exodus” interpreted “heart” as the agent of the law in the most ancient biblical text, the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) in praise of the divine deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian enslavement. For Judaism, that Exodus was the normative historical event and the traditional basis for faith. As Yhwh (God) acted in that poem, his nostrils blew the waters upward into a heap and “the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea” (v. 8). Modern exegesis has assumed that the heart of the sea was its interior midst on the false analogy of the physical heart situated in the middle of the human body. Yet, the several other biblical phrases “the heart of the sea(s)” all referred to Yhwh’s punishment by death of Israel’s enemy. This research identified “heart” as the active receptor or rejector of divine law. Heart searched, inclined, and moved toward—or against—the observance of God’s commands. Its ana- logue was not the interior physical heart, for there was no such anatomical knowledge among the ancient Israelites, but the exterior physical legs with feet, which Israelite physicians did know and treat. As definitive of human character, biblical heart walked upright in God’s ways or it departed from them by stumbling, backsliding, falling, breaking. Heart was a concept for lawful observance, not for psychological will, yet another anachronism, as in Augustine’s psychology. Biblical heart as movement on a particular way coincided in Exodus 15:8 with the trajectory of a storm at sea, where the waves rose up to overwhelm and drown the pharaoh’s charioteers in pur- suit of the fleeing Israelites. Its phrase “in the heart of the sea” meant in the judgmental movement of the sea, not in its locational midst. The drowning of Israel’s enemy was a legal process of divine judgment by talion—like for like—that weighed down the charioteers of the hard- hearted pharaoh who sank like stones in the hardened waves of the sea. “The Law of the Heart: The Death of a Fool (1 Samuel 25)” rejected the standard proof text for a biblical cardiology, the story of Nabal whose “heart died within him, and he became as a stone” (v. 37). Although his fictional death has been diagnosed medically, there is no evidence for the assumed Egyptian source of a biblical cardiac knowledge. Nabal’s death is explained contextually by Hebrew philology and biblical law. The story of Nabal played on his name, nabā l̄ “fool,” which denoted serious sin. A biblical fool committed extremely disorderly and unruly acts that endangered x PREFACE or destroyed social relationships.

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