Painful Inquisition: Body-Soul Problems in Early Modern Christianity

Abstract

Just a few weeks after Marlowe’s sudden death, Sir Walter Ralegh and his brother Carew were having supper with a Wiltshire neighbour, Sir George Trenchard. Also present at table were one Nicholas Jeffrey, the parson of Wick Regis, and a local minister named Ironside. Prompted by Carew’s apparent jest on the subject of sin, Jeffrey cautioned him to think of his soul. ‘The soul/ responded Carew, ‘what is that?’ Now being ‘willed to deliver his opinion on the matter’, Ironside at first answered that ‘it was a matter rather to be believed, than to be disputed of. But Walter Ralegh pressed him. ‘I have,’ he explained, ‘been…a scholar some time in Oxford, I have answered under a Bachelor of Art, and had talk with divines, yet hitherto in this point (what the reasonable soul of man is) have I not by any been resolved.’ Ironside therefore asserted, according to Aristotle, that the soul was the first act of a living body. Met with Walter’s objection that this definition was ‘obscure, and intricate’, Ironside responded (with evident tact) that it naturally was so for those less learned than Sir Walter. For this reason Ironside preferred to ‘say with divines plainly that the reasonable soul is a spiritual and immortal substance breathed into man by god, whereby he lives and moves and understandeth, and so is distinguished from other creatures’. ‘Yes,’ nodded Ralegh (perhaps with some impatience), ‘but what is that spiritual and immortal substance breathed into man?’

Touching the soul hath been more strange opinions, Than now beneath the great Turk are dominions.¹