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Thesis ID: CBB001567657

Seeds of the Soul: The Theological, Political, and Natural Philosophical Origins of Hereditary Thinking in Early Modern Europe, 1545--1660 (2014)

Claremont Graduate University
Easton, Patricia
De Laet, Marianne
Lake, Peter
The Claremont Graduate University
Ferrell, Lori Anne
Easton, Patricia
De Laet, Marianne
Lake, Peter

ISBN: 9781303852879

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Advisor: Ferrell, Lori Anne; Committee Members: Easton, Patricia, de Laet, Marianne, Lake, Peter.
Physical Details: 220 pp.
Language: English

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Theology Heredity Transmission of ideas Natural philosophy 16th century 17th century Europe

Historians of science have long suggested that Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lacked a notion of heredity, the idea that essential qualities are inherited through procreation. This dissertation challenges that view, arguing that long before the discovery of genes early modern thinkers were beginning to conceive of the world in terms of a natural lineage in debates about theology, politics, and the natural world. Key to these investigations was the soul in both its scientific and religious sense. According to Aristotle, the soul was the form of the body, responsible for its shape and structures as well as the proper functioning of life processes. According to Augustine and other Christian theologians, the soul was marked by original sin which was passed down from Adam to all of his descendants like a hereditary disease. These two models of the soul came together in early modern Europe in a debate about the hereditary transmission of souls, an idea called traducianism. This idea which began with Augustine was rediscovered by Luther in the mid-sixteenth century and inspired new ways of thinking about issues of heredity, especially in protestant universities. Traducianism helped to naturalize the idea of human heredity by emphasizing that the whole person, body and soul, was constituted through natural generation. According to this theory, all aspects of human, animal, and plant generation could be understood through natural laws, rather than relying on recurring miraculous acts of God. In the seventeenth century, this logic was extended to a variety of contexts. In early Stuart England, the debate over traduciansim became a debate about the source of the king's authority--whether it sprang directly from God or was transmitted through society. In the works of the German natural philosopher Daniel Sennert, traducianism was wrapped up in debates about the soul and the structure of matter. For some early modern thinkers, traducianism explained questions of human origin and difference which they confonted as they came into contact with a larger world. Throughout these debates, theological questions foregrounded continuities in nature. It was in original sin that Europeans discovered the idea of heredity.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/08(E), Feb 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1526012802.

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