Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.

Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools.

They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

Relying on physical remedies alone was often seen as downright ungodly: in England, Puritan minister John Sym advised “caution” that people “dote not upon, nor trust, or ascribe too much to physical means; but that we carefully look and pray to God for a blessing by the warrantable use of them.” To do otherwise—to rely on a physic or powder alone—would be to put the material above the spiritual. That was why a strictly mechanical approach to medicine was considered dangerously atheistic.

He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

devote what time I may still have to live to no other occupation than that of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of Nature, which shall be of such a kind as to enable us there from to deduce rules in medicine of greater certainty than those in present use.

Descartes and his followers had set themselves in opposition to the Scholastic notion of matter. According to the traditional way of thinking about these things, the sky has blueness in it, water has wetness, garlic has its odor.

Catholic tradition in the early modern period emphasized the physical. Bodily remains were keys to the deepest of mysteries, links in the chain between life and death, and, as the Council of Trent said, the bones of prophets, saints, and others “now living with Christ . . . are to be venerated by the faithful.

Some, like Gysbert Voetius at Utrecht, believed the materialism in the new philosophy was a direct attack on Christianity.

A rumor sprang up, which circulated for decades, that he had been poisoned.

Europe’s greatest intellectuals were as aware of his medical focus as they were of his philosophical and mathematical discoveries.

The crisis is a loss of meaning, and the quest is a search for truth, for something to believe in.