Galen of Pergamon, like Paul of Tarsus, engaged in strenuous, life-long work amidst vicious struggles with personal opponents.  Both Galen and Paul had privileged upbringings and promising opportunities for relatively tranquil and secure lives.  Paul’s life course is readily explained today as resulting from divine intervention, or, alternatively, deep psychosis.  But what explains Galen’s passionate life?

Galen argued that a physician must work hard to excel.  According to Galen, the excellent physician knows geometry, astronomy, anatomy, logic, dietetics, prognostics, and verbal exposition.  Galen described a physician moving beyond the work of Hippocrates’ son and other Hippocratic disciples by leaving their town of Cos and the court of the Macedonian King Perdiccas to visit all other places in Greece.  The purpose of this long, difficult travel was to care for the poor and to consider with experience Hippocrates’ writing on the effects of different waters and places on health.[1]  Galen noted:

{the excellent physician} will, necessarily, not only despise money, but also be extremely hard-working.  And one cannot be hard-working if one is continually drinking or eating or indulging in sex: if, to put it briefly, one is a slave to genitals and belly.  The true doctor will be found to be a friend of temperance and a companion of truth.[2]

Arabic literature records Galen writing:

He who is in such a position {the excellent physician} pays little regard not only to riches but also to leisure and relaxation, preferring toil and hardship hand in hand with virtue.[3]

A variety of sources have Hippocrates as the actor in stories about a physician refusing a lucrative call from the Persian King Artaxerxes and a physician leaving the court of Perdiccas.  Galen’s own text on the best doctor has, not Hippocrates, but an excellent physician as the actor in these stories.[4]  Galen considered himself to be an excellent physician.

Galen implicitly contrasted an Epicurean life with his life.  Epicurean doctrines emphasized leisure, relaxation, tranquility, and security (ataraxia).  In Galen’s time, as well as today, Epicurean living tends to be associated with pleasures of drinking, eating, and having sex.  The writings of Epicurus more directly and unequivocally connect ataraxia to being among  friends, being free from fear of death, and being free from concern for one’s place in an afterlife.[5]  Galen rejected the popular counsel associated with Epicureanism, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”[6]  Galen instead pursued wide-ranging scholarship, produced a huge body of written work, and engaged in demonstrations and medical practice.  Galen also rejected being among friends in practices such as morning social visits and evening symposia.  Galen instead chose the struggles implicit in being “a friend of temperance and a companion of truth.”  Epicurus encouraged his disciples to disseminate the “true philosophy.”[7]  Epicurus meant Epicurean philosophy.  Galen insisted, in contrast, on being a true doctor.  The true doctor worked hard to extend medical knowledge beyond Hippocrates’ great achievements.

Galen taunted Epicureans and other philosophic schools with the much less prestigious second-century example of Jews and Christians.  Discussing creation and nature, Galen declared:

Is not this Moses’ way of treating Nature and is it not superior to that of Epicurus? The best way, of course, is to follow neither of these … [8]

Elsewhere Galen jeered:

One might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ than to the physicians and philosophers who cling fast to their schools [9]

Using philosophical schools’ central topoi, Galen praised Christians :

The mass of the people are not able to follow the thread of an apodictic discourse, wherefore they need allusive sayings, so that they may enjoy instruction thereby.  Of this sort we now see the people who are called Christians deriving their faith from such allusive sayings.  Yet on their part deeds have been produced equal to the deeds of those who are true philosophers.  For example, that they are free from the fear of death is a fact which we all have observed; likewise their abstinence from the unlawful practice of sexual intercourse.  And, indeed, there are some among them, men, and women, also, who during the whole of their natural life refrain altogether from such intercourse.  And some of them have attained to such a degree of severe self-control and to such earnestness in their desire for righteousness, that they do not fall short of those who are true philosophers. [10]

Freedom from fear of death, freedom from bodily desires, self-mastery, and attainment of virtue were primary philosophical goods.  According to Galen, Christians demonstrated in life these goods just as well as did “true philosophers.”  Galen had contempt for the mere assertions of the schools of Moses and Christ.  In his polemics, Galen put forward deeds as trumping words.  Galen’s comparison of Christians to “true philosophers” is a sarcastic attack on philosophical elites.[11]  That attack strikes particularly at Epicureans, whom Epicurus urged to disseminate “true philosophy.”

Galen and Paul passionately pursued great projects.  When Galen criticized being “a slave to genitals and belly,” he echoed Paul’s implicit disparagement of the Epicurian life, “when we were children, we were slaves to the elements of the universe.”[12]  The underlying Greek root for slave in these expressions evoked in its time not a person cruelly and unjustly enslaved, but a person completely at a Master’s service.  Paul and Galen put their lives completely at the service of projects much greater than atoms, genitals, and bellies.  Paul worked tirelessly to disseminate the news that Jesus the Christ had fulfilled God’s promise to the Jews and extended salvation to all humankind.  Galen worked tirelessly to demonstrate the rational beauty of biological nature and to have that knowledge applied in medical practice.  In the vibrant intellectual world of ninth-century Baghdad, a prominent, hard-working scholar wrote an epistle presenting himself as a faithful disciple of Galen and Christ.

Galen’s passion in form was much like Paul’s.  What explains both is service to a great project.

*  *  *   *  *

Related posts:

• poetic beauty in Galen
• Galen’s perspective on interpersonal competition
• motivational value of a great project

Notes:

[1] Galen, The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher (Opt. Med.), III, trans. Singer (1997) p. 32-3.  Hippocrates reportedly wrote a text On Airs, Waters, and Places.  HP pp. 53, 62, and Hippocratic corpus.

[2] Opt. Med., trans. Singer (1997) p. 33.  Boudon-Millot (2000) p. 238 suggests that this text dates to 180-192 GC.

[3] HP p. 53.

[4] HP p. 53.  For other sources of these Hippocratic stories, see, e.g. Boudon-Millot (2000) p. 303.  Cf. Opt. Med., trans Singer (1997) p. 32.  Galen wrote a commentary on Hippocrates’ work, On Airs, Waters, and Places.  HP p. 187, Boudon-Millot (2000) p. 238.  Artaxerxes I was a Pesian king reigning 464-424 BGC.  Perdiccas II of Macedonia reigned from about 454 to 413 BGC.  Hippocrates lived from about 450 BGC to 380 BGC.  Hence Hippocrates’ son and disciples are chronologically implausible characters in these stories.

[5] On Epicurean beliefs, see, e.g. Epicurus’ principle doctrines and Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus.  Epicureans probably were relatively prevalent in Anatolia, were both Galen and Paul had roots.  De Witt (1954) pp. 59-63.  Epicurus advocated a calculus of bodily advantage, described as pleasure.  Epicurus was thus a forerunner of Jeremy Bentham, utilitarianism, consequential ethics, and contemporary Western economics.

[6] Isiah 22:13, 1 Corinthians 15:32.  Sardanapalus, the seventh-century BGC founder of Tarsus, had engraved on his tomb, “knowing full well that thou art but mortal, indulge thy desire, find joy in thy feasts. Dead, thou shalt have no delight.” Malherbe (1989) p. 85.

[7] Epicurus, Vatican Sayings, 41.

[8] Galen, De usu partium, book 11, chapter 14.  See Ref. 2 in Pearse (2011).

[9] Galen, De differentiis pulsuum, iii, 3.  See Ref. 3 in Pearse (2011).

[10] Abu’l-Fida, Concise History of Humanity, Ch. 3, Bk. 3.  See Ref. 6 in Pearse (2011).  The translation from Sprengling (1917), p. 96, uses the phrase “in truth philosophers.”  Lothar Kopf translates evidently the same Arabic phrase (HP p. 150) as “who profess philosophy in truth.”  The translation above is from Sprengling (1917) p. 96, with the elimination of the recording author’s parentheticals and with “true philosophers” substituted for “in truth philosophers.”  The former expression is within the same zone of meaning as the latter, more concise, and better reflects the over-all tone of the passage.  The frequently quoted translation of Walzer (1949) p. 15 isn’t faithful to Abu’l-Fida’s text.  In particular, the phrase “in matters of food and drink” isn’t in Abu’l-Fida’s text, while “cohabitation” doesn’t indicate the clear sexual implications of the relevant phrase.  Sprengling (1917) p. 106 comments:

Abulfeda’s text is not merely fuller than that of Agapius and Bar-Hebraeus, it is an utterly different text. The Greek is fairly apparent under the Arabic of both, more conspicuous in Abulfeda’s version; but the Greek under the Arabic and Syriac of the Christians is not the Greek of Galen. … But the Greek underlying Abulfeda’s version is Galen’s Greek. … Moreover, the sentiment and thought of Abulfeda’s text is Galen’s.

The inclusion of food and drink within some of the Arabic record of the Galenic text seems to reflect an anti-Epicurean expansion in translation.  Note that the version from Ibn al-Qifti, History of Learned Men, praises the Christians for (in Latin translation) “in cibo, potuque parsimoniam amare.”  This seems to be a contrasting parallel to Sardanapalus’ well-known grave inscription, “eat, drink, and have sex.”  On that inscription, see Malherbe (1989) p. 85, esp. ft. 49.  It has also been transmitted as “eat, drink, and play,”;  “eat, drink, and have sex” is a more specific meaning that seems to me more plausible coming from a powerful male leader.

[11] On the mere assertions of the schools of Moses and the Christians, see References 1, 4, and 5 in Pearse (2011).  On words versus deeds, see, e.g. Galen, On the Power of Cleansing Drugs (Purg. med. fac.) 2,11.328-30K, trans. Mattern (2008) p. 70, and Outline of Empiricism (Subf. Emp.) Ch. XI, trans. Walzer (1985) p. 42.

[12] Galen, Opt. Med., trans. Singer (1997) p. 33; Paul, Galations 4:3.   On this passage’s relation to Epicureans, see De Witt (1954) pp. 63-5.  The Greek root for slave in both these expressions is that of doulos.  In the New Testament, doulos is also frequently translated as servant.  For example, doulos is the Greek for servant in Titus 1:1, “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth which accords with godliness.”

References:

Boudon-Millot, Véronique, and Jacques Jouanna, trans. 2000. Galien.  t. 1. Paris: Belles lettres.

De Witt, Norman W. 1954. St. Paul and Epicurus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294.  Online transcription.

Malherbe, Abraham J. 1989. Paul and the popular philosophers. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Mattern, Susan P. 2008. Galen and the rhetoric of healing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pearse, Roger. 2011.  Galen on Jews and Christians.

Singer, P. N., trans. 1997. Galen. Selected works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sprengling, M. 1917. “Galen on the Christians.” The American Journal of Theology, v. 21, n. 1 (Jan.) pp. 94-109.

Walzer, Richard. 1949. Galen on Jews and Christians. London: Oxford University Press.

Walzer, Richard, and Michael Frede, trans. 1985.  Galen. Three treatises on the nature of science: On the sects for beginners, An outline of empiricism, On medical experience. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.

Tagged: Galen

In the second century, the physician Galen vigorously proclaimed true medical knowledge.  He studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, anatomy, and pharmacy.  He engaged in dissections and vivisections, treated patients with substances and surgery, and wrote many technical books.  An early Greek school of medicine, called the Dogmatists, downplayed the importance of factual observation and experience.  Galen harshly criticized the Dogmatists.   Early Greek philosophers had pondered the causes of existence and change.  Galen described material nature appropriate to purpose as circumscribing possibilities for existence and change.

Galen had contempt for practitioners merely of verbal arts.  Galen called such persons sophists.  They had little interest in facts and truth.  They sought public acclaim and personal wealth through appealing rhetoric:

The ubiquitous, fashionable, shameless sophists, according to Galen, try to contradict experience, they deny that which is evident, they dishonour phenomena and disregard clear observations, they reject anatomical facts, they give little heed to the probable, they even ignore evidence that has led to a universal consensus, and they transgress against the two things that constitute the whole medical art, viz. experience and reason.[1]

A Jewish scholar living in Alexandria two centuries before Galen described Moses as declaring, “What is impossible to every created being is possible and easy to {God} above.”[2]  Galen, who believed in a prime-mover God, forcefully rejected Moses’s knowledge of God:

it would not have been possible for {God} to make a man out of a stone in an instant, by simply wishing so. It is precisely this point in which our own opinion and that of Plato and of the other Greeks who follow the right method in natural science differs from the position taken up by Moses. For the latter it seems enough to say that God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should He wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes. We however do not hold this; we say that certain things are impossible by nature and that God does not even attempt such things at all [3]

Dogmatic physicians dismissed empirical facts and emphasized pure reason.  Galen considered Dogmatic physicians to be similar to Moses:

physicians of the kind mentioned are comparable to Moses, who gave laws to the Jewish people, for he wrote his books without adducing proofs, he merely said: God has ordered, or, God has said. [4]

An important idea in early Greek thought was that nothing comes from nothing.  The contrary position, creatio ex nihilo, was by Galen’s time associated with Jewish belief.  From Galen’s perspective, Moses’s description of God’s creatio ex nihilo was analogous to sophists’ creation of material wealth and public acclaim from nothing but words.

Celebrating verbal arts implied a much different valuation of Moses’s position.  About Galen’s time, a book instructing readers on how to be verbally noble, great, and impressive (attributed to Longinus) observed:

the lawgiver of the Jews {Moses}, a man who did not just happen, since he made room for the power of the divine and made it appear in accordance with its worthiness, says in the introduction to his Rules, “God said” — what? — “Let there be light, and there was; let there be earth, and there was.” [5]

This observation occurs in the midst of discussing Homer’s sublime expressions.  Homer’s writings in the ancient Greek world were, among the learned elite, much like the Bible was among the Jews.  The quotation from Moses’s “introduction to his Rules” measures up to the sublimity of the quotations from Homer.   That makes Moses very good, indeed.  Longinus’s reference to Moses as “a man who did not just happen” differentiates Moses from Galen’s image of a man made in an instant from a stone.[6]  The subsequent clause in Longinus’s observation “since he made room for the power of the divine and made it appear in accordance with its worthiness” is best read as explaining Moses’ verbal technique in the quoted words.  Moses, according to Longinus, represented God with sublime verbal technique.

Under Galen and Longinus’s contrasting evaluations of Genesis is their common interest in created beauty.  In the ancient world, differences between physicians, sorcerers, philosophers, sophists, mythic figures and historical persons were blurry.   Elite intellectuals, from a prominent Roman statesmen c. 75 GC to a prominent Islamic scholar in twelfth-century Damascus, associated Moses with magic.[7]  Galen complained of similar cross identification:

when a good man makes a sound prediction on the basis of methodical understanding, proper training, long experience, precise observation and rational deduction, far from receiving the acclaim he deserves he is suspected of sorcery (which is a good deal worse than the mere slur that scientific prognosis is nothing but fortune-telling) [8]

While attempting to reveal through anatomical facts a beautiful rational order, Galen competed aggressively with sophists in sophistic ways:

Galen’s audiences, moving back and forth between sophistic and Galenic epideixis, probably brought similar rhetorical, theatrical, and affective expectations to both kinds of performances. If Galen’s accounts are to be trusted, he did not disappoint their expectations: they found in him a superbly staged, historically aware, highly cultured, rhetorically informed, self-promoting, expert performer whose technical virtuosity amazed, delighted, and instructed a largely admiring public. In his keen rivalry with the sophists, and with those who, in his view, resembled them, Galen tried to secure victory by becoming a skilful performer in the very traditions represented by the ‘Second Sophistic’. [9]

Jews’ biblical study and their taking of Moses’s rules into their daily lives did not emphasize sophists’ rhetorical concerns.  Yet an ancient rhetorician could hardly fail to recognize the stunning power of the Bible in Jews’ lives and their love for their God.  Moreover, the Jews’ Hebrew Bible gained wide distribution in Greek from before the end of the second century BGC.  That the surviving literature of non-Jewish rhetoricians doesn’t show much appreciation for the Hebrew Bible may reflect primarily the history of political and cultural hostility toward the Jews.

Galen’s demonstrations of biological purpose and his references to the demiurge make most sense in relation to intellectual beauty.  To scholars today, Galen’s ultimate explanations look like merely teleological claims that function like Moses’s words creating laws.  Galen was not interested in arguing about creatio ex nihilo or eternal existence of the world.[10]  He sought to direct intellectual attention to the material surface — how biological parts fit together and work together to serve a particular purpose.   He saw within the material surface of the world an order supporting good reasoning and in turn revealing splendid truth.   Why did Galen refer to a demiurge at all?[11]  The right answer seems to me to be: as a subject for praise for the beauty that Galen’s system of reasoning revealed, at least to him.

I loved her and sought her from my youth,
and I desired to take her for my bride,
and I became enamored of her beauty.

You know modern, rigorous science through signs of bodies bored to death.  Understanding creation can be more lively.  Galen’s work, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Comedy, combined words and deeds to reveal and transform worlds.[12]  The way is poetry engaged with matter.

Related posts:

• the business of rhetoric in the ancient world
• service innovation in the ancient magic industry
• a bird-eyes’ perspective on post-modernism

Notes:

[1] Staden (1997) p. 34 (Greek terms in parentheses omitted above).

[2] Philo of Alexandria, On the Life of Moses, I, XXXI.174.

[3] From Galen, De usu partium, book 11, chapter 14.  See Reference 2 in Roger Pearse’s excellent compilation, Galen on Jews and Christians.

[4] From Galen, On Hippocrates’ Anatomy.  This work is lost, but the quoted text (reference 2 in Galen on Jews and Christians) has been preserved in HP p. 151.

[5] Longinus, On the Sublime, 9.9, trans. Arieti and Crossett (1985) pp. 57-8.  The Pentateuch was known as the Books of Moses, and ancient scholars considered Moses to have written Genesis.  See, e.g. Philo, On the Life of Moses, II, VIII.47.  Longinus’s quotation from Genesis is not from the Septuagint text (Arieti and Crossett (1985) p. 57, note).  Other Greek translations of Hebrew scripture are documented in the second century GC .  Others probably existed even earlier.

[6] The apparent intertextuality between Longinus and Galen favors dating On the Sublime after Galen, rather than before.  Some have questioned whether Longinus’s observation on Moses is a later interpolation.  The analysis above supports that observation’s integrity in On the Sublime.

[7] Pliny the Elder, in Natural History, 30.2, states: “There is another sect, also, of adepts in the magic art, who derive their origin from Moses, Jannes, and Lotapea, Jews by birth, but many thousand years posterior to Zoroaster.”  In twelfth-century Damascus, the scholar `Abd al-Latif al-Baghdādi noted:

Al-Shaqani asserted that Yāsīn could perform miracles which even Moses, the son of Amrām, would have been unable to perform, that he could produce gold coins whenever he wanted and in any quantity and any mintage he desired, and that he could turn the waters of the Nile into a tent, under which he and his colleagues would be able to sit.

HP p. 858.  Moses also figures in the Greek Magical Papyri.  For relevant discussion see Gager (1972), Ch. 4.

[8] Hankinson (2008) p. 7 (describing Galen’s view, not directly quoting Galen).  Galen frequently motivates his works as writing at the request of friends.  König (2009) sees in that motif:

a good example of why we should be more ready to view the relationship between literary and technical writing in the ancient world more as a relationship of continuum and cross-fertilization than of contrast.

Id. pp. 43-4. The less diverse and less dynamic institutions of scholarly study in our contemporary world support more rigid professional and generic boundaries.

[9] Staden (1997) p. 54.

[10] Chiaradonna (2009) pp. 244-52.

[11] Flemming (2009), p. 82, insightfully poses this question.  Her answer seems to tend in the direction of praise for the Emperor.  That seems to me too narrow of an understanding of the impulse to praise within Galen’s demonstrations and writings.

[12] The quote above is Wisdom of Solomon 8:2.  On Galen’s interest in transforming radically socio-intellectual practices, see König (2009) pp. 56-58, and Elliott (2005) Chs. 9 and 10.

References:

Arieti, James A., John M. Crossett, and Cassius Longinus. 1985. On the sublime. New York: E. Mellen Press.

Chiaradonna, Riccardo. 2009. “Galen and Middle Platonism.” Ch. 11 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge.  Cambridge University Press.

Elliott, Christopher Jon.  2005.  Galen, Rome and the Second Sophistic. Dissertation: The Australian National University, School of Social Sciences, Department of History.

Flemming, Rebecca. 2009. “Demiurge and Emperor in Galen’s world of knowledge.” Ch. 3 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge.  Cambridge University Press.

Gager, John G. 1972. Moses in Greco-Roman paganism. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294.  Online transcription.

König, Jason. 2009.  ‘Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of my Own Books‘, Ch. 2 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds) Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

Hankinson, Robert J. 2008. “The Man and His Work.”  Ch. 1 in Hankinson, Robert J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Galen. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr.

Staden, Heinrich von. 1997.  ‘Galen and the “Second Sophistic.”‘ Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 41: 33–54. doi: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1997.tb02261.x

Tagged: Galen