The Soul in Three Dimensions: Pietro Pomponazzi and Andreas Vesalius

Abstract

There is something magical about a good book. Although its author may be dead or unknown to us, within those dry, seemingly inert pages, a writer has succeeded in trapping a special form of energy. Heated by the attentive gaze of a fresh eye, this energy can be unlocked, so that those flat symbols on a white page now vibrate subtly, steaming with the reanimated heat of thought. For a very long time Christianity seems, by contrast, to have used books for their sheer dead weight. Theologians, cardinals and popes treated them as if they were bricks, forming solid and ideally motionless walls around those sacred truths known to and guarded by the Catholic and (to some extent) Protestant churches. For all the appalling power of these institutions, it seems to have been during the sixteenth century that books began to recover something of the independent life and mobility of real thought. Where there had been weight, there was movement. At certain moments it perhaps felt almost as if these dry leaves now took wing, fluttering in unpredictable patterns on random winds of change. As the century progressed, those freshly animated pages were to be caught in the magnetic field of one small but powerful entity: having taken wing, these once frozen words spiralled in towards the potent force field of the newly seen and newly depicted human body.