As noted in the Introduction, Galen’s commitment to ethical welfare and the pursuit of virtue is illustrated not only in works that have a transparently moral character, but also across a range of passages in non-practical ethical contexts. With mostly those in mind, this study begins with a critical analysis of the moral topics that concern Galen and the various strategies he employs to foster different types of moralising. The aim is to highlight the central features of his moral didacticism about the right and wrong way to live and the right and wrong way to be in oneself, which we will see in both subtler and more elaborated forms in the ensuing Chapters that focus on individual case studies.
Guiding people towards specific moral paths through encouragement is an overarching category in Galen’s practical ethics. The passage below from the Arabic epitome of Character Traits helps elucidate the key components of such moral coaching:
Someone who in his nature and his act makes [the attainment of] this pleasure [i.e. for eating] his goal is like a pig, whereas someone whose nature and act loves the beautiful follows the example of the angels. These [last], therefore, deserve to be called ‘godlike’, and those who pursue pleasures deserve to be called ‘beasts’. The things that are desirable are the good and the beautiful, and those that should be avoided are the evil and the ugly. When an action is good and beautiful all people must choose [to perform] it, and when it is bad and ugly they [must] all abhor it. This is generally acknowledged.
The distinction between pigs and angels (the Arabic substitution for Galen’s non-monotheistic ‘god’) impinges on the reader’s ethical decision-making, in so far as it juxtaposes two groups of moral agents.Footnote 1 The first opts for a life of sensation and bestiality specific to animals, in stark contrast to the second one that embraces a life of nobility and excellence. This virtuous type of life is described in attractive terms to Galen’s audience. For it is presented as approximating the level of the divine, a notion encapsulated in the Platonic ideal of assimilation to god, which is invested with social esteem further on in the work, in a statement that teases out what might already be implicit in the foregoing extract: ‘[T]here is no honour greater than that of imitating god, so far as is possible for a human being. This is achieved by despising worldly pleasures and preferring the beautiful’ (De Mor. 41 Kr.).Footnote 2 The thematic selection and bipolar organisation of the ethical material, together with the exhortative way in which it is communicated, make it action-directing,Footnote 3 i.e. prompting the reader towards the performance of good deeds. At its heart lie the concepts of exemplarity and imitation together with an appeal to the readers’ concern for their reputations, lest they yield to brutish wickedness instead.
Besides being succinct, direct and clear-cut, Galen’s moral message in this passage is also impersonal, since it conveys general truisms on morality without involving a specific addressee or, for that matter, the author’s moral voice. Individualisation is ruled out for the sake of a universal conceptual framework in which ‘all people’ must act in a certain way without exceptions allowed. No other, more complex, rhetorical technique to navigate one’s course of action in specific domains or real-life situations is on offer. That is the reader’s job, namely to customise the collective injunctions to their own moral life. On that premise, Galen’s moralism here synthesises two types of ethical instruction, viz. ‘protreptic’ (or ‘expository’) and ‘descriptive’ (or ‘exploratory’) moralism, the former suggesting what one ought to do and what to eschew (in this instance, to act virtuously, not wickedly), while the latter probes moral rules about human experience, inviting recipients to make up their own minds about how best to employ them in their lives.Footnote 4 In a way, Galen’s allowance for the open-ended, exploratory possibilities of virtuous activity is compatible with the conceit of self-governance as an inherent element of ancient ethics, according to Julia Annas: ‘Ancient ethical theories do not assume that morality is essentially demanding …; rather, the moral point of view is seen as one that the agent will naturally come to accept in the course of a normal unrepressed development’.Footnote 5 Scrutinisation of broad-brush advice with a view to its pragmatic use in individual circumstances might be one example of such unrepressed development, a Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’ leading to moral cultivation.Footnote 6 As we will see in various parts of this book, even though the moral learners’ autonomy is effectively preserved in Galen, in the sense that they are assumed to practise critical reflection and given moral options, there are sometimes limits to that autonomy, dictated mainly by the addressee’s or reader’s level of philosophical attainment, as well as the author’s didactic goals and self-referential claims in each case (e.g. Chapters 5 and 6).
Unparticularised moralism (which is expository and to some extent exploratory as seen above) appears in medical contexts as well, as for example when Galen stresses the negative repercussions of extreme affectivity on the body: ‘Obviously one must refrain from excess of all affections of the soul: anger, grief, joy, <outburst>, fear, envy; for these will change the natural composition of the body’ (Ars Med. 24, 351.2-6 Boudon-Millot = I.371.10-14 K.).Footnote 7 How exactly this occurs is not explained here, with Galen’s moral advice propounded as a basic directive for moderation, which it is up to the readers to make sense of in the light of their particular situation.
This moralising technique accords very well with the function of morally-loaded quotations in non-ethical settings. These are used by Galen to substantiate accepted truth regarding human nature and at the same time refine his readers’ abstractive skills, leading them to reflect if there is anything in what Galen says that could resonate with their own ethical state. A case in point is the beginning of the third Book of The Different Kinds of Pulse (Diff. Puls. 3, VIII.636.1-8 K.). Here Galen deals with the role of varied denotation in provoking unnecessary ambiguity and hence disagreement among people, especially in the realm of science. This topic arises from his more general distaste for linguistic pedantry, which Galen tends to put in a moral context, as, for instance, when he compares it with failure in one’s way of life (bios).Footnote 8 In this way, Galen seems to situate himself in the contemporary debate about the primacy of ethics over linguistic or logical subtleties, something which had troubled other philosophers such as Seneca or Epictetus.Footnote 9 In order to obliterate fastidiousness, then, he inserts a Euripidean quotation which associates this vice with despicable dispute (eris) over different ideas of goodness and wisdom.Footnote 10 We will see in a subsequent Chapter that eris is a staple in Galen’s moral outlook, which he accuses his rivals of in order to reinforce their negative characterisation and trounce them. On a first level, therefore the tragic quotation incites revulsion against contentiousness. On another level, Galen makes further use of the concept of the different meanings of goodness and wisdom in Euripides by adding truth (his favourite) as a third virtue in need of unanimous comprehension. This he does in order to emphasise the necessity of a shared mentality as to the notional burden of ethical principles affecting science as much as life. With these two moves, Galen makes the moral substance of the quotation an organic element of his prefatory section that warns against strife and in favour of genuineness, precision and clarity.
In other parts of the same work, Galen attacks the doctor Archigenes precisely for not explicating the true meaning of the heavy pulse, and so wrong-foots him on moral grounds, for prattling (λαλεῖν) and not actually talking (λέγειν), using a comic quotation from Eupolis: ‘Excellent in prattling, but in speaking most incapable’ (λαλεῖν ἄριστος, ἀδυνατώτατος λέγειν).Footnote 11 With its oppositional structure between virtue and vice, excellence and incapability put in general terms, this ethically-oriented quotation too takes on wider relevance, becoming applicable not only to a particular individual, in this case Archigenes, but to every single one of Galen’s readers, who are thus counselled against garrulity (ἀδολεσχία), another common evil that Galen disdains throughout his writings. I shall return to this in Chapter 3.
The moralising effect of the above and other similar quotations is made possible thanks to Galen’s – and, we assume, also his audience’s – belief that moral virtue is a defining feature of humanity. That explains his tendency to encourage admirable instantiations of excellence, e.g. love of truth (φιλαλήθεια), love of labour (φιλοπονία), love of honour (φιλοτιμία), and to attempt to dissuade the reader from wicked ones, most notably envy (φθόνος), love of strife (φιλονεικία), love of reputation (φιλοδοξία), shamelessness (ἀναισχυντία), false modesty (δυσωπία) or meddlesomeness (πολυπραγμοσύνη). In all these cases readers are obliquely urged to respond to their human stature, they are being alerted to and incentivised to adopt what is commonly advocated as human morality: e.g. ‘this is something that is a property of all of us: to embrace, accept and love the good, and to reject, hate and avoid the bad’ (ὑπάρχει τοῦτο πᾶσιν ἡμῖν, ἀσπάζεσθαι μὲν τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ προσίεσθαι καὶ φιλεῖν, ἀποστρέφεσθαι δὲ καὶ μισεῖν καὶ φεύγειν τὸ κακόν, QAM 11, 78.8-10 Ba. = IV.815.2-4 K.). In other texts, Galen insists that we are called humans for displaying the positive aspects of our nature, rather than moral infraction such as fierceness, savageness, idiocy and mischief (Di. Dec. 1.9, IX. 815.3-6 K.). And as already noted, a sense of shame is usually invoked when agents allow their rational and humane manners to be superseded by vulgarity and viciousness, e.g. Art. Sang. 7.3, 174.6-9 Furley and Wilkie = IV.729.8.-11 K. Even though this passage refers specifically to a group of Erasistratean doctors, the importance of ‘waking up’ to the shamefulness of something about oneself that one had previously not been properly aware of is verbalised in non-specific terms, by means of the comparison with waking up from a deep sleep (αἰδεσθέντες … ὥσπερ ἐξ ὕπνου βαθέος ἐγερθέντες), an experience no doubt familiar to all members of Galen’s audience.Footnote 12
Attitudes to sleep as well as to food and drink (of which more anon) are in fact hotbeds for lessons of morality in Galen. The work Thrasybulus dramatises an imputation against athletes that they are given to excessive sleeping, eating and drinking. A relevant passage reads as follows:
These are people who yesterday or the day before were indulging in unnatural stuffing of their bodies and sleep; yet they are so incredibly arrogant as to hold forth, shamelessly and at length, on subjects in which even persons of considerable education may have difficulty in immediately making a correct assessment of the logical conflict or consequence of the propositions. What would such people learn, even if they heard some proposition of great profundity, wisdom, and accuracy? In this type of scientific enquiry, even men trained from childhood in the best of disciplines do not always make good judges. It would be an odd thing if persons who were trained to win competitions, but who had so little natural talent that they failed even there—before one day turning up as gymnastic trainers—were the only individuals endowed with such prodigious understanding. The reality, though, is that wakefulness and intelligent thought, not sleep, are conducive to sharpness of wit; and it is an almost universally approved proverb—because it happens to be perfectly true—that a fat stomach does not make a fine mind. The only possibility that remains is that the dust may have presented them with their great wisdom. It would, however, be a little difficult to imagine mud as the progenitor of wisdom, when one observes that it is the habitual abode of hogs. Nor would one normally consider the lavatories, in which they pass so much of their time, a fertile breeding ground for mental brilliance. And yet these are their only activities: it has been plainly observed that they spend their entire lives in a perpetual round of eating, drinking, sleeping, excreting, or rolling in dust and in mud. Such people may be dismissed.
This section equates athletes with hogs (cf. the similar comparison in Character Traits, p. 21) and thus renders them examples of moral unsoundness not only for their fellow-athletes, but for humanity in general. This abstractive perspective gains more weight in the light of Galen’s purposeful linguistic selection, since he uses what he calls a ‘universally approved’ proverb, matching his similarly framed locution ‘This is generally acknowledged’ in the Character Traits passage cited above. The proverb ‘a fat stomach does not make a fine mind’ prioritises mental brilliance over disgraceful bodybuilding in a manner that would have been instantly recognisable to his highly literate audience. Expressions such as these that place stress on generalisable morals do not just enable Galen to make or clinch a point. They are also potent moral statements, focalised around the audience’s underlying sensibilities concerning contemporary morality. In essence, Galen repeats what his readers would already have known as a matter of common sense and everyday moral knowledge. But the narrativity in which he embeds this commonsensical ethics gives rise to a strong moralising ‘impulse’ in his worksFootnote 14 that speaks to contemporary readers. In this passage from Thrasybulus, the intricate association of athletes with a life of inertia, the imagery of lavatories, excretions, mud and dust underpinning the comparison with pigs, and their resounding disavowal by both Galen and all thinking men, would easily have made such life options unpalatable.
Thus far we have discussed cases of hortatory advice communicated through nominally objective rhetoric. This conveys general pronouncements regarding human life and morality to non-specific recipients. Yet, there are also examples like the following one given below, in which Galen’s persona takes centre-stage to articulate his moral beliefs in a dynamic fashion:
What I have said many times [in the past] I will reiterate now as well, convinced that it is very difficult for those who have reached the point of becoming slaves to a sect to change direction towards truth. Those, however, who are both considerate and genuine lovers of truth, they I hope will safeguard the qualifications given to us by nature concerning our activities in life, namely experience and reason. … For false opinions can preoccupy the souls of humans and render them not just deaf but also blind to the things that other people can clearly see.Footnote 15
This passage introduces the eighth Book of The Composition of Drugs According to Places. It emphasises the need to engage with truth, which in turn ensures the right application of experience and rationality, the principal methodological tools in Galen’s pharmacology. Galen’s preaching, communicated through the use of an emphatic ‘I’ this time, portrays him as a moral authority by describing his guidance as having a long history and (it is implied) been so successful as to deserve reiterating. This rhetorical manoeuvre also has a direct bearing on the author’s relation to his readers: he expects them to be thoughtful (συνετοί) enough to fulfil his hopes of their embracing the truth, despite the difficulties he mentions associated with that task. The grave consequences mentioned at the end of the passage of giving oneself up to falsehoods (portrayed as metaphorical blindness and deafness) are particularly dire and are connected with a risk of psychic corrosion. They therefore act as a warning, encouraging a proper moral stance towards truth. As has become obvious by now, Galen sets great store by seeking after truth (φιλαλήθεια), making it the backbone of his scientific approach on a methodological and epistemological plane. But this same virtue is also fervently espoused in his ethics, since knowledge of the truth is cast as being able to bring about the improvement of character (βελτίονα τὸ ἦθος)Footnote 16 but also individual flourishing (εὐδαιμονίαν), predicated on freedom from corrosive passions.Footnote 17 Galen’s fixation with truth may echo the topos of the Imperial-era moralist tradition whereby happiness is grounded on true understanding, extirpating deceptive perceptions liable to rouse passions. This is what Galen himself asserts in the second part of his Affections and Errors of the Soul, where he addresses moral errors qua faulty judgments (more on this in Chapter 6). Consequently, truth upholds virtue, a view also espoused in the Tabula of Cebes, an allegory of moral life dated to the early centuries of the common era that situates truth at the very core of the moral universe.
Having looked at Galen’s exhortation in terms of his escalated participation in the text, from impersonal to authoritative, we now turn more concretely to the role of the reader in textual situations relating to moralism. We have observed that Galen’s readership are the beneficiaries of his moral teaching, furnished with tips on the sort of values they should base their lives on, hinging on what should naturally obtain in science and society at large. Yet there are also cases in which the reader is personally invoked within the text, requested to take an active position on what they read, by musing over it and (alongside Galen) assessing conflicting behaviours before determining which one to adopt.Footnote 18 Such active interrogation of the narrated material corresponds exactly to the kind of reading skills ancient pedagogy attempted to foster.Footnote 19 Galen seems well attuned to these educational currents:
It is time now for you, my reader, to consider which chorus you will join, the one that gathers around Plato, Hippocrates, and the others who admire the works of Nature, or the one made up of those who blame her because she has not arranged to have the superfluities discharged through the feet. Anyone who dares to say these things to me has been spoiled by luxury to such an extent that he considers it a hardship to rise from his bed when he voids, thinking that man would be better constructed if he could simply extend his foot and discharge the excrement through it. How do you suppose such a man feels and acts in private? How wantonly he uses all the openings of his body? How he maltreats and ruins the noblest qualities of his soul, crippling and blinding that godlike faculty by which alone Nature enables a man to behold the truth, and allowing his worst and most bestial faculty to grow huge, strong, and insatiable of lawless pleasures and to hold him in a wicked servitude! But if I should speak further of such fatted cattle, right-thinking men would justly censure me and say that I was desecrating the sacred discourse which I am composing as a true hymn of praise to our Creator …Footnote 20
In the majority of passages that we have hitherto explored, Galen’s audience were invited to approve, almost intuitively, a nexus of uncontroversial dispositions in the form of Kantian moral rules.Footnote 21 Their role was limited to assimilating Galen’s ready-made advice into their personal moral performance. In the extract above things are different. Galen drives readers out of their comfort zone; he presents them with a problematic – especially by posing the sequence of rhetorical questions cited above – and tasks them with making reasoned moral choices; in other words, he instigates a ‘moral breakdown’. The term, coined by Martin Heidegger, is key to a modern theoretical framework for describing the anthropology of moralities and refers to a critical moment when people ‘are forced to step-away from their unreflective everydayness and think through, figure out, work on themselves and respond to certain ethical dilemmas, troubles or problems’.Footnote 22 In the same way, the decision as to which of two contrasting groups to support in the extract above (a frequent trope in Galen’s ethical discourse, as we have seen)Footnote 23 rests on the readers’ capacity for ‘thought’ in the face of moral ‘problematisation’, as Michel Foucault put it, in setting up a similar conceptualisation of the breakdown.Footnote 24
It should be noted, however, that even though Galen’s readers are, theoretically speaking, free to deliberate and choose, the specificities of Galen’s rhetorical articulation in the printed passage indicate that the moral option is, in fact, predetermined by his climactic denunciation of people belonging to the second group. This includes men with corrupted souls, who are compared to ‘fatted cattle’ (βοσκημάτων),Footnote 25 echoing Aristotle’s use of the same term in Nicomachean Ethics 1095b19–22, in the context of dismissing the life of pleasure that renders its followers slavish, resembling Sardanapalus. Any association with these corrupted men, Galen affirms, attracts condemnation on the part of prudent, self-controlled individuals. Not only that, but not joining Hippocrates and Plato who form the first group and reproaching Nature as per the second group, constitutes a sacrilegious act of the highest impropriety rather than a ‘hymn of praise to the Creator’, whom Galen elsewhere worships for his outstanding wisdom and power (Mot. Dub. 4.6-9, 136.16-25 Nutton). Galen’s accentuated denunciation has brutish behaviour at one end of the spectrum and divine insolence at the other. As so often, Galenic readers are autonomous, thoughtful entities, but the moralist in Galen rarely shies away from attempting to steer their behaviour.
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