Malina Buturovic, Yale University
As many of his readers have observed, Galen’s picture of divine creation in On the Usefulness of the Parts accords an unusually active role to matter, as the collaborator of the demiurge (Hankinson 2017; Das 2020). Rather than working against material intransigency, Galen’s Demiurge works alongside and in close collaboration with the intrinsic movements of matter. This paper surveys three crucial passages in which Galen explores the nature of this collaborative creative relationship between matter and the Demiurge. In the first, the Demiurge appears as a farmer responsible for both planting and cultivation, tasks which Galen describes as “the selection of matter” and the “choice of the better in what is being made” (UP 11.10 [Helmreich II, 143-144]; trans. May 1968, 524; see Walzer 1949; Schiefsky 2007; Flemming 2009; Holmes 2014; Marechal 2020). In the latter two, the Demiurge appears as a clockwork divinity who—in different ways, as “colonist” and “astrolabe-maker”—sets in order the components of the natural world and then ceases from all further intervention. (UP 14.2 [Helmreich II, 285]; trans. May 621; (UP 14.5 [Helmreich II, 295]; trans. May 1968, 627; see also Galen’s retraction of this model in Formation of the Fetus IV 696–7 K; 100, 14–29 Nickel and the discussions of Hankinson 2017, 261-266 and van der Eijk 2014 regarding this shift).
At first glance, these three models—the farmer, colonist, and astrolabe-maker—appear to be dramatically at odds. The farmer model lays out a strikingly interventionist picture of the ongoing involvement of the Demiurge in the functioning of the natural world. Both the colonist model and the astrolabe model (in subtly different ways) set out a vision of a natural world governed wholly according to the intrinsic movements of matter, after an initial intervention by the Demiurge. In the paper, I argue that we can nevertheless make sense of the vision underlying all three models, if we triangulate divine design and creative matter with a third partner in the process of creation: human agents. The question of divine intervention for Galen is shaped in large part by the prospect of specific possibilities of failure, introduced by human beings’ errant agency and explored within medical texts. Two difficulties—namely, that some processes seem to require direct divine intervention, and that human agency complicates natural processes—thus turn out to be closely interconnected. The need for repeat divine intervention is linked to precisely the range of medical contingencies which human agency introduces. Human beings exploit these contingencies by their forgetfulness, misbehavior, and error. The various contexts in which Galen lays out his different models of divine intervention thus expose the close entanglement he envisions between creative matter, human agency, and divine interventionism.