The animating premise of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Travesties depends upon the strange collocation of eminent people who in actual historical fact were living in Zürich at the time of World War I. It must be great fun to imagine conversation between James Joyce, say, and Vladimir Lenin. Today’s essay concerns two Anglo-Irishmen, both representatives of the English colonial (not to say imperial) project in seventeenth-century Ireland. The two men, though united by their deep Protestant piety, differed dramatically in their intellectual and spiritual personalities. One of them, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), was one of our earlier experimental scientists, a giant of early modern chemistry, and a founding member of and mover and shaker in the British Royal Society dedicated to “the promotion of science in the benefit of humanity.” The other gloried in the wonderful name of Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1682). At mid-century he had been a soldier in the Puritan revolution under Cromwell. After benefiting from a wide-ranging amnesty and conforming to Anglicanism he had withdrawn to his Irish homeland to live the quiet life of a gentleman farmer before, about 1662, becoming convinced—and convincing many others—that he had been given the divine gift of healing, with the touch of his hand, what was in that age a common disfiguring dread disease--scrofula. The therapeutic method was a little more than mere touch. It involved a kind of vigorous stroking of the affected areas, and its practitioner was often called “Greatrakes the Stroker”. This tubercular ailment manifests itself chiefly in the area of the neck, throat, and chin, but in severe cases invades also the lower and occasionally the upper parts of the face. In old England it was called the “King’s Evil,” the belief being that the monarch possessed thaumaturgical powers to effect its cure.
Greatrakes and Boyle were very near contemporaries, and very near neighbors. Boyle was the elder by a year. His father was the great man of the district (the earl of Cork), and Lismore Castle, where he was born, is perhaps six miles from the hamlet of Affane, site of the Greatrakes family farmland. Both spent many years of their lives in England; but it is quite possible, even probable, that they were as lads both in the same local primary school at Lismore. What is certain is that when Greatrakes became an international phenomenon as a wonder-worker, their paths would once again cross. Some years ago I told the strange story of Valentine Greatrakes in a book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. That book was in large part devoted to the exploration of some of the less obviously “enlightened” aspects of that crucial phase of Western intellectual history. I now am thinking principally about Robert Boyle, an Enlightenment figure if ever there was one. In the fundamentals of their unwavering Christian belief, chemist and faith-healer were of very similar mindset. They both clearly believed in the genuineness of Greatrakes’s cures. But Boyle, though he certainly thought that the world was the work of a divine creator, was an empiricist and an experimental scientist who believed that, in general, the divine creator regulated things according to general rather than partial laws. It is in the nature of modern science to explain and demystify the paradoxes of observed phenomena, such as what everyone calls “sunrise” is not in fact the rising of the sun. Boyle suspected there must be some explanation to be found here, that is, a scientific explanation.
Boyle managed to avoid deep involvement in the civil war that ravaged England in the middle of the seventeenth century. His father was an unequivocal royalist, but he himself had considerable sympathy for the Parliamentary side. For the most part, he kept mum, not a bad default position for people surrounded by competing passions. Still, he spent the most crucial years of the war in Tory Oxford. (Greatrakes had of course been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and apparently a good one.) All that was in the past at the time of Greatrake’s stroking fame, which reached its zenith in 1666—and when he came to the attention of his boyhood neighbor Robert Boyle. Greatrakes’s fame went international when, reluctantly, he made a therapeutic tour of parts of southern England at the importunate bidding of a learned English nobleman, Lord Conway, whose wife’s migraine headaches he proved unable to cure. (Though he had begun with scrofula stroking, and continued to specialize in it, so to speak, the Stroker had soon moved on to what might be called general practice miracle cures.) It was through Conway and Conway’s erudite circle of scientific and theological friends that he reconnected with his boyhood neighbor, the now eminent Robert Boyle. Greatrakes even became acquainted with several other members of the nascent Royal Society.
Remember that Boyle, like his even more famous younger contemporary Isaac Newton, was quite as interested in theology and scriptural exegesis as he was in experimental science. One could probably better say that for such men speculative theology and a close attention to the phenomena of the physical world were parts of a still unified quest for knowledge. To the extent that Greatrakes’s supposed cures have been considered seriously at all by modern scholarship, they have of course been rejected as impossible. Greatrakes had many doubters and even violent opponents, but none of them, so far as I know, took the view that miracles were impossible because there are no miracles. If you read the rather shallow article on Greatrakes in Wikipedia, you will be told that he was a man self-deluded. That is because what is known of his luminous moral character is so inconsistent with conscious fraud that the fraud must have been unconscious. As to the (literally) hundreds of independent witnesses of his cures, they were not independent at all, simply participants in a self-generating mass delusion. Certainly episodes of mass delusion are not unknown to history. Yet none of the Stroker’s contemporary doubters made that argument. The most powerful attack on the possibility of religious miracles in British philosophy would come only in David Hume, who lived just about a century after Boyle and Greatrakes, and who addressed the “miracle” question head on only in 1748. But actually Hume’s argument is an argument based in probability. Is it more likely that a man walked on water or that a man was mistakenly (with or without conscious fraud) reported to have walked on water? To Hume (and modernity) the answer is obvious.
The hostile doubt that Greatrakes faced in the 1660s was of a slightly different sort. There were, to be sure, skeptics. But the main objection was that it was simply not appropriate that a Protestant should be performing miraculous cures, such cures being staples of the old unenlightened Romish, medieval religion. So he was immediately hailed by one of his champions as “the miraculous Conformist”. The word conformist meant that he was not a non-conformist. He had submitted to the doctrine and the discipline of the national Church of England.
There is a good deal more to the Stroker’s amazing story though the part of it concerning me now is the reaction of his childhood chum, Robert Boyle, FRS, to the affair. Boyle does not seem to have questioned the cures, but as a scientist he sought a scientific and material explanation for them. He seems to have devoted a good deal of private thought to the matter, though he never arrived at firm conclusions, and we have a few--tantalizingly few—of his “lab notes” that record his thinking. Some theory of contagious diseases had by Boyle’s time replaced that of miasma, or foul air. (Think of the origins of the word malaria.) Boyle seems to have toyed with the following hypothesis: if disease could be cause by contagion—meaning “touching together” in Latin—might also sanitation—being made healthy—be achieved by a similar process? If a human agent could be a spreader of disease, might a human agent possibly be a spreader of health? Thus Boyle was prepared to consider the possibility that the Stroker was such an agent, a man sanatively contagious. The idea of sanative contagion, which appears as a trial balloon in some of the writings of the age, does not appear to have merit; but it is a scientific idea, not a religious one. Boyle shared most of Greatrakes’s principal religious ideas, but he sought to examine the physical phenomena that the Stroker and others attributed to the realm of the supernatural in the realm of experimental science. What is Boyle’s most famous book has an intriguing title: The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes (1661). As I read that book I see an Enlightenment updating of a once famous work of medieval philosophy, Anselm’s Fides quarens intellectum, “Faith Seeking Understanding”.
