III.2 "as an Animal is a Plant"

This is the arbor inversa, man as an inverted tree -- a classical trope widely cited by Renaissance theologians. As A. B. Chambers points out in his careful archaeology of the termA. B. Chambers, "'I was but an inverted Tree': Notes Toward a History of an Idea," Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 294., the arbor inversa has two distinct geneaologies: one, first cited by Timaeus in his dialogue with Plato, places the "sovereign part of the human soul ... at the top of the body," advising man to root himself heavenward; the other, from Aristotle, is predictably more rationalist, analogizing man's head, the site of consumption, to vegetable roots. As Aristotle writes, creatures "actually have their principal parts down below" while "the part which answers to a head comes to have neither motion nor sensation; at this stage, the creature becomes a plant, and has its upper parts below and its nether parts aloft; for in plants the roots have the character and value of mouth and head."