Physicality Understood Spiritually: The Pious Weeping of Margery Kempe

One of the most striking features of the autobiography of Margery Kempe is the outward manifestation of piety demonstrated most memorably through her continuous, unrestrained weeping. During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, mysticism and other more direct methods of communing with God arose, and Margery’s distinct manner of faithfulness reflects the shifting attitudes of this period. Her feelings toward this external expression of her faith vary throughout The Book from outright resistance to qualified approval to an actual desire that this weeping continue for the sake of Christ. Rather than serene, monkish piety, Margery’s was visceral and physical. Margery believed her tears were conferred upon her by God. Despite the fact that she regarded her weeping as a form of suffering, she acknowledged it as a gift because it reminded her of the continuous presence of God in her life. In the first mention of her weeping, Margery described the process as a form of “bodily penance” in which “our merciful Lord visited this creature with tears of contrition day by day.”[1] She expressed her penitence through this weeping, and at times it is clear that this process was between her and God alone. Margery defended herself from charges that “she was a false hypocrite” who “wept when in company for advantage and profit” by allowing a priest to examine these convulsive acts.[2] According to the priest, “she wept copiously” in the presence of no one “but himself and the clerk,” indicating that these paroxysms were not pretense but legitimate.[3]

By her own account, Margery’s weeping began as a form of atonement for sin, for it occurred primarily “when she contemplated her own wickedness,” but it soon transformed into a multipurpose act directed not only at herself but also those around her.[4] Her tears served a didactic purpose, reminding those who witnessed her own suffering of the suffering of Christ, who endured “hard strokes, bitter scourging and a shameful death at the last for me and all mankind, blessed may he be,” though she was adamant that her own suffering was “truly nothing” compared to what he suffered.[5] Similarly, Christ informed her in one of her visions that her pious weeping reiterated the sorrow of the Virgin, so Christ gave her “great cries and roarings, to make people afraid of the grace I put into you, in token that I wish that my mother’s sorrow be known through you, so that men and women might have more compassion of her sorrow that she suffered for me.”[6] By weeping both alone and in the presence of others, Margery’s hysterics developed a multiplicity of meanings, symbolizing both her personal communion with God and her desire to share this. However, while this morally instructive purpose existed, Margery was clearly uneasy with the boisterous and eruptive nature of her emotional outpourings. In one moment of despair, God informed her that “if you do not wish to suffer any more, I shall take it [her weeping] away from you,” to which she replied, “No, good lord, let me be at your will, and make me mighty and strong to suffer all that you ever wish me to suffer, and grant me meekness and patience as well.”[7]

Eventually, Margery not only accepted her weeping as God’s will, she embraced it as a form of his mercy and was “compelled to believe steadfastly, without any doubting, that it was God who spoke in her, and would be magnified in her for his own goodness and her profit, and the profit of many others.”[8] By the end of her autobiography, she became almost dependent upon these tears, as she was dependent upon God, “for she was sometimes so barren of tears for a day or sometimes half a day, and had such great pain for the desire that she had of them, that she would have given all this world, if it had been hers, for a few tears, or have suffered very great bodily pain to have got them…”[9] By equating her tears with the physical presence of God, Margery welcomed her odd form of piety by conceding “there was no savour nor sweetness except when she might weep.”[10] Margery recognized that her weeping was difficult to comprehend for many who witnessed it, but in the concluding passages of her first book, she stated that “what she understood physically was to be understood spiritually” by others.[11] For Margery, as well as for other mystics and religious lay people of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, piety was to be found in many different ways among diverse people and not merely in those individuals with the sanctioned piety of monasteries and convents.

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[1] Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B.A. Windeatt (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 34.

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] Ibid., 120.

[4] Ibid., 48.

[4] Ibid., 168.

[6] Ibid., 223.

[7] Ibid., 158.

[8] Ibid., 242.

[9] Ibid., 240.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 261.

"The King's Administration of His Realm": Penance and Virtue in Jean de Joinville's Life of St. Louis

For a nobleman of the High Middle Ages, expressions of Christian faith and piety took on many forms. The rise in the political and economic importance of the feudal system and the spiritual importance of the clergy contributed to a stratified social structure in which “those who worked, those who prayed, and those who fought” each had a specific role to play.[1] Taking up the cross in an “armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem” connected the spiritual to the secular by creating a way in which the Christian noblemen of the Middle Ages could express their faith while at the same time maintaining their feudal obligations and status as bellatores.[2] These crusades reconciled the knights’ Christianity with their inclination toward violence and legitimized the use of force in the name of Christ.[3]

King Louis IX of France embodied the ideal of the virtuous Christian ruler by undertaking a Crusade from 1248 to 1254, following the example of so many Western European kings and emperors before him. However, according to Jean de Joinville, upon returning to France, Louis made a conscious effort to seek peace rather than war. For the king and his biographer Jean de Joinville, what was more important in defining his holiness and piety: the crusade in his earlier life or the steady rule he provided for France over the next two decades? If it was the crusade, why was Joinville so keen on emphasizing the devotion of King Louis to his subjects in France? If it was his munificence as a ruler, why dedicate nearly three quarters of the Life of Saint Louis to the crusade which occupied fewer than six years of his forty-four year reign?

Louis’s distress over the failure of the Seventh Crusade may have led him to a more penitential life after his return to France. Shortly after his landing at Hyères in Provence, a Franciscan friar named Brother Hugues preached to King Louis and implored him to “rule his people in justice and equity that he may ever be worthy of God’s love and that God may not take his kingdom from him so long as he live[d].”[4] For the remainder of his reign, according to Joinville, Louis lived a pious life and ruled admirably, especially in his treatment of the poor, his humility toward his subjects, and his governmental responsibilities. He demonstrated austerity “after [his] return from overseas…[and] lived with such a disregard for worldly vanities that he never wore ermine, or squirrel fur, nor scarlet cloth nor were his stirrups or his spurs gilded.”[5] On one occasion, when Joinville informed Louis that he did not wash the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday, Louis expressed his concern, and admonished Joinville that he “should not disdain to perform such an act, seeing that our Lord had done so.”[6] The king, “who made it his chief concern to find out how the common people were governed, and their rights and interests protected,” commanded respect for them in his ordinances, ruling that “bailiffs, sheriffs, mayors, and all others…will do justice to all, without respect of persons, whether poor or rich…”[7]

Similarly, King Louis was conciliatory in affairs of state. In spite of his councilors’ protests, King Louis made concessions to the King of England and returned to him “so large a part of the territory” that he “and his predecessors had won from him” that his barons considered it a loss.[8] Louis claimed that he was “not bound to surrender [it] either to himself or his heirs” but did so “rather as a means of establishing a bond of love between [his] children and [the English king’s].”[9] In his defense, he only asserted that he wished not “to be at enmity with our Lord” and invoked the words of Christ, who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”[10]

However, if Louis truly did experience this sort of volte-face in his later life, one important question remains: If Louis’s penance took the form of non-violent acts, why did Louis attempt another crusade late in his life? Joinville certainly did not approve, and he refused to participate—a Crusade was a way to serve God, not the king, and Joinville told Louis that “if [he] wanted to do what was pleasing to God, [he] should remain here to help defend the people on his estates.”[11] It was also bad for France, which had enjoyed peace and prosperity under Louis. After he left, “the state of the kingdom [had] done nothing but go from bad to worse.”[12] By Joinville’s account, Louis simply possessed an authentically generous personality “right from the time of his childhood” irrespective of his deeds on crusade, and his “compassion for the poor and suffering” was borne out of this moral fortitude.[13] Like most medieval rulers, Louis maintained very different standards for treating with Christians and non-Christians. Louis refused even to speak to a Christian convert to Islam while in captivity in Egypt, and while on his deathbed, he instructed his son “to beware of undertaking a war against any Christian prince without careful deliberation; if it has to be undertaken see that you do no harm to the Holy Church or to persons who have done you no injury.”[14] While the final two decades of Louis’s reign may have been penitential for the failure of a crusade, it was not penitential for the conduct of the crusade. By embarking upon a second one late in his life, Louis attempted to fulfill a lifelong obligation to his faith that remained incomplete despite his virtuous behavior as ruler of France.

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[1] C. Warren Hollister and Judith M. Bennett, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 9^th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 157-158 and 166. Hollister calls this “tripartite” structure “bad sociology” but “good ideology.” It was created by the clergy to bring order to the nebulous social structure, and it reinforced the “mutual obligations” of its members.

[2] Caroline Smith, ed. and trans., Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), xii.

[3] Ibid., xxi.

[4] Jean de Joinville, The Life of Saint Louis, in Chronicles of the Crusades, ed. and trans. M.R.B. Shaw (London: Penguin Classics, 1963), 328.

[5] Ibid., 331.

[6] Ibid., 336.

[7] Ibid., 337-341.

[8] Ibid., 334.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 335. See Matt. 5:9.

[11] Ibid., 346.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 262 and 342.

[14] Ibid., 348.

Sin and "Pure Intention": The Wills of Abelard and Heloise

Given the personal calamities that Abelard and Heloise endured, it is understandable that they attempted to explicate their thoughts and actions in the context of sin. Abelard subscribed to the “ethic of pure intention,” meaning that the will of the sinner determined the sin rather than by the act itself.[1] In his Scito te ipsum, Abelard asserted that “our actions must be judged good or bad solely through the spirit in which they are performed,” and this interpretation of sin relocated the importance of moral transgression from the perpetration of sin to mind of the sinner.[2] Throughout their correspondence, both Abelard and Heloise wrestled with the implications of their sinful actions, but more importantly, they contended with the implications of their will to commit these acts. Paradoxically, Heloise considered herself both “wholly guilty” though also “wholly innocent” because she conceded that she had physically sinned with Abelard but maintained that her intentions were pure.[3] Like Abelard, Heloise affirmed that “it is not the deed but the intention of the doer” that defined sin, and she averred that “justice” must take these purposes into account.[4] The seemingly contradictory position of simultaneous guilt and innocence mirrored Heloise’s own situation at convent of Paraclete, where she exhibited piety through her actions while inwardly experiencing only hypocrisy.[5] If sin was in the intention, as Heloise and Abelard believed, then Heloise’s anguish lay in the continual process of sinning through her “lewd visions” and “fantasies” of Abelard.[6] Again, the will was more important than the act: Heloise emphasized that “virtue belong[ed] not to the body but the soul,” and claimed that she could “win praise in the eyes of men but deserve[d] none before God, who searches our hearts and loins and sees in our darkness.”[7]

Although he upheld the distinction between will and action, Abelard believed that his castration allowed for greater exculpation for his sins. Superficially, with Abelard’s desire to sin forcibly mitigated, he seems to have been liberated from the “pure intention” that defined his lust. The castration was performed against his will, but the effect that it had on his soul was beneficial: “I do not incur blame, I escape it. I deserve death and gain life. I am summoned and reprieved; I persist in crime and am pardoned against my will…Truly, the Lord takes thought for me. I will go then and declare how much the Lord has done for my soul.”[8] Did castration remove the will to sin from Abelard, or did it remain? The fact that he “persisted in crime” suggests that the will to sin remained despite his physical state, but Abelard also argued that he “had been freed…by God’s mercy [from] the power to commit…[the] sin” of lust.[9] In this way, Abelard, like Heloise, retained a position of simultaneous guilt and innocence.

Unlike Heloise, Abelard’s penance occurred in one excruciating instance as opposed to the enduring penance of Heloise. Since she believed her sin to be interior, Heloise’s acts of contrition were interior as well, involving personal guilt and shame over her past offenses. She directly compared the brevity of Abelard’s punishment, which he “suffered in the body for a time,” with the protraction of her own, which she endured “throughout [her] life in contrition of the mind.”[10] Heloise implied that Abelard’s inability to sin did not necessarily immunize him from the will to do so: “How can it be called repentance for sin, however great the mortification of the flesh,” she asked, “if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with old desires?”[11] Heloise recognized that, for both of them, the intention to sin remained despite their inability to commit the act. To explain this discrepancy, Abelard recast their relationship as “lust, not love,” which “brought [them] both to sin.”[12] This acknowledgment of lust accorded with Abelard’s notions of sinfulness as “pure intention” because both continued to sin—and pay for these sins—well after the acts were long past.

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[1] Betty Radice, ed. and trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), xxii.

[2] Quoted in Ibid., 263-64 n.10

[3] Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard, in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. and trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 53.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, xxx, and Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard, 69-70. Heloise referred to herself as a “hypocrite” multiple times throughout Letter 4 not only because of her desire for Abelard, but also because she felt that she committed to the convent for the wrong reasons.

[5] Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard, 68.

[7] Ibid., 69. See Psalm 7:10-17.

[8] Letter 5, Abelard to Heloise, 83.

[9] Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 36.

[10] Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard, 67.

[11] Ibid., 68.

[12] Letter 5, Abelard to Heloise, 86.

"Visible Faith": From Skepticism to Belief in Einhard's Translatio et miracula

In the Carolingian Empire, popular religious devotion often took the form of relic veneration. By the early ninth century, clerics had inserted themselves into the process of identifying and sanctifying authentic relics. Consequently, a dialectical relationship emerged between peasants, for whom relics represented almost magical Christian artifacts, and clerics, who regarded the allure of relics as an opportunity to legitimize their spiritual power.[1] In support of this clerical authority, the Council of Carthage in 801 and again in 813 enacted laws requiring all altars in the Carolingian Empire to contain relics.[2] This decree not only augmented the status of relics but also inadvertently increased the likelihood that relics might be counterfeited. Disbelief among clergymen in the early ninth century centered, not on the efficacy of relics as a whole, but on whether individual relics were legitimate.[3] Skepticism and doubt were not typical virtues for early medieval Christians, but employed properly, these traits served to guard against the exploitation of devout peasants by corrupt clergymen.

In this spirit, Einhard, secretary and courtier of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and famous biographer of the former, sought to certify the validity of the “genuine relics” at his church in Seligenstadt by admitting his own earlier doubt and by demonstrating their power through the many miracles they had produced.[4] Early in his Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, Einhard cast himself in the role of disbeliever in order to empathize with the unconvinced audience of this work. His own skepticism at the beginning of the Translatio mirrored the cynicism he was attempting to suppress, and his slow conversion throughout the text established the process he wished others to emulate.

While discussing the dedication of his new church with the Roman deacon Deusdona, Einhard confessed that he “was both distressed and intrigued” by the prospect of procuring relics from Rome, but he remained incredulous, though hopeful, at the possibility that this “uncertain claim” would yield actual relics.[5] Nevertheless, he dispatched his servant Ratleig to Rome, who eventually returned with the remains of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter. After reaching Einhard, the first miracle generated by the relics was a vision announcing that the relics wished to be relocated. Ratleig relayed this request to Einhard, but Einhard judiciously “decided to await evidence of some more certain sign” before translating the relics a second time.[6] The sign came in the form of a “bloody liquid…dripping all over…[the] reliquary,” which Einhard regarded as “considerable evidence” that the relics were indeed genuine.[7] Another vision to a priest chided him as “hard-hearted” and “stubborn,” so Einhard consented to the translation of the relics.[8] At this point, Einhard’s reluctance to accept the veracity of the relics’ power reflected the typical arguments against them, but, in the face of increasing physical and spiritual evidence, Einhard found it difficult to deny their potency. “Doubt,” Einhard averred, “sprang from the weakness of [his] faith.”[9] These doubts steadily disappeared as Einhard recounted the numerous miracles he witnessed in the presence of these relics. While much of the Translatio related “the accounts of others,” he was

entirely convinced to trust these accounts because of the things [he] had seen and knew personally. Thus [he] was able to believe without the slightest doubt that these events, which were reported…by those who said that they themselves had witnessed them, were true, even though [he] might, up until then, have had little or no [personal] knowledge of the individuals from whom [he] had heard these things.[10]

Einhard later narrated miracles with ease. Indeed, the majority of Book Four consisted of the many miracles ascribed to the relics, and Einhard described them “as if [he] had seen them with [his] own eyes” and presented them “without any hesitation or doubt.”[11] His doubts assuaged by evidence, Einhard presumed his transformation from reticent critic to devout enthusiast would convince any skeptic of the authenticity of the relics of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter. Of their miracles, Einhard wrote “with great confidence” that he had witnessed them with “visible faith.”[12]

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[1]Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Middle Ages, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 37.

[2]Ibid., 42-43.

[3]Paul Edward Dutton, ed. and trans., Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998), xxiv, and Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra, 36. Dutton refers to Claudius of Turin as “unsympathetic toward…popular religion,” which certainly colored his opinion of relics. Geary calls Claudius a “radical” who seemed to be fully aware that he was a minority on this position. Both note that Agobard of Lyon considered himself a skeptic, not of the power of actual relics, but of the multitude of false relics that proliferated in early ninth century Gaul. In this sense, he is not so far removed from the position of Einhard.

[4]Einhard, Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, in Charlemagne’s Courtier, ed. Paul Dutton (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998), xxv and 70. Dutton suggests that the fact that Einhard even used the phrase “genuine relics” [vera reliquiae] indicates that he was wary of imitations.

[5]Ibid, 70.

[6]Ibid., 80.

[7]Ibid., 79-80.

[8]Ibid., 81.

[9]Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 92.

[11] Ibid., 95.

[12]Ibid., 110.

Conflict and Complexity in the Historiography of Science and Religion: A Comparison of Andrew Dickson White and David C. Lindberg, Part 2

David C. Lindberg, the Complexity Thesis,
and the Deconstruction of the Conflict Thesis

Lindberg acknowledges two typical techniques used by White to explain early Christians’ lack of interest in empirical science: “First, the early Church denigrated the investigation of nature for its own sake: with the kingdom of heaven just around the corner, there was no time or energy to waste on irrelevancies.”[1] For virtually every major scientific paradigm shift, White discerned a traditional religious figure opposing it: “The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution in theology,” White intoned,

arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years… The general belief derived from the New Testament was that the end of the world was at hand… This belief appears frequently throughout the entire period of the Middle Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century, pouring contempt…over studies in astronomy to Peter Damian, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the eleventh century declaring all worldly sciences to be “absurdities” and “fooleries,” it becomes a very important element in the atmosphere of thought.[2]

Lindberg continues: “Second, whatever truth was discovered through patient observation and reasoning was forced to yield to the puerile opinions extracted by dogmatic superstitions from sacred writings. The result was a tyranny of ignorance and superstition that ‘perverted’ and ‘crushed’ true science.”[3] White consistently uses this quarrelsome language throughout his Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom—“conflict,” “war,” “attack,” “besiege,” “battles,” “triumph,” “defeat,” “soldier,” and so on, appear dozens of times throughout the work.[4] In the introduction to his abridgment, Warfare of Science, White even employs a direct analogy to historical and contemporary military leaders of what were, to him, far less serious conflicts in the long arc of history: “A hard contest it has been; a war waged longer, with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategies more shrewd than in any of the comparatively transient warfare of Caesar or Napoleon or Moltke.”[5] He continued to employ this rhetoric throughout his work. For example, White reestablished the familiar trope of a flat earth—which had not been seriously used to describe the shape of the earth since before the time of Plato—in his scathing denunciation of medieval geography:

Although the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, sought to crush [the idea of a spherical earth] beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better opinions of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten. Clement of Alexandria and Origen had even supported it. Ambrose and Augustine tolerated it, and, after Cosmas had held sway a hundred years, it received new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this.[6]

Although White acknowledged that some early Christians understood the physical geography bequeathed to them by the ancient Greeks, he mistrusted the Christian patristic writers who, in his mind, merely “tolerated” it in spite of their scriptural predilections. In his warfare metaphor, White drew the battle lines and pitted his soldiers against one another:

Columbus is the next warrior. The world has heard of his battles: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how at the Junta of Salamanca the theologians overwhelmed him with quotations from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine. And even after Columbus was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity, the Church, by its highest authority, was again solemnly committed to the theory of the earth’s flatness…But in 1519 Science gains a crushing victory. Magellan makes his famous voyages. He proves the earth to be round, for his great expedition circumnavigates it…but this does not end the war.[7]

As we have seen, the “perversion” and “crushing” of science demonstrated for White, not the pitfalls of religious belief, but the drawbacks of authoritarianism in religious institutions. Lindberg, whose specialty is the history of the physical sciences in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, presents numerous rejoinders in his voluminous writings in direct opposition to White’s dualistic arguments. For example, White decries Augustine’s positions on rationalism and empiricism and styles him as among the worst offenders in Western history:

Following [the] precept[s] of St. Augustine, there were developed, in every field, theological views of science, which have never led to a single truth—which, without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow. In meteorology, as in every other science which he dealt, Augustine based everything on the letter of the sacred text…[8]

The influence of Augustine on not only Christian theology but also the Western intellectual and philosophical traditions need not be overstated. However, Lindberg describes Augustine’s concept of science, which consisted not as a barrier to spiritual truth but as a handmaiden to better comprehend the mysteries of God and His creations, thusly:

Augustine, who did so much to determine medieval attitudes, admonished his readers to set their hearts on the celestial and eternal, rather than the earthly and the temporal. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the temporal could serve the eternal by supplying knowledge about nature that would contribute to the proper interpretation of Scripture and the development of Christian doctrine. And in his own works, Augustine displayed a sophisticated knowledge of Greek natural philosophy. Natural philosophy, like philosophy more generally, was to serve handmaiden functions.[9]

Roger Bacon serves as another interesting character in the narrative White presents in his epic war between science and religion. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan friar and natural philosopher, was imprisoned for a period of ten years. Lindberg maintains a rather skeptical position of his incarceration:

Despite a widespread popular belief that Roger Bacon was imprisoned for his attack on authority and his urgent assertion of a novel scientific methodology, for example, Bacon in fact represented very old methodological traditions, and his imprisonment, if it occurred at all (which I doubt), probably resulted from his sympathies with the radical “poverty” wing of the Franciscan Order (a wholly theological matter), rather than from any scientific novelties that he may have proposed.[10]

A devoted supporter of empirical observational techniques, Bacon made great strides in optics and the refraction of light, kept detailed astronomical observation, and anticipated the uses of gunpowder, among many other things.[11] Bacon is often described as an eccentric—even by the even-tempered Lindberg—and portrayals of his odd personality, intertwined with his advocacy of notions seemingly out of step with medieval sensibilities, contribute to the misunderstanding that he was imprisoned for experimentation. White added to this archetypal character the prescience of a prophet:

It should be borne in mind that his method of investigation was even greater than its results. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks…. On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they fought him steadily and bitterly. His sin was not disbelief in Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, not even dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy; on the contrary, he showed in all his writings a desire to strengthen Christianity, to build up the Church and to develop orthodoxy. He was attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be learned; he was condemned, as his opponents expressly declared, “on account of suspicious novelties.” [12]

Lindberg is highly skeptical of the allegation that Bacon’s difficulties with religious authorities originated from his dabbling with “scientific novelties” and it is telling that he preserves White’s language in his revision. Lindberg ventured to “rescue Bacon from the mythologizers and debunkers,” and he surely had White in mind when he proposed this reclamation of Bacon’s identity as “a brilliant, combative and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just then coming available while remaining true to traditional notions, patristic in origin, of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge,” rather than “a modern, out of step with his age, [or] a harbinger of things to come.”[13] White positioned Bacon as an ally of science in his binary war, but Bacon, a Franciscan friar, confounded these clear-cut divisions by advocating both empiricism and adherence to Church doctrine. Lindberg forcefully redefines him not as the “champion of autonomous, secularized natural science against a repressive church,” but as a more dynamic figure with internal contradictions: “The growing autonomy and secularization of science were among the things he feared. But he also feared the suppression of new learning. He was endeavoring, therefore, to steer a middle course between two equally dangerous extremes. In this he reflects, in microcosm, the dilemma of the thirteenth century.”[14] Indeed, he reflects the dilemma of simplifying any historical figure to the point of misrepresentation.

The trial of Galileo—the penultimate archetype in the story of religion leveling a crushing blow against an undeserving scientific mind—offers, of course, the most dramatic example of White’s Conflict Thesis in action. Galileo Galilei championed the heliocentric theory of Copernicus after his telescopic observations of the heavens in 1609 and 1610 yielded evidence of mountains and valleys on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, and moons orbiting Jupiter. In 1632, he was brought before the Roman Inquisition to defend his position that the earth revolved around the sun. After the Inquisition found his views suspect of heresy, Galileo was forced to retract his offending statements, and he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.[15] Most modern interpretations of the trial have cast a far more nuanced light on the subject than the black-and-white affair promoted by White. According to Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s difficulties emerged out of the convoluted nature of early seventeenth century patronage dynamics. Galileo’s guilt was regarded by religious authorities as a double indignation—not only did he contest the official position of the Church on Copernicanism, but he also insulted his former benefactor. In his early years as a mathematics professor in Padua, Galileo received significant support from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later to become Pope Urban VIII. It is possible that with an ally in the upper echelons of the Church, Galileo believed he might escape retribution for publishing hypotheses subtly challenging established Church positions. It did not help matters that Galileo, in his groundbreaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, put the geocentric, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, of which Pope Urban VIII availed himself, in the mouth of a character named Simplicio. Although modeled upon a sixth century commentator on Aristotle, the unfortunate connotations of the name did not endear Galileo to his former patron.

White suffused this story with his usual aggressive language, claiming that “the whole war [between science and religion] was at last concentrated” on Galileo, against whom it “was long and bitter.”[16] For White, Galileo’s trial also served as a proxy war for the Church to squelch the rising tide of Copernicus’ theory, and its conclusion brought a “victory for the Church” over his erroneous ideas.[17] It would require the undeniable proofs of later observational science to herald “the retreat of the Church” after this victory:

In spite of all that has been said by the…apologists, there no longer remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal infallibility was committed fully and irrevocably against the double revolution of the earth. As the documents of Galileo’s trial show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed on with all his might the condemnation of Galileo and of the works of Copernicus and of all others teaching the motion of the earth around its axis and around the sun. So, too, the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, and in all the proceedings which led up to it and which followed it, Urban VIII was the central figure. Without his sanction no action could be taken.[18]

However, Lindberg acknowledges the “complex realities” that better construe the proper nature of Galileo’s troubles with the authorities. He notes the obvious facts that are often obscured by didactic narratives of the affair:

Every one of the combatants, whether Church official or disciple of Galileo, called himself a Christian; and all, without exception, acknowledged the authority of the Bible. Many on both sides of the struggle, including Galileo, were theologically informed, capable of articulating carefully reasoned theological positions.[19]

Lindberg is careful not to minimize the importance of the conflict over heliocentrism in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, but he also definitively states that “it is impossible to identify clearly defined battle lines falling along a divide separating heliocentric scientists, prepared to overlook the Bible or interpret it allegorically, from geocentric theologians or clergy, committed to church tradition and Biblical literalism.”[20] Rather, the conflict was located “as much within the church (between opposing theories of biblical interpretation) and within science (between alternative cosmologies) as between science and religion.”[21]

Conclusions

Science and religion are, arguably, the most potent forces in modern life. As human institutions with a history of entanglement, modern historians face a difficult task in attempting to delineate their complex historical and contemporary relationships. Simplifying this relationship as one of unmitigated conflict obscures the rich tapestry of cooperation in which theological precepts often motivated empirical discovery, and natural philosophy often augmented the authority of Scripture. The simple act of defining “science” and “religion” as unified monoliths, ossified into rigid categories that are immune to historical change, ignores the transformations and modifications both have undergone in their long histories. David C. Lindberg reminds us that “strictly speaking, ideas cannot clash and theoretical claims cannot, of themselves, engage in combat.”[22] Obviously, Andrew Dickson White’s Conflict Thesis exerted immense influence over the historiography of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still wields considerable clout among the general populace today. And certainly, White reflects the spirit of his own age of progress, enlightenment, and scientific optimism. However, Lindberg’s reinterpretation of this relationship presents a more fruitful method of inquiry. If the proper territory of the historian is the study of people, then we must always emphasize the human dimensions of both conflict and complexity in science and religion.

[1] Lindberg, “Science and the Early Christian Church,” Isis 74 (1983): 510.
[2] White, Warfare of Science with Theology, 375-376.
[3] Lindberg, “Science and the Early Christian Church,” Isis 74 (1983): 510
[4] White, Warfare of Science with Theology, passim.
[5] Andrew Dickson White, Warfare of Science, 7.
[6] White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 97.
[7] White, Warfare of Science, 20-21. The myth of the medieval acceptance of a flat earth derives almost entirely from Washington Irving’s mostly fictional biography The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828. For a modern-day synthesis of historical scholarship on the endurance of this myth in popular culture and the American educational system, see Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishing, 1991).
[8] White, Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 325.
[9] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 150-151.
[10] David C. Lindberg, “Medieval Science and Its Religious Context,” Osiris 10 (1995): 76.
[11] David C. Lindberg, “Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition,” Isis 78 (1987): 520.
[12] White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1, 387.
[13] Lindberg, “Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition,” Isis 78 (1987): 520.
[14] Ibid., 534.
[15] David C. Lindberg, “Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos,” in When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34-35 and 53-57. Galileo is the subject of an extraordinary amount of scholarship. See especially Giorgio Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) for an adequate, if dated, general biography. For a more modern, politically contextualized study, see Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
[16] White, Warfare of Science with Theology vol. 1, 130.
[17] Ibid., 140.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Lindberg, “Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos,” 58.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 34.

Potential Paper Topics

I thought I'd go ahead and throw out some paper topics that have been rattling around in my mind for the past few weeks. One of the biggest differences between being an undergraduate and being a graduate student is in the amount of writing that is required of you. In sense, we have less writing, considering that we have fewer total papers to write than undergrads, but of course the papers that we are required to write are thirty, forty, fifty pages, not counting the thesis, which we are theoretically supposed to be working sporadically on for the next two years. The big project for my historiography class is a paper comparing the differences in method, theory, and approach to historical writing of two historians, examining especially how their own historical time periods shaped them and how their biases or their their time periods' biases shine through in their works. Our professor encourages any historical comparisons, but the idea of the project is to compare a historian that we've actually read in class with someone in whom we're personally interested. He also advocates choosing historians that belong to different historical eras and different nationalities as this highlights national as well as periodizational comparisons. In any case, most of the class seems to have settled on a topic and while I haven't exactly, I have a couple of ideas that I feel merit further exploration:

A Jungian Analysis of the Archetypal Hero in Eusebius' Life of Constantine and Einhard's Life of Charlemagne

To me, Eusebius and Einhard, though they don't demarcate any bookends in terms of historical writing, both write about figures who did bookend a historical period that truly demonstrates the emergence and culmination of the Christian Romano-German synthesis and the creation of a distinct European culture. Eusebius certainly belongs to the ancient world even if he was a Christian writing for a primarily Christian audience, and, like Augustine and Jerome, he certainly bridges the gap between ancient and medieval: he relies on the rhetorical style of writers like Cicero but is philosophically grounded in Christian thought (though, interestingly, he held a moderate position between Orthodox and Arian Christianities). Einhard is certainly a typical medieval chronicler but by virtue of his proximity to the Emperor Charlemagne, he had recourse to write about a man who was arguably the most powerful Christian ruler on the Continent since Constantine. Many scholars, Henri Pirenne, Alouis Reigl, and notably the inimitable Peter Brown, have remarked that the tripartite periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras is obviously simplistic and does not account for the transitional politico-religious realignments, but replacing these ossified categories is a difficult task even for the most of eminent of historians. Brown argues for the use of a "bridging" period between the 2nd century imperial crises and the Islamic conquests through the 8th century. Norman Davies, in his monumental general history Europe divides the ancient (Roma) and medieval (Medium) periods with his Origio on the cultural birth of Western civilization rising from the ashes of the Greco-Roman world, and it is telling that he dates this period from 330 (the founding of Constantinople) to 800 (the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor). In any case, politically, Constantine and Charlemagne provide convenient markers on either side of the "late antique divide" that one could point to as cohesive Christian polities unifying vast culturally and ethnically diverse landscapes, the latter consciously modeling on the former. In terms of the historians who wrote on these figures, I'm interested in looking at the archetypal models on which Eusebius and Einhard based their "characters" of Constantine and Charlemagne and whether or not, for example, they used Biblical precedent and/or the ancient Greco-Roman biographers of the kings, consuls, and Caesars (Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.) Since Jung himself compared the idea of "archetypes of the collective unconscious" to the Platonic world of forms, it seems fruitful to also examine the impact of Platonic thought on these compositions, especially because Eusebius was likely familiar with his work and Einhard was not (I'm actually not sure of this supposition; it's just an educated guess).

Pirenne and Brown: The Problem of Periodization in Late Antique and Early Medieval Historiography

Following the aforementioned difficulty in historiographical periodization, another related topic which very much interests me is that of the origins of the Middle Ages. This may strike any casual reader as a purely academic debate (and it is), but it is certainly important from a historiographical standpoint insofar as it is the in this period that what think of as Western civilization is really born--a messy combination of Roman law and institutions, Germanic and Latin-based languages, Germanic customs, and the Christian religion. The traditional date for the beginning of the Middle Ages is often marked as 476, the year of the deposition of the ironically named Romulus Augustulus and the end of the Roman Empire as completely independent from Germanic kings. In most general history books, the Middle Ages typically starts ca. 500 because it is a nice round number and because the year 500 in much of Europe is certainly quite different politically from the year 400 or any other "round number" from this era. Two historians have been at the forefront--one in early 20th century and one in mid to late 20th century--of a movement to change this traditional view. Brown, who I have mentioned, is among the popularizers of the "Late Antquity" model, positing a distinctly different time period between the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the Islamic conquests and reorganization of Europe into feudal kingdoms. Pirenne, who wrote earlier, was among the first historians to really challenge the 18th and 19th century enlightenment/positivist viewpoint of the Middle Ages as a dark time in Western history with little to no progress of any sort. The famous Pirenne thesis argues that the true beginning of the Middle Ages is not until the late 8th century after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia cut off Europe from the major trade routes of the Mediterranean, and Pirenne gives ample evidence of continued trade throught the 6th and 7th centuries when merchants and traders saw their life change little and in some instances may have actually seen improvement. Both these points of view are endlessly debated and considering that both these historians challenge long held tenants of Western historiography, I think a comparison of their approaches to defining the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval would be interesting.

The Church and Science: Late Twentieth Century Reassessments of the Draper-White Conflict Thesis of Medieval Science

This is the paper I'm currently leaning towards. This is a topic that has really driven my historical interest in the Middle Ages for the last couple of years, and I think it is among the most current and important modern issues in the historiography of science. I've written about the debate elsewhere and won't get into the details. Suffice to say, from a historiographical standpoint, this debate is very applicable to our current cultural climate where science and religion are pitted against one another as mortal enemies. The 19th century in general is such a bipolar age with regards to this topic in that the century saw both the rise of secular education and the belief, especially among European intellectuals, that empirical rationalism would soon supplant religious faith. It is also important to note that the late 19th century also witnessed the birth of Christian fundamentalism as we know it today. Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper both wrote of the great war raging between science and religion and of the modern triumph of enlightenment ideas over the superstition of the Middle Ages. It would take nearly a century for modern historians such as David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers to really argue against this viewpoint. It is certainly still very much popularly believed to be the case today. If I do end up writing on this topic, I'll be sure to post my research.

The Decline of Scholasticism and the Rise of Humanism: Late Medieval Thought and the Coming Renaissance

That Scholasticism was the primary mode of academic discourse in the medieval university system is an understatement. From the early 12th till at least mid 14th century, it was the only system within which reputable scholars and academics aired their ideas and theories. Just as the Church held a spiritual monopoly over Western Christendom, so too did Scholasticism, combined primarily with Thomist philosophy, hold sway over the scholarly mind, and this entrenchment, over time, led to a gradual erosion of original thinking until by the mid-14th century a serious crisis of stagnation entered Western thought. As we have seen, the "Latin Averroists" along with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas managed to propel Aristotle to the forefront of the philosophical dialogue, and even though his ascension hit numerous snags along the way (being banned in 1210 and severely restricted in 1231), his preeminence, especially among the Dominican order and its followers, became obvious by mid-century. The inertness of learning did not come about purely because of the rigidity of the Scholastic method so much as by the tyranny exerted over the minds of the period by an authority which was never to be contradicted. Numerous scholars spent decades systematizing and synthesizing Aristotle's works until at last a body of ideas existed that held up both the revealed truths of the Church and the observed truths of nature. But nobody is perfect, and chinks began to appear in The Philosopher's armor as scholars began to find out that the ancient scholar was not always correct and some ideas could still be interpreted, even in spite of the synthesis, as heretical. It became evident that new paths of knowledge had to be explored if any advancement could be made. What was to result over the course of about a century and a half were two dynamically different modes of thought: one which sought to divorce faith and reason and one that brought a more secular and more humanistic approach to Western philosophy.

The status of "mandatory" conferred upon Aristotle in 1255 was to be a short-lived one despite the fact that his works were now readily accessible and nearly sacred in Western Christendom. While Aquinas had been rather reserved in his application of Aristotelian logic to Christian theology, some near contemporary scholars dared to go further, stating that Aristotle's philosophy proved such diverse ideas as the unity of all thought, coalescing in a godhead (such as Siger de Brabant, 1235-1282) and the idea that the individual soul was not immortal but that all souls merged into one upon death (Boetius of Dacia, 1230-1285). The next major test of the Aristotelian corpus came just 22 years later in 1277 when more charges of heresy came up relating to Aristotle's work. However, this time it was not the Philosopher himself, but merely his works that were to be held up for scrutiny. Rather than putting a blanket ban on him, Pope John XXI commissioned the Bishop Etienne Tempiers of Orleans to review Aristotle's writings and bring to his attention any precepts that specifically contradicted the Holy Scriptures. Fortunately for Tempiers, Thomas Aquinas had completed his great compilation of Aristotle fewer than four years prior. In less than six weeks, the bishop brought forth no fewer than 219 propositions which he claimed should be banned. These were taken into consideration by the Pope, and he upheld Tempiers' findings. This prohibition, unlike the one of 1210, would not be as far reaching and ended up applying only to the University of Paris. Many other universities used this to their advantage and several attracted students who would otherwise have gone to Paris, boasting that their university still allowed his teachings. Still, the effect was that some of Aristotle's thoughts would be forever tainted with a brand of heresy and scholars would have to tread into Aristotelian waters at their own risk. And in spite of the ban, the University of Paris continued to be the foremost theological school in Europe. Far from being an inhibition on the minds of medieval scholars, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the hold this philosopher exerted over them began to give way to a more open-ended way to reach new realms of knowledge.

One such way that this new academic freedom led the learned was in the direction of skepticism. This was not so much skepticism in the modern sense as it was in the a skepticism specifically of the entire enterprise of Aristotelian synthesis. Several major thinkers of the late 13th and early 14th century attempted to scrap Aristotle altogether, hearkening back to more Augustinian and Platonic notions of the self, the soul, and the metaphysical nature of the universe. John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), for example, claimed that since the human being was a perfect being made imperfect through sin, we could never truly trust our senses empirically, thus, the only sure path of knowledge was faith in revealed scripture. This did not , as some have suggested, mean that Duns Scotus advocated a complete denial of reason, but that the sphere of reason had no place being used in the arguments raging in the theological arena. This mode of thought was particular to the Francisan order, which found its philosophical inspiration from the likes of Augustine and the Middle Platonists rather than Aristotle and the Averroist, but by the early 14th century, the gap between faith and reason was certainly widening.

It was William of Occam, however, who put together a coherent argument against the use of the Scholastic method, and his critique attempted to completely overturn the technique of linking theological premises through reasoned analysis. Scholasticism had been about plurality--combining multifaceted and disparate ideas into one congruous form. Occam turned this philosophy on its head, stating that "plurality need not be posited without necessity." He viewed all of this reconciliation as unnecessary and posited that Scholastics relied on too many assumptions to link between Aristotle to Scripture. The best theory was the one that required the fewest amount of leaps in logic to validate it. This very simple yet profoundly powerful thesis was an enunciation of what would come to be called "Occam's Razor" or "the law of parsimony." According to Occam, the simplest explanation was always the best one--and of course, for Occam, the simplest explanation for nearly every tenet within the Aristotelian corpus was that God was in control of all action. Occam promoted the idea of the absolute power of God at the expense of almost any other reason-based explanation. This was the greatest affront to Scholasticism in that Scholastics, at their core, believed that one could through reason become closer to God. Occam did not deny the importance of reason, but stated, as Duns Scotus and others had, that it had no place in theology. This is an essential divorce between faith and reason that is still with us to this day, though it would not reach its full peak until the Scientific Revolution. The great irony of Occam's most lasting contribution to philosophy is that, today, the premise of Occam's Razor is often used to disprove the existence of God.

But what of the other direction philosophy was heading during the close of the Middle Ages? For all their differences in opinion, Duns Scotus and Occam, the two most towering figures of the early 14th century, were essentially still working within the Scholastic framework. The modes of thought that would begin developing to the south in Italy, laying the seeds of the Renaissance which would unleash itself upon Europe beginning in the 15th century, were trending in an entirely different direction. Philosophy in general was losing a great deal of consistency in the Later Middle Ages, as it was interrupted by what Barbara Tuchman has called the "calamitous 14th century" which was racked by peasant revolts, religious upheavals, a sharp rise in mysticism, the long and bloody Hundred Year's War, and most of all the Black Plague. The unity of the previous few centuries was long gone and people seemed to seek comfort and consistency in a plethora of areas. What happened in Italy is a subject for another philosophy lecture, but in many ways its roots are firmly planted in the Middle Ages. In terms of philosophy, there is one figure that truly stands out as the early Renaissance champion of a new secular and humanistic outlook on life: Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374).

Petrarch very quickly became disenfranchised by contemporary university professors who insisted on reading the glosses and commentaries of ancient texts as if they were the equal of the original and he complained that the eloquence of the original Latin and Greek (though he knew no Greek) were too muddied and vulgarized by the later writers. By simply asserting that the original texts be held in the highest regard and by demanding access to the unadulterated ones (as much as was possible) Petrarch began the process of rediscovery for which the coming period was named. This was a literal rediscovery: Petrarch became a papal secretary and physically scoured libraries across Europe looking for old and long forgotten texts--and for this, he is thought to be personally responsible for the discovery of no fewer than 10 histories of Livy, several orations of Cicero, and at least one text of Archimedes. What resulted was a much more human-oriented philosophy that emphasized a study of the arts and humanities in their original form, a rejection of the authority of the universities (including Aristotle), and the individual freedom of scholars to discover at will. It is also at this time that the first recorded uses of the term "Middle Ages" appears to describe the preceding period (from medium aevum, Latin for "in-between-age," coined in the early 1400s by humanist scholar Flavio Biondo). This was a disparaging term, implying that the thousand years "in between" the fall of Rome and the rebirth of its cultural, literary, and philosophical greatness in 15th century was essentially a time of little importance and learning. But, of course, the Middle Ages, though crude, were hardly "dark" and the illuminating light of academia shined on even in difficult times. And the modern word, thought to be so influenced by the humanism and secularism of the Renaissance, was in a very tangible way, influenced as much as by the Medieval period as those which followed it.