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.

Picking Up My Cosmic Garments at the LOST and Found: Back in the Bardo, or "The Twenty-Eight Or So People You Meet in Heaven"

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." -Benjamin Franklin

LOST, in part, was an exploration of the tensions between seemingly contradictory notions: reason and faith dominated the first two seasons, fate and free will the next few, good and evil in the last. These dualistic schemata, of course, have contributed to conflict in countless myths, legends, and works of literature in the Western canon, and Sunday night, LOST added to this in its weird, love-festy, after-party, fetishistic sort of way (I half-expected the last shot to fade to white with the word "FOUND" scrolling toward me). The sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes ambiguous symbolism of the show is one thing that kept me thinking about it and coming back to it week after week. The forced and unwarranted simplicity of the good versus evil storyline that characterized the final season, while it had come to the fore only recently, had been backgrounded since the pilot, when Locke sat down with Walt, holding one white and one black backgammon piece, and explained that "there are two players...one is light, one is dark." (What we thought was superficial racial harmony was in fact foreshadowing the great ideological struggle of the later seasons?) I had held out hope, as late as the next-to-last episode that the Jacob/Man in Black conflict was a ruse, a ploy designed to lull us into a false sense of complacency, after which it would be revealed that neither were truly good or evil, that they were each manipulating the survivors in their own way, a la Sirrus and Achenar at the end of Myst (Cuse and Lindelof have remarked how heavily this game influenced their story-telling). Not only was I wrong, but to add insult to injury, they essentially placed the mantra of reason in the mouth of the evilest character on the show: "There are very smart men among us," the Man in Black says, "who are very curious about how things work." What is the lesson here? That trying to reason through things is inferior to having faith? The Jack/Locke dynamic in the first two seasons was so excellent precisely because they interpreted the island oppositely, yet both were very easy to to identify with. Unfortunately, for me, this dynamic was completely ruined in the finale. On this level, the show succeeded for so long because the writers openly and honestly depicted the real-life tensions of nearly irreconcilable conceptions without consciously favoring one or the other or suggesting that one was more powerful or viable than the other. This changed with the finale, as faith alone triumphed, and one of the principal messages of the show seems to have been - to use the now trite and overused phrases of the show - that, by "let[ting] go" of reason, we can "move on" to faith. This is at best simple moralizing and at worst intellectual dishonesty. While I found the finale to be emotionally satisfying, I found it to be extremely unsatisfying on a cerebral level. Indeed, what we got was, in the words of one unforgiving critic, "a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows, where all the primary Oceanic 815 survivors are redeemed, where a loving 'Dad' opens a Spielbergian door of light to the greater beyond." As the old adage goes, "truth is stranger than fiction." Unfortunately, LOST gave us a comforting fiction. I'll take genuine truth, discovered through reason, any day.

"I cannot allow your ignorance, however great, to take precedence over my knowledge, however small." -William James

I fully expected, nay, predicted (the one I made that actually came true), that the series would not really answer the major questions that have so obsessed hardcore LOST fans for the last six years: What was the source of the island's power? What was the meaning behind the numbers? What was the smoke monster made of? What caused the castaways time traveling? And so on. These were questions that could only be answered intrinsically within the show's mythology, not extrinsically through some overwrought pseudo-scientific borrowing from quantum mechanics or string theory. Such an ending would be lost (no pun intended) on the average American television viewer. Despite my love of science fiction, I fully braced myself for the fact that this is not how questions would be answered. But, in one sense, the writers betrayed the entire mythology of the series by implying that these were the wrong questions to ask in the first place. In the end, the moral of the series is that the metaphysical is more important than the physical, the spiritual is more important than the material, and hoping for answers through faith is more important than achieving them through reason. This is unacceptable to me, not because I think faith is, of its own accord, unsatisfactory, but because it is an entirely subjective experience, that gives meaning only individually - thus, while it may "answer" personal questions about the nature of reality, it is not a suitable way of attaining the type of knowledge that, I feel, LOST claimed it was offering. It seems as though Jack's entire character arc consisted of relinquishing reason, being a "man of science," and becoming a "man of faith." It is certainly difficult to disagree with that interpretation if we remember of his conversation with Locke in the first season - in which Locke asks, "Why do you find it so hard to believe?" to which Jack replies, "Why do you find it so easy?!" - with Jack's conversation with the Man in Black in the last episode, in which he tells him that Locke was right about everything from the beginning and says he wishes he'd had a chance to tell him.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

Along with faith and reason, fate and free will, good and evil, we might add fantasy and science fiction to the list of strange dualities. These, too, are overlapping genres and creating false distinctions between them may be ill-conceived, but there are some significant differences that created difficulties in attempting to view LOST as true science fiction. For quite a while, LOST did a wonderful job at skillfully melding traditional science fiction tropes, epitomized by the Dharma Initiative, the effects of electromagnetism, and time travel, with typical elements of fantasy. However, LOST always maintained an air of intrinsic plausibility, a world which had a set of specific explanatory rules that did not defy logic in any metaphysical sort of way. In a crude way, one major distinction between science fiction and fantasy is that, in science fiction,"things" are "explained." That is, elements central to the story are not usually taken as given in a particular fictional universe: Transporters are "explained" in Star Trek; magic, in The Lord of the Rings, is not. This is not a hard and fast rule - midicholorians aside, the Force is never really explained in Star Wars, for example, yet it exists within a universe in which things, more or less, are presumed to have a technological explanation. (Star Wars is often called "space fantasy" for this very reason.) In the words of literary critic Gwyneth Jones, science in science fiction

[has] nothing in particular to say about the subject matter, which may be just about anything so long as the formal conventions of future dress are observed. It means only, finally, that whatever phenomenon or speculation is treated in the fiction, there is the claim that it is going to be studied at some point scientifically - that is objectively, rigorously; in a controlled environment. The business of the writer is to set up the equipment in the laboratory of the mind such that the 'what if' in question is at once isolated and provided with the exact nutrients it needs. (Jones, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction, and Reality, 1999: 4)

Adam Roberts clarifies this by writing that the "truth" of the science in science fiction is unimportant, so long as "the scientific method, the logical working through of a particular premise" is maintained (Roberts, Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, 2000: 10). For a time, LOST did exactly this. The Dharma initiative is nearly ludicrous in our reality, but within the fictional universe of LOST, it existed as a prime example of the inductive method at work, of cognition through objective reasoning. In the end, however, LOST seemed to eschew even the idea of cognitively plausible ending adhering to the self-contained rules of its universe, opting instead for a touchy-feely, huggy, "everybody-dies-and-goes-to-heaven" ending. To be sure, plenty of science fiction has attempted these quasi-religious resolutions. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its enigmatic and equivocal star child, or Tarkovsky's Solaris, with its highly figurative house on an island, stand as primary examples. But Kubrick used this in a symbolic way, to signify the mental evolution of mankind as we reached out into the cosmos. Not so, LOST. "Everything that's ever happened to you has been real," Christian tells Jack in the final scene. The finale was literal, one-dimensional, and attempted to depict an irrational world devoid of any of the deeper symbolism that might have redeemed this convoluted, lazily-constructed resolution.

Perhaps mirroring the increasing binarism of the show, the chatter on the Internet seemed to revolved around the false dichotomy of "plot versus characters." While one variety of fan extolled the virtues of the multi-layered, complex characters, the other lauded the impressive scope and depth of its mythologically-driven, part science fiction, part fantasy, story arc. To me, these have always been false choices. The characters worked and were interesting because of the context of the island-story, while it was worth going down the rabbit hole of that twisted plot to begin with because of their intricate relationships. The writers have noted on several occasions that they originally envisioned this whole epic as a character-driven drama, and while I agree that that was what made the story compelling, I feel like attempting to separate them from the plot is pointless. Each is what made the other work, and the almost disrespectful lack of denouement in the finale left me wondering why they'd even created such an elaborate and compelling narrative architecture in the first place.

"The external world and the inner world are...only two sides of the same fabric, in which the threads and all forces and all events, of all forms of consciousness and their objects, are woven into an inseparable net of endless, mutually connected relations." -Lama Anagarika Govinda

What about the actual finale itself? At risk of sounding absurdly obvious, the finale was filled with mytho-logical and religious symbolism, most, though not all of it, Christian. Jack represented a Christ-figure, complete with wounds (or at least dripping blood) on his hands and feet, stab in the side, who eventually is reunited with his (the?) father (named Christian Shepherd, no less) in a happy little church where all of the people who've ever meant anything to Jack are all there waiting for him so they can all be ushered into the light. (Does this make Jacob like Holy Spirit? I thought he was supposed to represent, you know, Jacob.) The power of the island, while never explained, seemed to represent some sort of forbidden knowledge, a forbidden fruit which, if eaten, er, turns you into a smoke monster. The last season even came with its own holy grail, drinking from which gave one the powers of Jacob. Despite this very Christian interpretation, the reunion in the church in the final scene existed somewhere in the borderland between schmaltzy multi-denominational inclusiveness (note the cross, crescent, Star of David, Dharma wheel, Om, and Taijitu on the stained-glass window) and subjective "it-doesn't-matter-what-you-believe-in-as-long-as-you-have-faith." Even more galling was that the writers had been promising the theorists since season one that the overall twist was not that survivors were in purgatory, and lo and behold, the flash-sideways universe turned out to be a sort of purgatory where the castaways were required to atone for their past misdeeds (by reliving them properly?) before remembering their actual lives and being ushered into the next world. (OK, technically the writers were telling the truth, since the theory floating around was that the island was purgatory, which in fact turned out to be little more than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin). The purgatory theory actually works much better, not in the Abrahamic context, but the Dharmic one, in which the castaways are all part of the same jati of souls connected for eternity - and through multiple lives - and are returning to the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism, a liminal or transitional state between life and the next stage: luminosity of the true nature of the universe followed by karmic oneness with that nature. (This also provides another interesting LOST allusion, since the most famous English translation of the Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was made by Ram Dass, nee Richard Alpert.) Of course, in the Buddhist tradition, since the castaways were all deeply flawed individuals, they would likely be reincarnated where they would all meet up again in seemingly coincidental ways made possible by some sort of cosmic synchronicity. But this is just one interpretation. The point is that the island reality, in the very words of Desmond Hume in the finale, "doesn't really matter." Unfortunately, it mattered to a lot of us...

"Is it not time that Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?"
-Carl Jung

I'm having a hard time describing my feelings about why I so disliked the way things wrapped up without sounding anti-religious. I'm honestly not anti-religion, I simply cannot abide when people cannot explain something and they attribute it to God. This is more insulting to religion, as it relegates the concept of God to a mere epiphenomenal explanation of the increasing smaller details of existence. I think religion, in its symbolic and psychologically functional way, is extraordinarily important, but when literalism and dogmatism become the foundation for belief, it undermines everything that makes faith important in the first place. What made the ending of LOST so infuriating is that the writers had heretofore done such a great a job of demonstrating the tensions between faith and reason, while not really favoring one over the other. They simply acknowledged that these interpretations coexisted in an uneasy way, that the human condition necessitates reasonable men having to come to grips with the irrational, and men of faith having to deal with doubt. With the finale, the writers reneged on this approach, and said "faith trumps all." As one blogger wrote, "Do you want to believe in the supernatural or in science? That's the point they've always been trying to make. It doesn't matter if you believe in science or faith, or both, just believe in something. We can never know for sure why things are the way they are, we can only put them in the context of our own experiences and understand it the best we can." Maybe... Perhaps I'm being too hard on this show. I'm trying really hard not to let one episode ruin, what to me, was the second best show of the decade (behind Arrested Development). I really did like the bulk of the series, even if it did get clunky and unfulfilling in the final season. After some reflection, the flash-sideways, purgatory universe reminded me a bit more of the nexus from Star Trek: Generations, a place of great joy where we got free do-overs for those thing we'd done wrong in life. But as Kirk said of this purgatory, contradicting both Desmond and Christian, "None of this matters. Because it isn't real." Indeed. LOST promised us the cosmic importance of the power of myth; what it delivered was hackneyed bromides on the power of faith.

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]

---

[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.