slouching towards vocabulary
I keep finding myself, in numerous failed attempts to gather and structure all my thoughts in this chapter, returning to invoke "popular misconceptions about the middle ages." The problem is that I am not sure of my perspective anymore. This may be a "straw man." But I am not really *sure.* I mean, I don't regularly have conversations with anyone who believes in these so-called popular misconceptions. But then again, I have conversations with, er, myself, and with my philosophy professor committee member. And with a couple of people who have read Augustine very very carefully. And it is actually a fact that many scholars invoking Augustine to talk about early medieval Christianity in England do not read Augustine very carefully at all, and here as well as in my chapter I do not want to be nasty and point fingers and accuse scholars of an earlier generation for doing what scholars of an early generation simply did. (I am not saying the "later generation" does things better necessarily - just differently. In this I'm thinking of Peter Brown calling for "micro-Christianities," for people to just stop making sweeping statements about "medieval thought" and "medieval Christianity" or even "Platonic philosophy" or "medieval belief about the soul" because no statements like that are ever going to be true across so much time and across so many texts and continents and even neighborhoods. In my prospectus, I picked on C.S. Lewis, because I feel like I have known him for a very long time, having first studied him as an apologist in 1991, plus also he's safely dead and not likely to show up at a panel I'm on to take the piss out of my sophomoric framework. But even Lewis admits that his description of "medieval thought about the soul" is very sweeping and attends to the dominant things, not the undercurrents and bits later deemed heretical or lost in history, notes that for every Hrothgar there were fifty Hectors etc.)
I simply have *too much stuff* but am having the worst time finding a shape for it. And until I find a shape for it, it continues to just be a bunch of stuff. That would be fine if I weren't in a bit of a hurry.
What I am complaining about is stuff I know I have heard and read here and there, but who knows exactly where and when, about body-denigration and overwhelming identification of fleshly with female and the soul being the inner man and true self, always and everywhere and without question immortal, immaterial, and intellectual. This is just not true all the time, that body=flesh and that soul=life force=immortal, immaterial, intellectual/rational. But that doesn't seem to be a good place to start. So when I think, "ok, then what do I have?" what I have is a bunch of weird stuff that does not conform to or cohere into any particular dominant doctrine or theology, and indeed I think that is the point. Or rather I should say that I do not think a coherent doctrine or dogma was the point in any case.
Yet again I do not want to posit an ontology that was decisively "the" ontology (in the first case, I do not think there was only one, not even in any given 100 year span of Anglo Saxon England. And in the second case, Leslie Lockett has already done that and poked around in all the nooks and crannies and cupboards of Alfred's and Alcuin's and Aelfric's bookshelves.)
But I also am not really arguing that we need to read this stuff "only" as literature - though I certainly think we do, in the sense that the narrative truth, the way things are told and what happens in the dramatic portrayals of the devil walking around, or a saint throwing a key of hell over his shoulder, or a soul revisiting a body in a grave, is as important as "what Brother so and so believed to be true about the nature of the soul." I mean that I do not want to avoid ontology, but I do not think we can attend to ontology without considering narrative. I feel this to all be very clumsy, that I do not have the vocabulary for this. In part I mean this in the sense that these stories and poems and homilies dramatize scenes and put forward ways of thinking about the self, and use metaphors for a reason, and creat Soul and Body as *characters* in a narrative structure: "first the soul does this. Then the body does this. Then teh worm does this, and then God says 'STFU'." or "the soul tries to leave the body and the devil bops it on the head. then the soul tries to leave through the nose and the devil, who has a big eye in the center of his scaly forehead, laughs maniacally." This is not to say it's the same thing as "here is your official weekly bit of formal teaching about the soul and body, and an actual picture of what the enemy of mankind looks like." But it is also NOT to say 1. it is just stuff cooked up to scare the peasants senseless and control them so who cares about theological niceties (another huge and hugely bothersome, and very real, misconception about medieval Christianity that I WILL write a book about one day, a book accessible to people who say shit like that after watching Monty Python movies), 2. it is just entertainment, or pure "folktale," and should not be considered important as regards how to live as a rational embodied Christian being in a certain community and in a certain time and place. But I find myself very unsatisfied - for instance, what do I mean when I say "we should not consider this unimportant"? What kind of argument is that? (A lame one, that's what kind.) I do not want to frame this as either/or - but I do need some kind of way to frame it, and some kind of vocabularly to talk about what I think these works are doing. It does not seem quite enough to say "here are some ideas and images that are not "Augustinian" that were floating around, and nobody notices them because the tendency is to twist the text to fit a preconceived notion of what medieval people believed, which comes down to something like this: Augustine wrote it, therefore all medievals must have believed it (and therefore structured dramatic narratives in accordance with it). If you want to be more responsible, you can say "here's the proof this was true for Anglo Saxon England - Aelfric quotes Augustine right here. Case closed." All of this is itself a myth - one that has seriously limited our understanding of medieval spirituality. Augustinian theology is critical, sure, and it is also a LOT more subtle and complex than it is usually given credit for being, but we must put patristics into conversation with the medieval vernacular. What do we GET when we do that, though? I feel like I don't have the words for this.
Am I just overthinking that part? Is that not just obvious to anybody? Yet so much scholarship surrounding Soul and Body refers to whether or not the poet or the poem is orthodox or heterodox. I think those terms are not useful. I do not think that is the point of these works, even if there were some monolithic teaching circulating in insular Christianity saying "here is what to tell the rabble next Sunday, Aelfwine," and there was NOT. And I think framing the discussion that way leads us to ignore or just plain miss what is really interesting nad uniquely Anglo-Saxon about them. This is part of why scholars like Bynum can just skip right over Anglo Saxon england when writing about medieval concepts of embodiment, and why Raskolnikov can say that sowlehele is a Middle English concept/term. That would be news to Alfred, who used sawla haelo to translate Boethius' salus animorum 500 years before the writers Raskalnikov focuses on. But who will make this stuff accessible to non-Anglo-Saxonists when Anglo-Saxonists are tripping over themselves to subsume all questions of the soul under the headings of psychoglogy and cognitive linguistics? These dratted, embedded secular, post-Cartesian models irritate me. Why can't we take the soul as seriously as we take, I don't know, monsters? AS England turns human souls into characters in narrative bits far more often than it ponders the humanity or fate of Grendels in heroic poetry.
But there's another important element, and that is that these sorts of conversations have always been had in story and dialogue form. Aquinas comments on Augustine who comments on Paul who comments on what is happening in whatever little backwater. Augustine comments on Plato who tells us a story about Socrates, in which Socrates talks about the soul in a narrative with several other characters and they try different images and metaphors and theories on for size. In all of this mess of orthodoxy or not, people are saying things like "so and so was opposed to the Platonizing Christian tendency to do x y and z." AS IF there were *A* single Platonizing Christian movement with a membership card! And as if every Platonic text says the same thing. Sure, Augustine rejected the notion that man is "soul using body," and the image of man as "soul using body" does crop up in Plato. But so do lots of other images. But you know, my job here is also to stay with the literature and not write a "history of the reception of Plato in early medieval England" either.
Far, far too much stuff. And a meeting wtih my advisor tomorrow, which needs to count for a lot and which probably will involve me blathering like an idiot and wasting valuable time.
ETA: It occurs to me that something in the realm of myth studies, folklore studies, or even narrative theory might help me find vocabulary here. Some days I do not know if what I am saying makes any sense at all. And some days it seems so obvious as to not be worth saying at all. But then - Witness, for instance, Mari Womack, The Anthropology of Health and Healing, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, used as a textbook in medical anthropology classes: “in medieval theology, the distinction between mind and body was . . . clearly defined as a war between God and the carnal form of the human body. . . . In theological terms, the word ‘carnal’ is linked to consumption and enjoyment of bodily pleasures, such as eating, drinking, and sexuality. These activities . . . are condemned as ‘sinful’” (56). Sorry folks, but that is a grave mischaracterization. This makes me think all of this stuff needs saying, more, again. Though one would think after Bynum's _Resurrection_ that the saying did not need repeating in a scholarly context anyway....
ETA2: Lockett: “I am less concerned with the literary conventions by which the soul is personified and the corpse is made to speak; the crucial thing to observe is that all participants in these scenes . . . attribute virtually all responsibility for an individual’s actions to the body, in ways that reinforce the idea that the mind is not at all part of the soul” (391 n. 52). SO - I guess literary conventions it is for me.
I simply have *too much stuff* but am having the worst time finding a shape for it. And until I find a shape for it, it continues to just be a bunch of stuff. That would be fine if I weren't in a bit of a hurry.
What I am complaining about is stuff I know I have heard and read here and there, but who knows exactly where and when, about body-denigration and overwhelming identification of fleshly with female and the soul being the inner man and true self, always and everywhere and without question immortal, immaterial, and intellectual. This is just not true all the time, that body=flesh and that soul=life force=immortal, immaterial, intellectual/rational. But that doesn't seem to be a good place to start. So when I think, "ok, then what do I have?" what I have is a bunch of weird stuff that does not conform to or cohere into any particular dominant doctrine or theology, and indeed I think that is the point. Or rather I should say that I do not think a coherent doctrine or dogma was the point in any case.
Yet again I do not want to posit an ontology that was decisively "the" ontology (in the first case, I do not think there was only one, not even in any given 100 year span of Anglo Saxon England. And in the second case, Leslie Lockett has already done that and poked around in all the nooks and crannies and cupboards of Alfred's and Alcuin's and Aelfric's bookshelves.)
But I also am not really arguing that we need to read this stuff "only" as literature - though I certainly think we do, in the sense that the narrative truth, the way things are told and what happens in the dramatic portrayals of the devil walking around, or a saint throwing a key of hell over his shoulder, or a soul revisiting a body in a grave, is as important as "what Brother so and so believed to be true about the nature of the soul." I mean that I do not want to avoid ontology, but I do not think we can attend to ontology without considering narrative. I feel this to all be very clumsy, that I do not have the vocabulary for this. In part I mean this in the sense that these stories and poems and homilies dramatize scenes and put forward ways of thinking about the self, and use metaphors for a reason, and creat Soul and Body as *characters* in a narrative structure: "first the soul does this. Then the body does this. Then teh worm does this, and then God says 'STFU'." or "the soul tries to leave the body and the devil bops it on the head. then the soul tries to leave through the nose and the devil, who has a big eye in the center of his scaly forehead, laughs maniacally." This is not to say it's the same thing as "here is your official weekly bit of formal teaching about the soul and body, and an actual picture of what the enemy of mankind looks like." But it is also NOT to say 1. it is just stuff cooked up to scare the peasants senseless and control them so who cares about theological niceties (another huge and hugely bothersome, and very real, misconception about medieval Christianity that I WILL write a book about one day, a book accessible to people who say shit like that after watching Monty Python movies), 2. it is just entertainment, or pure "folktale," and should not be considered important as regards how to live as a rational embodied Christian being in a certain community and in a certain time and place. But I find myself very unsatisfied - for instance, what do I mean when I say "we should not consider this unimportant"? What kind of argument is that? (A lame one, that's what kind.) I do not want to frame this as either/or - but I do need some kind of way to frame it, and some kind of vocabularly to talk about what I think these works are doing. It does not seem quite enough to say "here are some ideas and images that are not "Augustinian" that were floating around, and nobody notices them because the tendency is to twist the text to fit a preconceived notion of what medieval people believed, which comes down to something like this: Augustine wrote it, therefore all medievals must have believed it (and therefore structured dramatic narratives in accordance with it). If you want to be more responsible, you can say "here's the proof this was true for Anglo Saxon England - Aelfric quotes Augustine right here. Case closed." All of this is itself a myth - one that has seriously limited our understanding of medieval spirituality. Augustinian theology is critical, sure, and it is also a LOT more subtle and complex than it is usually given credit for being, but we must put patristics into conversation with the medieval vernacular. What do we GET when we do that, though? I feel like I don't have the words for this.
Am I just overthinking that part? Is that not just obvious to anybody? Yet so much scholarship surrounding Soul and Body refers to whether or not the poet or the poem is orthodox or heterodox. I think those terms are not useful. I do not think that is the point of these works, even if there were some monolithic teaching circulating in insular Christianity saying "here is what to tell the rabble next Sunday, Aelfwine," and there was NOT. And I think framing the discussion that way leads us to ignore or just plain miss what is really interesting nad uniquely Anglo-Saxon about them. This is part of why scholars like Bynum can just skip right over Anglo Saxon england when writing about medieval concepts of embodiment, and why Raskolnikov can say that sowlehele is a Middle English concept/term. That would be news to Alfred, who used sawla haelo to translate Boethius' salus animorum 500 years before the writers Raskalnikov focuses on. But who will make this stuff accessible to non-Anglo-Saxonists when Anglo-Saxonists are tripping over themselves to subsume all questions of the soul under the headings of psychoglogy and cognitive linguistics? These dratted, embedded secular, post-Cartesian models irritate me. Why can't we take the soul as seriously as we take, I don't know, monsters? AS England turns human souls into characters in narrative bits far more often than it ponders the humanity or fate of Grendels in heroic poetry.
But there's another important element, and that is that these sorts of conversations have always been had in story and dialogue form. Aquinas comments on Augustine who comments on Paul who comments on what is happening in whatever little backwater. Augustine comments on Plato who tells us a story about Socrates, in which Socrates talks about the soul in a narrative with several other characters and they try different images and metaphors and theories on for size. In all of this mess of orthodoxy or not, people are saying things like "so and so was opposed to the Platonizing Christian tendency to do x y and z." AS IF there were *A* single Platonizing Christian movement with a membership card! And as if every Platonic text says the same thing. Sure, Augustine rejected the notion that man is "soul using body," and the image of man as "soul using body" does crop up in Plato. But so do lots of other images. But you know, my job here is also to stay with the literature and not write a "history of the reception of Plato in early medieval England" either.
Far, far too much stuff. And a meeting wtih my advisor tomorrow, which needs to count for a lot and which probably will involve me blathering like an idiot and wasting valuable time.
ETA: It occurs to me that something in the realm of myth studies, folklore studies, or even narrative theory might help me find vocabulary here. Some days I do not know if what I am saying makes any sense at all. And some days it seems so obvious as to not be worth saying at all. But then - Witness, for instance, Mari Womack, The Anthropology of Health and Healing, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, used as a textbook in medical anthropology classes: “in medieval theology, the distinction between mind and body was . . . clearly defined as a war between God and the carnal form of the human body. . . . In theological terms, the word ‘carnal’ is linked to consumption and enjoyment of bodily pleasures, such as eating, drinking, and sexuality. These activities . . . are condemned as ‘sinful’” (56). Sorry folks, but that is a grave mischaracterization. This makes me think all of this stuff needs saying, more, again. Though one would think after Bynum's _Resurrection_ that the saying did not need repeating in a scholarly context anyway....
ETA2: Lockett: “I am less concerned with the literary conventions by which the soul is personified and the corpse is made to speak; the crucial thing to observe is that all participants in these scenes . . . attribute virtually all responsibility for an individual’s actions to the body, in ways that reinforce the idea that the mind is not at all part of the soul” (391 n. 52). SO - I guess literary conventions it is for me.