Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

744 Pages·2014·8.137 MB·English

by  Albrecht Classen

Albrecht Classen (Ed.)
Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages
and Early Modern Age
Fundamentals of Medieval
and Early Modern Culture
Edited by
Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge
Volume 15
Mental Health, Spirituality,
and Religion in the Middle
Ages and Early Modern Age
Edited by
Albrecht Classen
ISBN 978-3-11-036087-5
e-ISBN 978-3-11-036164-3
ISSN 1864-3396
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Johanna Boy, Brennberg
Printing and binding: CPI buch bücher GmbH, Birkach
∞ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Albrecht Classen
Introduction   1
Maedhbh M. Nic Dhonnchadha
Constructing the Early Irish Cult of Brigit   155
Xenia Sosnowski
A Prince Under the Spell of the Devil? The Outburst of Charles the Fat
in 873 C.E.   175
Rosemarie Danziger
The Epic Hagiography as Scriptural Genre and its Pictorial Rendering in the
Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe Crypt Frescos   206
Feargal Ó Béarra
Buile Shuibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland   242
Susanna Niiranen
At the Crossroads of Religion, Magic, Science and Written Culture   290
Eliza Buhrer
“But what is to be said of a fool?”
Intellectual Disability in Medieval Thought and Culture   314
Lia B. Ross
Body and Spirit: Martial Practices Among Monastic Orders   344
Jean E. Jost
Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages: Affective Piety in the Pricke of Conscience
H.M. 128   387
Scott L. Taylor
Affectus secundam scientiam: Cognitio experimentalis and Jean Gerson’s
Psychology of the Whole Person   406
Thomas G. Benedek
A Comparison of the Psychological Insights of Petrarch and Johann Weyer   424
VI   Contents
David Tomíček
Mental Health in Bohemian Medical Writings of the 14th−16th Centuries   464
Liliana Leopardi
Magic Healing and Embodied Sensory Faculties in Camillo Leonardi’s
Speculum Lapidum   480
Andrew Weeks
The Invisible Diseases of Paracelsus and the Cosmic Reformation   507
Thomas Willard
Paracelsus on Mental Health   524
Marilyn Sandidge
Banishing “Franticks” in a Royal Wedding Celebration: Campion’s
The Lords’Masque   557
Bo Andersson
Order in Insanity: Eva Margaretha Frölich (d. 1692) and her National Swedish
Eschatology   579
Florian Westhagen and Tünde Beatrix Karnitscher
Melancholy as the Condition of Knowledge in Jakob Böhme’s Aurora   593
Martha Moffitt Peacock
The Inner Cause and the Better Choice: Anna Maria van Schurman, Self-
Fashioning, and the Attraction of the Labadist Religion   607
Allison P. Coudert
Melancholy, Madness, and Demonic Possession in the Early Modern
West   647
Hester E. Oberman
A Postmodern Perspective on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion   690
List of Illustrations   712
Contributors   715
Index   725
Albrecht Classen (The University of Arizona, Tucson)
Introduction
Mental and Physical Health, Spirituality and Religion in the
Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Medieval Answers for Our
Future? With Special Emphasis on Spiritual Healing Through
Narratives of Mourning: Johannes of Tepl and Christine de Pizan
I  Mental Health and Physical Health: A Universal Question—
The Role of Literature as a Narrative Medium
In this introductory paper my original intention was only to examine the meaning
and interconnectedness of mental and physical health, spirituality, and religion
in the case of two late medieval poems, one in German, the other in French. The
purpose was hence to explicate the fundamental role which literature can or
must play in people’s quest to transcend the material limitations of their exist-
ence, both in the past and in the present, with mental health, above all, as a
complex issue hovering between sanity and insanity, rationality and irrationality.
In the course of my investigations, however, I realized that I had to take a broader
approach and had to include many different literary examples and other narra-
tives from the pre-modern era in order to comprehend the profound importance
of human experiences both past and present in the interaction between body and
mind.
I have not dismissed the two important voices in the course of the subsequent
investigations, but I have embedded their messages in the broader medieval and
also psycho-medical context, as far as we can conceive of it today. Specifically,
our analysis will expose how much literature can provide access to, a concept of,
and avenues into the world of human emotions, conflicts, tensions, stress, and
worries, and how much the literary text, if not all narratives, offers a springboard
for the metaphysical dimension of human life. The examination of ‘fictional’ nar-
ratives easily proves to be a kind of intellectual and mental laboratory for the
study of people’s mind-sets, feelings, urges, needs, and desires, and we are then
provided with the opportunity to reflect on how those inner aspects were com-
municated or not. This then allows us to recognize the literary discourse from all
times and all cultures as a medium for the rediscovery of what constitutes human
life in its historical context.
The present study also intends to reveal how much current medical research
(often labeled alternative or integrative medicine, which is, however, not really
2   Albrecht Classen
the same) appears to be ready to engage in a dialogue with the Humanities, that
is, with the countless literary and spiritual voices from the past that have already
addressed many of the issues that currently appear to be of greatest importance
for human health, since physical phenomena never stand all by themselves and
must always be understood in the broader framework of body and mind. We
could also probe to what extent medieval medication or medical practices could
be of service for us today as a kind of alternative to modern approaches, but this
volume will focus mostly on spiritual and metaphysical aspects.
Mental illness, for instance, cannot simply be viewed from a medical or phar-
maceutical perspective; instead it also needs to be studied in light of a possibly
religious aitiology (etiology). Religious phenomena, by the same token, need
to be studied in light of what we know about the history of medicine, and they
should also be framed by a reflection on the contemporary literary discourse.
The visual arts and music have much to do with physical and mental health and
should not be ignored in the medical practice, even though the specific connec-
tions continue to be rather opaque and elusive.
After all, the experience of the numinosum is one we would call apophatic,
hence non-translatable into concrete terms of the worldly language. In poetry,
however, and in many other kinds of genres, rests the key for a profound under-
standing of the other dimension that truly determines existence beyond the
bodily limitations. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus
might be the best modern examples for this phenomenon,1 while Mechthild von
Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich, to mention just three of
the most famous medieval mystical female writers and poets, illustrated the same
issue from their own perspective, experimenting with the metaphysical strategy
of transcending the bodily constraints in the effort to reach out to the Godhead.
The case of the Dominican preacher and theologian, philosopher and mystic
(?) Meister Eckart (ca. 1250–1327), with his constant quest for a full understanding
of the relationship between self and God, as the apophatic entity sui generis, ulti-
mately incomprehensible by human rationality, also comes into play here because,
as he formulates in one of his sermons: “To ascend to the reason, to submit to it, is
to be united with God. To be united, to be one, is to be one with God.”2 In another
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Leslie Norris and Alan Keele. Studies in
German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture, 42 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1989); id., The
Duino Elegies, trans. Leslie Norris and Alan Keele. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and
Culture (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993).
2 Sermo XXIX, n. 304, LW IV, 270, 4–6: “Ascendere igitur ad intellectum, subdi ipsi, est uniri deo.
Uniri, unum esse, est unum cum deo esse.” Here quoted from Karl Albert, “Epilogue: Meister
Eckhart – Between Mysticism and Philosophy,” A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah
Introduction    3
of his German sermons Eckhart posited, reemphasizing a mystical dimension
to his theological philosophy, “There is a power in the soul which removes that
which is roughest and is united in God: this is the spark in the soul. (With it) my
soul is united to God more closely than a good in my body.”3
As these and other passages clearly indicate, this famous but at the end
highly contested German thinker, who has had a tremendous influence both
on his contemporaries and posterity until the twenty-first century, explored for
himself already essential vehicles to overcome the limitations of physical exist-
ence and to reach a mystical union with the creator God, thus establishing a new
form of mental health, as the result of a profound liberation from all traditional
bonds in human life.
Intriguingly, as Karl Albert alerts us, Friedrich Nietzsche confirmed both in
his Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen and in his Zarathustra that
the ultimate goal of all philosophizing consists of realizing the intuitio mystica.4
But not only that, we would have to trace the history of spirituality at least as
far back as to St. Augustine (354–430), who, in his Confessiones, struggled hard
to come to terms with the concepts of interiority and self in a spiritual and also
metaphysical sense. In his prayer, “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam
M. Hackett. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 36 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013),
699–709; here 706.
3 Pr. 208, DW I, 331, 9–11: “einkraft ist in der sêle, diu spaltet abe daz gröbeste und wirt vereinet
in got: daz ist das vünkelîn der sêle. Noch einer wirt mîn sêle mit got dan diu spîse in mînem
lîbe.” Quoted from Albert, “Epilogue” (see note 2), 706–07.
4 Albert, “Epilogue” (see note 2), 708–09; see also his Mystik und Philosophie. Richarz-Philos-
ophie (Sankt Augustin: Richarz, 1986); id., Einführung in die philosophische Mystik (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996). The whole issue, as it pertains to modern philos-
ophy and linguistics, is intensively debated; see, for instance, the contributions to In Search
of Meaning: Ludwig Wittgenstein on Ethics, Mysticism and Religion, ed. Ulrich Arnswald. Eu-
ropäische Kultur und Ideengeschichte, Studien, 1 (Karlsruhe: Universitäts-Verlag Karlsruhe,
2009); see also Henry Clark, The Ethical Mysticism of Albert Schweitzer: A Study of the Sources
and Significance of Schweitzer’s Philosophy of Civilization. With 2 essays by Albert Schweitzer
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysti-
cism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and
Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Reli-
gion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). The relationship between philosophy
and mysticism is also explored in many other areas, especially Islam and Judaism; see, for
instance, Diana Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experi-
ence in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari. SUNY Series in Jewish Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 2000); Richard M. Frank, Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism in Medieval
Islam. Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalām, 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005).
4   Albrecht Classen
nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus erat et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam” (Confes-
siones X, 38), this Church Father realized most intriguingly that the differences
between inside and outside, up and down, are only relative categories since the
depth of the soul and the height of the Godhead are, in a way, the same.5 As he
powerfully realized, and as countless other Catholic writers have commented
subsequent to him – here not disregarding the infinite number of other spiritual
thinkers among Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists –
You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things
which, If they were not in you, would not exist at all. You have called to me, and have cried
out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light, and have shone
upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight. You have sent forth fragrance, and I have
drawn in my breath, and I put after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you.
You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace.6
From here we could easily turn to the entire and huge corpus of medieval and
early modern texts, both secular and religious, where the writers, in a myriad
of fashions, have explored this very topic on their own, always probing how the
dimension of spirituality could be connected with the physical existence, since
the latter always seems to be just a screen, or mask, for what is to become in the
afterlife.7
5 Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text.
Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); here I have drawn from
Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, “Bilder in der Kirche, im Herzen oder gar
nirgends?,” Die Aktualität der Vormoderne: Epochenentwürfe zwischen Alterität und Kontinuität,
ed. Klaus Ridder and Steffen Patzold. Europa im Mittelalter, 23 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013),
19–43; here 34–35.
6 The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans., with an Intro. and Notes, by John K. Ryan (New York,
London, et al.: Image Books, Doubleday, 1960), Book X, ch. 27, 38, pp. 254–55. For the Latin
original, see Augustine, Confessions, vol. I: Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 134. For a good textual commentary of this important, often quoted pas-
sage, see James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, vol. III: Commentary on Books 8–13, Indexes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 196–98. As to the relevance of Augustine for modern readers,
see the contributions to Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, ed. John
D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005).
7 Joachim Bumke, Die Blutstropfen im Schnee: Über Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis im “Parzival”
Wolframs von Eschenbach. Hermaea. Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 94 (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 2001).