The Permeable Self

Five Medieval Relationships

Barbara Newman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781512826067, 9780812253344
• eBook ISBN: 9780812299939
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How, Barbara Newman asks, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in the Middle Ages, from lovers exchanging hearts with one another to mystics exchanging hearts with Jesus? What special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their ability to read minds? Why were mothers who died in childbirth buried in unconsecrated ground? Each of these phenomena, as diverse as they are, offers evidence for a distinctive medieval idea of the person in sharp contrast to that of the modern "subject" of "individual."Starting from the premise that the medieval self was more permeable than its modern counterpart, Newman explores the ways in which the self's porous boundaries admitted openness to penetration by divine and demonic spirits and even by other human beings. She takes up the idea of "coinherence, " a state familiarly expressed in the amorous and devotional formula "I in you and you in me, " to consider the theory and practice of exchanging the self with others in five relational contexts of increasing intimacy. Moving from the outside in, her chapters deal with charismatic teachers and their students, mind-reading saints and their penitents, lovers trading hearts, pregnant mothers who metaphorically and literally carry their children within, and women and men in the throes of demonic obsession. In a provocative conclusion, she sketches some of the far-reaching consequences of this type of personhood by drawing on comparative work in cultural history, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and ethics. The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God. The half-forgotten but vital idea of coinherence is of relevance far beyond medieval studies, however, as Newman shows how it reverberates in such puzzling phenomena as telepathy, the experience of heart transplant recipients who develop relationships with their deceased donors, the phenomenon of psychoanalytic transference, even the continuities between ideas of demonic possession and contemporary understandings of obsessive-compulsive disorder.In The Permeable Self Barbara Newman once again confirms her status as one of our most brilliant and thought-provoking interpreters of the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER 1

Teacher and Student

Shaping Boys

When our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they as it were speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach.

—Augustine, Instructing Beginners in Faith (ca. 403)

I beg you, while the face of my mind streams with tears, not to lay your care for me aside by withholding the alms of chastisement and reproof that I need.

—Hildegar of Poitiers to his teacher, Fulbert of Chartres (ca. 1025)

From our father we received our raw being, but from our teacher our being wise, which is greater and worthier. Good teachers, therefore, should be loved more than parents.

—William of Conches, Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (1144–48)

The charismatic teacher has been a compelling but problematic figure in recent culture. From that enduring sentimental favorite Goodbye, Mr. Chips, to the ubiquitous Harry Potter saga, a long series of novels, plays, and films have examined the social world of boarding school and the extraordinary influence a devoted teacher can have on adolescents, especially at a single-sex school.¹ “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” boasts Miss Jean Brodie in Muriel Spark’s novel, “and she is mine for life.”² In the cult film Dead Poets Society, an inspiring new teacher urges his boys to “make your lives extraordinary” by cultivating a love for poetry and self-expression, until a jealous headmaster determines to bring him down.³ The History Boys, set in another boys’ grammar school, pits the drama of upward mobility—the quest for coveted Oxbridge scholarships—against the complicated sexual dynamics of teachers and students.⁴ Albus Dumbledore, the powerful wizard and headmaster of Hogwarts, becomes an increasingly complex figure as his relationship with Harry Potter evolves through the course of seven novels, even after his death.⁵ One of the emotional wellsprings of J. K. Rowling’s series is its sensitive exploration of the mingled love, loyalty, anger, imitation, and bewilderment that such a teacher can evoke as a student matures.

Before the invention of universities—a development that occurred in Bologna in 1088, in Paris around 1150—the individual charismatic teacher was the heart and soul of education.⁶ Teaching litterae et mores, “letters and morals” (or manners), the master was not just an instructor but more important an exemplar, a model for imitation. His learning and his virtues, yes—but also his person, down to his very gait and posture, facial expressions and tone of voice, were set before disciples as a pattern of excellence. “The teacher is the lesson,” C. Stephen Jaeger writes. “The teacher’s appearance, way of walking, talking, and living, is the curriculum.”⁷ Just as a seal matrix leaves its stamp on soft wax, so the master imprints the disciple’s pliable mind. There could have been no higher praise of a student than to call him a living copy of his master. Medieval pedagogy thus represents an exceptionally powerful method of forming the self through the other, one that remained in force over the longue durée. From Augustine in the fourth century down to Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth, educational theorists stressed the vital role of imitation and the significance of the master-student relationship. In the heyday of this model, from the tenth through the twelfth centuries, we find grateful, even worshipful students praising their teachers in a rich array of sources—letters, biographies, panegyrics, and elegies.

In this chapter I look first at the theory, then at the practice of charismatic pedagogy, with its far-reaching effects on medieval self-fashioning. Deeply entrenched as it was, the practice inevitably lay open to abuses and critiques, which I also explore. I concentrate, so far as the evidence permits, on individual teacher-student relationships as expressions of love, loyalty, transformation, and at times, betrayal. A final section inquires into the transmission of charisma from the sage to the page, with the construction of the text as immortal teacher.

The Erotics of Instruction—in Theory

St. Augustine was many things, but he was first of all a teacher. As a rhetorician (the late antique version of a law school professor), he taught first in Carthage, then in Rome, then in Milan, rising to the pinnacle of his profession in barely a decade. Conversion led him to take early retirement from that field. But soon after his baptism he opened a Christian Platonist academy, of sorts, with a few close friends and relatives at Cassiciacum. While there he wrote four Socratic dialogues, including De magistro (On the Teacher), that demonstrate his pedagogical style in theory and practice. After he was consecrated bishop of Hippo malgré soi, Augustine quickly established a “monastery” that was in fact more like a seminary, meant to prepare educated Christian teachers for the North African church.⁸ The episcopal office only intensified his teaching career. In addition to his hundreds of sermons, most of them still extant, Augustine held frequent public disputations with Manichaeans, Donatists, and others. “The heretics themselves,” his biographer Possidius claims, “used to come hurrying with the Catholics with intense eagerness to hear [his books] read aloud,” bringing their own shorthand writers to produce transcripts on the spot.⁹ A close friend and episcopal colleague, Possidius made it his business to preserve Augustine’s unfathomably prolific output for posterity. With the Vandals besieging Hippo as the master lay dying, the disciple managed to ship Augustine’s entire library to safety in Rome. At the same time, he encouraged all who read his Vita to make as many copies of the master’s books as they could.¹⁰ Thanks to that foresight, even as Roman North Africa with its church fell to the barbarians, Augustine’s lifework survived. For a thousand years to come, he remained indisputably the most significant teacher of medieval Europe.

Of Augustine’s many works on pedagogy, the most famous is De doctrina christiana (recently translated as Teaching Christianity).¹¹ The most important for our purpose, however, is a little-known treatise, De catechizandis rudibus (Instructing Beginners in Faith).¹² Those “beginners” were men and women of all social classes who had expressed a desire to become Christians, now that the emperor Theodosius had made it materially advantageous to profess that once-dangerous faith. The newcomers, young and old, ranged from rustics to highly cultivated men, from earnest seekers to blatant social climbers. They were to hear a single, introductory talk on Christian doctrine before becoming eligible for the more arduous discipline of the catechumenate. Delivering that talk was a rather mundane task, and around 403 a teacher named Deogratias, suffering from burnout, wrote to Augustine for help. Deogratias had grown bored with his own lecture, whose elementary themes no longer held his interest; the passivity of his students discouraged him; and constant requests to repeat the lecture distracted him from more urgent and absorbing work. In short, any reader of this book will know exactly how he felt.¹³ Augustine patiently replies with directives for formulating the lecture, as well as two model versions. But in between he adds a remarkable section, de hilaritate comparanda: “how to develop a cheerful attitude.” One by one he treats the causes of burnout, ranging from bored and easily offended students to the inadequacy of language before the sublime. And then this:

Now, if we find it distasteful to be constantly rehearsing familiar phrases that are suited to the ears of small children, we should draw close to these small children with a brother’s love, or a father’s or a mother’s, and as a result of our empathy with them, the oft-repeated phrases will sound new to us also. For this feeling of compassion is so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they as it were speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach … for the more the bond of love allows us to be present in others, the more what has grown old becomes new again in our own eyes as well.¹⁴

In this passage Augustine addresses a problem every teacher has faced. Nowadays we might say (if uneasily) that struggling teachers should try harder to “identify with” their students. Augustine offers a precise, theologically inflected version of that advice: through love and empathy or compassion (animi compatientis affectus), the teacher can establish coinherence with the student such that “each of us comes to dwell in the other” (habitemus in invicem). When that happens, roles are exchanged, so what is new to the student becomes new and exciting to the teacher as well. “Each is both teaching, and learning from, the other,” George Howie explains, “since they are linked by a common purpose and in love with the same objectives.”¹⁵ Augustine uses the analogy of a man showing a friend the sights of his native city; the visitor’s pleasure renews the delight the host finds in scenes he had come to take for granted. But if this is true even for human works like cities, how much more does it apply to the works of God? In this way, even elementary catechesis can become a source of spiritual renewal for the teacher—and an adventure in charity for teacher and student alike. Such is Augustine’s erotics of instruction.¹⁶

Not only here, but throughout his oeuvre, Augustine insists that teaching is a work of love. All discipline, for example, can be reduced to “coercion and instruction,” the difference being that “coercion is accomplished by fear, instruction by love.”¹⁷ In his dialogue On Free Will, Augustine maintains that since learning as such is a good work, so must teaching be, to the extent that “if a man is evil, he is not a teacher; if he is a teacher, he is not evil.”¹⁸ Second only to love is the principle of imitation, which looms so large in Augustine’s view that it virtually defines the profession: “Teachers offer themselves for imitation, and this is precisely what people call teaching.”¹⁹ That remark appears aptly enough in a dialogue On Music, for if a teacher cannot model expert performance on the violin or flute, the student will not learn it. We are less inclined today to extend the principle to academic subjects. But for Augustine, philosophy and theology were disciplines every bit as practical as flute playing, learned more by imitating a teacher’s life than by mastering concepts.

Imitation has close ties to persuasion and thus to his own discipline of rhetoric, which aims to stir the emotions. In a dialogue On the Principle of Order (De ordine), Reason explains to Augustine that dialectic, or logic, “is the discipline which teaches us how to teach and to learn.” Highly intelligent people, when blessed with leisure and a zeal for study, can master it and learn the other liberal arts for themselves. But “only the exceptional mind” is able to grasp truth directly, so the majority must be moved by the emotional seductions of rhetoric to embrace what is good.²⁰ Augustine offers this by way of concession, for he was well aware of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. Being versed in both, he admits that the art of rhetoric is impure but necessary, for without it only a select few could acquire wisdom. Later, in Teaching Christianity, he acknowledges that an eloquent preacher can benefit people even if his own life is wicked. Yet the hypocritical preacher also undermines his teaching, for “however grand his diction, a speaker’s life has greater weight in determining whether he can be obediently heard.”²¹ In other words, if the members of an audience know that a teacher doesn’t follow his own counsel, they will be less likely to do so themselves. Students make the greatest progress when they are animated by love to imitate a beloved and admired master. Augustine’s Cassiciacum dialogues vividly illustrate such a pedagogy, full of affectionate banter and appreciation for each student’s individual quirks and ideas.

Another, related stream of tradition derives from the Benedictine Rule and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis. These monastic sources are concerned not with academic learning but rather with the twin arts of ruling (praeesse) and helping or profiting (prodesse) religious subordinates.²² St. Benedict presents the ideal abbot as a teacher whose “teaching should be a leaven of divine justice kneaded into the minds of his disciples.” He must direct and govern them with twofold teaching (duplici doctrina), that is, by deeds even more than by words. Reproving or encouraging as need requires, now threatening, now coaxing, he should show “now the stern countenance of a master, now the loving affection of a father.”²³ So important is this role that when it comes time to elect an abbot, the choice should be made by “merit of life and wisdom of doctrine,” not seniority or social rank (a stipulation widely ignored in medieval monasteries). The abbot ought to be prudent and considerate, hating vices but loving the brethren, always studying “rather to be loved than to be feared.”²⁴ As for the disciple, his place is to be silent and listen, “for speaking and teaching belong to the master.”²⁵

Gregory the Great, the first monk to be elected pope, prescribes a similar role for the pastoral leader (rector) in his Regula pastoralis.²⁶ Gregory takes an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. Members of One Another
• Chapter 1. Teacher and Student: Shaping Boys
• Chapter 2. Saint and Sinner: Reading Minds
• Chapter 3. Lovers: Exchanging Hearts
• Chapter 4. Mother and Child: Giving Birth
• Chapter 5. God and the Devil: Possessing Souls
• Conclusion, or Why It Still Matters
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments