The Medieval Fold

Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual

S. Verderber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137000972
• eBook ISBN: 9781137000989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

Striking cultural developments took place in the twelfth century which led to what historians have termed 'the emergence of the individual.' The Medieval Fold demonstrates how cultural developments typically associated with this twelfth-century renaissance autobiography, lyric, courtly love, romance can be traced to the Church's cultivation of individualism. However, subjects did not submit to pastoral power passively, they constructed fantasies and behaviors, redeploying or 'folding' it to create new forms of life and culture. Incorporating the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, Suzanne Verderber presents a model of the subject in which the opposition between interior self and external world is dislodged.

CHAPTER 1

THE GREGORIAN REFORM, PASTORAL POWER, AND SUBJECTION

In Nietzsche’s parable of subjection, the subject is produced through the application of an outside force, “priestly” or pastoral power, which aims to provoke accountability and the internalization of bad conscience. External force produces the accountable, interiorized subject. In the present argument, it is assumed that even in the absence of any activity of folding or subjectivation, the subject is produced within a decentered nexus of power, knowledge, and language. Pastoral power represents one potential form of power that provokes the “internalization” of bad conscience and the attendant fiction of the subject. This Nietzschean parable of subjection is applicable to the phenomenon of individuation in the twelfth century, with the problem that it lacks all historical contextualization and all specificity as to the traits of pastoral power, including its use of confession as a technique.

Fortunately, Michel Foucault developed the concept of pastoral power in the 1970s. Its significance within Foucault’s analytics of power is made clear in the 1982 essay “The Subject and Power.” Pastoral power is crucial to support Foucault’s contention that modern governmentality, contrary to a commonly held assumption, is characterized not only by the application of power to the masses, to the population as a whole, at the expense of the individual, but also by individualizing forms of power that find their historical source in pastoral power, invented first by early religions, including the Egyptians, Hebrews, and finally the Christians, who perfected it:

[M]ost of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power that ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That’s quite true. But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power.¹

Foucault summarizes four principal traits of pastoral power:

1. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to insure individual salvation in the next world.

2. Pastoral power is not merely a form of power that commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock . . .

3. It is a form of power that looks after not just the whole community, but each individual in particular, during his entire life.

4. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.²

The primary concern of this chapter is not with the fate of pastoral power as deployed within modern states, but with elucidating the history of the transformation of pastoral power in order to demonstrate the fundamental mutation it underwent during the twelfth century within the context of the movement known as the Gregorian Reform. During this era, pastoral power broadened its reach and enhanced its ability to elicit bad conscience among more people. Since the earliest era of the church, there had always been multiple procedures for dealing with sinners, from the rigorist position that sinners should be permanently excluded from the flock with no access to any kind of repayment or penance, to the exile of the sinner from the community for a set period of time, to the imposition of arduous or shameful acts that symbolized repayment to the community (such as fasting or wearing a hair shirt and covering oneself with ashes). During the twelfth century, the Gregorian Church, as part of its consolidation of canon law, cut through this morass of practices and officially defined “true penance” as confession to a priest. At the same time, the church constituted itself as a sovereign institution with its center of power in Rome, and built a bureaucracy that enabled it to rationalize penitential procedures throughout Latin Christendom. While Foucault insists upon the importance of confession as a technique of pastoral power, most famously in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, and elsewhere traces a rough history of forms of penance, he does not designate the emergence of confession more precisely in time, nor link it to the emergent ecclesiastical formations, such as the Gregorian Reform, that would have new motives for inventing more efficacious forms of individualizing power. Foucault leaves sketchy or undefined the historical dynamics leading to the emergence of confession as the definitive form of pastoral power. This chapter aims to sketch the diagram in which this new confessional technique, which Foucault considers a kind of pastoral power, emerged.

Scholars investigating the apparent emergence of the individual in the twelfth century universally agree that the requirement of all laypeople to make annual private confession to a priest, instituted officially into canon law at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, was central to this phenomenon.³ This date has taken on a monumental status in the history of the subject since Foucault declared that it marked the moment when institutionalized power discovered how to latch onto and produce individual consciousness, when the production of a radically reflexive discourse demanded by an authority, the clergyman, became the substance of the subject, the “truth” of the self.⁴ Although Foucault’s lectures from the 1970s are extremely thorough, they do not explain the specific political conditions that prevailed during the twelfth century that made it possible or desirable for private confession to become the only sanctioned form of penitential discipline in the Western Church. While most general studies of confession, often anxious to move from the Middle Ages to modern manifestations of confessional subjectivity, adopt 1215 as a convenient point of pseudo-origin for private confession (most responsibly acknowledging that the history of penitential discipline is much more discontinuous that this convenient chronological marker allows), this chapter will focus on an earlier period, one that has been less explored in studies anxious to get to 1215 and the greater quantity of documentary evidence that begins to be available from that period.

The moment that I will insist is crucial in the history of penitential discipline in the West is that when private confession was recognized by the church as an official, privileged component of the ritual of penance, not merely an act that happened by necessity as part of a larger process. The institutionalization of private confession as an official part of the penitential ritual, along with the elaboration of the technical means to put it into practice, occurred through the efforts of the Gregorian reformers. Many scholars have noted that by the time annual private confession was declared mandatory in 1215, the requirement was already in many places, as might be expected, a de facto reality, that the ground for the official decree had already been laid in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And yet these same studies stop short of asking why the church found this specific form of penitential discipline desirable in the first place. Why private confession? Why the suppression or marginalization of other, physically arduous forms of repayment or “satisfaction”?

In Abnormal, lectures given at the Collège de France between 1974 and 1975, Foucault insists that private confession, which emerged as the sole sanctioned means of performing penance in the West, must be considered a technique for exerting power. Here, he is seeking the moment in the history of the church when power discovered its potential to force the subject to confess, to produce a true discourse about his or her sexuality. To do so he states, “[A] survey of the ritual of penance will serve as my guiding thread.”⁵ Relying upon Henry C. Lea’s 1896 A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, Foucault tracks public penance and “tariffed” penance (to be discussed in detail later), and pinpoints as crucial the moment, which he speculates took place between the ninth and eleventh century, when the act of confession itself was viewed as humiliating enough to be considered adequate penance, without the performance of further acts.⁶ When, in the history of penitential discipline, did the words of the confession gain performative, as opposed to merely communicative, power? He posits that when this performative power of confessional speech was established, confession to another layperson was considered acceptable; he thus argues that, around this time, the church loses and then regains the power over penance and thereby the ability to oversee confession: “Now, what takes place in the second half of the Middle Ages, from the twelfth century until the beginning of the Renaissance, is that the Church manages to restore ecclesiastical power over the mechanism of confession that had, to a certain extent, deprived it of its power in the operation of penance.”⁷ At this point, confession to a priest becomes mandatory, lay confession is abolished, confession becomes exhaustive (all sins must be confessed, not just mortal ones), and the priest gains the juridical power to individually determine sin and punishment based on circumstances, not upon a fixed catalogue, as was the case in “tariffed” penance.⁸

In sum, for Foucault at this stage of his research, “sometime” in the twelfth century, the most organized institution of the day, the church, discovered the desirability and the means of requiring the production of a radically reflexive discourse by each and every one of its subjects. Foucault does not delve into the medieval politics that led to this development, understandable given that he is following a path of inquiry with a much broader temporal arc, one that hinges upon the distinction between the approach to sexuality in confession as practiced during the Middle Ages and that practiced during the Counter-Reformation. He insists that in medieval confession, the emphasis, in the domain of sexuality, was on the transgression of rules of social relationships: “Essentially, these offenses were fornication: acts between people not joined by vows or marriage; adultery: acts between married people or between a married and unmarried person; debauchery (stupre): an act with a consenting virgin but whom it is not necessary to marry or provide with a dowry . . . ”⁹ While it is precisely upon this phase, with its emphasis upon monitoring the sexual transgression of rules of social relationships, that this chapter will be insisting, many readers of Foucault will perhaps be more familiar with his study of confession following the Council of Trent, which aimed to elicit from the subject a discourse recounting the minute temptations, pleasures, and sensations of the body, opening pastoral power to the opportunity to develop a technology of the flesh: “The old examination was essentially the inventory of permitted and forbidden relationships. The new examination is a meticulous passage through the body, a sort of anatomy of the pleasures of the flesh (la volupté).”¹⁰ The “scholastic” phase, that was in question in the high Middle Ages, is characterized by the internalization of the Law, by the mandate to habitually examine the disjunction between thought and deed, and by the tendency, in the extreme, articulated by Peter Abelard, to see thought itself as a crime.¹¹ It would seem that this would be crucial in understanding the apparent emergence of the individual in the twelfth century, if not also in performing a genealogy of the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, as defined by Freud: “A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of the super-ego . . . the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts.”¹²

While Foucault has been accused, wrongfully I think, of oversimplifying the medieval period, what he establishes here is a binary opposition that is fundamental to the present analysis of twelfth-century subjectivity, that between repressive power—power that functions through the monitoring of transgression of the Law (in this case, laws regulating social relationships), which Foucault tends to identify with the phrase “sovereign power”—and productive power, power that operates through the disciplining of the mind and body. Is pastoral power as it operates in the Middle Ages only a form of sovereign power, operating through the application of Law and devoid of individualizing, productive effects? Foucault’s chronology would seem to suggest as much, and one aim of this analysis is to establish that productive power does indeed function during the twelfth century, as well as to gain clearer sense of the relationship between repressive, sovereign power (power that operates through Law) and productive power during the twelfth century. Medievalist Karma Lochrie has taken Foucault to task for simplifying or naturalizing medieval sexuality, positioning it as the “other” in opposition to a more complex, discursively produced modern sexuality: “As the seismograph of Christian subjectivity, medieval sexuality becomes the unexamined, even natural ‘given’ of Foucaultian theory about self-technologies. The [two quotations cited] create an originary, natural, and unitary moment for sexuality and its discourses. This moment forms the foundation for those modern proliferations of discourse that Foucault characterizes as modern habits of confession.”¹³ Doubtless Foucault attributes to the nineteenth century a much more complex diagram of power-knowledge in which categories of sexuality were produced, and he appears to neglect the complexity of medieval sexualities. However, his insistence upon the centrality of the Law, transgression, and sexual taboos to medieval confession indicates that he does not view medieval sexuality as free of social constraints. Indeed, throughout this inquiry, I am insisting that the internalization of the Law is an extremely complex procedure of subjection, with a whole range of multifarious effects. I believe it is also crucial to keep in mind the distinction Foucault makes between medieval confession and confession after the Counter-Reformation: the former is limited, at least in the period in question, although also innovative in its institutionalization, focus on intention and sincere contrition, and consideration of the individual singularity in the determination of punishment; it is the latter that Foucault primarily associates with the articulation in speech of the minute pleasures of the flesh.

The transformation of penance during the Gregorian Reform was driven by politics, the desire of the centralizing church to obtain primacy over the laity in the control of Latin Christendom, envisioned by the church as a potential Christian commonwealth. A gap in histories of penance obfuscates its primarily political purpose: barely any emphasize the Crusades, despite the fact that without the penitential motive, the church could never have set this centuries-long mass movement in motion. The primary motive of thousands of Christians, from all levels of the social order, to make the dangerous trek east to fight an unknown enemy was penitential, the promise of the total remission of sins, a papal policy that received greater definition as the decades and centuries wore on. The history of penance and the Crusades need to be considered in relation to the broader motive of the Gregorian Reform, which was the establishment of the primacy of centralized church power over disparate, fragmented nodes of feudal power. Historian Christopher Tyerman asserts that

the background to the First Crusade lay in this conflict [the Investiture Contest], as Urban II sought to use the mobilization of the expedition as a cover to reclaim the pope’s position in Italy and demonstrate his practical leadership of Christendom, independent of secular monarchs . . . The crusade is impossible to understand outside of this context of more general church and papal reform.¹⁴

Perhaps the fact that these three events are not usually considered in relation to one another is a reflection of the way the pie of medieval research is divided up, fine but palpable lines div...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  The Gregorian Reform, Pastoral Power, and Subjection
• 2  The Courtly Fold:  The Subjectivation of Pastoral Power and the Invention of Modern Eroticism
• 3  Chrétien de Troyes’s Diagram of Power: Perceval
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index