Discerning Spirits

Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages

Nancy Mandeville Caciola

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801440847
• eBook ISBN: 9781501702174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500.Since the outward manifestations of benign and malign possession were indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviors were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the "fragile sex" was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons.Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

PART I

“A PROTRACTED DISPUTATION”

CHAPTER ONE

POSSESSED BEHAVIORS

A man’s thoughts can be known to another man through certain bodily signs. . . . But if they do not observe the thoughts directly, but only through bodily signs, then they cannot know them at all, for the same bodily sign can indicate many things.

—THOMAS AQUINAS

In the late thirteenth century, Ida of Louvain scandalized her community. The daughter of a prosperous wine merchant, Ida already had refused marriage and become a recluse in a small cell within her parents’ home. One day, however, it seemed that she went mad. Casting aside even the simple clothes she now wore, Ida wrapped herself in a dirty rag and draped a mat over her shoulders for warmth. Aggressively seeking out the most crowded plazas and marketplaces, she preened and “strutted about if mad or a fool, offering a monstrous spectacle of herself to the people.”1 Townspeople murmured that Ida was in a frenzy, out of her mind; eventually she was tied up to prevent her from harming herself or others.

What compelled Ida to act in this way? If we believe her hagiographer’s testimony, it was a divine revelation. According to Ida’s vita, her radical behavior was traceable to a vision she had just received, the first of many to come. In Ida’s vision, a pauper approached her recluse’s cell and stood before her. He then reached out his hands and peeled back the skin of her chest, revealing her heart. The pauper climbed inside Ida’s heart and took up residence there, enjoying her “hospitality.” This is why Ida suddenly conceived a frenzy for such an abject—and visible—kind of poverty: she was divinely possessed, inhabited by the poor Christ.

The tale unveils a profound tension in the history of religious mentalities in the later Middle Ages. Whereas Ida and her hagiographer considered her state to be one of internal possession by the divine spirit, outside observers considered her “insane and frenetic,” a malady that frequently was attributed to demonic possession.2 Indeed, her behaviors—dementia, frenzy, trances, convulsions, and episodes of strange bleeding—precisely mirrored those characteristically reported of demoniacs at this time. Nor was Ida alone in being the object of confusion for observers, for accusations of demonic possession were quite a common response to women claiming divine inspiration in the later Middle Ages. Medieval communities struggled mightily over how to understand women who, surrounded by a tumultuous aura of the supernatural, appeared to be possessed by a spirit. Was the Ancient Enemy inside? Or the spirit of the Divine? Although Ida’s vision of the pauper entering her heart might have suggested a beneficent interpretation of her behaviors to a medieval audience,3 ultimately this vision was a purely internal experience. Hence it remained unverifiable. As Pope Innocent III wrote in a letter of 1199, “it is not enough for someone flatly to assert that they have been sent by God, when that commission is internal and private, for any heretic can say as much.”4 From the external vantage point of the observer, Ida’s behavior appeared pointless and disordered. Parading through the plazas while proudly modeling rags was taken as an “in your face” gesture by Ida’s contemporaries, an indication that something was deeply wrong with her, rather than a sign of divine illumination.

When medieval people attempted to decide whether an individual was divinely or demonically possessed, they were responding to a congeries of ambiguous behaviors that could signify either state. That is to say, the cultural categories of the divinely and the demonically possessed were constructed in similar ways as regards exterior behaviors, even though in terms of interior status the two categories were dichotomous: one involved the penetration of the Holy Spirit, and the other, an evil spirit. It is easy to find expressions of this idea emanating from thinkers of a variety of backgrounds and degrees of sophistication. Thomas Aquinas wrote of trance states, for example,

Abstraction . . . can occur from three causes. First, from a bodily cause, as is clear from those who through some infirmity are out of their minds. Second, through the power of demons, as is seen in those who are possessed. Third, from the divine power. It is in this sense that we speak of ecstasy, when one is elevated to a supernatural level by the divine spirit, with abstraction from the senses.5

This type of comment could be—and was—applied to a host of other ambiguous “bodily signs” or possessed behaviors. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that there were two kinds of spirit possession in the Middle Ages, one malign and one benign, that were outwardly indistinguishable from one another. Both were attended by spectacular abilities: “Though miraculous abilities can be gifts that God bestows upon the faithful for the confirmation of the faith—the revelation of the future, or gift of prophecy; the understanding of supernatural things, or gift of wisdom; and the understanding of human things, or gift of knowledge—nevertheless, similar things also can be, and are, accomplished by evil spirits.”6

This juxtaposition led to an epistemological conundrum for the medieval Church on both the local community level and the translocal, institutional level.7 How could one tell the difference between divine and demonic possession? The Adversary could so easily deceive the unwary. The demonic character delighted in deception: leading human beings into falsehood was understood to be a basic goal of the demonic hosts. Thus fears about hypocrisy and false sanctity were important currents in later medieval thought, and the ecclesiastical leadership of the time sought to disseminate these concerns among the broader population. One should not reflexively venerate anyone who appears to be saintly, but exercise caution.

The early thirteenth-century theologian and bishop of Paris William of Auvergne wrote of “the falsely righteous, whom we call ‘hypocrites’ in Greek, who seek glory with so many fasts and severe afflictions in the name of a vain­glorious sanctity.”8 These hypocrites, William explained, were like human reflections of demons: the deceptive essence of their character was a lower­level representation of the demonic character. The asceticism of such persons was, in itself, no proof of sanctity; it may even be a form of hypocritical pride. Thus one must be careful and constantly look for diabolic deceptions among the apparently saintly. Indeed, William contends that the demonic hosts, in imitation of the Almighty and His Church, have an infernal hierarchy of false saints that is directly modeled after the celestial hierarchy of true saints. “They parallel and assimilate [infernal] orders to [celestial] orders. For instance, false apostles to God’s holy apostles, and also false martyrs to God’s holy martyrs, and in the same way with confessors and virgins.” Such simulated saints are “in thrall to demons,”9 that is, under the control of unclean spirits.

The tinsel glamour of false sainthood was understood to be particularly attractive to women, however, for the fragile sex gave in to the blandishments of the devil more readily. Thus Pope Innocent IV in 1250 censured “silly women internally loaded down with sins who make an external show of sanctity, though virtue is utterly foreign to them.”10 The notion of the vainglorious woman prophetess deceived by an angel of darkness disguised as a angel of light was something of a late medieval commonplace. It regularly occurs in preaching exempla, for example. Étienne de Bourbon mentions the case of an abbess who respectfully used to consult “a certain woman recluse, whom she believed to have a spirit of prophecy, but this witch (malefica) and faker was speaking with the devil.”11 Caesarius of Heisterbach mentions a similar case of a woman recluse-prophetess deceived by the devil transfigured into an angel of light: “There lived a recluse named Bertradis, a holy and religious woman famous for the divine revelations with which she was illuminated. This woman for a long time mistook an angel of darkness for an angel of light, because she was less than cautious. The devil used to enter her little cell through the window, with a fantastic penumbra of light, in order to prophesy the future to her and to instruct her about the things she asked him.”12 This was not simply a literary and religious topos, however, but an idea with broad currency in daily life. The teachings of bishops, popes, and preachers about how demonic possession could appear to be divine possession had demonstrable effects upon the laity and lower clergy. Thus, laywomen who felt invaded by a foreign spirit often feared that they were demonically possessed and deceived:

I saw myself as the house of the devil, and as an instrument and an adherent of demons. . . . I turned to those friars . . . and said to them, “I don’t want you to believe in me any more. Don’t you see that I am a demoniac? . . . Don’t you see that everything I have told you is false? And don’t you see that, if there were no evil in the whole world, I would fill up the whole world with the abundance of my evil? Do not believe me any more. Do not adore this idol any longer, for the devil is hiding in this idol, and everything I have said to you is false, simulated, diabolic speech.”13

Conversely, confessors to possessed women dreaded lest their charges were false saints colluding with the Ancient Enemy: “If, in detriment to the truth, she lied repeatedly when speaking about God, about the saints, and about herself, then it necessarily follows that she cannot be a member of Christ, who is Truth, but a member of the devil, who is a Lie and the father thereof.”14

Thus the later medieval context was marked by a quite successful campaign, on the part of the ecclesiastical intelligentsia, to teach the laity and lower clergy to watch out for demonic deceptions—particularly among women. Not surprisingly, laywomen who claimed visionary experiences were scrutinized harshly under the rubric of discernment, sometimes for years on end. Becoming the target of divisive debates about inspiration counts as one of the most predictable elements in the lives of laywomen visionaries in this period.15

This chapter investigates the categories that medieval people were negotiating with when they engaged in the testing of spirits. It thus explores notions of divine and demonic possession in the abstract, without becoming engaged with specific case histories. What was a demoniac, or energumen, supposed to look like? How were the divinely possessed expected to behave? By building up a detailed description of these two cultural categories, this chapter establishes the conceptual underpinnings of the testing of spirits.

DEMONIC POSSESSION

Scriptural and Patristic Bases

The Western notion of demonic possession was as ancient as the gospels. Indeed, the plethora of demonic possessions recounted in the New Testament testifies to a new concern that was shared by many Jewish sects of the intertestamental period, among them the Jesus Movement.16 There is only one case of involuntary spirit possession described in the Hebrew Bible, that of King Saul. Exorcism is, strikingly, among Jesus’ favorite miracles in the synoptic accounts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.17 These gospels present Jesus as a warrior against the personalized forces of darkness and chaos, forces that both recognize and fear him. In Mark, an exorcism forms Jesus’ first public demonstration of supernatural power, and also provides the first occasion on which Jesus’ divine identity is recognized by another creature. “There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God’” (Mark 1:23–24; see Luke 4:33–35, Matt. 8:29). The demons acknowledge Jesus’ divinity long before his disciples: they know reality.

Most accounts of demonic possession in the gospels focus on Jesus’ role as a charismatic healer rather than on the state of the afflicted. One exception is the case of the Gerasene demoniac, which contains a fairly dense description of the demoniac’s habits and comportment. “When [Jesus] had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, even with a chain. For he had often...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I. “A Protracted Disputation”
• Part II: Spiritual Physiologies
• Part III. Discernment and Discipline