Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

by Ayoush Lazikani

Overview

Cultivating the Heart examines the nurturance of feeling – especially the intertwined affective stirrings of compassion, love, and sorrow – in a range of religious texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These texts encourage, stimulate, define and attempt to express the ‘cultivation of hearts’, an image inspired by Part VII of Ancrene Wisse, whereby readers and audiences of the texts nurture a range of sophisticated ‘affective literacies’. In addition to extensive analysis of English, Latin and Anglo-Norman texts, this book makes substantial reference to the affective strategies of wall paintings in parish churches, demonstrating how the affective strategies of wall paintings cannot be perceived as inferior to or irreconcilable with the affective import of textual media.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783162789
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	06/15/2015
Series:	Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Scholars and students in medieval studies and related disciplines.

Read an Excerpt

Cultivating the Heart

Feeling and Emotion In Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

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By A. S. Lazikani

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2015 A. S. Lazikani
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-265-9

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CHAPTER 1

Upon a Spiritual Cross: Feeling in the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies

For Augustine of Hippo (354–430), moving hearts through preaching is a form of conquest. Hard hearts are broken and bent, shifting towards the spoken words of the preacher – who becomes a victor over the wayward leanings of the human will. But in a study of feeling in early English homilies, the preacher cannot purely be seen in such essentialist terms. He is not a vanquisher of an inferior congregation. Instead, he and the audience together form an 'emotional community', to use Rosenwein's coinage – apprehending and evoking affective pain through a shared vocabulary and imagistic reservoir. As put by D. L. d'Avray in his major work on pre-1300 Parisian preaching, '[c]lerics not only drew the water from the bottomless well of homiletic material, but drank from it together with the laity'. The opening chapter of this book studies two groups of English homilies, preserved in Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487 (L) and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 335 (B. 14. 52) (T), with five homilies shared between the two manuscripts.

The homilies encourage the formation of an 'emotional community' of shared affective pain in the English language. Affective pain is categorized, stimulated, managed and voiced for a range of audiences. As discussed in the introduction, these homilies enjoyed a composite audience, with sophisticated urban townsfolk alongside less educated members of the congregation – not to mention clerics of various ranks. Homiletic material provided affective nourishment for both clerical and lay sectors. In the most basic terms, the affective pain expressed and shaped through these homilies takes two forms: sorrow for sin, and the twofold love for God and man that constitutes true charity. But beyond this core, there are a range of affective-somatic-cognitive stirrings that are encouraged in the homilies. This chapter will be divided into three parts. First, it will develop a framework for homiletic feeling based on Augustinian and Quintillian models; this will be followed by the second section, which pauses on the importance of affective pain in the penitential climate of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The chapter will then turn to the cultivation of affective pain in the Lambeth and Trinity homilies themselves.

Augustine and Quintillian

Emotion in the sermon/homily form is gaining scholarly attention across historical periods. There has as yet been little work on emotion in medieval homilies, however, particularly those in vernacular languages. D'Avray perhaps foresaw the need for such scholarship: he concludes his book by suggesting further study into 'mental habits' of thirteenthTo find a framework for feeling in-century sermons, work which would inevitably take into its remit the affective strategies of homiletic material. To find a framework for feeling in twelfth- and thirteenth-century English homilies, a framework not yet formulated in scholarship, one needs to look further back in history. The most valuable accounts can be found in the work of two authors in particular: the Roman rhetorician Quintillian (c. 35–c. 96) and Augustine himself. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana is 'the only substantial work on Christian preaching from the ancient world'. Quintillian's Institutiones, read and propagated widely in the Middle Ages, have been identified by both Mary Carruthers and Vincent Gillespie as a key source for understanding emotional stimulation in medieval texts.

An account of oratory's affective impact is found in Book VI of the Institutiones. Quintillian underscores the importance of commanding emotional response – it is the management of emotional response which conveys most greatly the power of oration ('adferre maius vis orandi potest'). He remarks at length on the need to make the content of oration sensorially present for both speaker and listeners, providing the example of an orator describing vividly a murder scene: 'non animo sanguis et pallor et gemitus extremus, denique exspirantis hiatus insidet? (Will not the blood, the deathly pallor, the groan of agony, the death-rattle be indelibly impressed upon my mind?' (434–5)).It is from these impressions that enargia emerges. Enargia is the process of making listeners powerfully 'present' ('intersimus'). In oration, the speaker must conjure the actual occurrence ('rebus'), so that the stirring of affect in both speaker and listener responds not to a second-hand narrative; it rather responds to a first-hand encounter. The stirring of affect is as powerful as it would be if we were truly present at a murder scene: 'et adfectus non aliter, quam si rebus ipsis intersimus, sequentur' (while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence). More essentially put, the object of speech should not only be spoken; it must also be shown: 'non tam dicere videtur quam ostendere' (434–7). The potency of enargia is also multisensorial. Although the murder scene appears visual – brought before eyes ('in oculis habebo') – speaker and listener undergo a sensorial immersion. The blood (presumably both its colour and smell), paleness, groans and sighs all form an impression within, producing a powerful stirring of affect, identifiable with the affective pain that would be felt by a witness present at the scene.

Quintillian highlights the need for the orator to identify ('simus') with the affective range of the victim in order to stimulate compassion ('miseratione opus') in listeners. The stirrings should become the speaker's own:

Ubi vero miseratione opus erit, nobis ea, de quibus queremur, accidisse credamus atque id animo nostro persuadeamus. Nos illi simus, quos gravia, indigna, tristia passos queremur, nec agamus rem quasi alienam, sed adsumamus parumper illum dolorem. Ita dicemus, quae in nostro simili casu dicturi fuissemus.

(Again, when we desire to awaken pity, we must actually believe that the ills of which we complain have befallen our own selves, and must persuade our minds that this is really the case. We must identify ourselves with the persons of whom we complain that they have suffered grievous, unmerited and bitter misfortune, and must plead their case and for a brief space feel their suffering as though it were our own, while our words must be such as we should use if we stood in their shoes.) (436–7)

This capacity for 'co-feeling', feeling pain as if it is the audience's own, is a subject that will be examined in detail in chapter 3 on anchoritic texts. For the purposes of this chapter, it should be noted that Quintillian's stress on the orator inhabiting the feeling of his subject is crucial for a successful preacher. The preacher must embody the feeling of affective pain before it can be transferred onto the audience – which in turn transfers its own feeling back to the preacher.

It is Book Four of the De doctrina Christiana that carries Augustine's exploration of the value and techniques of Christian oratory. Following Cicero (106–43 bc), Augustine proposes his famous threefold model of eloquence in speech: the speaker's objectives are to instruct, to delight and to move, with instruction a matter of necessity, delight a matter of charm, and moving a matter of conquest (74). This final point on affective impact as 'conquest' is most germane to the present chapter. Such conquest needs clarity of the 'eye':

Et sicut delectatur si suaviter loquaris, ita flectitur si amet quod polliceris, timeat quod minaris, oderit quod arguis, quod commendas amplectatur, quod dolendum exaggeras doleat, cum quid laetandum praedicas gaudeat, misereatur eorum quos miserandos ante oculos dicendo constituis, fugiat eos quos cavendos terrendo[.] (75)

(Your hearer is delighted if you speak agreeably, and moved if he values what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, and rues the thing which you insist that he must regret; and if he rejoices at what you set forth in your preaching as something joyful, pities those whom by your words you present to his mind's eye as miserable, and shuns those whom with terrifying language you urge him to avoid.) (229)

Augustine affirms the need for an alignment of the audience with the preacher. The hearer must be aligned affectively with the speaker; each affective response should be geared to the preacher's affective intention. In this passage, Augustine proposes a near-Quintillian notion of enargia, with the emphasis on feeling compassion ('misereatur') for those who are presented as pitiable before the eye ('ante oculos'). Affective alignment can only occur when the preacher successfully re-presents to the mind's eye the objects of value, fear, hatred, love, joy, and compassion. It is notable that both Quintillian and Augustine associate enargia with the audience's capacity to feel compassion – but it is also crucial for a range of affective responses, enumerated here by Augustine. Moving audiences is a conquest, Augustine explains, because it is possible to be instructed and delighted and yet refuse to give assent (76). Will and affective engagement are tied closely: minds/ hearts must be moved, must be conquered, in order to shift the movement of the will (79).

There are two strands in the Augustinian and Quintillian discussions on emotion in oratory which are important as starting points for this chapter. The first is the notion of making present – Quintillian's enargia and the mind's eye referenced by Augustine. Although achieved through an inner 'eye', thisenargia is multisensorial: homilist and audience become present in an event, immersed in its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical and/or affective touch. The Lambeth and Trinity homilies do not only speak of feeling – they invoke it with potency. The second strand is in Augustine's notion of affective alignment. A homilist must be aligned affectively with the audience, to enable the affect to be stirred in an appropriate direction. As Augustine might put it, it would be unhelpful for an audience to love what the preacher hates, or laugh at what the preacher pities. The text of the Lambeth and Trinity homilies are designed to grasp affectively both preacher and audience, enabling a transference of feeling from both sides. After all, the aim is to create a unified emotional community.

Affective Pain in Penitence

Before turning to the affective strategies of the Lambeth and Trinity homilies, it is important to spotlight the centrality of affective pain in the penitential climate of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which homilies/sermons had an important function. As Canon 10 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirmed the necessity of good-quality preaching, the more famous Canon 21 rendered confession compulsory for all adults. There is also a firm link in this period between sermons/homilies and the broad category of 'penitential/ confessional texts' – as corroborated by d'Avray and M. Michèle Mulchahey. Parallel to the growth in confessional literature, there was from the late twelfth century onwards what can be termed a 'revival' of preaching. Furthermore, as P. H. Tibber remarks, sermons played a role in the sacrament of penance, activating what he terms 'the process of self-examination and contrition' at the heart of the sacrament's efficacy.

By the early thirteenth century, three dimensions were recognised in the penitential processes: contrition (contritio cordis), confession (confessio oris), and satisfaction (satisfactio operis), each to combat the three modes of offence: the heart, speech and deed. Peter Lombard (c. 1110–60) reproduces this tripartite model in his Sententiae. It is a model also found in the Dominican Paul of Hungary's Summa de penitentia (c. 1219–21), the first handbook on penance for the Order, and the later work of the Dominican Raymund Pennaforte (c. 1180–1275). In differentiating contritio cordis and satisfactio operis, a distinction was made between 'interior penitence' and 'exterior penitence'. This distinction is seen in the De sacramentis Christianae fidei of Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141): 'Poenitentia exterior est in afflictione carnis. Poenitentia interior est in contritione cordis.'(Exterior penitence is in affliction of the flesh. Interior penitence is in contrition of the heart). The Latin term penitentia was itself used for both physical and affective penitential pain. Within this, a threefold model for satisfaction came to the foreground, of fasting (ieiunitas), prayers (oratio) and alms (helemosina). But shame was also a recognised aspect of satisfaction in twelfth-century theology – and inherent in confessional performance. For Peter Abelard, a 'great part' of satisfaction rests in humility ('in humilitate confessionis magna pars agitur satisfactionis'), and confession naturally invokes fear and shame. For the Lombard, the shame involved in confession is itself 'gravis poena' (grave penance).

Contrition and 'physical' satisfaction are both essential to the Lombard's authoritative definitions of penance as a sacrament, which may partly explain the significance given to both in the English homilies. In distinctions xiv–xxii of Book IV of the Sententiae he offers two divergent sacramental definitions. The first is that exterior penance is the sign, the sacramentum, of interior penitence; interior penitence is the object, the res. The second solution alters the position of interior penitence; here, it becomes both sacramentum and res. Interior penitence remains the res of exterior penitence, but is also the sacramentum of the remission of sin. As such, the abolition of sin is only an object; interior penitence is both object and sign; and exterior penitence is only a sign, but for two tiers of object. This latter solution persists into Pennaforte's work a century later, where confession (rather than exterior penitence) is only sign, interior penitence (contritio in his terminology) is both signified and sign, and cleansing is the object: 'Confessio est signum tantum, scilicet, contritionis. Contritio est res et signum: res signi confessionis, signum mundationis. Mundatio est res signi tantum, scilicet, contritionis.' (Confession is only a sign, namely of contrition. Contrition is object and sign: object signified by confession, sign of cleansing. Cleansing is object of a sign only, namely of contrition (p. 553)).

The enforcement of confession cannot be disentangled from the sacramental status of penance: both issues hinged on the level of sacerdotal power in absolving the penitent. The Lombard does maintain that forgiveness comes solely from contrition and 'humilitatem cordis' (humility of heart), differentiating confession of the heart (confessio cordis) from confession of the mouth (confessio oris). However, he also makes clear that if a priest is available, confession of the heart is insufficient to remit sins. By the early thirteenth century, all three dimensions to the penitential equation were seen as integral to the whole process, contributing to a demand for explicatory 'penitential literature'. Leonard F. Boyle notes that by the early thirteenth century, the newly founded Dominican Order was a potent force in the production of the category of texts he defines as 'summa poenitentia'. The rigorous and methodical process of self-examination was guided by the confessor and structured through schemata of the Seven Deadly Sins, Ten Commandments, Five Senses, and less prominently, sins of omission and the sins in the exterior versus the interior man. This is demonstrable in the thirteenth-century anonymous Dominican manual Summa penitentie fratrum Predicatorum, 'Cum ad sacerdotem', and the mid-thirteenth-century Confessio debet, which originated from an earlier work by the first Dominican cardinal, Hugh of Saint-Cher (c. 1200–63).

The legalistic nature of Dominican Pennaforte's Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio, written subsequent to his entrance to the Order in 1223, does not stifle the affective core of penitence in his text. In the final chapter of Book III (chapter xxxiv), penance is defined as lamentation so as not to re-commit sin (pp. 543–5). Pennaforte underscores the 'passive' and 'active' effects of contrition; both are characterized by violence, destroying the sin prior to any exterior act of satisfaction (p. 551). And satisfaction is itself envisaged by Pennaforte as both physical and affective in an elaborate model (pp. 557–61). Within this model, he defines three kinds of fasts: from material food, from temporal joy, and from deadly sin. It is this multidimensional model of fasting that is truly effective, Pennaforte argues:

Et hoc triplici jejunio debemus castigare jumentum nostrum. Parum enim prodest jejunare a cibo nisi jejunetur a peccato. (p. 559)

(And with this triple fasting we must castigate our beast of burden. Truly, it is insufficient benefit to fast from food and not to fast from sin.)

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter 1: Upon a Spiritual Cross: Feeling in the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies Chapter 2: The Gnawed Hand: Presence and Absence of Feeling in the Early South English Legendaries Chapter 3: Co-feeling: Compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group Chapter 4: Call Me Bitter: Feeling and Sensing in Passion Lyrics Conclusion