God's Justice as told by the Man of Law

What I find intriguing about the Man of Law’s tale is that it reads less like a tale and more like a saint’s life, similar to those from the Golden Legend. However, unlike last week’s selections, Constance is not martyred. Nevertheless she suffers great trials, all of which she bears patiently, while those who strove against her are struck by God and his justice. This made me think: why is this tale being told by the lawyer? Why would he choose to tell a tale of faith? I believe it is because of the justice that prevails throughout this tale. It is not human law upon which the storyteller focuses, but on the law of God. His chosen people, i.e. Constance, are protected because of their faith and devotion. When Constance sails to Syria to marry this Sultan she has never met, she bears it patiently though she laments “Allas, unto the Barbre nacioun/I moste anon, syn that it is youre wille; But Crist, that starf for our redempcioun/So yeve me grace his heestes to fulfille!” (lines 281-284) She submits herself not only to the will of her father (and later does the same on the ‘orders’ of her husband), but also to the will of her Father in Heaven. Such humility and devotion is rewarded, for she survives the attack on the Sultan and the other Christians by the Sultanness and her counselors. But on a rudderless ship, saved by the hand of God like Daniel in the lion’s den, she makes her way to pagan Northumberland.

I want now to skip ahead to her encounter with the amorous knight and murderer of Hermengild. This knight approaches her, “He woweth hire, but it availeth noght;/She wolde do no synne, by no weye.” (lines 589-590) And so, under the influence of Satan, he sneaks into the chamber she shares with Hermengild, slits the latter’s throat and places the knife by Constance’s pillow. But King Alla and his people, recognizing the inherent goodness of Constance, bring forth her accuser (the spurned knight). The king declares that, “if this knight wol sweren how that she/This woman slow, yet wol we us avyse/Whom that we wole that shal been oure justice.” (lines 664-666) And so the knight goes to swear upon the book, in a ceremony reminiscent of modern citizens placing their hands on the Bible in court, but no sooner does he swear that she is guilty then “an hand hym smoot upon the nekke-boon,/That doun he fil atones as a stoon,/And bothe his eyen broste out of his face/In sighte of every body in that place.” (lines 669-672) Again, Constance is protected by God against those who seek to do her ill. Each of these encounters includes some act of violence, and indeed throughout the tale justice seems to be done by means of violence. But here I wanted to highlight the theme of protection from God and how through her innocence, humility and devotion, she survives each trial, guided and protected by God’s hand.

Worthy of Public Worship

The first impression I received from the tales of the saints in “The Golden Legend” was of the very deliberate voice of divine justice in each story. In each tale, the saint figure can always be identified by the direct support he or she receives from a divine power, and the secular agents which oppose this heroic figure are marked as demonic. For example, St. Apollonia is regaled with accolades before proving herself to be a worthy martyr while Divinus, her evil captor is exposed as a “wretch of the demons” in the first sentence. She begins the story as a, “study column strengthened by the spirit of the Lord, perceived by the Lord for the merit and virtue of her faith, admired by the angels” (268). Although these tales attempt to serve as a popular vehicle through which Christian dogma might be spread, there is an obvious tendency to elevate the status of each saint far above the level of the average common person. The majority of the stories in “the Golden Legend” seem to hinge on some form of philosophical disagreement between the saint and some form of perverse, misguided power structure. In these stories, it is clear when specific items of Christian dogma are being privileged. After St. Sebastian convinces the condemned Marcellian and Marcus to accept their fate as martyrs, “suddenly a radiance shone from heaven and shed light upon him for almost an hour” (98). While the author clearly introduces this divine approval to support Sebastian’s argument in defense of martyrdom, it is not clear why. Sebastian is established as a saint merely because the views he expressed have some kind of innately superior virtue attached to them, not because of some essential component of Sebastian’s character. This process seems to occur haphazardly. The same is true of saint Anastasia, she is haphazardly pursued and presided over by a string of oppressors, finally becoming martyred. What makes these supposed martyrs so virtuous besides the author’s say-so?

 In his introduction to “the Golden Legend,” Ryan makes several observations which illuminate the significance of the saints’ stories in a broad context. It is important to consider that saints were the figures deemed “worthy of public veneration” by the Church. Each of these stories serves as a configuration of Catholic doctrine in a way which was accessible to a popular audience (xvi).  Ryan makes certain to point out the absence of an overarching “social doctrine” connecting the stories. The saints aren’t meant to prove their divinity and superiority by some kind of inner triumph; they appear to be chosen at random because they are meant to be in communion with a more transient form of God. Ryan explains: “For these people in general, God was not a philosophical abstraction, but a living, ever-present, caring actor, the creator and giver of life. Their life was a pilgrimage through a world that was passing, to which they were not to become attached” (xviii). The saints can be understood as the people who had the privilege of coming into the closest and most intimate contact with the Lord during their lives. They were not chosen or predestined for this task, it simply occurred to them like so many other components of our passing existence.

Pain or Damnation...which is worse?

In most of the texts we've studied, we see pain and death as punishment--many of the people in these writings have been persuaded against certain actions for fear of painful punishment like torture and whippings. It seemed like decisions were based on pain and laws were followed by fear of physical hurt or death. At first, it seems like Tiburce, Valerian, and Maximus are punished because of their deaths and Cecilia is rewarded due to her immortality. When looking into the text more deeply, however, it seems like their deaths may not have been meant to look at as a "punishment." In this tale, it seems like the biggest fear isn't pain or death at all as we've seen multiple characters (Tiburce, Valerian, and Maximus) convert to Christianity despite the possibility that they be punished by either by Almachius. There are a few important ideas that come along with these conversions. Firstly, I have to wonder what the final persuader was for their conversion. In Valerian's case, it seems to be fear of the loss of his love, Cecilia. It wasn't an unconditional love for the Christian God that determined his conversion, but rather the love for an earthly woman. The other men are in turn persuaded by Valerian to convert to Christianity, but it seems like the original conversion was made out of fear. Even in the face of physical pain and torment, these men stood by their newly acquired Christian beliefs. That leads me to think that their courage by standing by Christianity and refusing the pagan gods was similarly rooted in fear (as opposed to love), but which fear is more powerful? The quote below depicts Maxiumus' beating and eventual death:

"This Maximus, that saugh this thyng bityde,

with pitous teeris tolde it anonright,

that he hir soules saugh to hevene glyde

with aungels ful of cleernesse and of light

and with his word converted many a wight;

for which Almachius dide hym so bete

with whippe of leed til he his lif can lete.

Cecile hym took and buryed hym anon

By Tiburce and Valerian softely

Withinne hire burying playce, under the stoon;" (400-409)

It seems like the reward of Maxiumus' conversion and opening into the world of Christianity was greater than any beating he received. Though he had to pay with his life, he was able to be buried next to two other converts--Tiburce and Valerian--a symbol of their eternal bond and admittance into heaven. Back to the question posed above, I have to wonder what exactly this fear means. Why did these men risk everything (mainly their lives) for this Christian God? If we go with the idea that it is fear, then we must ask: what pain is "worse"--eternal pain/damnation or physical torture? Many Christian beliefs are rooted in fear of God, of damnation, and of the eternal pain their soul will have to endure in hell. If we go ahead and assume that these men made their sacrificial decisions over the thought that eternal pain would be much worse than the temporary bodily pain of torture and death, then what are the implications of this tale? It's clear that it makes a statement against pagan rooted religions, but when comparing Almachius' inability to kill Cecilia with the ease it took him to kill Tiburce, Valerian, and Maximus, it almost seems on the exterior that the three men were not as pure and good as Cecilia. On the surface it might appear that despite their conversions, these men were still not worthy or protected by God. Was their fear enough? Is the true reward their entrances into heaven despite their painful deaths?

The Untouchables - Donald Chang

Much like the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the “Golden Legend” depicts the pure lives led by various Saints, with an emphasis on their suffering and martyrdom. Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe focused on the importance of suffering, they wished to suffer alongside Jesus and Mary, they explicitly describe the misery, the pain, the blood and gore, the anguish, but they reveled in such suffering. The pain itself was the glory, there was a sort of masochistic pleasure they took in the idea of agony.

However, in the Golden Legend, there is a completely different view of this suffering. Whereas Julian of Norwich embraced the pain, accepted the rending of her flesh, the martyrs and Saints of the Golden Legend avoid the suffering, it is not the suffering itself that renders them beatific, but their acceptance, their willingness to suffer. In all the stories, the Saints are either completely healed of their wounds, ignore their pain, or completely protected from their tortures: “Agatha knelt in thanksgiving, and found that all her hurts were healed and her breast restored to her bosom”, “This fearless martyr…would not be conquered by the torments visited upon her by the heat of the flames, because her spirit was on fire with the far more ardent rays of the truth”, “Agnes [was] thrown into a roaring fire, but the flames divided and burned up the hostile crowd on either side, leaving the maiden unscathed” (pg 156, 269, 103).

This is a completely different take of the martyr, obviously more fictionalized. While the last readings made us empathize with Jesus Christ’s suffering and thus be swayed by his deeds as a human being, the Golden Legend enamors us with the supernatural power of God and the Holy Spirit. We see the workings of angels, “When she entered the house of shame, she found an angel waiting for her. His radiance filled the place with light and formed a shining mantle about her” (103). The Saints themselves are given supernatural powers all their own, as if they were deities unto themselves, “Crowds of pagans fled from the mountain to the Saint’s tomb, snatched up the pall that covered it, and hung it up in the path of the fire; and …the stream of lava halted and did not advance a foot farther” (157). These are Christian fairy tales, fables meant to demonstrate the reward that comes to pious Christians and the punishment that is meted out to unbelievers. Do you agree with this, or do you believe there was another purpose for these stories? I’m not very creative so my answer is very straightforward.

Strangely enough, unlike the bible, in which Jesus is quite forgiving of all, including his tormentors, the Saints in this work are presented as quite spiteful towards their tormentors and judges: “Shameless dog! Ravenous lion! You have power over the flesh but Christ keeps the soul to himself” (369). Why do you think that is?

The Second Nun’s Tale recounts the religious devotion of Saint Cecilia along with her husband Valerian and his brother Tibertius.  The Tale highlights the physical torment devout Christians must endure at the hands of the evil Romans.  Their pagan beliefs obviously went against the Christian faith, but what struck me was the depiction of Roman authority figures.  “The sergeantz of the toun of Rome hem soghte, / And hem biforn Almache, the prefect, broghte,” (361-62).  These are not ordinary Roman citizens venting their anger toward Christians, but these are sergeants and their prefect – figures of worldly authority attempting to impose worldly dominion over Christians who pledge allegiance to the supernatural dominion of Christ.  Chaucer highlights the struggle not only between pagan and Christian faith but also the opposition between corporeal and supernatural “authority” – a complex subject analyzed in the Chaucerian poetry class.  Though Almache is a prefect, he cannot force Cecilia to “Do sacrifice, or Cristendom reneye,” (459).  This conflict between authorities of physical imposition and spiritual devotion becomes self-evident when Almache has Cecilia slain.  Of course she sustains three strikes and survives to continue preaching the ways of Christ.  And after three days, she dies and is buried alongside Valerian, Tibertius, (and Maximus).  The allusion to the holy trinity is another prominent feature in the tale.

             The legend that struck me the most was of the Saint Apollonia.  In particular where it “she broke free from the hands of the wicked and of her own will threw herself into the fire with which they had threatened her.”  She was even more “eager to undergo death than they to inflict it” (269).  Though every tale of Saints illustrates the physical pain they endure in the name of Christ, none states so explicitly the willingness towards suffering.  Apollonia of her own volition casts herself into the torture that her captors were going to subject her to.  Such action even baffles them.  In their totality, through the monotonous accounts of miracles and martyrdom, it appears as though the most prominent lesson to be learned is the irrelevance of the body compared to the almighty Christian Lord. 

Such spiritual supremacy is observed in the Second Nun’s Tale as Cecilia survives sure death.  However, the divinity of the spirit only ever functions through a bodily host.  In reading the stories, it’s difficult to reconcile the emphasis on spiritual transcendence when it is the body that first and foremost presents itself as the vehicle through which the divine can operate at all.  This also led me to question the purpose of bodily life in the face of eternal spirit.  The martyrs all lead lives entirely devoted to the afterlife refusing corporeal temptations, especially lust.  But there are never any explanations for bodily manifestation in the first place.  The design of humanity in its bodily form seems to be glossed over and instead of embracing the human physiology; these stories attempt to deny mankind’s physical boundaries.  Even if, by medieval Christian parameters, the afterlife awaited the faithful, the body appears to serve no purpose other than dying.  So too does Christ in his human manifestation only serve to die.  So why even have a body at all?  Does it simply host the spirit which presides over all things in relation to God?  What medieval motive can reconcile corporeality in the first place?

What's The Deal With All These Miracles, Guys?

Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale has direct relationships with various other texts. I realize this is somewhat a spoiler alert, but it reminded me a lot of The Prioress's Tale. Both have heavy theological themes to them, and also pit people of faith in a great struggle with another group of people. A key incident of violence also unites the two stories. Also crazy stuff happens. But more on that later. Personally, I really love how Chaucer inserts Urban as a character in the story. He isn't a high-ranking pope in this case, yet he is instrumental in the story since he baptizes Valerian.

Almachius is a fiendish character in this. Chaucer does a good job blending in the theology with another common medieval trope. You guessed it! There's misogyny in this story as well. The way Almachius treats Cecilia following the conversion of Tiburce and Valerian is straight up mean:

"Almachius, that herde of this doynge,
Bad fecchen Cecile, that he myghte hir see,
And alderfist, lo, this was his axynge:
'What maner womman artow?' tho quod he...
Ne takestow noon heede of my power?" (421-424, 434)

It's a striking indictment of Almachius's character that, instead of going directly after Valerian or Tiburce, he goes straight for Cecilia's throat (pun intended considering the ending). He unleashes his fury out on the woman first, considering her religious affiliation was the motivation for this supposed slight against him. The clash between paganism and Christianity is blatant in this tale. It mirrors the anti-Semitic undertones of The Prioress's Tale to a very faithful degree. I suspect that this and the Prioress's Tale were written soon after one another, considering their similarities. The death of Maximus was brutal to me, and it illustrated the now-horrifying notion of dying for something you believe in. Almachius is nothing short of a scoundrel. He is every Disney villain combined into one supreme force of malevolence. His wickedness leaps from the page and leaves its mark.

Cecilia is INVINCIBLE (sort of). Almachius wants her boiled alive? She survives! Then we get to the throat-cutting:

"Thre strokes in the nekke he smoot hir tho,
The tormentour, but for no maner chaunce
He myghte noght smyte al hir nekke atwo." (526-528).

The number three has blatant meanings in this. It is indicative of the Holy Trinity. Chaucer truly drives this point home when he writes that Cecilia miraculously survives for three days following her incident. Just like the boy in The Prioress's Tale, Cecilia survives despite this severe affliction. This is interesting, considering we just covered Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich and their treatises on the soul and body. This is without a doubt a miracle, but it is exemplified through this bodily wound. It's interesting that Cecilia can only truly display her power through this affliction.

RANDOM: One Saint Legend that resonated with me was Saint Agatha. This is why:

"He ordered her stretched on the rack and tortured, and Agatha said: 'These pains are my delight! It's as if I were hearing some good news, or seeing someone I had long wished to see, or had found a great treasure." (155). That's the pinnacle of optimism right there. It's also indicative of how many people thought pain connected them closer to Christ. Also her breast is cut off, and Agatha SCOLDS THE PEOPLE DOING IT: "Are you not ashamed to cut off from a woman that which your mother suckled you with?" (also 155). There's a lot to be said again about body/soul relationships via Agatha's ordeal.

One question I had: Is the Second Nun's Tale considered a miracle of the Virgin story? Upon investigation I found out it it's classified as a "Saint's Legend." However, saint's legends and miracle of the virgin stories are somewhat similar. But are they inseparable? Is it too much of a stretch to group the two together?

The history of dualism in the Church.

Hey guys! Sorry about the late post, I had some unexpected commitments all day.

I've done some reading on Julian of Norwich before, and I had the exceptional pleasure of working as a research assistant for a professor who was working on some scholarship on Margery Kempe. As a result, I no longer react to these women with quite the same wonder we all do when we first come into contact with them. However, what struck me as particularly interesting was Caroline Walker Bynum's essay, which took a few much-needed steps towards creating some historical context for our understanding of how medieval scholars approached the body and soul.

In particular, she notes that due to social circumstances, the Church had to take specific theological stances - namely, that in order to combat the heresies of Cathar dualism, the Church had to assert the inherent value of both parts of the dualistic system (195). Cathars reportedly believed that a lesser god had created the physical world as a corruption of the beautiful perfection of spirit, and that the true god would never have inflicted physical existence upon his beloved creatures; as a result, they chastised the flesh, starving themselves at some levels of practice. (The legend goes that when the Cathars were rounded up to be burnt, they walked into the flames singing, because they were overjoyed to cast off their mortal flesh.)

I suppose my question is a somewhat experiential one. What intrigues me is the way that Church scholars attempted to navigate this thorny issue by asserting the value of the body in the formula of dualism. Bynum's article focuses on doctrines like resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment, and indeed on the very idea of the incarnation itself, both of which seem to indicate that the body is part of the whole "self" and that the spiritual can be written and experienced in the physical. However, why does it always seem to be the case that this inscription of the spiritual into the physical is almost always about the degradation of the body? We have seen that both Julian and Margery centered much of their lives of faith on the experience of debilitating illness. Christ's major contribution to human life is his death on the cross. Even in instances where physical processes seem positive, like a mother nursing and nourishing a child, we recall that medieval scholars thought of all processes of excretion as analogous - that even milk was processed blood (214-5), making even maternal relations somehow vampiric in nature. Do we ever feel that these attempts to mingle the physical and spiritual, which appear throughout Julian's and Margery's texts, ever actually elevate the physical? Do we ever really get a successful example of living an embodied spirituality? Julian lives cut off from the world, and even Margery's life is full of tribulation - whether she "succeeds" or "achieves" anything is somewhat dubious.

Violence as a psychological outlet

While reading the Margery Kempe stories and especially the Bynum piece on Female Body Relgious Practice, I could not help but analyze these texts from a psychoanalytic point of view and wonder whether through these texts (primarily based on women, the female body and female mysticism) that we could not perhaps learn something about human nature. It must be first understood that the Bynum article makes a huge point out of emphasizing that women were more often than not those who used their bodies in order to express their piety: "Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access to the divine." Moreover, another point is made by Bynum that there was a huge psychological component to the mystical actions of women and that it was not solely a consequence of the body. The intense suffering that women would put themselves through in order to achieve closeness to God is something that to us seems extremely intense and unheard of. They would try to emulate Christ's suffering on the cross by hurting their own bodies and pray for illness so that they could endure hardship and perhaps prove their piety in the way perhaps that a man at battle who was fighting for the cause of religion could claim to have done. While reading this I could not help but make a comparison to the harming of men to their bodies during violence at battle. It seems as though during the medieval period, for some reason or another, the body and mind connection was very strong. Men managed to use violence with each other and withstood as well as inflicted bodily pain which is unheard to us today. Women, who did not have this outlet on the battlefield used their bodies as well, perhaps as a psychological outlet to answer the doubts that they had about their existence and their morality. It is important to remember that women did not have the battlefield as an outlet to engage body and mind. As Kempe writes, "And when she was at any time sick or troubled, the devil said in her mind that she should be damned, for she was not shriven of that fault" and Bynum writes, "Thus one might artuge that women had to stress the experience of Christ and manifest it outwardly in their flesh, because they did not have clerical office as an authorization for speaking." Thus we can ask ourselves two major questions. Firstly, is there a comparison that can be made with how men united body and mind on the battlefield versus how women united spirituality and body in the ways in which they harmed themselves? And secondly, if women had been granted another, different avenue for expression, is it likely that they would have still partaken in self-inflicted suffering?