Reaching for the Divine amidst the Religious Contradictions of the High Middle Ages into the Renaissance
by sprincipe2012
September 2022. Sandra Principe
This past summer, I listened to a disc collection titled ‘How to Listen to and Understand Great Music,’ by the American musicologist Robert Greenberg. I repeatedly played his lectures on discs 3 and 4 on the transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance period. As I listened, I detected a significant change between the ending of the high Middle Ages and the beginnings of the Renaissance. In the later Middle Ages, music was ‘polyphonic.’ Multiple voices sang largely complementary melodies, with instrumental accompaniment that echoed earlier medieval Plain Chant. Greenberg believed these echoes of plainchant represented “the Hand of God” anchoring the whole work.
By 1350, mid-14th century, an amazingly beautiful work took music to a new level of polyphonic expressiveness – soprano and tenor simultaneously sing different poetic songs of Love – secularizing these heartfelt themes. These strangely differing tunes represented what musicologists call the fusion of ‘consonant and dissonant’ sounds. Greenberg explains that musical composition still hadn’t developed the harmonic scale. The harmonic blending of different tones came later, when 15th-century composers were inspired to repurpose the ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras’s mathematical theory for their music.
I thought it would be interesting to use the mid-14th century musical example to explore discords and disharmonies and their impact on that century of crises. Simultaneously, I aim to reflect on the High Middle Ages to see precedents for conflicts occurring in religious spheres. Greenberg’s lecture on 14th century emphasized the Great Schism, a religious crisis where the King of France moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon. The exile of the Avignon popes lasted seventy-five years. There followed the Black Death in 1350. The plague killed millions, and as society grappled with it, the Hundred Years War, caused by peasant uprisings, broke out. Faith in the Church as a strong institution that could protect social solidarity ebbed. The elites turned to anticlerical cultural innovations. They eschewed Biblical truths that typified the Medieval era, instead favouring ancient beliefs from pre-Christian Greek philosophers like Pythagoras.
Today, secular state-governments do not offer comfort during present crises involving climate changes. Instead people view them as failing to protect the substance and vitality of the natural world. We recognize humanity is at odds with the natural world, but haven’t found an equivalently harmonizing theory to Pythagoras to reconcile our existence with the rest of nature. We long for earthly deliverance that will save human and creaturely lives alike.
From my readings on the high Middle Ages, I saw that when the Church was at the height of its power, it could not deal humanely with people it considered heretics. The mid-12th to 14th-century Cathars, who were like ‘religious refugees from the East,’ and who we will discuss more fully later, are an excellent example. When they infiltrated into the West, they became so popular that they threatened the dominance of the Church, like ‘dissidents today. They had considerable influence in such regions as the south of France, where Cathar leaders and followers lived more self-regulated and upright lives than many prominent Christians.
As we shall see, contemporaneous to the presence of the unorthodox Cathars was an increase in pious and mystically-minded women visionaries. Like the Cathars, they were regarded as suspicious and subversive. As the 14th-century progressed, these women suffered persecution and executions in some cases. Simultaneously, by focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century, we see that not all religious scholars disavowed the secular intellectual interest in ancient philosophy. Aquinas constructed his theological system based on the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Despite his Aristotelian logic, even St Thomas couldn’t disregard Christian ‘Revelations.’ Ultimately, like women mystics of his generation, Aquinas encountered the Thought-voice of the Godhead. It effectively rendered his consciousness to the realization of his past ‘Unknowingness.’ Writing in the fifth century, the Greek theologian Pseudo-Dionysius recommended exploring this Unknowingness as the best way to reach towards God.
In this paper I organize the differing sections by voices from antiquity, the Middle and the Modern Ages. I also explore themes I see repeating as in music; sometimes the voices agree, but more often they disagree with their contemporaries. The result is discordant views, ‘dissonance’ in the musical sense. I heard Greenberg observe regarding the above mid-14th century work, mentioned earlier, it was not like music written once harmonic scales were discovered in 15th century. Instead, it has more in common with music of the 1940’s. Since that was a modern period of great crises and changes, I consulted the radical 20th century philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil. Weil died in 1943 in the midst of WWII largely for her self-denying asceticism.
I. Spiritual Challenges posed by the Cathars to the Roman Catholic Church
In his comprehensive book, The Cathars, Sean Martinextends his title to call Catharism ‘The Most Successful Heresy Of The Middle Ages (2004). Catharism was a dualist, Gnostic religion of some antiquity that rejected this physical world as evil from the time of its creation. This fundamental belief must have acted like a cathartic force in believers’ psyches, compelling them to see heaven as their only salvation. Catharoi is Greek for ‘pure’ and Cathars hoped that by pursuing a ‘purer’ way of life they could enter heaven directly at death. Quasi-Christians, they believed that Christ and Mary never existed as physical humans, but dwelled on earth in the Spirit. Martin notes that like Docetist heretics, Cathars doctrinally thought that Jesus’ body was an “illusion.’ Consequently they did not believe He underwent crucifixion (Martin 2004:180).
To the Cathars, human spirits were like the sexless spirits of angels, trapped in the material world. When death was imminent, their spiritual leader, a ‘Perfect,’ was called to perform their only rite, the consolamentum. The Perfect laid his hands on the dying in blessing to aid the spirit’s desired return to be with God.
When, following their apparent expulsion from Christian Byzantium, Cathars first appeared in Western Europe in the mid-12th century, they attracted the attention of the noted theologian, St. Bernard Clairvaux. When Bernard attempted to debate with some Cathar perfects, their supporters drove Clairvaux away with hoots and boos. St. Bernard warned the Church authorities that the Cathars could be like “foxes in the vineyard.” Consequently, early in the 13th century, the Pope authorized the Albigensian Crusade to eliminate religious heretics from the South of France. That military invasion was followed by interminable inquisitions; By the early 14th century, Catharism came to an end. Simultaneously, as we saw, the Papacy itself relocated to Avignon, and a succession of popes remained there in a kind of ‘Babylonian Captivity,’ subordinate to the powerful French kings.
For more historical context on the dynamic contradictions in the religious lives of 13th-century people, I refer you to my previous paper, ‘This 21st Century, Cycling into New Religiosity.’ The East Indian Swami, Vivekananda, taught the Hindu conception that there were four different types of centuries re-cycling one ‘caste’ after another. He understood this to be the changeover of class aspirations in history. Each new century brings in a class seeking to supersede the preceding class-hegemony, often attacking its existential base.
Perpetuating the Swami’s beliefs, the 12th century saw the importance of labour as Europe constructed its great Gothic cathedrals. Then, in the 13th century, a theocratic century, according to the Swami, clerical power was enhanced. Instead, the Cathars gained popular support with their implicit anti-clericalism and willingness to critique ecclesiastical corruption and dictatorial efforts to enforce sacramental participation. Contrary to the veneration of church sanctity, the Cathars gathered in people’s houses, fields and barns. Notably, Cathar popularity endured throughout the 13th century despite the Pope’s Albigensian Crusade and ensuing Inquisitions.
The 14th century, saw kings in France, along with rulers in the Italian city-states, acquire inordinate powers, economically motivated. The Swami’s system assigns this era to Kings, and they attempted to disable the Church’s power and religious influence. With the incoming Renaissance, the elites celebrated the more secular concept of Humanism. Were they decrying the Church’s ‘inhumanity’ during the 13th century’s persecutions of religious heretics?
In The Medieval World, Europe 1100-1350 (1961:219-220), Friedrich Heer describes how in the 12th century, people loved the saints of the Church. He writes, “[They are] invoked as “ friends of God, advocates with power to heal, channels to the omnipotent majesty of God.” As for St. Francis of Assisi, Heer observes: Francis is much admired today for his love of all created things, but “how close he came to the surrounding flames [of the inquisition], which consumed some of his persecuted friends and brothers.” (1961:198-99). Heer recounts the case of Armanno Pungilupo, who was venerated as a saint by the people; They buried him in the cathedral at Ferrara with an altar to honour him. In 1300, however, the Inquisition found Pungilupo to be a heresiarch, casting his images, altar and corpse into the flames.
II. Meister Eckhart, Dominican and mystically-minded Theologian, a Heretic
Based on my understanding of mysticism, the insights of Meister Eckhart into mystical truths remain valuable. Kevin Madigan (2015:421) says:
“Eckhart created a vocabulary for subsequent mystics to use. They used the words and categories of this God-intoxicated mystics and absorbed his writings, anxious to share his experience of mystical union with the divine.”
Eckhart wrote in the vernacular, middle High German, and as a Dominican scholar familiar with Latin, he taught at the University of Paris in the early 14th century. Around this time, he was tried by Franciscan inquisitors as a heretic. According to Madigan, quoting Eckhart directly in places, he explained how “the birth of God in the soul” occurs. The soul as a spiritual organ is capable of absorbing the divine light, for the indwelling soul has a locus where God and the human spirit commune. To my mind, he was re-phrasing the Negative Theology of the Greek theologian, the Pseudo-Dionysius, who suggested people should seek God in ‘the Divine Darkness.’ For Pseudo-Dionysius, assuming one’s own unknowingness of God was theologically preferable to endless liturgical recitations of the Divine Names of God, although he compared the sanctity of clerics to the angelic hierarchy. Eckhart emphasized that the human soul benefits best by achieving a “nothingness.” By emptying oneself, the spark of the soul “ignites”… this state of emptiness allows for the possibility that one can be formed into goodness – the Goodness that is God.” (Gen. 1:25, 30)
III. Two Visionaries who gained Church Approval
Consider the life-story of St. Thomas Aquinas. As a Dominican scholar and theologian, he wrote volumes of systematic theology during his lifetime. He searched through writings from Greek antiquity, especially Aristotle in translation from Arabic texts, and drew from Christian predecessors such as the fore-mentioned Dionysius’ Negative Theology. On September 8, 1274, towards the end of his life, while praying in the chapel, a mystical experience, a divine audition, overtook his being. From a crucifix on the wall, a thought-voice reached him – the Lord God addressed him. “You have written on me well. What reward do you seek?” … “Only yourself,” said St. Thomas. He laid down his pen, telling his confessor he could write no more. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ writings remain official doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, and are still studied in Catholic seminaries today.
Let me mention a German visionary and prophetess. The 12th-century writings of St. Hildegard of Bingen contributed to the emergence of ‘German Mysticism’ that culminated in Eckhart. Bingen was a well-educated prioress of a Benedictine nunnery, and towards the end of her life, she recounted her visions to the monk Volmar, who recorded them into Latin. Hildegard had waited years before confiding to her priest-confessor of life-long visions and auditions. Consider that at mid-12th century at Cologne, heretics were burned; once Hildegard found acceptance by the Church, she objected to these church-approved atrocities. Madigan quotes one of her visions:
“It came to pass when I was 42 years old that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming … suddenly I understood the meaning of the exposition of the books.“ (2015:420)
Hildegard became known as ‘Sybl of the Rhine,’ for her writings containing what Madigan calls secular and religious “apocalyptic prophecies regarding future corruptions. ”
IV. Church Persecutions of Cathars rewarded French Kings with power and wealth
Now, let’s examine the religious crises during high Middle Ages (13th-14th centuries) from the perspective of an important 20th century French intellectual, Simone Weil. Writing in exile from France during World War II, she castigated the French kings and Roman Catholic Church of the high Middle Ages for exterminating heretics like the medieval Cathars. In practice, Weil, regarded herself a neo-Catharist, and she lived like an ascetic Cathar; her purity of life led to denying herself adequate nourishments because of others’ suffering. She could have been a Cathar ‘Perfect’ in the Middle Ages when women and men qualified for such leadership.
Simone Weil saw Catharism as a “lost civilization” like pre-Roman antiquity. She believed it was a civil society was tolerant and moderate during the Middle Ages. As a Jewess drawn to Christ, she could not join the Church because of its history of persecutions; Nevertheless she attended Catholic mass faithfully while living as an exile in New York. Since Weil pointed to the intersecting aims of Church and French state in the later Middle Ages, it occurred to me that it was a foregone conclusion that the King of France would take the Roman Papacy under his wing. With the pope complicit, Philip IV dismantled the Templar Order of warrior monks, seized their wealth and burned their leaders.
I recalled from studying Church history that in the early centuries of Christianity, the Roman State persecuted Christians as “atheists” if they refused to participate in the imperial cults. The Roman authorities believed that sacrifices in the temples to their deities guaranteed the state’s security and general prosperity. Ironically, medieval churchmen forgot the Roman persecution of its martyrs who were slaughtered for worshiping only Christ and began similarly to kill other kinds of Christians outside of the church.
Guided by Hildegard’s expectations of future “corruptions” and Weil’s modern-day condemnation of the Medieval Church, I looked further at the Church’s persecutions of Cathars.. Did Hildegard know about the Cathars when they first appeared in Lowland Europe in the mid-12th century? They had migrated from the East, probably from Bulgaria for they were called ‘Bogomils.’ (This Slavic name meant ‘Dear to God”, or friends of God) . Evidence suggests they were expelled from Christian Byzantium for their radical ideas. All that horrific history of slaughtering Cathar heretics and others involved ‘holocausts’ was part of a larger and ongoing pattern of death-dealing, tying people such as declared heretics to funeral pyres and set afire to the cremations of thousands. It reached a terrible apotheosis during Weil’s lifetime as the Holocaust perpetrated against her fellow-Jews.
V. Renaissance beginnings in the 14th Century – Appreciations of ‘Fleshly Beauty,’ (at odds with Cathar’s Approval of John 1:10-12)
During the late 14th century, the Italian elite delighted in recovering the culture of ancient Greek Humanism, secularizing Western arts and literature. Wealthy rulers of city-states, like the Medici bankers of Florence, patronized the arts, and sculptors like Michelangelo were inspired by Ancient Greek models of the human body. Botticelli’s ‘Aphrodite born out of the sea’ demonstrated an appreciation of the beauty of the human body. It embodied the Renaissance idealism of the birth of the new human. The Church relied upon the artistic creativity of those workers of great art, encouraging Biblical stories and themes even as it permitted the human body to be displayed in its full vigour of fleshly expressions.
But back in the 13th century, the Cathars had denigrated the flesh in favour of the spirit, upholding the language of the Gospel of St. John.
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him … To all who received him,…he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or will of man, but of God…”(Jn 1:10, 12)
Interestingly, new mystical cults approved by the popes in the high Middle Ages envisioned Mary and Christ ‘in the Spirit’ (a Cathar idea), blessing both churches and sacraments, as we see later. These Church-approved cults, essentially highly mystical, began as the visions of mystic women. Conclusion: the church must have been more influenced by Cathar strictness of spirituality than was given credit for.
VI. Plato’s ‘Symposium,’ Diotima’s Teaching on Becoming ‘the Friend of God’
Contrary to the Italian Renaissance culture of admiring ‘fleshly beauty, Plato’s Symposium, written in late 4th or early 5th century, dramatized how Socrates learned about the elevation of the ‘Spirit of Love’ to the heights of the Divine.
The priestess Diotima, whom Socrates called “his instructress in the art of love,” spoke of love as ‘Spirit.’ Diotima conveyed the lovely idea of the progress in the heart: beginning perhaps with marrying for the sake of having children, then wanting to serve the broader community in state or nation affairs. Beyond this, she revealed the illuminating idea of the unearthly ‘Beauty’ of the divine world – exemplified in one who wishes to become “a friend of God.” Initially she declared to Socrates her understanding of the Spirit of Love: “Love is neither mortal nor immortal but it is a mean between the two… He [Love] is a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the moral.” 206 Finally she extolled the highest idealism of ‘Beauty,’ as follows.
. “But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty – the divine beauty?… pure and clear and unalloyed with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life …. Remember how in that communion, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will bring forth, not images of beauty, but of a reality … nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God… (Dialogues of Plato page 218).”
Plato immortalized Socrates as truly ‘a friend of God.’ At the end of The Symposium, he narrated the conversionary experience of Alcibiades. This handsome young aristocrat had supposed that when he spent a night alone near the great philosopher, that Socrates would be inclined to have sex with him. But not so, for, Alcibiades said: “What temperance there is residing within “ – within Socrates, that is….
“When I opened him, and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine and golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment whatever Socrates commanded… “ Later on, Alcibiades concluded: “For I have been bitten by a more than viper’s tooth; I have known in my soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs … the pang of philosophy…”
Conclusion: Plato’s and Socrates’ ideal forms, available to the mind, gave birth to the higher realms of the ineffable – that which cannot be grasped hold of physically, though art, sculpture, literature and music may imitatively illustrate certain wonders that derive from Higher Realities.
VII. Mystically-minded women visionaries of the high Middle Ages
Often, once a woman like Hildegard revealed to her priest-confessor the rich treasures of her interior life, a scholarly member of the clergy with knowledge of Latin would write up her experiences and record such mystical mysteries as her visions revealed. Here is an example from the modern theologian Von Balthasar’s review of the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas (1989:391-392). Balthasar refers to the work, ‘The Flowing Light of the Godhead’ by Mechthild of Magdeburg (dates 1207-1294), and he interprets her visionary experience as follows:
“… the pure Christian experience of God as the endlessly flowing, inexhaustible fountain…. The flowing of God is for Mechthild both being in itself and out of itself, glory and humility, riches and poverty, for it is ‘the burning God in his longing’ who goes out of himself into the ‘God-alienated’ and awakens the longing of the soul…”
While collaborating on writing testimonies of such illuminating, heavenly experiences, the woman visionary and the priest formed close friendships. Nevertheless, each continued to lead a chaste life in imitation of Christ Jesus. Like the Cathars, or the desert fathers in earlier Christian centuries, women mystics practiced strict fasting and with deprivations, and often suffered prolonged illnesses. When able, they offered charity to others, caring for the sick like lepers. Some communities sought support from religious orders like the Dominicans who, while scholarly, also did pastoral work among the masses. Unfortunately, later Dominicans and Franciscans helped the papacy hunt down heretics during the dreadful inquisitions.
The Christocentric theme evoked passionate feelings among pious women for Jesus’ human sufferings; They reverenced the Lord’s wounds, and particularly his ‘holy blood.’ Note that, unlike the Cathars, who denied Christ’s crucifixion, the pious women mystics revered Christ’s physical sufferings. In many ways this reverence anticipated the sufferings of millions in the mid-14th century who died of the plague.
In the Middle Ages mythology grew up around the container known as the Holy Grail, which held the preserved Christ’s blood. Wikipedia notes people infused it with the mythic and miraculous power to provide eternal youth and an infinite abundance of sustenance. In the literary romances of those times, as in the 13th century German Parsifal, and the English tales of the Knights of King Arthur, the knight constantly sought for the Holy Grail. Unlike adulterous Lancelot, the chaste Galahad succeeded in finding the Grail.
Flemish Beguine, Hadewijch of Antwerp, who died 1260, wrote poetry in old Flemish vernacular. She imagined the soul, not like the ‘Bride’ allegorized in the Song of Songs, but as a fearless knight riding alone, hungered and thirsty, jousting and dueling at times, “her own elaborate and literary framework for the achievement of divine love.” (Madigan 2015: 424-5)
VIII. Prejudicial views of women, the question of erotic forms in ‘bodily-mysticism’
Heer (1961:322) writes that St. Thomas Aquinas’ ethical system pertained only to men, quoting the philosopher as having said, ‘Men have to make use of a necessary object, woman, needed to preserve the species or to provide food and drink.”
Grace Jantzen critiques the Christian schools of philosophy and theology that prevailed in the 13th century, which excluded women from the church hierarchy. In ‘Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism’ (1995), she takes up the philosophy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, whose writings considerably influenced St. Thomas and other medieval theologians. From her readings of Dionysius, she argues he constructed an ideal model for the hierarchical structure of the church, consisting of bishops, priests and deacons (all male) and based on angelology. In The Celestial Hierarchy,Dionysius listed various angelic beings such as thrones, cherubim, seraphim, archangels, principalities, which he divided into three main groups. She quotes Dionysius’ thoughts upon the degrees of sanctity accorded priestly roles, as follows.
“The holy sacraments bring about purification, illumination and perfection. The deacons form the order which purifies. The priests constitute the order which gives illumination. And the hierarchs, living in conformity with God, make up the order which perfects …. Our hierarchy is harmoniously divided into orders in accordance with divine revelation… the same sequence as the hierarchies in heaven.”( Jantzen1995:98)
Elsewhere in her paper Jantzen refers to Aristotle’s prejudiced view of women. Writing about Aristotle’s views on biology, she says, “Women were misbegotten males, and were inferior both intellectually and morally.” (1995:107). In the Middle Ages it was believed that women lacked capacity for reason or understanding abstractions in logical argument. But, how could human priests imitate angels? Jesus spoke of souls in the next life as neither male nor female, but like the genderless angels in heaven.
Jantzen notes two channels of higher thought in the Middle Ages, an intellectual mysticism influenced by Dionysius, and “an affective strand,” non-Dionysian, incorporating a strong element of love, especially of Christ. But only men engaged in both. She proposes to look later at the ‘affective strand,’“a study of female alternatives, the highly charged erotic and bodily-based mysticism which males from that time to this often found disturbing and threatening..” (I do not have copies of Jantzen’s selection of such cases.)
As an example of bodily-mysticism, Wikipedia notes that Hildegard of Bingen wrote erotic-like adoration of the Virgin Mary, but here, as quoted, she used metaphors from nature. “Your flesh has known delight; like the grasslands touched by dew and immersed in its freshness. So it was with you, O mother of all joy.”
IX. Modern Depth Psychology: Born Again through Bodily-Mysticism
I think of the visionary women of the high Middle Ages as ‘bodily-minded’ in their imaginative experiences, because they were grasping for some inkling of Christ’s own Resurrection in the Spirit.
Recently, while recovering from the painful ordeal of cataract surgery, I had as authentic a visionary experience as I have known. It seemed to me that I (now an aging person) underwent the experience of a newborn; intense emotions arose within me that produced an exquisitely ‘sensuous experience.’ Dwelling in some over-lighted space I felt myself eagerly reaching out to touch parts of my mother’s body. I was in a state of Love for her who had given me birth. I loved her totally! I delighted in this new experience of being alive! But most vividly, physically, now I could reach out and touch with my own fingers parts of the upper body of this person who had given me birth. Where did this kind of experience come from? Suggestively, I returned to the writings of Stanislav Grof about altered states of consciousness whose ideas I had been exposed to when working in the psychiatric field.
Stanislav Grof, a Freudian trained psychoanalyst-psychiatrist, experimented in the 1960’s with supporting his patients through LSD-induced changes in consciousness. In his book, Realms of Human Unconscious (1976), he leads the reader to the ultimate stage that gives rise to the ‘Transpersonal,’ other realms of the spirit – once the adult-patient completed the ‘Perinatal Stage’ of re-living birth. Regarding ‘dual Unity” (178-179), he entitles this, “Ego Transcendence in Interpersonal Relationships and the Experience of Dual Unity.” He writes, “Typical of this category are the symbiotic union between mother and child ….dual unity accompanied by profound feelings of love and of the sacredness of the relationship.” (1976:178-179)
He describes a variety of Transpersonal categories, for instance, “Experiences of Encounters with Various Deities,” visions of gods the patient could identify, but sometimes others unknown to them culturally. Grof writes that subjects who encountered these blissful deities felt powerful emotional reactions he characterizes as “ecstatic rapture and divine bliss.”(Grof 1976:199-200) Consequently, we have a psychiatrist who experimented with LSD induced hallucinatory experiences and was able to authenticate details reported by the visionary experience, confirming that parapsychological explorations can be marvellously healing and liberating of the psyche and the spirit.
We might suppose the Medieval Cathars were not able to complete the ‘Perinatal Stage’ and reach beyond confronting their mortality. As Grof says, the person feels stuck inside the birth canal and unable to get out; It generates a no-exit feeling that one is going to die in this place.
Cathars voluntarily adapted to severe restrictions in life, especially Perfects who adopted lived with utmost simplicity, often working as weavers. They rigorously observed other dietary restrictions, and avoided consuming dairy and meat which they associated with animal sexual reproduction. Perfects practiced chasteness and never married. Cathar ‘believers,’ could marry but led ascetic lives. The third grouping, the ‘listeners,’ attended gatherings to learn more about Cathar teachings. When interrogated during inquisitions, they never swore allegiance to the Church, believing ‘swearing’ by heaven, earth, or oaths’ was forbidden by Jesus in Matthew 5:35. They accepted condemnation by church and state and went to their executions with impressive dignity and without expecting rescue.
During the Albigensian Crusade against Cathars in Languedoc, crusaders participated eagerly in the campaign. Many hoped to receive papal indulgences, or absolution of their sins, for killing these religious heretics. Crusaders indiscriminately slew Cathars and Catholics. One commander reportedly said, “God will know his own.” It is no wonder that the Cathars, expelled initially from Christian Byzantium, had nowhere to go once the Roman Catholic Church made them religious scapegoats. Like the early Christian martyrs, they could only go to their death (no-exit finality in the Perinatal experience).
X. Church Theological Inventiveness: Philosophy to the Rescue
The Church persevered during the high Middle Ages, aiming to develop philosophical exactitude that would justify theological mysteries with logic. Diarmaid MacCulloch in Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years (2009:393-395) outlines the Catholic Church’s approval of the doctrine of Mary’s assumption into heaven at her death (like Elijah and Jesus). In the mid-12th century, a German nun, Elizabeth of Schonau, had a vision of Mary’s physical being taken up to heaven. The account was recorded by her clerical brother and read widely. As popular belief it became the cult of the Assumption of Mary, and served that era of church-building, Notre Dame of Paris the leading architectural creation. MacCulloch explains, if a church possessed no saintly relics, by dedicating the building to Our Lady this brought blessings and graces.
Yet what of the doctrine of Mary’s own ‘Immaculate Conception’? The 11th-century Gregorian reform, saw the papacy embrace the doctrine, believing it strengthened the church’s efforts to impose celibacy on priests and monks. But MacCulloch observes this doctrine of “ever-Virgin Mary’ was problematic for the Catholic Church, at least as it related to the Cathar dualist belief that Mary existed only in Spirit-form. The Catholics argued that God could sanctify created and fleshly things, as much as things of the Spirit.
MacCulloch (2009:406) explains how later discussions at Pope Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council of bishops, attempts were made to resolve such contradictions involving Mary’s physical and spiritual sanctity. They also sought to affirm the ‘Transubstantiation’ of the Eucharistic bread and wine, officially decreeing consecration rendered them divine substances.
Drawing from Aristotelean definitions (as used by St. Thomas Aquinas), they considered the distinctions between ‘Substance’ and ‘Accident.’ In the example of a sheep, when it dies, its substance is released, but accidents remain, e.g. its size, woolliness, etc. as MacCulloch writes:
“So it is with transformation from bread into wine into the divine body and blood. Breadness and wineness have gone in substance, but something more, by divine providence, has happened: divine corporal substance has replaced them. Accidents of breadness and wineness remain … mere accidents.” (2009:406)
Significantly, early in the 13th century, a Belgian nun, Juliana received a vision of Christ. He wanted her to establish a new feast focused on the Eucharist. Dominicans subscribed to the substance of Juliana’s vision, and in 1264, Pope Urban IV announced the feast of Corpus Christ ‘the body of Christ’ – a feast still observed on the Thursday closest to the Last Supper. (MacCulloch, 2009:407).
XI. Balthasar on St. Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophical Theology
Balthasar reflects upon St. Thomas’ continuing importance in The Glory of the Lord, A Theological Aesthetics (1989:393-407). Reading Balthasar’s thoughts, I understood better how St. Thomas’s philosophically-developed theology reached upwards to the highest definitions he could give to speaking of the Godhead, Who is so far above us.
Balthasar emphasizes that to St. Thomas, the human has to realize that the Godhead is essentially unknowable, “the Wholly Other.” This idea derived from the 5th century, CE, mystical thought of the Pseudo-Dionysius who conceived of the ‘negative’ view of the Godhead. Logically God is the final cause, and theology needs to keep on reiterating that, in this respect, the Godhead is essentially and absolutely unknowable.
Here we find Balthasar’s elucidation of the language of St Thomas in formulating Metaphysical Truths about the Godhead – so far as any human could ever conceive of Divine Reality in relation to ourselves. St. Thomas confines the idea of ‘being,’ to us humans, which is not what can be said of God.
“Thomas sees esse [is, as in Yahweh’s “I Am.”] as the perfection of all reality… supreme ‘likeness of goodness,’ and so God can no longer be regarded as the being of things, except that he is their exemplary and final cause… In a radical way God is placed over and above all cosmic being …. The Wholly Other. We can know that God is, but not what he is …. our knowledge is surpassed and negated in a greater and definitive unknowing … The more he is recognized to be remote from everything that emerges as effects … he is known through negation. …”
Balthasar (1989:394) quotes from St. Thomas below, regarding the enlightenment of the mind in contemplating God’s Higher Light. We think that, intuitively St. Thomas anticipated his vision of God at last, in 1274 in the chapel :
“In this progress of knowledge the human mind is usually most helped if its natural intelligence is strengthened by a new light: the light of faith and the gift of wisdom and understanding, by which the mind is elevated above itself in contemplation, in so far as it recognizes that God lies above and beyond everything that it can know by nature. One may say it is reflected back on itself through the superior light, here quoting Gen. 32:31, ‘When the eye of the soul turns towards God, it is thrown back by the lightning flash of the Infinite.”
Talking about the sanctity of Creation, Balthasar further says: (1989:399-400).
St. Thomas took from Boethius (dates) the notion that God in his absolute beauty conceived the world’s beauty in his mind…. God as the sun of goodness sends out rays of light in the creation of the world, quoting the Psalmist, ‘When thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things’…. When God’s hand was opened with the key of love, creatures came forth.”
This language inspired me to remember a personal vision that suggested God’s Graces pour down upon us, even if we do not know clearly in our own minds what this is all about.
XII. Seeing God’s Hand over the Great Amazon
In the winter of 1986, I was a passenger on a cruise ship sailing south from the Caribbean to Belem, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River. We sailed in this great white, ocean-going ship through the magnificent Amazonian waters towards Manaos, in the Amazon Basin.
One evening, where the river opened up to a broad vista, I took out a gift I had brought to offer to this wonder of nature. It was some holy water from the Fatima shrine in Portugal. When the other passengers were at supper, I went onto the deck, and flung the few drops of the Fatima water into the Amazon. Suddenly, the sky filled with images of rows and rows of people standing together. At the time I wondered if they were the spirits of many who had drowned in the Amazon. Perhaps the holy water from Fatima woke them. Later, I thought they looked like the ‘Orans’ depicted in early Christian art, ‘the praying ones.’ They stared at me with great concentration, as though to prepare me for what was to happen next.
Then, the vaulted crown of the sky ignited. A celestial vision emerged. It was a gigantic Hand extending a giant chalice towards me. (Was it like the communion cup in the Anglican Church’s Eucharist?) These images dissipated as a rainbow filled the sky.
What that vision meant in its totality, I still do not know. I suppose that when a Divine Presence appears it does so in the language of symbols with which we recognize, even if we can’t interpret them.
In the end, what else do I think about these things? Firstly, knowingly or unknowingly, we are all in God’s hands, and most often the heavenly beings communicate with cosmic symbols. Secondly, as for Eckhart’s thought that the soul is concealed in a spiritual organ that occasionally ignites, I ask; What could one’s own soul be pushing us to know if not what Eckhart calls the “Goodness, that is of God?” Whenever we humans appreciate the wonders of nature, we cannot help but remember that this Divine Creation comes from God. For God declared, at the very beginnings, His own thought that His newly created world was “Good.” (Gen. 1:25, 30)
Bibliographic Sources
Realm of Metaphysics In Antiquity, Translated by McNeil, Louth, Saward, Williams and Davies. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.
Stanislav Grof, M.D., Realms of The Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc, 1976.
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, Europe 1100-1350, Translated from the German by Janet Sondheimer, New York: A Mentor Book from New American Library, 1961.
Grace Jantzen, Power, ‘Dionysius and the hierarchy of mysticism,’ Gender and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge University Press, 1995: 94-109.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years, New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Kevin Madigan, Medieval Christianity, A New History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.
Sean Martin, The Cathars, The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.
David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist, The Life and Thought of Simone Weil, New York, London, Toronto, Poseidon Press,1990
Plato (d. 347 BCE), Dialogues of Plato: Symposium, The Pocket Library edition..
Historical Visions 