Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages by Brewer Keagan;

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages by Brewer Keagan;

Author:Brewer, Keagan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4387882
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


Dangerous marvels: the theological backlash

If theologians acted as emotional role models attempting to evoke wonder at the faith, then it is unsurprising that secular marvels sometimes faced criticism as potential distractions from faith and danger to religiosity. As such, many theological writers attempted to distance themselves from secular marvels by characterising them as the domain of the foolish and the credulous (or in some cases, heretics),100 when the Christian faithful should rightly have been viewing Christianity’s mirabilia/miracula – Jesus’s miracles, the Eucharist, relics, salvation, creation – as more fitting objects of wonder. What was at stake in investigating nature too closely was the destruction of the mysteries inherent in creation, which had the potential to diminish wonder towards its creator. This was especially important in a cultural milieu that placed emphasis on uniformity and orthodoxy. In such an intellectual climate, skepticism towards normative truths threatened to undermine the universality of the Catholic church.

While some indicated their skepticism towards individual marvels, as when Roger Bacon decried as foolish those who believed that magnets were magical, others expressed more wide-ranging rejections of marvels due to the potential lack of faith they engendered. This is exemplified by Bernard of Clairvaux who, in criticising the exuberance of church art, wrote of the dangers of churches decorated with Plinian monstrous races like the famous example at Vézelay, because this led churchgoers to: ‘spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them rather than in meditating on the law of God’.101 Writers, too, sometimes made apologetic statements justifying their inclusion of marvels, as has been noted above in Chapter 5 of Jacques de Vitry (‘it is no danger to believe these things, which are not contrary to faith and good morals’) and above in Chapter 3 of Gerald of Wales (‘digressions of this sort must be excused’).102 Such apologies suggest that paying heed to marvels was contrary to Christian morality. Moreover, some scribes who copied marvels texts appended warnings to their readers. One fifteenth-century manuscript of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia adds: ‘Entertainments create vices; may you not be led into vice by reading this book’.103 Marvels were dangerous to Christian morality, because to investigate nature was to investigate the divine, bring God under the auspices of human reason and thereby diminish wonder at him. Moreover, there was a high likelihood that errors would be held as truths by a reading of books like Gervase’s Otia, an attitude that curiously blends skepticism and censorship.

Exegetical writings likewise portray a correlation between foolishness and wonder, and sometimes a binary opposition between wondering at worldly matters and the more correct wonder at matters of faith. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), for example, established a binary opposition between marvels and saintliness in her description of St Disibod when she noted that the saint’s detractors called his miracles: ‘stupid, vain, erroneous, and marvelous’, but in truth the saint was someone who rightly: ‘relinquished in heart and mind every pomposity of this world’.104 Richard of St Victor, a contemporary of Hildegard’s,



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