Barbara Newman: Beasts with Ravening Whelps

Barbara Newman

Some books can be judged by their covers, others by their titles. The American edition of Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages is subtitled ‘What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living’. At some point, the British publisher changed it to the anodyne ‘A Journey into the Medieval Mind’. Did they think the seven deadly sins sounded too depressing – or too ‘medieval’? On the contrary, Jones argues that this enduring framework for moral and spiritual analysis still has a great deal to offer. What he does for medieval psychology and ethics, Katherine Harvey does for health and medicine. She does not recommend that we go back to quarterly bloodletting or make ointments from cows’ dung, but she does show that, stereotypes aside, medieval people took hygiene seriously and anticipated our views on the importance of a balanced diet, regular exercise and what we would now call psychosomatic healing.

Jones begins his narrative with his own experience of the deadly sin of acedia. This is a lost concept but a ubiquitous malady: a compound of boredom, sloth, depression and despair. Ancient monks called it ‘the noonday demon’ because it struck hardest in the heat of the day, making them want to flee screaming from their cells. One popular theory of the sins defines them as forms of excessive or disordered love – of oneself (pride), of sex (lust), of food (gluttony) and so forth – but acedia is the love of nothing at all, or in Jones’s words, ‘falling out of love with life’. In the usual ranking it falls midway between the three deadliest sins, those of the spirit (pride, envy, anger) and the milder sins of the flesh (avarice, gluttony, lust). Yet unchecked acedia could also spur the deadliest sin of all. Suicide was the only sin that could never be forgiven because the sinner had deprived himself of any chance to repent. On Jones’s reading, Dante was suffering from acedia after the death of Beatrice, not to mention his exile from Florence, when he found himself ‘in a dark wood where the straight way was lost’. Acedia can be mere listlessness, taedium vitae, but it can also be pathological grief. Queen Juana the Mad of Castile and León organised a 400-mile burial cortège for her husband, halting en route to repeat the funeral rites every day. Though she was pregnant when he died, she merely paused the march to give birth, then carried on.

One of the odder moments in the long history of the sins came in the late 20th century, when they began to be redefined as virtues: pride as self-esteem, anger assertiveness, greed entrepreneurship, lust a healthy libido. In 2011 the Silicon Valley guru Reid Hoffman claimed that every social media platform exploits a different sin: ‘Tinder thrives on lust, Yelp on gluttony, LinkedIn on greed, Netflix on sloth, Twitter on anger, Facebook on envy and Instagram on pride.’ This was meant not as condemnation but as a guide to commercial success. Technology changes quickly, but the human psyche does not.

In medieval diagrams, the sins often figure as branches on a tree, each sprouting countless twigs, or as beasts with ravening whelps. As a diabolical kinship network each sin had sisters, brothers and children. Jones construes the seven deadly sins as a map of the mind, a kind of filing system for psychic impulses. The annual exercise of confession, mandated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, required all Christians to diagnose their sins of the past year. But while individual transgressions could be forgiven, one could never truly expunge the deadly sins, so they functioned as a guide to self-knowledge. When the system worked as it was meant to work, year after year, penitents learned to recognise their worst tendencies and replace them – or at least offset them – with their opposing virtues.

The lineage of deadly sins goes back to Evagrius Ponticus, a failed fourth-century politician who fled Constantinople after a sex scandal and ended his life as a desert monk. Jones describes Evagrius as conducting his ‘brain experiment’ while ‘standing naked and alone, up to his thighs in a freezing well of water’. By cataloguing every desire that troubled his peace, the ascetic realised that they fell into distinct categories. Pope Gregory the Great refined his system, conflating sadness with sloth and vainglory with pride, but adding the new sin of envy. Gregory’s seven have remained in place ever since, though there is nothing inevitable about the selection. Why not cruelty, for example, or falsehood? But, Jones argues, the mere act of classifying brings order into the chaos of mental life. The fact that the sins are negative categories is less discouraging than it may seem, since having concrete enemies to fight can be a spur to positive action.

Self-Help from the Middle Ages raises some provocative questions about historical figures. Was Thomas Aquinas truly a glutton, or was he so absorbed in thought that he ate whatever was set before him, without noticing how much? Did Catherine of Siena really think of her notorious (and fatal) anorexia as a ‘philosophy of wellness’? Could Bernard of Clairvaux, whose Sermons on the Song of Songs were the medieval playbook for divine eros, have become a predatory priest ‘in another life’? Apropos of avarice, Jones presents an extraordinary vignette. Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali from 1312 to 1337, was one of the richest people who ever lived. By exploiting gold mines and monopolising the salt trade in his territory, he amassed unimaginable wealth. Twelve thousand slaves, clad in silk and brocade, went before him scattering gold dust so that the roads would glisten beneath his feet. Does this make Musa an exemplum of avarice? Did it matter that he also invested in the judicial system, public works and splendid architecture?

Avarice does not embrace its opposite, voluntary poverty, nor does sexual abstinence constitute a form of lust. But gluttony is surprisingly double-edged. We may think of it as simply overeating, but the medieval period saw distinctions within the category, what Jones refers to as ‘fattening, fixating, fussing’. Daintiness or connoisseurship – the passion of the foodie – was thought to be every bit as sinful as chowing down on a double cheeseburger, because it evinced ‘a devotional attitude to food’ or obsession with a lesser good. Envy is another sin whose meaning has changed over time. Today we think of it as the desire to possess someone else’s goods or achievements, but medieval envy was a sin of malice, a desire that the other be deprived of those goods. And if we consider narcissism to be the ultimate form of pride, or self-obsession, for medieval writers the sin of Narcissus was quite different. He did not fall in love with his own reflection, but mistook that reflection for another. The essence of pride, beneath all the bluster and bravado, is ‘failing to see yourself for who you really are’. Humility is honest self-knowledge; pride is the lack of it.

One of the pleasures of Jones’s volume lies in his selective, often surprising interpretations of medieval art. For pride, he seeks out rare images of Lucifer before his fall, noticing the telltale signs of a ‘dangerous ego in the wild’. One soon-to-be-Satan smirks with a condescending smile; another turns towards God with pursed lips and a wagging finger, as if to give the Almighty a word of advice. Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, which document the life of Christ, also depict the bitter, spectral faces of the envious, conspicuously failing to rejoice in the sacred scenes before them. Connoisseurs of anger can consider six images of Judith beheading Holofernes, a figure of righteous indignation, ranked in order from the angriest to the calmest. And what to make of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights? Is it a playful, amorous paradise – life as it would have been if sin had never been invented? Or is it something more sinister? Jones sees apparently happy lovers ‘trying to isolate themselves in their own bubbles’ and draws a moral about the ‘violent nowness’ of lust: ‘Luxuria, in all its suspended desire, pays no respect to the passing of time or the duration of a human life. While lust wants you to rip the person you desire out of time, real love is historical.’

While Jones compares the confessor to a wise therapist, medieval writers often compared him to a physician. Fourth Lateran required patients to confess before receiving treatment, partly to save their souls in case they died, but also because healing the soul could make it easier to heal the body. Sin caused disease and a familiar medical axiom held that ‘when the cause ceases, so does the effect.’ William of Auvergne, a 13th-century bishop of Paris, likened the act of confession to vomiting: ‘Just as someone with an upset stomach, straining to expel what is harmful or unsuitable to it, distends his belly and opens his mouth wide to get rid of it’, the penitent too ‘strains and searches the belly of his heart to throw out and expel detestable and filthy vices and sins’. Unconfessed sins not only endangered their souls, but might make Christians physically sick.

Clerics and physicians had profound disagreements, especially when it came to asceticism. Saints’ lives and pastoral teaching heaped praise on celibacy, heroic fasting and vigils, while medics viewed all these practices as unhealthy. Doctors considered sex a form of excretion, and thought that semen, like urine and excess blood, needed to be regularly expelled for the body to flourish. Albert the Great believed that the reason women lived longer than men was that menstruation purged their superfluous blood, which an ancient taboo held to be toxic. Husbands were warned to avoid sleeping with their wives during their ‘flowers’ to minimise the risk of conceiving a sickly or disabled child. Since men lacked this natural remedy, regular phlebotomy (usually performed by barbers) was an important preventive health measure.

Harvey organises her discussion around what medical theorists called the six ‘non-naturals’, or factors external to the body: air, food and drink, movement and rest, sleep, excretion and retention, and the emotions. Then as now, mountain air was deemed to be healthy and gardens therapeutic. Sea air was, however, considered unwholesome. ‘Miasma’, a form of polluted air thought to be instrumental in spreading plague and other diseases, was a pervasive concern. Bathing was more common than we might think: in the late Middle Ages many cities invested in the construction of public baths. Physicians recommended daily exercise, especially walking, and good dental hygiene. Several recipes for tooth powders have come down to us, with ingredients including fennel seeds, mint and marjoram. Emotional balance also mattered: joy and music were good for body and soul, while grief and fear dried up the humours. A wildly unrealistic Welsh recipe collection from around 1400 identified saffron, one of the most expensive spices, as a way ‘to be happy always’ but warned against eating too much of it, lest ‘you die of happiness’.

Class was a greater divide than gender when it came to medieval ideas about health. Only the wealthiest could afford physicians, whose sensible health regimens were all written for noble patrons. Rich and poor were even thought to have different dietary needs. Wine (being expensive) was for the elite, ale or beer for the masses – though in the absence of an effective filtration system, either was safer than water. The wealthy feasted on fine wheat bread (the grain also used for the eucharistic host), while the poor baked theirs from barley, oats or rye. At sea, officers got white bread while ordinary seamen had to make do with dry biscuit. There was also a hierarchy of meats: chicken, veal, pheasant and venison furnished aristocratic tables, while Harvey claims that beef was ‘only fit for labourers’. But this sounds suspicious. Henry VII founded the elite Yeomen Warders, now called Beefeaters, to guard the Tower of London in 1485, and a daily ration of the rare meat was long considered one of the perks.

Different social classes fell prey to different kinds of sickness. Smiths, tanners, smelters and alchemists had the most dangerous jobs because of the toxic materials they used, while scribes risked losing their sight to eye diseases. In warfare, unprotected infantry were far more likely to die than heavily armoured knights. But from the Middle Ages all the way to the First World War, more troops lost their lives to illness than to combat. Then as now, the impoverished had a higher death rate in pandemics, while gout was a lifestyle disease of the rich. Even so the Black Death, thought to have killed anywhere from a third to half the population of Europe, took no regard of rank. The lack of any effective remedy did not preclude ingenious experimental treatments. Sweet smells, for example, were thought to hold miasma at bay. More expensive cures were also available. King Duarte of Portugal had a recipe that involved brewing a drink from pearls, coral, gold and camphor powdered into white wine, force-feeding it to a badger, then killing the animal and making a second powder from its organs, mixed with spices and unicorn horn. Finally one should drink this powder dissolved in vinegar. The unicorn horn (usually a narwhal horn), a panacea against poisons, could be worth ten times its weight in gold.

Life expectancy remained low, though not so low as commonly thought once infant mortality is taken into account. According to a rough estimate, only half of all babies born in medieval Europe survived to adulthood. Maternal mortality was also high: one study suggests that about 5 per cent of aristocratic English women died in childbirth. (Perhaps surprisingly, the rate may have been lower for working-class women, who married later and had fewer children.) The prevalence of infant death should not be taken to mean that medieval parents took little care of their offspring, as Philippe Ariès argued in 1960. Doctors, where they could be afforded, were regularly consulted and had a great deal to say about infant care. They strongly recommended maternal breastfeeding and some mothers adopted this as a form of birth control. Wet nurses were popular, however, because it was thought that sex soured breast milk and could harm the baby. Wet nurses were expected to abstain from intercourse. Sex was not the only anxiety for mothers employing these (generally poor) women, as they would pass their moral qualities to the infant along with their milk. The age of majority, whether for marriage or entrance into religious life, was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. Hard labour could begin much earlier. Skeletal evidence shows that teens and even children sometimes developed spinal and joint diseases that are now seen chiefly in the elderly.

For those who survived childhood, old age was not rare. But its desirability was open to question: the tenth-century abbot Ælfric of Eynsham wondered why so many people desired longevity, given the illness and pain it entailed. Hildegard of Bingen, who lived to be 81 despite chronic illness, never ceased to lament her many ailments. Pope Innocent III produced a vicious caricature of an old man,

easily provoked and hard to calm down. He will believe anything and question nothing. He is stingy and greedy, gloomy, querulous, quick to speak, slow to listen, though by no means slow to anger. He praises the good old days and hates the present, curses modern times, lauds the past, sighs and frets, falls into a stupor and gets sick.

The ars moriendi or ‘craft of dying’ became a popular literary genre in the late Middle Ages, a good death being necessary for the salvation of one’s soul. Although hospitals existed, they served mainly to house lepers and indigent patients. Most people died at home, yet death was a very public occasion. Bells rang to signal the procession of clergy bringing the eucharist to the dying. A remarkable drawing of the deathbed of Richard Whittington, ‘thrice Lord Mayor of London’, shows no fewer than eighteen bystanders crowding his chamber, including a priest, a doctor examining a flask of urine and various executors and bedesmen hired to pray for him. Medieval people learned to acknowledge their humoral complexions as well as their besetting sins, seeking to remedy both body and soul before it was too late.

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