Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast,Footnote ¹ Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336,Footnote ² a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,”Footnote ³ as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).

The broadening out of her concern with the body in particular to what she calls “the paradox of matter itself” in general has found book-length expression in her Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond Footnote ⁴ and now again, more broadly still, in the book under review: Christian Materiality: An Essay in Religion in Late Medieval Europe. In comparison with The Resurrection of the Body, and as its full title suggests, Wonderful Blood was a somewhat more tightly focused book—in its starting point at least, if not in the wider sweep with which it culminates. It is so, that is to say, in the specific topic it addresses (the Wilsnack blood cult in particular and the upwelling in the later Middle Ages of “blood piety” in general), in the time frame that serves to delimit it (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and in the geographic area on which it dwells (north Germany in particular). Although, and as we shall see, it is broader and more ecumenical in its reach, Christian Materiality, which began as three lectures delivered in 2007 at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is in many ways a companion piece to that earlier book. It probes many of the same neuralgic points in late-medieval piety; it dwells on many of the same themes, discusses many of the same authors and even uses some of the same pictorial illustrations. So far as the big picture is concerned, and as Professor Bynum herself tells us, what in both books she has been concerned to explain

So far as Christian Materiality itself is concerned, the evidentiary base on which she grounds the attempt at explanation is both arresting and encompassing. Wonderful Blood had concentrated on blood relics, blood imagery, and related phenomena: consecrated wafers that began to ooze the blood of Christ, pilgrimage sites that claimed to possess relics of Christ's blood from the Holy Land, vials of such blood prone to periodic liquefaction, images of the Man of Sorrows foregrounding the five wounds from which, even in death, rivulets of blood were depicted as gushing, the dramatic proliferation of devotion to those five wounds, theoretical disquisitions, devotional art, literature and poetry that “seem awash in blood,” and so on. To all of these Christian Materiality appends by way of addition an imaginative array of holy body parts and saintly fragments, ranging from the milk-teeth or foreskin of the baby Jesus, fragments from the crown of thorns, a gruesome mélange of bits and pieces of the saintly deceased and “contact relics” such as flowers, “holy earth,” or bits of cloth that had touched the bodies of saints or their tombs, all the way to the “transformation miracles” that enjoyed such a vogue during the later-medieval centuries—the wine in the chalice that was seen to turn literally into blood at the moment of consecration, the images of the Virgin that began to lactate, the sacred sculptures and wall-paintings that suddenly moved and came to life. What is drawn into consideration, in effect, is a disturbing and wildly proliferating array of phenomena that we ourselves tend to find quite bizarre and that makes the current baroque blitz of vampire, “alien,” and “living dead” films and television shows seem, in comparison, almost reassuringly tame.

Despite the worrying imbalance in the amount of surviving evidence underpinning what we know about early medieval religiosity and its later-medieval counterpart, so striking is all of this that Bynum does not hesitate to affirm that “matter was a more insistent and more problematic locus of the sacred in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries than in the early-medieval period” (19). And that leads her to push back against the common temptation to contrast an externalistic early medieval religiosity characterized as “credulous, mechanistic, and materialistic” with the increasing interiority of its later-medieval counterpart, marked as it was by a preoccupation with personal intention and inner discipline and by a sense that in the profounder reaches of the soul there exists an ineluctable orientation to the divine, an “eternal hunger,” as Jan van Ruysbroeck described it, “that shall never be appeased.”Footnote ⁶ In making that claim, she is not so much calling into question the new, later-medieval “stress in spirituality on interior response free from any necessity to conform that response to outer gesture or speech” as attempting to redress the balance by insisting that that was but “one pole of a paradox whose other pole was an increasing sense that the sacral is manifested and conveyed in matter.” It is with this latter pole and not the former that she is concerned in Christian Materiality.

In pursuing that concern and attempting to decode or tease out the meaning and significance of the bewilderingly alien phenomena she must perforce address, Bynum demonstrates yet again the admirable determination so evident in her previous books: namely, the firm rejection of the psychological reductionism and incomprehending condescension that such phenomena so often evoke from us as moderns and, beyond that, the commitment to letting “individual voices be individual. . .and the past be different.”Footnote ⁷ In the effort to pinpoint and come to terms with what precisely those voices may have been saying, she invokes and explores a rich array of perspectives drawn not only from history in general but also from art history and the history of philosophy and theology, as well as from the social sciences and the study of comparative religion.

Some of these perspectives, I should confess, strike me as being more to her purpose than others. I found richly and helpfully suggestive her use, for example, of insights from such art historians as Hans Belting and Herbert Kessler, who have dwelt intriguingly on the medieval conflation of the holy representation with the numinous thing itself, as also on the degree to which medieval images rather than being forthrightly mimetic in their representation appear to announce their own “overt materiality” (53). Less helpful, or so I would judge, is her rather oblique suggestion that the emphasis on the absolute power of God, so prominent in late-medieval philosophy and theology, somehow served to foster or at least sustain the extraordinary contemporary proliferation of miracles and wonders on which she wishes to throw light. It is true that an older generation of historians—people like Carl Feckes, Erwin Iserloh, the early Gordon Leff, perhaps also Werner Dettloff—by dwelling disproportionately on the absolute wing of the absolute/ordained dyad (I refer here to the potentia dei absoluta/ordinata [absolute and ordained power of God] distinction), did indeed emphasize the presently active nature of God's absolute power and viewed it as possessing an ever-present potential for cutting across, running counter to, or even abrogating the order—natural, moral, salvational—currently established de potentia ordinata (by ordained power). But that was far from being the view of Heiko Oberman (whom Bynum cites approvingly), and few scholars today would be tempted to sympathize with it. We now know the distinction in question to have been understood right from the start in differing ways—here, too, complexity remains complex. In the “classic” version of that distinction, God's absolute power bore no relation at all to theorizing about miracles. It was understood instead in strictly hypothetical terms as denoting God's power taken simply in the abstract, his ability, that is, to do many things that he does not in fact choose to do—theoretical divine capacity, in effect, rather than actual divine volition.Footnote ⁸

That duly noted, it should also be observed that as Bynum pushes on with her painstaking analysis, she is careful to disabuse us of any casual assumption that accounts of the transformative antics and miraculous powers of all this holy stuff were necessarily (or even characteristically) the product of a species of unresistant and unreflective credulity found only at the “popular” level. Doubt, skepticism, uneasy reservations, and anxious ambivalence were not uncommon at practically every level of society. If the bishop of Havelberg, the local ordinary, proved to be a staunch defender of the authenticity of the Wilsnack cult of the bleeding hosts, Nicholas of Cusa, in the course of the great legatine reforming mission which took him in 1450–1452 across an itinerary of some 2,800 miles from Rome all the way up to the North Sea coast of the Netherlands and back, sought, though without success, to suppress it outright. There was nothing unusual about that. The ecclesiastical authorities were prone to issuing warnings to the effect that the veneration of matter that was not truly holy was nothing less than idolatry. And they sometimes went to great lengths in the effort to find and examine the sort of evidence (documentary or otherwise) that they viewed as sufficient to authenticate or disprove a transformational miracle. Skeptical though he was about the bleeding hosts at Wilsnack, Nicholas of Cusa was himself moved to approve the pilgrimage to the allegedly incorruptible miracle hosts at Andechs. A half century earlier, in his widely disseminated Tractatus de reformatione ecclesiae (Treatise Concerning the Reformation of the Church), Pierre d'Ailly, a staunch Ockhamist possessed of an intellectual temperament that inclined toward the empirical, had deplored the contemporary multiplication of saints, feast-days, images, and devotional novelties.Footnote ⁹ And yet he, too, had proved confidently willing (having satisfied himself via eminently down-to-earth investigatory efforts stretching across two years) to confirm as “choses sacrées, sainctes et vrayes” (sacred things, holy and true) the authenticity of two characteristically late-medieval miracles of the bleeding-host variety around which popular cults had grown up in his own diocese of Cambrai.Footnote ¹⁰

Scrupulous caution and anxious skepticism, moreover, were not limited to those burdened with official ecclesiastical responsibilities. The University of Prague became embroiled in the protracted controversy that dogged the Wilsnack cult, and if ambivalence of the sort betrayed by Nicholas of Cusa toward the great vogue of blood piety and the proliferation of holy matter was fairly widespread among the clerical and intellectual elites, it was also to be found “at every cultural level in the later Middle Ages” (224). Ordinary people proved themselves to be perfectly capable of dismissing allegedly holy matter as nothing more than “dead stones and rotten sticks” (122) and, as their own accounts reveal, pilgrims themselves were perfectly willing to give the cold shoulder to devotional practices that smacked to them of fraudulence. Bawdy badges, even—modeled on the badges pilgrims wore—have been found that were clearly designed to make a mockery of the popular holy-wounds piety; others were intended to deride pilgrim hypocrisy by depicting nuns and priests as wandering genitalia. As the material focus of late-medieval piety intensified, moreover, so, too, it seems, did outright rejection of images, relics, and so-called Dauerwunder (i.e., marvels marked by temporal endurance, such as transformed eucharistic hosts that persisted across time as such), leading even to instances of image-hating and image-bashing. From the late eleventh century onwards, indeed, the inclination to outright iconoclasm increased among groups that had come to dwell in the border-marches of heterodoxy, and that inclination was to reach its peak later on during the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth century Age of Reformation.

Resonating, however, to the view that “iconoclasm is always an acknowledgement of the power of the image,”Footnote ¹¹ Bynum notes that “the very iconoclasts who denied images” and “smashed statues in order to show they were not alive” also “hacked them to pieces as if they were living enemies” (240, 271). The emotions at work seem to have been profoundly ambivalent—contempt, certainly, and hatred too, but perhaps also a measure of fear. And that observation points forward to the conclusions she draws in some of the most fascinating pages of her book.

In its emphasis on the sacraments as the indispensable vehicles of divine grace and its deployment in devotional practice of “sacramentals”—objects that have come through ritual blessing to be in some sense sacred (medals, crucifixes, holy water, rosary beads, palms, holy pictures, and the like)—the Catholic tradition has always seen the power of God as susceptible somehow of being channeled through matter such as bread, wine, salt, oil, human gesture, and human touch. But in the case of images it has tended to portray them as but teaching aids or as aids to excite devotion, serving to direct attention beyond themselves and toward the divine rather than actually “containing” it. The trouble, however, is that even the ecclesiastics who in the later Middle Ages gave voice to the latter point of view (which went back to Gregory the Great himself) frequently betrayed in so doing a measure of ambivalence. They did so in their attitude not only toward images, relics, and other types of holy matter but also toward those instances of dynamic material transformation that were in their day so rapidly multiplying. They seem, that is to say, to have been unable, willy-nilly, to avoid attributing some sort of spiritual agency or potency to the holy materials themselves. In this connection, it may be pertinent to refer to the parallel constituted by the perhaps rival “royal religion” of the day, the cult of sacrality attaching especially to the French and English kings and finding popular and dramatic expression in the exercise of the royal touch to cure victims suffering from scrofula-related diseases. That practice, ecclesiastical misgivings notwithstanding, appears to have gained in intensity during the late-medieval and early-modern centuries, coming to something of a peak in the seventeenth when Charles II of England was so assiduous in his touching for “the king's evil” as to have treated an average no less than twelve sufferers a day, each and every day of his entire twenty-five-year reign. In the wake of the Gregorian reform, with its attempt to put a definite end to the era of kings and emperor-pontiffs, the ecclesiastical authorities had understandably sought to downplay the “royal miracle” or, failing that, to explain it away as the outcome of the clerical anointing of kings—and, later on, to diminish even the significance of the latter by denying it its former status as a sacrament and, interestingly, by downgrading also its material components. Thus kings, unlike bishops, were no longer to be anointed on the head but on other, less important, parts of the body, and were no longer to be anointed with chrism but with another, less noble, oil. Significant, too, is the fact that these somewhat condescending ecclesiastical efforts did not meet with much success. In the fourteenth century, Charles V of France, a fervent believer in royal sacrality, wore a cap throughout his life to protect from profane touch the trace of sanctifying oil on his head where he had been anointed. And in England the royal cult continued the dissemination of its own version of “contact relics” in the form of the blessed “cramp rings” (medicinal rings) distributed by the king and generally believed to possess their own curative powers by virtue, according at least to Sir John Fortescue, of the royal touch.Footnote ¹²

Here, in the archaic form of piety associated with the royal cult, as in mainstream (and more unambiguously Christian) piety, holy matter, rather than simply gesturing beyond itself to the divine, was the locus, it seems, of its own indwelling, pulsating sacrality. This point Bynum presses home persuasively, with great insistence and a wealth of illustrative evidence. Again and again, when speaking of the “wonder-producing, God-filled matter” (164) that loomed so large in late-medieval piety, whether images or relics (the two tended often to be conflated), she draws attention to the degree to which they were seen, not simply as gesturing beyond themselves, not as, or “not only as analogies to, but also as [actual] disclosures of the divine” (44). As with sacramentals (and as also, we may add, with the parallel appurtenances of the royal cult), the matter involved was itself seen to be central. In effect, the holy was somehow felt to be “instantiated in matter” (65, 154). In addition to (or rather than) pointing beyond themselves to the holy, images and relics were somehow felt to embody it and to disclose the sacred in their very natural substance. Some sort of independent “manifest power” (28) was felt to dwell in the very matter of the holy object, which was seen itself to possess a species of autonomous agency. That being the case, such objects were treated as nothing less than “the locus of the divine” (285), prone in the context of the transformation miracles of the day to being the numinous site of dynamic “eruptions of the sacred” (110). Naturally, such notions and attitudes did not sit well with the theologians of the schools. Indeed, they maneuvered mightily in the effort to sidestep some of the threatening implications that might follow from “the idea that the holy is instantiated in matter” (65, 154). But given their own profound ambivalence on the issue, they proved in the end to be incapable of dismissing altogether that very idea.

In this, and at the more theoretical level, they were not helped by the fact that there was no more of a philosophical consensus in the Middle Ages about the nature of matter than there had been in pre-Christian antiquity. Even after the reception of Aristotle was completed in the thirteenth century, his own (sometimes baffling) handling of the subject did not necessarily succeed in carrying the day. Older ideas maintained their vitality and appeal and some of them were suggestive or supportive of the view that matter could well be possessed of a degree of autonomy and of some sort of agency of its own. Writing in his Etymologies (something of a medieval best-seller) at the very beginning of the Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville had proclaimed that “materia [matter] is named for mater [mother],” thereby implying that “matter is, in its essence, maternal—that is, fertile and capable of becoming” (231). Similarly maternal in implication is Plato's description in the Timaeus of the mysterious “Receptacle”—as it were, the womb of all becoming—filled with characterless and shape-shifting elements of matter and exhibiting a certain resistance to the imposition of Form (§§ 50D–51B). And that dialogue, in Chalcidius's Latin version, was studied intensively at Chartres and Paris during the twelfth century. Ovid's Metamorphoses, moreover, with its Hesiod-like postulation of a primordial chaos, devoid itself of form but awash with teeming material elements, began at the same time to enjoy something of an enduring vogue.Footnote ¹³ Given such a jumble of competing ideas, it is hardly surprising that there should have been at the time a great deal of uncertainty about the very nature of matter, a lack of clarity about how God could relate to it all, a nervous sense, even, that “the stuff of the world” was not only labile and dynamic but also somehow alive. Nor is it surprising that, given their intense “materiality,” there should be something paradoxical about “the religious practices, attitudes, and theories of late-medieval Christians” (285). Or, as Bynum is led to conclude, that they should reflect “a struggle to live in and understand a world in which physical stuff announces and discloses a creator whose nature (eternal, immutable and unknowable) is the [very] opposite of matter” (285).

Nobody, I suspect, who has devoted much time and thought to things medieval can have emerged from that experience without having grown comfortable with complexity. But few, I cannot help feeling, are destined to have become as willing as is Bynum to rest in paradox, still less to elevate paradox (as she does) to the status of “a basic interpretive principle” (34). It is hard, after all, to know what exactly that might mean, and even on issues as challenging as the ones we have been discussing, where one can discern in the theorists of the day little more than “the tip of semiconscious assumptions” (217), the urge to push the interpretative envelope a bit further remains a truly powerful one. Certainly, it is one that I myself find hard to resist, if only fleetingly and by way of conclusion. The more so in that I have become accustomed, talk of faith seeking understanding and of a harmony between reason and revelation notwithstanding, to thinking of the medieval (and, therefore, the Western) intellectual tradition as an extraordinarily conflicted one. Despite the deployment of the most refined of scholastic distinctions in the effort to render compatible the incompatible and harmonious the dissonant, it is as if a great (if often occluded) geologic fault runs along the whole length of that tradition, marked by periodic outbursts of seismic activity resonating to the bumping, the grinding, the subduction far below of those great tectonic plates of disparate Greek and biblical provenance that long ago collided to form the unstable continent of our mentalité. And, acknowledging now the similarly conflicted nature of medieval piety, which Bynum's work has served to foreground, I am led to wonder whether these two manifestations of stress and strain may not, at least at the level of theory, be somehow connected.

When, in his commentary on Genesis, Philo of Alexandria set himself the task of stitching together the biblical account(s) of creation with the one set forth in Plato's Timaeus and to wed to Greek philosophical commitments the biblical notion of a transcendent and omnipotent creator, he, like the Greek Fathers who were to tread in his footsteps, faced a two-pronged challenge: First, that of harmonizing Plato's Forms, archetypes, or Ideas, eternally and independently subsisting entities upon which the intelligibility of the world depended with that profoundly alien notion of the divine; and second, that of harmonizing with that same notion of the divine Plato's implied, and equally incompatible, postulation of an eternally preexisting matter. The first prong of that challenge Philo dealt with handily by treating the Forms as ideas in the mind of God himself, as the archetypal patterns in accordance with which as creator he shaped an intelligible world. And that foundational doctrine of the divine ideas was destined to enjoy a millennial (if not untroubled) history down through the centuries all the way to Leibniz and beyond. The second prong of the challenge, however, Philo seems to have but dimly perceived at best, and the same proved to be true not only of the earliest Christian thinkers but also in some measure of the twelfth-century commentators on Plato's Timaeus, who floundered uneasily in their attempts to cope with the notion of eternally preexistent matter. It had been some time, in fact, before Christian apologists like Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian had concluded that that notion was incompatible with divine omnipotence and had embraced, accordingly, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

Having spent much time with William of Ockham and some of those nominalist followers of his who trod the via moderna (the modern way), I have long since come to the conclusion that the doctrine of the divine ideas represented a victory for delicate philosophical and theological diplomacy rather than the achievement of any truly stable intellectual synthesis. It simply had the effect, or so I believe, of transferring what had been an external disjunction between the biblical vision and Greek philosophical ideas into the divine psychology itself where it came to generate enormous tension and, with it, the protracted scholastic wrangle about the primacy of will or reason in God that was still capable in the eighteenth century of pitting a Pufendorf or Thomasius against a Leibniz or Christian Wolff. That said, and in light of the conflictedness and sheer “materiality” of late-medieval piety which Bynum has so skillfully evoked, I now begin to wonder whether the doctrine of creation out of nothing fared in the long run any better than Philo's location of Plato's Ideas in the conflicted mind of God. Creation ex nihilo—a sheer nonsense to the Greek philosophical mind—is an extremely difficult notion to come to terms with. To those accustomed to thinking in Isidorean, Platonic, or Ovidean terms, might not that “nothing” have come to denote the spectral presence of some sort of ur-matter hovering uncertainly at the very portals of Being? Lurking behind all these notions of creation, after all, with Genesis itself not altogether excluded, was the mythopoeic vision of creation as the emergence of cosmos from some sort of primordial chaos, a vision which, in its millennial longevity and global, cross-cultural pervasiveness, can claim to be something close to the common sense of humankind on that particular issue.Footnote ¹⁴

In his “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” the concluding section of the Leviathan on which political philosophers usually refrain from dwelling, Thomas Hobbes speaks pertinently and engagingly of those “old empty bottles of Gentilism, which the doctors of the Roman Church. . .have filled up again with the new wine of Christianity, that will not fail in time to break them.”Footnote ¹⁵ Break those bottles, of course, that new wine eventually did, but on this point as on others the most striking thing about the whole process is just how very long it took. The marked materiality of late-medieval piety constitutes, I would suggest, an emphatic testimony to that fact. That suggestion, of course, is no more than speculative in its grounding, and I am conscious of the fact that Caroline Bynum may herself be moved to take it with an appropriately astringent pinch of scholarly snuff. But that notwithstanding, all praise to the fine book that can give rise to speculations such as these.