In this study of the theology of suffering Donald Mowbray alludes to recent work by Caroline Walker Bynum, Ellen M. Ross, and others, and he has much to contribute to the broad theme of suffering in later medieval culture. His own focus is resolute: this is a book on academic theology, and specifically the views of masters of theology who taught at Paris around 1230–1300, at a time when the works of Aristotle were being integrated into Western theology and the friars were taking their place as leading theologians. It draws on Sentence commentaries, quodlibetal disputations, disputed questions, and theological Summae. The names that recur are the Dominican theologians Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscans Alexander of Hales (and the summa falsely ascribed to him) and Bonaventure. Matthew of Aquasparta, Richard of Middleton, and Henry of Ghent also appear. For the most part this is a study of the major, widely influential theologians. What must be underscored is that Mowbray's book is at every point relevant to themes such as embodiment, gender, and heresy which lie at the heart of recent work on medieval religious culture. No less than Caroline Walker Bynum or Dyan Elliott, Mowbray turns to formal theology as a source for gaining insight into wider cultural issues, even if he is less explicit in making and developing the connections.
Chapter 1 examines ideas about pain and suffering, the importance of the non-dualist psychosomatic unit for an understanding of how both body and soul could suffer, and the relevance of all this to an understanding not only of Christ's suffering but more fundamentally of the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Christ. All the masters treated here assumed a body-soul composite, and all agreed that only the body could suffer pain properly speaking, but all were eager to explore the ways the psychosomatic unit allowed the soul also to suffer, whether through tristitia (sadness) or otherwise. In the case of Christ, the problems are more complex because the ordinary union of soul and body must be mapped onto the extraordinary union of divinity and humanity. One of the issues debated was whether Christ could experience pain in all parts of his soul; Bonaventure argued that he could, and that even while experiencing pain he could enjoy his intrinsic union with divinity he could suffer pain in the same part of his soul through its union with flesh. In all this, the masters were able to negotiate complex notions of human psychology and Christology only by developing a nuanced vocabulary for pain and exploring how specific forms of pain engaged the soul as well as the body.
Chapter 2 turns to interpretations of the Genesis narrative as a context for understanding gender: differences between men and women even before the fall were seen mainly in the light of those specifically female and male sufferings that ensued as punishment after the fall. Chapter 3 looks at ideas about voluntary penitential suffering, seen not as only as punitive but as restorative, a means for regaining lost order. Chapter 4 investigates the experience of children in limbo, and shows how the theologians dealt with the ambiguities of Augustine's notion that an unbaptized child suffers the pains of damnation but only to the slightest degree. Thirteenth-century masters might interpret that to mean they suffered the pain of loss (being deprived of the vision of God) but not the pain of bodily suffering—but this then led to questions about whether even the pain of loss could produce a kind of anguish that was analogous to bodily affliction. The issue had practical implications, especially when it came up in the quodlibetal disputations where issues were brought forward by the audience: most obviously, whether an unbaptized infant could be buried in consecrated ground.
The issue of how soul and body relate to each other becomes particularly crucial in the book's concluding chapters, which examine how the separated soul could be seen as suffering pain in hell and how the body in hell could suffer the pain of hellfire yet remain incorruptible. It would appear that material fire cannot afflict the immaterial disembodied soul (or, for that matter, an immaterial demon), and yet theologians felt obliged to find ways in which even the separated soul could feel pain. One explanation, endorsed by Thomas Aquinas, was that the soul recognizes the fire as constraining and thus harmful, which causes affliction even to the (temporarily) separated soul. Equally a conundrum was how the body could remain incorrupt while at the same time eternally burning—a paradox that seemed to require some kind of perverse perfection of the body enabling it to sustain hellfire without disintegrating into ash.
A clear leitmotif through the book is the emphasis on theological language. Near the beginning Mowbray proposes, “The hypothesis advanced here is that the masters developed an intricate language for pain which enabled them to understand the complexities of the human body.” Which is to say, they had vocabulary that sensitized them to the complex relations between body and soul, and even when their distinctions seem at first minute, the driving purpose behind them is to clarify this subtle relationship.
Ranging through a broad set of thematically related yet significantly different issues, this book is inevitably dense and demanding. There are some unclarities, for example in the explanation of different notions of how divinity and humanity are united in Christ (the exposition of the so-called Assumptus theory seems at odds with the evidence given in the notes). On the whole, however, the book is admirable not only as an introduction to this series of issues but for its reminder of the ways Scholastic theology entered into dialogue with the broader culture of the era.
