Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child

Being Born

B e i n g B o r n 1 At the start of his Confessions, Augustine is more candid than most about the precariousness of life, peering into the abyssal depths of becoming from which anything at all arises. But his remarks about the amnesiac infant are meant to be instructive, generating further reflection on the mysterious origins and ends of life. For in facing up to the existential limits of the child, Augustine initiates a struggle to apprehend transcendent being: “You, O Lord my God, gave me my life and my body when I was born.”1 Memory having failed, the confessional subject has recourse to apostrophe and assertive belief. Naturalistic explanations give way to mysterious supernatural ones, issuing a theology that may explain away the problem. Substituting prayerful appeal for an impossible first-person account, Augustine exemplifies his faithful repose in divine knowledge and providential care. And yet that is precisely the form his ignorance takes, as he is compelled to recognize in his lack of self-recognition something bare and alien, betraying a marked anxiety about the ontogenetic situation of human dependency and derivation. The divine gift confirms that one is not the author of existence and so deprives the individual of resources he later takes for granted (agency, speech, memory), throwing him into existence. A creature who originally lacks so much must admit, as Augustine does, that the human cannot explain the gratuity of personal persistence: “true though my conclusions may be, I do not like to think of that period as part of the same life I now lead, because it is dim and forgotten and, in this sense, it is no different from the time I spent in mother’s womb.”2 The 2 BEING BORN provenance of the human is no less baffling for being given in advance, then. As Hildegard of Bingen wrote some centuries later, “Oh human, regard what you were when you were just a lump in your mother’s womb! You were mindless and powerless to bring yourself to life; but then you were given spirit and motion and sense, so that you might . . . come to fruitful deeds.”3 Prophetic appeals to divine creation conduct the inquiry in another register, but they must not be mistaken for something they are not. Generation is not easily rid of disquiet, even if humans eventually do exhibit spirit, motion, sense, reason. As we will see, such sentiments anticipate many later discussions of delayed animation and epigenesis, according to which it takes ample time and space for a creature to unfold, and in that respect already reckon with the temporality and topology of the human. Again, claims for inceptive intelligence or soul (a putative innate ontology) only restate the problem (a dynamic ontogeny) they are supposed to solve, and this is a crucial moment of recognition informing this book. From the start, there is something irrational and improper in place of the developing matter of the child; there is still the haunting and inhuman paradox of living to die or dying to live, expressed in Augustine’s antimetabolic turn of phrase, vitam mortalem, mortem vitalem. He does not hide his uncertainty about the barely living thing: he does not claim to know “at what time the infant begins to live in the womb.”4 Nor did later writers settle the issue. The methodological challenges of the topic are not to be underestimated , then, as suggested already by attempts to save appearances. There is no shortage of efforts to rationalize novelty; one almost requires a theodicy to cope. Like others who followed, Augustine assumes that, given enough time, the human embryo will be formed and endowed with body and soul, and he in fact bequeathed to medieval thought the idea of directed unfolding by seminal reasons.5 He is basically recapitulating an Aristotelian entelechy according to which, “when we are dealing with definite and ordered products of nature, we must not say that each is of a certain quality because it becomes so, rather that they become so and so because they are so and so, for the process of becoming attends upon being and is for the sake of being, not vice versa.”6 As Aristotle puts the matter elsewhere in more dogmatic terms, “the generation is for the sake of the substance and not this for the sake of the generation .”7 From this teleological vantage, an embryo is liable to be viewed [18.219.236.199] Project MUSE (2024-04...