Permeable Borders

I will forever be indebted to Barbara Newman for teaching me that the word "medieval" is not a pejorative. I had been culturally conditioned to think of it this way, having been educated at a time when rapid industrial and technological advances encouraged a blind faith in progress itself. As we eradicated smallpox and touched the moon, we easily labeled people of earlier times as primitive or benighted. And, in the case of the Middle Ages, more hysterically judgmental as well. Even now, invoking the Inquisition is a conversation stopper, a dismissal of an entire epoch of human history without much regard for its richness, complexity, and significance. A recent cartoon, on the election of Pope Benedict XVI, says it all: it depicts the new pope addressing a crowd with the words, "Let's party like it's 1299!"

I am fortunate to have encountered the medieval era through the good graces of a Benedictine, Miriam Schmitt, who invited me to prepare a paper for the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. She said, simply, "You're a poet; you'll like Mechthild of Magdeburg," not at all put off that I had never heard of her. I am so fortunate also that when I began the reading necessary for the project, I discovered Barbara Newman's work, and that of Caroline Walker Bynum, Peter Dronke, and Margaret Miles. They, along with the Benedictine men and women who honor the medieval monastics both in their scholarship and their way of life, opened up the Middle Ages for me, and got me excited about the medieval imagination. And how marvelously elastic that imagination was, especially compared to our own fearful rigidity. I can only imagine the pity that medieval thinkers would have for us, how pathetic they would find the routine condemnation as "satanic" of such bountifully creative works as The Wizard of Oz or the Harry Potter books. The fundamentalism of our age, and the underlying fear of the imagination itself as evil, would no doubt confound those who found in fabula and storytelling, as Barbara Newman puts it, "a safe space for the imaginative exploration of Christian faith" (49).

God and the Goddesses gives evidence that such a "safe space" was desperately needed at a time when the power of "heresy hunters" was on the rise. Can we dare to imagine such a haven now, when one political party in America claims that its opponents are not "people of faith?" Are imaginations formed by television and video games, by corporate-speak and psychobabble still capable of freely contending with all the subtleties of human experience? Contradiction troubles us, as it clearly did not trouble the medieval writers and thinkers Barbara Newman cites. Their eager embrace of such thorny concepts as a God who is three-in-one, a savior who is God yet human, born of a mother who is a virgin, allowed them to regard "paradox itself," Newman writes, "as a touchstone of revealed truth" (326). What's wrong with these people? we might ask, excusing our forebears by recalling that in the medieval era, the professions had not yet been fully established. In our own day, the values of the business world predominate, and we've learned that it's not "professional" to admit to doubt, to admit that there might be another way of seeing, or knowing, or doing. Paradox be damned; it takes too much time to sort it out, and time is money.

Accepting the values of the business world also means frowning on any notion of ecstasy, or of true, wide-ranging freedom. We need to know exactly where we stand, and to do that, we must polarize: you're either right or left, red or blue, straight or gay, male or female, us or them. When physics threatens our complacency, promoting notions of "uncertainty principles," or dimensions beyond our experience, we look to the Bible for certainties it cannot provide. The storytellers and visual artists who populate the pages of God and Goddesses offer us a refreshing change of perspective, and also a corrective. In Newman's view, the medieval mind perceived borders as permeable, whereas...