In her book The Permeable Self, Barbara Newman—John Evans Professor of Latin, as well as English, Classics, and History at Northwestern University—explores the importance of coinherence in the medieval view of personhood. This is the concept that persons are profoundly interconnected, existing not in isolation but “in” each other. One illustration of this is the trope of exchanging hearts, whether between lovers or between female mystics and Christ.
The concept of our selves having such porous boundaries is perhaps an alien one to the contemporary American mind. But in this episode, Barbara discusses stories of heart transplant patients who—without knowing anything about the donors of their new hearts—began to take on personality traits of the donors. In a society where we often define personhood by its individuality and separateness, what do we make of instances such as these, which seem to bear out a medieval understanding of what it means to be human?
Barbara and Ryan discuss this and other aspects relating to how people in the Middle Ages conceived of personhood. They delve into saintly telepathy, the relationship between virginity and fertility, the social life of trees, and the tension between the public, performative persona and a private, interior sense of self. Together they ponder the different ways that people can be seen as existing coinherently with each other, both in the present and across the boundaries of time through genealogy.
Medievals believed that only sin prevented the permeability of minds, and thus there would be telepathy in heaven
There are many miracle stories about mind-reading in medieval hagiographies
Hildegard’s writings do not fit into the “genres” of her contemporaries, because “she used her visions as a way to provide a text on which to hang theological commentary. She exegeted her visions the way professional theologians exegeted Scripture.”
Hildegard was “almost a prophet of modern ecological awareness,” writing about how human beings and the natural environment influence each other, including the impact of human greed and sin
Hildegard was known both for her practical knowledge as a healer, as well as for supernatural healings; she failed to strictly separate the two
Hildegard composed the largest body of chant for whom we know the author; her music was written for her nuns to perform
The notion of a firm division between the sacred and the secular is a modern one
“I think this notion that the evil character is necessary to fulfill the quest of the chosen one [...] is such a profound insight, and I would say a theological insight. There are a lot of moments like that in medieval romance, where you cannot separate the sacred and the secular; and you often have what I call double coding, where there are two ways to read the same character performing the same action: one positive and one negative. And they don't cancel each other out; they co-exist.”
One example of double coding is the character of Lancelot, who is both an adulterer and traitor, as well as an example of courtly love and a Christ figure who frees captives trapped in the land of Gorre
Coinherence: the idea that humans are all profoundly interconnected, body and soul, rather than isolated individuals relating to each other solely on an external level
Coinherence as a possible explanation for original sin: Adam is not only the literal first man, but an archetype for all humankind; when he disobeys God, all of humanity is corrupted because we are “in” Adam
Similarly, Christ, the second Adam, could be explained as accomplishing redemption through coinherence
The word persona/“person” in medieval texts has its origins in theater, so many meanings behind the word have to do with public performance (i.e. priests, dignitaries, leaders)
A more private, interior sense of persona is exemplified in the dogma of the Trinity: three persons or selves in one divine being, who are nonetheless in each other and share the same divine nature
“If a person is someone who has this very interior sense of selfhood, but also is someone who is publicly performing a certain role, you get what I'd like to see as a dialectic of consciousness and performance. And that's what I think personhood is.”
Virginity and fertility are seen as interconnected, particularly in the Virgin Mary, who is “the cap of the arch where virginity and fertility meet,” and who both mothers and consecrated nuns were called to imitate
The image of an externalized heart, a relatively recent development in Christian iconography, had its origins in secular medieval troubadour poetry and romance narratives, with lovers exchanging hearts
The exchange of hearts starts appearing in the lives of the saints with Jesus giving his heart to female visionaries (i.e. Saint Catherine of Siena)
“Of course, what [the exchange of hearts] means spiritually is that she no longer has any will or desires of her own other than the desires of Christ. Her heart is Christ's heart; what she desires is what Christ desires. She is literally carrying out his work in her own body. [...] There are many more instances of this, but that's an extreme example of what coinherence looks like.”
In modern American society, we see the brain as containing the self rather than the heart
“In modern biomedical science, the brain becomes a kind of standard for the soul. So we use brain death as a criterion for the death of the body, whereas medievals would have said, it's the moment when the soul departs from the flesh that death occurs.”
There are many anecdotal stories of people who’ve had heart transplants and then taken on traits of the donor, without knowing who the donor was
“I see a genealogical chart as a kind of giant X where the ego—the person in the center—stands alone, but both into the past and into the future, it branches out endlessly. You can see that whole tree of lineage as a kind of coinherence, because something of every single one of my ancestors is in me, and something of me would be in every single one of my descendants.”
As research shows the ways that trees are interconnected and communicate with each other, the metaphor of the family tree can tell us more than we initially thought
Links
Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred
The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships
The Medieval Prophetess Who Used Her Visions to Criticize the Church
St. Hildegard of Bingen and Us
Know the Ways of the Lord: Illuminations from St. Hildegard
Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors