Episode 51 Transcript
Ryan:
My guest today is Barbara Newman. Barbara is the John Evans Professor of Latin at Northwestern University. That doesn't come close to describing all of the hats that she wears as professor of English, classics and history at Northwestern.
Barbara works across multiple languages and disciplines. Her study in the past has included many books and translations. Some of my favorites, which are most relevant to the theme of this podcast, Genealogies of Modernity, are Medieval Crossover: Reading the Sacred Against the Secular, and her recent The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships, which came out with University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021.
Barbara, welcome to the podcast.
Barbara:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Ryan:
Barbara, when I was a kid, my favorite book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It was captivating for a number of reasons, but the foremost reason was that the children could kythe. This I learned later is a middle English word; but in A Wrinkle in Time, kything denotes a kind of telepathic communication between family members, or people who are somehow intertwined.
I'm wondering if I wanted to learn how to kythe or to understand that, how would one go about doing that according to medieval theory of the mind's permeability?
Barbara:
Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And of course, I too loved that book as a child. I read lots and lots of fantasy and mythology and so forth.
Medieval people believed—and this was a little known aspect of Christian faith—that telepathy would have been normal if humanity were not fallen. The proof of that is that medieval authorities—Augustine, Gregory the Great, many others—taught that telepathy would be normal in heaven. Dante’s Paradiso is full of episodes where the saints read the minds of the blessed, and it was believed that it was really only sin that prevents our minds from being permeable to one another. Otherwise, to share one another's joy, it would be appropriate to see one another's thoughts. And so telepathy, the openness of every mind to every other mind, was a goal that could be hoped for among the blessed in heaven.
And that is anticipated by certain saints in their earthly life. There are a lot of miracle stories in saints’ lives and hagiography about mind reading saints.
I've worked more particularly [on] a corpus of medieval saints lives, where this happens all the time. Particularly, it happens in the context of confession and pastoral counseling. What fascinates me is it's not priests who have this power. It's women—lay women, and sometimes lay men—who are known as holy persons, who have the power to read minds through the mind of God. And so people come to them—maybe they're intimidated about going to confession; maybe they're just ashamed of their sins; maybe they don't like the priest; maybe they're just attracted to a holy woman or a man who's more charismatic than the priest. And they go, and the holy woman or lay brother can see what they've done: if they've fornicated, if they're tempted to suicide, if they're tempted to blasphemy, if they've stolen something, whatever it is. Because they already know what the sinner has done, they can give them appropriate counseling. It's a very powerful thing because it shows that God is present.
Ryan:
Is it possible that the fallen nature of verbal communication could be somehow compensated through vision? Would this be part of the reason that Hildegard Von Bingen, in her Scivias, presents it as very much a commentary on these images that have been revealed to her. Is that maybe another way of getting more directly at divine communication?
Barbara:
Vision is an interesting term. Many medieval women—far more women than men—who claim to have revelations from God or to be prophets, to know God's message to transmit to the people, would say that they have visions. These visions are often not very visual, in fact. Someone will say, Christ appeared to me, or I saw the Virgin Mary, or Saint Julian appeared to me; and the vision then becomes just a pretext for transmitting a verbal message.
Hildegard of Bingen is unusual because her visions are really extremely visual.They're painterly; they're even cinematic because there's action. There are dynamic tableaus where things change, figures move around. They do things. And we know what the visions look like, because she apparently collaborated with an artist. We don't know if it was a fellow nun of her monastery, or a monk; we don't know who it was. But she apparently drew rough sketches, or simply told this person verbally, “This is what I saw. I saw three figures standing at the south side of this building, and I saw three more figures standing at the east side of this building. And these are the clothes that they were wearing, and this is the color of their garments. And here's how they moved, and here's what they did, and here's what they told me.”
So her visions are just extraordinarily visual.
Ryan:
It seems to me that among what are known in the Roman Catholic Church as the Doctors of the Church, Hildegard is one of the least integrated of the women Doctors of the Church. One of them is Saint Therese of Lisieux, who is highly integrated into contemporary devotion; I think Saint Catherine of Sienna is maybe easier to process by academic theologians. But Hildegard—so eclectic, and so brilliant in ways that are maybe hard to process by academic theology—has in some ways remained inaccessible. Among all of the various disciplines in which Hildegard was active, what would be the one that you would commend the most to the attention of theologians?
Barbara:
It's an intriguing question, because academic theology in Hildegard’s day was early scholasticism. It was becoming more and more a professionalized academic discipline with its own genres: the questio, the summa, the disputatio and so forth. And Hildegard was having none of that. Of course she could not be university trained, even in the very early universities, because she was a woman. But 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. Sometimes she exegeted Scripture as well—she knew it backwards and forwards. But perhaps looking at Hildegard as an exegete would be a way into her world.
I would also recommend thinking of her as the Doctor of the Church who has most to say about ecology and the environment. She's almost a prophet of modern ecological awareness, because she had a profound sense of not only the way the natural environment influenced human beings, but also the way human beings influence the natural environment, often in a very negative way—polluting it through greed and other kinds of sin.
And she has a complicated system of correspondences between the world, the human body, and the soul. It's difficult to get into the intricate details, but I think the overall system is not that hard to comprehend. Once you get into it, you can gradually begin to see how she's working on the micro level.
Ryan:
I take it you're talking about her herbalism and medicinal writings about the application of various kinds of medicine?
Barbara:
Yes. She did work with herbal medicine. She probably had her own medicinal herb garden at the Rupertsberg, at her monastery. Almost all monasteries probably did, because they had their infirmaries, and those who were particularly known for skill in medicine would also attract people from outside the monastic community to come for healing. In Hildegard’s case, it's hard to distinguish between her practical knowledge as a healer—as someone who wrote extensively about herbal medicine and other forms of therapy—and someone who was known for supernatural healings. I don't know that she separated the two as strictly as modern readers would.
But it's not only in her medical writings that she talks about the environment. The visions of the Scivias, her first great visionary work, and especially her final work called the Liber Divinorum Operum—the Book of Divine Works—deal extensively with the composition of the human body, and how deeply embedded it is in the four elements. The heavenly spheres, the powers of the winds and the rain, and so forth—she never sees worshiping God or serving God as requiring a breach with the body or with the natural world. She is just profoundly embedded in nature. And that I think is what makes her attractive to so many people who are inspired by her work today.
Ryan:
And she herself experienced a number of debilitating illnesses.Some scholars think her illnesses had something to do with her conflicts with ecclesiastical authority. Would an analogy hold such that her writings on medicine also have something to do with conflict with ecclesiastical authority?
Barbara:
I don't think that her medical writings have anything to do with the conflicts that she faced; that's a kind of independent genre.
As for her illnesses: yes. She says herself, at the beginning of the Scivias, that when she received difficult calls from God and resisted them, she would become ill. For example, when God told her at a fairly ripe age, at the age of 43, “Cry out and write and speak the things that are revealed to you in this vision,” she was scared. Women just didn't do that. She was afraid of ridicule; she was afraid that she wouldn't be believed. All of this placed enormous strain on her, and she did become ill for a fairly long period.
And [she grew ill] again around 1150, when she had attracted so many women to her community that they had begun to outgrow their quarters at the male monastery, Saint Disibod, where they were living. She received the call to found her own independent monastery and to move her women, to buy the land and to simply uproot the whole community and move them there. She faced a lot of resistance from the abbot of Saint Disibod, because by now she was a kind of celebrity. Pilgrims were coming to see the famous Hildegard, the prophet, the visionary; and that brought revenue to the monastery. So the monks didn’t want to lose the women—and also the dowries that they brought with them when they joined—and so he said, “No. You're not doing this.”
And she took to her bed with what she said was a paralyzing illness. She said that God had brought this on her because she had disobeyed. The abbot came himself and physically tried to raise her body up from the bed, and found that she was as heavy as a stone and he could not lift her. This was supposed to be a miraculous sign from God that he really was calling the women to leave. At this point, the abbot threw up his hands and said, “Okay, fine. Go ahead, go wherever you want to go.”
Ryan:
What would have been the original context for Hildegard's musical compositions?
Barbara:
She has a wide following now as a composer. She is the composer to whom the greatest body of chant is securely ascribed to a known author of any composer before the 14th century. Her music is a very accessible way, I think, into her thought world. The context for her music would have been the monastic liturgy. There is a large repertoire of plainchant, or what's sometimes called Gregorian chant. But one thing that monks, as well as nuns, could do was add to the liturgical repertoire; there was no taboo against this. New chants were being added all the time.
So Hildegard wrote her music to be performed by her women. She must have either been a magnificent singer herself, or had some women in her convent who were, because the chants are very difficult to sing. They have a wide range; many of them are quite virtuosic. And any composer knows that you don't compose abstractly in a vacuum: you compose for the forces that you have at hand. I think she would have had the voices of particular singers in mind as she composed. But we know that her music was performed by her nuns.
Toward the end of her life, she became well enough known as a composer that some male monasteries commissioned her to write pieces in honor of their own patron saints: St Disibod, St. Mathias. We know that she actually sent some of her chants to other monasteries for them to perform, which must mean that somebody in her monastery—probably not Hildegard herself—knew the art of musical notation, and knew how to write the neums so that they could send off the music to be performed.
Ryan:
I'm interested in Christianity as a secularizing force. I really only became aware of this for the first time when reading Medieval Crossover, and your account of various romances: these stories of Arthurian knights going through the land and breaking spells, where there's Christianity driving pagan monasteries and superstitions and religious practices from the land. I think many listeners might be familiar with the end of The Hobbit, when they return to the Shire, and what has to be done is the harrowing of the Shire, the driving out of various disordered elements.
I think many people would be surprised to hear Christianization and secularization aligned, so could you explain how that works?
Barbara:
I think that the notion of some kind of firm division between the sacred and the secular is very much a modern conception, not a medieval one. To be sure, you'll have some ascetic monks who want to withdraw completely from the world. But much more often, the sacred and the secular are overlapping spheres.
You mentioned a moment at the end of The Hobbit, and so I want to mention a moment at the end of the Lord of the Rings which I think is very telling. Frodo and the whole fellowship of the ring have made their way through all kinds of terrors and danger, and finally, they've come to Mount Doom. This is the moment Frodo has almost completed his quest. All he has to do is drop the Ring of power into the crater of Mount Doom so that it can be destroyed. And at that moment, he can't do it. It's his ring; he's not going to give it up. But all along the way, he's been followed by Gollum, this sinister creature who had the Ring for a long time, and has been wholly corrupted by the Ring, and is just obsessed with [it’s] power. Gollum wants it so badly, that he cuts off Frodo's finger. So he has the Ring, and he's dancing up and down and he's saying “Precious, precious.” And as he's dancing around in his joy to possess the Ring again, he falls into the crater of Mount Doom, and so the Ring is destroyed. And I think that is a very Christian moment.
Tolkien always said The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. A lot of readers read it as an allegory; he always said it wasn't one. But he was deeply Catholic, and I think this notion that the evil character is necessary to fulfill the quest of the chosen one—of Frodo—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. 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. They don't cancel each other out; they co-exist.
Let me give you one example. There's a very famous romance by Chrétien de Troyes called Lancelot. This is the story that invents the character of Lancelot, and he has an adulterous love affair with Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. Many, many other writers would take that and run with that. But what happens in Chrétien's romance of Lancelot is so profoundly double coded. On the one hand, you know that Lancelot is committing treason and adultery—committing adultery with the queen was a form of treason because it could really mess up the line of succession if the queen were to have an illegitimate child. And you know that it's even worse than that, because Arthur deeply loves and trusts Lancelot, and yet Lancelot is betraying him with the queen. So on the one hand, Lancelot is not an admirable character at all. He is profoundly sinful and disloyal.
On the other hand, Lancelot is presented as a paragon of courtly love: selflessly, courageously, valiantly, devoted to do whatever it takes to rescue Guinevere after she's been kidnapped by a villain. He doesn't care about his own honor. He doesn't care about risking his life. He will do anything for her. And there's even—in one of these remarkable moments where pagan myth appears in an almost full fledged form, and yet as Christianized—where Lancelot enters a kind of pagan other world, which has been waiting for a hero to rescue all those who were trapped in this land. Once they enter, they cannot return, they cannot leave; it’s the land from which no man returns, until the hero opens the way. Just as Christ breaks open the gates of Hell after his crucifixion and harrows hell, and so all of the Old Testament righteous leave hell and enter salvation, Lancelot performs that deed, which makes him a Christ figure. And the signs of his being a Christ figure are unmistakable; no medieval reader could possibly have missed that. And yet it is this one who is adulterous, treasonous, and disloyal who performs the saving role of Christ.
So is Lancelot holy, or is he profane? He's both. It's just like Gollum at that moment, where one of the most sinister characters in The Lord of the Rings is the one who finally accomplishes the holy quest.
Ryan:
A great theological question is how sin can be original. So how do Adam and Eve’s sin originate sin, such that it affects every subsequent human? One model for this is genealogical, even genetic. St. Augustine wrote that the sin is communicated through the act of sexual intercourse, which couldn't be achieved without some measure of disordered desire.
But you point out in The Permeable Self that the model of coinherence is an alternative to this hereditary model. Let me just stop there and ask you to say more about this alternative to a genetic understanding of original sin.
Barbara:
Coinherence is not an ideal term, but we have no better word for it in English. It's the idea of being within one another. This is why I call it “the permeable self”: in reality, human personhood is not a matter of isolated individuals relating to each other as solely external entities. The formula of coinherence is you're in me, and I am in you. We're all connected. I like to cite the African proverb: “I am because we are.”
I think this understanding of personhood, which is widespread in Africa and in other parts of the world today, was the dominant idea of personhood in medieval Europe: the notion that we are profoundly interconnected, both at the level of our bodies through genealogy, and at the level of our souls. Telepathy—mind-reading— which I talked about earlier, is one example of that. So we have this deep, deep interconnection with one another, which can work for good, but also for evil.
You asked about original sin. The way I think Saint Paul understood it when he said “in Adam, all sinned,” is that Adam is not just the first human being. He is that, on a literal reading of Genesis; but in a much more subtle and sophisticated way, Adam is the platonic form of humankind. All human beings who will ever live are somehow contained in the person of Adam. So when Adam sins, when Adam disobeys God, the whole archetype of humanity is corrupted, is perverted. Not simply because we inherit original sin biologically—although we do according to Augustine—but because all of us are in Adam. And then redemption can take place because all of us are in Christ, the second Adam, in the same way.
I think of all theologians who work out the implications of this idea, by the way, Julian of Norwich is by far the most profound. But that is one example of how coinherence works.
Ryan:
You bring up the challenge of language. In a study of, for lack of a better word, pre-modern selfhood, you're not encountering the term “self”; you're not encountering the term “subject.” What was the language, what were the words that you were looking for, when you went back into these texts looking for these concepts?
Barbara:
I think that the most useful word for exploring the self in medieval texts is persona, the person. I love the concept of persona, because it has two very different origins and spheres of meaning that again converge. (You may be getting the idea that I think both/and thinking is a lot more exciting than either/or thinking!)
Persona is a word that comes from the ancient Greek theater. In Latin, persona means “that through which the sound comes”; it's an actor's mask. So a persona is a character in a play, and it has to do with performance: with what's public and visible and audible. So there are all kinds of meanings of “person” in medieval texts that have to do with performance. A legal proxy is a persona; someone who holds office is a persona. The priest acts in persona Christi—that as he's playing the role of Christ. There are legal persons, there are corporate persons; a dignitary, a parson as the leader of a church. “Parson” is simply a form of the middle English word “person.”
So there's this public performative sense of persona; but there's also a much more private interior sense of persona. This comes from dogmatic theology, the theology of the Trinity, which was worked out in the third/fourth/fifth centuries of the Common Era. Gradually, after much debate and dissension, theologians came to agree that God is one essence or one being in three divine persons—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each of these persons is what we might call a self, a center of consciousness; but they're in one another. The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father—this is what Jesus is constantly talking about in the Gospel of John; and all of them in common possess the divine nature.
So 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; and that’s the concept of medieval personhood that I've explored in The Permeable Self.
Ryan:
A common medieval wedding gift, at least among the aristocracy, was a book of the life of St. Margaret. She was the patron of women in labor, because she was swallowed by a dragon and cut herself out through its abdomen. But when I teach the life of St Margaret and I give that explanation, I am echoing my students' own perplexity because of the mismatch of the images there. Is a laboring mother, like a devilish dragon? Does the infant have to cut its way out? And why does it seem more like a cesarean section rather than a vaginal birth? What's going on here?
Barbara:
The connections between virginity and fertility are really interesting. Of course, at the core of all this is the figure of the Virgin Mary: the only Virgin who was a mother and the only mother who was a Virgin. Her unique status as the Virgin Mother of God cast an enormous spell over the entire medieval world. So mothers were supposed to imitate the virtues of the Virgin Mary, but also consecrated nuns were supposed to imitate her. She is the cap of the arch where virginity and fertility meet.
You see little examples of this: for example, when a woman in childbirth was laboring on and on and on and could not deliver, and there was desperate need of help or else she would die, one of the favorite talismans used to ease labor was the girdle of a saint. The girdle is simply the belt that the saint wears around his or her waist. Any nearby girdle of a saint that could be procured could be brought and put around the woman's womb to help her deliver. So there's a kind of talismanic power associated with holiness, and especially with virgin holiness, that paradoxically helps the mother give birth to her child. I think that this is a small example of the kind of devotion that you see in the cult of St. Margaret.
Ryan:
You have a chapter about the practice of the exchange of hearts. In contemporary religious iconography, the externalized or separable heart is really prominent. Even if you're not a Christian, you've probably seen it on one of those candles that you can buy in the grocery store in the Mexican food section.
But that's actually a fairly recent development in Christian devotional culture. I think it goes back officially as early as the late 14th century; but then you don't have St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who really popularized the devotion, until the end of the 17th century. But far earlier than that, the entire conceptuality seems to be there within erotic poetry, within the courtly love tradition.
Do you have a sense of how the earliest Christian adopters of this iconography dealt with those origins?
Barbara:
The exchange of hearts is a trope that's fascinated me for a long, long time, because it's one of the examples where sacred culture is demonstrably influenced by the secular. I've traced the chronology of this, and the secular poets definitely get there first.
There's this mythology of the separable heart, and you see it already in troubadour lyrics, where the troubadour says, “My heart has gone in quest of my lady, and she has stolen it away from me,” or “My heart seeks a kiss from her.” The heart goes out as a synecdoche of the person; the loving heart goes on quests. Troubadour poetry is all about unrequited love, so the lady usually rejects the heart of the lover.
In narrative romances, this trope of exchanging hearts occurs all the time. We mentioned Chrétien de Troyes earlier; he's one of the popularisers of the idea where two lovers have to part. The male lover is going off to war, the lady’s jealous husband has discovered them, or something, and they have to part. So they kiss, and the lady says, “I give you my heart, let it go with you.” And the man says, “And I give you mine, may it remain here with you.” And after that, there is a fiction that there’s an almost physical coinherence: that the lady's body is given life by the heart of the man, and the man is given life by the heart of the woman, as if they had physically exchanged hearts. So even separating from each other, they become one, he in her and she in him.
After this theme had been circulating in romance for maybe 50 years or so, you start finding it in the saints’ lives, where Jesus becomes the courtly lover; and he asks the female saint, or she asks him, for an exchange of hearts. So the woman gives her heart to Christ, and he gives his heart to the female saint. It's just like in the secular romances, except now it's divine; now Jesus takes the place of the adulterous lover.
You find this early on in Lutgard of Aywieres. You'll find perhaps the most famous case with Catherine of Siena, another of the female Doctors of the Church, which I think is really interesting, because she is so literal about it. She said that Christ came to her in vision and took her heart away. She then told her confessor, “Father, I no longer have any heart in my body.” And he is like, “Yeah, Catherine. Right. Very funny.” And she says, “No, no really, it’s true!” Then a few days later, Christ comes back, holding his own ruby red heart in his hands, and places his heart in the breast of Saint Catherine. She said that this was a real, physical thing. And her hagiographer, in order to prove that it's a real thing and not just a fantasy, said her companions could see the scar from the incision on her chest, as if Christ could actually perform some kind of heavenly surgery on her body when he gave her his heart.
Of course, what it 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.
Ryan:
It seems so alien to suppose that if you take a part of your body out, your self is being taken out and has the potential to be exchanged. Until we reflect that in contemporary American society, we actually do have a part of the body where many people quite literally think that if it were to be taken out—if it were to technologically be possible to exchange it with another body—it would be an exchange of selves. And that's the brain.
I was just astounded by the persistent significance of the literal trope that you bring up in your conclusion, in this phenomenon of heart transplant recipients at least seeming to, or believing, that they have actually received something of the self of the other. Could you explain a little bit more about that? And is that a continuity between this very material, physical concept of the heart and the self in the middle ages?
Barbara:
I think it is. About twelve years ago, a philosopher named Anselm Min invited me to a conference that he was organizing using the medieval legacy to shed light on contemporary philosophical problems. At first I said, “No, I don't do this kind of work at all. I'm not even a philosopher; I'm a literary critic.” And he said, “You do this kind of work. Come on.” And I said, “Okay.”
I decided to look at the exchange of hearts, which I was already working on as a medieval topos, in the light of the modern literature about heart transplants. I wound up reading a lot of work in bioethics about what contemporary bioethicists have to say about organ transplantation. One thing they point out is that 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 various problems with using brain death as a criterion, because that's the moment when you can harvest other organs for transplantation, even though in many ways the person is still alive. So that's a whole issue on the side.
About heart transplants: there are hundreds, now maybe thousands, of anecdotal stories of heart transplant recipients saying that they have developed a relationship with the donor of their transplanted heart. That is, the person who is dead is still alive somehow inside of them. There are some fascinating examples of this; actual studies have been done.
I'll give one example which I think is particularly striking. This man was a factory worker, a white guy, a bit of a racist, a middle-class American person who became very ill and needed a heart transplant. He was not told anything about his donor, because surgeons have very strict protocols of anonymity about that. Over time he found himself becoming much friendlier with his black colleagues at the factory; he really wanted to get to know them and become friends with them. He also surprisingly developed a passionate interest in classical music, which was something he had never had anything to do with. He wanted to listen to classical music all the time. And his wife is like, what's going on here?
Well, he was in this study that interviewed heart transplant recipients, their friends and family, and also the friends and family of the donors. It turned out that the donor—the man who had given his heart to this factory worker—had been a black man who was a classical musician. He was killed in a drive-by shooting on his way to a violin lesson. The change in the recipient's personality—and remember he knew nothing about the donor—just seems to indicate, okay, another man's heart is inside his body.
There's another story of a woman who had been a lesbian activist, very involved in causes on behalf of the lesbian and queer community. She was also a passionate meat eater: her favorite restaurant was McDonald's. After receiving a heart transplant, she found she couldn't stand the smell of meat anymore. She would never go to McDonald's again. And she found herself being attracted to men, which she had never been before, and becoming straight. Her heart donor had been heterosexual and had been a vegetarian who had run a health food restaurant. And again, it was kind of a dramatic personality change.
These are just two stories. I could go on and on and on with them. But that, for me, is a sign that coinherence is a real thing.
Ryan:
This actually points to what I wanted to come back to. Are there other examples, besides the example of original sin, where the model of coinherence is an alternative to a hereditary model?
What you've just described is the communication of personality traits in a way other than genetic or genealogical, one that is, that is coinherent. That's so fascinating to me, because genealogical thinking depends in large part on it's graphic representation. What the graphic representations do in a family tree or in a genealogical table is separate out one generation from the next. In fact, that is not our experience; generations typically overlap with each other and are not separate.
We also know that there are many ways that one generation can differ from the next, and perhaps have more in common with another lineage. So I'm really interested, at this moment of my research on genealogy, in the alternatives to hereditary models, whether it's lateral contagion in manuscript histories or whatever else.
So thinking along these lines, does it seem to you that coinherence is consistently an alternative to genealogical thinking? Is it a mode of temporality that is not linear in the way that genealogy is?
Barbara:
I've never thought about coinherence as an alternative to genealogy. I don't see why it can't occur across generations too; I don't think it necessarily has to be lateral. Just musing on genealogy a little bit: one thing that's interesting about genealogy is we often trace a particular line. If we're tracing the genealogy of kings, then [its] only the Kings who have actually reigned, maybe their brothers who have been dukes and their sisters who have been married to counts and so forth. Only they “count.”
But if you go far back enough in any genealogical tree, and you look at all of the lines, not just one central patrilineage that you're tracing, you soon go to a point where you have so many ancestors that you can't keep track of them all. I mean, two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents … you go on and on and on. If you look at genealogy in a democratic way, where you consider that all of these ancestors equally contributed genetically to the person who's making the chart, then it becomes much more complicated than to trace particular characteristics through one simple patrilineage.
Similarly, if you go into the future and you have descendants, and they have descendants, and they have descendants, then it branches out infinitely. So really, 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. But you can't really say, “it's only this one that counts” or “only that one that's relevant,” because it just goes on forever, doesn't it?
I just want to throw out one more image here: we talk about family trees, and trees are of course characterized by ramification. Ecologists have been doing wonderful work lately on trees and forests, and discovering [that] at the level of the roots, all of the trees in a forest are deeply interconnected with one another. They can even communicate with each other. They can send messages: where there's water, when drought is coming, where there's danger, where there are parasites that might be attacking. There are some forests I've read that are, in a strict genetic sense, one single organism, because all of the trees share a genetic heritage. I think the more we learn about what wonderful creatures trees and forests are, the more we can think this metaphor of a family tree may have even more to tell us than we thought it did.
Ryan:
It seems to me that there's some kind of real desire for this sense of a permeable self in contemporary culture. One piece of evidence that I just came across last night when watching the hit TV show Ted Lasso with my wife, was that one of the characters makes a comment like this. He talks about the recent research on forests and how they’re actually social communities, and each benefits the other, and no tree is in direct competition with another. And he's holding a book, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which has been a bestseller. It's all about fungi and the ways that that fungi are incorporated into our own human biology, and into these broader ecosystems. When you look at the fungi, it begins to be very difficult to say, “here is where one organism stops and here's where the other begins.”
Barbara:
Well, there's good reason, I suppose, that rhizomes became a great metaphor in literary theory a few years back. And then, look at the research on the microbiome, where we have coherence not only with other members of our own species, but with practically infinite species of bacteria, without which we couldn't digest our food. You have to have a healthy microbiome in order to possess health.
I've thought about coinherence between human beings, but I think it's a principle in the whole natural world. Maybe that brings us back to Hildegard again, to how just deeply rooted we are in nature in so many ways.
Ryan:
Thank you very much, Barbara. This has been such a delight.
Barbara:
Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it very much.