Now þou hast seuene manere seknesses, and heore medecynes. After comeþ þe souereyn leche and takeþ his medecynes, þat sauen mon from þe seuene vices and confermen him in þe seuene vertues, þorw þe ȝiftes of þe holigost, þat ben þeose: þe spirit of wit, and of vnderstondynge, þe spirit of counseil, and of strengþe, þe spirit of connynge, and of pite, þe spirit of drede of god.1
Fear confounds categories and classifications as much as the mind, and is here simultaneously an emotion, a gift, and a medicine . For this text, an influential Middle English translation of Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Ecclesiae, fear or drede is understood as a medical treatment for the soul itself. Specifically, drede works to remove vice from the soul and instil virtue, as it is one of the many ‘medecynes’ of the ‘souereyn leche’ (Christus Medicius).2 Though the last on this list, drede has an elementary medical function as it works to arrest the progress of illness, of sin: ‘furst mon moot leue wikkednesse: and þat vs techeþ þe spirit of drede of god.’3 When it comes to drede, distinctions are difficult: the emotion is both the first gift of the Holy Spirit and a medicine that begins the treatment of the soul. The entire passage is thus a compact summary of a range of medically inflected theological ideas: sin is sickness, Christ is a doctor, and emotions are medicines. Moreover, this version of the text is found in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1.), a vast collection of religious texts preoccupied with enabling a state it terms ‘sowle-hele’: the health of the soul, or salus animae. Of course, the idea that the health of anything, let alone the soul, begins with drede is rather strange, as medieval medicine consistently presents it as dangerous and damaging.
For the period’s main medical compendia, the Isagoge ad Techne Galiene of Johannitius, and Constantine of Africa’s translation of the Pantegni, the emotions are one of the res non-naturales (non-natural things): six key environmental and behaviour factors that must be carefully regulated to maintain health .4 Fear or timor is one of the main passions of the soul, and exerts profound effects upon the body and its inner workings. When experienced, fear can ‘contract and supress the natural heat’ with great rapidity, a process that can have serious medical consequences.5 Indeed, fear can cause one of the key fluids in the body , vital spirit, to rush back towards the heart, making the extremities deficient in this substance and thus altering the body’s overall humoral balance. As this balance is so key to medieval medicine ’s idea of health , fear can increase the probability of disease.6 While isolated occurrences of fear pose more manageable dangers, frequent experiences of fear and its attendant physiological impacts carry the additional problem of habituation: as the passions of the soul are reciprocally connected to the body, the physiological states that accompany emotions can become potentially permanent. Indeed, in John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum, drede plays a causal role in a range of pathological conditions. The most pernicious is melancholia , which the text defines as an ‘infeccioun of þe myddel celle of þe heed wiþ priuacioun of reason’.7 This condition can be caused by a range of environmental factors, but also by excessive emotional experiences: by ‘grete þouȝtes of sorwe, and of to greet studie, and of drede’.8 Citing Galen, the text asserts that ‘if þe dredes of suche endureþ withouten cause, his passioun is melencolia’.9 The medical consensus clearly notes that drede ought to be avoided. Yet, despite such a consensus, drede is presented as a positive and useful emotion in a range of religious texts. This is not a mistake born of ignorance. On the contrary, it is a deliberate recommendation that comes from the complex engagement with the nature and operation of the soul.
Medicine and theology are deeply interconnected during the period, and function as integral parts of the era’s ‘explanatory models of reality’.10 Their overlap and interpenetration is considerable, a fact reflected in the very word for health during the period: salus, a word that also means ‘salvation’.11 Over the course of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, with the wide dissemination of the Isagaoge and the Pantegni, and the translation of the works of Averroes and Avicenna on the soul, the fusion of medical and theological knowledge takes on a new level of intensity and purpose. A number of influential theologians write detailed treaties on the soul, exploring not simply its relation to the body, but also its emotional capacities, and they impose structural schemas to help conceptualise and clarify its operation. William of St Thierry’s De natura corporis et animae, Issac of Stella’s Epistola de anima, Hugh of St Victor’s De unione corporis et spiritus, and Alcher of Clairvaux’s influential De spiritu et anima all divide the soul into irascible and concupiscible powers, and ascribe specific emotional states to those divisions. However, they do not ascribe any positive or negative impacts to those emotional states. As a result, the emotions begin to be understood in terms of their functional utility rather than their contribution to, or fortification from, a pathological state: as Boquet and Nagy note, the key insight that these texts make is that ‘the emotions of the concupiscible aspired towards virtue, while the emotions of the irascible kept away the vices.’12 Medieval theology explores this through its engagement with the affective origins of virtue and vice. Though completely different in their outcomes, virtue and vice share an emotional nature. When repeatedly experienced, any emotion can form a disposition towards specific modes of behaviour. Thus virtue is in essence ‘a passionate habitus or way of being, motivated and morally connoted by emotion. In this conception, affective intensity was no longer regarded as harmful, and it survived in the lasting disposition of virtue.’13
The most significant and influential account of the emotions and their potential utility is found in the work of John of la Rochelle. His Tractatus de divisione multiplici potentiarum animae (c. 1233) and Summa de anima (c.1235) have greater classificatory and taxonomical precession than prior accounts of the emotions. They prove to be very influential, informing the work of St Bonaventure, Odo Rigaldi, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.14 He makes a key assertion regarding the four principal emotions noted in prior medical, philosophical and theological texts:
These four affections of the soul are the beginnings of all vices and virtues, and the common substance. Therefore whenever love and hate are instituted with wisdom, moderation, strength and justice, they are raised into virtues, i.e. wisdom, temperance, fortitude and justice, which are almost the origins and the cornerstones of all virtues, since when they are instituted in the soul with charity and virtue, through the hate of the world and itself it [i.e. the soul] improves in the Love of God and one’s neighbour, and through the contempt for temporal and inferior things it grows in the desire of eternal and supernal things.15
The emotions are the source of the soul’s sickness and its health . What makes an emotion dangerous is not where it resides in the soul, or indeed what that emotion may be; rather any emotion can become dangerous if it is not properly controlled, or subject to moderation, guidance, and direction towards the proper object. In such a model fear becomes an instrument rather than a danger, a potent but potential tool for treating the soul. This essay will explore the therapeutic function of fear. It will begin by analysing the theology of fear, and the nature of sin, before moving to consider how texts from the period understood drede as having a specifically medical operation within the soul. Finally, it will consider another text from the Vernon manuscript that is deeply concerned with evoking drede and accessing the ‘medecynes’ of the ‘souereyn leche’: The Prickynge of Love.
Fear for the Soul
The theological exploration and elaboration of fear has a central point of origin: the Bible. Throughout the Old and New Testament, fear or timor underpins the soul’s relationship with its creator. It is only God who deserves to be feared, and from that fear comes a host of additional benefits: wisdom, spiritual cleansing, and the perfection of salvation.16 The early Patristics explore and extend its utility. Aggregating the disparate mentions of fear in the Bible, they subdivide it in two interconnected categori...