 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, All Manner of Thing Shall Be Well – English Mysticism. In these episodes on medieval philosophy, we've looked at quite a few works written in languages other than Latin, with Dante writing in Italian, Mächter de Magdeburg and Meister Eckhart in German, and Marguerite Poet in French. But never in the whole podcast series have we discussed a work written in the language of the podcast itself – English. That's going to change now. We've reached the late 14th century, the time of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's Piers Plowman, and the time also of several devotional works that deserve a place in our history of philosophy. Of course, the so-called Middle English of these texts is not quite the same as the one we use today. There are unfamiliar words and familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. But for the most part, it's surprisingly comprehensible and reads like modern English typed by someone with unrestrained enthusiasm for the silent E and a keyboard whose Y key has gotten stuck. Even an inquisitive 4-year-old uses Y less than your average 14th century English author. But then the authors we need to discuss were hardly average. They produced several classics of Christian spirituality, sometimes drawing on the same sources that inspired scholastic thinkers, yet operating outside of a scholastic context. This is shown not only by their decision to write in English, but also by their intended audience. For the most part, we're dealing with books of advice on spiritual matters. Already in the first half of the 14th century, a religious hermit named Richard Rolle wrote Guides to the Life of Religious Devotion, as well as Liturgical Commentary. His lead was followed by Walter Hilton, who died at the close of the century in 1396. Close to him in time and in thought is the anonymous author of a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. It has even been suggested that Hilton may be the author, though scholars generally reject this proposal. Most intriguing and famous though are the women mystics who wrote in English. Rolle and Hilton provide a context for understanding how this could be possible, as both composed works aimed at women who lived lives of religious seclusion, so-called anchorites. But the really key figures here are Julian of Norwich and, looking ahead to the early 15th century, Marjorie Kemp. Julian wrote The Book of Showings, in which she recounts and interprets a series of visions she enjoyed while suffering from a nearly fatal illness. Marjorie Kemp is a somewhat later figure, though her astounding and controversial Exploits and Travels, which included a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also included an inspirational face-to-face meeting with Julian in the year 1413, who was by then an elderly woman. It is tempting, and common, to lump both the male and female figures together as a kind of counter-cultural movement. They were isolated, in a literal sense, as hermits and anchorites, but also in the sense of being outside the main intellectual currents of the 14th century. Even the obvious precedence for a figure like Julian would not have been available as an encouraging model. The writings of female mystics were more widely disseminated and read on the continent than in England. An exception that proves the rule is the Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Poet, who you'll remember had been executed for her supposed heresy in 1310. Her book was translated into Middle English and circulated in the same spiritualist circles as the works of these English mystics, but it did so anonymously. On the other hand, we should avoid exaggerating the outsider status of the English mystics. Rolla and Hilton both wrote in Latin as well as English, and unlike Marguerite, these authors, even the rather daring Julian, were careful to adhere to the teachings of the Church. Nor should we exaggerate the similarity between these authors. Just because they wrote works of spiritual devotion in English does not mean that they agreed about everything. Indeed, we can find plenty of disagreements between the two most famous works produced by the English mystics, which I'll focus on for the rest of this episode, The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian's Book of Showings. Of the two, The Cloud of Unknowing is slightly more likely, though still not very likely, to feature in histories of philosophy less broad-minded than this one. This is because it draws on a source that has been influencing medieval thinkers from the Carolingian period onwards, from Ariuszna to Albert the Great and Aquinas to Oumai-sur-Ekhot. This source is the writing of the pseudo-Dionysius, pioneering negative theologian and among the first to integrate Neoplatonic ideas into Christianity. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing is more than willing to follow the negative theology part, as the title of his devotional treatise already suggests. He's offering advice to a younger recipient, explaining to him the best path to follow when devoting himself to God. His forecast is that, as creatures, our prospects are cloudy with a chance of mystical union with God. We begin, he says, in a darkness which is the eponymous cloud of unknowing, a failure to grasp God that we can never overcome, since he transcends the light of reason. Instead, we should add a further cloud of forgetting, that is, strive to forget all created things to focus on God alone. God is and will remain ungraspable to our mind, but not to our love. This is apt to remind us of Marguerite, and before her the Beguine mystics Hadivich and Mächtelt. All these female authors believe that love is the ladder that takes us up to God, which is why they repurpose the tropes of courtly love literature, emphasizing the longing and suffering of the soul as it hopes for a glimpse of God. But, despite his discouraging remarks about knowledge and the human mind, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing prefers a more abstract approach. He in fact recognizes two paths to God which he calls active and contemplative. Each path can be pursued in a lower or higher way. The lower path of active devotion consists in, basically, leading a good life, performing acts of mercy and charity. The author's attitude towards this sort of life is reminiscent of Marguerite's remarks on virtue, though stated far less provocatively. Such actions are admirable and good, but the true devotee of God cannot be satisfied with them. A superior method is the higher active path, which is one and the same as the lower path of contemplation. It consists in meditating on one's own smallness in comparison to God, on the suffering of Christ on the cross, and so on. As we'll see, this path is the one followed by Julian of Norwich. But our anonymous author thinks that we can do better. The higher path of contemplation is the one symbolized by the cloud of forgetting. We should leave behind even such exalted objects of contemplation as the angels and saints, and focus on nothing but God himself, a rather paradoxical instruction given that God entirely transcends any means we might have of grasping him. The author's advice is to use meditational techniques which sound strikingly like practices found in other cultures. For example, repeating a single word to oneself again and again, like sin, or the name God. Both our will and our knowledge should be oriented away from the self and away from any created thing. Here, the author makes the nice point that acknowledging other things implicitly involves acknowledging oneself as their knower, so that concentration on any created thing leads back to the self. In place of this, the author says that we should choose to be blind rather than have knowledge. In another passage that is strikingly reminiscent of Marguerite, the author explains why we should be seeking union with God rather than pursuing the classically philosophical project of knowing the self. Each of us was created from nothing and is still nothing, in comparison to God, to whom we are infinitely inferior. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing also worries that the sort of inward turning practiced by other mystics could make one vulnerable to demonic influence. If you are granted a vision, how are you to know whether it comes from God or the devil? Perhaps by taking advice from your neighborhood necromancer. The author relies on experts in demonology for the observation that the devil always shows himself as having a single nostril. You may snort through both your nostrils in disbelief, but at the time the phenomenon of the divine, or apparently divine vision, was widespread. It was especially common among cloistered women, as is clear from a story of the German nun Christina Ebner, who was taken aback when told that one of her sisters had never enjoyed a visionary experience. The Cloud author was not the only one to fret that apparently divine visions could in fact be the workings of madness or some other, even more insidious influence. Such worries sometimes affected the visionaries themselves, as we can see in the case of Julian of Norwich. After she was visited by a series of sixteen visions, she was at first afraid to embrace them as what she would later call showings or genuine revelations. Instead, she described them to others as ravings brought on by illness, something she later regretted as a kind of betrayal on her part. According to her later account, in the Book of Showings of Divine Love, she had in fact prayed for such an illness. I desired to have all manner of pains, she would write, bodily and ghostly, that I should have, if I should have died, all the dreads and temptations of fiends, and all manner of other pains, save the outpassing of the soul. The illness came in May 1373 and lasted three days. During this time, she saw with what she calls spiritual rather than bodily sight, such images as the bloody face of Christ and the crown of thorns, and also the devil. Sadly, she doesn't mention how many nostrils he had. Yet she is clear that she had no desire to suffer for suffering's sake. She wished rather to commune in the Passion of Christ. The most striking passages in her book are indeed the descriptions of the showings. These are often horrific, always detailed and concrete, and sometimes amplified with metaphors, as when she describes drops of blood shaped like the scales of fish and pouring down like water off a roof. The physicality and frank violence of these descriptions may seem to betray a negative attitude towards things of the body. But Julian's central concern is not hatred of the body, it is the theological and philosophical problem of suffering. This becomes clear from her own account of the meaning of her visions. Like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian presents herself as a visionary who is in the best position to expound the meaning of her own visions, despite the fact that she is, as she admits with a touch of false modesty, a simple creature unlettered. Her showings explains what she saw, and also the point of what she saw, according to her own understanding, as she often puts it. One passage epitomizes the way that female medieval mystics could assert authority over their own teaching without directly challenging contemporary assumptions about the inferiority of women. God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not and never was my intention. For I am a woman, ignorant, weak, and frail. But I know very well that what I am saying I have received by the revelation of him who is the sovereign teacher. Because I am a woman, ought I therefore to believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God, when I saw at that same time that it is his will that it be known? This is not to say that Julian immediately understood the import of her own experience. To the contrary, after composing a short account of the visions, she spent years trying to decode the message she had received, finally setting down her conclusions in a far longer version with extensive interpretation. The difficulty that drove forward this protracted process was the aforementioned one of reconciling the existence of suffering with the mercy and providence of God. Even nowadays, the so-called problem of evil is often brandished by atheists as a powerful reason to reject the existence of God. Julian, of course, had no doubts on this score, but struggled to reconcile the reality of sin and suffering with divine benevolence. This was a particular challenge for her because, in what has become the most famous moment of her visions, God spoke to her saying, Compounding the forthright optimism of these words was Julian's conviction that God is in all things and predestines all things. Nothing, as she says, is done by hap or by adventure, because all things are ultimately done by God and all that he does is well done. One explanation of how this can be so, despite the evident reality of sin, is the traditional account of evil that goes back to the pagan Neoplatonist Plotinus by way of Augustine. Evil is in itself nothing, so does not need to be created by God. Or, as Julian puts it, sin is no deed. But her answer to the puzzle goes considerably beyond this familiar response. She can point to her own experience in which she took on suffering voluntarily in order to come closer to God in an echo of God's generously suffering in human form to redeem humankind of sin. This shows that pain can work towards good ends. Still, without sin, there would be no suffering. In fact, it is suffering that makes sin manifest to us. Because sin is nothing in itself, we can never be aware of it directly, but grasp it only through its effects. More original still is Julian's reconciliation of sin with divine benevolence. Not until the invention of the gas grill will so much thought be given to how things are well done. For one thing, she claims that sin at first comes about through good, not bad, intentions. She compares humankind to a servant who, rushing to carry out his master's will, falls into a ditch and suffers great agony before finally being rescued. A similar analogy was given by Anselm, who, however, had emphasized the malevolent will of the servant. You might remember his struggle to understand the perverse choice that led to the fall of Satan. Julian rejects the idea that we are being punished for perverse malevolence, instead seeing sin as the inevitable result of our vast inferiority to God. Furthermore, in another unwitting echo of Plotinus, Julian thinks that there is a part of the soul that remains unfallen and perfect in its will. The soul's godly will ensures that it can never separate fully from God, but is permanently united to Him. As she puts it, our soul is so fulsomely wand to God of His goodness that between God and our soul may be right not. Our sinful nature, sadly, means that in addition to this perfect will, we have a lower aspect, as she calls it sensuality or the bestial part, which inevitably chooses sin. It has been said that this view seems to teeter on the edge of heresy, given that grace may seem unnecessary if part of us always remains pure and good. But Julian puts great emphasis on the unity of the human person, who is both body and soul. Being human quite literally involves taking the good with the bad, so there is no prospect that we can merit salvation without God's freely given assistance. Nonetheless, Julian worries that she risks contradicting authoritative Christian doctrine. So, unlike the more provocative Marguerite Porret, Julian is at pains to assure her reader that this is not the case. Her greatest worry here, again, relates to God's promise to her that all manner of things shall be well. This certainly seems to suggest that all souls are saved in the end, yet Julian knows this would be inflagrant contradiction to the view of the church. For this reason, her idea of a perfect will that remains united with God is, officially at least, applied only to those souls that are predestined for salvation. Yet she can't help wondering whether God might offer some sort of mysterious last-minute redemption and in general reminds us that as creatures, we are never really going to understand why sin was allowed or how exactly it will be redeemed. At the risk of making her sound heretical after all, it has to be said that Julian's solution to the problem seems to resonate strongly with the ideas of the late ancient Christian thinker Origen, for whom souls fall away from God into sin, but are all eventually redeemed. Julian was, of course, not the only intellectual to write in English at around this time. We've already mentioned the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and several other English mystics, including another woman, Marguerite Kemp. These figures are important in the history of Christianity and also as examples of early English literature. But, with all due respect to them, no one will think of these authors if asked to name the most famous writer from the period to write in English. There is only one candidate for that title, indeed a candidate so famous that I don't need to say his name, only the title of his best-known work, The Canterbury Tales. But I'll say his name anyway, Geoffrey Chaucer. Of course, no history of English literature could avoid mentioning him, but is there any reason to discuss him in a history of philosophy? Thereby hangs a tale, as we'll see next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.