The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (The Wiles Lectures) by Robert Bartlett (PDF)

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How did people of the medieval period explain physical phenomena, such as eclipses or the distribution of land and water on the globe? What creatures did they think they might encounter: angels, devils, witches, dogheaded people? This fascinating book explores the ways in which medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural and showing how the idea of the supernatural came to be invented in the Middle Ages. Robert Bartlett examines how theologians and others sought to draw lines between the natural, the miraculous, the marvelous and the monstrous, and the many conceptual problems they encountered as they did so. The final chapter explores the extraordinary thought-world of Roger Bacon as a case study exemplifying these issues. By recovering the mentalities of medieval writers and thinkers the book raises the critical question of how we deal with beliefs we no longer share.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages is sure to interest scholars and students from a range of fields. In this work, Bartlett has offered an encouraging model of how academic writing can not only spur the intellect but also stir the imagination and spark humor.” -H-Net, Christopher LeCluyse Book Description This book explores how medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural. About the Author Robert Bartlett is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews. His previous publications include The Making of Europe (1993), England under the Norman and Angevin Kings (2000) and The Hanged Man (2004). Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Great topics for discussion and pondering. Interesting in book discussions.

⭐A comprehensive & insightful look into medieval conceptions of the universe, the nature of wonders & miracles, and puts paid to the false notion that medieval people were ignorant & unlearned.Illustrated throughout with copies of illumination, pity the publisher didn’t spring for colour reproductions, but the real gem is the text itself.

⭐This book is an excellent history of the concepts of “nature” and “supernatural”. Clearly, the concept of “nature” has a long history extending back to the Greeks (‘physis’) and the Romans (‘natura’). However, since the word “nature” is a Latin word, one can expect that there would be no equivalent words in non-Greek/Roman cultures. Indeed, in the Old Testament (which is written in Hebrew), there are no equivalent words for “nature”. The fact that the term really was an abstraction (as in “the nature of man”, “natural flowers”, “Nature knows best”) even in the ancient Latin world, it makes it less likely that other cultures and languages would have developed the same abstraction. It is no wonder then, that it was the Latin Western cultures that developed further the ideas of “nature” and, later on, “supernatural”.When it comes to the history of the Latin word “supernatural” (‘supernaturalis’), it turns out that it is a more recent term and concept. In fact, it was invented in the Middle Ages more than 1,000 years after Christ. This book provides an excellent history of the invention of “supernatural” and how theologian-“scientists” (“scientists” were called “natural philosophers” in the ancient and medieval worlds) dealt with classifying events, phenomenon, causes, and creatures in the structure of the world/universe. They tried to assess whether these things were regularities, irregularities, unusual, marvelous, miraculous, or monstrous. That is, they tried to distinguish between what occurs or exists normally and that which is an exception, or lies beyond, what normally occurs or exists. Around the 13th century, the term “supernaturalis” gained some prominence to capture that which was “beyond the order of nature”, even though it was by no means settled in that century. As the book notes, numerous factors complicated the situation.Since there are debates on “naturalism” today, this book is very relevant to scientists, historians of science, and people who interested in the history of religion and science.Here is a glance at what is found in the book:1. The Boundaries of the Supernatural“The concept of “Nature” is an ancient and central feature of Western thinking. Whether it has exact correlates in other civilizations is a demanding and interesting question, which someone else can answer. In Western culture it has been employed in a variety of ways. Sometimes it has been used to structure large intellectual systems (natural law theory or natural religion, for example), but at all times it permeates discourse. For instance, in such a formative text for the Western intellectual tradition as St Augustine’s ‘City of God’ the word nature and its cognates occur 600 times. Obviously not each of those occurrences bears exactly the same weight and has exactly the same significance, and it is always important to be aware of the many uses to which the word can be put. C. S. Lewis dedicates fifty pages in his Studies in Words to the “vast semantic growths” around the word “nature” and its equivalents “phusis” and “kind”. Most of the texts I discuss here are in Latin, the standard language of the educated in the Middle Ages, so it is helpful for me that ‘The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources’ now in progress, reached the letter “N” in 2002. It gives ten primary meanings of ‘natura’, “nature”, and eleven of ‘naturalis’, “natural”, but, since each main meaning is subdivided into often quite distinct senses, there are in reality twenty-five meanings of nature and twenty-nine of natural. The word nature can be a synonym for something as grand as the whole physical creation but is also employed in the euphemistic phrase “answer a call of nature”, whereas the meanings of “natural” range from “not artificially made” to “of illegitimate birth”, from “normal” to “native”. And this is only from British sources! However, I am not going to pursue a doggedly definitional path. The value, for me, of the dichotomy “natural/supernatural” is that it leads directly to investigation of medieval debates, to conflicting views of what exists and different ideas of what an explanation consists of. This book is concerned with debates and differences in the medieval period – there will be nothing about “the medieval mind”. Some intellectual historians, like some literary scholars or anthropologists, seem to have a strong urge to search for the inner coherence of the beliefs of those they study and might talk easily of “belief systems”. This urge is doubtless well intentioned but seems to prejudge the issue. What of our own beliefs? I would be surprised if a thorough and sincere review of my own beliefs concluded that they were consistent, coherent, and steady. Like most people, I think I hold many discordant beliefs. Their discord only becomes apparent, however, in certain circumstances – this, in the terms made familiar by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, is when latent anomalies in our paradigms become visible and uncomfortable.’ I look at several instances of such intellectual discomfort in the Middle Ages. In fact the concept of “nature” leads naturally to debate, for it is usually defined against something. The natural can be contrasted with the artificial, that is, the man-made, with grace, that is, the God-given, with the unnatural, with human society, and so on. C. S. Lewis, in the work just mentioned, actually structures much of his discussion by asking. “What is the implied opposite to nature?” Any concept that is so dyadic will generate discussion about its boundaries and its contraries. I start my enquiry with a concrete example of the discourse of the natural and supernatural from the central Middle Ages. Like all scriptural religions, medieval Catholic Christianity gave birth to a rich culture of textual analysis, exegesis, and commentary. The Word of God was scanned, pondered, and elucidated, and then these elucidations were themselves scanned, pondered, and elucidated. The Gloss, that is, detailed commentary, was a characteristic fruit of such a process.” (1-3); “To clarify the first category, those things whose causes “are in God and in creatures”, Peter Lombard employed St Augustine’s concept of “seminal natures” or “seminal reasons”: “God has implanted “seminal natures” in things, according to which things come forth from other things, from this seed such a grain, from this tree such a fruit, etc…. they were implanted into things by God at the initial creation. And just as creatures are mutable, so too these causes can be altered; the cause which is in the immutable God, however cannot be changed.” The causes that are in God and creatures are therefore both primordial, in that they were implanted by God at the creation, and mutable, like all creatures. In contrast, the causes that are in God alone are immutable. Peter Lombard has thus moved from the Genesis verses to a theory that causes are of two different kinds (and in the Western tradition ontology, the science of being, often assumes that a key distinction is different kinds of cause). According to Peter Lombard, following Augustine, God had implanted the seminal causes in things – a horse will give birth to a horse, an apple tree bears apples – but had reserved certain things to himself alone. He believes this distinction can be expressed in the language of the natural: “Whatever happens according to the seminal cause is said to happen naturally (‘naturaliter’), for in this way the course of nature becomes known to men. Other things are beyond nature (‘praeter naturam’), since their causes are in God alone.” Here is a central dualism: the natural and what is beyond nature. As we shall see, at the time Peter Lombard was writing, in the mid-twelfth century, the word “supernatural” was scarcely known, let alone widespread, but, if it had been, he would surely have employed it to label these “things beyond nature”. Hence we see, in this influential Parisian theologian, a clear division of those things in the universe: some are natural, follow their seminal reason, are part of the course of nature known to man; others are beyond nature, and their cause is in God alone. In subsequent centuries, the style of thinking that Peter Lombard embodied, with its careful distinctions of sense, analytical ingenuity, and the constant impulse towards abstraction, all, of course, on a bedrock of Scripture, became the dominant mode in the universities that arose in France, Italy, and elsewhere in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That style is termed by historians “Scholasticism,” and its most Familiar representative is Thomas Aquinas. By his time, a standard rung in the theologian’s ladder was the composition of a commentary on Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’, and Aquinas dutifully fulfilled this requirement. His ‘Commentary on the Sentences’, written around 1255, naturally included discussion of the passage I have just been talking about, that is, Lombard’s exposition of Genesis 2: 21-2, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. Aquinas was stimulated by his predecessor’s analysis into outlining his own definition and classification of miracles. A miracle, he writes, is something “wonderful in itself” which he defines as follows: “Something is “wonderful in itself” when its cause is absolutely hidden, when there is a power in the thing, which, if it followed its true nature, would produce a different result. Of this kind are the things caused directly by God’s power (the most unknown cause) in a way different from that exhibited by the order of natural causes…” So, like Peter Lombard, Aquinas is looking for definitions in terms of type of cause: some things are caused by “the most unknown cause”, God’s direct power, others are part of “the order of natural causes”. The concept of the miraculous thus depends on the concept of the natural, and this interdependence is even more explicit in Aquinas’s categorization of miracles. According to him, they fall into three categories: “above nature”, “beyond nature”, and “against nature”…Christian definitions of miracle have tended to revolve around three central conceptions: miracles can be characterized by their causation, by the sense of wonder they arouse, and by their function as signs. Some thinkers take a strong stance on one of these ideas, whereas others attempt to integrate them. In general, terms, the medieval Latin West inherited from Augustine a stress on the wonderfulness of miracles. They are God’s work and amazing….It is a style of thinking that might inspire reverential awe but was unlikely to generate clear conceptual categorization of the type in which Scholastic theologians dealt. For thinkers in that tradition, such as Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, the heart of a definition of miracle lay in the way that it was distinct from “the order of natural causes”. Hence Scholastic theorists of miracle, in stressing the primary importance of different orders of causation, created a sharper line between miracle and nature than that inherited from the patristic tradition.” (6-9); the canonization process in the Church emerged around 1200 AD and it included an interrogatory dimension where questions on the involvement of “natural” and “beyond natural” causes and this helped make more distinctions on the essence of events; “Such instances show the way that a probing investigation into the miraculous, conducted, as it was, by men with sophisticated Scholastic ideas about how the universe ran, could encourage thinking in terms of the natural. An obvious twin of the natural is the supernatural, and it is unsurprising that exactly the period that sees the creation of standard questionnaires on miracles, the thirteenth century, sees also the appearance, for the first time, of the word “supernatural” (‘supernaturalis’) as a significant tool for organizing thought. The Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac traced the evolution of this term in Christian theological writings in a work published in 1946. He recognized that the idea itself could be well expressed periphrastically by the phrase “above nature (‘supra naturam’)”, which was common from the fourth century onwards, but there is something significant about a new coinage. Even if the mere word “supernatural” does not enable writers and thinkers to say something they could not say before, its appearance surely indicates that they wanted to say it more often and more conveniently. It is therefore important that it is in the thirteenth century that, in de Lubac’s words, “‘supernaturalis’ will begin to be used as a common term (un mot courant)”. He points especially to its employment by Thomas Aquinas: “after him, the distinction natural/supernatural tends to replace many analogous distinctions”.” De Lubac’s conclusions certainly seem well founded. The Index Thomisticus (which, it should be pointed out, also indexes some works not by Aquinas) gives 370 instances of the word. For example, returning to our Genesis account, Aquinas asserts that the creation of the universe in such a way that woman could be produced from the rib of man was effected “through supernatural power (‘per virtutem supernaturalem’)”. To keep a sense of proportion, it is worth noting that the Index also lists 43,000 uses of “nature” and “natural”. Lubac’s survey indicates that the term “supernatural” was rare before the twelfth century. The main exception is in the works of the unusual ninth-century scholar John the Scot, who employed it both in his own writings and in his translations from Greek, but John the Scot is an isolated case.” (12-13); De Lubac’s study required extensive reading, but newer electronic databases like Acta Sanctorum Database (which collects historical sources on saints and miracles) support his conclusion – “The outcome of a search on the word “supernatural (‘supernaturalis’)” and its various grammatical forms in this database is a s follows. First, the word is not particularly common. In all the hundreds of hagiographic texts included in the Acta Sanctorum, we find fewer than fifty instances. Second, these show a clear chronological distribution: not one is earlier than the mid-thirteenth century, precisely the time when, according to de Lubac, Thomas Aquinas was bringing the word “supernatural” into common theological discourse. Third, there is a noticeable tendency for the term to be used by the mendicant friars, Franciscans and Dominicans alike. Indeed, amongst the earliest uses of “supernatural” is that by Bonaventure, writing his Life of St Francis in the early 1260s, and other early examples include Lives of St Dominic and Thomas Aquinas himself. The new Latin coinage came into the vernacular languages at the end of the Middle Ages, appearing for the first time in French in 1375 and in English around the following century, in both cases by direct modeling on the Latin word. The history of the term “supernatural” in hagiographic writing thus corresponds exceptionally well with that in general theological writing. The mendicants, high Scholasticism, and the supernatural were born together.” (15-16); around 1215 AD Gervase of Tilbury noted that there are marvels that are inexplicable, unusual, and cause amazement that are “in nature” and “beyond nature”; distinctions were made between the miraculous and the monstrous (unusual things), the miraculous and magic (natural); “This idea that the demonic and the magical should be categorized as natural rather than supernatural or preternatural was to have a long future, forming the cornerstone of conventional demonological thinking in the era of the great witch-hunt. The fullest recent account of early modern demonology in English is insistent that demonology was considered by contemporaries “a form of natural knowledge” and that is a fundamental mistake to associate the witchcraft beliefs of the time with “supernaturalism”.” (20); natural magic was considered as part of the natural sciences; the story of Moses and the pharaoh showed that magic could turn sticks to serpents so the distinctions between magic and miracle were not necessarily unique; “Moreover, the vocabulary and terms of discussion of the natural and the supernatural did not develop in isolation but under the pressure of dogmatic constraints. One did not want a God who was unnatural. “Nature” had such a large and ancient associated baggage as a positive and normative concept that it was hard to classify anything God did as “contrary to nature”. “The things that God does beyond the order of nature”, Aquinas asserts, “are not contrary to nature.” God could indeed even be identified as “first nature (‘prima natura’)” and hence his deeds were pre-eminently “natural”. Further, if to God all things were natural, then, of course, in a sense, there are no miracles. In the pithy statement of a thirteenth-century monk: “we call a miracle anything against the accustomed course of nature, which produces wonder in us; according to the causes above, nothing is a miracle.”” (26-27); the dramatic increases in Greek texts in Europe that occurred between 1150-1250 AD provided systematic and naturalistic ways to talk about the physical world and Aristotle was a major reason since he included politics and man’s animal nature in his view of nature; historians often reify centuries with silly labels like the “Age of Discovery” despite the facts that these same periods had both scientific advancements and also mass witch hunts – ironic2. “The Machine of This World”: Ideas of the Physical UniverseThe original definition of machine from the Oxford English Dictionary is “a fabric or structure, especially the fabric of the universe”; medieval writers used terms like machine of this world (‘machina mundi’) in terms of matter and motion – not in a Newtonian sense or modern way; discourse on the elements, geography, and structure of the universe/world; dealing with Biblical passages, theology, and knowledge of the world such as how did God make creation; medieval explanations of eclipses were similar to our views on eclipses and natural arguments on eclipses were used to counter magical explanations of it (like howling to the moon or monsters eating the moon); an interesting interaction when Fulcher of Chartres, on one of his writings on the Crusades, interprets lunar eclipses and the moon turning red a day before the eclipse3. Dogs and Dog-heads: The Inhabitants of the World3 divisions of living spirits: those not enclosed in the flesh (e.g. angels), those enclosed in the flesh but not dying in the flesh (e.g. humans), and those enclosed in the flesh and dying in the flesh (e.g. animals); witches; on dogs; since ancient times, the Greeks and others believed there were many different types of human (e.g. Cyclops, pygmies, etc), but the text discussed people with dog-heads in the medieval period4. “The Secrets of Nature and Art”: Roger Bacon’s Opus maiusRoger Bacon was a medieval theologian and what we would describe today as a scientist. His views on many topics are reviewed from his works and it shows that he held many views scientists today hold. He pretty much advocated for wide spread science literacy and mathematical rigor – predating Galileo by a few centuries – and also discussed a “scientific method” of sorts while also noting that experimental methods and building instruments for research were essential for man and were of political importance. He has been called the “First Scientist” by some historians.For further reading on related issues please check out:This is Robert Bartlett so we know we are on sound ground from the start.Easy to read,Bartlett engages the reader with a down to earth tone without the dumbing down so many academics use in their general works.Everything you need to understand the spiritual thinking of the period which is ripe for further research.Exceptional.

⭐A jewel in the crown of British historians.

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