Mystics, Star Wars, and Saints I

As I’ve just recently joined HHU and Anglistik 1, much of my time these past few weeks has been spent getting to grips with new systems (how do I use Webex? And Ilias?) and meeting wonderful new colleagues (who patiently explained how to use Webex and Ilias). The most rewarding part of any given day, however, has been thinking about how to make my teaching material relevant and interesting to my students. Most of the time, the material speaks for itself: medieval English literature is at turns fun, poignant, surprising, and sometimes just downright bizarre. For example, the South English Legendary’s account of a heretical pope dying on the toilet (cause of death: exploding guts). Finding analogies to contemporary culture can also be useful however, as they help to explain certain texts and ideas that at first may appear distant to a modern readership.

This has been a balancing act between identifying useful analogies and discarding those that are probably not helpful. For example, the fourteenth-century writer of the so-called Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, encourages his reader (a male recluse), to put a ‘cloud of forgetting’ between him and the known world: in other words, to forget every person, thing, and image he has ever seen – to literally think of nothing (but careful not to think, either!). Why? The goal of contemplation according to medieval mystical writers was to achieve union with God. This particular writer follows the via negativa, the ‘negative way’, of contemplation and believes that, as God is unknowable to human beings, the only way to achieve contemplative union with God is to first forget the world – to place a ‘cloud of forgetting’ between the contemplative and the world. But how to explain this initial ‘cloud of forgetting’? Encouraging students to think of the via negativa approach to contemplation as somewhat akin to modern-day mindfulness and its practice of clearing your mind is, on balance, I think, OK. Comparing Middle English contemplatives to Jedi masters is a route I’m glad I didn’t follow.

Other aspects of medieval society have unfortunately been easier for students to relate to this year. Normally, when introducing students to anchorites, the reaction is one of disbelief and mild horror. Often the recipients of mystical texts such as The Cloud of Unknowing, an anchorite was a male or female religious willingly enclosed in a cell (usually) attached to a church. Upon entering, the door would be sealed and the anchorite would have the rites of the dead performed over them, ostensibly never leaving the cell again. This year, living in relative isolation with limited social interaction is an experience to which we can all relate.

Although, if you really want another bad Star Wars analogy (who doesn’t?), you could compare an anchorite’s search for isolation and union with God to Luke Skywalker’s remote retreat to Skellig Michael, off the west coast of Ireland, in search of Jedi knowledge.

Leaving anchorites, contemplatives, Star Wars, and heretical popes aside, my teaching so far has required some discussion of medieval beliefs regarding morality, sin, and eternal damnation. And such topics inevitably bring me back to my favourite type, or genre (although this term is problematic!) of medieval text: saints’ lives. I promise you, these are not as boring as they sound.

Next time, I’ll talk about saints, 'unsaintly' behaviour, and why I think this is interesting.