A Life of Toils & Vigils: Innocent III and the Phenomenality of Research

Brevis sit et vana huius seculi fallax gloria 

Brief and empty is the deceptive glory of this world

-- Jacques de Vitry.

We are never what we are; something different is always possible.
-- John D. Caputo

One of the most popular texts during the medieval period was Pope Innocent III's (d. 1216) On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), which dates to the 1190s.  The text repeatedly confronts its readers with the absolute and, for Innocent, abject mortality of earthly existence.  For Innocent, "man was formed out of earth, conceived in guilt, born to punishment. What he does is depraved and illicit, is shameful and improper, vain and unprofitable. He will become fuel for the eternal fires, food for worms, a mass of rottenness."  In an effort "to make [his] explanation clearer and ... fuller," Innocent elaborates with apparent relish:

Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes; what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin. He was born to toil, dread, and trouble; and more wretched still, was born only to die. He commits depraved acts by which he offends God, his neighbor, and himself, shameful acts by which he defiles his name, his person, and his conscience; and vain acts by which he ignores all things important, useful, and necessary. He will become fuel for those fires which are forever hot and burn forever bright; food for the worm which forever nibbles and digests; a mass of rottenness which will forever stink and reek….

But before we write Innocent off as a hater of all things fleshly, before, that is, we issue against him some dualist insult, we might pause and reflect on what it is that Innocent''s apparent "misery" at human life targets.  Here the corruptible nature of the human body serves to frame a more general concern for the proper comportment of earthly life.  Like the slightly later tradition of the ars moriendi and even to some extent the mid-twentieth-century theological notion of a "fundamental option" (most commonly associated with the German Jesuit Karl Rahner) or for that matter certain Heideggerian and Gadamarian ideas about facticity and situatedness,  to be acutely aware of our finitude allows us, at least potentially, to live with a greater sense of the importance and weightiness of what we do now.  But also its absolute contingency, for things can be otherwise.  Our place on the Wheel of Fortune will be altered.

But one passage in particular strikes me as remarkable resonant.  Here Innocent calls his readers to remember what might called a constitutive non-knowability characterizing the factical life of scholarship: 

For although a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils, there is hardly anything so cheap and easy that a man can understand it fully and clearly, unless perhaps he knows for sure that nothing is known for sure.  This may seem an unresolvable contradiction.  But why?  "For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presses down upon the mind that muses on many things" [Ecclesiastes 8:16-17].  Hear what Solomon says about this: "All things are hard; man cannot explain them by word" [Ps. 63:7-8].

What I find so remarkable about this brief passage is how it powerfully articulates the difficulties of a scholarly life.  These are not merely or only existential difficulties, but are somehow structural -- perhaps even ontological.  Innocent writes about how "a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils."  This chiasmus between toiling and vigiling is so necessary because our ability to know is so constitutively flawed, impotent.  From a theological position, this inability to know -- whether fully or accurately -- might, following Augustine, be declared a necessary condition of postlapsarian existence.  Original Sin, in an Augustinian frame, has inescapably cognitive consequences.  (I think this is a feature that Milton deftly weaves into his Paradise Lost.)  But still we press on, still we toil in our vigils, still we keep vigil over our toils.  Innocent here sounds to my ears remarkably like John Caputo in More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are: "We are driven by the passion of non-knowing" (p. 3).  But in that same passion -- brimming with its unique difficulties, replete with its own anxieties and calamities -- we are able to hear a certain tonality of hope and expectation.  Caputo again, from his still beautiful essay on Foucault: "For our being human spins off into an idefinite future about which we know little or nothing, which fills us with a little hope and not a little anxiety, a future to come for which there is no program, no preparation, no prognostication" (p. 36).

With Innocent, we see that, in whatever else it might consist, the phenomenality of scholarship rests precisely in its hylomorphic qualities.  Life is hard, and we have to work hard to get it right: so Aristotle wrote, Solomon confessed, and Caputo channeled.  But the life about which we speak is a life which unfolds in unseen directions, and it is this Deleuzian impersonality that might enable us to think our lives otherwise.  As Amy Hollywood writes in the close pages of Sensible Ecstasy: "What is required is a resolute attempt to think the body otherwise, as the site of possibility and limitation, pleasure and suffering, natality and death, for all human beings in all our multiplicity and diversity" (p. 186). 


For the texts from Innocent, I have used the translation by Margaret M. Dietz (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts/Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

SEMA, Redux

I thought I'd take a few minutes and offer a some musings about the recently passed SEMA conference. Generally speaking, and here I'm echoing comments already made on ITM (see here and here), I must say how grateful I am to Eileen Joy and all the local organizers and sponsors for putting together not only an intellectually stimulating but, most impressively, a truly convivial conference. Mille grazie!

I was unable to attend as many sessions as I had hoped -- not least because I was so beat with lack of sleep and flying in on Friday morning. I did hear Jeff Cohen's amazing plenary/meditation on rocks and Mandeville's "boundary denying ethnography." Regretablly, I missed the other plenary by Steve Kruger; I just needed some "me time" (mea culpa!). Also, due to travel plans, I completely missed the first of two BABEL sessions on "Eros and Phenomenology" -- sorry Eileen, Nicola, and others. Gratefully, however, Nicola has posted his paper as has Karl, whose paper appeared in a different session on "excrement/waste studies/fecopoetics" (which I also sadly missed!). Eileen has promised to do likewise (once she recovers).

I was involved in two sessions on Saturday, one where I presented and another where I chaired. After some rather annoying technical difficulties, the session I chaired went very well, with some amazingly interesting papers dealing with devotional literature and objects. Although all the papers were stimulating and very enjoyable, I particularly enjoyed Elina Gerstman's presentation.

My own paper was the first of four in a session devoted to Patience and Pearl; or, as I like to call it, "me and everyone else." Obviously, I mean that the other panelists were focused on Pearl, and their work gave me some very good insights into how I might connect my own arguments for a liturgical reading of Patience to certain similarly animating concerns of Pearl. Oddly enough, the panel outnumbered the audience (3 attendees; 4 panelists), but it was still a good session. My paper (see the abstract) was very much a work-in-progress, and, sadly, no one there seemed too interested in my project. That said, the best feedback I received was during a discussion with Karl Steel that Saturday evening. But I remain worried about one thing: he said it'd be great if I could make Patience an "interesting" text. Certainly, I much appreciate the support and encouragement. My worry, however, stems from the fact that this is a common judgment of the varied nature of my work on Gower, Chaucer, and others. In other words, I don't want to be--or at least just be--that guy who makes difficult or dejected texts "interesting." Anyway, as I continue to formulate a dissertation project, I'm becoming very inclined toward having Patience be a chapter. But more on that prospecting adventure later.

I was able to attend the second of the "Eros and Phenomenology" panels, which featured truly stunning papers by Lara Farina, Cary Howie, and Tony Hasler. I really enjoyed all of them, although the first two spoke most directly to my own research interests. Lara spoke about a "materialist history of reading" that would attend to the "intimate senses [of] touch, taste, smell." She further commented on how these issues are part and parcel of the "cultural management of eros in reading." But it was, above all, Cary's paper that made me shudder! I had neither heard Cary speak before, nor been much acquainted with his work other than being aware of his book Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature. No summary would do justice to his elegant, moving meditation on the "phenomenology of the body (in) waiting," about "redeem[ing] our appendages," about the impact and vitality of "undesirable proximities." Regrettably, I was unable to speak with him at the conference, but have since had a very generative email correspondence and very much look forward to meeting at Kalamazoo, if not before. His paper resonated with my own thinking about Patience, and my own ultimate desires to speak about that text's phenomenality. I find Cary's notion of a phenomenology of the "expectant body" alluring, and I think it connects nicely with my own leanings toward Jean-Louis Chretien's "phenomenology of call and response."

I'll end this post by recalling a comment that Eileen made to several of us at the pub that Saturday evening. She remarked about feeling as if "something has changed in medieval studies." Earlier (and often), Jeff Cohen had already noted that this was a conference during which one could (or retroactively would) identify a seismic shift in our field. Both Eileen and I drew on such stoney metaphors in our conversation about the "geological time" of academic work--a time that seems so utterly slow until it's so suddenly altered much as a slow but continuous river alters the rock formations and land masses through and near which it flows until it erupts through a long placed blockage to chart a new course. I think Eileen is correct: something has changed, is changing. Among other things, I find the ethically charged and phenomenologically enriched work of BABEL members to be but one of those vibrations that our disciplinary seismographs might register. We might recall that the temporality of a seismograph is always already "out of sync," for its predicative value is posited on its delayed ability to register past tectonic vibrations. However minescule or imperceptible the delay, the seismograph is never simultaneous or co-incident with that which it measures; its grammar is always that of the future anterior, the "will have been." The felt change and the hope of its continued rhizomatic movements subsists in that mutuable, fluvial interplay between (with bows to Lara) enveloping gestures of touch and/in/through pressure. If we are to continue our surface excitations, we ought to continually ask, with Cary, "What's at stake in our tact?"