The theologian Jean Gerson, known for his writings condemning Saint Bridget as a false visionary, discusses the discernment of spirits in highly medicalized terms. He attributes a predisposition to hosting divine spirits to specific humoral conditions (a sanguine complexion) and a predisposition to hosting demonic spirits or to fraudulent imitation of possession with other specific humoral conditions (a melancholic complexion). He also details the physical causes of fantasy and brain damage, such as excessive fasting. “Medical books are full of such monstrous apparitions and disturbances in the power of judgment resulting from injury to the interior powers.” Citing Jerome, Gerson claims that such people “are more in need of the remedies of Hippocrates than the counsel of others.” 35 Not only does a female complexion cordon off possibilities for experiencing the divine, but her medical description parallels the defining traits of sloth. For example, the causes of sloth mirror the physical and psychological traits generated by a phlegmatic, female physiology; “tendernesse,” “tenterhed or nessched of herte,” “ydelnesse,” “heuynesse,” and “pusillanymyte,” are among those listed in The Book of Vices and Virtues. 36
One further association of sloth and melancholy inextricable from gendered identity is lovesickness. Although the relationship between sloth, gender, and mystical experience is contested, at least implicitly, by the remarkable imprints of female medieval mystics, one form of sloth that is particularly male is Amor hereos or lovesickness. Lovesickness was an established medical condition in the Middle Ages to which melancholics were considered especially prone. 37 Lovesickness is a disease of judgment, a failure of estimation, characterized by the overheating of the brain, and the fixity of the imagination on a loved object. 38 Other diagnostic symptoms are sleeplessness, languishing, and myopic fixation. Melancholics, who take impressions so deeply, as in the case of mystics, are thus most susceptible to lovesickness.
Lovesickness features as a theological concern in pastoral writing. Canon 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council, whose requirement that physicians call a priest before treatment has already been discussed, concludes with the following: “and since the soul is far more precious than the body, we forbid under penalty of anathema that a physician advise a patient to have recourse to sinful means for the recovery of bodily health.” 39 Such sinful means included fornication, masturbation, and drunkenness, all established medical cures for lovesickness. 40
Whereas sloth as lovesickness corresponds to the melancholic humor, sloth in its more familiar definition—that of laziness, lethargy, or idleness—corresponds to the phlegmatic humor. The phlegmatic are chaste, slow in movement and reason, sleepy, fat, dull. Some of these associations are symbolic and some are more medical. As an example of the first type, we can think of the medieval and modern use of “luke-warm” to describe the slothful or those not fully committed. In Summa Viciorum, for example, Peraldus lists one of the species of acedia as tepiditas, and describes the slothful as tepidus. In Middle English texts, “leuk” and “leukwarm” describe people and activities performed without fervor, yet tepid warmth also reflects a phlegmatic physiology. 41
Medical descriptions of the phlegmatic, however, resemble those of sloth: “for a verray fleumatik man is in þe body lustles, heuy, and slowʒ; dul of wit and of þouʒt, forʒetful; neissche [soft] of fleissche and quauy [moist] … ful of slouthe and of slepinge.” 42 This phlegmatic physiology is consistent with many poetic and pastoral descriptions of sloth. In The Mirror of Man, for example, Gower writes that “si fleumatik” [if phlegmatic], he “soie a attemprée” [will be tempted], by “Gloutenie et Lacheté” [gluttony and sloth]. 43
Robert Rypon’s sermon offers a more medically thorough alignment of the first ages of development—infancy and childhood—with cold and moist complexions, which will be covered in more detail in the next chapter. The cold and moist complexion naturally disposes infants and children to sloth and gluttony: “and thus it causes heaviness; this heaviness troubles the body and disposes it to somnolence, which is especially a species of sloth.” Such sloth is natural in children, and a remedy is available in the form of their parents’ provision of labor. 44 Rypon’s understanding of early physiology is consistent with medical descriptions of infants and young children as of moist complexion, requiring much sleep. 45
Certainly, medieval medical texts acknowledge the symptoms and dangers of sloth. Lanfranc writes that the “surgian, in al þat he myȝte, he muste tempere a sijk mannes slepinge; for to myche slepinge engenderiþ superfluyte & febliþ his vertewes, & coldiþ & lesiþ al his bodi.” 46 Too much sleep imperils the body and weakens the virtues.
However, the most urgent use of medicine in pastoral texts as regards sloth concerns the potential for abuse. Pastoral writers warn that sinners exploit the material connections between sloth and the body, as the slothful falsely invoke material illness to excuse themselves from sins and obligations. We recall the homilist who explained how the devil and sinners rename sins according to their own interests—manhood for wrath, for example. The slothful do the same. However, “slowþe” is called “impotencia.” The sleeping slothful, being roused to attend church, decline on physical grounds, claiming that “I am olde” or “sekely … I am febyll.” 47 Fasciculus Morum also rails against the ready excuses of the slothful for why they cannot keep vigil, fast or pray: “the first of these a slothful man cannot undertake because it would weaken his body; neither can he undertake the second because he gets a headache or eye ache; nor the third either because he does not know the Our Father and other prayers, and if he does, he gets a swollen tongue and lips.” 48
Sinners’ tendency to locate excuses for their behavior in their bodies is a marked and recurring trait of depictions of sloth. Lydgate’s Sloth piles on descriptors and disabilities to excuse herself. She is “slow and encombrows/Haltynge also, and Gotows.” Her “lymes crampysshynge/Maymed ek in [her] goynge,/Coorbyd.” 49 Acknowledging her excuse-making, she states that she is “fowndryd [exhausted] ay with cold;/On ech whedyr, I putte blame.” 50 Yet she might also here gesture toward a humoral excuse in coldness.
The blending of symptoms and sins is particularly acute in the case of sloth and therefore particularly dangerous. Sinners deceive themselves into thinking that their sin is a sickness. In an exemplum in Alphabet of Tales, one monk convinces himself that he is sick when actually he is in sin. When it is time to “rise vnto matins, he was euer stryken into a grete ferdnes & a fayntnes, to so mekull þat he supposed hym selfe þat it was a sekenes.” 51 Similar accounts of how the devil tempts sinners by preying on their natural humoral imbalance, The Book of Vices and Virtues describes one cause of sloth as “tenterhed or nescched of herte, þat is þe deueles feþere bed.” On this bed, the devil “seiþ to a man or womman, “þou hast be noresched to softely, and þou art of to feble complexioun; þou myʒt not endure to do gret penaunce, for þou art to tendre.” 52 Specifically, sloth is the devil’s medicine in John Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium, tempting monks to stay in bed with medical excuses to miss matins. 53
Lady Sloth steals into the soul by playing a desheitez [invalid] in the Anglo-Norman Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, Henry of Lancaster’s personal confessional. 54 Using images related to charity and hospitality, Henry explains how Sloth insinuates her way into the soul, seeking comfort, and then falls asleep. 55 Throughout the text’s exposition of sloth, Henry draws both symbolic and material connections with medicine. He describes the operation of theriac, an antidote to venom that is itself an even stronger poison. However, “should the poison inside the man have been there for some time and be so virulent and malignant that the theriac is simply not potent enough to expel it, then the man worsens by so much the more.” 56 Henry claims that he is so poisoned, and that the theriac of sermons, which includes the strong poison of the pains of hell, is not efficacious.
In response to the heavy urgency of the humors, pastoral writers also describe both physical and metaphorical cures for sloth. Outlining four purgatives that heal
the sinner, one fifteenth-century homilist blends metaphorical and material healing in his exposition of the first purgative, sweat. Sweat is especially efficacious for “he or sche þat lyueth in þe synne of slowthe.” 57 Although “travel [travail] or ellis be grete labor” that generates material sweat might usefully combat the sin of sloth, the labor described by the homilist is figurative, and signifies abstinence: “absteyne the frome all delicus metis and drynkis þe whiche scholde cawse this flessche to ryse in oþer synnes þat wolde be rebell to they sowle.” 58 The homilist goes on to describe this cleansing abstinence as follows: “the best medycyn for þis disese is to travel tyll thu sweyte owte þe fowles synne.” 59
Yet pure physical activity is a vital treatment in material medicine. Exercise was one of the non-naturals. John of Mirfield (d. 1407), who was both a priest and a doctor, compared excessive rest to stagnant water that caused disease: “just as stagnant waters putrefy and iron and all other metal rusts from lack of use, so it is excessive rest the creator, nurse and multiplier of evil humors and the begetter of corruption in members of the body and in the human blood.” 60 This analogy between the stagnant body and stagnant water, or disease-causing miasma developed in the later Middle Ages, reflecting the plague epidemic as well as increased understanding of how disease spread. 61 Other homilists use the plague etiology to analogize the sinner mired in sloth, idleness and inactivity, 62 as illustrated in the following sermon:it is of oure liffe here in þis world as it is of þe watur of þe see, and as of oþur watur þat stondeþ in podels [puddles]. Þe watur of þe see is euermore in contynue mevynge and sterynge, ebbynge and flowynge; but þe watur that stondeþ in podels meves not, but is in reste. Where-fore it vaxes sone corrupt and stynkynge … For ryght as þe watur in podels þat stondeþ and noʒthe is meved … vaxeþ corrupte and stynkynge, ryght so man that is not goyinge ne wirchynge in good verkes vexeth corrupt and stynkynge thorowe dedelye synne. 63
It is unclear whether man signifies the soul (in which case the plague and the disease-causing miasma are metaphors) or the body (in which case the passage offers a more material description, such as that found in John of Mirfield). The economic and social context of post-plague England, however, supports the material interpretation. Plague bore a material relation to conceptions of labor and sloth. After the plague, there was both a shortage in the labor market and increased social mobility, and the English Parliament passed various laws to restrict wages, vagrancy, and begging. 64
Later medieval ideas of sloth further the role of medicine in understanding the sin. Although theologians consider the implications of physiology and the constraints of the body and human culpability for all the sins, more pastoral descriptions engage explicitly with these arguments in relation to the corporeal sins of sloth, gluttony, and lechery. Fittingly, the metaphorical and metonymic understandings of these more corporeal sins encroach upon metaphorical descriptions, rendering them at times ambiguous or indecipherable.
Notes
1.Columba Stewart, “Evagrius Ponticus and the Eight Generic Logismoi,” in In the Garden of Evil, ed. Newhauser, pp. 3–34 (p. 30–32); see also R. E. Jehl, “Acedia and Burnout Syndrome: From an Occupational Vice of the Early Monks to a Psychological Concept in Secularized Professional Life,” in same collection, pp. 455–76.
2.John Cassian, De Institutis coenobiorum, PL 49 and trans. by Boniface Ramsey, The Institutes (New York: Paulist Press, 2000). Translations taken from the Ramsey edition. “Once acedia has seized possession of a wretched mind it makes a person horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a slight distance, as being careless and unspiritual. Likewise it renders him slothful and immobile in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling … He complains and sighs, lamenting that he is bereft and void of all spiritual gain … he makes a great deal of far-off and distant monasteries, describing such places as more suited to progress and more conducive to salvation.” (X.2)
3.Cassian, The Institutes, X.25.
4.Young, p. 171.
5.Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 30 ff.
6.Ibid., p. 43.
7.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, qu. 84, art. 4.
8.On the first point, see Wenzel’s chart of references to acedia and the three temptations (The Sin of Sloth, p. 167).
9. Middle English Sermons, p. 32.
10.Cassian, The Institutes, X.1.
11.Hilton, Scale of Perfection, p. 126.
12.See Johnson, “A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins,” p. 121 and Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 108.
13.In Prick of Conscience, the slothful suffer from “potagre” and gout while in purgatory, p. 82.
14.Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, p. 372, line 13716.
15.Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 108.
16.Vincent Gillespie, “Mystic’s Foot: Rolle and Affectivity,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, II, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exter Press, 1982), pp. 199–231.
17.Cited in Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 108.
18.And sloth is associated with palsy and dead flesh in “Templum domini.”
19. A Macaronic Sermon Collection, p. 442.
20.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 310.
21.Gower, Mirrour de l’Omme, p. 86.
22.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.386. See the discussion in Alastair Bennett, “Covetousness, ‘Unkyndenesse,’ and the ‘Blered’ Eye in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon Yeoman’s Tale,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014): 29–64.
23.Peter of Limoges, Moral Treatise on the Eye, pp. 86–7.
24.Ibid., II–I, q. 37, art. 4.
25.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 35, art. 1.
26.Lombardo, The Logic of Desire, p. 194–5.
27.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, qu. 35, art. 3.
28.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, qu. 84, art. 4; II–II, qu. 35, art. 2. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire, p. 195.
29. Jacob’s Well, p. 103.
30.The expansion of the sin of sloth to include the world of work and labor is covered by Gregory M. Sadlek, Idleness Working: the Discourse of Love’s Labor from Ovid Through Chaucer and Gower (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), pp. 167–207.
31.Reginald Pecock, The Donet, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS o.s. 156 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 106.
32.Ibid., p. 106.
33.For a list of sources on acedia and the humors, see Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, pp. 191–4.
34.Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 206–7. For further discussion about the role of female physiology in mystical visions and demonic possession, see Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Spirit Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) and “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 268–306.
35.Jean Gerson, “On Distinguishing True From False Revelations,” in Jean Gerson, pp. 334–64 (p. 346).
36. The Book of Vices and Virtues, pp. 26–7.
37.For an extensive study of the associations of melancholy, lovesickness and gender into the early modern period, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
38.Mary C. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: the Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 7–12.
39. Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils, p. 236.
40.Other sinful means included incantation, breaking holy fasts, and drinking intoxicating beverages. Darrel W. Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 202. Peter of S
pain, “Questions on the Viaticum (Version A),” in Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, p. 229.
41. Middle English Dictionary, “leuk,” 1.b.
42. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 157.
43.Gower, Mirrour de l’Omme, p. 201. Likewise, the devil of The Book of Vices and Virtues tempts the “flewmatike of glotonye and slowþe.” The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 156.
44.See Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
45. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, pp. 298–300.
Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture Page 21
