representing others in medieval Iberian & modern academic literature

Hamilton representing others as scary clown

The conclusion to Michelle Hamilton’s Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature begins with an epigram from another scholar.  Read it with philosophical seriousness:

Three ingredients, then, are necessary to make Europe: Rome, Greece and Christianity.

— Rémi Brague, Eccentric Culture

Hamilton then begins in her own words:

Rémi Brague’s provocative assertion that the only traditions that contributed to the formation of contemporary Europe are Western ones reflects contemporary critical views of European identity and history. [1]

Hamilton thus rewrites “are necessary to make” into “the only traditions that contributed.”  That’s passive-aggressive symbolic violence to the other scholar.[2]  Such deliberative acts, not the totalizing view, sadly reflect contemporary critical practice in discussing European identity and history.

Welcome to the New Middle Ages.  It’s producing cartoon literature that outdoes this-for-that didactic allegory.  It’s re-chanting academic ideology.  The whole enterprise is less humorous than medieval theology or modern medicine.

Where is now Jaume Roig?  What happened to the French Revolution?  Why has intellectual life sunk into a sea of lies?

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Notes:

[1] Hamilton (2007) p. 147.  Id. contrasts the “Roman/Greek/Christian construction of identity” with the “Arab/Andalusi/Jewish” identity.  The construction of these constructions of identity depends heavily on the constructions of contemporary academic medieval Iberian studies.  Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor shows them about as much respect as it does for Aristotle.  Hamilton’s book has received laudatory reviews from her fellow scholars of medieval Iberian history and culture.

[2] Rémi Brague himself seems to be exceptionally precise in his use of words.  That’s not the only way to participate fruitfully in intellectual life.  But that way deserves at least a minimal level of intellectual respect.

[image] Scary clown thanks to Graeme Maclean and Wikipedia.

Reference:

Hamilton, Michelle. 2007. Representing others in Medieval Iberian literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sirach, emphasizing God's primacy, ambivalently praised physicians

Sirach placed God over Galen

While many persons served many gods within the ancient Mediterranean world, Jews served a jealous god.  From a Jewish perspective, and subsequently Christian and Islamic perspectives, no other god was higher, greater, or stronger than the god of Abraham, the Lord.  No other god was truly the creator of heaven and earth.  No other god cared as well for those who served him.  To a sick person, a human physician providing healing and deliverance from suffering might seem like a god.  Ancient Jewish literature shows concern about physicians usurping the position of the Lord.  That concern did not prevent Jews from acquiring medical knowledge and seeking the help of professional physicians.

The description of the Jewish King Asa’s death highlights the mistake of appealing to physicians rather than to the Lord.  King Asa made a deal with the Syrians to help him defeat an enemy within Israel.  Asa’s mistake, according to a prophet, was not treachery among human tribes, but failure to appeal to the Lord.  The prophet thus declared that Asa would face further war.  Immediately following that story is an account of the cause of Asa’s death:

Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe; yet even in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but sought help from physicians. [1]

Asa thus died.  In this account, seeking help from physicians parallels seeking help from a foreign army.  Both are betrayals of the Lord.

Sirach, a “sage of Israel” writing about 2200 years ago, praised physicians while implicitly recognizing god’s jealousy.  Sirach offered this wisdom:

Honor the physician with the honor due to him, according to your need of him, for the Lord created him; for healing comes from the Most High, and he will receive a gift from the king.  The skill of the physician lifts up his head, and in the presence of great men he is admired. [2]

This wisdom is full of ambivalence toward physicians.  Advice to “honor the physician” is immediately qualified with “with the honor due to him, according to your need of him.”  Honor is thus immediately reduced to practical need.  Moreover, the ability of the physician is credited to the Lord: “for the Lord created him; for healing comes from the Most High.”  The reference to a gift from the king suggests a reward from a deputy of the Lord to the physician for administering the Lord’s healing.  The physician seems to be vainly proud and falsely admired for healing skill that came from the Lord.

Sirach continued with similarly ambivalent wisdom about physicians.  Sirach credited the Lord with creating physicians’ medicines.  He advised the sick to “pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.”  Sirach supported physicians in the context of prayer:

give the physician his place, for the Lord created him; let him not leave you, for there is need of him.  There is a time when success lies in the hands of physicians, for they too will pray to the Lord that he should grant them success in diagnosis and in healing, for the sake of preserving life. [3]

According to Sirach, physicians’ prayers to the Lord are the source of success in diagnosis and healing.  Immediately after invoking “preserving life” is a line that modern scholars have struggled to understand:

He who sins before his Maker, may he fall into the hands of the physician. [4]

This verse concludes what is commonly considered to be Sirach’s section on physicians.  A highly knowledgeable scholar explained that verse:

The final verse is difficult {linguistically}, but reiterates the traditional view that sin, as the cause of sickness, requires God’s healing discharged by his agent, the physician, with the medicines of his {God’s} creation. [5]

The difficult verse can thus be interpreted consistent with Sirach’s praise of physicians.

The difficult verse can also be interpreted more punishingly.  The phrase “fall into the hands of the physician” could mean care and protection.  It also could mean capture and harm.  The latter interpretation connects to the subsequent section on death.  The subsequent section on death otherwise seems to have little relation to what textually comes immediately before and after.  The difficult verse may be a scribal interpolation associating physicians with death.  Perhaps Sirach himself made that association.  In any case, physicians as causes of death was a well-known topos in the ancient world.

Concern about godly jealousy did not prevent Jews from acquiring medical knowledge and seeking the help of professional physicians.  Writing roughly about the year 1000, the Jewish physicians Asaph and Shabbethai Donnolo strove to integrate highly regarded Greek medicine into Jewish thought and practice.  Ideological debate about medicine’s place in Jewish life extended for more than a millennium.  So too did acquiring apparently useful medical knowledge and treating sick persons.  Among Jews, Christians, and servants of other gods in the ancient Hellenistic world, divine and human healing were regarded as largely complementary.[6]  Symbolic battles can have little relation to actual practices.

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Notes:

[1] 2 Chronicles 16:12.

[2] Sirach 38: 1-3.

[3] Sirach 38: 12-14.

[4] Sirach 38: 15.  Life, more life, is a fundamental Jewish value.  The translation above is based on the Greek text of Sirach.  The Greek text is apparently more readily interpretable than is the Hebrew text of Sirach at this line.  The Greek text gives an ancient interpreter’s understanding of the Hebrew text.

[5] Allan (2001) p. 391, discussing the Hebrew text.

[6] Nutton (2013) Ch. 18.  Jews, as well as Christians, became leading physicians in the early Islamic world.  The Jewish physician Masarjawaih and the Bakhtishu, a Syro-Persian Christian family of physicians, were active in ruling circles in eighth-century Baghdad.

[image] Portrait of Galen, adapted from the Vienna Dioscurides (Juliana Anicia Codex or Codex Vindobonensis), completed in Constantinople c. 512, folio 3 painting.  Adapted by T.L. Poulton, as published in Charles Singer (1925) The evolution of anatomy: a short history of anatomical and physiological discovery to Harvey (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner) p. 47, via Wellcome Images.

References:

Allan, Nigel. 2001. “The physician in ancient Israel: his status and function.”  Medical History. 45 (3): 377-94.

Nutton, Vivian. 2013. Ancient medicine. 2′nd ed. London: Routledge.

Yoga: The Art of Transformation begins with you

Yoga: The Art of Transformation, now at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, shows representations of physical-spiritual exercises across two millennia.  These physical-spiritual exercises became what’s known today as yoga.  To best appreciate this exhibit, you must cultivate awareness of your bodily position within it.

The earliest illustrated manuscript of yoga poses shows a person doing a headstand.  The manuscript, which is from the beginning of the seventeenth century, explains that this pose creates “a kind of fire that burns up all impurities.”[1]  Feeding that fire is blood flowing with gravity to the head.  All the rest of the poses involve seated positions.  Seated positions were associated with meditation.  Don’t just walk through the exhibit.  Sit and meditate.  Do a headstand if necessary.

Some of the most poignant paintings show two yoga practitioners seated in meditation, facing each other.  That’s not a teacher demonstrating exercises in front of a yoga class.  It’s not a personal trainer telling you what to do.  It’s also different from the television show Lilias, Yoga and You, which makes a personal connection only with an alliteration of y’s.  Practicing yoga together is like couples dancing with a cosmic orientation.  Bring another with you through this exhibit.

sanstone yogini from Kannauj

A short walk across the hall of the Sackler Gallery connects eleventh-century yogini sculptures to nineteenth and twentieth-century European-American representations of yoga.  What does a sculpture of a busty yogini armed with a sword and riding an owl have to do with Thomas Edison’s early film Hindoo Fakir?  Stripping away contemporary cultural prejudices, the two representations are similar in important ways.  Both are sensational imaginings of others carrying claims of spiritual power.  Embodied human beings, male and female, laugh and leer.  Exhale the tension you feel from your toes to your ears.

The Hindoo Fakir and the yogini both allude to physical exercises.  The fakir vigorously manipulates his female counterpart and marvels at her capabilities.  The yogini has beautiful physical symmetry except for special differences.  One difference is the weapons the yogini holds in opposing hands.  Another, more subtle difference is the sexual characteristics of the two figures at the base of the yogini’s spread legs.[2]  Play coed Twister.

An ancient idea in yoga is the union of the microcosm of individuality with the macrocosm of universality.  The exhibit includes an early nineteenth-century Indian painting of Vishnu as Vishvarupa.  Inscribed within the figure of Vishnu are animals, people, buildings, and landscapes representing all of the cosmos.  The exhibit itself has a wide range of objects presented from the museum-standard cosmic perspective.  You must bring the objects of this exhibit within yourself.

Yoga: Art of Transformation is at the Sackler Gallery through January 26, 2014.

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Notes:

[1] Folio from the Bahr al-Hayat (Ocean of Life), from Mughal court, India, Uttar Pradesh, Allahabad, dated 1600–1604.  The Persian text around the image is translated in the exhibit’s item description.  That’s the source for the quote above.

[2] The sexual differentiation of the figures as the base parallels the sexual differentiation within the paired figures symmetrically placed at the top of the sculpture. The other notable asymmetry is the bent necklace near the yogini’s navel.  Curator Debra Diamond describes this yogini as one of her favorites:

Its sculptor beautifully exploited the softness and warm golden color of sandstone to convey the organic quality of plump flesh. This organic quality has its roots in a sculptural tradition that began with clay. The plasticity of terracotta imbues its realization from the doughy stems of the lotus flowers at bottom to the thick, circular halo at top. In contrast, passages of intricate carving, like her pearl-studded necklace and girdle, not only provide texture and visual interest, but also curve around her body to emphasize its rounded volumes. Indeed, the artist’s ability to balance—without fussiness—the smooth limbs and the very precisely realized cuticles of her fingernails, her individually carved little teeth, and the crisply delineated feathers of the owl is masterful. That balance of adorned and unadorned achieves dynamism from a rigorous yet rhythmic geometry. All this achieves drama from the sculptor’s sophisticated manipulation of volumes and shadows.

From the exhibit’s Curator Q&A.

[image] Yogini, sandstone sculpture, 86.4×43.8×24.8cm; from India, Uttar Pradesh, Kannauj, dated c. 1000-1050;  held at San Antonio Museum of Art, purchased with the John and Karen McFarlin Fund and Asian Art Challenge Fund, 90.92.  Image courtesy of Sackler Gallery press office.

anti-medical satire in al-Harizi's Tahkemoni

Judah al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni, a Hebrew work written in Spain about 1220, presents a charlatan physician. The physician claims the authority of Eastern learning:

I hail from Babylon, where I sought earth’s master sages, granaries of the Wisdom of the ages.  I have studied medicine under brilliant physicians, poured water on the hands of peerless diagnosticians, drunk their words down passionately, not circumspectly; and not from books, but from their lips directly.  I have swum deeply in their inner sea: the pillars of their wisdom stand revealed to me. [1]

With a brief, introductory bow to God’s healing powers, the physician with godly allusions offers to dispel all forms of bodily suffering:

I, with His help who formed Earth and Sky, can bind up your pain and give you ease again, staunch your every wound and set your strings well tuned.  All who ache or ail, be hale!  Mine the unguent and salve for every loathsome lesion you might have.  Let the snake-bite man take what I give: and it shall be that everyone bitten shall look on me and live.  You who hunger for health, come dine: mine is a powder ground exquisite fine to open eyes shut tight, giving the blind full slight.  I have a potion that sets the barren teeming and the frigid steaming.  For each raw wound recalcitrant to medication I am come from the city with Salvation.  With God’s help I shall put your deafness behind, heal the blind, set the lame skipping like lambs, and butting about like rams.  Each and every hurt that casts man down to dirt, yes, your very least distress I shall send loping off to the wilderness. [2]

A crowd of sick and suffering persons came, “like manna in the wilderness,” to the physician.  Their pain made for his gain:

a motley hubbub up from the farms, dotards and babes-in-arms, a swain groaning his pain, a dame moaning her name, all pouring forth their grief; and he, clucking sympathy, hurrying his relief in bottles and jars, and garnering their dinars, his humour none the worse for having filled his purse through his sham and baldfaced scam. [3]

The narrator is contemptuous of both the charlatan-physician and his victims.  Invective and satire against physicians is continuous from Roman literature and literature in the early Islamic world to medieval European literature.[4]

one time's cures are other time's quackery

The narrator, who participates in Tahkemoni, berates the physician for his chicanery.  The physician “curled his lips as to curse,” but instead responded in verse:

Because you are my honest friend
your every word I take as manna;
But I must wander far and wide
till I be blest with coin’s Hosanna.
Flint-hearted Time rears wavelike up
and strikes me cruel, early and late:
Lodge no complaint at my door, good friend;
lodge your complaint against harsh Fate. [5]

The word “manna” recalls persons’ “hunger for health.”  Their falling “like manna” on the physician enables him to fill his purse.  The honest friend’s words offer no such benefit.  A physician must acquire means to eat.  That means being “blest with coin’s Hosanna.”  The continuous struggle for survival is hard-hearted and cruel.  The physician deflects opprobrium for his chicanery to economics and “harsh Fate.”

That’s not a convincing excuse if you wear fine robes and live in luxurious quarters.

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Notes:

[1] Judah al-Harizi, Tahkemoni, Gate 30, from Hebrew trans. Segal (2001) p. 246.  Tahkemoni adapted into Hebrew the Arabic literary genre maqama.  Rhyming prose interspersed with poetry is characteristics of maqama.  The claim “not from books, but from their lips directly” relates to a more general controversy over the merits of learning orally from a teacher versus learning from books.  In eleventh-century Egypt, the scholarly physician ibn Butlan criticized the scholarly physician ibn Ridwan for learning from books.

[2] Id. pp. 246-7.  The text is replete with biblical figures and allusions to god’s healing acts and compassion.  E.g. Isaiah 55:1-3.  Many of these figures and allusions are also in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus, the good physician.  Al-Harizi’s charlatan physician promised powder for opening eyes shut tight.  Such powder would reverse the failure of physicians in Tobit 1:10.

[3] Id. p. 248. On manna, see Exodus 16.

[4] In his commentary on Gate 30, Segal notes:

Alharizi was not alone in raising a laugh at the expense of physicians; earlier and later figures in Jewish literature, indeed in all European and Arabic medieval literature, made uncharitable remarks about doctors, especially as they claimed or pretended impossible expertise — clearly the case here.

Segal (2001) p. 562.  The excellent Soul and Gone provides anti-medical satire in Hebrew poetry from Hillel ben Shmuel (first half of the 13th century – 1295?), Yaakov Frances (1615 – 1667), and Immanuel Frances (1618? – 1710?).

[5] Id. p. 249.  At the end of the story, the narrator refers to the physician as “Truth’s doctor.” The physician earlier invited the people, “come forward, try me; test my Truth; and only then deny me!”  Al-Harizi seems to be playing with a contrast between truths of economics and truths of medicine.

[image] Old medicine bottle / jar collection, thanks to aussiegall for sharing and Wikicommons for collecting.

Reference:

Segal, David Simha, trans. and ed. 2001. Judah al-Harizi. The book of Taḥkemoni: Jewish tales from medieval Spain. Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.