Medievalish 3.8
The Olympics, Catherine of Siena, Piers Plowman
Dear friend,
The Olympics ended yesterday. My family has always loved the Olympics. I love the glimpse of a world in which we can learn how to celebrate one another’s triumphs, to work hard at something beautiful, to run the race with joy and determination. It’s not all elevated, either: I was particularly charmed this year by Snoop Dogg and his evident joy and pleasure in being present.
The Olympics are not perfect, but sometimes they feel like a glimpse into the peaceable kingdom. I am struck by the wild, strange, beautiful variety of people. Though they all share an ordering towards a kind of physical and mental excellence, the athletes are all so different from one another. The stunning diversity of bodies, muscles and shapes and minds depend on natural aptitude and most of all what the athlete has trained for and sacrificed for and loved with their whole heart and body. Seeing a gymnast next to a basketball player, a swimmer next to a distance runner, or a shot-putter next to a diver vividly illustrates these differences. Yet they are all Olympians, who have worked and loved and aimed towards this goal for a very long time. Their aim to glory and disciplined excellence is shared but looks different.
Totally unoriginally, I always think of St. Paul in Second Timothy:
I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day: and not only to me, but to them also that love his coming. (2 Tim. 4:7-8, 1899 Douay-Rheims)1
Cliched to connect this verse to athletes! But also yes!
Being a medievalist, I can’t help reading symbolism and allegories and metaphors everywhere. For me, the Olympics lay bare, like creation, the outrageous and inviting capaciousness of being made in the Image of God and running our various races and fighting our various fights and keeping the faith in each of our different contexts, lives, and loves.
There is this beautiful variety in the life of following Jesus that we can easily miss or even deny if we are not paying attention. Our orientation to glory and call into sacrificial love is shared. But sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking of sanctification as sort of an assembly line situation, one where we all just replicate each other as we are hallowed and sanctified in the life of following Jesus. However, Christ himself is bigger than any one image or narrative or perspective, he requires four gospels—more accurately, the whole arc of scripture—to reveal his character. He encompasses every virtue; his every act teaches us the life of love. No one person can imitate him in his fullness. We need the strangeness of one another to witness the bigger picture.
I am reminded of what St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) heard from God on our different giftings:
Why do I give this person one virtue and that person another, rather than giving them all to one person? It is true that all the virtues are bound together, and it is impossible to have one without having them all. But I give them in different ways so that one virtue might be, as it were, the source of all the others. So to one person I give charity as the primary virtue, to another justice, to another humility, to another a lively faith or prudence or temperance or patience, and to still another courage. …Through her love of that virtue she attracts the other virtues to herself, since they are all bound together in loving charity.2
As Catherine understands, our differences actually and paradoxically unite us as we seek wholeness in Christ’s Body. This surprising diversity of the life of love ends up being one of the great reminders of one of my favorite medieval poems, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. This fourteenth-century poem is a long alliterative allegory, tracking the “main character” Wille, representing the human will and a sort of everyman, seeking the good life. To simplify a rather complicated poem, Wille meets person after person, from Study to Clergie to historical figures like Trajan, and argues with them, listens to them, seeks their guidance or rejects it.
But at last towards the end of this rather long poem Wille has found a teacher who can instruct him on the nature of love, Liberum Arbitrium. The Latin name means free will, but he is not just the will that chooses whatever it wants, but the will freed into loving by the grace of God. In other words, Liberum Arbitrium is not the shallow fantasy of a freedom only accomplished in fortressed individuality far from the constraints, demands, and obligations of daily life and other people. This will is freed into love. He has been given clear eyes and judgment free from the shackles of selfishness, envy, hatred, and self-loathing, in the choice of loving others, oneself, and God. Grace and practice, united in the will. Liberum Arbitrium can help Wille to recognize Charity himself.
Liberum Arbitrium launches into some of the most glorious lines of the poem, which begin ‘Charity is a childlike thing, as holy church witnesses…”3 Like a child who happily plays with a stick or with an expensive toy, this mysterious Charity is indifferent to wealth and undeceived by its power. But also like a child, Charity sees people, and enters into life with them where they are:
He is glad with all who are glad, as kids that laugh together And sorrows when he sees men sorrow--as you see children Laugh when others laugh and mourn when others mourn.
As a result, Charity, can be found in all sorts of places living all shapes of lives. He dwells in prisons, and with the poor. He paints beautiful prayers in books; he takes poverty and hardship of his own with patience. He believes and trusts other people; he repents and tries to make amends. If you’re looking for him, Liberum Arbitrium says, you’re not going to be able to recognize him by the way he looks or dresses—“I have seen him in homespun and in gold gilt”—nor even his manner of speech, theologically learned or wincingly uncouth.
But you might be able to recognize Charity by his works. Wherever he walks in the world, he is a glad giver. Charity does not dwell in sackcloth and ashes, or prominently go about with a drawn and solemn face at the miseries of the world. He is “merriest of mouth at dinner” and companionable in company. Liberum Arbitrium then lists people in this charity formed by a humble and contrite heart: we meet hermits and kings, men and women, friars and monks and layfolk living this life of charity. These people have little in common except their active will to love God and one another.
This is true of all the saints, canonized and uncanonized, of the remarkable people in each of our lives. Like Olympians, they share nothing in common but the greatness and sacrificial discipline of their love, oriented toward the true end: seeing Jesus.
So, then, the natural follow-up questions: Are you, so to speak, more of a table tennis player or a discus thrower or a pommel horse specialist? What is the particular call for you into obedience, into love, in your life and time and place? And where are you being invited into appreciating that vastness of the Body of Christ in the strangeness and gifts of other people?
What I’ve been up to this month:
I turned in BOOK TWO!!! So thankful.
I guest preached at my church in a series on virtues & vices on July 21 (on humility!) and get to do it again this Sunday, August 18. If you’re a Denver local, come visit, or if you’re not but you’d like to hear it, watch online.
Relatedly, I love teaching, leading retreats, and helping folks into the world of historical writing. If your church, ministry, or class would like to learn more about imagination and literature, our medieval brothers and sisters, Christian mysticism, or related topics, book me—my fall is starting to fill up!
I’ve been setting up interviews for the fall on Old Books with Grace… it’s a good lineup. This English major is pretty psyched because I’m going to have to do my theology homework: get ready for a plenitude of ecumenical conversations on theologians as diverse as Paul, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Zwingli, Luther, and for more literary topics too!
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Working on a book review of William Mattison’s Growing in Virtue: Aquinas on Habit.
Fiction: I finally finished In this House of Brede by Rumer Godden which was a true delight. Highly recommend.
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: Thinking I might return to the end of Piers Plowman for a little essay brewing in the back of my mind… I can never quite get away from that ridiculous poem.
Article: I only read articles that I wasn’t terribly excited about this month. Nothing to share.
A Prayer from the Past
Today’s prayer is from Anglican divine Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), said after receiving the Eucharist.
If all the creatures in the world should offer themselves together with me to praise thee, O Lord, yet is it certain that we could not give thee sufficient thanks for the least of thy mercies; and if together we cannot sufficiently praise thee for the least, how much less can I alone perform so great a duty, for such inestimable blessings, as I have at this time received; for vouchsafing to visit me, comfort me, and honour me with acceptance and admittance to thy blessed table. …
Give me a heart, which may love thee with so true, faithful, and constant affection, as that nothing under the sun may separate me from the love of thee. Let me not follow the love of the world, or delight in the vanities of it any longer: but give me power to kill and quench all other love and desires, and to love thee only, desire thee only, and only think of thee, and thy commandments: that all my affections and thoughts may be fixed on thee; that in all temptations and adversities, I may have recourse to thee only, and receive all comfort from thee alone, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.
Peace for your August,
Grace
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I like to look up and use all different scriptural translations to see what emerges. Douay-Rheims, closest to the Vulgate Latin Bible used by medieval readers and thinkers, uses “justice” instead of “righteousness” in this passage and I like the reframing that offers us today. A lot more could be said about this, but I highly recommend looking at a bunch of different translations if you’re meditating over a passage.
St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (Paulist Press, 1980), 37-38.
All these lines are from C.16 of Piers Plowman. This is my translation from Middle English.
Thank you for this wonderful reflection. The Olympics were exciting and inspiring to watch. I loved the connection you made to Catherine of Siena and Piers Plowman!