The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics

Extract

We all know about those embarrassing saints scattered throughout the Middle Ages, our ancestral crazy aunts in the attic and uncles in the barn. St Simeon Stylites, sitting on his post for nearly a century; St Catherine, living on a single communion wafer; St Beatrice, weaving for herself a belt of thorns. What are historians to make of them? What motivated their weird behaviour? And especially, how are we to explain such behaviour, and worse, the admiration of such behaviour, to our curious students?

In this book, a psychiatrist, Jerome Kroll, and a medievalist, Bernard Bachrach, team up to try to answer such questions with the techniques of modern science and the approaches of modern historiography. Their hypothesis is provocative. The motivation for the shocking practices of some of the saints was not that ascribed by admiring medievals or even by the practitioners themselves; that is the desire or compulsion to participate in, and offer penitence for, Christ's suffering. Nor was it that usually ascribed by modern authors who see insanity, sexual masochism or proto-feminism. Rather, such behaviours constituted a technology of mysticism, a way of achieving an altered state of consciousness productive of mystical experience.