Studies in Radical Religion in the Central Middle Ages (c.850-1210) by Angus J. Braid Alcuin Academics (2011). Pbk. 442 pages. £25. ISBN 978-1780185101.
In this book Angus Braid wants to explore ‘the origin of personal religion in the experience of deep-thinking individuals, who believe they have been in contact with “the divine”.’ The quotation marks around that last term indicate that he writes not as a believer but as an academic. In fact this work has its origins in a doctoral thesis and bears many of the marks of such: copious references and extensive bibliography accompany detailed exegetical analysis of texts from which the overall argument is constructed.
This may seem daunting to the general reader but is essential to the purpose of the work, which is to get behind the official façade of religion and discover ‘the individual and his personal religion, rather than organised religion’. The fact that the people whom Braid wants to focus on are some very esoteric illuminati from the Middle Ages also adds to the challenge of this book.
In the context of the medieval Church, claims to personal belief or illumination were immediately viewed with suspicion as heretical: the Church claimed a monopoly on any divine communication, viewing any other claims to be devilish deceits. Historians now generally regard ‘heresy’ as protests – often ‘traditionalist’ and scripturally based – against ecclesiastical innovations introduced to enhance clerical control and power. Sometimes the charge of heresy could be a matter of academic jealousy between different schools of thought, at others just a means of getting back at someone. For their part, inquisitors were mostly looking to have their own paranoid suspicions of demonic plots to undermine the church confirmed as an excuse to enforce conformity. Scant regard was paid to what heretics were actually saying and every attempt made to obliterate their teaching, This in turn has created a problem for historians as most of what we now know about radical or heterodox thinkers has come from the records of the very people who condemned them and sought to deny their true identity. As Braid writes, ‘Those in power can remove the evidence, and rewrite the memories of individuals or groups, denying them their identity.’ The most recent ‘revisionist’ studies of heresy in the Middle Ages go in for very careful textual and contextual readings, which characterises the methodology of Braid. The results are as radical for our understanding of history as the original challenge was to the ecclesiastical power structure of the day.
Another distinctive feature of Braid’s work – particularly his study of the roots of Western illuminism in Sufism – is his knowledge of the Islamic context, which has always been problematic to European historians. In fact it is no understatement to say that over the centuries the relationship between Europe (Christendom) and the Arabic world (Islam) has always been problematic. One consequence has been that both general histories and specific monographs have proceeded, with an occasional nod to our southern neighbours, as if Christendom and Islam were almost hermetically sealed and alien entities.
This state of denial has totally distorted and falsified vast areas of our cultural understanding, serving to perpetrate a state of alienation. Only recently has this whole paradigm begun to be challenged – often by Arabic scholars. For example, histories of astronomy routinely skip from the classical world of Ptolemy to Copernicus. The lacuna is staggering as we now know that key geometric diagrams used by Copernicus were exact copies from Nasr al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy, one of the texts of the Maragha school of astronomy, based to the east of Tehran in the thirteenth century and which clearly anticipated the work of Copernicus (cf. Pathfinders, Jim Al-Khalili, 2010).
Braid shows himself to be very aware of the limitations of the standard model of historical understanding. In his consideration of the mystical roots of alchemy and chemistry he acknowledges the difficulties, which have ‘only recently begun to be studied in a careful and scholarly way’. The word ‘gibberish’ is a lingering echo in our language of the phenomenally precocious chemical theories in the 8th century of Jabir ibn Hayyan (translated, Geber) which dull Europeans couldn’t understand (and the etymology of which dictionaries still do not acknowledge!) The more closely we scrutinise the past, the more we realise the significance of the ongoing currents of cultural osmosis which bring people together and undermine stereotypes: as Braid puts it, ‘The religious quest is the search for the authority by which we can live the best possible life…as part of an interconnected world.’ His work is a reflection of this belief.
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of the SOF movement who, being now redundant, has more time to think about the issues involved.