Barbara Newman’s new book presents a rich and detailed account of five different medieval relationships that, in her view, model “permeable” forms of intersubjectivity. A “permeable” relationship is understood as a way of “being-within-one-another,” like the persons of the Divine Trinity (4). Newman’s five relationships are: the teacher and student, the confessor and penitent, love relationships, the pregnant or nursing woman and her baby, and an individual assailed by demons and his or her confidant. One of her working presuppositions is that “the essence of personhood is the capacity to be permeated by other selves, other persons, without being fractured by them” (6). The term she re-uses to capture this permeability is “coinherence.” She argues that “the ontology and practice of coinherence are subtly persistent, even pervasive, in medieval thought” (5). Her overarching narrative is that coinherence is “foreign to modern ways of thinking” (266) or “unfamiliar to us” (269). To make better sense of both medieval “persons-in-relation” (214) and troubling twenty-first century phenomena such as reports of apparent telepathic influence or of heart transplant patients seeming to be influenced by the personality of the person whose heart they have acquired, she suggests, “we might need the medieval idea of coinherence” (279). The framework of permeability can both enrich our understanding of the medieval period and allow a more open-minded, but nevertheless rigorous, empirical investigation of phenomena that can’t currently be accounted for within existing scientific paradigms.

To give a brief overview of her discussion of the five relationships: the “permeable” model of teaching entails imitating charismatic role models as opposed to the “utterly different culture of disputation” (54) which replaced it when universities became the main forum of advanced instruction. After her discussion of charismatic pedagogy, Newman moves on to “the practice of mind reading or spiritual clairvoyance” (60). “Saints could discern the hidden thoughts and deeds of others because of their communion with the divine mind, in which all created minds converge” (81). The leakage between bodies and minds continues in the image of the exchange of hearts that moves from lovers swapping hearts in medieval romance to Christ and the spiritual aspirant doing the same in the vitae of saints: “Conceived as more porous than the modern organ […], the heart readily admitted influences from without, such as divine and demonic forces, or the assault of love’s arrows from the eyes of the beloved” (109). At the same time, porosity has its limits. The exchange of hearts should not come at the expense of continuing separate identities, as the lovers in Tristan discover: “the exchange of hearts in Tristan fails because it seeks to establish not only coinherence, which can accommodate difference, but also identity” (118). The same idea of the limits to porosity returns in the ecclesiastical authorities’ rejection of the complete mystical union expressed in the texts of authors such as Marguerite Porete or Meister Eckhart in the early fourteenth century. Challenging the claim that an individual could become one with God, theologians “asserted that […] the human person remains irreducible and inviolable. Thus a soul can never be totally annihilated in divine union, as Marguerite Porete maintained” (211). Newman agrees with the conclusions of the church authorities: “coinherence has its limits, even though the medieval self is far more permeable than its modern Western counterpart. It is formed by and through others to a degree we may find hard to comprehend. Yet personhood, for all its porousness, remains in principle a stable category” (212).

The most graphic embodiment of “coinherence, permeable selves, the formation of one person by and through another” (156) can be seen in late medieval views of conception, pregnancy and nursing, the subject of the fourth chapter. Here, practical medical advice from the period is presented alongside figurative invocations of the physical processes of human reproduction. The everyday experience of motherhood and its spiritual allegorizing are strikingly combined in the work of Julian of Norwich: “taking Julian at her word, all pregnancy, childbearing, nursing, and childcare are divine actions, performed by the very women so often denigrated as mere ‘carnal’ mothers. Maternity is thus a special case of the abstract principle articulated earlier in Julian’s text: ‘God doth alle thing, be it never so litile….For ther is no doer but he’” (205). Finally, in the fifth chapter, we learn how the experience of being “obsessed” or besieged by demons shows the darker flipside of the aspiration to become one with God. In Newman’s reading, accounts of such travails can be situated in “the danger zone of overlap between unusual experience and mental illness” (214). “For perhaps the central aspect of possession, or even obsession, is a loss of personal agency. The subject feels like a passive victim of his or her own thoughts and actions, which seem due instead to the invading force” (255). To conclude her argument, Newman emphasizes the conceptual resources which her models offer for thinking in the twenty-first century. Coinherence “expresses a way of being human--a different type of selfhood, an alternative theory of mind--that is largely alien to the contemporary West yet finds many parallels elsewhere” (285).

Newman’s “then vs. now” narrative of a modern Western fall from permeability is grounded in a reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). [1] Taylor’s book, as Newman presents it, charts a shift from the “porous” selves of the period before 1500 to the gradually accruing “buffered” or self-contained model of modern selfhood (2). Yet Taylor’s account of the gradual shift since 1500 is not quite the simple replacement of the porous by the buffered self that Newman implies. For Taylor, forms of porosity persist in the modern era, but with a new sense of plurality and choice: “we are aware today that one can live the spiritual life differently; that power, fullness, exile, etc., can take different shapes” (Taylor 2007,11). The change is not the result of a loss (Taylor criticizes what he calls “subtraction” narratives). To the contrary, it is the result of the discovery of new forms of meaning-making: “western modernity including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices” (Taylor 2007, 22). Moreover, the novel forms of autonomous selfhood are themselves always relational: “modernity is also the rise of new principles of sociality” (Taylor 2007, 169). Taylor’s account of the secular age is thus one in which experiences of permeability occur alongside habits of self-buffering, and individuals develop their identities with an awareness of these competing habits. Taylor, like Tocqueville or Isaiah Berlin, whom he approvingly cites, prizes plurality (Taylor 2007, 52), whilst simultaneously reconstructing the historical steps by which various competing habits and vocabularies develop. A Secular Age thus extends the argument of his earlier book, Sources of the Self, which similarly traced the competing commitments--to everyday life, to individual autonomy, and to a sense of connection to a larger world--from which the fractured “package” of modern Western identity is constructed. [2] His historical reconstructions do not so much trace a fall from grace (“then vs. now”) as the gradual emergence of the ambivalent and complex array of habits from which modern identities are forged.

Reading Newman’s account alongside this fuller version of Taylor’s argument helps to bring out the nuance and power of the story she reconstructs. For instance, her discussion of the last relationship in the series, that between the individual assailed by demons and his or her confidant or confessor, does not read sources “at face value” (217). Instead, the demons that tempt the late fourteenth-century widow Ermine of Reims articulate an “eminently sane” (251) critique of the ascetic regime to which the woman submitted. Her confessor, Jean Le Graveur, hoped that his record of Ermine’s travails would be approved by the chancellor of the faculties of theology, law and medicine at the University of Paris, Jean Gerson (234). Following the death of her husband, Ermine took an oath to follow the spiritual direction of Jean le Graveur. She then felt committed, on pain of damnation, to maintaining the regime of isolation, fasting, and self-castigation that he prescribed: “an ambitious confessor who wanted the prestige of directing his own holy woman could exercise all the prerogatives of an abusive husband: isolating her from family and friends, demanding rigorous obedience, exercising heavy-handed authority, and arrogating to himself the sole right to probe her inner life, judge her thoughts, and mediate them as he saw fit. This is precisely how Jean Le Graveur behaved” (238). In this context, the comments and jibes of her demons can be read as articulating “a cogent protest against the constraints of rigid obedience, penitential asceticism, and the emotional regime of guilt and fear” (239) to which Ermine submitted. The demons advise her to take off her hair shirt, return to her friends and to stop making herself sick by being overly anxious about her salvation (242).

The fifth chapter and the conclusion make explicit issues which are only implicit earlier in the book. The first is the potential for abuse, both physical and psychological, in “permeable” relations (279). The second is the varying degree to which the claims of the medieval texts--to telepathic insight, or to being assailed by demons--should be taken at face value. The fifth chapter mobilizes a generous, modern psychological reading of the texts to suggest that Ermine’s psyche attempts a kind of self-repair, speaking out against the harsh, and ultimately self-serving, regimen imposed by her confessor. The same kind of charitable but critical reading could be applied to, say, the report in the Revelations of the fourteenth-century Dominican nun, Margaret Ebner, that she suckled a miraculously animated doll of the Christ child (194). Newman sees in Ebner’s case a “material corporeal piety” (194) which re-embodies the more abstract discussion of God’s birth in the soul to be found in Meister Eckhart. The approach of the fifth chapter suggests we can push further and find a vocabulary which includes the permeable model of identity that informs the late medieval texts whilst simultaneously giving a charitable, historically grounded, and psychologically plausible account of the situations that the texts record and respond to. The experience of suckling a doll can be put in a wider context that doesn’t take the experience entirely at face value.

One reason Newman hesitates to fully develop the approach deployed in the fifth chapter might be her concern that modern vocabularies and modern habits can’t really cope with coinherence: “coinherence is not exactly a household word, but I have given it pride of place in this book because it names a concept that no other English term describes--precisely the one I mean to investigate” (7). Her own argument doesn’t quite bear out the claim that modern vocabularies are inadequate for the task of expressing coinherence. This is most obvious where she is drawing productively on the studies of Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann on the various learnable practices which underpin different “theories of mind” or different ways of relating to oneself and others in the contemporary world (59-60). Newman also cites Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923) as a foundational modern attempt to think about individual identity in relational terms (180-81). Buber was not alone among early twentieth-century thinkers in this respect. From the 1910s there is a tradition of phenomenological thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt who grappled with exactly the issue of, to use Newman’s formulation, “the capacity to be permeated by other selves without being fractured by them” (6). Their work is, in the twenty-first century, being revived and extended by Dan Zahavi, Shaun Gallagher, and Sophie Loidolt, among others. [3] There is also great interest in psychology in developing empirical models of relational identity of the sort Buber derived theoretically. [4] This current work confirms Taylor’s suggestion that porosity doesn’t go away but becomes one way of relating to the world alongside others. It continues to be articulated experientially and theoretically, and to be explored empirically. Newman’s book is an important resource for understanding the long slow history of the different ways societies have figured and fostered, with varying degrees of understanding and honesty, the permeability of human identities. As Newman also suggests, an awareness of this history can help to stake out cross-cultural common ground beyond the Latin West.

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Notes:

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 503.

3. Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

4. Leonhard Schilbach et al., “Toward a second-person neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 4 (2013): 393-414.