Christus Medicus and Religious Controversy in Late-medieval Europe

Download or read book Christus Medicus and Religious Controversy in Late-medieval Europe written by Patrick Outhwaite and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Modern scholars have decisively shown that in the Middle Ages there was not a clear divide between religion and medicine, yet the true significance of the connection is still to be uncovered. Nowhere are the nuances of the relationship between religion and medicine more clearly presented than in the tradition of Christ the Divine Physician, Christus medicus. The allegory of Christ the Divine Physician originated in the Synoptic Gospels, where Christ's Passion signified the ways in which suffering could be reconfigured as a process of healing. Christus medicus, however, was more than an allegory. Throughout the Middle Ages physicians invoked Christ in their treatments as bodies and souls came to be treated under the same joint process of healing. Hospitals were important settings for experimentation with medical and religious treatments. Nun-nurses and chaplains facilitated physical as well as spiritual remedies, and within these institutions patients often engaged more with spirituality and the Church sacraments than when they were healthy. In England and Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), reformist groups used concepts developed in these institutional settings to press for increased lay access to religion off against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Ecclesiastical authorities consequently entered debates over who had the authority and legitimacy to facilitate Christ's spiritual and bodily healing. These debates were initially localised concerns, but questions of who had the authority and training to administer healing came to engulf the entire Church during its greatest crisis of the late medieval period: the Papal Schism (c. 1378-1417). During the Schism, in which the papacy split into two and then three competing factions, the Church was described as a diseased body by dissident and more orthodox theologians alike. The dissident groups to which this study attends believed themselves to be the ideal healers of the Church. Drawing on previously unpublished sermons, devotional works, and medical texts, this study contends that dissidents from related movements in England and Central Europe invoked Christus medicus both as a metaphor through which to criticise the Church and as a means to relate Christ's healing to practical reform directly. Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia drew on forms of lay spirituality that were remarkably similar to those employed in contemporary hospitals. They claimed that the health of the souls of the laity depended on lay inclusion in the sacraments and access to Scripture in a manner that they could understand, namely, translated and preached in the vernacular. Wycliffites and Hussites sought to create a more personal and direct spiritual connection between the laity and Christ the Divine Physician, and thus to bypass the mediation of what they viewed as a corrupt clergy. The laity were encouraged to read Scripture for themselves, confess directly to Christ, and take the Eucharist on a more frequent basis in order to facilitate spiritual health. Shaped by localised institutional contexts, issues of spiritual health came to take centre stage at two of the most important ecumenical councils of fifteenth century, at Constance (1414-1418) and Basel (1431-1449). During the Papal Schism, a time when theologians and reformist groups were increasingly concerned with facilitating a direct interaction with Christ through the words of Scripture and the sacraments, Christ the Divine Physician was a malleable figure that appealed in numerous contexts. Throughout this project, Christus medicus featured in texts that addressed different audiences in different regions, but the tradition remained remarkably consistent between cultures, languages, and genres in its calls for greater access to Christ's healing. These consistencies were not mere coincidence, but part of a sustained plea for Christ to treat his patients' bodies and souls"--