Tolan, 'Understanding Conversion', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9504
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9504-tolan-understanding
@@@@95.4.2, Morrison, Understanding Conversion
Karl F. Morrison. Understanding Conversion. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1992. xxvi, 246 pp. ISBN 0813913608.
Review by John V. Tolan -- University of North Carolina
at Greensboro
The project of Karl Morrison's Understanding Conversion is
encapsulated in its title: it is to understand both the term
conversio and (to the extent possible) the phenomenon called
"conversion" by Western Christians--in particular, by authors of the
twelfth century.
Why conversion? Because, for Morrison, "the repertory of changes
called conversion has kept the call for moral change dominant and
relentless in Western culture, and thus one of the most decisive norms
according to which the West has thought about and shaped itself" (p.xii).
He contrasts Christian notions of conversion with those of other world
religions (in particular Islam and Buddhism) and finds the Christian
concept unique in its incessant call for personal moral renewal. While he
looks at conversion in its various permutations from antiquity to the
twentieth century, the focus is on the twelfth century.
Why the twelfth century? Because of his conviction that "powerful
lines of intellectual and spiritual continuity bind us to the Europe of
Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres, lines more powerful, indeed, than those to
the classical world" (p.2). The idea of conversion received its fullest
and richest expression in the twelfth century and that idea shaped western
concepts of ethics and psychology.
Throughout, Morrison is cautious and meticulous in his definition and
use of the terminology employed by the authors whose work he analyzes.
"Conversion" had a long history before the twelfth century, indeed
multiple histories, and Morrison unpacks and disentangles them carefully.
Conversion is a metaphor, borrowed from the mechanical arts: it referred,
for example, to the transformation of tin and copper into bronze. As a
metaphor used by classical pagan and Christian authors, its connotations
were many: for example, cosmic egress and regress for the Neoplatonists;
changing of religious allegiances from paganism (or Judaism, Islam, or
Christian heresy) to Catholic Christianity; rejecting the world to lead
the life of a hermit or monk; transformation of man (God's likeness
polluted through the fall) through redemption into a true image of God.
This attention to the polyvalence of "conversion" makes Morrison's subject
both broader and richer than what many earlier scholars have referred to
as "conversion."
At this point Morrison skillfully attacks earlier scholarly
definitions of conversion, in particular that of Arthur Darby Nock, whose
view Morrison calls the "peripety" theory of conversion. For Nock,
conversion was a transformative event, a swift, dramatic and permanent
change of religious allegiance: the best-known examples of this sort of
conversion were Saul's transformation into Paul on the road to Damascus
(Acts 9.17) and Augustine's (in the garden in Milan, described in
Confessions, book 8). Morrison counters that conversion, for
medieval authors, is a gradual transformation, a turning towards God.
Nock and others have misread the stories of Saul/Paul and Augustine. Saul
did not CONVERT on the road to Damascus, he was only CALLED; he only
understood the importance of his mission after Ananias explained it to him
and after exile in Arabia; his true conversion was a gradual turning
towards Christ in love by imitating him and culminated in his receiving
the reward of martyrdom. Similarly, most scholars have focused on
Augustine's calling in the garden and ignored the descriptions of his
continuing temptations and tribulations in books 10-13
Confessions: for Augustine, his "conversion" to God was anything
but complete.
This kind of conversion then--which Morrison terms "empathetic
conversion"--was a gradual transformation. It is distinct from "formal
conversion" which is a change of religious status and affiliation: either
of a non-Christian to Christianity (conversion away from Christianity was
termed apostasy rather than conversion) or of a layman to the life and
habit of a monk. Formal conversion, unlike empathetic conversion, could
be false, hypocritical. Even if sincere, it was merely a step in the long
transformative process of empathetic conversion, a process that could be
broken or abandoned at any stage along the way.
This notion of conversion is tangled up with several paradoxes
involving theodicy and free will. Is true conversion (and hence
salvation) a gift of grace from God, or can it be willed by man? The
convert, imitating Christ, is portrayed as spurned and abused by the his
fellow, poor and tortured like Christ himself, dead to the world. This
sort of suffering can lead to reaffirmation of one's role as
conversus, or it can on the contrary lead to doubt and wavering.
Hence narrations of conversion contain visions and miracles which are
meant to reassure the conversus and strengthen his resolve (and of
course to prove his sanctity to the reader); these visions are
interspersed with long periods of suffering and doubt, meant to test the
convert's conviction and endurance. Rather than solve these theodical
paradoxes, these narratives tend to enforce them, to revel in them.
The stories of conversion, Morrison repeatedly emphasizes, are
fictive: they describe not the phenomenon of conversion itself but rather
how twelfth century authors explained and understood that phenomenon. The
texts, moreover, provided role models for action in the world: they
described actors in the divine drama who were meant to be emulated.
Missionaries (to pagans of the Baltic, to Jews, or to Muslims) modeled
their behavior on that of the apostles and of early medieval missionaries
(as their lives were known to the twelfth century through text and art).
Their chief concern, as reflected in their biographies, was less to
convert infidels than to perfect their own conversion through their
steadfastness and, if possible, through winning the crown of martyrdom.
They were players reenacting a sacred drama, and they were admired for
their ability to courageously and nobly play their role through to the
bitter end.
This leads Morrison into another paradox: noble humility, the subject
of his sixth chapter. The idea of conversion is essentially subversive:
the rich shall be poor, the poor rich; the meek shall inherit the earth.
The ideal is an attack on the worldly hierarchies based on wealth, power,
and birth. Monasticism becomes--another paradox--institutionalized
conversion. Morrison shows that the ideals of nobility are taken over
from the knightly class and--rather than being subverted--are transformed
and reaffirmed. God's army, the conversi, endure suffering,
hardships, and physical privations in their battle for their Lord. The
weak and ignoble stumble and fail; the strong and noble succeed.
The twelfth century, with its preoccupation with ecclesiastical and
monastic reform, and with the growing ideal of imitatio Christi, is
for Morrison the golden age of empathetic conversion. We have already
seen that monasticism embodies the paradox of institutionalized
conversion: monastic tracts such as those of St. Bernard are road maps for
the spiritual pilgrimage towards Christ. It is no accident that at the
same time that reformers preach the duty for each individual Christian to
abandon the world and follow Christ, Jews are increasingly reviled and
attacked. Jews come to represent the absolute rejection of the call to
empathetic conversion: they refuse to imitate Christ and they are
increasingly accused of his murder. Jews are under increasing pressure to
convert, and some of those who do convert (Hermann-Judah, Petrus Alfonsi)
write tracts in order to show that their formal conversion to Christianity
reflects a true (empathetic) conversion. By putting Christian- Jewish
relations in the context of the conversion ideal he brings interesting new
perspectives on the oft-debated issue of why anti-Judaism is on the rise
in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe. Surprisingly, Morrison has very
little to say about that other great twelfth-century preoccupation,
heresy, and ignores recent work on relations between reform and heresy in
the twelfth century. It would have been interesting to see how he might
fit heresy into his schema.
While the largest (and indeed strongest) sections of this book deal
with twelfth-century Latin Europe, Morrison ranges far beyond, both
chronologically and geographically. He needs to, of course, in order to
support the major premise of his book: that the twelfth-century concept(s)
of conversion changed the western categories of ethics and psychology.
Earlier periods (especially Pagan Rome) are cited primarily to show
discontinuity while the more recent periods in European and American
thought are cited to show continuities with the twelfth century. The
result is mixed: some striking insights come, for example, from his
analysis of Simone Weil or James Joyce in the light of twelfth-century
notions of conversion. In the context of this book such forays into more
recent centuries are necessarily few and brief, and this inevitably lends
a certain air of arbitrariness to them. The choice of texts reflects the
authors own range of reading and interests rather than any systematic
approach to post-medieval thought; the result is a series of striking
parallels, but not a convincing argument. Morrison's footnotes are thick
with references to the best recent scholarship as long as he is within the
twelfth century, when he strays to other periods, references thin out:
ironically he leans more on scholarship for his analyses of the period for
which he is an unquestioned expert than for those outside the middle ages.
While some of his analyses of other periods yield unexpected gems,
others fall flat. Let me look at one example in detail. His fourth
chapter is about the concept of conscience (and a host of satellite
concepts). Conscience as we know it, Morrison argues, is largely a
product of the twelfth century. To prove this, of course, he has to show
not only continuity between the twelfth century and later periods but a
break with earlier periods--in particular, with pagan Rome. He argues
that a "sea change in ideas of empathetic education" (p.119) took place
between the writings of Catullus and Terence on the one hand, and Peter
Damian and John of Salisbury on the other. His contrasting (at
pp.100-101) of Catullus' Carmen 63 with a passage from Peter
Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus attacking clerical homosexuality is one
of the weakest of Morrison's juxtapositions. The two texts, extremely
different in genre, purpose, and audience, both deal with the themes of
emasculation and remorse. Morrison amply shows that Damian's text
reflects a greater range of moral consciousness and subtlety than
Catullus' poem. But what does this prove? No one in Rome in the
first-century B.C. would have accused Catullus of being a subtle moral
philosopher; on what grounds can Morrison invoke him as representative of
pre- Christian Roman ethics? If we are to see the vocabulary of
conscientia and related concepts as a crucial development of
twelfth-century ethics, why does he not contrast this with an ethical
lexicon taken from pagan Roman and Greek philosophers? In the notes to
this chapter, Morrison cites not a single book of scholarship on the Roman
period. I am not denying that Morrison's "sea change" may have indeed
have taken place; but his presentation of the Roman ethical universe is
too weak to give us a clear idea of what that change might have been.
I have similar reservations about some of his sweeping contrasts with
the ethical systems of Islam and Buddhism. "To adhere to Islam," he says
(p.6), "is 'to follow the right way,' meaning formal observance." There is
indeed in Islam (as in Judaism and Christianity) a strong tradition
emphasizing orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Yet by equating Islam
solely with formal observance is to ignore major themes in Islamic ethics
and spirituality. The Qur'an is rife with condemnations of
Munafiq, hypocrites: those who through their actions and words
appear to be pious but in their hearts are not. While formal monasticism
and an ordained clergy were indeed not part of Islam, the legal traditions
and the mystical sufism of Islam certainly had complex and sophisticated
ethical notions. If Morrsion wishes to contend that these notions are
substantially different from twelfth-century conscientia (which
they may well be), he will have to make a case for it.
These reservations in no way detract from the power and grace of the
central focus of the book: the compelling nature of the doctrine of
conversion in twelfth-century Latin Europe. Morrison ranges over a rich
variety of Latin texts. His argument skillfully explains phenomena
familiar to scholars of the twelfth century, undercovering interesting and
unexpected connections between them (for example, the connection between
monastic reform and anti-Judaism, discussed above). Anyone interested in
the intellectual history of the twelfth century or in the history of
ethics and religion will find this book fascinating and will come away
with new insights.