Here’s a change of pace for you:
I like to learn and then write about obscure Catholic Things. Why? Obviously, I think there’s value in knowing about them. Wrapped up in the present and in presentism, we lose. We lose perspective, most of all. Being Catholic, Christian, human, is more than my experience right here and right now. In addition, the more we know about the past, the weaker the power of the authoritarian narrative-shapers in the present is in our lives.
So let’s take today’s very obscure Catholic Thing and Catholic Person: John of Morigny.
I learned about him via a chapter in a book called Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages. Being an edited volume, only a few of the articles caught my interest, and this was one – “”The Visions, Experiments, and Operations of Bridget of Autruy (fl. 1305-15)” by Nicholas Watson.
Bridget’s visions are accessible to us through the work of her brother, yes, John of Morigny. So there’s the beginning of your rabbit trail, one that takes us through the complexities, not just of history in general, but specifically of the role and impact of magical thinking and practices in medieval spirituality.
John was the author of a work called Liber florum celestis doctrine / The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching, difficult to access until a recent edition published by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, edited by Watson and Claire Fanger. Fanger has also written a book on Moringy called Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk.
(You can read chunks of the latter book – quite interesting – via Google Books.)
Here’s the short(ish) version of what this is all about. Very short version: magic.
Ars notoria was a method of medieval magic centered on obtaining infused knowledge. Inspired in part by Solomon’s prayer for wisdom, it was a mix of Jewish/Christian/Arabic ideas and practices – rituals and prayers designed to guarantee that the practitioner would be able to access the knowledge and wisdom that was “contained” in God and therefore, perhaps accessible to one who managed the correct connections to the divine.
John, a Benedictine monk from Chartres, spent some years engaged in ars notoria until he discerned that its source and direction were not divine, but malevolent.
Inspired by visions, mostly of the Blessed Virgin, he then spent years exploring and devising a more “orthodox” form of this magical practice, which is what is contained in the Liber. Prayers, rituals, fasting, meditation, the expectation of visionary experiences and engagement with the divine via these visions. From the volume’s introduction:
The Liber florum celestis doctrine is an attempt to reconcile the goals of a condemned medieval ritual magic text, the Ars notoria, with late-medieval Catholic Christian orthodoxy. The text was written in stages between 1304 and 1317 by John, a Benedictine monk from the monastery of Morigny who spent his school years at Chartres and later studied briefly at Orléans. Despite its protestations of its own orthodoxy and attempt to position itself in a positive way among the “apocrypha fidei,” the text was condemned as heretical and sorcerous …and a copy burned at Paris in 1323.
The text offers readers two interrelated systems for attaining knowledge. The first system is exhaustively detailed in the second of its three books (the Liber virginis marie), composed in two phases from 1304-07 and probably from c.1308- c. 1311. This system consists of a series of prayers to God, the angels, the whole court of heaven, and especially the virgin Mary. By reciting the prayers with proper gestures and accompanying exercises–primarily, purification, fasting, and the recitation of the canonical office–over a period of nine weeks, the practitioner attains knowledge of the seven liberal arts, philosophy, theology, and any other branch of formal learning he or she may desire. Since the structure of formal learning represents the mind of God as this is expressed in creation, and since the angelic powers are products of that mind in the realm of spirit, each of the nine angelic orders can be identified with a branch of knowledge. John’s system follows the Ars notoria in exploiting this identification (so that from the Angels he learns Grammar, from the Archangels, Rhetoric, and so on), but submits his opus to the overarching control of the virgin Mary, queen of the angels and patron of his entire project.
The Liber virginis marie is in four parts …. Three of these contain the prayers, in numbered groups of seven and thirty respectively, which take the practitioner through various stages of purification, ascent to the court of heaven, and reception of knowledge. The fourth consists of instructions for recitation of the prayers in conjunction with an Office of the Angels, as well as of information about how to teach children and others using the prayers, and instructions for making and consecrating new copies of the text which any practitioner must follow.
This is the fourteenth-century monk’s reinterpretation of the Ars Notoria, which in turn is the most complex version of the “God, please get me through this test!” prayer ever created.
Which is hinted at by John himself in his prologue:
Now I, John, while I was a student in school, suffered many poverties in books and exemplars, as well as in many other necessities, and above all I desired with my whole heart to come to the knowledge of all the sciences. And since it was not possible to do this by taking courses on account of my poverty, and in the foresaid book was contained a means by which I might be able to attain my purpose by instant teaching , setting aside all other studies I undertook to study in it more frequently; and I studied in it so much that I figured out what I had to do to make it work. Once I had grasped this, I set to acquiring my proposed desire, the work of this book according to its teaching, better than I had [previously] been able to do.
Isn’t that interesting? His reasoning was that he didn’t have the books, couldn’t afford the books or the courses, but God has all the wisdom and knowledge, so why not get what he needed directly from Him?
So why bother with this? Well, don’t, if you’re not into history, but even so, there are a few takeaways that might be relevant:
First, a reminder of how Church and culture are continually and deeply intertwined. That’s neither intrinsically bad or good – it just is. It’s the job of the Church (all of us) to be constantly discerning, separating the wheat and chaff, testing everything.
(The question always is – test everything against what standard? Ah, there’s the rub…)
Second, it raises intriguing questions about the imagination and spirituality,
Third, the more personal, less theoretical question of what it is we hope and expect from our spiritual lives and practices. To John and others, the application of the ars notoria made sense: if God is the source of all wisdom, gaining more direct access to that source will give us the wisdom, right?
It might seem silly, and we might be tempted to point and laugh because Progress, but consider your own expectations of the spiritual life.
I pray, I’m faithful…shouldn’t I feel more peace and certainty? Why don’t I constantly experience a conviction of God’s presence?
Or:
I’m feeling good about God and spiritually alive – surely then every intuition and feeling I have about my actions is aligned with God’s will…I’m connected to him after all.
Magical thinking, it seems, comes in many forms….