Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy: England and Central Europe, 1350–1434

Jesus appears in many guises throughout the gospels. Following his resurrection, Mary Magdalene confuses him with a gardener; later, two disciples on the road to Emmaus mistake him for a pilgrim. In his own words, he is the good shepherd (pastor bonus), who knows and cares for his sheep, and likewise a sound physician, who attends to sick souls. When the self-righteous become discomfited by his association with sinners, Jesus observes to them curtly that “those who are healthy don’t need a doctor” [Non necesse sani habent medico]. His rebuke emphasizes the practical nature of his ministry—its curative purpose and power.In this engaging book, Patrick Outhwaite explores the tradition of Christus medicus, or Christ-the-physician, through a series of close readings of late medieval texts. His aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of the tradition but instead to discuss its significance in the context of late medieval religious controversy and especially writings associated with the Wycliffite and Hussite heresies. One of his special achievements is to demonstrate the tradition’s variety. In devotional, homiletic, polemical, and conciliar texts, Christus medicus functions variably. Sometimes, he gently nurses the sick soul back to health. At other times, he must apply to its disease the fearsome arts of spiritual cautery, ligature, and even amputation.Beneath the tradition, Outhwaite explains, is the idea of the church as a body—mystical, according to the Pauline epistles, and yet at the same time astonishingly physical in its individual and social symptoms. Outhwaite correctly emphasizes the importance of Augustine’s writings to the development of the Christus medicus tradition. More than the other Fathers, Augustine was preoccupied with what we might call the psychosomatic nature of sin, its simultaneous affliction of body and spirit. As a result, the church requires both physical and metaphysical therapy. Outhwaite’s discussion of Augustine’s writings is nuanced. For example, he describes how Augustine “frequently privileged the soul over the body in his conception of health, but . . . acknowledged that the relationship between the body and soul was multivalent and complex” (2). Correspondingly, Outhwaite himself never allows the physical aspect of Christ-the-physician’s work to fade entirely from view when discussing its spiritual function. For instance, he remarks in his introduction on the important role of charms and amulets in medieval medicine and the significance of the regimen sanitatis, or healthy lifestyle, as a “vernacular self-help trend” (19). In chapter 1, “The Virgin Mary as Nurse, Medicine, and Mother: Devotional Texts and Hospitals,” he commingles his analysis of Henry of Grosmont’s Anglo-Norman treatise, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicine, composed in 1354, with a discussion of the locations and practices of medieval hospitals, such as the Hôtel Dieu of Paris, in order to connect the restorative properties of water with the cleansing of sin through baptism. In chapter 3, “Christus chirurgus and Wycliffite Preaching in England,” he proposes a compelling analogy between the licensing of preachers and surgeons during the fifteenth century as a new context for understanding Wycliffite preference for the Word over the Eucharist as the best prescription for spiritual health (130–40). The parallels Outhwaite develops between spiritual and physical medicine never come across as strained, because he grounds them in the exacting analysis of contemporaneous theological and medical documents.Chapter 4, “The Diseased Ecclesia from Jan Hus’s Exile to the Council of Basel,” contains some of his most original insights. These derive from his presentation of the doctrinal and polemical disputes between two Hussite factions: the Utraquists, who urged communion under the two species of bread and wine, and the Taborites, who prioritized reading Scripture over frequent reception of the Eucharist as a salutary practice. In the course of their arguments, the Utraquists maintained that glosses were necessary to sound biblical interpretation. Conversely, the Taborites insisted that glosses “dilute the purity” of the Word (190) and thereby diminish its medicinal power. In describing this debate, Outhwaite explores a number of texts that will not be familiar to most scholars: for example, the Taborite treatise Cum eadem est Via, whose author prefers literal rather than typological interpretations of the Old and New Testaments; and the similarly biased but probably non-Taborite Anatomia de Antichristi, whose author develops the Christus medicus tradition by way of its opposite—an attack on the “physicians of the Antichrist” (197), whose hermeneutic remedies are fraudulent. As Outhwaite summarizes the Anatomia author’s argument, “The process of digesting Scripture is vital to ensure one’s spiritual health and for absorbing the meaning” of the divine Word (196). The glossators’ additives and supplements are unnatural and may even prove to be toxic. Outhwaite’s translations from his primary texts are always accurate and graceful. In his footnotes, he gives complete quotations from the Latin originals, often from original manuscript sources.The emphasis in much of Outhwaite’s book is on diseases of the individual soul and their treatment. Chapter 5, “Responses to Heresy at the Councils of Constance and Basel,” shifts the focus toward the social patient—that is, the church as a sick institution during the Great Schism, when its corporate “organological” self was in extremis (201–17). Here, Outhwaite notes how more severe measures became necessary to ensure the patient’s survival, such as the use of violent spiritual purgatives—although most church authorities regarded them only as a last resort. “To ligature wounds and soothe them with emplasters” (203): These should be the primary treatments applied by Christus chirurgus and his interns. The language of conciliar documents, according to Outhwaite, frequently acknowledges the pain associated with surgical processes such as cautery and amputation. Such procedures are to be reserved only for those members who infect or scandalize the whole. Jan Hus, for example, had to be executed. In his determinatio, or formal judgement, against the followers of both Hus and Wyclif, Stanislaus of Scarbimiria, rector of the University of Krakow, describes heresy as a gangrenous limb that gives off a pervasive and “fetid odour” of corruption (212) that spreads throughout the church. It must be removed. Outhwaite draws careful distinctions concerning the different medical metaphors used in antiheretical writings. For example, excommunication, which Stanislaus promoted as an essential remedy for heresy, is nevertheless to be understood as “a purgative that would inflict pain in order to bring the excommunicant back to the Church with a healthier soul” rather than as a form of spiritual amputation (213).Overall, then, Patrick Outhwaite’s Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy is an impressive book. I have two minor criticisms. First, because chapter 1 discusses Mary, Jesus’s mother, as a sort of locum tenens for her son the physician, the book begins awkwardly, introducing Christus medicus only to delay deliberate attention to his character until chapter 2. Second, while the book’s analysis of Christ-the-physician in Wycliffite sermons is praiseworthy, it slights other important Wycliffite texts such as the Lanterne of Li3t. This treatise, a digest of Wycliffism, receives only passing attention on page 123. The Lanterne author uses the important medical metaphor (adapted from Augustine) of corrupt priests who, because of their own infirmities, are unable to “ransake,” or debride, the wounds of sinners, so that their moral infection can heal. This figure occupies a middle ground between the soothing and aggressive medical procedures Outhwaite analyzes throughout his book. It merits further attention in light of his already astute textual diagnoses.