Wikidworld (#118) / Cutting Off One's Nose to Spite One's Face
Even accounting for the astounding philosophical, legal, political, economic, engineering, and architectural achievements of High Middle Ages, the scale of human suffering dwarfed everything else.
When I was in high school, we had classes with a substitute teacher named Mr. Marty who sported an artificial nose fashioned from aluminum fit awkwardly above a thin mustache — his natural nose likely having been blown away during World War II.
Of course, this visible lack of a key facial landmark deeply fascinated us. If we’d been alive during the Middle Ages, however, such a disfigurement would have seemed entirely commonplace. Indeed, the phrase, cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, originated during the Middle Ages.
We often speak today of precarious circumstances faced by specific groups — those experiencing discrimination, those who lack job security, those without access to decent health care or safe environments. We characterize these precarious circumstances as institutional and policy failures. Which generates outrage. We know who and what to blame. The cosmology of liberalism is political, framed by the idea that collectively humans can shape and determine their destinies.
Our human-centered cosmology attunes us to modern inequality and precarity. At the same time, this cosmology makes it almost impossible for us to fathom the levels of precarity experienced by humans living during the Middle Ages, in which none of these enabling institutions existed.
Indeed, one of the great ironies of Thomist Natural Law moral philosophy has been the Dominionist idea that humans were created in the image of an all-powerful God. Ironic because in the 13th century, when Thomas Aquinas was alive, humans possessed almost no institutional options for collectively shaping and determining their destinies. There was literally nothing all-powerful or god-like about their status in relation to the natural world.
As a result, humans living in Europe during the Middle Ages were helpless before the forces of nature that continually buffeted them. This is the reality that Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century characterized as human life in the state of nature, within which a person was subject to “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Let’s consider some basic measures of human welfare: life span, infant mortality, illness and disease, famine and starvation, and violence. In this review, I lean heavily into Steven Pinker’s books, The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now.
Life Expectancy. In the 21st century, average life expectancy in Europe is about 80 years for men and 85 years for women (it is lower in the United States). In the 13th century, life expectancy was about 35 years. During the Plague years of the 14th century, life expectancy fell to 17 years.
Infant Mortality. In the 21st century, on average, 3 infants per 1,000 died within their first year of life in Europe. In the 13th century, approximately 400 infants per 1,000 did not live past their first year.
Illness and Disease. Since the 19th century, the discoveries of only 12 medical and scientific pioneers have saved approximately 2 billion lives that would otherwise have been lost to communicable diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhus. During the Middle Ages, with no public health knowledge or public health institutions to combat the spread of disease, these afflictions devoured all in their path. In a span of months, the Black Death consumed between 30 percent and 60 percent of the population in regions across Europe.
Famine and Starvation. In the 21st century, famine and starvation are no longer intractable and, indeed, are vanishingly rare in western Europe. During the Great Famine of 1315-1317, estimated deaths accounted for 10 percent of the population in Northern France and 10-15 percent in the South of England.
Violence. The violence visited upon humans by illness and disease, famine and starvation, and natural disasters such as fire, flooding, and earthquakes was only rivaled by the violence that humans inflicted upon each other. In the 21st century, homicide rates in western Europe hover at under 1 per 100,000 population per year. In the 13th century, estimated homicide rates ranged between 30 and 100 per 100,000 population per year.
During the Middle Ages, environmental insecurity and interpersonal violence were both pervasive and closely intertwined. Populations were volatile because life was precarious and insecure. Juridical and personal violence was endemic — the two were often difficult to distinguish. And this violence extended to facial violence, specifically to nasal — or schnozzle — violence.
Cutting off a person’s nose was sometimes an official punishment meted out for treason, heresy, prostitution, or sodomy. But more often was an act of private vengeance. One notable instance of this personal assault betrays the impulsive — if scripted — nature of the act. A man who had been cuckolded by an acquaintance evened the score by the cutting off the nose of the offender’s wife.
Sociologists and historians of the Middle Ages have routinely observed the emotional turbulence that characterized relationships and interactions in this period, the absence of self-restraint and emotional dysregulation that we today associate with children or the mentally ill, but that can more generally characterize stateless societies governed by codes of honor. People lived fully within their natures. But these were impulsive, violent natures that in no way resembled the concept of Human Nature from which Aquinas derived the precepts of Natural Law.
Conservative Christians such as Andrew Willard Jones — along with alt-right defenders of Western Civilization — have in recent decades resurrected myths about the organic peace that prevailed under the reign of Christian rulers. They date this peace to Charles Martel, the great 8th century Frankish prince who turned the tide against the Muslim conquests of Europe during the Battle of Tours and who established the Carolingian royal dynasty.
As we’ve seen, however, nothing that we can recognizably term “peace” characterized the Middle Ages. Even accounting for the astounding philosophical, legal, political, economic, engineering, and architectural achievements of High Middle Ages, the scale of human suffering dwarfed everything else.
Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic philosophers defined Human Nature as the formal capacity to exercise reason. Human rationality reflected the imprint upon humans of the divine. However, during the Middle Ages, Human Nature was absorbed within the turbulent, formless chaos of Nature’s Nature. Within Nature’s hurly-burly, human rationality of any but the most instrumental sort could barely be discerned.
Absent any institutional capacity to manage and reduce human suffering — alongside a very real inability to explain the natural causes of suffering — society therefore accounted for the omnipresence of suffering in supernatural and in what we might call today supermoral terms.
The Church explained natural occurrences — they explained the suffering that resulted — as divine judgments for the sins of the afflicted. As one poem written after the Great Famine of 1315-1317, When God saw that the world was so over proud, He sent a dearth on earth, and made it full hard.
Ordinary people were themselves sufficiently rooted in their own circumstances to challenge these generally transparent efforts of the clergy to reinforce their own authority. Malignant forces — manifestations of evil beyond the purview of God — also crawled the earth. The Church — which was itself rooted in particular circumstances that belied their own nostrums concerning divine judgments — also could not dismiss these possibilities. To make this evil real, suffering communities externalized and embodied it within others — Muslims, Jews, heretics, and witches.
The Crusades, Inquisitions, and witchcraft frenzies that swept across Europe during the latter portion of the Middle Ages represented the urge to restore a Christian moral order by identifying and waging war against scapegoats that could make real and specific the natural forces against which they otherwise felt powerless.
Natural Law also contributed greatly to this ritualized, juridically sanctified propensity to scapegoat and sequester evil, an instinct that was subsequently woven deep within the fabric of Western legal and political institutions. Next, we’ll dive more deeply into the legal idea, practices, and institutions that sanctioned and supported the Crusades.