Dreaming with the Medievals
Legends that help us hear the voice of God
This Mid-Week Edition of Ecstatic features Carolyn Etzel Branch
IN GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S 20th-century play St. Joan, the Captain Robert de Baudricourt questions seventeen-year-old Joan of Arc on the guiding voices she claims to hear. Joan cheerfully explains that saints have been talking to her, passing her messages of direction from God.
“They come from your imagination,” the captain warns.
“Of course,” answers Joan. “That is how the messages of God come to us.”
STORY GIVES US THE GIFT of a spiritual vocabulary and structure that lacks immediate solution—and this sometimes stings. We long for the literal over the literary, where we can view a situation as an episode, while the Maker is instead writing an epic.
What a temptation, to comfort sorrow by assigning quick meaning to it. It would be easier to try and shove a confusing cliffhanger into the mold of a finished chapter—but this is not what stories do in our lives. The saints of the imagination tend to us by resisting 1:1 ratios. Like Christ’s parables, they refuse immediate interpretation in favor of slow, kaleidoscopic revelation. When I do not know how to pray as I ought, the Spirit intercedes with Anne of Green Gables and Susanna Clarke.
This past fall, the saints in my imagination hailed from an older Britain. Against a backdrop of gothic arches and waning sunlight, I sat with mystic writers like Margery Kempe and George Herbert, and watched them watch God. Initially, Margery repelled me, with her general audacity and penchant for hysterics. I still doubt that she and I would have been friends; had our paths crossed in reality, I likely would have been fighting an eye roll the entire time. However, the deeper I immersed myself in her memoirs, the more I noticed a compelling peculiarity. Rather than a simple hagiography or autobiography, Margery’s recording of her life read like an Arthurian legend; and sometimes, the events of her life almost perfectly mirrored the accounts of Camelot.
THE LAST DOOR will not open. Lancelot comes up short, disoriented by the sudden obstacle in a castle of otherwise unlocked doors, and falls against the entrance to catch his breath. After months roving forest and sea to find the Holy Grail, he faces yet another dead end. But as Lancelot’s heart slows, he begins to hear it.
The music drifts like the fragrance of dinner to a starving man. Some celestial symphony brushes colorful fingers over his face and a voice wails sweetly, “Joy and honor be to the Father of Heaven.” Lancelot kneels as he glimpses the sacred chalice. However, the mystic vision drains him and he collapses into a weeks-long sleep.
Miles away, in the village of King’s Lynn, Margery Kempe wakes up. Deep in the throes of a violent melancholy after the birth of her first child—the eldest of fourteen—she lies in bed at night with her husband. Divine music falls on her; water in a desert. In her confession, The Book of Margery Kempe, she chronicles the moment in third person, recalling, “She heard a sound of melody so sweet and delectable, she thought, as if she had been in paradise. And therewith she started out of her bed and said, ‘Alas, that ever I did sin; it is fully merry in heaven.’” Margery becomes enthralled with God.
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I proudly explained to my long-suffering professor that The Book of Margery Kempe follows all the rules of a Medieval romance and ought to be considered one. He took the news pretty well. “Do you think she knew?” I pressed. “Was it a conscious decision to stylize herself and Christ as these two romantic figures on a hunt for one another? Did she want us to read her pilgrimages as quests, almost like a grail pursuit of Christ’s mystical presence?”
The dreamlike cry of Heaven’s music had marked a concluding chapter in Lancelot’s grail romance, but it played an introductory note in the quests of Margery Kempe. If you’ll forgive a moment of history, I’ll paint just how simultaneous these episodes are. The Book of Margery Kempe was published in the 1430s; Le Morte d’Arthur—from which this particular story of Lancelot is drawn—followed in 1485. However, Arthurian legends crawled onto the written page from various corners of medieval Europe, predating Margery, coinciding with her, and following after her death. There are numerous other resemblances between Margery and Lancelot—they share transformative forays into the wilderness, fits of perceived madness, and complicated love lives. The parallels protest coincidence.
My professor rubbed his face, exasperated. “This—you—no, alright listen. This is the wrong question. It doesn’t matter if she knew, it was in the water. These questing romance narratives filled everything, and everything was spiritual.” Together we pored over Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs, narrative poems like Piers Plowman, and liturgical texts like Ancrene Wisse–which depicts Christ as a jousting knight seeking to win the hearts of anchoresses.
MARGERY INTERPRETED God’s voice through the conceptual structures the Western medieval psyche had woven for her. Her journeys, beginning in England and quickly spreading outwards, compose one of the key romantic elements of Margery’s life: the quest. This trope elevates travel to an almost spiritual practice, polishing the hero as she ascends toward her goal, tempered by failure and trials. The stories begin like this: the hero lives in a place of relative stability and safety, such as the court. Some noble task then interrupts this merry life: a crusade, the discovery of a miraculous relic, or an injustice to be righted. Sweet music hails the hero; there is questing to be done.
Margery distinguishes herself from other medieval heroes in that her sojourns are spurred not by a desire for earthly glory, like a knight seeking an elevated seat at court, but by a desire for the admonishment of her beloved Christ, who leads her in paths towards heavenly riches. Margery quests for the honor of sainthood rather than knighthood. The medieval imagination establishes the trope; Margery then performs it through discipleship. The romance genre mediates her understanding of God. Something deeper than reading occurs; cultural imagination becomes the language which she and God speak to each other.
MARGERY’S SACRED ENACTMENT of theses tropes is no anomaly; we love to read God in our own legends. Peruse the halls of an art museum and discover Christ dressed like the Dutch masters or painted in watercolor on silk by a Chinese artist. But tropes move beyond this practice of envisioning God in familiar artistic expression, influencing the very particulars of ordinary life. The social and cultural legends that swirl within our global understanding and viewpoint within the 21st century afford us a far wider well to draw from than Margery, but the truth remains that our stories form the lattices for our theology.
Whether intentional or subconscious, when organizing the triumphs and griefs of our lives into testimonies, our imaginations often do so in the language of trope.
Margery experiences this literary structure without solution too. Both she and Lancelot find themselves caught in the bent angles of a love triangle. For Lancelot, his abiding love for Guinevere interrupts her marriage to his king and friend, Arthur. In Margery’s case, she becomes the literal bride and lover of Christ yet remains inconveniently bound by matrimony to her husband John.
The trope offers her no perfect answer or formula. Unlike Lancelot, she is hinging between marriages rather than entering a new relationship. And reducing Margery’s marriage with John to an unfortunate prefatory plot that precedes her ultimate romance with Christ—her suffering lover—over caricatures her situation. Nonetheless, Margery wrestles with the complexities of her devotion to spouse and God, especially within a cultural context which eroticized spirituality and championed celibacy. She wrestles with her life through literature, and the tropes tend to her by offering a means of expression. They interpret and accompany, but never solve.
THIS REALIZATION RISKS some disillusionment. Is Margery’s mystic career delegitimized by its similarities to grail romances? If her perception of and relation to God took its shape over the course of evenings hearing of stained glass chivalry and dragon-slaying saints, was it then mere contrivance?
I dare contend that truth and imagination are not competing guides, but are instead often actually indistinguishable. Rather than hindering our pursuit of Christ; drama, fiction, and imagination light the path. Tropes come to us as blessings, altars in the wilderness that unveil the story of God unfolding around us. Legend does not replace the divine voice, but it becomes a means of grace through which God speaks.
Garrett Green writes plainly for us, “People commonly assume that what we imagine must be imaginary… but imagination can be employed realistically, in the service of truth.”
Deep in a fictive forest, Lancelot goes to sleep. Perched on reality’s unfurling edge, Margery wakes from that same dream. Might we imagine that they both dreamt truthfully, and that our dreams could look similar?
Carolyn Etzel Branch
Writer & Student
Carolyn is a current graduate student at Duke Divinity School, pursuing a Master of Divinity with certificates in Theology & the Arts and Anglican Studies. What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
Today’s essay was recently read live at our Charlotte Inkwell Evening where we gathered with 200+ to experience beauty, goodness & truth together.
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I love this insight into the way Margery's life and her telling of her story is shaped by her imaginative milieu. Fascinating to think how the grail legends give shape to the spiritual journeys of both Margery Kempe and T.S. Eliot, who draws on the legend of the Fisher King in final section of The Waste Land.
Very thoughtful and gives us much to think about.