Let's Talk About: The Medieval Body

Playwright, journalist, and podcaster Ngofeen Mputubwele is writing a play about a deceptively simple question: when did white people stop dancing? What began as a conversation about medieval bodies quickly became something much large: a history of how Western Christianity came to distrust its own flesh, and how that distrust got exported around the world.

In this first conversation, Ngofeen and I trace the origins of the Western church's conflicted relationship with the body: the fall of Rome as a civilizational 9/11, Augustine's personal war with his own desire becoming the theological architecture of an entire tradition, and the earthy, embodied fusion of Augustinian theology with the "indigenous" place-based spirituality of ancient Europe that gave medieval Christianity its sensory richness (the relics, pilgrimage, a whole cabinet full of ways to do something with your shame)

Then the Reformation arrives and strips it all bare. What's left when you take away the rituals? You turn inward, which has huge implications for the body.

Transcript

Hey, everybody. I have a series of some pretty interesting conversations to share with you.
So a few months ago, I got a message from a playwright. His name is Ngofen Mputabuele.
And he reached out to me. He told me that he's writing a play called When Did White People Stop
Dancing?
church history he's talking to all kinds of different experts and historians trying to solve this
puzzling question where did the dances of the middle ages go and what he wanted to know from me was
you know what what was the western church's relationship with the body like there's this sense that
in the middle ages You know, you think of a more raucous, festive,
kind of free, interestingly, more free relationship with the body. And when you think of early
modern Western Europe, you think of intensely controlled, repressed, a more tightly wound
relationship with the body. So Angolfan wanted to talk about how did that change come about?
And that happens to be something I think about a lot. you know, the Western Christian view of the
body and its origin points. So the question can sound kind of academic,
but when you start pulling on this thread,
Western Christianity's relationship with the body, what it says it believes about the body,
what it has actually practiced around the body through history.
You start to pull on this thread and you realize that it's not really a question about dancing at
all. It's a question about power, trauma, how a civilization comes to distrust its own flesh and
then exported that distrust around the world through colonization. They've been really fascinating
conversations and we just keep having them week after week because there's always more to talk
about, more to say. So Ngofin is a singer, he is a journalist,
he is a podcaster, he's the host of the Human Rights Watch podcast,
Rights and Wrongs. He studied opera in university and then law,
practiced as a lawyer for a while, then moved into journalism and podcasting. He's the host of
Duolingo's French podcast. and a producer of the New Yorker's award-winning podcast,
Felakuti Fear No Man, which looks into the life and legacy of the famous Nigerian musician and
activist, also known as the grandfather of Afrobeat. And he's also a student of dance,
both from his Congolese upbringing, as well as now a student of ballet.
And when it comes to Christianity, Ngofen had a very, he grew up moving between various
Christianities, Congolese Catholicism, the historic black Baptist church in America,
as well as white American evangelicalism and reformed Christianity. So he brings this really rich
embodied cross-cultural intelligence to all of our conversations. And they go in really
interesting directions. So I'm just going to drop you in to our first conversation that we had.
And here we were talking about some of the origin points of Western Christianity's relationship
with the body. And as I do, I talk about Augustine and the fall of Rome.
But we also look at the fusion of, on the one hand, Augustinian theology and what really...
can be considered the indigenous place-based spirituality of Europe,
because it's that fusion that comes together and creates medieval Christianity in the West.
So we're looking at what medieval faith felt like in the body,
what it meant to have an embodied ritual practice, you know,
relics, pilgrimage, the sacramental system as this giant cabinet full of things and practices that
you could do with your shame and guilt. And then we start to look at how things really changed in
the 1300s and 1400s, though we get a lot more into that in the next conversation.
So this is history interfacing with big questions of today.
And so this mixed relationship that Western Christians have with the body,
where on the one hand, It's creationally good or feeling alive during worship is both encouraged,
but also we're suspicious of it. It's a very complex and even confusing kind of relationship with
the body. And so we explore that together in this conversation and start to unpack some of it. So I
hope that you enjoy the conversation that comes and there's going to be more released in the weeks
as the weeks go on this summer.
If you think about the 1600s. on now we have a court we have versailles a very good example because
we have like etiquette we have um and there's very concrete things for instance silverware
silverware the thing that we think of as fully silverware exists uh after this transition but all
of that is to say before there's this sort of um uh image of european body
as more free more um you know less restricted not the thing that we think of like the 1800s like
it's not that thing and certainly not the 1700s it's not that thing before the 1500s can you tell
me a little bit about like how might i fill that picture out um with what's going on in the world
historically church-wise etc yeah i i've since you um asked me to talk about this this stuff uh
i've done some reading and it really is like an unbelievably transformative century in the 1500s in
so many ways so there's a lot that changes but you know in my work i look at the reformation as
this major traumatic experience for western europe it is the fracturing and breakdown of everything
that they knew they lived in a society that was
You know, as far as they understood, there was really only like two parts of the world.
There was Christendom, which means the kingdom of Christianity, which was a coalition of many
different kingdoms. And then you had Dar al-Islam as the enemy.
And I was like, that was their world. And so the Reformation is not just a theological event.
That's actually not really. biggest change that it makes. It is a complete,
utter collapse of the medieval norm and the medieval world.
And there's so many things you can say about that. You know, one really small,
it's not small at all, actually. You could do a whole talk on just this,
but the medieval world taught people how to relate to their dead. Their dead were in purgatory.
They were burning off the sins of their... debts that they still had, they were paying that off.
And if you were in purgatory, you would get to heaven eventually.
It's like being in a line, like a cleansing line. And people would pray for their family,
their debt. They would do masses for them to reduce their time in purgatory. They would maybe
purchase an indulgence to reduce the time in purgatory. So they had this whole ritual and...
whole economy of how to relate to their dead, they weren't dead.
They were still there. The Reformation is about kind of eliminating what the Reformers saw as
Catholic accretions, extras, things that were not part of the New Testament church,
which of course these weren't.
So when you hear that from a Protestant perspective, you're like, oh good, they are cleaning it up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But these people lost their, immediately, overnight lost their connection
to the dead, to their family. So that's just one little piece of what was something that was
eliminated for, I guess you could say, noble reasons. And you don't realize how much...
like it was bearing how much of people's anxiety what that's all to say is uh what strikes me when
you're talking about like you know the the courtly etiquette and the raucous you know pre pre
-modern like gross sounds and you know sloppy people doing like messy things yeah there is a after
after 1500 in many different areas of european life you have an attempt to clean up and tidy
everything and i i started to think about this actually many years ago um when you look at lawns
okay you look out front and you see the lawn and you see what like the western or colonial in in
our case in north america what it does it prize in value it wants everything like cornered
everything like separated and there there is i i understand it like i feel it inside me there's a
beauty to it but it's it was assigned more than just like this is one way of organizing things it
was like this is the civilized way and um you know you see it in agriculture like these fields with
again clear corners of You know, corn. That's actually,
it's actually quite a weak way to grow food. It's a monocrop.
If you have a disease that attacks corn,
you're doomed.
If everything goes well, the yield is amazing. But if something goes wrong,
it's all over. But an ecosystem, to counter that,
is messy. and diverse and extremely resilient.
If one component in the ecosystem suffers, the whole thing readjusts.
And so it's kind of like the reformers and the Catholic Church then in response to the reformers'
criticisms are all about getting things neat and tidy, fixing it all up,
whether that's doctrine, whether that's... ritual practice and that might be one of the things
you're seeing uh with the body and changing because the medieval body was faith was of embodied
experience faith wasn't about really what you think about jesus or the church it was about what
rituals you went through example so like you know how in in the 21st century,
when we say, oh, you're just going through the motions. We mean that negatively. Like we mean you
don't really care. You're just doing what's prescribed. You're not really invested.
That is very much a reformer route. Because what they did is they stripped away all the containers
of ritual, you know, like having to kneel or having to even go to confession or having to,
you know, light this candle, or do all the various things that the medieval peasant Christian
considered what it meant to be Christian, was to engage in the church's sacramental rituals.
But the reformers take all that away and say, so what's left, right?
They make these proclamations that none of these activities that you're doing are earning God's
favor. So people are like, okay, I guess that's good news in some way. Luther says it's God's
grace. You don't have to work off debt in purgatory.
Christ has paid the debt. And that, again, theologically, that's liberating, was liberating for a
lot of people, especially liberating for him, Luther, because he felt a sense of crushing debt.
But then it's like, okay, so what now? And so it turns inward.
It stops being about the external rituals that you're engaging in.
And it becomes, do you really have faith? How can you know? Well, you can't go on a pilgrimage.
That doesn't demonstrate faith. That doesn't do anything. You have to look inside.
And so that's one of these critical things that shifts in the early modern period is this new
emphasis on interiority.
For the reformer, what does it mean to be a Christian while you read the Bible and you have to
believe it and understand it for yourself? Everything's internal.
Just a quick interruption. What's so funny hearing that in 2026,
funny as in curious, is we right now are living in a moment that is after the culture's acceptance
of therapy.
So when I was in college, we were pre-therapy. Now, 2026, we're like,
you know, we're the conversations are about everyone's blaming therapy for everything.
You know, that's sort of where the cultural conversation exists in May of 2026. People blame
therapy. What I find so interesting about what you just described is the internalization is a
similar sort of move. as the thing that we critique therapy for, which is like the conversation
about therapy, the critique of it is like, you're so focused on the in, in, in,
you're going to in, you need to just do, you know, that's sort of a critique. yeah uh and it's just
like interesting to notice it's just an observation of like let's also like uh in a way it sounds
like in a way also the the result of the reformation was also went in like an inward turn very much
and and you know this was not a peaceful process like one thing i've been reading about lately is
you know as i'm trying to understand church history through the lens of pain and wounds or grief
One of the things that follows the Reformation is the destruction of all the statues and all the
images and all the, again, these accretions. But it can be quite a violent thing to basically
destroy all the sacred objects that your family in previous generations held as sacred and dear.
And you're channeling some of the grief from this breakdown of,
reality as you knew it into these kind of destructive, destructive,
destructive processes to cleanse and strip away and make things neat and tidy painting over the
walls, you know, Protestant reform churches from the like late 1500s,
early 1600s are whitewashed, like getting rid of all the art,
getting rid of all. Yeah.
It's literally, yeah, literally whitewashed. So if you go to Switzerland, go to a Zwinglian church.
Zwingli was one of the reformers that we don't talk about as much. Those churches are just these
white, bare, empty kind of spaces. And that was all part of this move to clean things up.
But again, so then what now? We don't have any images anymore. We don't have this experience of
beauty.
The only beauty we're supposed to really find is like the beauty of Christ's work.
And again, so what do you do? You look inside to see, do I really believe this? Like,
am I saved or am I one of the elect predestined? The answers are all within.
And when you talk about like, you know, where therapy is at right now, one thing I've noticed,
which I think is really exciting, it's a frontier. It's like talk therapy isn't enough.
and that's kind of similar to this where it's like the inward analysis isn't enough what like this
is trapped in your tissue your traumas in your tissues and it needs to so you know it's like we
have to that's what somatic experiencing is all about it's like releasing the built up even like it
can even be from not even from just your life but from your ancestors that's locked inside your
tissue that's keeping your body like you know constricted yeah yeah yeah yeah okay let's if if the
1500s is our hinge point let's spend some time going backwards and just paint for me the picture of
pre-1500s you know sort of that medieval medieval europe medieval christianity you've talked about
like pre-white walls has sacred object like give me like you know give me the vista give me paint
that image for me well you have like because the the the medieval period is usually the way we
usually break it into three three kind of major sections the early the high and the late and that's
that makes sense because um things are so different in each period so like the early middle ages uh
is kind of the things that happen after the western roman empire collapses so to me that was that's
one of the most understudied eras in church history which is really weird because it seems like it
would be so important but what you end up having is the roman infrastructure that kind of set this
like kind of set up life, collapses in the West. And it's this time of chaos.
It doesn't just mean it's like mayhem all the time. That's not accurate.
A collapsed society is still, people still go to work. They still eat. They still do all the
things. But it's kind of undergirded by this sense of instability and uncertainty.
And that's when... in the west really diverges from the eastern traditions because it experiences
the collapse of its world while the east doesn't can you give me just a just some uh if you were to
like a micro example of like if i'm living if i'm living in the early medieval period um what might
i uh quick um quick uh analog if i'm living in this era that we live in now and i'm a historian 200
years from now talking about this period i might point to the fact that like me and all my friends
oh i i was at this ceremony i was at this award ceremony last week um earlier this week and um they
were giving awards for ai at a creative ceremony and whenever they gave an award for something
related to ai a lot of us creatives were all like not ready to clap And we're all having
conversations among friends about like, oh, you know, using this or what do you feel about the AI?
Whatever. That's like that's that would be I think if I were a historian two years from 200 years
from now, that would be maybe like a micro data point that I might explain the times. So take that
same method and go back to medieval times. What sort of a micro data point of like the world is
collapsing around me?
Well, the the most probably the the one that would be. most jarring was the people who came in and
were now like the like lords of your society were heretics um you you had constantine the empire uh
you know within a generation later becomes officially and exclusively nicene christian heresy is
now like an illegal uh thing that's they're going to stamp out uh so the empire is moving like the
age of Christian empire, this is like the 300s and 400s. In the East,
they keep going on that trajectory for a long time, for another thousand years. They still have a
Christian emperor like Constantine until the 1450s in the East at Constantinople.
But in the West, in the year 410, Rome is sacked, which is the best thing to compare it to is it's
like September 11th. where it doesn't like destroy Rome,
the empire entirely, but it forever changes how people see themselves,
their safety, all the stories about Rome or in America's case, America being kind of invincible and
safe is gone. So it's like that. But then people,
like there's kind of myths about it. They're like, oh, the invasions of the barbarians, right? And
we imagine these like savages, because that's how the Latin people saw it.
That's what they wanted to communicate. They did see the barbarians as inferior, as less human, as
savages. Actually, a lot of the language you get for indigenous people later on comes from...
how the greeks and romans saw the wild people of the north um but they're not pagans the people who
come in and start kind of carving up the old roman territory they're christian they're germanic
peoples they're christians but they are arian christians so followers of of arias as opposed to
nicene christians arian like the i-a-n not y-a-n Right,
not Y-A-N. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so now you're like, okay,
what happened here? Like, I thought God had given us the empire.
I thought that was the whole plan. Like, he vindicated the martyrs. He gave us the empire.
And this was going to be the vessel through which, you know, the gospel came to the whole world.
And now it's just over. And I'm looking out and I'm seeing the guy sitting on, like, the throne is
a heretic. So that it's like that was something that was extremely disorienting.
They actually the Roman people associated the coming of the barbarians with the end of the world.
They thought this would be the end. This is when the judgment would come. Oh, that's not what
happened. So that's one one point is just looking and being like, I can't believe these inferior
heretics are our overlords now. Like this is just.
embarrassing and disorienting and what's God doing, you know?
So when you talk about like America right now and what we'll write about it,
I've wondered if it is a collapsed society already. Like I read an article on that about,
I don't know, five, six years ago, and it argued from the perspective of someone who lived through
the Sri Lankan civil war. Living in a collapsed society.
Like I just said, they still went to work. They still ate. They still saw their friends. And I was
like, it was arguing that America already is collapsed. This is what it looks like. This is what it
feels like. It feels like this gnawing sense of pessimism.
And you're standing on shaky ground all the time. That's what it is like to live through a
collapsed society. And so that's kind of where what happens in the early Middle Ages is all the
Roman officials and magistrates and civic authorities gone. But the church had an alternative,
its own hierarchy and structure. So it survives because it's not connected to the state.
It's parallel with it. And so what happens is they people are like,
can you guys, hey, bishops and priests, can you? take over the bishop steps in i have a question
it's so it's it's a very like to me it's a very practical question i always have a hard time
understanding what it means that the church stepped in is it for instance like would it be
equivalent to saying like um the government provided um this is such an american ism but like the
government is providing providing social services the government collapses there are no more social
services and so then you go to like your denomination or whatever and you're like well you guys set
up a soup kitchen is it that kind of thing like what does it mean that they stepped in kind of
practically well it's more than just that i mean in a lot of ways the christian movement started
social services in the roman empire they didn't have that before like the social services they
offered was like the military protection and you know of course i'm i know they use taxes to do a
lot to build aqueducts and that. But when it comes to providing relief for the poor,
that was one of the things that made Christianity attractive and grow because the state didn't do
that. So yes, definitely the church fills all of the charity type void.
But bishops are also now like judging civic.
lawsuits.
The Pope is managing the grain supply for the city of Rome and all of that,
cleaning up sewage, managing that. It's literally everything. And I've wondered,
what would have happened if the church wasn't there? Well, what would have happened was probably
local people would have stepped up. But because Latin people had What they had been trained in was
that you look to authority to do this. You don't you don't do it yourself.
Like, you know, you don't break into small, local egalitarian communities and figure things out.
They had been imperialized. And so that's not to make them sound like helpless and hopeless.
It's just they were looking to authority and the church represented like it had.
It had the structures that they were used to. And that makes sense because it formed itself in the
soil of Roman Empire.
So you see bishops starting to resemble monarchs and emperors.
Because that's just the way that these people thought. They thought in pyramids.
So yeah, when the church steps in and steps up, it is... kind of filling the whole gap of civic
infrastructure and spiritual.
And then once you start to get strong new governments arising, when you have like the Germanic
invaders and the Latin people kind of, you know, coming to a new agreement for societies and
establishing these new societies. It's like the church always struggles with.
having to relinquish power. It's like it wants, because it was so formative in the early Middle
Ages that it filled the void, it handled things in the crisis. It's like it doesn't want to let go
of that. And so much of Western church history is a battle between the secular ruler and the
spiritual authority. Like that shapes so much of the geopolitical history, at least.
And so
reinsert sort of like the body in this transition between early to high medieval time.
This is probably a gross simplification, but from the early period,
we're sort of in like the world sort of is in chaos and we're just like recalibrating.
Yeah. What are we moving into in the high medieval period, especially body related?
Well, I mean, the most important figure. in the West of the early Middle Ages is Augustine.
So Augustine is the theological response to Rome's fall.
You know his book, The City of God? You've heard of that? So that book is written to answer the
question, the disorientation I was explaining. Like, what just happened?
I thought that... was God's empire. Rome was God's city. And now it's being run.
by heretics, like, what happened here? That's why Augustine writes it. He writes the city of God to
say, look, empires come and go. They rise and they fall.
That's not the kingdom of God. And how resonant is his work with the average person?
That's really hard to know. Theologically, it's really essential. But that's not what's important
for the body.
uniquely capable in a period when like, there's just not a lot of other voices,
right? There's not a lot of other, there's not a philosophy happening, education's breaking down.
And he's like this shining light, this solitary individual capable of so much thought that at a
time when it's like pretty empty in the West. when everyone else is managing chaos,
that whatever his own experience and what he wrote becomes so identified with just the way,
the truth itself. And so Augustine is one of the major reasons for the changing relationship with
the body. Because sometimes in intellectual history, you can point and say,
well, there was a lot more going on than just the work of this figure. But when you're pointing to
the year like 420 in the Latin world, Augustine is kind of the whole show.
And so his personal experience is of monumental importance to the whole Western church's history
after him. It's unlike anything else. I don't think this has happened anywhere else with this
potency. So his own personal experience with his body.
becomes the map, the schema that the Western church almost adopts.
So he conceived of himself as enslaved to his sexual desire.
And what he did was he formulated this theology of the will being utterly bound to sin,
no matter what. We want to be chaste. and we can't be.
It's like saying we want to be satisfied with this amount of money in the bank,
but we can't. Our will and our body are in total opposition to each other.
Now, that isn't how the body is talked about in other parts of the Christian world at that time.
The body is the thing that God took on himself and was transforming from within and augustine would
have this is one of the sorry this is just one of the most striking discrepancies in all of
christianity which is on the one hand its central metaphysical commitment that god became human is
the most pro-body stance possible and yet in its practice,
it has been one of the most negative movements in history towards the body.
That is such a strange, disorienting dissonance. And there's probably a lot you could say about why
that happens. Generally, people are like, well, Augustine was a Neoplatonist,
so he believed that matter was inferior to the spirit. And that's true.
But they were Neoplatonists in the East, too. So something is different. It's not just that.
That doesn't explain the whole history. But I find that I am constantly returning to him and his
experience of frustration with his desire. And then it's like he encodes that as he reads that into
Paul when he reads Paul's epistles. You know, Paul says one place, like, I do the thing I don't
want to do. For Augustine, Paul might have just meant that in passing.
But for Augustine, that becomes like a central doctrinal node that starts to explain.
It explains his personal experience, that he's enslaved to his desire, that God, the only freedom
he can experience is of God through God's grace, right? God freeing him.
But he's actually...
And Augustine, why does he come up with that framework? It's not like it just drops out of the sky.
He thinks one day I'm going to write this down. No, it's because there's a British monk named
Pelagius who's in the Celtic tradition. And he says that humans are capable of obeying God and
following Christ and being perfect. That we are actually capable of this over time.
And Augustine just loses it at that, that that's gaining any steam. it's like his ultimate trigger
because if that's true then he's uh in big trouble like then like augustine's damned you know
because he's so imperfect yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so if you want to understand the
the this trajectory of negative experience with the body even though in the creeds you're
proclaiming the resurrection of the body you have to look at augustine because he is that's bedrock
and so i guess the question would be hearing that i would think that that means okay so the
medieval church then you know post augustine is like super antibody um it is like the thing that i
think of as like the 1700s the 1800s yeah why is that not the case because i it's like help me
understand that because like theologically augustine is elevated to like This guy is the main
thinker of the Western tradition. The Pope, Pope Gregory the Great,
who lives in the late 500s, who's a really central figure in Christian history.
Augustine is like, that's what he reads. That's what he's shaping. But the Christianity of Europe,
the people, that's a totally different story.
It's not about ideas. If you wanted to start to label what was the spirituality of indigenous
Europe, well, that spirituality is one of a sacred landscape of holy wells and sacred grottos and a
physical world infused with magic, that kind of thing. And so Western Christianity is like,
It's like one part Augustine in conversation with the indigenous spirituality of Europe,
which again is very place-based, very much about these holy sites.
And so what you see grow up is a fusion of those. So the old holy wells become places where a saint
was martyred. Quick question.
that place-based spirituality is that christian before the well like before before it's a martyr
place it's christian or it's not christian or maybe that's part of the category it's uh no that's
like ancient that goes way back yeah okay yeah okay so you were saying place-based the holy what
was the holy well is now like where saint so and so got martyred exactly and so what what ends up
changing is like it's kind of like a reconfiguration of their indigenous spirituality. So instead
of going to like the herbalist or something for an or an oracle for healing,
the church is like, well, the saints are in heaven in Christ's presence praying for us.
And you can pray to, you can ask them to pray for you. They could do miracles. They look to like
passages in the old Testament, like where Elisha's bones. People touch them and they're healed.
That really resonates with the European spirituality. And so it's like this fusion that is quite
embodied. You touch this bone.
You hold this relic. You smell these smells. It is very embodied,
even though at a theological, philosophical level. The body is also seen as like the primary site
of temptation and that Augustinian, like your desires are at war with your will,
you know? So it's like, those are all happening together and they create this fusion.
That's what I try to stress that the reformation is also rooted in the same culture and ancestry.
It's not something new. The Catholic and the Protestant are siblings.
They are from the same stock. But what the Protestants do is in this attempt to,
again, get back to just the core interior, like core of faith,
who do they turn to? Well, they turn to Augustine, the great theologian.
I see. I see. So I'm going to simplify it for my brain. Rome falls.
It's essentially 9-11 for the empire. The social importance of 9-11.
I, living in 2026, am living on the other side of 9-11. So, Rome falls,
and it's a paradigm-shifting moment. Everyone's grappling with it in different ways.
New rulers are showing up, etc. And then we have, like, this is a Ngofen...
this is like the message if you remember that translation um this is like a this is not factual but
just like for my brain is that like basically you have like a really really good author filmmaker
named augustine who can just like is so good at portraying the like the um anxieties of the era and
sort of distilling it into something that people can be like yes it does feel like that right like
that's that's the you know that's spielberg or that's that's um one of these just like these sort
of like thinkers there's no movies but like it's like a a thinker you know a cultural thinker that
we're like uh-huh yeah and so you know if you're friends and you're thinky you're like yeah it's
kind of like that thing augustine said right it's kind of like they're talking about it okay and
the one of the core things that he's doing is being like yeah so like up till now we were like rome
is the sort of like fruition of the church yeah is that like the gospel like you know and then it
fell which we didn't think was going to happen but it did and you know now that i think about it
empires there were a bunch of empires before us and they came and they went and we're rome was like
that too so we can't we can't fix our eyes on rome that's not right the gospel The kingdom is,
like, otherworldly. It's not Rome. It's something else. Mm-hmm. And I like the example of a
filmmaker just because, like, I can understand. Like, when you're an artist, you're always, like,
making stuff sort of processing what you're going through. Mm-hmm. You're always sort of,
like, wrestling with these same ideas and different works or whatever. So you have this filmmaker,
Augustine, who's like... all that stuff and being like okay it is the kingdom is otherworldly but
i'm just like so bad like i have so much um i can't control my sexual appetite i have all this
whatever and like i try and i try and i can't and you know what like it's in the bible paul saying
the same thing it's there this totally makes sense and like as i process it like i totally yeah
it's like our will will never be able to overcome you know yeah uh so and so like you build a whole
sort of thought system around it you're the main you're the the oscar award film director and
everyone's looking at you and being like yeah and probably some people i would imagine are
disagreeing with you but like largely like you're the guy um and so it's like okay great so now so
but you are existing in a where is augustine based Where is Augustine?
He's a North African. That's right. That's right. Which is interesting. Which is very interesting.
But so, okay. So you have Augustine who's like sort of like converted our thinky brain. But then
we're all like living in sort of like the Western part of what was the Roman Empire. And we all
have our relationships to our places, you know? Yep.
One of the things that has stuck with me, I listened to one podcast episode that you did, and I've
talked about this numerous times, is you were saying something about Celtic and thin places. That
image is in my head. So like you're living in sort of the thinkers are out, you know, Augustine's
doing his thing. But like down on the ground, you know, we have places that matter to us. We have
seasons that matter to us, grottos, etc. Okay. As we...
as the bishops and all these folks in like are starting to like kind of like pick up the
administrative shambles we get this like merger of like an augustine brain with like a place
location thin places body yeah is that that's sort of a yeah i think that's a fantastic synthesis
of what's going on yeah cool and so like and i see what you're saying of like it's not like
augustine went away it's like those two strains are there and you know oh go ahead go ahead go no
it's just that they get um they get kind of managed and interwoven in different ways right so
theologically um it's it's sort of like the the world one of the errors is that like ideas are the
primary drivers of reality We have these ideas and then we build worlds around them.
That is a thing that happens, but the world builds our ideas too. It tells us what is true and what
matters because what I've come to realize is reality is a feedback loop.
That's the real way that we come to know things. The Western epistemological discussion is always
like, do we know things through? the the senses or do we know things through revelation from god or
through logic and it's like well we're more like a creature that's constantly uh in a feedback loop
trying things and seeing that doesn't work so that's not true and that's that's really how we come
to know things through feedback right and so yeah they're both the augustinian theology is shaping
the the practice but the practice is also shaping like what kind of things matter theologically
yeah Take me back to where I'm going to guess we're in the high medieval period.
That's part two, right? High medieval is the middle period. Yeah, it's like the early Middle Ages
is like roughly from the fall of Rome in the 400s to around the year 1000.
Okay, okay. It's an era of reconstituting, rebuilding. Yeah.
And then that next thing is high. By the high Middle Ages, you have like, a well-ordered feudal
society. Everything is like structured. You have like the church sets, the rhythms,
the calendar, the sort of like what we're doing here. It has the economy of sin,
which is like when you're baptized, your original sin, which is something Augustine formulated, is
cleansed. So now you no longer carry the original sin,
but all the things you keep doing are... building up debt yeah uh-huh and so you you have to kind
of go through the church's mechanisms to alleviate that and then you'll gain it again and then you
have you know so you'll eventually work it off in death after you're dead in purgatory and then
finally at some it could be like the equivalent of like millions of years who knows at some point
you will see god and be a saint basically
So that's kind of running. It's just like order has sort of come. The peasants know this is your
position. The knights have theirs. And then the church. So it's like,
well, what now? It's got this newfound confidence. Islam is changing in the East because the Turks
are carved, like they're kind of like the invaders. of the Roman days.
They're conquering the Arab Islamic empires,
and they're making changes, and something in the Western mind is very triggered by what's happening
in the Middle East, and they're like, this is our new project. We need to take this back.
And the Pope makes this claim that if you go on crusade and die,
you gain what's called a plenary indulgence. And what does that mean? That means all your purgatory
time is gone.
If you die on crusade, you don't spend any time in purgatory. You die and you go straight to
heaven. And I say this with the authority of, you know, Peter himself. Good question.
The new heavens, new earthness of things.
um is that gone has not showed up is that not showed up yet like oh that's that was the original
right that's the right that's the vision of like that's what jesus believed in that's what paul
believed in that's that's they didn't understand like they didn't have a concept a concept of like
when i die i'll go to heaven and that's kind of where i'm gonna be um i actually just did a
carousel on this um like how the meaning of what It means to be saved changed.
And I did another one a week earlier on why we became Christians became obsessed with the
afterlife.
So it's sort of like formally and officially the church is always held to new heavens,
new earth, resurrection of the body. It's good. All of that. But that doesn't the honest truth is
that doesn't really matter. Like our official stances. What matters is what is actually believed in
real life. where the imaginative weight is placed. And in the Middle Ages,
the imaginative weight is not placed on the resurrection of the body. It is placed on,
when I die, my goal is to get to heaven. This realm of,
who knows exactly how they imagined it, but it was just a realm of delight.
So yeah, it's always there. It's just not, that's not where the weight is placed. Yeah.
Like, okay, so now I'm a medieval peasant living in Germany,
the thing we're going to call Germany.
It's almost like a conflict that I'm trying to understand. You just described those parameters to
me, but then I think, aren't I also intuitive and super into my body? Or is that wrong?
That is, it's hard to know, like, on the local level, what did,
I'm sure people trusted their bodies to some extent, right? The Middle Ages is also interesting
because it's not a surveillance state. You actually have a lot of freedom.
Not that they want that to be the case, but they just don't have the mechanisms and infrastructure.
Modern life is way more controlled and you're under surveillance and watched than you were in the
Middle Ages. Yeah, your village did that.
You know, that's another whole thing we can talk about maybe another time, but like why there's a
surge in heresy in the high Middle Ages, like new offshoots that the church actually builds up a
much stronger surveillance technology in order to manage all this new heresy.
But yeah, like you definitely weren't going to find the theologians talking about how our intuition
is good. The body was something to be disciplined. It was something that tripped you up.
It was full of desires that you needed to manage. It's just that the church said,
manage these desires through our system of sacraments.
So if you commit a sexual sin, go to confession, and then it's gone. The Protestants,
it's much more like... It's like because it's also internal, you have to hold the shame and there's
no container to there's no conduit to get rid of the shame. In the Middle Ages,
you have these this mass tangles of conduits of which you could channel all the things you feel
ashamed about and get absolution and go again, go on a pilgrimage or pray this prayer or burn a
candle and these things you can do physically to demonstrate your repentance.
and gain forgiveness and feel like ah okay i'm clean today that the reformers hate that but you can
also see why that was why we we as humans need those kind of things i feel um so interesting so
interesting it was like working this idea out because it's like the medieval time what you're
describing is i feel sort of guilt um i exorcise that guilt by doing one of the church's prescribed
actions you know go to that guy kneel before him say these things go on that pilgrimage burn this
incense i don't know if that's a thing but whatever like the church has like a prescription like
you do this thing do that thing you know yeah um and then i'm
just thinking i'm jumping to the 20 the aughts and the 2010s If you feel in American evangelical
Christianity, I can't speak to the 2020s, but I can speak to the odds and the tens. If you feel
bad, you exorcise that.
I think a big way, because you don't do confession because you're Protestant. I think a big way
that you do that is in the worship ceremony, like in the singing, you know? you go which is
interesting because it is it is sort of this permitted embodied place but also highly criticized
for being so embodied because i remember a big theological conversation in my college days which
was like 04 to 08 was there was this argument was always about like it was it was about hillsong
united and it was like hillsong united it's music is so emotions-based. It's so much about your
feelings. You go to worship and you sing this stuff and you feel good, but do you actually believe
the doctrine? That was the conversation we were having in the early aughts, in the mid-aughts. But
I do think it still was the case that if you feel kind of gross,
you exorcise that. I mean, I think our pillars are like quiet time.
But I really feel like it might be a personal experience to take the Augustan mistake. I feel like
it is worship. The singing worship. That's the place where you let it all out.
And you think about the way that people talk about sermons. I would say maybe it's the worship plus
the sermon. Because people use verbs like, oh, that sermon wrecked me. It's this way of saying,
it came out.
in the aughts in the 2010s that's the exorcising mechanism in the by the time we get to the high
medieval the exorcising mechanism is these sort of prescriptions of what to do with your body very
structured oh but they have a whole like it's like um they just have this huge cabinet full of
things you can do okay okay like just tons of different practices not just like sing but i mean
like you know visiting um a church with a special relic that a saint buried under its altar,
touching the bone. Like that was, again, Protestants reacted with horror to that kind of thing.
Like just gazing on like a body that was incorrupted.
That's what, you know, incorruptible bodies. I don't know if you've ever heard of those. Yeah. You
know, it's just like, and pilgrimage is so much more than just like go walk over there.
It's like, an arduous journey usually for really bad sins you know things like like something major
um where you you you have a lot of penance to do what's a major bad sin to the medieval mind well
like i mean it could be something like murder okay okay okay it could be something like severe um
or like adultery you know okay that's interesting because it's like it's not even it's good to like
fill out the image so my contemporary picture in my brain when you when you use that word um
pilgrimage is very like book an airbnb go to like lured or someplace in spain yeah sort of sort of
like taking the sights yeah taking the sights like you know fake maybe journal a little bit and
then you're like ah i did a pilgrimage um and That's that's that's 21st century feeling of that
word. You're describing pilgrimage in the context of that time as it's almost being like,
well, take every assumption that you have about travel in the 21st century and think about it then.
OK, so you're still going to go to Lourdes or whatever, but like you're in Germany. So good luck.
You know, do it without shoes. Do it without like.
eat only vegetables, like stuff like that.
So yeah, that, so that was our first conversation. Next time we're going to get more into Ngofen's
biography. You'll hear a lot more from him. This really fascinating stew of Congolese Catholicism,
the historic black Baptist church, white reformed evangelicalism and the various things that he's
noticed. about each of those traditions and their relationship with the body and emotion and what's
allowed and what's suspicious. And I will shed a lot more light and detail on how the Black Plague
changed the Western relationship with the body permanently. This move from purgative suffering to
punishing suffering. And one really fascinating thing we talk about is the Danse Macabre,
which is this thing, this... image and imaginative thing that came out of the Black Plague where
they were imagining this dance with death that could not be refused. And so that generates some
pretty interesting tangents. So check back next week and I will get our second conversation up
where we start digging into this stuff a little more. Thanks for listening today.