Some of our responses to the pandemic and other crises echo the flagellant movement of the 14th century.
Some of our responses to the pandemic and other crises echo the flagellant movement of the 14th century.
M aybe there’s a pattern to life. The world is plunged into a turmoil by a plague from China. Quarantines are unable to entirely halt the spread of death. A great mass of people lose faith in the ability of their long-lived public institutions to deal with the health crisis. And that lack of faith spreads to the other social evils that the authorized institutions have failed to arrest: the violence endemic in society, and disruptive climate change. A great mass of ordinary people break out of fearful quarantine and take their appeals outside of their inherited institutions and into the streets, for a direct confrontation with evil.
This was the flagellant movement of the mid-14th century. It was composed of men who beat themselves with whips or chains and displayed their bloody backs in public processions, trying to do penance not just for their own sins but for the sins of the world. In doing so, they hoped to move God himself to end the evils of the age.
If we think on it at all, we are likely to think of the flagellant movement during the Black Death as a fanatical and morbid cult. But there was a spiritual and emotional logic to what they were doing.
After the towering artistic, theological, and civilizational heights of the high Middle Ages, European civilization seemed to be taking a step backward into violence and darkness in the 14th century. Across one long lifetime, the Western world had been marked by schism, the interregnum, plunging fertility rates, a major famine, the sudden onset of the Little Ice Age, and, worst of all, the Black Death. Where grapes had once grown at the borders of Scotland, there was now just ice. Wars and rebellions seemed to be rumbling everywhere as social relations were inalterably changed by the decreasing supply of labor.
The traditional response to a crisis at the height of Christendom would be liturgical. Ordinarily, the Mass itself, a re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, was known to propitiate God’s wrath at sin. More special but also regular were the rogation days — normal, scheduled liturgical events that demanded fasting and abstinence. Rogare is the Latin verb for “to ask.” And the clergy were tasked with leading the faithful in their petitions for relief from disaster.
But in the decades after the schism, the education level of the clergy across Western Europe fell dramatically. The 14th century also saw the reemergence of simony and sexual corruption in their ranks. The increased proliferation of religious processions also seemed to rob the special rogation days of their purpose.
In sum, the authorities who were supposed to appease God’s wrath were suspected of being compromised with evil. And the normal liturgical means of redress seemed to have grown stale and suspect from overuse and ineffectiveness after a series of rolling crises.
And so ordinary believers started taking the matter of penance into their own hands at mass gatherings, building on previous flagellant ceremony, and creating something of a popular movement. The processions went on tours across cities, pulling in participants from every social rank. The spectacles featured kneeling and laying prostrate. The liturgies were conducted in the vernacular and included the reading of a “heavenly letter,” which was a “call to action” for “the movement.”
Writing on it, scholar Eric A. Gobel, describes the effect on everyone:
The audience who witnessed the performance engaged God personally as well. By listening to and possibly singing along with liturgical songs that they could comprehend, then bearing witness to a supplication that required an audience, medieval people engaged with religion in a way that, for many, would have been intimate and thrilling. The heavenly letter’s power lay not only in its Godly affirmation of flagellant efforts, but also in its call for support.
I thought of all this when I saw the social-media postings of protesters showing off their slightly cut-up or reddened knees, a mark that they had knelt on the hot ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds. I thought of it when listening to comedian Dave Chappelle’s recently released Netflix monologue on the death of George Floyd and the response in the streets. It’s a moving and sometimes confounding performance, featuring both heartrending accounts of violence and the spooky numerological coincidences that are a feature of the persecuted and paranoid mind. Chappelle rejected calls from news anchors for black celebrities like him to get involved and speak out in favor of something else. “These streets will speak for themselves whether I’m dead or alive,” he says. “I trust you guys. I love you guys.”
Like the onlookers in the 14th century, Chappelle trusts the mass movement to confront evil.
We don’t face anything on the scale of the crises in the 14th century. But in the past 20 years, there has been a feeling of repeated failures in war and on the domestic front, and a frustration that the normal sources of authority are populated by men too corrupt and too stupid to confront the crisis at hand, and that the normal process of reform and improvement is broken. It may not even be strictly true. And when the organized civic and religious cult goes into failure, a disorganized caucus and passionate cult will rise in its place. Plague makes us feel vulnerable. It doesn’t pull us away from the other social troubles of our time but rather heightens our sensitivity to them.
For now we live under the shadow of death.