Mariette in Ecstasy, Post 2

This is my second post on Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy.  The first post can be found here. 

 Part 1, Continued.

I didn't provide my thoughts yet as to why I thought the novel was set in 1906.  Let me do so here.  The novel hinges on the mystery of Mariette's religious experiences culminating with the stigmata, whether it's true, a hoax, or some psychosomatic condition.  The early 1900's had the confluence of three threads in the medical-cultural world.  Through these three threads, Hansen is creating what I'll call stress points for the reader on which to question the nature of Mariette's experiences and condition.

(1) Medicine was finally becoming a real science.  Fifty years before there were still bleeding patients to cure them of "humors."  Understanding of germs and vaccines had finally developed and implemented in the medical process to the best they could.  Blood types were understood, x-rays were developed, and real medicines based on empirical experiments were being performed.  So by 1906, there has to be some sort of empirical explanation for the stigmata.  One could not just accept God "zapped" Mariette.  A couple of hundred years earlier and people might have easily accepted it.  Now there is a higher level of credibility that has to be achieved.

(2) Psychology was the rage.  Freud had rocked the world with his papers.  In the 1890s he had studies on hysteria published and he was linking it to sex.  In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which defined a distinction between the conscious and unconscious, so that according to him there existed unconscious thoughts that went beyond our wills.  In 1905 he published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality where he provided theories of sexual development from infancy through maturity.  Now don't get me wrong; I consider 90% of this psychoanalysis/therapy to be bunk and having no empirical basis, but the intellectual world was sold on this.  But by 1906, one could point to psychological reasons for religious experiences and people were linking them to sexuality. 

(3) William James, a philosopher, also started writing on psychology but with the perspective of religious experience.  In 1902 he published The Varieties of Religious Experiences.  Now I don't know that much detail of James' work (by the way he was author Henry James' brother) but from what I could research there were both positives and negatives to his conclusions.  On the positive side he gave credibility to the notion of religious experience and that it was not some disorder as Freud seems to imply.  He classified different types of religious experiences and their apparent expressions and manifestations.  On the negative side he does still link them to some mindful state that that one either can put oneself in or gets from experience.  While ultimately I think James sees positive value to these mystical experiences, for him they are some sort of psychosomatic phenomena rather than God doing something to the mystic.

So I think Hansen has chosen 1906 because the world now looks differently on mystical experiences differently than in the past.

Kerstin Replied:

Unfortunately Manny, much of this is a myth. People have always had the ability of keen observation. Our forbears were far more astute then we give them credit for. Medicine, then as know, has many successes, but also a lot of snake-oil salesmen. Yes, there have been a lot of advances and we all have benefited, but at the same time not everything in school medicine is sound. What do you think is better for the patient, bloodletting or a lobotomy?

In Europe, before school medicine, you had what is today called monastic medicine. It is a fascinating subject. Obviously the concept of Galen of the four humors are outdated, but the concept of the four temperaments (= body type) isn't. It is a kind of proto Myers-Briggs. Doctors used to administer medicine according to the specific to your temperament, meaning, they would treat the same illness differently with different people. This was based on a long tradition of observation. Today, if you have high blood pressure, for the first few months you're nothing but a guinea pig figuring our which one will work.

Then there is serious research going on in at least one university I know of, in Würzburg, Germany, studying monastic medicine, the precursor of school medicine. Monasteries used to have huge medicinal herbal gardens. Since they as a rule ran the hospitals and infirmaries, they also provided much of the medical care of their immediate vicinity. Much of their knowledge ("science" is Greek for "knowledge") was written down, and there are texts that survive. These are the texts that are being systematically studied. The university of Würzburg also has a huge herbal garden where they grow the plants we know were grown then. They have made astounding discoveries. One is a salve for infected eyes. When the researchers put the everyday ingredients together they were amazed they had found in essence a precursor to penicillin.

My Reply:

I don’t know Kerstin, I think we’re going to disagree.  Let me first address the easier to articulate points you made.  (1) Understanding temperament is not science.  I’m sure all civilizations everywhere in all times understood temperament.  Homer consciously delineates various temperaments in The Iliad. But there is nothing scientific about that.  Even today, Myers-Briggs is not science.  It’s just not.  (2) I’m sure all civilizations had home remedies that worked and some that didn’t work.  That doesn’t mean they understood the biological principles that made them work.  That scientific understanding of principles is world view changing. 

Now the harder part to articulate.  Absolutely the middle ages – and again probably all civilizations could use observation and apply reason.  St. Albert the Great, one of my favorite saints, advocated empirical observation of nature back in the 12^th century.  (Actually there is a new bio out which I may nominate for our next read.)  But observation and reason fall short when you are trying to solve a problem where one doesn’t have knowledge of the fundamental phenomena.  For instance, many people observed the plague and all the deaths it caused.  But it was impossible to link it to germs and microorganisms because they weren’t aware of them.  When one observes an event and tries to link it to a cause, one thinks through a drop down menu of potential causes, and reason applies the most likely, and if you’re scientifically minded, you would do an experiment to prove it.  But in the middle ages, as one looks through that drop down menu, for causes of plagues, there isn’t anything in the menu for microorganisms.  No matter how intelligent and observant a person from the middle ages could be – and St Thomas Aquinas and St Albert the Great are two of the smartest people who ever lived –he wouldn’t be able to have reasoned microorganisms to be at the root of the plague.

Now apply this to a stigmata.  The drop down menu that a person would have today would be (1) hoax, (2) psychological/psychosomatic, and (3) God.  Today in 2019, I suspect most people would say it’s a hoax and very few today would say it’s from God.  How many people in 1225 questioned St. Francis of Assisi’s stigmata as an act from God?  I far as I can tell no one but I’m sure there were some.  How about even today, how many of us believe the St. Francis’s stigmata was real?  I would like to think it was real, but if someone proved it indisputably fake today, it wouldn’t surprise me.  That element of skepticism has entered western culture, probably irreversibly, and at this point spread across the world.  It has altered how we look at the world. 

Ron Hansen, at least until the very end, is making the reader choose from that drop down menu, and 1906 is just about the year all three of what I listed for the menu have an equal weight.  I also think he does not leave it ambiguous in the end, which has huge implications, and makes us re-evaluate the themes of the novel.