Death in the Margins
One of my lifelong hobbies includes old manuscripts, especially Medieval ones. There is almost an Indiana Jones adventure quality I feel to looking at these texts which were made with such artistic flair and serious labor. Call me weird, but I feel it is almost an experience akin to time-travel. In recent years, scholars and historians have been paying far more attention to what are called the Marginalia of Illuminated Texts, which is the Latin for “things in the margins”. Just like we may doodle on anything from newspapers to diocesan letters (sorry, I’ve seen it happen), medieval artists made all sorts of decorative additions to their work. So many libraries and universities have now digitized their collections, so you don’t have to fly to Paris or to Rome to see some of the most famous and beautiful works in human history. You can magnify them, rotate them, and otherwise scrutinize them from the comfort of your computer at home.
There is so much that can be found on the margins of Illuminated Texts: fantastical and mythical creatures, depictions of the earth and the heavens, pastoral and agrarian themes, and more. These little Books of Hours, which could be compared to the size of a brick, were extremely expensive to make, and often were the property of devout female royalty who wished to pray the Liturgy of the Church. These books were also often used to teach young royalty to read. We even see, in some cases, their masters, armed with whips, overlooking them as they read! (This can be seen in the picture above)
These Books of Hours are also replete with images which were meant to inculcate piety and establish a theological and even cosmic vision on the reader. Many of these, with their fanastical and chaotic scenes occupying the margins, and with the inspired text or holy picture occupying the center, make almost as it were an enclosed garden for the reader. In reading the particular Book of Hours I have at the beginning of this article, I discovered something very intriguing which I think prompts a thought for deeper consideration.
In looking at much of the Marginalia of Queen Jeanne’s Book of Hours, at one point, I ran across a scholar with an interest in botany who observed that many of the pages were wreathed in Bryonia dioica, a particular plant endemic to central and southern Europe. Botanists and zoologists sometimes comment on marginalia because they are able to identify perhaps the origin of certain texts and their creators, as the illuminators tended to decorate with animals and plants that would have been familiar to people. It turns out that byronia dioica, also called English Mandrake, is an extremely poisonous flowering vine which, if ingested, can cause severe gastrointestinal distress, even resulting in death.
When we consider the content of marginalia, especially as they contain often dangerous creatures, like dragons and the like, it is almost as if they borrow from the cosmology of the Book of Genesis. At the periphery is a sort of ‘realm of chaos’ which is kept at bay by God’s good creation. It is almost like the cartographer who would literally write over his Terra Incognita, “Here are Dragons”. What stands in the middle of all this chaos, peril, and possibly death? What keeps it at bay? The Divine Word. So even in the page I put above, after some initial French rubrical instructions for the Feast of St. Louis of France, are the immortal words of the Psalter’s Invitatory: Domine, labia mea aperies, et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam. “Lord, you will open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise.” What we see here then is that right praise of God is the very thing which keeps the forces of chaos and death at bay, both literally and figuratively. In a sense, to pray rightly is to create a new terrestrial paradise, because that is the place where living relationship with God is restored.
This insight, drawn from a Medieval Manuscript, is particularly poignant, in that we as a species have not left the situation implied by the Psalter and its Marginalia. There is the perennial struggle in the human heart and mind between The Word, and the ‘marginalia’ of life: the things that make us afraid, the lies which deceive, the distortions which lead us away from the truth of things. Four days ago, Forbes Magazine published an article on ‘DeepFake’ technology which should make many people concerned. The takeaway is that any person with a good enough knowledge of AI can doctor entire videos or images of real or imaginary people appearing to do things which they in fact never have. For now, there are ways for people to analyze images to determine which are counterfeit and which are not. However, a time may come in which we literally cannot tell fact from fiction. In a sense, the marginalia will have moved into the center of the page of our life, and will have driven out the Truth, that which every man and woman needs to flourish in life. The fantastical, the weird, the death-bearing and the objects of our fears are only kept out of the mind and the heart so long as the Divine Word is kept at the center.
I strongly resist what some people call being a “Luddite”; that is, being anti-technological and resistant to change. However, there is something to be said for keeping some things deliberately “low-tech”, because they serve humanity, and its nature. I enjoy the benefits that technology brings. But I am sure I join many others who loathe the slavery it can create. As the old proverb goes, habere, haberi: if you have, you are “had”. To possess a physical thing almost always involves being conditioned by that which you think is the object of your sovereign will. The relationality of the created universe and the human psyche is far more taken for granted than we realize, and one day, it will have its rights respected, or the price will be madness and dissolution.
The Eastern Tradition sometimes will speak of the human person being made a ‘Living Icon’, or representation of God, by the divinizing power of the Holy Spirit. As a Latin Christian, I would say something similar: all of us are meant to become Illuminated Manuscripts. All of us have our ‘marginalia’, or those things about us which are strange, embarrassing, farcical, and maybe even sinful. But all of us, especially those of us who pray the Liturgy of the Hours, and read the Sacred Scriptures with attention, have a privileged ability to have The Word carved within by means of the Finger of the Spirit of God.
It is perhaps one of the sad ironies of our age that the same intellectuals, journalists and entertainers who had sown the era of the “post-truth” are now reaping the age of the “fact-checker” and censorship. As we know from the post-modern philosophers, in the vacuum left by radical relativism, all that is left is power. It does not take a conspiracy theorist to see the major tech companies, the media conglomerations, and the governments of the world all grasping at the narratives they need to legitimate their hegemony over the minds and hearts of the human race. This is not a global conspiracy, but an amalgamation, an inevitable effect of a critical mass of sinful humanity refusing to desire the truth, and instead, pursuing the marginalia of life.
Should it surprise us then in any way, that concerning the coming of the Antichrist, the ultimate Lawless One, St. Paul tells us that God will send the disciples of the “World Deceiver” (Didache 16:4) a “strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that they may be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12)? Only a people who have come to love lies can be overcome by the ‘antichrists’ that come and go throughout history. Like James and Jambres of old, the acolytes of antichrist can make staves appear to turn into serpents, but their power only consists in lies.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the brilliant St. John Henry Cardinal Newman made his life’s motto “Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem”, or “Out of Shadows and Images into the Truth.” For the power in every Christian and person of good will lies in the Truth. Pope Francis is often speaking of the Church needing to go out into the “periphery”, or the margins of society. Sociologically and evangelistically, I think this exhortation has merit. However, if it is done without living from the center, we will always lose a part of ourselves. Margins only exist because they are meant to delimit a larger whole; as such, they can either be absorbed into the larger narrative, or kept outside for the sake of the integrity of the whole. Margins in life are like boundaries in psychology: they delimit our responsibilities and our ego, and create respect for the self and for others.
As matters continue to degenerate in the press, on social media, and in other places, it is imperative that we as Christians lead the charge in being complete enemies of detraction, calumny, and rash judgment. We also should lead the charge in choosing, both for ourselves and for our children, Incarnational Reality over Virtual Reality. We must learn to value and cherish the real, whenever and wherever we find it, or else the poisonous vines and creatures of nightmare should encroach on what is most sacred, and enslave us.
