A 14th-century visionary's words intriguing still

From The Addison Independent, March 10, 2011

In early February 1315, a 50-year-old man named Limoux decided that he wanted to fast for forty days and nights like Jesus.  Lacking a desert, he took himself off to an isolated cave north of his small town in the Pyrenées, with no provisions. He had managed to keep to his fast for 10 days when he finally stumbled down the mountain too hungry to continue, and ate.

In that very moment, he had a sudden, brilliant flash of insight; a revelation. “God put this intellect into his heart that now he asserts that he has, this subtlety and philosophy.”

This matter-of-fact story is found in the summary of Limoux’s confession that was read aloud to the crowds who witnessed his death on the stake almost fifteen years later.  It is so spare and precise that it might have come from the Bristol police log.  Religious revelation (vexed, controversial and deeply personal) does not generally make the pages of our local newspapers, however. If we are to understand both what happened to Limoux that day and what it means, we must investigate this story like detectives attempting to solve a crime.

One detail of Limoux’s story checks out. With the help of some hunters and old men at a café in the center of St. Paul-de-Fenouillet one evening last February, I was able to identify Limoux’s cave based on his description. The mountain just north of town is known locally by the name he provided (“ruppe Cabronia,” now the Serre Cabroune), and has an ideal cave that has been much used by hermits over the centuries.

With this concrete, tangible information in hand, I can actually believe Limoux, just as a student of mine said she believed another visionary who had walked arm and arm with the Holy Trinity. I do not have to believe that God was the source of his sudden inspiration, but I would bet my red patent pleather boots that something profound happened that day. (It really is “pleather,” not leather.  These boots are vegan.) He told the truth: he had had a revelation.

There is an obvious modern interpretation of his experience: a psychotic break. Mark Vonnegut, whose memoir The Eden Express documents his descent into insanity, describes his sudden moments of insight, how everything began to make sense. The universe was full of meaning, and he was full of joy and fear and wonder at seeing it for the first time.  Everyone called him crazy. But he was sure that he knew the truth, or even The Truth, and said, “for me to have sat around calling crazy stuff ‘crazy’ would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done.” Vonnegut, a religion major at Swarthmore, suddenly understood the very meaning of life.  What did Limoux understand, and what does that teach us about him?

It is here that we need our imaginations. So I asked myself the question I ask my students:  What was surprising?

Limoux’s three words stood out: “intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy.” Ordinary words for us, but extraordinary in the mouth of nearly anyone in the 14th century outside a university. Plowmen, fullers and shopkeepers did not speak this way.

If Limoux spoke of a new “intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy,” that is because those words were part of his life before his revelation. He was no simple tanner or itinerant shepherd, but someone who had pondered philosophy and used his intellect in subtle and mysterious ways.  Our text is silent about his past before that February day, but if we historians, the detectives, use all the skills and tools at our disposal, there is much we can learn. With imagination, this opportunity need not be wasted.

I see Limoux as the man on the street corner holding the sign that says “The End of the World is Here.” Who and what was he before insanity struck him? What stories does he have to tell? But just as for Limoux, if we really want to understand and to see the man on our street corner, we need to use not only our intelligence and our imaginations, but also our compassion.

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).