16th century AD

Past & Present, Nov, 1995 by Maureen Flynn

The most renowned theologian who argued for leniency in cases of angry blasphemy was Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Italian Dominican whose Summa theologiae was rapidly becoming the preferred guide to the moral philosophy of the Catholic church.(49) In his discussion of the nature of sin, Aquinas had affirmed that it was indeed possible to be unmindful of one's own use of language. "Blasphemy sometimes bursts out indeliberately", he indicated, ". . . through a sudden movement of passion breaking out into words welling up in [the] imagination without heed to their meaning". On such occasions, he commented, the utterance constitutes a venial sin because it did not involve rational choice. Blasphemy is only a mortal sin, he stated, "when [one] is aware of the significance of his words and adverts to the fact that they are blasphemous".(50)

In the Thomistic formulation, sacrilegious slips of the tongue derive from the imagination, and emerge as language long before the rational faculty of the mind has time to comprehend meaning. This view is grounded upon the ancient Greek notion that the human mind is divided into separate and relatively autonomous functions, with the faculty of the imagination, traditionally located at the front of the brain, processing sensory data before reason in the expression of speech. Blasphemies, in this anthropological schema, need not always derive from the moral centre of the mind; they could also arise from the pre-moral affective and imaginative parts on the surface of rational thought.

If the hurling of vicious vocables could be regarded, in this more lenient Christian view, as a symptom of psychic imbalance, a verbal trace of premature psychic affects, the remaining question is why hot-tempered ejaculations so frequently took the form of transgressing socially accepted boundaries between sacred and profane. What exactly is this mood of anger that could provoke pious Christians, in so many different circumstances, into verbally denying or insulting their God? From a psychological perspective, it is necessary to ascertain why the emotion of anger so frequently manifested itself in verbal signs, in a veritable theatre of linguistic representations intended for others to hear.(51)

The problem becomes even more intriguing if we reflect on the position held by many modern cultural historians that scepticism about the existence of God was nearly absent from people's minds in the medieval and early modern periods. It has become almost a historiographical commonplace to point out that prior to the eighteenth century the West lacked a vocabulary and a conceptual framework to support an atheist perspective on the universe.(52) People shared, a world-view in which the presence of God was an ontological necessity. Although, from time to time, select groups of intellectuals may have challenged God's control over specific events shaping people's lives, few if any seem to have doubted, in a philosophical sense, that he existed.(53) In the light of this transcendental perspective, it is curious that we hear so many denials of God muttered under the breath of frustrated individuals. A possible explanation is that anger had a liberating effect, allowing them to expand beyond their cultural boundaries and explore a world totally different from that which they normally experienced. Perhaps contemporary theologians were right in suspecting that an impulsive outburst against God implied that the faithful sought to stand outside the prescribed order of things - at least temporarily. On the other hand, we must also take seriously defendants' claims about their sustained commitment to the Catholic faith, interpreting carefully what their "angry" remarks have to say about the soul's disposition toward the sacred.(54)