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| Image: Martin Kraft (photo.martinkraft.com) License: CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
by SEETA CHAGANTI
In a recent email
to UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt, an anonymous group of senior faculty
state that unless the administration agrees to remove a Confederate statue
(known as “Silent Sam”) by March 1, the faculty sending the email will do it
themselves. One can admire their missive for a number of reasons, including
their commitment to direct action and their explicit, and correct, charge that
the statue sends students, faculty, and staff of color the message that they
are unwelcome and undervalued on the campus. But one aspect of this exchange that
struck my medievalist ear with particular force is the invocation of “pastoral
care,” in both the email and their subsequent press release, to describe the
faculty’s understanding of their mission regarding students. Thinking about the
resonances of this phrase in the context of the early Middle Ages revealed to
me the strong tie between the antiracist act of removing this statue and a less
tangible, but also crucial, imperative. This imperative is to render complicated
ideas broadly accessible, so much so as to challenge the hierarchies by which
such ideas are disseminated, in any fight for racial and social justice.
Book 1 of Gregory the Great’s sixth-century Cura pastoralis, or Liber regulae pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Rule), speaks not simply
about the care of the flock but also about authority itself. The treatise describes
the care of souls as governance, the
weight of governing (regimen, Chapter
1; pondus regiminis, Chapter 3), and
in doing so sounds uncannily pointed and prescient in our current moment.
Gregory remarks on the importance of acquiring appropriate learning before
assuming authority (Chapter 1) and of practicing what one preaches when in a
position of authority (Chapter 2). He warns that many minds will not be equal
to the distractions (Chapter 4) that offices of authority place before one.
Furthermore, a leader might be puffed up (tumidus,
Chapter 4) or experience a misguided sense of deservingness (Chapter 9). And Gregory
acknowledges the importance of feeling reluctance to serve as an authority due
to one’s own humility but doing so anyway from a sense of duty (Chapter 7),
rather than greedily seeking power. In other words, for a critical account of
the pitfalls of governance that anticipates, by over a millennium, exactly the
kind of leadership to which we are now subjected, see Book 1 of the Liber.
But I’m not that interested here in giving airtime to the
specific problem of Trump through Gregory the Great, or in analyzing Gregory’s attitude
toward dominion itself. I am interested in the reception of Gregory’s cura pastoralis in the English Middle
Ages and how that reception extends the implications of the pastoral care that
the UNC faculty enact. In the late ninth century, King Alfred translated
Gregory the Great’s Latin words about pastoral care into English, along with
other works of religious and philosophical learning. Alfred’s response to
Gregory’s work shows us that the critical stance toward an expression of authority,
as well as the duty to attend to the flock (both accomplished by taking down the
statue), must connect to the work of making difficult, subtle, and complicated
ideas accessible to everyone. In a preface to the translation of Gregory’s text,
Alfred observes that learning has decayed in England because Latin literacy has
declined (afeallen wæs). Alfred declares
it his mission to promote learning and wisdom by translating important works
into English, for many know how to read English writing (monige cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan). His preface specifies that he
will send a copy of the translation to every bishopric in England, and while
that copy may not be removed from its minster, the better to ensure its
continued accessibility there, it can be re-copied to promote its accessibility
elsewhere. The Middle Ages often seem overrun with dragons of ecclesiastical
and monarchical power, and thus it is easy to criticize this period as deeply
committed to hierarchy and even responsible for hierarchical systems beyond its
own time. But within that context, Alfred’s impulse to vernacularize and disseminate
this work represents an intriguing experiment (one that he sees as having
ancient precedent) in reconfiguring the channels of access to learning.
And even if Alfred’s motives are more complicated and less equitable
than this formulation suggests, we as modern readers have something to gain
from discerning in Alfred’s program an experiment in access. For in advocating
this access, Alfred specifies what it really means to speak in a way that
everyone understands. Re-reading the preface clarified to me that making
concepts available in a language familiar to us (we ealle gecnawan mægen) is not the same thing as plain speaking, a
concept that has become a misguided anti-intellectual ideal. Vernacularity does
not mean “telling it like it is,” or expressing opinions that justify ignorance
and bigotry by costuming them as directness. It is not the easy
comprehensibility of simple vocabulary and syntax. It means doing the work of
translating – at every educational stage and in every educational setting – a
complicated architecture of concepts concerning governance, systems of privilege
and control, and responsibility to care. It also means translating these ideas in
ways that will promote further thoughts and actions toward justice rather than
stifling them. For these reasons, I think the “Seventeen Tar Heel Faculty”’s identification
of pastoral care as a guiding principle is especially fitting. This idea’s long
history focuses on ministering to the flock, and even, as the UNC faculty enact
it, empowering through that ministration those most vulnerable to injustice and
harm. But in considering what pastoral care means and requires, the medieval
ruler Alfred also heard a call to promote a more inclusive, and therefore a more
productive, rigorous, and challenging, means to learning than had existed before.
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