Last month, I had the chance to sit down with Grace Hamman to talk about her new book, Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life ( Zondervan Reflective). This is a timely book for anyone interested in the intersection of medieval spirituality and modern evangelical Christianity, and Grace was a joy to spend time with talking about the weird and wonderful world of the Middle Ages. Note: my interview with Grace has been edited for length and clarity.
JR: Grace, welcome to the Anxious Bench. Thanks for joining me. So, you are talking about your new book, Ask of Old Paths. I find it really fascinating and very timely. One of the things I was wondering, just to kind of kick off our conversation, is about your backstory with this book, and then with your work as a public scholar more broadly.
This is your second book written about medieval Christianity for a broad audience—a broad, largely Christian, mostly evangelical audience. You have a PhD in Medieval Lit from Duke University, so clearly you have a professional interest in this. When did you know, or when did this sort of interest generate the idea that, Oh, this actually is speaking to my faith, this is speaking to my personal life, my Christianity, and then also, This could actually speak to a lot of Christians. How did you make that jump?
GH: That’s such a fun question. No one’s ever asked me that before, and I’ve been asked a lot of questions lately, so that’s really lovely.
For me, I immediately was stunned and struck, when I started reading medieval literature, by its relevance to my own walk of faith. That was one of the reasons why I became a medievalist. I had always loved history and literature, and had this long path of pursuing the study of words and language. And once I started reading Middle English seriously in grad school, I just kind of fell head over heels, because I realized this is the meeting point of all my fascinations with language and history and faith. I didn’t even know that that was potentially possible, that I would find that, and so that was just thrilling to me.
Immediately, I started thinking of many of these medieval writers as my teachers. I think good reading resembles a conversation where you are speaking back and listening as well—listening a lot more than you’re speaking. These medieval writers and poets and preachers and theologians were speaking into my life. I was learning, and I was listening.
I had the great fortune, once I decided to be medievalist and got my doctorate, of having an advisor who had a double appointment in the Divinity School at Duke and in the English department. He was an Anglican from England, and very serious about his own faith. It looked different than mine, but I had this amazing model of scholarship and devotion. And he wasn’t writing devotional texts. He was a very a brilliant…is a brilliant academic. But I began to see how, in an individual life, not just my own, these things work together, informing thought and informing your heart.
And then, really what happened is that, through a series of different choices and circumstances, I left academia. I was a mom of three young kids, and I was just kind of losing my mind, to be honest. I love my children, but I was like, I need an intellectual outlet that is related to what I’ve been studying, or I am going to lose it. So I was just kind of like, I’m going to start floating things to see if other people are interested in this. So I just began to throw spaghetti at the wall and see if any of it stuck. I started this podcast, and then I thought, You know what? People seem interested in this. I’m going to try to write a trade book, not an academic book, because I feel like there’s this deep hunger out there for deeper roots.
Most of my readers are American—I do have some readers overseas—but I think a lot of us Americans don’t feel a deep-rootedness to our place. We haven’t lived there many generations. We don’t necessarily have deep-rootedness in the brothers and sisters of the faith who came before us. And I think there’s this real yearning. That’s kind of why I wrote this book, to help us connect with the church of the past, get out of some of our own cultural paradigms of Christianity that are unhelpful and obscuring of the character of the love of God, and dive deeper into how we can keep pursuing that life of love after Christ.
JR: Your first book looks at various images and depictions of Jesus in medieval spaces. This book—it’s in some ways doing similar work, but it’s in some ways very different. You’re introducing your audience to the concepts of seven capital vices and their antidotes, the virtues. This question, I recognize, may seem a little obtuse, given [gestures broadly] everything, given the world that we live in. But I really am curious: why a book on vices and virtues right now?
GH: I think for me, how I enter into it—and I talk about this a little bit in the intro—anything you write [has] this web of weird, tangled thought behind it. So, going into the web more is [the fact] that I’m super interested in language, I’m super interested in the ways that we communicate, and the ways that we share beauty, or share ugliness, on the other hand.
I feel like one of our deep social disasters right now is that we are speaking past each other. And that’s, like, such a “duh” thing to say. Millions of people have commented on it. There’s nothing new there. But then, I also am interested in how we are pretty good at critiquing things. We’re pretty good at deconstructing things or tearing them down. We are less good at thinking about, how can we begin to communicate well, then? How can we not just speak past each other and actually identify our shared communal interests as the body of Christ? The church is so vast and so multifaceted. I became really interested in how our moral language is very washed out, very insipid, and much more based on what we believe and value, rather than how we act and how we are in the world together. That’s not the worst thing. There are very important reasons to articulate what we value. However, our values don’t have to translate into our action.
So, you can say, “I value X,” and then go do the complete opposite thing, and often you aren’t even aware of it. There’s no cognitive dissonance. I mean, maybe there is if you’re lucky and thoughtful. But often you’re like, I believe in loving your enemy, and then you go and treat someone horribly on social media, or say something super shady and unfair, even if it’s not blatantly awful.
I think we have a real disconnect, and I think the language of the virtues and vices, this kind of re-examination of ourselves and self-knowledge and the way we move through the world, is a way in which maybe we can begin to identify shared goals, shared ways to love neighbor and love the self that [are] not dependent on these kind of camps of opposing viewpoints. I can acknowledge, “Hey, we believe different things, but I see how you are pursuing what you understand as justice, and we both want justice. That is a shared desire.”
One of the multiple reasons I wanted to write this book is because I think we are not seeing the forest for the trees. We have a lot more in common with our enemies than we initially think.
JR: Especially considering so many of the people that we would consider quote-unquote enemies, or at least political foes or ideological foes are also in the Church, you know?
GH: Absolutely, one hundred percent. I mean, who among us hasn’t wrestled with realizing somebody who you really love believes something really different than you do about what is good and what is bad and what should be done? Thinking in these terms of virtues and vices, and especially in relation to yourself, it always has to go back [to you]. You can’t use this as a tool to rap other people on the knuckles. This is very much the log in your own eye versus the splinter in someone else’s, where you’ve got to deal with your own heart before, and then move out into the world from that.
JR: One of the things I found interesting was, you begin the book by talking about pride and humility. And on the one hand, pride seems a natural [starting point]. Everybody will say pride is sort of the big one, right? It’s the one that all the other ones are kind of rooted in. But you write about humility as sort of the ground of all virtues and, as you say in the book, it may be surprising to your readers that love or charity isn’t this foundational virtue. Can you talk a bit about why that is? Why is it that humility and not love, or some other virtue, perhaps, is the foundation of virtuous living?
GH: This is one of my favorite pet topics because my dissertation was on humility. This is how I got in all this mess in the first place. My dissertation was on humility in late medieval contemplative writing and poetry. Humility is baffling, because it’s one of those words where we pay lip service to it a lot. It’s a normal word in modern English. It’s not like some of the words in this book. Meekness or chastity are words where you’re like, I’m not even sure if this is good, I’m not sure if this only has been weaponized, or I don’t even know what it means. Humility is a word that is still very much in our common vocabulary.
But when you look at medieval texts, they place it at this foundational, world-changing level in the moral life. Pope Gregory the Great says [that] anyone who has all the virtues but doesn’t have humility carries, as it were, dust into the wind. It’s this preservative, this powerful foundational virtue, and that, I think, is what feels weird to us. The reason is because without humility, we are always going to fall back into pride. Pride is the twisting of every good gift we have ever received into means to buttress the importance and the centrality of the self.
So, it’s our protective instinct. I take credit for the things that I shouldn’t take credit for, or I lean into these things about me, because I want to see myself as the center of the universe. I want to understand myself as the most important thing around which everything else revolves. And every virtue can be even used in that attempt. So, even if I’m the most patient person that you’ve ever encountered, or the most courageous…if [I] don’t have humility, these just become corrupted into more reasons why [I’m] better than other people.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who’s a great monastic writer and theologian, calls it true self-knowledge, especially in regard to your weakness. And this is where we see this fascinating intersection of our own preoccupation with knowing ourselves. I think every era in history has longed to know themselves and seeks it in different ways. We do it, but we often focus on what is unique, or good, or interesting about ourselves, and we don’t like thinking about what makes us weak, or dependent on other people, or like other people, aligned with them. And that’s the work of humility; it’s always grounding us back into our need for God, and our need for one another, and how nothing we do or say can be disconnected from these networks of dependence we are within.
There’s an image in the book of, the tree of virtues, and humility is the root at the bottom. And then you have this big tree, and then at the top is Caritas, Charity, and it’s Jesus. It’s this total inversion of what you would normally think. It’s not only a picture of our moral lives. It’s a picture of the incarnation as well, where in the humbling, taking on flesh, that humility of God that flowers in Jesus and his life and his death and His resurrection. Our moral life becomes like a mirror of the incarnation, and we grow into love out of that humbling.
JR: I’d like you to talk to me about gluttony for a second. When I was reading the book, in a historical frame, it’s the one that makes the least sense to me, at least in terms of, like who’s writing these texts, and what era these texts are written. So, if it’s medieval religious who are waxing poetic about virtue, they’re almost, by definition, people who go without.
GH: Yes.
JR: And I would imagine for the masses as well, like in an agrarian society, stomachache from overeating is much less likely than hunger pangs, right?
GH: One hundred percent.
JR: So, when medieval authors are writing about something like gluttony, is this…are their pens pointed particularly at aristocrats, bishops, and princes? Or is there something more to gluttony than just, sort of the temptation that comes with overindulgence.
GH: Yes, yes, this is fun. Because you’re right, this is actually twofold. One is that something that I love about medieval conceptions, of the vices in particular—and this is true of the virtues as well, but in a different way—is that your station in life and your vocation actually have a pretty strong shape in what vices will be the most tempting to you, and the most consistent threat to your life and to your pursuit of God.
I think we’ve kind of lost that sense. If I work in tech and I’m making a lot of money, avarice or pride is going to be something I need to be cautious about. Or, if I am a teacher, and I’m doing this selfless, hard work, pride and envy are going to be deep thorns for me that I need to kind of keep an eye on. So certainly, there was this awareness of the contextualization of these vices, the ways you had to pay attention, [that] certain things were going to be harder for you than for other people. And that’s not a problem, necessarily, with you or even with your choices, but a reflection of reality, the ways that we are tempted, and the ways that we become used to things in our life.
The vices are habits, they are part of what we continually see and do. So, what you do on your everyday affects you, not only on a physical level of how you earn your bread or whatever, but on an emotional and spiritual level of what you are accustomed to, what you habitually do and think, and the people you’re around, all that stuff. Nobles, kings, even wealthier religious houses—this would have been seen as a higher temptation.
But then the other piece of the puzzle…this was actually a really eye-opening chapter to write, because I was like you. I was kind of like, I’m not necessarily tracking with the danger of this as a deadly sin. This feels like an overreaction, a very medieval overreaction. They had a complicated relationship with bodies, just like we do today, but in a very different frame, different questions, different worries. And I loved this chapter because gluttony is actually presented as measureless consumption, which I think is something that then you can apply to all kinds of life. This idea of, if I want something, then I’m gonna have it. So, instead of thinking about the communities farming, or the environmental impact of shipping this fruit—you know, these are modern examples—but this is the idea of, I’m only consulting my own whims on what I eat, this could lead to much larger social and systemic problems that we are seeing now. That is a direct impact of our gluttonous culture.
And the other thing that was interesting is that they expand that to not only food and drink, but to language, because it’s all with the mouth. It has to do with seeking pleasure, answering your every whim. Things like measureless speech would have been included under gluttony, so the ways in which you indulge yourself speaking. And I mean, if that’s not, like, a direct indictment of modernity and how we are on the internet, or how we are in the news, or in politics, the heedlessness of our tongues. I mean, I was kind of blown away by thinking of that as gluttony, as just pursuing pleasure.
JR: Yeah. And there’s a link there, I think, and you pointed out, between avarice, gluttony, and lust as these sort of, what you call at some point, thoughtless consumption. I thought that was a really apt way to summarize what all three of those vices are sort of like. They’re all sort of walking together in that “thoughtless consumption” mold. And I want to return to that. I do want to be cognizant of your time, but I just have a couple more questions, if that’s alright.
One thing [that struck me] is the presence of images [in your book]. Obviously the medieval texts kind of take center stage in this book, but I was surprised when I opened it up and started reading it how many fascinating images there are. As you were kind of thinking about this book, thinking about the concept of vices and virtues, you stumble upon these illuminated manuscripts, and you see all these wonderful images. What is that doing for medieval audiences, medieval readers? Like, why are they so caught up in these imaginative landscapes as sort of teaching instruments, right? Obviously, they’re entertaining, and that’s one thing that I don’t downplay. But why are medievals kind of almost uniquely wrapped up in image and metaphor and visual depiction of devotion, or doctrine, or some of these sort of biblical motifs. What is it about images?
GH: This is a great question. When people ask me what can the medieval church teach us, I think this is one of the things that we would do well to think about really seriously. We are a very text-based church in modernity, and that’s not a bad…I mean, clearly, I have an English degree, I love the written word more than just about anything except for actual human beings! But the medieval church was preaching in an era of low literacy, right? How were you, as an ordinary person—if you weren’t fortunate enough to be born into a noble family, or to be a monk or a nun, (which had much higher rates of literacy among their charges)—how would you have known the character of God, known doctrine, known these different ideas about what it meant to live a life of love? You would have gotten sermons. But those were often a mixed bag, just like they are today.
And images were then a very important means of both teaching prayer and devotion, and of teaching, just in general, doctrine, ways of living, how to follow Christ. So, the insides of medieval churches, even the tiniest, most humble medieval parish church, were covered with images of scriptural scenes, of things like the seven capital vices and their virtue remedies, of the seven works of mercy that I talk about in the Mercy chapter, of saints and saints’ lives, so many images, and then that they were carved, they were wall paintings, they were frescoes, they were stained glass—just every category. And these weren’t just decoration; these were actually teaching instruments.
In a world without literacy, then, the power of metaphor in memory works really different than quoting scripture at someone. To be sure, medieval people definitely had better memories than we do today. We have widespread accounts of people memorizing a lot of poetry and a lot of scripture who were unable to read. So, great memorizers. However, they often had mnemonic ways of remembering things that were very image-oriented. Images played this profound role in helping people to recall things, and to think seriously about things, even if they couldn’t approach the written word. And that’s, I think, something the modern church, I think we…a lot of our language becomes washed out, because we’re so dependent on being able to pick up our phone, or pick up a book, and encounter something again, rather than letting it take hold in our minds through our memory, which is such a powerful agent of character formation, and through images, so…
JR: Yeah, I feel that on a deep level. I was thinking about—when you were talking about the difference between sermon and sort of something that’s static, like, every time I go to church. So, [my church] worships in an old German Methodist building that was built in the 19th century, and they have these beautiful stained glass installations. And, you know, there’s three of them. One is Jesus welcoming the children, from the Gospel of Matthew; there’s one of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet; and then there’s one of the women at the empty tomb. And every time I go to church…I can remember maybe a handful of sermons, and, you know, and we’re regular churchgoers! But I have a solid sense of the character of God and the character of Jesus when I walk into this space, because I’m always reminded of what Jesus is doing, and who Jesus is with [by looking at these windows] and so that really resonates with me. And the, the sort of…the use of metaphor and imagination is something that you see even in, like, the way that Jesus teaches.
GH: This is very Christ-like, really.
JR: Yeah, it’s like, Jesus isn’t, like, handing systematic theologies to anyone.
GH: No!
JR: He’s like, the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who, you know…
GH: Yes! Mustard seed; birds! I mean, Jesus loves an image or a metaphor. Because, again, he’s teaching to humans who can understand and use language, but who are bigger than that, who need more than language to form us as individuals. And you’re right; the spaces you are in form you, and when you walk into that space time after time, seeing these stories, every time letting them enter your imagination, that’s going to form you on a really deep and almost indelible level sometimes. Like, it’s hard to trace even how deep that goes.
JR: Okay, I’ve got one more for you, and it’s an important one, I think—at least to me. You used this language earlier in our conversation of networks of dependence, and I really like that kind of language. In your chapter on avarice and mercy, you talk about how mercy is… and this is a quote from the book that I actually underlined, highlighted and, you know, I tore up the page. You said that mercy is the nearest human practice to divine justice.
When we talk about virtue, one of the things that can be tempting, I think, is to focus on sort of the [idea that] virtue is about my personal edification, it’s about personal holiness and sanctification and all of these individualistic aspects that we sort of are familiar with in at least in certain segments of American Christianity. But one of the throughlines that I read in your book is this attention to the social ramifications of vice and the social implications of practicing virtue.
The big takeaway is that when we talk about vice and virtue, it’s not just my soul that’s at stake, but it’s also the material conditions of other people that are at stake. What does virtue have to say in our context, where…you write about the globalization of the West, and the values that we have on free trade, and sort of a globalized trade economy. How does medieval virtue speak to Christians who are trying to put this together and say, I want to be socially conscious, but I feel like there’s a piece missing, right? How does your journey into the virtues help you parse that out personally, and then sort of for people who will read this book?
GH: Yeah, this is such a good question, because even if you took out the virtues and vices piece, this is something that we all face all the time: how do we not get paralyzed in the face of…I feel so helpless at these massive systems of injustice or the ways people are speaking or whatever it is, fill in the blank. Most of what I look at, I look at a lot of poetry and a lot of art, but it’s coming out of this pastoral tradition of talking about how to live together in community. And it’s doing so through thinking about the sacrament of penance, which is obviously a very dirty word for most of us Protestants. But really what that means is, Hey, nothing you do does not have social ramifications. Everything you do, every word you say to somebody, every act, every purchase, fill in the blank, ripples outward into the community. And medieval people took that seriously—more seriously than we do, despite our paying lip service to it. And this is because there was less social mobility, so where you were born, for most people, that’s where you were. That was your community. And so, family feuds and all those kinds of things had long, long memories. Arguments between people went deep. And [for] something like receiving the Eucharist, which people only did once a year around Easter, you had to make a bunch of apologies and act in certain ways before you could receive the Eucharist, because you weren’t supposed to receive it if you were out of charity with your neighbor. The only way to become virtuous is to be around other people.
I had this horrible moment while teaching where I was teaching Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions of a Solitary Walker,” and he writes in it—and this to me, like, I’m telling this story because, to me, this crystallizes something about our culture, and about even how I feel myself. This is a bad confession. But he writes in there—and he’s going off on how great he is—”if I was just left to myself, I would be perfect. I would never hurt anyone, I would never do anything wrong. I would always do the right thing if I were just left to myself.”
And my students were like, “Yeah, that’s real, this is truth!” And I was visibly falling apart up in front, because I was just, like, this is so sad. I’m really, really sad. Then I realized, you know what? I think that way too. I can’t pin this blame on my students. I always think, Oh, if that car hadn’t cut me off, well, I would be in a great mood, you know, or whatever.
St. Catherine of Siena, in total opposition to this, writes that, your neighbors are the birth canal of your character. Within the context of community, both the good and the bad, is how we practice the virtues at all, and move towards the life of love. It’s so dependent. And so I think where we can get caught up today as Christians…we think too macro, because we are aware of, oh, you know, this government, or this capitalism, or this whatever, instead of thinking, Who are the immediate people who are birthing my virtues or my vices? It’s my parents, it’s my siblings, it’s my children, it’s my students, it’s my coworkers, fill in the blank, right? We have to restart thinking about how we are acting in our immediate communities, and how that ripples outward before we can jump into the macro, where it just gets overwhelming and you feel, Wow, there’s nothing I can do to fix this or to help people. That’s not true. It’s literally who is in front of you that you impact, and they have that impact on you.
JR: Yeah. I love the way you narrate the relationships in a medieval, you know, let’s just say a medieval parish. You’ve got multiple generations who have all worshipped at the same space, grandpa’s buried in the church graveyard, and, you know, you carry all of these joys and… but also all these harms with you, and it passes on, and it kind of saturates the space. Thinking about your local context and your immediate circle is really helpful, and just very well said. I appreciate that a lot.
Well, Grace, I want to just thank you for writing this book. Thank you for sharing your expertise and your insight and your pastoral wisdom with us. I enjoyed it greatly, and I hope that it finds its way into the hands of a lot of people, and they get the chance to walk with you in this conversation with medieval virtue and vice. Thank you for being here.
GH: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.
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