Constructing Empathy*

Karl F. Morrison /

Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick

In my wanderings, I lately came across a double hologram (ca. 1950).

Turn it one way, and you see a bust of Jesus, emblazoned with a heart
circled with thorns. Turn it another way, and you see a bust of the
Blessed Virgin, with a heart circled by roses. Though the faces are
sweetly passionless, flames crown both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and
the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The busts are so placed that each is
visible, shadow-like through the other, overlapping exactly. Instead of
layering, the hearts intersect.
Rachel Fulton recovers the story behind this image with four hands,
two hearts, and one identity. Her magisterial book constitutes a distinguished contribution to the history of empathy. It concentrates on the
inventionover a long space of time and by numerous minds working
independentlyof a devotion keyed to empathy between the Crucified
and his Mother so complete that it transcended the separateness of
their persons. In their piety, worshipers discovered, not a commingling
of persons, so much as a subsuming of the Blessed Virgin in the allenfolding divine energy called love, specifically as it worked on Golgotha. By compassion, the Virgin suffered, died, was entombed, and
rose with Christ. This apotheosis of humanity into divine love came
from workshops of male monastic culture; the artifact was accomplished, by stages, between the ninth and the late twelfth century.
Human nature gave the medium of this bonding, and, in fact, the
key was the one feature of humanity that seemed most invincibly dividing: the body. And yet, in Fultons account, human flesh was exactly
the essential medium of empathy; for, having only one human parent,
Christ had no flesh but his mothers. The flesh of Christ and the flesh
of his Mother were one.
Fulton delivers, in abundance, elements of the doctrine of the Virgin
as co-redemptrix with Christ, nailed to her Son with the spikes that
fastened him to the Cross, pierced by such force with the sword of
compassion that his death became her own. Still, I missthough they
may be there (see pp. 202, 226, 23940, 339)anticipations of a further, logical enlargement of the doctrine of co-redemption, conspicuous at least in seventeenth-century devotion: namely, that the Virgin
* Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 8001200
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xvi676 pp., $40.00 (cloth).
2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2004/8402-0005$10.00

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mediated between her Son and believers in such as way that Jesus and
his Cross might be imprinted in believers through the Virgin, and that
the very sword of grief that pierced her soul would wound theirs.
The first and shorter section of Fultons book (chaps. 13, 185 pp.)
traces a transformation of the devotion to Christ: that is, how, between
the ninth and eleventh centuries, the conception of Christ shifted from
triumphant warlord and righteous judge to weeping sufferer. In the
master narrative of religious drama, the role assigned to believers
changed reciprocally with that of Christ. Ninth-century doctrines called
for gratitude, awe, and terror. These responses persisted. In their original setting, they had excluded empathy; but, continuing them, eleventh-century meditations on Christs human nature, in all its physical
and emotional vulnerability, opened the door to empathy between believers and Christ grounded in the common bond of flesh and sustained by love. Eucharistic disputes brought the focus of attention to
the actual fleshliness of the Incarnation and thereby to the Blessed
Virgin, the donor of Christs flesh. Anselm of Canterburys prayers to
the Blessed Virgin (and writings by some of his disciples) were the
hinge on which this door opened to a changed devotional world.
The second, and longer section of From Judgment to Passion (chaps.
48, 287 pp.) carries the story of transformation to the end of the
twelfth century. Writer after writer ramified the new ways of feeling
called forth in the eleventh century and articulated by Anselm into a
wider monastic consciousness. The result was an ornate understanding
of how empathy closed the divisions of individual selfhood between the
Virgin and Christ as the Mother appropriated her Sons physical pain
and mental suffering to her own mind and heart. A change occurred
from the conception of the Virgin as a Queen, bearing the agony and
death of Christ stoically as the price that had to be paid for the worlds
salvation, to the Virgin as co-sufferer (p. 206). The deeply theatrical
experience of liturgy trained the minds of worshippers to invent imaginary dialogues between Mother and Son at the Crucifixion. Giving free
rein to their quest for narrative, with virtuoso manipulations of metaphor and allegory, three commentators on the Song of Songs invented
elaborate romances of the Crucifixion, extravaganzas of pious eroticism
that fanned out portraying the Virgin with ever greater refinement of
detail as the mother and spouse of Christ, fully one in flesh with him,
beginning with her consent to the Incarnation and continuing through
every stage of his passion, death, and resurrection. With jubilant, flagrant anachronisms, commentators created these romances to catapult
themselves and their intended readers into the ecstatic kiss of the Incarnation, the transactions on Golgotha, and the glorification of the

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flesh, uncontaminated by decay, at the consummation of the Virgins
marriage with her Son in heaven.
From time to time in this story, I thought I noticed the gravitational
pull of bodies conspicuous in the constellation of empathy but invisible
on Fultons star chart. That was particularly true regarding antecedents.
The classical tradition is one such unlocated body. Aristotles doctrine
of catharsisthat for audiences the pleasure of tragedy lay in being
smitten with pity and fear by the representation of suffering enacted
before themrequired the communication of pain. However satirically
Terence originally intended his famous tag, I am a human being; I
think nothing human foreign to me [homo sum; humani nil a me
alienum puto] owes its comic bite to ideas long and gravely taught by
philosophers. Moreover, the biblical command to love God and neighbor (Lev. 19:18) had been subject to much rabbinical study before and
after Christians assimilated it, and, though centuries of christological
disputes lay ahead, some Christians in the late Roman world, close to
the beginning of their faith, characterized Christs humanityhis flesh
and blood and susceptibility to temptationas essential to the working
out of Gods compassion toward the human race (e.g., Heb. 2:1418;
4:15).
Antecedents aside, I also observed a gravitational pull by uncharted
forces exactly at the point where Fulton begins her story: the Carolingian empire, the locus of judgment. Celia Chazelles enlightening
book, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christs
Passion (Cambridge, 2001) was in press about the same time as From
Judgment to Passion. Under evident constraints, Fulton found it possible
to consult Chazelles book, but not to take her general findings into
account.
Still, some of Chazelles evidence was readily available and might
have indicated modification of Fultons starting point: Carolingian portrayals of the Crucified as a triumphant warrior-king and avenging
judge. That evidence includes pictorial representations of Christ on the
Cross that deliberately portray Christs mortal humanity in extreme torment and the helplessness of death. It also includes critics of Paschasius
Radbertus, whose triumphant glorification of the Crucifixion Fulton
expertly analyses. Those critics included Hrabanus Maurus, whom Fulton considers, but not as a critic of Paschasius. Indeed, in some texts,
Paschasius himself took Christs sufferings as a way in which corruptions in our humanity were transfused into the pure humanity of Christ
and redeemed. Even before Chazelles meticulous study, it was plain
that, while Carolingians did characterize the Crucified as Victor and
Judge, they also developed a keen sense of his suffering, mortal hu-

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manity. Passion and compassion are already present among them, with
a lively conviction that meditation on Christs humility in life and suffering unto deathin short, participating in his humanitywas part of
assimilating oneself to the Savior.
This amphibious portrayal of Christ suggests that, even at the beginning, the image of Christ was compassion as well as judgment, and
that later reciprocal exchanges between the image of Christ and that
of the Blessed Virgin were more complex than simple priority in time
would allow (cf. p. 214). Consequently, Anselm of Becs devotion to the
Virgin does not serve as the exclusive pivot on which Christ the divine
judge turned into Christ the human sufferer. At any rate, a large deposit of ancient, patristic, and Carolingian reflections on compassion
before Anselm of Bec lay behind Remigius of Auxerres (d. 908) observation on the fifth Beatitude: a man is called merciful if . . . he
takes others sufferings, and grieves for them, as his own. I did not
find these pre-Anselmian experiments in compassion in From Judgment
to Passion.
Though essentially a chapter in the history of empathy, Fultons book
also brings welcome contributions to the history of scriptural exegesis.
There is something playfully ironic about her contrast between the genres of history and commentary (e.g., pp. 29294, 429). For her book is
exegetical, and Fulton leads readers into the dynamics of her subject
by techniques of Scriptural exegesis ingrained in monastic culture, applied in the texts she analyzes, and, in fact, movingly celebrated by her
in concluding remarks (p. 465): that is, rumination, reading and pondering over the same texts again and again, locating them in varied
contexts, spiraling around them, meditating on them in different lights
and many perspectives. This is exactly the method of exposition Fulton
expertly applies, as she moves across the space of four centuries (but
consulting sources from the patristic age onward), insisting always on
ruminating on each text in the contexts of its tradition, of the authors
life and associations, and of the literary constellation in which she locates it, spiraling on tenaciously through its chambers until she reaches
vila called the main
her hermeneutical objective, which Teresa of A
dwelling place where the very secret exchanges between God and soul
take place (First Dwelling-Place, chap. 1, sec. 3, in The Interior Castle,
trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez [New York, 1979], p.
36).
Some sectionsfor example, those on Peter Damian and Anselm of
Canterburyconstitute little monographs.
True to ruminative tradition, Fulton places great emphasis on visualization, especially on the discipline of visualizing as one reads.

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(Reading, she observed, is the context for seeing [p. 343]). Thus,
her study has much to offer perennial debates about the interplay of
words and images, above all in what she has recovered from her texts
about the use of rhetoric (especially metaphor and allegory), theater,
liturgy, and, of course, pictures as devices for cognitive visualization.
Singing too was a stimulus for visualization, not only in the psalmody
of the monastic hours, and this connection gives pungency to the dominance in her story of the Song of Songs. Of course, the fact that visual
cognition has its limits as long as it is tied to carnal human nature
figured in Fultons account of empathy. For, since the flesh is an impediment to seeing God, the Virgin could not consummate her marriage with her Son until after death (p. 386).
The critical importance of visualization in Fultons anatomy of empathy heightened the complexity of her story, especially in the passionate leaps of imagination by which the male monastic writers she studies
fused themselves with the Virgin, and also in their gendering of rhetorical figures and in the works of spiritual counsel they wrote for
women (e.g., pp. 167, 227, 288, 420).
Certainly, in her methods, Fulton exemplifies and vindicates her rule
that empathy with the creators of evidence is essential to historical inquiry, that the writing of history is itself an act of compassion as much
as it is an act of observation and dispassionate analysis (p. 470).
Throughout her book, she deploys an admirable array of up-to-date
forensic skills in her analyses of liturgy, rhetoric, several varieties of
theology (ascetic, dogmatic, sacramental), and the visual arts, all enriched by a discerning measure of contemporary literary theory.
Naturally, one lays aside this rich and complex study asking for more.
I wonder why the predominance of pain and suffering. Why, as Ariel
Glucklich asks, do religious persons hurt themselves?or in Fultons
story, not only inflict bodily harm on themselves, but invent profound
spiritual agony. (Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the
Sake of the Soul [Oxford, 2001], p. 6.) To ask this is also to ask, What
keeps empathy from solipsism? Peter Damian used a common rhetorical device when he deplored the theatrical madness of enemies he
dismissed as self-serving, their minds, he said, devoid of reason. What
assured Peter Damian and other shapers of empathy, as described in
this book, and their followers too, that they had not fallen prey to their
own, or demonic, fancies?
There is another haunting question. Empathy between Christ and
the Virgin was grounded in their common humanity, but it was also
miraculous and nature-defying in the divine insemination of a virgin,
death without disintegration, and the glorification of mortal, but in-

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corrupt, flesh. Could empathy extend beyond Christ and the Virgin,
and beyond worshipers who by spiritual mimesis participated in their
oneness, to those outside the enclosed garden of faith? Now and then,
the excluded peer through the chinks in Fultons pagesJews, Cathars
and other heretics, ungrateful believers, and critics of the writers who
are the principals in this story. Even chivalric society appears to have
stood outside the hermeneutic circle of empathy. One is curious to
know where the history of empathy fits in what R. I. Moore called the
formation of a persecuting society, and what the limits of empathy
were. That is a theme for another exploration. Broaching it, as Fulton
has done, is a formidable achievement and by no means her only one.

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