The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships

At a time of increased polarization, when the dangers of overvaluing individualism and personal choice are constantly on display, a view of selfhood as fundamentally relational seems welcome. Newman's The Permeable Self opens by stressing the differences between modern and premodern concepts of selfhood. While modernity is said to support an independent, bounded self, in which thoughts and feelings are characterized as located within each individual's mind, the premodern self was understood, she argues, as dependent and porous. Drawing on the scholarship of Charles Taylor and Timothy Reiss, Newman evokes the experience of premodern selfhood as “embedded” within what Reiss calls “facets of being”: family, parish, community, the material world, and the supernatural.Newman explores the permeable self through a series of personal, mostly binary relationships (in some instances, God acts as a triangulating power). Employing sources and themes she knows well, she examines the civilizing force of charismatic education, the rhetoric of romantic love and monastic friendship, holy women's indirect paths to spiritual authority, demonic possession, and perhaps most relevant to our current political climate, connections between a pregnant woman and her fetus. Newman's tool for understanding the nature of these relationships and what they reveal about the medieval experience of being in the world is coinherence—a Christian theological concept used to explain the relation of the three persons that comprise the Holy Trinity. Coinherence can prove a slippery term, but the critical element to Newman's analysis is that the medieval self was understood “as formed by and through others” while retaining its “distinct identit[y] . . . in and through . . . [its] coinherent relationships.” The interdependence of self and other is then unpacked through a series of relationships arranged in order of increasing intimacy—concluding with examples that flirt with complete annihilation.The dialectic of self as subsistent yet distinct is paralleled throughout the book by a dialectic of medieval and modern. Newman oscillates between stressing the alterity of the medieval, relational self and nodding to points of intersection with current technologies and cultures. Indeed, the initial stress on difference is something of a straw man, since even the rhetoric of American self-fashioning has been nuanced to reflect the roles of inherited status and economic opportunity. Furthermore, as Newman explains in her introduction, “coinherence tends to emerge most clearly in liminal places, providing a counterweight to the more familiar concept of personhood as rational autonomy.” Thus, for example, the permeability of consciousness demonstrated by a saint's telepathic power to read a sinner's mind and know his unconfessed sins is characterized as miraculous. It seems, then, that without divine (or demonic) mediation, the unspoken “secrets of the heart” remain hidden and that permeability is a temporary gift (or curse). In her final chapter, Newman seeks to lay out the continuing relevance of these medieval ideas. She is forthright that here she “aims to be provocative,” and the dangers and benefits of coinherence that she suggests are certainly challenging.