In episode 5 we look into the blessings of honest to God Poverty...!
Welcome to episode 5 of the Hansel and Gretel Code...
So... just as a reminder, the first sentence of our manuscript version of the story is this:
Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived before a great forest.
and yes, it’s taken us 4 whole episodes to analyze the metaphors of just that first short sentence...
and yet, before we can move on to the second sentence of the fairytale, there's one last, incredibly ILLOGICAL item we need to ponder:
And that is Poverty as something Desirable.
now, of course that sounds kinda goofy, except it’s a concept you’re already familiar with...
Poverty, as a paradoxically logical strategy for obtaining success and satisfaction in life — or at least an afterlife — is one of the staples of many religions, both Eastern and Western.
That said, we’re going to find that voluntary poverty, as espoused by religious reformers of medieval Europe prior to the Protestant Reformation, is so very important to our understanding of the fairytale... unless we head to the library and take a closer look at it, we’ll be missing out on a crucial bit of historic context, not to mention quite a few gems...
to begin with, the intuitive time machine takes us back to the Europe of the 13th century... and the Latin word: mendicare, which means: to beg...
and what we find in 13th century Europe is that a profusion of Catholic religious orders known as mendicants began sprouting up like mushrooms...
naturally, there have always been beggars (and thieves) whose poverty was anything but voluntary, however, these religious mendicants were groups of like-minded, um, enthusiasts, who decided to give up all worldly possessions and live in absolute, voluntary poverty.
As far as callings go, this one certainly takes, um, guts, (so to speak) because instead of entering the marketplaces of European towns to earn a living through the practice of some craft, or trade, or art... they chose begging.
well, even in our own achievement-driven zeitgeist, this doesn’t sound COMPLETELY preposterous...
we’re all familiar with religious organizations whose methods are more or less similar to those of the MEDIEVAL mendicants...
hell, we’re even familiar with their modern, non-religious counterparts — the non-profits...
what we’re not so familiar with is how these groups, and especially their founders, could possibly be related to our woodcutter and his family...
well, the family ties all have to do with that deceptively simple, multifaceted metaphor of Poverty...
we’re going to see that the history of voluntary poverty in Europe amounts to a genealogy of our woodcutter and his ancestors.
in fact looking though the family album, we’ll find that Hansel and Gretel's poorer relations constitute one main branch of the family tree going way, way back in history.
of course, just my saying that doesn’t make it so...
to prove it we’ll have to put three different kinds of European paupers in a lineup and see if one of them bears any sort of resemblance to our woodcutter...
the first and most obvious group of 13th century paupers were the out and out destitute — whose poverty was utterly involuntary...
and I gotta be honest, I’m not seeing any resemblance there whatsoever...
next there was that enormous group of garden variety serfs, whose poverty was something of a mixed bag — especially in terms of motivation...
serfs essentially agreed to remain poor (and work their asses off) in return for guarantees of safety and protection...
sure, this might be the social class our woodcutter belongs to, I just don’t see any intuitive, family resemblance...
and remember, we’re looking for interpretations of the metaphors that resonate...
that have real juice in them...
and the connection between this sort of poverty and that of our woodcutter is just too literal to be meaningful...
in fact it’s so literal, it’s boring...
there’s no juice in it...
finally there was this very particular religious variety of paupers who had deliberately —and somewhat flamboyantly — chosen to live barefoot, and in absolute, voluntary poverty.
and this is where intuition starts perking up...
and it all starts with the basic question of: why...?
why did these people, both men and women, decide it was their ambition and calling to be poor...?
well, in order to answer that question, it’s important to remember that there already WERE plenty of ordinary monks and clerics running around...
pretty much all of them in their sandals...
none of whom were required to renounce all worldly goods and live as absolute paupers...
some of them, in fact, were pretty well off...
however — seeing as how many clerics were neither the picture of humility or moderation, the mendicants all had a particular agenda:
They wanted to counterbalance what they felt was the unseemly behavior of their more "worldly" brethren — and maybe even shame them, by example...
the one thing they all agreed on was that the best way to do this was to return to “that old time religion...” namely, the age of the apostles.
in order to do so they found the perfect recipe to follow in 2 brief snippets of the New Testament, specifically: Matthew 19:21 and Luke 10:4
according to Matthew, Jesus said “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give (it) to the poor, and...come, follow me.”
many of them, in fact, WERE obsessed with being perfect... and that’s where Luke came in...
His snippet added a few more specifics and another wrinkle to the recipe for perfection with these directions: “Carry neither money bag, knapsack, nor sandals....”
And so this business of voluntary poverty came to be known as Apostolic Poverty, because these poverty perfectionists made it perfectly clear — they wanted to live in as close a manner to the apostles as possible...
And so right here, we have another historic reference to the same concept of return to a less sophisticated, more primal time and culture that we saw in Episode 4...
this time, as a religious remedy to counterbalance what so many perceived as the impious excesses of their Zeitgeist...
and coming back to the Zeitgeist of the Grimm’s, we’re reminded of the Romanticist theory of return to an earlier, less sophisticated, and more innocent way of thinking and living...
all of which tells us that these mendicants were, in fact, precursors of Romanticism and its theories...
but they were no theorists, these were people who put their money (or voluntary lack of it) where their mouths were...
and, speaking of mouths, outside of praying and begging for their daily bread, you’d think they would just otherwise be happy to keep them shut...
instead, long before Luther, many of these mendicants were outspoken in their criticism of the Catholic Church and the Vatican.
Of course they were simply saying out loud what most people were already thinking about the heaviest and most obvious Church abuses of temporal power, and the more scandalous examples of clerical wheeling and dealing in things like simony — the buying and selling of indulgences
but opening their mouths was a HUGE mistake!
Because many of these men and women (by virtue of their personality types) had embraced a less cerebral and more emotional and intuitive approach to religion, they were no match for the hairsplitting dogmatism of Canon Law and its shrewd, persnickety lawyers.
History tells us that when they had sufficiently annoyed both temporal and clerical rulers, in other words, when their popularity and reputation had grown enough to become embarrassing to all the authorities involved, including the Vatican, many of them were officially declared as heretics, and then imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake.
And right here, I don't think I'm being too pushy if I ask you whether you think there might be just the vaguest hint of similarity between the fate of these heretics, and that of Hansel and Gretel had they NOT been successful in managing the witch.
Well, for the sake of our story, what really was, um, at stake here was not only the question of the Vatican's enormous Authority, Power and CashFlow, but the ultimate prize that all Ecclesiastic Power, Wealth and / or Poverty was believed to grant / bestow / promise / guarantee AND control... namely: Perfect and Eternal Post-Mortem Bliss.
Yet what does this all have to do with our woodcutter, who is no monk — mendicant or otherwise — and whose poverty may not be strictly voluntary? And for goodness sakes, we're still only talking about the first sentence of the fairytale...!
Well, here’s the deal: it's no secret that Hansel and Gretel is literally about finding a way back home to the house of the father.
What this action constitutes metaphorically — at least in religious terms — is known as Atonement...and therefore: Salvation or Redemption or even...happily ever in the hereafter... (if we choose to look that far ahead.)
Intuition tells us that our fairy tale return is symbolic of the very same salvation / redemption / atonement that guarantees the Perfect and Eternal Post-Mortem Bliss promised by christianity and controlled by the Vatican.
That said, if we limit ourselves to a strictly orthodox religious understanding of this business of atonement, we'll be missing out on another, deeper, and more primal aspect of this Return — which is the mystical (and decidedly heretical) concept of re-union, or becoming as one with the deity — otherwise known as mystical union or "unio mystica".
And finally, if we go even less orthodox... i.e. return even FURTHER back... we actually have the more gnostic and pre-socratic concept of Henosis... which means re-union with The One.
I don't want to take us too far back and off the track, except we've also got a Back to the Future moment here, because this same return and atonement also references a very specific religious and redemptive Age of the Future...
A future that was predicted to begin in 1260, to be precise — right in the middle of that 13th century zeitgeist... and the very reason for the sudden profusion of mendicants...
it’s important to our understanding of the fairytale, but we’ll get to that in Episode 6...
for now, let’s hop back on the time machine and find ourselves taken to the Vatican on August 14th 1279...
on that day in history, Pope Nicholas III (who, BTW eventually shows up in Dante’s 8th Circle of Hell as the worst of simoniacs - or practitioners of simony) well, he officially declared that the renunciation of ownership of all things —and I quote — “both individually but also in common, for God’s sake, is meritorious and holy....”
this is a particularly interesting moment in the history of apostolic poverty, because over the centuries the extreme degree of poverty even the real hard-core zealots were willing to take on wasn’t something every one of those groups could stomach or support ... and so squabbles over who was right and who was wrong — how much poverty was spiritual enough and how much wasn't — well, they were driving various popes crazy...
and while it wasn’t until the 13th century that imitating the poverty of Christ and the apostles became such a popular sport, the history of doing so goes back at least to the 3rd Century
and so, along with the squabbling, there had been numerous interventions like this one on the part of the papacy to clarify the Church's official stance on poverty... in other words, to lay down the law concerning which definitions of poverty were spiritually correct... and which were heretical.
however, not only were they numerous, they were often inconsistent and, surprise, surprise: contradictory.
okay, so trying to untangle the myriad complicated threads of factual information involved in apostolic poverty is a bit nutty of me...
The very profusion of names, dates, ideas, counter-ideas, refutations, condemnations and confrontations between rebellious fanaticism and orthodox fanaticism (Yikes...!) makes it practically impossible to grasp this stuff as a clear and coherent whole.
And attempting to do so is an awful lot like trying to juggle handfuls of sand.
Yet in sifting through the myriad individual facts, seriously important connections to our story of Hansel and Gretel keep emerging...
And by looking at some of these amazing little gems, we actually get a glimpse into the brilliant mind of our author, who would have known so many, if not all of these facts!
in the next 2 episodes, we’re going to highlight the most relevant and entertaining of those facts by paging through our woodcutter’s family album and looking at some of the groups and personalities we find there...
and I guarantee, we’re going to see the uncanny family resemblance between them, our woodcutter, and especially, his children: Hansel and Gretel... otherwise known in our manuscript version of the story as Little Brother and Little Sister...
and oh, by the way...
you realize, of course, that Brother and Sister are how monks and nuns address each other...?
mmm hmm...
well, that’s all for now...
thanks for listening...
I hope you enjoyed the episode...
alrighty then
Music credits:
Schubert - Piano Sonata no. 20 in A major, D. 959 - I. Allegro performed by Paul Pitman and courtesy of musopen.org
Mozart - Idomeneo, K. 366 - Act III. Torna la pace, Idomeneo I courtesy of European Archive and musopen.org
Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor 'Pathetique', Op. 13 - I. Grave performed by Paul Pitman and courtesy of musopen.org
Schubert - Six Musical Moments, D. 780 - III. Allegro moderato in F minor performed by Sofja Gülbadamova (licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0) and courtesy of musopen.org
Episode 4 - Financials and Career Choices / Episode 6 - The Woodcutter Family Album