blog assignment #1

This post is late but because I've had the chance to go through a discussion section, I feel like I'm in a better position to answer the prompt. One thing about the middle ages that this class is already changing for me has to do with credibility. I have always been curious about how different life might have been for people living around the time of Christ than it is for us today. But I never even considered that the things Athanasius and Severus wrote about, devils whose heads were touching the sky, incarnations of satan that materialize out of thin air and are driven to dematerialize simply by the sign of the cross, the saints mysteriously turning up one day covered with bruises and cuts from fighting with lucifer etc...I never even considered that these things might actually have happened. Stacey said to us in section today that this many people writing and talking about the same crazy occurences can't all be crazy. So what are they seeing? Are they recording truthfully a world so radically different from ours that a devil might actually appear to someone and be driven away simply from hearing the name of Christ? Or is it that we don't hear about these things anymore? Is it that we are so conditioned to be skeptical and disbelieve anything we can't prove with logic and rational thought that the idea of the supernatural is relegated to the realm of the impossible? I'm skeptical about my own skepticism. The readings, the force with which these authors and their subjects believed in what they recorded, are making me doubt.
But to return to that skepticism fo just a moment, I would like to talk more in sections about some rational explanations for the "possessions" that our saints deal with. The girl in Martin for example, whose father fell at Martin's feet and begged him to see her, was "possessed," but possibly mostly with a progressive muscular disorder. Even if that's the cause, though, how did Martin heal her?