Ritva Palmén: Guarding the Inner City of the Soul: The Patristic Legacy of the Notion of Security in the Middle Ages

This paper will discuss the medieval uses of notions of security (securitas), certitude (certitudo) and peace (pax). By focusing on the writings of Cicero (d. 43 BC), Augustine (d. 430), Gregory the Great (d. 604), Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), the paper aims to show how Roman ‘securitas’ transformed and received new religious connotations within Patristic sources and how these novel interpretations were further developed and used in medieval texts.Building on the diverse and diffuse tradition from the Patristic era, medieval writers understood security either as a form of negligence or assurance of faith and inner peace. In their analyses, monastic authors depicted both the human soul as well as their monastery as a kind of city (civitas) or house (domus) and asked how the inner peace of mind or the ordered communal life should be protected. By employing a wide range of military analogies, they described various internal defence systems, recommended strategies against the armies of tempting thoughts and emphasized virtues like humility. The ultimate purpose of these accounts was both to help the individual to safeguard the inner balance of one’s soul and to serve in maintaining the good relationship between the individual and community.