Idolatry of Feeling: Walter Hilton and the Inner Life of Heresy

Abstract

The Augustinian canon Walter Hilton (d. 1396) ranks among the most spiritually conservative writers within the religious culture of fourteenth-century England. This essay seeks to elucidate the terms and imagery by which he opposed religious heresy by examining its relationship, as presented in Hilton’s English and Latin writings, with spiritual feeling. I examine, as well, how the interactions of feeling with dissent supported what he perceived as a false image of the self—for Hilton, one of heresy’s most distinctive features. Far from declaring feeling itself to be idolatrous, however, his works advocate a process by which affective spirituality, guided by the virtues, could serve the process of its own reforming. The doctrinal and affective programs of reform treated at length in book 2 of his Middle English Scale of Perfection, what Hilton calls a reform in faith and in feeling, assimilate this inner reform to the virtue of meekness in a process that is both iconoclastic and anti-idolatrous in its expression. As this essay finally argues, Hilton’s anti-heresy discourse intersects with prevailing attitudes across mainstream religious culture in a way that points to a kind of affective orthodoxy. The latter served as an intellectual means of policing the borderlines of dissent through an affective register that sought to fashion an inner commitment to orthodox religious formations.