While different approaches to wonder are evident throughout the Middle Ages—from philosophy’s search to remove ignorance to the enhancement or intensification of wonder in art or mysticism—wonder is especially abundant in travel narratives, and Mandeville’s text, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, is a great example of wide-eyed wonder. Around every corner of his journey he encounters people, places, and things startlingly new and different, and he never ceases to be amazed by it all. In entering foreign territory, wonder comes as naturally to him as fear comes to a child suddenly lost and alone. While there are manifestations of this primal fear in Mandeville’s travels, the stronger impulse is actually courage—there is a lot of nerve and audacity in Mandeville’s willingness to take leave of his home and wander through unknown lands. And he is clearly changed as a result: Mandeville’s journey from the West to the Holy Land and then into regions further east resulted in this remarkable knight’s suspension of all he had known prior to the journey and, subsequently, in a new vision—more catholic, more liberal, magnanimous. Mandeville is a border crosser, an illegal alien, trespassing across walled cities and across the boundaries of European preconceptions and prejudices, and it took heavy doses of courage for him to scale walls of this sort.
Mandeville’s experiences in the East (Turkey, India, China), for instance, instill in him a remarkable sympathy and appreciation for human diversity (I leave aside the question of whether Mandeville ever actually traveled to these regions in person or whether they are the journeys of a remarkably imaginative reader). Not only does he withhold condemnation and judgment of different cultures and religions, he speaks admiringly of Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Hindu Brahmins. In a memorable passage about Brahmins—who “always go about naked”—Mandeville writes:
Even if they are not Christians, nevertheless by natural instinct or law they live a commendable life, are folk of great virtue. . . . And even if these people do not have the articles of our faith, nevertheless, I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature, and their good intent, God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan, yet nevertheless his deeds were as acceptable to God as those of His loyal servants. And even if there are many different religions and different beliefs in the world, still I believe God will always love those who love Him in truth and serve Him meekly and truly. . . . For we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates. (SJM, 178–80)
We learn a lot about Mandeville from this passage. He reveals to us a man who is charitable and benevolent toward all of God’s creatures and who contends on their behalf, speaking of their goodness and natural faith, their ability to love God however different and idiosyncratic their religions may appear to the Christian mind. But he also tells us about his theology, how little we know the mind of God, how little we can presume about anything about God’s ways. Although there are many precedents for this Christian approval of pagan traditions—medieval theology’s practice of baptizing the Greek philosophers—Mandeville is a path breaker both for his emphasis on travel and for his almost anthropological interest in non-Christian religions. He is not, after all, speaking of Greek philosophy as in most Christian theology, but of the various religions and beliefs of the world. Quite unlike a sequestered theologian—say, Thomas Aquinas—Mandeville’s narrative is the tale of a man who achieves wisdom through all he experienced about the other, through the people he came to know, the friendships created, the relationships developed. If the hero of the narrative realizes that God loves everyone “even if they are not Christian,” it comes at the end of a long journey and through experiences that are closer to the writing of history than to philosophy, closer to Herodotus than to Thomas Aquinas (in fact, a lot like the traveler of Thomas More’s Utopia).19
The protagonist of the narrative, in short, finds his classroom in the wide world of human experience. Like a peripatetic philosopher or naked Brahmin wandering the world, he is not confined to a cell or university. His pedagogy is tied up with his wandering outside the walls of universities, cities, cultures, civilizations. He is a champion of what the medieval Latin tradition referred to as sapentia, an experiential wisdom distinct from a scientific, theoretical approach to knowledge (scientia). Mandeville is a medieval pilgrim driven by curiosity and wonder at the strange and peculiar creations that God has put on the earth. His path is remarkably inventive and original.
To take another example, Mandeville tells a fantastic story about the first approach of Alexander the Great into the lands of the East. As Alexander approaches the land of the Brahmins, one daring sage confronts Alexander and challenges his conquering impulse: “Wherefore then do you gather the riches of this world? . . . Out of this world you will take nothing with you, but naked as you came hither shall you pass hence, and your flesh shall turn back into the earth from which it was made. And yet, not having any regard to this, you are so presumptuous and proud that, just as if you were God, you would make all the world subject to yourself; yet you do not know how long your life will be, nor the hour of your going” (SJM, 179–80).
The lesson is a clear censure of all dreams of invincible wealth and power. Alexander’s conquering drive is a subtle subterfuge hiding his essential nakedness and mortality, says the Brahmin. If Alexander has come to the East to conquer, wearing his pride and presumption like a coat of arms, Mandeville has come for the wisdom of the East. He has come for understanding, to enlarge and expand the horizons of his being and, even more, his culture’s own self-understanding. His exploration of foreign lands teaches him, as Greenblatt remarks, that no one is ever quite at home. His travel narrative is a sketch of homelessness, a disruption of any secure sense of belonging. It is a journal of permanent displacement and alienation, of wandering without possessing. The end of Mandeville’s wandering amounts to an uprooting in his origins.20
All of that is to say that Mandeville has a large, capacious soul, and only by the route of dispossession does he make room for the largesse that he demonstrates in his writings. By dispossessing himself of his ego’s darkest impulses, he suddenly notices manifestations of this drive in his culture at large and does not hide his disapproval and displeasure. European and Christian triumphalism now appears to him just as shameful and disgraceful as any other deadly sin. As Mandeville crosses borders in his wandering, he is interrupting and dislocating his entire culture’s haughty and vain feeling of centeredness (ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Christocentrism, etc.). As unsettling and disquieting as this experience can be, Mandeville finds virtue in this cultural derailment the way he finds wisdom in his nomadic ways. He finds value in dispersion.
As much of this ethic of dispersion demonstrates his intellectual magnanimity, it surely also includes an ethics of barrenness and poverty. He tells us numerous stories in the book, but many of them return to the theme of renunciation and abnegation. In his travels to the Middle East he tells us that he lived and served the great Sultan for a long time and even fought on his behalf in wars against the Bedouin. Consequently, the Sultan sought to reward him for his loyalty: “And he would have arranged a rich marriage for me with a great prince’s daughter, and given me many great lordships if I had forsaken my faith and embraced theirs; but I did not want to” (SJM, 59). “I did not want to”: this concise comment typifies his renunciation. He turns away from the lure of wealth and power as Jesus had when facing similar temptations in the desert. His ethic is desertlike, sparse and meager, a Quaker-esque spirituality.
The wisdom Mandeville gains from his encounters with other cultures returns him to his homeland a changed man. He now sees his Western church and culture as an outsider might and the portrait is unflattering. He appeals to the wisdom of the East in hopes that it might help Christianity recover what has been lost, a spirit of humility and simplicity and an appreciation for the rich diversity of God’s creatures. While Columbus carried with him the tales of Mandeville’s journeys to the East, he provides us with a good case of the prophetic warning “they have eyes but they do not see.” Because