Luke 22.44 and Sweating Blood: Jesus and Medieval Natural Philosophers

Abstract

Luke 22.44, in which Jesus’s “sweat became as drops of blood,” generated significant thirteenth-century discussion. Unlike pre- and early-Scholastic texts that treated the bloody sweat as miraculous, numerous Scholastic theologians, under the influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy, reconsidered its physiological implications. Since Aristotle had attributed a bloody sweat to a poor humoral complexion, they acknowledged that a bloody sweat is natural, albeit ordinarily a sign of illness and a bad complexion. This forced them to struggle, however, to reconcile Aristotle with other traditions that identified Jesus as possessing the most noble and perfect complexion. For Albert the Great, John Pecham, and Roger Marston Jesus’s subtle complexion produced such intense sadness and pain when anticipating the Passion that it produced bloody sweat as a concomitant change in the body. This solution contributes to the affective piety of the later Middle Ages, which intensified the emphasis upon Christ’s suffering in the Passion.