PETER THE VENERABLE.
It serves to illustrate the meshes which held the highest men of the
twelfth century together, when we encounter Peter the Venerable, Abbot
of Cluny. His true name was Pierre Maurice de Montboisier and he was
from Auvergne—“one of the noblest and most genial natures,” says
Morison, “to be met with in this or in any time.” What a fine old man he
was! Under him as abbot, Bernard of Cluny was prior, and the loving care
of Peter prepared an epitaph for that bravest and sweetest of singers.
It was he who bearded the other Bernard in his very den, and who came
out of many contests against that almost invincible ecclesiast with more
honor than before. Few could say this of a battle with the Abbot of
Clairvaux; and to no one but Peter does Morison, the biographer of
Bernard, concede any such victory.
It was also this admirable Peter who took Peter Abelard under his
protection. With a large and patient generosity he developed the better
nature of that headstrong, conceited, unhappy man; and when Abelard died
he wrote to Heloise the really warmhearted and tender letter, with a
great deal of humanity about it, which I have quoted already. And thus,
to whomsoever it may fall to consider the history of France in the
twelfth century; or of Abelard and the new philosophy; or of Bernard and
ecclesiastical polity; or of the other Bernard and the Latin hymns, it
is inevitable that the name of Peter the Venerable shall arise and stand
high above the throng of those by which he is surrounded.
His mother’s name was Raingarde, and her death, long after he had
attained his wide reputation, was deeply felt by him as that of one of
the best of women and dearest of mothers. For Pierre de Montboisier, in
those days when the stagnation and corruption of thought and morals were
not felt as they were felt later on, was a man as well as a monk. But
when, at last, the religious people became monks and not men; when they
were stupid, uninteresting, fat-fleshed and gross in life; when they had
no courage or piety; then they neither did the world any good nor made
their own souls ripe for heaven. And as sportsmen tell us that the
mellow “bob-o-link” ceases to sing and is only fit for slaughter when he
becomes the “rice bird” of the South, so it was with them. Latin
hymnology almost ceases to be interesting after this century. And Peter
the Venerable, while he wrote but little himself, is too fine a factor
in the arousing of others for us to forget him and his work.
He must have been born in 1092 or 1094—the earlier date being more
probable; and when he was sixteen or seventeen (1109) he became a monk
of Cluny. These were the “black” monks;—as the Cistercians of Citeaux
and Clairvaux were the “white.” He had six brothers, most of whom took
similar vows. What else indeed was there to do? You must either hack and
hew your way with a battle-axe, and risk your neck and your castle, or
you must become a monk. There was no middle course. Peace-loving,
studious people—those who aimed to help the world up toward God—had no
other choice. Nowadays we should find plenty of room for Peter; but he
did what was then best, and entered Cluny.
At thirty years of age he was its abbot. This was in 1122. It happened
by reason of Pontius, the former abbot, a self-sufficient and imperious
man, being forced to resign his office and go on pilgrimage to
Palestine; he even promised not to come back at all. Then the monks of
Cluny elected another abbot; and as he died almost immediately, they
were compelled to choose a third, namely Peter. But it was in a hard
seat that they placed him; he had a mismanaged property, and a body of
men who needed a good deal of attention.
Let us picture him to us in the fashion and habit of his appearance. He
had a “happy face,” a “majestic figure,” and “plenty of those other
unfailing signs of virtues” which justified his name “The Venerable.” It
was such a big-hearted, big-bodied style of man who now undertook this
reformation. By the help of Matthew, Prior of St. Martin in the Fields,
near Paris, he effected it in about three months. Then there was a
period of peace. But, all of a sudden, here comes Pontius, with soldiers
at his heels, when Peter is absent, wanting his old place again. He
bursts in the gates, forces the monks who remain to swear allegiance,
carries off crosses and candlesticks and whatever was worth anything for
melting down into money, and plays robber-baron over all the
neighborhood. Peter himself tells the story: “He came in my absence....
With a motley crowd of soldiers and women rushing in together, he
marched into the cloisters. He turned his hand to the sacred things....
He raided the villages and castles around the abbey, and, trying to
subdue the religious places in a barbaric way, he wasted with fire and
sword all that he could.” It was certainly a very serious matter.
Peter did the best he could with it—this resulting in Honorius II.
despatching a legate from Rome with a great curse, ready-baked and
smoking-hot, for the soul’s benefit of that “sacrilegious, schismatic,
and excommunicate usurper,” Pontius. I have not read the curse; but I am
positively certain that Pontius and Pontius Pilate must have been
elaborately compared in its sentences. Such anathemas were supposed to
dry the blood and wither the brain. Pontius trembled and restored his
ill gotten gains and vanished to his own place. And Peter had peace at
last.
There had already been a controversy with St. Bernard about Robert,
Bernard’s cousin, who liked the cordiality of Cluny a good deal better
than the thin-visaged and almost fierce zeal of Clairvaux. For this
reason he changed his allegiance. Consequently Bernard wanted him sent
home. And by this time he was, according to strict rule, actually
restored. However, Clairvaux chuckled very much at the confusion in
Cluny; and Bernard was ungenerous enough to take this time, of all
others, to publish quite an elaborate and even brilliant disparagement
of the Cluniac rule. I shall let this also pass for the present, for it
will meet us again, only saying that Peter seems to have gone on wisely
about his own business and avoided any reply—a quite unusual proceeding
in a controversial age. In 1126 he had taken up again his previous line
of administration; and when this “apology” came out in 1127 he was
practically meeting its objections in the best manner. As Frederick
Maurice says of him, “The Abbot of Cluny would have wished the monk to
be rather an example to men of the world of what they might become, than
the type of a kind of life which was in opposition to theirs. He feared
that a grievously stringent rule would lead ultimately to a terrible
laxity.”
In 1130 Pope Honorius died. Pierre de Leon (Peter Leonis), calling
himself Anacletus, got himself illegally elected, and seized the control
at Rome. Cardinal Gregory of San Angelo, who was the rightful but weaker
claimant, assumed the title of Innocent II., and forthwith set out to
secure the help of the great abbeys of France. Now Anacletus had been a
Cluniac; and Bernard, Peter’s and Cluny’s opponent, favored Innocent.
But when Innocent, in 1132, appeared at Cluny, he was hailed as the true
and genuine Pope—a piece of magnanimity which he had no right to expect.
And from this time Peter’s allegiance was undoubted; although, like a
great many persons in the world, Innocent II. conceded more to the stern
will of Bernard than to the generous conduct of the Abbot of Cluny.
Indeed, he did but very little in the way of privilege for Peter’s
abbey; and he turned nearly all his gifts and favors toward Bernard.
This so exalted the Cistercians that Peter protested. It is a blot upon
Innocent that such a protest was needed. For Peter had been the first to
welcome him, sending him “sixty horses and mules, with everything which
could be wanted by a pope in distress.”
Many a man would have wheeled around and left the ingrate. But Peter’s
revenge was handsome and characteristic. He summoned a general chapter
of his order; and it was held at the time that Innocent, recognized at
length, was going away to Rome. There were “two hundred priors and a
thousand ecclesiasts,” delegates from France, England, Spain, Germany,
and Italy. These cheerfully and promptly agreed to accept a more
stringent rule in all their religious houses. And thus Innocent, and his
Warwick of a Bernard, could see for themselves the strength and the
charity, and the sincere purpose of the man whom they were setting
aside. I feel that I must here add the exact words in which Morison, St.
Bernard’s best biographer, justifies this estimate of the character of
Peter the Venerable. “The relations between Peter and Bernard throughout
their lives,” he says (p. 222, _note_), “give rise to contrasts little
favorable to the latter. Peter nearly always is gentle, conciliating,
and careful not to give offence, even when as here (in the case of the
Bishop of Langres) sorely provoked. Bernard too often made return by
hard and even violent language and conduct.”
With such a stately and well-balanced person in our mind’s eye, we
cannot be surprised to find that he had plenty of solid pluck, that he
was “mild as he was game, and game as he was mild.” In 1134, returning
from the Council of Pisa against Anacletus, he and his followers were
attacked by robbers. The abbot tucked up his sleeves, and took the sword
of the Church militant on the spot. Perhaps he was glad to let his big
thews and sinews have full play. At all events he so dashed and smote
these ungodly men, that he beat them actually back, and had therefrom
considerable glory. I never read that he or his abbey was much meddled
with afterward.
About this date his visits to Spain drew his attention to the Koran. He
was struck by the religious efficiency of it, and in order to meet it
better he prepared for a full translation of it. Peter of Toledo,
Hermann of Dalmatia, and an Englishman named Robert Kennet, or perhaps
(says the _Histoire Litteraire_) de Retines, were selected for this
duty. To them were added an Arab scholar and Peter of Poitiers, the
abbot’s favorite private secretary. They were to render the Koran into
Latin directly; and at it they went, accomplishing their task between
1141 and 1144, at the time of an epidemic in the monastery. Then Peter
himself joined with them in a refutation of its errors—albeit his
Latinity was not first-rate, being rather that of a man of affairs than
of a student. There was another Latin refutation of the Koran by Brother
Richard, a Dominican who lived in the thirteenth and into the fourteenth
century. Luther translated that into German in 1542.
What a warm-blooded, good, hearty fellow Peter must have been! He had
only found three hundred monks at Cluny in 1122; but Hugo of Cluny, his
successor, was entitled to take rule, there and elsewhere, over ten
thousand. Mount Tabor, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and Constantinople
were among the places where the “black” monks were well established. And
a large share of this was due to the sagacity and statesmanship of
Peter. In proof of this fine humanity, take his behavior to Abelard. The
full story comes properly in another place; for Abelard himself was a
writer of hymns, and worthy of more than transient reference. But when
poor Abelard was repudiated, disgraced, shamefully mutilated, and nearly
at despair’s edge, wearied out with St. Gildas and his refractory monks,
and finally defeated by the purer and higher logic of Bernard, then,
indeed, do we see Peter of Cluny at his best. He received the
disappointed and broken man with “the welcome of an unutterably
guileless and sympathetic heart.” Cluny’s gates opened wide to take him
in. Cluny’s genial, restful spirit closed in about his own like the
feathers of the mother bird around her callow, shivering brood.
And when he dies, it is Cluny’s abbot who details with the loving
particularity, which would most help the sore heart of Heloise, all his
last doings. He speaks even to the kinship of every age when, after this
long and tender letter, whose Latin glows with a deep fervency, he
closes in this wise: “May God, in your stead, comfort him in his bosom;
comfort him as another you; and guard him till through grace he is
restored to you at the coming of the Lord, with the shout of the
archangel and the trump of God descending from the heavens.”
It is time that we speak of his writings, of which a full edition was
published at Paris in 1522, one of the Cluniac monks being its compiler.
Frequently, during the next two hundred years, they are republished in
whole or in part. They are thus by no means inaccessible, though their
merit is not so great. One of the important works is directed against
the Jews, for whom he had a most pious dislike. Others are in the nature
of epistles or of controversial replies, valuable only for their time
and their spirit.
Of his verse, however, we have left us but about fourteen specimens. One
of these is against the detractors of the poetry of Peter of Poitiers,
who were nearer right than he supposed them to be. Another is a rhymed
epistle to a certain Raimond, of some sixty-four lines. Then we have a
“prose,” the word being cognate to _prosody_, in honor of Jesus Christ.
Its structure, except for the additional short syllable, is identical
with the “leonine and tailed rhyme” of Bernard of Morlaix, his prior:
“A patre mittitur, in terris nascitur, Deus de virgine
Humana patitur, docet et moritur, libens pro homine.”
It celebrates Him, sent from the Father, born on the earth, God from a
virgin, wearing our mortal shape, teaching and tarrying with us, and
atoning for our sins. The best, perhaps, of all his poems is what Trench
and March quote:
“Mortis portis fractis, fortis
Fortior vim sustulit,”—
the real original of those splendid lines:
“Now broken are the bars of Death,
And crushed thy sting, Despair!”—
which we find in Bishop Heber’s resurrection hymn, commencing, “God is
gone up with a merry noise.” There is a life to these verses which one
must understand their author in order to appreciate. They follow, in the
best attire that I can give them. They are exultant rather than
illustrious. It is the man and not his measures whom we celebrate!
Daniel does not think it worth his while to include him at all.
Archbishop Trench takes his own text from the _Bibliotheca Cluniacense_,
Paris, 1614:
ON THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD.
The gates of death are broken through,
The strength of hell is tamed,
And by the holy cross anew
Its cruel king is shamed.
A clearer light has spread its ray
Across the land of gloom
When he who made the primal day
Restores it from the tomb.
For so the true Creator died
That sinners might not die,
And so he has been crucified
That we might rise on high.
For Satan then was beaten back
Where he, our Victor stood;
And that to him was deathly black
Which was our vital good.
For Satan, capturing, is caught,
And as he strikes he dies.
Thus calmly and with mighty thought
The King defeats his lies,
Arising whence he had been brought,
At once, to seek the skies.
Thus God ascended, and returned
Again to visit man;
For having made him first, he yearned
To carry out his plan.
To that lost realm our Saviour flew,
The earliest pioneer,
To people Paradise anew
And give our souls good cheer.
Peter the Venerable died on December 25th, 1156; but how or with what
surroundings we are not told. He was buried beside his old comrade,
Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, within the walls of the church
which Innocent II. consecrated upon his memorable visit to Cluny. And
the _Histoire Litteraire_ breaks out into an unusual eulogy; and
declares that in his case the title of “Venerable” was no less honorable
than that of “Saint.” They did not make “saints” out of such men as
Peter—and I don’t quite see why they should. There was too much
flesh-and-blood reality about him, too little of musty theology and
altogether too little bigotry. But somehow the broad-faced happy sun
proves himself to be the “greater light;” while the moon goes palely on,
a ghost in an unaccustomed sky.