advance the civilization of their people were essentially introducers of
foreign culture. This was manifestly true of the missionaries (chief among
whom was the Anglo-Saxon Boniface) who brought Christianity to Germany. It
was true both as to the Christian and the secular learning of Rabanus
Maurus, who was born at Mainz, a very German.[386] With all his Latin
learning he kept his interest in his mother tongue, and always realized
that his people spoke German and not Latin. He encouraged preaching in
German; and with the aid of his favourite pupil, Walafrid, he prepared
German glosses and Latin-German glossaries for Scripture.
Before Rabanus’s death popular translations of the Gospels had appeared,
imbued with the Germanic spirit. The _Heliand_ and Otfrid’s
_Evangelienbuch_ are the best known of these.[387] Then, extending through
the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh century we
note the labours of that most diligent of translators, Notker the German,
a monk of St. Gall, and member of the Ekkehart family, which gave so many
excellent abbots to that cloister. He died in 1022. Like Bede, Rabanus,
and many other Teutonic scholars, he was an encyclopaedia of the knowledge
afforded by his time. He was the head of a school of German translators.
His own translations covered part of Boëthius’s _De consolatione_,
Virgil’s _Bucolics_, Terence’s _Andria_, Martianus Capella’s _De nuptiis_,
Aristotle’s _Categories_ and _De interpretatione_, an arithmetic, a
rhetoric, Job, and the Psalms. He was a teacher all his life, and a German
always, loving his mother tongue, and occupying himself with its grammar
and word forms. His method of translation was to give the Latin sentence,
with a close German rendering, accompanied by an occasional explanation of
the matter, also in German.[388] All the while, this foreign learning was
being mastered gallantly in the leading cloisters, Fulda, St. Gall,
Reichenau, Hersfeld, and others. Within their walls this Latin culture was
studied and mastered, as one with resolve and perseverance masters that to
which he is not born.
Besides those who laboured as translators, other earnest fosterers of
learning in Germany appear as introducers of the same. Bruno, youngest
brother of Otto I., is distinguished in this rôle. He promoted letters in
his archiepiscopal diocese of Cologne. From many lands learned men came to
him, Liutprand and Ratherius among others. Otto himself loved learning,
and drew foreign scholars to his Court, one of whom was that conceited
Gunzo, already spoken of.[389] Schools moved with the emperor (_scholae
translatitiae_) also with Bruno, who though archbishop, duke, and burdened
with affairs, took the time to teach. A passage in his Life by Ruotger
shows the education and accomplishments of this most worthy prince of the
Church and land:
“Then as soon as he learned the first rudiments of the grammatic art,
as we have heard from himself, often pondering upon this in the glory
of the omnipotent God, he began to read the poet Prudentius, at the
instance of his master. This one, as he is catholic in faith and
argument, eminent for eloquence and truth, and most elegant in the
variety of his works and metres, with so great sweetness quickly
pleased the palate of his heart, that at once, with greater avidity
than can be expressed, he drank up not only the knowledge of the
foreign words, but even the marrow of the innermost meaning and most
liquid nectar, if I may so say. Afterwards there was almost no branch
of liberal study in all Greek or Latin eloquence, that escaped the
quickness of his genius. Nor indeed, as often happens, did the
multitude of riches, or the insistency of clamouring crowds, nor any
disgust otherwise coming over him, ever turn his mind from this noble
employment of leisure.... Often he seated himself as a learned arbiter
in the midst of the most learned Greek and Latin doctors, when they
argued on the sublimity of philosophy or upon some subtility of her
glistening discipline, and gave satisfaction to the disputants, amid
universal plaudits, than which he cared for nothing less.”[390]
One may read between these awkward lines that all this learning was
something to which Bruno had been introduced at school. Another short
passage shows how new and strange this Latin culture seemed, and how he
approached it with a timorous seriousness natural to one who did not well
understand what it all meant:
“The buffoonery and mimic talk in comedies and tragedies, which cause
such laughter when recited by a number of people, he would always read
seriously; he took small count of the matter, but chiefly of
authority, in literary compositions.”[391]
Such an attitude would have been impossible for an Italian cradled amid
Latin or quasi-Latin speech and reminiscence.
The most curious if not original literary phenomenon of the time of Bruno
and his great brother was the nun Hrotsvitha, of Gandersheim, a Saxon
cloister supported by the royal Saxon house. A niece of Otto’s was the
Abbess, and she it was who introduced Hrotsvitha to the Latin Classics,
after the completion of her elementary studies under another _magistra_,
likewise an inmate of the convent. The account bears witness to the taste
for Latin reading among this group of noble Saxon dames. Hrotsvitha soon
surpassed the rest, at least in productivity, and became a prolific
authoress. She composed a number of sacred _legendae_, in leonine or
rhymed hexameters.[392] One of them gave the legend of the Virgin, as
drawn from the Apocryphal Gospel of Matthew. She also wrote several
_Passiones_ or accounts of the martyrdoms of saints, and the story of the
Fall and Repentance of Theophilus, the oldest poetic version of a compact
with the devil. Quite different in topic was the Deeds of Otto I. (_De
gestis Oddonis I. imperatoris_) written between 962 and 967, likewise in
leonine hexameters. It told the fortunes of the Saxon house as well as the
career of its greatest member.
Possibly more interesting were six moral dramas written in formal
imitation of the _Comedies_ of Terence. As an antidote to the poison of
the latter, they were to celebrate the virtue of holy virgins in this same
kind of composition which had flaunted the adulteries of lascivious
women--so the preface explains. Again, Hrotsvitha’s sources were
_legenda_, in which Christian chastity, martyred though it be, triumphs
with no uncertain note of victory.[393] These pious imitations of the
impious Terence do not appear to have been imitated by other mediaeval
writers: they exerted no influence upon the later development of the
Mystery Play. They remain as evidence of the writer’s courage, and of the
studies of certain denizens of the cloister at Gandersheim.
Besides this convent for high-born women, and such monasteries as Fulda
and St. Gall, an interesting centre of introduced learning was Hildesheim,
fortunate in its bishops, who made it an oasis of culture in the north.
Otwin, bishop in 954, supplied its school with books from Italy. Some
years after him came that great hearty man, Bernward, of princely birth,
who began his clerical career at an early age, and was made bishop in 992.
For thirty years he ruled his see with admirable piety, energy, and
judgment; qualities which he likewise showed in affairs of State. He was a
diligent student of Latin letters, one “who conned not only the books in
the monastery, but others in divers places, from which he formed a goodly
library of codices of the divines and also the philosophers.”[394] His was
a master’s faculty and a master-hand, itself skilfully fashioning; for not
only did he build the beautiful cloister church of St. Michael at
Hildesheim, and cause it to be sumptuously adorned, but he himself carved
and painted, and set gems. Some of the excellent works of his hand remain
to-day. His biographer tells of that munificence and untiring zeal which
rendered Hildesheim beautiful, as one still may see. Yet, throughout,
Bernward appears as consciously studying and gathering and bringing to his
beloved church an art from afar and a learning which was not of his own
people. The bronze work on the Bernward column in Hildesheim is thought to
suggest an influence of Trajan’s column, while the doors of Bernward’s
church unquestionably follow those of St. Sabina on the Aventine. This
shows how Bernward noticed and learned and copied during his stay at Rome
in the year 1001, when Otto III. was imperator and Gerbert was pope.
Bernward’s successor, Godehard, continued the good work. One of his
letters closes with a quick appeal for books: “Mittite nobis librum
Horatii et epistolas Tullii.”[395] Belonging to the same generation was
Froumundus (fl. cir. 1040), a monk of Tegernsee, where Godehard had been
abbot before becoming bishop of Hildesheim. He was a sturdy German lover
of the classics--very German. At one time he writes for a copy of Horace,
apparently to complete his own, and at another for a copy of Statius;
other letters refer to Juvenal and Persius.[396] His ardour for study is
as apparent as the fact that he is learning a literature to which he was
not born. His turgid hexameters sweat with effort to master the foreign
language and metre. People would have made a priest of him; not he:
“Cogere me certant, fatear, quod sim sapiens vir,”
and a good grin seems to escape him:
“Discere decrevi libros, aliosque docere:
from such work no difficulty shall repel me; be it my reward to be
co-operator (_synergus_) with what almighty God grants to flourish in
this time of Christ, or in the time of yore.”[397]
The spirit is grand, the literary result awful. With diligence, the
studious _élite_ of Germany applied themselves to Latin letters. And in
the course of time tremendous scholars were to rise among them. But the
Latin culture remained a thing of study; its foreign tongue was never as
their own; and in the eleventh century, at least, they used it with a
painful effort that is apparent in their writings and the Germanisms
abounding in them. There may come one like Lambert of Hersfeld, the famous
annalist of the Hildebrandine epoch, who with exceptional gifts gains a
good mastery of Latin, and writes with a conscious approach to
quasi-classical correctness. The place of his birth and the sources of his
education are unknown. He was thirty years old, and doubtless had obtained
his excellent training in Latin, when he took the cowl in the cloister of
Hersfeld in 1058. But the next year he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
afterwards other journeys. He wrote his _Annals_[398] in his later years,
laying down his pen in 1077, when he had brought the Emperor to Canossa.
His was a practised hand, and his style the evident result of much study
of the classics. His work remains the best piece of Latin from an
eleventh-century German.
Among German scholars of the period, one can find no more charming
creature than Hermann Contractus, the lame or paralytic. His father, a
Suabian count, brought the little cripple to the convent of Reichenau. It
was in the year 1020. Hermann was seven years old. There he studied and
taught, and loved his fellows, till his death thirty-four years later. His
mind was as strong as his body was weak. He could not rise from the
movable seat on which his attendant placed him, and could scarcely sit up.
He enunciated with difficulty; his words were scarcely intelligible. But
his learning was encyclopaedic, his sympathies were broad: “Homo revera
sine querela nihil humani a se alienum putavit,” says a loving pupil who
sketched his life. Evil was foreign to his nature. Affectionate, cheerful,
happy, his sweet and engaging personality drew all men’s love, while his
learning attracted pupils from afar.
“At length, after he had been labouring for ten days in a grievous
pleurisy, God’s mercy saw fit to free his holy soul from prison. I who
was his familiar above the rest,” says the biographer, “came to his
couch at dawn of day, and asked him whether he was not feeling a
little better. ‘Do not ask me,’ he replied, ‘but rather listen to what
I have to tell you. I shall die very soon and shall not recover: so to
thee and all my friends I commend my sinful soul. This whole night I
have been rapt in ecstasy. With such complete memory as we have for
the Lord’s Prayer, I seemed to be reading over and over Cicero’s
_Hortensius_, and likewise to be scanning the substance and very
written pages of what I intended to write Concerning the Vices--just
as if I had it already written. I am so stirred and lifted by this
reading, that the earth and all pertaining to it and this mortal life
are despicable and tedious; while the future everlasting world and the
eternal life have become such an unspeakable desire and joy, that all
these transitory circumstances are inane--nothing at all. It wearies
me to live.’”[399]
Was not this a scholar’s vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the
_Hortensius_ even as Augustine, from whose _Confessions_ doubtless came
the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the _Vita_ is
so uncouth and unformed as to convey no certain grammatical meaning. One
can only sense it. The biographer cannot write Latin correctly, nor write
it glibly and ungrammatically, like a man born to a Latinesque speech.
Hermann’s own Latin is but little better. It approaches neither fluency
nor style. But the scholar ardour was his, and his works remain--a long
chronicle, a treatise on the Astrolabe, and one on Music; also, perhaps, a
poem in leonine elegiacs, “The Dispute of the Sheep and the Flax,” which
goes on for several hundred lines till one comes to a welcome _caetera
desunt_.[400]
Thus, with a heavy-footed Teutonic diligence, the Germans studied the
Trivium and Quadrivium. They sweated at Latin grammar, reading also the
literature or the stock passages. Their ignorance of natural science was
no denser than that of peoples west of the Rhine or south of the Alps.
Many of them went to learn at Chartres or Paris. Within the mapped-out
scheme of knowledge, there was too much for them to master to admit of
their devising new provinces of study. They could not but continue for
many decades translators of the foreign matter into their German tongue or
German selves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they will be
translators of the French and Provençal literatures.
Even before the eleventh century Germans were at work at Logic--one
recalls Gerbert’s opponent Otric;[401] and some of them were engaged with
dialectic and philosophy. William, Abbot of Hirschau, crudely anticipated
Anselm in attempting a syllogistic proof of God’s existence.[402] He died
in 1091, and once had been a monk in the convent of St. Emmeram at
Ratisbon in Bavaria, where he may have known a certain monk named Othloh,
who has left a unique disclosure of himself. One is sufficiently informed
as to what the Germans and other people studied in the eleventh century;
but this man has revealed the spiritual conflict out of which he hardly
brought his soul’s peace.
II
Nothing is so fascinating in the life of a holy man as the struggle and
crisis through which his convictions are established and his peace
attained. How diverse has been this strife--with Buddha, with Augustine,
with Luther, or Ignatius Loyola. Its heroes fall into two companies: in
one of them the man attains through his own thought and resolution; in the
other he casts himself on God, and it may be that devils and angels carry
on the fight, of which his soul is the battle-ground and prize.
Nevertheless, the man himself holds the scales of victory; the choice is
his, and it is he who at last goes over to the devil or accepts the grace
of God. This conflict, in which God is felt to aid, is still for men; only
its forms and setting change. Therefore the struggle and the tears,
through which souls have won their wisdom and their peace, never cease to
move us. Othloh, like many another mediaeval scholar, was disturbed over
the sinful pleasure derived from Tully and Virgil, Maro and Lucan. But his
soul’s chief turmoil came from the doubts that sprang from his human
sympathies and from moral grounds--can the Bible be true and God
omnipotent when sin and misery abound? The struggle through which he
became assured was the supreme experience of his life: it fixed his
thoughts; his writings were its fruit; they reflect the struggle and the
struggler, and present a psychological tableau of a mediaeval German soul.
He was born in the bishopric of Freising in Bavaria not long after the
year 1000, and spent his youth in the monastic schools of Tegernsee and
Hersfeld. His scholarship was made evident to men about him through his
skill in copying texts in a beautiful script, ornamented with
illuminations. In the year 1032 he took the monk’s vows in the monastery
of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon, which had been founded long before in honour
of this sainted Frankish missionary bishop, who had met a martyr’s death
in Bavaria in the late Merovingian period. The annals of the monastery are
extant. When the Ottos were emperors, grammatical and theological studies
flourished there, especially under a certain capable Wolfgang, who died
as Bishop of Ratisbon in 994, and whose life Othloh wrote. The latter, on
becoming a monk, received charge of the monastery school, which he
continued to direct for thirty years.[403] Then he left, because some of
the young monks had turned the Abbot against him; but after some years
spent mainly at the monastery of Fulda, he returned to St Emmeram’s in
1063, where he died an old man ten or fifteen years later. From his youth
he had been subject to illness, even to fits of swooning, and, writing in
the evening of his days, he speaks of his many bodily infirmities.
As Othloh looked back over his life, his soul’s crisis seemed to have been
reached soon after he was made a monk. The wisdom brought through it came
as the answer to those questionings which made up the diabolic side of
that great experience. Othloh describes it in his _Book concerning the
Temptations of a certain Monk_.
“There was a sinful clerk, who, having often been corrected by the
Lord, at length turned to monastic life. In the monastery where he was
made a monk he found many sorts of men, some of whom were given over
to the reading of secular works, while some read Holy Scripture. He
resolved to imitate the latter. The more earnest he was in this, the
more was he molested by temptations of the devil; but committing
himself to the grace of God, he persevered; and when, after a long
while, he was delivered, and thought over what he had suffered, it
seemed that others might be edified by his temptations, as well as by
the passages of Holy Scripture which had come to him through divine
inspiration. So he began to write as follows: I wish to tell the
delusions of Satan which I endured sleeping and waking. His deceits
first confounded me with doubt as to whether I was not rash in taking
the vow perilous of the monastic life, without consulting parents or
friends, when Scripture bids us ‘do all things with counsel.’ Diabolic
illusion, as if sympathizing and counselling with me, brought these
and like thoughts. When, the grace of God resisting him, the Tempter
failed to have his way with me here, he tried to make me despair
because of my many sins. ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘that such a wretch
can expect mercy from God the Judge, when it is written, Scarcely
shall a righteous man be saved?’ So he overwhelmed me, till I could do
nothing but weep, and tears were my bread day and night. I protest,
from my innermost heart, that save through the grace of God alone, no
one can overcome such delusions.
“When the Weaver of wiles failed to cause me utterly to despair, he
tried with other arguments of guile to lead me to blaspheme the divine
justice, suggesting thoughts, as if condoling with my misery: ‘O most
unhappy youth, whose grief no man deigns to consider--but men are not
to blame, for they do not know your trouble. God alone knows, and
since He can do all things, why does He not aid you in tribulation,
when for love of Him you have surrendered the world and now endure
this agony? Have done with impossible prayers and foolish grief. The
injustice of that Potentate will not permit all to perish.’ These
delusions were connected with what I now wish to mention: Often I was
awakened by some imaginary signal, and would hasten to the oratory
before the time of morning prayer; also, and for a number of years,
though I slept at night as a man sound in body, when the hour came to
rise, my limbs were numb, and only with uncertain trembling step could
I reach the Church.
“One delusion and temptation must be spoken of, which I hardly know
how to describe, as I never read or heard of anything like it. By the
stress of my many temptations I was driven--though by God’s grace I
was never utterly torn from faith and hope of heavenly aid--to doubt
as to Holy Scripture and the essence of God himself. In the struggle
with the other temptations there was some respite, and a refuge of
hope remained. In this I knew no alleviation, and when formerly I had
been strengthened by the sacred book and had fought against the darts
of death with the arms of faith and hope, now, shut round with doubt
and mental blindness, I doubted whether there was truth in Holy
Scripture and whether God was omnipotent. This broke over me with such
violence as to leave me neither strength of body nor strength of mind,
and I could not see or hear. Then sometimes it was as if a voice was
whispering close to my ear: ‘Why such vain labourings? Can you not,
most foolish of mortals, prove by your own experience that the
testimony of Scripture is without sense or reason? Do you not see that
what the divine book says is the reverse of what the lives and habits
of mankind approve? Those many thousands who neither know nor care to
know its doctrine, do you think they err?’ Troubled, I would urge, as
if against some one questioning and objecting: ‘How then is there such
agreement among all the divinely inspired writings when they speak of
God the Founder and of obedience to His commands?’ Then words of this
kind would be suggested in reply: ‘Fool, the Scriptures on which you
rely for knowledge of God and religion speak double words; for the men
who wrote them lived as men live now. You know how all men speak well
and piously, and act otherwise, as advantage or frailty prompts. From
which you may learn how the authors of the ancient writings wrote good
and religious sayings, and did not live accordingly. Understand then,
that all the books of the divine law were so written that they have an
outer surface of piety and virtue, but quite another inner meaning.
All of which is proved by Paul’s saying, The letter killeth; the
spirit, that is the meaning, maketh to live. So you see how perilous
it is to follow the precepts of these books. Likewise should one think
concerning the essence of God. And besides, if there existed any
person or power of an omnipotent God there would not be this apparent
confusion in everything,--nor would you yourself have had all these
doubts which trouble you.’”
The last diabolically insidious suggestion was just the one to bring
despair to the unaided reason seeking faith. Othloh’s soul was passing
through the depths; but the path now ascends, and rapidly:
“I was assaulted with an incredible number of these delusions, and so
strange and unheard of were they that I feared to speak of them to any
of the brothers. At last I threw myself upon the ground groaning in
bitterness, and, collecting the forces of my mind, I cried with my
lips and from my heart: ‘O if thou art some one, Almighty, and if thou
art everywhere, as I have read so often in so many books, now, I pray,
show me whom thou art and what thou canst do, delivering me quickly
from these perils; I can bear this strife no more.’ I did not have to
wait; the grace of God scattered the whole cloud of doubt, and such a
light of knowledge poured into my heart that I have never since had to
endure the darkness of deadly doubt. I began to understand what I had
scarcely perceived before. Then the grace of knowledge was so
increased that I could no longer hide it. I was urged by ineffable
impulse to undertake some work of gratitude for the glory of God, and
it seemed that this new ardour should be devoted to composition. So I
wrote what I have written concerning those diabolic delusions which
sprang from my sins, and then it seemed reasonable to tell of the
divine inspiration by which my mind was enabled to repel them; so that
he who reads these delusions may at the same time know the workings of
the divine aid, and not ascribe to me a victory which was never mine,
or, thinking that aid was lacking in my temptation, fear lest it fail
in his. I remember how often, especially on rising in the mornings, it
was as if there was some one rising with me and walking with me, who
mutely warned, or gently persuaded me to amend faults which it may be
only the day before I was ignorantly committing and deeming of no
consequence.
“When surrounded by such inspirations I would enter the Church and bow
down in prayer--God knows that I do not lie--it seemed as if some one
besought me with like earnestness of prayer, saying: ‘As that has been
granted which you asked of me, it will be precious to me if you will
obey my entreaties. Do you not continue in those vices which I have
often begged you to abandon? are you not proud and carnal, neglectful
of God’s service, hating whom you should not hate, although the
Scripture says, Every one who hates his brother is a murderer? Where
now is the patience and constancy and that perfection which you
promised God, if He would deliver you from perils and make you a monk?
God has done as you asked, why do you delay to pay your vow? You have
asked Him to set you in a place where you would have a store of books.
Lo, you have been heard; you have books--from which you may learn of
life eternal. Why do you dissipate your mind in vanities and do not
hasten to take the desired gift? You have also asked to be tried, and
tried you have been in temptation, and delivered. Yet you are still a
man unfit for peace or war, since when the battle is far off you are
ready for it, and when it approaches you flee. Which of the holy
fathers that you have read of in the Old or New Testament was so dear
to me that I did not seek to try him in the furnace of tribulation?
Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake.
Steep and narrow is the way; no one is crowned who has not striven
lawfully. When you have read these, and many more passages of
Scripture, why if you desire a crown of life eternal, do you wish to
suffer no tribulation for your sins?’”
Then the Spirit of God, with many admonishings, shows Othloh how easy had
been his lot and how needful to him were his temptations, even the very
carnal temptations of the flesh, which Othloh suffered in common with all
monks. And he is bid to consider their reason and order:
“First you were tried with lighter trials, that gradually you might
gain strength for the weightier; as you progressed you ascribed to
your own strength what was wrought by my grace. Wherefore I subjected
you to the final temptation, from which you will emerge the more
certain of my grace the less you trust in your merits.”
The “warring opposites” of Othloh’s spiritual struggle were, on the one
side, evil thoughts and delusions from the devil, and, on the other, the
strength and enlightenment imparted by the grace of God. The nearer the
crisis comes, the clearer are the devil’s whisperings and the warnings of
the instructing voice. Othloh’s part in it was his choice and acceptance
of the divine counsellor. This conflict never faded from his mind. He has
much to say of the visions[404] in which parts of his enlightenment had
come. Once reading Lucan in the monastery, he swooned, and in his swoon
was beaten with many stripes by a man of terrible and threatening
countenance. By this he was led to abandon profane reading and other
worldly vanities. These visionary floggings left him feeble and ill in
body. They were the approaches to his great spiritual conflict. His
“fourth vision” is in and of the crisis. This monk, immersed in spiritual
struggles, had also his opinions regarding the government of the
monastery, and for a time refused obedience to the abbot’s irregular
rulings, and spoke harshly of him:
“For this I did penance before the abbot but not before God, against
whom I had greatly sinned; and after a few days I fell sick. This
sickness was from God, since I have always begged of His mercy, that
for any sin committed I might suffer sickness or tribulation, and so
it has come to me. On this occasion, when weakness had for some days
kept me in the infirmary, one evening as it was growing dark I thought
I should feel better if I rose and sat by my cot. Immediately the
house appeared to be filled with flame and smoke. Horror-stricken, my
wonted trust in God all scattered, I started, tottering, towards the
cot of the lay brother in charge, but, ashamed, I turned back and went
to the cot of a brother who was sick; he was asleep. Then I sank
exhausted on my cot, thinking how to escape the horror of that vision
of smoke. I had no doubt that the smoke was the work of evil spirits,
who, from its midst, would try to torment me. As I gradually saw that
it was not physical, but of the spirit, and that there was no one to
help me, as all were asleep, I began to sing certain psalms, and,
singing, went out and entered the nearest church, of St. Gallus, and
fell down before the altar. At once, for my sins, strength of mind and
body left me, and I perceived that my lips were held together by evil
spirits, so that I could not move them, to sing a psalm. I tried till
I was weary to open them with my hands.
“Leaving that church, crawling rather than walking I gained the great
church of St. Emmeram, where I hoped for some alleviation of my agony.
But it was as before; I could barely utter a few words of prayer. So I
painfully made my way back to my bed, hoping, from sheer weariness, to
get some sleep. But none came, and, turn as I would, still I saw the
vision of smoke. Suddenly--was I asleep or awake?--I seemed to be in a
field well known to me, surrounded by a crowd of demons mocking me
with shrieks of laughter. The louder they laughed, the sadder I was,
seeing them gathered to destroy me. When they saw that I would not
laugh, they became enraged, crying, ‘So! you won’t laugh and be merry
with us! Since you choose melancholy you shall have enough.’ Then
flying about me, with blows from all sides, they whirled me round and
round with them over vast spaces of earth, till I thought to die.
Suffering unspeakably, I was at length set down on the top of a peak
which scarcely held me; no eye could fathom its abyss. Vainly I looked
for a descent, and the demons kept flying about me, saying: ‘Where now
is your hope in God! And where is that God of yours! Don’t you know
that neither God is, as men say, nor is there any power in Him which
can prevail against us? One proof of this is that you have no help,
and there is no one who can deliver you from our hands. Choose now;
for unless you join with us you shall be cast into the abyss.’ In this
strait, scarcely consenting or resisting, I faintly remembered that I
had once believed and read that God was everywhere, and so I looked
around to see whether He would not send some aid. Now when the demons
kept insisting that I should choose, and when I was well-nigh put to
it to promise what they wished, a man suddenly appeared, and, standing
by me, said: ‘Do not do it; all that these cheats say is false. Abide
firm in that faith which you had in God. He knows all that you suffer,
and permits it for your good.’ Then he vanished, and the demons
returned, flying about me, and saying: ‘Miserable man, would you trust
one who came to deceive you? Why, he dared not wait till we came! Come
now, yield yourself to our power.’
“Uttering these words with fury, they snatched me up, and whirled me,
sorely beaten, across plains and deserts, over heights and precipices,
and set me on a yet more dreadful peak, hurling at me abuse and
threats, to make me do their will. And, as before, I was near
succumbing, and was looking around for some aid from God, when that
same man again stood near, and heartened me. ‘Do not yield; let your
heart be comforted against its besiegers.’ And I replied: ‘Lord, I can
no longer bear these perils. Stay with me, and aid, lest when you go
away they torment me still more grievously.’ To which he said: ‘Their
threats cannot prevail so long as you persevere in faith and hope in
the Lord. Be comforted; the sharper the strife, the quicker will it
end. If with constancy you wage the Lord’s battles, you shall have
eternal rewards in the future, and in this world you shall be famous.’
“Then he vanished the second time, and the demons, who dared do
nothing in his presence, raged and mocked more savagely, and kept me
in anguish, until, the divine grace effecting it, the convent bell
rang for early prayer. I heard it as I lay in bed, and gradually
gaining my senses, I was conscious that I was living, and I no longer
saw the vision of smoke. With gratitude I remembered what the man in
my vision told me that my trial would soon be over. After this, though
for many days I lay sick in body and soul, my spiritual temptations
began to lessen; and I have learned that without the Grace of God I
am, and always shall be, a thing of naught.”
The struggle through which faith and peace came to Othloh became the
fountain-head of his wisdom; it fixed the point of view from which he
judged life, and set the categories in which he ordered his knowledge; it
directed his thoughts and imparted purpose and unity to his writings. His
gratitude to God incited him to write in order that others might share in
the light and wisdom which God’s grace had granted him; and his writings
chiefly enlarge upon those questions which the victory in his spiritual
conflict had solved. I will refrain from drawing further from them,
although they seem to me the most interesting works of a pious and
doctrinal nature emanating from any German of this still crude and
inchoate intellectual period.[405]
III
From the point of view of the development of mediaeval intellectual
interests in the eleventh century, England has little that is distinctive
to offer. The firm rule of Canute (1016-1035) brought some reinstatement
of order, after the times of struggle between Dane and Saxon. But his son,
Hardicanute, was a savage. The reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066)
followed. It wears a halo because it was the end of the old order, which
henceforth was to be a memory. Then came the revolution of the Norman
Conquest. Letters did not thrive amid these storms. At the beginning of
the period, Dunstan is the sole name of note, as one who fostered letters
in the monasteries where his energies were bringing discipline. English
piety and learning looked then, as it had looked before and was for
centuries to look, to the Continent. And Dunstan promoted letters by
calling to his assistance Abbo of St. Fleury, of whom something has been
said.[406]
In Dunstan’s time Saxon men were still translating Scripture into their
tongue--paraphrasing it rather, with a change of spirit. Such translations
were needed in Anglo-Saxon England, as in Germany. But after the Conquest
the introduction of Norman-French tended to lessen at least the
consciousness of such a need. That language, as compared with Anglo-Saxon,
came so much nearer to Latin as to reduce the chasm between the learned
tongue and the vernacular. The Normans had (at least in speech) been
Gallicized, and yet had kept many Norse traits. England likewise took on a
Gallic veneering as Norman-French became the language of the Court and the
new nobility. But the people continued to speak English. The degree of
foreign influence upon their thought and manners may be gauged by the
proportion of foreign idiom penetrating the English language; and the fact
that English remained essentially and structurally English proves the same
for England racially. In spite of the introduction of foreign elements,
people and language endured and became more and more progressively
English.
In the island before the Conquest, the round of studies had been the same
as on the Continent; and that event brought no change. The studies might
improve, but would have no novel source to draw upon. And in this period
of racial turmoil and revolution, it was unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon
temperament would present itself as clearly as aforetime in the Saxon poem
of _Beowulf_ or the personality of the Saxon Alfred, or in the Saxon
_Genesis_ and the writings of Cynewulf.[407] In a word, the eleventh
century in England was specifically the period when the old traits were
becoming obscure, and no distinct modifications had been evolved in
correspondence with the new conditions. Consequently, for presentations of
the intellectual genius of the English people, one has to wait until the
next century, the time of John of Salisbury and other English minds. Even
such will be found receiving their training and their knowledge in France
and Italy. England was still intellectually as well as politically under
foreign domination.
* * * * *
In every way it has been borne in upon us how radically the conditions and
faculties of men differed in England, Germany, France, and Italy in the
eleventh century. Very different were their intellectual qualities, and
different also was the measure of their attainment to a palpable mediaeval
character, which in Italy was not that of the ancient Latins, in France
was not that of the Gallic provincials, and in England and Germany was not
altogether that of the original Celtic and Teutonic stocks. Neither in the
eleventh century nor afterwards was there an obliteration of race traits;
yet the mediaeval modification tended constantly to evoke a general
uniformity of intellectual interest and accepted view.
There exists a certain ancient _Chronicon Venetum_ written by a Venetian
diplomat and man of affairs called John the Deacon, who died apparently
soon after 1008.[408] He was the chaplain of the Doge, Peter Urseolus, and
the doge’s ambassador to the emperors Otto III. and Henry II. The earlier
parts of his _Chronicon_ were taken from Paulus Diaconus and others; the
later are his own, and form a facile narrative, which makes no pretence to
philosophic insight and has nothing to say either of miracles or God’s
Christian providence. Its interests are quite secular. John writes his
Latin, glib, clear, and unclassical, just as he might talk his Venetian
speech, his _vulgaris eloquentia_. There is no effort, no struggle with
the medium of expression, but a pervasive quality of familiarity with his
story and with the language he tells it in. These characteristics, it is
safe to say, are not to be found, to a like degree, in the work of any
contemporary writer north of the Alps.
The man and his story, in fine, however mediocre they may be, have
arrived: they are not struggling or apparently tending anywhither. The
writing suggests no capacity in the writer as yet unreached, nor any
imperfect blending of disparate elements in his education. One should not
generalize too broadly from the qualities exemplified in this work; yet
they indicate that the people to which the writer belonged were possessed
of a certain entirety of development, in which the component elements of
culture and antecedent human growth and decadence were blended in accord.
This old _Chronicon_ affords an illustration of the fact that the
transition and early mediaeval centuries had brought nothing to Italy that
was new or foreign, nothing that was not in the blood, nothing to deeply
disturb the continuity of Italian culture and character which moved along
without break, whether in ascending or descending curves.
Yet evidently the eleventh-century Italian is no longer a Latin of the
Empire. For one thing, he is more individualistic. Formerly the prodigious
power of Roman government united citizens and subject peoples, and
impressed a human uniformity upon them. The surplus energies of the Latin
race were then absorbed in the functions of the _Respublica_, or were at
least directed along common channels. That great unification had long been
broken; and the smaller units had reasserted themselves--the civic units
of town or district, and the individual units of human beings upon whom no
longer pressed the conforming influence of one great government.
In imperial times cities formed the subordinate units of the _Respublica_;
the Roman, like the Greek civilization, was essentially urban. This
condition remained. The civilization of Italy in the eleventh century was
still urban, but was now more distinctly the civilization of small closely
compacted bodies, which were no longer united. For the most part, the
life, the thought, of Italy was in the towns; it remained predominantly
humanistic, taken up with men and their mortal affairs, their joys and
hates, and all that is developed by much daily intercourse with fellows.
Thus the intellect of Italy continued secular, interesting itself in
mortal life, and not so much occupied with theology and the life beyond
the grave. This is as true of the intellectual energies of the Roman
papacy as it is of the mental activities of the towns which served or
opposed it, according to their politics.
On the other hand, the intense emotional nature of the Italians was apt to
be religious, and given to despair and tears and ecstasy; its love welled
up and flung itself around its object, without the mediating offices of
reason. If reflection came, it was love’s ardent musing, rather than
religious ratiocination. One does not forget that the Italians who became
scholastic theologians or philosophers left Italy, and subjected
themselves to northern spiritual influences at Paris or elsewhere. Their
greatest were Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. None of
these remained through life altogether Italian.
Thus, with Italians, religion meant either the papal government and the
daily conventions of observance and minor mental habits, all very secular;
or it meant that which was a thing of ecstasy and not of
thought--generally speaking, of course. The mediaeval Italian (in the
eleventh century only to a slightly less degree than in the twelfth or
thirteenth) is, typically speaking, a man of urban human interests and
affairs, a politician, a trader, a doctor, a man of law or letters, an
artist, or a poet. If really religious, his religion is an emotion, and is
not occupied with dogma, nor interested in doctrinal correctness or
reform. Such a religious character may, according to individual temper,
result in a Romuald[409] or a Peter Damiani; its perfected ideal is
Francis of Assisi.
Things were already different in the country now called France. No need to
repeat what has been said as to the lesser strength and somewhat broken
continuity of the antique there, as compared with Italy. Yet there was a
sufficient power of antique influence and descent to keep the language
Romanesque, and the forms of its literature partly set by antique
tradition. But the spirit was not Latin. Perhaps it had but seemed such
with the Gallic provincials. At all events, the incoming Franks and other
Germans brought a Teutonic infusion and reinspiration that forever kept
France from being or becoming a northern Italy.
Neither was the spirit urban. To be sure, much of the energy of French
thought awoke and did its work in towns; and Paris was to become the
intellectual centre. But the stress of French life was not so surely in
the towns, nor men’s minds so characteristically urban as in Italy, and by
no means so predominantly humanistic. Even in the eleventh century the
lofty range of French thought, of French intellectual interests, is
apparent; for it embraces the problems of philosophy and theology, and
does not find its boundary and limit in phenomenal or mortal life. Gerbert
is almost too universal an intellect to offer as a fair example. Yet all
that he cared for is more than represented by other men taken together;
for Gerbert did not fully represent the interests of religious thought in
France. His was the humanism and the thirst for all the round of knowledge
included in the Seven Arts. But he scarcely reached out beyond logic to
philosophy; and theology seems not to have troubled him. Both philosophy
and theology, however, made part of the intellectual interests of France;
for there was Berengar and Roscellinus, Gaunilo and St. Anselm, and the
wrangling of many disputatious, although overwhelmingly orthodox, councils
of French Churchmen. Paris also, with its great schools of theology and
philosophy, looms on the horizon. The intellectual matter is but inchoate,
yet universally germinating, in the eleventh century.
Thus intellectual qualities of mediaeval France appear inceptively. The
French mediaeval temperament needs perhaps another century for its clear
development. Both as to temperament and intellectual interests, a line
will have to be drawn between the south and north; between the land of the
_langue d’oc_, the Roman law, the troubadour, and the easy, irreligious,
gay society which jumped the life to come; and the land of the various old
French dialects (among which that of the Isle de France will win to
dominance), the land of philosophy and theology, the land of Gothic
architecture and religion, the hearth of the crusades against the Saracen
or the Albigensian heretic; the land of the most distinctive mediaeval
thought and strongest intellectual development.
In the Germany and the England of the eleventh century there is less of
interest from this point of view. England had scarcely become her
mediaeval self; the time was one of desperate struggle, or, at most, of
tumultuous settling down and shaking together. As for Germany, it was
surely German then, and not a medley of Saxon, Dane, and Norman-French.
The people were talking in their German tongues. German song and German
epos were already heard in forms which were not to be cast aside, but
retained and developed; of course the influence of the French poetry was
not yet. The Germans were still living their own sturdy and half-barbarous
life. Those who loved knowledge had turned with earnest purpose to the
Latin culture; they were studying Latin and logic, and, as we have said,
translating it into their German tongue or temperament. But the lessons
were not fully mastered--not yet transformed into German mediaeval
intellectual capacity. And in this respect, at least, the German will
become more entirely his Germanic mediaeval self in another century, when
he has more faculty of using the store of foreign knowledge in combination
with his strongly felt and honestly considered Christianity.
CHAPTER XIV
THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION
I. THE PATRISTIC CHART OF PASSION.
II. EMOTIONALIZING OF LATIN CHRISTIANITY.
The characteristic passions of a period represent the emotionalized
thoughts of multitudes of men and women. Mediaeval emotional development
followed prevailing ideas, opinions, convictions, especially those of
mediaeval Christianity. Its most impressive phases conformed to the tenets
of the system which the Middle Ages had received from the Church Fathers,
and represented the complement of passion arising from the long acceptance
of the same. One may observe, first, the process of exclusion, inclusion,
and enhancement, through which the Fathers formed a certain synthesis of
emotion from the matter of their faith and the circumstances of their
environment; and, secondly, the further growth of emotion in the Middle
Ages.
I
In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era
there took place a remarkable growth of the pathetic or emotional element
in Greek and Roman literature. Yet during the same period Stoicism, the
most respected system of philosophy, kept its face as stone, and would not
recognize the ethical value of emotion in human life.[410] But the
emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like
the shades by Acheron, were not to be restrained by philosophic
admonition, or Virgilian _Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando_. And
though the Stoic could not consent to Juvenal’s avowal that the sense of
tears is the best part of us, Neo-Platonism soon was to uphold the
sublimated emotion of a vision transcending reason as the highest good for
man. Rational self-control was disintegrating in the Neo-Platonic
dialectic which pointed beyond reason to ecstasy. That ecstasy, however,
was to be super-sensual, and indeed came only to those who had long
suppressed all cravings of the flesh. This ascetic emotionalism of the
Neo-Platonic _summum bonum_ was strikingly analogous to the ideal of
Christian living pressing to domination in the patristic period.
No need to say that the Gospel of Jesus was addressed to the heart as well
as to the mind; and for times to come the Saviour on the Cross and at its
foot the weeping Mother were to rouse floods of tears over human sin,
which caused the divine sacrifice. The words _Jesus wept_ heralded a new
dispensation under which the heart should quicken and the mind should
guide through reaches of humanity unknown to paganism. This Christian
expansion of the spirit did not, however, address itself to human
relationships, but uplifted itself to God, its upward impulse spurning
mortal loves. In its mortal bearings the Christian spirit was more ascetic
than Neo-Platonism, and its _élan_ of emotion might have been as
sublimated in quality as the Neo-Platonic, but for the greater reality of
love and terror in the God toward whom it yearned with tears of
contrition, love, and fear.
Another strain very different from Neo-Platonism contributed to the sum of
Christian emotion. This was Judaism, which recently had shown the fury of
its energy in defence of Jerusalem against the legions of Titus.
Christians imbibed its force of feeling from the books of the Old
Testament. The passion of those writings was not as the humanly directed
passions of the Greeks. Israel’s desire and aversion, her scorn and
hatred, her devotion and her love, hung on Jehovah. “Do I not hate them, O
Jehovah, that hate thee?” This cry of the Psalmist is echoed in Elijah’s
“Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” Jewish wrath was
a righteous intolerance, which would neither endure idolatrous Gentiles
nor suffer idolaters in Israel. Moses is enraged by the sight of the
people dancing before the golden calf; and Isaiah’s scorn hisses over
those daughters of Israel who have turned from Jehovah’s ways of decorum:
“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth
necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with
their feet; therefore Jehovah will smite with a scab the crown of the head
of the daughters of Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret parts.”
Did a like scorn and anger find harbourage in Him who likened the
Pharisees to whitened sepulchres, and with a scourge of small cords drove
the money-changers from His Father’s house? At all events a kindred hate
found an enduring home in the religion of Tertullian and Athanasius, and
in the great Church that persecuted the Montanists at Augustine’s
entreaty, and thereafter poured its fury upon Jew and Saracen and heretic
for a thousand years.
Jehovah was also a great heart of love, loving His people along the ways
of every sweet relationship understood by man. “When Israel was a child,
then I loved him, and out of Egypt called my son hither.” “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, so as not to yearn upon the son of her womb?
Yea, these may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Again, Jehovah is the
husband, and Israel the sinning wife whom He will not put away.[411]
Israel’s responding love answers: “My soul waits on God--My heart and
flesh cry aloud to the living God--Like as the hart panteth for the
water-brooks”! Such passages throb obedience to Deuteronomy’s great
command, which Jesus said was the sum of the Law and the Prophets. No need
to say that the Christian’s love of God had its emotional antecedent in
Psalmist and Prophet. Jehovah’s purifying wrath of love also passed over
to the Christian words, “As many as I love, I reprove and chasten.” And
“the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom,” found its climax
in the Christian terror of the Judgment Day.
The Old Testament has its instances of human love: Isaac and Rebekah,
Jacob and Rachel. There is Jacob’s love of Joseph and Benjamin, and
Joseph’s love, which yearned upon his brethren who had sold him to the
Egyptians. The most loving man of all is David, with his love of Jonathan,
“wonderful and passing the love of women,” unforgotten in the king’s old
age, when he asks, “Is there yet any living of the house of Saul, that I
may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” To a later time belongs the
Song of Songs. Beautiful, orientally sensuous, too glowing perhaps for
western taste, is this utterance of unchecked passion. And its fortune has
been the most wonderful that ever fell to a love poem. It became the
epithalamion of the Christian soul married to Christ, an epithalamion
which was to be enlarged with passionate thought by doctor, monk, and
saint, through the Christian centuries. The first to construe it as the
bridal of the Soul was one who, by an act more irrevocable than a monastic
vow, put from him mortal bridals--Origen, the greatest thinker of the
Eastern Church. Thus the passion of the Hebrew woman for the lover that
was to her as a bundle of myrrh lying between her breasts, was lifted,
still full of desire, to the love of the God-man, by those of sterile
flesh and fruitful souls.
Christianity was not eclecticism, which, for lack of principles of its
own, borrows whatever may seem good. But it made a synthetic adoption of
what could be included under the dominance of its own motives, that is,
could be made to accord with its criterion of Salvation. What sort of
synthesis could it make of the passions and emotions of the
Graeco-Roman-Oriental-Jewish world? That which was achieved by the close
of the patristic period, and was to be passionately approved by the Middle
Ages, proceeded partly in the way of exclusion, and partly by adding a
quality of boundlessness to the emotional elements admitted.
With the first conversions to the new religion, arose the problem: What
human feelings, what loves and interests of this world, shall the believer
recognize as according with his faith, and as offering no obstacle to the
love of God and the attainment of eternal life? A practical answer was
given by the growth of an indeterminate asceticism within the Christian
communities, which in the fourth century went forth with power, and
peopled the desert with anchorites and monks.
Ascetic suggestions came from many sources to the early Christians.
Stoicism was ascetic in tendency; Neo-Platonism ascetic in principle,
holding that the soul should be purged from contamination with things of
sense. Throughout Egypt asceticism was rife in circles interested in the
conflict of Set and his evil host with Horus seeking vengeance for Osiris
slain; and we know that some of the earliest Christian hermits had been
recluses devoted to the cult of Serapis. In Syria dwelt communities of
Jewish Essenes, living continently like monks. Nevertheless, whatever may
have been the effects of such examples, monasticism developed from within
Christianity, and was not the fruit of influences from without.
The Lord had said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; and soon enough
there came antagonism between the early Churches and the Roman Empire. The
Church was in a state of conflict. It behoved the Christian to keep his
loins girded: why should he hamper himself with ephemeral domestic ties,
when the coming of the Lord was at hand? Moreover, the Christian warfare
to the death was not merely with political tyranny, but against fleshly
lusts. Such convictions, in men and women desirous of purifying the soul
from the cravings of sense, might bring the thought that even lawful
marriage was not as holy as the virgin state. The Christian’s ascetic
abnegation had as a further motive the love of Christ and the desire to
help on His kingdom and attain to it, the motive of sacrifice for the sake
of the Kingdom of Heaven; for which one man must be burned, another must
give up his goods, and a third renounce his heart’s love. Ascetic acts are
also a natural accompaniment of penitence: the sinner, with fear of hell
before him, seeks to undergo temporal in order to avoid eternal pain; or,
better, stung by love of the Crucified, his heart cries for flagellation.
When St. Martin came to die he would lie only upon ashes: “I have sinned
if I leave you a different example.”[412] A similar strain of religious
conviction is rendered in Jerome’s “You are too pleasure-loving, brother,
if you wish to rejoice in this world and hereafter to reign with
Christ.”[413]
So currents of ascetic living early began in Christian circles; and before
long the difficulty of leading lives of self-mortification within the
community was manifest. It was easier to withdraw: ascetics must become
anchorites, “they who have withdrawn.” Here was reason why the movement
should betake itself to the desert. But the solitary life is so difficult,
that association for mutual aid will soon ensue; and then regulations will
be needed for these newly-formed ascetic groups. So anchorites tended to
become coenobites; monasticism has begun.
In both its hermit and coenobitic phases, monasticism began in the East,
in Syria and the Thebaid. It was accepted by the Latin West, and there
became impressed with Roman qualities of order, regularity, and obedience.
The precepts of the eastern monks were collected and arranged by Cassian,
a native of Gaul, in his _Institutes_ and _Conlocations_ between the years
419 and 428. And about a century afterwards, western monasticism received
its typeform in the _Regula_ of St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 543), which was
approved by the authority of Gregory the Great (d. 604).[414]
By the close of the patristic period, monasticism had become the most
highly applauded practical interpretation of Christianity. Its precepts
represented the requirements of the Christian criterion of Salvation
applied to earthly life. Like all great systems which have widely
prevailed and long endured, it was not negation, but substitution. If it
condemned usual modes of pleasure, this was because of their
incompatibility with the life it inculcated. The _Regula_ of Benedict set
forth a manner of life replete with positive demands. Its purpose was to
prescribe for those who had taken monastic vows that way of living, that
daily round of occupation, that constant mode of thought and temper, which
should make a perfected Christian, that is, a perfect monk. And so broad
and spiritually interwoven were its precepts that one of them could hardly
be obeyed without fulfilling all. Read, for example, the beautiful seventh
chapter upon the twelve grades of humility, and it will become evident
that whoever achieves this virtue will gain all the rest: he will always
have the fear of God before his eyes, the terror of hell and the hope of
heaven; he will cut off the desires of the flesh; he will do, not his own
will, but the Lord’s; since Christ obeyed His Father unto death, he will
render absolute obedience to his superior, obeying readily and cheerfully
even when unjustly blamed; in confession he will conceal no evil thought;
he will deem himself vilest of all, and will do nothing save what the
_regula_ of the monastery or the example of the elders prescribes; he will
keep from laughter and from speech, except when questioned, and then he
will speak gently and humbly, and with gravity, in few words; he will
stand and walk with inclined head and looks bent on the ground, feeling
himself unworthy to lift up his eyes to heaven: through these stairs of
humility he will reach that perfect love of God which banishes fear, and
will no longer need the fear of hell, as he will do right from habit and
through the love of Christ.
Having thus pointed out the way of righteousness, Benedict’s _regula_
gives minute precepts for the monk’s conduct and occupation through each
hour of the day and night. No time, no circumstance shall be left
unguarded, or unoccupied with those acts which lead to God. Wise was this
great prototypal _regula_ in that its abundance of positive precepts kept
the monk busy with righteousness, so that he might have no leisure for
sin. Its prohibitions are comparatively unemphatic, and the monk is guided
along the paths of righteousness rather than forbidden to go astray.
Thus monk and nun were consecrated to a calling which should contain their
whole desire, as it certainly demanded their whole strength. Was the monk
a celibate because carnal marriage was denied him? Rather he was wedded to
Christ. If this is allegory, it is also close to literal truth. “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy mind.” Is not love the better part of marriage? And how if
the Lord thy God has been a gracious loving figure here on earth, who
loved thee humanly as well as divinely, and died for thee at last? Will
not the complete love required by the commandment become very ardent, very
heart-filling? Shalt thou not always yearn to see Him, fall at His feet,
confess thy unworthiness, and touch His garment? Is there any end to the
compass of thy loving Him, and musing upon Him, and dwelling in His
presence? Dost thou not live with Him in a closer communion than the
sunderances of mortality permit among men, or between men and women? And
if it be thou art a nun, art thou not as close to Him in tears and washing
of those blessed feet, as ever was that other woman, who had been a
sinner? Thou shalt keep thy virginity for Him as for a bridegroom.[415]
But the great commandment to love the Lord thy God has an adjunct--“and
thy neighbour as thyself.” _As thyself_--how does the monk love himself?
why, unto Christ and his own salvation. He does not love his sinful
pleasures, nor those matters of earth which might not be sins, had he not
realized how they conflicted with his scheme of life. His love for a
fellow could not recognize those pleasures which he himself had cast
away. He must love his fellow, like himself, unto the saving, not the
undoing, of him--be his true lover, not his enemy. This vital principle of
Christian love had to recast pagan passion and direct the affections to an
immortal goal. Under it these reached a new absoluteness. The Christian
lover should always be ready to give his life for his friend’s salvation,
as for his own. So love’s offices gained enlargement and an infinity of
new relationship, because directed toward eternal life.[416]
Unquestionably in the monk’s eyes passionate love between the sexes was
mainly lust. Within the bonds of marriage it was not mortal sin; but the
virgin state was the best. Here, as we shall see, life was to claim its
own and free its currents. Monasticism did not stop the human race, or
keep men from loving women. Such love would assert itself; and ardent
natures who felt its power were to find in themselves a love and passion
somewhat novel, somewhat raised, somewhat enlarged. In the end the love
between man and woman drew new inspiration and energy from the enhancement
of all the rest of love, which came with Christianity.
Evidently the great office of Christian love in a heathen period was to
convert idolaters to the Faith. So it had been from the days of Paul.
Rapidly Christianity spread through all parts of the Roman Empire. Then
the Faith pressed beyond those crumbling boundaries into the barbarian
world. Hereupon, with Gregory the Great and his successors, it became
clear that the great pope is always a missionary pope, sending out such
Christian embassies as Gregory sent to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
If conversion was a chief office of Christian love, the great object of
Christian wrath was unbelief. That existed within and without Christendom:
within in forms of heresy, without in the practices of heathenism.
Christian wrath was moved by whatever opposed the true faith. The
Christian should discriminate: hate the sin, and love the sinner unto his
betterment. But it was so easy, so human, from hating the sin to hate the
obdurate sinner who could not be saved and could but harm the Church. One
need not recount how the disputes of the Athanasian time regarding the
nature of Christ came to express themselves in curses; nor how the
Christian sword began its slaughter of heretic and heathen. Persecution
seemed justified in reason; it was very logical; broad reasons of
Christian statecraft seemed to make for it; and often a righteous zeal
wielded the weapon. It had moreover its apparent sanction in Jehovah’s
destroying wrath against idolaters within and without the tribes of
Israel.
So the two opposites of love and wrath laid aside somewhat of grossness,
and gained new height and compass in the Christian soul. A like change
came over other emotions. As life lifted itself to further heights of
holiness, and hitherto unseen depths of evil yawned, there came a new
power of pity and novel revulsions of aversion. The pagan pity for life’s
mortality, which filled Virgil’s heart, could not but take on change.
There was no more mortality, but eternal joy and pain. Souls which had so
unavailingly stretched forth their hands to fate, had now been given wings
of faith. Yet death gained blacker terror from the Christian Hell, the
newly-assured alternative of the Christian Heaven. The great Christian
pity did not touch the mortal ebbing of the breath; that should be a
triumphant birth. But an enormous and terror-stricken pity was evoked by
sin, and the thought of the immortal soul hanging over an eternal hell.
And since all human actions were connected with the man’s eternal lot,
they became invested with a new import. So the Christian’s compassion
would deepen, his sympathy become more intense, although no longer stirred
by everything that had moved his pagan self. With him fear was raised to a
new intensity by other terrors than had driven the blood from pagan
cheeks. His sense of joy was deepened also; for a joy hitherto unrealized
came from his new love of God and the God-man, from the assurance of his
salvation, and the thought of loved human relationships never to end. So
Christian joy might have an absoluteness which it never had under the
pause-giving mortal limitations of paganism.
Within the compass of pagan joyfulness there had been no deeper passion
than the love of beauty. That had its sensuous phases, and its far blue
heights, where Plato saw the beauty of order, justice, and proportion. For
the Christian, the beauty of the flesh became a veil through which he
looked for the beauty of the soul. If a face testified to the beauty of
holiness within, it was fair. Better the pale, drawn visages of monk and
nun than the red lip too quickly smiling. Feeling as well as thought
should be adjusted to these sentiments. Yet Plato’s realization of
intellectual beauty found home within the Christian thoughts of God and
holiness, indeed helped to construct them. This is clear with the Fathers.
In the East, Gregory of Nyssa’s passion for divine beauty was Platonism
set in Christian phrase; in the West, Augustine reached his thoughts of
beauty through considerations which came to him from Greek
philosophy.[417] “Love is of the beautiful,” said Plato; “Do we love ought
else?” says Augustine. Both men shape their thoughts of beauty after their
best ideals of perfection. Augustine’s burn upward to the beauty of a God
as loving as He is omnipotent; Plato’s had been more abstract. Augustine’s
Platonism shows the highest Greek thoughts of beauty and goodness changed
into attributes of a personal God, who could be loved because He was
loving.
In these ways the loftier Christian souls suppressed, or transformed and
greatened, the emotions of their natures. It was thus with those possessed
of a faith that brought the whole of life within its dominance. There were
many such. Yet the multitude of Christians ranged downward from such great
obsession, through all stages of human half-heartedness and frailty, to
the state of those whose Christianity was but a name, or but a magic rite.
Always preponderant in numbers, and often in influence and power, these
nominal and fetichistic Christians would keep alive the loves and hates,
the interests and tastes, the approvals and disapprovals, of paganism or
barbaric heathenism, as the case might be.
II
The patristic synthesis of emotion passed on entire and authoritative to
the Middle Ages. It exercised enormous influence (usually in the way of
compulsion, but sometimes in the way of repulsion) upon emotional
phenomena both of a religious and a secular nature. Yet it was merely the
foundation, or the first stage, of mediaeval emotional development. The
subsequent stages were dependent on the conditions under which mediaeval
attitudes of mind arose, very dependent upon the maturing and blending of
the native traits of inchoate mediaeval peoples and upon their
appropriation of Latin Christianity and the antique education.
The northern races had been introduced to a novel religion and to modes of
thought considerably above them. Their old conceptions were discredited,
their feelings somewhat distraught. Emotionally as well as intellectually
they were confused. Turbid feelings, arising from ideas not fully
mastered, had to clarify and adjust themselves. From the sixth to the
eleventh century the crude mediaeval stocks, tangled but not blended,
strange to the religion and culture which held their destinies, were not
possessed of clear and dominant emotions that could create their own forms
of expression. They could not think and feel as they would when their new
acquirements had mellowed into faculty and temperament, and unities of
character had once more emerged.
Christianity and Latin culture were operative everywhere, and everywhere
tended to produce a uniform development. Yet the peoples affected by these
common influences were kept unlike each other through varieties of
environment and a diversity of racial traits which still showed clearly as
the centuries passed. In consequence, the emotional development of these
different peoples remained marked by racial characteristics, while also
becoming mediaeval under the action of common influences. It proceeded in
two parallel and partially mingling streams: the one of the religious
life, the other of earth’s desires. They may be observed in turn.
Augustine represents the sum of doctrine and emotion contained in the
Latin Christianity of the fifth century. However imperfectly others might
comprehend his thought or feel the power of his grandly reasoned love of
God, he established this love for time to come as the centre and the bound
of Christian righteousness: “Virtus non est nisi diligere quod diligendum
est.”[418] He drew within this principle the array of dogma and precept
constituting Latin Christianity. On the other hand, the practical
embodiment of the patristic synthesis of human interests and emotions was
monasticism, with its lines set by the Rule of Benedict.
Pope Gregory the Great[419] refashioned Augustine’s teachings, and placed
the seal of his approval upon Benedictine monasticism as the perfect way
of Christian living. His mind was darkened with the new ignorance and
intellectual debasement which had come in the century and a half
separating him from Augustine; and his soul was filled with the fantastic
terrors which were to constitute so large a part of the religion of the
Middle Ages. Devil lore, relic worship, miracles, permeate his
consciousness of life. The soul’s ceaseless business is so to keep itself
that it may at last escape the sentence of the awful Judge. Love and
terror struggle fearfully in Gregory. Christ’s death had shown God’s love;
and yet the Dies Irae impends. No delict is wiped out without penitence
and punishment, in this life or afterwards--let it be in Purgatory and not
in Hell!
The centuries following Gregory’s death rearranged the contents of Latin
Christianity, including Gregory’s teachings, to suit their own
intellectual capacities. This (Carolingian) period of rearrangement and
painful learning, as it was unoriginative intellectually, was likewise
unproductive of Christian emotion. Occasionally from far-off converts,
who are not troubled overmuch with learning, come utterances of simple
feeling for the Faith (one thinks of Bede’s story of Cædmon); and the
Teuton spirit, warlike as well as intimate and sentimental, enters the
vernacular interpretation of Christianity.[420] The Christian message
could not be understood at all without a stirring of the convert’s nature;
some quickening of emotion would ensue. This did not imply a development
of emotion corresponding to the credences of Latin Christianity, to which
so many people had been newly introduced. That system had to be more
vitally appropriated before it could arouse the emotional counterpart of
its tenets, and run its course in modes of mediaeval religious passion.
Accordingly one will look in vain among the Carolingian scholars for that
torrential feeling which becomes articulate in the eleventh century. They
were excerpting and rearranging patristic Christianity to suit their own
capacities. They could not use it as a basis for further thinking; nor, on
the other hand, had it become for them the ground of religious feeling.
Undoubtedly, Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo were pious
Christians, taking their Faith devoutly. But such religious emotion as was
theirs, was reflected rather than spontaneous. Alcuin, as well as Gregory
the Great, realizes the opposition between heaven and the _vana
delectibilia_[421] of this world. But Alcuin’s words have lost the
horror-stricken quality of Gregory; neither do they carry the floods of
tears which like thoughts bring to Peter Damiani in the eleventh century.
Odo, Abbot of Cluny in the middle of the tenth century, has something of
Gregory’s heavy horror; but even in him the gift of tears is not yet
loosed.[422]
From the eleventh century onward, the gathering religious feeling pours
itself out in passionate utterances; and in this new emotionalizing of
Latin Christianity lay the chief religious office of the Middle Ages,
wherein they went far beyond the patristic authors of their faith. The
Fathers of the Latin Church from Tertullian to Gregory the Great had been
occupied with doctrine and ecclesiastical organization. This dual
achievement was the work of the constructive mind of the Latin West,
following, of course, what had been accomplished by the Greek Fathers. It
stood forth mainly as the creation of those human faculties which are
grouped under the name of intellect. Patristic Latin Christianity hardly
presents itself as the product of the whole man. Its principles were not
as yet fully humanized, made matter of the heart, and imbued with love and
fear and pity: this creature of the intellect had yet to receive a soul.
It is true that Augustine had an enormous love of God. It was fervently
felt; it was powerfully reasoned; it impassioned his thought. Yet it did
not contain that tender love of the divinely human Christ which trembles
in the words of Bernard and makes the life of Francis a lyric poem. St.
Jerome also had even an hysterically emotional nature; Tertullian at the
beginning of the patristic period was no placid soul, nor Gregory the
Great at its close. But it does not follow that Latin Christianity was as
yet emotionalized, or that it had become a matter of the heart because it
was accepted by the mind. Its dogmas and constructive principles were
still too new; the energies of men had been spent in devising and
establishing them. Not yet had they been pondered over for generation
after generation, and hallowed through time; they had not yet become part
of human life, cherished in men’s hopes, fondled in their affections,
frozen in their fears, trembled before and loved.
What was absent from the formation of Latin Christianity constituted the
conditions of its gradual appropriation by the Middle Ages. It had come to
them from a greater past, sanctioned by the saints who now reigned above.
Through the centuries, men had come to understand it, and had made it
their own with power. Through generations its commands and promises, its
threats and rewards, had been feared and loved. Its persons, symbols, and
sacraments had become animate with human quality and were endeared with
intimate incident and association. Every one had been born to it, had been
suckled upon it, had adored it in childhood, youth, and age: it filled all
life; with hope or menace it overhung the closing hour.
The Middle Ages have been given credit for dry theologies and sublimated
metaphysics. Less frequently have they been credited with their great
achievement, the imbuing of patristic Christianity with the human elements
of love and fear and pity. Yet their religious phenomena display this
emotionalizing of transmitted theological elements. Chapters which are to
follow will illustrate it from the lives of many saints of different
temperaments. As wide apart as life will be the phases of its
manifestations. The tears of Peter Damiani are not like the love of the
God-man in St. Bernard; St. Francis’s love of Christ and love of man is
again different and new; and the mystic thought-shot visions of a
Hildegard of Bingen are as blue to crimson when compared with the
sense-passion for the Bridegroom of a Mechthild of Magdeburg. Even as
illustrated in these so different natures, it will still appear that the
emotional humanizing of Latin Christianity in the Middle Ages shaped
itself to the tenets of the system formulated by the Church Fathers. It
was an emotionalizing of that system, quite as much as a direct
appropriation of the Gospel-heart of Christ. Christ and the heart of
Christ were with the mediaeval saints; and yet the emotions as well as
thoughts through which they turned to Him received their form from
patristic Christianity.
Religious art plainly tells the story. Let one call to mind the character
of its achievements in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. That was
the period following the recognition of Christianity as the religion of
the Roman Empire. Everywhere basilicas arose.[423] Some of them may be
seen in Rome, in Ravenna, in Constantinople. They still contain many of
the mural mosaics which were their glory. Numberless artists laboured in
the composition of those stately church decorations. There was a need,
unprecedented and never afterwards paralleled, of creative composition.
Spacious surfaces were to be covered with prefigurative scenes from the
Old Testament, with scenes from the life of Christ on earth, and
representations of His apocalyptic triumph in the Resurrection. They had
all to be composed without aid from previous designs, for there were none.
The artists had need to be as constructive as the Church Fathers, who
through the same period were perfecting the formulation of the Faith. They
succeeded grandly, setting forth the subjects they were told to execute,
in noble, balanced, and decorative compositions, which presented the facts
and tenets of the Faith strikingly and correctly. Stylistically, these
great church mosaics belonged to antique art. What did they lack? Merely
the human, veritably tragic, qualities of love and fear and pity, which
had not yet come. Like the dogmatic system, this mosaic presentation was
too recently composed. Its subjects were not yet humanized through
centuries of contemplation, reverence, and love.[424]
Many of the early compositions, repeated from century to century, in time
were humanized and transformed with feeling. But this was not in the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when art was but a decadent and
barbarized survival of the antique Christian manner, nor in the tenth and
eleventh. One may note also that the mediaeval expression of Christian
emotion was beginning in religious literature. This came with fulness in
the twelfth century, and along with it the emotionalizing, the veritable
humanizing, of religious art began. Yet the artists of western Europe
still lacked the skill requisite for delicate execution. A marked advance
came in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That was the great period
of Gothic architecture; and in the sculpture on the French cathedrals,
stone seems to live and feel. The prophetic figures from the Old
Testament, the scenes of man’s redemption and final judgment, are
humanized with love and terror. Moreover, the sculptor surrounds them with
the myriad subsidiary detail of mortal life and changing beauty, showing
how closely they are knit to every human love and interest.
In Italy a like story is told in a different manner. There is sculpture,
but there also is mosaic, and above all there is and will be fresco.
Before the end of the thirteenth century, Giotto was busy with his new
dramatic art; no need to tell what power of human feeling filled the
works of that chief of painters and his school. The hard materials of the
mosaicist were also made to render emotion. If one will note the mosaics
along the nave in Santa Maria Maggiore, belonging to the fifth century,
and then turn to the mosaics of the Coronation of the Virgin in the apse,
or cross the Tiber and look at those in the lower zone of the apse of
Santa Maria in Trastevere, which tell the Virgin’s story, he will see the
change which was bringing love and sweetness into the stiff mosaic medium.
Torriti executed the former in 1295; and the latter with their gentler
feeling were made by Giotto’s pupil, Cavallini, in 1351. The art is still
as correct and true and orthodox as in the fifth century. It conforms to
Latin Christianity in the choice of topics and the manner of presenting
them, and drapes its human emotions around conceptions which the patristic
period formed and delivered to the Middle Ages. Thus, in full measure, it
has taken to itself the emotional qualities of the mediaeval
transformation of Latin Christianity, and is filled with a love and tears
and pity, which were not in the old Christian mosaics.
Quite analogous to the emotionalizing of Christian art is the example
afforded by the evolution of the Latin hymn. The earliest extant Latin
hymns are those of St. Ambrose, written in iambic dimeters. Antique in
phrase as in metre, they are also trenchantly correct in doctrine, as
behoved the compositions of the great Archbishop of Milan who commanded
the forces of orthodoxy in the Arian conflict. They were sung in anxious
seasons. Yet these dignified and noble hymns are no emotional outpour
either of anxiety or adoration. Such feeling as they carry lies in their
strength of trust in God and in the power of conviction of their stately
orthodoxy.
Between the death of Ambrose and the tenth century, Latin hymns gradually
substituted accent in the place of metrical quantity, as the dominant
principle of their rhythm. With this partial change there seems to come
increase of feeling. The
“Jesu nostra redemptio,
Amor et desiderium.”
of the seventh century is different from the
“Te diligat castus amor,
Te mens adoret sobria”
of Ambrose.[425] And the famous pilgrim chant of the tenth century, “O
Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,” has the strength of long-deepening
emotion.[426]
These hymns have but dropped the constraint of metre. Religious passion
had not yet proved its creative power, and the new verse-forms with their
mighty rhyme, fit to voice the accumulated emotions of the Liturgy, were
not in existence. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the
strophic evolution of the Latin hymn, in which feeling, joined with art,
at last perfected line and stanza and the passionate phrases filling
them.[427] Yet nothing could be more orthodox than the Latin hymn
throughout its course of development. Its function was liturgical. It was
correct in doctrinal expressions, and followed in every way the
authoritative teachings of the Church; its symbolism was derived from the
works of learned doctors; and its feeling took form from the tenets of
Latin Christianity. The _Dies Irae_ and the _Stabat Mater_ yield evidence
of this.[428]
From the religious phases of mediaeval emotion, one may pass to modes of
feeling which were secular and human. The antecedents were again the
racial traits of the peoples who were to become mediaeval; the formative
influences still are Christianity and the profane antique culture. The
racial traits show clearest in vernacular compositions, some of which may
carry fervent feeling, such as enkindles the Crusader’s song of _Hartmann
von Aue_:
“Min froüde wart nie sorgelos
Unz an die tage
Daz ich mir Kristes bluomen kos
Die ich hie trage.
Die kundent eine sumerzìt,
Die alsô gar
In suezer augenweide lit;
Got helfe uns dar.
“Mich hât diu werlt also gewent (gewöhnt),
Daz mir der muot
Sich z’einer mâze nâch ir sent:
Dêst mir nu guot.
Got hat vil wol ze mir getân,
Als ez nu stât,
Daz ich der sorgen bin erlân
Diu manegen hât
Gebunden an den fuoz,
Daz er belîben muoz
Swenn’ ich in Kristes schar
Mit fröuden wünneclichen var.”[429]
The secular emotional development was connected with the religious. It was
stimulated by the deepening of emotional capacity caused by Christianity,
and was not unrelated to the Christian love of God, the place of which was
taken, in secular mediaeval passion, by an idealizing, but carnal, love of
woman; and instead of the terror-stricken piety which accompanied the
Christian’s love for his Maker and his Judge, the heart was glad and the
temper open to every joy, while also subject to the fears and hates which
spring up among men of mortal passions.
In the romantic and utter abandonment required of its votaries, this
earthly love may well have drawn suggestion from that boundless love of
God which had superseded the Greek precept of “nothing in excess,”
teaching instead that no limit should be set on what was absolutely good.
The principle of love unrestrained was thus inaugurated, and did not
always turn to God. Ardent natures who felt love’s power, might hold it as
the supreme arbiter and law of life, and the giver of strength and virtue.
These thoughts will shape the tale of Lancelot and myriad poems besides.
They also may be found incarnate in the living instance: the heart of
Heloïse held a passion for her human master which she recognized as her
highest law. It was such a passion as she would hardly have conceived but
for the existence of like categories of devotion to the Christian God. Not
in her nature alone, but through many Christian generations whereof she
was the fruit, there had gone on a continual enhancement of capacities of
feeling, for which she was a greater woman when she grew to womanhood and
felt its passion. Through such heightening of her powers of loving, and
through the suggestiveness of the Christian love of God, she could
conceive and feel a like absolute devotion to a man.[430]
There were, moreover, partially humanized stages in which the love of God
was affiliated with loves of mortal hue. Many a mediaeval woman felt a
passionate love for the spiritual Bridegroom. Its expression, its
suggestions, its training, might transmit power and passion to the love of
very mortal men: while from the worship of the Blessed Virgin expressions
of passionate devotion might pass over into poems telling man’s love of
woman. And what reaches of passion might not the Song of Songs suggest,
although that imagined bridal of the Soul was never deemed a song of human
love?[431]
BOOK III
THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: THE SAINTS
CHAPTER XV
THE REFORMS OF MONASTICISM
MEDIAEVAL EXTREMES; BENEDICT OF ANIANE; CLUNY; CITEAUX’S _CHARTA
CHARITATIS_; THE _VITA CONTEMPLATIVA_ ACCEPTS THE _VITA ACTIVA_
The present Book and the following will set forth the higher
manifestations of the religious energies of the Middle Ages, and then the
counter ideals which knights and ladies delighted to contemplate, and
sometimes strove to reach. In religious as well as mundane life, ideals
admired and striven for constitute human facts, make part of the human
story, quite as veritably as the spotted actuality everywhere in evidence.
The tale of piety is to be gathered from those efforts of the religious
purpose which almost attain their ideal; while as a comment on them, and a
foil and contrast, the deflections of human frailty may be observed.
Likewise the full reality of chivalry lies in its ideals, supplemented by
the illuminating contrast of failure and oppression, making what we may
call its actuality. The emotional element, reviewed in the last chapter,
will for the time be dominant.
* * * * *
Practice always drops below the ethical standards of a period. The
contrast appears in the history of Greece and Rome. Yet in neither Greece
nor Rome could there exist the abysms of contradiction which disclose
themselves after the conversion of western Europe to the religion of
Christ.
And for the following reasons. Greek and Roman standards were finite; they
regarded only the mortal happiness of the individual and the terrestrial
welfare of the State. To Greek thought the indefinite or limitless was as
the monstrous and unformed; and therefore abhorrent to the classic ideals
of perfection. Again, Greek and Roman standards demanded only what Greek
and Roman humanity could fulfil in the mortal life of earth. But the
Christian ideal of conduct assumes the universal imperfection and infinite
perfectibility of man. It has constant regard to immortality, and eternity
is needed for its fulfilment. Moreover, whether or not Christ’s Gospel set
forth any inherent antagonism between the fulness of mortal life and the
sure attainment of heaven, its historical interpretations have never
effected a complete reconcilement. They have always presented a conflict
between the finite and the eternal, unconceived and unsuspected by the
pagan ethics of Greece and Rome.
This conflict dawned in the Apostolic age. During the patristic period it
worked itself out to a formulated opposition between the world and the
City of God. Of this, monasticism was the chief expression. Nevertheless,
pagan principle and feeling lived on in the reasonings and characters of
the Church Fathers. The Roman qualities in Ambrose, the general survival
of antique greatness in Augustine, preserved them from the rhetorical
hysteria of Jerome and the exaggeration of phrase which affects the
writings of Gregory the Great.[432] With the decadence preceding, and the
confusion following, the Carolingian period, antique qualities passed
away; and when men began again to think and feel constructively, there
remained no antique poise to restrain the strife of those mighty
opposites--the joys of life and the terrors of the Judgment Day.
This conflict, inherent in mediaeval Christianity, was in part a struggle
between temporal desires which many men approved, and their renunciation
for eternal joy. From this point of view it was a conflict of ideals,
though, to be sure, life’s common cravings were on one side, and often
unideally turned the scale. We are not immediately concerned, however,
with this conflict of ideals; but with the contrasts presented between
the actual and the ideal, between conduct and the principles which should
have controlled it. The opposition between this life and eternity is
mentioned in order to make clear the tremendous demands of the Christian
ethical ideal, and the unlikelihood of its fulfilment by mediaeval
humanity. So one may perceive a reason why the Middle Ages were to show
such extremes of contrast between principles and practices. The standards
recognized as holiest countered the natural lives of men; and for that
reason could be lived up to only under transient spiritual enthusiasm or
by exceptional people. Monasticism held the highest ideals of Christian
living, and its story illustrates the continual falling away of conduct
from the recognized ideal.
Without regard to the contrast between the ideal and the actual, the
Middle Ages were a period of extremes--of extreme humility and love as
well as cruelty and hate. Such extremes may be traceable to a certain
unlimited quality in Christian principles, according to which no man could
have too much humility or Christian love, or could too strenuously combat
the enemies of Christ. To be sure, an all-proportioning principle of
conduct lay in man’s love of God, answering to God’s love which
encompassed all His creatures. But such proportionment is difficult for
simple minds, and many of the extremes which meet us in the Middle Ages
were directly due to the simplicity with which mediaeval men and women
carried out such Christian precepts as they were taken with, in disregard
of all else that commonly balances and conventionalizes human lives.
For this reason also the Middle Ages are picturesque and poetic. Nothing
could be more picturesque and more like a poem than the simple
absoluteness with which St. Francis interpreted and lived out his Lord’s
principle of love, and made universal application of his Lord’s injunction
to the rich young man, to go and sell his goods and give to the poor, and
then come follow Him. This particular solution of the problem of God’s
service was taken by Francis, and by many another, as of general
application, and was literally carried out; just as Francis with
exquisite simplicity carried out other precepts of his Lord in a way that
would be foolishness were it not so beautiful.
There was no contrast between conduct and principle in the life of
Francis; and in other men conduct might agree with such principles as they
understood. Many a rustic layman, many a good knight, fulfilled the
standards of his calling. Many a parish priest did his whole duty, as he
thought it. And many a monk and nun lived up to their monastic _regula_,
if indeed never satisfying the inner yearning of the soul unquenchably
striving for perfection. Indeed, for the monk ever to have been satisfied
with himself would have meant a fall from humility to vainglory.
The precepts of the Gospel were for every man and woman. Nevertheless, the
same rules of living did not apply to all. In this regard, mediaeval
society falls into the two general divisions of clergy and laity, meaning
by the former all persons making special profession of religion or engaged
in the service of the Church.[433] This would include anchorites and monks
(also the _conversi_[434] or lay-brethren) and the secular clergy from the
rank of bishop downward. To such (excepting seculars below the grade of
sub-deacon) the rule of celibacy applied, as well as other ascetic
precepts dependent on the vows they had taken or the regulations under
which they lived. Conversely, certain rules like those relating to the
conduct of man and wife would touch the laity alone.
A general similarity of principle pervaded the rules of conduct applying
to all orders of the clergy, secular and regular.[435] Yet there was a
difference in the severity of the rules and the stringency of their
application. The mediaeval code of religious ethics applied in its utter
strenuousness only to monks and nuns. They alone had seriously undertaken
to obey the Gospel precept, _esto perfecti_; and they alone could be
regarded as living the life of complete Christian militancy against the
world, the flesh, and the devil. The trials, that is to say the
temptations, of this warfare could be fully known only to the monk.
“Tentatio,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “est militia,” _i.e._ warfare; it
is possible only for those who live humanly and rationally, after the
spirit, which is to say, as monks; “the seculars (_i.e._ the clergy who
were not monks) and the carnal (_i.e._ the laity) who walk according to
the flesh, are improperly said to be tempted; for as soon as they feel the
temptation they consent, or resist lukewarmly, like the horse and the mule
who have no understanding.”[436]
We have spoken of the inception of monasticism, and of its early
motives,[437] which included the fear of hell, the love of Christ, and the
conviction of the antagonism between pleasure and that service which opens
heaven’s gates. Such sentiments were likely to develop and expand. The
fear of hell might be inflamed and made visible by the same imagination
that festered over the carnality of pleasure; the heart could impassion
and extend the love of Christ through humanity’s full capacity for loving
what was holiest and most lovable; and the mind could attain to an
overmastering conviction of the incompatibility of pleasure with absolute
devotion. Through the Middle Ages these motives developed and grew
together, until they made a mode of life, and fashioned human characters
into accord with it. Century after century the lives of thousands
fulfilled the monastic spirit, and often so perfectly as to belie
humanity’s repute for frailty. Their virtues shunned encomium. Record was
made of those whose mind and energy organized and wrought, or whose piety
and love of God burned so hotly that others were enkindled. But legion
upon legion of tacit lives are registered only in the Book with seven
seals.
Monastic abuses have usually spoken more loudly than monastic regularity.
In Christian monasticism there is an energy of renovation which constantly
cries against corruption. Its invective reaches us from all the mediaeval
centuries; while monastic regularity has more commonly been unreported. It
is well to bear this in mind when reading of monastic vice. It always
existed, and judging from the fiery denunciations which it awakened, it
was often widely prevalent. In fact, the monastic life required such love
of God or fear of hell, such renunciation of this world, its ambitions,
its lusts and its lures, that monks were likely to fall below the
prescribed standards, and then quickly into all manner of sin, from lack
of the restraints, or outlets, of secular life.
Consequently the most patent history of monasticism is the history of its
attempts to reform and renew itself. Its heroes come before us as
reformers or refounders, whose endeavour is to reinstitute the perfect
way, impassion men anew to follow it, by added precepts discipline them
for its long ascents, and so occupy them in the practice of its virtues
that all distracting impulses shall perish. Their apparent endeavour (at
least until the day of Francis of Assisi) is to renew a life from which
their contemporaries have fallen away. And yet through all there was
unconscious innovation and progress.
The greater part of the fervent piety of the Middle Ages dwelt in
cloisters, when not drawn forth unwillingly to serve the Lord in the
world. Mediaeval saints were, or yearned to be, monks or nuns.
Consequently monastic reforms, as well as attempts to raise the condition
of the secular clergy, emanated from within monasticism. Its own rules of
living had been set from within by Benedict of Nursia, and others who were
monks. There was much irregularity at first; but the seventh and eighth
centuries witnessed the conflict between different types of monastic
organization, and then the general victory of the Benedictine _regula_.
This was also a victory for monastic reform; for moral looseness,
accompanied by heathenish irregularities, easily penetrated cloisters when
not protected by a common and authoritative rule. As it was, the energy of
Benedictine uniformity seemed exhausted in the contest.
But a Benedictine refounder arose. This was the high-born Witiza of
Aquitaine, the ascetic virtuosity of whose early life had won him repute.
Assuming the name of Benedict, he established a monastery on the bank of
the little Aniane, in Aquitaine, in the year 779. His foundation
flourished in righteousness and increased in numbers, till it drew the
attention of Alcuin and Charlemagne to its abbot. Benedict was given the
task of reforming the monasteries of Aquitaine. Afterwards Louis the Pious
extended his authority; till in 817 a reforming synod, over which he
presided, was held at Aix, and the king’s authority was attached to its
decrees. All Frankish monasteries were therein commanded to observe the
_regula_ of Benedict of Nursia, with many further precepts set by him of
Aniane, aggravating the severity of the older rule; for example, by
enforcing a more rigid silence among the monks when at labour, and
restricting their intercourse with the laity. Great stress was laid upon
the labours of the field. There was little novelty in the work of this
reorganizer, with his consistent ascetic contempt for profane literature.
His labours were typical of those of many a monastic reformer after him,
who likewise sought to re-establish the strictness of the old Benedictine
rule, and in fact added to its austerities.
The next example of reform is Cluny, founded in the year 910. Its cloister
discipline followed the _regula_ of Benedict with the additions decreed by
the synod of Aix. Under Odo (d. 942) Majolus (d. 994) and Odilo (d. 1048)
it rose to unprecedented power and influence. Mainly because of the
winning and commanding qualities of its abbots, it received the support of
kings and popes; its authority and privileges were increased, until it
became the head of more than three hundred cloisters distributed through
France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. In ecclesiastical policy it stood for
decency and reform, but without giving extreme support to either emperor
or pope. Balance and temperance characterized its career. It was a
monastic organization which by precept and example, and by the wide
supervising powers it received from the papacy and from temporal
authorities, promoted regularity and propriety of life among monks, and
also among the secular clergy. The “reforms of Cluny” do not represent any
specific intensifying of monastic principles, but rather the general
endeavour of the better elements in Burgundian and French monasticism to
overcome the crass secularization of the Church, within and without the
cloister. Cluny’s influence told generally against monastic degradation,
rather than in favour of any special ascetic or ecclesiastic policy. The
prevailing simony, the clerical concubinage, the rough and warlike ways of
bishops and abbots were all corruptions standing in the way of any
monastic or ecclesiastical improvement; and Cluny opposed them, in
moderation however, and with considerable acquiescence in the apparently
necessary conditions of the time.[438]
After the comparative strictness of its first abbots, Cluny’s discipline
moderated almost to laxity; and the interests of the rich and magnificent
monastery became elegant and somewhat secular. It still maintained
monastic decencies while not going beyond their demands. Its face was no
longer set against comfortable living, nor against art and letters. And
the time came when fervent spirits demanded a more uncompromising attack
upon the world and the flesh.
Such came from Citeaux (near Dijon), where a few monks founded a
struggling monastery in 1098. Its fortunes were small and feeble until the
time of its third abbot, the Englishman, Stephen Harding (1109-1134),
whose genius set the lines of Citeaux’s larger destinies. Her great period
began when, shortly after Harding’s entrance on his abbacy, there arrived
a band of well-born youths, led by one Bernard. Then of a truth the
cloister burned with ardour. Its numbers grew, and Bernard was sent with a
Cistercian band to found a daughter monastery at Clairvaux (1115).
Like Stephen Harding, Bernard was an ascetic, and the Cistercian Order
represents a stern tightening of the reins which Cluny left lying somewhat
slackly upon the backs of her stall-fed monks.[439] Controversies arose
between the Cluniac Benedictines and the Cistercian Benedictines insisting
on a stricter rule. Bernard himself entered into heated controversy with
that great temperate personality of the twelfth century, Peter the
Venerable, Cluny’s revered lord.
The original _regula_ of Benedict provided an admirable constitution for
the single monastery, but no plan for the supervision of one monastery by
another. The mediaeval advance in monastic organization consisted in the
authoritative supervision of subordinate or “daughter” foundations by the
superior or primal monastery of the Order. The Abbot of Cluny exercised
such authority over Cluniac foundations, as well as over monasteries
which, at the instance of the secular lord of the land, had been
reorganized by Cluny.
The Cistercian Order represents a less monarchical, or more decentralized
subordination, on a plan similar to the feudal principle of
sub-infeudation, whereby the holder of the fief owed his duties to his
immediate lord, who in turn owed duties to his own lord, still above him.
Thus in the Cistercian Order the visitatorial authority over each
foundation was vested in the immediate mother abbey, rather than in the
primal abbey of Citeaux, from which the intervening mother abbey had gone
forth.
This plan was formulated by Stephen Harding’s _Charta Charitatis_,[440]
the charter of the Cistercian Order and a monument of constructive genius.
Apparently mindful of the various privileges recognized by the feudal
system, it begins by renouncing on the part of the superior monastery all
claim to temporal emolument from the daughter foundations: “Nullam
terrenae commoditatis seu rerum temporalium exactionem imponimus.” “But
for love’s sake (_gratia-charitatis_) we desire to retain the care of
their souls; so that should they swerve from the holy way and the
observance of the Holy Rule, they may through our solicitude return to
rectitude of life.”
Then follows the command that all Cistercian foundations obey implicitly
the _regula_ of Benedict, as understood and practised at Citeaux, and that
all follow the customs of Citeaux, and the same forms of chant and prayer
and service (for we receive their monks in our cloister, and they ours),
“so that without discordant actions we may live by one love, one rule, and
like practices (_una charitate, una regula, similibusque vivamus
moribus_).” A short sentence follows, forbidding all monasteries and
individual monks to accept from any source any privilege inconsistent with
the customs of the Order.
So the _Charta_ enjoined a uniformity of discipline. Wise and temperate
provision was made for the enforcement of the same when necessary by the
immediate parent monastery of the delinquent foundation. “Whenever the
Abbot of Citeaux comes to a monastery to visit it, its abbot shall make
way for him, and he shall there hold the office of abbot. Yet let him not
presume to order or conduct affairs against the wishes of its abbot and
the brethren. But if he sees that the precepts of the _Regula_ or of our
Order are transgressed, let him seek to correct the brethren with the
advice and in the presence of the abbot. If the abbot be absent, he may
still proceed.” Once a year the Abbot of Citeaux, in person or through one
of his co-abbots, must visit all the monasteries (coenobia) which he has
founded, and if more often, the brethren should the more rejoice. Likewise
must the four primary abbots of La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and
Morimond, together visit Citeaux once a year, at such time as they may
choose, except that set for the annual meeting of the general Chapter. At
Citeaux also, let any visiting abbot be treated as if he were abbot there.
“Whenever any of our churches (monasteries) by God’s grace so
increases that it is able to found another brotherhood, let the same
relationship (_definitio_) obtain between them which obtains between
us and our _cofratres_, except that they may not hold an annual
Chapter; but rather let all abbots come without fail every year to the
annual Chapter at Citeaux.
“At which Chapter let them take measures for the safety of their
souls; if in the observance of the holy _Regula_ or the Order,
anything should be amended or supplemented, let them ordain it; let
them re-establish the bond of peace and love among themselves.”
The annual Chapter is also given authority to correct any abbot and settle
controversies between abbots; but when an abbot appears unworthy of his
charge, and the Chapter has not acted, it is the duty of the abbot of his
mother church to admonish him, and, upon his obduracy, summon other abbots
and move for his deposition. Thus the _Charta Charitatis_ apportioned
authority among the abbots of the Order, providing, as it were, a mutual
power of enforcement in which every abbot had part. One notices also that
the _Charta_ is neither monarchical nor democratic, but aristocratic; for
the abbots (not the Abbot of Citeaux alone) manage and control the Order,
and without any representation of the monks at the annual Chapter.[441]
The _Charta Charitatis_ seems a spiritual mirror of the feudal system.
Mediaeval monasticism, whether cloistered or sent forth into the world,
was predominantly coenobitic or communal. Yet through the Middle Ages the
anchorite or hermit way of life was not unrepresented. Both monk and
hermit existed from the beginning of Christian monasticism; they
recognized the same purpose, but employed different means to achieve it.
For their common aim was to merit the kingdom of heaven through the
suppression of sense-desires and devotion to spiritual righteousness. But
the communal system recognized the social nature of man, his essential
weakness in isolation, and his inability to satisfy his bodily wants by
himself. Thus admitting the human need of fellowship and correction, it
deemed that man’s spiritual progress could be best advanced in a way of
life which took account of these facts. On the other hand, anchoritism
looked rather to man’s self-sufficiency alone with God--and the devil. It
held that man could best conquer his carnal nature in solitude, and in
solitude best meditate upon his soul and God. The society of one’s
fellows, even though they be likeminded, is a distraction and a hindrance.
Obviously, the devoted temper has its variants; and some souls will draw
from solitude that strength which others gain from support and sympathy.
Both the coenobitic and the hermit life were, from the time of their
inception, phases of the _vita contemplativa_. Yet more active duties had
constantly been recognized, until at last monasticism, in an ardour of
love for fellow-men, broke from the cloister and went abroad in the steps
of Francis and Dominic. Even this active and uncloistered monasticism drew
its strength from its hidden meditation, and, strengthened from within
itself, entered upon the _vita activa_, and practised among men the
virtues which it had acquired through contemplation and the quiet
discipline of the cloister. So if we people of the world would have
understanding of the matter, we must never forget that at its source and
in its essence the monastic life is a _vita contemplativa_, whether the
monastic man, as a member of a fervent community, be sustained through the
support of his brethren and the counsel or command of his superior, or
whether, as an anchorite, he seclude himself in solitude. And the essence
of this _vita contemplativa_ is not to do or act, but to contemplate,
meditate upon God and the human soul. By one line of ancestry it is a
descendant of Aristotle’s βίος θεωρητικός. But its mightier parent was the
Saviour’s manifestation of God’s love of man and man’s love of God. From
this source came the emotional elements (and they were the predominant and
overwhelming) of the Christian _vita contemplativa_, its terror and
despair, its tears and hope, and its yearning love. Through these any
Hellenic calm was transformed to storm-tossed Christian ecstasy.
Monastic quietism might at any time be drafted into Christian militancy.
In the crises of the Church, or when there was call to go forth and
convert the heathen or the carnal, both monk and hermit became zealots in
the world. Yet important and frequent as these active functions were, they
were not commanded by the Benedictine _regula_, either in its original
form or in its many modifications, Cluniac, Cistercian, or Carthusian;
hence they were not treated as part of the monastic life. There was to
come a change. The _vita contemplativa_ was to take to itself the _vita
activa_ as a regular and not an occasional function of perfect Christian
piety. An evangelization of monasticism, according to the more active
spirit of the Gospel, was at hand. The monastic ideal was to become humane
and actively loving. In principle and theory, as well as practice,
Christian piety was no longer to find its entire end and aim in
contemplation, in asceticism, in purity: it was _regularly_ henceforth to
occupy itself with a loving beneficence among men.
Some of the ardent beginnings of this movement did not receive the
sanction of the Church. The Poor of Lyons, the Humbled Folk (_Humiliati_)
of Lombardy, the Beghards of Liége, were pronounced to be heretics.
Predominantly lay and ecclesiastically somewhat bizarre, they were
scarcely monks. Yet these irregular evangelists of the latter part of the
twelfth century were forerunners of that chief evangelizer of Monasticism,
Francis of Assisi.[442]
The life of Francis, as all men know, fulfilled the current demands of
monasticism. He lived and taught obedience, chastity, humility, and a more
absolute poverty than had been before conceived. With respect to the first
three virtues, it was only through his loving way of living them that
Francis set anything new before his brethren. As for the last, it may be
said that monks had always been forbidden to own property; only the
monastery or the Order might. Francis’s absolute acceptance of poverty
comes to us as inspired by the command of Christ to the rich young man: Go
and sell all, and give to the poor, and then come follow me. But had no
Christian soul read this before and accepted it absolutely? The Athanasian
Life of St. Anthony, at the very beginning of Christian monasticism, has
the same account; he too gave up all he had on reading this passage. But
then he fled to the desert, while Francis, when he had given up all,
opened his arms to mankind. In accordance with his brotherly and social
evangelization of monasticism, Francis modified certain of its practices.
He removed restrictions upon intercourse among the brethren, and took away
the barriers, save those of holiness, between the brethren and the world.
Then he lifted the veil of silence from the brethren’s lips. They should
thenceforth speak freely, in love of God and man. So monasticism stepped
forth, at last uncloistered, upon its course of love and teaching in the
world.
In spite of the temperamental differences between Francis and Dominic, and
in spite of the different tasks which they set before their Orders, the
analogy between Franciscans and Dominicans was fundamental; for the
latter, as well as the former, regularly undertook to evoke the _vita
activa_ from the _vita contemplativa_. The Dominicans were to preach and
teach true Christian doctrine, and as veritable _Domini canes_ destroy the
wolves of heresy menacing the Christian fold.
Dominic received from Pope Honorius III., in 1217, the confirmation of his
Order, as an Order of Canons according to the _Regula_ supposed to have
been taught by Augustine. The Preaching Friars were never cloistered by
their _regula_, any more than were the Minorites. Two or three years
later, Dominic added, or emphasized anew, the principle of voluntary
poverty, not only in the individuals but in the Order as a corporate
whole. Whencesoever he derived this idea--whether from the Franciscans, or
because it was rife among men--at all events it was not his originally;
for Dominic had accepted at an earlier period the one-sixth of the
revenues of the Bishop of Toulouse. This he now renounced, and instead
accepted voluntary poverty.
It was not given to Dominic to love as Francis loved. Nor was he an
incarnate poem. But it was in the spirit of Christian devotion that he
undertook and laid upon his Order the performance of active duties in the
world, especially of preaching true doctrines for the salvation of souls.
Dominic took no personal part in the Albigensian blood-shedding; and he
was not the founder of the Inquisition, although his Order was so soon to
be identified with it. He was a theologian, a teacher, and an ardent
preacher; a devoted man, given to tears. Almost the only words we have
from him are those of his Testament: “Caritatem habete, humilitatem
servate, paupertatem voluntariam possedete.”[443]
CHAPTER XVI
THE HERMIT TEMPER
PETER DAMIANI; ROMUALD; DOMINICUS LORICATUS; BRUNO AND GUIGO,
CARTHUSIANS
To contemplate goodness in God, and strain toward it in yearning love, is
the method of the Christian _vita contemplativa_. In this way the recluse
cultivates humility, patience, purity, and love, and perfects his soul for
heaven. And herein, in that it is more undistracted and more undisturbed,
lies the superiority of the solitary life over the coenobitic.
Yet this conceived superiority is but the reason and the conscious motive
for the solitary life. The call to it is felt as well as intellectually
accepted. It is temperament that makes the recluse; his reasons are but
his justification. In solitude he lives the reaches of his life; from
solitude he draws his utmost bliss. To leave it involves the torture of
separation, and then all the petty pains of unhappy labour and distasteful
intercourse with men. “Whoever would reach the summit of perfection should
keep within the cloister of his seclusion, cherish spiritual leisure, and
shudder at traversing the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea
of blood. For the world is so filthy with vices, that any holy mind is
befouled even by thinking about it.”[444]
Here speaks the hermit temper, by the mouth of a supreme exponent. If
Hildebrand, who compelled all men to his purposes, kept Peter Damiani in
the world, that ascetic soul did not cease to yearn for the hermit life.
His skilful pen served it untiringly. Its temper, its merits, and its
grounds, appear with unique clarity in the writings of him who, sore
against his will, was the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia.[445]
“The solitary life is the school of celestial doctrine and the divine
arts (_artes divinae_),” says Damiani, meaning every word. “For there
God is the whole that is learned. He is also the way by which one
advances, through which one attains knowledge of the sum of
truth.”[446] To obtain its benefits, it must be led assiduously and
without break or wandering abroad among men: “Habit makes his cell
sweet to the monk, but roving makes it seem horrible.... The unbroken
hermit life is a cooling refreshment (_refrigerium_); but, if
interrupted, it seems a torment. Through continued seclusion the soul
is illuminated, vices are uncovered, and whatever of himself had been
hidden from the man, is disclosed.”[447]
Peter argues that the hermit life is free from temptations (!) and offers
every aid to victory.
“The wise man, bent on safeguarding his salvation, watches always to
destroy his vices; he girds his loins--and his belly--with the girdle
of perfect mortification. Truly that takes place when the itching
palate is suppressed, when the pert tongue is held in silence, the ear
is shut off from distractions and the eye from unpermitted sights;
when the hand is held from cruel striking, and the foot from vainly
roving; when the heart is withstood, that it may not envy another’s
felicity, nor through avarice covet what is not its own, nor through
anger sever itself from fraternal love, nor vaunt itself arrogantly
above its fellows, nor yield to the ticklings of lust, nor
immoderately sink itself in grief or abandon itself wantonly to joy.
Since, then, the human mind has not the power to remain entirely
empty, and unoccupied with the love of something, it is girt around
with a wall of the virtues.
“In this way, then, our mind begins to be at rest in its Author and to
taste the sweetness of that intimacy. At once it rejects whatever it
deems contrary to the divine law, shrinks from what does not agree
with the rule of supernal righteousness. Hence true mortification is
born; hence it comes that man kissing the Cross of his Redeemer seems
dead to the world. No longer he delights in silly fables, nor is
content to waste his time with idle talk. But he is free for psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs; he seeks seclusion, he longs for a
hiding-place; he avoids the monastery’s conversation-rooms and
rejoices in nooks and corners; and that he may the more freely attend
to the contemplation of his Creator, so far as he may he declines
colloquy with men.”[448]
“In fine,” says Damiani, in another treatise, “our entire conversion,
and renunciation of the world, aims at nothing else than rest. This
rest is won through the man’s prior discipline in the toils of strife,
in order that when the tumult of disturbance ceases, his mind, through
the grace of contemplation, may be translated to gaze upon the face of
truth. But since one attains to this rest only through labour and
conflict, how can one reach it who has not gone down into the strife?
By what right can one enter the halls of the King who has not
traversed the arena before the doors?”[449]
“It further behoves each brother who with his whole heart has
abandoned the world, to unlearn and forget forever whatever is
injurious. He should not be disputatious as to cookery, nor clever in
the petty matters of the town; nor an adept in rhetoric’s jinglings,
or in jokes or wordplay. He should love fasts and cherish penury; he
should flee the sight of man, restrain himself under the censorship of
silence, withdraw from affairs, keep his mouth from idle talk, and
seek the hiding-place of his soul, and in such hiding be on fire to
see the face of his Creator. Let him pant for tears, and implore God
for them by daily prayer.”
With this last sentence Damiani makes his transition to the emotional side
of the Christian _vita contemplativa_. He will now pour himself out in a
rhapsody of praise of tears, which purify and refresh the soul, and open
it to the love of God.
“From the fire of divine love rises the grace of contrition (_gratia
compunctionis_), and again from the contrition of tears (_ex
compunctione lacrymarum_) the ardour of celestial yearning is
increased. The one hangs from the other, and each promotes the other;
while the contrition of tears flows from the love of God, through
tears again our soul burns more fervidly toward the love of God. In
this reciprocal and alternating action, the soul is purged of the
filth of its offence.”[450]
Elsewhere Damiani suggests how the hermit may acquire the “grace of
tears”:
“Seclude thyself from the turmoil of secular affairs and often even
from talk with thy brethren. Cut off the cares and anxieties of
mundane action; clear them away as a heap of rubbish which stops the
fountain’s flow. As water in a cavern of the earth wells up from the
abyss, so sadness (_tristitia_) wells in a human heart from
contemplation of the profundity of God’s Judgment, and yet will not
flow forth in tears if checked by the clods of earthly hindrance.
Sadness is the material of tears. But in order that the veins of this
fount may flow more abundantly, do thou clear away all obstacles of
secular business--and other matters also, as I know from experience.
Even spiritual zeal in the punishment of delinquents, and the labour
of preaching, and like matters, holy as they are and commanded by
divine authority, nevertheless are certainly obstacles to tears.
“So if you would attain the grace of tears, you must even curb the
exercise of spiritual duties, eliminate malice, anger, and hatred, and
the other pests from your heart. And do not let your own accusing
conscience dry up the dew of tears with the aridity of fear. Indeed
the confidence of holiness (_sanctitatis fiducia_) and a conscience
bearing witness to its own innocence, waters the pure soul with the
celestial rivulets of grace, softens the hardness of the impure heart,
and opens the floodgates of weeping.”[451]
“Many are the ways,” says Damiani in words sounding like a final
reflection upon the solitary life--“many are the ways by which one
comes to God; diverse are the orders in the society of the faithful;
but among them all there is no way so straight, so sure, so unimpeded,
so free from obstacles which trip one’s feet, as this holy life. It
eliminates occasions for sin; it cultivates the greatest number of
virtues by which God may be pleased; and thus, as it removes the
opportunities of delinquency, it lays upon good conduct the added
strength of necessity’s insistence.”[452]
Peter Damiani, exiled from solitude, found no task more grateful than that
of writing the Life of his older contemporary, St. Romualdus, the founder
of Camaldoli and other hermit communities in Italy. That man had
completely lived the life from which the Church’s exigencies dragged his
biographer. Peter put himself, as well as his best literary powers, into
this _Vita Romualdi_, and made it one of the most vivid of mediaeval
_Vitae sanctorum_. If Romuald was a hermit in the flesh, Damiani had the
imagination to make the hermit spirit speak.[453]
“Against thee, unclean world, we cry, that thou hast an intolerable
crowd of the foolish wise, eloquent as regards thee, mute as to God.
Wise are they to do evil; they know not how to do good. For behold
almost three _lustra_[454] have passed since the blessed Romualdus,
laying aside the burden of flesh, migrated to the heavenly realm, and
no one has arisen from these wise people to place upon the page of
history even a few of the lessons of that wonderful life.”
The tone of this prologue suggests the kind of lessons found by the
biographer in the Life of Romuald. He was born of an illustrious Ravenna
family about the year 950. In youth his devout mind became conscious of
the sinfulness of the flesh. Whenever he went hunting, as was his wont,
and would come to a retired nook in the woods, the hermit yearning came
over him--and in love, says Damiani, he was prescient of what he was later
to fulfil in deed.
His father chanced to kill a neighbour in knightly brawl; and for this
homicide the son entered the monastery of St. Apollinaris in Classe, to do
forty days’ penance for his parent. This introduction to the cloister had
its natural effect on such a temper. Goaded by a vision of the saint,
Romuald became a monk. He soon showed himself no easy man. His harsh
censure of the brethren’s laxities caused a plot to murder him, the first
of many attempts upon his life.
Three years he dwelt there. Then the yearning for perfection drove him
forth, and, for a master, he sought out a hermit named Marinus, who lived
in the Venetian territory, a man well meaning, but untaught as to the
method of the hermit life. He and his disciple would issue from their cell
and wander, singing together twenty psalms under one tree, and then thirty
or forty under another. The disciple was unlettered, and the master rude.
Romuald experienced intolerable tedium from straining his fixed eyes upon
a psalter, which he could not read. He may have betrayed his _ennui_. At
all events Marinus, grasping his rod in his right hand, and sitting on his
disciple’s left, continually beat him, and always on the left side of his
head. At length Romuald said humbly: “Master, if you please, would you
henceforth beat me on the right side, as I have lost the hearing of my
left ear.”
In the neighbourhood there dwelt a duke whose rapacity had brought him
into peril. It happened that the abbot of a monastery situated not far
from Chalons-sur-Marne in France came pilgrimaging that way, and the duke
took counsel of him. The two hermits were also called; and the advice to
the duke was to flee the world. So the whole party set forth, crossed the
Alps, and travelled to the abbot’s monastery. There the duke became a
monk, while Romuald and Marinus dwelt as solitaries a little way off.
From this time Romuald increased in virtue, far outstripping all the
brethren. He supplied his wants by tilling the soil, and fasted
exceedingly. He sustained continual conflicts with the devil, who was
always bringing into his mind the loves and hates of his former life in
the world.
“The devil would come striking on his cell, just as Romuald was
falling asleep, and then no sleep for him. Every night for nearly five
years the devil pressed crosses upon his feet, and weighted them with
the likeness of a phantom weight, so that Romuald could scarcely turn
on his couch. How often did the devil let loose the raging beasts of
the vices! and how often did Romuald put them to flight by his dire
threats! Hence if any of the brethren came in the silence, knocking at
his door, the soldier of Christ, always ready for battle, taking him
for the devil, would threaten and cry out: ‘What now, wretch! what is
there for thee in the hermitage, outcast of heaven! Back, unclean dog!
Vanish, old snake!’ He declared that with such words as these he gave
battle to malignant spirits; and with the arms of faith would go out
and meet the challenge of the foe in a neighbouring field.”
Marvellously Romuald increased his fasts and austerities, after the manner
of the old anchorites of Egypt.[455] Miraculous powers became his. But
news came of his father which drew him back to Italy. That noble but
sinful parent had entered a monastery where, under the persuasion of the
devil, he was soon sorry for his conversion, and sought to return to the
world. Romuald decided to go to his perishing father’s aid. But the people
of the region hearing of it, were distressed to lose a man of such
spiritual might. They took counsel how to prevent his departure, and with
impious piety (_impia pietate_) decided to send men to kill him, thinking
that since they could not retain him alive, they would have his corpse as
a protection for the land (_pro patrocinio terrae_). Knowing of this,
Romuald shaved his head, and as the murderers approached his cell in the
dusk of morning, he began to eat ravenously. Thinking him demented, they
did him no injury. He then set forth, staff in hand, and walked from the
centre of Gaul, even to Ravenna. There finding his father still seeking to
return to the world, he tied the old sinner’s feet to a beam, fettered him
with chains, flogged him, and at length by pious severity so subjugated
his flesh that with God’s aid he brought his mind back to a state of
salvation.[456]
Thus far Romuald’s life affords striking illustration of the fact that
prodigious austerities and the consequent repute for miracles were the
chief elements in mediaeval sainthood; also of the fact that the saint’s
dead body might be as good as he. But while he lived, Romuald was much
more than a miracle-working relic. He was a strong, domineering
personality. It was soon after he brought his father back to the way of
holiness that the old man saw a vision, and happily yielded up the ghost.
The son continued to advance in his chosen way of life and in the elements
of character which it fostered. He became a prodigious solitary; one to
whom men and their ways were intolerable, and who himself was sometimes
found intolerable by men. Even his appearance might be exceptional:
“The venerable man dwelt for a while in a swamp (near Ferrara). At
length the poisonous air and the stench of the marsh drove him out;
and he emerged hairless, with his flesh puffed and swollen
(_tumefactus et depilatus_), not looking as if belonging to the _genus
homo_; for he was as green as a newt.”[457]
Such a story displays the very extravagance of fleshly mortification. It
has also its local colour. But one should seek its explanation in the
grounds of the hermit life as set forth by Peter Damiani. Then the
incidents of Romuald’s life will appear to spring from these hermit
motives and from the hermit temperament, which became of terrible
intensity with him. Also the egotism, so frequently an element of that
temperament, rose with him to spiritual megalomania:
“One day (apparently in the latter part of his life) some disciples
asked him, ‘Master, of what age does the soul appear, and in what form
is it presented for Judgment?’ He replied, ‘I know a man in Christ,
whose soul is brought before God shining like snow, and indeed in
human form, with the stature of the perfect time of life.’ Asked again
who that man might be, he would not speak for indignation. And then
the disciples talked it over, and recognized that he was certainly the
man.”[458]
In another part of the _Vita_, Damiani, having told of his hero’s sojourn
with a company of hermits who preferred their will to his, thus continues:
“Romuald, therefore, impatient of sterility, began to search with anxious
eagerness where he might find a soil fit to bear a fruitage of souls.” It
was his passion to change men to anchorites: he yearned to convert the
whole world to the solitary life. Many were the hermit communities which
he established. But he could not endure his hermit sons for long, nor they
him. His intolerant soul revolted from the give and take of intercourse.
Such intolerance and his passion to make more converts drove him from
place to place. He seemed inspired with a superhuman power of drawing men
from the world. Now
“therefore he sent messengers to the Counts of Camerino. When these
heard the name of Romuald they were beside themselves with joy, and
placed their possessions, mountains, woods, and fields at his
disposal, to select from. He chose a spot suited to the hermit way of
living, intrenched amid forests and mountains, and affording an ample
space of level fruitful ground, watered with crystal streams. The
place was called of old the Valley of the Camp (Vallis de Castro), and
a little church was there with a convent of women who had turned from
the world. Here having built their cells, the venerable man and his
disciples took up their abode.
“And what fruitage of souls the Lord there won through him, pen cannot
describe nor tongue relate. From all directions men began to pour in,
for penance and to bequeath in pity their goods to the poor, while
others utterly forsook the world and with fervent spirit hastened to
the holy way of life. For this most blessed man was as one of the
Seraphim, himself burning with the flame of divine love, and kindling
others, wherever he went, with the fires of his holy preaching. Often,
while speaking, a vast contrition brought him to such floods of tears
that, breaking off his sermon, he would flee anywhere for refuge, like
one demented. And also when travelling on horseback with the brethren,
he followed far behind them, always singing psalms, as if he were in
his cell, and never ceasing to shed tears.”[459]
In that age, the hopes and fears and wonderment of men looked to the
recluse as the perfected saint. No wonder that those Italian lands, so
blithely sinful and so grievously penitent, were moved by this volcanic
tempest of a man, fierce, merciless to the flesh, convulsed with scorching
tears, famed for austerities and miracles. He lashed men from their sins;
men feared before one whose presence was a threat of hell. Said the
Marquis of Tuscany: “Not the emperor nor any mortal man, can put such fear
in me as Romuald’s look. Before his face I know not what to say, nor how
to defend myself or find excuses.” And the biographer adds that “of a
truth the holy man had this grace from the divine favour, that sinners,
and especially the great of this world, quaked in their bowels before him
as if before the majesty of God.”[460]
But some men hated, and especially those of his own persuasion who could
not endure his harshness. From such came attempts at murder, from such
also came milder outbreaks of detestation and revolt. No other founder of
ascetic communities seems to have been so rebelled against. He went from
the Valley of the Camp to Classe, where a simoniac abbot attempted to
strangle him; then he returned, but not for long, for the abbot
established in his place rejected his reproofs, and maligned him with the
lords of the land. “And in that way,” says Damiani, “the tall cedar of
Paradise was cast forth from the forest of earthly men.”[461]