Chapter XIII
MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND; CONCLUSION
I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture.
II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict.
III. England; Closing Comparisons.
I
In the Germans of the eleventh century one notes a strong sense of German selfhood, supplemented by a consciousness that Latin culture is a foreign matter, introduced as a thing of great value which it were exceeding well for them to make their own. They are even conscious of having been converted to Latin Christianity, which on their part they are imbuing with German thoughts and feeling. They are not Romance people; they have never spoken Latin; it has never been and will never be their speech. They will master what they can of the antique education which has been brought to them. But even as it was no part of their forefathers’ lives, so it will never penetrate their own personalities, so as to make them the spiritual descendants of any antique Latin or Latinized people. They have never been and never will be Latinized; but will remain forever Germans.
Consequently the appropriation of the Latin culture in Germany is a labour of translation: first a palpable labour of translation from the Latin language into the German tongue, and secondly, and for always, a more subtle kind of translation of the antique influence into a German understanding of the same, and gradually into informing principles made use of by a strong and advancing racial genius. The German genius will be enlarged and developed through these foreign elements, but it will never cease to use the Latin culture as a means of informing and developing itself.
No need to say that these strong statements apply to the Germans in their home north of the Alps and east of the Rhine; not to those who left the Fatherland, and in the course of generations became Italians, for example. Moreover, general phrases must always be taken subject to qualification and rounding of the corners. No people can absorb a foreign influence without in some degree being made over into the likeness of what they are receiving, and to that extent ceasing to be their unmitigated selves. In general, however, while Latin Christianity and the antique culture both were brought to Germany from abroad, the Germans were converted or transformed only by the former, and merely took and used the latter--a true statement this, so far as one may separate these two great mingled factors of mediaeval progress.
Evidently those Germans of the opening mediaeval centuries who did most to 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.
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]
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]
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]
His next sojourn was Vallombrosa, where after his decease one of his disciples was to found a famous cloister. From that nest in the Tuscan Apennines, he went to dwell permanently on the Umbrian mount of Sytrio. At this point his biographer proceeds:
“Whoever hears that the holy man so often changed his habitation, must not ascribe this to the vice of levity. For the cause of these changes was that wherever he stayed, an almost countless crowd assembled, and when he saw one place filled with converts he very properly would appoint a prior and at once hasten to fill another.
“In Sytrio what insults and what indignities he endured from his disciples! We will set down one instance, and omit the rest for brevity. There was a disciple named Romanus, noble by birth, but ignoble by deed. Him the holy man for his carnal impurity not only chided by word but corrected with heavy beatings. That diabolic man dared to retort with the fabrication of the same charge, and to bark with sacrilegious mouth against this temple of the Holy Spirit, saying forsooth that the holy man was spotted with this same infection. The rage of the disciples broke out immediately against Romuald. All were his enemies: some declared that the wicked old man ought to be hanged from a gallows, others that he should be burned in his cell.
“One cannot understand how spiritual men could have believed such wickedness of a decrepit old man, whose frigid blood and aridity of attenuated frame would have forbade him, had he had the will. But doubtless it is to be deemed that this scourge of adversity came upon the holy man by the will of Heaven, to augment his merit. For he said himself that he had foreknown it with certainty in the solitude which he had left just before, and had come with alacrity to undergo this shame. But that false monkish reprobate who brought the charge against the holy man, afterwards became Bishop of Noceria through simony, and in the first year of his occupancy, saw, as he deserved, his house with his books and bells and the rest of his sacred paraphernalia burned; and in the second year, the divine sentence struck him and he wretchedly lost both his dignity and his life.
“In the meanwhile the disciples put a penance on the holy man as if he had been guilty, and deprived him of the right to celebrate the holy mysteries. He willingly accepted this false judgment, and took his penance like a culprit, not presuming to approach the altar for well-nigh six months. At length, as he afterwards told his disciples, he was divinely commanded to celebrate mass. On the next day, when proceeding with the sacrifice, he became rapt in ecstasy, and continued speechless for so long a time that all present marvelled. When afterwards asked the reason of his delay, he replied: ‘Carried into heaven, I was borne before God; and the divine voice commanded me, that with such intelligence as God had set in me, I should write and commend for use a Commentary on the Psalms. Overcome with terror, I could only respond: so let it be, so let it be.’ For this reason the holy man made a Commentary on the whole Psalter; and although its grammar was bad, its sense was sound and clear.”[462]
Various attempts were made in the Middle Ages to render the hermit life practicable, through permitting a limited intercourse among a cluster of like-minded ascetics, as well as to regulate it under the direction of a superior. In Italy, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the picturesque energy of the individual hermit is prodigious, while in the north, as in the establishment of the Carthusian Order, the organization is better, the result more permanent, but the imaginative and consistent extravagance of personality is not there. In the hermit communities founded by Romuald there was a prior or abbot, invested with some authority. Yet the organization was less complete than in coenobitic monasteries; for Romuald’s hermit methods sought to minimize the intercourse among the brethren, to an extent which was scarcely compatible with effective organization. An idea of these communities may be had from Damiani’s description of one of them:
“Such was the mode of life in Sytrio, that not only in name but in fact it was as another Nytria.[463] The brethren went barefoot; unkempt and haggard; they were content with the barest necessaries. Some were shut in with doomed doors (damnatis januis), seemingly as dead to the world as if in a tomb. Wine was unknown, even in extreme illness. The attendants of the monks (famuli monachorum) and those who kept the cattle, fasted and preserved silence. They made regulations among themselves, and laid penances for speaking.”[464]
For seven years Romuald lived at Sytrio as an inclusus, shut up in his cell, and preserving unbroken silence. Yet though his tongue was dumb his life was eloquent. He lived on, setting a shining example of squalor and austerity, eating only vile food, and handing back untouched any savoury morsel. His conflicts with the devil continued; nor was he ever vanquished. Advancing years intensified his aversion to human society and his passion for solitude. In proportion as he made his ways displeasing to men, his self-approval was enhanced.[465] A solitary death kept tally with the temper of a recluse life.
“When he saw his end draw near he returned to the Valley of the Camp, and had a cell with an oratory prepared, in which to immure himself and keep silence until death. Twenty years before, he had foretold to his disciples that there he should attain his peace; and had declared his wish to breathe forth his spirit with no one standing by or bestowing the last rites. When this cell of immurement (reclusorium) was ready, the mind in Romuald was so that it scarcely could be imprisoned. But his body grew heavy with the increasing ills of extreme age, and the hard breathing of tussis. Yet not for this would the holy man lie on a bed or relax his fasts. One day his strength gradually forsook him, and he found himself sinking with fatigue. So as the sun was setting he directed two brothers who stood by to go out and shut the door of his cell after them. He told them that when the time came for them to celebrate the matin hymns at dawn, they might return. Unwillingly they went out, but did not go at once to rest; and waited anxiously, concealing themselves by the master’s cell. After a while, as they listened intent and could hear no movement of his body nor any sound of his voice, correctly conjecturing what had happened, they broke open the door, rushed in and lighted the light; and there, the blessed soul having been transported to heaven, they found the holy corpse supine. It lay as a celestial pearl neglected, but hereafter to be placed with honour in the treasury of the King.”[466]
The spiritual unity which lies beneath the actions of Romuald should be sought in the reasons and temper of the hermit life. To perfect the soul for its passage to eternity is the fundamental motive. Monastic logic convinces the man that this can best be accomplished through withdrawal from the temptations of the world; and the hermit temper draws irresistibly to solitude. The only consistent social function left to such a man is that of turning the steps of his fellows to his own recluse path of perfection. Romuald’s life manifests such motives and such temper, and also this one function passionately performed. We see in him no love of kind, but only a fiery passion for their salvation. Also we see the absorption of self in self with God, the harsh intolerance of other men, the fierce aversions and the passionate cravings which are germane to the hermit life.
Physical self-mortification is the element of the hermit life most difficult for modern people to understand. Yet nothing in Romuald extorted more entire admiration from his biographer than his austerities. And if there was one man on earth whom Peter admired as much as he did Romuald, it was a certain mail-coated Dominicus, a virtuoso in self-mortification. He exhibits its purging and penitential motives. Scourging purifies the body from carnality; that is one motive. It also atones for sins, and lessens the purgatorial period after death; this is another. There is a third which is rooted rather in temperament than in reason. This is contrition; the contrite heart may love to flagellate itself in love of Him who suffered sinless.
Dominicus was surnamed Loricatus because he wore a coat of mail against the attacks of the devil through the frailties of the too-comfortable flesh. In his youth, family influence had installed him in a snug ecclesiastic berth. As he reached maturity and bethought himself, the sense of this involuntary simoniacal contamination filled him with remorse. He abjured the world and became a member of the hermit community of Fonte Avellana, where Damiani exercised the authority of prior. Yet the latter looked on Dominic as his master, whom he admired to the pitch of marvel, while regretting that he lacked himself the strength and leisure to equal his flagellations. So Peter was enraptured with this wonder of a Dominic, and wrote his biography, which deserved telling if, as Peter says, his entire life, his tota quippe vita, was a preaching and an edification, instruction and discipline (praedicatio, aedificatio, doctrina, disciplina).
One descriptive passage from it will suffice:
“I am speaking of Dominic, my teacher and my master, whose tongue indeed is rustic, but whose life is polished and accomplished (artificiosa satis et lepida). His life indeed preaches more effectively by its living actions (vivis operibus) than a barren tongue which inanely weighs out the balanced phrases of a bespangled urbanity (phaleratae urbanitatis). Through a long course of gliding years, girt with iron mail, he has waged truceless war against the wicked spirits; with cuirassed body and heart always ready for battle, he marches eager warrior against the hostile array.
“Likewise it is his regular and unremitting habit, with a rod in each hand every day to beat time upon his naked body, and thus scourge out two psalters. And this even in the slacker season. For in Lent or when he has a penance to perform (and he often undertakes a penance of a hundred years), each day, while he plies himself with his rods, he pays off at least three psalters repeating them mentally (meditando).
“The penance of a hundred years is performed thus: With us three thousand blows satisfies a year of penance; and the chanting (modulatio) of ten psalms, as has often been tested, admits one thousand blows. Now, clearly, as the Psalter consists of one hundred and fifty psalms, any one computing correctly will see that five years of penance lie in chanting one psalter, with this discipline. Now, whether you take five times twenty or twenty times five you have a hundred. Consequently whoever chants twenty psalters, with this accompanying discipline, may be confident of having performed a hundred years of penance. Herein our Dominic outdid those who struck with only one hand; for he, a true son of Benjamin, warred indefatigably with both hands against the lawless rebels of the flesh. He has told me himself that he easily accomplished a penance of a hundred years in six days.”[467]
This loricated Dominic was conscious of his virtuosity. We find him at the beginning of a certain Lent, requesting the imposition of a penance of a thousand years! Again, he comes after vespers to Damiani’s cell to tell him that between morning and evening he has broken his record by “doing” eight psalters! And once more we read of his coming troubled to his master, saying: “You have written, as I have just heard, that in one day I chanted nine psalters with corporeal discipline. When I heard it, I turned pale and groaned. ‘Woe is me,’ I said; ‘without my knowledge, this has been written of me, and yet I do not know whether I could do it.’ So I am going to try again, and I shall certainly find out.”[468]
Dominic probably derived more pleasure than pain from his scourgings. For besides the vanity of achievement, and some ecstasy of contrition, the flesh itself turns morbid and rejoices in its laceration. Yet such austerity is pre-eminently penal, and is initially impelled by fear. With Dominic, with Romuald, with Damiani, the fear of hell entered the motives of the secluded life. To observe this fear writ large in panic terror, we turn to the old legend regarding the conversion of Bruno of Cologne, the founder of the Carthusian Order. The scene is laid in Paris, where (with much improbability) Bruno is supposed to be studying in the year 1082. One of the most learned and pious of the doctors of theology died. His funeral had been celebrated, and his body was about to be carried to the grave, when the corpse raised its head and cried aloud with a dreadful voice: “Justo Dei judicio accusatus sum.” Then the head fell back. The people, terror-stricken, postponed the interment to the following day, when again, as before, with a grievous and terrible voice the corpse raised its head and cried: “Justo Dei judicio judicatus sum.” Amid general terror the interment was again postponed to the next day, when, as before, with a horrible cry the corpse shrieked: “Justo Dei judicio condemnatus sum.”
At this, Bruno, impressed and terrified, said to his friends: “Beloved, what shall we do? Unless we fly we shall all perish utterly. Let us renounce the world, and, like Anthony and John the Baptist, seek the caves of the desert, that we may escape the wrath of the Judge, and reach the port of salvation.” So they flee, and the Carthusian Order, with its terrific asceticism, begins.[469]
This story, aside from its marvellous character, does not harmonize with the more authentic facts of Bruno’s life. It is, however, a striking expression of the ascetic fear; it also reflects psychologic truth. Who but the man himself knows the naughtiness of his own heart? its never-to-be disclosed vile and morbid thoughts? The modern may realize this. Hamlet did. And it was just such a phase of self-consciousness as the mediaeval imagination would transform into a tale of horror. Bruno himself had been a learned doctor, a teacher, and the head of the cathedral school at Rheims; he had been a zealous soldier of the Church. In all this he had not found peace. The profession of a doctor of theology, even when coupled with more active belligerency for the Church, afforded no certain salvation. The story of the Paris doctor may have symbolized the anxieties which dwelt in Bruno’s breast, until under their stimulus the yearnings of a solitary temper gathered head and at last brought him with six followers to Carthusia (la grande Chartreuse), which lies to the north of Grenoble. 1084 is the year of its beginning.
It was a hermit community, the brethren living two by two in isolated cells, but meeting for divine service in a little chapel. Camaldoli may have been the model. Bruno wrote no regula for his followers, and the practices of the Order were first formulated by Guigo, the fifth prior, in his Consuetudines Cartusiae, about the year 1130.[470] These permit a limited intercourse among the brethren, for the service of God and the regulation of their own lives. Yet the broader object was seclusion. Not only severance from the world, but the seclusion of the brethren from each other, in solitary labour and contemplation, was their ideal. The asceticism of these Consuetudines is of the strictest. And somehow it would seem as if in the Carthusian Order the frailties of the spirit and the lusts of the flesh were to be permanently vanquished by this set life of labour, meditation, and rigid asceticism. Carthusia nunquam reformata, quia nunquam deformata, remained true century after century. This long freedom from corruption was partly due to the lofty and somewhat exclusive character of the brotherhood. Carthusia was no broad way for the monastic multitude. Its monks were relatively few and holy, the select of God. Men of devout piety, they must be. It was also needful that they should be possessed of such intellectual endowment and meditative capacity as would with God’s grace yield provision for a life of solitary thought.
The intellectual piety of Carthusia finds its loftiest expression in the Meditationes of this same prior Guigo,[471] the form of which calls to mind the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. In substance they reflect Augustine’s intellectual devoutness and many of his thoughts. But they seem Guigo’s very own, fruit of his own reflection; and thus incidentally they afford an illustration of the general principle that by the twelfth century the Middle Ages had made over into themselves what they had drawn from the Fathers or from the pagan antique. Guigo’s Meditations possess spiritual calm; their logic is unhesitating; it is remorselessly correct, however incomplete may be its premises or its comprehension of life’s data. Whoever wishes to know the high contemplative mind of monastic seclusion in the twelfth century may learn it from this work. A number of its precepts are given here for the sake of their illustrative pertinency and intrinsic merit, and because our author is not very widely known. He begins with general reflections upon Veritas and Pax:
“Truth should be set in the middle, as something beautiful. Nor, if any one abhors it, do thou condemn, but pity. Thou indeed, who desirest to come to it, why dost thou spurn it when it chides thy faults?
“Without form and comeliness and fastened to the cross, truth is to be worshipped.
“If thou speakest truth not from love of truth but from wish to injure another, thou wilt not gain the reward of a truthspeaker but the punishment of a defamer.
“Truth is life and eternal salvation. Therefore you ought to pity any one whom it displeases. For to that extent he is dead and lost. But you, perverse one, would not tell him the truth unless you thought it bitter and intolerable to him. You do still worse when in order to please men you speak a truth which delights them as much as if it were lies and flattery. Not because it displeases or pleases should truth be spoken, but as it profits. Yet be silent when it would do harm, as light to weak eyes.
“Blessed is he whose mind is moved or affected only by the perception and love of truth, and whose body is moved only by his mind. Thus the body, like the mind, is moved by truth alone. For if there is no stirring in the mind save that of truth, and none in the body save that from the mind, then also there is no stirring in the body save from truth, that is from God.
“Thou dost all things for the sake of peace, toward which the way lies through truth alone, which is thine adversary in this life. Therefore either subject thee to it or it to thee. For nothing else is left thee.
“The lake does not boast because it abounds in water; for that is from the source. So as to thy peace. Its cause is always something else. Therefore thy peace is shifting and inconstant in proportion to the instability of its cause. How worthless is it when it arises from the pleasingness of a human face!
“Let not temporal things be the cause of thy peace; for then wilt thou be as worthless and fragile as they. You would have such a peace in common with the brutes; let thine be that of the angels, which proceeds from truth.
“The beginning of the return to truth is to be displeased with falsity. Blame precedes correction.
“In the cares which engage thee for thy salvation, no service or medicine is more useful than to blame and despise thyself. Whoever does this for thee is thy helper.
“Easy is the way to God, since it advances by laying down burdens. Thou dost unburden thyself so far as thou deniest thyself.
“When anything good is said of thee, it is but as a rumour regarding which thou knowest better.
“Consider the two experiences of filling and emptying (ingestionis et egestionis); which blesses thee more? That burdens thee with useless matters; this disburdens thee. To have had that is to have devoured it altogether. Nothing remains for hope. So in all things of sense. They perish all. And what of thee after these? Set thy love and hope on what will not pass.
“Bestial pleasure comes from the senses of the flesh; it is diabolic, a thing of arrogance, envy, and deceit; philosophic pleasure is to know the creature; the angelic pleasure is to know and love God.
“When we take our pleasure from that from which brutes draw pleasure--from lust like dogs, or from gluttony like swine--our souls become like theirs. Yet we do not shudder. I had rather have a dog’s body than his soul. It would be more tolerable if our body changed to bestial shape, while our soul remained in its dignity, that is, in the likeness of God.
“Readily man entangles himself in love of bodies and of vanity; but, willy, nilly, he is torn with fear and grief at their dissolution. For the love of perishable things is as a fountain of useless fears and sorrows. The Lord frees the poor man from the mighty, by loosing him from the fetter of earthly love.
“The human soul is tortured in itself as long as it can be tortured, that is, as long as it loves anything besides God.
“Thou hast been clinging to one syllable of a great song, and art troubled when that wisest Singer proceeds in His singing. For the syllable which alone thou wast loving is withdrawn from thee, and others succeed in order. He does not sing to thee alone, nor to thy will, but His. The syllables which succeed are distasteful to thee because they drive on that one which thou wast loving evilly.
“All matters which are called adverse are adverse only to the wicked, that is, those who love the creature instead of the Creator.
“If in any way thou art tormented by fear, or anger or hate or grief of any kind, lay it to thyself, that is, to thy concupiscence, ignorance, or sloth. And if any one wishes to injure thee, lay that to his concupiscence. Thy distress is evidence of thy sin in loving anything destructible, having dismissed God. Thou dost grieve over the ruined show; lay it to thee and thine error because thou hast been cleaving to things that may be broken.
“He seeks a long temptation who seeks a long life.
“What God has not loved in His friends--power, rank, riches, dignities--do not thou love in thine.
“Snares thou eatest, drinkest, wearest, sleepest in; all things are snares.
“We are exiles through love and wantonness and inclination, not through locality; exiles in the country of defilement, of dark passions, of ignorance, of wicked loves and hates.
“In so far as thou lovest thyself--that is, this temporal life--so far dost thou love what is transitory.
“Adverse matters do not make thee wretched, but rather show thee to have been so; prosperity blinds the soul, by covering and increasing misery, not by removing it.
“Every one ought to love all men. Whoever wishes another to show special love toward him is a robber, and an offender against all.
“Mixed through this body, thou wast wretched enough; for thou wast subject to all its corruptions, even to the bite of the flea or the sorunculus. This did not suffice thee. Thou hast mixed thyself up with other quasi bodies, the opinion of men, admiration, love, honour, fear and the like. When these are harmed, pain comes to thee, as from bodily hurt. Thy honour is hurt when contempt is shown thee; and so with the rest. Think also thus regarding bodily forms.
“Unless thou hast despised whatever men can do to thwart or aid thee, thou wilt not be able to contemn their disposition toward thee, their hate and love, their opinions, good or bad.
“Why dost thou wish to be loved by men?
“Who rejoices in praise, loses praise.
“Who is pained or angered by the loss of any temporal thing, shows himself worth what he has lost.
“No thing ought to wish to be loved as good, unless it blesses its lover in the very matter for which it is loved. But no thing does this if it needs its lover, or is helped by loving or being loved by another. Most cruel, then, is the thing which wishes another to place affection and hope on it when it cannot benefit that other. The devils do this, who wish men to be engrossed in their service instead of God’s. So cry to thy lovers, Cease, ye wretched, to admire or respect or honour me; for I, miserable wretch, can neither aid myself nor you, but rather need your aid.
“So far as in thee is, thou hast destroyed all men, for thou hast put thyself between them and God, so that gazing on thee and ignoring God, they might admire and praise thee alone. This is utterly profitless to thee and them, not to say destructive.
“Whatever form thou dost enjoy is as the male to thy mind. For thy mind yields and lies down to it. Thou dost not assimilate it, but it thee. Its image endures, like an idol in its temple, to which thou dost sacrifice neither ox nor goat, but thy rational soul and thy body, to wit, thy whole self, when thou enjoyest it.
“See how, as in a wine-shop, thou dost prostitute thine as a venal love, and to the measure of pay weighest thyself out to men. In this wine-shop he receives nothing who gives nothing. And yet thou wouldst not have that which thou dost sell, unless freely from above it had been given to thee who gave nothing. Therefore thou hast received thy pay.
“To be empty and removed from God is to make ready for lust.
“Who wishes to enjoy thee in thyself, deserves from thee the thanks of flies and fleas who suck thy blood.
“This is the very sum of human depravity to forsake the better, which is God, and to regard the lesser and cleave to them by delighting in them--these temporalities!
“The beetle as it flies sees everything, and then selects nothing that is beautiful or wholesome or durable, but settles down upon dung. So thy soul in mental flight (intuitu pervolans) surveying heaven and earth and whatever is great and precious therein, cleaves to none of these, but embraces the cheap and dirty things occurring to its thought. Blush for this.
“When thou pleadest with God not to take from thee something to which thou cleavest by desire, it is as if an adulteress caught by her husband in the act, should not ask pardon for her crime, but beg him not to interrupt her pleasure. It is not enough for thee to go wantoning from God, but thou must incline Him to save and approve the things in which thou takest delight to thy undoing--the forms of bodies, their savours and their colours.
“The poverty of thine inner vision of God, purblind as thou art, although He is there, makes thee willing to go out of doors from thine own hearth, refusing to linger within thyself, as in the dark. So thou hast nothing to do but go gaping after the external forms of bodies and the opinions of men. Thou dost carry thyself in this world as if thou hadst come hither to gaze and wonder at the forms of bodies.
“May God be gracious to thee, that the feet of thy mind may find no resting-place, so that somehow, O soul, thou mayest return to the Ark, like Noah’s dove.
“Prosperity is a snare, adversity the knife that cuts it; prosperity imprisons us from the love of God; adversity breaks the dungeon in pieces.
“Since you are taken only by pleasure, you should shun whatever gives it. The Christian soul is safe only in adversity. From what thou cherishest God makes thee rods.
“The only medicine for every pain and torment is contempt for whatever in thee is hurt by them, and the turning of the mind to God.
“As many carnal pleasures as thou spurnest, just so many snares of the devil dost thou escape. As many tribulations--especially those for truth’s sake--as thou dost flee, so many salutary remedies thou spurnest.
“In hope thou mayest cherish the unripened grain; thus love those who are not yet good, Be such toward all as the Truth has shown itself toward thee. Just as it has sustained and loved thee for thy betterment, so do thou sustain and love men in order to better them.
“You are set as a standard to blunt the darts of the enemy, that is, to destroy evil by opposing good to it. You should never return evil for evil, except very medicinally; which is not to return evil but good.
“If to cleave to God is thine whole and only good, thine whole and only evil is separation from Him.
“Who loves all will be saved without doubt; but who is loved by men will not for that reason be saved.”
The unity of these Meditations lies in the absolute manner in which the meditating soul attaches itself to God as its whole and only good. Herein Guigo’s thoughts are Augustinian. One notes their clear intellectual tone. Nothing lures the thinker from his aim and goal of God. He abhors whatever might distract him; and as to all except God and God’s commands, he is indifferent. Guigo detests impermanence as keenly as did the Brahmin and Buddhist meditators of India. He has as high regard as any Indian or Greek philosopher for a life of thought. But there are differences between the Carthusian prior and the Greek or Indian sage. Guigo’s renunciation does not (from his standpoint) penetrate life as deeply as Gotama’s; for Guigo renounces only things comparatively insignificant, so utterly transient are they, so completely they pale before the light of his goal of God. Therein shall lie clearer attainment than lay at the end of any Indian chain of reasoning. So note well, that Guigo, like other Christians, is not essentially a renouncer, but one who attains and receives.
The difference between him and the Greek is also patent. The source of his blue lake of thought is not himself, but God. Although calm and sustained by reason, he is rationally the opposite of self-reliant, and so the opposite of the ideal Stoic or Aristotelian. God is his Creator, the source of his thoughts, the loadstar of his meditations, the all-comprehending object of his desire.
We find in Guigo further specific elements of Christian asceticism, which sharpen his repugnances for the world of transient phenomena. Those phenomena mostly contain elements of sin: all pleasure is temptation and a snare; adversity keeps the soul’s wings trimmed true. So the main content of passing mortal life, while not evil in itself, is so charged with temptation and allure, that it is worthy only of avoidance. The transient, the physical, the brutal, the diabolic--one shades into the next, and leads on to the last. Have none of them, O soul! They are snares all.
Of course, Guigo has the specific monkish horror of sexual lust, that chief of fleshly snares. But he goes further. With him all particular, disproportionate love is wrong; love no one, and desire not to be loved, out of the proportionment of the common love which God has for all His creatures: so love you, and not otherwise. Others, even women, attained this standard. In the legend, St. Elizabeth of Hungary gives thanks that she loves her own children no more than others’. She is no mother, but a saint. So Guigo will love all--love indeed? one queries. Thus also will he have others hold themselves toward him, lest he be a stumbling-block in their or his salvation.
Yea, salvation! If indeed this monk shall not have attained that, of a truth he would be of all men most miserable--save for the quiet, thought-filled calm which is his inner and his veritable life. It is a calm not riven by the storms which drove the soul of Peter Damiani. God was not less to Guigo; but the temperaments of the two men differed. Not beyond or out of one’s nature can one love or yearn, or even know the stress of storm.
XVII. THE QUALITY OF LOVE IN SAINT BERNARD
Through the prodigious power of his personality, St. Bernard gave new life to monasticism, promoted the reform of the secular clergy and the suppression of heresy, ended a papal schism, set on foot the Second Crusade, and for a quarter of a century swayed Christendom as never holy man before or after him. An adequate account of his career would embrace the entire history of the first half of the twelfth century.[472]
The man who was to move men with his love, and quell the proud with fear, had, as a youth, a graceful figure, a sweet countenance, and manners the most winning. Later in life he is spoken of as cheerfully bearing reproaches, but shamefaced at praise, and his gentle manners are again mentioned.
“As a helpmeet for his holy spirit, God made his body to conform. In his flesh there was visible a certain grace, but spiritual rather than of the flesh. A brightness not of earth shone in his look; there was an angelic purity in his eyes, and a dove-like simplicity. The beauty of the inner man was so great that it would burst forth in visible tokens, and the outer man would seem bathed from the store of inward purity and copious grace. His frame was of the slightest (tenuissimum), and most spare of flesh; a blush often tinged the delicate skin of his cheeks. And a certain natural heat (quidquid caloris naturalis) was in him, arising from assiduous meditation and penitent zeal. His hair was bright yellow, his beard reddish with some white hairs toward the end of his life. Actually of medium stature, he looked taller.”[473]
This same biography says:
“He who had set him apart, from his mother’s womb, for the work of a preacher, had given him, with a weak body, a voice sufficiently strong and clear. His speech, whatever persons he spoke to for the edifying of souls, was adapted to his audience; for he knew the intelligence, the habits and occupations of each and all. To country folk he spoke as if born and bred in the country; and so to other classes, as it he had been always occupied with their business. He was learned with the erudite, and simple with the simple, and with spiritual men rich in illustrations of perfection and wisdom. He adapted himself to all, desiring to gain all for Christ.”[474]
Bernard was born of noble parents at the Chateau of Fontaines, near Dijon, in the year 1090, and was educated in a church school at Chatillon on the Seine. It is an ofttold story, how, when little more than twenty years of age, he drew together a band formed of his own brothers, his uncle, and his friends, and led them to Citeaux,[475] his ardent soul unsatisfied so long as one held back. Three years later, in 1115, the Abbot, Stephen Harding, entrusted him with the headship of the new monastery, to be founded in the domains of the Count of Troyes. Bernard set forth with twelve companions, came to Clara Vallis on the river Aube, and placed his convent in that austere solitude.
Great were the attractions of Clairvaux (Clara Vallis) under Bernard’s vigorous and loving rule. Its monks increased so rapidly and so constantly that during its founder’s life sixty-five bands were sent forth to rear new convents. Meanwhile, Bernard’s activities and influence widened, till they seemed to compass western Christendom. He had become a power in the politics of Church and State. In 1130 he was summoned by Louis le Gros practically to determine the claims of the rival Popes Innocent II. and Anacletus II. He decided for the former, and was the chief instrument of his eventual reinstatement at Rome. Before this Bernard’s health had been broken by his extreme austerities. Yet even the lamentable failure of the Second Crusade, zealously promoted by him, did not break his power over Europe, which continued unimpaired until his death in 1153.
This active and masterful man was impelled by those elements of the vita contemplativa which formed his inner self. First and last and always he was a monk. Had he not been the very monk he was, he would not have been the dominator of men and situations that he proved himself to be. Temperament fashions the objects of contemplation, and shapes the yearning and aversions, of great monks. The temperamental element of love--the love of God and man, with its appurtenant detestations--made the heart of Bernard’s vita contemplativa, and impassioned and empowered his active faculties. It was the keynote of his life: in his letters it speaks in words of fire, while other writings of the saint analyze this great human quality with profundity and truth. In these he renders explicit the modes of affection which man may have for man and above all for God; he sets them forth as the path as well as goal of life on earth, and then as the rapt summit of attainment in the life to come. Through all its stages, as it flows from self to fellow, as it rises from man to God, love still is love, and forms the unifying principle among men and between them and God.
Let us trace in his letters the nature and the power of Bernard’s love, and see with what yearning he loved his fellows, seeking to withdraw them from the world; and how his love strove to be as sword and armour against the flesh and the devil. By easy transition we shall pass to Bernard’s warning wrath, flung against those who would turn the struggling soul aside, or threaten the Church’s peace; then by more arduous, but still unbroken stages, we may rise to the love of Jesus, and through love of the God-man to love of God. We shall realize at the close why that last mediaeval assessor of destinies, whose name was Dante Alighieri, selected St. Bernard as the exponent of the blessed vision which is salvation’s crown in the paradise of God.[476]
The way of life at Clara Vallis might discourage monks of feeble zeal. Among the brethren of these early days was one named Robert, a cousin of the Abbot, seemingly of weak and petulant disposition. Soon he fled, to seek a softer cell in Cluny, the great and rich monastery to which his parents appear to have dedicated him in childhood. For a while Bernard suppressed his grief; but the day came when he could endure no longer Robert’s abandonment of his soul’s safety and of the friend who yearned for him. He stole out of the monastery, accompanied by a monk named William. There, in the open (sub dio), Bernard dictated a long letter to be sent to the deserter. While the two were busy, the one dictating, the other writing, a rainstorm broke upon them. William wished to stop. “It is God’s work; write and fear not,” said Bernard. So William wrote on, in the midst of the rain; but no drop fell on him or the parchment; for the power of love which dictated the letter preserved the parchment on which it was being written.[477]
Whoever has read this letter in its own fervent Latin will not care to dispute this miracle, for which it stands first in the collection of Bernard’s correspondence. Bernard does not recriminate or argue in it; his love shall bring the young monk back to him. Yes, yes, he says to all that the other has urged regarding fancied slights and persecution:
“Quite right; I admit it. I am not writing in order to contend, but to end contention. To flee persecution is no fault in him who flees, but in him who pursues; I do not deny it. I pass over what has happened; I do not ask why or how it happened. I do not discuss faults, I do not dispute as to the circumstances, I have no memory for injuries. I speak only what is in my heart. Wretched me, that I lack thee, that I do not see thee, that I am living without thee, for whom to die would be to live; without whom to live, is to die. I ask not why thou hast gone away; I complain only that thou dost not return. Come, and there shall be peace; return, and all shall be made good.
“It was certainly my fault that thou didst go away. I was too austere with thy young years, and treated thee inhumanly. So thou saidst when here, and so I hear thou dost still reproach me. But that shall not be imputed to thee. I never meant it harshly, I was only indiscreet. Now thou wilt find me different, and I thee. Where before thou didst fear the master, thou shalt now embrace the companion. Do not think that I will not excuse any fault of thine. Dost thou wish to be quite free from fault? then return. If thou wilt forget thy fault I will pardon it; also pardon thou me, and I too will forget my fault.”
Bernard then argues long and passionately against those who had led the young man away and received him with such blandishments at Cluny; and passionately he argues against the insidious softening of monastic principles.
“Arise, soldier of Christ, arise, shake off the dust, return to the battle whence thou hast fled, and more bravely shalt thou fight and more gloriously triumph. Christ has many soldiers who bravely began, stood fast and conquered; He has few who have turned from flight and renewed the combat. Everything rare is precious; and thou among that rare company shalt the more radiantly shine.
“Thou art fearful? so be it; but why dost thou fear where there is no fear, and why dost thou not fear where everything is to be feared? Because thou hast fled from the battle-line, dost thou think to have escaped the foe? It is easier for the Adversary to pursue a fugitive than to bear himself against manful defence. Secure, arms cast aside, thou takest thy morning slumbers, the hour when Christ will have arisen! The multitude of enemies beset the house, and thou sleepest. Is it safer to be caught alone and sleeping, than armed with others in the field? Arouse thee, seize thy arms, and escape to thy fellow-soldiers. Dost thou recoil at the weight of thy arms, O delicate soldier! Before the enemy’s darts the shield is no burden, nor the helmet heavy. The bravest soldiers tremble when the trumpet is heard before the battle is joined; but then hope of victory and fear of defeat make them brave. How canst thou tremble, walled round with the zeal of thy armed brethren, angels bearing aid at thy right hand, and thy leader Christ? There shalt thou safely fight, secure of victory. O battle, safe with Christ and for Christ! In which there is no wound or defeat or circumvention so long as thou fleest not. Only flight loses the victory, which death does not lose. Blessed art thou, and quickly to be crowned, dying in battle. Woe for thee, if recoiling, thou losest at once the victory and the crown--which may He avert, my beloved son, who in the Judgment will award thee deeper damnation because of this letter of mine if He finds thee to have taken no amendment from it.”
“It is God’s work,” said Bernard to the hesitating scribe. These words suggest the character of the love which inspired this letter. He loved Robert as man yearns for man; but his motive was to do God’s will, and win the young man back to salvation. In after years this young man returned to Clara Vallis.
It was Bernard’s lot to write many letters urging procrastinators to fulfil their vows,[478] or appealing to those who had laid aside the arms of austerity, perhaps betaking themselves to the more worldly life of the secular clergy. This seems to have been the case with a young canon Fulco, whom an ambitious uncle sought to draw back to the world, or at least to a career of sacerdotal emolument. In fact, Fulco at last became an archdeacon; from which it may be inferred that in his case Bernard’s appeal was not successful. He had poured forth his arguments in an ardent letter.[479] Love compels him to use words to make the recipient grieve; for love would have him feel grief, that he might no longer have true cause for grief--good mother love, who can cherish the weak, exercise those who have entered upon their course, or quell the restless, and so show herself differently toward her sons, all of whom she loves. This letter, like the one to Robert, concludes with a burning peroration:
“What dost thou in the city, dainty soldier? Thy fellows whom thou hast deserted, fight and conquer; they storm heaven (coelum rapiunt) and reign, and thou, sitting on thy palfrey (ambulatorem), clothed in purple and fine linen, goest ambling about the highways!”
Bernard also wrote letters of consolation to parents whose sons had become monks, or letters of warning to those who sought to withdraw a monk from his good fight. In one instance, his influence had made a monk of a youth of gentle birth named Godfrey, to his parents’ grief. So Bernard writes to them:
“If God makes your son His also, what have you lost, or he? He, from rich, becomes richer, from being noble, still more illustrious, and what is more than all, from a sinner he becomes a saint. It behoved him to be made ready for the Kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world, and for this reason it is well for him to spend with us his short span of days, so that clean from the filth of living in the world, earth’s dust shaken off, he may become fit for the heavenly mansion. If you love him you will rejoice that he goes to his Father, and such a Father! He goes to God, but you do not lose him; rather through him you gain many sons. For all of us who belong to Clara Vallis have taken him to be our brother and you for our parents.
“Perhaps you fear this hard life for his tender body--that were to fear where there is nothing to fear. Have faith and be comforted. I will be a father to him and he shall be my son until from my hands the Father of Mercies and God of all consolation shall receive him. Do not grieve; do not weep; your Godfrey is hastening to joy, not to sorrow. A father to him will I be, a mother too, a brother and a sister. I will make the crooked ways straight, and the steep places plain. I will so temper and provide for him that as his spirit profits, his body shall not want. So shall he serve the Lord in joy and gladness, and shall sing before Him, How great is the glory of the Lord.”[480]
Young Godfrey was a daintily nurtured plant. For all the Abbot’s eloquence he did not stay in Clara Vallis. The world drew him back. It was now for the saint to weep:
“I grieve over thee, my son Godfrey; I grieve over thee. And with reason. For who would not lament that the flower of thy youth which, to the joy of angels, thou didst offer unsullied to God in the odour of sweetness, is now trampled on by demons, defiled with sins, and contaminated by the world. How could you, who were called by God, follow the devil recalling thee? How could you, whom He had begun to draw to Himself, withdraw your foot from the very entry upon glory? In thee I see the truth of those words: ‘A man’s foes are they of his own household.’ Thy friends and neighbours drew near and stood up against thee. They called thee back into the jaws of the lion and the gates of death. They have set thee in darkness, like the dead; and thou art nigh to go down into the belly of hell, which now is ravening to devour thee.
“Turn back, I say, turn back, before the abyss swallows you and the pit closes its mouth, before you are engulfed whence you shall not escape, before, bound hand and foot, you are cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, before you are hurled into darkness, shut in with the darkness of death.
“Perhaps you blush to return, where you have only now fallen away. Blush for flight, and not for turning to renew the combat. The conflict is not ended; the hostile arrays have not withdrawn from each other. We would not conquer without you, nor do we envy you your share of the glory. Joyful we will run to thee, and receive thee in our arms, crying: ‘It is meet to make merry and be glad; for this our son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.’”[481]
Who knows whether this letter brought back the little monk? Bernard wrote so lovingly to him, so gently to his parents. He could write otherwise, and show himself insensible to this world’s pestering tears. To the importunate parents of a monk named Elias, who would drag him away from Clara Vallis, Bernard writes in their son’s name thus:
“To his dear parents, Ingorranus and Iveta, Elias, monk but sinner, sends daily prayers.
“The only cause for which it is permitted not to obey parents is God; for He said: ‘Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’ If you truly love me as good and faithful parents, why do you molest my endeavour to please the Father of all, and attempt to withdraw me from the service of Him, to serve whom is to reign? For this I ought not to obey you as parents, but regard you as enemies. If you loved me, you would rejoice, because I go to my Father and yours. But what is there between you and me? What have I from you save sin and misery? And indeed the corruptible body which I carry I admit I have from you. Is it not enough that you brought miserable me into the misery of this hateful world? that you, sinners, in your sin produced a sinner? and that him born in sin, in sin you nourished? Envying the mercy which I have obtained from Him who desireth not the death of a sinner, would you make me a child of hell?
“O harsh father! savage mother! parents cruel and impious--parents! rather destroyers, whose grief is the safety of the child, whose consolation is the death of their son! who would drag me back to the shipwreck which I, naked, escaped; who would give me again to the robbers when through the good Samaritan I am a little recovering from my wounds.
“Cease then, my parents,” concludes the letter after many other reproofs, “cease to afflict yourselves with vain weeping and to disquiet me. No messengers you send will force me to leave. Clara Vallis will I never forsake. This is my rest, and here shall be my habitation. Here will I pray without ceasing for my sins and yours; here with constant prayer will I implore that He whose love has separated us for a little while, will join us in another life happy and inseparable,--in whose love we may live forever and ever. Amen.”[482]
If Bernard was severe toward those who threatened some loved person’s weal, his anger burned more fiercely against those whom he deemed enemies of God. Heavy was his hand upon the evils of the Church: “The insolence of the clergy--to which the bishop’s neglect is mother--troubles the earth and molests the Church. The bishops give what is holy to the dogs, and pearls to swine.”[483]
Likewise, fearlessly but with restraint arising from his respect for all power ordained of God, Bernard opposes kings. Thus he writes to Louis the Fat, in regard to the election of a bishop, with many protests, however, that he would not oppose the royal power--for which we note his reason: “If the whole world conspired to force me to do aught against kingly majesty, yet would I fear God, and would not dare to offend the king ordained by Him. For neither do I forget where I read that whosoever resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God.” But--but--but--continues the letter, through many qualifyings which are also admonitions. At last come the words: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, even for thee, O king.” Thereupon the saint does not fail to speak his mind.[484]
Bernard’s fiercest denunciations were reserved for heretics and schismatics, for Abaelard, for Arnold of Brescia, for the Antipope Anacletus--were they not enemies of God? Clearly the saint saw and understood these men from his point of view. Thus in a letter to Innocent II.[485] he sums up his attitude towards Abaelard: “Peter Abaelard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith, when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss! Nothing may hide from him in the depths of hell or in the heights above! The man is great in his own eyes--this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.” Here was the gist of the matter. That a man should be great in his own eyes, apart from God, and teach others so, stirred Bernard’s bowels.[486]
Of Arnold, the impetuous clerical revolutionist and pupil of Abaelard, Bernard writes with fury: “Arnold of Brescia, whose speech is honey and whose teaching poison, whom Brescia vomited forth, Rome abhorred, France repelled, Germany abominates, Italy will not receive, is said to be with you.”[487] Again, Bernard rejoices with great joy when he hears that the anti-pope who divided Christendom was dead.[488]
It is pleasant to turn back to Bernard’s lovingness and mercy. His God would not condemn those who repented; and the saint can be gentle toward sinners possibly repentant. He urges certain monks to receive back an erring brother: “Take him back then, you who are spiritual, in the spirit of gentleness; let love be confirmed in him, and let good intention excuse the evil done. Receive back with joy him whom you wept as lost.”[489] In another letter he urges a countess to be more lenient with her children;[490] and there is a story of his begging a robber from the hands of the executioners, and leading him to Clara Vallis, where he became at length a holy man.[491]
So one sees Bernard’s severity, his gentle mercy, and the love burning within him for his fellows’ good. Such were the emotions of Bernard the saint. The man’s human heart could also yearn, and feel bereavement in spite of faith. As his zeal draws him from land to land, he is home-sick for Clara Vallis. From Italy, in 1137, fighting to crush the anti-pope, a letter carries his yearning love to his dear ones there:
“Sad is my soul, and not to be consoled, until I may return. For what consolation save you in the Lord have I in an evil time and in the place of my pilgrimage? Wherever I go, your sweet recollection does not leave me; but the sweeter the memory the more vexing is the absence. Alas! my wandering not only is prolonged but aggravated. Hard enough is exile from the Lord, which is common to us all while we are pilgrims in the body. But I endure a special exile also, compelled to live away from you.
“For a third time my bowels are torn from me.[492] Those little children are weaned before the time; the very ones whom I begot through the Gospel I may not educate. I am forced to abandon my own, and care for the affairs of others; and it is not easy to say whether to be dragged from the former, or to be involved in the latter is harder to bear. Thus, O good Jesus, my whole life is spent in grief and my years in groaning! It is good for me, O Lord, to die, rather than to live and not among my brothers, my own household, my own dearest ones.”[493]
Bernard had a younger brother, Gerard, whom he deeply loved. In 1138 he died while still young, and having recently returned with Bernard from Italy. Bernard, dry-eyed, read the burial-service over his body; so says his biographer wondering, for the saint was not wont to bury even strangers without tears.[494] No other eyes were dry at that funeral. Afterwards he preached a sermon;[495] it began with restraint, then became a long cry of grief.
The saint took the text from Canticles where he had left off in his previous sermon--“I am black, but comely, as the tents of Kedar.” He proceeded to expound its meaning: the tents are our bodies, in which we pilgrims dwell and carry on our war. Then he spoke of other portions of the text--and suddenly deferred the whole subject till his next sermon: Grief ordains an end, “and the calamity which I suffer.”
“For why dissemble, or conceal the fire which is scorching my sad breast? What have I to do with this Song, I who am in bitterness? The power of grief turns my intent, and the anger of the Lord has parched my spirit. I did violence to my soul and dissembled till now, lest sorrow should seem to conquer faith. Others wept, but with dry eyes I followed the hateful funeral, and dry-eyed stood at the tomb, until all the solemnities were performed. In my priestly robes I finished the prayers, and sprinkled the earth over the body of my loved one about to become earth. Those who looked on, weeping, wondered that I did not. With such strength as I could command, I resisted and struggled not to be moved at nature’s due, at the fiat of the Powerful, at the decree of the Just, at the scourge of the Terrible, at the will of the Lord. But though tears were pressed back, I could not command my sadness; and grief, suppressed, roots deeper. I confess I am beaten. My sorrow will out before the eyes of my children who understand and will console.
“You know, my sons, how just is my grief. You know what a comrade has left me in the path wherein I was walking. He was my brother in blood and still closer by religion. I was weak in body, and he carried me; faint-hearted, and he comforted me; lazy, and he spurred me; thoughtless, and he admonished me. Whither art thou snatched away, snatched from my hands! O bitter separation, which only death could bring; for living, thou wouldst never leave me. Why did we so love, and now have lost each other! Hard state, but my fortune, not his, is to be pitied. For thou, dear brother, if thou hast lost dear ones, hast gained those who are dearer. Me only this separation wounds. Sweet was our presence to each other, sweet our consorting, sweet our colloquy; I have lost these joys; thou hast but changed them. Now, instead of such a worm as me, thou hast the presence of Christ. But what have I in place of thee? And perhaps though thou knewest us in the flesh, now that thou hast entered into the power of the Lord, thou art mindful only of His righteousness, forgetting us.
“I seem to hear my brother saying: ‘Can a woman forget her sucking child; even so, yet will I not forget thee.’ That does not help, where no hand is stretched out.”
Bernard speaks of Gerard’s unfailing helpfulness to him and every one, and of his piety and religious life. He feels the cares of his life and station closing around him, and his brother gone. Then he justifies his grief, and pours it forth unrestrained. Would any one bid him not to weep? as well tell him not to feel when his bowels were torn from him; he feels, for his flesh is not brass; he grieves, and his grief is ever before him:
“I confess my sorrow. Will some one call me carnal? Certainly I am human, since I am a man. Nor do I deny being carnal, for I am, and sold under sin, adjudged to death and punishment. I am not insensible to punishments; I shudder at death, my own or others’. Mine was Gerard, mine! He is gone, and I feel, and am wounded, grievously!
“Pardon me, my sons; or rather lament your father’s state. Pity me, and think how grievously I have been requited for my sins by the hand of God. Though I feel the punishment, I do not impugn the sentence. This is human; that would be impious. Man must needs be affected towards those dear to him, with gladness at their presence, with sorrow at their absence. I grieve over thee, Gerard, my beloved, not because thou art to be pitied, but because thou art taken away. May it be that I have not lost thee, but sent thee on before! Be it granted me some time to follow whither thou art gone; for thou hast joined the company of those heavenly ones on whom in thy last hours thou didst call exultingly to praise the Lord. For thee death had no sting, nor any fear. Through his jaws Gerard passed to his Fatherland safe and glad and exulting. When I reached his side, and he had finished the psalm, looking up to heaven, he said in a clear voice: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ Then saying over again and again the word, ‘Father, Father,’ he turned his joyful face to me, and said: ‘What great condescension that God should be father to men! What glory for men to be sons of God and heirs of God!’ So he rejoiced, till my grief was almost turned to a song of gladness.
“But the pang of sorrow calls me back from that lovely vision, as care wakens one from light slumber. I grieve, but only over myself; I lament his loss to this household, to the poor, to all our Order; whom did he not comfort with deed and word and example? Grievously am I afflicted, because I love vehemently. And let no one blame my tears; for Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb. His tears bore witness to His nature, not to His lack of faith. So these tears of mine; they show my sorrow, not my faithlessness. I grieve, but do not murmur. Lord, I will sing of thy mercy and righteousness. Thou gavest Gerard; thou hast taken him. Though we grieve that he is gone, we thank thee for the gift.
“I bear in mind, O Lord, my pact and thy commiseration, that thou mightest the more be justified in thy word. For when last year we were in Viterbo, and he fell sick, and I was afflicted at the thought of losing him in a strange land and not bringing him back to those who loved him, I prayed to thee with groans and tears: ‘Wait, O Lord, until our return. When he is restored to his friends, take him, if thou wilt, and I will not complain.’ Thou heardest me, God; he recovered; we finished the work thou hadst laid on us, and returned in gladness bringing our sheaves of peace. Then I was near to forget my pact, but not so thou. I shame me of these sobs, which convict me of prevarication. Thou hast recalled thy loan, thou hast taken again what was thine. Tears set an end to words; thou, O Lord, wilt set to them limit and measure.”[496]
We may now turn to Bernard’s love of God, and rise with him from the fleshly to the spiritual, from the conditioned to the absolute. There is no break; love is always love. More especially the love of Christ, the God-man is the mediating term: He presents the Godhead in human form; to love Him is to know a love attaching to both God and man.
Guigo, Prior of the “Grande Chartreuse,” whose Meditations have been given,[497] was Bernard’s friend, and wrote to him upon love. Bernard replies: “While I was reading it, I felt sparks in my breast, from which my heart glowed within me as from that fire which the Lord sent upon the earth!” He hesitates to suggest anything to Guigo’s fervent spirit, as he would hesitate to rouse a bride quiet in the bridegroom’s arms. Yet “what I do not dare, love dares; it boldly knocks at a friend’s door, fearing no repulse, and quite careless of disturbing your delightful ease with its affairs.” Bernard is here speaking of love’s importunate devotion; his words characterize the soul’s importuning of God:
“I should call love undefiled because it keeps nothing of its own. Indeed it has nothing of its own, for everything which it has is God’s. The undefiled law of the Lord is love, which seeks not what profits itself but what profits many. It is called the law of the Lord, either because He lives by it, or because no one possesses it save by His gift. It is not irrational to speak of God as living by law, that law being love. Indeed in the blessed highest Trinity what preserves that highest ineffable unity, except love?”
So far, Bernard has been using the word charitas. Now, in order to indicate love’s desire, he begins to use the words cupiditas and amor.[498] When these yearning qualities are rightly guided by God’s grace, what is good will be cherished for the sake of what is better, the body will be loved for the soul’s sake, the soul for God’s sake, and God for His own sake.
“Yet because we are of the flesh (carnales) and are begotten through the flesh’s concupiscence, our yearning love (cupiditas vel amor noster) must begin from the flesh; yet if rightly directed, advancing under the leadership of grace, it will be consummated in spirit. For that which is first is not spiritual, but that which is natural (animale); then that which is spiritual. First man loves (diligit) himself for his own sake. For he is flesh, and is able to understand nothing beyond himself. When he sees that he cannot live (subsistere) by himself alone, he begins, as it were from necessity, to seek and love God. Thus, in this second stage, he loves God, but only for his own sake. Yet as his necessities lead him to cultivate and dwell with God in thinking, reading, praying, and obeying, God little by little becomes known and becomes sweet. Having thus tasted how sweet is the Lord, he passes to the third stage, where he loves God for God’s sake. Whether any man in this life has perfectly attained the fourth stage, where he loves himself for God’s sake, I do not know. Let those say who have knowledge; for myself, I confess it seems impossible. Doubtless it will be so when the good and faithful servant shall have entered into the joy of his Lord, and shall be drunk with the flowing richness of God’s house. Then oblivious to himself, he will pass to God and become one spirit with Him.”[499]
So one sees the stages through which love of self and lust of fellow become love of God. A responsive emotion attends each ascending step in the saint’s intellectual apprehension of love--as one should bear in mind while following the larger exposition of the theme in Bernard’s De deligendo Deo.[500]
The cause and reason for loving God is God; the mode is to love without measure: “Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est; modus, sine modo diligere.” Should we love God because of His desert, or our advantage? For both reasons. On the score of His desert, because He first loved us. What stint shall there be to my love of Him who is my life’s free giver, its bounteous administrator, its kind consoler, its solicitous ruler, its redeemer, eternal preserver and glorifier? On the other hand, “God is not loved without reward; but He should be loved without regard to the reward. Charitas seeks not its own. It is affection and not a contract; it is not bought, nor does it buy. Amor is satisfied with itself. It has the reward, which is what is loved. True love demands no reward, but merits one. The reward, although not sought by the lover, is due him, and will be rendered if he perseveres.”
Bernard proceeds to expound the four stages or grades (gradus) of love:
“Love is a natural affection, one of the four.[501] As it exists by nature, it should diligently serve the Author of nature first of all. But as nature is frail and weak, love is compelled by necessity first to serve itself. This is carnal love, whereby, above everything, man loves himself for his own sake. It is not set forth by precept, but is rooted in nature; for who hates his own flesh? As love becomes more ready and profuse, it is not content with the channel of necessity, but will pour forth and overspread the broad fields of pleasure. At once the overflow is bridled by the command, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ This is just and needful, lest what is part of nature should have no part in grace. A man may concede to himself what he will, so long as he is mindful to provide the same for his neighbour. The bridle of temperance is imposed on thee, O man, out of the law of life and discipline, in order that thou shouldst not follow thy desires, nor with the good things of nature serve the enemy of the soul, which is lust. If thou wilt turn away from thy pleasures, and be content with food and raiment, little by little it will not so burden thee to keep thy love from carnal desires, which war against the soul. Thy love will be temperate and righteous when what is withdrawn from its own pleasures is not denied to its brother’s needs. Thus carnal love becomes social when extended to one’s kind.
“Yet in order that perfect justice should exist in the love of neighbour, God must be regarded (Deum in causa haberi necesse est). How can one love his neighbour purely who does not love in God? God makes Himself loved, He who makes all things good. He who founded nature so made it that it should always need to be sustained by Him. In order that no creature might be ignorant of this, and arrogate for himself the good deeds of the Creator, the Founder wisely decreed that man should be tried in tribulations. By this means, when he shall have failed and God have aided, God shall be honoured by him whom He has delivered. The result is that man, animal and carnal, who knew not how to love any one beside himself, begins for his own sake to love God; because he has found out that in God he can accomplish everything profitable, and without Him can do nothing.
“So now for his own interest, he loves God--love’s second grade; but does not yet love God for God’s sake. If, however, tribulation keeps assailing him, and he continually turns to God for aid, and God delivers him, will not the man so oft delivered, though he have a breast of iron and a heart of stone, be drawn to cherish his deliverer, and love Him not only for His aid but for Himself? Frequent necessities compel man to come to God incessantly; repeatedly he tastes and, by tasting, proves how sweet is the Lord. At length God’s sweetness, rather than human need, draws the man to love Him. Thereafter it will not be hard for the man to fulfil the command to love his neighbour. Truly loving God, he loves for this reason those who are God’s. He loves chastely, and is not oppressed through obeying the chaste command; he loves justly, and willingly embraces the just command. That is the third grade of love, when God is loved for Himself.
“Happy is he who attains to the fourth grade, where man loves himself only on account of God. Thy righteousness, O God, is as the mountain of God; love is that mountain, that high mountain of God. Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord? Who will give me the wings of a dove and I will fly away and be at rest. Alas! for my long-drawn sojourning! When shall I gain that habitation in Zion, and my soul become one spirit with God? Blessed and holy will I call him to whom in this mortal life such has been given though but once. For to be lost to self and not to feel thyself, and to be emptied of thyself and almost to be made nothing, that pertains to heavenly intercourse, not to human affection. And if any one among mortals here gain admission for an instant, at once the wicked world is envious, the day’s evil disturbs, the body of death drags down, fleshly necessity solicits, corruption’s debility does not sustain, and, fiercest of all, brotherly love calls back! Alas! he is dragged back to himself, and forced to cry: ‘O Lord, I suffer violence, answer thou for me’ (Isa. xxxviii. 14); ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Rom. vii. 24).
“Yet Scripture says that God made all things for His own sake; that will come to pass when the creation is in full accord with its Author. Therefore we must sometime pass into that state wherein we do not wish to be ourselves or anything else, except for His sake and by reason of His will, not ours. Then not our need or happiness, but His will, will be fulfilled in us. O holy love and chaste! O sweet affection! O pure and purged intention of the will, in which nothing of its own is mingled! This is it to be made God (deificari). As the drop of water is diffused in a jar of wine, taking its taste and colour, and as molten iron becomes like to fire and casts off its form, and as the air transfused with sunlight is transformed into that same brightness of light, so that it seems not illumined, but itself to be the light, thus in the saints every human affection must in some ineffable mode be liquefied of itself and transfused into the will of God. How could God be all in all if in man anything of man remained? A certain substance will remain, but in another form, another glory, another power.”
Hereupon St. Bernard considers how this fourth grade of love will be attained in the resurrection, and “perpetually possessed, when God only is loved and we love ourselves only for His sake, that He may be the recompense and aim (praemium) of those who love themselves, the eternal recompense of those who love eternally.”
Christ is the universal Mediator between God and man, not only because reconciling them, but as forming the intervening term, the concrete instance of the One suited to the comprehension of the other. Such thoughts and sentiments as commonly apply to man, when they are applied to Christ become fit to apply to God. Herein especially may be perceived the continuing identity of love, whether relating to human beings or to God. The soul’s love of Christ is mediatorial, and symbolic of its love of God. All of which Bernard has demonstrated with conjoined power of argument and feeling in his famous Sermons on Canticles.[502]
The human personality of Christ draws men to love Him, till their love is purged of carnality and exalted to a perfect love of God:
“Observe that the heart’s love is partly carnal; it is affected through the flesh of Christ and what He said and did while in the flesh. Filled with this love, the heart is readily touched by discourse upon His words and acts. It hears of nothing more willingly, reads nothing more carefully, recalls nothing more frequently, and meditates upon nothing more sweetly. When man prays, the sacred image of the God-man is with him, as He was born or suckled, as He taught or died, rose from the dead or ascended to heaven. This image never fails to nerve man’s mind with the love of virtue, cast out the vices of the flesh and quell its lusts. I deem the principal reason why the invisible God wished to be seen in the flesh, and, as man, hold intercourse with men, was that He might draw the affections of carnal men, who could only love carnally, to a salutary love of His flesh, and then on to a spiritual love.”
Conversely, the Saviour’s example teaches men how they should love Him:
“He loved sweetly, wisely, and bravely: sweetly, in that He put on flesh; wisely, in that He avoided fault; bravely, in that He bore death. Those, however, with whom He sojourned in the flesh, He did not love carnally, but in prudence of spirit. Learn then, Christian, from Christ how to love Christ.”
Bernard shows how even the Apostles failed sometimes to love Him according to His perfect teaching and example:
“Good, indeed, is this carnal love,” he concludes, “through which a carnal life is shut out; and the world is despised and conquered. This love progresses as it becomes rational, and perfected as it becomes spiritual.”[503]
From his own experiences Bernard could have spoken much of the winning power of Jesus, and could have told how sweetly it drew him to love his Saviour’s steps from Bethlehem to Calvary. The fifteenth sermon upon Canticles is on the healing power of Jesus’ name.
“Dry is all food for the soul unless anointed with that oil. Whatever you write is not to my taste unless I read Jesus there. Your talk and disputation is nothing unless that name is rung. Jesus is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, joy in the heart. He is medicine as well. Is any one troubled, let Jesus come into the heart and thence leap to the lips, and behold! at the rising of that bright name the clouds scatter and the air is again serene. If any one slips in crime, and then desponds amid the snares of death, will he not, invoking that name of life, regain the breath of life? In whom can hardness of heart, sloth, rancour, languishment stand before that name? In whom at its invocation will not the dried fount of tears burst forth more abundantly and sweetly? To what fearful trembler did the power of that name ever fail to bring back confidence? To what man struggling amid doubts did not the clear assurance of that name, invoked, shine forth? Who despairing in adversity lacked fortitude if that name sounded? These are the languors and sickness of the soul, and that the medicine. Nothing is as potent to restrain the attack of wrath, or quell the tumour of pride, or heal envy’s wound, or put out the fire of lust, or temper avarice. When I name Jesus, I see before me a man meek and humble of heart, benignant, sober, chaste, pitying, holy, who heals me with His example and strengthens me with aid. I take example from the Man, and draw aid from the Mighty One. Here hast thou, O my soul, an herb of price, hidden in the vessel of that name, bringing thee health surely and in thy sickness failing thee never.”
This is a little illustration of Bernard’s love of the Christ-man, a love which is ever taking on spiritual hues and changing to a love of the Christ-God. Christians, from the time of Origen, had recognized the many offices of Christ, the many saving potencies in which He ministered unto each soul according to its need. And so Bernard preaches that the sick soul needs Christ as the physician, but that the saintly soul has other yearnings for a more perfect communion.
This perfect communion, this most complete relationship which in this mortal life a soul can have with Christ, with God, had been symbolized, likewise ever since the time of Origen, by the words Bride and Bridegroom, and the Song of Songs had furnished the burning phrases. With surpassing spirituality Bernard uses the texts of Canticles to set forth the relationship of the soul to Christ, of man to God. The texts are what they are, burning, sensuous, fleshly, intense, and beautiful--every one knows them; but in Bernard’s sermons flesh fades before the spirit’s whiter glow.
“O love (amor), headlong, vehement, burning, impetuous, that canst think of nothing beyond thyself, detesting all else, despising all else, satisfied with thyself! Thou dost confound ranks, carest for no usage, knowest no measure. In thyself dost thou triumph over apparent opportuneness, reason, shame, council and judgment, and leadest them into captivity. Everything which the soul-bride utters resounds of thee and nothing else; so hast thou possessed her heart and tongue.”[504]
What Bernard here ejaculates as to the overwhelming sufficiency of love, he sets forth finally in a sustained and reasoned passage, in which man’s ways of loving God are cast together in a sequence of ardent thought and image. He has been explaining the soul’s likeness to the Word. Although it be afflicted and defiled by sin, it may yet venture to come to Him whose likeness it retains, however obscured. The soul does not leave God by change of place, but, in the manner of spiritual substance, by becoming depraved. The return of the soul is its conversion, in which it is made conformable to God.
“Such conformity marries the soul to the Word, whom it is like by nature, and may show itself like in will, loving as it is loved. If it loves perfectly it weds. What more delightful than this conformity, what more desirable than this love, through which thou, O soul, faithfully drawest near to the Word, with constancy cleavest to the Word, consulting Him in everything, as capable in intellect as audacious in desire. Spiritual is the contracting of these holy nuptials, wherein always to will the same makes one spirit out of two. No fear lest the disparity of persons make but a lame concurrence of wills: for love does not know respect. The name love comes from loving and not from honouring. He may honour who dreads, who is struck dumb with fear and wonder. Not so the lover. Love aboundeth in itself, and derides and imprisons the other emotions. Wherefore she who loves, loves, and knows nothing else. And He who is to be honoured and marvelled at, still loves rather to be loved. Bridegroom and Bride they are. And what necessity or bond is there between spouses except to be loved and love?
“Think also, that the Bridegroom is not only loving but very love. Is He also honour? I have not so read. I have read that God is love; not that He is honour, or dignity. God indeed demands to be feared as Lord, to be honoured as Father, and as Bridegroom to be loved. Which excels the rest? Love, surely. Without it, fear is penal, and honour graceless. Fear is slavish till manumitted by love; and the honour which does not rise from love is adulation. To God alone belong honour and glory; but He will accept neither unless it is flavoured with love’s honey.
“Love asks neither cause nor fruit beyond itself. I love because I love; I love that I may love. A great thing is love. Among all the movements, sensations, and affections of the soul, it is the only one wherein the creature can make a return to its Author. If God be angry with me, shall I likewise be angry with Him? Nay, I will fear and tremble and beseech. If He accuse me, I will make no counter-charge, but plead before Him. If He judge me, I will not judge but worship. And when He saves me, He asks not to be saved by me; nor does He who frees all ask to be freed of any one. Likewise if He commands, I obey, and do not order Him. Now see how different it is with love. For when God loves, He wishes only to be loved; He loves with no other end than to be loved, knowing that those who love are blessed with love itself.
“A great thing is love; but there are grades in it. The Bride stands at the summit. Sons love, but they are thinking of their inheritance. Fearing to lose that, they honour, rather than love, him from whom they expect it. Love is suspect when its suffrage appears to be won by hope of gain. Weak is it, if it cease or lessen with that hope withdrawn. It is impure if it desires anything else. Pure love is not mercenary: it gains no strength from hope, nor weakens with lack of trust. This love is the Bride’s, because she is what she is by love. Love is the Bride’s sole hope and interest. In it the Bride abounds and the Bridegroom is content. He seeks nothing else, nor has she ought beside. Hence he is Bridegroom and she Bride. This belongs to spouses which none else, not even a son, can attain. Man is commanded to honour his father and mother; but there is silence as to love. Which is not because parents are not to be loved by their sons; but because sons are rather moved to honour them. The honour of the King loves judgment; but the Bridegroom’s love--for He is love--asks only love’s return and faith.
“Rightly renouncing all other affections, the Bride reposes on love alone, and returns a love reciprocal. And when she has poured her whole self out in love, what is that compared with the perennial flood of that fountain? Not equals in abundance are this loving one and Love, the soul and the Word, the Bride and Bridegroom, creature and Creator--no more than thirst equals the fount. What then? shall she therefore despair, and the vow of the would-be Bride be rendered empty? Shall the desire of this panting one, the ardour of this loving one, the trust of this confiding one be baffled because she cannot keep pace with the giant’s course, in sweetness contend with honey, in mildness with the Lamb, in whiteness with the Lily, in brightness with the Sun, in love with Him who is love? No. For although the creature loves less, because she is less, yet if she loves with her whole self, nothing lacks where there is all. Wherefore, as I have said, so to love is to have wedded; for no one can so love and yet be loved but little, and in mutual consent stands the entire and perfect marriage.”[505]
Who has not marvelled that the relationship of marriage should make so large a part of the symbolism through which monks and nuns expressed the soul’s love of God? Historically it might be traced to Paul’s precept, “Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church”; still more potently it was derived from the Song of Songs. But beyond these almost adventitious influences, did not the holy priest, the monk, the nun, feel and know that marriage was the great human relationship? So they drew from it the most adequate allegory of the soul’s communion with its Maker: differently according to their sex, with much emotion, and even with unseemly imaginings, they thought and felt the love of God along the ways of wedded union or even bridal passion.[506]