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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES
IN
MEDIEVAL LIFE AND THOUGHT
Edited by G. G. Coulton
FIVE CENTURIES OF RELIGION
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOLUME I
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, Manager LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.C. 4
NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY }
CALCUTTA l MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. MADRAS )
TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SVWOHX AH ARIIHSMHOA
FIVE CENTURIES OF RELIGION
BY
G. G. COULTON
M.A., Camb., Hon. D.Litt., Durham
FELLOW OF ST JOHn’s COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, HONORARY FELLOW OF ST CATHARINE S COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN ENGLISH
VOLUME I
ST BERNARD, HIS PREDECESSORS AND SUCCESSORS, 1000-1200 a.d.
CAMBRIDGE
at the university press
1 9 2 3
asa.
u
“From the study of history the Church has everything to gain; from the critical examination of every existing move¬ ment, from the cultivation of a critical habit in every thinking being, the ministers of religion have nothing to fear, everything to hope.”
Letters of Bishop Stubbs ,
ed. W. H. Hutton, 1906, p. 72
“The cause of truth, never dominant in this world, has its ebbs and flows. It is pleasant to live in a day when the tide is coming in. Such is our own day.”
Cardinal Newman, University Sketches, Lecture xx
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
TO
THE MASTERS AND FELLOWS OF TWO CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES
TRINITY
TO WHOM THIS BOOK OWES ITS BEGINNINGS
ST JOHN’S
WHOSE SINGULAR GENEROSITY HAS SPEEDED ITS COMPLETION
*3
**•
*
* > «
>»
PREFACE
A LTHOUGH my other two volumes are almost ready for the jfV press, and could, if necessary, be printed as they stand, yet it seemed better not to let the first wait upon those finishing touches which are still required for the second and third. It is hoped that each volume will be found to have a certain com¬ pleteness of its own. The second, dealing mainly with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, will describe in detail the monks’ finance, economy, discipline, daily business and exterior relations during the generations in which the institution was possibly strongest in itself, and certainly most conspicuous in the western world; it will be entitled “The Friars and the Dead Weight of Tradition.” The third will deal with the reforming efforts of the fifteenth century, their failure to arrest the general decay, and the ensuing catastrophe of the sixteenth century.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Syndics and officers of the University Library and Press for unvarying kindness and help ; to my wife for the Index ; to Messrs A. Hamilton Thompson and H. E. Salter for their generous communication in advance of many important documents; to Messrs H. S. Bennett and G. R. Potter for valuable assistance in proof-correction, and to the following for kind assistance in illustrating these three volumes : Dr F. J. Allen, M. Lucien Begule, Messrs C. H. Bothamley and E. M. Beloe, Dr M. R. James, Prof. A. G. Little, Mr H. Olley, the Prior of St Hugh’s Charterhouse, MM. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, the Editor of The Studio, Messrs Spottiswoode and Co., and the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge.
G. G. C.
January, 1923
-
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. AIM AND SCOPE OF THIS WORK
CHAPTER I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM A question not altogether dependent on religious beliefs, i. Potentialities of monasticism in the modern world, 6. The problem of self-sacrifice, 7. Its significance in the Great War, 9
CHAPTER II. THE RISE OF MONASTICISM .
The characteristic manifestation of Christianity during the dark ages , 1 o . Monasticism organized “otherworldliness ,”14. Attractive¬ ness of seclusion, 16. Unsacerdotalism of early monasticism, 18
CHAPTER III. THE MONK’S GOD .
Appreciative accounts easily accessible, 20. Need for counter¬ emphasis, 22. Monasticism as institutional Christianity, 26. Popular demonology absorbed by the Church, 29. Great power ascribed to demons, 38. Their ubiquity, 40
CHAPTER IV. THE LORD OF DARKNESS Popular anthropomorphism and virtual Tritheism, 45. Medieval symbolism essentially popular, 59. Dualism. Considerable inde¬ pendence of spiritual Christianity, 60. Literal interpretation of the Last Judgement, 64
CHAPTER V. HELL AND PURGATORY .... Salvation only for the few, 67. Undercurrent of revolt against the official attitude, 72. Increasing emphasis laid on the tortures of purgatory, 75
CHAPTER VI. THE SAFEGUARD OF THE COWL The precept of silence, 79. Frequent evasions, 86. Monachi ad succurrendum, 90. Acedia, 97
CHAPTER VII. THE MASS .
It is the popular medieval conception which mainly concerns us here, 100. Earliest records unfavourable to Transubstantiation, 103. Anatomical miracles, no. The Host treated as a fetish, 116
CHAPTER VIII. THE MASS (Continued) .... The Mass and the monks, 124. Neglect, indifference and irreve¬ rence, 129. Medieval notions based upon unproved axioms, 135
CHAPTER IX. THE MOTHER OF GOD .... To what extent can we speak of Mariolatry? 138. The Church saturated with feudal ideas, 141. Mary and the Mendicants, 144. Mary popularly exalted above Christ, to all practical purposes, 150
CHAPTER X. THE GOSPEL OF MARY . . . .
Official encouragement of Mariolatry, 155. Her beauty, 159. Feminine characteristics, 162. Yet despair and indifference were common, 169. Berthold of Regensburg, 17 1
PAGE
xxxi
1-9
10-19
20-44
45-66
67-77
78-99
100-123
124-137
138-154
I55-U3
X
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XI. WOMEN AND THE FAITH Low status of medieval woman, 174. Low ideal of marriage and family life, 179. Demonology, 183. Medieval blasphemy and un¬ belief, 186. The Great Schism, 190. Catholicism and Progress, 192. But many redeeming features; St Benedict’s Rule, 194
CHAPTER XII. ST BENEDICT .
Early life, 198. At Monte Cassino, 201. Prominence of the devil in St Gregory’s Dialogues, 203
CHAPTER XIII. THE RULE OF BENEDICT . Common-sense its characteristic, 208. Quasi-military obedience, 210. Labour, 211. Prayer, 212. Self-denial, Poverty, Obedience, Chastity, 214. Rigorous discipline, 217
CHAPTER XIV. OBLATE CHILDREN .
Need for centralization of the Benedictine houses: the Cluniac reform, 219. Children dedicated at an early age, 223. Rigorous restrictions, 227. Early break-down of this system, 230
CHAPTER XV. THE MIRACLES OF ST BENEDICT . Secularization has set in long before the eleventh century, 234. The abbey of Fleury, 238. Miracles of healing, 241. Saintly help as a business contract, 244
CHAPTER XVI. THE NEED FOR REFORM .
Power of local magnates, 247. Feeling of security within the monastery, 251. Many clauses of the Rule obsolete, 253. The commendam system, 259
CHAPTER XVII. WHAT CONTEMPORARIES THOUGHT The struggle for clerical celibacy, 262. The Consuetudines Vetustae Cluniacenses, 267. Movement towards reform in the eleventh century, 273. Wealth a natural cause of decay, 275. Foundation of Citeaux, 280. St Stephen Harding and the Carta Caritatis, 281
CHAPTER XVIII. ST BERNARD .
His relations with Abailard. His real greatness, 283. Early life and parentage, 287. Knowledge of the Bible-text, 291 . His common- sense, e.g. attitude towards the Immaculate Conception, 293. Eloquence and spiritual fervour, 298
CHAPTER XIX. CLAIRVAUX .
Large numbers. Puritan tendencies, 300. St Bernard’s sermons, 302. Conversion of Henry of France, 305. Bernard’s compelling love the secret of his success, 308. His temptations and weak¬ nesses, 312
CHAPTER XX. THE CISTERCIAN IDEAL
Causes of decline, 315. The fault lies in the system, 317. External
difficulties, 320. The model monk a puritan, 321
CHAPTER XXL CISTERCIANS AND CLUNIACS . What is the evidence for Cistercian pharisaism? Ordericus Vitalis, 324. Peter the Venerable, 325. Cistercians abolish the oblate system, 327. Admission of novices. Food, 329. Labour, 331. Reasonableness of Bernard’s attitude, 333
PAGE
174-197
198-206
207-218
219-233
234-246
247-261
262-282
283-299
300-314
315-323
324-334
CONTENTS
xi
CHAPTER XXII. A CISTERCIAN FOUNDATION .
The Rule too high an ideal, 335. The monks of Heisterbach, 338. Art restricted, 340. Relics, 342
CHAPTER XXIII. CAESARIUS OF HEISTERBACH Early years at Cologne, 343. Corruption of that city, 345. Motives leading to conversion, 347. Monks frequently tempted, 351. Apostasy not infrequent, 352
CHAPTER XXIV. A NOVICE’S SOUL .
Psychological interest of the novice. The Everlasting Yea, 354. Aiired of Rievaulx, 355. Bickerings within the cloister, 361. Philosophical calm the ultimate goal, 363
CHAPTER XXV. THE NOVICE AND HIS MASTER . Dangers of apostasy, 365. Reality of the devil, 368. Helinand of Froidmont, 370. True Cistercians are sure of heaven, 372
CHAPTER XXVI. THE CISTERCIANS OF 1250 a.d. . Comparative excellence of the Order, 375. Desire for flesh-food, 378. Hard business policy, 379. Value of the cowl, 381. Con¬ sciousness of rest, 384
PAGE
335-342
343-353
354-364
365-374
375-385
CHAPTER XXVII. COMMERCIALISM AND DECAY . 386-397
Contemporary records, 386. An acquisitive society, 389. Indul¬ gences to eat flesh, 392. Debts, 394. Exemption from tithes, 396
CHAPTER XXVIII. THE ETERNAL FEMININE . . 398-412
Intercourse with women rigorously prohibited, 398. Progressive laxity, 403. Incontinence. Strict claustration. Nuns, 405. German degradation ; Tritheim, 408. French evidence collected by Imbart de la Tour, 41 1
* CHAPTER XXIX. THE ENGLISH CISTERCIANS . . 413-429
Foundation of Fountains, 413. Disorder at St Mary’s, York, 415.
Wealth brings decay, 417. Neglect at Meaux, 419. Pittances, 421.
Hired labourers, 425. Money and morals, 429
J CHAPTER XXX. EPILOGUE . 430-438
Modem doctrinal developments, 430. Exclusive character of monasticism, 432. The monk superseded by the university student and the friar, 433. Cloistered Christianity a stage in evolution, 435. The brotherhood of man, 437
APPENDIXES:
1. Monastic History . 439
2. The Medieval Hell:
A. The blessed rejoice in the sight of the damned . . . 441
B. Infant perdition . 442
C. The chances of hell . 445
D. A friar and a magistrate . 449
E. A typical monk . 452
xn
CONTENTS
PAGE
3. Monks and Personal Salvation . 45 8
4. Medieval Unfaith . .
5. Processus Belial . 466
6. Demonology in the Law Courts . . • 468
7. Monastic Silence and Laughter . 469
8. Predestination . . .
9. Monks’ Signs . .
10. Conversion ad succurrendum . 476
1 1 . Aquinas on the Host . 4§i
12. The Host and the Mass in Witchcraft . 484
13. Newman and Condemned Criminals ..... 488
14. The Multitude of Masses . 49°
15. The School of the Eucharist . 49 1
16. Good and Bad Masses . 495
17. Cistercians and the B.V.M . 499
18. St Bernard’s Spot . 5QI
19. Mary-legends :
A. General view . 501
B. Two main sources :
(a) “Botho” . 503
(1 b ) Caesarius . 5°5
C. Two tales translated from “ Botho ” . S°6
D. Two other characteristic stories . 5°8
E. Mary and the cannibal . 5r3
F. Marienkind — Our Lady’s Child . 515
20. Pezii Praefatio . 517
21. American Medievalists . 521
22. The God of Justice . 522
23. Medieval Puritanism . 526
(a) Natural beauty . S27
( b ) Music . 53°
(c) Dance . 53 1
(d) Dress and Trifling . 538
24. Women and Witchcraft . 541
25. Ovidius Moralizatus . 543
26. John Schorn and Maid Uncumber:
(a) Schorn . 545
(b) St Uncumber . 546
27 Monks and Baths . 551
28. The Vision of Wettin . 554
29. Patron Saints . 557
30. Ground Plan of Fountains Abbey . 558
INDEX . 559
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
NO.
1. KIRKSTALL ABBEY . Frontispiece
By Thomas Girtin, from the water-colour in the S. Kensington Museum.
TO FACE
2. A CARTHUSIAN MONK’S CELL . 16
From p. 138 of The Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse (Burns and Oates, 1893), by kind permission of the Prior of St Hugh’s Charter- house, Partridge Green.
Shows clearly the arrangement by which each monk leads a solitary life within the great monastery. A number of such cells are grouped round the great court, the inmates meeting only thrice in the 24 hours for Divine Service in their church, on Sundays for meals in the common refectory, and on a few other occasions ( l.c . chapters xiv and xv). This combination of anachoretic and mon¬ astic life, possible only to a select few, goes far to explain the Carthusian boast: “Nunquam reformati, quia nunquam defor- mati.”
3. SS. ACHE AND ACHEUL, FLANKED BY ANGELS . 50
From the north-west portal of Amiens.
From L. Pillion, Les Sculpteurs frangais du XIIIs, by kind per¬ mission of MM. Plon, Nourrit et Cle.
4. MELCHIZEDEK AND ABRAHAM . io6
From the west front of Reims Cathedra] (interior).
Illustrating a prominent feature of Mass-symbolism, derived from Genesis xiv, 18 ff., Ps. cx, 4 and Hebrews vii, r ff.
5. THE HOSTIENMUHLE (HOST-MILL) OF BERNE
CATHEDRAL . 10J
By arrangement with Franco- Suisse, 35 Allmendstrasse, Berne.
For full description see pp. 122 ff. of Dr Stanz’s Miinsterbuch (Berne, 1865). In the upper part of the window (not shown here)
Moses strikes the rock, and there gushes forth the mystic spring of 1 Cor. x, 4. This comes down into the present picture, tended by Peter and Paul. The upper part of the present picture is mainly filled by the round wooden case containing the millstones. Above this is a great funnel (the hopper) through which the corn passes into the mill, guarded by the emblems of the four Evangelists, each of which holds a scroll with a pertinent text such as Hoc est Corpus Meum. On the right of the hopper we may see the Pope, with a halo round his head, holding the sluice which diverts the rivulet from its Old Testament course to turn this New Testament mill-wheel.
Under the mill stand a Pope, Cardinal, Bishop, and Priests adminis¬ tering to the people (left and right wings) the Hosts which come from the mill, presided over by the figure of a Naked Infant holding a great scroll inscribed: “I am the bread of life which came down
cr 1
b
XIV
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
NO. TO
from heaven ; he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.” The four lowest compartments are filled with folk gazing upwards in adoration. The window was probably given by Sir Caspar v. Miilinen and his wife in 1517 ; a knight and his lady, answering to what we know of these, are represented kneeling and receiving the. Host straight from the Pope. The whole idea of the Hostienmiihle may be suggested by a play upon the name Miilinen.
6. THE MOTHER STEALS THE CHRIST-CHILD
From the fifteenth-century wall-painting in Eton College Chapel, figured in M. R. James’ Frescoes in the Chapel at Eton College (Spottiswoode, 1907), by kind permission of the author and pub¬ lisher. The same subject was treated in the Lady Chapel at Win¬ chester; see Trans. Brit. Archaeol. Assn. 1845.
7. THE ABBEY AND TOWN OF VfiZELAY
By arrangement with Imprimerie Cret 6, Paris (late Neurdein Freres).
A great Cluniac monastery, round which grew up an important hill-town; see excellent illustrated monographs by Ch. Poree, L’Abbaye de Vezelay (Paris, Laurens), and Rose Graham, An Abbot of Vezelay (S.P.C.K. 1918).
8. THE ABBEY OF FLEURY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CEN¬ TURY .
From Abbe Rocher’s Histoire de Vabbaye royale de St-Benoit-sur- Loire, 1865.
Typical of a great abbey, with its wall and towers of defence.
9. A MASON’S CARRYING-TRAY .
(See p. 242.) From Didron, Annales Archeologiques, vm (1848), 49. The medallion is in the thirteenth-century glass of the apse at Chartres.
10. ABBEY CHURCH OF FONTENAY .
See L’Abbaye de Fontenay (Paris, Laurens), by M. Lucien Begule, who has generously permitted me to reproduce this and other plates from his earlier edition, far more bulky and expensive, which is now out of print.
Fontenay can be reached by four miles of pleasant walk from the station of Montbard, on the way to Dijon. The abbey was bought at the Revolution by a brother of Montgolfier, the pioneer of ballooning. His descendants have spent nearly a million francs in restoring it, and are very liberal in allowing their concierge to show visitors round. The church, cloisters, lay brethren’s workshop, and other parts of the domestic buildings are practically as they were in St Bernard’s time; it is even more instructive than Fountains.
11. TOMB OF ST STEPHEN OF OBAZINE .... (Musee du Trocadero, Paris), by arrangement with Crdte Freres.
St Stephen and his fellow-monks joined the Cistercian Order about 1148; see my Medieval Garner, pp. 82-8. The tomb shows the B.V.M. worshipped in due rank by all five classes of people connected with the Order — abbots, monks, lay brethren (distin¬ guished by their beards), nuns, and hired servants (swineherds, etc.). It is a precious document for Cistercian costume.
FACE
138
224
238
239
290
291
NO.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xv
TO
12. LAY BRETHREN’S QUARTERS AT FOUNTAINS ABBEY From a photograph kindly supplied by Mr C. H. Bothamley.
"U1® great undercroft in which the lay brethren spent most of their indoor time ; it served them for hall, refectory (frater), work¬ shops and store-chambers. (See plan, p. 558.)
13. LAY BRETHREN’S DORMITORY AT FOUNTAINS From photograph by Mr C. H. Bothamley.
The dormitory has lost its roof and the upper part of its walls ; for a completer specimen of a dormitory see plate 14. Here at Fountains the dormitory forms an upper storey to the undercroft shown in plate 12. To the left we see the rere-dorter, and above, in the background, the three gable windows of the lay brethren’s infirmary. Behind, on the right, is the south wall of the church nave, in which the lay brethren worshipped. (See plan, p. 558.)
14. MONKS’ DORMITORY AT FONTENAY ....
(Begule, L’Abbaye de Fontenay.)
The lower storey here was probably the novice-room (see pp. 295, 354). and, farther on, the chapter-house. Behind can be seen the choir of the church, into which the monks went down, as usual, by a stone stair from the dormitory. Compare plan of Fountains, p. 558.
15. VESTIBULE TO CHAPTER-HOUSE, FONTENAY .
(Ibid.)
On the left we see the chapter-house door, with one of the two usual flanking windows (e.g. Jesus College, Cambridge). The door in the centre of the picture leads to what was probably the novice¬ room.
16. FONTENAY CLOISTER-GARTH .
(Ibid.)
Shows the nave of the church, covered with its original tiles of primitive Roman shape.
17. FONTENAY CLOISTER (EASTERN WALK)
(Ibid.)
The double door in the centre of this walk faces the vestibule of the chapter-house. At the end of the walk is a door into the church.
18. TINTERN ABBEY .
The most perfect existing specimen of English Cistercian architecture: like most of its fellows, it stands in wild and beautiful scenery.
19. THE SAVED .
From the Portal of Bourges Cathedral.
20. THE DAMNED .
From the same.
Two complementary scenes from one of the most famous of medieval Last Judgements . Note the symbolism of the souls in Abraham’s bosom.
FACE
368
369
416
417
432
433
436
448
449
b
XVI
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
NO. TO FACE
21. THE CANNIBAL OF KEMER . 5H
From E. A. Wallis-Budge, Miracles of the B.VM. (London, 1900).
In the upper picture, the cannibal is seen eating his wife ; in the lower, we see his meeting with the husbandman and his final deliverance by the B.V.M.
22. THE ABBEY OF FONTENAY . 526
(B6gule, l.c.).
On the left is the church, of the plain kind recommended by St Bernard. Then, the cloister, with dormitory windows above.
To the right of the cloister, two bays of the refectory (frater), which, after the Cistercian custom, ran at right angles to the south walk. Behind, the great building where the lay brethren lodged and managed the mill and the iron-works. In the right foreground, part of the gateway block. The block behind the dovecote is modern. Compare plan of Fountains, p. 558.
23. THE DOVECOTE AT FONTENAY . 527
(Ibid)
The square building added to the dovecote is comparatively modern. Behind, the west front of the church The Abbey is two miles from the nearest village, and almost at the head of the valley.
24. CRUCIFIX AT ROMSEY ABBEY . 546
From photograph kindly supplied by Dr F. J. Allen.
Probably of pre-conquest date, but in any case exemplifying the older convention of clothed crucifix. A still more striking example of these “crucifixes androgynes” is on the south transept wall at St-Etienne de Beauvais.
TEXT-FIGURES
PAGE
From the author’s Medieval Studies, No. 12, by kind permission of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. Medieval churches, when the stone is soft enough, often contain many rough sketches of this kind on pillar or wall : there are some of great interest in the west doorways at St Albans Cathedral . 3°
From Herrad v. Landsperg’s Hortas Deliciarum, ed. Straub and
Keller, 1879-99 . 32,33
Herrad, abbess of the great nunnery of Odilienberg, died in 1195; two leaves of the MS. are dated respectively 1159 and 1175.
From A. N. Didron, Iconographie Chretienne, 1843, pp. 565-604, where many other examples of the same kind may be found . . 47-9
There is a good translation and continuation of this book by E. J. Millington and Margaret Stokes (Bohn, 1851, 2 vols.).
From stained glass windows at Bourges, figured by Viollet-le-Duc
in his Dictionnaire raisonne de l’ Architecture, IX (1868), 416, 426 . 53
From Herrad v. Landsperg. (See above) . 54
The devils are taking the soul of Dives, and an angel that of Lazarus.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvii
PAGE
From J. Fergusson’s History of Architecture (1865) .... 220
The large number of chapels and altars will be noticed. This ground-plan had considerable influence on that of our English cathedrals.
From a sketch by the author. The road from Dijon starts across from the left foreground: Talant stands on a hill to the left, just outside the picture . 285
From a panel of a stained glass window, probably from Bury St Edmund’s Abbey, reproduced in The Journal of the Archaeological Association for 1869, p. 334 . 546
From Revue de VArt Chretien, x (1866), 1 13. (Article on Ste-Wilge-
forte by A. Bonvenue) . 547
By permission from p. 102 of A. Hamilton Thompson’s English Monasteries (1913), a small book which is indispensable to the student of monastic arrangements. This plan may be used to illustrate plates 10, 12-17 and 22-23 °f the present volume . . . . , 558
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
ABBREVIATIONS
AA.SS. or AA.SS.Boll. AA.SS.O.S.B.
A.F.H.
A.L.K.G.
C.H.E.L.
Camb. Med. Hist.
C. S.
D. N.B.
E. E.T.S.
E.H.R.
M.G.H. Poetae.
M.G.H. Scriptt.
P.L.
R.S.
Acta Sanctorum Bollandiana.
Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, ed. Mabillon, J.
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum.
Archiv fiir Litter atur- und Kirchengeschichte, ed. Denifle and Ehrle.
Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge Medieval History.
Camden Society.
Dictionary of National Biography.
Early English Text Society.
English Historical Review.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Poetae Latini aevi Carolini.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores. Patrologia Latina. Migne.
Rolls Series, Chronicles and Memorials.
AUTHORITIES
This list is not in any sense exhaustive; it only aims at facilitating reference in cases where the full title of the book is not evident from my text or notes, and at giving the reader a rough idea of the value of different sources.
Acad. Oise. Memoir es del' academic d’archeologie du departemeni deVOise. (Beauvais, various years.)
Acton, Lord. Correspondence, ed. Figgis and Laurence, 1917.
Adams. Henry Adams. Mont St-Michel and Chartres, 1913.
A stimulating, but not always accurate book.
Ailred. Aelredi abbatis opera. Migne, P.L. vol. 195.
Albers, B. Consuetudines Monasticae. Stuttgart, 1907.
Alphabet of Tales. E.E.T.S. 1904.
A collection of tales for preachers, mainly from thirteenth century sources.
Alvarus Pelagius (Alvarez Pelayo). De Planctu Ecclesiae. 1517.
A Franciscan bishop and papal penitentiary in the early fourteenth century; his book is of extreme value for its frank verdicts on contem¬ porary ecclesiastical and monastic conditions.
XX
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
Ana. Fra. Analecta Franciscana. (Quaracchi.) Various years.
Ancren Riwle, ed. Morton. C.S. 1853.
Antonino, Summa. Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Summa Con- fessionalis. Lyons, 1564.
Arx, Ildefons v. Geschichte d. Kantons St Gallen. 1810-3.
A laborious and very valuable piece of local history.
Ashley, W. J. Introduction to English Economic History, 3rd edn. 1911.
Ayton, Joh. de Athona, in appendix to Lyndwood’s Provinciale. 1679.
John of Ayton was, like Lyndwood, a Cambridge doctor in Canon Law; both writers pass, incidentally, very illuminating judgements upon the Church of their day.
Baissac, J. Hist, de la diablerie chretienne,\ ol. 1. Le diable. Paris, 1882.
Bartolus. Bartholi Tractatus Judiciorum et Processus Sathane contra Genus Humanum. (Jean Petit.) Paris, c. 1508.
Beissel, S. Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland wahrend des Mittelalters. Freiburg i/B. 1909.
Benoit, D. P. Histoire de V Abb aye et de la terre de Saint-Claude. Montreuil, 1891-2.
The author’s diligence is beyond all praise; his judgements will not always commend themselves to those who follow his documents.
Berchorius. Petri Berchorii opera omnia. Cologne, 1 730-1.
The Repertorium Morale, filling the last two volumes of this edition, is full of valuable evidence. Pierre Berchoire or Bersuire was Prior of St-Eloi at Paris, and died in 1362.
Berthold of Regensburg. Predigten, ed. Pfeiffer, F. 1862.
A Franciscan of the second generation, and one of the greatest mission- preachers of the Middle Ages ; a mine of information for the social history of the mid-thirteenth century.
Biagi, G. Men and Manners of Old Florence. 1899.
Bourbon. Etienne de Bourbon. Anecdotes historiques, ed. Lecoy de la Marche, A. 1877.
Almost as valuable for the social history of the thirteenth century as Jacques de Vitry and Thomas Cantimpratanus.
Bromyard, J. Summa Praedicantium. 1518.
The author was a Dominican of Chaucer’s day; his books are full of social and ecclesiastical information which has never been properly exploited.
Burck, G. Stand und Herkommen der Insassen einiger Kloster der mittel- alterlichen Mark Meissen. Meissen, 1913.
A careful piece of statistical work by a Protestant writer.
Busch. De Ref. Johann Busch. Liber de Reformatione Monasteriorum, ed. K. Grube. Halle, 1887.
A source of extreme value. But Dr K. Grube’s monograph, Johannes Busch (Freiburg i/B. n.d.) must be used with great caution ; it is respon¬ sible for some of the gravest inaccuracies in L. Eckenstein’s Woman under Monas ticism.
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
xxi
Butler, E. C. Benedictine Monachism. 1919.
Valuable in many ways, but entirely dependent on secondary sources for the latter half of the Middle Ages.
Caes. Heist. Caesarius of Heisterbach. Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Strange, J. Cologne, 1851.
Unsurpassed in value for the social history of the thirteenth century. An English translation by H. v. E. Scott is in preparation.
Cartulaire de Molesme. Cartulaire de V Abb aye de Molesme, ed. Laurent. 1907.
Champion, E. La France d’apres les cahiers de 1789. 1897.
Throws valuable side-lights on many medieval conditions which still survived under the Ancien Regime.
Cistercian Fathers, or lives and legends of certain saints ... 0/ the Order of Citeaux. Translated by Collins, H. First series. 1872.
The only book in English which contains a good many first-hand touches from the early Cistercian records.
Cons. Sublac. Consuetudines Sublacensis Monasterii, ed. Allodi, L. Subiaco, 1902.
These customs are at least as old as 1089: see Allodi’s Introd. p. x.
Dacheux, L. Jean Geiler de Kaysersberg. Paris, 1876.
A very valuable study of Church life at Strassburg in the early sixteenth century, by a scholarly Roman Catholic priest.
D’Arbois. Ftudes sur I’e'tat interieur des abbayes Cisterciennes, by D’Arbois de Jubainville, H. 1858.
A fully-documented monograph based entirely upon original docu¬ ments; it is unfortunately out of print and almost unobtainable.
David of Augsburg. De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione. Quaracchi, 1899.
David was pupil (not master, as was once thought) to Berthold of Regensburg; he is one of our most illuminating sources for monastic discipline in the thirteenth century.
Denifle, H. Die U niversitaten d. Mittelalters. 1885. (Vol. 1 all pub¬ lished.)
Duchesne, L. Histoire ancienne de Vdglise. (English translation, 1910.)
Dugdale-Caley. Monasticon Anglicanum , by W. Dugdale, ed. Caley, J., etc. 1817-30.
The most voluminous collection of monastic documents, with the exception of Mabillon’s, in any language.
Durand, Guillaume. Tractatus de modo generalis concilii celebrandi. 1671.
The author was Bishop of Mende, and nephew to the celebrated writer on Church Symbolism. This treatise, written at the Pope’s bidding for the Ecumenical Council of Vienne in 13 11, deals very fully with the matters which most needed reform at that date.
XXII
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
Ekkehard. In Rerum Alamannicarum Scriptores, ed. Goldast and Senckenberg. 1730.
This Ekkehard, fourth of the five writers of that name who flourished at St-Gall, died in 1071. His chronicle, the most valuable of all that century for monastic life, has been freely utilized by S. R. Maitland in his Dark Ages.
Exord. Mag. Cist. Exordium Magnum Cister dense . P.L. vol. 185.
An indispensable source for early Cistercian history.
Evesham, Revelation to the Monk of, published by E. Arber in his English Reprints [1868].
The monk, really of Eynsham, was misnamed after Evesham by the first printer of this most interesting story, W. de Machlinia, about 1482 A.D.
Eynsham Cartulary, ed. Salter, H. E. (Oxford Hist. Soc.) 1907-8.
Contains, among other valuable documents and disquisitions, the text of the Revelation wrongly ascribed to Evesham.
Felibien, M. Histoire de V abb aye royale de Saint-Denys. 1706.
Fowler, J. T. Cistercian Statutes. Yorks. Archaeol. Assocn. Journal, vols. ix, x, xi. 1886-90.
Franc. Opusc. Opuscula S. Francisci. Quaracchi, 1904.
A very cheap and useful edition.
Gautier de Coincy. Miracles de Notre Dame, ed. Poquet. 1857.
Printed in a limited edition, it is now almost unprocurable. But see Lommatzsch.
Gerson. Joannis Gersonii opera. Paris, 1606.
Gerson was perhaps the greatest churchman of the fifteenth century; his voluminous works are full of valuable evidence which has never been fully exploited.
Gladbach. Stratner, J. Wirtschafts- undVerwaltungsgeschichte der Abtei Miinchen Gladbach im Mittelalter. Gladbach, 1911.
A valuable monograph by a Roman Catholic student.
Glories of Mary, by St Alfonso Liguori, transl. by M. T. Weld. London, 1852.
Godfrey of Viterbo. Pantheon, ed. Struve. 1726.
Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton. (Temple Classics.)
Guibert. Ginberti abbatis de Novigento opera. P.L. vol. 156.
Guignard, P. Les monuments primitifs de la regie cistercienne. Dijon, 1878.
Haeften, B. Disquisitiones monasticae. Antwerp, 1644.
Hamack, A. Das Monchthum. English transl. by Kellet and Marseille. 1901 .
Heimbucher, M. Die Or den u. Kongregationen der katholischen Kirche. 2nd edn. 1907-8.
Herolt. Ex. Johannes Herolt. Promptuarium Exemplorum.
Herolt. Mirac. Johannes Herolt. Miracula B. Virginis.
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES xxiii
Herolt. Serm. Johannes Herolt. Sermones Discipuli, in two parts, De Tempore and De Sanctis.
These three were often printed and bound together in a single volume. That which I have mostly used was printed at Rouen about 1510.
Humbert de Romans. De Eruditione Praedicatorum in M. de la Bigne, Maxima Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, vol. xxv. Lyons, 1677.
Humbert ( d . 1277) was fifth General of the Dominican Order, and his testimony is of special value.
Ildefons, see Arx.
Imbart de la Tour, P. Les origines de la Reforme. 1905-14.
A very valuable book by a learned and fair-minded Roman Catholic professor.
Janssen, J. Geschichte d. deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang d. Mittel- alters. 17th edn. Freiburg i/B. 1897.
Full of valuable material, but must be used with great caution; see appendix 1.
Jebb, R. C. Has art thriven best in an age of faith? Glasgow, 1889.
Jocelin of Brakelond. C.S. Chronica, ed. Rokewode, J. G. C.S. 1840.
Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. Clarke. Transl. by Clarke, Sir E. London (Murray), 1903.
The first translation of this book in The King’s Classics was also by Sir E. Clarke; the translation at present current in that series is less accurate, and the preface is particularly untrustworthy.-
Jub. Faux Miracle. Article by Dom Liber [C. Potvin] in the Revue de Belgique for 1870. Reprinted twice in pamphlet form, i.e. (1) Le Jubile d'un Faux Miracle. Brussels, 1870; (2) Le Faux Miracle du Saint Sacrement a Bruxelles. 2nd edn. Brussels, 1874.
Kalischer, E. Beitrage zur Handelgeschichte der Kloster zur Zeit der Grossgrundherrschaften. Berlin, 1911.
A valuable monograph by a Protestant student.
Kempis, Thomas a. Opera, ed. Sommalius, H. 1759-
Kirkstall Coucher. The Coucher Book of Kirkstall Abbey. (Thoresby Soc. vol. viii.) 1904.
Lamprecht. Beitrage. K. Lamprecht, Beitrage zur Geschichte d. franz. Wirthschaftslebens im 1 1 ten Jahrdt . 1878.
Lamprecht. Wirth. K. Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirthschaftsleben im Mittelalter. 1885-6.
Masterly studies by one of the greatest social historians of our day.
Lancre, P. de. Tableau de Vinconstance des mauvais anges et demons. Paris, 1612.
A book of extraordinary interest, by a magistrate who was sent officially to deal with witchcraft in the Basque provinces.
L A. Wilson. The Worcester Liber Albus. Wilson, Canon J. M. 1920.
A very valuable analysis, for the general reader, of the documents printed in the next item.
xxiv ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
L. A. Worcs. The Liber Albus of the Priory of Worcester, parts I and II. Worcs. Hist. Soc. 1919.
Contains a calendar of the first 1219 documents in this great monastic register, summarized, annotated and indexed by Canon J. M. Wilson.
Lea, H. C. History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church. 1896.
Lea, H. C. History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. 3rd end. 1907.
Lea, H. C. History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. 1888.
Contain the completest and most scientific discussions of these subjects, from the historical point of view, that have yet been published.
Leach, A. F. The Schools of Medieval England. 1915.
Lechler, G. V. John Wiclif and his English precursors , transl. Lorimer,P. 1878.
Lecoy de la Marche, A. U esprit de nos aieux. Paris [1888].
A small jest-book, mainly collected from medieval preachers’ manuals; it is now, unfortunately, out of print.
Little, A. G. Studies in English Franciscan history. 1917.
The Ford Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1916; indispensable to the student of Franciscan history.
Lives of the Brethren. A translation of the Dominican Vitae Fratrum, by J. P. Conway. Newcastle, 1896.
Lommatzsch, E. Gautier de Coincy als Satiriker. 1913.
A valuable monograph, exploiting the social and ecclesiastical informa¬ tion yielded by a book which is beyond the reach of most students.
Lucius, E. Die Anfange des Heiligenkults in der christlichen Kirche. Tubingen, 1904.
Lupton, J. H. Life of John Colet. 1887.
Lyndwood, W. Provinciale. 1679.
The standard medieval book for English students of Canon Law. Lyndwood studied at Cambridge and then at Oxford; he died in 1446 as Bishop of St Davids. The book is full of valuable sidelights on history.
Mabillon, Ann. Annales Ordinis S. Benedicti. Mabillon, J. 1703-39.
This, with the companion AA.SS.O.S.B., forms the most valuable contribution, beyond all comparison, ever made to monastic history.
Mabillon, J. Traite des etudes monastiques. 1691.
Maitland, S. R. The Dark Ages. 1890.
A book first published in the early days of the Tractarian movement, by the grandfather of Prof. F. W. Maitland, who characterized it ad¬ mirably (H. A. L. Fisher, Life of F. W. M. 1910, pp. 2-3): “ It seems to me that he did what was wanted just at the moment when it was wanted.” He pricked many ultra-Protestant bubbles ; and it is rather his followers than he who have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.
Male, E. L’ Art religieux du ri/fi en France. 1898.
Male, E. L’Art religieux de la fin du moyen age. 1908.
Very valuable for the study of iconography and symbolism, though rather too indulgent to exaggerated theories which have little documentary support. An excellent translation of the earlier volume by Dora Nussey, Religious Art, etc. (Dent, 1913.)
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
XXV
Manrique, A. Annales Cistercienses . 1642-59
An uncritical, but laborious and valuable collection of early sources.
Mapes (or Map), Walter. Latin poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. Wright, T. C,S. 16.
Mapes, Walter. De Nugis Curialium, ed. Wright, T. C.S. 50.
Martene, E. De antiquis Monachorum Ritibus. 1764.
Martene, E. Commentarius in Regulam S. Benedicti. 1690.
Martene, E. Voyage litteraire de deux religieux Benddictins. 1724.
Martene, E. and Durand, U. Thesaurus novus anecdotorum. 1717.
Meffret, Fest. and Temp. Hortulus Reginae. (a) Sermones de Praecipuis Sanctorum F estivitatibus . Munich, 1611; (b) Sermones de Tempore. Pars aestivalis. Munich, 1612.
Though these sermons enjoyed great popularity, little is known of the author but that he was a priest of the diocese of Meissen, who flourished between 1443 and 1476.
Melanges Mabillon. 1908.
A memorial volume of addresses and essays composed for the bicen¬ tenary of the great scholar’s death.
M6on, D. M. and Barbazon, E. Fabliaux et Contes. Paris, 1808.
Miracles. Miracles de St-Benoit, ed. Certain, E. de. (Socidte de l’histoire de France.)
Mirk, see Myrc.
More, Sir Thomas. English Works, ed. Rastell. London, 1557.
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia, ed. Lumby. 1879.
Morison, J. C. Life and times of St Bernard. 1863.
Mussafia, A. Marienlegenden. In Sitzungsberichte d. kais. Akad. d. Wissenschaften (Phil. -hist.). Vienna. I, vol. 113 (1886); II, vol. 1x5 (1888); III, vol. 119 (1889); IV, vol. 123 (1891). [Referred to as I, II, III, IV respectively.]
Myrc (Mirk), John. Festial: a collection of Homilies. E.E.T.S. 1905.
One of the earliest of English printed books; this, and the author’s Instructions for Parish Priests (E.E.T.S. 1868) are of great value for the history of religious education. The author was roughly contemporary with Chaucer, and governed the priory of Lilleshall in Shropshire.
Nider, J. De Reformatione Religiosorum. Antwerp, 1611.
Nider, J. Formicarium (alias Formicarius). Douai, 1602.
Nider, J. Preceptorium. Douai, 1611.
Nider was prior of the great Dominican friary at Bale, papal inquisitor and finally rector of the University of Vienna: he died in 1438. He is one of our earliest and fullest authorities on witchcraft ; his utterances on church reform deserve more attention than they have received.
Nomasticon Cisterciense, by Dom Julien Paris, ed. Sejalon, H. Solesmes. 1892.
The fullest existing collection of Cistercian Statutes, from the begin¬ ning to the Reformation. Even this modern edition is already out of print and almost unprocurable.
Northumberland Assize Rolls, ed. Page, W. (Surtees Soc. 88.) Durham, 1891.
xx vi ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
Pelbart, O. Pomerium Sermonum de Sanctis. Pars Estivalis. Hagenau, I5I5-
Pelbart, O. Pomerium Sermonum de Beata Virgine. Hagenau, 1515.
The author was a Hungarian Franciscan ; his first volume was printed in 1475 and he died early in the sixteenth century. Like many Franciscan preachers, he supplies much valuable historical evidence.
Pez, Blannbekin. Agnetis Blannbekin. . .vita, ed. Pez, B. Vienna, 1731.
Valuable chiefly for the “Botho” miracles printed in the same volume. See appendixes 19 and 20.
Pez, B. Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus. 1721-.
Pfeiffer, F. Marienlegenden. 1846.
Pirenne, H. Histoire de Belgique. Brussels, 1902.
Very valuable for social history.
Poole, R. L. Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought. 1884. 2nd edn. 1920.
Potter, L. J. A. de. Vie de Scipion de Ricci. 1825.
de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, supported the religious reforms of Leopold in Tuscany and Joseph II in Austria; he was deposed by the pope and died in 1810. The documents printed in this book show how many medieval conditions had survived almost unchanged in eighteenth century Italy.
Powicke, F. M. Ailred of Rievaulx and his biographer Walter Daniel. Manchester, 1922.
A valuable monograph on one of the greatest of our medieval abbots, with important extracts from unprinted sources.
Pupilla Oculi, by Burgo, J. de, Chancellor of Cambridge University.
The book, written in 1385 as a guide for parish priests, passed through many early editions; that which I have used was printed at Paris in 1518.
Pusey, E. B. Eirenicon. 1865.
Rashdall, H. Doctrine and development. 1898.
Rashdall, H. The idea of Atonement in Christian Theology. (Bampton Lectures, 1915.) 1919.
Rashdall, H. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 1895.
Razzi. S. Razzi, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria. Florence, 1618.
Razzi was Abbot of Camaldoli, and a writer well-known in his own day. He died towards the end of the sixteenth century. This volume contains a characteristic selection of medieval Mary-legends.
Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright, T. and Halliwell, J. O. H. 1841-3.
Revue Benedictine. Published by the Benedictines of Maredsous.
A learned periodical of great value for monastic history; far superior to anything of the kind which is published in English. See Studien, etc.
Richard, C. L. Analysis Conciliorum. 1778.
A very useful summary of conciliar decrees from the earliest date down to 1607.
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES xxvii
Riegger, J. A. S. von. Amoenitates Literariae Friburgenses. 1775—6.
A valuable collection of extracts from the writings of enlightened German churchmen on the verge, and during the early years, of the Reformation.
Rocher, Abbe J. N. M. Histoire de V abb aye royale de St-Benoit-sur- Loire. Orleans, 1865.
A valuable, though somewhat uncritical, monograph.
Rosignoli, C. G. Maraviglie di Dio nel Divinissimo Sacramento . Venice, 1717.
Though published by a Jesuit “with the licence of his superiors,” this book is now extremely rare; there is no copy in the British Museum Library. It contains 120 histories of Mass-miracles, principally medieval.
Roskoff, G. Geschichte des Teufels. 1869.
Royce, D. Landboc of Winchcombe. 1892-3.
Sackur, E. Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und allgemeingeschicht- lichen Wirksamkeit bis zur Mitte des nten Jahrdts. 1892—4.
A scholarly work, but far more valuable for political than for social history.
St-Cher. Hugonis de S. Caro opera omnia in universum Vetus et Novum Testamentum. Venice, 1600; and Cologne, 1621 (an edition which follows that of Venice page for page).
One of the most distinguished among the early Dominicans; these eight folios contain a wealth of hitherto neglected evidence.
Savine, A. English Monasteries on the eve of the Dissolution. Oxford, 1909.
A scientific and exhaustive study by a Russian Professor of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, indispensable to the serious student of monastic history.
If the author is misled here and there by his comparative unfamiliarity with 9 English geography and social conditions, we owe him all the more gratitude for undertaking, in Moscow, a task which our own countrymen had neglected for nearly a century.
Schonbach, A. E. Studien zur Geschichte d. altdeutschen Predigt. Vienna, 1900—7. [The different essays are quoted by their dates.]
Studies of extraordinary learning and historical value.
Seebohm, F. Oxford Reformers. (Everyman’s Library.)
Seidl, N. De Pueris Oblatis. Munich, 1872.
A most scholarly monograph : see chapter xiv.
Sharpe, E. Architecture of the Cistercians. 1874.
Smyth, J. Lives of the Berkeleys. (Bristol and Gloucester Arch. Soc.
1883-5.)
Full of documentary information from records which have since dis¬ appeared.
Spec. Doct. Spec. Hist. Spec. Morale Spec. Nat. .
See Vincent of Beauvais.
xxviii ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
Speculum Spiritualium. Printed at Paris at the expense of W. Bretton of London in 1510.
One of the many books by anonymous or little-known authors which testify to religious unrest and aspirations on the verge of the Reformation. I quote from the British Museum copy.
Sprenger, J. Malleus Maleficarum. Frankfort, 1600.
Gives almost as early and valuable evidence for witchcraft as Nider. Sprenger also was a Dominican and papal inquisitor ; he wrote about 1495 .
Stud. u. Mit. Studien und Mittheilungen a. d. Benedictiner- und Cister- cienserorden Wurzburg. Various years.
A scientific periodical as scholarly and valuable as the Revue Benedictine.
Summa Angelica, by Angelus de Clavasio. 1521.
The author ( d . 1495) took his name from Chivasso near Genoa; he was vicar-general of the Observantine Franciscans, and enjoyed the special favour of Pope Sixtus IV. His book became the most popular, perhaps, of the many manuals of instruction for the clergy which were written in the 150 years before the Reformation.
Thiers , J . B . T raite des superstitions qui regardent les sacrements . 4th edn . Avignon, 1777.
The author, a learned French parish priest (1636-1703) wrote a number of volumes which show a wide study of sources. This particular volume was put upon the Index, though it would be difficult to point to anything in it which is not taken from orthodox medieval writers.
Thomas Cantimpratanus. Bonum universale de Apibus. Douay, 1597.
The author, a Dominican friar and suffragan bishop (1201-70) is one of our best sources for thirteenth-century life. The book itself is almost impossible to procure; but a translation of all the anecdotes scattered through its pages, by Miss B. A. Lees, late History Tutor of Somerville College, Oxford, is now in preparation.
Thomas Wallensis (or Walleis). Flores Omnium Pane Doctorum. Leyden,
I5'75-
Thompson, A. Hamilton. Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln. (Lincoln Record Soc. vols. vii and xiv, 19x4 and 1918.)
With full English translations and copious notes; by far the most scholarly editions of any monastic visitations that have yet been published.
Tritheim (Trithemius), J. Opera. Mainz, 1604.
One of our most valuable testimonies for the successes and failures of monastic reformers in the fifteenth century, by an abbot who played a prominent part in them and was one of the most learned men of his day.
Vacandard, E. Vie de St-Bernard. 2nd ed. 1897.
The best existing life of the saint.
Vincent of Beauvais. Vincentii Bellovacensis Speculum Quadruplex. Douai, 1624.
Vincent ([i2oo]-i264) was librarian to St Louis of France, at whose request he drew up this, the greatest and most popular of medieval encyclopedias. The Speculum Morale, though printed as his, is by another sub-contemporary hand.
Viollet-le-Duc, E. Dictionnaire raisonne de V Architecture frangaise. 1854-68.
Contains, incidentally, a good deal of important matter for social history.
ABBREVIATIONS AND AUTHORITIES
XXIX
Vitae Fratrum. Gerardi de Fracheto Vitae Fratrum O.P., ed. Reichert,. B. M. Louvain, 1896.
A very valuable source for early Dominican history, answering roughly to the Franciscan Chronicle of the Twenty -four Generals and the Cistercian Exordium Magnum.
Vitaspatrum. Vitae Patrum sive Historiae Eremiticae libri decent. P.L„ vols. 73 and 74.
Indispensable for the comprehension of the earliest monastic ideal and practice. The documents are by different authors of the fourth and fifth centuries; a Syriac redaction of this book is available in English ( The Paradise of the Fathers, by E. A. Wallis Budge. Chatto and Windus, 1907). A very good selection is published in Italian by Sonzogno of Milan (Cavalca, Vite de' Santi Padri, pre-war price 1 lira).
Vitry, J. de. Exempla, ed. Crane, T. F. (Folk-Lore Society, vol. 26.) 1890.
The most valuable, perhaps, of all collections of preachers’ anecdotes., but now out of print.
Wagner, G. Untersuchungen ii. d. Standesverhaltnisse elsassischer Kloster. I. Die Abtei Murbach. Strassburg, 191 1 .
A valuable statistical study by a Protestant student.
Watkins, O. History of Penance. 1920.
Wilpert, J. Fractio panis. Freiburg i/B. 1895.
An excellent study of the earliest Eucharistic rites by a distinguished Roman Catholic scholar.
Winch. Consuet. A Consuetudinary of the 14 th century for the Refectory of St Swithin, ed. Kitchin, G. W. 1886.
Valuable for the full comprehension of the next item.
Winch. Ob. Rolls. Compotus Rolls of the Obedientiaries of St Swithin’s Priory, Winchester, ed. Kitchin, G. W. 1892.
Contains most important first-hand evidence as to monastic house¬ keeping, with excellent introduction and notes by the Dean of Winchester.
Winter, F. Die Cister denser des nordostlichen Deutschlands. 1868-71.
A very valuable study, based on a wide survey of original documents.
Workman, H. B. The evolution of the monastic ideal. 1913.
An excellent book within its self-imposed limitations; see appendix 1.
Wright, T. St Patrick’s Purgatory ; essay on legends of Purgatory , Hell and Paradise. 1844.
Ydens, S. Historic van het H. Sacrament van Mirakelen. Brussels, 1608.
A very curious chapter in superstition; Canon Ydens was the chief historian of the Miraculous Host of Brussels (appendix 11); but the book is now very rare.
Zedler, J. Grosses Vollstandiges Universal-Lexicon. Plalle and Leipzig, 1733- •
CR I
C
»
INTRODUCTION
Opus aggredior opimutn casibus ; monastic history is a dazzle of shifting lights and shadows. Of the first six abbots of Cluny, four were saints in deed as in name ; but a detailed story of the abbes commendataires who held the French abbeys in 1789 would read like a studied satire on St Bernard and St Francis. Yet, if we may say that anything is possible in monasticism, we must not say that everything is true ; the monk has scarcely more reason to compiain of the enemies who have sought to render him odious, than of the indiscreet panegyrists who have often made him unreal, and therefore profoundly uninteresting to the generality of mankind. The only road to abiding interest in this singular chapter of history is to elicit from the records so many and such various words and deeds as may be presented without overcrowding the canvas. Among the mass of readers, there is enough healthy faith and enough healthy criticism to estimate, in the long run, how far any given historical presentment squares with the facts of life . Human nature is not altogether unchanging ; but it does remain constant enough to justify the gospel of Descartes, that, even in complicated questions, every man’s success in truth-seeking depends mainly on his wish to get at the truth.
It is now a little more than a quarter of a century since I began definitely collecting materials for this present attempt to revive a distant past ; and some people tell me that it is a waste of time. To one man, all creeds are outworn; and he feels less interest in the religious past of Europe than in Buddhism or Shintoism. Another, on the contrary, will vehemently maintain that the faith of our fathers cannot be profitably approached but by those who claim to hold it still; a prohibition which, even if this assertion of complete continuity were true, would land us in the logical absurdity of abandoning Mormon history to the Mormons, Bolchevism to the Bolcheviks, and why not even botany to the plants? The historian must strive by closest eye¬ sight to identify himself with the past ; but this must always be a two-eyed vision also; half the truth lies in exact comparison,
XXX11
INTRODUCTION
which is impossible without some effort of detachment. If the medieval Church was a paradise in which man, though naked, was good and happy, let us seek to enter in again. If it was altogether detestable, let us shake the very dust of it from our feet. But if here, as elsewhere, we find much to admirfe and much to avoid, let us profit equally by both observations, and steer onwards into the future with that steadier course of men who keep every past landmark in view, and scan the whole horizon.
We seem to stand at a critical point today. The greatest histories of Greece and Rome were written by men who described their own times, or times so recent that oral evidence played a very prominent part. Modern historians, covering far wider fields, are almost altogether dependent upon documents; and, since these documents give a natural prominence to the men and the events which attracted most attention at the moment, there¬ fore modern history has generally been political; kings and ministers, generals and diplomatists, fill nine-tenths of the stage. A far more laborious work, and in its beginnings far more im¬ perfect, will be a real social history. The story of all Napoleon’s genius and victories is worth infinitely less than that of the French peasant and artisan from 1789 to the present day; but the im¬ portance of this latter story is a true measure of its difficulty. A child may tell us who won at Marengo, how many men he lost and what prisoners he took, but who shall strike for us an equally clear and correct balance of Jacques Bonhomme’s losses and gains since 1800? Cobbett and Carlyle, from very different points of view, complained with equal bitterness on this head ; but it was easier to complain than to find the remedy. Even Carlyle was not able to carry the world much farther here, in default of those hundreds of predecessors who might have collected and systematized materials for him, if the tide had set earlier in that direction. That tide has been gathering force in the last thirty years ; the man in the street does now ask more and more insistently for something deeper and wider than mere political history. Moreover, increasing numbers of thoughtful readers are now willing to spend time and money in support of the social historian who will give them documents as well as theories ; and that is why I have ventured to devote these three
INTRODUCTION
XXXlll
volumes to the story of men who, at their best, desired to be ignored by the world, and whom, at the worst, their own con¬ temporaries would very gladly have ignored.
My title-page will have made it sufficiently clear that this volume deals mainly with Religion in the medieval sense, in which the “Religious” was the cloistered soul. That limitation is far less narrow than it might seem at first sight; for, at the beginning of our period at least, cloistered religion had earned its name par excellence ; and no modern study of medieval piety could avoid putting it in the foreground. Moreover, it can claim one of the most prominent places in any general history of human creeds and worship ; for it is one of the most striking examples, in all world-history, of institutional religion on a great scale — great both extensively and intensively, and therefore showing very plainly both the strength and the weakness of all efforts to embody the Unseen. Having dealt in these volumes, there¬ fore, with the cloistered religion of the later Middle Ages, I hope to pass on later to a study of other religious currents during these five centuries. But my immediate task must, for some time, be concerned mainly with monasticism. I had hoped to publish my lectures within a few months of their delivery in 1910; but task has followed task with fresh claims of such immediate urgency that I have now held back for far more than the Horatian nine years. Time has strengthened all my main convictions ; and my most serious misgivings are prompted by the necessarily fragmentary and discursive character of the work even as it now stands. Thus, however, I must publish, with such additions as have been possible during three years of broken leisure, or not at all : and this book will at least serve to indicate the lines of research and argument which need to be followed in any adequate history of monachism. I have already half completed a collection of original documents, mostly translated from the Latin, which may supply a body of pieces justificatives for the three volumes. Later, if life and leisure serve, I hope to take up part of this subject again in a series of separate studies which may utilize all the evidence I have collected from different sources, and supply a foundation for still fuller discussion by succeeding scholars. For, although the representations of some among my predecessors have forced me here and there to weight my pages
XXXIV
INTRODUCTION
with what may seem a superfluity of documentary evidence, yet there is scarcely any point on which this represents more than a fraction of what could easily be produced. I hope, therefore, to leave my ms. collections and indexes for public use, where they may serve in some degree to shorten the labours of those' who may find time to pursue any of these subjects more exhaustively than I can ever hope for myself.
The historian of monasticism has two fatal errors to avoid; he is lost if he fails to explain either why monks were once so many, or why they are now so few. The Religious Orders have been among the main forces of European civilization ; at certain times and in certain places they may perhaps have been the greatest of all civilizing forces. Yet every government in Europe has gradually followed Henry VIII’s example; and herein the State seems to express the mind of the individual, since adult vocations to the cloister are now extremely rare, among men at least. The system has never had more passionate panegyrists than Kenelm Digby and Montalembert ; yet neither took his own creed seriously in practice. It is the aim of the present writer to keep these contrasts continually in view, and never to state the one truth so as to exclude the other. How far he has suc¬ ceeded, the public must decide.
What then, in briefest outline, is the story of these five hundred years? Beginning our more detailed study in the eleventh century, on the full tide of a great and progressive age, we shall find our Western monks marshalled nominally in a vast world-institution — an institution in which the Abbot’s authority secures unity within the cloister; the Bishop’s or Archbishop’s within the diocese or the province; and the Pope’s over all. Yet a close study shows much of the same irregularities which St Benedict had found in the earlier monachism. The monk still was indispensable to the society of the eleventh century; yet there was a great gulf between the average monk and his Rule ; the salt was sorely needed, yet it had lost too much of its savour; nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te. Here and there, as at Lanfranc’s and Anselm’s Bee, the growth was pure and vigorous , but in most places it was half-choked with the weeds
INTRODUCTION
XXXV
of those wild centuries which are justly called the Dark Ages. Monasticism, perhaps the least feudal of medieval institutions, had gradually taken a strong tinge of feudalism ; it had wrapped itself more closely, from generation to generation, in the cloak of worldly property and privilege, which even threatened to become hereditary. This is what we find even in the eleventh century; but then comes the great Cistercian movement with its kindred and contemporary reforms ; thence we shall pass on to the Franciscan-Dominican revival; after which begins a slow cooling and settlement of this vast cenobitic sea. Popes and Councils prove powerless to move it to any general or steady purpose ; gusts of reform pass like catspaws over the face of the waters without stirring their deeper stagnation; little by little, society begins to lose faith and patience; an age of partial and tentative disendowment begins ; and then, when the slow currents have gathered unity of direction and, from that unity, a ten-fold force — then, at last, comes the great revolution. For many centuries these men’s wealth had exposed them to the greed of princes and capitalists. In Chaucer’s day, the people themselves had plainly begun to find the monk less necessary; God was more evidently deserting the cloister. Little more than a century later, in More’s day, the conjuncture only awaited some prince strong enough in his own self-will and in the general obedience of his people, needy and covetous enough to dare much in any case for money ; and driven now by legitimate political necessities to dare still more. If anything can be called inevitable in history, this is that inevitable thing. National feeling had grown so strongly between 1300 and 150° — even, to some extent, national church-feeling — that all the materials for a conflagration existed already. Sooner or later, even though Henry VIII had never lived, some powerful prince must have found himself under Henry’s financial and political temptations to defy the Pope ; and that fight must have been to the death. At any time, the monks were certain to take the Papal side more or less directly ; that is one of the few points on which Catholics and Protestants are completely agreed. A monasticism richer in spiritual gifts than in worldly possessions would certainly have decided the struggle in the Pope’s favour ; but now this wealthy and senescent in¬ stitution brought him little spiritual help, while it opened a fatal
XXXVI
INTRODUCTION
breach on his flank. Here was every temptation to the spoiler; abundant booty almost unprotected by God or man ; even Mary could not dream seriously of undoing more than a small fraction of her father’s work of spoliation. This Reformation tragedy has been told often enough; Froude has presented one side; Di£on, Gasquet and Gairdner the other1 ; the net result of these pleadings has been very ably summed up by A. F. Pollard and H. A. L. Fisher. That last fight is as dramatic and familiar as the battle of Waterloo; but nobody has yet attempted to trace the obscure currents of history which led up to it ; or to show how steadily, and in general how unsuspectingly, that vast army which had held Europe at its feet marched on from day to day towards its ineluctable fate. In the thirteenth century, a world without monks would have seemed as impossible as a world of monks would seem to us in the twentieth ; and it is absurd to suppose that we owe this difference to two men, Luther and Henry VIII. The object of the present book is to describe, however sum¬ marily, the life and work of those myriads of nameless cloisterers who were so naturally dominant in the Middle Ages, and by whose own choice it has come about, if indeed man is in any sense master of his own and others’ fate, that their successors count for so little in the world around us. Some future day, when modern differences on easily-ascertainable matters of fact shall have been adjusted by patient research and mutual candour; when at last historical students shall be as fully agreed on all main questions of Reformation history as they are already upon all main problems of the Great Rebellion, it will then be seen that the last few centuries of medieval monachism develope a tragedy, in the Greek sense, almost as striking as that of the fall of imperial Rome. Its keynote is inevitable retribution — denn alle Schuld rdcht sich auf Erden. We mark, on a broad canvas, the virtues of the virtuous, the vices of the villains, and the listless drift of the majority. We see the eipcoveia, the fate as certain as it is unseen ; the great wave of history swells suddenly up to a still greater climax, and thence onward in a downward sweep which tells its tale as plainly as the upward curve. Those who suffered
1 See, however, Gairdner’s important retractations in The Nineteenth Century and After for July, 1909. Fisher’s summary, however judicial is affected by his unfamiliarity with some important aspects of medieval life.
INTRODUCTION
XXXVll
most under Henry VIII were often the least guilty in themselves ; men burdened with a fatal inheritance. For the London Car¬ thusians and the Friars Observant, for dignified and respectable old men like the Abbot of Glastonbury, the least sympathetic student will find the same regrets as for those who innocently suffered the Theban woe, “curse upon curse, pang upon pang. . .helpless.”
And yet, sad as was the fate of many noble figures in the sixteenth century, the slower tragedy of the epigoni was more painful, without the same dramatic effect. To follow French monasticism in detail from the Reformation to the Revolution is mainly a study in morbid tissues, which even the Benedictines of St-Maur cannot wholly redeem. The whole lesson of this institution, with its greatness and its littlenesses, can be learnt from the five last centuries of the Middle Ages. Documents are abundant for the whole period, and the organism itself, as yet, is unmarred by any violent interruption of growth.
This, then, is the bare chart of our coming journey; but everything depends upon the traveller’s own eyes, and the dis¬ position which he brings to this task of exploration. “ Seek, and ye shall find,” is as true in history as in religion. An ably- conducted paper like The Church Times , representing a large professional public which claims in a very special sense to rest upon an historical basis, complains of “ the darkness which con¬ ceals the medieval monk and nun from us as successfully as it hides the early inhabitants of Mashonaland and Yucatan”1. But this, so far as it is true at all, is chargeable to the very men who, in our own days, complain of it most bitterly. The ignorance, so far as it exists, comes not from misfortune but from per¬ versity. It is not that time has devoured all but an insignificant wreckage of the actual documentary evidence, but that those who profess the greatest interest in medieval monasticism, and who claim it as their special province in history, do in fact shrink disloyally from facing the vast mass of records, partly through indolence but mainly through fear to face unwelcome truths. They persistently ignore these documents whose very survival they regret ; the key of knowledge they have taken away ; they
1 June 30, 1922, p. 695, col. 4.
xxxviii INTRODUCTION
themselves have not entered in, and those that were entering in they have hindered1.
Monastic historiography has a very curious history of its own; there were giants in the seventeenth century, b,ut these have had no true successors. Mabillon and his fellow-workers of the Congregation of St-Maur laid the foundations, but the foundations only, of what might have been one of the most important contributions ever made to social history. The Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti never got beyond noo A.D., nor the Annales Ordinis S. Benedicti beyond 1120, even reckoning the supplementary matter which Martene drew from Mabillon’s papers. But it is only at the point where Mabillon and Martene were stopped by death that the real wealth of intimate docu¬ ments begins. The Cistercian General Chapter Statutes, extending almost continuously from 1134 to 1547, supply a steady thread of evidence such as we lack altogether for the preceding centuries ; and these Cistercian records are supple¬ mented in the next century by similar, though less perfectly preserved, Chapter Acts of the Dominicans, Franciscans, Cluniacs, Benedictines and Austin Canons. About the same time, monastic chronicles become far fuller and more explicit; Jocelin of Brakelond, the chronicles of Evesham and Meaux, the Lives of the Abbots of St Albans, may be paralleled by a large number of equally intimate records from France, Belgium, Italy and Germany. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Diary of Odo Rigaldi gives us such a statistical view of monasticism throughout the whole diocese of Rouen (and, in a lesser degree, throughout the whole province) as we get neither earlier nor later in the whole Middle Ages ; and Rouen was a typical well-managed diocese. Henceforward visitatorial docu¬ ments become far more abundant; at first, we get detailed injunctions dealing with specific matters needing emendation at particular monasteries; then, with the fifteenth century, we often have the actual preliminary evidence given by monks and nuns to their visitors, upon which episcopal injunctions were afterwards based. It is probable that about half these documents
1 The brief monographs published in French and German are often excellent so far as they go, but seldom help us far towards a general synthesis. Moreover, such as they are, they have been almost altogether ignored by writers in the English language.
INTRODUCTION
XXXIX
are still in MS.; but it needs years of study to master even those which are already printed. We are often able to check and illustrate these depositions from contemporary account-rolls, deeds of gift or sale, or customals prescribing the details of common life in particular monasteries. With the fifteenth century come also a few Visitors’ Manuals, the invaluable autobiography of one Visitor (Johann Busch) and the diaries of two others (Ambrogio Traversari and Abbot Martin of Vienna). Abbot Tritheim’s sermons and disciplinary writings show us clearly how much reformers had achieved in the latter half of the century, and how much they had failed to achieve; priceless evidence of the same kind comes from France, where a double current of orthodox reforming effort provoked counterpleas from the conservative side also. Meanwhile, from the thirteenth century onwards, we have a fairly continuous series of similar disciplinary treatises, of criticisms from heretics and replies by monastic apologists ; these become increasingly frequent and plain-spoken as the Reformation draws near. In the Reforma¬ tion period itself, we have very illuminating reports from the papal Visitor Felician Ninguarda, which go far to corroborate the medieval evidence. Equally illuminating are the records of still later reformers — Cardinal Richelieu in France, Scipione de’ Ricci in Italy, and Joseph II’s Visitors in Austria; these show us how the strength and the weakness of monachism are alike bound up with essential elements in the different Rides ; so that the same system produced very similar fruits in all places and at all times. When we consider also the vast literature which bears less directly upon this great institution — the works of satirists and panegyrists; casual references in non-monastic chronicles ; books of canon law ; judicial and political documents ; papal petitions and, above all, synodal or conciliar decrees — when all these are taken into account, it must be admitted that even the prodigious erudition of a Mabillon laid only the founda¬ tions of monastic history. As a contemporary remarked who honoured him, Mabillon knew from the seventh century to the eleventh admirably, but his knowledge was practically limited to those five hundred years1. Moreover, vast as Mabillon’s know-
1 “ Still we may readily credit the words of Abb6 de Longuerue, one of the savants who used to frequent the Sunday afternoon reunions at St-Germain
xl
INTRODUCTION
ledge was, he was not always free to say what he knew. We must not only remember his natural bias, shown in such discussions as that on the Benedictine schools in one of the introductions (saec. hi, i, § iv) of his Acta Sanctorum, and in a few other_places where strict impartiality would scarcely have been human. For, beyond this, he had to reckon with his monastic superiors and with the Roman hierarchy. He very narrowly escaped the Index for having dared to expose a few of the falsehoods current in his day about certain popular saints ; he got into serious trouble for repudiating certain Augustinian treatises which are now universally admitted to be spurious, and for having held the balance honestly, in his preface, between the Jansenists and the Ultramontanes, each of whom claimed Augustine’s authority1. In his edition of Petrus de Celia, he was compelled to cut out the greater part of that preface in which he had ventured to draw attention to the evidence which Petrus supplies for monastic decay in the later twelfth century2. It may safely be asserted that, if his life had been prolonged far enough to bring his Annales well into the thirteenth century, he would never have been permitted to print Odo Rigaldi’s Diary with such com-
des Pr£s. ‘ Le Pere Mabillon,’ says he, ‘savoit fort bien le 7, le 8, le 9, le 10 et le 11 siecles ; mais il ne savoit rien ni en defk, ni au-dela.’ Non omnia possumus omnes; and seeing that it has become rather the fashion to speak in an offhand way of Mabillon ’s ‘almost unbounded learning’ it is well to keep before our eyes this corrective from the mouth of a thoroughly capable as well as shrewd, if somewhat erratic, observer.” Abbot E. C. Butler in Downside Review, 1893, P- 123. Cf. Melanges Mabillon, 1908, p. 261 : “He had left scarcely any materials for the twelfth and succeeding centuries ”
1 E. de Broglie, Mabillon, II, 21 1 ff. ; cf. E. C. Butler, Benedictine Monachism PP- 341 ff.
Melanges Mabillon, pp. 101 ff. His private protest to the President of the Congregation of St-Maur, printed for the first time in this modern collection, shows on the one hand how clearly he recognized the folly, apart from the guilt, of such suppressions, and on the other, the absolute powerless¬ ness of this greatest specialist of his day in the hands of the hierarchy. He writes: [This suppression] condemns not only Petrus de Celia, but also St Bernard Peter Damian, the Venerable Bede and all the great men of our Order who have deplored its disorders. . . It is certain that our best means of stopping our adversaries’ mouths is that we should ourselves condemn in advance, all that is or has been found irregular in our Order. . . If we cut out this passage alone from our Preface, our adversaries themselves, who will read this passage in the author’s text, will have reason to complain of our in¬ sincerity, in that, while noting his zeal for everything else, we dissemble his zed for the Order in order to spare ourselves.” Since, therefore, he was not suffered to tell the truth on this point, he cut out all his reflections on Peter’s personal character; i.e. more than half his preface.
INTRODUCTION xli
ments as the document would have suggested to his straight¬ forward mind. The later history of monachism could scarcely have been written by monks alone; and, in fact, later monks have scarcely even attempted it. The bulk of modern encomiasts have practically adopted Dupanloup’s motto, “surtout, mefiez- vous des sources”; or even Cardinal Manning’s still more reactionary maxim that the appeal to history is a treason and a heresy1. Nine-tenths of all that has been written since Mabillon’s time really goes back to Mabillon, directly or indirectly. The vast wealth of documents between St Bernard and the Reformation is practically non-existent for modern historians. Mr A. Hamilton Thompson, by translating and annotating only two volumes of the Lincoln Visitations with true scholarly care, and Miss Power in her Medieval English Nunneries, have given intelligent readers more light upon the actual monachism with which Henry VIII had to deal, than Montalembert gave in that bulky book which owes all its historical value to Mabillon, ending practically where Mabillon ends, and tricking out Mabillon’s sober and solid con¬ clusions with a rhetoric which is not always even sincere. For Montalembert, like Kenelm Digby, was “heart-broken” when his own daughter took him at his word and went into a convent2. In Digby ’s case, the decision caused an almost life-long estrange¬ ment ; yet Digby had been an even more enthusiastic panegyrist than Montalembert. His Mores Catholici, delightful to read, has only the slenderest claims to history. It is a common-place book of extracts from contemporary and non-contemporary writers, heaped together without critical discrimination or even historical sequence, and not always accurately translated. Newman’s monastic essays have the charm and sincerity of his best writings ; but Newman would frankly have confessed his dependence on secondary authorities; he took his history mainly from such sources as the prefaces to Mabillon’s Acta Sanctorum, but he had not Mabillon’s width of horizon to guide him3.
1 See The Daily Telegraph for Oct. 8, 1875 (an explanation even more illuminating than the original words on p. 226 of Manning s Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost); Acton’s Correspondence, ed. Figgis and Laurence,
1 (1917), 5°-
2 B. Holland, Memoir of Kenelm Digby, 1919, pp. 163 ff.
3 See appendix 1.
xlii
INTRODUCTION
These three volumes, therefore, represent an attempt to grapple with the neglected evidence of the last five medieval centuries; and, however imperfectly, a pioneer attempt. Dis¬ connected as my original lectures were, and obvious as the gaps will be even now, I believe them to represent the first serious struggle to narrate the story of the monastic centuries from all kinds of contemporary documents. Having striven to tell the truth, I welcome criticism from other students who can convict me either of mis-stating facts or of ignoring essential evidence. On the other hand, let those who disagree with me deign at least to face my facts ; for this is my main reason for publishing now, when the general public is in a mood to demand facts, whether pleasant or unpleasant. I cannot flatter myself that my inter¬ pretation of the documents is final ; but, on the other hand, I am convinced that no man will venture henceforth to ignore the vast mass of first-hand evidence for monastic life which lies at the feet of all scholars who deign to stoop and make use of it. Good monks of today, if they would only see it, are even more truly concerned than other men to face these records which have come down to us from good monks in the past. We all see now, what Sir Thomas More could not really deny when it was pressed upon him in argument, loyally as he tried to defend ecclesiastical traditions, that the most fatal policy for anybody is the policy of Eli towards his sons1. The ecclesiastical authorities of the early sixteenth century were mainly striving, as they had striven for centuries past, to gloss over the faults of their weaker brethren ; they thus left no room for any but catastrophic reform. The sense of solidarity is apt to deaden the sense of personal responsibility : a man will do for The Cause what he would not dream of doing for private profit. If the modern world is often equally unjust on the other side — if our walls are placarded with caricatures of bibulous monks by way of advertisement for this man’s beer or that man’s whisky — this is partly because even honest monks have not yet repudiated methods of advocacy which violate the plainest canons of literary rectitude. We shall never kill error but by a general agreement in favour of better
1 More’s Apology, chap, xliii. It is evident that More is compelled to recognize a great deal of truth in the accusations of St- Germain. For the accusations see Chaps, xvi and xvn of this volume, and volumes n and m.
INTRODUCTION
xliii
things ; the homage to truth must not be one-sided, but reciprocal. Medieval history in general, and monastic history in especial, are still halting at that rudimentary stage where no man can hope to get a bird’s-eye view from the heights that stand above all controversy. Therefore we of the present generation can best serve the public by plea and counter-plea ; and we can even serve ourselves best, in the long run, by laying all our cards frankly upon the table.
■
'
CHAPTER I
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
npHE root-problem of monasticism is one which every ideal has
1 to face ; we could not get rid of it by suppressing Christianity, or even Theism, tomorrow. The formal State, and the formal conventions of any healthy society, are necessary and satisfactory- up to a certain point; but a very small dose of idealism soon brings us beyond that point. This ideal need not be religious, m the ordinary sense of the term ; pacifism and militant free- thought have to make very much the same choice which lay before the early monk. Can we best serve our higher aim by crystallizing into a society within Society, and so cutting our¬ selves off from the contagion of the un-ideal multitude? Or is it a braver and more effectual choice to keep full touch with the rest, always conforming so far as conformity is morally permissible, and hoping gradually to leaven the world by con¬ stant intercourse? The modern idealist generally makes the latter choice , the monk made the former. This contrast invites criticism, but gives no excuse for mere off-hand judgement; we cannot decide on the easy principle that our own later and higher civilization must needs be better informed than our remote ancestors. It is very possible that each has chosen rightly in his own way, and that the different solutions have been legiti¬ mately conditioned by widely different circumstances. I hope to deal more fully with this problem in a later and more com¬ prehensive volume; meanwhile it is enough to hint here that time has not essentially changed this riddle of life, but only stated it in fresh terms. The very refusal to choose is, in itself, a choice.
And, if the monk s main problem comes home very nearly to us, so also do the details of his daily life. The Great War has made many men regard collectivism with new eyes ; and history may now count upon more general sympathy towards that ancient form of collective effort. For monachism is not only one of the most resolute of those ventures of faith
CR I
i
2
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
which, through victory or through failure, have created the world we live in, and which are destined to make better worlds for our children and their descendants; it is also one of the greatest of world-pageants ; one of the most dramatic episodes in the long Legende des Siecles. Even the Dark Ages of monadhism have a gloomy grandeur of their own ; “thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud ; . . . and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace.” It is a chapter of history which may often be misread, but will never be forgotten. The artist still draws some of his highest inspiration directly from monastic architecture ; indirectly, modern landscape owes almost as much to our ruined abbeys; Wordsworth and Turner take us inevitably to Bolton; Girtin to Kirkstall; Scott to Melrose. And, to the psychologist, there is a rich mine in monastic meditation, from its most refined forms in the Imitatio down to the primitive fetishism of the Miracles de St-Benoit, or of similar collections where the homme moyen sensuel of the Middle Ages frankly reveals his inner mind to posterity. From such ordinary folk, whose ideas reflect the average of their own age, and who offend, even while they interest, the average of ours, the hero-worshipper may look up and away to saints like St Bernard or St Francis, and take heart from them as Matthew Arnold took heart from the memory of his father.
Elere I must speak of myself ; it is better to be frankly personal where we feel strongly; that which has inspired a life-long interest in one case is the more likely to chime in with some other man’s tastes; and the public even permits us to be fondly garrulous, so long as we can avoid the genre ennuyeux. Doubtless there are things monastic which only a monk can fully conceive ; and that is the abiding value of such a book as Abbot Butler’s. But most men feel it even more important to understand some¬ thing of monachism in general as a factor in world-history, and something of the individual monk as a fellow-man differing from themselves in type, but not in essential humanity; a man whom in one sense we shall never know, as we shall never know even our own friends; — “the heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his grief,” — but whom we may yet observe with pleasure and profit, as we
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM 3
watch those whom we meet daily in the flesh. Now, for the monk’s place in world-history the monk himself is as interested a witness as is the Englishman or the Frenchman when it comes to a question of England’s or France’s place among other nations. There is no monastic historian who, for learning and impartiality, comes even into the same class as Mabillon; yet Mabillon’s logic breaks down at once when he comes to the question of monastic services to education, for which he found such sweeping claims and so little evidence; and, again, he consented without a struggle to the suppression of a preface in which he had ventured to expatiate on the services of a great medieval Benedictine in the cause of monastic reform1. Mabillon tacitly admitted the right of his superiors to conceal the fact that reform had been sorely needed ; and there¬ fore it is well that monastic history should sometimes be written by men free from this temptation, even though they have their own temptations to ignore some facts and over-emphasize others. From the non-monastic, as from the monastic historian of monachism, the public asks only two things, that he should labour lovingly at his subject, and that he should give the reader ungrudgingly of all that he seems to have found. And the present writer, who never lived inside a monastery in the body, has never been far from them in thought. I was born under the shadow of the Greyfriars’ tower at Lynn; bred in that Nar valley which once had fifteen cloisters in five-and-twenty miles, and has thence been called “the Holy Land of Norfolk”; and schooled within daily sight of Chaucer’s Dunmow. My first schoolboy essay was an attempt to arouse interest in these things; and during the last 20 years my main accumulations of notes have been monastic. Our interests are rightly conditioned not only by intrinsic, but also by proportional values. The mind has its own law of relativity; we cannot all be always spending all our enthusiasm upon just those things which happen most directly to touch the life of our time ; we are rightly influenced also by the chance which casts some particular fragment of world-truth upon our own path; or, again, by other men’s neglect of or injustice to our own hobby — things which move
1 Mabillon, AA.SS.O.S.B. Saec. in, i, praef. § iv; L. Delisle in Melanges Mabillon, 1908, pp. 101-2.
4
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
not only our selfish but also our disinterested nature. Interest gradually becomes absorption ; we wake up at last to find our¬ selves head over ears in love; the statue has come to life, all the more adorable because it is our own and not another s ; we feel the full force of Sappho’s olov to yXvKv/jba\ov —
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough
A-top on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot somehow —
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
There must come a time in every student’s life when he feels intensely the need of further restraint and concentration ; many earlier interests must be sacrificed; “entsagen sollst du, sollst entsagen, das ist der ewige Gesang.” Happy are those who, as they grow old with the object of their desire, can say daily, “Time cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety ” ; and in this subject there is infinite variety; for monachism, during ten centuries, was an epitome of European life. All kinds of natures drifted into the cloister; all sorts of ambitions took root there; every virtue flourished, and every sort of weed grew up among the wheat. There is no imaginable scene, tragic or comic, that was not or might not have been played on that stage; and, although every marked exception was thus possible, yet here, as in the outside world, the normal was humdrum and commonplace. The real background was grey : there is no excuse, with all the documents before us, for those who would paint it dead black or dazzling white. But here, as in our own lives, we can keep the grey in its place as a background, and cast our main light upon those threads of black and white and rainbow colours which combine to make the distinctive pattern of the tapestry. Thus conceived, the cloister-life of those ten centuries shows a motley crowd, stately in its distant and slow procession before our eyes ; a crowd in which even the grotesque is tempered by distance, and all too glaring contrasts are merged in the magic mists of time. Strain as we will, peer as we may through alternate telescope and microscope, we are almost as much tantalized as fascinated by what we see1. If Emanuel Deutsch had lived to three-score years and ten, he might still have mourned as he
1 I make no exception here for modern monastic writers, whose manner of life is in many ways so different from St Bernard’s, that they often find it as hard to reach the true perspective as Protestants do. A good deal of this
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
5
mourned when the cancer ate out his life on the threshold of maturity, that fate had slit his thread just when the real Past was beginning to unfold itself to his view1. But, shadowy and elusive as the vision is, it haunts us all the more persistently ; we are always wooing, never sated with fruition ; more and more, as time wears on, we live side by side with this reflection of our own mind upon the mists of the past. It is a double life, a double self :
Partout oix j’ai voulu dormir. . .
Sur ma route est venu s’asseoir
Un malheureux vetu de noir
Qui me ressemblait comme un frere2.
How many of us, long before the Great War, had seen that catastrophe dimly as a distant and melancholy pageant! In France, in Germany, we were holiday-makers, but our bed¬ room windows had trembled to a steady, monotonous pulsation ; and we had known, without waking, that this was the night- march of some great division in the autumn manoeuvres. The procession, half heard, half felt, weaves itself into the traveller’s dreams, and long persists as a steady undertone to all he hears or thinks in daytime — this tramp, tramp, tramp of thousands and tens of thousands, each with a soul of his own, but also with that collective army-soul which lends such a mysterious significance to their midnight defilade. The same feeling came upon us all tenfold, with a choking at the throat, in the latter months of 1914, when the village street pulsed for hours under the footfall of endless columns marching to the tune of Tipperary, and every face was different under the same uniform, and the
may be realized by reading between the lines of that apologetic chapter in Abbot Butler’s Benedictine Monachism, pp. 368-83. I have dealt with a similar subject in The Hibbert Journal for Jan. 1921, pp. 326 ff.
1 “I work hard; but often I am on the brink of giving up. To resuscitate a time which perhaps after all had better remain dead, is a rash task. Who knows? perhaps after all I may be only and really in a dream, while I fancy I see golden towers and palaces gleaming in the dark blue depths, streets and market places crowded with a motley crew — Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Jewish, Indian, and the rest — and hearing the vague, wild hum of strange dead voices, and seeing above all the weird strained look in their eyes which prays and implores unceasingly — Redeem us ! You remember the ‘ Doctor, sind Sie des Teufels ? ’ with which the Captain caught hold of Heine’s boots as he was leaning over the ‘ Schiffsrand,’ looking downwards I” ( Literary Remains of Emanuel Deutsch, 1874, p. xiii.)
2 A. de Musset, Nuit de Decembre.
6
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
same shadow hung over every soul of that innumerable multi¬ tude : Morituri te salutant. That pageant of those who were going to die, familiar now to every town and village, has quickened our sympathies for the eternal pageant of those who are^dead. In distant history, those ghosts of the past march onwards to a battle which was fought for us; with their stripes we are healed; on one side, their victory points us the way; on another their defeat stands as our danger-signal; the world could not have been what it is, if these dead men had not fought and bled. By attraction or by repulsion, their minds have done more to colour ours than we generally acknowledge ; they not only thought many of our thoughts for us, but coined hundreds of the words we use in daily life. Quisque suos patimur manes ; and, in the life of mind and spirit, that paradox of the Religio Medici may be literally defended :
“Before Abraham was, I am,” is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense, if I say it of myself ; for I was not only before myself but Adam; that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity. And in this sense, I say, the world was before the creation, and at the end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.
Moreover, something like monasticism haunts us potentially even at the present moment. If the Russian horror were to sweep now over the whole civilized world, it is probable that the first attempts at reconstruction, as soon as some sort of crystallization became possible, would include something nearly analogous to medieval monasticism. A few men would retire into their own souls, living even on roots and water for the sake of living the free life of the spirit; a few would begin, others would follow, and groups would form within the great class- dictatorship. Some rudimentary notions of science, letters and art would survive in these communities, to germinate again in happier times; the literature, the art, and even the science of a remote posterity would owe gratitude to them ; and no man of culture would be disinterested in their history. Why, then, should the modern world so far neglect the men who saved these fragments from the wreck of Greek and Roman civilization, that
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
7
we may almost say of them what Hallam says of another medieval association; “The curious subject of Freemasonry has un¬ fortunately been treated of only by panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious”1?
The heroism of the great Religious becomes more compre¬ hensible in proportion as we visualize the ordinary monk or friar or nun. Though Newman was not a monk in the strictest technical sense (for the Oratorians are a secular congregation), yet his life illustrates monastic vocation and conversion more vividly, perhaps, than any other modern book. He was an accomplished musician and violinist; his palate was so delicate that he was made official wine-taster for the cellars of his Oxford college ; his letters from abroad show a wonderful sense of form and colour; he apprehends and describes with an effortless accuracy which puts him absolutely in the first rank. All these things he seems to have subordinated, early and completely, to what he felt an incomparably higher vocation. He broke a stubborn and masterful will to obedience, and often to the pettiest obedience, though here the struggle was life-long and never, perhaps, completely victorious2. St Bernard, again, was born and bred for human society; he had every personal and intellectual charm. Though he chose to make himself un¬ observant of natural beauty for what seemed Christ’s sake, yet his very sermons show a keenness of observation and (where necessary) of satire which tell their own tale of struggle and renunciation. Nor did the choice seem as simple to those men, perhaps, as it seems to their modern panegyrists who pitch the note of admiration upwards and upwards till it reaches a falsetto. We can see the final triumph of the dead saint’s ideal ; but we are apt to forget his own inevitable doubts and misgivings; St Bernard himself, though his mind was one of the serenest, was vividly conscious of the temptation to welcome as divine truth that which was really devilish falsehood. Even in the Middle Ages, Religious must sometimes have doubted not only of final perseverance (as they constantly confess) but also, to some extent, even of wisdom in their choice. They must have
1 Middle Ages, ch. ix, pt. ii, note. (Ward, Lock and Co.’s ed. p. 641.)
2 See, for instance, Acton’s Correspondence, ed. Figgis and Laurence, pp. 76, 82.
8
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM
asked not only: “Need I give up so much?” but even: “Is it right to look upon the abandonment of some of these things as a sacrifice to God?” With all their worship of celibacy, the best of them generally recognized the value of married life; they were not blind to parental love; they saw the natural innocence and beauty of many “worldly” relations and enjoy¬ ments ; and they knew how truly a man may give praise to God as he tastes them. They do not often put these things into plain words ; they would perhaps not even have frankly confessed so much to themselves; yet something of the bitterness which we often find in the very sweetest of these ascetic natures — the 22nd chapter, for instance, of the 1st book of the Imitatio — suggest that the writer is crying aloud in order to deaden his own pangs; that he does not always float in a serene sense of victory over evil, but needs to work himself up into artificial indignation against that which he is now professionally pledged to hate, yet which God in the beginning may have formed him to love. The Religious sometimes gives the World the go-by not in the lofty indifference of impenetrable armour, but seamed with soul-scars that are still tender to the lightest touch of memory, and with a conscience not altogether free from sug¬ gestions of treachery towards things which the Almighty had created and found very good :
respiciens udis prodita luminibus.
Behind the dullest of these monastic records there lurks tragedy, in the fullest dramatic sense of the word — the inspiration of human endeavour and endurance,— and pity for all that human flesh and nerves must suffer in the struggle1— and sympathy with those far more pitiable figures who despaired sooner or later as we ourselves might well have despaired, and who sank into self-confessed failure. I housands were sincerely converted in the spirit, yet not in the flesh ; they remained unrefinedly and almost unrepentantly fond of all merriment and good cheer and good fellowship; but such men, even through their lapses, bear true witness to the immensity of their ordinary sacrifice, as the
1 Often we find medieval saints echoing to God that cry from the book of Jon Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh of brass?” Abbot Butler (p. 56) seems not to recognize this as a biblical quotation.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONASTICISM 9
death of the common private is often more significant than the officer’s.
We shall see presently how St Benedict conceived of monastic life as a warfare ; and thus, again, it may be easier now to under¬ stand the monk’s mind than it was ten years ago. Most of us believe that these saints would have been ideally better without their asceticism1 ; yet we need not, on that account, be dominated by a regretful sense of waste. From most points of view, what waste could have been more heartrending than that of our best and brightest youth in the earliest stages of this War? Ideally, it would have been infinitely better that all this young intellect and energy should have been organized in time of peace to prevent war; if all young men under thirty had been capable of working wholeheartedly for ten years in favour of the League of Nations, they alone could have carried it through against all opposition from their elders. But, practically, human incon¬ sistency and improvidence being what it is among young and old, this abominable waste of life has made the world see what even “advanced thinkers” refused to see before; and the self- sacrifice of these thousands, which in other circumstances would have been culpable rashness, has in this case ministered to our salvation. Those who are now working hardest to make war impossible do also, in most cases, feel most keenly the grandeur of the young men’s sacrifice; and similarly, however we may aspire to create a world in which professional monachism may be out of date, this should not blind us to what has been done for humanity by the self-denial of monks in the past. If the monastic legend in many ways resembles the Napoleonic legend — if we have had too many blind admirers on the one side, and too many on the other who could never think of the “Corsican Ogre ” with patience — time has brought its remedy in both cases. The public is now sincerely anxious to hear the truth, for good or for evil, in so far as the truth can be sifted out from the mass of surviving documents.
1 The word is here used in its ordinary modern sense. But Abbot Butler in his fourth chapter protests, with a certain amount of justice, against the indiscriminate use of the word in a disadvantageous sense. He himself, however, leaves considerable excuse for misunderstanding when he defines it as “some set efforts at self-denial and spiritual achievement beyond what is required in order to work out our salvation” (p. 36).
CHAPTER II
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
MONASTiciSM, as the very word proclaims, was concerned originally with separate and sporadic vocations ; it was not a collectivist, but an individualist movement. In every genera¬ tion, exceptional men have realized with startling force a truth which belongs really to all generations. It has come suddenly home to them that, in the strictest sense of the word, they do not live in a Christian land ; that no nation has ever followed whole¬ heartedly after Christ; nor, if we chose to shake all our native dust from the soles of our feet, could we find a Christian land elsewhere on the globe. It is not only that good men and women, in this twentieth century, habitually regard the Sermon on the Mount in a spirit less of fervent discipleship than of distant toleration. Everywhere we find some men casting doubt upon doctrines which others count as cardinal truths of the Christian creed; and, as a very earnest and thoughtful Anglican has recently expressed it: “There are no longer grounds for be¬ lieving that the Western world is Christian now in a sense in which it was not in the period immediately preceding the peace of the Church under Constantine the Great”1.
Although this difficulty strikes each generation with fresh force, it is a problem as old as Christianity itself. In the present century divergences of belief may preponderate, as they did in the earliest generations ; in the Dark and Middle Ages men may have been less distressed by constant and articulate doctrinal doubts than by the contrast between the confessed creed and the actual conduct of average Christendom. But both elements of discord have always been strong ; in no generation could men be true Christians by mere birth without conscious re-birth; and monachism represents not only one of the earliest roads to¬ wards regeneration, but also one of the broadest and most frequented. Its importance in the history of civilization is inde¬ pendent, to a great extent, of creed or doctrine. It is difficult to contest the historical fact, whether we like it or not, that 1 J. N. Figgis, Civilisation at the Cross-Roads, 1913, p. 29.
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
n
Christianity has influenced the world more than any other event in history; and that monachism was, for ten centuries at least, one of the most characteristic of Christian manifestations. It was the inevitable logical outcome of one conception of Christ’s message; and, though no creed can fairly be pressed by its opponents to its extreme logical implications — though we must always try to understand a religion as it is understood and practised by its adherents — yet, in cases where it is they them¬ selves who have drawn certain extreme conclusions both in theory and in practice, such conclusions are among the most instructive data of social history. In them, we see the ideal writ large, and can study the full development of all that was merely embryonic in the original theory. To compare the static with the dynamic conception of Christianity, we must look closely into monastic history.
During this last generation, since the Church made peace with Darwinism, we are all more or less ready to conceive our creed dynamically. Newman’s doctrine of Development preached evolution in religion even before Darwin preached it in biology ; and practically all theologians now accept that doctrine; the differences are only of degree. Bishop Gore, the champion of orthodoxy, frankly treats the Old Testament on the same principles of interpretation which his modernist opponents ap¬ ply to the New Testament and to the records of the sub- apostolic age. It is conceded on all hands that immense changes have taken place during the nineteen Christian centuries ; orthodox and heterodox differ only in their estimate of the gradual or catastrophic nature of these changes. To the orthodox, all real Christianity of today is a single vast tree whose every leaf and fibre lay hid in the single seed sown by Christ ; nothing is true but what springs directly from that one grain. To the modernist, the evolution is rather that of a succession of crops grown on changing soils and under the most diverse climatic conditions. Each fresh succession has sprung, essentially, from that single seed; but there has been cross-fertilization; there have been strange new developments and equally startling re¬ versions to type ; the laws of evolution have even produced new Christian species ; yet all these were implied from the first ; all are legitimate, so far as they can justify themselves to the
12
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
world by use or beauty; all are, in some sort, expressions of the mind of Jesus. This is the dynamic conception of Christianity. It sees, in diversity itself, a unity more real than that which cannot live except by forcible elimination of all thatj.s not uniform with itself. To the modernist, one reality neecf' not necessarily be clothed with the same forms as other realities; all are real in proportion as they conform to divine laws of growth; and, to borrow the idea which Dante himself took from Boethius, all may say: “my desire and will are rolled, with the steady motion of a wheel, by that Love which moves the sun and the other stars”1.
Nor are such conceptions exclusively modern; among the greatest of the early Fathers there was a far stronger conception of religious evolution, and of unity in diversity, than we find in the Middle Ages proper. Gregory II, in 730 A. D., could complacently argue upon the supposition that the apostles had worshipped images2; conspicuous theologians often claimed an apostolic origin for monachism and for the system of indulgences ; but men like Origen and Augustine knew too much of history and philosophy to go so far astray. If the ignorant multitude of their age, and the whole official Church of later and more ignorant ages, conceived their religion in the extreme static sense — if they imagined Christ and his apostles as having handed down a series of clear-cut and immutable dogmas, outside of which there would be no salvation — this was not the fault of the greatest minds in the early Christian generations.
The worst distortions of Christianity, perhaps, have sprung from the crude notions of heaven and hell suggested to the multitude by Christ’s brief and highly-coloured allusions. Here and there a Christian thinker might argue, even in the Dark or Middle Ages, that God may recognize as Christians many who never bore that name3; but, to the vast majority, all time and all eternity were conditioned by the sharpest possible line of division, drawn at the moment of death. A minority would
1 Paradiso, xxxm, 143.
2 Migne, P.L. vol. 89, col. 514. The pope’s personal authorship of this letter found among his works has been questioned ; but nobody doubts that the letter was sent from the Roman Court to the Emperor Leo III; nor is there any trace of disapproval expressed by Gregory or any subsequent Popes.
3 See the references in Christ, St Francis and Today, pp. 105, 190.
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
i3
go to everlasting bliss, the great majority to unending torment; and this immeasurable contrast was as glaring in time as in quality ; it was just the dying man’s last breath which brought a decision as sudden as it was irrevocable ; between one moment and another, he for whom everything had been possible was now sealed eternally to one fate or the other. The growth of the doctrine of an intermediate state softened this contrast, but left it essentially unchanged for thinking men ; each might hope that he deserved no more than purgatory ; but none could be sure that the devil might not seize him at his last gasp1; no pains could be wasted which guarded, even in the most infinitesimal degree, against this horrible contingency. The full consequences of such a faith are seen even today in Sicily, where murderers after their execution are worshipped as saints. The crowd is more certain of these men’s salvation than of the holiest among the rest; such a man has publicly repented on the scaffold, has received the last cleansing rites of the Church, and goes straight into eternity without a moment for further sin2. No great writer in the Middle Ages drew this strictly logical in¬ ference; all the best men did all they could to avoid the more immoral consequences of the official creed; indeed, it may be said that the best men so emphasized the truly spiritual side of Christianity, and were so completely possessed by it, that crudities and superstitions fall into the background. Lord Acton insists that there are two Gods in the modern Roman Church, the good God of real Christianity, and the very different God of ultramontanism ; and certainly it was so in the Middle Ages3. S. R. Maitland vindicated the spirituality of the best medieval theologians against the hasty and ignorant accusations current in his day4 ; but a very great deal might be cited with equal truth on the opposite side ; the God of the Imitatio is not the same who appears in the Miracles de St-Benoit, or even in St Gregory’s Dialogues and Peter the Venerable’s Liber Miracalorum.
This eschatology, crude as it was, did unquestionably con¬ tribute to the fact that the medieval man looked forward more
1 Logically, that is : illogically, a man might choose to convince himself of his own future salvation; and this feeling (which Newman mistakenly imagined to have been born with Calvinism) was fairly common in the Middle Ages: see From St Francis to Dante, 2nd ed. p. 57.
2 See appendix 13. 3 Correspondence, 1,78. 1 The Dark Ages, ch. vii.
i4
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
seriously than his remote ancestors ; and foresight is one of the main conditions of cultural advance. All serious books of the Middle Ages, it may almost be said, are coloured by the one main consideration that every man has a soul to save ; certainly all their philosophy was based upon that assumption. 'There was, indeed, much more scepticism of all kinds than has generally been admitted; but the vast majority acquiesced, at least, in the official creed; and the attempt to put that creed into practice resulted inevitably in the experiment of monachism. The early stages of that experiment have been admirably de¬ scribed in two easily-accessible books, by the ablest French specialist of the Roman communion, and the most distinguished Protestant. It will be found, I hope, that the following brief de¬ scription tallies both with Mgr Duchesne’s Histoire Ancienne de VEglise (n, 491 ff. and in, 32 ff.), and with Harnack’s Das Monchthum, (translated into English in a little volume which has for its main title The Confessions of St Augustine).
Monachism represents the extreme ideal of “otherworldli¬ ness ” in the Church ; and it represents that ideal in an organized form. The question of the earnest Christian’s attitude towards the world around him was not always quite simple from the very first; it grew more complicated in process of time, as the world changed — and, above all, as the Church herself changed. Was Christ a socialist? We have repudiated the suggestion; yet, at least, we must admit that he wished his more immediate disciples to be unencumbered with earthly possessions and family ties. Moreover, only so could they have done their mis¬ sionary work: and we must also remember how the early Christians lived in daily expectation of the second coming of their Lord. But, as years, and then generations passed, this exclusively missionary element naturally fell more and more into the background. Many Christians had their family, their busi¬ ness, their office under the State. Should they abandon these, or might not more be done for Christ by using them for Christian purposes ? The problem was acute already in apostolic times ; how was a wife to do when she found herself married to an unbeliever, or vice versa ? St Paul’s solution was in accordance not only with common sense and charity, but also with the higher courage (1 Cor. vii, 13-16): “Let her not leave him. . .
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM 15
For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife? ” The general balance of choice would tend the more steadily in that direction in proportion as time wore on and the end of all things seemed more and more remote ; it became evident then that even the Christian must do what he could to make the best of the existing world.
And, as this problem confronted the individual, so also it confronted the society, the Church. Should itremain as obscure, as detached as possible, waiting in solitude for the Second Advent? or should it enter into civic life and imperial life? should it form an imperium in imperio , and so pursue its mis¬ sionary work by ordinary business methods ? It would be difficult to find an answer different from that which was in fact given ; yet that decision meant relegating some very plain gospel precepts to the position of counsels of perfection. Property, family ties, office in city or in state, all these things implied either a silent abandonment of certain tenets distinctive of the first generation of Christians, or a difficult and perpetual struggle of adaptation. We need go no farther than this to explain the growing worldli¬ ness of the Church. This did not begin with Constantine and his state-church; it was already notorious before 250 a.d. We there find the Church losing, on the one hand, her disciplinary hold; she no longer exacts more than the minimum penance for notorious offences; she is anxious to keep all she can, and fears to frighten any adherent away. And, in the midst of this growing charity towards sins against God, she becomes on the other hand less and less indulgent towards sins against herself. Strong in her outward organization, she boasts all the more of herself as the One, and insists the more inexorably on excluding all who disagree with her. We see this clearly in the revolt and secession of the Montanists — those puritans of the early Church with whom even Tertullian, one of the greatest of the early Fathers, threw in his lot. These Montanists rejected all com¬ promise with the world; intent on the Second Advent, they had no sympathy with the idea of a Church converting infidel society by slow and patient interpenetration. But orthodoxy excommunicated and expelled the Montanists at the end of the second century: the Church split then on the question
i6
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
of toleration of the world, as the Anglican Church is likely to split in our age on the question of toleration of free thought in Christianity. And from that time forth, if not before, we may say that Christian society was no longer bound together mainly by the bonds of fraternal love, but by the framework of an official hierarchy. Moreover, the hierarchy, in order to keep its power over the mass of the baptized, had to make constant concessions to ordinary social customs — in other words, the worldly spirit. Therefore, within a century of this time, we find an increasing stream of hermits going forth into the wilder¬ ness : “ They fled from the world, and therefore from the Church which had admitted the world into her bosom,” and they thus divided Christendom not controversially, but in self-defence. This impulse came partly from Alexandria, then the centre of Christian thought. Partly, also, it originated in imitation of the pagan ascetics who had long lived in the Egyptian desert. The earliest Christian hermits were Paul and Antony, whose lives are enveloped in obscurity : but of whom we know that they were roughly contemporaries, that they chose an eremitical life about 250 a.d., and that their example attracted numerous disciples. About a century later, it is certain that the remoter Egyptian districts swarmed with such anchorites. In that climate, the transition is easy from civilization to a sort of Nebuchad- nezzardom. I had once the opportunity of asking Dr Doughty, after the republication of his Wanderings in Arabia , what had been his worst enemy on that adventurous travel. He replied without hesitation: “Hunger.” “Then the Bedouin’s diet of dates is unsatisfying? ” “ No, but the Bedouin gets so little even of dates ; if it were not a climate in which one could scrape one¬ self a hole in the sand, and starve and dream all day long, it would be impossible to survive.” This was an illuminating word for Egyptian monachism ; and Michelet has written a few pages of autobiography which throw a similar cross-light on our subject1. In the period of bodily starvation which succeeded his break-down from overwork, he noted the characteristics of this fasting life ; its vagueness, even where it had a singular clearness of its own, like the clearness of a half dream at dawn; its poetry, its wanderings among the clouds and stars, yet its incapacity to
1 Le Banquet, chap, vi, Philosophic du Jeftne.
PLATE 2
A CARTHUSIAN MONK S CELL
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM i7
bring anything solid back with it to everyday life. “How could I ever have persuaded myself” (he adds, in words marked by Lord Acton) “that it was the fasts of the Church which created £ tne Gothic Cathedrals ! ’ And thus he applied his own experience of an invalid slowly reviving under the Italian sun to his past studies in medieval history. This life of seclusion and passive contemplation in the eastern deserts, as it attracted those who aimed at the strictest self-discipline, tempted also the undisci¬ plined and the sluggard. A little manual labour sufficed to keep body and soul together; a little weaving of palm-baskets or husbandry in an oasis; and sometimes pilgrims came with offerings enough to render even the lightest labour unnecessary. Already at the beginning of the fifth century, Jerome describes idle and useless monks as a common phenomenon. They came in crowds to overawe the church councils; about 390 A.D., even the orthodox emperor Theodosius wrote to St Ambrose “monachi multa scelera faciunt”; and to this, more perhaps than to any other cause, we owe the irrevocability of monastic vows1. So long as the monk’s status was purely voluntary, and therefore his obedience fluctuated between church and state, he formed an anomalous and unsettled element in the body politic. It suited the hierarchy, but it was still more important for the government, that his status should be clearly defined and his allegiance fixed beyond all ambiguity. Therefore, from 532 on¬ wards, we find imperial legislation providing that the monk must choose, once for all, between his cloister and the world. For, in the meantime, the solitary cell had been to a great extent superseded by what we may already call the cloister. Vae soli! is the constant refrain of monastic disciplinarians ; “Woe to him which is alone, for, when he falleth, he hath none to lift him up”2. The single cave or hut, then, gave place more and more to the organized group; Pachomius, about 315 A.D.,had already organized community-life on a large scale, and written a Rule for it. The best Pachomian monasteries became not only praying colonies but working colonies, numbering hundreds of inmates3. St Basil, about 360, carried this organization a step further, and
1 L. Duchesne, Hist. Ancienne de I’Sglise, 11, 521; H. C. Lea, Hist, of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 3rd ed. 1, 119 ff. 2 Eccl. iv, 10.
3 Brief but excellent descriptions of this stage of monachism may be found in Abbot Butler, ch. ii, and Workman, ch. ii, § 6.
i8
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
his Rule has since dominated the East even more completely, perhaps, than Benedict’s dominated the West1.
It is important to note how strongly early monasticism was tinged with unsacerdotalism (not, of course, with ^mft-sacer- dotalism). This unsacerdotalism is startling to those whcf read the past only through the spectacles of present orthodoxy. It is difficult (as Duchesne points out) to avoid the conclusion that St Antony never received the Holy Communion for years and years together2. One year, at least, it needed a special miracle to tell St Benedict which was Easter day3. Yet it always comes out in the purest forms of monasticism; reforms like those of Citeaux and St Francis are characterized by a definite sub¬ ordination of the priestly element. We must beware, however, of supposing that these unsacerdotal movements ran into anti¬ sacerdotalism. Though monks and secular clergy differed so widely in their manner of life, yet they could agree to differ. The world-cleric, however unwilling to abandon society for his own part, was quite willing that others should do so ; the Middle Ages laid immense emphasis on the doctrine of vicarious sacri¬ fice; and everywhere we find the bargain, tacit or expressed, “You shall mortify your body; you shall amass a treasury of merits; you shall pray for me, and I will contribute to your sustenance.” The monk, on the other hand, was glad to have the secular cleric as his ally against the common enemy of Christianity. If, therefore, it was inevitable that Christendom should separate in practice on the question of cloister-life and world-life, there was no reason in theory why both should not work together.
Monasticism, growing up thus spontaneously in the East, soon spread westwards, and became an even greater factor in Western than in Eastern civilization. For Harnack draws a contrast which, however he may exaggerate for the sake of epigrammatic brevity, is true in the main. The monk of the Greek Church has remained, to the present day, more remote from the world than the Western monk was at his best. Though the great Basilian monasteries were to some extent organized for external beneficence, yet the Eastern monks made few direct contribu-
1 See W. K. Lowther Clarke, St Basil the Great , 1913.
2 Duchesne, Hist. Anc. 11, 491. 3 Gregory, Dialogues, bk n, c. i.
THE RISE OF MONASTICISM
19
tions to civilization; they were seldom leaders of thought; and, as state officials, their role was less of guidance than of passive obedience. It was among rougher people, and under a more inclement sky, that self-discipline became a more active force ; and Western monachism centres round St Benedict.
There were already many monasteries in the West before him, and even monastic lawgivers. Celtic monachism was definitely earlier, and differed markedly, in many important respects, from Benedictinism1. About 360, we find in Italy, under St Eusebius of Vercelli, what is practically a monastery; and, at the same date, St Martin founded an actual monastery in France, at Liguge. John Cassian, about 410, compiled his Institutes and Collations, collections of monastic precepts and examples which do in effect supply a Rule in the vaguer sense; Caesarius of Arles (about 530) compiled a Rule for his monks, and another for his nuns. Benedict’s contemporary, Cassiodorus, founded a monastery and gave it a Rule in which reading and writing should, in a great measure, take the place of manual labour: this was some ten or twenty years after Benedict had written his own Rule. The time was evidently ripe ; and in St Benedict there appeared the man.
1 See J. W. Willis-Bund, Celtic Church of Wales, 1897; excellently sum¬ marized by Workman, pp. 181 ff.
CHAPTER III
THE MONK’S GOD
Before following the actual events of St Benedict’s life, and that Rule which became the real foundation of Western monachism, it may be well to consider what religious ideals were logically implied in, or practically developed by, this coenobitic institution. What went these men out into the wilderness to see?
The full answer would supply matter for a volume or volumes ; I must compress it here into a few chapters, of which the in¬ sufficiency cannot be felt more acutely by my readers than by myself. It is often rash to generalize even on the religion of one’s own country and generation ; and, so far as all the finer shades are concerned, the difficulty increases with each back¬ ward step in time. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot fully realize ourselves without some comprehension of our fore¬ fathers ; and to understand our medieval forefathers we must above all things study their religious outlook. Here, it is very easy to exaggerate in either direction. If I had chosen to represent the worst cases of ecclesiastical ignorance or per¬ versity as typical, I could easily have filled these chapters with a chronique scandaleuse, true in detail but distorted as a whole. Yet even this, however invidious, would have been scarcely more misleading than the contrary exaggerations of Kenelm Digby, who picks out a series of exceptional manifestations, and holds these up as types of those Ages of Faith to which civiliza¬ tion must return, or perish. Moreover, such bright examples are easily accessible not only in Digby’s works but often in translations from their own writings, or at least in admirable monographs. Remusat’s and Church’s Anselm, Morison’s and Vacandard’s St Bernard, Marson’s biography of St Hugh of Lincoln (mainly translated from the contemporary Magna Vita), and Michelet’s chapter on Thomas a Kempis and the Livre de Vlnternelle Consolacion, are all easily accessible. The Imitation itself is one of the cheapest volumes in the book-market ; most of St Bernard has been translated, a good deal of St Anselm;
THE MONK’S GOD
21
the religious autobiography of the mystic Suso, and many of Tauler’s sermons; the English mystics can easily be read. In these books the reader may, for himself, study monastic con¬ templation and prayer at their best ; and if he still finds himself exclaiming, with Thackeray, “ Good heavens ! what a wilderness this teaching would make of the world!”1, let him remember that such teaching is in strict accordance with postulates which nearly all thinking men accepted in those days; and, further, that the riddle of existence has not been solved even yet, and that many unprejudiced modern thinkers are willing to allow great force to the ascetic view of life.
Yet let us remember, on the other hand, that this noble com¬ bination of a firm grasp upon realities with a scorn of all that is merely transitory cannot be claimed as characteristically medieval; here, we may" set beside the Catholic saints a great cloud of witnesses from without that narrower fold. The chosen spirits of all history are stamped with a strong family likeness ; Plato might have shaken hands with Anselm; and Plato’s real religion was no more typical of the Greek creed of his day than Anselm’s was of the ordinary Catholic2. It is the line of least resistance in history, but a very dangerous line, to choose a
1 I quote from memory; he says it of The Imitation, I think in one of his letters.
2 Dr Inge, in his Christian Mysticism, has justly emphasized the essential resemblance between mystics of all religions, Eastern and Western. But an actual quotation may make this even clearer. I take it from the review of a recent book by a Hindu mystic, Rai Sahib Dinesh Chandra Sen ( Times Lit. Suppl. Jan. 13, 1921). There is but one word in this noble protest — a single technical word — which might not have come from an orthodox mystic of the Middle Ages : “ In a brief preface to his last book, Mr Sen challenges the incredulity of even his own co-religionists. ‘If you say,’ he asserts, ‘that this attainment of His presence is but a fancy of the mind, since no one really attains it, I ask what is the attainment of Him. It is the taking of Him to the soul, in the belief that He is true. And if this be getting Him, can you say that we fail to get Him? If you say that this is all sheer folly, how is it that the fool gains the whole world? If you say that we are mad, when the madman walks the street the very dogs recognize him. And how is it that he whom you call mad is recognized by the great of the earth, by the sceptic, the worldling, the Vaidantic, the ascetic, who forget their dogmas and their preoccupations in admiration of simple faith? Why do they gaze at him with straining and streaming eyes? Is it not that they know that he has attained the Divine vision? He that has grasped the supreme beauty shows it in his eyes and in his face. Those who go empty hearted betray their vacuity even to their own consciences. Some say that the pearl is only a disease of the oyster. If our attainment, too, be but a disease of the soul, is not the pearl ours ? Is not such a disease more desirable than health itself?
22
THE MONK’S GOD
few brilliant examples as typical of any age1. Roger Bacon, knowing only a little of a few great Greeks and Romans, was hypnotized by the vast superiority of these men, and jumped to the conclusion that general society in classical times had lived by a far higher moral standard than his own thirteenth century2. New’man and the Tractarians were similarly hypno¬ tized by a few great men of the Middle Ages ; their disinterested one-sidedness gave them great penetrating force ; they brought new life into the Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism of their generation ; but there is no reason why we should go on merely transcribing Newman as Newman transcribed Mabillon. If the public is to learn the truth, we must even consciously redress this want of balance by counter-emphasis ; the last few genera¬ tions have bequeathed to the social historian of the Middle Ages something of a negative task. It has been my aim there¬ fore, in these chapters, to concentrate the main light upon what may be called the middle and upper-middle classes in medieval religion — upon that vast mass intermediate between the saint and the sinner, in whom the really distinctive type of a society or of an age is to be found. It will be noted that all the writers from whom I shall quote were recognized as teachers in their own day ; while some (like Caesarius of Heister- bach) enjoyed great authority even into the seventeenth century or beyond. And I may add that I have taken real pains to choose the typical even among these writers, and even in fields where, in the nature of the case, material vouchers are im¬ possible, since the compiler must trust to his own instinct in selection3. More and more I am encouraged to hope that this selection will bear the test of time, in proportion as year
1 The late Father Figgis, whose admiration for the Middle Ages was tempered by a great deal of first-hand knowledge and a saving sense of humour, was willing to admit the one-sidedness of many current representa¬ tions. “ I he modern world tolerates sanctity rather than admires it, and outside the Bible regards it as almost wicked to believe in saints. Further, it has a notion of what the saints are that is almost entirely false to the facts ; and before they can be made an apologetic argument their character, their variety, their enormous practical influence, and their abilities need to be better known.” ( Civilisation at the Cross-Roads, 1913, p. 211.)
2 See From St Francis to Dante, ch. v.
In this and the next chapter, for instance, I am seldom directly indebted for my quotations to Roskoff or Baissac; Richalm I had met quite indepen¬ dently. And if I venture, out of innumerable possible quotations from medieval records, to present a few here as typical, it is because I have read
THE MONK’S GOD
23
after year of study has convinced me that the most prominent champions of ultramontanism in medieval history are men who quote mainly at second or third hand from medieval books which I have taken pains to read in the original, and from which my opinions have been formed, as a rule, in complete inde¬ pendence of modern non-Catholic writers. If I have in fact spoken with unusual plainness about Roman- and Anglo- Catholic histories, and may have to speak equally plainly again, it is because I have spent many hours in testing them by the original sources from which they claim implicitly or explicitly to derive, and because I am convinced that we can make no real progress until it becomes usual to test all facile generaliza¬
tions in the same manner.
The monk’s religion, at its best, was coloured with that im¬ patient patience of the saints’ cry in the Apocalypse— Quousgue Domine? “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge ? ” “ The Lord is at hand ” ; this long accumula¬ tion of human offences calls for a proportionately sudden and
dramatic judgement of God; “the righteous also shall see, and fear, and laugh at him that made not God his strength. As with the single soul, so with the world; the final seal shall be set in the twinkling of an eye ; and one turn of God s balance shall decide between eternal bliss and eternal misery. Therefore “we preach, as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” “Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation”; nothing else is worth serious thought.
But the falsehood of this last corollary went far to cancel the truth of the main proposition. By all means let us remember that every moment matters; but let us not believe that this is the whole of God’s truth, and that all else may be neglected. The whole education of the human race lies in our gradually recognizing, first, the complexities which underlie simple words like man and God , and, consequently, the danger of attempting to reduce our creed to clear-cut, simple and immutable formulas. There is at least this good in modern religion, that it rests no longer on the assumption of a catastrophic judgement impending at any moment, but rather tries to see man’s life as a whole,
sufficiently at random among monastic biographers and moralists to feel some confidence of generalization. A writer concerned to expose only the most sordid sides of religious life in the Middle Ages could fill a volume with scandalous matter which will not be found in this book.
24
THE MONK’S GOD
and to think of the universe in terms of historical, or even geological time. Many critics of present-day religion (if we are to take their words seriously) would seem to fear that there must be something wrong with a God who has evolved the present world by such slow degrees ; something wronlg with modern man for striving honestly to measure the sluggish vastness of the past, and for confronting the possibilities of a no less vasty future. To face these things passes sometimes for sinful pride ; yet it was an orthodox medieval abbot who wrote ignorantia plures habet superbos qiuim humiles ; and it was perhaps the greatest of Catholic historians who quoted those words in self-defence against the pious ignorance of his own day1. But, however inexcusable this impatience of research may be in those who aspire to lead the thought of their generation, it is natural and inevitable in the multitude. The thinking man always stands, as the Apostles did, between the moment when a materialistic conception of the Kingdom of Eleaven was ex¬ ploded, and the moment when the New Jerusalem is readv to come down adorned as a bride from heaven; he may always cry, with de Musset, “ce qui a ete n’est plus; ce qui sera n’est pas encore; voila le secret de nos maux!” For this impatience is not confined to orthodoxy; the sceptic will often catch at illusion as a relief from an aching void of disillusion. “ O, reprends ce neant,” wrote Victor Hugo in a moment of weariness:
O, reprends ce neant,
Gouffre, et rends-nous Satan!
And Heine can even regret the “comfortable” days when man still believed in the devil.
Das Herz ist mir bedriickt, und sehnlich Gedenke ich der alten Zeit ;
Die Welt war damals noch so wohnlich,
Und ruhig lebten hin die Leut’.
Doch jetzt ist alles wie verschoben,
Das ist ein Drangen! eine Not!
Gestorben ist der Herrgott oben,
Und unten ist der Teufel tot.
Und alles schaut so gramlich triibe,
So krausverwirrt und morsch und kalt .
1 J. Mabillon, Traite des Etudes Monastiques, pt i, ch. 13.
THE MONK’S GOD
25
But the poetic licence of these disillusioned men of letters will not bear comparison with the plain homespun prose of a man who lived himself in those “comfortable” times; one who himself believed most sincerely in the devil, and struggled all his life against the half-believers. Berthold of Regensburg, one of the greatest of medieval preachers, pauses in one of his sermons to meet an objecting voice from the audience :
Brother Berthold, thou speakest oft and oft of these devils and all their sleights, yet we never hear or see or touch or feel a single devil .
To which Berthold replies:
Lo ! now that is even the worst harm they can do thee : for, hadst thou but once seen a single devil in his true form, I should know for certain that thou wouldst never sin more ... If the devil came out at this moment from this forest hard by, and this city that we see before us were a burning fiery furnace heated through and through, then should ye see such a press of folk as never was seen, and such as shall never be seen in this world, and all of them thronging head¬ long into that burning fiery furnace1.
Yet, while some disbelieved as rationalists, others withheld belief simply out of passive stupidity: that which Hugo or Heine felt at moments, the multitude feels always; it shrinks from walking by faith rather than by sight ; the unseen must be so like to the seen, and so easily visualized, as to involve no great effort of religious imagination. The true Christian always risks to be mistaken, as in the earliest days of his religion, for an atheist, since his God is not the God of the multitude. Medieval religion, like all others, tells a story of continual revolt and counter¬ revolt; of the many struggling against the few, and the few against the many. St Augustine’s Confessions , St Bernard’s letters, the Imitatio, are splendid monuments of noble faith. But even they show also, what we know from many other sources, how brief is the step from the sublime to the ridiculous ; and average natures, meaner natures, materializing what they could grasp of these higher abstractions, were too often found wallowing frankly in the ridiculous. The reflection of these religious ideas in the common mind was the merest caricature
1 Predigten , ed. Pfeiffer, 1, 413. The same thought occurs frequently in Herolt, Ex. P. 66 and 67, Serin, cxxv, r; cf. Vine. Beauvais, Spec. Nat. 1. 11, c. 121.
26
THE MONK’S GOD
of its reflection in Augustine’s. Nor need we descend to the lowest classes to find this painful contrast. The official creed of the Middle Ages, quite apart from popular corruptions — the religion prescribed by Papal and Conciliar decrees, and sys¬ tematized in such authoritative books as Aquinas’s Sumtmi differed widely from the religion for which the earliest martyrs died, and from any religion which the modern world is likely to accept in its entirety. Modern Catholicism, when certain postulates are granted, stands on very strong ground. But when the reasonable modern Catholic claims identity between his own creed and that of the thirteenth century, he has been misled by the historians of his own communion into saying the thing that is not.
There is only a one-sided truth in Renan’s often-quoted epigram, The monk is the true Christian. It would be more strictly true, though less brief and pointed, to say that the monk is the Institutional Christian writ large. Much that is charac¬ teristic of monachism in general can hardly be found in the Christ of the Gospels. The monk’s spirit is less that of he that is not against us is for us, than of we forbade him, because he followeth not after us. Christ discouraged length, formality and publicity in prayers; yet these became essential to Western monachism; public prayer, according to set forms, was the Opus Dei par excellence, and was arranged to fill half the monk’s waking hours1. The first Christians were wandering, homeless and disendowed; the monk was far more securely housed and endowed than the average citizen of his day. He clung to his distinctive costume with a superstitious reverence for which it is impossible to find any justification in the Gospels. The monk’s life was dedicated to the same Lord as St Paul’s, but
1 Abbot Butler calculates these daily services at only four hours in St Benedict’s own time; but they were lengthened afterwards. Concerning the choir service in general he writes (p. 29): “Of the external services St Benedict placed prayer, and in particular common prayer, the celebration in choir of the canonical office, first in order of thought and importance. . . It so filled his mind that it is the one subject on which he legislates in minute detail, devoting eleven chapters to that ordering of the psalmody and office which after fourteen centuries is still used by his sons: ‘the Work of God’ is his name for it, and he says that ‘ nothing is to be set before the Work of God.’ ” Compare the words of Adam, the twelfth-century Praemonstratensian of St Andrew’s: “Psalmodia in choro. . .specialiter opus Dei est.” (B. Pez, Thesaurus, I, ii, col. 352.)
THE MONK’S GOD
27
it was only a very small fraction of cloisterers who earned their livelihood by the labour of their hands, or who made them¬ selves all things to all men. The vast majority never attempted to move as freely among their fellow-men and women as Christ and His disciples had moved. And features which were still subordinate even in the institutional Christianity of subapostolic times obtained an exaggerated importance in the fullest develop¬ ment of monachism. The Mass, formalized throughout the Church as time went on, was formalized tenfold in conventual churches. Image-worship, ridiculed by Origen and other early Fathers, gradually acquired a firm hold in the sanctuary, and most of all in the monastic sanctuary. Although the monk, in early days, was expressly contrasted with the cleric, and though the distinction survived as a matter of technical terminology to the end of the Middle Ages, yet the average monk tended to become more clerical in his ideas than all the rest of the clergy. And those ideas of God which most clearly differentiate medieval from modern Christianity flourished with peculiar luxuriance in the cloister.
It was at first the strength of the Christian religion, as it afterwards became its weakness, to lay intense stress upon the great issues at stake in every human life. The moral earnestness of Stoicism could not commend itself to the multitude ; the cults of Mithra and Cybele, did indeed so commend themselves; but these possessed comparatively little moral content. Christianity alone succeeded, even more than Judaism, in bringing home to multitudes of average men and women the eternal importance of truth and of right conduct. It made men believe in a future life who had never believed before; and its adherents were marked by that “inflexible and intolerant zeal” which Gibbon notes as one factor in its success. From at least a very early time, the Gospels were so interpreted as to fix a literally im¬ measurable gulf between religious success and religious failure. Here and there a writer of doubtful orthodoxy might agree with Origen in hoping that God might set some limit to damnation, however distant. But the overwhelming majority agreed with Augustine, and Origen’s influence was almost negligible in the Middle Ages. To Augustine, it was “very absurd” that Christians, from sentimentality, should hope for any end to
28
THE MONK’S GOD
the agonies of the damned, so long as they believed in the eternal happiness of the blessed1. He meets the objections of those who refused to believe that the body could suffer such torments without being consumed2; these objections he can dis¬ prove by three concrete examples, the salamander lives inTire ; the hardest diamonds may be cut with the help of goat’s blood ; and the flesh of the peacock is incorruptible, a thing anteriorly incredible, but tested by Augustine’s personal observation3. He next goes on to refute those who feel that no crime can deserve punishment to all eternity. By Adam’s sin we are all damned in the lump — hinc est universa generis humani massa damnata — and, “even as, if all remained under the pains of this just con¬ demnation, there would be no room for the merciful grace of our Redeemer, so also, if all were transported from darkness into light, the severity of the Avenger would nowhere appear.” He makes short work of those who plead that, since Christians are bound to pray even for their worst enemies, therefore the saints must pray for these their wretched fellow-creatures, and God must lend an ear to such piteous supplications. The saints do not pray for the damned, since these are not the saints’ enemies but the enemies of God ; nor can we believe that Christ, when he spoke of “ eternal fire,” was threatening what he did not mean — minaciter potius quam veraciter dictum. And others before or after Augustine maintained this doctrine in even cruder forms. Tertullian, at the end of his De Spectaculis, strikes a note which rings all through the Middle Ages, that the saints shall actually gain added bliss through the sight of the torments of the damned4. Christianity had had to fight for existence, and it was scarred to the last by this conflict. The faithful could not forget what some of their noblest had suffered; and, thus remembering, could not altogether forgive5.
It is impossible to separate early Christianity altogether from
1 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxi, c. 23, ad fin.; cf. all chapters 1-26. Gregory the Great repeats the same argument.
2 Compare the popular doubts in the thirteenth century as shown in
Berthold of Regensburg’s sermons. I deal briefly with these in the second of my Medieval Studies (2nd ed. 1915). 3 c. 4.
4 Gibbon and Lecky have made this passage well-known; but it is so significant that I reprint it here (appendix 2 a).
6 It was, in fact, this natural cult of the martyrs which did most to bring image-worship into the Church.
THE MONK’S GOD
29
the world in which it was born and grew up. It had conquered partly in virtue of its inherent strength, partly by adaptation to its environment ; and in that environment popular demonology played a very important part. It was natural, therefore, that the demon’s role should become increasingly prominent in the new religion. Not that the age of real miracles had ceased. Ambrose’s victory over Theodosius, and Leo’s influence over Attila, were triumphs of spiritual and moral force; and, so long as the Church had men of this kind, she stood like Moses over against Pharaoh’s magicians1. But Christianity as a state-religion adopted many ordinary methods of statecraft; it then became, too often, a struggle of magician against magician; in mere self-defence, the orthodox must not only compete with but actually outbid the demonology of the heathen2. From the same causes, and during the same generations, the Church began to worship the images which she had formerly repudiated, and to promote the devils from their comparatively modest place in the New Testament to a far more conspicuous share in the growing creed3. They became materialized in direct ratio to the general materialization of Christianity; they took shape and colour. It is in the fourth century that we first learn how the
1 But, at all times in the Middle Ages, there were clear-sighted and orthodox men who, starting from the fact that authentic miracles were rarer in their own day than they seemed to have been in the early days of Christianity, recognized the comparative weakness of the miracle for apologetic purposes. Among the earliest of these are Origen, Augustine and Gregory; one of the latest is the author of Dives and Pauper, who was probably a friar writing a little before 1400. The author says that, if God had not shown many miracles in apostolic times, “they that were in the faith should have forsaken the faith, and few would have come to the faith. .. [But, nowadays], if any such miracles fall in any land among Christian people, it is a token that some of them be not stable in the faith, and that God is not all apayed [ i.e . pleased] with the people. For St Paul saith that tokens and miracles be not given to people of right belief but to folk of false belief. And the more miracles that men see, the less need they have for their faith, as St Gregory saith in his homily. And so multitude of martyrs and miracles prove not goodness of the people that they be done among, but rather they show and prove the malice of the people.” ( Prec . 1, c. 56; cf. my Christ, St Francis and Today, 19J9> PP- 26 ff.)
2 St Augustine tells us how, now that Christians have become so numerous, the heathen find their best excuse in the evil lives of those who profess to follow Christ; and St Augustine’s demonology is far more developed than than of the struggling days of Christianity.
3 See especially the first volume of G. Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, and Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, chapters iii and iv.
30
THE MONK’S GOD
Sketches on Church Walls and Pillars.
Fiend from Beechamwell (Norf.) ; Monk from Dunmow Priory (Essex) ; Vernicles or Christ-portraits from Kingston (Cambs), Gamlingay (Cambs) and Coton (Cambs).
THE MONK’S GOD
3i
devil is black1 ; in the later Middle Ages, when men had formed clear (if contradictory) ideas of the form of the human soul and the supra-human angels2, they give us frequently the minutest descriptions of fiends that have been seen. Moreover, while the medieval artist could compass real beauty of feature only at exceptional times and places, the devil’s portrait was within the scope of the rudest ages, or the least instructed village workman3.
In so far as the church walls were the Bible of the Poor, they formed necessarily a very rough-and-ready book ; we may almost say, a nursery-book. It was the artist’s business to preach; and, like the modern revivalist, he was naturally tempted to harsh outlines and lurid tints. St Methodius, we are told, converted King Bogoris of Bulgaria by painting on his palace walls an embodiment of the current conceptions of hell; that same Bogoris, in later life, followed his master’s example and took the cowl4. To all but saints, indeed (and how many real saints are there in every generation?) these shadows are almost in¬ dispensable to bring out the brighter colours of religion; the medieval devil, as Roskoff puts it, was the natural shadow of the medieval angel5. Indeed, according to one of the most popular and accredited of chroniclers, God Himself needed the devil for artistic effect. Godfrey of Viterbo wrote:
But perchance thou wilt ask, O Reader, wherefore God created the Devil, knowing that he would turn to ill. I answer, that He created him for the garnishing of His own handiwork. Even as a painter layeth on his black background, that the white may come out more clearly,
1 Roskoff, 1, 284 : but there is at least one earlier example than he quotes — the devil who appeared to St Antony in the form of a negro ( Vitaspatrum , Migne, P.L. vol. 73, col. 130; cf. similar instances, cols. 879, 1131, 1155, and vol. 74, col. 200).
2 Two separate visionaries quoted by Caesarius of Heisterbach saw the soul as a transparent glass-like globe, having eyes all round (1, 39, 208) ; the usual pictorial representation was in the form of a naked child. Guibert of Nogent is exceptional in dwelling on the incorporeal nature of the soul (cols. 676-7).
3 I deal more fully with this subject in Chapter IV.
4 AA.SS.Boll. Mart, n (1668), p. 13; Zed.ler, s.v. Bogoris.
6 Compare the story of the artist painting the Virgin Mary and the devil which finds a place in many collections of Legends of the Madonna, and was recorded in the fifteenth century paintings on the walls of Eton College Chapel (M. R. James). In one of the Mary-legends, the artist spits at intervals in the face of the devil whom he is painting on the wall. A series of illustrations given in Archaeologia (vol. xlix, opposite p. 206) exemplifies how much easier it was for the medieval artist to bring home to his readers the ugliness of the wicked than the beauty of the good.
32 THE MONK’S GOD
so do the righteous become more radiant through the iniquity of the wicked1.
And this is the devil’s role in monastic life. The colours of heaven were brighter, but vaguer ; men dreamed of its^ un¬ clouded blue and of its meadows “white and green and red”; but they were in no haste to quit cloister or choir, dormitory or refectory for that eternal home. Meanwhile, the dark back¬ ground and the firm black outlines of monastic demonology
The Last Judgement. Good Religious. (Herrad v. Landsperg.)
gave far greater distinctness to the general religious picture, and determined men’s conduct more directly at critical moments. For once that a saint is recorded to have trodden an urgent temptation underfoot by thinking of the joys of heaven, wre could probably find a dozen cases where it is told of him, as of St Antony, that he found his shield in “the memory of the
1 Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon , par. i, § 18 (ed. Struve, 1726, p. 21). Compare Vincent of Beauvais, Speculutn Historiale, lib. xxxi, cc. 126, 129. (ed. Douai, 1624, pp. 1331, 1332), and Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dial. Mirac. 1, 330. Vincent (col. 1330) uses the simile of the painter and his picture, and sums up “inferni horror pertinet ad ornatum universi.”
THE MONK’S GOD
33
avenging pains of hell, and of the worm that dieth not”1. Quite characteristic for “conversion” (which, in nine out of ten medieval cases, means entrance into a monastery), is the tale of the Lord of Vignory told by Jacques de Vitry (p. 53) and Etienne de Bourbon (p. 58). His son, on his way to be knighted, rode through Clairvaux, where, “seeing these knights of the Blessed Virgin,” he suddenly thought of his own mortality and entered the Order forthwith. The lord came with an armed host
The Last Judgement. Bad Religious. (Ibid.)
1 P.L. vol. 73, col. 129. In Caesarius of Heisterbach’s first section, De Conversione, the part played by the fear of hell is far more conspicuous than the brighter hopes; there is scarcely any trace of the modern altruistic idea that the primary impulse of conversion is the glory of God, apart from any question of personal salvation or damnation. In The Alphabet of Tales, a later collection of examples for sermons (E.E.T.S. 1904, pp. 147-9), the negative elment is still more predominant. Caesarius explicitly notes the significance of the fact that “in almost all visions that have been vouchsafed of the pains of the wicked and glories of the elect, the vision of torment hath almost always come first” (1, 330). Ailred of Rievaulx, again, in his detailed description of the three steps of conversion to monasticism, puts fear first in point of time (col. 556; cf. 531-2). This had been formulated long before him by St Isidore of Seville, “ let every convert first begin with fear for his sins, and thus let him pass to the desire of heavenly things. . .it is necessary
CHI
3
THE MONK’S GOD
34
to burn out the monks who had stolen his son; the boy rode out to meet him:
and when the father saw his son disfigured with shorn hair and sordid vestures, he scarce knew him. Then, almost falling to the earth in his extremity of grief, he cried, “Son, wherefore hastjhou thus dealt with me? Thou must come home again, and I suomit all my lands to thy will.” Then said the son: “Father, there is a certain most perilous custom in these lands of ours, which hath driven me forth from thy domain and constrained me to take the cowl.” “Nay,” said the father, “but I leave all the customs of my domain unto thy will, that thou mayest change or revoke them as it shall please thee ; tell me now what is this custom which hath driven thee forth, and I promise thee surely that I will abolish it. Then said the son: “This is that custom which I fear so sore; that the young die as soon as the old — nay, and sometimes sooner wherefore, unless thou abolish this custom, I will never return; for how canst thou promise me thy succession or thine inheritance when I know not that I shall outlive thee? For the calf dieth as quickly as the cow, the son as the father, the boy as the greybeard. Then said the father: “My son, how can I abolish this custom which God hath brought in?” And he was pricked to the heart and took the cowl side by side with his son.
This, almost everywhere, is the main point emphasized; as Ailred of Rievaulx says, whatever wealth or honours or pleasures a man may have forsaken in the world, he can set against them “this one privilege of Christ’s servants, that they fear not death” (col. 532).
There is much anthropomorphism in all religions and in all ages: a man cannot jump away from his own shadow. But in this the Middle Ages stood midway between pagan materialism and the creeds of the present day ; the immense success of the Saints was in a great measure due to the very human weaknesses mingled with their less approachable virtues. Giraldus Cam- brensis observed that strangers who went to live in Ireland became Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores, and he marks something similar in the very Saints of that land :
This also seems notable ; that, even as the men of this nation are
that he should first turn to God in fear, that through dread of future torments his fleshly temptations maybe conquered.” (P.L. vol. 83, col. 609.) The actual medieval attitude is so often mistaken by modern writers who quote from each other instead of studying original sources, that it seems worth while to add an appendix on this subject (no. 3).
THE MONK’S GOD
35
impatient and precipitate to vengeance, in this mortal life, beyond all other nations, so also those of them who are now raised above the rest by their merits displayed during their mortal life, seem more vindictive of mind than the Saints of other regions1.
So also with the medieval conceptions of Heaven, Earth, and Hell; all were imagined as subject to the same fundamental Saws, organized alike, and presenting many analogies with each other. To repeat Roskoff s observation : the diabolic element appeared as a natural and necessary shadow of the spiritual.
This comes out very strongly in one of the most curious of all medieval demonologies. Some readers may have visited Schonthal in the Neckar Valley, between Heilbronn and Heidelberg, as tourists; others may remember it as the place where Gotz v. Berlichingen lies buried among his ancestors. It was founded for the Cistercians in 1 1 57 by a noble of the place, who himself took the vows as a lay-brother. In 1218 and 1219 its abbot was Richalm, who had already attained to a considerable local fame as a visionary, and who after his death, earned the title of Beatus. Many of his discourses were carefully recorded by a disciple ; and the book may perhaps be taken as the completest handbook of medieval demonology. A brief analysis of this book will enable us to proceed afterwards with a clearer view of our general bearings. The whole treatise, which is not long, was printed by Bernard Pez in his Thesaurus, 1721, vol. 1, pt ii, pp. 376 ff.
Richalm emphasizes, what had been insisted upon already by the Fathers of the Desert, that demons turn their main efforts against godfearing folk 2. The majority of mankind are already the devil’s3; his real quarrel is with the Elect; and these he attacks at what should be their holiest times and places :
A certain brother was vexed by devils, and cried to God for succour.
1 R.S. v, 137.
2 See Vitaspatrum (P.L. 74), col. 847; Cassian, Coll.v 11, c. 27; Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Nat. 1. 11, c. 124; Kempis, Disc. Claust. c. ii, § 1.
3 This, of course, was a medieval commonplace. Augustine took very literally the text that many should be called and few chosen; damnatorum multitudinem, salvandorum paucitatem, writes the author of a treatise on the Scorn of this World which was often ascribed to Bonaventura; Caesarius of Heisterbach knows that the damned are “incomparably more numerous than the good” (1, 29). A few popular mystics, in the later Middle Ages, shrank from the implications of this horrible belief ; but they found little encouragement here from official orthodoxy. See appendix 2 c.
3—2
THE MONK’S GOD
36
Then answered the devils: “Do thou cease from thy works, and we will cease from ours. Thou art ever busy, and so are we. Fornicate, and do as other men, and we will no longer molest thee”1.
Specially fearing the Mass, they lay special wait for the celebrant :
At Prime, when the hour of Mass draws near, they come to trouble the celebrant, and to provoke him to some fit of wrath or indigna¬ tion... When I was in the warming-house, I heard some devils saying to others: “Weaklings and sluggards! wherefore flock ye hither and spend ye your time in idleness? Wherefore are ye not at Mass?”. . .Hence it is that a certain brother hath complained to me that about the hour of Prime, and when he is robing himself for Mass, he is always possessed with troubling thoughts; whence and wherefore, he knoweth not.
This, suggests the pupil, may explain why Richalm himself takes the Blessed Sacrament with so loud and notable a smacking of the lips ; but Richalm repudiates the fact itself ; it is the devil who makes this sound, in order that one monk may attribute it to another.
“ Is it the same, then, with that friend of ours whom I should warn against that indecorous custom of his if he were under my authority as he is under yours? For, when he eateth his pottage, he is wont to suck it from his spoon with a louder noise than I ever heard before, so that all we can hear who sit around him — nay and you yourself, at your other table, might hear him if you lent an ear. Moreover, in taking the Sacrament he sucks louder and more notably than need requires.” “That too,” replies Richalm, “is the same diabolical illusion, which does as much injustice to that brother as to myself. You have evidently no conception either of the demons’ multitude, ubiquity, or activity. All our little daily slips and mis¬ understandings are either their acts or their figments — that groan that you just uttered was really theirs. On the other hand, you saw me put my hand convulsively to my beard; that was their doing. At other times, they make my hands so heavy that I can scarce raise them. They beset me at hours of labour and make me scant of breath; it is they who sometimes raise my spirits so high that I
1 L.c. col. 447 (where incendis should pretty certainly be intendis ); the other references are to cols. 445, 377-9, 397, 417, 380, 408, 425, 433, 424, 385, 414, 380, 353, 454, 384, 388, 400, 380. For the special diligence of devils in haunting the best monks, see Guibert, col. 868, and Heloise’s confession in her second letter to Abailard ; it is a commonplace with monastic moralists. “Religiosos tentant daemones de libidine plus quam alios.” (Meffret, Temp. 24, b.)
THE MONK’S GOD
37
break into actual laughter1. All this snoring and coughing and sneezing and spitting in choir is their work2. Here, indeed, they sometimes overreach themselves. One brother, at Matins in choir, heard one demon saying to the rest : ‘ Which of you made that fellow spit ? would it not have been better to let him remain sleepy, than thus to wake him up to his psalm-singing?”’
But commonly they had considerable success.
The demons do indeed beset all: but they spend all their best strength and will upon Masters and Superiors, exhorting each other and saying: “If we do but ply these men and press upon them, then we shall conquer all; for if the head be sick all the members will suffer.” Wherefore they compel me to nod and sleep in choir, that the rest may sleep there more freely and excusably. One troop of demons will spend all their force and all their efforts on weighing my eyes down and closing my eyelids. Another troop is deputed to cause a certain gloom and similitude of sleep — for it is no true sleep, but only an image of slumber. Another cometh and snoreth before my nose; and the brother by my side believeth that it is I who have slept and snored.
At this point the disciple answers:
“This occasion bringeth a matter into my mind which I must needs impart unto you, if perchance you can amend it. Oftentimes, in choir, you are wont to give forth a sound which is as the sound of them that sleep, or that groan, or that sigh for weariness and great oppression of travail.” “True indeed; but it is the devils who do this. Do you remember those groans which I was wont to make openly in choir, and concerning which you rebuked me?” “I re¬ member well.” “Those also were made by them.”
But the victory is not always to the demon :
“One night in choir, I heard one devil saying to another, ‘Take those eyes for thy province to-night ’ ; now it was of me that he spake, for that night I was wakeful and sober.”. ..“Whenever I see a brother sleeping in choir, and purpose within myself to awaken him, then the demons exhort each other to prevent me, by awaking him before my coming to rouse him. And this they do lest perchance, when I shall have roused him and rebuked him, he should resist them some other night when they would fain overwhelm him with sleep.”
For the demons bear defeat ill, lacking both generosity of mind
1 Which, as we shall see, was as unbecoming to a medieval Religious as the dance and the theatre were to an Anglican of the Clapham school.
2 “ Sicut scitis, ego frequenter in choro soleo excreare” (380).
THE MONK’S GOD
38
and courtesy of tongue; when baffled, they will descend to the coarsest terms of abuse.
Even now I heard the devils reviling us, and saying: “A pair of abominable whoresons!” Nay, to you in especial they say4.“And thou too, filthy bald rat!”1
Next to Mass and psalmody, they fight hardest against labour, reading and writing. They make Richalm scant of breath when¬ ever he tries to labour; it was they who, when he had caused stones to be collected for one building, instigated the prior to abstract these for some other purpose :
“Whereat I felt a wondrous sore pricking of inward indignation, but restrained myself and baffled the fiends2. They loathe especially to see us reading our Rule, or St Gregory or St Bernard : the other day I saw a devil carefully plastering up a lay-brother’s ears, lest he should listen to the exposition of the Rule. When one of us sits at his reading they come up to him and, like one who cauterizes the skin, first touch him more distantly and breed weariness in him ; and then more closely; and at last they come to close quarters and plunge the iron into him, so that the man is overcome with weariness, casts away his book, rises from his seat and departs. . .Oftentimes, when I am reading straight from the book and in thought only3, as I am wont, they make me read aloud word by word, that they may deprive me so much the more of the inward understanding thereof, and that I may the less penetrate into the interior force of the reading, the more I pour myself out in exterior speech.” “What then,” says the pupil, “do you advise? For we are seldom together in reading: each goeth to his own work.” To which Richalm answers :
‘Reading is a furnace; a furnace which trieth all men. When I sit at spiritual reading, they send sleep upon me; against which I am wont to put out my naked hands, that thus they may be chilled, and that the cold may prick and keep me more wakeful. Then the devils prick me under my garments like fleas; then they bite me and lay hold of my hands and draw them under my cowl, that they may grow warm and I may grow the more slothful in reading. Again, at other times, they rest my jawbone upon my hand, and spread
1 “ Et ipse jam daemones audivi exprobrantes et dicentes nobis : Vos ambo pessimi filii meretricum ! Et ad vos specialiter dicunt : Et tu, immunde calve mus!” The demons applied the less courteous of these two epithets to the Precentor also, when he struck up the antiphon Propitius esto at Matins. “Numquam tibi fiat propitiatio apud Deum, pessime fili meretricis!” (448).
2 408, 425, 417; cf. 442, 398, 389-92, 395, 397.
3 I.e. reading silently to himself. In St Augustine’s time such silent reading was certainly very exceptional ; and probably, all through the Middle Ages, most men read aloud even when they were alone.
THE MONK’S GOD
39
my hand thereunder, that I may be the more inclined to sleep . . . It -is their special and greatest business and care to occupy men with outward things, lest they should grasp the pure inward truth by reading; wherefore the devils strive to turn men rather to thoughts of lechery and to remove them from the sense of holy reading. . . Therefore it is that, even in the greatest convents, scarce one or two monks can be found who gladly sit in the cloister and gladly fix their attention on inward things.”
So also with writing:
‘ Last night we were treating in the Parlour concerning the copying of St Bernard’s sermons; and then I heard the devils saying ‘what shall we do with this matter?’ but I cared not therefore, until we had brought our purpose to good effect. For you must know that those complaints which were afterwards raised in Chapter by such and such a brother against the work of writing, saying that there were few who set themselves to this work of the Scriptorium — you must know, I say, that it was the devils who raised those complaints, and they are sore grieved that we should write. Afterwards I was tempted, and the brethren urged me to speak of this matter; but I would not, knowing that, the more I spoke, the more these com¬ plaints would grow.” The disciple answers, “Just now, when I sat writing, I heard a sound as of a toad within mine own belly; and this is oftentimes so ; wherefore I do indeed fear that I may perchance have somewhat of this sort within me. And, if I had had aught of the kind before hearing this from you, and if it had continued, I should believe that I had indeed a toad in my belly.” “Ah,” replies Richalm, “they do this daily unto me.”
Headache, indigestion and melancholy were common monastic complaints, especially when regular labour had become less of a reality; when the main work was done by lay brethren or hired servants, and the priest-monk, if he laboured at all, did so fitfully and as a matter of rather unwelcome duty. St Bernard’s sufferings from dyspepsia surpassed even those of Baxter and Carlyle and General Booth. Richalm was evidently amongst the many who had not that “stupidity and sound digestion” which Teufelsdrockh postulated as a necessary foundation for optimism. The powers of evil frequently succeeded in giving him a feeling of nausea in choir1. He once overheard a demon complaining to another that he (Richalm) could not be tortured this matin-tide with his usual huskiness of voice :
“for, this time, he has no inflation of the stomach to help me.” (That 1 379! cf. 382, 420-4, 390, 416, 440, 452.
4°
THE MONK’S GOD
was one of their sharpest weapons); “oftentimes they swell my belly, so that I need to loosen my girdle beyond all wont and measure. But, when they chance to forget and slacken their efforts, then I tighten my girdle as before; but then again they return and find me thus, and pinch and constrict me; but I bear my pain. This day we have drunk good wine; and, behold! there is now a multitude of intoxicating demons throughout the Parlour here, hovering over us and around us. So was it also on All Saints’ Day; I ought to have told you this when we drank that good wine ; so great was the multi¬ tude of intoxicating devils there congregated, that I could walk no¬ where either in Cloister or Church ; but especially in Cloister, about the Parlour and Refectory. Yet on the morrow all were vanished, and the Cloister was emptied of them.” — “Whither then had they fled ? ” — “ Doubtless they had come from those taverns, and had been summoned and invited to our company ; those devils who are always with us called in these others to their aid.” — “What, then, was their work here?” “They make a man drunken; they make him drunken even without wine. . .Behold, I am now troubled with coughing and flatulence; that is their work. Lately I drank a little wine, by occa¬ sion whereof they have sent me this flatulence and gripes, to the intent that I may cease from my v/ine; yet wine is good for me, and a cordial to my natural complexion. So also have they filled brother So and So with such a horror of wine, that even at the Holy Sacrifice, at the ablution, he must needs take water. . . See, I am now hoarse . . . The devils would fain stir me to dislike of nuts, that I might believe my hoarseness to come from these nuts that we have . . . Do you not hear a sound as of rubbing?” — “Indeed, I hear a wondrous, yet not unaccustomed sound ; it would seem to proceed from some dis¬ temper of your stomach or bowels, such as we suffer daily.” — “ Nay, but it is the demon’s sound ; it is not as you think.” — “ I should have found it hard to believe you, considering the quality of that sound.” — “Nay, but even the groan that you uttered even now was not your own. Have you not perpended how brother So and So groans thus, and loudly? ” — “ I have perpended indeed ” — “ That also is their doing. . .” — “But what profit do the demons find herein?” — “That they may disquiet the brother next unto him.”
Devils creep into Richalm’s teeth and make them ache; they swarm under his garments with the bodily semblance and the bloodthirsty appetite of fleas. The victim is tempted “ to scratch himself after an unseemly fashion,” and the devil has gained a petty triumph. Their ubiquity, indeed, is inconceivable, or conceivable only by an illumine like Richalm.
It is marvellous that any one of us should still be alive; were it
THE MONK’S GOD
4i
not for God’s grace, no one of us could escape1. They ride like motes in the sunbeam ; they are scattered everywhere like dust ; they come down upon us like rain ; their multitude fills the whole world ; the whole air, the whole air, I say, is but a thick mass of devils.
We have already seen how they spread like pestilential bacilli from the tavern to the cloister; in the same way, the monks often catch them by contagion from their guests, who bring familiar demons about their persons.
I myself (says Richalm) caught them from Brother William, when we were together in Infirmary; they left him and fastened upon me. I hear them in the voice of birds, and in the plashing water that falls into the Cloister basin. They flock thick and fast to the Parlour, where they are sure to find levity somewhere in our talk; they would fain persuade me to indulge the brethren now and then with a little more than the statutory time for conversation. They haunt us worst of all on our deathbed. But they are always and everywhere in wait for us, like an arrow fitted to a bended bow and pointed at our breast2.
Moreover, they have a hierarchy and a discipline like our own3. They have their officers, their rank and file, and a most elaborate military organization. They show the courage and endurance of soldiers.
These evil spirits have their regular officers in every monastery, told off to fight against each of our officials. For instance, the Abbot’s adversary is called Abbot among them, the Prior’s is called Prior,
1 396; cf. 421, 410, 443, 426, 419, 427, 417, 415, 453, 460, 406.
2 Their innumerable multitude was a commonplace ; the blessed Giovanni d’Alvernia “had a marvellous power against the demons, whom he put to flight everywhere with wondrous authority and ease. Sometimes he was seen, walking in the road, to run after them and drive them off with his staff, casting it from him against their fleeing figures. Monte Alverno [where he had his hermitage] was so beset with multitudes of demons that the very air seemed thick and dark with them ; yet he would run fearlessly hither and thither, beating these airy spirits as he might with his staff, and following after them in their retreat until he had chased that evil host from the whole mountain. They sought to trouble him with many illusions. . .but he, calling on the name of Jesus and making the sign of the cross, drove them off like flies.” (Wadding, Annales, an. 1322, §45.) Cf. Guibert, col. 890. St Gregory’s story of the nun who swallowed a devil sitting on a lettuce was repeated from one moralist to another all down the Middle Ages.
3 401 ; cf. 444, 422, 438, 440, 435, 406. This hierarchy is emphasized by others; cf. Cassian, Coll, vn, cc. 17-21, 32; Vine. Beauvais, Spec. Nat. 1. 11, c. 1 13; Guibert, col. 869; Meffret, de Temp. p. 109; the devil has his own altars, from which rises the steam of sinners’ banquets; his own sabbaths, the sinner’s indolent repose ; his sacrifices, from men’s gluttony ; his oblations, the scot-ales and lechery in taverns, etc., etc.
42
THE MONK’S GOD
the Precentor’s is their Precentor, and so forth . . . They perform thus their duties not confusedly and promiscuously, but each with stead¬ fast application to his own office, except perchance when there is some greater business in hand, as when a soul is about to leave the body; then they flock thither in multitudes, but not without-lheir Superior’s permission”1. If we have aspecial reverence for aparticular saint or a particular feast, then a demon is told off to stand between us and him or it. They have even their universities and their formal studies in the art of slaying souls, as we have in theology. Therefore “they talk Latin also, taking wondrous pains to speak that tongue in good order and without corrupt errors.”
Hence their extraordinary intellectual success :
“ They interpose and intermingle so many false illusions, bringing in numberless falsehoods to cover even a single point of truth; lest men should be able to discern the truth, which is thus confounded by admixtures of falsehood.”
Only by God’s grace can any man survive all this; and the best shield against the Devil is a good life2. Our guardian angel, also, helps us much. Next to these, our best weapons are holy water and the sign of the cross. “ Magna est Sacramentorumsaliset aquae efBcacia ” ; the whole air is full of devils when I come into church; they rush upon me as I approach the holy-water stoup; then, as I sprinkle myself, they flee. Nay, plain salt has some of this efficacy also; “often, at table, when the demons have robbed me of my appetite for food, I have tasted a grain of salt and my appetite has revived.”
The sign of the cross puts them to flight:
“They can do nothing against the sign of the cross. Yet it is true that they sometimes make a stand even against this, yielding only slowly. Even as a doughty warrior will suffer himself to be wounded, and pierced through and through, before he gives way, so also is it with them, even though they suffer grievous torments from this sacred sign.” Moreover, our victory is often short lived; here, as after the holy-water, they are soon back again — ad brevissimam horam valet, quia mox redeunt. It is more efficacious to make this sign on one’s bare flesh, “over the heart, that is, under the left pap; there I make great signs of the cross, from the neck even unto the waist.” The other night I felt sleepless ; I set myself to make this sign over and over again, and was soon asleep.
1 For their special attendance at monks’ deathbeds see also St-Cher, vi, 87, 2.
2 409; cf. 386, 418, 425, 430, 379.
THE MONK’S GOD
43
The pupil opines that it must be very laborious to sign oneself so frequently and on so elaborate a scale ; and Richalm admits this.
But never was any labour better worth while. The omni¬ presence and the power of the demon is fully realized only by the few who have received this power of second sight. The pupil sometimes betrays signs of polite incredulity when his faith has been subjected to some special strain; and Richalm can sympathize with these doubts. He admits that more things have been revealed to himself than can be found in the Bible or the Fathers:
“I have found little in the Holy Scriptures of these matters, in comparison with the actual evils wherein we poor wretches are held and vexed”1. “God hath revealed unto me such things as I could never fully expound to any man, nor he fully believe ; things greater and stranger than I have ever found in any scriptures.” “If I were openly to disclose many things which are revealed unto me, men would stone me.” “A few years ago, if any man had told me [that every sound we hear is the sound of a demon], I should have accounted him a madman.”
Yet it is of supreme importance that this knowledge should be made accessible to the faithful. As the pupil says in his prologue :
the main theme of these revelations is, that the sole malignity of the devil be set forth ; concerning which we ought to believe all the snares and treachery and malice and iniquity that human tongue can tell. Yet methinks no man, who knoweth what he hath lost and what are those thieves among whom he fell in going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, will fail to give easy credence to these things. Let that man disbelieve whose home is in this world, to whom solitude is a prison, a latrine is a palace, darkness is light, and filth seems heaven. Let those doubt the truth of this matter who have not known the height and the wickedness of Satan.
The whole book is a commentary on what the Cluniac Ralph Glaber had written two centuries earlier, that the whole world was full of “manifold deceptions of demons or men” (P.L. 142, col. 675). And hundreds of monastic records might be quoted by way of illustration or epilogue to this text. T. he whole of a great abbey might be momentarily given over to the devil,
1 379; cf. 410, 415, 416, 377.
44
THE MONK’S GOD
with the town which had grown up under its shelter. In 1116, as the Peterborough chronicler tells us, his home caught fire for the second time1 :
The monastery was burned, and the whole town with it. Kor^on that day the Abbot had cursed the abbey, and in his wrath (for he was a very wrathful man) he rashly sent it to the devil. For the brethren had gone into the refectory that morning to amend the tables2; and this displeased him; and he cursed his curse and went forthwith to hold a plea at Castor. Moreover a certain servant who was kindling a fire in the bakery3, seeing that it burned but slowly, cried Come, devil, and blow this fire ! whereupon it blazed forth and reached even unto the roof, and flew from office to office even into the town . . . And thus, by the work of the devil who had been invoked, and by God’s sufferance for our own sins’ sake, the whole abbey and town were burnt, and all the bells were broken, and the fire continued in the tower for nine whole days ; but in the ninth night there arose a mighty wind and scattered the fire and live embers from this tower upon the Abbot’s lodgings, so that we feared all those offices must now burn which hitherto had been spared. Truly, that day was a day of grief and pain.
1 Dugdale-Caley, i, 350, b.
3 Probably to alter the tablets on which were written the standing orders for the week.
3 The text, by an obvious error, has pristino for pistrino.
CHAPTER IV
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
IT is true that Richalm treats the subject more systematically and in greater detail than any other, and that it might, as he admits, be difficult to find any “scriptura” corroborating his belief that all worldly noises are made by demons. Yet his doctrine seemed of great value not only to contemporaries but to post- Reformation scholars of his church; and it would not be difficult to compose a catena of passages from other and better-known medieval writers which would justify all the main assertions in his book. All the monastic autobiographers show, incidentally, something very near to Richalm’s consciousness of demoniac omnipresence and power. Ralph Glaber, Othloh of St Emmeram, Guibert of Nogent, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Salimbene of Parma, all show this overwhelming sense of dualism in religion. St Bonaventura is sometimes quoted, by those who seem imperfectly acquainted with his actual writings, as an example of the tenderness introduced by Franciscanism into medieval philosophy. There is a grain of truth in this, but hardly what these modern writers imply. His teaching frequently em¬ phasizes the severe and gloomy side of religion; and he, like nearly all medieval theologians, anticipated many of the doctrines which most people associate with seventeenth century Puritanism. He has no hope of salvation for unbaptized infants, nor does he doubt the joy which the just will find in the pains of the damned1. In many of his mystical works and those of his school, if not in most, it is assumed that the first step towards God is that of conscious flight from hell2. Long before this, Christ had become so much associated with the severity of the Last Judgement, and His office of propitiator had dwindled so much in proportion to the Virgin Mary’s, that we scarcely recognize the real spirit of the Pauline epistles in official theology. It is astonishing, for instance, how seldom the triumphant
1 See appendix i A.
2 A conspicuous exception is the De Gradibus Virtutis ; here the contempla¬ tion of the Last Judgement and Hell comes only in ch. 28.
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
46
Catholic of the thirteenth century made full use of that most triumphant chapter in the whole Bible, the eighth to the Romans, in comparison with other passages of far less spiritual force1.
For even Bonaventura was a man of his time ; and it is a fatal error to regard religion as a thing which, coming pure fromTiod in the past, has gradually been debased by man. There was in medieval religion a strain of coarseness unavoidable among those ruder conditions of life. Men were even more at the mercy of visual representations, and therefore of anthropomorphic con¬ ceptions, than in our own day. It is only with the mid-twelfth cen¬ tury that spiritual refinement comes even into French statuary; it developed far later in most other lands; and, to the very last, the average of medieval art was more conspicuous for vivid effect than for refinement; we must not be misled by the statues of Chartres and Reims, for instance, which are not typical but exceptional. The church building was the Bible of the Poor; but it was often a strangely unbiblical Bible2. The great majority of paintings and carvings had no reference either to the Old Testament or the New, but to the legends of the saints; and, even where the representations were more definitely doctrinal than this, they lent themselves to popular conceptions which no man would defend in our own day. The Trinity which scanda¬ lized Wyclif may still be seen surviving on walls or windows : three solemn figures identical in their features; or one three¬ headed person; or a triad distinguished by emblems, just as three saints might be ; or (commonest of all) a group of the Old
1 A computation from the admirable list supplied by the Quaracchi editors in their index-volume of Bonaventura’s works shows that he quotes from the Song of Solomon more than twice as often, in proportion to its length, than from the Epistle to the Romans. The former, of course, was expounded mystically of Christ and His Church. The sixth verse of the eighth chapter is quoted 38 times: “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm ; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave ; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.” On the other hand, the whole of the last five verses of Romans viii — the passage beginning “ who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? ’ ’ — supply only 27 quotations between them .
2 The question of the Bible in the Middle Ages is far too wide for dis¬ cussion here; one side of the subject has lately been treated exhaustively in Miss Deanesly’s Lollard Bible ; and I have tried to summarize the whole very briefly in a pamphlet, The R. C. Church and the Bible (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1921). Even as a fetish, the Bible lost its power: “When your parishioners swear,” writes Giraldus Cambrensis, “they have less fear for the holy book of the Gospels than for the relics of saints” (R.S. 11, 158).
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
47
Three in One. {Ibid)
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
48
Man with papal crown, the Crucifix, and the Dove1. Church art dealt in theory with the supersensuous ; but, in fact, it was often crudely materialistic, and filled the popular mind with ineradicable crudities. Even Abailard, if the tradition was right which ascribed to him that image of the Trinity in his afrb&y of Paraclete, thought fit to put these anthropomorphic conceptions before the rank and file of his monks2. Yet here was a danger
The Emblematic Three. (From Didron.)
1 Wyclif “acknowledges it also to be indisputable that images may be made with a good design, when it is done for the purpose of stirring up the believing to a devout adoration of God Himself. But, on the other hand, he recalls the fact that in the early church images were not used in such great numbers as they are at present. Nor does he conceal the fact that the use of images operates mischievously on men’s minds in more than one direction. It leads, e.g. to error in the faith, and to the idea that God the Father and the Holy Ghost are corporeal, when the Trinity is represented by artists in such a way that God the Father appears as an old man who holds between His knees God the Son hanging upon the cross, while God the Holy Ghost lights down in the form of a dove upon them both, and such like. Very many besides have fallen into the error of taking an image for something animated, and solemnly bowing to it, which indisputably is idolatry. Many also have been led to believe in miracles performed by the image, a super¬ stition resting upon mere delusion, or at most a diabolical deception.” (jf. W. and his English Precursors , by Prof. Lechler, trans. P. Lorimer, 1878, 11, in.)
2 Mabillon, Ann. Bened. VI, 85. The representation there described answers almost exactly to the second of these four in the text, except that at the Paraclete, Christ was in the centre; He was crowned with thorns and the Holy Ghost with olive; the Father alone was shod, and the features of all three Persons were identical. A century later, the Court of Heaven appeared very differently to a holy visionary; she saw a vast procession of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, and other faithful souls’
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
49
which great churchmen recognized even in the Middle Ages,
as the ablest among Roman _ _ _
Catholic students have recog¬ nized it in more modern times.
One of the greatest among the Bollandists, Father Henschen, shows how medieval iconography has encouraged idle legend. He is apologizing for an obviously apocryphal life of two saints who, having been decapitated for the faith, took up their heads and carried them to their final burying-place. It was not possi¬ ble to write with absolute liberty in 1788, while the sacristan of St Denis was still telling visitors to that royal abbey how the patron saint had carried his own head thither from Paris, six miles distant1. But concerning
The Trinity Group. (Ibid.)
two obscure saints at St Wandrille Henschen could express himself more freely ; and he writes :
I have no more to say about this story than that, when once it had become customary in France for sculptors or painters to represent all the saints who were thought to have been decapitated as holding that same head in their hands against their breast, then that popular error throve whereby they were fancied to have taken up their several heads after death and carried the same to the place where their remains were worshipped. This might indeed have happened
each with a waxen taper, moving two and two towards the Temple of Heaven for High Mass ; [for she was evidently ignorant of the Johannine word : “And I saw no temple therein.”] “ Last of all, with His Mother, came our Saviour, who is the Head of all the Saints, the Splendour of Glory and the Sun of Righteousness, in pontifical vestments, with a mitre on His head, and staff and gloves and rings and the other ornaments of a bishop.” They struck up an anthem to the Virgin Mary and went into the Temple, where Christ celebrated at the altar, St Stephen read the Epistle, and St John Evangelist the Gospel. (Caes. Heist. 11, 26.)
1 Felibien (p. 77), follows his still more learned brother Mabillon in de¬ clining to pronounce on the truth either of this miracle or of the identification of St Denis with Dionysius the Areopagite, which Abailard had doubted so much to his own cost.
CRI
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50
THE LORD OF DARKNESS
once or twice1 ; but, when once we have recognized the false principle which has deceived so many, we cannot prudently believe it of any saint whose legend is