The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
RELIGIOUS SENSIBILITY AND RELIGIOUS
IMAGINATION
Ever since the gentle mysticism of Saint Bernard, in the twelfth century, had started the strain of pathetic tenderness about the Passion of Christ, the religious sensibility of the medieval soul had been increasing. The mind was saturated with the concepts of Christ and the cross. In early childhood the image of the cross was implanted on the sensitive heart, so grand and forbidding as to overshadow all other affections by its gloom. When Jean Gerson was a child, his father one day stood with his back against a wall, his arms outspread, saying: “Thus, child, was your God crucified, who made and saved you.” This image of his father, he tells us, remained engraved on his mind, expanding as he grew older, even in his old age, and he blessed his pious father for it, who had died on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross. Saint Colette, when four years old, every day heard her mother in prayer lament and weep about the Passion, sharing the pain of contumely, blows, and torments. This recollection fixed itself in the supersensitive heart of Colette with such intensity, that she felt, all her life through, the most severe oppression of heart every day at the hour of the crucifixion; and at the reading of the Passion she suffered more than a woman in childbed.
A preacher sometimes paused to stand in silence, with his arms extended in the form of the cross, for a quarter of an hour.
The soul is so imbued with the conception of the Passion that the most remote analogy suffices to make the chord of the memory of Christ vibrate. A poor nun carrying wood to the kitchen imagines she carries the cross; a blind woman doing the washing takes the tub for the manger and the washhouse for the stable.
This extreme religious sensibility shows itself by copious weeping. Devotion, says Denis the Carthusian, is a sort of tenderness of heart, which easily moves to tears of piety. We should pray God to have “the daily baptism of tears.” They are the wings of prayer and, according to Saint Bernard, the wine of angels. We should give ourselves up to the grace of meritorious tears, get ready for them and let ourselves be carried away by them all the year round, but especially during Lent, so that we may say with the psalmist: Fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae panis die ac nocte.[1] Sometimes they come so easily, that we pray sobbing and groaning. If they do not come, we should not force them; we should then content ourselves with the tears of the heart. In the presence of others we should avoid these signs of extraordinary devotion.
Vincent Ferrer shed so many tears every time he consecrated the Host that the whole congregation also wept, insomuch that a general wailing was heard as if in the house of one dead.
Popular devotion in France did not take a special form as we notice in the Netherlands, where it was standardized, so to say, in the pietistic movement of the Brethren of the Common Life and the regular canons of the Congregation of Windesheim. This was the circle whence proceeded the “Imitation of Christ.” The regulations which the Dutch devout bound themselves to obey, gave their piety a conventional form and preserved them from dangerous excesses of fervour. French devotion, although very similar, kept more of its passionate and spasmodic character, and led more easily to fantastic aberrations, in those cases where it did not speedily wear itself out.
Nowhere do we notice its character better than in the writings of Gerson. The chancellor of the university was the great dogmatic and moral censor of his time. His prudent, scrupulous, slightly academic mind was admirably fitted to distinguish between true piety and exaggerated religious manifestations. This was, indeed, his favourite occupation. Benevolent, sincere and pure, he had that meticulous carefulness in point of good style and form which so often reminds us of his modest origin in the case of a man who has raised himself by his own talents from humble circumstances to an aristocratic mentality. He was a born psychologist and had a fine sense of style, which is near akin to the craving for orthodoxy.
At the Council of Constance, Gerson defended the Dutch Brethren of the Common Life against whom a Dominican of Groningen brought a charge of heresy. He was, nevertheless, fully aware of the dangers threatening the Church from a too exuberant popular devotion. It may therefore appear strange that he often disapproved of manifestations of piety in his own country, which reappear in that very “devotio moderna” of the Netherlands, over which he threw the mantle of his authority. The explanation is that the devout in France had no safe sheepfold of organization and of discipline to keep them within the limits of what the Church could tolerate.
The world, said Gerson, is approaching its end, and, like an old dotard, is exposed to all sorts of fancies, dreams and illusions which lead many a one to stray outside the pathway of truth. Mysticism is brought into the streets. Many people take to it, without suitable direction, and indulge in too rigid fasts, too protracted vigils, and too abundant tears, all of which disturb their brains. In vain they are advised to be moderate and to take heed lest they fall into the devil’s snares. At Arras, he tells us, he visited a woman who won the admiration of the multitude by going completely without food during several consecutive days, against her husband’s wishes. He talked to her and only found in her a vain and arrogant obstinacy; for, after her fasts, she ate with insatiable voracity. Her face betrayed imminent insanity. He also cites the case of an epileptic woman who thought that each twinge of pain in her corns was a sign that a soul descended to hell.
Gerson set little store by visions and revelations which were recent and universally spoken of, including even those of Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. He had heard so many stories of this sort that he had lost all belief in them. Someone or other would always be asserting that it had been revealed to him that he would be pope. A certain man, in particular, believed himself predestined, first, to become pope, then to be the Antichrist, so that he had thought of killing himself in order to save Christendom from such an evil.
There is nothing more dangerous, says Gerson, than ignorant devotion. The poor devout, learning that the heart of Mary exulted in her God, strain themselves to exult also; they call up all sorts of images without being able to distinguish between truth and delusion, and they take them all for miraculous proofs of their excellent devotion.
Contemplative life has great dangers, he continues; it has made numbers of people melancholy or mad. Gerson perceived the connection between fasting and hallucinations, and had a glimpse of the rôle played by fasting in the practice of magic.
Now, where was a man of Gerson’s psychological subtlety to draw the line of demarcation in the manifestations of piety, between what is holy and laudable and what is inadmissible? The dogmatic point of view did not meet the case. It was easy for him, a theologian by profession, to point out deviations from dogma. But he felt that, as regards manifestations of piety, considerations of an ethical sort should guide our judgment, that it was a question of degree and of taste. There is no virtue, says Gerson, which is more neglected in these miserable times of schism than discretion.
The Church in the Middle Ages tolerated many religious extravagances, provided they did not lead up to novelties of a revolutionary sort, in morals or in doctrine. So long as it spent itself in hyperbolic fancies or in ecstasies, superabundant emotion was not a source of danger. Thus, many saints were conspicuous for their fanatical reverence for virginity, taking the form of a horror of all that relates to sex. Saint Colette is an instance of this. She is a typical representative of what has been called by William James the theopathic condition. Her supersensibility is extreme. She can endure neither the light nor the heat of fire, only the light of candles. She has an immoderate horror of flies, ants and slugs, and of all dirt and stenches of all kinds. Her abomination of sexual functions inspires her with repugnance for those saints who have passed through the matrimonial state, and leads her to oppose the admission of non-virginal persons to her congregation. The Church has ever praised such a disposition, judging it to be edifying and meritorious.
On the other hand, the same sentiment became dangerous, as soon as the fanatics of chastity, not content with shutting themselves up in their own sphere of purity, wanted to apply their principles to ecclesiastical and social life. The Church was repeatedly obliged to disown the violent assailants of the validity of the sacraments administered by priests living in fornication, for the double reason that sound catholic doctrine has always separated the sacredness of the office from the personal dignity of the bearer, and that she knew herself to be not strong enough to uproot the evil. Jean de Varennes had been a learned divine and a celebrated preacher. Chaplain to the youthful Cardinal of Luxemburg at Avignon, he seemed destined for the highest ecclesiastical career, when he suddenly threw up all his benefices, with the exception of a canonry of Notre Dame of Reims, gave up the great style of his life and went to Saint Lié, his birthplace, where he began to lead a saintly life and to preach. “And he was much visited by people who came to see him from all countries on account of the simple, very noble and most honest life he led.” Soon he is called “ the holy man of Saint Lié”; he is regarded as a future pope, a miraculous being, a messenger of God. All France talks of him.
Now, in the person of Jean de Varennes the passion of sexual purity assumes a revolutionary aspect. He reduces all the evils of the Church to the one evil of lust. His extremist programme for the re-establishment of chastity is not aimed only at the clergy. As to fornicating priests, he denies the efficacy of the sacraments they administer: an ancient and redoubtable thesis which the Church had encountered more than once. According to him, it was not permissible for a priest to live in the same house with his sister or with an elderly woman. Moreover, he attacks immorality in general. He ascribes twenty-three different sins to the matrimonial state. He demands that adultery shall be punished according to the Ancient Law; Christ Himself would have ordered the stoning of the adulterous woman, if He had been sure of her fault. He asserts that no woman in France is chaste, and that no bastard can live a good life and be saved. In his vehement indignation he preaches resistance to the ecclesiastical authorities, to the archbishop of Reims in particular. “A wolf, a wolf!” he cried to the people, who understood but too wall who the wolf was, and repeated joyously: “Hahay, aus leus, mes bones gens, aus leus.” The archbishop had Jean de Varennes locked up in a horrible prison.
This severity towards all revolutionary tendencies of a doctrinal kind contrasts with the indulgence shown by the Church for the extravagances of religious imagination, notably for ultra-sensuous fancies about divine love. It required the psychological perspicacity of a Gerson to be aware that there also the Faith was menaced by a moral and doctrinal danger.
The spiritual state called dulcedo Dei, the sweetness of the delights of the love of Christ, was towards the end of the Middle Ages one of the most active elements of religious life. The followers of the “devotio moderna” in the Netherlands had systematized it, and thereby made it more or less innocuous. Gerson, who distrusted it, has analysed it in his treatise, De diversis diaboli tentationibus, and elsewhere. “The day,” he said, “would be too short if I were to enumerate the innumerable follies of the loving, nay, the raving, amantium, immo et amentium.” He knew the peril by experience. For he can have only meant himself when he described the case of one of his acquaintances who had carried on a spiritual friendship with a nun, at first without any trace of carnal inclination, and without suspecting any sin, till a separation revealed to him the amorous nature of this relation. So that he drew the inference from it, Amor spiritualis facile labitur in nudum carnalem amorem,[2] and considered himself warned.
The devil, he says, sometimes inspires us with feelings of immense and marvellous sweetness which is very like devotion, so that we make the quest of this delight our object and want to love God only to attain it. Many have deceived themselves by immoderately cultivating such feelings; they have taken the mad excitement of their hearts for divine ardour, and were thus miserably led astray. Others strive to attain insensibility or complete passiveness, to become a perfect tool for God.
It is this sensation of absolute annihilation of the individual, tasted by the mystics of all times, which Gerson, as a supporter of a moderate and prudent mysticism, could not tolerate. A female visionary told him that in the contemplation of God her mind had been annihilated, really annihilated, and then created anew. “How do you know?” he asked her. “I experienced it,” she had answered. The logical absurdity of this reply had sufficed him to prove the reprehensible nature of these fancies.
It was dangerous to let such sensations express themselves by explicit formulas; the Church could only tolerate them in the form of images. Catherine of Siena might say that her heart had been changed into the heart of Christ. But Marguerite Porete, an adherent of the sect of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who also believed that her soul had been annihilated in God, was burnt at Paris.
What the Church dreaded above all in the idea of the annihilation of the personality was the consequence, accepted by the extremist mystics of all religions, that the soul absorbed in God, and therefore, having no will, can no longer sin, even in following its carnal appetites. How many poor ignorant people had been dragged by such doctrines into the most abominable licence. Every time Gerson touches the question of the dangers of spiritual love, he remembers the excesses of the Bégards and of the Turlupins; he fears a truly satanic impiety, like that of the nobleman he mentions as having confessed to a Carthusian that the sin of lust did not prevent him from loving God; on the contrary, it inflamed him to seek for and taste more eagerly the sweetness of divine love.
So long as the transports of mysticism were translated into passionate imaginings of a symbolic nature, however vivid their colours might be, they caused but a relative danger. On becoming crystallized in images, they lost some of their noxiousness. In this way the exuberant imagery of the time, to a certain extent, diverted the most dangerous tendencies of the religious life of the epoch, however bizarre it may appear to us. Jan Brugman, a popular Dutch preacher, might with impunity compare Jesus, taking human form, to a drunkard, who forgets himself, sees no danger, who gives away all he has. “Oh, was He not truly drunk, when love urged Him to descend from the highest heavens to this lowest valley of the earth?” He sees Him in heaven, going about to pour out drinks for the prophets, “and they drank till they were fit to burst, and David with his harp, leaped before the table, just as if he were the Lord’s fool.”
Not only the grotesque Brugman, the serene Ruysbroeck, too, likes to represent divine love under the image of drunkenness. Hunger also served as a figure to express the relations of the soul with Christ. Ruysbroeck, in The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, says: “Here begins an eternal hunger. which is never appeased; it is an inner craving and hankering of the loving power and the created spirit for an uncreated good.... Those that experience it are the poorest of men; for they are eager and greedy and they have an insatiable hunger. Whatever they eat and drink, they never become satiated by it, for this hunger is eternal.” The metaphor may be inverted, so that the hunger is Christ’s, as in The Mirror of Eternal Salvation. “His hunger is immensely great; He consumes us entirely to the bottom, for He is a greedy glutton with a voracious hunger; He devours even the marrow of our bones.... First He prepares His repast and in His love He burns up all our sins and our faults. Next, when we are purified and roasted by the fire of love, He opens his mouth like a voracious being who wishes to swallow all.”
A little insistence on the details of the metaphor will make it ridiculous. “You will eat Him,” says Le Livre de Crainte Amoureuse of Jean Berthelemy, in speaking of the Eucharist, “roasted at the fire, well baked, not at all overdone or burnt. For just as the Easter lamb was properly baked and roasted between two fires of wood or of charcoal, thus was gentle Jesus on Good Friday placed on the spit of the worthy cross, and tied between the two fires of His very fearful death and passion, and of the very ardent charity and love which He felt for our souls and our salvation; He was, as it were, roasted and slowly baked to save us.”
The infusion of divine grace is described under the image of the absorption of food, and also of being bathed. A nun feels quite deluged in the blood of Christ and faints. All the red and warm blood of the five wounds flowed through the mouth of Saint Henry Suso into his heart. Catherine of Siena drunk from the wound in His side. Others drunk of the Virgin’s milk, like Saint Bernard, Henry Suso, Alain de la Roche.
The Breton, Alain de la Roche, a Dominican, born about 1428, is a very typical representative of this religious imagery, both ultra-concrete and ultra-fantastic. He was the zealous promoter of the use of the rosary, with a view to which he founded the Universal Brotherhood of the Psalter of Our Lady. The description of his numerous visions is characterized at the same time by an excess of sexual imagination and by the absence of all genuine emotion. The passionate tone which, in the grand mystics, makes these too sensuous images of hunger and thirst, of blood and voluptuousness, bearable, is altogether lacking. The symbolism of spiritual love has become with him a mere, mechanical process. It is the decadence of the medieval spirit. We shall return to it shortly.
Now, whereas the celestial symbolism of Alain de la Roche seems artificial, his infernal visions are characterized by a ‘ hideous actuality. He sees the animals which represent the various sins equipped with horrible genitals, and emitting torrents of fire which obscure the earth with their smoke. He sees the prostitute of apostasy giving birth to apostates, now devouring them and vomiting them forth, now kissing them and petting them like a mother.
This is the reverse side of the suave fancies of spiritual love. Human imagination contained, as the inevitable complement of the sweetness of celestial visions, a black mass of demonological conceptions which also sought expression in language of ardent sensuality. Alain de la Roche forms the link between the placid and gentle pietism of the “devotio moderna” and the darkest 2 horror produced by the medieval spirit on the wane: the delusion of witchcraft, at that time fully developed into a fatally consistent system of theological zeal and judicial severity. A faithful friend of the regulars of Windesheim and the Brethren of the Common Life, in whose house he died at Zwolle in 1475, he was at the same time the preceptor of Jacob Sprenger, a Dominican like himself, not only one of the two authors of the Malleus maleficarum, but also the propagator in Germany of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, founded by Alain.