Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (67 page)

Another late-eleventh-century religious order made a permanent success of monastic simplicity: the Carthusians. Like the Cistercians, they take their name from their first house, the Grande Chartreuse (
Maior Cartusia
in Latin; a Carthusian monastery was domesticated in English to 'Charterhouse'), but their inspiration is not so much the Benedictine tradition as a rediscovery of the monasticism of the East which had provided the first models for Western monasteries. A description bestowed on them by successive admiring popes was 'never reformed because never in need of reform' (
nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata
). Their key to avoid the temptations to slackness which haunt every religious community is their resolve to preserve each monk in solitude in order to seek a greater intimacy with the divine. Each member of the community occupies his own walled-in cottage and garden within the monastery, only meeting his fellows for three periods of worship through the day. Their return to the earliest forms of monastic life meant that they would never be a numerous religious order, but Carthusians were always widely respected.

Carthusian austerity sometimes seemed excessive to outside authority. One fourteenth-century pope tried to force the order to allow monks to eat meat in times of ill-health and to modify their solitary lives in other ways, but such were their protests that he let them preserve their standards. A pleasing legend, but no more than a legend, perhaps created by a Carthusian with a sense of humour, says that His Holiness was intimidated by the rude health of the protest delegation, in which the youngest member was eighty-eight and the oldest ninety-five.
⁵¹
The reasons for such health became apparent in archaeological excavations on the rubbish pits of the London Charterhouse; the monks' meat-free diet was exceptionally varied by medieval standards, with fish, vegetables and a rich choice of fruit - grapes, figs, plums, sloes, mulberries, strawberries, walnuts - plus whatever they chose to grow in their individual gardens. Moreover, their plumbing was exemplary.
⁵²

Yet another product of the diversity of eleventh- and twelfth-century monasticism was the Augustinian movement, so called because it looked not to Benedict but to a series of statements and simple rules made by or attributed to Augustine of Hippo, for religious communities under his control.
⁵³
The Augustinian Rule appealed because it was even more general and brief than the Rule of Benedict, and thus could be adapted for community life in a wide range of circumstances. The membership of each Augustinian community, as priests living under a Rule (
Regulum
), were known as Canons Regular, in contrast with the 'secular' canons of non-monastic cathedrals and colleges. Their priestly duties took them to places where they could provide pastoral care for the laity, so they had precisely the opposite attitude to the world from the Cistercians. They sought out newly developing towns; they planted their houses beside the castles and homes of the wealthy, often taking over existing large churches whose community life was in disarray. They were enthusiastically received because they satisfied a universal hunger for the prayers of holy people. Their communities rarely sought to be as large or wealthy as Benedictine or Cistercian houses, and so they supplied spiritual services at what seemed like cut-price rates: the gift of a field from a modestly prosperous knight, or a town tenement bequeathed by a merchant's widow; a few pence from a poor man's family at his deathbed. Moreover, they gave tangible benefits to the communities around them; they served in parishes or hospitals as priests.

The result of all this was an extraordinary degree of choice for a twelfth-century man or woman seeking to fulfil a monastic vocation, to find a community best to express his or her personal piety, or simply to find a congenial spiritual friend outside the pressures of the ordinary world. To take one instance, by the end of the twelfth century the two English East Anglian counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, prosperous and thickly populated by the standards of the time, boasted around eighty monasteries and nunneries, representing eight different orders, including the Benedictines, amid a population contained in about fifteen hundred parishes. An hour or two's walk would bring virtually everyone in East Anglia to the gates of a religious house.
⁵⁴
Amid this great diversity, one devotional impulse caught them all up, but it was particularly prominent among the Cistercians. Although this order's initial steely singleness of purpose and austerity might make it seem reminiscent of modern Christian evangelistic campaigning organizations, today's evangelicals would find this aspect of the Cistercian outlook uncongenial: all their monasteries were dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. In this, the Cistercians were riding the crest of a wave which, in the era of the Gregorian reforms, had swept through all Europe.

From the time of the Nestorian controversy (see pp. 222-8) Western theologians made one significant step beyond Eastern devotion to the God-bearer (
theotokos
). When they translated that contentious word, they generally pushed it into Latin phrases straightforwardly meaning 'Mother of God' (yet another issue about the West to irritate Greeks). A mother is a more powerful figure than a bearer, and the word is also likely to produce a preoccupation with gynaecological issues - for instance, the rows in fourth-century Rome in which Jerome had championed Mary's perpetual virginity (see p. 314).
⁵⁵
Such thoughts blossomed in the eleventh century, when various circumstances combined to promote and enrich Marian devotion. For Gregorian reformers, the ever-Virgin was the perfect example of the chastity which underpinned their new ideal of universal clerical celibacy, and naturally this theme particularly appealed to monks. Rather later, as the threat from the Cathars grew intense, Mary seemed, against Cathar dualism, to be a guarantor that God could sanctify created and fleshly things as much as he could the Spirit, since it was in Mary that the Word was made flesh. This did have its problems, since the Cathars themselves were also caught up in the general rise of devotion to Mary, and simply insisted that she was not a human mother - after all, did she not lack a genealogy in the Bible?
⁵⁶

Quite apart from that annoyingly good point, the theme of motherhood continued to promote nervousness among Mary's Western devotees, precisely because of their new preoccupations with celibacy and the regulation of marriage. Mary's sexuality ought to be kept away from sin if the Incarnation was to be itself preserved from that taint. Two conclusions arose with long-lived implications for Mary's place in the Christian faith. First, a number of English Benedictine abbots conferred in the 1120s and, in their enthusiasm for the Mother of God, began promoting the idea that Mary had been conceived without the normal human correlation of concupiscence (lust); because her conception was immaculate, unspotted by sin, so was her flesh. The doctrine was controversial: Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the loudest advocates of devotion to Mary in his preaching, said flatly that the idea of Immaculate Conception was a novelty which Mary would not enjoy, and that no conception, not even hers, could be separated from carnal pleasure. The Immaculate Conception went on disturbing the tranquillity of Catholic theology as late as the Counter-Reformation, when not even the impulse to defend Mary against Protestant irreverence stilled the quarrels.
⁵⁷

Yet the doctrine chimed usefully with a devotional belief current in both East and West that Mary's flesh should not see the normal corruption of death, and it also creatively interracted with a notable and highly significant absence throughout the Christian world: any tradition of Mary's burial, tomb or bodily relics. The next stage was an accident waiting to happen: in the late 1150s, a mystically inclined nun in the Rhineland, Elizabeth of Schonau, experienced visions of Our Lady being taken into Heaven in bodily flesh. The account of these apparitions, enthusiastically written up by her clerical brother with convenient brevity, was within a few years a manuscript best-seller all over Europe, not least thanks to the international contacts of the Cistercians. The fully fledged doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary was born, out of all the gathering strands of less precise devotional opinion from centuries before.
⁵⁸
The huge success of a theological innovation suggested by a semi-literate German female shows that Marian devotion was no abstract theological issue; it was fired by a popular hunger to love the Mother of God.

The very absence of Mary's corpse from this sinful world was useful, because it necessarily promoted intense fixations on images of her missing body. Churches which did not possess any relic of any significance - that was particularly likely in northern Europe - could trump the competition simply by commissioning a statue of Our Lady, which with luck, divine favour, local enthusiasm or assiduous salesmanship might produce evidence of its miraculous power and become the focus of pilgrimage. This represented a certain democratization of pilgrimage cults, since any parish church might be a setting for such an image, as much as any monastic house. Given such considerations, it was not surprising that Our Lady could upstage lesser saints even when their relics were present, and all over Europe from the eleventh century churches were rededicated away from local saints, or even international saints, in honour of the Mother of God. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was uncontroversial for a bishop to do as Peter Quinel, an energetic Bishop of Exeter, did in 1287, ordering every parish church in his large diocese to make sure that they displayed an image of the Blessed Virgin as well as an image of their church's patron saint.
⁵⁹
The very fact that he could confidently expect action on such a matter was a proof of the way in which Gregory's vision of a well-functioning ecclesiastical machine engineered for the glory of God had scored massive successes. Bishop Quinel issued his order in an age when the Gregorian papacy had achieved its greatest successes and had showed how capable it could be of surmounting formidable new challenges. These challenges we must now explore.

12

A Church for All People? (1100-1300)

THEOLOGY, HERESY, UNIVERSITIES ( 1100-1300)

We have now met various expressions of the ways in which Western Europeans were searching for salvation in the anxious, busy Gregorian age: pilgrimages, crusades, new monastic initiatives (many more than are here described). A problem remained: the clerically dominated structure of Latin Western Christianity had not exhausted the yearning of layfolk to show that they were active participants in the Body of Christ which was his Church. Throughout Europe a growth of industry, particularly in manufacturing clothing, created a network of new towns, and the Church found it difficult to cope; its developing parish system and the finance on which the parish was based operated best in the more stable life of the countryside. Now many people found themselves faced with the excitement and terror of new situations, new structures of life; their uncertainties, hopes and fears were ready prey for clergy who might have their own emotional difficulties and quarrels with the clerical hierarchy. This has been a repeated problem for institutional Christianity in times of social upheaval.

Religious dissent had developed throughout Europe, particularly its most prosperous and disturbed parts, from the early eleventh century. The Church gave much of it the label heresy and in 1022 King Robert II of France set a precedent by returning to the Roman imperial custom of burning heretics at the stake. Modern examination of this case suggests that the unfortunate victims were not heretics even in the contemporary Church's sense, but were caught up in the King's struggle with a local magnate.
¹
Others expressed opinions which had not previously been declared unorthodox, but which were now defined as outside acceptability. Such was the case with the theologian from Chartres Berengar of Tours (
c
. 999-1088), who expressed his unease with the increasing precision with which his contemporaries asserted that eucharistic bread and wine could become the body and blood of Christ (Berengar escaped the flames by a sequence of humiliating forced recantations and died in mutinous silence). Even the Cathars, to whose suppression the Church devoted so much energy, may have started merely by seeking a purer, less worldly form of ministry before official repression turned their sympathies towards visiting dualists from the eastern Mediterranean (see pp. 387-8).

Certainly other dissenters began in a perfectly orthodox fashion and were marginalized by circumstance. Such were the Waldensians, a movement started around 1170 in Lyons by a wealthy man called Valdes, who gave away all his wealth to the poor and ministered to a group who also valued poverty as the basis for Christian life.
²
Church authorities were not prepared to make a distinction between this affirmation of poverty and that of the dualist Cathars in the same region, and from 1184 a solemn papal pronouncement (a bull) condemned them both. The Waldensians went on expanding, but were increasingly estranged from the episcopate of the Church on one vital issue: they were convinced that every Christian had a vocation to preaching, and that fatally clashed with the clerical priorities of the Gregorian reforms.

Elsewhere, there were more extreme forms of dissent. From at least the beginning of the thirteenth century, self-appointed leaders roamed Europe preaching that individuals could meet God through an inner light; it might be that God's Spirit could be found in all things, in a form of pantheism. These very loosely organized and often totally independent 'Brethren of the Free Spirit' could whip up mass support in times of crisis, often announcing that such disruptions heralded the beginning of Christ's reign on earth; much of their excitement became mixed up with the later crusades and the increasingly hopeless struggle to defend the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. So it shaded off without an easily definable break into the religious innovation which previously had brought so much of the official structures into being.
³
The ferment of the age seemed in danger of slipping from the Church's control.