Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (70 page)

Despite such scepticism, enough influential people chose to believe Carmelite fictions to ensure their survival as a respected section of the mendicant world. There was indeed a distinctive value in their stubborn adherence to their story of Elijah: because they kept their collective memory of contemplation on Mount Carmel, they brought to the West a love of wilderness which the Cistercians had at first possessed but were already losing. Carmelites appreciated the aesthetic beauty of wild nature with a relish which anticipates later European romanticism. In his first defence of the order in 1270, their Prior-General Nicholas Gallicus wrote with engaging delight:

I want to tell you of the joys of the solitary life. The beauty of the elements, the starry heavens and the planets ordered in perfect harmony, invite us to contemplate infinite wonders . . . all our sisters the creatures strive in the solitude to fill our eyes, ears and feelings with their caresses. Their inexpressible beauty cries out in silence and invites us to praise the marvellous Creator.

In order to enjoy such divine pleasures, the Carmelites later had their donors create wildernesses for them, not to farm but simply for contemplation: the first wild gardens or sacred theme parks.
²¹

Other enterprises were not so lucky. The Italian Order of Apostles, for instance, was founded in Parma by Gerardo Segarelli in the 1260s to promote apostolic poverty like the Franciscans, but in 1300 Segarelli was burned as a heretic by a Dominican inquisitor. Through the filter of viciously biased later accounts of his movement, we glimpse a man who was strikingly like Francis, who gained support from several Italian bishops, and who had no traceable heretical associations. The problem was that he came late in the day to the foundation of orders of friars. Dominicans and Franciscans treated him as unwelcome competition; a major council of the Church at Lyons in 1274 decided to suppress 'all forms of religious life and the mendicant Orders' founded after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. While many Franciscans furiously debated among themselves about the justice of the council's narrowing of religious possibilities, the Order of Apostles actively resisted suppression and in 1290 its members were collectively condemned by the Pope. Soon afterwards, the Church started burning them.
²²

Segarelli and his order were not alone in their misfortunes. For all their founder's personal friendship with cardinals and even with one pope, Francis's followers included crowds who were more part of the wild underworld of thirteenth-century religion than of the establishment. His movement split between those who wished to remodel the order to make it more like the Dominicans, and 'Spirituals' who wished to reject all property, and by implication all ordered society, on the basis that Christ and his Apostles had no private possessions - that nagging truth embedded in the Gospels, which the Apostle Paul had first considered a problem (see p. 113). The Spirituals took up the teachings of a mystically minded south Italian Cistercian abbot of the previous century, Joachim of Fiore, whose broodings on the course of human history had convinced him that it was divided into three ages, dominated in turn by Father, Son and Holy Spirit; he thought that the third Age of the Spirit would begin in 1260 and would see the world given over to the monastic life.
²³
Joachim's prophecies caused great excitement: in 1254, fifty years after his death and on the eve of the 1260 deadline, one ultra-enthusiast Franciscan proclaimed in Paris that Joachim's writings had replaced the Old and New Testaments as the 'Eternal Evangel' envisioned in the Book of Revelation (14.6). It was after all in 1260 that the flagellant movement first appeared in Europe. Joachim's thought continued to fascinate a great variety of Christians and ex-Christians down to modern times, including W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence. Those who listen to the vapid rock anthem 'The Age of Aquarius' are catching a last echo of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot whose vision was of a dawning new age.
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The wilder sections of the Spirituals became increasingly mixed up in the battles between popes, kings of France and Holy Roman Emperors; eventually Pope John XXII, a strong-minded and not always admirable cleric, was driven in 1318 to condemn the Spirituals as heretical. Four of them were burned at Marseilles for proclaiming that Christ had lived in absolute poverty; it was a sensitive issue, reflecting adversely on the clerical hierarchy's wealth and therefore on their power. The most extreme Spirituals, one of whose leaders noisily proclaimed his allegiance to the memory of the martyred Gerardo Segarelli, came to lead movements prepared to defy the Church even with physical violence; their resistance lost nothing in the telling of official chroniclers and produced savage repression.
²⁵
Those Franciscans who escaped destruction continued to quarrel with each other about the interpretation of their founder's message of poverty, and it has been a characteristic of Franciscan community life that breakaway orders have continued to be founded to make a particular point about this. Even the depiction of Francis in painting is contentious; those versions of the order which particularly emphasized poverty or austerity made a point of commissioning pictures of the saint which portrayed him as especially gaunt and ragged. Franciscan oratory could still have alarmingly unpredictable results on crowds: the preaching of maverick Franciscans inspired one of the last crusades in Hungary in 1514-15, but also led to angry mobs turning not on Muslims but on the nobility and gentry who had failed to provide proper leadership against them. Both sides in that most terrible of Hungarian social upheavals turned to impaling their opponents, which seems a long way from Francis's gentle message.
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For all its divisions, the surviving Franciscan Order harnessed much of thirteenth-century Europe's religious energy. Like the Dominicans, Franciscans became deeply involved in the universities, and both orders made a point of siting their houses wherever there were people, so that one can often tell whether or not a settlement was important and wealthy in the High Middle Ages by seeing if any friaries were founded there. Unlike most monastic orders, friars welcomed laypeople into their communities for spiritual counsel and discussion, and they usually deliberately built their dining halls in part of their site which would make it easy for people to walk off the street to talk to them. They evolved a distinctive form of church architecture: their spacious naves were preaching halls stripped of obstacles, often single wide chambers, so that crowds could listen to sermons. Popular enthusiasm for mendicant preaching meant that the style spread beyond the friars to produce a large crop of 'hall churches' all over Europe, with single naves, or naves with aisles of equal height, the pillars of the dividing arcades as slender as was safe.

THOMAS AQUINAS: PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

The year 1260 did not bring the end of the world, as Joachim had predicted and so many had expected. Those middle decades of the thirteenth century did represent the culmination of the age which had started with the reforms at Cluny, because they saw the crowning years of the career of the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. If Gregory was the most decisive personality of the eleventh-century Church and Bernard of Clairvaux its greatest preacher in the twelfth, then Aquinas's system of thought, Thomism, in the thirteenth represents a defining moment in the theology of the medieval West. He was the son of a nobleman from Aquino in south Italy, but his career illustrates the international flavour of the age, when a knowledge of Latin would be enough to make one understood by everyone who mattered in society from Stockholm to Seville. Having joined the Dominicans, he went on to study and work not just in Italy but also in the universities of Paris and Cologne. Aquinas's huge corpus of writings mark the height of Western Europe's enthusiasm for Aristotle (who was for him simply 'the Philosopher'), and he encouraged the translation into Latin of all Aristotle's works then known. After much opposition and misgivings from theologians especially in the later thirteenth century, the work of Aquinas had the eventual effect of ending the official Church's fears about the challenge which Aristotle's thought appeared to present to Christian faith.

Aquinas took as the ground of his work that the systems of thought and reasonable analysis presented by Aristotle did not deny the central place of faith, but illustrated, perhaps even proved, its truths. Aristotle's categories and discussion of 'forms' reflected the nature of the humanity which God had created, which had its form in a rational soul and was naturally inclined to act with reason. Nothing should be proposed which is contrary to our reason; this is the path to truth which God has given us, and it is to be used combatively, in argument and counter-argument, in order to form an intellectually acceptable conclusion, in the vigorous debating method of scholasticism which was a century old by Aquinas's time. It was in the process of approaching faith through reasoned argument that Aquinas found Aristotle so useful, particularly Aristotle's newly translated works on logic and metaphysics (see pp. 33-4). Building on Aristotle's idea that everything created must have a cause from which it receives its existence, he could construct a system in which everything that is and can be described is linked back in a chain of causation to God, the first cause of all things. This God is still primarily the 'Unmoved Mover', Plato's perfect, passionless God, so it would be a caricature to see Thomas as rejecting Plato in favour of Aristotle; he was using any intellectual resource at his disposal in order to create his system. It is seen at its fullest in Aquinas's great work the
Summa Theologiae
('Sum Total of Theology' - often more commonly known as the
Summa Theologica
).
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The
Summa
deals with the most abstract questions of being and the nature of God, yet it also extends to very practical discussions of the way everyday life should be viewed, and how we should live as part of God's purpose. Through its questions and distinctions pushing to conclusions, it presents a harmonious view of God's earthly and heavenly creation, a structure in which the successors of Gregory VII could see themselves as the earthly peak of God's system. Thomas put limits on the use of reason in understanding this harmony. In the opening discussion of the
Summa
, he quickly led the reader to a conclusion which was that of the pseudonymous Dionysius the Areopagite long before, and which had become much more familiar among the theologians of Byzantium: 'It seems that we can use no words at all to refer to God'.
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That may seem strange for a work which, in its standard English edition, runs to sixty-one volumes and which remained unfinished at Aquinas's death in 1274, but what this greatest of scholastic theologians understood was that all language about God had to employ the sideways glance, the analogy, the metaphor. So Aquinas's judgements on truth are presented as a summary of probabilities, of the balance of arguments: something which those turning to his great work for certainties have not always appreciated.

Nowhere is Thomas's balance between the specific and the wordless more apparent than in a text of his encountered by countless more Catholics than have read the
Summa
, his great eucharistic hymn
Pange
lingua
('Sing, my tongue, the mystery of the glorious Body and precious Blood'). Aquinas wrote this as part of a devotional office for the new feast of Corpus Christi in 1264, at the request of Pope Urban IV himself. For centuries, the Catholic faithful have experienced the last two verses of
Pange lingua
in one of the most dramatic moments of theatre provided by Western Latin liturgy: Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the ultimate though belated expression of the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. This eucharistic devotion is peculiar to the Western Latin tradition. It developed from the Corpus Christi festival, whose only disadvantage in the eyes of medieval Westerners was that it was not enough of a good thing: it only happened once every twelve months. Through the rest of the Church's year there arose a custom of 'reservation of the Blessed Sacrament': part of the eucharistic bread consecrated in the Mass was 'reserved' from the service, and housed in a safe place, a 'tabernacle', enhanced in churches by ever more magnificent decoration and canopy work. Soon the reserved bread became known in common parlance simply as 'the Sacrament'. In its tabernacle (often also called the 'Sacrament House') it was available for worshippers to use as the focus for their adoration whenever they wished, and it became a popular custom for clergy to gather the devout in front of the tabernacle, to lead them in devotional prayer.

Three centuries and more after Aquinas's time, the Sacrament was not simply reserved in this fashion, but it became the focus and main actor in its own service, known as Benediction. In the most elaborated form of Benediction, the priest or deacon, splendidly vested, brings the consecrated bread out of its tabernacle and uses it to bless the worshippers before him. Slowly and reverently lifted from the altar, generally with the officiant's hands veiled to avoid direct contact with its container, the Sacrament is moved through the cross-pattern of the blessing, a spiritual symbol made emphatically physical. There can be no more powerful embodiment of the Western doctrine of Christ's 'Real Presence' in the eucharistic elements than this service of Benediction. As the priest prepares to gather up God's blessing in this way, those present sing Aquinas's
Tantum ergo
, the culminating verses of his
Pange lingua
:

Therefore we, before him bending,
this great Sacrament revere;
types and shadows have their ending,
for the newer rite is here;
faith, our outward sense befriending,
makes our inward vision clear.

Glory let us give, and blessing
to the Father and the Son,
honour, might and praise addressing,
while eternal ages run;
ever too his love confessing,
who from Both with Both is One.