Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (71 page)

'Faith, our outward sense befriending, makes our inward vision clear': there is the resolution to the puzzle posed by the
Summa
's affirmation that no words may describe God. As the blessing is done, and the moment of climax falls away, the priest leads his flock in a prayer which is also by Aquinas:

O God, who under a wonderful sacrament has left us a remembrance of your passion: grant, we beseech you, that we may so venerate the holy mysteries of your body and blood, that we may evermore perceive within ourselves the fruit of your redemption.
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LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE: PERSONAL DEVOTION AFTER 1200

Aquinas's praise of Jesus Christ in the Mass was written for a Latin Europe where the conditions of life for most people were worsening, and where the symbolism of a person who was also bread and wine, food and drink, had a bitter resonance. For nearly two centuries from around 1200, the climate of the northern hemisphere generally got colder. Europe's farming was inefficient, its food supplies unequally divided between those with power and those without. The new conditions brought misery to a population whose growth had for two centuries been pressing on the agricultural resources available. It is always risky to try and relate such background anxieties to religious belief, which can be shaped by many different considerations, but the thirteenth century saw the flowering of a distinctively Western devotional pattern which concentrated on God as person, actively intervening in his creation, and on a more personal exposition of the human reality of Christ and his Mother. It is true that this personal search for God was already perceptible in the previous century. The great eleventh-century theologian Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote alongside his works of formal logic and dialectic passionate meditations on the beauty of God: 'Lord Jesus Christ, my redeemer, my mercy, my salvation . . . how great is the leanness of my desire and abundant the sweetness of your love.' In fact the Latin term '
meditatio
' seems first to have been used to describe such a text in the decades after his death. Anselm's meditations already circulated widely in his lifetime, and they inspired much imitation (most of it attaching his name to new texts) in the century after his death.
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Yet after 1200, within this pattern of search for the divine, there was a greater concentration on the specific details of the life and death of Christ. New themes emerged: Dominicans, culminating in Aquinas, built up their own line of thought on the sufferings of Christ, and Aquinas built up a logical case (which not all will find convincing) that Christ's physical pains in his Crucifixion were greater than any experienced by any other human being in history. There could be many motives in this particular theological development. Just as in the developing cult of Mary in the twelfth century, Dominican inquisitors facing Albigensians might have an eye on the Cathar denial of physicality in the divine. Even if that was one consideration, it has been suggested that the Dominicans might also have been trying a theological put-down of their rivals the Franciscans. Franciscans were inclined in Dominican eyes to over-stress the closeness of their founder to the suffering Christ, up to and including the reproduction in Francis's own body of Christ's
stigmata
, and it was useful therefore to stress just how far even a Francis could fall short of what the Lord had gone through.
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Yet such considerations can only be partial eddies within a wider phenomenon. Without the deepening worries of so many about their sheer physical survival, the varied voices which created these new perspectives on Christian worship and contemplation might not have been so readily heard: voices like Juliana of Cornillon, who spearheaded a much more physical popular devotion to Christ's body in the Eucharist (see p. 407), and besides the Dominicans, generations of Franciscan preachers and theologians, inspired by Francis himself.

Francis's search for God had a new perspective. Not only Anselm but Augustine of Hippo and Dionysius the Areopagite had seen God primarily as Plato's 'Unmoved Mover': so, after Francis's time, did Thomas Aquinas. But rather than perceiving God as this self-sufficient divine being, Francis saw a person: his Lord. Again and again, Francis calls God 'Lord God' (
Dominus Deus
). The Lord enters agreements - covenants - with his people, just as he did with the people of Israel (see pp. 60-61). As his side of the bargain in covenanting, he acts, rather than simply is.
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His greatest action is in becoming truly human in Jesus Christ through his mother, Mary. Francis called people to see the ordinariness, the humanity, in Christ, in order that they could love and worship him better as God. It was Francis who built the first Christmas crib, complete with apocryphal ox and ass, as a devotional object in church.

Francis's personal view of God was echoed in an immensely popular and much-imitated early-fourteenth-century Franciscan work of devotion, long attributed to his disciple the Italian Franciscan theologian Bonaventure but now generally thought to have been written two generations later by another Italian Franciscan, John de Caulibus (hence the author is still often known as 'Pseudo-Bonaventure'). John wrote his
Meditations on the Life of Christ
to help a nun of the Franciscans' associated Order of Poor Clares in her contemplation of Christ's earthly life, presenting it as a series of eyewitness accounts interlaced with commentary and exhortation which all imaginatively extended the Gospel narratives, so that the reader might be inspired to imitate Christ in her or his own daily life. John rejoiced in the fact that the Gospel narratives had not aspired to include everything about Jesus, and so he could fill the gaps. Here, for instance, is his augmented account of the birth of the Saviour:

When the hour of truth had arrived, namely, midnight Sunday, the virgin arose and placed herself at the foot of a kind of column which was there. But Joseph was seated, morose because he had not been able to provide anything more fitting. He rose, picking up some hay from the manger and scattered it by our Lady's feet. Then he turned aside. Thereupon the Son of God, leaving his mother's womb without any breach or lesion was one moment inside the womb and next outside the womb on the hay at his mother's feet. At once his mother bent over, gathered him and tenderly hugged him. She placed him on her lap and instructed by the Holy Spirit, began an overall anointing wash with heaven filled milk of her breast. Then she wrapped him in her veil and laid him in a manger.
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The
Meditations
were so pictorial in character (and manuscripts of the text so frequently full of illustrations) that they were one major stimulus to a newly individual and intimate sacred art which sought to transcribe a visual reality into painting or sculpture - very different from what had gone before in the West, let alone the carefully prescribed traditions of Orthodox art.

The Franciscan devotional style - the celebration of the everyday proclaimed in Francis's Christmas crib - was an inspiration for one of the first artists in the Western tradition to be remembered as an individual personality and to project a personal vision in his artistic achievement: Giotto. One of Giotto's earliest commissions, in the last years of the thirteenth century, was to oversee and take the leading role in painting a sequence of frescoes in the basilica in Assisi dedicated to Francis and his shrine. When in the Arena Chapel in Padua slightly later Giotto painted the Nativity scene which de Caulibus would soon paint in words, his vision was equally a projection beyond scripture: it has a realism which at the time was revolutionary, but it also went beyond a snapshot of the everyday (see Plate 25). Giotto's Nativity provides a scene for our meditation as unobserved external observers and worshippers, just like the Poor Clare nun reading her text. He portrays the intense gaze of a young mother on her son, but the son fixes her with a gaze equally intensely focused and beyond that of a newly born baby. The ox's eye is also firmly fixed on the Virgin as it strains forward up to the manger with the ass. This is a study of relationships which are familiar to us from our daily lives, but in which the haloes of Mother and Son, and our knowledge of the sacred story, pull us beyond our own experience, to the relationships of love which form the heart of Christianity's story of salvation.
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If we read John de Caulibus's
Meditations on the Life of Christ
, what is immediately apparent is the concentration of their narrative particularly on the extremes of Christ's earthly life: his infancy and Passion. In this set of choices, de Caulibus was simply echoing much contemporary preaching of his contemporaries in the Franciscan Order. Infancy and Passion privilege the role of Mary, both in Christ's birth and in her agony at his final sufferings. Once more, this Marian devotion was a development from popular twelfth-century devotional themes (see pp. 393-4) - but with a new element: it was in the later thirteenth century that Mary too became not a benevolent but distant monarch, a model for queen dowagers and empresses everywhere, but a wretchedly mourning mother (see Plate 30). Indeed from the early fourteenth century she was commonly depicted throughout Europe as 'Our Lady of Pity' or
Pieta
, cradling her dead son in her arms after he had been taken down from the Cross.
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Christ too was now first depicted in art not as a King in Majesty or serene Good Shepherd, but as the 'Man of Sorrows', with the wounds of his crucifixion exposed and his face twisted in pain. The emphasis continued through the Reformation into sixteenth-century Protestantism, which centred on the death of Christ and his atoning work for humanity by his suffering.

This constant exposition of the Passion had an unfortunate side effect. To dwell on Christ's sufferings was liable to make worshippers turn their attention to those whom the Bible narrative principally blamed for causing the pain: the Jews. Franciscans were not slow to make the connection explicit, and in doing so, they complicated and darkened the already tense relationships between Jews and Christians. Augustine of Hippo had declared that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. They should therefore be allowed to continue their community life within the Christian world, although without the full privileges of citizenship which Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end. So Jews continued to be the only non-Christian community formally tolerated in the Christian West, but their position was always fragile, and they were excluded from positions of power or mainstream wealth-creating activities. One result was that a significant number turned to moneylending at interest (usury), an activity which, thanks to half-understood prohibitions in the Tanakh, the Church prohibited to Christians. That trade could bring wealth to Jews, but certainly not popularity.
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It is true that the Franciscans had not pioneered or single-handedly invented the link between Jews and the Passion. The Western liturgy of Holy Week had been elaborating and intensifying the drama of Good Friday, the day of Jesus's death, for at least a century before their first appearance, and others had drawn their conclusions from the emotion of that liturgical experience.
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Yet the tragedy remains: the heirs of the apostle of love, Francis, were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe. It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe's first mass expulsion of Jews when, in 1289, Edward I's Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later. Such anti-Semitic ill-will continued to be balanced, in the untidy fashion of human affairs and with Augustine's lukewarm encouragement, by perfectly cordial or straightforward relations between Jews and Christians, but the impulse to harass or persecute Jews became a persistent feature of Western Christianity which it has only now properly confronted in the wake of terrible events in the twentieth century.
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Jews were not the only group to be scapegoated: we have already noted (see pp. 400-401) the way that in bad times, lepers and homosexuals could also be seen as conspiring against Christian society.

The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and disruptors of the Church like the Spiritual Franciscans, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century. In 1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. In the wake of the Pope's commission, six or seven years later he issued a bull,
Super illus specula,
which now proclaimed that any magical practices or contacts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. This was one of those ideas which bide their time; for the moment witches were not much troubled by the Church's discipline, but more than a century later, with the aid of new publicists fired by their own obsessions, the Western Church and its Protestant successors were to initiate more than two centuries of active witch persecution (see pp. 686-8).
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It is pleasant to turn back from this aspect of medieval Western devotion to something very different: an intensification of personal mysticism, particularly among women recluses and religious. As with the emergence of a more personalized view of the Christian story among Western Christians generally, there were previous precedents. The most famous twelfth-century female mystic was Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess of Rupertsberg, who a generation before Joachim of Fiore recorded her visions and prophesied about the end of time, and whose writings cover a range of interests unusual at the time in male scholars let alone abbesses: cosmology, medicine, musical composition as well as theology. Hildegard was speaking and writing at the end of the age when women in monasteries were likely to have as good an access to scholarship as men. In her lifetime, the first universities were taking shape, all-male institutions which were to gather to them most of the intellectual activity of Western Latin culture. Perhaps that is why women were now so attracted to a mode of spirituality which was independent of formal intellectual training, but in which mind and imagination sought out the hiddenness of God, beyond doctrinal propositions or the argumentative clashes of scholasticism. Such mystics reversed the normal priorities of Western spirituality, which privileges the positive knowledge of God and affirms what Christian teaching positively says about him, to join Easterners in privileging silence and otherness. One of the best-known works to emerge from this tradition, an anonymous English fourteenth-century meditation probably by a country priest and called
The Cloud of Unknowing
, goes beyond Aquinas in quoting that mysterious and subversive fount of Eastern spirituality, Dionysius the Areopagite, when he says that 'the most godlike knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing'.
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