CHAPTER XIII
TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
In studying the history of religious life, we must beware of drawing the lines of demarcation too sharply. When we see side by side the most striking contrasts of passionate piety and mocking indifference, it is so easy to explain them by opposing, as if they made up distinct groups, the worldly to the devout, the intellectuals to the ignorant, the reformers to the conservatives. But, in so doing, we fail to take sufficient account of the marvellous complexity of the human soul and of the forms of culture. To explain the astonishing contrasts of religious life towards the end of the Middle Ages, we must start with the recognition of a general lack of balance in the religious temper, rendering both individuals and masses liable to violent contradictions and to sudden changes.
The general aspect presented by religious life in France towards the end of the Middle Ages is that of a very mechanical and frequently very lax practice, chequered by spasmodic effusions of ardent piety. France was a stranger to that special form of pietism which sequesters itself in small circles of fervent devotees, such as we find springing up in the Netherlands: the “devotio moderna,” dominated by the figure of Thomas à Kempis. Still, the religious needs which gave birth to this movement were not wanting in France, only the devotees did not form a special organization. They found a refuge in the existing orders, or they remained in secular life, without being distinguished from the mass of believers. Perhaps the Latin soul endures more easily than that of Northern peoples the conflicts with which life in the world confronts the pious.
Of all the contradictions which religious life of the period presents, perhaps the most insoluble is that of an avowed contempt of the clergy, a contempt seen as an undercurrent throughout the Middle Ages, side by side with the very great respect shown for the sanctity of the sacerdotal office. The soul of the masses, not yet completely Christianized, had never altogether forgotten the aversion felt by the savage for the man who may not fight and must remain chaste. The feudal pride of the knight, the champion of courage and of love, was at one, in this, with the primitive instinct of the people. The worldliness of the higher ranks of the clergy and the deterioration of the lower grades did the rest. Hence it was that nobles, burghers and villeins had for a long time past been feeding their hatred with spiteful jests at the expense of the incontinent monk and the guzzling priest. Hatred is the right word to use in this context, for hatred it was, latent, but general and persistent. The people never wearied of hearing the vices of the clergy arraigned. A preacher who inveighed against the ecclesiastical state was sure of being applauded. As soon as a homilist broaches this subject, says Bernardino of Siena, his hearers forget all the rest; there is no more effective means of reviving attention when the congregation is dropping off to sleep, or suffering from heat or cold. Everybody instantly becomes attentive and cheerful.
Contempt and gibes are levelled especially at the mendicant orders. The types of unworthy priests in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, like the starving chaplain who reads mass for three doits, or the confessor pledged to absolve the family of everything every year, in return for his board and lodging, are all of them mendicant friars. In a series of New Year’s wishes Molinet rhymes thus:
“Prions Dieu que les Jacobins
Puissent manger les Augustins,
Et les Carmés soient pendus
Des cordes des Frères Menus.”[1]
At the same time, the restoration of the mendicant orders caused a revival of popular preaching, which gave rise to those vehement outbursts of fervour and penitence which stamped so powerfully the religious life of the fifteenth century.
There is in this special hatred for the begging friars an indication of a most important change of ideas. The formal and dogmatic conception of poverty as extolled by Saint Francis of Assisi, and as observed by the mendicant orders, was no longer in harmony with the social sentiment which was just arising. People were beginning to regard poverty as a social evil instead of an apostolic virtue. Pierre d’Ailly opposed to the mendicant orders the “true poor”—vere pauperes. England, which, earlier than other nations, became alive to the economic aspect of things, gave, towards the end of the fourteenth century, the first expression to the sentiment of the sanctity of productive labour in that strangely fantastic and touching poem, The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman.
Still, this general abuse of priests and monks goes hand in hand with a profound veneration for their sacred function. Ghillebert de Lannoy saw a priest at Rotterdam appease a tumult by raising the Corpus Domini.
The sudden transitions and the violent contrasts of the religious life of the ignorant masses reappear in that of cultured individuals. Often enlightenment comes like a thunderclap, as it did in the case of Saint Francis suddenly hearing the words of the Gospel as a compulsory command. A knight hears the baptismal ritual read: he has perhaps heard it twenty times before, but suddenly the miraculous virtue of these words pierces into his soul, and he promises himself henceforth to chase away the devil by the mere recollection of the baptism. Jean de Bueil is on the point of witnessing a duel, the adversaries are both going to swear to their good right on the Host. Suddenly the captain, seized by the thought that one of them must needs forswear himself and will be lost irrevocably, exclaims: “Do not swear; only fight for a wager of 500 crowns, without taking an oath.”
As for the great lords, the basic unsoundness of their life of arrogant pomp and disordered enjoyment contributed to give a spasmodic character to their piety. They are devout by starts, for life is far too distracting. Charles V of France sometimes gives up the chase at the most exciting moments to hear mass. Ann of Burgundy, the wife of Bedford, now scandalizes the Parisians by splashing a procession by her mad riding, now leaves a court fête at midnight to attend the matins of the Celestines. She brought upon herself a premature death by visiting the sick of the Hôtel Dieu.
Among the princes and the lords of the fifteenth century, more than one presents the type of an almost inconceivable mixture of devotion and debauchery. Louis of Orleans, an insane lover of luxury and pleasure, addicted even to the sin of necromancy, has his cell in the common dormitory of the Celestines, where he shares the privations and duties of monastic life, rising at midnight and sometimes hearing five or six masses a day.
The coexistence in one person of devotion and worldliness is displayed in a striking fashion in Philip the Good. The duke, famous for his “moult belle compagnie” of bastards, his extravagant feasts, his grasping policy, and for a pride not less violent than his temper, is at the same time strictly devout. He was in the habit of remaining in his oratory for a long time after mass, and living on bread and water four days a week, as well as on all the vigils of Our Lady and the apostles. He is often still fasting at four o’clock in the afternoon. He gives alms on a great scale and in secret. After the surprise of Luxemburg, he remains engrossed in his hours and special prayers of thanksgiving so long that his escort, awaiting him on horseback, grow impatient, for the fight was not yet quite over. On being warned of the danger, the duke replies: “If God has granted me victory, He will keep it for me.”
Gaston Phébus, count of Foix, King René, Charles of Orleans, represent so many different types of a very worldly and often frivolous temperament, coupled with a devotional spirit which one shrinks from stigmatizing as hypocrisy or bigotry. It has rather to be regarded as a kind of reconciliation, hardly conceivable to the modern mind, between two moral extremes. Its possibility in the Middle Ages depends on the absolute dualism of the two conceptions, which then dominated all thinking and living.
Men of the fifteenth century often couple with austere devotion the love of bizarre splendour. The craving to decorate faith with the magnificence of forms and colours is displayed in other forms besides works of religious art; it is sometimes found in the forms of spiritual life itself. When Philippe de Mézières plans his Order of the Passion, which was to save Christendom, he imagines a whole phantasmagoria of colours. The knights, according to their ranks, will be dressed in red, green, scarlet and azure, with red crosses and hoods of the same colour. The grand-master will be all in white. If he saw but little of this splendour, as his order was never established, he was at least able to satisfy his artistic taste in the monastery of the Celestines at Paris which was the refuge of his last years. If the rules of the order, which he followed as a lay-brother, were very severe, the convent-church, on the other hand, a mausoleum of the princes of the time, was most sumptuous, all sparkling with gold and precious stones; it was reputed the most beautiful of Paris.
It is but a step from luxurious piety to theatrical displays of hyperbolic humility. Olivier de la Marche remembered to have seen in his youth the entry of Jacques de Bourbon, the titular king of Naples, who had renounced the world because of the exhortations of Saint Colette. The king, miserably dressed, was carried in a sort of hand-barrow, “not differing from the barrows in which dung and ordure are usually carried.” An elegant cortège followed closely. “And I have heard it recounted and said”—says La Marche—“that in all the towns where he came, he made similar entries out of humility.”
The minute directions given by a number of saintly persons concerning their burial bear witness to the same excessive humility. The blessed Pierre Thomas, improving upon the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, leaves orders to wrap him up in a sack, with a cord round his neck, and so place him on the ground to die. “Bury me,” he says, “at the entrance of the choir, that every one may walk over my body, even dogs and goats.” Philippe de Mézières, his disciple and friend, tries to go even further in fantastic humility. In his dying hour a heavy iron chain is to be placed round his neck. When he has given up the ghost, he is to be dragged by his feet, naked, into the choir, where he is to remain on the ground, his arms crossed, tied by three ropes to a plank. Thus “this fine treasure for the worms” is to wait till people come to carry it to the grave. The plank is to take the place of the “sumptuous coffin, ornamented with his vain and worldly coat of arms, which would have been displayed at the interment of the unhappy pilgrim, if God had so much hated him that he had let him die at the court of princes of this world.” Dragged along once more, his “carrion” is to be thrown, quite naked, into the grave.
One is not surprised to hear that this lover of precise specification made several wills. In the later ones details of this kind are wanting; and at his death, which occurred in 1405, he was honourably buried in the frock of the Celestines, and two epitaphs, probably of his own composition, were carved on his tombstone.
The ideal of sanctity has always been incapable of much variation. The fifteenth century, in this respect, brings no new aspiration. Consequently, the Renaissance exercised hardly any influence on the conception of saintly life. The saint and the mystic remain almost wholly untouched by the changing times. The types of saints of the Counter-Reformation are still those of the later Middle Ages, who in their turn did not essentially differ from those of the preceding centuries. Both before and after the great turning of the tide, two types of saints stand out conspicuously: the men of fiery speech and energetic action, like Ignatius de Loyola, Francis Xavier, Charles Borromeo, who belong to the same class as Bernardino of Siena, John Capistrano and the blessed Vincent Ferrer, in earlier times; and the men absorbed in tranquil rapture, or practising extravagant humility, the poor in spirit, like Saint Francis of Paula and the blessed Pierre of Luxemburg in the fifteenth century, and Aloysius Gonzaga in the sixteenth.
It would not be unreasonable to compare to the romanticism of chivalry, as an element of medieval thought, a romanticism of saintliness, in the sense of a tendency to give the colours of fancy and the accents of enthusiasm to an ideal form of virtue and of duty. It is remarkable that this romanticism of saintliness always aims far more at miracles and excesses of humility and of asceticism, than at brilliant achievements in the service of religious policy. The Church has sometimes canonized the great men of action who have revived or purified religious culture, but popular imagination has been more impressed, in all ages, by the supernatural and by irrational excess.
It is not without interest to note some traits showing us the attitude of the aristocracy, refined and fastidious and engrossed in the chivalrous ideas, towards the ideal of saintly life. The princely families of France have produced later saints than Saint Louis. Charles of Blois, descended, by his mother, from the house of Valois, found himself charged, by his marriage with the heiress of Brittany, with a war of succession, which filled the greater part of his life. On marrying Jeanne de Penthièvre, he had promised to adopt the arms and the battle-cry of the duchy, which meant: to fight Jean de Montfort, the pretender supported by England. The count of Blois waged the war like the best of knights and captains of his time. He passed nine years in captivity in England, and perished at Aurai in 1364, battling side by side with Bertrand du Guesclin and Beaumanoir.
Now this prince, whose career was altogether military, had led, from his youth onward, the life of an ascetic. As a child he plunged into the study of edifying books, a taste which his father did his best to moderate, judging it unsuitable to a future warrior. Later he used to sleep on straw near the conjugal bed. After his death he was found to have worn a hair-shirt under his armour. He confessed every evening, saying that no Christian ought to go to sleep in the state of sin. As a prisoner in London he was in the habit of entering the cemeteries to kneel down and say the de profundis. The Breton squire whom he asks to say the responses refused, saying: “No; there lie those who have killed my parents and friends and have burnt their houses.” On being released, he resolved to undertake a pilgrimage, barefooted, in the snow, from La Roche-Derrien, where he had been captured, to the shrine of Saint Yves at Tréguier. The people, hearing this, covered the road with straw and blankets, but the count made a detour and hurt his feet, so that for weeks he was unable to walk.
Directly after his death his royal relations, especially his son-in-law, Louis d’Anjou, a son of the king, took steps to have him canonized. The proceedings, which took place at Angers in 1371, ended in his beatification.If we are to trust Froissart, this Charles of Blois would seem to have had a bastard. “There was killed in good style the aforesaid Lord Charles of Blois, with his face to the enemy, and a bastard son of his called Jehans de Blois, and several other knights and squires of Brittany.” Was Froissart mistaken? Or are we to suppose that the mingling of piety and sensuality, which is so evident in the figures of Louis of Orleans and of Philip the Good, reappears in him in a still more astonishing degree?
No such question arises in the case of the blessed Pierre de Luxembourg, another ascetic sprung from court circles. This scion of the house of Luxemburg, which in its several branches held the imperial dignity and a preponderant place at the courts of France and Burgundy, is a striking representative of the type called by William James “the under-witted saint,” a narrow mind, which can only live in a carefully isolated sphere of devotion. He died in his eighteenth year, in 1387, having been loaded from his childhood with ecclesiastical dignities, being bishop of Metz at fifteen and a cardinal soon after. His personality as it disengages itself from the narratives of the witnesses in the proceedings for his canonization is almost pitiful. He is of a consumptive disposition and has overgrown his strength. Even as a child he was wholly given up to austerity and devotion. He reprimands his brother when he laughs, because the Gospel does tell us that the Lord wept, but not that he laughed. Sweet, courteous and debonair—says Froissart—“virgin as to the body, a very great giver of alms. The greater part of the day and the night he spent in prayer. And in all his life there was nothing but humility.” At first his noble parents tried to dissuade him from a life of religion. When he said he wished to go forth and preach, he was told: “You are much too tall, everybody would recognize you at once. You could not endure the cold, and as to preaching the crusade, how could you do that?” “I see,” said Pierre—and here the very recesses of his narrow mind seem lighted up for a moment—“I see very well, that you want to lead me from the right road to the bad; but assuredly, if I once enter on it, I shall do so much that the whole world will talk of me.”
When once his ascetic aspirations had overcome all attempts to extirpate them, his parents were clearly proud of having such a young saint in the family. Imagine, amidst the unbridled luxury of the courts of Berry and Burgundy, this sickly boy, horribly dirty and covered with vermin, as the witnesses attest. He is ever occupied with his sins and notes them down every day in a pocket-book. If he is prevented from doing this by a journey or some other reason, he makes up for this neglect by writing for hours. At night he is seen writing up or reading his pocket-books by the light of a candle. He rises at midnight and awakes the chaplains in order to confess; sometimes he knocks in vain—they turn a deaf ear to his nocturnal call. If he obtains a hearing, he reads out his lists of sins from his little scraps. Towards the end of his life, he is shriven twice a day and will not allow his confessor to leave him for a moment. After his death a whole chest was found filled with these little lists of sins.
The Luxembourgs and their friends immediately took steps to get him canonized. The request was made at Avignon by the king himself, and supported both by the University of Paris and the Chapter of Notre Dame. The greatest lords of France appeared as witnesses at the trial in 1389: André de Luxembourg, Louis de Bourbon, Enguerrand de Coucy. Though the canonization was not obtained because of the pope’s negligence (the beatification only took place in 1527), the veneration of Pierre de Luxembourg was at once established, and miracles multiplied at Avignon, on the spot where he lay buried. The king founded a Celestine monastery there after the model of the one at Paris, which was the favourite sanctuary of the high nobility, and which Pierre had also frequented in his youth. The foundation-stone was laid by the dukes of Orleans, Berry and Burgundy.
There is another case which may serve to illustrate the intercourse of princes with saints: Saint Francis of Paula at the court of Louis XI. The very peculiar type of piety which this king presents is too well known to be described here at large. Louis XI, “who bought the grace of God and of the Virgin Mary for more money than ever king did,” displays all the qualities of the crudest fetishism. His passion for relics, pilgrimages and processions seems to us almost totally devoid of really pious sentiment, and even of respect. He used to handle the holy objects as if they were expensive medicines. At the approach of death he sent to all parts of the world for extraordinary relics. The pope sent him the corporal of Saint Peter. The Great Turk actually offered him a collection of relics which were still at Constantinople. On the table beside his bed was the “Sainte Ampoule,” the vase in which the holy oil for coronation was kept, and which had never left Reims before. According to Commines, the king wanted to try its miraculous virtue by having his whole body anointed. The cross of Saint Laud was specially sent for from Angers to take an oath upon, for Louis made a difference between oaths taken on one relic and on another. These are traits reminding us of the Merovingian times.
In him the fervent venerator of relics blends with the collector of curiosities. He corresponds with Lorenzo de Medici about the ring of Saint Zanobi and about an Agnus Dei, that is to say, one of these figures cut out of the fibrous trunk of an Asiatic fern, which were also called Agnus Scythicus, or Tartarian lamb, and to which rare medicinal virtues were attributed. At Plessis lès Tours the holy persons, summoned thither to say prayers for the king, rub shoulders with musicians of all sorts. “At that time the king had a great number of players of deep-toned and sweet instruments brought to him, whom he lodged at Saint-Cosme, near Tours, where they assembled, as many as a hundred and twenty, among whom there were many shepherds from the country of Poitou. Who often played before the king’s mansion (but they did not see him), that the king might enjoy the aforesaid instruments as a pleasure and pastime and to prevent him from sleeping. And, on the other hand, he also sent for a great number of male and female bigots and devout people like hermits and saintly creatures, to pray God incessantly to allow that he should not die and that He might let him live longer.
Saint Francis of Paula, the Calabrian hermit, who surpassed the Minorite friars in humility by founding the order of the Minims, was literally a purchase of the royal collector. After having failed with the king of Naples, Louis’s diplomacy succeeded, by the pope’s intervention, in securing the miraculous man. A noble escort bore him from Italy, sorely against his will. His ferocious asceticism reminds us of the barbarous saints of the tenth century, Saint Nil and Saint Romuald. He flies at the sight of a woman. Since his youth he has never touched a piece of money. He sleeps upright or in a leaning position; he lets his hair and beard grow. He does not eat animal food and accepts only roots. The king, who is already ill, took pains to procure the proper food for his rare saint. “Monsieur de Genas, I beg you to send me lemons and sweet oranges, and muscatel pears, and parsnips,[2] and it is for the holy man who eats neither flesh nor fish; and you will do me a very great pleasure.” At court he was known only as “the holy man,” so that Commines appears not to have known his name, although he often saw him. The mockers and suspicious persons also called him “holy man.” The king himself, at the instigation of Jacques Coitier, his physician, begun by setting spies on the man of God and by putting him to the proof. Commines is prudently reserved about him. Although declaring that he had never seen a man “of such saintly life, nor one in whom the Holy Spirit seemed more to speak through his mouth,” he concludes: “He is still alive, so that he may well change, for the better or for the worse, so that I shall be silent, as many mocked at the arrival of this hermit, whom they called ‘holy man.’” It is noteworthy that learned theologians like Jan Standonck and Jean Quentin, having come from Paris to speak to him about the founding of a monastery of Minims at Paris, went back full of admiration.
It is a significant fact that the princes of the fifteenth century often ask the advice of great visionaries and extravagant ascetics in political matters. Thus Saint Colette is consulted by Philip the Good and by his mother, Marguerite of Bavaria, and acts as an intermediary in the controversies between the houses of France, Savoy and Burgundy. Her canonization was demanded with pious insistence by the house of Burgundy.
More important still was the public part played by Denis the Carthusian. He also was frequently in touch with the house of Burgundy. Obsessed by the fear of imminent catastrophes, such as the conquest of Rome by the Turks, he urges the duke to undertake a crusade. He dedicates to him a treatise on princely government. He advises the duke of Guelders in the conflict with his son. Numbers of noblemen, clerks and burghers come to consult him in his cell at Ruremonde, where he is constantly engaged in resolving doubts, difficulties and questions of conscience.
Denys le Chartreux, or of Rickel, is the most complete type of religious enthusiast at the end of the Middle Ages. His mental range and many-sided energy are hardly conceivable. To mystic transports, ferocious asceticism, continual visions and revelations he unites immense activity as a theological writer. His works fill forty-five quarto volumes. All medieval divinity meets in him as the rivers of a continent flow together in an estuary. Qui Dionysium legit nihil non legit,[3] said sixteenth-century theology. He sums up, he concludes, but he does not create. All that his great predecessors have thought is reproduced by him in a simple and easy style. e wrote all his books himself, and revised, corrected, subdivided and illuminated them. At the end of his life, he deliberately laid down his pen. Ad securae taciturnitatis portum me transferre intendo.[4]
He never knew repose. Every day he recites the psalter almost entirely, and, at any rate, half. He prays continually, while dressing or while engaged in any other occupation. When others go to sleep again after matins, he remains awake. Big and strong, he exposes his body with impunity to all kinds of privations. I have a head of iron, he would say, and a stomach of brass. He feeds, for choice, on tainted victuals.
The enormous amount of theological meditation and speculation which he achieved, was not the fruit of a peaceful and balanced life of study; it was carried out in the midst of intense emotions and violent shocks. Visions and revelations are with him ordinary experiences. Ecstasies come to him on all sorts of occasions, especially: when he hears music, sometimes in the midst of noble company, who are listening to his wise advice. As a child he rose when the moon was shining brightly, thinking it was time to go to school. He is a stammerer. He sees the room of a dying woman full of demons who knock the stick out of his hand. He constantly converses with the dead. When asked if he often sees apparitions of deceased persons, he answers: “yes, hundreds of times.” Although constantly occupied with his supernatural experiences, he does not like to speak about them, and is ashamed of the ecstasies which earned him among the laudatory surnames of the great theologians that of Doctor ecstaticus.
The great figure of Denis the Carthusian no more escaped suspicion and raillery than the miracle-worker of Louis XI. The slander and abuse of the world pursued him all his life. The mental attitude of the fifteenth century towards the highest religious manifestations of the age is made up equally of enthusiasm and distrust.
- ↑ Let us pray God that the Jacobins May eat the Augustinians, And that the Carmelites may be hanged With the cords of the Minorites.
- ↑ Perhaps the king wrote by mistake, pastenargues for pastéques = watermelons.
- ↑ He who reads Denis reads everything.
- ↑ I am now going to enter the haven of secure taciturnity.